Major Peter “Doug” Douglass, Jr., who was short for a pilot and looked even younger than his twenty-five years, wanted to say good-bye to his father before he took off for Europe. The easiest way to do that would have been simply to land his P-38 in Washington. But Peter Douglass, Sr., was a captain in the United States Navy, and Doug Douglass did not want the “good-bye” to turn into a fatherly lecture on the hazards to an officer’s career of flouting regulations forbidding “diversions en route to the aerial port of departure.” The other easy alternative, declaring engine trouble over Washington, was just too much of a convenient coincidence.
Between Alabama and North Carolina, however, Doug Douglass found his answer. He had a good executive officer who could lead the rest of the group to Westover. And he really didn’t think anyone would ask questions about carburetor trouble near Baltimore making a “precautionary” landing there necessary. So he used the in-flight communications system to relay a spurious message to his father:“Replacement package will arrive Baltimore 1330 hours.” He was confident his father would know what it meant.
Charity Hoche was waiting for him with an OSS station wagon. He knew Charity fairly well. He had, in fact, rather casually made the beast with two backs with her on one of the few times he’d been able to make it to Washington. Charity worked for the OSS—that is to say, for his father—as sort of a housekeeper for the turn-of-the-century mansion the OSS operated on Q Street near Rock Creek Park.
She came out of the same very upper-echelon set as Donovan and Jimmy Whittaker and Cynthia Chenowith and Ed Bitter and his wife. A bright girl with a dim look, she had picked up from friends (most of them OSS types) and at parties more than she should have picked up about the OSS. So it was decided that the best way to keep an eye on her was to give her a job.
And she looked damn good, too, when he saw her. Marvelous breasts, long blond hair, and a pronounced nasal manner of speech he found enticingly erotic. But he had come to see his father, not for a casual roll in the hay.
“My dad’s tied up?” he asked.
Charity told him that his father was indeed “tied up” but that he hoped Doug could wait until eight, at which time he might be free.
On the other hand, since my father is tied up, maybe a casual roll in the hay would steady my nerves for the arduous duty I am about to face.
So they went for a beer, except he didn’t drink because he was going to have to fly, and Charity drank some concoction with fruit juice and a cherry and gin. It tended to make her emotional. By four o’clock, Doug had decided he would not fly on to Westover until tomorrow. Every hour on the hour, Charity called to see if his father had any word for them.
Then they had dinner someplace, but he didn’t pay much attention to what they had to eat. They had started playing kneesy under the table pretty soon after their arrival, and that was more interesting than food. Around dessert or coffee or some damn thing, she leaned over to say something to him and rested her magnificent breast on his hand.
Finally, it was out in the open, although there was some imaginative use of euphemisms: They could not go to Charity’s place for a “nap”—the euphemism here being that if he was going to fly to England the next morning, he would need his rest—because she lived at the house on Q Street, and people might get the wrong idea.
Anyplace but Washington, a hotel would have worked; but there were no hotel rooms to be had in Washington. (They spent a dollar and a half in nickels confirming that by telephone.)
And then Charity found a way: They would go to Ed and Sarah Bitter’s suite in the Wardman Park Hotel. Not only could they call from there to see if there was word about his father, but Charity remembered hearing that Ed Bitter (who was a bit dense about such things) was out of town on duty.
Sarah was much more likely to understand how important it was for Doug to get that nap, and she would probably even displace her child Joe from his room so that Doug’s nap would be both private and without interruption.
Sarah Child Bitter was indeed delighted to see Major Peter “Doug” Douglass, Jr., Army Air Corps. For Sarah’s husband, Lieutenant Commander Bitter, was for a number of reasons particularly fond of Major Douglass.
In the days before the war, Ed Bitter and Doug Douglass had been “Flying Tigers” together. Right after the war started, Doug had saved Ed’s life at considerable risk to his own neck. Wounded by ground fire while strafing a Japanese air base, Ed had managed to land his crippled plane in a dry riverbed. And then, defying the laws of aerodynamics, Doug had landed his P-40, loaded Ed into it, and taken off again with Ed on his lap. If Doug hadn’t done that, Ed would have either died from loss of blood or fallen into the hands of the Japanese who regarded the “Flying Tigers” as bandits and beheaded the ones they caught.
Doug Douglass was welcome to Little Joe’s room anytime he wanted it.
But not for the purpose Charity obviously had in mind. Sarah took her into the butler’s pantry and told her so.
"I don’t mean to be nasty about this, Charity,” she said. “But if you insist on acting like a woman who goes to hotels with men, go to a hotel.”
“If there were any vacant hotel rooms in Washington, and there are not, they would not rent one to an aviator and his blonde,” Charity argued. “They demand marriage licenses.”
“Then you are just going to have to restrain your impulses until you can arrange something,” Sarah said. She giggled and added,“Either a marriage license or your own apartment.”
“Unfortunately, there’s no time to do that,” Charity said.
“Unless you get to roll around with him tonight, you’ll go blind, right, or grow hair on your palms?”
“This time tomorrow night, he’ll be in his little airplane somewhere over the Atlantic,” Charity said.
“Did he tell you that?” Sarah asked.
“No, and I don’t want him to know I know,” Charity said.
“If it’s a secret, why are you tel
ling me?”
“What are you going to do, phone Hitler? The only reason I’m telling you is that I want you to know how important this is to me.”
“Charity, I love you, but I know you. If I ever found out…”