The other problem was sex. Taft launched into a vivid description of Cincinnati’s railroad terminal, which had become a national crossroads, the center of rail traffic passing along the north-south route between Chicago and Florida or the Gulf Coast, and east-west traffic passing between Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. The station was jammed by travelers, many of them men. And you know who travels to find traveling men: traveling women.
In Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, he told them, predatory women lurked. It’s possible to imagine the audience at this point uneasily shifting in their chairs, as Taft blamed their gender for much of the nation’s moral ills and social dislocations. “Starting with some of the professionals, and then extending down among large numbers of amateurs, girls go down there and wander around in the station and find themselves a soldier and go out and sit in the park. And the park is a very large one with trees and bushes and everything else. And it’s gotten to be a kind of a bad situation.” Taft did not elaborate on what he meant by “professional” and “amateur,” but he did return often to the topic of prostitution, talking about “camp followers” who traveled to construction sites and military encampments, spreading “prostitution and promiscuity” as well as venereal disease.
At the end of this soliloquy on laundry, grocery shopping, troublesome children, pox, prostitution, and other developments caused by wartime changes in their own behavior, the female code breakers of Arlington Hall were invited to rise and sing the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
It was true that newfound freedoms were changing the women’s lives. Men, now, were the ones avid to get married. Men were the ones who wanted to have someone back home to write to; someone to produce an heir by; someone waiting when they came back from war, wounded or whole. Women—often—were the ones holding out for a bit more time to think. Dot Braden herself was in a bit of a pickle in that department.
At the time, of course, the only real way for men and women to stay in touch was to write letters. Phone calls were feasible, but only rarely and not for long distances, or not often: Long-distance calls were expensive and soldiers often didn’t have access to a phone, nor did women living in dorms or boardinghouses, where, at most, there might be a bank of pay phone booths or a lone public phone used by all residents. At Fillmore Gardens, there was a sole telephone in the basement. But everybody could write letters: weary mothers writing to faraway sons—and, now, faraway daughters—late at night after chores were done; young women scribbling on paper held to their knees while riding crowded city buses; soldiers waiting in camps and aboard ships. Everybody had stationery and pen and pencil, and everybody, everywhere, was writing letters. The censorship department read the letters to make sure secret locations were not revealed; loose lips sink ships, as everyone knew, but that didn’t stop the letters from traveling back and forth across thousands of miles of land and ocean.
Dot, for her part, had no fewer than five men she was writing to. Two were her brothers. The third was her putative fiancé, George Rush, a tall young man with a prematurely receding hairline whom she had dated while she was at Randolph-Macon. George had been a good college boyfriend: He was an avid dancer and liked going to mixers. It was true that he’d once given her a pink corsage to go with a stop-sign-red dress, and it was true, Dot had to admit, that she had thrown the corsage against the wall—everybody knew pink and red did not go together—but overall he had been a good companion for that period in her life.
Dot and George had not seen each other much in the past year, however. He entered the Army in April 1942, four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and kept getting moved farther west. He was stationed now in California and while away had sent Dot a small package, which she had opened to see—to her dismay—a diamond engagement ring. Doubtless he expected her to be pleased, but the ring’s arrival was not welcome. Dot liked George but never envisioned spending her life with him. She was inclined to send it back, but young women were told not to do anything to upset soldiers who were away from home, so she kept it. She had never worn it teaching; it would have created too much of a stir. And she never truly considered herself engaged. At one point, perhaps sensing this, George had made the cross-country train ride back to Lynchburg to secure her affections. He showed up on her doorstep and announced his plan: He and Dot would elope. They would drive to Roanoke, an hour away, and get married. Then Dot would move to California to be near him.
Dot had no intention of doing any of this. She disliked being pressured, and refused. George insisted. As a stalling tactic, Dot said she had to talk to her mother. It was a ploy to get her mother involved, and it worked; Virginia Braden sat on Dot’s suitcase to prevent her from going with George. The gesture was unnecessary. Dot turned down the marriage proposal and George went back to his base but continued to write. Once her own job offer came from the War Department, Dot felt even more eager to avoid being tied down. She did not want to move to California. She wanted to move to Washington, and she wanted to serve the war effort. Her patriotism had been aroused along with her sense of adventure.
Meanwhile Dot had begun exchanging letters with Jim Bruce, an Army meteorologist whose family owned a dairy farm in Rice, Virginia. Jim was tall and laid-back and four years older than she was. She had met him during a casual dinner date with mutual friends and had known him now for several years. Even when she was dating George Rush, Jim had always been there in the background, keeping quiet track of where Dot was, dropping by, coaxing her to go out. For quite some time, Jim had been after her to take off George Rush’s ring. There was something about Jim that was steady and reassuring. He was a college graduate and before the war had been working at a DuPont chemical plant. The problem was, he ran with a rowdy crowd of drinkers. But her mother liked him. The Army put him in meteorological training at the University of Michigan, but from time to time he would come to Lynchburg and look Dot up. She would walk with him, always a little worried that friends of George Rush would see them.
At one point Jim Bruce had persuaded Dot to ride to Richmond to see his sisters. She accepted in part because she liked his blue-and-white Chevrolet. They’d eaten at a hamburger joint and gotten up to dance. “You know, if people see you with that diamond on, they’ll think I’m engaged to you,” he murmured as they were dancing.
In Richmond they drove into Byrd Park, where he parked the car. Dot didn’t protest because she knew he was honorable and would never try anything. “I bet you’re going to marry me” was what he said. She put him off. But she always had Jim Bruce in the back of her mind. It was hard to say why. He did look spiffy in his uniform.