“Pletnev?” I whispered, my heart faltering. “My goodness.” The kindly doctor who had spent hours tending to my husband at his bedside. He had been gentle and soft-spoken, brilliant, but entirely devoid of even an ounce of political cunning.
“Oh, Marjorie.” Joe dropped his head, and I noticed the new streaks of silver that laced his dark head of hair. “The sorrow I felt at seeing those men…the way they trembled in the prisoner’s box.”
I nodded, imagining the scene, even though I was grateful not to have witnessed it in person. Had I sat there, looking at these men as they were damned to death, would I have been able to keep quiet? Hide my beliefs that these trials were cruel and the sentences unjust? Suddenly I longed to go home with an urgency I had not yet felt. As I stared past my husband and toward the window, out over a bleak, windswept winter night, I felt scared. I felt homesick. I reached for my husband, and as we held each other, we wept.
* * *
As devastated as we were about the trials, things grew bleaker still when we awoke several mornings later to news from the West. That morning at breakfast, a flustered aide ran in to deliver the news that Hitler had marched into Austria. The next great war, the demon that had been lurking for so long, had stepped from the shadows into the reality of daylight.
My birthday a few days later was a subdued affair. We had champagne and supper in the dining room at Spazzo House. I was turning fifty-one, and we invited just the embassy staff to partake in a cake and a toast. I did not feel up for much more. For a birthday present, Joe gave me more priceless Russian art that he had acquired through Polina Molotova: a Fabergé clock of gold and rose porcelain and a silver coffee service once owned by the Romanovs. But the most surprising birthday present came not long after that, in the form of a message from President Roosevelt. He had reassigned us. “Where?” I asked, as Joe studied the telegram. “London? Paris?”
Even something less glamorous like Oslo or Copenhagen would have been welcome news. Anything to move closer to the West, closer to my girls and our homeland, as the vise of war tightened.
“Two countries,” Joe answered.
I didn’t like the sour-lemon look of his face. “Oh?” I managed.
“Belgium and Luxembourg,” he said.
Belgium and Luxembourg. My mind called up the map. Two small countries, right in the middle of Europe. In an instant, the initial joy at the news of a pending relocation gave way to a somber realization, thick and heavy as lead: Belgium and Luxembourg were mere miles from Adolf Hitler’s border.
Chapter 40
Washington, D.C.
Summer 1938
War was closing around Europe like a choking noose, and there we were, making our way right into the center of it. But before our departure, there was lunch at the White House with the president on a blue-sky summer day. I was disappointed to see that Eleanor was not there, as she was traveling in New York, but the president welcomed us to a small table just outside his Oval Office, where we sat down to a relaxed spread of sandwiches and iced tea. The small-talk pleasantries concerning Hyde Park and Topridge, children, and the plans for Sara Delano Roosevelt’s upcoming birthday party were quickly completed, and then it was on to the more pressing business at hand.
“Now, Joe, Marjorie.” Franklin Roosevelt eyed each of us in turn, speaking in that jaunty, crisp cadence that was famous the world over thanks to his regular radio messages. “I’m sending the pair of you off on one of the most significant missions in Europe. You’ll be looking and listening for all of us. And we’re eager to hear what you find.”
With that parting pep talk—or perhaps warning—we set sail, crossing the Atlantic on a mild summer wind and dropping the anchor of the Sea Cloud in Ostend, a northern port city of Belgium.
If I considered the size of the territory alone, our new mission seemed like a demotion; I owned land tracts in Texas that covered nearly as many miles as these small states. But given the recent developments across Europe and what the president had told us in our final days in the States, I knew this was a highly strategic post. These were two small but ancient European kingdoms, wedged in between bitter enemies Germany and France, their people glancing nervously in each direction and wondering when and from where the war might storm in.
Our first few weeks brought with them a whirlwind of introductions and official state receptions. In Luxembourg we were presented to Grand Duchess Charlotte of Nassau, an imposing woman who held a banquet for us attended by her fleet of footmen in crimson tunics and navy-blue breeches. In Belgium we were welcomed by King Leopold, who marked our arrival with a ball and a festive parade through Brussels, his gold-liveried attendants doting on us in their powdered wigs. We ate as we had not throughout our entire time in Moscow, feasting at tables made colorful by fresh-cut flowers and golden plates heaped with rich cheeses, goose confit, and warm, fresh-baked bread, each course accompanied by a new pour of wine directly from the nearby Rhine and Loire Valleys.