Free Criminals by Valerie Trueblood

type his tables of figures with their crossed sevens and curled nines. Few men typed at that time. Mr. Orlenko wrote with a fountain pen, making a lacework of corrections, holes rubbed and stuck through the paper where he used a typewriter eraser with a stiff brush. “Why not pencil ?” we all groaned. With this pen he also doodled trees, all over his DOD blotter and in the margins of the legal pads he wrote on, and then scribbled them out.
    He never took sick leave or even his full two weeks of vacation, despite the wife. There were children but they were thought to be grown. Nevertheless, the secretaries acted them out, saying, “ Da , Papa!” and banging their heels together. His fingers were a deep saffron and the thumb, too, because he curved it under and petted the end of his Camel while he was thinking. Above his heavy, carved features flew thick black eyebrows.
    From his brushed hair came a breath of nutmeg when he bent over your desk. He was very clean, and that—not all that common in those from his part of the world, the secretaries said—was because of the DP camp. He would shake out a white handkerchief and hold it as he worked. He kept a drawer of them, ironed, according to the secretaries. His wife ironed the shirts he wore, of which the garment bag on the door, they said, held extras for when he worked overnight. He never appeared tired, and kept his erect posture, arrogant and foreign. When a secretary had checked our lists and we took them in tohim, his eyes meeting ours never lost their intense warning, though a moment before he would have been squinting into one of his folders with a kind of tenderness.
    â€œYou know, I’m intrigued by Mr. Orlenko,” Holly said one day. “He seems like such an interesting man.” We made fun of her accent, the way she said “intrigged,” and “Mayan” for man, though indeed Mr. Orlenko was from another time. “So European,” she said. “He works so hard. The N. is for Nazar, did you know that? Nazar. Nazar Orlenko.”
    Often when there is a gruff temperament in the office the gentler ones will find something touching in it, I did learn that. They will cosset a man who chews Maalox and slaps his blotter and bangs his telephone receiver. In the Pentagon we saw women attentive as mothers toward some bitter GS-9 who had to park in the farthest lot and walk in, and be spurned by the younger secretaries. But Mr. Orlenko did not have one of those office mothers, and in fact had nobody except his never-seen wife, for whom the accepted word was “pitiful.” Nobody until Holly in her freedom—as Frost tells us the lovely shall be choosers—chose him.
    In Frost’s poem, the lovely woman is punished. When he wrote “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” Frost was living in a world in which there was an audience presumed to believe, however mistakenly, that beauty conquered all. It may be the Kennedys didn’t know the poem and really thought the lovely were choosers and that was that. We’ll never know. Maybe they were not concerned with Frost’s zeal to show them the bitter lot of beauty, or with anything except “The Gift Outright,” in which there is the line about “many deeds of war” being the deed to the country.
    The three of us, Holly and Alex and I, were traveling the outer ring of the Pentagon on our lunch hour, talking about Alex’s future. He was going to run for office as a Democrat. He would start locally. The Secretary of Defense was coming toward us, surrounded by men with cameras on their shoulders and strings of spiral cord looped around them, and he was laughing, not exactly heartily but not with the craven note, either, of a man who would live to write a book abouthow bitterly mistaken he was in this period. He was not much further along than the interns, it turned out. He, too, had a lot to learn. “Hello, Alex,” he said.
    â€œIs