Justine sat across the table from a brand-new friend, sipping tea and talking about possible espionage.
“Somebody’s sabotaging our work,” Justine said. “Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”
“That’s what I think. You think somebody’s mad at the company and wants to get back at Mr. Higgins? Somebody with a temper, like Sonny?”
“Maybe. But maybe it’s an enemy doing the sabotage.”
“To stop us from getting our work done?”
“Or maybe just to slow us down. The Allies could have the best army, the best navy, the best bullets, and the best bombs, but we’ll still lose the war if the enemy beats us before we beat them. In my head, I know that all of this is true, but it’s just really hard to make myself believe in something as far-fetched as Axis spies right here in my hometown.”
Justine took a sip of her tea, to which she’d added a splash of milk and nothing else, since neither of them owned a granule of sugar.
“I got five brothers and two parents that ain’t got ten years of schooling between them all.” Georgette paused to breathe in the scent of her tea. “Four of my brothers are off fighting, and the other one’s home wounded. It woulda helped my folks if one or two of ’em coulda stayed home, but the Marines wanted ’em bad. So bad they sent recruiters to the house. And they wanted to go. Taking this job means I can do my part to end the war, same as them. If somebody’s trying to undo my work, then I gotta say that I take it personal.”
Now that she realized how truthful her new friend had been when she called The Julia a beautiful place to live, Justine also realized how generous Georgette had been to share her milk and her tea bag.
“Sending money home to my folks to make up for my brothers not being around to help with the fishing and farming is the least I can do,” Georgette said, gesturing with her teacup. “They all worked theirselves ragged to help Mama and Papa keep me in school through the eighth grade.”
She eyeballed Justine, as if to see whether she thought an eighth-grade education was an accomplishment or an embarrassment. Justine tried to look impressed that Georgette had finished junior high. The more she heard of the woman’s story, the more impressed she actually was.
“Mr. Higgins ain’t finished high school, either,” Georgette said, lifting the cup to her mouth. “Heard him say so myself. He said he got kicked out of every school in Omaha. Anyway, I’ve got enough schooling to know that there ain’t such a word as ‘ain’t’ or ‘theirselves,’ and I know how to make my subjects agree with my verbs, but talking like you talk would make it sound like I think my family and the way they talk ain’t respectable enough. I save my good English for when I want a job or when I need to impress somebody. The rest of the time? I say what I want to say, and I cuss when I feel like it. I’m a grown woman who earns my own way, and I can do that if I want to.”
Justine gave Georgette’s statement the respectful moment of silence it deserved, and she used that time to think about the ways that people keep their loved ones close. She finally said, “I suppose I hang on to my grammar and big words, even when nobody around me gives a damn how I talk, because it keeps my parents alive when I sound like them.”
Justine savored the taste of the “damn,” which her mother and father would absolutely not have countenanced. Somehow, being with Georgette gave her permission to curse, and it felt good.
Georgette smiled at her in a way that made Justine think that maybe she didn’t quite have the hang of casual cursing yet. She said, “My folks was raising five boys in a four-room house when I come along. The bathroom was a two-hole outhouse. Still is. All the water we needed for drinking and cooking and bathing came from a pump out back. Still does. When I outgrowed the little bed in Mama and Papa’s room, they had to figure out what to do with a little girl in a house full of men.”
“Did they put you in the outhouse?” Justine hoped this joke was funny.
To her relief, Georgette laughed. “Almost. They put me on the sleeping porch. It had screens to keep the bugs out. I had a paper fan to cool myself off in the summer, and I came in and slept between Mama and Papa on those few nights in the wintertime when it got bad cold. Most of the time, my porch was a nice place to be, all by myself with good-smelling air and the sound of the night animals moving around in the dark. You know…raccoons and possums and such. The night noises here in the city aren’t near as pleasant.”
Justine thought of the night sounds outside her window at The Julia. People were on the street at all hours, talking and laughing and sometimes arguing. Once, there had been a horrible scream, followed by the pounding sound of someone running, and the women of The Julia had gathered in the parlor while their landlady, Mrs. Guidry, called the police. The next day, they had learned that the screaming woman was dead and her husband was in jail. By contrast, Georgette’s sleeping porch sounded about as peaceful as Justine’s childhood bedroom had been, one door away from the room where her parents had slept. The difference between her upbringing and Georgette’s, of course, was that Justine’s childhood bedroom had had walls. Georgette had essentially slept outdoors for her entire life before moving into The Julia.
Georgette reached out and brushed a gentle hand over Justine’s chenille bedspread, cheap and acid-green. “That’s so pretty. You bought it new at the store, I bet.”
Justine nodded, somehow embarrassed to have had a couple of bucks to spend at a going-out-of-business sale. Here sat somebody who needed her job even more than Justine did, yet Georgette was willing to risk it by talking to her about the possible saboteur at their workplace. That willingness spoke of someone with a clear sense of right and wrong.
The skeptical side of Justine, the part that was trained to think by scientists, entertained the possibility that Georgette needed money badly enough to sell out her country for it, and this made her realize that she no longer resisted acknowledging that somebody might be doing just that. Maybe Georgette was the saboteur, and maybe she’d approached Justine to see how close she was getting to the truth.
Justine tried to think like a German spy looking for somebody to infiltrate a munitions plant. Or maybe a Japanese spy. Would somebody working for what was left of the Axis be able to see Georgette’s potential, or would they write her off as the product of eight years in a rural school full of poor people like her?
In Justine’s judgment, the enemy would use one of those reasons to dismiss Georgette as worthless. Also, in Justine’s judgment, the enemy would be wrong. She decided to trust the woman in front of her.
“If my parents were here,” Justine said, “they’d be able to tell me why those radio parts that we Carbonites are building are worthy of sabotage. I don’t know what the answer is, but I have some ideas.”
“Now that I hear you talking, I remember hearing about some strange doings in other parts of the Carbon Division. Missing hand tools. Busted cables. Things like that.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Justine said.
“There’s a lotta things about the work we’re doing that I don’t understand. I mean all of it. I don’t understand nothing, starting with what we’re making that’s so black.” Georgette waved a hand at the hook where Justine had hung her carbon-stained bath towel to dry. “I ain’t never seen nothing on a boat that looks like the parts we’re building, chère. And I might as well have got born on a boat.”
It was touching to see how badly Georgette wanted to understand why Justine thought that Axis spies could possibly be interested in the Carbonites and their work. Justine had so much trouble explaining her ideas that they stayed up long past Mrs. Guidry’s curfew, despite the fact that they’d both worked a ten-hour day. Justine used the time to explain—well, start explaining—mid-twentieth-century theoretical physics to a junior high graduate. Her pupil was sharp and savvy, but her knowledge of the world beyond southern Louisiana was spotty. The invisible worlds of subatomic particles and electromagnetic waves might as well have been nonexistent.
“You gotta make allowances for what I don’t know,” Georgette said. “Now that I live in the city, I’m trying to make up for lost time. I get to read the paper most days, and never mind that I can’t afford the penny to buy it with. People throw ’em away. Even if I find one in the trash that’s a day old, it’s still worth reading when you got lots of catching up to do.”
“You’ve seen newsreels?”
“One time, I saved up and saw a movie. The newsreels that showed before the main feature were the best part. It was like—” Georgette paused, unable to come up with words that were big and grand enough for what she wanted to say. “It was like I was there. On the deck of a ship like the ones my brothers are on, watching planes flying overhead. They kept coming, one after another after another. The war’s awful, and I wish they was home safe, but just think. They’re seeing the world. They’re seeing miracles.”
“But you had heard about such things? You had radio growing up?”
“My Uncle Herb did. We’d all go over to his house to listen to the president talk. It seemed like magic to hear his voice come out of that wood box. It’s amazing to me that I’m helping build parts for one of them magic boxes. Tell me something, though?”
Justine, dazed by the blizzard of words, just said, “Sure thing. What do you want to know?”
“Why’re we making radio parts for the Army? Or is it the Navy? I’m never sure who we work for, not really. Maybe they think our soldiers and sailors will fight more better if they can enjoy music on the radio? That don’t make a lick of sense.”
Justine was glad that the conversation had wound back around to the original topic.
“Well, soldiers and sailors and pilots need to be able to talk to each other, and radios are good for that.”
Georgette’s jaw fell open. “You mean—” She tried again. “You mean I could talk into a radio, and the president could hear me the way I hear him? And he could talk back? Like a telephone, except without wires?”
“I mean exactly that. Well, if you had a transmitter—” Georgette looked blank, so Justine tried again. “You could talk to President Roosevelt if you had the kind of radio that would let you talk back and if you knew how to tune it to reach him. And if he was listening to that frequency when you called.”
“Damn.” Georgette took a sip of her pale tea, brewed with a tea bag that had already made a cup for each of them. “That would win a war.”
“It would win a war if the other side didn’t have it, too. Since the Axis powers do have radio, having radios just means we’re keeping even with them. I can’t imagine that making more radios at this stage of the war is a do-or-die proposition.”
Justine paused. A lot of the things she’d heard at her parents’ parties were probably still classified, but she knew that she’d seen newspapers that mentioned the word “RADAR,” and describing technology that had been brand-new when her parents were talking about it with their friends. “I’ve heard a rumor about a new bomb sight under development. I’ve wondered if that’s what we’re building, but I think it’s more likely that we’re making parts for RADAR installations. The technology is new and it keeps changing, so it only makes sense that the military would keep building newer and better equipment for as long as the war lasts.”
Georgette didn’t even have a vague grasp of what RADAR was, answering, “Ray-what?” when Justine asked what she knew about it.
So Justine had backed up and explained it. This was harder than she would have expected. She tried several strategies for explaining radiolocation, but Georgette finally lit up when Justine explained how bats moved in the world.
“Some scientists at Harvard,” she said, “have shown that bats find their way in the dark by making squeaky sounds and then listening to the way the sound bounces off things and comes back to them.”
Justine thought those words seemed simple enough to do the job, and the concept wasn’t all that complicated. She looked at Georgette for signs that she understood what Justine was trying to say.
“So it’s like when you’re outside at night and you can tell how far away the trees are by the way your voice sounds?” Georgette’s wide smile said that Justine had finally found the perfect explanation for a woman who’d had to find her way in the dark every time she’d gone to the outhouse at night.
Justine grinned and nodded.
“We’re building parts for a machine that can do that?”
“Yes, I think so. Well, close. RADAR—that’s R-A-D-A-R, all capital letters, and it stands for Radio Detection and Ranging—uses radio waves instead of sound waves.”
“I’m just close?” Georgette smacked her flattened hand on the rickety little table where Justine had spread a half dozen books. It shook on its uneven legs. “You can’t just once let me be right?”
“When you’re right, I’ll tell you.”
“Mighty nice of you. But I do get your point on how useful it is to know where your enemies are. And just think of being able to find out from a far distance, where they can’t shoot at you. That could…”
As Georgette’s voice trailed off, Justine could hear the rest of the sentence. That could save my brothers’ lives. That could bring them all home.
“You’re not wrong about sound. Sound waves are useful, too. Bouncing sound off things that are underwater is a good way to find submarines. It’s just that I don’t think we’re building parts for echolocation.” She didn’t recall seeing anything about echolocation technology in the newspapers, so she didn’t come out and say the word “SONAR,” much less try to explain the acronym.
By the time Justine had shown Georgette the 1942 article in Popular Mechanics that had almost given away the British early warning system’s secrets, Georgette was fully briefed on how important it was to know where planes and ships were and how fast they were moving. And also about how important it was to keep the enemy from getting the same information about the Allies’ vessels. She had also lent Georgette her old algebra book and walked her through the first few lessons. Georgette had been thrilled by Justine’s offer to teach her as much math as she wanted to learn, so thrilled that she let out the kind of squeal more usually associated with the offer of a shoe-shopping spree or a weekend at the beach.
Justine was starting to understand why her parents had enjoyed teaching so much. And Gloria. Gloria lived to teach. Being a professor at a women’s college meant that Gloria had moved in a constant cloud of worshipful young women who had never met anyone like her. Gloria must have enjoyed teaching Justine to read as much as Justine was enjoying the sight of Georgette struggling with a concept and then—suddenly, miraculously—grasping it.
Remembering the afternoons that she’d spent with Gloria and The House at Pooh Corner had brought Justine to a decision she’d been struggling all day to make. She needed to see Gloria. She needed to get her opinion about the possible sabotage of her work at the Michaud plant, but she would have to be very careful about how she did it. She had taken an oath of secrecy that weighed on her mind. The oath might make it impossible for her to get the help she needed from Gloria, but she had to try. If she could trust anybody to help her stop the sabotage without endangering herself or the war effort, it would be her godmother. Gloria’s thought processes had the transparent clarity of pure mathematics, but she’d been a refugee and she’d never lost the refugee’s engrained suspicion of authority.
Justine knew that she would have eventually convinced herself that it was time to face her godmother, but her conversation with Georgette had saved her weeks of fretting about it. Just her luck, she was heading into her day off. She could be face-to-face with Gloria in twelve hours, apologizing for their time apart, and she had Georgette to thank for that. Or to blame, as the case might be.
At some point in the evening, Georgette looked at Justine’s little bedside alarm clock and said, “You’ve been explaining this stuff to me for hours. You ain’t tired of talking to somebody this ignorant?”
“Don’t say that. ‘Ignorant’ is a terrible word. Nobody knows everything there is to know. I like talking to you because you ask questions. You want to get down to the bottom of things. You’d be surprised at how rare that kind of intellectual curiosity is. I don’t know how to talk to somebody who isn’t curious. I don’t dislike people like that. I just can’t think of anything to say to them.”
“Intellectual. Huh.”
Georgette rose. “Would you excuse me for a minute?” Then she walked out into the hall. Justine presumed she was going to the bathroom, although the abrupt way she’d left was a little odd.
When Georgette came back moments later, she had a battered tin pail in her hand, which was also a little odd.
“It ain’t nothing,” Georgette said. “Just a little something we can share while you do some more explaining.”
And then she held out the pail, and Justine saw that it was full of grapes, plump, velvet-skinned, fragrant, and almost black.
“My Papa comes to town on my day off every week, and he always brings me something to help me keep my grocery bill down. It’s fish when it’s cold enough that they don’t start to smell before he can get here on the bus. This time of year, the weather’s too hot for that, so he brings me something out of the garden or maybe some wild plums. This week, it was these here muscadine grapes. They grow wild by the house. Grab a handful and tell me some more about—what do you call it? Oh, yeah. Radiolocation. RADAR.”
If Justine had still harbored doubts that she was right to share her fears with Georgette, she never doubted her new friend after she shared her wild grapes. They talked all night, they laughed until the sweet, sticky juice ran off their chins, and they had absolutely no idea what real danger was.
Not then. Not yet.