hundred years old. We refine sugar. My children are at school in England, but my wife and I are comfortable enough in Berlin. We are both native Berliners.” He sighed, looked around at the snug rosewood-panelled library in which they sat, and went on: “Things are not as bad as they were in 1938. That was the worst. If there is no war, they’ll improve quickly. I’ve been told this seriously by some high officials. Old friends of mine.” Rosenthal hesitated and added, “The Fuhrer has done remarkable things for the country. It would be foolish to deny that. I have lived through other bad times. I was shot through a lung in Belgium in 1914. A man goes through a lot in a lifetime.” He spread his hands in a graceful resigned gesture.
Victor Henry said, “Well, Mrs. Henry loves the house, but I don’t want to take advantage of anybody’s misfortune.”
“You’ll be doing just the opposite. You know that now. Two years?”
“How about one year, with an option to renew?”
At once Rosenthal stood and held out his hand. Henry rose and shook it. “We should have a drink on it perhaps,” said Rosenthal, “but we emptied the liquor closet when we left. Liquor doesn’t last long in a vacant house.”
It felt odd the first night, sleeping in the Rosenthals’ broad soft bed with its exquisite French petit-point footboard and headboard. But within a few days, the Henrys were at home in the mansion and busy with a new life. From an employment agency suggested by the agent came a maid, a cook, and a houseman-chauffeur, all first-rate servants, and — Henry assumed — all planted informers. He checked the electric wiring of the house for listening devices. The German equipment and circuits were strange to him, and he found nothing. Still, he and Rhoda walked on the lawn to discuss touchy matters.
A whirling couple of weeks passed. They saw Hitler once more at an opera gala, this time at a distance, up in a crimson damask-lined box. His white tie and tails were again too big, emphasizing his Charlie Chaplin air of a dressed-up vagrant, despite his severe stiff saluting and the cheers and applause of beautiful women and important-looking men, all stretching their necks to stare worshipfully.
At two receptions arranged for the Henrys, one at the home of the charge and one at Colonel Forrest’s house, they met many foreign diplomats and prominent German industrialists, artists, politicians, and military men. Rhoda made a quick hit. Notwithstanding her panic before the chancellery reception, she had brought a large costly wardrobe. She sparkled in her new clothes. Her German kept improving. She liked Berlin and its people. The Germans sensed this and warmed to her, though some embassy people who detested the regime were taken aback by her cordiality to Nazis. Pug was something of a bear at these parties, standing silent unless spoken to. But Rhoda’s success covered for him.
Rhoda was not blind to the Nazi abuses. After her first walk in the Tiergarten, she refused to go back. It was far more clean, pretty, and charming than any American public park, she admitted, but the signs on the benches, JUDEN VERBOTEN, were nauseating. Seeing similar signs in restaurant windows, she would recoil and demand to go elsewhere. When Pug told her of his interview with Rosenthal, she had a deep attack of the blues: she wanted to forgo the house and even talked of getting out of Germany. “Why, imagine! Renting out that beautiful house for a song, just to keep it from being sold over his head — to some fat Nazi, no doubt, lying in wait to pick it off cheap. How horrible.” But she agreed that they had better take it. They had to live somewhere, and the house was divine.
Day by day, she reacted less to such things, seeing how commonplace they were in Berlin, and how much taken for granted. When Sally Forrest, who loathed the Nazis, took her to lunch at a restaurant where a window placard announced that Jews were not served, it seemed silly to protest. Soon she ate in such places without a second thought. In time, the Tiergarten became her favorite place for a Sunday stroll. But she insisted that anti- Semitism was a blot on an otherwise exciting, lovely land. She would say so to prominent Nazis. Some stiffened, others tolerantly smirked. A few hinted that the problem would straighten out in time. “I’m an American to the bone, going back six generations,” she would say, “and I’ll never see eye to eye with you on this business of the Jews. It’s absolutely awful.”
Most Germans seemed resigned to this independent, outspoken manner of American women and the way their husbands tolerated it; they regarded it as a national oddity.
Victor Henry stayed off the Jewish topic. Nazi Germany was a big, not readily digestible lump of new life. Most foreigners were strongly for or against the Nazis. The correspondents, as Kip Tollever had observed, hated them to a man. Within the embassy view varied. According to some, Hitler was the greatest menace to America since 1776. He would stop at nothing less than world rule, and the day he was strong enough, he would attack the United States. Others saw him as a benefactor, the only bulwark in Europe against communism. The democracies had shown themselves impotent against the spread of Bolshevist parties, they said. Hitler fought totalitarian fire with hotter and strong fire.
These judgments, either way, stood on slender bases of knowledge. Pressing his new acquaintances for facts, Victor Henry got vehement opinions and gestures. Statistics abounded in sheaves of analyses and reports, but too much of this stuff also came down to guesses, propaganda, and questionable paid intelligence. He tried to study German history late at night and found it a muddy tangle going back more than a thousand years. In it he could find no pattern and no guide at all to the problems of 1939. Just to figure out where the Nazis had come from, and what the secret was of Hitler’s hold on the Germans, seemed a task beyond him and beyond anybody he talked to; even the outlandish question of German anti-Semitism had a dozen different explanations, depending on which of any twelve Foreign Service men you asked. Commander Henry decided that he would grope uselessly if he tried to fathom these major matters in a hurry. Military capacity was something he knew about; it was a narrow but decisive aspect of Hitler’s Third Empire. Was Nazi Germany as strong as the ever-marching columns in the streets, and the throngs of uniforms in cafes, suggested? Was it all a show, no more substantial than the transparent red cheesecloth of the towering swastika banners? Deciding to take nothing for granted and to marshal facts for himself, Victor Henry dug into the job of penetrating this one puzzle.
Meanwhile Rhoda adapted merrily to diplomatic life. As she got used to her staff and to Berlin customs, her dinner parties increased in size. She invited the Grobkes to a big one that included the charge d’affaires, a French film actress, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and a dour, stout German general named Armin von Roon, with a particularly hooked nose and an exceedingly stiff carriage. Rhoda knew none of these people well. General von Roon, for instance, she had met at Colonel Forrest’s house; and because someone had told her that he stood high in the Wehrmacht and was considered brilliant, she had made up to him. She had a gift for charming in a momentary encounter. She always looked elegant, she could be amusing or sexy without forcing either note, and she made one feel that it would be pleasant to know her better. People tended to accept her invitations.
The company was above the level of Grobke and his wife. They were dazzled and flattered, and the presence of Room all but froze them with awe. Grobke whispered to Victor Henry at one point that Roon was the real brain in Supreme Headquarters. So Pug tried to talk to Roon about the war, and found that he spoke astonishing good English. But he would utter only frosty generalities, which made the attache think the better of him, though it yielded nothing to report.
Before the evening was out Grobke, full of wine and brandy, took Victor Henry aside and told him that the captain of the Swinemunde navy yard was making stupid difficulties, but that he was going to push the visit through, “and I’ll get your English friend in too. God damn it. I said I would and I will. These shore-based bastards just live to create trouble.”
The Henrys received one cheerless letter from Madeline, written when she arrived in Newport for the summer. Warren, as usual, did not write at all. Early in July the letter Byron had written his father at last caught up with him:
Dear Dad:
I received your letter and it threw me. I guess I gave you the wrong impression about this girl Natalie Jastrow. It’s fun to work with her, but she’s older than I am, and she was a junior Phi Bete at Radcliffe. Her best boyfriend is a Rhodes Scholar. I’m not in that league. However, I appreciate your good advice. She is really excellent company, and talking to her improves my mind. That should please you.
Dr. Jastrow has me researching the Emperor Constantine’s military campaigns. I took the job for the money, but I’m enjoying it. That whole period, when the world balance tips from paganism to Christianity, is really
