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Her name was Penny, and it was her real name, and she hated it. Back home in Ohio it had been a common name and she wanted to be uncommon; abroad in the wider world it sounded small and cheap, like she was the least valuable thing in all America. Then there were the jokes about penny-pinching, or being saved and earned, like she’d belong to any sap who bothered to pick her up.
“Would that include me?” asked the English soldier who’d been buying her drinks all evening.
She smiled at him. He was nice, handsome enough, and had impeccable manners. She’d joined up with WAC thinking only that it would get her out of Columbus, but had since come to realize the true value of being in the service was that it gave her easy access to foreign men. She was stationed in Normandy; the night before, she’d gone out with a Frenchman.
“You’re not a sap,” she purred. “You’re gallant.” Maybe she’d had too many drinks. But the war had ended three days earlier, and everyone felt like celebrating.
Her soldier laughed. “One can but try,” he said. He paid for another round, then another. She ended the night in his bed. His name, he reminded her when they awoke, was Wadsworth.
“But what,” he murmured, threading fingers through her hair that next morning, “shall we call you?”
“Penny. It’s Penny.” She jerked away from him and began groping for her clothes.
“Yes, I remember,” he said placidly, “but you said you didn’t like it. So why not pick a new name? It’s a new day, after all. There’s a new peace. Why not a new you?”
She gazed at him, considering. Somehow this hadn’t occurred to her before, and the idea delighted her. “Like what?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he replied, drawing her back down to the pillow. “You want something more valuable; how about ‘Shilling?’” He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away.
“You’re making fun of me!”
“Only a little,” he admitted. “But alright. I’ll do better. What about…” He thought for a moment. “Alexandrina Victoria?”
“Kind of a mouthful.”
“True,” he chuckled. “But as posh as they come.”
“What else have you got?”
They tossed around names until she had to get back to her unit. Cleopatra. Katerina. Astrid. Nannette. She liked them all, liked picturing herself as them all. She knew then that she wouldn’t be Penny for a day beyond her discharge.
She didn’t see Wadsworth again. She would have liked to, but it was a chaotic time and they simply lost each other. Until many years later – when he was still Wadsworth, and, she was amazed to discover, a servant. Though of course, Yvette was a housemaid and prostitute by then, so a married butler outranked her on both counts.
Before his wife died, sometimes in a playful mood he would call her Shilling when there was no one around to hear.
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That’s how it could have happened. But how about this?
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“Power should rest in the hands of the workers. Surely that’s the point,” she said, careful not to over-pronounce her ‘r’s.
“Should, but can’t,” Wadsworth retorted. “Surely that’s the point.”
She let her glasses slide down her nose and looked at him over the rims, fully aware that this was one of her best angles. “Capitalist.”
“Realist,” he corrected.
“Do you mean to argue that fascism’s inevitable?” an older man demanded, interrupting her flirtation.
“Not at all,” Wadsworth replied. “Merely that revolutions tend to undermine themselves.” He spoke with the clipped, perfect tones of a BBC announcer; she wanted to take notes. He continued, “A workers’ uprising is all well and good, but someone’s got to run things, and presto! Now there’s a new ruling class, and the same problems all over again. Obviously that’s what Orwell is saying, and in case it wasn’t clear enough, he’s named the bloody pig Napoleon!” He smacked his copy of Animal Farm onto the table for emphasis.
This was during the year she went by Jane and wore a lot of black. She was living in London, supporting herself in the usual way, but with thoughts of self-improvement. Perhaps she could remake herself as an intellectual. She might marry a university professor, or at least attract a wealthier clientele. All of which had led her to join this book discussion group, though in the two evenings she’d attended so far, it had improved nothing but her British accent.
“Setting the politics aside for a bit,” interjected the matronly woman who was their hostess, “I was particularly interested in the treatment of – well, I supposed I’d call it animal nature. How the heroes of the book were those animals who stayed true to their essential natures, whereas the pigs got into trouble when they began sleeping in beds and walking on two legs and all that.”
“Well, who among us hasn’t occasionally pretended to be something we’re not?” asked Wadsworth. His tone was amiable, but his eyes went straight to Jane. “I, for example, might pass myself off as American, but that wouldn’t necessarily make me a villain.” He smiled blandly at the group.
Mortified, Jane sat silent for the rest of the evening, and escaped as quickly as possible when the discussion concluded. She never went back again.
When she began working for Mr. Boddy three years later, she recognized Wadsworth immediately. But he never showed any sign of remembering her.
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It might have gone like that. But here’s what really happened:
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She called herself Inga in those days, and was ostensibly Swedish (or rather, “Svedish”). Not that she knew the first thing about Sweden, but that couldn’t have mattered less, because she had blond hair and generous breasts and a predilection for tight sweaters, and this was, apparently, all anybody wanted from Scandinavia. Men could be counted on to lean in close and ask, with a nod and a leer, “So, is it true what they say about Swedish girls?” and she would bat her eyelashes and reply, “Vhy, vhat do zey say?” and after that there wasn’t much need to talk.
Until she met an Englishman who batted his eyelashes back at her and said, “I hear you can do the most extraordinary things with a meatball.”
Thrown off-script, she could only stammer, “I—what?” realizing, as the word left her lips, that she’d forgotten to substitute a v for the w.
Wadsworth smiled. “Never mind, dearie.” He patted her knee in a not remotely lascivious way and changed the subject to Greta Garbo movies, of which he had seen far more than she had. In the ensuing hour’s conversation, he did not look at her chest even once. Nothing in all her experience had prepared her for how to deal with such a person.
A girlfriend had to explain it to her later, about men who liked other men. She found the notion peculiar, but in the weeks and months that followed, with all the men and all the gropings and pawings she had to endure, she would often think fondly of that hour with Wadsworth. A pansy he might be, but he’d also been a gentleman, and she didn’t come across many of those. She came to consider him, in retrospect, a friend.
Which was why she felt so betrayed, all those years later, when they found themselves working for the same odious employer and Wadsworth introduced her to his wife. His wife! He’d married a woman after all! Yvette (for she was Yvette by then) couldn’t believe it. And yes, Wadsworth still acted the gentleman, and yes, he was tactful enough not to reference the fact that she’d had a different name and nationality at their previous meeting, though he brought up Greta Garbo at the first opportunity. But still, Yvette felt it like a knife to the back.
Well, all men were the same, and you couldn’t trust anybody. Yvette informed Mr. Boddy about the wife’s Socialist friends as soon as she discovered them. Wadsworth was better off without her anyway.