Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Nonetheless, standards for scholarship and objectivity of presentation were high. They were something new under the sun, because while a few economists had infiltrated New Deal programs, never had such a large number of university people come to Washington to work on very much their own terms. The contact with the center of things—the sense of being involved in a highly important and momentous enterprise—was exciting to almost all and addictive to some. Many saw themselves as men of destiny, finally consulted as wise by those with power, Plato’s Republic come at last. If a certain contempt for the more clandestine parts of OSS was endemic, most tended to take on the swashbuckling airs that came with the ground.

  Another academic characteristic was the incessant plotting, counterplotting, the faction fighting, the backbiting, the war of the committees. Oscar did not relish the infighting, but he was better at it than she would have guessed him to be. He had a sharp eye on the way he wanted to go, and he waited for advantages to open up. He formed alliances warily. He made others court him. From a newcomer he had risen rapidly to a position of some visibility. The truth was, she thought, he was smarter than a good many of them and more genuine in his respect for the materials they dealt with. She had not made a mistake in deciding to work for him and to move on with him. If Oscar often waited for others to approach him, he was by no means passive in the face of the main chance and struck hard when he had decided to take something over or start something new. As a Jew, he had been one of two in the social sciences at Columbia, Blumenthal and himself, which made Columbia more liberal than most schools of its caliber. But in R & A, the old boys of the Ivy League schools and DAR surnames mingled with refugees like Widerman and native born Jews like Oscar and even an occasional immensely overqualified Negro like Cora DuBois.

  As an expert on Fascism in Germany, Oscar had ended up working on a team effort on unions which had nothing to do with his past work, although oddly enough it did relate to hers. She was treated as Oscar’s property, although that did not prevent several of the younger men from pursuing her.

  Abra was not given to being pursued. She tended to decide quickly to try or not to try whatever flavor adventure a man represented, but she was not acting normally. She was surprised at herself and half pleased, half displeased. She was fascinated by Oscar, stuck as if up to her waist in warm mud, and unable to go backward or forward. This stasis could continue for years, obviously.

  He was friendly, courtly, warm and yet it never seemed to occur to him to take her to bed. She understood he had long-ingrained principles against involvement with his students; but she had never been his student formally. She figured out that in New York he had been sleeping with an actress appearing in a Maxwell Anderson play, a stately redhead who had showed up at their office several times to Oscar’s obvious annoyance. That affair had presumably sputtered out with Oscar’s removal to Washington, although the actress had taken the train down at least once to see him. A Viennese psychoanalyst had also come through town and spent a weekend with him. Abra was reasonably sure he had not yet become seriously entangled with anyone in Washington.

  Sometimes she felt like a young girl with him, but not primarily because he was older. No, it was that she had to remember back to age fourteen yearning after Leslie Howard and Clark Gable, to identify the sexual malaise known as frustrated desire. There had been a lot of lust in Abra’s life, but it had been lust easily satiated. If her roving eye lit on a man who turned out to be unavailable, she had never been apt to sit and brood on what she could not have, but to move on to what was enjoyable. She had not endured this stifled, congested wanting since early adolescence.

  If they had worked less hard, her frustration would have bothered her more. She sometimes considered letting the curly-headed cherub-faced naval lieutenant upstairs inveigle her into bed. She would not take up with anyone in OSS, because she wanted to leave a clear path to Oscar. But she did not accept the invitations to a genuine Chinese feast upstairs, because in part she was enjoying her state. Is this love? Abra wondered; it was certainly something novel. Anyhow, the lieutenant was probably better employed as a friend and confidant than as a stopgap lover.

  She spent her spare moments—in the bathtub, washing her hair, riding the overcrowded trolleys, proofreading, waiting for books they needed to come out of the stacks—staging scenes in which Oscar finally succumbed to the attraction that she knew, she knew, she knew was mutual. She wondered sometimes if any actual consummation would not be anticlimactic, but she never doubted she would prefer to find out. Hanging in steamy self-heated limbo did not suit her self-image or her real needs.

  She felt his gaze upon her often when he thought she was not aware. He liked to touch her, although his caress was light, almost fleshless. He took care for her and of her. All of that, but no cigar. Abra cursed his control. Somehow she had to get through it. She also respected the quality of the work they were doing. They were writing an internal report at the moment on the Socialist unions of Germany and of Austria, their history of opposition to Fascism, their economic role in the greater Reich, and their interconnections to unions in other countries occupied by the Nazis.

  Oscar believed that the Socialist unions were a potential intelligence resource, but of course the report would have to suggest that conclusion indirectly, in proper pseudoobjective style. One of the advantages of the new project was that she frequently had to run up to New York to conduct an interview with some exile who sounded promising. Thus she kept up with her New York friends, staying with Karen Sue on Riverside Drive. Karen Sue had a photograph of Ready in his lieutenant commander’s uniform on her table. Abra did not consider it a flattering photo, as it made him look horsefaced, but Karen Sue was proud of it. Karen Sue dropped several broad hints about how she would love to spend Christmas in Maine with Abra, but Abra put her off, saying she had no idea if she would be able to take Christmas leave long enough to travel to Bath. Ready would have to make up his own mind if he wanted to take Karen Sue home to meet their parents. It would not prove an easy introduction.

  Sitting in Karen Sue’s living room gazing at the ships gathered in the Hudson River, Abra smiled to think how her parents would protest that Karen Sue was too exotic, and what graver shock they would experience should she bring Oscar to Bath. That thought startled her. She had never before considered bringing any man along home. Her brain was being addled by sexual repression.

  She openly asked Karen Sue and Djika’s advice. They were flattered, because Abra had never talked about her sex life. Djika had no useful formula. She had been a virgin until Stanley Beaupere had seduced her, and he had entertained no qualms about an affair with his graduate student.

  Karen Sue was more practical. “Sit on him. If a man has been so nasty and unfair as to rule you out of bounds, you don’t hang about looking sickly and lovelorn, dangling yourself like some overripe bunch of grapes. You just put your little hands on him and introduce yourself directly. Sit on his lap and throw your arms around his neck. He’ll cotton to the idea then. Especially if you’re sitting on you know what. You have to figure men are generally a little dense.”

  Abra decided this advice was worth attempting, if she could arrange the occasion. A party? Could she get him drunk? He did not tend to drink hard liquor, preferring wine, and she had never seen him drink more than he could handle. The rest of November sped by without her seeing much of Oscar. She had been given a piece of the project to pursue on her own through the archives and the German-language periodicals, and she was producing her own report due in mid-December.

  Thanksgiving Abra went home to Bath, while Oscar spent it with his ex-wife and his daughter. On Kay’s several visits to Washington, Abra had done her best to charm, without success. She considered Kay spoiled and shallow. Kay was clearly hung up on her daddy and acting out resentment that he had left her by punishing her mother and him. Abra kept these opinions to herself.

  She laid her plans. She was not intimate with Susannah, with whom she shared the tin
y glum apartment, but it was impossible to avoid knowing each other’s business. She knew Susannah was sleeping with her sergeant, and Susannah knew she longed to get her hands on Oscar. Susannah’s boyfriend from the Quartermaster Corps procured Abra a steak for her birthday. She was working closely with Oscar that day, because she had presented him with a draft of her report and they were going over it word by word, note by note, table by table. Late in the day as he was expressing satisfaction with her work, she sighed repeatedly with a lugubrious intonation not altogether feigned. She let Oscar wheedle out of her that it was her birthday, that she had a steak but no one to eat it with, that she was longing for company, a bottle of wine and a little celebration. The steak was part of the bait, since Oscar had often taken her out to dinner, and that was a dead end. She had to infiltrate his apartment or lure him to hers.

  They brought the steak to the wine. Oscar had sublet the apartment of an OSS official now in Stockholm, the second floor of a shuttered brick town house in Georgetown. It had come furnished in French provincial and well equipped, although Oscar remarked he had removed the dismal paintings of hunt scenes and slaughtered pheasants to a guestroom. He had also removed the owners’ library to that room, in boxes along one wall. It ran heavily to genealogical works, laudatory biographies of minor nineteenth-century judges, college presidents, naval officers, and morocco-bound uncut volumes of Thackeray, Tennyson, Longfellow and Emerson.

  Oscar watched her in the kitchen for only a couple of minutes before he said kindly, “It’s your birthday. You sit down with a glass of wine and I’ll make supper.”

  Abra wondered if perhaps she should have learned to cook. It had always struck her as a drab, unnecessary skill: What were restaurants for? “Was your ex-wife a good cook?”

  “Actually she is. I learned out of cookery books—that’s their raison d’être, right?” He was in fact competent in the kitchen. The meal was simple enough: broiled steak, mashed potatoes, a salad and a little cake they had bought on the way to his apartment—but it was more sumptuous than Abra usually enjoyed. She would have enjoyed it far more if she had not been engaged in working up her nerve for the pass she intended. If he rejected her, would she have ruined their work relationship? It was even riskier close up than it had appeared when she had first contemplated direct action. So much could go so thoroughly wrong.

  They had espresso afterward from a little stovetop pot. Oscar traded sugar coupons for coffee, since he had almost no sweet tooth and was addicted to coffee. Abra’s hands burned cold in her lap. She must do something soon. Sit on him, Karen Sue had said. At least that was some kind of action. Hot flashes and icy cramps possessed her.

  She had to act or the evening would slip away, tomorrow would dawn as bleak and frustrated as the day before, and she would have to wait another year before she could cook up a second birthday scheme. She wished she could down a good belt of whiskey to give her liquid courage. All her previous conquests seemed pitifully easy. She had only had to smile, to show a little leg or bosom, to lean forward in a doorway, to linger behind the others in the street and take a man’s arm, to put a little english on a party kiss.

  “Oscar,” she said as meaningfully as she could across the table.

  “Ummm? That steak was good. I wonder if Susannah’s boyfriend could be suborned into providing another?”

  She stood. “I’ll do the dishes … a little later.” My, that was a great come-on line. It practically ought to give him an orgasm. She had lost her touch. She had lost her marbles. She had regained her virginity. She was a blathering idiot and he ought to laugh at her. She marched around the table for the next several hours, approaching, approaching, approaching. Finally she arrived in front of Oscar to carry out what she had decided: sat down in his lap, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Although it seemed to her no man could be surprised, she could sense that he in fact was. His lips against hers were warm but inert. She pressed harder against him, and finally his arms came tentatively around her, and he began kissing her back.

  When she let his mouth go, his hands went up to her arms. Before he could disengage her, if that was his intention, she said against his neck, “Oscar, I am not drunk. I am not your student, nor ever have been. Guess what I want for my birthday? Come to bed with me.” By the end of her little speech, she could feel his erection against her hip as she leaned into him.

  He chuckled, taking her face between his hands. “I’m being seduced, am I?”

  “That’s the intention.”

  His right hand slid down her back to her overhanging buttock. “You have the sweetest heart-shaped ass I’ve ever watched. It’s delighted me for a year now that you never wear a girdle.”

  “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

  His black olive eyes looked into hers, his hand moving on her thigh, over the wool of her skirt and then under it. “Don’t tell even little lies. Abra, you want me, you’ve got me, but on my terms. We will play no games.”

  She was not sure what he meant but she would ask later. She was burning. They stood heavily together, kissing, and then he turned her to the right. “Let’s go.”

  It certainly had not proved to be a lengthy seduction. Abra lay under him five minutes later quite convinced that the attraction had been mutual and was intense. It all happened almost too quickly for her to fully respond, but the second time they made love that night, she came in a long inrushing series of towering toppling waves. The first time was fierce, the second time, sensual.

  Afterwards she lay spent but quite pleased with herself beside Oscar, who had fallen asleep. She owed Karen Sue something. Not a family Christmas, for she was not sure she was primed for one this year herself, but she would never tell Ready Karen Sue’s past. She had anticipated lengthy arguments, gradual acquiescence, but Karen Sue had been on the mark. Oscar’s defenses were all out in front, defenses of head and habit. His flesh was on her side. A sleeping lion, she thought, looking at the hair on his arms in the little light of the bedside clock.

  She felt none of the urge she had often experienced after sex to get up and slip out, to go home to her own neat bed. The wanting was only a little abraded; rising up beneath it was an enormous new construct of desire, to know what Oscar was thinking, had thought, was about to think, to know everything he imagined and had done and wanted to do, to understand, to examine, to perceive, to relish, to discuss. This might not be love as other women used the term, Abra thought, stroking lightly the hip of the man sound asleep beside her, sprawled as if he had fallen from a height, but it sure was more than curiosity.

  Having him sexually was fully as satisfying as she had fantasized, and now at last she was out of that limbo of shadow fucking. She worried briefly about the next day. He had assumed they would spend the night together. That was already something, for she knew well that urge to clear the other out, as she knew the urge to move on out herself. His body was on her side. She had faith that once the barriers were lowered, they would stay down. If the first time had been like a dam breaking, the second had been far more conscious. He did not tend to ask if something pleased, but to watch, to feel for reactions. He had been exploring her. She was astonished that she could not sleep. Something had hooked her and hooked her hard.

  NAOMI 4

  Home Is the Sailor

  “It’s a rotten time to get born and grow up,” Four Eyes Rosovsky said meaningfully, drawing on a fag he rolled from discards in his parents’ ashtrays. He could roll cigarettes with one hand.

  Naomi agreed, sighing. “It’s not fair.” Lately she had been feeling that her family, her own real family, had thrown her away in sending her off. She never got letters from them any longer, and she could not even feel as if they cared about her. Maman had always preferred Rivka, now she was sure of that. Why hadn’t they insisted Jacqueline go? Naomi no longer really belonged to anybody. The only one in the world who adored her was Boston Blackie and he was just a cat.

  It was their senior year and her friends swaggered
around the halls of the grade school. There were paper drives or scrap drives every couple of weeks, when they got to escape classes to collect flattened tin cans, bundles of newspapers and magazines, old machinery and pans from basements and garages all over the neighborhood. There was always time to sneak a smoke with the gang and hang out watching the freights or if anybody had the money, to go arm and arm into the drugstore and have a milk shake or a double chocolate soda. That was the best part of senior year. But what Sandy had warned her was true, they had to make their own graduation dresses.

  “Don’t fret, little one,” Rose said, although Naomi was now three centimeters taller than her aunt. “If your dress doesn’t come out good, you bring it home and I’ll fix it for you.”

  To Sandy, Naomi announced, “When I grow up, I will live in a tent in the summer and in a hotel in the winter. I will never sweep from the floor every day the dirt of that day and I will never stand and scrub diapers stinky with baby shit.”

  “We’ll be in the movies together. I’ll be like Lana Turner or Betty Grable, and you’ll be like Hedy Lamarr or Dorothy Lamour. They always have a blond actress and a brunette. We’ll have mansions with lots of servants, and they’ll do all the things our mothers make us do. I mean my mother and your aunt,” Sandy corrected herself condescendingly.

  “I have a real mother too.” She did not think Sandy believed her. Naomi and Sandy acted parts from movies they had seen. They put on Ruthie’s dress that was too frayed in the seams to repair. They dressed in old lace curtains that had belonged to Sandy’s mother. They did sexy dances in Sandy’s bedroom and watched themselves in the mirror, swinging their hips and giggling. They practiced jitterbugging and doing the rumba and the samba to the radio. Mostly Naomi was the boy and led, because Sandy did not like to be the boy, although she knew the dances better. One time when they had Sandy’s flat to themselves, when her mother took little Roy to the doctor for his adenoids, they played Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Naomi made up a tap dance on Mrs. Rosenthal’s dining room table.