A Woman of No Importance Read online

  In Virginia’s old life, Barbara had watched her being chased by well-to-do young suitors with maternal satisfaction. Such was her daughter’s appeal before she lost her leg that Virginia was known to her friends at her posh private high school, Roland Park Country, as “Donna Juanita.” Tall and rangy with sparkly nut-brown eyes and a melting smile (when she chose to use it), she was unusually spirited and presented an irresistible challenge for those young men who dreamed of taming her. Virginia held such displays of male ardor in contempt, however, and would assert her independence by wearing tomboy trousers and checked shirts whenever she could. “I must have liberty,” she proclaimed in her school yearbook in 1924, at the age of eighteen, “withal as large a charter as I please.” Little she said or did accorded with her mother’s great plan.

  Virginia took pleasure in defying convention. She hunted with a rifle, skinned rabbits, rode horses bareback, and once wore a bracelet of live snakes into school. It was clear that the fearless young “Dindy,” as her family called her, yearned for adventure, just like her seagoing grandfather. Even if it meant enduring discomfort. The fact that Roland Park Country pursued a Dickensian insistence on keeping its windows open in below-freezing weather—meaning the girls took their lessons in coats, gloves, and hats—seems not to have bothered her at all.

  Dindy described herself as “cantankerous and capricious”1—a view shared by her classmates, who nevertheless also recognized her gifts for organizing and initiative. They viewed her as their natural leader and voted her in as their class president, editor in chief, captain of sports, and even “Class Prophet.” Her elder brother, John, studied chemistry at the University of Iowa and then dutifully went to work with his father, as had been envisaged since his birth. By contrast, Virginia liked to explore pastures new, encouraging her classmates to expect from her nothing less than the unexpected. Considered by her peers at school the most “original” among them—an accolade she evidently enjoyed—she admitted that she strove to live “up to her reputation at all times.”2 If Ned was indulgent of this individualistic outlook, then Barbara had quite different views. Mrs. Hall was intent on her daughter forsaking her interest in adventure for the greater prize of a rich husband and a fashionable household. At the age of nineteen, Virginia dutifully became engaged and appeared destined for the confined domestic life of many other society women reaching adulthood in the 1920s.

  However eligible her well-heeled fiancé might have been in her mother’s eyes, though, Virginia still bridled at his entitlement and cheating. Yes, young “ladies” such as Virginia had long been expected to defer to their menfolk, but now rebellion was in the air, with the advent in Baltimore as elsewhere of the independence-loving flappers. They were a new breed of young women who broke the Prohibition-era rules on drinking and scandalized their elders by cutting their hair short, smoking, and dancing to jazz. They rejected the one-sided restrictions of a traditional marriage and were taking a more active role in politics, not least because in 1920 (after a century of protests) American women had been granted the vote. Virginia looked around her: home life was stifling, but the world outside seemed to offer enticing new freedoms. And so—to her fiancé’s evident indignation—she ditched him. (It turned out to be the right call, as he later reputedly worked through three unhappy and adulterous marriages.)

  Virginia may have shared her mother’s sense of vaulting ambition, but she began to direct it toward a career and exploring the world rather than bagging a feckless husband, however well-heeled. Barbara had had little choice in her youth but to work as a secretary; few other options were open to a single woman of modest fortune in the late nineteenth century. She was mystified by her daughter’s desire for a job away from home instead of a lifetime of married leisure, but Virginia’s regular family trips to Europe as a child and the influence of her crisply-dressed German nanny had inspired a hunger for independent travel. She had excelled at languages at school and dreamed of using them to meet what she termed “interesting” people by becoming an ambassador, apparently undeterred by the fact that such exalted positions had hitherto been reserved for men. Dindy was set on proving herself an equal in a masculine world and to that end, it was her doting father (to whom she was unusually close) who allowed her to spend the next seven years studying at five prestigious universities.

  She had begun in 1924 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe (now part of Harvard) but the bluestocking atmosphere bored her, and in 1925 she moved to the more metropolitan Barnard College in Manhattan, where she enjoyed the theaters on Broadway. She was still conscious, however, that after dispatching one suitor, she was expected to conform and quickly catch another suitable husband. She failed to find one. Nor did Virginia impress her tutors, who marked her down as “an average student” who failed to participate in campus life or turn up to physical education classes. French and math were her favorite subjects (she loathed Latin and theology), but although she left in “good standing” her grades were mainly Cs and she did not graduate. She knew she required a college education, but was now anxious to begin her life in the real world. Barnard was perhaps still too much like home for her to thrive.

  Paris seemed to offer wider horizons and she persuaded her parents that she would do better if only she could go abroad. Like many well-to-do East Coast Americans before and after her, Virginia viewed the French capital as the elegant gateway to liberation. Hundreds of young Americans boarded Cunard liners for Europe every week, sending back word on how fashionable women in Paris—the so-called garçonnes—were positively expected to be independent, athletic, and androgynous in appearance, and to work and love as they pleased. So in 1926, the twenty-year-old Virginia also moved to the other side of the Atlantic, far from her mother’s wearying disappointment, to enroll at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques on the city’s Rive Gauche. At the height of the so-called Années Folles, in place of American Prohibition and racial segregation, she found a thrillingly diverse art, literary, and music scene that drew in such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, and the legendary black dancer Josephine Baker (famous for her Charleston performances at the Folies Bergère and later for her service in the Resistance). In the cafés of Saint-Germain and the jazz clubs of Montmartre, Virginia met actresses, racing drivers, intellectuals, and budding politicians. The adventurous young woman from Baltimore smoked, drank, and danced with them all, far more enthralled by what she learned from her dazzling new friends than from her teachers. Here, at last, she felt free to be herself.

  This freewheeling lifestyle continued when she moved in autumn 1927 to the Konsular Akademie in Vienna to study languages, economics, and the press. In contrast to her time in New York, she coasted in her classes, achieving the required grades with the minimum effort, and found plenty of time to revel in the city’s frantic party scene. Tall, slender, and now elegantly attired in the latest European fashions, Virginia attracted plenty of male attention, especially from a dashing Polish army officer named Emil, who escorted her on romantic walks along the banks of the Danube. He adored her as a free spirit and in so doing won her heart in a way that no one had before. But her father (seemingly egged on by Barbara) took exception to his uncertain origins and the idea of his daughter settling in Europe for good and forbade her from seeing him again. Although distraught, the normally willful Virginia obeyed her beloved Ned (as she called him) and broke off the unofficial engagement. She kept a photo of Emil for some time afterward, but her independence ran only so far. She never saw her lover again, and was later to discover that he had probably perished in spring 1940, one of thousands of Polish officers executed in cold blood by Russia’s secret police during the Second World War and buried in mass graves in the forest at Katyn.

  Once she got over her heartbreak, Virginia left Europe for home a very different woman from the one who had set sail in 1926. She carried with her not only a degree at last but a burning belief in female emancipation. Those three
carefree years instilled in her a deep and abiding love of France and the freedoms its people had offered her. That passion was to withstand all the barbarity that was to come and drove her to put her life on the line to defend what she would call her “second country.” She had also honed her collection of five foreign languages—most usefully French and German, but also Spanish, Italian, and Russian—although she was never able to shake off her American drawl. She had become unusually well versed, however, in European culture, geography, and most of all, politics. When she was in Vienna she saw fascist groups triumph during outbreaks of bloody political unrest. On trips over the border she witnessed Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party rising fast in popularity on the back of his pledge to put Germany first, with his Nuremberg rallies becoming massive displays of Nazi paramilitary power. In nearby Italy, the dictator Benito Mussolini had declared war on democracy itself back in 1925, and had been building up a police state ever since. She was thus witness to the dark clouds of nationalism gathering across the horizon. Peace in Europe and Virginia’s intoxicating “belle vie de Paris” were already under threat.

  Dindy returned home to Maryland and Boxhorn Farm in July 1929, shortly before much of what remained of the family fortune was wiped out in the Wall Street crash and the Depression that followed. Her brother, John, lost his job in the now beleaguered family construction and finance business, and the general gloom appears to have affected Virginia’s graduate studies in French and economics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her attendance was erratic but her grades sufficient to apply to the State Department to become a professional diplomat, still her fervent dream. With the confidence of youth—plus her languages and extensive academic study—she expected to succeed in the requisite entrance exam. The fact that only six out of fifteen hundred Foreign Service officers were women should have been due warning. The rejection was quick and brutal. The high echelons of the State Department seemed unwilling to welcome women into their ranks, she told her friend Elbridge Durbrow, but refusing to countenance defeat she planned to “enter by the back door.”3

  In the meantime, she tried to support her father as he lurched from one business calamity to another, agonizing over the plight of the thousands now out of work, and facing the prospect of his own ruin. On January 22, 1931, as he emerged from his office in downtown Baltimore, Ned collapsed on the pavement from a massive cardiac arrest and died a few hours later. His loss at just fifty-nine was a cruel blow to his family, and perhaps to Virginia most of all. He had doted on his daring young Dindy, indulging her fondness for traditionally male pursuits such as hunting, even buying his daughter her own gun. Now he had gone and so had much of the money. John and his wife and two children moved in with Barbara at Boxhorn Farm to cut costs, and Virginia was expected to live a quiet life with them. Such a claustrophobic arrangement was tolerable for only so long, however, and soon she was applying for jobs. After seven months stuck at home, by August 1931 Virginia was impatiently on her way to a clerk’s job in the American embassy in Warsaw. It paid two thousand dollars a year, a respectable salary (and a third higher than the median household income of mid-Depression America, when many families were on the breadline). She had also finally broken out of Baltimore and into the ranks of the State Department. But for all her studying and high expectations, it was as a secretary, just like her mother.

  Virginia nevertheless made an instant impression at work, conducting her duties—coding and decoding telegrams, dealing with the mail, processing diplomatic visas, and dispatching reports back to Washington on the increasingly tense political situation—with flair and initiative. Warsaw was a vibrant city with the largest Jewish population in Europe, but Poland (an independent state only since the end of the Great War) was precariously squeezed between the two muscular powers of Germany and Russia and its future was uncertain. It was an instructive time and place, and Virginia’s sympathy for the Poles was no doubt heightened by memories of her love affair with Emil. It may be that in having been trained in coding she also got her first tantalizing glimpse of the intelligence world. In any case she felt her extensive studies and experience were being wasted behind a typewriter. So a year later she asked for and received her bosses’ backing—including that of her friend Elbridge who was now her vice consul—to apply to retake the diplomatic corps entrance exam. She was particularly confident about the oral test, in which she had proved herself an outstanding candidate, scoring 100 percent the first time around. Virginia knew she was at her most compelling and impressive in person. Yet mysteriously the oral paper questions never turned up and so she missed the deadline for the application. Just as she thought she was finally about to be accepted into the core of the State Department, she was cast out again onto its fringes.

  In her frustration, she applied seven months later to transfer to Smyrna (now Izmir) in Turkey—a perfect posting for someone with her love of the outdoor life because of its proximity to the lagoons and salt marshes of the Gediz Delta, famous for its pelicans and flamingos. When she arrived in April 1933, she found that her official duties were no more exalted than in Warsaw, and indeed that Smyrna was of less strategic interest. It was in this unlikely spot, however, that an adventurous if perhaps still naïve young woman was forged into a figure of exceptional fortitude; it was here that fate dealt Virginia a hand that would change her life. What happened here, where the Gediz River flows into the sparkling Aegean Sea, would help shape a distant nation’s future in a World War that was still six years away.

  Soon after her arrival, Virginia began organizing groups of friends for snipe-shooting expeditions in the marshes. Friday, December 8, dawned clear and mild as she prepared for another day of sport, taking the treasured 12-gauge shotgun she had been given by her late father. There were plenty of the party’s long-billed quarry that day and there was high excitement among the group of like-minded hunters, although snipe were always difficult birds to shoot on the wing because of their erratic pattern of flight. Ever competitive, perhaps it was Virginia’s eagerness to be the first to bag one of the well-camouflaged birds that distracted her and also persuaded her not to engage the safety catch. Either way, it was as she climbed over a wire fence running through the tall reeds of the wetlands that Virginia stumbled. As she fell, her gun slipped off her shoulder and got caught in her ankle-length coat. She reached out to grab it, but in so doing fired a round at point-blank range into her left foot.

  A creeping slick of blood stained the muddy delta waters around her as she collapsed into unconsciousness. The wound was serious—the cartridge she had fired was large, blunt, and full of spherical lead pellets now embedded deep into her foot. Her friends desperately sought to stanch the bleeding with an improvised tourniquet while they carried her to the car and dashed to the hospital back in town. The doctors in Smyrna acted quickly, and for the next three weeks she appeared to rally and recover. Her friends—and State Department headquarters in Washington—were relieved to be told that Virginia would be back to normal within a couple of months. What the local clinicians did not yet realize was that a virulent infection was seeping into the open wounds. Just before Christmas, her condition began to deteriorate rapidly and the head of the American hospital in Istanbul was urgently summoned, along with two American nurses. By the time they arrived after the twenty-four-hour train journey, her foot was swelling up and turning black, the putrid flesh was beginning to smell, and her whole body was racked with waves of ferocious pain. Immediately the American team realized that it was the worst possible outcome: gangrene had taken hold and was fast spreading up her lower leg. In the days before antibiotics there was no effective medical treatment and Virginia’s organs were in danger of shutting down. She was on the brink of death when, on Christmas Day, surgeons sawed off her left leg below the knee in a last-ditch bid to save her.4 She was twenty-seven.

  The amputation had gone well, given the circumstances, but when Virginia came around, nothing would assuage her grief fo
r her old life. The Izmir consulate cabled Washington that “Clerk Hall” was “resting very comfortably” and was expected to recover her health within two or three weeks, although a return to her duties would take a lot longer. But often in those early days, Virginia could not foresee a future for herself that she could bear. Her life had contracted to a hospital bed and, worst of all, the pity of others. And how could she break the news to her mother, who had never wanted her to go so far away and who had already lost her darling Ned? Through a kaleidoscope of mental images of blood and suffering, Virginia was to relive her actions that fateful day for the rest of her life, all the while punishing herself for her carelessness.