by Marge Piercy
Beverly set down her cup meaningfully, although carefully, considering Abra’s recent mishap. “All right, girl, what are you going to do? You have to make a move soon if you’re ever going to.”
Several people who had worked on the German agent project had been asked if they wanted to sign on to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Preliminary work had been going on in New York for months, but as the end of the war in Europe clearly approached, they were setting up offices in London and recruiting OSS people. Oscar had been approached also, before she was. He ruminated and said no. He was scheduled to go to Paris and then as occasion let him, to Germany. He had been processing materials from the German agents.
To Abra he said, “I have a pretty good idea what’s real with the bombing. When our agents got into the Ruhr and Berlin, they found everybody eating fine and services scarcely disrupted. They complained we had given them clothes too shabby for the norm. Okay, now the cities are being leveled, but I doubt if this survey will be allowed to talk about how ineffective strategic bombing has been. I don’t want to get involved in a whitewash.”
Now Abra sighed, thinking of Marlitt. “I’m going to tell them I’m interested.… Do you think they’ll take me without Oscar?”
“They’re taking me. I bet we’ll get to Europe finally.” Beverly stuck out her lower lip. “Now tell me, are you going to get on board or dillydally around until all the berths are filled?”
“I’m seeing them today. I really am.”
She did not believe it even after she had done it. They could not be interested in her without Oscar. What was she, except Oscar’s assistant? Then she heard informally that they were taking her. They liked her background. She felt a stiffening of pride. She could make it on her own in this world, amazingly.
When the new orders finally came down, Oscar handed them to her without a comment.
“I won’t be going with you to Paris,” she said lamely. Even at this late moment, some part of her wanted him to beg her.
He nodded. “For me it’ll be a loss, but for you, I suspect, a gain.”
“Your appraisal’s inadequate. This will be my great loss too.” Are we really parting so formally? She could not believe it. She felt like someone in a stage play. Surely the curtain would drop and they would walk off together, as they had for so long.
She sat with Beverly over a doled-out glass of the weak war beer trying to explain why the exchange had let her down. Beverly said, “But what do you want? Him on his knees? Lover come back to me. You walk out the door, his balls fall off, and he says, clutching himself, wow I never knew.”
The major who was now a lieutenant colonel passed them on his way out, a young British soldier at his heels. He paused, nodding at Abra and grunting hello with the same slightly puzzled air he always wore when he recognized her but failed to place her.
“How do you know Our Lord God Zachary Barrington Taylor?” Beverly asked, leaning forward, elbows on the tabletop.
“I spent a night with his roommate once. Who is the bastard, besides full of himself?”
“He’s a gen-you-ine hero. Popped in and out of four resistance movements. A one-man army. They worship him at SO and tell tales that would do for a Superman comic. He’s also queer as a five-leafed clover.”
She was glad that the bombing survey was set up in another building, Eisenhower’s old headquarters on the square, even though she was still within two blocks of Labor Branch. She began work there in late March, with the bulk of those recruited in the States arriving in April. She was assigned to a section studying the effect of the bombing on German morale. Back in the States a war was being waged over the future of OSS, and the hallways of her old unit were fraught and buzzing with the newest victories and defeats. A lot of the battle seemed to be fought in the newspapers, as well as in Congress. Abra observed that some of her colleagues viewed the approaching end of the war as a personal disaster. They longed to continue in intelligence and looked back on their collegiate or corporate careers with a shudder.
“Do you ever think about staying in intelligence?” she asked Beverly.
“No, by the time I’m safely home, I’ll have enough pub crawling and working nine A.M. to midnight. I want to see the peaks and those rolling hills. I want to ride out in the early morning with the fog sitting down in the clefts. I want my horses and my own spread.”
“I don’t know what I want. I admit sometimes going back to Columbia and finishing a Ph.D. sounds exasperatingly dull. But I notice we are talking less about our Fascist enemies and more about the dangerous Communists lately, and this war isn’t even over. It gives me pause.”
“You know, it’s guys like your Lieutenant Colonel Taylor who’ll go bonkers. I hear he was in insurance before the war. He’s been charging all over the landscape feeling like one hell of a dude. Now he’s supposed to sit at a desk and worry about actuarial tables?”
“Maybe he should have got killed instead of his friend. His friend wasn’t gung ho. He was some kind of artist.”
“Taylor doesn’t strike me as the type that gets killed. Other people around him may die like flies, but he’ll walk through the bullets. War is hell for most people, but it’s heaven on wheels for some of the weird ones, have you noticed?”
Abra drained her weak beer. “But what I’m trying to figure out is if I’m one of those weird types myself. If I haven’t got used to this life, to being mobilized.”
“We all have, girl. We’ll have to get unused.”
Oscar had long since left London for the Continent. Roosevelt died and the future yawned suddenly more uncertain. Abra had never voted for anybody else for president; she couldn’t imagine how the government could continue with the center missing. Astonishingly, she received a promotion to first lieutenant and worked the usual six-day week on the bombing survey. There was talk they would be moved to Germany. No more rockets fell. More lights went on. Every two weeks, Oscar wrote her, chattily, affectionately. She responded in kind, for her sense of style demanded she be civil. A courier brought her a bottle of Chanel Number Five along with intelligence reports.
On May Day the news came that Hitler had killed himself. There was an impromptu party at the office. The next evening while they were returning from supper at the big mess in the Grosvenor House, they heard that the BBC had just announced the surrender of the German army in Italy. Rumors about that had been endemic in OSS for several days. It was understood that Allen Dulles of OSS Switzerland had a hand in arranging the surrender.
The radio was kept on that night. It was an addiction, to hear the good news repeated and hope for more. At ten-thirty, as they were closing up for the night, Stuart Hibberd came on and announced the fall of Berlin.
“It’s over!” Abra heard herself screaming. “It’s over!”
“That depends,” Beverly said.
“On what?”
“First, whether the Bavarian Redoubt exists, and how well defended it is. If it’s anything like we’ve heard, it might take months or a year to take it. Second, we know Himmler launched Werewolf, an underground of sabotage and clandestine warfare.” Beverly did not want to be tricked into celebrating until she knew with absolute security no bad news was going to trickle in. Abra felt she herself was more like the general population, avid for something to feel good about. The tension of waiting just built over the weekend. It was all anyone was talking about. Is the war over? Is the war finally over?
Monday everybody seemed to be milling in the streets, hanging around outside Buckingham Palace. When she got into the office, she heard that Admiral Doenitz, the putative head of a state that seemed to be nonexistent, had finally accepted the surrender terms, but still no announcement came. She had a sick feeling that something was wrong. Perhaps the SS was holed up in the Bavarian Redoubt with rockets and new secret weapons. Nobody tried to work. People drifted from office to office and building to building exchanging news and rumors stirred together.
Why didn’t the radio speak, why? At six c
ame an announcement there would be no announcement by Churchill that night. What was wrong? She had no stomach for supper. She ate a sandwich at her desk, and tried again to read the materials spread about her. At seven-forty in the evening came another announcement: tomorrow would be celebrated as Victory in Europe Day and would be a national holiday, as would be the ninth. So was it peace? What a ridiculous wimpy way to end a war.
In the morning she woke in her dank bedroom groping for her coat and her flashlight, as the familiar sounds of yet another air raid broke over her. She was enraged with disappointment. Why doesn’t the fucking war end already? Enough, too much, way past too much. I want my life! She was up, into her uniform and half into her shoes before she realized that it was not bombing but thunder. She made herself coffee with dried milk and saccharin, carrying it back to bed.
She lay in the cavelike darkness of her room, imagining the streets of New York. At home, they would be celebrating, massed in Times Square. Sometimes she missed New York, but London had become her city too—and she found the survey work fascinating. Just lately she had been given more responsibility; one of her bosses had pronounced her reports literate, their highest compliment. She had a team under her. Soon they would be going over to Germany, which ought to be interesting. In some ways, it had been a disadvantage to her career to work with Oscar, because what she had done had become all his. Now she was on her own. Her work was visible.
The rain was over and the day warm and shining when Beverly appeared in the late morning, wearing not her uniform but a carefully saved linen frock, wrinkled but summery. Beverly had sandwiches and a thermos and a bottle of St. Emilion she had inveigled from somebody just returned from France. “I thought we’d go out in the streets with more people than you ever thought existed, and have a picnic. It’s party day.”
The crowds were jolly and well behaved, people with children and babies and even dogs decked out with red, white and blue ribbons and rosettes and streamers, with paper hats perched on their heads, with flags on their prams and borne overhead, carried cheerfully waving in the hand. Bunting hung from the buildings. There were street musicians with violins and accordions and people who carried a cornet or a drum or a mouth organ to make a joyful noise. Others were banging on dustbin lids or old petrol drums. Groups were singing or just cheering.
They milled around with everybody else slowly circulating toward the palace where an announcement was expected. Then they drifted away. After their feet tired, they found an unoccupied patch of ground in St. James’s Park and sat down for their picnic. Bells were ringing from all the churches. They saw few people drunk and none violent. For one thing, the pubs had already run out and closed. There weren’t enough spirits available to get drunk.
All of London seemed as the day wore on like a perfect children’s Halloween party. People had put on fancy dress or funny hats. In a little street in Chelsea a piano had been dragged outside and a community sing was going on featuring at the moment “Knees Up, Mother Brown.”
The bobbies looked on with polite approval as people tore down advertisements to build bonfires. Every street had one. In one street they were doing the Lambeth walk to a phonograph on a stoop. In another, children were leading a victory parade with drums and penny whistles. On the Thames tugs were blowing the V signal. As they wandered to Piccadilly, they came on a crowd of other Americans in a conga line and joined in, swung through the streets as she remembered holding on in the whip of childhood games.
She was happy and she was melancholy. She should have seen the end of this war with Oscar, at whose side she had gone through so much of it. Where was he? Would he think of her? The odds were that he was already in Germany, where she doubted they were celebrating. Her salvation was to put regrets aside and live in the present.
When the floodlights were turned on at Buckingham Palace, at the National Gallery, Whitehall, Big Ben, people cheered and little children oohed and aahed, for they had never seen city lighting. When Beverly and she were standing on the bridge near the tower of Big Ben watching it light up, a little girl next to them began to cry in fear. “It’s burning,” she moaned into her mother’s shoulder. “It’s burning.”
She and Beverly rested on the embankment as the crowds swept past, moving in amiable eddies and quick good-natured charges. Everybody had their flags out, the few remaining French, the Belgians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Americans, the Australians, the Canadians. A woman in tweeds who ought to be wilting in the summery air stopped to tie her oxford and then marched off, waving a small Union Jack. Couples were kissing, standing tightly embraced as if to join right through their clothing.
Abra was reminded of her fantasy of the fall that she had dried up sexually. All day she had been in a vague state of sexual excitement, not really wishing to pick anyone up and comfortable in Beverly’s partnership, but flush with health, with ripeness, with her own young and vigorous body. Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.
“Look!” Beverly cried, seizing her arm.
The fireworks were beginning, the first she had seen in four years, if she did not count the sometimes eerie beauty of the real thing. As each rosette of sparks and streamers burst upon the night sky, so much less black than it had been, a joy that was mostly youth and a sense of her own self swelled her chest.
RUTHIE 10
A Killing Frost
April twelfth was a Thursday. Ruthie delivered a paper in her Problems of Families seminar, dealing with changing patterns of child rearing in first- and second-generation immigrant families, which provoked far more controversy than she had imagined. It seemed evident to her that something was lost as well as gained when old patterns gave way to new ones. Therefore she found surprising the assumption on the part of most of her classmates and her professor that such alterations were always positive.
She defended her research and challenged their assumptions, but as she worked on the line, she was still vibrating internally from the debate. How dare those people think that everything done their way was superior? That foreign patterns meant stupidity? That everybody else in the world was always wrong? That those who dressed shabbily and lived in poverty were necessarily ignorant? That only not knowing better kept Italians actively Italian, and not proper white Protestants with Smith and Jones names?
They did think they were better, to the point where the lack of agreement on the part of anybody else astonished them. Oh, she had learned something about prejudice today. Maybe she had expected the vaunted neutrality of the social sciences to prove out. They had assumed that she was the one whose prejudices were clouding her vision, that she was engaged in special pleading. High up in the back of her head a wry voice proclaimed its lack of surprise and its savage amusement, but most of her was scandalized, scalded. She wanted to believe in goodwill—why? she asked herself, frowning behind the welder’s mask. She loved the mask because it not only protected her eyes from sparks and hot metal, but because it protected her from other people’s eyes. Did she have a need to believe in goodwill because she was a good person or because she was a lazy person and it was less work to assume others were well intentioned?
They could see nothing but superstition in family tales—bobbe-mysehs. The past was to be wiped away like dirt. Children were to have no notion where they sprang from, the histories that led to them, the people who had lived and died to make them.
When the public-address system announced an important message, everyone paused to listen. She had a moment of hope that the war in Europe at least was over. The troops had broken into Germany already. The newsreels were full of rapid advances. Maybe the Nazis had surrendered?
“Who’s dead? What did he say?” Vivian pushed back her mask, frowning.
“He says the President is dead,” Ruthie repeated, staring around her. “The President?” she repeated, realizin
g what she had just said.
“Is that some kind of joke?” Vivian glared. “What President?”
But there was only one.
It was almost silent in the shop. The line had stopped. Somewhere a warning bell was still clanging and some piece of equipment was still moving, probably a lift. A swirl of voices rose and quieted as the PA system sputtered and then repeated the announcement. “According to The Associated Press, President Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage this afternoon at 3:55 P.M. eastern war time. I repeat, the President is dead, of a cerebral hemorrhage. We picked up the news on the radio just a few moments ago, and we called WJR to confirm, but we couldn’t get through. Then we called the Free Press. It’s true.” The voice trailed off.
Vivian covered her mouth, her hand pressing hard. Ruth felt that absurd desire to smile that sometimes came to her in the midst of calamity, as if to ward off further blows, a grimace of appeasement. What would happen now? Would the war go on? Would everything grind to a halt?
She knew rationally that such a question was ridiculous. Of course the war would continue. Of course the government would continue. Who would be president? It took her a moment to remember the vice president’s name. It had been Wallace, but Roosevelt had dumped him and taken a senator from Missouri to appease southerners who considered Wallace too radical, too truculent. “President Truman,” she said aloud. It sounded absurd. The President was Roosevelt. The President had always been Roosevelt except way back when she was a little girl and they were hungry all the time. His was the voice of government, that rich warm cocoa voice coming out of the radio and explaining how things would be and how they ought to be. Injustice meant the President didn’t know, didn’t have the facts, but always, you assumed he was on your side. If he knew, he would care, and he would try to make it better.