Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “I never heard of a Jewish marine,” Ruthie said dubiously.

  “So I’ll be the first.”

  Now he was down in Parris Island, surviving brutality and contempt as best he could. Duvey had taken his able-bodied seamen’s papers and gone off to look for a berth on an oceangoing ship, although his pals in the union argued that the work on the Great Lakes was just as essential. Duvey did not think so. “Essential, what is that crap? Nobody’s going to torpedo you off Toledo. I’d feel like a coward hanging around here.”

  “At least you won’t be in the Army or the Navy fighting,” Mama said.

  Duvey laughed. “No, you just get shot at. You don’t do much shooting.”

  They were all relieved nonetheless that Duvey wasn’t in the Navy, having to fight in sea battles. He was just doing what he had done for years, but now in the ocean instead of the Great Lakes. Occasionally they got a packet of letters from him, mostly anecdotes of his crew, but then two months would go by and nothing would come. She felt guilty that she did not love her brother better, and she determined to love him more starting right now. Bravery he had never lacked. Maybe she just took that for granted. She had always valued gentle endurance more, but gentle endurance was not a primary virtue in wartime.

  “Mama, it’s twelve o’clock. I must get ready. Now!”

  Mama sighed. “All right, you take off the skirt and you get ready, everything but the skirt, and I’ll stitch it up. Tata will just have to wait a little while for his lunch.”

  “My one day off, I have to go hungry?” He was protesting pro forma.

  “I never saw anybody marry themselves.” Naomi sat on Ruthie’s bunk watching.

  “Get married. In English it’s get married.”

  “Get married. I want to see how it’s done. Can I please come?”

  Ruthie paused, wriggling into her best slip. “I don’t see why not, tsatskeleh. Put on your plaid dress and comb your hair.” Naomi’s presence might dilute her murky pain. She had wanted to bash in Leib’s head when he had taken up with Trudi. With thousands of girls in Detroit and all of them making eyes at him, how could he pick out her good friend to start chasing? She had wanted Trudi to be too loyal to her to go out with the sweetheart who had just dumped her; but she had to admit that Trudi would sacrifice quite a bit to have a steady boyfriend, and now a husband. Ruthie had had to swallow her resentment or lose Trudi, and finally she had felt that she really had no right to object, because after all she had known the price of keeping Leib and had not been willing to pay it. Yes, taking Naomi would in some way shield her from the force of her own possible regret and dismay—and jealousy.

  After Ruthie dressed except for the skirt, calling at the crack of their bedroom door to Mama did not produce results. She glared at the wind-up alarm on the bedside table. She’d have to take the skirt from Mama whatever shape it was in, put it on and leave. She was not going to risk being late—it would seem too calculated a gesture of disrespect or a sign she could not face the marriage. “Naomi, stop fiddling with your hair, it’s fine. Just put those barrettes in. The red barrettes, one on each side.” She was embarrassed, but she had to walk out in her slip bottom, dressed, including the little spring felt hat, except for her skirt.

  “Mama, I have to put it on now.”

  “Ruthele, just another tiny minute and I’ll have the hem sewn.”

  She took firm hold of the skirt. “Mama, there aren’t any more minutes. I can’t be late, and I have to walk out the door now. Right now. Let go, Mama! I mean it.”

  Her mother’s mild milky brown eyes fixed on her questioningly. Normally Ruthie would give in. But Mama knew that when her only daughter took on a certain crisp veneer, she wasn’t kidding or negotiating but announcing. “Darling, you can’t wear that with pins—”

  “Nobody will notice.” Ruthie worked the hem loose from her mother and put the skirt on. It was sewn three quarters of the way around with a stretch on the side still pinned. “Come on, Naomi. Get your coat.”

  It was a cool clear day with a little moisture in the wind but none in the sky. As they hurried toward the synagogue, they passed a Catholic church that was pouring out, all the people dressed up in suits and hats and a smattering of uniforms. “It’s their Easter today,” she said to Naomi. “I hope it’s not a bad sign for Trudi and Leib. Bubeh used to tell stories about Poland at Easter, how there would be pogroms some years. Other years the goyim would simply come and beat and kill one or two, for sport.”

  “In school, they made us sing Easter songs. I didn’t think I should say anything, and besides, I couldn’t understand the words half the time. It’s much harder when they’re singing.”

  “They shouldn’t make you do that, but you’re right. This is not a good time for us to single ourselves out to complain.”

  “I heard Sharon and Mama talking. They said Leib should have married you.”

  “Ketsale, who asked me? Do I want to marry Leib?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.” She was sure about that, although as they hurried through the blocks, the lingering ice vanished, the first green shoots in the lawns and crocuses and daffodils in the bed outside the Beth Shalom temple, she knew that not wanting to marry Leib did not necessarily mean she rejoiced in his marrying another. She must find in her heart that goodwill.

  Beth Shalom was a squat yellow brick building with a mogen david on its front in small panes of tinted glass above two sets of heavy doors. They headed around the rear, through the little gate. As she yanked Naomi along by the hand at a forced trot, she hoped they were not already late. She noticed suddenly that Naomi was no longer markedly shorter. “You’re growing,” she said in surprise.

  “I grew half a centimeter last month.”

  “What is that in inches?”

  Naomi shrugged. “I know some things in one system and some in the other, but I can’t move back and forth.”

  The whole party was inside, but the rabbi had not appeared and only his wife was there fussing over Trudi and settling everybody till he should be ready. Leib was not yet in uniform. His black suit bought for his father’s funeral two years before was now a little short, a little tight, but still became him, his high forehead under the tousled dark hair, his wide-set eyes peering commandingly from a strong bone structure of juts and caverns, his whole tall well-filled-out frame not embarrassed by the tightness of the suit but exploiting it to show off his brawn. Leib’s father had been nicknamed Misha the Bear. He had been in the moving business and had wrestled furniture from one side of the Jewish ghetto to the other, most of his years on a horse-drawn cart, the horse stabled in their backyard. Leib had his strength and his temper.

  Ah, he moved her through the eyes, he always had. Not enough, Ruthie thought, my eyes have easy virtue and little sense. He will make any woman happy a little while and then unhappy a long while.

  Trudi wore a pale pink dress. Neither Trudi nor her mother nor Ruthie had been able to find a short white dress that would be suitable, not from one end of Detroit to the other. It was too early for a summer white and wedding dresses were out of the question on such short order—and too expensive. Trudi had cried, but the pale pink would be usable later and set off her dark brown hair and olive skin. The rabbi came in, rubbing his hands together, as Trudi’s father surged to meet him. Trudi’s mother lifted the veil of her old black hat with cherries on it to daub at her eyes.

  Ruthie thought, we must buy a hat for Naomi, it’s time, she’s becoming an adolescent. Naomi had on a striped babushka. Poor lamb, what a time to begin growing up. What a time.

  Then she caught Leib staring at her, the way he used to, burning hungry eyes. She dropped her gaze, then turned to Naomi and fussed with her. Naomi’s eyes were huge, seeing everything including Leib’s attention. When Ruthie glanced back he was still staring. She hoped nobody else would notice, but they all were gathered around Rabbi Honig. Leib’s mother was doing something to Trudi’s dress, a pull here, a tug there, a dusting. Then s
he stepped back to fix Trudi with a sharp almost baleful stare. She seemed to be asking, So what does he see in her?

  Ruthie had the sickening feeling that Leib would like still to reach over and grab her the way he had used to, and drag her up to the rabbi and take her instead. Not out of love, no, but because he still wanted her in that hungry violent way that had wakened her far, far less than Murray’s quiet and attentive caresses. She would not look at him again.

  Ruthie stood near one corner of the chuppah. The pins kept catching on her calf. The stocking would be torn to shreds, and where would she find a replacement? She kept her gaze on Trudi, not glancing at Leib again until the ceremony was ending and he broke the glass in the napkin under his foot, stomping as he had stomped out of the room the evening he had broken off with her at last. As he smashed the glass he threw one last look at her with that same glaring intensity and then he turned away and kissed Trudi, a great film star clinch. Then everybody began shouting mazel tov and toasting the couple in sacramental wine.

  Ruthie stood a little back, forgiving Leib his hungry glare, for now he was thoroughly married to Trudi and things must work their way out. She was remembering Murray’s last week before he had taken the train. She had spent as much time as possible with him, and the last two days she had called in sick to work, not caring, needing to steal the time.

  It had been a wet raw snowbound February with ice dripping from all the trees and rutting the side streets. They had spent a lot of time in the Art Institute, the main public library, the student lounge at Wayne. Where could they go? They saw a couple of movies. Movies were open twenty-four hours for people on the swing and graveyard shifts, and always crowded. Mostly Murray did not want to waste their time together looking at anything other than her, he said. They drifted in an intense stasis, a net of attention entangling both. They talked, on and on and on. They were giving each other their childhoods, as if playing home movies on screens in the other’s head.

  Unfortunately his parents had not taken to her. They had seemed panic-stricken that she and Murray might marry that week. His parents resembled each other, both oval in face and body with light brown hair turning grey so that she thought of them as uniformly beige. They were close to the same height. Both wore gold-rimmed glasses and a common expression of agitated dismay as they turned to her. Having once enjoyed a solid middle-class existence, they did not accept her. They had an idea of the girl Murray should bring home, someone with money, connections. Someone useful. His mother pursed her lips and frowned at Ruthie, but she was too ineffectual to be rude.

  The day before he had to leave was the worst, sweet sour pain. Murray said, and she could see him clearly speaking as they sat in a booth in a chili joint near the college, “I have to keep fighting the urge to claim you. To tie you to me. To demand that you become mine right now, before I leave. Because I know it’s wrong. It’s stupid. You don’t claim somebody and make them your wife and your lover before you disappear. It’s selfish. It’s to have a piece of somebody that belongs to you.”

  “I’ll wait for you. I can promise that. I love you.” She had said it then at the booth in the chili parlor, holding hands over cups of cold coffee. “You don’t have to make any official claim.” After she spoke, she was stiff with embarrassment, wondering how she could have said such a thing out loud to a man, especially a man who had not said that to her first.

  “I love you, Ruthie. I think I’ve loved you since the first time we went out. I thought I was being romantic and making you up, but I wasn’t. You’re just what I want, and I wish to hell there wasn’t this damned war in the way. It’s a ridiculous time to fall in love. It tears me up inside to think we found each other and we may never get to live out our lives together.”

  Ever since she had wondered if she should have done as Leib and Trudi were doing and said, Let’s get married, damn everything else. Or worse, she wondered if she should simply have offered herself to him, because he was too thoughtful and gentle to demand what he made quite clear he longed for. They had kissed until their lips were sore. She wanted him. She discovered what that felt like, and it was frightening. She wondered if the intense pain of wanting was peculiar to her, something unbalanced. Someday she would ask Trudi. But he was leaving and she was staying, and everything was still true, that they should not marry so young, that having a family would destroy them both, that if they clung too hard to each other, they would condemn each other to the desperate and grimy streets of her upbringing. Therefore she had resisted the unspoken appeal; therefore she felt guilty at Trudi’s wedding.

  ABRA 2

  Stories to Make the Ears Bleed

  “A Berliner, I was. You don’t understand. It’s something like being a Parisian in France, a New Yorker here, nu? You’re smarter or you think you are anyhow. And if you were born there, as I was, then you think knowing everything from the inside out is your birthright.” Mrs. Marlitt Speyer was thirty-five but looked younger with ash-blond hair swept up on top of her head, wearing a well-cut mannish pinstriped suit she told Abra she had made herself. She called herself a ladies’ couturier. Now she had a job with some Seventh Avenue firm that she described with a twist of her firm lips as “a place that makes upholstery for women who don’t know any better.”

  “My family had lived in Berlin for the last hundred and thirty years, and before that we lived in the Saar, in a little town where we have, where we had, a summer house. We were wine merchants. My father and my uncle had a business on Leipziger-Strasse.… No, not now, for on Kristallnacht, the SA, the brown shirts came. They broke the windows and looted the wine. Then they set the shop on fire. They beat the watchman and then threw him in the fire. He was a poor Jew who had already been forced out of the small town where he lived. He was uneducated, a bit simple but a good man who supported his parents. He died in hospital. My father was in the Saar country ordering the auslese, the sweet late-picked wine, you know, the expensive ones. My uncle was home and the brown shirts beat him and put him in Sachenhausen. He was there for three months and then we got him out, poor, without anything. Sometimes then you could still buy your way out. He’s a cripple now, I send them a little money in Paraguay when I can.”

  Marlitt watched carefully, Abra felt, but without obviously staring. Abra admired that ability and resolved to perfect it herself in her questioning. She had begun to think she would probably switch her thesis subject to one gleaned from these interviews, as she had done none of her own since she’d gone to work for Oscar Kahan. It was a matter, she felt, of Marlitt snatching quick appraisals when she herself glanced at her pad.

  “The Nazis wouldn’t let you out till they had picked you clean and then the Americans wouldn’t let you in without resources. My aunt and uncle managed to get visas to Paraguay, but we had no money left. My uncle wanted to come here, but the Americans said he had a criminal record, because of being arrested when they put thirty thousand Jews that night in the camps … Oh, I was working till the end. I had a special permit because I was a designer. They wanted my designs, you know, most of the German fashions are clumsy. I wanted to be an artist, but in art school, my dear, they convinced me I had no genuine talent and then I learned that I did, but not for sculpture—or maybe sculpture on the body.” Marlitt sketched a shape in the air. Abra was struck by the movement. Marlitt had the habit of sitting extremely still.

  “Orthodox? Oh, no, we were Liberals. Reminiscent of your Conservatives, but very, very German. We were all very German. My dear, the first Jews in Germany were settled soon after the Diaspora, in the third century A.D. I believe we were there ahead of the Germans, actually. My father and uncle were active in the CV—oh, that was the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens. It resembled your Anti-Defamation League, but not so limited. We formed a front with the central and the social democratic parties. We threw our all into those elections. Not for a moment were we blind to the problem of the Nazis, but we had not the numbers, the money, the power to stop them. Oh, no, be
fore Hitler came to power, we thought the Zionists were silly. We were German, my dear, we couldn’t even bring ourselves to identify with the Ostjuden—Jews who had emigrated from Poland because, you know, we had not had pogroms in Germany and we had economic opportunities. We found the Ostjuden foreign to us. Unsophisticated.” Marlitt passed thin fingers over her chin briefly. “We were used to German pundits reviling us. We considered it as you do as a woman when you hear some man holding forth on the silliness of women. You think, oh yes, and yet one of us gave birth to you and one of us nursed you and you’ll marry one of us. We were so German. My father had served in the World War. He had received an Iron Cross, that made him very proud.”

  Marlitt gave a quick dry laugh. “You see, we were so used to being denounced, and business as usual. Every other German was an anti-Semite accustomed to rant about the Jewish problem and the Jewish influence and the Zionist conspiracy. But they would expect you to understand, they didn’t mean you personally. It was the others, the bad Jews. You grow used to thinking that they don’t really mean it when they make the little jokes about Jews. You just let it pass over and wait for them to act human again. We were almost comfortably accustomed to all those little and big insults, just so we prospered and lived our individual lives.”