The Woman Who Smashed Codes Read online

  Elizebeth didn’t understand any part of this sentence. She didn’t know what he meant by spending the night or what Riverbank was. She struggled for a response, finally stammering a few words. “Oh, sir, I don’t have anything with me to spend the night away from my room.”

  “That’s all right,” Fabyan said. “We’ll furnish you anything you want. Anything you need, we have it. Come on!”

  Then, to her surprise, Fabyan grabbed Elizebeth under one elbow, practically lifting her by the arm. Her body stiffened in response. He marched her out of the library and swept her into the waiting limousine.

  People often guessed that she was meek because she was small. She hated this, the assumption that she was harmless, ordinary. She despised her own last name for the same reason; it seemed to give people an excuse to forget her.

  “The odious name of Smith,” she called it once, in a diary she began keeping at age twenty. “It seems that when I am introduced to a stranger by this most meaningless of phrases, plain ‘Miss Smith,’ that I shall be forever in that stranger’s estimation, eliminated from any category even approaching anything interesting or at all uncommon.” There was nothing to be done: changing her name would cause horrendous insult to blood relations, and complaining provided no satisfaction, because whenever she did, people asked why she didn’t just change her name, a response so “inanely disgusting” that it made her feel violent. “I feel like snipping out the tongues of any and all who indulge in such common, senseless, and inane pleasantries.”

  Her family members had never shared this fear of being ordinary. They were midwestern people of modest means, Quakers from Huntington, Indiana, a rural town known for its rock quarries. Her father, John Marion Smith, traced his lineage to an English Quaker who sailed to America in 1682 on the same boat as William Penn. In Huntington he worked as a farmer and served in local government as a Republican. (“My Indiana family,” Elizebeth later wrote, “were hide-bound Republicans who had never under any instances voted for any other ticket.”) Her mother, Sopha Strock, a housewife, delivered ten children to John, the first when she was only seventeen. One died in infancy; nine survived. Elizebeth was the last of the nine, and by the time she was born, on August 26, 1892, most of her brothers and sisters had already grown up and scattered. She got along with only two or three, particularly a sister named Edna, two years her elder, a practical girl who later married a dentist and moved to Detroit.

  Sopha had decided to spell “Elizebeth” in a nonstandard way, with ze instead of the usual za, perhaps sensing that her ninth child named Smith would want something to set her apart in the world. But Elizebeth didn’t need the hitch in her first name to know she was different. Prone to recurring fits of nausea that began in adolescence and plagued her for years, she had trouble sitting still and keeping her tongue. She clashed with her father, a pragmatic, stubborn man who ordered his children around and believed women should marry young. She questioned her parents’ faith. John and Sopha, though not devout, were part of a Quaker community and believed what Quakers do: that war is wrong, silence concentrates goodness, and direct contact with God is possible. Elizebeth’s God was more diffuse: “We call a lot of things luck that are but the outcome of our own bad endeavor,” she wrote in the diary, “but there is undoubtedly something outside ourselves that sometimes wins for us, or loses, irrespective of ourselves. What is it? Is it God?”

  Her father didn’t want Elizebeth to go to college. She defied him and sent applications to multiple schools, vowing to pay her own tuition; a friend later recalled that she was full of “determination and energy to get a college education with no help or encouragement from her father.” (John Smith did end up loaning her some money—at 4 percent interest.) After being rejected from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a top Quaker school, she settled on Wooster College in Ohio, studying Greek and English literature there between 1911 and 1913. Then her mother fell ill with cancer and Elizebeth transferred to another small liberal arts school, Hillsdale College in Michigan, to be closer to home. At both schools she earned tuition money as a seamstress for hire. Her dorm rooms were always cluttered with dresses in progress and stray ribbons of chiffon.

  College took Elizebeth’s innate tendency to doubt and gave it a structure, a justification. At Wooster and Hillsdale she discovered poetry and philosophy, two methods of exploring the unknown, two scalpels for carving up fact and thought. She studied the works of Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, carrying books of their poems and plays around campus, annotating and underlining the pages until the leaves separated from the bindings. A course on philosophy introduced her to a new hero, the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who “believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect,” she wrote in a paper. “He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.” Elizebeth, a smart person from a working-class family, found this concept liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts. She wrote a poem about this epiphany:

  I sit stunned, nerveless, amid the ruins

  Of my fallen idols. The iconoclast Philosophy

  Has shattered for me

  My God . . .

  But through the confusing ruins, Faith, still hoping,

  Somehow raises her hands and bids me—

  Yearn on! Finally

  Through the mazes of error and doubt and mistrust

  You will come, weary heart

  To the final conclusion upon which you will build anew.

  You will find triumphant

  The Working Hypothesis,

  The Solid Rock.

  In addition to the well-worn volumes of Shakespeare and Tennyson, she lugged her own diary from place to place, a book with a soft black binding that said “Record” on the cover in silver script. The round-cornered pages were lined. She wrote in wet black ink with a quill pen, in a slanted cursive hand that was not too beautiful, about the importance of choosing the right words for things, even if those words offended people. She didn’t like it when she heard a friend say that a person who had died had “passed away” or that a staggering drunk at a party was “a bit indisposed.” It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!”

  Sometimes Elizebeth had trouble channeling these energies and frustrations into cogent work. Her professors found her intensely bright, yet unfocused and argumentative. More than one told her, she said, that “I have marvelous abilities, yet do not use them.” A philosophy professor wrote on the back of her Erasmus paper, “Very suggestive, with lots of good ideas and phrases. Also novel. But the style is choppy and the ideas are not in proper sequence.” Next to these words Elizebeth scribbled a defiant note, dismissing the criticism on the grounds that she had recently won second place in a state oratorical contest.

  She found herself attracted to male artists. Attending a choral concert one night, “my musical heart was carried completely away by a baritone,” she wrote. “He loved the very act of singing—it could be seen in his eyes, in his mouth, in his very hands, as they irrepressibly moved in half-gestures. It made me want to be able to sing well myself, so badly that—well, I just couldn’t sit still with the desire of it.” At Hillsdale she dated a poet named Harold Van Kirk, called Van by his friends, handsome and athletic. He typed French sonnets for her and later joined the army and moved to New York. Van’s roommate, Carleton Brooks Miller, wooed her when the relationship with Van fell apart, urging Elizebeth to read James Branch Cabell’s erotic science fiction novel Jurgen because “it reveals the naked man-soul as it is.” Carleton joined the army, too, then became the minister of a Congregational church near the college, writing to Elizebeth a few years later that he was still looking for a mate.

 
When graduation came around in the spring of 1915, Elizebeth still felt like “a quivering, keenly alive, restless, mental question mark.” She had no sense of where to go or what she wanted to do with her life. That fall she accepted a position as the substitute principal of a county high school twenty miles west of her childhood home. The landscape of small-town Indiana was depressingly familiar to Elizebeth, and while she enjoyed parts of her job—she taught classes in addition to running the school—she also felt trapped. For an educated American woman in 1915, teaching at the high school level or below was what you did. Almost 90 percent of professors at public universities were male; only 939 women in the country received master’s degrees in 1915, and 62 women earned Ph.D.s. Elizebeth had arrived at the last stop on a dreary train. There was no path from teaching that led anywhere else she might want to go. A woman taught, had kids, retired, died.

  All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it “this little, elusive, buried splinter” and hoped for it to be “pricked from my mind.” But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove. “I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal? Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me? I don’t know what it is unless it is that characteristic which makes so many people remark that I should have been born a man.”

  Wanting something more, and ready to take a risk, Elizebeth quit her job at the Indiana high school in the spring of 1916 and moved back in with her parents to think about what was next. She soon remembered how unpleasant it was to live with her father. She reached her limit and packed a suitcase in early June. Nervous, but forcing herself to be brave, she boarded a train for Chicago, hoping to find a new job there, or at least a new direction.

  That month, the war in Europe—the First World War, then called the “Great War”—was two years old. America had not yet joined the battle. Woodrow Wilson was finishing his first term as president and campaigning for reelection in November on a platform of peace. More than a thousand Republican delegates had just kicked off their national convention to nominate a challenger to Wilson. They were gathered in the same city that now lured Elizebeth: Chicago, the young capital of the Midwest, an upstart empire of stockyards and skyscrapers.

  The scale of the city jangled her. Pedestrians brushed past each other on sidewalks that cut mazes through the downtown office buildings, banks, apartments, hotels. It rained most every day, a cold, miserable rain, sheets of fat, icy drops that saturated the wool coats of the political delegates and swamped the grass at the baseball parks, canceling Cubs and White Sox games. Elizebeth stayed in the apartment of a friend on the South Side and ventured out each morning in search of work, visiting job agencies and presenting her qualifications. She told the receptionists she would like to work in literature or research. She pictured herself at a desk in a room of desks, taking notes with a sharp pencil. Not clerical work but something that required the brain. The people at the job agencies said they were sorry, but they didn’t have anything like that.

  She had no other cards to play. No money or connections, no means of bending Chicago to her will. She felt small and anonymous. After a week she decided to return home.

  Before boarding the train, though, she wanted to make one more stop in the city, at a place she had heard about, the Newberry Library, which owned a rare copy of the First Folio of William Shakespeare, a book whose backstory had intrigued her when she learned it in college. The Bard’s plays were never collected and printed in one place during his lifetime, because the culture in which he worked, Queen Elizabeth I’s England, revered the spoken word above the written. It wasn’t until 1623, seven years after his death, when a group of admirers gathered thirty-six of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies in a single hefty volume that came to be known as the First Folio. Simply publishing the book was a radical act, a statement that the phrases of a playwright deserved to be documented with the same care as the Gospels. A team of London artisans produced about a thousand copies, each typeset and bound by hand. Five men memorized portions of the plays to help them set type faster, stacking metal letters one by one into words and sentences.

  Over the centuries, most of the copies were lost or destroyed. The Newberry had one of the few on display in America. So, on what she thought would be her final day in Chicago, Elizebeth made her way to the library.

  The library was an odd institution, created by a dead man’s will and a quirk of fate. A rich merchant named Walter Newberry died on a steamship in 1868. The crew preserved his body for the remainder of the voyage in an empty rum cask before returning it to his beloved city, where lawyers discovered that Newberry had left behind almost $2,150,000 for the construction of a public library.

  According to his will, the library had to be free to use, and it had to be located in North Chicago. These were the only conditions. The library didn’t even have books to start with, because three years after Newberry’s death, his own hoard of rare volumes was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

  The slate of the library was blank. Now the library’s trustees wrote their status anxieties upon it. These were wealthy Chicago businessmen who felt they lived in one of the finest cities in the world and were painfully aware that the world did not agree. For all of Chicago’s sudden material success, its skyscrapers and factories and department store empires and slaughterhouses, it lacked the institutions of art and music and science that elevated New York and Boston and Paris in traditional measures of civic greatness but omitted Chicago and made its large men feel small.

  They wished to prove that they were men of culture and refinement, and they were willing to spend whatever it took.

  This was the same insecurity that drove the fathers of Chicago to raise the dreamlike White City, the temporary pavilions of the Chicago World’s Fair that soared along the southern edge of the lake in the summer of 1893. The White City exhibited the future in prototype, pieces of an unfinished puzzle. On August 26, 1893, a day of demonstrations at the Palace of Mechanical Arts, a building twice as large as the U.S. Capitol, the palace rumbled and whirred with machines that turned raw sugar into candy, made sausages and horseshoe nails and bricks, and sewed ten thousand button holes per hour. All day long one hundred thousand people wandered the sprawling aisles, eardrums split by machine roar, drinking lemonade that spurted from a fountain. An entire newspaper was printed in exactly sixty-three minutes starting with raw planks of wood that were pulped as people watched. “Everywhere was a demonstration of the almost irresistible power of mind when matter is set to do its bidding,” the Tribune reported. The world’s tallest man, Colonel H. C. Thurston of Texas, eight foot one and a half in boots, mingled with the throngs, and in the afternoon fifty thousand gathered outdoors to watch a fat man dive for a bologna sausage that dangled from a pole above the lake’s lagoon.

  This was the day Elizebeth turned one year old in Indiana. And as crowds of Americans roamed the White City in awe, builders completed construction of the Newberry Library, ten miles north of the noisy fairgrounds, and the first patrons entered the library in reverent silence.

  Unlike the White City, a spectacle for the masses, the library was designed as “a select affair” for “the better and cleaner classes,” the Chicago Times wrote with approval when the Newberry first opened. It was an imposing five-story building of tan granite blocks. All visitors had to fill out a slip stating the purpose of their research and they were turned away if they could not specify a topic. The books, available for reference only, were shelved in reading rooms modeled after the home libraries of wealthy gentlemen, cozy and intimate spaces containing the rarest and most sophisticated books that vulgar Chicago money could buy. During the library’s first decades, the masters of the Newberry acquired books with the single-mindedness of hog merchants. They bought hundreds of incunabula, printed volumes from before 1501,
written by monks. They bought fragile, faded books written by hand on unusual materials, on leather and wood and parchment and vellum. They bought mysterious books of disputed patrimony, books whose past lives they did not know and could not explain. One book on the Newberry’s shelves featured Arabic script and a supple, leathery binding. Inside were two inscriptions. The first said that the book had been found “in the palace of the king of Delhi, September 21st, 1857,” seven days after a mutiny. The second inscription said, “Bound in human skin.”

  In one especially significant transaction, the library acquired six thousand books from a Cincinnati hardware merchandiser, a haul that included a Fourth Folio of Shakespeare from 1685, a Second Folio from 1632, and most exceptional of all, the First Folio of 1623, the original printing of Shakespeare’s plays.

  This is the book that Elizebeth Smith was determined to see in June 1916, when she was twenty-three.

  Opening the glass front door of the Newberry, she walked through a small vestibule into a magnificent Romanesque lobby. A librarian at a desk stopped her and sized her up. Normally Elizebeth would have been required to fill out the form with her research topic, but she had gotten lucky. The year 1916 happened to be the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and libraries around the country, including the Newberry, were mounting exhibitions in celebration.

  Elizebeth said she was here to see the First Folio. The librarian said it was part of the exhibition and pointed to a room on the first floor, to the left. Elizebeth approached. The Folio was on display under glass.

  The book was large and dense, about 13 inches tall and 8 inches wide, and almost dictionary-thick, running to nine hundred pages. The binding was red and made of highly polished goatskin, with a large grain. The pages had gilded edges. It was opened to a pair of pages in the front, the light gray paper tinged with yellow due to age. She saw an engraving of a man in an Elizabethan-era collar and jacket, his head mostly bald except for two neatly combed hanks of hair that ended at his ears. The text said: