Irrepressible (15 page)

Another of the firm’s clients was the impresario Sol Hurok, who booked the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in venues across America. Bob, properly dazzled by “these beautiful prima ballerinas tripping through the office,” was distinctly hospitable. Women liked him. He knew how to show a girl a good time in New York.

BOB TREUHAFT WAS thirty years old in 1943 and eminently eligible, a catch. A charming, single guy with a great sense of humor, he made an excellent living. What’s more, he wasn’t in the military and he wasn’t going to be. He wasn’t happy about staying out, but there wasn’t much he could do if they wouldn’t take him. He had tried to enlist, but was classified as 4-F, or unfit for service.

Bob had suffered his first epileptic episode in college at eighteen: a grand mal seizure, like lightning in his brain. He bit his tongue, and blood had run from his mouth, and when he came to, he found himself surrounded by horrified onlookers. The shock terrified Bob. He felt ashamed at first, to have been so violently transported. These episodes continued at the rate of a couple a year. He suffered convulsions of varying intensity and once fractured his shoulder. Not many people knew. Epilepsy had an aura of mysticism and madness, not qualities an up-and-coming young lawyer cared to publicize, no matter how modern and tolerant his client base. He worked hard, dated around, downed the elaborate cocktails, danced smoothly, and stayed up late debating the state of the world. He was a New York Jewish
intellectual, the witty, pragmatic type fond of puns and satire, with an elite, Ivy League polish. He couldn’t have been less of a mystic. Still, there was something vulnerable in his nature, a sensibility that moved him to make the most of his time. He took the medications available, but it would be years before he’d find the right combination of drugs to control his condition.

 

VIRGINIA PROVIDED CARE and refuge for Decca and Dinky for the better part of a year. The Romilly and Mitford families urged Decca in letters and through intermediaries at the British Embassy to return to England, but she refused to consider the prospect. She started to look for work, and when Binnie and Michael Straight offered her their apartment, Decca and her daughter moved to Washington.

Because of the city housing shortage, Decca shared her new home with roommates, all of them “government girls” filling the many war-related job vacancies. She thrived on the chaos and noise of this sisterhood and invited refugees and friends of friends traveling through to squeeze in wherever another cot could fit. A visitor would find bras drying on the umbrella stand and newspapers piled in the sink. The place smelled of nail polish, and the telephone was always occupied. One night, fifteen-year-old Ann Durr was invited to dinner with Decca’s roommates and their boyfriends. The older guests drank a lot of cocktails, and after a few, Decca tipped her chair back and then fell all the way, heels over head. (Ann saw that she wasn’t wearing underwear, and it occurred to her that Decca still hadn’t found anyone willing to wash her clothes for free.) The tipsy guests declared the wayward chair a reactionary tool. In those days,
reactionary
was the prime epithet used by young Lefty women who poured into Washington offices. (Among themselves, the young women might condemn their
reactionary
boss,
reactionary
boyfriend,
reactionary
father.) The word had bite.

Decca arranged day care for her daughter with a kind woman whom she nicknamed Honkert (an encomium from the childhood “Honnish” language she shared with her sisters) and went to work as a receptionist for the British Royal Air Force delegation. Then in September, she found a job at
the Office of Price Administration, a government regulatory agency. It was fun, she wrote in her first letter to Muv in nine months, in the OPA.

 

BOB TREUHAFT HAD begun work as a lawyer for the Office of Price Administration the previous June. He met Decca around the time he was putting the finishing touches on a regulation that he had written and that would come to be known sarcastically as the “ban on pleasure driving.” The proposed policy would conserve fuel by limiting all non-war-related automobile driving. Civilian drivers could still commute to work and use their cars in emergencies, but were encouraged to use public transportation and carpool wherever available. This deeply unpopular regulation butted up against a battery of myths about the American way of life. It challenged the individualist’s legendary mobility, the freedom of the open road, and the country’s love affair with its vehicles. It polarized opinion within the OPA and spoke to Decca’s gathering interest in collectivization—for what she saw as the social good—above individual desire for success or comfort.

At first sight, Bob thought she was just another stunning girl in the secretarial pool. Decca was many things, but not quite a secretary. She had entered the civil service at the “cruel category of sub-eligible typist.” Although her typing skills were subpar, her social skills were prodigious. She had resourcefully “discovered a marvelous place called the typing pool, and learned to partake of its life-restoring waters.” Her voice, accent, hauteur, and confident presence worked wonders. She’d request multiple proof-read copies, and the unsuspecting eligible typist would practically curtsy. It couldn’t have been very long before the word got around that a celebrity was walking among them. Somebody would have seen the photos, read the articles, heard the rumors. The masquerade didn’t last long. Soon she was applying for a promotion to inspector, a rank for which her deportment was well suited. Decca was rarely rattled, and rattling others while remaining impassive—a talent she had cultivated since childhood—was an excellent qualification for any OPA inspector, who was liable to be cursed and otherwise abused for enforcing unpopular regulations.

There remained one obstacle to promotion, which she easily overcame. The civil service requirement for the inspector job was a college degree. Decca recalled her completion in Paris, at the age of sixteen, of a course called Civilisation Française, so “Graduate Université de la Sorbonne” was true in its way. She later wrote: “Paris was then occupied by the Nazis; it seemed unlikely that the personnel people would check.”

Bob was an agency lawyer about to test the new pleasure-driving regulation, and Decca the new investigator assigned to gauge its real-world success. For several freezing autumn nights, they stationed themselves outside an upscale nightclub called the Troika, in the Mayflower Hotel. Most government employees had some kind of waiver to drive on official business, but few could claim exemption for a drive to a nightclub. Apprehending a millionaire would demonstrate that the mandate was meant to apply to everyone, rich and poor alike. And the prospect of nailing a hypocrite made it that much more fun. They were on a stakeout, sharing hot coffee from a thermos.

What did Decca and Bob say over those four or five hours? What had they in common? Both had unresolved relationships with unlucky fathers. Bob had a sister. Decca knew sisters. Did he know she had two fascist sisters? He knew, of course he knew (he’d done his homework). He was really “marvelously funny.” She hadn’t known that in the Bronx,
toilet
was pronounced “turlett.” She thought him dapper and found his background fascinating: Hungary, the ballet, the American labor organizer David Dubinsky. She liked his “slanting, twinkling black eyes.” He’d been in Europe in 1937. So had she! In Manhattan in 1939! She, too! They might have met on the street, sat beside one another in the cinema. About the time Decca agreed to a date the next day, they heard a car’s tires crunch on the icy avenue in front of the nightclub. Gotcha! She and Bob slid over to confront the car’s passengers, the Norwegian ambassador and his wife. (The accusers knew she really was his wife when she made a big fuss about their diplomatic immunity.)

The next day at lunch, Bob and Decca met in the OPA cafeteria. Her thrifty strategy for dining impressed him. “She would pick up a glass of
tomato juice and drink it and put the empty glass down on the shelf below the counter; then when we got to the salad, she would eat a salad and put the empty plate down below the counter; and at the end she’d take a cup of coffee and I’d pay for it, and that would be five cents . . . It was a very cheap date.” Bob was besotted and rationalized “such frugality”—he might have called it chutzpah to go from policewoman to scofflaw overnight. Steeped in the rogue tradition in which she had come of age, freeloading lunch may have seemed unremarkable, or maybe she was showing off the part of her character that didn’t care if she got caught. Before long, Bob was toasting her with this ode:

Soon they were having dinner almost every night, either in Bob’s flat or at hers. It was all happening very quickly. Decca wrote to her mother that she’d visit England again when it was possible, but America would be her “permanent home” for all sorts of reasons: She enjoyed her job, and it was a better place to raise her daughter. The one thing she wasn’t ready to admit was that she had met someone at work. Even if it seemed a little soon after Esmond’s death—not yet a year—she liked him very much.

Bob made her laugh. She was happy for the first time in a long time—awake again, her funny self. Behind her were the dark months of brooding and fearing the future, of weeping and clinging to her child. He was so sweet with her daughter, and twenty-month-old Dinky liked him, too. Ahead, whatever was to come, he was 4-F. He wouldn’t be going into the army or overseas. No one could say she hadn’t given enough. She brought him to Alexandria to meet Virginia and Cliff Durr. Virginia liked him, but never thought it was a serious affair.

Bob had the advantage of being nothing like anyone Decca had known before. But in her friends’ eyes, he had the disadvantage of being so unlike Esmond. How do you compete with a meteorite? Bob just kept going. He was indefatigable. They punned together, their banter good-natured and unsentimental. They were friends, equals—if anything, it was Bob who deferred to a radiant Decca, who was roaring again, singing Maurice Chevalier songs, doing a Charlie Chaplin imitation, pulling faces, making Dinky crow, telling long stories about eccentric aristocrats as distant as myth. Their friendship was inspiring. He was in love with her—of this she was confident. Yes, he did have a reputation. He was a little famous for being in love. Before they had met, there had been a fiancée. There were the ballet dancers from the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, who would look him up when they came through town. Bob kept his mother up-to-date on his social calendar:

At the end of November, Decca wrote to her mother: “You can’t imagine how fascinating my job is . . . I’m now an Investigator, and may have to travel around the country. If so, the Durrs will look after the Donk while I’m away.” Decca was restless. There were OPA offices across the United States, and she was attracted to the idea of San Francisco, so far from everything. She did the paperwork, expecting to have months in which to change her mind and plans. With surprising alacrity, Decca’s transfer to the OPA office in San Francisco was approved. In December, she wrote to Katharine Graham in South Dakota (where her husband was stationed) to say she thought she’d see her en route, but that letter and others written around that time are ambiguous. She was waiting for some encouraging signal from Bob.

Around Christmas 1942, Bob moved in the wrong direction. He and his roommate Abe Glasser recorded a musical marriage proposal to Glasser’s girlfriend on “one of those do-it-yourself phonograph machines.” They sang: “Dear Joyce, please come to Washington—Abe wants to marry you; Dear Joyce, please come to Washington—No government girl will do.”

Decca thought the boys’ caprice fairly amusing until she discovered that loosened by cocktails and infatuated by new toys, they had made other records proposing to other old flames all over the country. Bob sent at least one proposal to an old girlfriend, who didn’t understand the joke part and planned to visit.

By New Year’s, to Bob’s “pleased surprise” and Decca’s “deep chagrin,” several of the girls showed up in Washington. Decca wrote that she was not invited to their marriage proposal party: “For the first time in my life I was assailed by the bitter, corroding emotion of jealousy.” Her feelings for Bob were in a “hopeless muddle.” Bob said she suddenly told him that she was leaving. “She claims that she left Washington because I was interested in other girls, that I wasn’t going to make up my mind.” Meanwhile, Decca had made up her mind to go “as far away as possible, and start a totally new life.”