Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  She was serving fish oftener these days, not only because red meat was rationed, but because fish was quick to prepare. She could not reach home after her patrol before seven. Unfortunately, The Professor was thus always home well before her on her flying days, and he was not pleased with the new regimen. As she hastily dumped her gear in the hall closet and rushed through the living room toward the kitchen, carrying her parcels, he fixed her with his best admonitory “You’re going to flunk this course if you don’t straighten out” glare. “Is there some reason you’re even later than usual this evening?”

  “There was a long line in the fish store. With meat rationed, everyone’s eating more fish.”

  “I certainly had noticed we are.”

  Her way of dealing with her father’s ill temper was pretending, since he did not come out directly and shout at her about what angered him, that she did not understand he was annoyed. Now she gave him a brief bleak meaningless smile and bolted for the kitchen.

  “You aren’t going to sit down to supper looking like a mechanic, are you?”

  As if he had ever noticed what she wore. As if anyone ever cared. “Supper will be ready shortly.”

  He snorted but said nothing more, turning the radio up. Every night she studied the war in the Globe, listened to the commentators and the analysts, studied the battle reports with the atlas volume of the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica open on her lap. The Allies were clearly losing just about everyplace. On a map of the Philippines she had been following the steady erosion of the American and Philippine positions. In Africa, the battle seesawed but usually ended with the Allies in retreat.

  Tonight the news was dreadful as she found herself moving ever more slowly about the large kitchen. General King had surrendered at Bataan. It sounded as if few of the forces had been successfully evacuated to Corregidor, where the Army still hoped to hold out. That fortress island was supposed to be impregnable. Something like ninety thousand Filipinos and Americans had surrendered to the Japanese. In Russia there was heavy fighting deep inside the country, with the Germans again advancing.

  What would happen to them if they lost the war? The German army appeared invincible, and the Japanese had taken over Asia without difficulty. The decline of the West, she thought, but could not believe the Germans or the Japanese would really invade the United States. The first fear of invasion through California had diminished. The battles would be fought elsewhere, so what would defeat mean? Reparations? A search for scapegoats? Perhaps an American Nazi party blaming the Left or the Jews or colored people or who knows what vulnerable part of the population for the humiliation? Perhaps a return to the Great Depression?

  Why did it feel so personal to lose? As if she herself were losing? She had a moment of fierce and despairing anger as she stood slicing the potatoes she had boiled that dawn into the fat rendered from Sunday’s chicken, in which onions were already lightly browning. Yes, it smelled delicious and she did not give a damn. She did not want to cook potatoes lyonnaise while millions of people died and the world burned. She felt at once guilty and helpless, imprisoned. Even her flying felt absurd to her. Here she was enjoying the keenest pleasure she knew while in the Philippines emaciated soldiers were being marched to prison camps and in German-occupied Russia, partisans were hanged for daring to resist.

  In the Soviet Union, women were flying in combat. Marina Reskova, the woman pilot and navigator, had formed three women’s air regiments, one of fighters and two of bombers. In England, women were ferrying planes regularly. Here they wouldn’t even let women fly domestically, in a support role. She longed to use her skill, her strength. She would not be afraid. She knew she could fight, if only she were given a chance.

  She paused, fitting the pieces of fish dunked first in flour, then in eggy milk, then in cornmeal into the broiler pan. Could she kill? She thought so, but felt she needed evidence for her belief. She set traps for mice. She had taken part in the butchering of a pig at her paternal grandfather’s farm. Her grandfather had slit the throat of the pig quickly and calmly, approaching the pig with the knife and simply passing the knife across the throat. The pig had walked away rather puzzled as the blood poured down, and then staggered to her knees. Two minutes later the pig had been dead, and Jeff and she had assisted in pouring boiling water over the carcass and scraping off the hair. The long incision and the extraction of the organs from the fat had fascinated rather than outraged her. Jeff was the more squeamish of the two, but they had both experienced the slaughter and butchering of the pig as an initiation ritual granted them rather than as a display of adult brutality.

  Besides, would Jeff ever kill anyone? He was in the Army, but combat seemed at least as far from him in Alabama as from her in Bentham Center. She supposed you rarely had time in combat to philosophize. Probably you were trained to react, and you reacted. In the plane she did not stop to think about how to turn the wheel or how to step on the rudder; she read the few gauges and reacted. If she were in combat, surely the machine gun would respond when she activated it, and she would do that when threatened as automatically as dealing with the elevators or ailerons.

  “A lot of the boys are enlisting at the end of this school year,” her father announced at supper. “I don’t know if there’s any point keeping this college open. But they may be starting a governmental program here, the administration says. I don’t like so much paprika on the sole.”

  “Sorry. I thought I’d try something different.” She had been thinking about killing and not noticed what her hand was doing. “Do you believe we’re going to lose this war?”

  “Nonsense,” The Professor thundered. “What kind of isolationist garbage have you been listening to? Despair is not productive.”

  He would never discuss politics with her. She could not understand why, for he had discussed everything with her mother. As a daughter, she was forever immature to him. “The fish on the second layer aren’t as heavily paprikaed.”

  “Good. It disguises the flavor. Unless the fish were old?”

  “No, no. They were perfectly fresh.”

  Why did she brood about combat? Because she wanted to be tested by the war, to take a real part. Jeff might not be doing anything he viewed as valuable, but it was not his choice. He was enlisted in the anti-Fascist cause, and if the use to which he was put was not what he might have chosen, nonetheless he had the peaceful mind of someone fully involved.

  Even The Professor felt the weight of longing to be useful. He had written to various governmental departments about his work during the First World War (as they were calling it now, for this was beginning to be called the Second). He had received acknowledgments that looked to be form letters. Every couple of weeks he dictated a letter about his qualifications and his desire to be of service directed to some bureau, letters she sent off with his resume to the addresses he furnished.

  The Professor had put his old Austin up on blocks for the duration, a phrase local people had begun to use frequently. Closed for the duration. She realized he had pushed his plate away and was looking at her expectantly. “What do we have for dessert?”

  “Dessert?” She had forgotten to make anything. “Let me start the coffee,” she temporized and fled to the kitchen. Make a fast cornstarch pudding? Sugar was rationed and she was not eager to expend their month’s allotment. No cookies in the cupboard. She had used to keep a supply of goodies on hand for such moments, but nowadays that was called hoarding. Then she remembered that Mrs. Augustine had given her a pint of pears canned from the tree that stood in the Augustine’s yard, not yet in bloom this year but just tipping the buds open. She found the pears, dousing them liberally with the remaining rum in the last bottle.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” he inquired icily, staring into his dish.

  “You know with sugar rationed, I can’t make the same desserts I used to. It’s pears Mrs. Augustine put up soaked in rum.” Soaked for five minutes, but let that pass, she begged him silently.
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  “If you’re low on sugar, I imagine the Garfinkles would let you have some maple syrup. We’ve always bought our syrup from them.” He tasted the pears, coughed slightly. “Is that the last of the rum?”

  “Afraid so,” she said briskly. With little enthusiasm she spooned up her first bite of pear. She had put in more rum than she had realized. The effect was raw but not unpleasing, at least to her who had spent the day in an unheated aircraft much colder than the fields below it. Once in a while The Professor had a bottle of wine, which he stood beside his plate, and from which he occasionally poured her a sparing glass. The taste of any spirits always made her think of Zach and the days when Jeff and he had been always together and when she had been with them whenever they would endure her company. If I ever leave home, she thought, I will fly airplanes and drink whiskey. She smiled.

  The Professor asked, “Do you like it?”

  “Yes, I do. If it doesn’t please you, I’m sorry, but just leave it and I’ll eat it.”

  As she cleared the table, she did just that, taking the rummy syrup he had left in his dish and quaffing it from a glass as she scraped and stacked the dishes for washing. They had all gone up on Jumpers Mountain one June night in Zach’s junior year and Zach had passed around a silver flask in the shape of a fish from which they had each in turn drunk gin. The gin had made her shudder, but she had felt as if she were sipping the blood of adulthood. It was a rite of passage. She had been in love with Zach and her lips touching the silver of the flask which his mouth had caressed only the moment before had made her more drunken than the alcohol.

  The moon was the color of his flask and seemed to float like a fish in a light haze. In town there had been a rich and cloying scent of private but the air here smelled of balsam and spruce. Up on the open cliffs of the mountain they watched the moon just a day short of full rising and she felt as if she looked the moon in the face from the same height.

  It had not been foolish to love Zach: she ought to have adored him if only out of the simplest gratitude, for he had shown her the way out of her caterpillar-hood and if she still lived mostly in a cocoon, at least she knew what she wanted to be, like the moon herself, a huntress roaming free through the mountains of the clouds and the rivers of the wind.

  Once or twice when she had been behind the wheel of one of Zach’s sleek fast cars, she had experienced a joy of extension, of becoming one with a fine and powerful machine that carried her senses beyond herself as it responded to her decisions, her will, her skill. She was not a bad driver, but a sports car seemed inferior to the command of space in flying. The lightest, flimsiest plane with a forty-horsepower engine could penetrate a dimension the most expensive racing Ferrari in the world was denied.

  No matter how meager her life at times, she was fully half owner of a plane. She had bought Steve out of his quarter when he had enlisted. The other owner, a lawyer, flew mostly for relaxation and occasionally to visit a client, when that amused him. She felt that the plane was really hers, because she was the one who flew it most of the time and she was the one who repaired it and worked on it and coddled it. Someday she would buy out the lawyer altogether. He talked of getting something fancier after the war. She could keep this one running for years. If she hurried with the dishes, she could manage to type for at least two hours, although her hands were swollen from the cold in the plane. Never mind. She would manage.

  The day she got her commercial license finally she was going up on Jumpers Mountain, and she was going to find a bottle of whiskey or gin somewhere, and she was going to sit and sing songs and salute the moon. She would have her celebration. She would tell Jeff, who would rejoice with her, if only long distance. She would then have done one fine thing.

  DUVEY 1

  Many a Stormy Sea Will Blow

  Duvey spent the first three months of 1942 on the Caribbean run, so he was damned glad to ship out on the North Atlantic convoy route instead. He had been working tankers, but no more. He had lost five friends he knew about and probably more he hadn’t found out yet. All his pals had cashed in on tankers torpedoed offshore since January, hit close enough to the American shore to smell it and see the lights. Cape Hatteras was the worst, but the whole coast was deadly.

  A woman he met in a bar told him that her mother lived in Vero Beach where the Dodgers wintered, and every morning on the beach arms, ears, headless torsos washed up with the twisted metal. Mostly the tanker crew went up in a great whoosh of flame and maybe that was lucky, because the guys who dived off, he had helped fish some of them out of the sea. He’d choose to go up all at once, rather than dive into a burning sea or be “saved” with burns over his whole body, to die slowly in a hospital ward or to hobble around Detroit, the local bogeyman.

  The U-boats were having the war all their own way, lurking off the coast and playing shooting gallery with the tankers against the lights of Miami, Charleston, Savannah, New York. The cities weren’t even blacked out. Seamen’s lives were cheap. The heroes were in the Army and Navy, but the seamen were dying at much higher rates, and if anybody onshore thought the war would be won without the food, the oil, the matériel they were carrying, they were as crazy as he had always thought most people to be. If England was going to hold out and if the United States was going to get into the war effectively, the ships had to deliver their cargo.

  He had made his choice. He was not going to dress up like a brass monkey and salute some asshole who happened to have gone to Annapolis. He had always been a working stiff and he would stay one. This was the real work of the war, as he understood it, and he was used to seeing cities from their ports and their bottom sides. They’d fought and pissed blood for their union, and they were going to war under union rules and union wages. The National Maritime, a CIO union like Tata’s, had taken them from forty dollars a month for lying in garbage and filth to a hundred dollars a month and now they had hazardous bonus pay of another hundred. A lot of jerks behind desks wanted to cut their wages, but when the shipowners gave back the huge profits they were making, then they’d take a pay cut: that’s what the union said, and that’s what he said.

  When he thought of it, he scrawled a letter home, because he didn’t want Mama worrying. He was careful what he said, filling his letters with questions and tall tales. She thought he was safe out of the Navy because he wouldn’t have to fight. Better she thought that way. He would say nothing to set her wise. He had always brought trouble home to her, but he didn’t like to. As the eldest, he knew how difficult her life had been.

  He was a hard case in his way, for sure, grown up in the basement of the Depression and pinched for almost everything he might have wanted. Arty couldn’t see past the end of his nose. Ruthie might make something of herself. She had a streak of goody-goodyness that made him puke, but she was a straight kid and helped Mama. She might even get through college some year, the first graduate in their family, if she wasn’t fool enough to get married. Marriage finished people off. Women started having babies and pretty soon they looked just like their mothers and had nothing to say but what their mothers had said. Men got that worn-down stooped look and started bulging over their belts.

  It wasn’t for him. He’d never even come close. He liked women he wasn’t about to bring home. The only kind of girl worth the bother was one used to supporting herself, a waitress or a bar girl or a manicurist or a whore who didn’t belong to a pimp, one who knew how to take care of herself so she didn’t bring you a disease. The sweetest girl he’d ever had was colored, Delora with coppery skin and long fine, fine legs and an ass she only had to carry down the street to bring men to their knees. But having a colored girl was trouble. They almost couldn’t go anyplace for a meal or a drink without him getting into fights with white jerks or fights with colored who didn’t want him messing with their women, they said, as if any woman of the same color belonged to them as a set. He didn’t mind a scrap, but not every time they left the house.

  He’d grown up near colored, and he could never
understand the fuss whites made. Take a Russian Jew and a Swede, or a Scotsman and a Sicilian, and they were just as different. But every time you tried to talk to a guy who was nutso on the subject, he would go on about, Would you want one to marry your sister? As if that’s all those black guys were wanting all the time, to come and marry somebody’s cross-eyed gimpy sister. Sure, they’d be curious to get in bed with a white woman the same as he’d been curious about a colored woman the first time, but after that it was an individual smile or way of walking or a line that made you laugh that hooked you.

  Detroit had a big colored population, growing all the time because the colored came up from their dead-end lives in the South to get work in the factories. He figured that like the Jews, probably the smartest ones were those who wouldn’t take it anymore in the black equivalent of the shtetl and just had to find someplace they could get ahead and make a decent life. The colored in Detroit were often smart, snappy, lively people who walked around with a load of anger for the shit they had to take.

  There were six black guys on the Montauk, down in the engine room. They kept to themselves mostly, and while he passed the time of day with them when they came face-to-face, he didn’t have much to do with them. There was one other Jew on board, the radioman, but he was an officer. If somebody asked him if he was a Jew, he said he was, but he never volunteered the information unless he knew he was talking to another Jew. You said you were a Jew, they wanted to start in on you. They thought all Jews were patsies and you had to be twice as tough.

  Guys asked him about himself, he said, “I’m from Detroit, Jack, where the cars are fast and the women are faster. We’re born on wheels and we burn alcohol like gas.” That gave them a handle.