that we would be taken back into the Navy with no loss of seniority, and that if we were promoted while in the AVG, we would receive a promotion in the Navy. It seems that the Navy has a policy by which lieutenants (Junior grade) with six months in the war zone are considered eligible for promotion, so they took that into consideration, and then also made good their word to promote me since I had been promoted in the AVG.
What that means is that I’m back in the Navy with a grade (temporary, of course) two grades higher than I was the last time I saw you. I find it hard, frankly, to think of myself as Lieutenant Commander Bitter (all the lieutenant commanders I knew were old men), but it must be so, for that’s what it says on the sign on my bed.
The other good news is that I will be returned to the United States. A hospital ship is en route here, and as soon as they have enough people to fill it up (and there probably will be more than enough by the time it gets here) I’ll be returned to the United States. There is a good chance that I’ll be gone before any letter you might write could get here, so you can save stamps.
I have no idea where I’ll be stationed in the States, but perhaps I’ll be able to come to Memphis to see you. I would like very much to buy you the most elaborate dinner the Peabody dining room has to offer.
Please say hello to Ann, and if you’d like to risk the paper and a stamp, write your
Fond Pen Pal,
Ed
“He’s been hurt,” Sarah said to Ann. “Not seriously. He had some kind of an accident.”
“He’s lying through his teeth,” Ann said.
Sarah looked at her in surprise. Ann walked back out of the bedroom and returned with the manila envelope in which she had all the rest of the story, copies of the radiogram, and the letters from the Chinese embassy and from Peter Douglass, Jr., and the clippings from Time and Life.
“He looks terrible,” Sarah said when she saw the photographs. “He looks starved.”
“He’s alive,” Ann said. “And he’s coming home.”
“Why didn’t you show me this stuff before?” Sarah demanded.
Ann shrugged her shoulders.
“I was suffering from perfectly normal postnatal depression,” Sarah said furiously. “I wasn’t crazy!”
Ann smiled at her.
Sarah thought of something else. “Have you heard from Dick Canidy?”
“Not from or about,” Ann said.
“Well, they’re probably keeping him busy,” Sarah said,
“and he just hasn’t had time to write.”
“Sure,” Ann said. “Either that, or there is a Chinese girl, or girls, or an American nurse, or an English nurse, or all of the above.”
“You don’t know that,” Sarah said.
“I know Richard Canidy, damn him,” Ann said.
4
WARM SPRINGS, GEORGIA
JUNE 8, 1942
The President of the United States and Colonel William J. Donovan took their lunch, fried chicken and a potato salad, on the flagstone patio outside Roosevelt’s cottage. The two were shielded from the view of other patients and visitors at the poliomyelitis care center by a green latticework fence.
Roosevelt had a guest, who vanished immediately on the arrival of Donovan by car from Atlanta. Donovan wondered why he was surprised and shocked. Roosevelt was a man, even if his legs were crippled. Eleanor, he well knew, could be a pain in the ass. Barbara Whittaker was far more charming, and certainly better-looking, and Chesly Whittaker had died in the bed of a woman young enough to be his daughter. Why should he expect Roosevelt to be a saint?
And, he told himself, in any event it was none of his business. He had come to Georgia to discuss the war, and what COI was doing to help win it. Whether Franklin Roosevelt was getting a little on the side had nothing to do with that.
The most important thing on Roosevelt’s mind at lunch was neither the beating the nation was taking in the Pacific nor even the first American counterstroke, Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, scheduled for the fall. What he wanted to discuss was the superbomb.
Donovan had previously learned that while the experiments at the reactor at the University of Chicago were by no means near completion—they had yet to try for a chain reaction—Dr. Conant of Harvard had reported that the scientists were more and more confident that things were going to work. After these reports Roosevelt had been so confident—or, Donovan thought, so desperate—that he had