Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  From the trolley, they walked toward her house very slowly in spite of the raw wind. She felt chilled through, cold and damp, but she did not want to hurry. He had taken her hand in helping her off the trolley and he still held it. His hand was warm and dry. She found it easy to walk with him, because he did not take giant steps. I like him, she thought as if astonished at herself. She looked at his face as they passed under the streetlights. His nose ran straight as if drawn with a ruler. His mouth was full and soft-looking. She imagined kissing him, but she did not think it would happen, at least not yet. Eventually she would kiss him. Maybe this time an embrace would feel right.

  One Cold Sunday

  Lady Hamilton was the Sunday matinee movie Bernice and Mrs. Augustine were watching, sharing a box of caramel corn, to which Mrs. Augustine was partial. Mrs. Augustine was the wife of Professor Emil Augustine, who taught chemistry. She was a short round woman who suffered from mild arthritis and terrible corns, so that she walked slowly and painfully, but she had always tried to keep an eye on the household next door since Viola died, or as Mrs. Augustine put it, passed beyond.

  Mrs. Augustine believed in reincarnation, because, as she told Bernice, it was ever so much cheerier than Christian heaven and hell. That did not prevent her from attending Episcopal services with her husband, who took no interest in Mrs. Augustine’s more recherché views. Mrs. Augustine clipped articles from the newspapers about people who thought they could remember previous lives. Most of those interviewed had been Egyptian princesses, the empress of Russia, Pavlova, Lord Byron, but Mrs. Augustine could recall life as a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Maine in the 1840s. She had been overly fond of the bottle and had eventually fallen to her death on the rocks of her island, but life in the interim had been pleasant and she had not ever felt lonely. Bernice considered that if she had to spend her life with the crusty Emil, a lighthouse keeper might seem a pleasant alternative.

  Vivien Leigh was lovely and Laurence Olivier, handsome, but she found her attention wandering from the adultery. She recalled a portrait of Lord Nelson, was it in the Tate? One of those days they led tourists at a dogtrot through three museums, while Jeff lectured himself hoarse.

  The Professor took over when they visited castles and monuments. Not always that neat a division. She remembered the summer of 1939, the last summer they had shepherded The Professor’s charges across Europe. For a moment she smelled salt and heated stone. Her arms were dark under the strong sun of the Mediterranean, as she enjoyed a brief vacation from their charges’ vacation, sweet stolen time to play tourist herself.

  Jeff and she had sat by the harbor in Thessaloníki sipping retsina and eating the sweet little clams raw (as they always warned the tourists not to), followed by fried baby squid, kalamarakia. Their party was touring Haghia Sophia and other important churches of the lower town. The Professor had a sympathy for the solemn staring Byzantine saints his children lacked. Jeff and The Professor had studied the papers daily, for fear of being caught by the outbreak of war, but they had boarded ship and were halfway across the Atlantic when the Germans rolled into Poland. This April after the Greek army had fought off the Italians through the fall and winter, the Germans had crushed them with their massive armor and overrun the British forces on hand; would she ever see Greece again?

  After the movie the lights came up and people started to rise. Bernice was zipping her rubber galoshes over her oxfords, when she saw that Mr. Berg, the portly old man who managed the movie house, was standing on the stage gripping a microphone as an usher tried to unroll the cord. “I have an announcement, ladies and gentlemen!” he bellowed, too excited to wait for the microphone to be plugged in. He stepped forward to the apron of the stage on which vaudeville used to be performed. “I have an important announcement. On the radio they told us the Navy is being attacked in Honolulu. I repeat, the U.S. Navy is being attacked.”

  Mrs. Augustine said, “Thank heavens Emil is too old to fight.”

  When she walked in, The Professor had come out of his study and was hunched over in the living room, right in front of the Westinghouse console radio with its doors open, its dial lit up and the volume turned loud.

  “They made an announcement in the Bentham.” Bernice sat in her accustomed chair. “Is it war?”

  “War against Japan, I would assume. He’ll have to declare war now.”

  “Has the President come on the air yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  Bernice stared at the glow of the radio dial. She had put in a pot roast before she left, turning it low. However The Professor was looking over his glasses at her with an expectant air. “When shall we dine?”

  That was not a serious question, as they always ate on Sunday at six-thirty, but she understood his question to translate as, Why are you sitting around the living room with the table not set and the finishing touches to put on my meal? She walked slowly to the kitchen, surprised to find that she was light-headed, almost dizzy. She immediately turned on the small radio that sat on the kitchen counter.

  Major George Fielding Eliot, Columbia’s military expert, was analyzing developments in a brisk voice. “The Japanese appear to be taking the offensive in an effort to delay American operations in the Far East. Apparently confronted with a situation in which there was no escape except war, the Japanese have attacked the main American naval base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor in the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. This attack is by air and can only come from aircraft carriers since the Japanese do not have any bases close enough to the islands from which to launch land-based aircraft.”

  She remembered an evening when Zach had been visiting Jeff. He had flown his Aeronca in, and the day itself had been heaven. It had come out that Zach was separated from his wife, in spite of her having a baby. That was the month Amelia Earhart had disappeared on the leg of her round-the-world flight near the Marshall Islands. Zach had insisted the Japanese had shot her down because she had been doing reconnaissance for Roosevelt, which was why the President had had an airstrip built especially for her on Howland Island. Jeff and Zach had infuriated her, because they were rational and speculative, while she felt a personal loss. She had always been convinced she would meet her idol someday, whose photograph she had clipped from the paper and put on her wall, surrounded by Jeff’s early and recent landscapes.

  The radio spoke smartly into her reverie. “This is a very great risk for the Japanese to have placed aircraft carriers within reach of the very powerful naval patrol bombers and the long-range Army bombers from the island of Oahu. It is a risk that can only be assumed as a very desperate measure, one which may well result in the loss of carriers that are making the attack but which may also gain for the Japanese important time to carry out operations in the Far East, by delaying the proceeding of the Pacific Fleet to the western Pacific.”

  The crisp sure voice made the news partially reassuring. The major might have been describing a manager’s decisions in a baseball game, or the kind of thinking she was accustomed to when she played chess with her father. She was ashamed of her light-headedness. Perhaps these events did not necessarily mean war; or perhaps war would be represented in her life by just such authoritative male voices explaining distant causes and effects: a calamity less onerous than the Depression.

  Time to put on the brussels sprouts and prepare a sauce.

  Oscar was right, the Spanish restaurant was good. Louise had paella and Oscar had a zarzuela de maresco: shrimp, lobster, clams and mussels in a tomato sauce flavored with garlic and saffron. She rather wished she had gotten that too, although her paella was excellent. Trust Oscar to know just what to order. He was not a food or wine snob, but seemed to assimilate the right choices through his pores, perhaps because he was curious and never shy about asking the waiter what the couple at the next table were eating. It had led them to some memorable meals over the years, most of them good, some of them simply memorable like the time they had eaten sea urchins in a Chinese restaurant.


  They began with a glass of dry sherry, then shared a bottle of white rioja. Oscar talked about his project interviewing refugees. Louise had good antennae. Watching his face, she remarked, “I’d expect that a lot of this information would be useful intelligence? I presume the government has enough sense to guess we’ll get involved in this war sooner or later?”

  “Umm,” Oscar said. “Would you like another taste of my zarzuela? I see you eyeing it with a certain interest.”

  “Your zarzuela, indeed. Really, Oscar.” She helped herself. She had the answer, but only partially. Who was he working for?

  “I wouldn’t mind a taste of yours, not at all. It’s been a long time.”

  “I’m ashamed of you, Oscar, trying to seduce me to avoid answering my question. Which does after all answer it.”

  “Seducing you is on the program a priori. The attempt anyhow. I used to be able to get round you.” He refilled her glass. “Is your heart entirely hardened against me?” He tried to look soulful but looked only boyish, which was sufficient.

  “You can’t have imagined I’d go off to a hotel with my ex-husband?”

  “We’re too civilized and we have each a nice roomy pleasant apartment. I think of you oftener than you realize, Louie. Oftener than you’d believe.”

  “That’s certainly true.” She was quite convinced she was the one who brooded on Oscar, but she had no intention of letting that out.

  “It’s a cold blowy Sunday. What better way to celebrate it? I have some marvelous oloroso sherry a friend brought in for me.”

  “I thought you had Madeleine installed, mistress regnant.”

  “Louie, you always overestimated that. I was a convenience for her, an old friend in a new country. She landed something at UCLA. The psychoanalytical network to the rescue.”

  “Tell me something. Who got bored, you or Madeleine?”

  “Louie, New York is overrun with refugee psychoanalysts. Madeleine couldn’t get a foot in here. Los Angeles is no stranger to her than New York, and she was offered a lectureship. She’ll establish herself there and soon she’ll have a practice.”

  She could read not the slightest evidence of heartbreak in Oscar. He seemed to have more to conceal in whatever intelligence connection he was feeding information into, than in what remained of his relationship with Madeleine Blufeld, blond, elegant, Austrian and one of the causes of their divorce, from Louise’s viewpoint. No doubt he was telling the truth, as he saw it; Madeleine needed to move West for her career and Oscar needed not to. No doubt he would expect to take up with Madeleine when she came through New York occasionally. No doubt he would expect a romantic tête-à-tête should circumstances bring him to Southern California. Oscar did not like final good-byes.

  “You’re looking so lovely, Louie, that even if I hadn’t been thinking about you all week, seeing you across the table like a bouquet of red roses would be enough to force my mind on you.” Oscar did not pay many compliments. No doubt he was aware, although he would probably never understand why, that the mention of Madeleine had dampened the mood he was trying to create. Oscar was in his offbeat way a sentimentalist, and she had to assume that for him, spending part of their old anniversary in bed seemed fitting.

  The trouble was that while she could muster up indignation in the abstract, she still found him powerfully attractive. He seemed to radiate heat. His dark eyes beamed at her, he leaned his broad shoulders forward over the table and his big shapely hands on whose backs and knuckles the hair grew lushly as a well-kept black lawn, moved out onto the surface of the table, gesticulating, pouring ever more wine, passing her tidbits, claiming space, advancing. Oh, what the hell, Louise thought, why not? Madeleine’s gone West and I cannot, cannot work up much lust for Dennis. I won’t let myself take this seriously, I won’t let myself be hurt. Not this time. I will take him the way men take women and then go home, see Dennis for a nice civilized and fairly dull evening and get to work early tomorrow. Why not? She felt pleased with herself for deciding in a properly ruthless way. Perhaps that was what being a divorcée brought with it, the freedom to make wicked abrupt decisions, decisions to enjoy and saunter off.

  The waiter had been hovering over them and then departing for much of the meal. Now as Oscar signaled for the bill, he spoke rapidly and abruptly to Oscar as if he could not wait. “While you are sitting here, the radio announces you are at war. Yes, your country.”

  “What is it?” Louise leaned forward. “We’ve declared war on Germany?” She remembered suddenly that these were Spanish refugees; they had carried out their war against the forces of evil and reaction; that war that had shown her generation a people could have justice and numbers on their side and lose, that democracy too could fail in war.

  “The Japanese have bombed your Honolulu. John Cameron Swayze said so on the radio while you are sitting here. They say it is still going on.”

  “Honolulu?” Oscar repeated. “There must be some mistake. Why would they bomb Honolulu? It’s like attacking Miami Beach.”

  “I am sorry for your people in Honolulu. To be bombed, it makes you afraid even if you are brave. You can do nothing. They come down like rain and you cannot get out from under them.” The waiter shook Oscar’s hand solemnly. “I wish this country luck in its war. But you will have the money to buy tanks and planes. That was lacking us.”

  Oscar left an enormous tip and they stumbled into the street. He flagged a cab. “No, Oscar, I’m going uptown. I want to go home to Kay and find out what’s really happening. Thanks again for a pleasant afternoon.” She took his hand in a firm shake. “See you.”

  Oscar was too dazed to argue, although his mouth opened and closed and he reached out as if to stop her from climbing into the cab. He too was confused by the news and eager to turn on the radio. He turned to scan oncoming traffic for another cab. As hers pulled away from the curb, she saw him walking rapidly along Fourteenth Street, hastening to his apartment on West Fourth.

  “It’s not Honolulu, it’s the Navy base at Pearl Harbor,” the cabdriver said. “It’s a stab in the back. But those Navy guys are real fighters, I bet they gave the Japs as good as they got. Bunch of little yellow apes. They never seen trouble like they walked into today.”

  Louise felt as if she had been reprieved from probable folly at the very last second, a Victorian damsel saved from the smooth villain, but she regretted her salvation. She had few illusions about what Oscar offered, although she was aware of fantasies circling deep in her, wishes like fragile tropical fish with filmy trains of tail other fish would love to nibble. Those wishes, they were mindless as guppies and she would keep them down in the darkness of her spine where they belonged. Even as she sped uptown to her daughter and the source of news and the telephone that must surely be ringing, she was sorry that the waiter had told them, instead of allowing them to discover it after they had rediscovered each other.

  Murray called Ruthie in the early evening. “I can’t seem to sit still,” he said. “Maybe we could take a walk, a short one? I know you have homework. So do I.”

  Ruthie could scarcely hear him for the radio booming behind her and the equally loud radio blaring behind him, in his house. She knew she should stay home and study, but she felt roiled up. “Come over right now,” she said softly. “I can’t stay out long. We can go for coffee.”

  Naomi was carrying Boston Blackie around like a dollbaby. She asked, “These Japanese, are they like the Germans?”

  “They’re all part of the Axis. They’re our enemies.”

  “But do they hate Jews too?”

  Ruthie tousled her curls. “I don’t think they know who Jews are, Naomi.”

  “Then maybe they aren’t as bad.”

  “Shhhh!” Ruthie tapped Naomi’s lips with her finger. “Don’t say that to anyone else. Ever.”

  “I promise,” Naomi said. “I know anyhow that when they drop bombs, it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or not. Even the cows get burned and lie dead by the side of the road. Even the dog
s are strafed.”

  Murray arrived within forty minutes, having borrowed his father’s old Dodge. When she saw him standing on the doorstep in his checked cap and old tweed coat, she felt that renewed sense of ease. He stood there diffident, a little hunched, smiling at her. She brought him in for the shortest time she could manage. When she started to speak, Duvey hushed her. Everybody was crowded around the living room radio.

  “We have just received word that Guam may be under attack. The cable company reports its line cut. The Japanese attacked the practically defenseless city of Shanghai. They are reported to have shelled the famous waterfront section, the Bund. They are said to have sunk a British gunboat and to have taken over the American gunboat Wake which was acting as communications center for the American consulate. The International Settlement has been occupied by the Japanese. That means that perhaps three thousand Americans are stranded.

  “From Washington the recruiting office of the U.S. Navy announces that all recruiting centers will be open at 8 A.M. tomorrow.”

  Outside on the street in spite of the cold drizzle, they walked slowly. Without thinking first, without turning over the decision, she gave him her hand and he tucked it with his into his side pocket so he could hold it without a glove. “I wonder if I should join the Navy?” Murray said. “My mother’s against it, but I wouldn’t hardly expect any mothers would be in favor. I’ve never been on a boat in my life. Have you?”

  “Only the steamer to Bob Lo. My class went when we graduated the eighth grade and my father’s union had a picnic there once.”

  “Do you feel scared?” He gripped her hand tighter.

  “Yes. I don’t know what it all means. Part of my family has been at war for two years now—”