Chapter2 - 6

Nora said faintly. Under the counter, Duke whined and pressed against their legs.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Twenty-five thousand doesn’t matter ?”

“It’s not all I’ve got. And money’s recoverable.”

Xavier bolted half his whiskey in one swallow. “I need to know something, Nora. Did George Harding hurt you before today?”

“You want to know if what he said was true.”

Nora’s lips felt numb. “If I screwed him.”

“I don’t care about that. I had women before you; it doesn’t matter to me if there were men for you before me. I know who you are, what you are—”

“Class top to bottom?”

Nora’s voice was bitter.

“That’s right.”

Xavier’s gaze was unblinking. “I don’t care if he slept with you. I need to know if he hurt you.”

Nora exhaled, feeling the bump on her head throb. He waited. He’d wait forever, she knew. And if she wouldn’t tell him, he could find out. It wouldn’t even be that difficult—it had been in the goddamn papers .

“I was eighteen, just out of high school.”

She fortified herself with a sip of whiskey that burned all the way down. “Trying to find a job, trying to dodge my mother setting me up with all those nice young police sergeants my brother kept bringing home. Me knowing I’d rather die than be a cop’s wife, so what do I go and do but run straight for a bad boy. George ‘Mad Dog’ Harding, how do you like that name, a cliché right out of one of Pete’s Mickey Spillane books. George, new in town with his sharp suits and his emerald cuff links, turned up at Dailey’s one day when I was dragging my brother out of a card game. I dated George for six weeks, and I liked every bit of it. I liked him taking me out on the town, I liked rolling in the back seat of his convertible, and, oh, did I like how mad my mother was.”

Nora took the ice pack away, not looking at Xavier. “Stupid girl. Not as stupid as I might have been, though. George slapped me just once, after a big loss at the track, and that was enough for me. I told him never to call me again.”

“And?”

“George doesn’t like hearing the word no .”

She felt her mouth twist. “The day I came home from my interview at the National Archives, walking on air because they said they’d start me in the file room, George pulled up in that convertible and dragged me into it. For the next three hours he drove me all over the capital, drunk, rambling about how he was going to marry me, and smacking me in the forehead with his gun butt whenever I argued.”

Nora bolted the rest of the whiskey. “I was dizzy enough at the end, he dropped me off at the hospital. Such a gentleman. They admitted me with a concussion, and he came back that night with candy and roses. I woke up to find him holding my hand...”

Breathe. Breathe. Xavier didn’t seem to be breathing at all.

“I pulled away shouting that I was going to press charges against him. The noise brought the nurses in, and he ran. Couldn’t run from the charges, though. The newspapers even reported it: ‘Caveman Wooing Tactics Lead to Indictment.’ He ended up getting a stretch for assault and carrying an unlicensed weapon.”

Finally, she made herself look up at Xavier. “I didn’t even know he’d been released until I saw you throwing him out of the Amber Club.”

Xavier sat statue-still, big rough hands laced around his tumbler. She remembered him saying before that if he ever really got angry, she wouldn’t have to guess it—she could feel his anger now, filling the room in slow, icy rolls, making the air thick. “That all of it?”

he asked at last, neutrally.

“That’s it,”

Nora lied, looking him right in the eye.

Xavier moved closer, cradling her head in his hands. He kissed the bruise on her temple and then he kissed her mouth, and Nora trembled because it felt like something was being set in motion. A boulder tipping over the verge of a cliff and hovering before a long fall; a mountain rolling its shoulders.

“You should go home,”

he said, pulling back, hand still cupping the back of her neck. “Call in sick from the Archives tomorrow; take some time to rest. You need a doctor, have him bill me. Cops come around, you don’t know anything.”

“Just like Louise?”

Nora rose, Duke pressing against her legs. “Xavier—”

“I won’t see you for a while,”

he broke in. “I’ll keep you clear of it. You’ll hear from me.”

And she was being walked out the door of this house where she had her own key and her own drawers for her nightgown and makeup, Xavier’s fingertips at the small of her back light as butterflies, his steady breath stirring her hair like a wind made of pure rage. Just an ordinary winter day in an ordinary Washington neighborhood, but the air in the hall crackled and Nora smelled blood.

She turned in the doorway, wrapped her arms around him, spoke directly into his ear. “The bed on New Year’s Day,”

she said. “Bagels and lox and champagne, Duke snoring on our feet. Don’t throw that away. Don’t do this.”

He didn’t say anything; just hailed a cab and then held her till it was time to put her in it. His breathing was very even. He was, Nora thought, already gone.

The delivery came to Nora three weeks later: January31, 1951, the day the headlines were full of the news that the Rosenbergs had been indicted. A slim fellow in a sharp suit was waiting outside the steps of the National Archives on her lunch break, a fellow she was pretty sure she’d seen calling Xavier “Boss”

inside the Amber Club. “MissWalsh,”

he said, passing over what appeared to be a handful of wadded-up newspaper.

She smoothed out the wad and found herself looking at the Evening Star , page1, headline so fresh it had to have just been printed: “George ‘Mad Dog’ Harding Slain in Gun Attack at After-Hours Club.”

Nora’s vision tilted as she saw the page had been wrapped around a very familiar six-carat diamond ring. A scrawl of pencil ran along the margin of the screaming headline.

I kept you out of it.

Marry me when I get clear of this?

Nora raised her eyes to the man who’d made the delivery.

“Mr.Byrne passed the package to his lawyer for you,”

the man said. “He’ll be charged with first-degree murder.”

“Are you following the trial?”

Nora started violently at her desk. “What?”

“The Rosenberg trial!”

said a dizzy brunette from the National Archives steno pool. “Did you hear Julius Rosenberg will be testifying in his own defense? I can’t wait —”

“That trial,”

Nora said, forcing her fingers to relax around the file she had fetched for Mr.Harris. “No, I hadn’t heard.”

Being a bit too preoccupied with another trial that was set to begin at the end of March.

I won’t go , Nora promised herself. But she’d absorbed details about it anyway: that Xavier had pleaded not guilty, that the Warring clan had hired Charlie Ford to head his defense, and that the saying in Foggy Bottom went If Ford’s your lawyer it’s 3–1 you’re guilty and 6–5 you’ll be acquitted . Nora had spend long, tossing nights wondering if 6–5 odds were good enough when the penalty was the electric chair. And wondering if she had the right to hope a man would be acquitted when he was guilty as sin.

But she pushed that aside, heading to her boss’s office. “The report you wanted on the effects of helium on parchment in preservation cases, Mr.Harris. And though there hasn’t been any official word from the Library of Congress as regards the transfer of the Declaration—”

“That can wait, MissWalsh.”

Her normally cheerful boss looked suddenly serious, almost stern. “Please close the door and take a seat.”

It was a very brief exchange. Four minutes at most. Nora walked out mechanically, not really feeling her feet underneath her. She aligned a pencil on her desk and pretended to transcribe a stack of shorthand, but her fingers kept fumbling. “Are you all right, Nora?”

asked Mrs.Halliwell, who had opposed Nora’s promotion, and who had an avid gleam in her eye now. As if she knew that no, Nora wasn’t all right, and exactly why. Ordinarily Nora would have chirped Ah, you know everything’s right as rain, Mrs.H! , but today it was all she could do to keep the tears out of her eyes. She could not manage to chirp .

“Nora, hallo!”

bubbled Fliss, knocking on Nora’s door that evening. Did all Englishwomen bubble like her? “It’s Thursday—surely you heard us all trooping up the stairs? Grace made stroganoff and we’re all working on the wall vine; Pete brought the ladder up so we can take it up across that slanted bit toward the ceiling. Lina’s bringing brownies—”

Fliss rattled on, dimples gleaming, hair gleaming, even the baby on her hip gleaming. Across the landing behind her was the usual spill of music and laughter from the half-open door of Grace’s room. Nora pulled her threadbare robe closer around herself, feeling dreary, drab, dour, and worthless. “I’m not coming to dinner tonight,”

she managed to say, starting to close the door.

“Oh, you poor love, are you sick? Shall I bring you a plate? I brought a shepherd’s pie—”

“No, thank you. I don’t want to trouble you.”

Still trying to close the door.

“It’s no trouble! Let me just cut you a piece—”

Nora heard herself shouting, “I don’t want any goddamn pie , Fliss, go away !”

Fliss’s smile blinked for a moment like a light bulb flickering, then winked back on. “I’ll just wrap something up for later,”

she said, as Nora slammed the door.

She wasn’t sure how much later it was when Grace’s voice floated in from the landing. “They’ve all gone,”

she called. “Care for some sun tea? It’s about half gin.”

Nora found herself opening up, less for the gin than for the smile in her neighbor’s voice. Grace stood in her old robe with the faded Chinese dragons; it was too light for this chilly March night, but she never seemed to feel the cold. “Come on, you,”

she said, offering the glass. “Add a flower to my much-extended wall vine, and I’ll tell you all the gossip you missed tonight.”

“I hurt Fliss’s feelings, didn’t I?”

Nora said resignedly, trailing across the landing.

“Mmm, hard to tell with the English. The outward shellac of good manners runs a mile deep. More like two miles on that one.”

Grace closed the door behind them both, her tiny room in its usual state of confusion after a Thursday night supper: glasses scattered about, cigarette butts in an old saucer for an ashtray. “Actually, the gossip tonight was all about you.”

Nora tensed.

“It was really very kind of you not to come, because poor Arlene could finally drop the subject of her latest diet regime and talk about your ring. It’s nearly killed her, having to be in the same room with a diamond that size and not talk about it. Especially since her Harland, whoever he is, hasn’t given her one yet.”

Self-consciously, Nora turned the diamond around to the inside the way Xavier usually wore it. “I’m not engaged. I just—he’s not around for me to give it back, and I can’t just leave it lying about.”

“A rock like that? Certainly not.”

Grace gave her sleepy-looking smile. “You don’t have to wear it on that particular finger, though.”

Nora was silent.

“Did I tell you I have a new man in my life?”

Grace turned to the window, raising the sash. “He’s a bit of a loner, but he should be in the mood to drop by now... Yes, here he is.”

A bony ginger cat came winding along the ledge outside and through the window, flowing down to the floor in one practiced jump. “Doilies Nilsson will skin you,”

Nora warned. “No pets allowed.”

“But this house needs a pet. All houses do, if they’re to become real homes.”

Grace stooped to stroke the cat, who was winding around her ankles with a rusty mrow . “To hell with Doilies. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“Is that your motto for life?”

“It’s worked so far.”

Grace poured out a saucer of milk for the cat, who lapped it up briskly and then sashayed back out the window without a backward glance. “I do like a man who lets himself out without leaving a mess behind,”

Grace mused. “Rare in the male sex. I thought I’d call him Red, what do you think?”

Nora sat down rather suddenly on the edge of Grace’s narrow bed. “I’m eating my heart out over a gangster, and I have no idea how to stop.”

Grace took the glass out of Nora’s hand, refilled it from the jug in the icebox, tipped in another slug of gin, and brought it back. “Ah,”

she said, curling up in her worn armchair rather like her cat.

“You don’t exactly look surprised. Does everyone know?”

Nora couldn’t help saying. “Fliss? Mrs. Nilsson?”

“No... I put one or two things together. That lovely wrap you picked up, and all those overnight visits to family. And Pete said something about the gentleman who came into Moonlight Magnolias to pick your flowers. ‘ He’s got a cruel cliff of a brow’ was how Pete put it, sounding a bit wistful. He still has a crush on you, of course.”

“He won’t for long, once he knows. My boss knows,”

Nora burst out. “He called me into his office today... I don’t know how he found out, Xavier kept my name out of anything in the papers, but Mr. Harris knew. Government men, they all talk. He’d had a word from a lawyer or someone in the police. He knew .”

Grace’s voice was quiet. “Have you been fired?”

“I will be,”

Nora said raggedly, “if I cause any embarrassment to the National Archives.”

“Goodness, can they do that?”

“Of course they can. Even though my work and my conduct have never been anything but exemplary. Even though it’s none of their business who I see in my private life. Even though they’d never dream of asking a man who he dates on his own time.”

Fury smoldered in the pit of her stomach, remembering Mr.Harris’s censorious face as he delivered his lecture. Her potential ; her responsibilities to the Archives. How badly she’d wanted to stand up and tell him she wasn’t some wayward teenage daughter who needed to be slapped on the wrist and sent to her room, that she was a grown woman and he could take his lecture and shove it.

But the job. The job she’d worked so hard to get—the job that was levering her slowly but surely out of Foggy Bottom.

“I could lose it all,”

she said, voice so low she could barely hear herself. “Because, yes, it will be seen as embarrassing if the personal secretary of the executive officer of the National Archives continues a known relationship with a man on trial for first-degree murder.”

And when you said it like that, Mr. Harris’s lecture sounded entirely warranted, didn’t it? The facts were so stark, when they weren’t muddled up with the way Xavier could melt her heart hunkering down to wrestle with Duke—the way he listened when she talked, as if memorizing every word—the way he took her to pieces just slowly running a thumbnail up her spine. None of that mattered. He was a man on trial for murder, and she was wearing his diamond on her left hand, and she didn’t know how she’d gotten in so deep.

“I was so careful,”

she whispered into her glass of sun tea. “I got burned once—I said never again. And here I am, right in the middle of another goddamn bonfire.”

“You must like the heat,”

said Grace.