Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  She tried not to put pressure on him. Still, the question of whether they would or would not make love any given evening was a drone oscillating under the rhythm and the melodies of the day. Perhaps if they lived together, the opportunities would naturally present themselves. That would not quite do. They could not live openly together, though they need not conceal their relationship.

  Love, she thought, sponging up the last of the egg with the dreadful bread—I was better off without it. It’s the ultimate boring obsession. But when she imagined a life without Oscar, it was a sepia landscape, devoid of color, drained of intense light and consuming shadow. No, her obsession might bore her, but he did not, and that in her experience of men was new.

  “I’ve been reading the Naples reports.” Oscar leaned back in his chair. “In enjoying this food as we do, we must never forget what real, honest food tastes like. It’s important not to confuse the imitation with the reality.”

  “Is that some sort of comment on Naples?”

  “Lord, no. Only on the food.”

  She was brooding whether he was implying some comment on their relationship so that she missed the first part of what he said. “… a city without water, without lights, without electricity, without gas, without food, without a functioning public transportation system, without railways, without phone communications—all blown up by the retreating Germans, but a city that freed itself. There’s the first full-fledged uprising of a resistance movement anyplace, and it’s impressive. It hasn’t changed any of the brass’s thinking yet—they hate armed civilians—but I consider it significant.”

  “OSS is pouring a lot of people into Italy. It’s the first real chance for the cloak and dagger boys to cut loose.”

  “There’s the same tug-of-war between the Right and the Left going on there that happened in North Africa, except that the Left has more going for it—far more militants, organizations, arms.” Oscar sighed. “I wish I had learned Italian. I’m sure I could pick it up quickly. But they aren’t going to send us. They’re already concentrating on the Channel crossing.” He rose. “Back to work now. I have a treat for us Sunday. I procured tickets to Barbirolli conducting all Beethoven at the Albert Hall.”

  Oscar always scouted tickets for the finest music he could find. She thought of it as a habit left over from his marriage, for she had never had the courage to tell him she would rather go to the movies or dancing, and that her kind of music had a backbeat. She sat through the concerts watching the audience and brooding. Would she ever have the stomach to suggest that concerts were wasted on her? No, better she sat beside him than somebody else did. When he remarked that Louise particularly liked Toscanini’s Seventh, it was only by accident she finally figured out Toscanini had not written it, but rather Beethoven. She felt she was condemned to sitting in the presence of loud boring music because Louise loved it. Always coming after her, always.

  Two weeks later, Oscar finally had word of his sister, Gloria. It came in the debriefing report of an American flier who had been shot down and then passed along the ratlines over the Pyrenees to freedom. After the military was done with them, Oscar’s section went over those debriefings to gather economic information. This one was a month old before he saw it, but Gloria was unmistakable. “That’s her house in Maisons-Laffitte, and that’s Gloria, absolutely,” he said, showing her the description.

  “Is she tall?” Oscar, after all, wasn’t.

  “She can seem taller than she is.”

  Gloria was a stop on the underground railway that sent downed pilots and escaped prisoners south to the Pyrenees. The flier had thought her a Frenchwoman who spoke unusually clear English, and she had not corrected his impression. He had also taken her to be a widow.

  “That’s funny,” Oscar said. “I wonder where the baron is? She does wear a lot of black, always. She looks stunning in black.”

  It was the first concrete news he had been able to gather of her. Here was a flier who had actually met her. Oscar would have liked to look up the fellow but he was flying again. Abra was pleased to be taken into his confidence, to share in his family news. She had still to meet any of them, except for Kay at college, whose letters came irregularly but amply. Perhaps Gloria would be the first.

  Daniel and Abra wrote to each other, letters marked more by wit or attempts at it than by hard news. However, in mid-November Abra got a letter from Daniel mentioning with obvious glee that Oscar’s ex-wife had moved into Abra’s old apartment in Washington, sharing it with Susannah until December. Abra was both angered and, in a totally irrational spirit, felt invaded, spied upon, crowded. It was true she had let the apartment go. The lease was in Susannah’s name, and she was posted to London indefinitely, possibly for the duration; nor was she particularly attached to those tiny, drab rooms which she had never taken the trouble to make hers.

  Nonetheless, she was not amused, as Daniel seemed to be. She thought it tacky of Louise. She was further displeased to learn that Oscar knew about the move already, from their former team leader in Washington. Dr. Widerman had never warmed to her—she was not the type of woman he approved of—and she was sure he had told Louise about the apartment as a dirty trick.

  Oscar also seemed to consider it mildly amusing. Daniel and Franz Widerman and Oscar should get together and giggle in their beer. Abra would have liked to be able to tell Louise what she thought of her lack of tact.

  Finally she felt most annoyed at Daniel, who seemed to view Louise as a fine stand-in for herself as a handy downstairs flirtation and walking and drinking companion. Abra felt not only invaded but replaced. She was piqued by Daniel’s defection. Even her flirtations at home were forgetting her. She did not feel invincible these days.

  DANIEL 5

  Working in Darkness

  For much of the fall and early winter, Daniel was on night watch and did what sleeping he could in the daytime. Rodney, his roommate, and his lover Ann were still on an earlier watch, so the change affected his life more than he would have supposed beforehand.

  He scarcely saw Ann. No more circumspect lunches on the cafeteria deck of the building, and the occasional evenings of lovemaking were hard to arrange. Sunday afternoon, her aunt was always home. Gradually the relationship was lapsing, and although he fancied a tone of reproach in Ann’s voice when they did manage to speak, it was less marked than he would have expected. He wondered if she too had grown bored with the small beer of their extremely partial intimacy.

  Yet at odd moments he missed her keenly. His desire for her had always been partially sexual, partially aesthetic, for he had never grown tired of looking at her. Her least gesture had a casual grace—putting on a wrap, lifting a cup, turning to answer the phone. He missed the frank gossip about their department. He did not miss the tedious recitals of her feelings, her wan ambitions; he did not miss the constant evidence of her passivity. Sometimes he had felt she approached life with the avidity of a bathroom waiting to be remodeled. Yet he knew his impatience was unjust. She lived like a silverfish in cracks, the interstices of a society actively hostile to her. She wished for normality as for Oz or Shangri-la. Perhaps his prizing of her exotic beauty and grace was equally unjust as his impatience. She would have given them up in a moment for common acceptance.

  If he missed Ann more than he would have anticipated, he did not miss Rodney at all. He slept while Rodney was at work; while Rodney slept, he worked. Downstairs a very attractive older woman had moved in, who turned out to be Abra’s bugaboo, Oscar Kahan’s ex-wife. At first he thought there were two new roommates, because two names appeared on the mailbox, L. Kahan and A. H. Sinclair. After a week of seeing only Susannah, who was quite pregnant and about to move out, and the new woman with the auburn hair and rosy skin and the figure that even Rodney had noticed right off, he inquired.

  She laughed. It was a deep laugh that seemed to well up from her full breasts. “It’s all me.” She was carrying up her mail in both arms. She seemed to get more than the rest of the building put tog
ether, letters of all shapes and sizes, big manila envelopes, packages of books. “I work under both names.”

  Briefly he entertained the fantasy that she was in some kind of show business, because she was attractive enough and she had the easy presence of a woman used to talking in public.

  Then one day she dropped half her mail. There were too many slick magazines wedged into the tottering pile. The letters slid to the floor. As he stooped to pick them up, he read the name on one, Annette Hollander Sinclair. He was following her long full classic ass up the stairs with his arms full of what she had dropped. “Why does this name sound so familiar?”

  “Do you read much magazine fiction?”

  “Oh my God,” he said. Ann’s favorite writer. “You write that stuff? I mean …” He shut up.

  “I do write that stuff.” She grinned at him, slightly irregular teeth under her large grey eyes. “But I bet you’ve never read any of it. My ex-husband never could. It was better if he didn’t try.”

  “Should I? I’m curious enough.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. If you want to read something, read this.” She handed him a New York Times Magazine off the coffee table, at the same time that she steered him firmly, as she always did, out the door.

  He read it in the bathroom, three interviews joined together by commentary that set them off in ways that were complementary to each other, a much decorated woman sharpshooter from the Soviet Union, a woman who was flying B-17s for the WASP, a woman who had just escaped from France where she had been active in the Resistance. He remained intrigued by Louise, although he lacked time to pursue his curiosity. She clearly did not take him seriously because of his age, so much younger than she must be, an attitude he was sure he could get around. She was more vulnerable than she realized.

  He would not be on night watch forever. Louise was at least as busy as he was. She had just ended an affair with a French movie director—a hard act to follow, but Daniel considered that his absolute contrast might be a strength in disguise. It was a drifting off to sleep fantasy, a Sunday afternoon indulgence. The rest of the time his mind was on his work.

  Even at night sometimes he dreamed in code, and more than once, in Japanese. One night he woke from an erotic dream all in Japanese in which he was making love to Ann, except that when she spoke to him, she was Louise. It seemed unpatriotic to dream in Japanese and to have erotic fantasies set in Japan, but he could not help himself.

  Naval transmissions had less personality than the old Purple decrypts. The Japanese diplomatic corps often sent messages that were longer than the naval codes and far more redolent of wit, snobbery, ego, acute observation. The Baron Oshima in Berlin had been a fascinating correspondent, a shrewd and artful observer whose cables could have formed the basis of a fascinating book on Nazi Germany. Various diplomats would throw snits when they felt themselves undervalued, a common occurrence in that world of self-importance. They took all queries personally and threw tantrums when their security was questioned. The world of Purple was quite human.

  In the naval signals, the drama was intuited rather than acted out. Yet they came to know the admirals, the captains of that fleet. He knew he was not the only officer who had had mixed feelings about the American assassination of Admiral Yamamoto. Their decoding had enabled him to be shot down when he was inspecting forward outposts.

  The office had been processing a great many messages from the garrisons in the Gilbert and the Marshall islands. The Gilberts were obviously the next step in trying to pierce the ring of formidable Japanese defenses. Daniel had been handling as high priority transmissions from the Japanese installations on Makin and Tarawa after an American carrier force had gone in to deliver a fast strike. On Betio Island eight out of sixteen planes had been caught on the ground and demolished.

  All the garrisons reported their effective strength regularly, including combat ready, wounded, ill, giving a rough inventory of stores, fuel, planes, ammunition. The decoders tried to keep track of refueling and the marus—Japanese merchant marine ships—that replenished the supplies of the various islands. The maru code had been broken by the naval code breakers in Hawaii. The maru code was one of those tasks that had lacked excitement. Then when somebody accomplished the brute work, suddenly vast amounts of information appeared that changed the nature of one aspect of the war.

  The maru codes gave departures and destinations of cargo ships and tankers and sometimes what was on board them. Most importantly for the American submarines that had had trouble sinking any ships the first year of the war, the codes gave the position where the convoy would be each day at noon. In a vast ocean dotted with tiny islands, such information made all the difference. Suddenly like the German U-boats, the American submarines were in the right place at the right time.

  Daniel was on night duty when the amphibious invasion at Tarawa began—dawn in the central Pacific. The mood among the men on the night watch was excited optimism. This ought to be a walkover. All that intelligence could hand to the command, they had: the cryptanalysts had even identified the four biggest guns as eight-inch coastal guns taken by the Japanese from the British defenses at Singapore, where they had pointed the wrong way to help when the Japanese attacked from inland.

  The command knew the strength and the location of individual Japanese units, even the officer in charge. The decoders in Washington and in Hawaii had passed on details of the fortifications, the weaponry available to the Japanese, estimates of ammunition and of food on hand. This was no improvised slap-bang operation like Guadalcanal. Daniel expected, along with everybody else in the office, that the invasion would be over, if not by the time they went off duty, surely before they came on again.

  Yet it became clear, before the night was half through, that nothing was working out right. It was harder for them to follow than a battle at sea, but progress was simply not happening. When Daniel returned the next day, a disaster for the Marines was coming down on the other side of the world. The casualty figures were bad. Japanese sub I175 reported that it sank a carrier, Liscombe Bay. In the ensuing explosion, the seven hundred men on board were all lost. The Marines had casualties of about one man in four. It was the third day before the Japanese garrison sent out their last message. “Our weapons are gone and now everyone will attempt a final charge. May His Majesty the Emperor and may Japan live ten thousand years!”

  As near as Daniel could piece it together, the Navy had used nineteenth-century maps and expected the amphibious assault to go in on high tides that never came. Moreover, reporting on numbers and types of weapons turned out to be useless when they were carefully concealed and dug in.

  As for the Japanese casualties, they were total. All died except for one officer and sixteen enlisted men. Tarawa was taken, but hideously. It daunted them all. Daniel imagined the war slogging toward Japan with enormous casualties on each tiny isle. There was no celebration among the signals intelligence people. It felt as much a disaster as a victory.

  At Thanksgiving Daniel went home briefly to his parents in the Bronx. Haskel brought a woman he had been seeing, extremely nervous in the full family presence. Judy was there with her baby on her lap. Her husband was in the Italian campaign. Judy kept asking Daniel what he was doing hanging around Washington, while he attempted to deflect her questioning and pass her off with bland answers and little jokes. “I think it’s a disgrace,” she said. “You’ve got an office job, a cushy office job, while other men are out there fighting.”

  “Why should you wish your own brother to be in danger?” their mother asked, kneading her hands.

  “If he wasn’t a coward, he’d want to be out there too.”

  Nobody suggested Haskel should go overseas. Daniel kept his mouth shut, but his appetite was poor. That night he must return. The war would not wait. Still he found himself depressed. His parents’ apartment felt claustrophobic to him, overfurnished, overstuffed, overheated. His parents seemed to feel more secure, with his father managing a small blanket factory, and the
y mentioned plans for postwar acquisitions. He wondered if he would still feel close to his Shanghai uncle as he could not to his own parents. They asked him about nice Jewish girls; he passed them off with the promise, after the war. After the war, they would buy a refrigerator and a couch and he would shop for a wife. He felt suffocated, guilty for his alienation.

  When he returned to Washington, Operation Flintlock was in preparation, the attack on the Marshalls. It was early December before he realized he had not heard from Abra in a while. In wartime, many events could impede correspondence, but he guessed that she was annoyed with his last letter, in which he had mentioned Louise favorably. He knocked off a quick funny letter to her about wartime Washington and the jokes going around. Just before Christmas he got a reply, friendly and flirtatious. He was apparently forgiven.

  Louise confided in him that she had not decided what to do about Christmas. She had never cared for it herself, but Oscar had thought they should celebrate it for Kay’s sake, so that she would not feel deprived. Louise would just as soon let it lapse, but she felt with Oscar abroad, she ought to make up for his absence. Kay was annoyed about coming home to Washington instead of New York, where she could see her old friends from Elizabeth Irwin, but Louise had sublet her New York apartment to a couple in OWI New York.

  “How come you feel so guilty in front of your daughter?”

  “I suppose no mother ever feels she did an adequate job. And if your marriage has come apart, part of you thinks you failed, even if the rest of you thinks it was probably all to the good.”

  He was curious about the daughter. He expected her to be a young version of the mother, but he was disappointed. She wasn’t bad looking, sleek dark brown hair curled on her shoulders, pleasant enough features in repose, but she was awkward and sullen with him. When he first presented himself at the door to have Sunday dinner with them, with a gift of a quarter pound of real butter and half a dozen fresh eggs, she said, “Who’s that?” in a loud and rude voice, in spite of what he was sure had been her mother’s briefing.