The Rebellion of Yale Marratt

by Robert H. Rimmer

  Anne walked slowly through the lobby, watching the crowds of army officers, wondering which of them would be on the plane with her. They were so young and yet looked so important. Several of them stared at her as she passed. Out near the hotel's deserted swimming pool she sat in a beach chair and hoped that no one would follow her. She didn't feel able to fend off the glib approach that some of these young lieutenants had acquired. In a few minutes of conversation they had you sized up as a possible bed companion. Some had the idea that the Red Cross girls were provided, courtesy of Uncle Sam, for just one thing. Enlisted men were easier to handle. Most of them seemed just glad to have a girl to talk with.

  She remembered her conversation with Mr. Gisler, the field director to whom she reported. "I want to go overseas," she had said. "I didn't join the Red Cross just to run an enlisted man's club in the States."

  "What's your hurry, Anne? You've got a good spot here in Miami. A lot of the girls would give their right arm to get stationed here." Mr. Gisler was good-hearted. He tried to figure out why each girl was in the Red Cross. Then he adopted the attitude of father-confessor. He knew about her husband. Dead on Guadalcanal after less than sixteen months a soldier. He had been killed six months after Anne had joined the Red Cross. Her promise to follow him wherever he went in the army could never be kept. Once she knew of Ricky's death, she had no longer tried to get assigned in the Pacific theater. It didn't matter where she went -- just so long as she kept moving. She had been certain of one thing. She hated Miami with its melting pot of soldiers, sailors and civilians living as if there were no war. Living as if their own pursuit of immediate pleasure was all that mattered. She kept working on Mr. Gisler for reassignment. Last week he had called her into his office.

  "Well, you asked for it! You are assigned to the Assam Valley. To one of the dirty little bases set up by the Army to ferry pipe into the China end of the Burma Road." He looked at her grimly. "A lot of these fellows have been over there for three years."

  What you mean is they haven't seen any white girls."

  Mr. Gisler had been embarrassed He started to give her the routine advice. How she should conduct herself. How to maintain the Red Cross distance, and yet give the soldiers all the feeling of companionship that they might get from any girl in the States. To stay away as much as possible from the officers. The officers had nurses. Red Cross clubs were for the enlisted men. In a few seconds Mr. Gisler managed to cover every admonition she had received since joining the Red Cross.

  "A smile means so much," Mr. Gisler had said, smiling himself and showing a decayed tooth. "You are a very lovely woman, Mrs. Wilson. You'll have to . . . well, you know what I mean."

  Anne knew what he meant. When she walked up to a group of them and said, "Hi, boys," their mouths would open and they would grin foolishly. Someone would remark, "Gosh, the Red Cross is coming up in the world! Where did they get you?"

  She had heard them say, "Have you seen that blonde dish with the deep blue eyes? Brother what a shape." Or, "Boy, would I like to get into that." Or, "What a pair of tits, yum, yum." And she had smiled. Not from conceit, but amusement. The difficulty was keeping out of their grasp. For every one that looked and admired, there were two that wanted to grab or touch. They acted like disappointed children when she gently repulsed them.

  She accepted it as a fact that men were attracted to her. It meant nothing. The one man who had counted was dead. Maybe there would be another man, but she would never lose the memory of her first and only love.

  You grow up with a boy, she thought. A rough and tumble, tously haired kid who was always going on expeditions in the woods to examine trees, to collect leaves and plants. You wander along with him, carrying his precious collections, helping him catch all kinds of strange bugs and insects, and pretty soon you care for him so much that you begin to lose your own identity and you're in love though you're only ten years old and don't know what love is.

  Maybe you do know. Maybe you do. You begin to share his thoughts. Boy thoughts. And you love his excitement with life as he calls you, "Fancy! Fancy. Look at this spider! Watch him. Isn't he wonderful?" And you know somehow he is different from the other kids. He's only twelve but he lives in a wonderland of birds and flowers and insects, and he shares his secrets and his knowledge with you.

  She remembered going to Ricky's house. How Mr. Wilson accepted her easily and talked with Ricky and her, like grown-ups about the wonders of life. "Right in your own back yard," he had said, "are entire worlds pursuing their destiny; unaware of human beings. Underfoot in the insects you crush, in the grass you walk over, is all the unsolved mystery of life and living."

  Sitting in Mr. Wilson's den, cluttered with books and specimens, she and Ricky spent many afternoons while his gentle father explained to them the wonderful world of flora and fauna. Afterwards, Ricky would talk with her while she looked at him wide-eyed, not fully understanding, but feeling a wonderful urge to hug him and tell him how much she cared for him.

  It was you, Ricky, every step of the way. It had been really a marriage from childhood through college. When he finished high school Ricky went to Western Reserve. He was there when she arrived. He, a glamorous junior. She a freshman.

  He guided her in her courses. "Don't go too far in biology," he advised her. "Take some, but branch out into something else. Maybe psychology or sociology. I don't think a man and wife should have identical interests. Do you?" He looked at her seriously. She must have had a question on her face. "Fancy, Fancy, you are going to marry me some day? I suppose I haven't been very romantic or anything, but I've always thought of life with you in it. You're my religion, Fancy. A man can't go very far in the world without that."

  I cried, she thought. I loved you so much, I cried. There are some emotions too big to hold onto. You have to release them. That's what I'm doing now, Ricky. Trying to release all the pent-up love that is in me by helping. It isn't much, she thought. I mother the kids. Talk to them about their home, their girl friends, their wives. I hand them a cup of coffee, light them a cigarette, and see the tears behind their eyes. You don't know what loneliness is until you see them and have the same loneliness in your heart. Sure, they whistle at me, but they're whistling in the dark of their own unhappiness. It's a kind of curtain they pull between themselves and the past. On one side is a tough what-the-hell attitude, on the other -- the side they keep to themselves -- is home and whatever it may mean.

  You can't think when you're lonely. Not coherently. You just feel. You feel the night, moon-pale and the sky black. You feel the smell of Miami Bay. The lonesome, dead smell that the tide leaves behind. It reminds you of other bays and other tides, and all you know is that you are lonely. Tears are at the corners of your eyes. You wonder what loneliness consists of, and you know that it is an aching of the mind that throbs through your body as though part of you had been torn away.

  For long minutes the moon would disappear, Miami Bay would be black. Then, as the cloud disappeared, islands across the bay would reappear; skylighted dragons creeping toward the ocean. Bent, wind-weary, palms shivered in the light breeze, their fronds restless. The music of a popular song and the thrashing discords of the orchestra seemed remote and cleansed out here. Lonely, too, and ephemeral.

  We were married once, Ricky. I guess we're married still, she thought, in a funny sort of way. I could be in there dancing, she thought. I could be. I could be home. It's Christmas Eve back home, and there's snow on the ground. Heaps of it. She had seen pictures of it in the Miami papers. They deprecated it as if to say, "Aren't you glad you're here? Aren't you glad you're warm while those poor people have to suffer the cold?"

  She had been walking down Lincoln Road wishing she was cold when she saw those pictures. Her body ached with the feel, the long vanished feel of her husband. She remembered how his cheeks would be cold and red. How she would press her face against them. How she enjoyed standing on tip-toe as she reached up to meet his embrace.

  She would drop her fur
coat in a heap on the sofa, and kiss him and muss his hair; talking all the while in the excited eager chatter of a schoolgirl. "Rick, we're going to have steak tonight. I splurged. And I made ice-cream too, with fresh strawberries. Well, frozen. I love you! You look so cute with your hair mussed. May Thomas is going to have a baby! What do you think of that? Don't you think we should get started? I made rolls, too. Aren't I a good wife?"

  Back. Back somewhere in the confusion called time. Back when I wasn't sitting here in Miami waiting for my name to be called over a public address system . . . we were married, Ricky.

  Remember our first dance at Western Reserve? I had on a lacy white evening gown that showed the tops of my breasts. I heard one of the fellows -- probably Willy Anderson -- remark, "Wow what a pair of boobs." You were angry. Willy didn't mean anything. I probably should have worn a less revealing dress. You seemed to really belong to me that night. Your eyes kissed me when I looked at you. It was all kind of silly and adolescent, I suppose. You touched my breasts. You put your face against them, in the car. It seemed as if I were protecting you against something. I held onto your hand, as if the only reality were you.

  I've always been afraid, Anne thought. Once I was afraid I would die before I accomplished all the things I had planned. I remember myself at Western Reserve. Those were the days when all the boys argued hotly that they'd be god-damned if they would ever fight in a foreign war. They would go to jail first. I went to America-First rallies with Ricky and I applauded Gerald P. Nye and Charles Lindbergh. I knew that Ricky wouldn't fight. Yet the fear was there. The everlasting fear that he would have to go to war . . . wanting to or not . . . understanding or not. I knew in my heart that America's college days were ending. America was graduating. Life was real. Free will as you planned it was not the graduation gift.

  It's strange, she thought, what a change in values had occurred in just three or four years. There had been books on their shelf at home that were meaningless. She could remember when she and Ricky had discussed Steinbeck or Richard Wright, or Erskine Caldwell. It all seemed so important, then. So terrible that such outrages against human decency could exist in the United States of America. Richard Wilson would set some of these things right, and Anne would help. These things shouldn't happen here. Then the war came, and what could be encompassed by the mind . . . poor whites here, or unfortunate Negroes there, or persecuted Jews, or vile capitalists . . . could no longer be grasped. It was beyond the power of one man to correlate the evil in the world and crusade against it. Tragedy on so vast a scale was incomprehensible. You lived with it and you ignored it. You substituted a flippant fatalism for the philosopher's dream called free will.

  Some day the smaller struggles would emerge but to what extent would her generation care? What would these soldiers do afterwards?

  How did you really know that you were Anne Wilson? People said you were. They addressed you as if you were the same "I" who had graduated from the Red Cross school, the same "I" who majored in sociology at Western Reserve and graduated cum laude while Mom and Dad sat somewhere in the audience, beaming and proud. To them you were the same "I" who was born Anne Meredith, May 11, 1919. The baby girl who made them so happy. But were you the same "I"? -- the same "I" who had married Richard Wilson who now was dead?

  The "I's" were not the same. They were hundreds of separate "I's." If you wished you could call them Anne Wilson but they weren't the same people, simply friends who met once in a while in your mind. Friends to whom you nodded in passing.

  The "I" was wind-tossed by ceaseless experience coming too rapidly for assimilation and comprehension. Some things stood out here and there. It was like Marcel Proust's cup of tea. A smell, a touch, a feeling could bring memory crowding painfully to the foreground of consciousness as if the "I" sought to re-establish itself, to reassert that it really existed. But Proust was wrong, she thought. Memory doesn't come back in a flood bringing a whole life with it. It comes back in isolated snatches without meaning, and without desiring it.

  The moldy smell of the bay at low tide was an old smell. She had breathed it before when she and Ricky had taken their one vacation on Cape Cod. It was an odor of time gone by. She fought it, feeling that the mystery of this dank, cold smell was something she shouldn't probe too deeply.

  That summer they had been driving along the road between Provincetown and Hyannis. Why they had gone to Provincetown she couldn't remember. Not everything comes back; gestures and feelings, yes . . . not reasons. Perhaps, they had found a movie somewhere up that way. She and Ricky were always going to movies.

  It was odd, she thought, even then we couldn't stop going. It was a madness. A warning, presaging the events to come, this endless going; this urge to escape from something. The clouds that were gathering around us were too large to drive away from or even fly away from, but we all kept hopefully moving. The strong ones will have to stop some day, she thought, and face it. Face the paucity of our own souls in the light of day, and answer the probing questions.

  She tried to recall the evening. The memory was thin, wafted in on a smell of tide from Miami Bay; eager to vanish. It had been a cold summer night, with a heavy fog. She remembered the windshield of their car was clouded over with precipitation. The windshield wipers fluttered back and forth. An easterly wind blew in between the door and frame of the car. The cold breeze swept along the floorboard. Her left leg had seemed frozen.

  "Aren't you ever going to fix that door?" Anne had asked. She had shivered and tried to pull her coat down farther over her knees. She remembered he didn't answer.

  "Did you hear me, Richard Wilson?" she demanded.

  "Sure."

  "Well?"

  "Do you do everything I ask you? Did you clean the kitchen closet so that I can find a wrench if I wanted it without having clothespins and bottles fall down on my head?"

  "Ricky, do you always have to answer me by asking another question? If you don't hurry up and fix this door, I won't ride in the car any longer."

  They drove home in silence, Anne pretending to be angry. It was a simple recollection, yet meaningless, extracted from the past that was. Those few weeks on the Cape had been their only sample of normal civilian living.

  The wind blew lightly across Miami Bay. Again the tide smell filled her mind. She and Ricky had stood on the front porch of the cottage they had rented on the Cape. Anne puttered through her handbag looking for the key to the front door. In the dim light from the street lamp across the street he had watched her. She knew that he was exasperated.

  She kept turning things over in her pocketbook, afraid to admit she couldn't find the key. "Anne, you are so unsystematic," Ricky had said. "Right now I'll bet your pocketbook is jammed with letters I wrote you two weeks ago plus hair pins, lipstick, cosmetic, pencil, pens, that rabbit's foot, five or six mirrors, a small flashlight, handkerchief, change purse and the whole bottom scattered with loose change and paid and unpaid bills." He looked at her crossly. "Why don't you admit it? You haven't got the key!"

  "No, I haven't," she had snapped, "and don't look so peeved. It's somewhere. The people who rented us this cottage will have another. Besides we can go in the bedroom window." She walked down the front steps and around to the side of the cottage.

  He followed her, shivering. He looked at the window and wondered aloud if it was unlocked. "If this is summer on the Cape you can have it."

  "Are you going to stop talking and boost me up?" Anne's voice got shrill when she was angry.

  He grabbed her around the waist. "Sometimes you sound more like a fishwife than Mrs. Richard Wilson." He shoved her toward the window.

  She fussed with the window while he supported her. Finally she slid it up. She started to wiggle through. He slid his hand up her calf and grabbed her crotch.

  "You goosed me!" she screamed. She catapulted through the window. He heard the crash of a skidding chair, and then silence.

  "Anne? Anne! Are you all right?"

  She hadn't answered.
<
br />   "Anne!"

  She heard him hoisting himself into the window. Heard him as he fumbled in the blackness of the room. He saw her on the floor motionless. Saw she might have hit her head on the footboard of the bed. He stumbled around in the darkness, frightened, saying he hadn't meant to hurt her. She kept very quiet. He picked her up and put her on the bed . . . worried . . . saying softly, "Anne, Anne, I'm sorry. I love you." Finding her lips, he had kissed her, and then she bit him.

  "You ape!" She laughed. "That'll teach you not to go around goosing women. Not even your wife!"

  Why remember that in the thousands of experiences she and Ricky had shared? And if it had to be remembered why, she wondered, should I remember it as I would a dream? A dream where you watch as if from some concealment like a god, things happen to you.

  Only last night she had had a similar dream. She was at some winter resort. Ricky was there. Dad and Mom and Mr. Wilson. They had two toboggans. They were all about to go down a long, snow-covered mountain. Ricky had pointed the course they should take. Mr. Wilson had disagreed with him, pointing to a course that travelled along the knife ridge of the mountain. You'll fall off the edge, you'll get killed, Anne dreamed. It was a gradual slope on the side they could see. But Anne, the dreamer, the motivator, knew it was a precipitous drop on the far side. If the toboggans rose too high on the slope they would drop over. They all would be killed. No one agreed with her. Angrily she took one of the toboggans. She plunged down the mountain herself. The perspective changed. She was at the bottom looking up. She had made the descent safely. She saw them coming and then her semi-consciousness split three ways. She was lying in her toboggan watching them come. She was watching herself watching them come. They banked along the top of the hill. She was Will . She willed them to crash over. Then the Anne, lying at the bottom of the hill, rebelled. She tried to revoke the will of the other Anne. But it was too late. She had awakened with the crash of that toboggan in her mind.