and friendly, saying Hello in the morning and a Have a good weekend on Fridays. But I can’t say they were overly welcoming. I wanted to be part of the group, but didn’t want it to seem like I wanted to be part of the group. One might think this scenario plays out only in high school or college, but the politics of friendship are tricky at every age.
The Pool invited me to lunch with them a few times, but that was before my first paycheck, when I had only enough money for my bus commute. By the time I did have money to spare, the lunch invites had dried up.
I wanted to believe their standoffishness was a product of my having taken their friend Tabitha’s place, though couldn’t help but think it was something else, something that had plagued me my entire life: the feeling of being a constant outsider, of being most comfortable alone. Even as a child, I preferred to play alone. I’d pretend our small kitchen pantry was a fort. I’d create elaborate plays with puppets cut from brown paper bags and glued to Popsicle sticks. I was happiest playing by myself. When my little cousins would try to play with me, I’d end up scolding them for messing up one of the puppets or not playing the character exactly how I’d wanted them to. They’d get mad and leave, and I’d tell myself that that was fine. It was easier to convince myself that it was I who didn’t want to play with them.
Regardless of feeling out of place, I took to the day job fast. And although I typed slower than the other women, I was steady and accurate.
There was more of a learning curve with my after-hours work.
On my first day, when I asked just how I’d be trained, I was given a slip of paper with the address of an unmarked tempo office that overlooked the Reflecting Pool—the office where I was to meet the officer Teddy Helms each day after I clocked out.
The first time I met Teddy, I was struck by how much he resembled a movie star playing a spy. He was a few years older than I—tall, with brown hair, long delicate fingers, and handsome in the way men like that are expected to be. Several members of the typing pool were absolutely gone for Teddy, but I never really saw him like that. He did look like the type of man I’d fantasized about as a young girl, though—not as a lover or boyfriend, but as the older brother I’d always wanted. Someone who’d teach me how to fit in, how to be less painfully awkward, someone to protect me from the high school boys who’d flip up my skirt in the hallway. Someone to help support Mama and ease our financial burdens that came and went with each spent paycheck.
Teddy was quiet at first, saying I was the first woman he’d ever trained. In the OSS days, women had been entrusted with blowing up bridges, but just a few years later, the Agency was still testing the waters to see what we were capable of.
Teddy was different. “If you ask me, women are well suited to be Carriers,” he said. “No one suspects that the pretty girl on the bus is delivering secrets.”
Teddy and I got to know each other well in those first few weeks of ’57. He was the kind of man one feels comfortable with from the get-go—someone you’d find yourself telling more in the space of an hour than people you’d known your whole life.
Teddy had come to the Agency after being recruited by one of his lit professors at Georgetown. He studied political science and Slavic languages and spoke fluent Russian with a practiced accent that could fool any Muscovite. During our trainings, Teddy would switch between English and Russian, saying he enjoyed any opportunity to practice. It was a joy to be able to talk to him in the language I used only with Mama. He’d ask question after question: about my mother’s dress business, my childhood in Pikesville, my college days at Trinity, my shyness. No one had ever asked me questions like that before, and at first I balked at his boldness. But before long, I found myself unspooling my personal history to him.
Perhaps I felt so comfortable because he had offered up facts of his life so willingly. I discovered he had an older brother