by Marge Piercy
Louise had been pleased that she could offer this benign educational experience to her daughter. She had gone to night school herself and never managed to get her degree. She had hoped that Kay might attend Wellesley or Radcliffe, but Kay wanted a small college town.
It was not that Kay was less critical of her, as now poking her English muffin. “But why don’t we have butter? Other people get it all the time. What’s the use of being so thick with the government and all the time running off to Washington, if we can’t do a little better with rationing?”
No, Kay was just as critical as before, but obviously enjoyed absorbing Louise’s time and energy. In truth Louise sometimes enjoyed her daughter’s company, but often did not. Kay was self-absorbed, and her conversation never strayed far from what she wanted or did not want, liked or did not like, what she thought this one or that one thought about her, or might do to or for her. Louise liked a greater degree of intellectual content and a higher degree of abstraction in discourse. Nonetheless, she gave and gave to Kay, aware that Kay would be leaving home in September and aware too how her sexual misadventures had left her even more insecure than she had been.
Louise was still in her bathrobe when Kay left for school. Glancing at the clock, she hastened to bathe and dress. With Oscar home, she would never have appeared at breakfast in deshabille. When the phone rang at ten to nine, she was sure it was Blanche with a problem. With her twins in school, Blanche worked from nine to three. But the voice that queried, “Louise?” was Oscar’s familiar rumble.
“Oh, hello, Oscar,” she said, seeking as always an appropriate tone to use with him, neither artifically chilly nor encouraging. “How are you? Are you calling from Washington?”
“I’m at Grand Central Station in a booth. I’m off to London—”
“Can you tell me when, or is that a military secret?”
“I’m in New York for the next eight hours. I thought I’d come right up.”
She felt a cold panic. “Where is Abra, by the way?”
“Visiting her family.” He cleared his throat. “I thought I’d come by now and see you.”
“Oh, not right now, Oscar, I have an appointment.” She lied in a panic. She had not prepared herself to meet him. She could not face him at once, without armoring her nervous system.
“Oh.” He allowed himself to sound disappointed, forlorn. “An important appointment?”
“Professional.” After all, he was off to the war zone. She could not refuse to see him. “Kay just left for school. I’ll try to reach her.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t call her out of school.”
“I’ll meet you for lunch.” She was not going to let him come to the apartment. “Twelve. That Spanish place you like?”
“Let’s eat uptown. I haven’t had decent Chinese in ages. What about the Harbin Inn?”
“Fine,” she said. “Then we can meet Kay at school.”
She really had considerable work. She had been writing less fiction and more journalism. Her present state of mind was better suited to the latter. That had been her original ambition, and the war was giving her an opening. She could exploit her name to write features on all aspects of women’s work and lives.
She was off in two weeks to zigzag around the country for a piece on women fliers for Collier’s. In the meantime, she owed The Saturday Evening Post a story, and she had to finish a rewrite on a Times magazine feature on children of working mothers. She had been quarreling with her editor, as he wanted something far more negative than she felt the material warranted. Psychologists she had interviewed had been gloomy and prognosticated doom for children not supervised by their mothers all of the time for all of their childhood, but her own observations of good nurseries and her interviews with families had persuaded her that children who spent their days with other children in a well-run center were probably more advanced socially and emotionally than children on whom their mother squatted all day, a brooding hen. As she had.
She arrived at lunch ten minutes late, from having changed her clothes three times. Oscar was already in a booth looking at his watch. After they had ordered and brought each other somewhat up to date, she said, “I’m sorry Abra couldn’t be here. I enjoyed meeting her.”
“I’m sure you’re sorry. You relish gloating over me. I wouldn’t be with her, if you had come back to me.”
“Oscar! Come back? I wasn’t aware I’d gone anyplace.”
She had liked Abra but mainly she had pitied her. What Abra had in abundance was energy, a vitality that shimmered, a bright liveliness not sufficient to protect her against Oscar. She was obviously crazy about him. For a decade he had been dealing with young people as a teacher, and he was very much in control. It was all too easy for him. He deserved more trouble than Abra was about to give him.
“And you? Are you still having your Frenchman for main man?”
“Enough of this, Oscar. Let’s talk about something interesting. Your OSS almost folded its tents, didn’t it? You have a powerful enemy in General Strong. The head of military intelligence is a dangerous foe.”
“That’s mainly the problem of the cloak and dagger boys. We make our own way. Research and Analysis gives to the other branches, but we receive little. We churn out our reports and everybody clamors for them.”
“Do you think now that you’ve tasted life in the power center, you’ll ever settle back down to teaching? Nothing more exciting than delivering a paper that may cause discussion in a learned journal?”
“I like teaching. I like working on my own stuff. I like New York better than Washington, with everything that implies. They want to put me in uniform,” he said glumly.
“They’re drafting you? At your age?”
“I’m afraid they mean to give me a commission. I’m resisting. I hate uniforms. I don’t want to salute anybody.” As she opened her mouth, he added quickly, “Or have anybody salute me.”
“You’re accustomed to more intimate adulation,” she grinned at him, a little alarmed at how much she was enjoying the lunch. “I hope you manage to stay uncommissioned.… What would they make you?”
“A captain.” He grimaced. “Maybe you’d like me as a captain?”
“Only of a tugboat. I always dreamed of a tugboat captain.”
“Couldn’t very well have a wife in every port at that job, could I?”
“One on Staten Island, maybe.”
“I never wanted but one wife,” he said darkly.
“At a time? One wife, one mistress and one in the wings. Is there more duck?”
“We’ve finished it.” He was frowning into space. “Another of my good students was killed in Tunisia.”
“Did I know him?”
He shook his head. “Just a skinny bright nineteen-year-old.”
“I keep thinking about that Polish labor leader who committed suicide in London, Samuel Zygielbojm, because he’d been trying to persuade the Allies to do something to stop the killing in the camps, and he was told that was simply not an Allied priority. He killed himself so that the papers would have to talk about the massacre of Jews. To protest the indifference of the American and British governments. Sometimes I think about taking that staff job at OWI they keep pushing, to have some influence.”
“Propaganda’s a powerful tool. Maybe you should.” He fixed her with a knowing smile. “But you won’t like Washington. It’s full of old boys.”
She sighed. “Shall I tell you something I’ve been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.”
“What are you working on?”
She described the piece, the interviews and then The Times’s insistence that she tone down her positive response to working women. “Even in the midst of the government’s effort to recruit women into factories, even in the midst of small businesses closing because they can’t get help, I find peo
ple scared that everything will fall apart if women have any independence, any choice. That women will run wild in the streets.”
“If women demand jobs, there’s a real fear that there will be unemployment for men. If women want money, who’s to pay? Those who have. It’s the same fear that gripped the nobles when the peasants revolted. Who will till the crops if we don’t tie these people forcefully to the land? Maybe as men, we suspect women wouldn’t bother with us if they didn’t have to. Maybe we don’t know what makes you stay with us when you stay, so we don’t know why you might not pick up at any moment and go. Then when you’ve left, we never really know why.”
“Bullshit. A man usually does think he knows what keeps a woman with him. He may be wrong. He may think it’s love, when it’s financial security, he may think it’s sex, when it’s fear of loneliness, but I’m sure every man thinks his woman has good reason for sticking with him.”
“Louise,” he began meaningfully, when she glanced at her watch, saying, “Get the check, or we’ll be late meeting Kay.”
What she most hated about Oscar was that he had not valued their marriage enough to preserve it. She felt still a harsh cold anger at that thought, as if he had taken something precious, something irreplaceable, the beautiful but daily used Ming bowl of their marriage and carelessly let it fall to the floor and crack irrevocably apart.
Why had he not seen that having fifteen years of common history was precious and could not be replaced? A decade and a half of common politics, growing knowledge, error and success, a decade and a half of passionate conversation. She loved discussions with him as obviously he did with her, but it had meant so little to him that he had let it all go with a carelessness for which she would always feel contempt.
They met Kay on time and the afternoon passed swiftly and then Oscar was gone in a taxi, to London, to the war, and Louise was left to wish she could get thoroughly drunk.
Traveling was full of delays. She might be bumped from any plane at any time and left to sit in the drafty cold waiting room of an airport for the rest of the night. After hours in a DC-3, her bones felt jarred loose. Her head ached from the noise. The inadequate pressurization meant piercing headaches. Trains were crowded to the point of nausea, dirty, late, without the barest amenities, people even jammed traveling in the bathrooms.
In Texas she visited Cochran’s Convent, as some referred to Avenger Field, the only all-female air base. She liked the women and their spirit, and she enjoyed the graduating ceremonies. Now, a month later, she was following up on some graduates, to see what had become of the skills learned at Avenger and how they were aiding the war effort. General Hap Arnold needed many more female pilots, so she was to promote the effort. There was talk of a film, but for the moment, she was producing a Collier’s piece.
She flew to Detroit, then was taken to Romulus Field, in an industrial suburb. There she met a group of WASP ferry pilots from the class she had watched graduate. She sat with them in their mess: Flo, the redhead who had barnstormed before the war; Helen the lady, daughter of a newspaper publisher; Lorraine, whose father was a commercial pilot; and Bernice, a big intelligent woman whom all the others seemed to depend on to get them through hard times. She was a tall rawboned woman, articulate in the accent of New England, a professor’s daughter.
Bernice was reluctant to act as spokeswoman, constantly glancing at the others for approval of what she said. She was a woman, Louise thought, who had not realized yet she was a natural leader and that others turned to her. She had low self-esteem, perhaps because she was not conventionally pretty—or even unconventionally pretty, Louise admitted to herself.
Yet Bernice moved confidently, with evident strength and with a natural grace that was more animal than human—the grace of a horse or a lioness. She had soft straight brown hair she kept short, a pert nose, a warm smile. Her hands and feet were in balance with her body but large for a woman. Except when she was doing something mechanical, Bernice tended to keep still, her hands folded as if to keep them out of sight. What wounds were inflicted on women who did not meet society’s standards of prettiness.
The Army had granted special permission for Louise to accompany the pilots as they ferried planes. She had a photographer at Romulus for an afternoon, who interrupted everything with his insistence on posing the women in unlikely positions on random planes, complaining about their tan gabardine pants and white shirts as nondescript. He wanted uniforms.
“Gee, so do we,” Flo said.
“If they’d put us in uniform, it would make life easier,” Bernice said gently. “Oftentimes people don’t know who we are. We have trouble with the military at some fields. We have such an in-between status.”
She accompanied Bernice in the backseat of a training aircraft to an air base in Tennessee. It was not a comfortable journey, and she decided that once was quite enough to get a feel for the difficulties. At dark, Bernice landed at a field in Ohio. Then they hitchhiked into town to try to find lodging, ending up in a sleazy rooming house, where the bathroom down the hall smelled of men who had pissed in the dark and missed. Everyone treated them with the utmost suspicion, as if they were traveling whores. At dawn they were back at the tiny airport ready to take off for the final leg of the delivery.
“You have no military status—no privileges, no protection, no insurance,” Louise pointed out. “Don’t you feel as if you’re being taken advantage of, because you’re women?”
Bernice looked at her without comprehension. “But it’s wonderful. It’s heaven,” she said, as they sat in a hot airless room at the field in Tennessee, waiting for a ride into town so they could take a bus toward civilization.
“Heaven?” Louise repeated. She looked around at the bleak room. Bernice expected to travel all night back toward Detroit. Louise was accompanying her as far as Nashville, from which she was returning to New York. She felt as if she hadn’t bathed in a week. The food at Romulus had been plentiful, if not inspired, but they had been living on chili and hot dogs since. She disliked peeing through a funnel into a soda bottle. When Bernice finally reached Romulus, she would start out again with another small plane to deliver and then the endless trek back. The women ferry pilots were not allowed to thumb rides on military aircraft.
“Almost every day we fly,” Bernice said simply. “There’s always a plane waiting. And we arrive on time. We don’t get lost. We deliver the planes safely. Please tell people that: We’re good at what we do. And we fly—all of the time, we fly!”
JEFF 5
Friends Best Know How to Wound
“It’s nothing but bitchy impatience. Why go off into France by yourself?”
“I’m not going by myself. I’ll have a radio operator.”
“Don’t give me technical answers. It’s an absurd choice. You’re an SO man. Why are you switching to SI?” As deeply angry as Zach was, he spoke plaintively rather than aggressively, his head hanging over a chair arm.
“I think I’m better suited to intelligence than to action. Besides, I’m sick of London.”
“You’re sick of me.”
“Zach, don’t be an egomaniac. You aren’t London. We’ll work together again.”
“Do you have any rudimentary idea, you idiot, how many agents have been lost in France just this year?” Zach sat up to glare, his eyes glittering and bloodshot. “The Gestapo is eating them up entire, whole chains of agents. They penetrate with ease. I don’t think the British have one intact ring in Paris.”
“But I’m not being sent to Paris. If in fact they ever do get it together to send me anyplace. This is a highly theoretical discussion.”
“Why are you doing this?” Zach was more agitated than Jeff had ever seen him. He was coldly furious and worried at once.
Jeff felt flattered, but far more strongly he felt the urge that had been growing in him to get into France, into the war, into another set of problems; he also felt defensive, because it was Zach he was trying to escape. “London depresses me.”
“At the moment, it probably would.”
“Does London depress you, or do I depress you?”
“Zach, not everything in my life is you. Being here reminds me of Mary—”
“That milkmaid. You only fuss over her because she’s in forty fragments and you can’t have her. Otherwise you’d be bored by now. You’ve never stuck to a woman longer than six months without being bored out of your skull. You no sooner tumble into bed with someone than you want to seduce him, her into loving you. You like that love, you eat it like bonbons, but then it grows passé. Adoration is so predictable. You’ve always wanted to lose someone—”
“I’ve lost people before. My mother, for one.”
“Think you wouldn’t have broken Mummy’s heart too?”
“I doubt it. She was a tough cookie. She had many interests.”
“As do we all. You’re just bored because you had a little social scene going with those bearded frauds, and now it’s dissipated. You can’t play at being an artist in London.”
“I wasn’t playing.”
“Ruins in the rain. Really, my dear! Don’t you find that a wee bit too sentimental and rather done? It doesn’t matter that they aren’t crumbling Roman walls. It’s the same genre brought up to date. Fuzzy walls in the luminescent rain. Yawn.”
Jeff found himself on his feet bearing down on Zach, who lay in an easy chair with his long legs over the far arm. He realized as he stopped himself just over Zach that he had been about to smash his friend right in the face. Zach was intentionally provoking him, but he would not play. He did not want the scene of them pummeling each other. The idea disgusted him. Instead he turned on his heel and strode out, slamming the door.
What Zach had said about his painting made him furious. It was bad enough to be an unfashionable landscape painter in 1943, but to be accused of sentimentality or romanticism was unbearable. Did Zach really think so little of his work? He might never again be sure. Zach had wanted to hurt him and had succeeded. He wished sharply for Mary, as he had almost on the hour since he had returned. He wished for his previous life in London, for the woman and the circle of friends now scattered. He could hardly remember her face, although sometimes he fancied he heard her voice. She was vanishing into his frustration. Yes, he was tired of hanging around after Zach. Zach had his own ends to pursue, but they were not Jeff’s.