Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Every day Ruthie ate her brown bag lunch quickly in the women’s room. Then she ran to the downtown library to study. Ruthie always had a book in her purse, which she would read on the trolley, while she was stirring soup, while everybody else was listening to the radio.

  Naomi wondered if Aunt Rose had remembered to make her lunch, but she felt shy about asking. Ruthie looked at her and seemed to read her mind. “Mama, did you make a lunch for Naomi?”

  “Why wouldn’t I make her a lunch? Just because I forgot once. At my age, can’t I be forgiven and forgotten a little mistake?”

  “What do I have?” Naomi asked. Maman would say she was being rude, but she was curious. Here nobody rebuked her for the question, although Uncle Morris would tease her when he heard her asking. Every morning Aunt Rose made up three lunches, in three different lunch boxes with thermos jugs.

  “Today because of the snow, nice hot cabbage soup. Bread with it and a piece of cheese.”

  This would be borscht with only beets and cabbages, not the one with the beef. She loved it but it made her homesick, because Maman too made such a soup: a family soup, learned from their parents. She thought she could probably make it too, if she wanted. But she did not want to. She wanted it made for her, by Maman.

  She put on her leggings and galoshes, buttoned up her coat, picked up her notebook and her satchel for books, her lunch box that was red and had on it a picture of Superman flying, and headed for school, six blocks away. The street was still dark and the streetlights on, but the sky was beginning to lighten.

  The snow was coming down in big lazy flakes as if it had forever to cover the city. Already the parked cars were coated. Adults did not use bikes here or motorbikes, but even working people had cars. Uncle Morris had a car, from his own factory. Every month they paid money on it, like rent, although it was not new but already the fender had a dent that had been knocked out and then had rusted. Papa would have loved a car. He knew how to drive. Back before the Nazis had started all the troubles, they had gone off sometimes into the country with Georges who was a mechanic and had an ancient Renault, and his wife and fat good-natured son Razi. Her parents acted like kids then, giggling and cuddly. Everybody ate chicken and drank red wine. Papa played the mouth organ, and they sang in French and Yiddish.

  She plodded off past the kosher butcher—Four Eyes Rosovsky’s father—where Aunt Rose did not like to shop because she thought he was too expensive, past the fish store where Sandy’s papa worked, past the hardware, past the good bread smell of Fenniman’s bakery and the dark beery tunnel of bar. Here the sidewalks were slushy already. She stomped in the melted puddles. She formed walls around herself as she walked, getting ready for school, where writing and speaking and reading in English was only part of the work.

  The hardest part of her task was studying how to be like the other children, who seemed to her at once older and younger than she was, who had recently turned twelve. They cared more about boys, knew about cars and sports and clothes, radio programs and comic strips. For the other kids, war was something on the radio, something distant and belonging to “Terry and the Pirates” which she too hurried home after school to listen to, followed by “Captain Midnight” and “Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy.” They had never been bombed. They had never shaken with fear from planes diving on them and shooting bullets to kill. They had never seen a mother holding a headless baby. They had never seen people and cows dead together like disgusting dirty meat in the fields. They did not imagine the war as a great bonfire hiding off in the direction where the sun was rising, so that the red glare that preceded it seemed to come from the fires of distant bombing, of burning cities, of fear like smoke always on the wind.

  BERNICE 1

  Bernice and the Pirates

  Bernice had grown up thinking her name was Bernice-Professor-Coates’s-Daughter, something like Kristin Lavransdatter she realized when she read Lagerlöf’s novel. By that time her name had been increased for years to Poor Bernice, Professor-Coates’s-Daughter, Poor Motherless Jeff and Poor Motherless Bernice.

  Mother had been a big warm frowsy woman dripping scarves and gloves, always toting an enormous cracking leather purse rotund and cylindrical as a hippopotamus and a secondary carpetbag stuffed with books and knitting, handkerchiefs and medicines not only through all of their travels in near and farther Europe every summer, but even on forays into Boston for the day, or to friends’ houses for the evening. Anyone seeing The Professor, lean, prematurely greying, carrying a cane which he used mainly on the stairs, with his fleshy often bedraggled wife Viola, would have judged him as mind and her as body.

  Bernice however remembered her mother reciting and discussing her way through the Iliad and Pindar with two of her women friends at Thursday lunches. Viola’s Latin and Greek were far superior to The Professor’s, and she was no slouch at his specialty, modern European languages. As The Professor escorted his charges, students or club women or retirees or schoolteachers on vacation, through a grand tour each summer to supplement the genteel penury of his faculty stipend, out of Viola’s pouch came the Guides Bleues and the Baedekers, supplemented with art and political history.

  Viola had been a substantial woman, with an enormous lap and a hearty amused voice, not someone expected to die in a matter of a month, one nasty never-to-be-forgotten February of double pneumonia. Bernice had been eleven, Jeff, twelve and frail for his age, bookish, shy. Bernice had begun keeping house in deep confusion, with an inner prayer that her loneliness and her burden would not be permanent. Mother would reappear as arbitrarily as she had vanished into first the sickroom, then the hospital, then the suddenly smaller body. Their father had always existed mostly behind closed doors, but their mother, although she demanded respect for her concentration, would nonetheless take them on her lap while reading or chatting.

  Every morning for the next year Bernice woke hoping her mother would be in the kitchen frying bacon, making raisin cinnamon toast. She kept waiting for that smell of cinnamon and coffee.

  Instead she came downstairs to a cold and empty kitchen and last night’s dishes that she had or hadn’t done, to make breakfast, a girl soon tall enough to reach the high shelves. For Jeff and herself she made oatmeal of one third strawberry jam, her invention. She invented many dishes in her early cooking, most of them peculiar. For her thirteenth birthday her father The Professor gave her a Fannie Farmer cookbook. She immediately hated its calm authoritative manner, its heft, its laced oxfords air, but she nonetheless mastered it. Plain sensible cooking. Why not? Wasn’t that how people saw her? A plain sensible girl.

  Now thirteen years later, she still made breakfast for The Professor every morning. Mondays through Fridays he liked his eggs poached on an English muffin or sunny-side up with cinnamon toast, with bacon done crisp but not blackened. He had café au lait with one teaspoon of sugar. He liked his morning Globe folded by his plate. Weekends he preferred pancakes with maple syrup, and breakfast was served at nine.

  The Professor went off early to campus, only five blocks, but snow had fallen last night and he allowed plenty of time to navigate the walks not yet shoveled. People often assumed his slight limp must be from a war injury, for he had served in The War to End All Wars. Bernice knew that her father had spent the war in Washington translating German communiqués. His foot had been injured when a cow stepped on it at their grandfather’s farm up in Putney, Vermont, when she was little.

  The boar’s head cane had been purchased in Cologne to replace an earlier hickory cane broken, although no one here might credit the truth, in a street brawl when he was visiting a Jewish Heine scholar with whom he had been corresponding. As they left the theater, the brown shirts had attacked his friend, who had recently been forced out of the university. Bernice considered the adventure perhaps The Professor’s finest hour; certainly his physical courage had surprised and half shamed him, for he did not consider fighting civilized. Bernice kept the boar’s head handle well polished. They had omitted Germa
ny from their itinerary after that.

  Bernice stood at the sink washing breakfast dishes. Holmes extends his lean sinewy arm and injects the solution of cocaine, which she imagined as a blue liquid, like cobalt. Her own drug of choice was playing adventure movies in her head. Sunday afternoon she had gone with her neighbor Mrs. Augustine to watch Errol Flynn play pirate. She had run through the movie with variations while cleaning the house, while darning The Professor’s socks, while typing other professors’ papers, but to imagine herself the dolled-up prize of any pirate had worn threadbare in a day, unlikely from the first moment. She had been joining the pirates since. There had been women pirates, Anne Bonney, for one.

  It was swinging through the rigging and slashing away with the saber that gladdened her, although she remembered Flynn’s sensual face and wiry body with approval. Bernice could handle a rapier with some facility, for she had fenced with her brother at St. Thomas, where there were always a few girls in attendance although not encouraged. Now she called up a fantasy that had lasted her three years, in which she flew into the Pacific and rescued Amelia Earhart from an unmapped island, where she had crashed. Sometimes Bernice led the expedition and sometimes stowed away and then took over in crisis, turning out to be the best pilot of the lot: that was not fantastic, anyhow. The guys at the field all respected her ability.

  She trudged off to campus next with a list of books The Professor wanted. St. Thomas was not a Catholic school. To have thought so would have been to reveal inferior class origins. It was Episcopal insofar as it was anything (chapel was nominally required); however, basically St. Thomas was where rich families sent their sons who managed to flunk out elsewhere, the boys who got drunk on weekdays, the boys caught in the wrong place with the wrong sort or gender, the boys caught bribing the janitor to view the exam beforehand.

  Her father had once had ambitions to leave St. Thomas for something more vital, but the combination of the Great Depression and Viola’s death had grounded him permanently. She was grounded with him. “How is he?” the neighbors asked her. How she was, was all too obvious. Healthy, always healthy.

  The postman was coming up the street with the morning mail. She waited for him, while carefully brushing snow off the rhododendrons. “How are you today, Miz Coates?” It was his delicacy to blur her name, for obviously their postman felt her spinster state a shame he did not want to insist on.

  She was rewarded for her kindness to the rhododendrons by a letter from her only brother Jeff, among a handful of letters from Europe, acquaintances seeking immigration or help. Jeff might or might not have written to their father, but he knew she got the mail daily and wrote her separately.

  La Colina Roja

  Taos, New Mexico

  November 30, 1941

  Dearest Bird,

  It’s cold up here. We had a dusting of snow last week, but I miss New England most in the fall and then sharply again when the holidays approach. Sorry I couldn’t get home for Thanksgiving, but frankly I can’t come East twice—no $$ as usual, so thought I’d come for Christmas. (I’m half tempted not to go back, but we’ll see.)

  She paused in her reading and folded the letter carefully into her small sensible shoulder bag (what had she, husbandless, childless, professionless, to carry besides her wallet, change purse and keys, with a small sensible comb to administer first aid after the wind to her short sensible hair?). Her reactions were roiled up. Jeff was about to lurch off again in some new direction. The Professor would be annoyed, sarcastic. At the same time she envied the freedom that Jeff might not use productively but always had.

  The freedom to pick up one morning and shove off, clear out. He had freedom in abundance and she was starving for a crumb of it. She felt also a hands-breadth of anger, a feeling that she would have had no trouble settling herself usefully in the world and applying her energy, her intelligence, her strength to some worthy task. She could think of fifty things she would love to be able to go and do.

  She should finish the typing piled up. Bernice typed papers for other faculty members, earning money which she spent promptly at the local airport. The airport was snowed in for the winter, while she was saving her money to buy a share in a light plane, a sixty-horsepower Piper Cub her friend Steve was paying off. If she could save two hundred and fifty dollars by spring, she would own a quarter of the plane and be able to fly ten times as often. Since the government had started a training program in the college the year before, often when she went to the airport, she waited all day and still could not get a plane. She was working toward a commercial license, but at the rate she had been able to afford time in the air, that would take years. Like her, Jeff had his pilot’s license, but he had never bothered to go on.

  As if he could read her mind, he wrote—when she opened the letter again in the overheated library with its faint serpentine hissing of radiators, waiting for the librarian to locate The Professor’s requests:

  I keep asking myself why I can’t stick it here. The light is stark, the landscape monumental. The Tiwa call the mountain behind Taos holy, and surely they’re right. Perhaps it’s the ignominious grind of working for Quinlan, but this is not right for me. I can’t seem to do anything original. I feel as if I’m looking through the eyes of artists who’ve already painted here. I can’t seem to encounter the landscape freshly. For all that it’s splendid and wild and compelling, I’m not compelled.

  Furthermore things with Dolores have got sticky. Speaking Spanish—and improving my Mexican Spanish which contrary to The Professor’s opinion I view as a marvelously supple and electric tongue, quite superior to the lispy pansy tones of Castilian dialect—has proceeded apace, but so has Dolores’s desire to view me as an incipient provider of rings, haciendas, babies.

  I could handle the Dolores situation if I felt as if I had arrived in my own proper landscape, but as much as I am moved by these handsomely colored mesas and mountains, the high painted desert, the ancient pueblos, this is not ultimately my promised land.

  Anyhow, I look forward to our time together. No doubt you will explain me to myself as usual and make all clear. I am dreaming of something more tropical. I need to follow the sun, but to something lusher, juicier. The mountains are not finally my holy places. This is not my palate. Too much ochre perhaps, too much burnt sienna. Or maybe just another social scene. Why do I feel so much more naturally and easily an artist in Europe than here?

  love as ever,

  Jeff

  She liked earth colors, herself, the world seen from a plane. She could still remember the first time Zach had taken her up, her alone, because Jeff was painting and would not go. First he had showed her Bentham Center from above, orderly, small, soon left behind, and then they had soared toward, up and over Jumpers Mountain and then onward to the Connecticut, swollen and muddy with spring runoff. Next Zach had begun to tease her, to try to scare her, pulling into great lazy loops and then short abrupt ones, rolls, dives. Finally he had realized she was not screaming, not afraid but eager, rapt, having at least as much fun as he was. He had leaned over and ruffled her hair, pulling it. “Do you want to learn, Bernie?”

  She had nodded fiercely, unable to speak, unable to admit her desire.

  “Say please.”

  She did speak then. “Please, Zach. Please! Teach me.”

  He seemed to consider it at length, frowning, prolonging and enjoying her agony, making her taste the wanting and the suspense. “Maybe I’ll do it and maybe I won’t.” But he had.

  “Coming,” she burst out too loudly. Mrs. Roscommon had been whispering at her. Bernice hurried to the desk, where a stack of the requested books loomed near toppling.

  She was embarrassed at having plunged in that way, out in the world. Now she was back in drabness. When she remembered those times with Zach and Jeff, it was that moment in The Wizard of Oz—a movie she had seen three times—when Dorothy passed out of Kansas into Oz, and black and white burst into glorious and radiant technicolor. As she did not care for music
als, she had seen few technicolor movies; that transition moved her enormously. That was what it was like to pass from Bentham Center into adventure. She had gone over and over those days so many times, she was not sure exactly how events had happened, for she had freely embroidered them until they were half fantastic. She felt crazy sometimes to think she spent so much time reliving and working over events that Zach himself and Jeff must have largely forgotten, working them over until she herself was no longer sure what she remembered and what she had pretended happened.

  As she plodded home to dump the books and then to the butcher for lamb chops and to the greengrocer for broccoli, if he had it, cauliflower if he did not, she thought that perhaps cavorting with Errol Flynn pirate to pirate with a saber in her teeth was a shade more bearable than returning constantly to that brief paradise of permission to follow along with her brother and Zach. Often she dreamed she was flying. She dreamed herself back at the controls of Zach’s Aeronca, banking it, diving, rolling it. One night last week she had wakened crying. How could she have explained to, anyone she was weeping because she knew how to fly but had no plane? The Freudians would say it had to do with sex hunger, but she knew nothing about sex, and flying was more real to her than broiling The Professor’s chops.

  She supposed she should hate Zach for cavalierly teaching them to fly but she could not object; it was the only taste of paradise she had ever been permitted. She had had a crush on him then, but she had been aware she had no more chance with him than a large woolly dog. He enjoyed her company. It amused him to teach Jeff’s smart ungainly good-tempered sister to fly. Her loyalty and adoration were pleasing to him as to any god offered incense.

  Zach was a creature from another world, exiled to St. Thomas for the same reason many of the boys arrived. Zach was not terminally stupid; he got poor grades because he had little interest in anything academic. Classes did not move through the air fast enough. Zach had cracked up a car while blind drunk. At St. Thomas he did that again, demolishing a Morgan on the hairpin turn coming down from Jumpers Mountain.