In the Garden of Beasts

to Bassett and her equally secret effort to divorce him had become public knowledge. “Nasty what myenemies cooked up about me in Chicago,” she told Wilder. One woman in particular, whom Martha identified as Fanny, had begun spreading especially unpleasant rumors out of what Martha believed to be jealousy over Martha’s publication of a short story. “She insists that you and I have had an affair and it has come back to me from two people. I wrote to her the other day pointing out the dangers of slander unfounded and indicated the mess she might get into.” She added, “I feel sorry for her, but it does not alter the fact that she is a rather slimy mouthed bitch.”
    She sought to capture for Wilder a sense of the wintry city outside her windows, this new world in which she found herself. “The snow is soft and deep lying here—a copper smoke mist over Berlin by day and the brilliance of the falling moon by night. The gravel squeaks under my window at night—the sinister faced, lovely lipped and gaunt Diels of the Prussian Secret Police must be watching and the gravel spits from under his soft shoes to warn me. He wears his deep scars as proudly as I would fling about in a wreath of edelweiss.”
    She expressed a deep and pervading sorrow. “The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.”
    THOUGH MARTHA’S REFERENCE to “mazes of hate” was a bit strong, Dodd had indeed begun to sense that a campaign was gathering against him within the State Department and that its participants were the men of wealth and tradition. He suspected also that they were assisted by one or more people on his own staff providing intelligence in sotto voce fashion about him and the operation of the embassy. Dodd grew increasingly suspicious and guarded, so much so that he began writing his most sensitive letters in longhand becausehe did not trust the embassy stenographers to keep their contents confidential.
    He had reason to be concerned. Messersmith continued his back-channel correspondence with Undersecretary Phillips. Raymond Geist, Messersmith’s number-two officer (another Harvard man) also kept watch on the affairs of Dodd and the embassy. During a stop in Washington, Geist had a long and secret conversation with Wilbur Carr, chief of consular services, during which Geist provided a wide range of intelligence, including details about unruly parties thrown by Martha and Bill that sometimes lasted until five in the morning. “On one occasion the hilarity was so great,” Geist told Carr, that it drew a written complaint to the consulate. This prompted Geist to call Bill into his office, where he warned him, “If there was a repetition of that conduct it would have to be reported officially.” Geist also offered a critique of Ambassador Dodd’s performance: “The Ambassador is mild mannered and unimpressive whereas the only kind of person who can deal successfully with the Nazi Government is a man of intelligence and force who is willing to assume a dictatorial attitude with the Government and insist upon his demands being met. Mr. Dodd is unable to do this.”
    The arrival in Berlin of a new man, John C. White, to replace George Gordon as counselor of embassy could only have increased Dodd’s wariness. In addition to being wealthy and prone to hosting elaborate parties, White also happened to be married to the sister of Western European affairs chief Jay Pierrepont Moffat. The two brothers-in-law carried on a chummy correspondence, calling each other “Jack” and “Pierrepont.” Dodd would not have found the opening line of one of White’s first letters from Berlin to be terribly reassuring: “There appears to be a spare typewriter round here, so I can write you without other witnesses.” In one reply, Moffat called Dodd “a curious individual whom I find it almost impossible to diagnose.”
    To make matters even more claustrophobic for Dodd, another new officer, Orme Wilson, who arrived at about the same time to become a secretary of embassy, was Undersecretary Phillips’s nephew.
    When