Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  If he was clear, if he was open, if he was vulnerable and strong enough in his seeing, then he would grasp some spirit present and it would animate what he painted, although his first reaction was always to hate what he had done, because it failed the vast changing thingness he had astonishingly and passionately witnessed. Studio painters could dream of control, but landscape painters knew how they stood before the gods of the place, tiny, hopeful, diddling away. All he could ever paint was a tiny flash of what truly showed itself to him, a seizure on one moment.

  Thus Jeff headed East toward home and toward the next adventure that must surely save him from remaining there long.

  RUTHIE 1

  Ruthie’s Saturday

  Ruthie Siegal had dated more in high school than she did now. For one thing, she had enjoyed many more free evenings. Four nights a week she went to classes at Wayne; Friday was traditionally a family night. Although her family went to the synagogue only on holidays and although since Bubeh had died, Mama no longer kept kosher, she did bake challah and roast a chicken. Friday remained a special night with the candles in the holders Bubeh had brought from Poland and a clean tablecloth laid over the oilcloth. That left Saturday and Sunday nights only, and sometimes Mama needed her help.

  Nor did she meet a great many young men eager to ask her out. The salesforce at Sam’s was female and only women came in to buy dresses, unless a husband tagged unwillingly along. In her classes, many of the young men were not Jewish, and the Jews often were married or engaged.

  She had gone out with Leib all through her last year of high school, but he had pushed her again and again to sleep with him. She would not. Not only did she fear the consequences, she did not want to bring more trouble into the house and betray the confidence of her mother, who trusted her far more willingly than mothers of her friends trusted them. What finally did not tip that balance was that the wish was his, not hers. She simply did not want him enough, and if she had given way, it would only have been to keep him. So finally she had not kept him.

  Tonight she had her third date with Murray, who was in her Monday-Wednesday class because he too wanted to become a social worker. Ruthie had gone out with perhaps five young men since that final foot-stomping scene with Leib, when he had broken down, wept and called her names and then calmed abruptly and walked out of her life, but she had gone with none of them more than twice, and usually once was enough.

  “You have to give them the benefit of the doubt,” her best girlfriend Trudi said. “You ought to wait to see what’s going on with a guy.” Ruthie did not have a lot of time to waste with idiots and fresh schlemiels. She would be better off home studying than killing four hours fighting off a pasty-faced gorilla or making conversation as if it were secreted out of the depth of the bone marrow one precious drop at a time. If she did not force herself through night school classes, she would never be a social worker; forever she would be stuck in a dead-end department store job. The older women who worked there liked Ruthie because she was quick to see their fatigue and offer to help; but they represented failure to her. If she was kind to them, it was part habit, for so she had been trained, part unwilling empathy and part a superstitious attempt to buy off that future she did not want by bribing it with small favors. It was not a true mitzvah.

  She was nervous about tonight, because a third time seemed almost a commitment, and because she was not sure she should be going out. Mama had made her usual rounds of rummage sales for clothes, much of it needing repairs. Even though Ruthie got a discount at Sam’s, they could not afford many new clothes. That afternoon she had meant to teach Naomi to build a snowman, but drizzle had melted the snow. Instead they had looked at magazines. Ruthie had not been putting enough time into improving Naomi’s English.

  She wished Duvey would take that on, but he was seldom home once he pried himself out of bed. He was running around with his old gang. She was not quite sure what they were up to—she knew Duvey had Trojans in his wallet and went to Negro prostitutes in the Paradise Valley section. Condoms were scattered all over the grass in the park after the weekend like punctured balloons, where Leib had shown them to her as an argument.

  Duvey also had a knife that was far more of a weapon than a fishing knife, and when had he ever gone fishing anyhow? One of Ruthie’s Sunday jobs was cleaning all the bedrooms. Mama was always terrified Duvey would drown in the Great Lakes. Ruthie worried more about the depths of Detroit. She saw the street life and petty crime of the neighborhood as a series of sticky traps set for each of them, to hold them fast in poverty.

  Duvey played cards for money (or against money, Ruthie sometimes thought, since he so invariably lost). Still Duvey always gave Mama a wad of bills when he came home from the ore boats, before he started getting rid of his pay. Mama would put it in the bank, then draw from it when the little troubles that always came began to descend like summer hail, so many individual stones but each painful when it hit.

  Their middle brother Arty had married when he was just the age Ruthie was now, nineteen. He had found only occasional jobs as delivery boy, so he and Sharon lived with the family. After Mrs. Rabinowitz upstairs was taken off to the state hospital, Mama got the landlord to let Arty and Sharon move up. The apartment had the stink of the dirt of the ages, that had taken Sharon, Mama and Ruthie a week to clean. Sharon was seven months’ pregnant with Marilyn. Since then Sharon had had Clark.

  The only girls Duvey ever was seen with were flashy shiksehs, usually blondes out of a bottle. Mostly when he was home, he hung out with his gang going to bars, listening to jazz and sitting up all night losing money at poker and twenty-one. He had taught Ruthie to play cards, but once she learned, she always beat him. She had been teaching Naomi the kid games, fish and war, so Naomi could play with the local children. Kids could be mean to someone a little different. She ached for Naomi sometimes. She wanted to pad the rough edges of their Detroit neighborhood for her. Naomi was a bright little thing but naive. French Jews grew up slowly. She was far more thoughtful than an American her age, but less savvy, less able to make her way socially. Her family had probably been more orthodox.

  In the house of her friend Sophie everything stopped on the Sabbath. They sat in the dark and the girls could not even read or sew or listen to the radio. Even when the Siegals had kept kosher for Bubeh, they had never had that tyranny of inaction. Ruthie imagined it must turn the Sabbath from something a little special to something dreaded.

  Bubeh wanted everything right in the kitchen; she really meant it when she called food trayf. She considered nonkosher food unclean, physically impure and foul, like a plate of mud or rotten fish. Otherwise Ruthie had always thought that Bubeh and Mama winged it a lot. Tata didn’t care. He was a Socialist and a freethinker, and he viewed the remnants of Jewish ritual in their home as something for the womenfolks and children, nice but hardly essential.

  Bubeh and Mama both thought Jewish ritual and custom important but subject to reinterpretation, a new life in a new land; their observance was strongly pragmatic. She suspected she would be that way herself. She had adored Bubeh, who shared her room until she died of stomach cancer.

  Bubeh had been her special responsibility, since she was eight. When Bubeh was sick, Ruthie took care of her, even if it meant staying out of school. She could always catch up; she always did. Bubeh had said to her when Arty was talking about wanting a son, “When a boy is born, the men make a fuss. They have the bris and they pray and everybody rejoices. But when a girl is born, in her heart her mother is twice glad. Because she is born over again in her daughter, and maybe this time it will be better.”

  Bubeh was almost blind with cataracts. A doctor at the clinic said they were operable, but who had the money for operations? In Poland she had done fine embroidery on blouses and linens. Bubeh sewed constantly for the family, although she did it mostly by touch and occasionally she would make a mistake matching colors—then no one would tell her, so that she would not feel bad. She had been sensitive about her
vision, always pretending she could see more than she was able. All day she and Mama had listened to the soaps on the radio. “Ma Perkins,” “Our Gal Sunday,” “The Romance of Helen Trent”: Could a girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of one of England’s richest titled lords? Was there romance after thirty-five? Would Stella Dallas ever give up on her rotten daughter Lolly-Baby? Since Bubeh’s death, Mama never listened. Ruthie was not sure whether it was because they made her miss Bubeh, or because she had never really liked them. When she asked, Mama shrugged off the question. “Who am I, Mrs. Rockefeller, I have time to sit with my ear stuck to the radio? Who makes things stretch, if not me?”

  Ruthie stood now at the window of her bedroom facing on the alley, dark already at four-thirty. A skinny cat was lurking under a box. She turned away not to see it, cold in the rain. Automatically she reached for Boston Blackie, who had been Bubeh’s cat and was now especially hers. He was a big black and white tom weighing fifteen pounds and a lot of that bone and muscle. His left ear was crooked and his tail had an extra kink in the end where Tata said the vertebra was broken. When Bubeh had taken him in, he had gladly given up his alley fights and the pursuit of sex and settled down. “He’s a philosopher,” Bubeh used to say. “All day he thinks about G-d and the universe. You should meet a man so grateful as this cat. You give him the gizzard, he thanks you purring and rubbing. You pet him on the head, he kneels to you. Let him in your bed and he’s a gentleman.”

  Naomi was bent over the desk working on her spelling homework. Actually it was not a desk but the bottom half of a vanity. The mirror had been broken and one handle come off a drawer, so some person with more money than sense had set it out on the street, where Ruthie had seen it. Arty and Mama and she had schlepped it home between them, where Ruthie painted it blue. Now Naomi and she had their own desk. She tousled Naomi’s curly brown hair, kinkier than her own. Naomi stared up into her eyes as if in despair. “Is the homework very hard? Can I help you?” Ruthie asked.

  “English doesn’t make sense. There aren’t any rules.”

  Ruthie thought about it. “There must be some.”

  Naomi was still staring. “Will my eyes ever turn green, like yours?”

  “But your eyes are pretty, Naomi. Hazel is just as pretty.”

  “Will my hair ever turn black like yours, or will it always be brown?”

  “Hasn’t your hair gotten darker since you were born? Then maybe it’ll go on getting darker. But it’s a pretty color. They call that chestnut here, I don’t know why. I never saw a chestnut.”

  “What is chestnut?”

  “Look it up in your dictionary.”

  Naomi had a big green English-French dictionary her own father had given her. It was one of the few treasures she had carried from Europe. “Marrons! You don’t know what they are? They sell them on street corners roasted, over little fires. They’re ground and put in desserts. And in syrup. Marrons glacé.” Naomi’s little heart-shaped face took on an animation almost glittering. She vibrated energy. “There is a dessert called Mont Blanc that is cream of chestnut, tres riche. Did you never have it?”

  “I don’t think we have chestnuts here. We have shagbark hickories all over Michigan, and walnuts. We went out to this cottage a Russian Jew who is a friend of Tata’s has and we all picked black walnuts, before you came, Naomele. I hope sometime we’ll go again. They’re big oily balls you have to tear off to get the inner nut, and they stain your hands dark.”

  Murray was taking her out to eat and then to a movie, but she helped Mama start the piroshki, making the dough for her. It was a bitter cold night. Duvey was out. Only Arty and Tata sat in the living room listening to the news. Sharon and the little ones were crowded in the kitchen with Mama and her and now Naomi too, to keep warm. They had to pay for coal, so they couldn’t afford to keep the house toasty. The wind off the river tried every window and crept through the crevices in the old wooden frame. The steamy kitchen smelled good, making Ruthie reluctant to leave.

  When she went to her room to dress, Naomi followed her and sat disconsolately on the bottom bunk where Ruthie slept (the privilege of being a breadwinner), watching with sad eyes. “Tsatskeleh, what are you pouting for?” Ruthie chucked Naomi under her little pointed chin.

  “Who is this man? What do you want with him?”

  “He’s a nice young man, a scholar, from college. You’ll like him.”

  “I won’t.” Naomi glared. “You’re wearing my favorite dress for him.”

  The red taffeta. It was the only nice dress Ruthie had, although she had put a dollar down on a green velvet now in layaway. She hoped to get it paid off by January, but she still owed five dollars on it. They shouldn’t hold it that long, but the woman in layaway liked Ruthie.

  Murray arrived early, but Ruthie was so nervous she had gotten ready and was back in the kitchen with an apron over her dress helping Mama bake piroshki. Quickly she tore off the apron and ran into the living room. Tata was easy with Murray, shaking his hand, asking him what he thought about whether the English would crack under the bombing, whether the Germans still meant to invade England. Ruthie liked Murray for looking embarrassed and saying he didn’t know. Men often parroted what they had read in the paper, pretending they had some kind of inside knowledge.

  Just as he was awkwardly helping her into her coat—the lining was ripped, for without Bubeh to mend, they got behind—Duvey came in. Mama, who was greeting Murray from the door of the kitchen scrunching her apron in her hand as if that would conceal that she was wearing it, shrieked when she saw Duvey’s face. “Duvidel!” Mama cried. “What happened to you?”

  “I fell on the ice,” Duvey said grumpily, rubbing his nose.

  Tata looked at Ruthie who looked back at him. “You should get going with your fellow before you’re late,” he said mildly. Tata did not believe in Duvey’s fall either, but he wasn’t going to scare Mama by expressing skepticism. He came home from Chevrolet bone weary, not wanting to seek any more trouble than fell on him.

  “Mayn lebn, you hurt your eye, your nose.” Mama was peering into Duvey’s face while he grimaced his impatience, but nonetheless permitted himself to be fussed over and led off to the bathroom.

  Outside in the street as they hurried toward the Woodward trolley, Murray said, “I thought it looked like your brother had been in a fight.”

  “Thank you for not mentioning it in front of Mama. He’ll have a black eye tomorrow.”

  “What’s it about, do you know?”

  Ruthie shook her head. “I don’t know if I want to know. Duvey’s a little wild.”

  They went to a Chinese restaurant, which was new to Ruthie. That made Murray laugh. He said he thought all Jews who didn’t keep kosher ate Chinese when they went out. When you got bar mitzvahed at a Reform synagogue, they told you now you were a man and you should go out and eat Chinese every Sunday with your family.

  Murray was only a little bit bigger than Ruthie, unlike Leib who had loomed over her by almost a foot. She liked him being smaller, like Tata, like herself. She did not feel afraid of him, as she always had in an undercurrent with Leib. He seemed gentler.

  He was telling her how after his father’s Dodge-De Soto agency had gone under in 1930, his father had first tried to sell door-to-door. Then he had taken their savings and bought a chicken farm. “Why he imagined a bunch of Jews from Detroit could run a chicken farm, I don’t know. Back to the land. But he kept saying, no matter what happened, we wouldn’t starve.”

  “So what happened? Did you eat all the chickens?”

  “First a dog got some, then a fox. The survivors all caught a disease. Every one of them legs up lying dead in the yard all mangy and bedraggled. Then we tried turkeys, on borrowed money. With turkeys we made it through.”

  “With turkeys?” Ruthie laughed. “I shouldn’t laugh. I don’t know why I think it’s funny.”

  “But it was. If there’s anything stupider than chickens, it’s turkeys. At least t
hey don’t crow. I could never get used to that hideous racket at dawn.” Murray flapped his arms and gave a creditable imitation. Everybody looked at them, but Murray did not seem to notice. He was only looking at her. Ruthie blushed. “Now he has a tenant running the turkey farm. My parents moved almost into the city. He’s back selling cars for a dealer out Grand River, but with production cut back, I don’t know what he’ll try next.”

  Behind horn-rimmed glasses his eyes were a rich warm brown with glints of amber. His hair was combed straight back, a fine light brown that static made cling to the collar of his shirt and sweater, stand up on the crown of his head. They assured each other they were determined to finish college. Murray was looking for a job as a waiter so he could go to college during the day and get through faster. In the meantime he worked in a florist’s.

  “I have to stay in school,” Ruthie said. “It’s my only hope, it’s what I really want. Then I can help people like my own family. I can understand them better than those people who’ve never been in trouble in their lives.”

  Murray told her his idea about the life he wanted, unwrapping it slowly as a carefully packed china plate. He would work in the city but he would not live there. “If you drive out Grand River, or Ann Arbor Trail, Plymouth Road, you come into country. You could buy a farmhouse out there and travel to work. Then when, you know, you had a family, the children wouldn’t have the same problems. They’d be healthy. They’d have grass and trees and birds around them. That was good for me.”

  They got so involved that they were late to the movie, but only the newsreel was on. The Japanese envoy Kurusu and Ambassador Nomura were presenting what they claimed were final proposals for peace between Japan and Washington. There was a picture of the Dionne quintuplets in identical outfits playing in the snow. The Marines were evacuating Shanghai, but the voice-over said they would soon be back. Then the first feature came on, an Ellery Queen mystery with Ralph Bellamy, in which Murray guessed the murderer halfway through; and then Ann Miller in Time Out for Rhythm.