Rita

Rita is a young woman who visits Wyndam-Matson in his apartment at the Muromachi Hotel late one evening, a visitor whose presence triggers one of the novel's most explicit discussions of the nature of authenticity and the power of counterfactual fiction. She is described as wearing only a black silk slip, with blond hair falling loosely over her bare, slightly freckled shoulders, and she paces irritably while Wyndam-Matson takes a phone call from Ray Calvin about the forged Colt .44. Her youth and her reading habits mark her as distinct from the older, cynical businessman; she is the one who introduces into the story the banned novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which she has read and which she insists contains a serious political theory, not merely a love story.

Role in the Historicity Debate

When Wyndam-Matson, agitated by the blackmail threat from Frank Frink and Ed McCarthy, tries to dismiss the entire concept of historical authenticity as a 'mass delusion,' he uses two Zippo lighters to make his point: one supposedly carried by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was assassinated, the other an ordinary lighter. He asks Rita if she can feel the 'historicity' in the genuine one, and she cannot. She picks up both lighters and examines them, but when Wyndam-Matson insists that the value is all in the mind and that a paper of authenticity proves the worth, not the object itself, she responds with skepticism: 'I don't believe either of those two lighters belonged to Franklin Roosevelt.' This challenges his entire argument, forcing him to produce the Smithsonian Institution's framed certificate to prove his point. Her refusal to accept the invisible aura of historicity exposes the fragility of the entire system of authentication that underpins the West Coast trade in American artifacts.

Conduit for The Grasshopper Lies Heavy

Rita is the first character in the novel to summarize the plot of Hawthorne Abendsen's counterfactual novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and she does so with an intensity that reveals how deeply the book has affected her. She explains that Abendsen's theory is that if Joe Zangara had missed Roosevelt in Miami, Roosevelt would have been reelected in 1936, would have armed America, and would have been followed by Rexford Tugwell in 1940, leading to a world where Germany and Japan lost the war. She describes the book's key events: President Tugwell is so smart that he has all the ships out to sea before Pearl Harbor, so the U.S. fleet is not destroyed; Churchill stays in power and defeats Rommel in North Africa; the British and remnants of the Russian armies halt the German advance at a town called Stalingrad. Her face glows with animation as she speaks, her eyes become large, and she gestures as she talks, grabbing Wyndam-Matson's shoulder with intensity. When he laughs at her, she insists it is not funny, that it really would have been like that. Her passionate advocacy of the book's vision stands in stark contrast to Wyndam-Matson's dismissive cynicism, and it is through her that the reader first encounters the novel's central counterfactual premise.

Departure and Significance

After Wyndam-Matson retrieves the Smithsonian certificate to prove the lighter's authenticity, Rita's mood shifts. She becomes pensive, withdrawn, even a little depressed, and she asks to leave. When Wyndam-Matson presses her to stay, she refuses, and he drives her home. During the drive, she continues to expound on The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, describing how in the book the U.S. fleet survives Pearl Harbor, Japan is defeated, and the British turn the tide of the war at Stalingrad. Wyndam-Matson dismisses her arguments, insisting that no strategy could have defeated Rommel and that Japan would have won anyway. Rita's final contribution to the conversation is a moral one: she speaks of the concentration camps that began when General Rommel was replaced by Lammers, and she describes the work camps in the East where a friend of hers lived, where mail was censored and people had to get up at six-thirty in the morning to band music. Her brief appearance thus serves to introduce the novel's most important thematic counterpoint—the possibility of a different world—and to expose the moral bankruptcy of Wyndam-Matson's worldview, which accepts the Nazi regime's efficiency as a justification for its horrors.