The next morning, Arnie completed his nearly inviolable morning exercise routine in the hotel basement, a fierce combination of intense moves like burpees and push-ups, all done to exhaustion. After eating the simple breakfast served by the hotel in another part of the basement, Louise and Arnie reported to Max Hamilton, the US chargé d’affaires, at his office, which was located in a converted mansion that sat among large, now-bare deciduous trees near a park crisscrossed with walking lanes and intersected with narrow paved roads.
Hamilton appeared to be in his early fifties, and Louise found him to be charming, East Coast, well educated, intelligent, and probably wealthy. Arnie had told her, just before they went into Hamilton’s office, that it was a blessing that Finland didn’t want an embassy; it avoided his having to report to an ignorant political appointee instead of an experienced career diplomat like Hamilton.
Louise wasn’t so sure, because she quickly saw that Max Hamilton evinced one of the downsides of the career diplomat. Anytime she’d ask a question of substance, he’d smile and deflect pleasantly and politely, saying nothing of importance.
She’d asked if the United States would offer financial help or loans to Finland, even though they’d fought with the Germans. He’d answered, “We’re really not into the banking business. Do you need any help finding a personal bank here in Helsinki?” She’d tried again, asking him how strong the Communist Party of Finland was and how dependent it was on the Soviets. He’d answered, “It is, of course, an active political party. One of many. It’s probably best if we keep our opinions about the internal policies of a host country’s political parties to ourselves.” She wasn’t sure if she’d been rebuked.
She kept her frustration hidden behind what she called her polite-face smile. Beneath it was good old Oklahoma irritation. How in hell could she do her job if Hamilton wouldn’t answer her questions and none of her good clothes were here?
She listened while Hamilton and Arnie discussed the details of his job. Finland was directly under the likely path of American B-29 bombers flying out of England and Greenland to bomb Russia should war erupt. Soviet air and naval bases needed to be located and their capabilities determined. Emergency landing sites needed to be established. Possible invasion routes and key roads, rail lines, bridges, and their load capacities needed to be identified. Probable strategies needed to be understood. Any threat to Finnish independence that would move Finland into the Soviet camp, whether posed by the Red Army, Soviet intelligence organizations, or the pro-Soviet Finnish Communist Party needed to be uncovered.
When she’d sensed that Arnie had exhausted all of his detailed questions, she plunged in to help Arnie with the part of his job that he was neither good at nor inclined to do: managing up. She turned on the charm. If Hamilton wanted just to make congenial small talk with her, then she’d, by gum, make use of that. So, she joined the game he was playing and began lobbing conversational tennis balls across the net that were easy to hit back. She quickly learned that Hamilton was an enthusiastic member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. She made sure he knew she was still an enthusiastic member of Delta Gamma sorority. Within ten minutes he was telling funny stories about Foggy Bottom in the old days and had even unbuttoned his suit coat. It ended with Hamilton calling his wife, asking her to have coffee with Louise at the legation that afternoon to help Louise get settled.
Back on the street, Arnie said, “Thank you. You know how I hate buttering up.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Did you have to make him fall in love with you?”
“Just fall at my feet, my dear.” She tucked her arm in close to the crook of his own. He in turn pulled her in closer to his side, making her want to hurry back to the hotel.
When they got there, however, Arnie immediately disappeared to his new assignment, leaving Louise a bit frustrated. Temporarily thwarted from what she considered her most important task, she turned to her own assignment, finding an apartment. The first order of business on that front was the impending meeting with Hamilton’s wife. That meant ironing the dress she was wearing. The other two dresses she’d packed were a conservative cocktail dress and a housedress, neither suitable for meeting Mrs. Hamilton for coffee at the legation offices.
She did some of her best planning ironing clothes and the to-do list was already long. Arnie would need clothes, too, if their crates didn’t arrive. They needed stationery for thank-you notes. Telephone service. Groceries. There must be a fish market. Helsinki was on a harbor after all. Did Finland have department stores?
Army wives were used to getting things done alone, especially when a war was on. They raised their children alone. They made all the difficult decisions—where to go to school, what to do about the teacher their child hated, getting the children to church, making sure they remembered their absent fathers and knew who their father’s parents were—all tasks she wished she could have been doing herself. About the only difference between being an army wife and a widowed or divorced single mother was the steady paycheck and the hope that someday the loneliness would end without having to go down to the local bar—and dealing with their husbands when they came back from war forever changed.
Having found housing off base several times during the war and again in the suburbs of DC when Arnie spent seventeen weeks at Strategic Intelligence School, Louise thought she would only be mildly challenged by it being her first time outside of the United States.
In the past, finding housing had been easy compared to the things she’d done working in her father’s lumberyard as a teenager. By the time she was in high school, she had been helping contractors with purchases and dealing with their complaints, helping with the books and preparing the taxes, and, on occasion, when her father was short of help in the yard, even doing jobs like pulling out higher grades of lumber from recently arrived mixed pallets to sell for premium prices. This involved moving hundreds of pieces of lumber, some of the larger two-by-twelves weighing over sixty pounds. She smiled, remembering using nearly a jar of her mother’s Pond’s Cold Cream on her hands and having to roll sideways out of her bed in the morning for about a week because she was so stiff.
In college, she’d been elected president of her sorority. Managing meals, house maintenance, recruitment, complicated social events, and the quarrels, jealousies, and emotions of eighty-seven girls, followed by six and a half years of military life, most of it spent in wartime, she assumed would have prepared her for her current assignment.
It hadn’t. None of her previous experience had been in a country reeling from a recent war. Finding housing in the States had been hard, but there hadn’t been thousands of homeless refugees pouring into the city. And the language was totally alien. Although she’d majored in education, she’d minored in French in college and the language had been easy for her. Trying for several months to learn even rudimentary Finnish had left her feeling tired and inadequate. Yes, she could find the bathroom, count to one hundred, and figure out how to buy a bus ticket, but engaging in an intelligent conversation would have to wait. That would be another item on the list she thought, finding a Finnish language tutor. On top of it all, there were less than six hours of daylight, and daylight was gloomy at best.
Every day, Arnie left their hotel early and returned late, always in darkness. The Finns called their country Suomi, which Arnie had told her was derived from some pre–Finnish language word for “bog,” adding in his careful way that it was only one theory of several. Others were that Suomi meant “land of the lakes” or just “the land.” After several days of trudging around the war-torn, bleak city, she thought darkly that the bog theory was the more likely.
Not that Louise hadn’t expected housing to be difficult to find. Housing all over Europe was scarce because of the bombing. Helsinki, too, had been bombed—by the Russians—using American bombers. Much of Helsinki had been saved from severe damage because the Finns had lured the bombers away from the city by lighting fires and placing searchlights on the islands just off the coast. The actual cause of the housing shortage was the four hundred thousand Finns who had fled their homes in Eastern Finland rather than live under Soviet domination and another one hundred thousand discharged soldiers.
Then, there were the orphans, thousands of them.