Read Online Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal - Free Book Online Page A

Kitty’s father replied.
    Kitty paced up and down the stifling front office on Broadway, staring at the sample portraits displayed on the walls. She had a nine thirty appointment to speak to Poppy Clements, the theater producer’s wife who had been at Mrs. Basshor’s party, and here she was, waiting for the punctilious Prentiss to fill out official passport application forms.
    â€œOccupation?”
    â€œBusinessman.”
    â€œYour age, please, sir?”
    â€œForty-seven.”
    â€œAnd date of birth?” Prentiss’s nib scratched against the cheap government-issue paper. He wrote carefully, blotting each entry so that the ink wouldn’t smudge.
    Kitty couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. When she’d arrived in New York the previous year, all she’d carried by way of identification were two letters, one from school and one from her father’s attorneys, and the nervous young customs official who boarded the ship had seemed embarrassed to check even those.
    But this morning, Mr. Weeks explained that the State Department had issued new regulations. Since the war broke out, it had become mandatory for all Americans traveling abroad to carry a passport, and by the end of the previous year, the rules had become even more rigid, requiring a sworn application before a clerk of a court and the inclusion of two unmounted photographs.
    â€œAnd will you be traveling with your wife, Mr. Weeks?” Prentiss said.
    â€œMy wife is deceased. I will be traveling with my daughter.”
    Julian Weeks provided Kitty’s particulars: Capability Violet Weeks, nineteen years of age, born February 10, 1896, in Selangor, Malaya.
    The scratching nib paused. “Selangor?” the photographer said. Then he added, “No matter, sir. Miss Weeks’s citizenship follows yours. Your place of birth, Mr. Weeks?”
    â€œDover, Delaware.”
    â€œAnd you have a birth certificate to prove that?”
    Kitty suspected that Prentiss enjoyed the liberty of asking the many questions that the form required of his customers, although he presented it as a courtesy that he offered gratis to those requiring a photograph.
    â€œI don’t have a birth certificate,” Mr. Weeks said. “Do you, Mr. Prentiss?”
    Prentiss coughed. “So many men of our generation don’t possess one. Was your father native born or naturalized, Mr. Weeks?” Pen poised, he waited for a reply.
    Julian Weeks said, “That’s a bit much.”
    Kitty read from a news clipping, pinned beside a list of the photographer’s services and prices:
    Statement from Secretary of State Bryan, November 13, 1914: The President, upon the advice of the Secretary of State, has this day signed an order under which the rules governing the granting and issuing of passports in the United States are made much stricter than they have been in the past. The immediate cause of the amendment to the passport regulations was the fact that the Department of State had been recently informed of several cases in which aliens holding themselves as native American citizens have obtained, or attempted to obtain, American passports for purposes of espionage or otherwise in foreign countries.
    â€œI don’t believe this,” she said and read out loud: “‘Under the former rules it was not difficult to obtain passports fraudulently.’ Anyone claiming citizenship through birth in the United States only had to make a sworn application before a notary. ‘It was not required that either the applicant or witness be known to the notary.’”
    She turned to her father. “Now you will need a witness, who must also be an American citizen, to make a sworn statement in support of your application. And that individual must be known to the clerk of the federal or state court.”
    â€œThe new regulations have been instituted to keep us all safe,” Prentiss observed.
    â€œMy father was