Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  The first time she had climbed into the cockpit of a fighter, she had felt an immediate urge to pry herself back out. She had wanted to bolt. She could not possibly learn the use or the meaning of all those dials and switches, those levers and gauges, those buttons and knobs. Then she thought that fighters were flown by men who had to react in split seconds or die in flames, so she could surely learn to master the instruments’ apparent complexity with no one shooting at her. She would not let herself be daunted and she would act at all times as if she felt complete confidence.

  Bernice barely fit into the cockpit. Flo was more comfortable physically. Bernice imagined that the ideal fighter pilot ought to be small in stature: in fact, a woman rather lighter boned than herself, but she kept such heresies to share only with the other women pilots. She was extremely lucky to be stationed at Long Beach, for here they seemed to go less by the book and more by ability.

  With many different airplane manufacturers located in the area, she would eventually get to fly every single fighter in production. Sometimes they did not return directly but might be given a trainer or other plane to deliver anywhere else in the continental United States, and might end up flying four or five different planes to destinations thousands of miles apart before reappearing at Long Beach to claim the next fighter for ferrying to Newark, whence the planes would be sent on to the war itself.

  Mrs. Augustine reported that The Professor had solved his problems with a live-in housekeeper, a German refugee, “not a Jewish lady as I understand it, but the wife of a Socialist professor who was fired and came to the United States.” He had died of cancer, leaving his widow destitute. Her English, Mrs. Augustine reported, was patchy. “Sometimes I understand her, sometimes I don’t. Your father talks German with her.”

  Some of the neighbors would not speak to her, because of her being German. They thought she might be a spy. Her name was Mrs. Gertrud Ansheimer, and she had moved in with a little dog.

  Bernice had some trouble imagining her father living with a dog, big or little, as he had nothing but contempt for pets. Jeff and she had been forbidden them as dirty and unnecessary.

  Bernice soon received a note from her father, the first since she had left home. He did not say he forgave her, but he commenced as if he had been writing regularly. He complained about having to teach classes in which he could only be a step ahead of his students. He was teaching all the languages, from French to German to Italian (and you know, he wrote, how faulty my Italian remains), Spanish, and also navigation and algebra. He had taken brief courses in order to bone up on those subjects, but he still felt like an impostor.

  “We have a pooch now, named Der Meistersinger because of the droll noises he produces when he wishes to go out or demands to be fed or given his doggy bone. He is a terrier of sorts and has been catching rats in the woodpile. Not your brown rats, but the local wood rats who seem to hang around the house in the winter. Very useful animal, this Meistersinger.”

  Bernice hastened to write back an equally bland and factual letter about her work. She sent along a photograph of herself with Flo in front of a P-38 Flo had been about to ferry east.

  “Notice my suntan,” she wrote on the back. “Today it’s 92 here. My poor body must be horribly confused about the season. Ninety-two here this afternoon and in two days I’ll be in a blizzard.”

  Crisscrossing the United States seemed to confuse their bodies in other ways too. She missed a period entirely. If that had happened right after she had slept with Zach, she would have been convinced, in spite of his pronouncements of infertility, that she was pregnant. However, she doubted she could carry a sperm around hidden in some crevice for months, and when she finally brought up the subject, she discovered the other women pilots experienced the same dislocation. “Too close to the moon,” Flo hazarded.

  Zach wrote occasionally. Sometimes he would send off an amusing account of some activity safe to describe, such as a rock-climbing expedition—presumably in some partisan context—when he was attacked by an irate nesting eagle. Twice he wrote her sexually explicit letters in French. Her French was excellent—her mother Viola had made sure of that from early childhood, as next to ancient Greek that had been her favorite language—but she lacked the precise vocabulary for sexual parts and action, and had to guess his meaning. Zach wrote that he liked to give the censors a workout and a little fun. He could not contemplate anything more boring than reading the average person’s mail, unless it was being forced to listen to his phone conversations, or his sins in a confessional. Once he had had to pose as a priest and it seemed to him a lousy way to make a living. He felt there were few original sins, although he planned to see what he could manage in that line when next they got together.

  He wrote, “I hear that your brother is alive and functioning, that’s all I know. I still would like to kick him from here to Sunday. If he survives, you and I should gang up on him and beat him to a pulp for putting us through all this. My opinion is that you have the real brains of the family, and turn out to be surprisingly more fun to hump.”

  Flo referred to them when they came as Bernice’s love letters. Bernice found that an amusingly inaccurate label. Sometimes they were funny, sometimes petulant, often obscene, but never did they speak of love, which was just fine with her. She could still not quite believe what had happened between them, but her memories were strong.

  For years she had masturbated by imagining herself in various movies which slowly brought her into a state of excitement. Now her masturbation was more efficient, relaxing her to sleep in fifteen minutes. She focused on one of the scenes with Zach. His body was as vivid and real to her as the dials on the instrument panel of the fighters she flew. Zach’s blatant control and his streak of sadism made her feel flown. That was somehow potent. It was the ignition spark. No more vague glories of melting flesh.

  Except when his occasional letters came or when she masturbated, she seldom thought of Zach. Her life was absorbing. She thought oftener of Jeff, with a rootless anxiety. Having no idea where he was or what he was doing, it was as if he had vanished. She presumed that any news would be bad news, and that it was better to exist without information, but daily she thought of him and hoped he was safe and thriving.

  In the meantime, she was learning to shoot. They were required to carry a .45 sidearm, not to protect themselves but rather the extremely valuable planes equipped for combat, with a number of secret devices and instruments on board. Aside from delivering the plane promptly and safely, their other prime directive was to keep it from being stolen or examined by anyone unauthorized.

  Helen wrote that she hated the ugly object and always took the bullets out and stored the .45 in the bottom of her suitcase. Flo already knew how to use a rifle. She liked to practice at a local range, where Bernice began going with her. Although Bernice considered the .45 inelegant, it was still an impressive piece of hardware, and she did not want to be excluded from its mastery.

  Weapons had always been Jeff’s prerogative. Learning to shoot had been one of his private pleasures, those jaunts into the countryside when he explored the male world and then the world of sex open to him but not to her, at the same time managing to denounce wordlessly The Professor’s values. It had never occurred to Jeff to teach her to shoot, just as it had never occurred to her to ask to be taught.

  Carrying the pistol, she felt stronger. Why was a swagger built into it? Was it the myth of the West? Was it an artificial penis? Was it going against the grain of her upbringing? It can’t hurt to know how to use it, even if I never need it, she told herself, and besides, it’s a lot quicker than poison and surer than sleeping pills if I ever decide to check out in a hurry.

  Death was never far away. One of the women test pilots had cashed it in two weeks before, at another California base. A woman who towed targets in the South had crashed, not from being hit by the live ammunition she faced daily but, scuttlebutt said, from sugar in the gas tank put in by one of the men at that base who hated th
e WASPs. They felt the WASPs were taking their safe or semisafe jobs and sending them into battle overseas—which was the point. Sometimes they just felt women couldn’t be allowed to do what they did. That woman had died in flames for the right to fly.

  No weapon could defend against sabotage by maintenance personnel or somebody else with a grudge and access to the hangar, but only the pursuit pilots had sidearms. It was one more way in which they felt chosen, special. When she came in for a pursuit-style landing at a hundred and twenty miles an hour dead-on and then climbed out of the plane, she could not help enjoying the shock, the whistles, the moans, when the pilots at the base saw that it was a woman flying a plane they might not be checked out to touch. Once again in Texas, that did not happen, because that time too she was taken for a man. Expectations were powerful and often controlled what people saw.

  Nights in run-down tourist homes and seedy hotels were not amusing, but she could always read. Sometimes she read mysteries to relax, because there was nothing like a good locked room puzzle to engage her mind and make her forget a drab and often hostile little town. Sometimes she read Proust, a squat red Modern Library book. Other times she worked on a mail-order accountancy course she was taking.

  With Flo, she talked about what they would do after the war. Bernice would not return to Bentham Center. “The only way I’m going back there is in a pine box,” she told Flo. “And then only if you don’t heed my dying wishes. I want to be cremated and scattered from a plane over Long Beach. I like it here.”

  Actually the perennial summer bored her, but she loved the work she was doing. They chatted about starting a back country airline, about teaching flying, about running an air circus. What they were sure of was that they were going to stay in flying. Maybe they’d get jobs as test pilots. Maybe they’d get jobs as commercial pilots. Everybody said that the aviation industry was going to take off after the war. Their base commander said every middle-class family would have a plane, just as they had a family car, and they would use it for long trips instead of driving. “Say you have to go from San Diego to San Francisco. Instead of a drive that would take two days, you’ll hop in the family plane,” he explained to the group of WASPs.

  “Whatever happens, we’ll be in on the ground floor,” Flo said softly to Bernice. “We’ll keep on flying.”

  “No matter what,” Bernice agreed. “We’ll keep on together.”

  ABRA 7

  The Loudest Rain

  The Labor Branch was buzzing with energy these days, in preparation for the invasion in the late spring. Almost every night they worked late. Oscar was off at a meeting. Abra left work at nine with Wilhelm and one of the secretaries, Beverly, to drop in on a party for an R & A man back from Algiers. Beverly was a broad-faced drawling Idaho girl. Wilhelm had been a pipefitter in Cologne, a stooped but burly man with a great scar on his face, from a fight with the brown shirts.

  She had left the party in a mews in Belgravia for home, when the sirens went off. Must be a practice air raid, she thought. Bombing in London was a thing of the past, just an occasional nuisance raid everybody ignored. Abra was used to rubble, to walking down a street and seeing a gap between buildings like a missing front tooth, to seeing facades with nothing but rapidly sprouting weeds behind the gaping orifices that had been windows, to buildings sliced in two with the rooms open to the cold rain.

  She walked a little faster wondering idly what she was supposed to do, reflecting how much at home she had become in London, used to warm beer and cold bedrooms. Probably she should head for the Underground.

  Oscar had not volunteered any information about tonight’s meeting, some sort of inter-Allied intelligence huddle. He always hoped to learn more about his sister, Gloria. She seemed to be part of MI9 which kept aloof from the other agent networks, specializing in the retrieval of downed pilots and escaped military personnel. A great many women worked in and even ran the MI9 networks. The Germans and their French collaborators were zealously trying to roll them up. All of the time Oscar was a little worried about his sister, a sort of whine in the walls of his mind like a piece of machinery left running, a tension she could sense. He slowly collected what information he could and dreamed of crossing into France to find Gloria, but he was not trained for espionage or liaison work, and OSS had no intention of so training him. They needed him where he was. He was too valuable to be risked on personal odysseys.

  Planes overhead, many. She heard a loud thud and the pavement beneath her shook. Suddenly she realized it was not a practice drill. London was being bombed. She felt quite unbelieving, staring up at the skies in which searchlights were crisscrossing and ack-ack guns were roaring into life. She watched the shells bursting. It was better than fireworks, really. The barrage balloons turned like silver dolphins among the lights. A big four-engine plane was caught in the beam of a searchlight and then another fixed on it, so it was trapped in their crossbeams. Rocket shells went off but it continued, unscathed. The plane dived but the lights stayed on it. Its belly opened and out tumbled an amazing number of objects like great seeds turning and falling lazily. A man grabbed her by the elbow.

  “Come on, love, we’ll hop it to the tube. Jerry’s at it again. Come on, briskly.”

  They ran down the street together, as the big guns in Hyde Park began barking. The pavement quivered as if a train were running beneath them. A bomb dropped extremely close. “Almost on us,” Abra gasped, running faster.

  “Ah, no, love, don’t think so. Half a mile maybe. There we are.”

  They piled into the entrance of the Bond Street Underground station and ran down the steps into the crowd of people settling themselves, men, women, children, dogs, cats, a bird or two in a covered cage, babies squalling in arms and one nursing contentedly. The man who had run down the street with her sat down with friends who were saving him a place on a blanket. He gave her a wave and paid no more attention. She was grateful to him. Americans were not used to being bombed. They thought bombs were for other people.

  The bombs came nearer. It was like something vast walking over houses, shaking the earth. Moloch the metal with feet of fire. It began to feel more personal, that someone up there was trying to kill them all. How safe really were the underground stations?

  “Where’re the Spitfires?” one man asked querulously. “Where’s the Air Defense?”

  “All over Germany doing the same to them, wouldn’t you wager?” came a woman’s nasal clipped tones.

  “How long does it usually go on?” Abra asked.

  “A Yank,” the woman said. “It’s new to you, isn’t it? Oh, sometimes it’s over in forty-five minutes and sometimes it goes on all night.”

  “The worst is,” the man said in his quavering voice, “when the all clear sounds and you go out, and then it starts again. That’s the worst.”

  Abra looked around, but she saw no one she recognized except her hairdresser and the newspaper vendor from the kiosk where she always bought her morning paper. He was playing checkers with a woman who must be his wife. Both of them had the loose skin of fat people who have lost a great deal of weight. It would be hard to remain really fat in London these days, Abra thought. She herself had lost weight, but it was hard to figure out how much. The British measured their weight in stones, and she always gave up before she figured hers out. She only knew her skirts had grown loose. She tried to think about stones and skirts and the interesting faces of people, quite a mix of social classes, but the bombs kept walking nearer, nearer. She could not think of anything else but the one that was going to fall next, here, on her. Bombs were shaking the walls. “Hitting Westminster hard. Tonight he’s letting go a hogshead of the big ones.”

  “Yes, tonight Jerry means it. He thought we forgot him.”

  “Sounds like the ack-ack blokes got one.”

  “Anybody for pinochle?”

  “Harry, sit down straightaway and stop tormenting your sister. I’ll box your ears if you don’t behave.”

  “Ooooh, that was a l
oud one.”

  The ground shifted under her. The ceiling would split open, the girders descend in a fall of rock and masonry, burying them, crushing them. She had to use the bathroom. There was already a queue of thirty. She joined it. I would not like to die among strangers, she thought. I want to be with him. It occurred to her that Oscar could die, wherever he was out in London. After all, if that man hadn’t grabbed her arm, she might have stood in the street watching the fireworks until one of them landed on her head. She tried to remember the splendid spectacle of the bombs turning in the air, but her throat closed. She could not swallow her saliva.

  A man came stumbling down the steps bleeding from cuts on his scalp, his left cheek and his left arm. “Flying tigers,” she heard someone say as people gathered around him. She asked and was told that meant fragments of glass blown at you.

  “Make way, I’m a doctor.” A woman left the queue and pushed her way through the crowd.

  The noise was the worst, she thought. It made her feel claustrophobic. She felt as if her head would burst with the bombs. If only it would be quiet for a few minutes, just quiet enough to catch her breath and think again, just quiet enough so her head would stop ringing, she would feel restored. She kept imagining that the next bomb would drop directly on the Underground station and they would be buried under tons of rubble.

  A woman who had joined the queue behind Abra was saying, “And one of the first bombs dropped on that cinema in Curzon Street full of people watching that new movie with Laurence Olivier and it was dreadful, the ceiling fallen and people screaming and trapped.…”

  She wished for Oscar, his presence, the solidity and warmth of his body and the power and mercurial zest of his mind, to talk to her, to distract her, to comfort her. She did not want to die separated from him, in ignorance of his safety or danger. As she finally pressed forward into the overburdened toilet stall to relieve herself, she stared at the door scrawled with the names of fifty different couples.