Dear Lisa,
Apparently there’s a lair of gangsters just down the street from Briarwood House! Irish mob—I sit in my window hoping to see machine guns and getaway cars. My window overlooks the whole square; the best place on earth to watch people. Though my housemates offer plenty of diversion! Will sulky little Lina ever make a decent batch of cookies? Will old Mrs. Muller ever crack a smile? Who on earth is sending Nora Walsh all these sumptuous flowers?
I wish you were here.
—Grace
Thanksgiving had come and gone, all anyone could talk about was the upcoming Rosenberg trial, and Nora Walsh was moving up in the world.
“You look very smart.” Grace March, wrapped in a threadbare robe embroidered with Chinese dragons and waiting on the fourth-floor landing with her toothbrush, looked admiringly as Nora hurried out of their shared bathroom. “That suit’s new, isn’t it?”
“Hecht Company, sale rack.” Nora gave the peplum on her smoke-blue gabardine jacket a pleased tug. It took a lot of sale haunting and bargain-bin shopping to look expensive on a budget as limited as hers, but it was worth it. There were those at the National Archives who thought Miss Walsh was entirely too gauche, too green, too Foggy Bottom to have been promoted out of the file room to personal secretary of the Mr. Harris, executive officer of the Archives. Miss Walsh had decided that even if she hadn’t been raised to be elegant, college-educated, or top-drawer, no one was ever going to know it by looking at her. She might live in a boardinghouse shoebox and take weekend shifts at the local greasy spoon, but the moment she headed to the National Archives her lipstick was flawless, her clothes up to the minute, and her voice ironed of every Irish vowel.
“Very nice, Tipperary.” Grace had nicknamed Nora that since hearing her family had originally made its way over from Tipperary county in the old country and it made Nora grin every time. “Quality gabardine always shows,” Grace continued, rubbing Nora’s cuff between her fingers. For a woman who went about most of the time in peasant skirts and ballet flats, she had a very sharp eye for clothes. “Coming to the Briar Club dinner tonight?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Nora’s usual dinner was a cup of soup heated on her hot plate, part of the aforementioned scrimping and saving. Thursday dinners were usually the best meal Nora had all week, all the saints bless Grace March and her Briar Club. (So dubbed by Pete, with an adorable solemnity that had all the women biting their cheeks in an effort not to laugh. Well, except Arlene Hupp, who put her head back and giggled, eyes sparkling as Pete’s face fell. “So sorry, Pete, you’re just too funny!” Claire Hallett had promptly spilled a cup of sun tea down the front of Arlene’s cashmere twinset: “So sorry, Arlene, you’re just too in the way!” A bit excessive, Nora thought, but Claire was inclined to overflex her claws at times.)
“I saw you writing a postcard yesterday, Grace,” Nora went on, snatching up her handbag. “Want me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out, so Doilies Nilsson won’t snoop?” Doilies was what Grace had dubbed their landlady (when Pete wasn’t in earshot) for all those horridly starched little antimacassars she was always crocheting and draping over every blessed surface.
“I’m not done writing it out yet, thank you.” Grace smiled her sleepy half smile and disappeared into the bathroom, tousling her golden-brown hair. Nora hadn’t seen Grace get a single letter in the five months she’d lived at Briarwood House, or post one either, or mention a single family member back home. For a woman who had such an easy listening air as she welcomed other people’s life stories, she was remarkably unforthcoming with her own.
Nora appreciated that. She didn’t talk about her family, either.
The square was just waking up as she came through the front door of Briarwood House, pulling on her pristine darned-at-the-fingertips gloves. The drugstore across the street was already open, clerk sweeping off the steps; Dave’s Barbershop on the opposite corner already had a fellow rushing in, barking, “Neaten up the sides and leave the top!” Next door, Mr. Rosenberg was out on the front steps of the corner deli, affixing a small sign in the window: No relation to Julius & Ethel Rosenberg. “Think that’ll do the trick?” he asked Nora as she swung past. “The way people are looking for Reds these days, I don’t need any baloney about being the Rosenbergs’ Commie cousin . . .”
“I don’t know who could think that, Mr. Rosenberg. No one who makes bagels like yours could ever be a spy.” Nora waved and kept walking, around the corner and past the Crispy Biscuit, where, unbeknownst to her more refined Monday-to-Friday employers, she picked up weekend shifts—then past the Amber Club where Joe Reiss played six nights a week until three in the morning. The sunlight was golden, the air crisp and cold, and block by block the slightly shabby streets of Foggy Bottom picked up their hems and put out their lace curtains, until she hit Washington Circle and veered onto Pennsylvania, where suddenly the nation’s capital began taking itself very seriously indeed. Maybe her hometown didn’t have the bustle of New York or the glitter of Hollywood (not that Nora had seen either), but where else could you find a city with the drawling charm of a small Southern town and the electric sense that everything really important in this country was happening right here? Nearly three miles to walk to work every day, but Nora wouldn’t give it up for anything: the sense every morning that her city was unfurling around her, bright with promise.
Just like her own life finally was, after that horrendous series of bumps that had hit like grenades when she graduated high school.
Down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, where Nora sent silent well-wishes to Mr. Truman, then a nip down Ninth to Constitution—and there it was: the National Archives, granite-grand, pillared and pedimented, history breathing quietly from it. Nora had been coming here since she was a freshly minted eighteen, the newest of the file girls. It still made her catch her breath, stand a little taller in her glossy black patent pumps. Mother of God, but she loved this place.
If she had time, she liked to come through the front entrance and into the Rotunda, past the case where the Bill of Rights was reverently displayed—but her feet slowed today as she reached the top of the steps, and all her happy morning goodwill curdled. Because leaning against one of the massive columns was a man in crisp policeman’s blues, hair gleaming the same soft brown as Nora’s.
“Hello, deirfiúr bheag.”
“Nearly twenty-one is really too old to be little anything, Timmy,” Nora said coolly, feeling her heart start to thump. “And I don’t think of myself as your sister anymore.”
Sergeant Timothy Walsh clapped a hand to his heart as if she’d shot him. “Come on, darlin’, how long are you going to hold a grudge?” He hadn’t ironed the Irish out of his voice the way she had—he didn’t have to, when half his precinct resonated with accents from Cork, Mayo, and Meath, and when the name Walsh had already paved your way because your father had made it from the beat to the rank of detective. No one had paved Nora’s way.
“Did I ever tell you how proud I am of you, working at a place like this?” He tilted his head to look up the vast stretch of columns. “Little Nora from Foggy Bottom, hobnobbing with all the bigwigs at the Archives . . .”
As if you’ve set foot in a library since high school, or even know what an archive is. Nora took a harder grip on her pocketbook, exhaling. He knew exactly how to get under her skin, he always had, and there wasn’t any use getting steamed up because it would just entertain him. “Timmy, please get out of my way. I’m going to be late for work.”
“If you could see your way to loaning me a bit . . . Catriona’s birthday is this week, and Timmy Junior’s got to see a doctor about his ears. I’ve got expenses.”
“No,” Nora said flatly. He made a good salary, and there was no reason for empty pockets except that he liked the cards and the ponies and the extra dram at Pete Dailey’s over on New Hampshire and Virginia. “I am not giving you a dime—”
But he’d already nipped her pocketbook off her shoulder, fast as a pickpocket. Nora yanked back, hissing, “Tim—” but he was rummaging through it, and she didn’t dare make a commotion. Which was why he’d braced her here, right on the front steps of the National Archives, and people were giving them curious looks. The doorman, who was the biggest gossip in the whole building, and Mrs. Halliwell, who headed up the file room and had been the loudest voice opposing Nora’s promotion to Mr. Harris’s office. What did she see, a jumped-up file girl talking to a beat cop, or a couple of Micks who didn’t belong? What would she think if Nora made a scene, shouting at Tim and trying to yank her wallet back?
Nora had made a scene before, the first time her brother braced her on the way to work and yanked her handbag off her arm. She just ended up with a broken handbag strap as well as an empty wallet. Tim was bigger; he was always going to win if it came to a struggle. He knew it, and Nora did too.
“I’ll pay you back. Next week, I promise.” He never did, and every dollar from her billfold had already disappeared into his pocket. He leaned in and kissed Nora’s cheek, or tried to—Nora took a step back. “You’re a gem. I won’t forget this.”
“I won’t either,” said Nora, feeling her blood pound in impotent rage. “Hard to forget it when your brother steals from you.”
“Don’t be like that, deirfiúr bheag. We miss you back home, you know. Mam wishes you’d visit. So does Siobhan.”
Siobhan misses me because now there’s no one to watch the kids for her, Nora thought uncharitably and accurately of her brother’s wife. That was what an unmarried sister-in-law was for: watch the babies, tend the mother-in-law, iron the police uniforms, smile, be grateful. Not move out to a swank job in the capital and start wearing pencil-slim suits and talking above herself.
“I’m working a new thing, you know,” he went on, flicking a bit of invisible dust off his badge. “The Feds are looking to wrap up the Warring brothers, the Foggy Bottom gang, the numbers racket—”
“Good luck prying the district away from the Warrings, Tim. They’ve been here longer than Prohibition. And don’t you play poker with Rags Warring every Saturday at Dailey’s?” While he collected his weekly payoff, Nora could have added, but didn’t bother. Half the local cops were on the take.
Tim shrugged, grinning. “Doesn’t mean I won’t help the Feds roll ’em up if it gets me a nice promotion come New Year.”
Cops and robbers, Nora thought. Every kid in Foggy Bottom played cops and robbers. If you were from a family like Nora’s, Mass every Sunday and First Communion photographs in the parlor and a good amount of police blue running through the family tree, you were on the cop side in those games. If you came from a family like the notorious Warrings, where the numbers racket was passed down from brother to brother (and so was the backyard still and the jugged moonshine back in Prohibition days) you played on the robber side. What most people hadn’t figured was this: that both sides were utter rackets. That both sides, in Nora’s experience, understood the game.
“Get lost, Timmy,” Nora managed to say evenly, and moved past her older brother into the National Archives, heels stabbing the ground like knives. By the time she was seated at her desk, sorting the mail with efficient speed, preparing her boss’s cup of coffee (“Good morning, Mr. Harris—don’t forget your ten o’clock and here’s that report you asked for on the new preservation case for the Bill of Rights—”), Nora’s inner calm almost matched her outward poise again.
So you still get the occasional family hand shoving its way into your pocketbook, she thought, taking possession of her big glass-smooth desk. You’re still on the right track.
And she didn’t ever—after what had happened at eighteen—intend to get knocked off it.