There was another soldier she was writing to. There was nothing serious about it. He had the somewhat improbable name of Curtis Paris and she’d met him at a Washington dance. Curtis was a fellow southerner and had asked if he could write to her. This was a common request—men were always asking to write—and Dot didn’t see any reason to say no.
Early in December 1943, about two months after she arrived in Washington, Dot got a letter from Curtis, who was stationed in San Francisco. “Dearest Dottie, Greetings and salutations and stuff and junk,” it began, and he thanked her for a letter she had sent him that “had a soothing effect plus the faint aromma of apple blossom (face powder??) which is rare and outstanding as compared to the usual g.i. chow hall etc.” Curtis chatted about what the soldiers at the Presidio were doing: hiking ten miles two or three times a week and playing a lot of football. “I’m getting some good muscles,” he informed her, commiserating a bit about the senselessness of the U.S. Army. They had gone to play “our usual football game” in a local field, only to find out that the field had been plowed. The men had placed stakes with football helmets for the boundaries “so now I’m sure I know what Flanders Field looked like. No wonder I could not run with the ball.” He said that the men in his unit teased him for saying “y’all,” and he was sure she, as a southerner, would understand what that felt like.
In her last letter, Dot had sent him a photo. Curtis was very taken with it.
The picture!! Wow! I was never more pleased in my life. I don’t see how it could be better. The fellows all looked it over and seemed astounded at the Virginia talent. Of course they ask all the particulars and where you were from and well to my regret there just isn’t much of a story for me to tell—at least, not as much as I wish there had been. I have a pass today so I’ll get the portrait framed in good form so as to lend moral support to the military personnel around my bunk.
He asked her to keep writing him. “I like your letters and the phrases you coin.”
Dot didn’t take it seriously. All the girls were writing letters, often to lots of soldiers, and many women received three or four or five letters a day. One was writing to twelve different men. It was fun and it was something to do and it felt like they were helping the war by keeping up morale. The women sent snapshots: small black-and-white pictures showing them in front of the U.S. Capitol, or sunbathing, with a handwritten inscription on the back. To be sure, not all male-female encounters were epistolary: Soldiers and officers streamed in and out of Washington, and it was feasible for a woman to have a different date for every meal of the day. The magazines and papers put it about that women in Washington were lonely—“they can get a wonderful job, but they can’t get a wonderful man,” one article said about g-girls—but nothing could have been further from the truth. There was a master sergeant from Massachusetts Dot went out with from time to time; he would take her to dances and bring her back on the streetcar, and while the whole thing was chaste and lighthearted, she did get attached to the corsages he would bestow. She wore George Rush’s engagement ring, or didn’t wear it, depending on the situation. The ring was good for fending off men or for keeping dates light and tentative.
But—as she soon learned—it wasn’t just women who were dating more than one person. Around the same time she got that letter from Curtis Paris, Dot received a phone call from Jim Bruce, who was being sent overseas and wanted to know if Dot would come down to see him off. “I’ll have to let you know,” she told him, in some confusion, then called her mother. “Jim Bruce wants me to see him off. What do you think I should do?”
“Well, now, Dorothy, you know I like Jim and I don’t like George,” came Virginia Braden’s voice on the line. “But you still have that ring. You’ll just have to make up your own mind.” So Dorothy called Jim back, placing a long-distance call. When she got through, the operator said: “I have another person calling Lieutenant Bruce. I let her go first. If you don’t mind waiting I’ll put you through afterward.”
“You certainly are popular,” Dot said when she was put through.
“That was my sister,” Jim Bruce told her unconvincingly.
Dorothy wasn’t fooled. There was another girl in the picture. “Well, I’m sorry, I can’t go,” she told him tartly.
This occurred when she was living at Arlington Farms. The next morning there was a message tacked to the door to her room. It said, “Lieutenant Bruce is coming to Washington this afternoon.” She read the note and went on to work thinking she’d see him at the end of her shift, but while she was working, an administrator came to say she had a phone call. Security was so tight at Arlington Hall that it was hard for an outsider to get a call through, so Dot knew it must be urgent. The call was from one of Jim Bruce’s sisters.
“Have you seen Jim?” his sister asked breathlessly. Dot said no, but that she expected to see him that evening. “He’s wanted back here!” said Jim’s sister. He was being shipped out sooner than he thought. This was not uncommon. Orders were often dispatched and changed at the last minute, to keep the enemy from anticipating troop movements. “I have talked to every girl he knows, and you were last on the list.”
Jim showed up at the end of Dot’s shift, unaware that his unit was trying to reach him. It emerged that he did have another girlfriend, who had been willing to see him off. But after he’d put that young woman on the train, he’d rented a car and driven up to Arlington in a spontaneous burst of passion to see Dot, the one girl he really wanted to see before he left for war. “You’ve got to be back at the boat,” Dot told him. They said a hasty good-bye, and Jim, having returned the rental car, scrambled to get a seat on a train back to Richmond. And that was the last time Dot Braden saw Jim Bruce for almost two years.
Life was like that. Men came and went. At night, air raid sirens would sometimes go off, signaling residents to turn off their lights and pull down their blackout shades. This happened when Dot and Crow were having dinner with an old friend of Dot, Bill Randolph, who had taught at the military academy in Chatham and now held a diplomatic post. Bill’s mother lived in Alexandria, nearby. The sirens started wailing, so Bill pulled out his guitar and they all sat on the porch in the darkness, Dot and Crow and Bill and his mother, and sang into the night. Life was strange now, and often oddly pleasant, even as Dot kept big framed photographs of her brothers, Teedy and Bubba, and George Rush and Jim Bruce and worried about all of the men in her life, all the time.
PART II
“Over All This Vast Expanse of Waters Japan Was Supreme”
CHAPTER FIVE
“It Was Heart-Rending”