Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Ruthie lay in bed, her joints aching as if she had fallen from a height. Long after she had come home, she could still feel the vibration of the line resonating through her. We do what we can, each of us, she said to the ceiling and to the distant and increasingly unreal Murray, we do what we can.

  Maybe she was as unreal to Murray as he had become to her. Maybe he had stopped loving her. He did not have to marry her. Maybe he would not view her getting her college degree as contributing to their common future, but would be resentful of a woman who had acquired the education to which they both aspired. Maybe he would want a younger or more glamorous woman. What would become of her? She would have thrown away her virginity and would remain alone. One of her professors at Wayne had lectured the women in his course that they were a lost generation, doomed to spinsterhood. He had orated over them in a mixture of pity and scorn as they sat taking notes.

  Two fat tears slid from the corners of her eyes. Then she saw herself as silly as Sharon, clutching old dance programs. If Murray did not want her, she would still have her degree. She would be a professional. She would move into a little apartment of her own and she would take Naomi, yes, and she would save for Naomi to go to college at Wayne too. If Murray no longer wanted her, she would have her own life. She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately. If she lived just with Naomi, she could sleep late on weekends. She could sleep as late as she pleased.

  The alarm was ringing beside the bed like a buzz saw biting into her head before she knew she had been asleep, and then it was time to rush again, again to rush and rush and rush.

  Sundays she liked to go for an hour with Morris to the garden as a break from studying and because except for a hurried breakfast, she scarcely saw him Monday through Saturday. The victory gardens for their block were in vacant lots where three houses owned by the same brothers had been burned for insurance during the Depression. The steps for each house were still in place but the foundations had been filled in years before. One of the lots was an outdoor skating rink, a built-up rim of earth flooded every November when the weather turned cold enough to freeze hard. The other two were divided into many small vegetable plots.

  Morris wanted to dig the carrots, the beets, the rutabagas, the parsnips. The week before, November had opened with the first snow, although it had melted by ten o’clock. Still it was a sign that winter was coming soon. She helped him and for a reward they got to talk.

  “We know something about the deportations to the camps, how many Jews die there. I don’t think Aunt Chava or Naomi’s sister are still alive. If the rest of her family is in the Resistance, she’s likely to be an orphan. I think, Ruthele, we have her for life and we better face that.”

  “I’m sorry for her family, but I’m more than willing to keep Naomi.”

  “Yeah, we’ll keep her, don’t worry. She’s a good girl. We lost Duvey, we got her. Somewhere in G-d’s mind, does it balance? I don’t see how, but never mind.” Morris sighed.

  “You miss Arty, don’t you?” In his letters, Arty sounded unhappy. Most of the draftees were kids. He longed for his family. The food upset his stomach.

  “We did the same kind of work, on the line. We’re in different locals of the same union. I never had that with Duvey, just to be able to talk about what happens. Arty and I talked the same language.”

  She wanted to say that she too worked on the line. “I always had trouble talking to Duvey too.”

  “I wish they hadn’t taken Arty. I don’t think they should take fathers.” Morris shook his head. “War goes on long enough, they’ll start on old guys like me. Hand us a gun and point us at the enemy.”

  “Tata, you sound so discouraged, you scare me.”

  “I need something to hope on.” He leaned on his spade. “The world is more evil than I gave it credit for when I was a young man. I thought, all we need is to get more civilized. But Germany’s a cultured country, as cultured as any. I find myself thinking about the darkness in people, and I wonder how any good happens.”

  “Tata, whatever the world is like, you’re a good man. You try to be just. I try to be like you.”

  “Like me.” He rubbed his bald spot. “Arty is like me, he won’t make much of a soldier. They should have left him home. It isn’t right for them to take one son and then put the last one in danger.”

  A son, a son. As if she did not count. It was time for her to go back to her schoolwork. Morris would putter in the garden for hours. He talked about getting a little place in the country when he retired, where he could raise cabbages and tomatoes. Ruthie didn’t believe him, because he had his organizations. Since the letter had come on thin paper for Naomi, he was even more insistent that American Jews must lobby the Roosevelt administration into saving European Jews. They must make the administration let in more than the tiny legal trickle which the State Department as a policy attempted to stop at the source in Europe. They must push for bombing of the railroads leading to the camps and bombing of the camps themselves. The Allies must denounce the killing of Jews. Now Morris had three meetings every week.

  Thanksgiving came dismally. Tarawa was taken in the Pacific. Arty was still in Louisiana training. Heavy fighting, town by town, house by house, went on in Italy. An old atlas lay permanently on the kitchen counter so they could look up the places in the news. All week a freezing rain fell, sleet, wet snow changing back to sleet. Ice formed on the trees and branches cracked. First Sharon got a cold and then Rose, then Naomi, then Ruthie and Morris. It brought a middling fever and a sore throat.

  Ruthie was in bed with a fever of 101.4 and a splitting headache when Trudi appeared with a telegram. Leib had been wounded in action at someplace called Monte Pantano. He was in the hospital in Naples, but he would be coming home. Trudi was weeping. She did not know whether to celebrate or mourn. “They don’t say if he’ll live, if he’s okay, if he’s half dead. What’s the use of this? They don’t even say when he’s coming. How can I live, not knowing?”

  Ruthie croaked, “Be glad he’s alive. He’s hurt enough to get out of the war, so be glad. He’s alive and coming home.”

  Would she receive such a telegram? No, if it happened, his parents would hear. Did she wish for a wound that would save his life? Who wouldn’t wish for it? But what price would she pay for his life: a leg, an arm, paralysis? She could not sweet-talk Trudi into calm. Trudi had plenty to fear.

  She slept and dreamed that all that came home of Murray was a head in a cage, a talking head that watched her with sad eyes as she rushed to and fro in the house. She woke sweating. Her fever was breaking. If she was not too weak, if she could crawl out of bed, in the morning she must return to school and to the factory.

  LOUISE 7

  Toward a True Appreciation of Chinese Food

  In the drab middle of sleety January, Louise flew out to the West Coast on assignment. This time there would be no gossipy vacation in Claude’s little expatriate world, and she found herself depressed and resentful of the interminable delays, bumped off planes in Chicago, again in Kansas City to spend the night huddled in drafty waiting rooms hungry, cold, exhausted and fending off attentions of bored and overfed businessmen who seemed to be doing very well indeed out of the war. Taking three days to get across the country was nothing to complain at length about; nonetheless she felt dirty, messy, with a sore stomach and tired eyes.

  Lonesome and impinged upon at once, it was not any of her fellow travelers for whose company she longed, but she attempted to keep up a facade of conviviality. Finally she pretended to suffer a bad cold and was left alone to her reading. She had T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The ideas seemed to her willfully medieval but the music of the lines sang in her ears. She was also reading the former drama critic of the Partisan Review, who had come out with a book that was somewhere between short stories and novel, The Company She Keeps. The author, Mary McCarthy, wrote with a matter-of-factness about sex in ways that intrigued and fascinat
ed Louise as a new level of discourse about women’s lives.

  Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did, as conquest, as adventure—in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically than men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically.

  She had a brief fantasy of writing about her own childhood, honestly, of writing about anti-Semitism and sexual abuse in foster families, but she grimaced, lowering her head to her book. It would not be permitted. It would be seen as too depressing. As a woman there were still far more things that could not be said than could be said; if they were said, they could not be heard. Madness lay that way. Forget it.

  She finally arrived at Portland, where she was taken to the Bentley, an extremely civilized hotel that still kept up a passable grade of service in spite of the war. She had a bath, a good supper and a night’s sleep followed by an ample breakfast and a second bath. Then she was picked up and taken to Vanport.

  Vanport was the largest of the instant cities that had been put up overnight, four miles west of Portland. A car from the Kaiser shipyards drove her, while she scanned the press release. Nothing could have prepared her for the utter bleakness. Thirty-five thousand people were living in mud, out of which rose identical pale one-story wooden houses up on concrete blocks which were sinking or sunken in the primordial ooze. The Portland Housing Authority had thrown up the houses the year before, making this Oregon’s second biggest city. Thrown up seemed the right word.

  Vanport even had its own suburb, East Vanport, which stood on a swamp formerly a shabby golf course on a peninsula sticking into the Columbia River. That was perhaps the saving grace: the river was vast and handsome. The other saving grace was the rent: $7 a week for a studio and $11.55 for four rooms. Plenty of shack stores sold whatever the merchants could lay hands on to sell.

  In the hospital she saw badly burned children. Many of the renters were not used to electric heat and electric stoves. They had had wood stoves all their lives, and they never thought to turn heaters or stoves off. Fires broke out in the little wooden houses that went up in minutes. Yet the inhabitants were cheerful. Most were earning what they called top dollar, with everybody in the family bringing home money, and they all had plans to live differently after the war. They were hardworking, likable people with heady ideas about what they would buy and what they would own and where they would live. Something began to strike Louise as she conducted her interviews, an observation that would never enter her articles. She had interviewed enough refugees to know what they thought they were fighting for: they were defeating Fascism or liberating their homeland or fighting for their own freedom to be whatever they were that had become illegal or dangerous, Jews or Masons or Communists or Socialists or Seventh-Day Adventists, avant-garde painters, surrealist writers. Or they were simply fighting like the Russians for survival, because the Germans planned to annihilate them.

  But Americans were fighting for a higher standard of living. They were fighting their way out of the Depression. They were fighting for the goods they saw in advertisements and in movies about how the middle class lived. What these people saw in their future was not a new brotherhood of man (and certainly not of woman), but the wife back at home, a new car in the new garage of the new house in the new tract with grass this time. They saw themselves moving into an advertisement full of objects they had coveted, but never owned and seldom even touched. They were fighting for what they had not had before the war, a want list of specific objects with plenty of room to add more.

  On the way back, she stopped in Detroit to visit another instant town, Willow Run. Snow was coming down hard, falling on the uncollected trash and rutted mud. It was even more dismal and undergoing a hushed-up typhoid epidemic, because of poor sewage facilities. Out in Washtenaw County, the workers who had poured in for the Ford Willow Run bomber facility were facing hostility from the farmers and townspeople around them, who viewed them as an army of occupation. The school was overcrowded and desperately understaffed. The women who did not work were going stir-crazy in their trailers or tiny huts. It was not instant city that had been created at Willow Run, but more obviously and strongly than at Vanport, instant slum. That she was going to say, as strongly as she knew how. These people had come to do a job and were being treated like cattle. She had seen German prisoners of war in the South better housed than these families.

  They had fires here too, but a woman was being carted off bleeding copiously from between her legs because of a badly done or self-inflicted abortion. Remembering Kay, Louise wrung her hands unconsciously as she watched the woman carried on a stretcher along the street as the ambulance bearers talked about her as if she were a criminal, while her little children ran after them and the neighbors watched.

  She decided since she was stuck in Detroit with a snowstorm delaying flying that she would call on the WASPs she had written about. Perhaps she could extract a follow-up piece from this visit.

  She found Bernice and her sidekick Flo jubilant, for they had just received notice they were being transferred to another base, where they would be delivering not trainers but fighters, the top line of the best planes being produced. They would be among the first women ever to fly fighters; in fact, they would be the first pilots after the test pilots, and they had heard that an increasing number of women were being used for testing new as well as repaired planes. They were celebrating with gusto and some local moonshine, and they invited her to join them. The photos from the article she had written about them were on the barracks wall.

  The raw whiskey shocked her mouth, but she drank it anyhow, trying to quiet voices in her head that warned of blindness from treated alcohol. Imagine putting poison in alcohol just so people couldn’t use it to get drunk: the society that did that had a screw loose. Helen had a phonograph in the barracks—the daughter of the Republican newspaper publisher from Nebraska, was it?—that was playing Tommy Dorsey and the Andrews Sisters. Flo was trying to show Bernice how to do the lindy, but Bernice obviously did not want to learn. Finally Louise got up and danced with Flo. She used to dance at rent parties and fundraisers. Oscar had been a good dancer. Perhaps he still was. Claude waltzed and fox-trotted well, but could not lindy. Idly she wondered if anybody had ever taught Daniel how to dance.

  She was a big hit. When she finally plunked down out of breath, she felt sober again and hastened to drink more of the white lightning, as they called it. Her feet were sore from the splintery boards of the barracks—she had kicked off her shoes long before—and her blouse was damp with sweat, but she had enjoyed doing something physical. She never seemed to lately.

  Watching the young women at play, she brooded on her daughter. This year, Kay was her own person, even if that person found someone new to imitate every six weeks. She was currently in love with her French professor, who must be fifty and had a white beard like Santa Claus. She reported his opinions as holy writ. At Daniel she had turned up her nose. He was too young: this from an eighteen-year-old. In fact, Daniel had not put himself out to be charming to Kay, either. That tentative matchmaking had been a flop over Christmas vacation.

  “He has a crush on you, Mother!” Kay had said as if reporting leprosy.

  “Oh well,” Louise said. “He’s much too young. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You knew!” Kay sounded shocked. She pulled on her hair, the way she had done since she was little when she was nervous or annoyed.

  “Well, you do notice those things, dear. It’s of no importance.”

  “I think it’s tacky.… Is Daddy going to marry that girl he has? Abra the horseface?”

  “I have no idea, Kay. Actually I doubt it.”

  “Abra—what kind
of a jerkwater name is that? And why did he take her to England, if he isn’t going to marry her?”

  “He didn’t take her, honey. The OSS sent them both. I suppose they need her too.” Actually she was sure Oscar had put in to have Abra Scott transferred with him, and why not? He never let go of anyone. He could hold on to Abra till she was forty-five and never marry her and never permit her to move in with him. Louise shuddered. “I believe she explained to you that Abra is a family name.”

  “Why do you stick up for her? I think that’s tacky too.”

  “Abra tried very hard with me and I appreciate the effort. She never did me harm, and she found me a nice apartment in Washington, inadvertently.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kay had looked aghast.

  Louise realized at once that she had not told Kay the apartment had been Abra’s, and that she could not. “A friend of hers knew about this.”

  Kay turned away. “I hate it. Why don’t you move back to New York, to our home?”

  Remembering that conversation in a roomful of women midway between her age and her daughter’s, she doubted Kay would ever return to live with her. Kay would marry young, she suspected. She would like that not to be true, because she considered Kay far too immature and far too silly around men to choose well; but she did not imagine she would be consulted. Let go as you must, she told herself, you have no other choice.

  The vaunted romance society was selling was instant passion. The great romance happened all at once; it swept a woman off her feet. A true woman couldn’t resist. You hardly knew who he was but you saw the uniform and the message was, LOVE NOW. Every man in uniform was entitled. Every woman was carried away.

  It ended in real life with the woman carried away all right, bleeding on a stretcher. It ended up in those squalid maternity homes she had visited where sullen and overweight sixteen-year-olds were treated like ax murderers and read appropriate passages from the Bible by squinting evil-minded men and vindictive overstarched women. It had ended for Kay more safely but painfully enough in the offices of a Park Avenue physician. Yes, and her own stories were one more way of selling that hypnotism to women, love as a drug, a cure-all, a religion.