The Japanese messages dried up. Delia Taylor Sinkov, the Sweet Briar graduate who had risen to direct the research unit for all Japanese Army codes, would later tell her son that there was nothing to do, now, at Arlington Hall, except sit around working crossword puzzles. On August 18, 1945, Brigadier General Preston Corderman gathered Arlington Hall employees into a grassy clearing. It was his intention to “speak to all Arlington Hall personnel regarding the past activities of the Signal Security Agency and the conversion of the Signal Security Agency to a peacetime status,” as a postwar memo put it. Ann Caracristi and her friends called it his “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry” speech.
The gist was: Thanks very much, everybody. Time to go. Job well done. The Arlington Hall code breakers were thanked for their service and told that it was their patriotic duty to get off the government payroll.
This seemed fair to Ann Caracristi. She loved the work, but she could see that the government no longer needed her service. She returned home to Bronxville, where a family friend helped her get a job in the subscription office of the New York Daily News. It was her job to sift through data and pinpoint who the paper’s subscribers were. Ann’s bosses wanted her to prove that their subscribers were more highbrow than most people thought. It was not bad work, but it was not as much fun as breaking codes. So she was delighted when she got a call from her good friends Wilma Berryman and Gertrude Kirtland, both still at Arlington Hall. Gert was high in the personnel office and had clout. So did Wilma. Together they formed something of an old-girls’ network, and they wanted Ann Caracristi back at Arlington and were prepared to make it happen. Ann said yes in a hot minute, and before she knew it she was headed back to Washington, where she would live for the rest of her life. It turned out that Arlington Hall was not being shuttered.
In fact, it was just getting started.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Good-Bye to Crow
December 1945
Jim Bruce returned from overseas in September 1945. After nearly two years of a purely epistolary relationship—during which they had agreed to marry—the couple’s feelings were confirmed when they saw each other in person. “We’ve got to get a ring,” Jim told Dot. She had just about had her fill of rings, but even so, she “knew Jim was the one.” Crow had started crying when she heard Jim Bruce was coming back. It wasn’t that she was jealous, because Crow wasn’t that kind of friend. It was just that she was going to miss their easy and companionable friendship, their excursions, their breakfasts, their shared jokes.
In December, Dot’s mother wrote her a newsy letter talking about Christmas preparations. “I went down town yesterday to do some shopping but things are so picked over here, even now, that we didn’t do much but go from one store to another and wear ourselves out.” She mentioned the upcoming wedding—ceremonies remained small and often casual affairs—saying the seamstress had a cold and that parts of Dot’s outfit were delayed. All would be ready in time for the wedding, however, and Virginia Braden had gotten the buttons for Dot’s negligee. She joked about a woman they knew who was getting married in her sixties “and the old man is seventysome.” She traded a bit of gossip, saying that “he gave her a $250 diamond ring which she selected with her daughter’s help. (I still have hopes! Ha!)”
She told Dot how to cook a chicken, something she would need to know. “All you have to do to cook a chicken is—after boiling it until tender put it in a pan with a little of the broth sprinkle it with flour put in oven, and every now and then baste it with the broth, to help it from being so dry until it is brown.”
Dot Braden and Jim Bruce were married on December 29, 1945, a few days after Christmas. It was a small wedding at Court Street United Methodist Church in Lynchburg. The bride wore a gray silk suit and a daring fuchsia feathered hat that she—citified now—felt was the height of fashion. “I thought I was Miss Style,” Dot would later say with a laugh. She and Jim took a short honeymoon in the North Carolina mountains, but from there Jim had to travel back to Oklahoma, where he would be mustered out. Leaving the Army took a while. Time seemed to be operating in slow motion.
And so Jim put Dot on the train back to Arlington after their honeymoon ended, and set out to drive to Oklahoma. On the train ride back, Dot noticed some faint red spots on her face. When she got back to the Arlington apartment, Crow and Louise looked at her with alarm and helped her get to the dispensary. She was coming down with the measles. “Is this something that happens to you when you get married?” Dot asked Crow and Louise. It was a real question. She meant it genuinely. Neither of them knew the answer. It seemed plausible that marriage would do something like that to you, give you measles, create some kind of physical reaction.
Dot had not heard the “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry” speech, or if she did, she ignored it. On December 14, Dot had taken a test evaluating her written French and did so well that she was put in the French decoding section, which was up and running in Section B-III of Arlington Hall, clearing up messages left over from the German occupation. Promoted from CAF-4 to SP-6, she was making $2,320 a year, about $700 more than when she arrived, and far more than she had made as a teacher. Her evaluations all had been positive; in quarterly reports she had received “outstanding” on qualities including skill, attention to pertinent detail, and resourcefulness.