While Jim was in Oklahoma, they both felt it made sense for Dot to keep her job. Housing was hard to come by, and the money would come in handy. But separation was hard on the newlyweds, and Jim’s letters from Oklahoma vacillated between pragmatism and romantic impatience. They were unfailingly affectionate. “My dear wife,” they began. One letter noted that he had just received two letters from her. “I think I enjoyed them more than any letters I received from you before. I am sure that I am really in love with you,” he said. “I am glad that you enjoyed our honeymoon, Dot. I enjoyed it very much too. Since I received those letters this afternoon I can’t stop thinking about you. It is bad in a way because I bought something at the PX and left my wallet on the counter.” He then went into a long description of getting the wallet back.
He was torn over whether Dot should come to Oklahoma to join him. “The boys who brought their wives are out having a terrible time finding a place to live,” he related. “I think I could find a room some place for us to sleep but I don’t know how good it would be.” He knew she liked her work and that it might not be practical for her to come. “We can’t always be practical, though,” he reflected. And so it went, back and forth for several letters. “Dot, I do know that I love you very much and want to see you again as soon as possible.” He confessed that he felt “very lonesome for you.”
On January 31, 1946, Dot Braden Bruce resigned from Arlington Hall and prepared to travel to Oklahoma to join her husband. She sold her share of the furniture to Crow, who was keeping the one-bedroom apartment with her sister Louise. Louise was working as an astronomer at the Naval Observatory, and Crow was still working at Arlington Hall. Their little sister Kitty was finishing college, and would later embark on a career in computer programming. None of the Weston girls would ever go back to live in Bourbon. Nor would Dot live in Lynchburg again.
Union Station—so much more familiar than when she first arrived—was chaos. The ticket office told Dot she could get a ticket as far as Cincinnati and then would have to take her chances. Crow came to see her off, and so did Dot’s mother, Virginia Braden. Dot’s memory of Crow as she left was of her best friend crying and calling out, “If you think I’m going to stay here all my life with Sister, you’ve got another think coming!” Dot would always remember her mother turning to comfort Crow, saying, “You’ll find a man. There are plenty of men coming back after the war.”
Dot traveled on. Soldiers had not seen women in months. They all wanted to talk to her. She never paid for a meal. One GI asked if she would get off the train and have dinner with his family. She told him she was married and he said they wouldn’t care; his folks would just be happy to meet her. Another sat down next to her, feigned sleep, and snuck his arm around her; a sailor intervened, calling him a “bastard,” and made him move away. When she got to Cincinnati, helpful soldiers lifted her up and bodily put her on the train to Oklahoma. Jim was waiting. He managed to get discharged over the course of a few weeks, and they moved to Richmond, where DuPont had held his job.
In February 1946, Dot received a letter from what was now called the Army Security Agency, the new name for Arlington Hall. It thanked her for her wartime service. “Because you were found to be a person of excellent character and unquestioned loyalty to the United States,” it also said, “you were entrusted with information which should not, under any circumstance, be revealed to unauthorized persons.” Information she was privy to “should not now, or at any future time, be revealed.”
It was a nightmare finding housing after the war. Everybody in America needed a place to live. In Richmond, the newlyweds set up in what Dot came to think of as the apartment from hell: The walls were thin and there was a couple next door who fought, arguing and throwing dishes. Not all postwar marriages were working out as well as theirs was. The government trucked in prefabricated houses for veterans. Jim stood in line and they got one. The new neighborhood was a nice place to live. The women drank coffee and talked about their new babies. Nobody asked Dot what she had done during the war.
Dot got pregnant, but Jimmy was born prematurely, and that was another fresh hell. When they got Jimmy home, he would cry and cry. The doctor said whatever she did, not to overfeed him, telling her to give him some kind of formula that mostly seemed to be water, and the hunger made him cry more. Dot had never had a baby before and thought all babies cried that way. So she obeyed the doctor’s bad advice and had to listen to Jimmy cry. Crow came down from Washington and brought her flowers and got her through that awful period. Jimmy would grow up just fine and Dot and Jim had two more children, both daughters, everybody healthy and happy.
Crow stayed at Arlington Hall, but she couldn’t tell Dot what top secret project she was working on. Several years later, Virginia Braden’s prediction came true and on a blind date Crow met a man, Bill Cable, who worked for the Veterans Administration and had the good sense not to pump his date for information about what she did. Dot always said Bill Cable couldn’t have fit Crow better than a glove. “She couldn’t have gotten a better husband.” He was calm and good-natured and every bit as slow and deliberate as Crow was. Crow would not marry him until Dot and Jim came up to meet him and give their stamp of approval. Crow continued working at Arlington Hall, as a mathematician in a unit with some of the elite wartime code breakers. Her personnel record showed that she received excellent ratings, and in 1948 her unit of mathematicians received a commendation. But then she and her husband started their family. On December 31, 1952, Ruth Weston, pregnant with their first child, submitted a handwritten note to her government bosses saying, “I wish to resign my position as Mathematician,” explaining that “My time is needed at home to care for my baby.”
Women now were expected to quit work when they started having babies. The postwar U.S. government made this clear. There was no more state-sponsored child care. In a postwar, Cold War America, child care was viewed with suspicion, as the kind of thing communists used to raise their children collectively. The U.S. government began doing the opposite of its wartime recruiting; it made propaganda-type films telling women it was important to leave their jobs, return home, and tend their households. The films pointed out that it was unnatural for women to be breadwinners, taking jobs from men. Quitting one’s job became a matter of patriotism. And so, many of the wartime women workers did leave their jobs when they had children. Among them was Crow, even though she very much liked what she did.
When Ruth “Crow” Weston Cable’s daughters were growing up, they were under the impression that they were somehow related to Dot’s son, Jimmy Bruce. The two former code breakers remained so close that their children assumed they were family. Ruth Weston Cable would call up Dot Braden Bruce and say, “Dot! This is Crow!” and Dot would bring up the mattress escapade and they would laugh and laugh. Dot always kept the gold earrings Crow gave her. Both women grew bored at home and went back to work when their children were old enough. Dot became a real estate agent. Crow, still living in Arlington, took a job as a cartographer with a transportation consulting agency. Crow loved maps, and she loved her work. She also worked the polls every Election Day, honoring the patriotism and sense of civic duty that her father, back in Bourbon, Mississippi, had instilled in her. That day of commitment to democracy remained sacred to her.
EPILOGUE
The Mitten