by Marge Piercy
It was two when the all clear sounded and she followed the crowd up into the street thick with smoke and all the varied burning smells of a hundred different materials and compounds ablaze, the stench of sewage from a burst main, the wail of fire sirens, of ambulances. Flames licked at the sky toward Hyde Park, where the antiaircraft batteries were still at last. She walked along Gilbert Street, but Weighhouse Street was roped off. A bomb had fallen right at the corner and sheared off part of a building. They were digging in the rubble looking for bodies. On the pavement lay something dark and sticky she did not want to see more closely. The street ahead was impassable with fallen masonry and a burning car. What a mess it makes, she thought and laughed at herself. She would have to go back to Oxford Street and round the long way.
At her corner, the sidewalk was covered with glass, glittering dully out into the middle of the road. She picked her way carefully. No bombs had dropped here, but the shock wave of one close by had broken windows. She was relieved to see her own building standing secure, dark behind its blackout curtains.
In her flat, one of her pictures had fallen from the wall and its glass broken. She was exhausted but not sleepy and went over the flat to check for other damage, turning on the electric fire in the sealed fireplace. The ivory walls were growing shabby, painted last probably in thirty-nine, as was the wan pastel floral chintz of the armchairs and sofa. One cushion had leaped to the middle of the floor. A vase that had belonged to the flat’s owners, white china studded with raised roses, had broken, to her relief. Items of bric-a-brac had fallen. She supposed that interior decorating in a bombed city must take such problems into account. Was it really safe to go to bed? Perhaps it would all start again. Would she dream of the bombing? She was still righting the fallen objects and realigning the pictures that had lurched crooked on the walls when her phone rang.
“You’re there, good. I was worried. I called the office and learned you’d left a couple of hours before the raid started.”
She was pleased that he worried. “I’d just dropped into a party and I was starting home. I was a bit naive. I stood in the street when the sirens went off gawking at the show. Where were you?”
“Quite safe. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t think anybody would mind if we came in a bit late tomorrow. How about ten?”
She agreed, wishing he would offer to come over, but it was, after all, three in the morning.
Abra began to notice the enormous number of Americans running around London, especially in Mayfair, outnumbering the native English and overwhelming them. She was suddenly not the exception she was used to being, but one of a herd trotting along. Even American women were no longer rarities, for she saw WACs and nurses everyplace.
After growing accustomed to British behavior, she shared certain amusements with the native Londoners, one being how often the Americans saluted each other. It could be dangerous on the streets, elbows always flying out. The Americans were louder, heftier, well-fed looking. Suddenly indeed there was more food in London. In the massive brick Grosvenor Hotel nearby, overlooking Hyde Park, a vast mess was established, the size of a dancehall serving a thousand at a time for fifty cents a meal cafeteria style, American pork chops, fried chicken, ice cream. She had not had ice cream since Washington. The regulars named it “Willow Run” after an aircraft plant outside Detroit, because of the assembly line approach to meals. Soon Abra would be able to take what meals she chose there, since Oscar had become a captain finally and she was in the process of being militarized and would get her rank in a week or two.
In the halls of OSS she heard the good old boys complaining loudly about how bitter cold it was in their club since the windows had been blown out by Jerry that night. The fresh damage shocked her eyes. On Brook Street, where R & A was housed, a building in the next block had been hit and cracked open like a brick egg. She could not help thinking of the people she saw going in and out of all these buildings every day. The rubble she had got used to had seemed as ancient as Roman ruins: part of the landscape, overgrown with weeds and wild flowers in the spring and summer, purple rosebay, the home of stray hungry cats and rats that never seemed to lack for food. But these new blast sites had been buildings she had passed daily, places she stopped in for tea, her own greengrocer, the shop where she had her hair cut, bringing a towel along as one did to the hairdresser’s nowadays in London. To have one’s regular shop bombed was a disaster, because she could not divorce a shopkeeper who had her ration book. The butcher or the grocer were not choices lightly made nor easily changed.
Oscar and she were lucky to have rented their flats when they had, for many Londoners had returned during the bombing lull. Lodgings were in short supply; hotels were crowded; restaurants, mobbed. Now London felt more like Washington, overflowing with thousands of headquarters personnel who would never see a battle, and with an empty apartment worth a hefty bribe.
People seemed cranky in the wake of the bombing, as if they couldn’t bear the thought of the whole thing starting again; as if having survived the immense ordeal of the blitz, they really shouldn’t have to survive what was already being called the little blitz. In general she thought the British were wearing thin on nerves, getting angrier, bitter. When she had first come, she had never seen an antigovernmental slogan, but the working class who composed most of the homeless who slept in the tubes were getting tired of Churchill and the Conservatives. It was rumored that the miners were about to go out on strike.
On the eighteenth, another raid hit while Oscar and Abra were still at work. They could not suddenly run downstairs, as there were classified documents scattered all over the desks and cabinet tops. There was a great crash, while they were still making their papers secure. The building rocked and all the lights went out. Abra remembered a flashlight and fumbled it out of a drawer and they made their way with other stumbling and joking workers down to the shelter in the basement. “The phones are out too,” someone making his way downstairs by the flare of his Zippo was complaining. The steps were slippery with fallen plaster. By the time they reached the basement, the auxiliary generator was up and working and the lights came on dimly.
Oscar found a seat on a pile of barrels and pulled her up. He leaned over to sniff them suspiciously. “For all I know the SO boys could be storing gunpowder here.”
The lights went out again. Everyone groaned. Someone made loud kissing noises and somebody else was whistling “When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World.”
“Last night I dined with some of our British colleagues,” Oscar said. “I wish I could have brought you along, not only for company but for the food. They don’t live badly. Salmon and plover. It felt inappropriate to eat a plover, whatever that is. I wouldn’t even know one if I met one.”
“They’re mostly shorebirds,” Abra said. “Although there are upland plovers. I wouldn’t think they’d make a meal.”
“They served several. Were you a bird-watcher once?”
“Had a boyfriend who was. It’s inevitable to learn a little.”
“What have you learned from me?”
Too much, she thought. “To keep my mouth shut.” She winced against him as another bomb landed close by. The trouble was she could not tell the difference in sound between the big antiaircraft guns in the park launching their rockets at the planes and the sound of the bombs coming down. She clutched at him. He held her close to his chest, until the lights came on. Then he held her more circumspectly, an arm around her shoulders.
“After all,” he said in her ear, “there’s no use being frightened. You should wince whenever you hear a car engine. Your odds of being struck by a car are much higher than of dying in a direct hit by a bomb.” His own pulse was steady.
She realized she had been wrong. It wasn’t better with him. Oh, it was an improvement to keep an eye on him and know he was safe, but she could not display her fear. If only the bombs would be less noisy. She could not think, could not find a clear silent place inside her skull to collect herself,
to hide from the loud disasters that rattled her bones. She found her mouth fallen open, panting. She felt like an instrument the bombs were playing and she could not escape.
Fear was so tedious, so incredibly tedious. She knew that her fear of the bombs made the raid stretch out to eternity. She anticipated from moment to moment the shock, the blast, the flames, the concussion. It was as if she lived every moment three times over. Oh, she was bored with her fear, but that did not lessen its grip on her bowels. Once again she had to apologize her way stepping over the people sprawled on the floor and look for a bathroom. Please can I be excused from the war: bombing gives me diarrhea. She saw before her an endless series of air raids to be endured in silent asphyxiating terror with her bowels turned to cold churning liquid, her heart racing, her palms clammy. It was worse here, much louder than in the subway. Dust filled the air and objects kept toppling.
She must not let Oscar despise her. She must conceal her fear and manage conversation, when with every bomb that fell she wanted more and more to start screaming, to cover her eyes, her ears and crouch in embryo position and pray to the bombs not to hurt her.
“Something I ate,” she said to Oscar, who was chatting with Wilhelm and blunt stalwart Sergeant Farrell. “I’m fine now.”
“Wonder what Goering has in mind, wasting his bombers on London?” Wilhelm mused.
The man who answered, lounging nearby, was a tall beefy blond major not in their section. “I suppose they must have busywork while waiting for us to invade. He’s stripped the Balkans and the Eastern Front of what air power they can peel off. What are they going to do while we keep them waiting? But they don’t have the pilots they had in forty.” He spoke in an affected drawl, the halfway-to-British accent many rich Americans adopted.
She recognized him. He had been the roommate of that young American she had picked up in the OSS pub one night when she was pissed at Oscar. The major had struck her then and struck her now as vain, arrogant, the type of her richer cousins.
She did not feel a great urge to remind him where he had seen her, although he nodded a vague greeting in her direction. That young man could have been her twin, both of them used to getting what they wanted from others with a modest display of charm. She had never bothered telling Oscar about the night, because it would not make him jealous. What would be the point of cheapening her fidelity that had not been diminished by that act? The dismal revelation of that evening was how little pleasure she could now abstract from the sexual adventures that had been her forte. That young man had been a more than competent lover, experienced, attuned to a woman’s responses, yet the pleasure had meant little. She had not been able to escape the feeling of being in the wrong place with the wrong person.
The egoistic major had been in Italy with SO; he had been in Yugoslavia and seen Tito’s army in action. He pronounced on all subjects oracularly but with an undertone of amusement, as if he was playing at arrogance. He was too much like her cousins to attract or interest her, and she stayed back in the shadows, waiting for Oscar to finish with him.
She was annoyed with Oscar because he felt no fear during the raids, and ashamed before him because she did. She was not accustomed to fear. She had learned to ride, been thrown and hopped back on before her injuries healed. She had been in a car crash with a drunken boyfriend and made jokes about her black eye and her broken wrist and the tooth that had to be capped. She had been sailing since she was old enough to grasp a rope, out in rough weather, and loved the rising wind and the scudding foam and even the heavy lurch of a ship the waves were pounding. She had listened to music in Harlem and danced in bars her friends were frightened to enter. She had marched in demonstrations with the police breaking heads and throwing tear gas grenades into the crowd, and never thought of missing a May Day because of the danger.
She was ashamed of herself, yet she thought that the vast majority of humans were of the same mind during air raids. In the shelters no matter how cheerful or stolid people tried to sound, she could smell their fear. She resented having to lie to Oscar. Why wasn’t he afraid? Did he lack imagination? That night she worked up the nerve to ask him.
He was lying on his back, arm cocked behind his head, other arm still around her. They had just made love at length. “To be buried alive would be a crying shame. But to die at once in blast, not bad as dying goes, and there’s plenty of it around. It’s not that I don’t have enough to live for. But in some ways I have fucked up my life.” With that he turned on his side and went to sleep or pretended to.
DANIEL 6
Under the Weeping Willow Tree
Daniel was back on early watch, rising in the morning and getting home at a reasonable time, periods of crisis aside. Due to the heart attack of a commander who had worked in a little cubicle, Daniel had a new job. Also a new rank. He had been promoted to lieutenant commander. He did not suppose this was so much because of the excellence of his work, as because the job had previously been done by a commander. Therefore it could not be done by a lieutenant. The Navy thought that way, and no doubt, his promotion had followed as the day the night, or as the indigestion the overeating. So he told Louise as they celebrated over crabs.
His boss had told him privately and in a serious tone that he should remember that in the Navy, there was no advance to a grade higher than captain without sea experience. His boss sounded somber, depressed. He was talking about himself, obviously; they were rooted firmly in Washington and in OP-20-G. To Daniel, for whom a promotion was a pleasantry, a little more pay and a couple more privileges seldom exercisable at OP-20-G, the Navy’s intransigence meant little; but for the career men, much.
Spring was sneaking up on Washington, the loveliest time. Sometimes he felt it was the only attractive season, in between the sleety winter and the steam-room of the summer. After New England, fall was a disappointment. But spring was early, lush and flowery. Dogs were already copulating near the reflecting pool. The soldiers at attention had a dreamy look. Daffodils bloomed. Secretaries brought their lunches outside to eat while the fat squirrels begged. He had heard rumors that during the meat shortage, local people had been trapping them.
Suddenly women emerged from their winter huddle willowy in pastel flowered dresses. Pale aqua, pink and robin’s egg blue suits, unlikely hats under silk flowers or ceramic cherries bloomed on the sidewalks and in the restaurants. What would spring be without falling in love? Ann was seeing somebody else, although he did not know who. Then he saw her at lunch, her face animated with the urge to please, staring across the table at a translator who had been a professor at Berkeley and who had a wife and family back in California. He tried, tardily, to have an avuncular conversation with her at lunch next day, but only made her angry. He had not realized he had done so, until she rose and left him at the cafeteria table alone.
Once he had mastered his new duties, Daniel promised himself he would be free to pursue Louise. He had not been in just this state of aroused infatuation since the first two weeks with Ann. It was a good spring tonic. It actually gave him increased energy to devote to his new situation, for the infatuation was not yet real enough to interfere. It was simply there, hidden away like the bottle of whiskey one of his superiors kept in his desk drawer, ready when Daniel needed distraction or relaxation to be tasted. He had so much to learn and master that he was once again infatuated with work also. He felt at the height of his powers, fully committed and alert and engaged.
One reason he had been selected, he was sure, was because of his previous liaison work with William Friedman at the Army counterpart of OP-20-G. Now Daniel was no longer decoding, but rather going over masses of information that came in from other cryptanalytical sources for items of interest to the Navy, routing them where they must go.
When he had been in the process of being vetted for the job, his mother had called him. “Danny, what is it? Are you in some kind of trouble? The FBI, they come around to ask a lot of questions about you. I didn’t tell them about Seymour.”
“Just so you’re happy,” his mother said plaintively. “When are you coming home?”
He sighed, closing his eyes and then opening them abruptly because he saw too vividly the discontented round face of his mother. They would make him feel guilty about not coming home often, when if they were truthful, they would admit his presence was an irritant. His sister with her baby meshed with his parents. Haskel was their pride. Both his sister and his older brother came and went in the gloomy family apartment in the Bronx weekly, almost daily. He arrived, claiming to be their son, but not belonging, not interested in the gossip about Haskel’s patients or the local cousins or the latest exploits of Judy’s baby.
He could not explain to his mother what he was doing, nor did she press him. She never did. He had sailed off the edge of the family charts when he went to Harvard to study Japanese for the Navy. They lived by choice in a closet world, frightened by anything strange.
He himself was addicted to novelty, and the amount he had to learn in his new job only stimulated him. He relished an occasional encounter with Friedman, who was now presiding over an intelligence factory in Arlington, Virginia. Friedman looked thinner, balder but just as dapper and just as precise. He complained of the amount of administration he was stuck with. In addition to the Purple diplomatic codes, his office was handling the highly complex decodes of the Japanese army.
The winner of the most valuable Purple player trophy continued to be the Baron Oshima, Tokyo’s representative to Berlin, who had just come through with a detailed report on his tour of the Atlantic Wall. He analyzed the German command in France, reported on the number of divisions, when they would be rotated and described the defenses. Contributions to the Allied effort on the part of Lieutenant Colonel Nishi, Japanese army attaché in Berlin, were running a close second, Friedman remarked. He looked over the German defenses with a professional soldier’s eye, reviewing critically the placement of the artillery, the interesting use of the machine-gun emplacements to achieve interweaving cross fire. He analyzed the differing intensity of the defenses at various points on the coast of France.