Now back in America, in November of 1918, Edda is working at the Central switchboard in Washington, D.C. Her supervisor, Miss Genovese is not happy with Edda: she has incurred several "infractions" for her dress or not following proper protocol on the switchboard. Edda has been home from France for two months now. The last call of her night shift is a caller who tells her she has to tell the truth before it's too late and ends with the word, "Brightwood". Unable to find out more from the mysterious caller, Edda leaves work very upset.
She returns to her Aunt Tess's boarding house where she has a room on the fourth floor, along with other boarders including a young man, Theo Graybill who has a limp from a hip injury. Theo notices immediately that something is not right with Edda and he presses her to tell him. But all Edda will reveal is that she took a local call that was "odd". He tries to reassure Edda that the call was likely just random as it is impossible to choose the operator on a call.
Unable to sleep after her shift, Edda decides to purchase new clothing instead of doing her laundry. While Edda is in Hecht's to purchase new white blouses and navy wool skirts, two women run in, announcing the war is over. An Armistice has been signed! This leads to partying and celebration everywhere including at Edda's aunt's boarding house. Intoxicated after drinking champagne, and still deeply upset over the call, Edda finally tells Theo what actually happened that fateful day seven months ago in France.
She explains to Theo that as a Hello Girl, and part of the American Expeditionary Forces, it was Edda's job as an operator to transfer calls between platoons, bases and generals, speaking and translating between French and English. Everything was in codes that changed daily. Ordered to place a call one night to Brightwood, the code Edda believes was for Baltimore's Forty-Eighth Regiment, Edda froze, unable to remember the code. The Forty-Eighth Regiment had advanced beyond the front and were trapped. Thirty-four men perished. The caller to her switchboard used the code, Brightwood and told her to tell the truth.
Edda decides that she has to return to her home in Roland Park in Baltimore to retrieve a Polk's City Directory. When she calls Aunt Tess to ask her to bring her money to the train station, Edda learns that one of the switchboard operators, Louisa Safechuck has killed herself. However, it is Theo who brings her the money and who accompanies Edda to Baltimore against her wishes. On the train, Theo confesses to Edda that he shot himself in the leg to avoid going to the front.
In Baltimore, Edda and Theo have a difficult run in with her father, who is dismissive towards Theo and unkind towards Edda. After visiting the home of Charley Dannenberg and meeting his angry father, the two return home. The very next shift, Edda receives yet another telephone call telling her she's the only one who can help them and mentioning Brightwood. Hysterical, her adjoining operator, Helen Gibson takes Edda to the break room where she is offered a chance to do a publicity shoot for the Hello Girls.
Back at her room, Edda tells Theo about the second call and the two sit down to try to determine which families might be the most suspect. But as Edda and Theo continue to investigate the families of the dead soldiers, Edda must finally face the reality of the trauma she experienced and come to
Discussion
The Brightwood Code is a historical fiction novel set in 1918, at the end of World War I. The story focuses on Edda St. Clair, a former Hello Girl who has returned suddenly from France, traumatized by an event that led to the deaths of thirty-four young soldiers. The story alternates between Edda in the present, in Washington, attempting to uncover the mystery of the caller and the recent past events that occurred while she was at the front in France.
Believing that she could forget what happened if she left France, and found work in a different city Edda's life unravels. She returns home to Baltimore, her father describing her arrival "...like a ghost, telling us nothing is wrong but of course something is wrong. Her room is a pigsty. She has to be dragged into the bath." She flees from her own homecoming party and is unable to dance with the son of her father's boss. Soon after, Edda flees from Baltimore, to Washington where she is able to find work as a telephone operator with Bell. It is at this point that Edda receives two mysterious calls, mentioning the code word Brightwood and begging her to tell the truth. The past has come back to haunt her and Edda is determined to find out who is behind the calls.
Initially Edda believes that the mysterious caller is someone related to one of the dead soldiers, all of whose names she has memorized, and is asking her to claim responsibility for their deaths. Edda is certain that she is responsible because she failed to do her job. "Of course there are things I left out. But nothing that would excuse any of my behavior...Boys were dying on the front. My job was to answer telephones. My only job was to answer telephones." However as the story unfolds, it is not quite that simple.
Edda believes she must investigate each soldier's family to determine who is making the calls. Theo challenges her as to what she hopes to achieve, telling her, "But what kind of endings do you think you can give?....You can't rewrite what happened, no matter what you do. None of us can. Whatever happened is what happened." Edda tells him, "There has to be something. There has to be some kind of finality. Some kind of way of making peace. It can't be the case that something horrible happens and you just have to live, forever, with this feeling of..."
As Edda continues to struggle to solve the mystery of who is contacting her, her feelings of guilt and conflict intensify. "I need peace, and I need an ending, and I need to make amends and have amends made to me. And I need to bring my soul back from France. I cannot keep living divided this way, I cannot keep feeling as though I am still in that switchboard room, still in that switchboard room with Luc."
When Edda meets Charley Dannenberg's father a second time she recognizes the "primal woundedness", the "pain stuffed down" and the "untended grief" he is experiencing because she is experiencing the same. But it's after meeting August Danneman's sister, Eliza, that Edda begins to make sense of what happened to her in France. "Is it possible that I did the best I could with the choices I had? Is it possible that what happened to the boys of the Forty-Eighth was because of something I did, but not my fault? Is it possible that I am to blame, but not to punish?"
When Theo explains how he got out of fighting in the war, he tells Edda that his choice to do anything to get out of the war means he is a coward. But Edda tells him that maybe our choices simply show "who we were forced to be in the moment that we made them."
Early in the novel, Theo quickly and correctly surmises that Edda's trauma is somehow related to a man named Luc. Edda refuses every attempt to discuss him and it isn't until much later when she remembers the details of that night in the office that it is understandable why this is. Eventually, Edda discovers the person behind the calls and learns that they were not asking her to take responsibility for the deaths of the men of the Forty-Eighth Regiment but to expose a man who had harmed her and possibly many other Hello Girls. These revelations lead Edda to realize that she had been so focused on what happened to the young soldiers, she missed recognizing her own trauma. "I was so focused on the story of the boys who were hurt and lost at war that I missed the story of how I was hurt and lost at war. I missed part of the story. I missed my own part of the story."
The novel highlights some of the terrible realities of World War I, a war that saw many young men humiliated into enlisting, believing that their honor depended upon doing so. The reality of the war was young soldiers were sent out again and again by generals behind the lines, to face the muck, machine gun fire and gas without any chance of success and little of surviving. As the war dragged on with neither side winning, many people came to see the war as a hopeless endeavor with little regard for the soldiers. Mr. Dannenberg states this to Edda when they meet a second time. "The truth is that boys like him are expendable. They fought in trenches but the decision about their lives were made over the telephone by people who got to keep their hands clean. That boys like my son never belonged in France, died their because of people like you. Because you were cruel and careless. My son paid with his life, and the people who drove him to enlist, and the people who should have looked after him once he got there -- they didn't pay at all."
The character of Theo Graybill is representative of those young men who were terrified to go to war, who in some way knew the measure of what was happening, but who had no say. " 'I was so scared, ' he continues. 'When my number was called, going was what I was supposed to do. Be a man. Be the first brave man in the family. I wanted to go but I was so scared to go, and I would have done anything not to go. And then I got there and I did. Do anything. I did anything I could do to come home again....' "
The novel also highlights the almost impossible predicament women who have been sexually assaulted faced in the early twentieth century. The conversation between Edda and her supervisor, Miss Genovese portrays the difficulty they faced in reporting Luc. When Edda asks why she didn't report him, Miss Genovese states that it didn't happen to her, that she needed someone who had been harmed by Luc L'Enfant, and that she would have been blamed for allowing the assault to happen to Louisa Safechuck. She knew that Edda was likely also a victim of Luc because of her premature arrival home from France and so she needed to try to get her to report him. And still she wasn't even sure if that was enough. "It doesn't work to have just one girl's word against a man. You need two. You need twenty...Maybe twenty still would not have been enough. Maybe none of them would have been enough."
The Brightwood Code is a well written and thought-provoking novel that uses the historical fact of the Hello Girls as it's backstory. What starts out as a character trying to solve a mystery, reveals a whole other story, in a twist that is heartbreaking. In spite of all that has happened, the novel does end on a positive tone, with Edda open to developing her friendship with Theo.
The Hello Girls were female switchboard operators in what was known as the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit during World War I. The unit was formed in 1917 and was made up of two hundred twenty three women, most of whom served in France.
Book Details:
The Brightwood Code by Monica Hesse
New York: Little, Brown and Company 2024
321 pp.
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