Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  OP-20-G could not take the time off to join in the mass orgy that shook Washington, because they had to monitor the communications to and from the Japanese troops. It was not certain that all commanders or all kamikaze pilots would obey the emperor. Indeed some flew to commit ritual suicide with their planes. An attempted military coup in Tokyo failed.

  It was a time of too rapid decompression. Daniel wished he could join the excited people who stormed the White House fence and snake-danced on the grounds. Ann went into mourning and would not speak to anyone, for she had just had a telegram. When her father was released from camp and returned to his home, he was beaten to death by a mob. Ann submitted her resignation. Daniel went to the aunt’s house, but Ann was gone, her aunt would not say where. He wondered if she had fled to her Japanese relatives, whenever they had gone from camp.

  He got an infuriating letter from Louise. It contained not one word of love, not a word of plans for them together, but instead it presented him with a big fat problem.

  Dearest Daniel,

  Conditions in the refugee camps are dreadful. Generally the Americans vastly prefer the Germans, who after all are clean, tidy, efficient and wonderful at running things, including camps. In some cases, they have put the same guards back in charge, or others like them. On the other hand, they find the slave laborers and concentration camp inmates dirty, odd-looking, sick, disgusting and apt to whine. When they talk about Jewish DPs infiltrating Germany and Austria, they sound just like the Nazis.

  Now, this is very important. I have located your aunt, Esther Balaban. She is only thirty-one, although she looks years older at the moment. Still, with a little flesh on her bones and the color coming back in her hair, she is looking better every day. She is an amazing woman, with immense powers of endurance—obviously, for she survived two years of Auschwitz and a year before that in the Lodz ghetto.

  Esther wants to come to the United States. Her husband, your uncle, was killed in the ghetto, shot down in the street. Her children were gassed at Auschwitz. She alone has survived from your family in Kozienice. This woman does not belong behind barbed wire. I am enclosing a brief letter from her. She is learning English rapidly. Either you yourself or your parents should immediately write to her and begin the process of sponsoring her to enter.

  The enabling legislation is …

  Who the hell had asked Louise to go looking for obscure relatives? He groaned with vexation. He had a powerful urge to tear the letter into forty pieces, but he did not want to feel that guilty. That evening, he called his parents. He explained that Louise was a war correspondent he had met in Washington. He felt distant from her. His father remembered Esther only as a neighbor’s child, but responded at once. “Eli’s wife,” he kept saying, “Eli’s wife wants to come to us. How did he die? And the children? All dead? All the children dead?” His father would take over the process, obviously. Daniel wrote a brief note to Louise to that effect, wondering why she was still in Europe instead of returning swiftly as she had promised, hoping that she would read the words of his note as coldly as he intended them.

  Abra was on her way back to the States. She had to decide whether to continue on to Japan with the reconstituted bombing survey. OP-20-G would be reduced to a minor operation soon. Those proficient in Japanese were invited to interview for the bombing survey in Japan. Daniel signed up.

  Since he was eighteen, it had been in his mind to return to China when he could, and he had never quite abandoned that goal. By now, however, his Japanese was far better than his Chinese. The civil war in China appeared to be heating up, which could make travel difficult. In any event, Tokyo was a lot closer to Shanghai than Washington was.

  His fellow workers gossiped over plans. Some decoders and translators went off to Colorado to study Russian. What they were training for was clear, but Daniel was not interested. Although he had proved to be an able cryptanalyst, he did not want to spend the rest of his life doing things he could mention to no one. No, the Japanese language was the route he was going to choose. There would be a desperate need for Americans who spoke, read and wrote Japanese. He suspected he had a career, although what it would be remained a mystery.

  Perhaps he would end up in his uncle’s soap business in Shanghai. Perhaps he would be the company representative in Japan. Perhaps he would work with the government of the Occupation. He would go along with the bombing survey and improvise his way from there. It should all prove fascinating.

  As he went out to National to meet Abra’s plane, he wondered where she figured in his plans. The night before he had dreamed about her. They had been walking and came to a hut, where they had immediately taken off their clothes and melted into bed. But when he lay over her, she had become Ann.

  Did he fear disappointment? He had cared strongly for only one woman, Louise. As his correspondence with Abra had been growing longer and meatier, his letters to and from Louise had been trailing off. She had sent only a postcard in response to his last cold letter, from Exeter in England, saying that she expected to be heading back to the States next week. Probably she was in New York right now, but she had not called him. He would not forgive her.

  Certainly he had no idea what there really was between Abra and himself, other than a lot of paper and ink. Her plane taxied in for a landing and now the stairs were wheeled out and passengers began to shuffle off. He saw her climbing down. She hurried along, talking with another young woman from the DC-4. He was standing on the observation platform, but Abra did not glance up. Both women seemed exhausted, sticking together, carrying duffle bags and parcels and wearing dusty and slept-in WAC uniforms. She looked older, certainly more angular, not quite as pretty as he had remembered, but that long-legged stride, at once colty and sexy, was good as ever. The other woman was also blond, broader faced and broader in the shoulders and beam than Abra.

  He knew it would take her a while to get through the controls, so he ambled downstairs and found a bench facing the door she would have to exit. His lust was back, surprisingly. He had listened to reels of nonsense from her about Oscar, and he must not let that start again. He felt quite clearly that yes, he had been waiting for her these past months, but did she know that?

  He yawned with boredom and vexation. The room was heavy with old smoke and stank of something rancid and mechanical. Finally Abra burst through the door with the other woman, and as Daniel stood, a white-haired man in a cowboy hat and fancy tooled boots rose from a nearby bench and bellowed, “Beverly!” He made a dead run at Abra, but it was the other woman he embraced, almost knocking Abra aside.

  As a policy decision, Daniel seized Abra at the same time and kissed her, having decided while waiting to alter their relationship from the first instant. Caught off balance or off guard, she lurched against him, lay passive a moment and then kissed him back. The duffle bag fell against his leg. He did not intend to prolong a public scene, so he stood back while he was only beginning to realize that he was enormously enjoying touching her. She felt sparer than Louise, strong, wiry, but fleshy enough. He hoped, he prayed, there would be a taxi. There wasn’t, but the white-haired man with Beverly in tow caught up with them outside. “My daughter tells me you’re that Abra she kept writing us about.” Introductions all around. “Yep, I was a dollar-a-year man, helping out with their problems around here, but I’m going back. Only waiting around this stinkhole to fetch my daughter home. Can we give you a ride?”

  He had a limousine waiting. Daniel piled in beside the driver, while Abra got in back with Beverly and her father. Daniel gave his address. “My old apartment,” Abra cried out. “Of course.” He was sure she remembered it was his now, but perhaps she thought he meant to stay upstairs. Beverly was peering at him. She kept asking him questions about what he did. He gave his usual disengaging answers, dropping the fact that he might be joining the bombing survey as if it were still only a possibility.

  “That’s great,” Abra said. “I’ve just about decided to do that myself. I can’t think of anyt
hing else I’m dying to do. Look at how lush everything is. Look at all the people. Everybody’s got new clothes. Have you noticed how fat people are? Everything seems so … obscenely untouched.”

  When he got her inside, she threw herself on Louise’s couch. Her face looked suddenly blank. “I’ve been traveling for three days. For three days! My head is full of roaring, the floor is lurching under me. I have a bellyache, a headache, I’m filth and I don’t know who or where or what I am or why.”

  “I’m going to run you a bath.” He had procured a bottle of dreadful rum, which he mixed with cola to make it palatable. He put ice in from the little refrigerator Louise had finagled for the kitchen and handed it to Abra, sitting on the couch beside her while the bath filled.

  “Don’t touch me till I’ve had my bath,” she warned, laughing. “I smell like an airplane people have used badly.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I think maybe. I’m so confused I don’t even know. I must be hungry. Mustn’t I?” She shut herself into the bathroom to undress, taking her drink and her heavy duffle bag with her. Two days ago, he had removed the last vestiges of Louise’s tenure from the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen—that is the last vestiges Abra might be able to identify. That morning, he had laid in a stock of edibles. Be prepared. He made sandwiches and put out potato salad and cole slaw from the delicatessen. He stood back, surveyed his table and admired the bronze and gold chrysanthemums he had bought. His mind told him that floating chrysanthemums was the term the Japanese used for a certain type of mass kamikaze attack. He sat down in the living room and waited.

  When she came out of the bathroom wearing, not her uniform, not a fresh dress, but her old peach satin robe he remembered catching a glimpse of in the days when she had been his downstairs neighbor, he smiled with relief. Even though she was drying her hair in a towel and looking shy, standing on one foot in his living room, she would have got dressed if her intention was to keep him at bay. “My things are all so shabby,” she murmured, looking down at herself. “My hair was filthy.”

  “Everything is shabby but you yourself.” He rose and came toward her. “In Japan, we’ll get you a beautiful silk kimono the color of the blue of your eyes.” He put his hands on her shoulders and the robe slipped. “Are you very hungry? I’ve set out lunch.”

  “My hair is wet. You don’t mind?”

  “I don’t care at all.” He wondered if he should try to pick her up and carry her to the bedroom, but she was smiling and instead gave him her hand. She looked happy, relieved, a sudden shimmering of high spirits in her face that made her twice as attractive. She had not been sure of him either, he realized. She was naked under the robe and suddenly his clothes felt thick on him, suffocating. He had to tear them off, which he began to do as he stumbled beside her toward the bedroom and his bed.

  BERNICE 10

  Some Changes Made

  Bernice and Flo were living in a tiny drafty house in San Francisco, near the wharfs where local fishing boats tied up. A spur for loading freight cars ran under their window. When the wind blew from the ocean, they smelled the chocolate factory in the next block. When the wind blew from the Bay, they smelled the tomato cannery to that side. When the wind blew from the north, they smelled fish. Their neighborhood was lively, housing Chinese, returned Japanese, Italians, colored people, Mexicans and queers, mostly male but a few like themselves. The little house wasn’t cheap—nothing was.

  After the fliers began to come back from the war, Flo had been laid off. They did not belong to the 52-20 club, which was what veterans called unemployment; they got no unemployment and no benefits. Bernice still limped a little, but her broken back had healed well and she did not care about the scars so long as Flo did not care. Before they had settled in San Francisco, she had taken a boat north and bummed around coastal Alaska in male dress, exploring the possibilities. She had found the land spectacular and the economy booming, a frontier. On her return, she got a job as a secretary in the offices of a small airline. Flo worked in a cannery. Friday and Saturday nights they went to Mona’s, where they could dance together, at ease in the company of other women who were couples too. Bernice dressed butch then. She liked to. She felt as if she was handsomer in male drag than she had ever been in women’s, and besides, it established who they were. It said she wasn’t available to men, and that she had a right to Flo and could keep her.

  One weekend after Bernice helped a male couple move, she borrowed their truck and took Flo out into the country, to Yosemite. The man in the office called her mister. “Evening, mister.” Just for the hell of it, she signed them into the tourist cabin as man and wife. Then she lay in the rickety bed stewing. She had the credentials for a job, if only she were Mr. Coates and not Miss Coates, she had the experience. It would be so damned easy. Sometimes she imagined trying to pass herself off as her brother, pretending she was Jeffrey Coates.

  It was not that she felt like a man, even in male clothes. With Flo, she sensed her own female power flowing out and returning to her. She felt her mother in herself, Viola’s warm strength; she knew herself loved and gathered into female tenderness that she had missed and lacked and always, always wanted. She felt more of a woman, not less.

  Neither of them was making much, although they saved whatever they could for their big ever receding plans. She saw old dyke couples in the bar, who both reassured and worried her. They gave her hope that two women could make a viable couple, flourish in their mutual love in spite of what society told them. Unless one or the other had money, she could also see long years of bare survival ahead of them, working-class dykes in marginal jobs who could playact at power and autonomy only in Mona’s twilit world.

  Maybe it was well the WASP had not been militarized. Lately some women had been coming by who had been open about their sexual relationships all through the war in the WAC and nobody had ever bothered them. Now with peace came witch hunts. Lesbians were called in for questioning, arrested, dishonorably discharged.

  After Jeff’s body was shipped back, Bernice went home for his reburial. She wanted passionately to take Flo along, but they did not dare. Bentham Center looked a little shabbier from lack of paint, although on the edge of town little pastel cupcakes of houses were being turned out in rows of tracts where there had been farms. The Garfinkle horse pasture was surveyed and staked for houses to come.

  She slept in her old room, hung with Jeff’s paintings. A French adjutant Lev Abel had written them a kind letter in French about what a hero Jeff had been and how he had died helping to liberate France. Lev Abel said he had known Jeff personally and that he had been very brave and had many friends among the resistance fighters, who all missed him sorely. He wrote too that Jeff had spoken often of settling near Toulouse after the war, and that he was sorry that Jeff should not enjoy the fruits of victory and the good life they all hoped would come with the peace.

  Bernice had hoped that Zach would be at the reburial, but only a letter arrived. He sent condolences from Indochina. The OSS had awarded Jeff a posthumous medal. It was buried with him in the little cemetery about a third of the way up Jumpers Mountain.

  Bernice was getting to know her new stepmother, a plump sandy-haired woman with a marked German accent and pale blue eyes, who looked Bernice over and over in a way Bernice did not find comfortable. She was glad to attach herself to Mrs. Augustine, who assumed her discomfort was due to her father’s remarrying.

  “He’s going to leave her the house, he told me so.” Mrs. Augustine clucked disapprovingly.

  “I don’t want it,” Bernice said truthfully. She longed to tell Mrs. Augustine about Flo. Finally she did, after a fashion. She said, “Mrs. Augustine, I don’t think I’m ever going to marry. I don’t want to. I share a house with a wonderful woman in San Francisco. Her name is Florence. We were in the WASP together. I’d rather live with her than with any man.”

  “I can understand that,” Mrs. Augustine said. “The best of them is all wrapped up in himself an
d they all expect to be waited on hand and foot. Who does the cooking?”

  “We both do. We alternate. We know how to cook different things. Every Sunday, we eat out.” To talk of their little habits and rituals made her feel less lonely.

  Mrs. Augustine sighed. “It must be nice to come home and have somebody make supper for you, even just once.”

  She did not think Mrs. Augustine exactly understood her relationship with Flo, but in essence she understood. Bernice felt she had received a blessing from the only real friend she had in Bentham Center. The Professor asked few questions. He held forth on the returning GIs and the chance for St. Thomas to develop into a college with higher standards. He pontificated on Truman and the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Germany. His eyes mostly rested on his wife’s face. Gertrud waited on him and bustled around him. Her new stepmother made Bernice nervous, but Gertrud seemed to find her new position engrossing. On the phone, she did not identify herself as Bernice could remember Viola saying, “This is Viola Coates,” but rather, “This is Mrs. Professor Edward Coates.”

  Bernice was packing everything of hers that she still cared about, old books, pictures, Jeff’s paintings, her bicycle, to ship railroad express to San Francisco. She also took some of Jeff’s clothes, his good tweed jacket, some shirts and sweaters and flannel pants. In his old room she tried on his jacket and pants. She did not really look like him, but she looked like his brother. Nobody challenged her appropriation.