Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “He’s in Donovan’s newly reorganized bureau, OSS. That’s—”

  Claude sat up, stripped to alert nerves as when she had identified Gloria for him. “What branch?”

  “He’s doing research for them, that’s all I know. Among German exiles.”

  “R & A, probably.” He picked up The Times, his interest vanished.

  Louise felt a small nerve in her neck squeeze a signal. She looked sideways at him but asked no questions. She did not even experience a moment’s paranoia, because Claude was a Jew and thus would not suddenly unmask as a Nazi spy, but she felt that same area of opacity she had with Oscar in the Spanish restaurant. Somewhere in that little frisson of the nervous system was a story, Louise thought: the good wife who knows far more than she ought and sees far more and puts it all together like a first-rate detective, but is so clever, in women’s magazine terms, that her own husband goes on believing she is naive and accepting of his cover stories. She made a few notes on the margin of “The Week in Review.”

  Walking into her New York apartment—hot, rather dusty, large and empty, with Kay off in camp and Mrs. Shaunessy on vacation with one of her married daughters, Louise experienced several moments of devastating sadness, a Great Plains of loneliness which this week only set into relief. Her body had wakened and was howling already in the empty apartment like a dog tied up and abandoned. She wanted Claude back. She wanted him with her. She had just been beginning to know him. She felt as if she had spent the whole week in a vain effort to defend herself against what was inevitable. She would fall in love with his quick nervous grace, his quirky lovemaking, his anecdotal mind in a way like her own, and be forced to realize the affair was only an anecdote to him.

  She could not even plunge into her mail, sorted by Blanche into towers. It represented a hundred demands, two hundred duties, and zero love, zero joy. The guidelines she had been working on with her group at the Office of War Information’s (OWI) Magazine Bureau lay on top of one pile, the Magazine War Guide for fiction writers. It laid out the propaganda goals as well as the themes the government wanted stressed, and would be updated every three months. It would go to the editors of several hundred magazines and to over a thousand free-lance writers. She supposed all that propaganda ought to do some good, but at the moment it felt remote. She took a bath, washed her hair, made herself a pot of coffee and sat down to write a story that would pay the rent, about the clever wife who kept her mouth shut. Outside, the streets of the city were as dim as her mood, all neon signs shut off, the streetlights at quarter power. She might as well work.

  JEFF 3

  High Tea and Low Tricks

  Jeff pushed away what had been called blackberry trifle, a pasty oblong innocent of knowledge of the blackberry although intimate with cornstarch, and examined his friend. Zach was signaling the waiter. “You should have had the gooseberry,” he said reprovingly. “Always take Mother’s advice. She has your welfare at heart.”

  “I do thank you for the rescue from the Slough of Alabama. That place was rotting me through.”

  “This is the way to live,” Zach said, ordering cognac with specificity that made Jeff smile. Zach looked well. In the two and a half years since Jeff had last seen him, Zach had taken off most of the weight he had put on during his marriage. He looked hard and amazingly for the English summer, tanned. He always tanned red as moroccan leather.

  “By the way, are you still married?” Jeff asked.

  “Why not? No reason not to be, unless something arises that makes it inconvenient, like an invitation to marry the heiress to a throne. As it stands, I’m not married unless I wish to be. Ideal state. No interference and all the excuses in the world.” Zach’s ash blond hair was worn a little longer than regulations would permit, but regulations around OSS were loose. When Zach had dropped in on him in the small hotel where he was billeted, Zach had been wearing a major’s uniform, but now he sported an elegantly tailored pale grey suit.

  “Do they give us a Savile Row allowance?” Jeff asked. “Never have I seen such sartorial splendor as hangs around Grosvenor Square HQ.’

  “Most of the HQ lads, they could pay OSS a pension and not miss it. We’ll take you to be fitted. Can’t bring you around looking like a Salvation Army reject. Of course the uniform covers a multitude of social lapses. All officers are supposed to be gentlemen.”

  He didn’t inquire how he would pay for the suit. If Zach had reason to pass him off as a rich man’s son, he would accept the disguise. In the meantime, as Zach had remarked, the uniform would do. The cognac was smooth, with oaky depths. He felt it easing the knot at the top of his spine. Tonight was the first alcohol he had had in weeks, for the troop ship had been dry.

  They were in a club to which Zach belonged. Except for the sticky dessert, the meal had been excellent and the service, smart, although he supposed the linen was less snowy than it would have been formerly. The windows were covered with blackout curtains. Uniforms were everywhere, but nobody seemed to glare at the many men not in uniform. Here, as in Washington, everybody seemed to assume anyone not in uniform was in the government or in some important clandestine or propaganda work. He had been astonished to see women enlisted personnel and officers—not just nurses, but women in military uniforms. The bigger shock had been the extent of destruction. Half of London seemed reduced to plaster dust, broken bricks, stains on the shattered pavement. The hotel The Professor had used with their charges was a smashed facade and a rubble field.

  “I can’t quite get used to the bombing.”

  Zach laughed, sharply. “In one sense, you never do get used. In another, you become pleasantly numb and blasé about climbing over the rubble. Half the time you don’t bother to take cover, it’s just too big a bore. You learn to affect a cool demeanor. Finally you sleep through a raid, and then you know you’ve arrived.” Zach lit a cigar, proffering one.

  He declined with a shake of his head. “People tell me it was much worse the last two years.”

  Zach grimaced. “There were nights when London was simply on fire, the whole damn vast plain of the city going up in a thousand separate and uncontrollable fires, the pressure down, the power out, the fire fighters helpless. You’d hear people screaming and you were at a loss to help. It went on like that night after night after night. I wanted to rip the bombers down from the sky with my own hands. I wanted to kill.” Zach smiled, leaning back and drawing on his cigar. “I presume you think they taught you how to do that in the States? We are babes in arms compared to the ancient and Byzantine deviousness of the British MI-6. They have taught us everything we know, which they consider about enough to qualify us for kindergarten. Prepare to be patronized.”

  Zach had changed the subject. Jeff deduced it was considered bad form to express consternation at the bomb damage, or even to appear to notice it unless one had a specific reason. (“Oh, rats, Jerry got my flat last night. Now I’ll have to find somewhere to sleep tonight,” Jeff had heard one young man remark in the hall at SO.) “Do we deal with them a lot?”

  “Rather a lot,” Zach said with a lengthy sigh. “Who is the enemy?”

  “The Axis?”

  “They too. But we have other enemies. There is J. Edgar Whoopdedoo—J stands for, Just wait till you see my file on you, will you give me whatever I want or do I leak it to the press? He envisioned an international FBI and our existence affronts him. In Washington at one point the FBI was putting more effort into shadowing us than the Nazis, and they fucked up one of our operations at an embassy because they considered we were poaching on their turf. Plus they kill to keep us out of Latin America—but then Nelson the Rock wants us out of there too.”

  “Tell me, do we have any time left to fight the war?”

  “Which war is that? Then we have enemies in the State Department, those narrow-minded tight assholes. They fight us every step of the war. At one point the lady in charge of issuing passports would only give us ours with OSS in big letters. Talk about stamping a passport, ARRES
T THIS SPY. In Spain this year the American embassy almost blew our operation. We were running a sloppy team. I was over there twice, and I thought it was a bit of The Marx Brothers Hit Madrid—no wonder Madrid hit back.”

  Jeff was realizing that Zach seemed happier than he had been since college, certainly since his family had forced him to marry, settle down, take an active role in the insurance business and fulfill his full range of dynastic obligations. Zach was free again. Now he looked older in some respects—his skin had aged, his forehead had faint but always present lines, the grey of his eyes had more iron in them.

  He looked younger in other aspects. He did not look as if he were drinking too much, which meant he was enjoying his life. When Zach was fully engaged, he drank but he could go off it when he should. When Zach felt confined, he needed alcohol to get through his days and nights. He could be mean then. Zach had a sadistic streak, but when he liked his life, he controlled it. He had an equally generous side to him. Many virtues, many vices, all a yard wide.

  Zach ordered two more cognacs and Jeff sipped his. “In spite of what I take are your efforts to sophisticate me, to tarnish the fine glow of my organizational innocence, I want to repeat my gratitude for getting me out of Alabama—and essentially out of the Army. It’s not my favorite pastime, being a soldier. I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to be, spies or backdoor fighters, but it’s easier on my psyche.”

  “Look around you. You’ll see a lot of fine old names and you’ll see the rising cream of the best banks and investment houses in New York, the snazziest law firms, the boys who’ll be judges and senators and sit on the boards of the big corporations. You can be bloody sure that they have picked one of the best berths in the war. But field officers are another matter, my dear. That’s what I have briefly been, in Greece for the Brits, and once the bloody Brits stop squatting on us and trying to keep us from getting our hands dirty, that’s what I shall be again. That’s the real fun and games.” Zach leaned forward over the table, his grey eyes glittering. “Then it’s you against everything, and you’re down to your nerve, your guts, your smarts. It’s life, says Mother, on the cutting edge.”

  “Sounds better than Alabama,” Jeff said, wondering when he had finished that second snifter of cognac and when he had begun a third. They had killed a bottle of Margaux over supper. He wondered lazily if he would have the guts Zach was talking about. He tried to remember anything dangerous he had ever done, but at the moment his previous life appeared tame in retrospect. He thought of rattlesnakes, fistfights, riding the rails, getting mugged in an alley in Kansas City. But somehow he had walked through all of it. Perhaps as Zach suggested, this would challenge something so far unused, unawakened in him. He hoped so.

  Zach gave that short choppy laugh as if reading him. “How the boy cottons up to it, how the boy shines in anticipation. One of the best stimulants—the nerves’ own fine high overwound keening. Feeding and watering oneself at a decent table is lovely now and then, but nothing beats fucking and fighting for keeping the whole man fit.”

  “I gather the fighting is mostly infighting at the moment. What are you fucking?”

  “Anything that moves, dear boy. I remain totally without prejudice and ever ready. My cock knows no frontiers he cannot penetrate.” Zach grinned, wriggling his thumb in a gesture that had since adolescence meant sex to him and thus to Jeff. “Wartime London is a great place for all kinds of ginch. You always did have to fight it off, but here you’ll have to wield a club.”

  As Jeff observed over the next weeks, Zach seemed to be dividing his sexual favors between ladies and navvies. The ladies were the well-born daughters of country houses, war widows of distinction, cultured and emancipated ladies vaguely connected with SIS or SOE, the branches of British intelligence they had the most contact with. The low-born lads were the rough trade Zach always seemed to find without looking hard.

  Neither scene appealed to Jeff, who was sent to a country estate in Sussex for a course in special operations (over here they seemed to assume nothing he had learned in Washington was sufficient) and when he got back to London, Zach was not around. You did not ask, he learned, when someone was suddenly missing.

  Jeff was marking time in London. Unless he had a bomb dropped on him or was run over by an emergency vehicle while stumbling home looped from one of the constant OSS parties or a friendly bash in a pub, he was safe while people were dying in great bloody piles everywhere across Europe and Asia. He began to think of painting. One Sunday he went out with his oils and a canvas and worked in a frenzy all day. He turned it to the wall and did not look at it again for a week. Then he turned it back. Yes, yes, it was a jump painting. Something had happened in/to him.

  At eighteen, he had begun by imitating the Impressionists and then worked his way into something of his own, harder edged, a passion for the shadows and pits in a landscape where dark hid and welled up, where light bled into darkness, lanced across it. Lately Turner had been on his mind, but Turner celebrated masses of light, light almost as wind, and he felt some different approach working like yeast in him.

  Oddly he began sketching the ducks in St. James’s Park. He had seldom used animals in his landscapes—occasionally a gull high overhead stylized to a flattened W, except for a dead coyote he had painted at Taos. He began painting water, the ponds, the Thames, and then rain. There was nothing Turneresque in his studies of the grey England damp, yet he knew he was being moved in some new direction and yielded to it. This was real work at last, but slow going except for that first jump painting.

  Zach reappeared on a Friday night and invited him to move into his flat, the upper floor in a smallish brick house in Chelsea. It managed to suggest itself as a cottage, in spite of being one of a row of partially bombed houses in a U-shaped street a couple of blocks from the Embankment and Cheyne Walk. Zach had been sharing it with a captain just posted to Stockholm.

  The flat consisted of two small bedrooms, a pretty sitting room with a view of a fine old plane tree dropping its leaves without turning any particular color except the brown of paper bags, and a peculiar narrow kitchen. A cleaning lady came in to complain and to clean up the mess Zach mostly created. The flat gave Jeff a peculiar settled feeling, as if he had come to the war and to London in order to find a place he could call home at least temporarily. His bedroom would do as a studio.

  Out front a low brick wall set them off from the quiet street. On both sides of the walk to their house were pedestals, with the gate hung between them, and a cement ball balanced on each side. Zach in giving directions always referred to their house as the one with the blue balls, or the cement balls, or he would say, “We have a shopkeeper’s sign out front, two big balls, so you can find us.”

  Jeff could not remember the last place he had actually moved in, fixed up and lived in for any length of time. Zach relied on him for any nest building that was to occur. Zach had found the captain who had gone off to Stockholm too similar to himself in his bachelor habits, and seemed to expect Jeff to make things nice. Zach’s women were no more domestic than Zach and cleaned up by ringing for a maid.

  Jeff hung around SO, being given occasional minor assignments, assisting some officer in tasks needing little assistance. In October he was sent off to parachute school for a week, to learn British style. English parachutes opened differently than American and he had learned to jump out the side of a plane, rather than through the bottom. Carey and Aaron from his Washington group turned up to train with him.

  As time passed he found himself feeling slightly guilty. Here he was fulfilling his dream, studying art in London—rather than Florence or Paris, unfortunately, but that was a relatively minor complaint—on a government subsidy, with a nice flat in a pleasant part of London, even if it was under siege. He finished two more paintings and enough time passed for the first to begin to look good to him. He took his pay and bought real linen, the last the art supply store had. He had been painting on cotton for years.

  Occasionall
y he ran into someone he had known from before the war, one of The Professor’s cronies from the University of Grenoble or Cologne, involved in the research operations for which his side of OSS had such scorn. He wondered. They seemed busy, useful, engaged. He had been prepared and prepared and now lay, a too sharp knife in a drawer quietly oxidizing. At other times he thought, why not? He had lost his youth in poverty and working-stiff jobs. Why not reclaim what the Depression had robbed from him? Why not taste a little of the ample freedom and comfort for which he had envied Zach? If there was anything that war was, besides organized murder, it was organized waste. Let him not waste his time here.

  Therefore he painted, fiercely, compulsively. He began what might be a series of rubble paintings, across the river in the industrial, working-class sections always heavily bombed. He had begun to paint rubble in morning light. The tentative period of the water studies was behind him. Painting on the street in his uniform, nobody bothered him. They assumed, perhaps, it was official work, a record for some government office. Sometimes people on the streets would crowd up behind him to look over his shoulder and see what he was getting down and then they’d make some comment he frequently could not decipher, but which sounded friendly, and walk on. He was obsessed with the partially destroyed buildings, what was pulverized and what remained, the rooms blasted open, the tree with half its branches splintered, torn open to the light, the shadow of a chimney standing alone, the tawdry pathos of rooms opened like stage settings to the passerby.

  “Don’t think we’ll be hanging around forever,” Zach said. “We’ll be shipping out sooner than you think.”

  “I’ve heard that one before. How was Turkey?”

  “I’ll take a load of grandmothers with me if I’m sent again. It’s certainly the place to sell them. Double agents are a drug on the market. Triple agents, quadruple agents, agents selling back at extravagant prices to the people who first floated the rumors, the rumors they floated. I found it rather smarmy. They say Switzerland is the same scene on a cleaner scale. But you have to rank higher than I do and have more top honchos for your friends to pull that service.”