Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “I know you were working on breaking the code. I saw all those lists.”

  “I can’t do it. All I can figure out is a word or two. Sometimes I get furious at her, frustrated, because I can read it right up to the point where they leave Paris and go down to Toulouse, and she starts taking the children through the mountains. Then it becomes just nonsense, pages and pages of craziness where half the words make sense and the other half are just stuck in, like, I saw Daniela chair the red book outside the city.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “She was scared she’d be captured and the Nazis would read her journal and learn too much.”

  “You sound as if you feel very close to her.”

  “How can you feel close to a dead person? Everybody in my family is dead. Why did they make me live if they were all going to die?”

  “They could only save one. Why not you? You’re very precious.”

  “She used to hate us—the twins. Then she got all sentimental about us when she was underground. She even started calling us by our Jewish names, Naomi, Rivka. She forgot what we were really like—brats.”

  Ruthie hugged her cousin, who stood unresponsive, staring off: her cousin who was four inches taller than she was and at least as full-figured suddenly, startlingly. “You’re a very special person, a sweet and good and smart young woman, Naomi. Your parents would be proud of you, your mother, your father, your sister too.”

  “Ha!” Naomi pulled sullenly away. “They’d hate me!” She started walking fast toward the car. “I want to drive now. It’s my turn.”

  On August 14, Morris came home from the factory at eleven in the morning, saying that the plant had closed to celebrate the end of the war. Rose was in the yard washing clothes with a scrubbing board and a brush. His work clothes were boiling in soapy water on the stove. She yanked off her soaked apron, although her faded cotton dress under it was just as wet across her full belly. Ruthie threw down the want ads to hurry after them into the street. A car passed honking its horn, the windows open and guys leaning out. “The war’s over! The war’s over!” Ta ta ta turn went the horn.

  Sandy Rosenthal came running down the steps of the front house. “Is it true? Is it real this time?”

  Everybody milled around. Ruthie felt as if she were going to fly apart. People were leaning out their windows shouting to each other. Around the end of the block came the sound of a drum. A ragged procession of neighborhood kids paraded down the sidewalk and then into the street, wagons, bikes, tricycles, a scooter, two dogs, one with a flag in his collar, a baby buggy decked with bunting. In the buggy was a struggling tabby stuffed into a baby dress. The children were blowing horns, banging on pot lids and trash can covers.

  Everybody was kissing and hugging. Bells were ringing in the Polish Catholic church and in the African Methodist church nearby. A siren began to wail and from the through streets came a rising cacophony of honking and tooting. Detroit was preparing to party, from one end to the other. Everybody who could stand upright was getting ready to take to the streets.

  Ruthie hugged Sharon. Then she ran off to Fenniman’s bakery to fetch Naomi. She wanted to sing and dance, she wanted to run through the streets with everybody else. The end of dying, the end of killing, was that not a true holiday under the sun? A new world, the United Nations Morris kept talking about. Freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from persecution.

  Right after Labor Day, Ruthie was hired by Aid to Dependent Children, which was undergoing a great expansion of caseload as women were being laid off or pushed into poorly paid jobs. She was hired to start the following Monday, and she did. Murray wrote he had high points and should be among the first marines home. Then the last week in September a wire came from San Francisco. He would be on a train arriving 7:54 Tuesday evening and she should come and meet him along with his parents.

  Ruthie dreaded calling Murray’s parents. None of her early fantasies that they would treat her as their daughter-in-law-to-be had worked out. She waited a day, sure he had wired them also, but no call came. She had to call them.

  “They don’t know how to act,” Rose pronounced, folding her arms across her breasts. She shook her head. “German Jews are more Germans than Jews, even after this war I tell you that. They are born with rulers stuck up their behind.”

  Ruthie picked up the phone, put down the phone, picked up the phone, put it down. She could not continue being cowardly. She dialed, praying they were not home. His mother answered, a woman who had never told her to call her anything but Mrs. Feldstein. “This is Ruthie.”

  “Ruthie?” Mrs. Feldstein repeated dubiously, as if she knew either too many Ruthies to guess which one, or none at all, and could not possibly be expected to know any.

  “Ruthie Siegal,” she said dryly. “Murray sent me a telegram to meet the train with you tomorrow.”

  “Oh. We had thought we would only be family at such a moment. We weren’t planning to make it a social occasion.”

  “Mrs. Feldstein, whether you like me or not, Murray asked me to be there, and I’ll be there.” Ruthie quietly but firmly put the phone down. She sat there, tense with anger and humiliation. Her postwar life was getting off to a splendid start. The first thing she had done to celebrate Murray’s homecoming was to tell off his mother.

  She did not even know if she wanted to see him that quickly. Who was he anyhow? A stranger in a uniform who had spent time with her when they were both much younger, a man who had seduced her in a parked Dodge on Belle Isle in summer 1942. He had sent her photographs of himself, the most recent in his uniform by a little Japanese teahouse with a Japanese woman on either side in kimonos. She had frowned at that picture, on the back of which he had written, Me with two guides. Guides?

  That whole next day, she suffered about what to wear. She had time only to go home on the trolley, eat quickly and change even faster. The good wishes of her family were ringing in her ears as she maneuvered the car she had borrowed for the evening out of its tight place at the curb and drove carefully to the station, her hands wet and clammy on the wheel. She had considered wearing the pink dress of that evening, but it seemed pitiful and out of place. Finally she had selected a maroon dress she had bought for work, tailored and with the new longer hemline. She thought she looked almost sophisticated. That to his mother.

  The station was hung with banners welcoming the troops. As she was worming her way through the crowd, the gate to a track opened and a mass of people stampeded toward a departing train. She was carried along helplessly to the gate to the platform, which stood partially ajar. There she managed to pry herself out of the mob and cling to a bar until they swept past her. She was bruised and queasy. She wondered if Murray had neglected to tell his parents he had asked her to come to the station—perhaps his own feelings were ambivalent. In letters to his mother, had he expressed doubts about her? Finally she arrived at the right gate, but the train was late, expected at eight-fifteen.

  In the press, she did not even see his parents until nine o’clock, when the gate finally opened and the first travelers began to pour through, a mix of servicemen with bags over their shoulders, families and the usual business travelers. As the first friends and relatives glimpsed the voyagers they were awaiting, they shrieked and ran forward. Then she saw his father, whose hair was now more grey than brown, with his mother just behind bobbing back and forth to crane at the discharging passengers.

  Finally she saw him, tan and fit but with an expression that she would not have called a Murray look, borne along in the procession with a dazed, sleepy, glazed-over face. He looked handsomer than she remembered, as if a subcutaneous layer of fat had burned off, paring his face to more mature, tauter lines, but he looked also … less alive? He must be exhausted.

  She was still staring at him when his mother rushed forward to embrace him, followed by his father. His parents looked so pallid, so flabby and beige next to him, they might have been his grandparents. It was typical of the lack of connection b
etween his parents and her that at Thanksgiving, she realized, she had not even considered calling Murray’s family for a bird. She was still watching, unable or unwilling to move, when Murray’s gaze brushed across her, then instantly jarred back.

  She came forward then, buffeted by the crowd, but before she had taken four steps he had surged forward to grab her. When he kissed her, he tasted of tobacco. It was like being kissed hard by a stranger. She found herself weeping, and the rest of the evening was played out in short bursts of confusion.

  On Friday she went to work as usual and Murray slept all day, so it was not until the next evening that they saw each other alone. He arrived at six-thirty with his parents’ old Dodge. The sight of it gave her flutters of misgiving. He took her out to Chinese. The restaurant where they had eaten when they had been dating was still open, with the same old woman at the cash register nodding them in, another willowy teenager waiting tables.

  Murray seemed alert, jumpy even. As soon as they took a booth, he lit a cigarette.

  “You smoke now.”

  “Didn’t I used to?” He was staring down, his mouth tight. He had nothing to say until their orders were taken and finally the wonton soup arrived. “Wasn’t that your old boyfriend Leib I saw on the porch?”

  “He’s married to Trudi and living upstairs with his wife and two children. He lost a foot in Italy.”

  “That’s cosy. Your old boyfriend upstairs.”

  She felt icy. “No, it isn’t cosy. It’s rather nasty, but nobody would listen to me. Sharon couldn’t keep the upstairs place on her allotment check, and Arty didn’t want her to work. Murray, I wrote you all this.”

  “I don’t remember.” He passed his hand over his forehead, as if he were sweating heavily.

  “Murray, I don’t like Leib. One time he caught me alone in the house and he made a pass at me—”

  “Oh? Did you fuck him?”

  She winced at his tone and language. “No. Why would I? Or because I gave in to you, do you think I’m a whore?”

  “What happened?” He had a habit of turning his head partly away from her when she spoke, evasive, frightening.

  “Nothing happened, except bad words. And I have to be careful all the time in my own home so I’m never alone with him. You understand with seven people living in our apartment, that isn’t difficult. My whole last year in school, I could hardly study at home. Now I’m afraid he’s after Naomi.”

  “Naomi? That little French kid?”

  “You haven’t seen her. She’s not little and she doesn’t sound French anymore, although the kids still call her Frenchie.”

  “Working in the factory, you were surrounded by guys.”

  “Working on the line, I was surrounded by noise. Murray, during most of the time you’ve been gone, I have been working six days a week, going to school full time and doing my sleeping Sundays. If you don’t feel like picking up things again, that’s your choice, but don’t invent excuses. I haven’t had time for another guy, and if I’d had the time, I wasn’t interested. Whatever your family may say, as if they ever saw me, I’ve been faithful one hundred percent. Maybe it’s yourself you’re talking about?”

  He looked up and into her eyes. “I believe you. It’s a nightmare, living in an all-male world where women are just what they have between their legs. You start believing anything. There’s something in you, Ruthie, I almost forgot, that’s a center. Everything else swirls around it, but there it is, something I can rest on.”

  He began to talk compulsively about Jack who had gone home to his wife, a certain Schlomo. He did not try to get her to make love, but brought her home when the restaurant closed, leaving a huge tip for tying up the table. He told her he had trouble hearing in his left ear, which is why he kept turning his head.

  The next day he brought her presents: a fine pale green kimono with chrysanthemum blossoms, a heavier silk in dark maroon, a sake set, two fans, lacquerware, a serving bowl with cranes embossed. Then he told her to pack a picnic lunch and took her out into the country. He had a blanket that he carried into the woods. When she saw that, she knew they would make love. She was afraid. She hardly knew what she felt, because the quiet room of her mind felt as overcrowded as the train station had been. She did not know if she felt love or if she felt fear.

  The first time was as painful as the very first time had been, but by the next afternoon, it was easier. “It’s the middle of October. How long can we go on outside? And the car is like making it in a phone booth. Do you realize we’ve never had a damned bed to ourselves?” Murray was dressed again, propped against a tree smoking. The taste of the tobacco disgusted her. Either she would have to start, or she would have to get him to stop. With a deep sigh, she asked him for a cigarette.

  He was quarreling with his parents by the end of the week. She understood; they wanted the son who had left. He alternated between fierce ambition (Wayne would not do at all, a streetcar school. Perhaps he would go to Ann Arbor) and being unable to organize himself to go down to the government office to get in the 52-20 club, as returning soldiers called unemployment. Every night he called Jack or Jack called him. Schlomo called in the middle of the night, drunk, and woke Murray’s parents.

  Schlomo was not Schlomo but Slo Mo and Italian, dark skinned, lightly but strongly built. He turned up at Murray’s doorstep. His parents had called him a drunkard and he had left home after two weeks. He couldn’t live in Akron anymore, he said. He thought he’d look for a job in Detroit, where his pal was. As far as Ruthie could tell, he did not look for any job. Instead Murray and Slo Mo rented a tiny apartment farther downtown, in an area mostly colored. Murray said he liked it because it had a bedroom door that shut. Within a few days, it stank. Beer bottles piled up, chicken and pork bones from local rib joint takeout, newspapers.

  Ruthie was in despair. She felt as if Murray had turned into a pile of unwashed laundry. She hated to go back with him to his filthy apartment and climb into the bed, while Slo Mo listened to loud music on the radio right outside the door. All he seemed to want to do was eat trayf, drink beer, make love and sleep. He slept half the day. Finally she asked him to take a walk with her and talk to her, seriously.

  “Murray, I can’t go on like this. I love you, but I don’t know what you want. I can’t go on sleeping with you, the way we are. I feel guilty about it. I hate going to your apartment. It’s filthy. I want to help you get yourself together, but I don’t know if that’s what you want.”

  He was silent a long time, his hands knotted at his sides. “I didn’t think it would be like this. On the ship, it all seemed so clear.”

  “I can’t help you if we don’t want the same things.”

  “Let’s get married. Tomorrow.”

  “We can’t get married tomorrow. We have to have a license. We have to get a rabbi.”

  He shrugged. “If you want a rabbi, sure. I guess if you get married at the courthouse, they talk about God down there too. Let’s get it moving.”

  She seized him by the arms and turned him to face her. “But is that what you want?”

  “I want you. I know that much. Yes, it’s what I want. If Jack was here, we’d be okay, but he’s with his wife. He’s having troubles too, but he’s doing better than me and Slo Mo. I need to be married. Jack keeps telling me that, and he knows me.”

  Jack might know this Murray, but she did not. However, if he was her duty to make whole again, then it became her to get started on it. As he kissed her, she clung to him. They would get married and she would work and he would go to school. There he would find himself again as a Jew, as a man, as a scholar, as a thinking being. She would start sending away for applications tomorrow, order his transcript from Wayne, get his papers in order.

  She read in desperate search for information, late at night when everybody else was asleep, at breakfast, at lunch, on the trolley, everything she could about returning servicemen and their problems. Articles said it was her responsibility to make good. He had suffered. The woma
n must submit, but she must be maternal. She must be strong but conceal her strength, she must be sweet and giving and think only of him, and he would heal. Murray would again be Murray. That was her real task. All the articles talked about how she must be entirely feminine. Freud was suddenly being quoted with approval in even the popular women’s magazines.

  They were married the second week of November, just after Ruthie found a four-room apartment on Dexter Boulevard, far from the two-man slum Slo Mo and Murray had created. Slo Mo’s mother was calling him up every day, so that Ruthie hoped he would soon get tired of waiting around Detroit and go back to Akron. Dexter Boulevard was lined with brick apartment houses that had always seemed to her the height of middle-class comfort. With the good money she was earning and Murray’s unemployment, they could carry it easily. Suddenly she was a different person, Mrs. Feldstein. At work she had to fill out tax forms and they made up another nameplate for her, as if she had just been hired. She sent away for a new driver’s license.

  Murray liked the apartment, but it wasn’t his dream. He was beginning to remember his ideas. They bought a bedroom set, very modern. They felt proud of it, with a Hollywood oak bedboard and matching dressers, his and hers. Their other purchase was a Formica table for the kitchen with chrome chairs. Murray wanted everything modern, nothing fussy. He was taking an interest in the furniture. From Trudi he borrowed books of house plans.

  Ruthie was resigned to saving Murray first, and then bringing up the subject of Naomi. For the moment while Naomi was in high school and they were getting settled in their apartment, she could stay put with Rose and Morris. When Murray looked at his house plans and sketched houses, she mentally included a room for Naomi.

  They had been married for two weeks when Murray began to talk after they got into bed, about Saipan, about a Sergeant Hickock, about Jack, about Tiny and Harvey, about Rostrovitz who had cut up her picture, about Okinawa. Gradually she began to understand what he was telling her.

  Finally she said, holding his heavy head against her breast, “You had a right! You did what you had to. Nobody else needs to know.”