by Marge Piercy
If I could give them my blood to drink, I would do it without a word.
ABRA 3
Such a Roomy Closet
“Shall we take a walk?” Oscar Kahan said, as if it were a usual request. “It’s such a beautiful day. As it were.” He added the last comment with a grin because the day was hot and soggy, the sort of day when Abra remembered summers in Maine with nostalgia. Staying in New York in the heat felt sometimes as if it were masochism.
She followed him, imagining herself a character in a comic strip, a Daisy Mae with a huge question mark floating over her head in a balloon. Never before had Oscar Kahan asked her to take a walk. She had discovered herself fantasizing about him lately, and had been toying with the idea of abandoning her policy of never becoming sexually involved at work. Her policy, after all, was based on caution rather than morality. What was the use, anyhow, of throwing her own code over, when Oscar Kahan treated her with the same unfailing but nigh universal warmth he spread over all of his students? She was aware she had taken lately to arranging herself in positions designed to emphasize the line of her calf, her profile, her bosom, but if Oscar Kahan noticed, he did not act upon what he observed. Until now.
They left his office and headed westward, toward the river. As they strolled, he questioned her about recent interviews and commented on others, impressing her as always with his grasp of the large pattern and the small detail. Maybe he simply wanted some fresh air, although she did not think there was any to be had nearer than Connecticut. Perhaps the warm weather made him restless. Perhaps having grown up in Pittsburgh, he was accustomed to smog, and actually found the stinking air of Manhattan in summer bracing.
In Riverside Park, he took a bench somewhat isolated from the others, with a view of ships in the river and a couple embracing on the grass. He glanced around, taking in the scene, and then gave her a hard appraising look. “I won’t be teaching in the fall.”
There goes my job, she thought. “Where are you going, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Have you considered getting more involved in the war effort?”
He’s managed to enlist, I bet. “I thought about the WAVES—the Navy’s my family’s branch of service—but I can’t imagine myself marching around saluting. I’m too much of a spoiled brat for military discipline.”
“Yet you take orders.”
“You know that’s not the same thing.”
He stared intently at the tug maneuvering a stolid grey freighter upriver. “I’m planning to recruit you. But not for the WAVES.”
She glanced sharply at him. He smiled. “Don’t look so shocked. It doesn’t become you. You know perfectly well you’ve been involved in intelligence work. You figured that out long ago. Now I’m officially joining OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. I’d like to take you with me.”
Finally there it was in the open. “What is OSS?”
“A bit of everything, actually. Propaganda, intelligence, spying. I know mostly Research and Analysis people.”
“Where would we be going?”
“For the moment, noplace but into another office. Later on, who knows? I don’t want to discuss details before you make up your mind. I’ll be running a little project and I have carte blanche to bring as much of my staff with me as I choose.”
“Of course!” Abra said. “Of course I’ll do it.”
“You don’t even know what you’re getting into.”
“Oh, but I’m sure it will be interesting. I have confidence in you.”
“Did you ever finish up your degree?”
“Not exactly. I completed my class work and passed my orals, but I’m still rewriting my dissertation to Professor Blumenthal’s criticisms.”
“You’ll have to put it aside for the duration.”
“I’m not thrilled with rewriting it for the fourth time. Does it matter that I don’t have my doctorate?”
“I doubt it.” He stood. “This is all silly, because there’s so little I can tell you before I take you there, and yet you have to decide first. I hope you aren’t being romantic about this.”
Did he suspect her of a crush? Perhaps she’d been a little too obvious with her leg show. “In what way?”
“It isn’t a matter of cloak-and-dagger intrigues, beautiful spies and dashing heroes, just academic analysis. We’ll be trying to make sense out of vast quantities of information, and the work may often be more statistical than stimulating.”
“I trust your judgment that it’s important. I think you have your political priorities straight, and I hope I do.”
“We have a little trip to make to an office in Rockefeller Plaza that need not otherwise concern you. Sign you on, start the process.” He offered her his arm off the bench with rare courtliness. “It’s time I became more involved. The slowness of entry was driving me crazy,” he said with a flash of anger suppressed. “Now we’ll get moving.”
In July, Ready appeared after months of absence. He had just been commissioned a lieutenant commander and was expecting to be assigned to a carrier. In the morning he was scheduled to head home by train.
Her favorite brother looked older, she thought, his skin leathery and seamed, nets of new wrinkles around his dark blue eyes, his hair even blonder than hers. He was in a good, antic mood. When she suggested various friends, he wanted all of them. After Italian food, which Ready always craved, in a local Village dive Abra favored because even before the war there had never been any pictures of Mussolini displayed, they were joined by Djika, Karen Sue and Karen Sue’s new roommate, Eveline, a second cousin on her mother’s side from Beaufort, North Carolina, married to an ensign on a convoy escort destroyer. Karen Sue viewed sharing her apartment as her foremost sacrifice to the war effort.
After they had drunk their way through a couple of Village spots, they went uptown to the Onyx Club and then the Famous Door, listening to swing and dancing till two in the morning. “Sweet Georgia Brown,” Abra sang and did the lindy with her brother. Watching Karen Sue and Ready dance cheek to cheek to “That Old Black Magic” in the smoky ill-lit room, the mobbed floor, she suddenly imagined what it would feel like to be in love with someone and send him off to war. Falling in love was something that happened to other women, never to her, and while so far in her life she had viewed herself as able to enjoy men because she was not obsessed with them individually, now she wondered if she were incapable and if she would always avoid what others seemed passionately to seek.
Eveline was dancing with a lieutenant whom Ready had invited to their table. Karen Sue and Ready were doing a sleek flirtatious lindy. “In the Mood” was loud, the brass section standing to blare out their anthem, but Djika’s low incisive voice came through clearly from her position at Abra’s elbow. “Seeing you with this brother, one begins to understand the basis of your aversion to men of your own appearance and background.”
“But Ready’s my favorite brother. We’ve always been close.”
“Quite so.” Djika nodded, as if she were saying, Mate in two moves. “In fact you even look exceptionally like. You naturally found him attractive when you were growing up, so in fear at the incest lurking, you seek out men who could not possibly be part of your family.”
“Ah, the dubious joys of Freud,” Abra punned. “Prove you were in love with your father at age four, and what do you have? The same set of current problems. I certainly hope I had the good taste to lust after Ready when I was little, instead of my hideously dull brother Roger or father.”
Djika told her for the thirtieth time that ignoring Freud made her naive, but Abra was sure her taste in men was motivated by curiosity, hunger, zest for life, a passion for experience far more than by the incest taboo Djika postulated. At the moment all such considerations were theoretical, as she was too busy for more than an occasional night with an old flame, and her curiosity about Oscar Kahan remained unsated.
During that dance something was exchanged, because Ready muttered to Abra as he came back to the table that h
e was going to spend what remained of the night with Karen Sue. The next day he told her Karen Sue made him pretend to sleep on the couch until Eveline had gone to bed. He presumed that was the southern way, but pronounced Karen Sue a woman and a half. Then Abra put him on the train north to Maine.
That Wednesday, Djika, Karen Sue, Eveline and Abra sat sharing a chicken fricassee cooked by Karen Sue’s housekeeper, wine punch and honeydew melon, with their shoes off and the windows pushed high and two fans turned on them. Stanley Beaupere had gone off to the Jersey shore with his wife and children on vacation, leaving Djika to fume in the city.
The sun was setting over New Jersey and the grey ships gathered in the river. “Every evening they collect there,” Karen Sue said dreamily. “In the morning they’re all gone. It’s got to be symbolic of something, the ships that vanish during the night.”
“Out on Cape Hatteras, you wouldn’t believe the mayhem,” Eveline said, shaking her curls. “The beach is just dotted with wreckage and oily bodies.”
“I heard you were offered an assistantship in the fall by Blumenthal and you turned it down, Abra.” Djika fixed a stern gaze on her. “What’s wrong with you? If we weren’t at war, you’d wait forty years for such a chance.”
“I’m working full time at a government information office.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just researching and writing pamphlets.”
“What kind?” Djika asked.
Abra pulled out of her shoulder bag a pamphlet entitled Potatoes for Patriotism. She handed it over to Djika, knowing exactly what her friend would read:
By eating potatoes instead of wheat, the people of the United States can help win the war. We have not enough wheat for the Allies and ourselves. We have an abundance of potatoes. Wheat flour is a concentrated food and therefore good for shipping; potatoes are bulky and consequently not suited for limited shipping space.…
The introduction was followed by pages of simple recipes. After potatoes baked, stuffed, boiled, steamed, riced, mashed, in cakes or puffs or pies or soup or salad or codfish balls, the more desperate offerings ensued: Potato loaf with ground peanuts and canned tomatoes. Mashed potatoes as substitute for bread crumbs in fish or meat loaf. Fish and potato loaf. Fish hash with cold mashed potatoes. Potato biscuits. Potato dumplings. Potato muffins. Potato pastry. Potato drop cookies. And then the finale, potato cake.
It was Abra’s experience that no curiosity about her new job survived exposure to the potato pamphlet. Amused, Oscar had sent on a memo about her ingenuity. Each of the women in turn examined the pamphlet and looked at her with a mixture of pity and dismay. The subject immediately changed.
Aside from Djika, who still dwelt in mangled fidelity in the shadow of Stanley Beaupere’s apparently well-built marriage, they were all lacking the companionship of men. Their male peers were disappearing from campus. At Columbia, the space between the buildings and under the trees that had always been social territory was turned now into parade grounds for midshipmen under military discipline and far too young for them. The usual pattern of their social lives was to spend most evenings not taken up by work or volunteering with their female friends. Then when some former boyfriend or acquaintance appeared on leave, the women dropped everything, stayed out till dawn and caught up on sleep after the hectic weekend.
“Abra, come on here for one little minute.” Karen Sue was beckoning to her. “I have something I want to see if it fits you, child.”
What Karen Sue wanted to fit on her was a promise she would not tell Ready that Karen Sue had been married. “It wasn’t a real marriage, after all. I mean, nothing happened hardly, and an annulled marriage is one that never really was.”
Abra groaned. “But, Karen Sue, Ready doesn’t think you were a virgin, right?”
“What he thinks in that regard need not concern us right now, Abra, and as surely as you’re my true friend, I don’t want you to discuss matters pertaining to my past life, which you don’t know the real truth about anyhow, and therefore such talk can only cause trouble. Loose lips sink ships.”
Abra went home grumpy. She did not like being forced to choose between telling a truth to Ready that might or might not interest him, and displeasing Karen Sue, whom she truly liked. Damn Karen Sue, did she have designs on becoming Abra’s sister-in-law? She couldn’t quite picture it, but she wondered if Karen Sue could not, with a gold frame.
If she had told her friends exactly what she was doing, they would have been as puzzled as they were bored by the potato pamphlet. At the moment Oscar and she appeared to be in the old clothes business. They were still collecting oral histories of recent immigrants, especially those whose previous addresses or places of birth had military or industrial significance. They were also collecting wrist-watches, pens, razors, wallets, luggage, underwear, overcoats, shirts. They paid for everything and had a faintly plausible explanation: they were investigating the state of the German economy, and the workmanship and metals in a watch, or the type of cloth in a suit, could provide useful information. It was all bundled off to a warehouse in Washington, where this scavenged material was to outfit agents who would eventually be dropped behind enemy lines.
The information they collected, the reminiscences, also went off to Washington. The agent who had been carrying out this collection of information and rummage sale fodder before them had been transferred to London, where presumably he was engaged in something more to Oscar’s liking. Every week Oscar took the train to Washington, not only to deliver the week’s limp prizes, but to try to finagle or politick them into proper research and analysis work. The R & A division of OSS Washington, Oscar muttered, was rife with brilliant minds. They had to get posted to Washington.
Oscar was eating himself up. They worked long hours, attempting to do the best job they could, six, often seven days a week, but Oscar was marking time. He had not left Columbia to collect old clothes and was inclined to credit academic rivalries with what he saw as the waste of his talents. It was during his increasing frustration that he told her to call him Oscar, and indeed began to complain to her familiarly as to a wife or mistress. Abra, who was still finding the tales of the refugees fascinating, suffered less impatience. New York was her home, as it was Oscar’s. Although she was resigned to a move to Washington, she was not chafing to be there.
She amused herself with watching the formality between them gradually abrade under the pressures he generated. She was Abra, he was Oscar. They ate lunch together at the deli downstairs on Madison Avenue, or she went out and brought back sandwiches. The day Oscar interviewed a Communist who had been in the merchant marine and so ready with details on German shipping that a whole dossier on him would go to OSS Washington, he took her to supper at a Spanish restaurant on Fourteenth Street. There the waiter seemed to know him and the manager came over and left a plate of tidbits as a present from the house, to nibble with their amontillado.
Oscar expanded with the food and the wine. Not that he became even slightly tipsy, he simply relaxed, and for him to relax meant to lay claim to her attention, to charm, to open up the personal as he had been careful never to do in the nine months of their proper relationship.
“There were four of us,” he was saying. “I’m the oldest. My brother Ben came next, and he’s still in Pittsburgh, in the dry cleaning business. Then the two girls, Bessie, who’s married to a dentist and big as both of us put together, a wonderful warm mother with five kids. Then my younger sister, Gloria.” He frowned at his plate of seafood.
“What is she doing?”
“I wish I knew. She’s in Paris.”
“Still? Why didn’t she leave before the war started?”
“The war started there two years before it started here, remember. She’s married to a minor French aristocrat, and she’s a fashion writer. Her business is what the French couturiers put out. I don’t think it occurred to her that the war had any bearing on her life. And I don’t know if it really does.” He rubbed his nose as if
to polish it, frowning slightly.
“Do they have any children?”
“No, by agreement. He’s a good deal older, and he has children by a previous marriage who stand to inherit.”
“If he’s rich and aristocratic, he must be in a good position to protect her, wouldn’t you think?”
“I hope so. It’s hard not hearing anything. We’ve always kept in touch, all of us. I’ll go to Pittsburgh in September for the High Holidays, to my mother. Gloria used to come over every two years, and I’d see her in Paris.” He tilted his head, pouring more of the coarse red wine. “What’s your family like? Are you close?”
She had the sense as the dinner progressed that this was a place he had brought other women, and that part of the more personal tone of their evening was not calculation or decision on his part, but simply the fulfilling of an already established and comfortable pattern. She was amused. She suspected that both he and she were so accustomed to sitting across the table from lovers that each automatically brought that habit of warmth to the present table. Yet she was not marking time as so often she was when men talked about themselves, for her curiosity about Oscar had been honed by months of impersonal but energetic interaction.
She was pleased to tell him about Ready, about Roger, about her background, exotic to him as his was to her. He came from a family that seemed to have had little money to spare, but in which his education had come first. Perhaps the middle children had been sacrificed a bit, or perhaps they had simply lacked his brilliance or ambition. Then with Gloria, times had been easier and the others settled, so that everything that could be provided, was, and she sallied forth a beauty to conquer the world.
Yet the connections between each of them, dentist’s wife, dry cleaning manager, academic and chic lady, seemed to hold in avid concern for each other. She caught spicy whiffs of emotion off that family, of tangled loves and hatreds and raised voices and tearful phone calls in the night. Yet Oscar seemed quite sure of his position, the oldest, the dearest, the distant center. His mother was alive and figured in his life. His father had died of a heart attack three years before. His mother, who must retain the family handsomeness, was considering marrying again, and all of the siblings except the exiled Gloria were passionately intriguing to further or prevent that marriage to a widower.