by Marge Piercy
“I’m essentially done,” he said. “OSS is being dismantled. R & A is going to the State Department, but not with me aboard. I leave for New York August twenty-eighth. Collier’s has you booked on a flight two days later, via Lisbon. Will you go?”
She nodded. “If they let me out. I hate hospitals.”
“The war’s over. The announcement should come today, but we picked up the emperor Hirohito broadcasting his surrender to the Japanese people. It’s done, Louise.”
She lurched to her feet and stared out the window. In the courtyard a jeep was executing a smart turn. The day looked clay colored and dusty. “Is it really over? Those atomic bombs did it?”
“Perhaps they gave the peace party in the Japanese cabinet more leverage. Their sticking point was the emperor, and it seems that after insisting on unconditional surrender all the way, we will let them keep their divine emperor. It isn’t clear whether we dropped those bombs on the Japanese or if they were actually aimed at impressing the Soviets.” He steadied her. “They’ll let you out of the hospital tomorrow. But only if you behave.”
“What does that mean?”
“If I could have got you passage sooner, I’d have done it. It’s time to go home. You look like death in life, by the way.”
Louise sighed. “I hate the idea of hanging around here. If I’m to be unemployed, I’d rather be unemployed at home.” She could do nothing more for the camp victims here; any political pressure would have to be applied back in the States.
“I have a place we can go. Peaceful. No ruins. That is, no contemporary ruins. No camps. Quiet. We can have it for two weeks, starting tomorrow. It’s in Devon. Have you ever been?”
She shook her head no, sinking into her chair. “I think the bug is stubborn because it isn’t just a bug. Reality made me sick, not a microbe.”
“Will you go to Devon with me? We’re both finished over here.”
“It seems decadent and uncaring to take a vacation.”
“Consider it a convalescence. Or you can stay in the hospital, if discomfort sits better with you. It won’t be luxurious. It’s just a cottage on a big estate we’ve used.”
A decision felt too difficult. It was simpler to acquiesce.
“It’s a little more rustic than I’d realized,” Oscar said ruefully, surveying the cottage. In the big house where he had stayed before, an archives division of R & A was packing the war for shipment to Washington. By the end of August, OSS would be out of here, and its owners reinstalled.
The cottage was built of stone under a thatched roof, picturesque as he had described it to her, but with only a peat stove for chilly evenings and to heat water for a bath or dishes. The kitchen had another stove, fortunately with some gas left in a cylinder. It lit with a match and a great whoosh. There was only one bed, an observation which caused her a moment’s suspicion until she saw how woebegone he was looking.
“It’s beautiful, Oscar. Just be glad it isn’t more authentic. Have you ever seen the figures on how much of rural England lacks indoor plumbing? Besides, I’m the invalid. You’re the cook and housekeeper on this trip, right?”
“You’ll be amazed how I’ve learned to take care of myself.”
“Abra didn’t take good care of you?”
“Abra didn’t take any kind of care of me. She’s not a berrieh, Louie, but it was educational. I have new skills. I can cook, I can clean, I can iron my own shirts, although I confess I look forward to New York laundries.”
“You can cook, you can clean, and I have no housekeeper any longer. Maybe I should marry you?”
“That’s my idea,” he said. “If we can manage between us to do one good thing. Now I’m taking that ancient bicycle to town for provisions. Will you be all right?”
“I’ll be fine.” And she was, bundled in a quilt to watch the afternoon fog creeping over the lavender and maroon moor. Oscar had borrowed several books from the library of the big house, and she had Joyce Cary’s amusing new novel The Horse’s Mouth in her lap. Much of the time she just watched the fog stealing toward the cottage, built on the edge of the manor park with only a low stone wall keeping them from the vast treeless spaces that beckoned. Inside she was rebuilding her sense of self.
Clotted cream seemed to be the medicine her dysentery required to quiet it. The food here was more plentiful than anyplace she had been since Normandy, with smoked trout, salmon and Dover sole. The fishing boats were going out regularly and they bought local runner beans, gooseberries and plums. Dining in town the third night, they had lamb. Her strength came seeping back. Every day they walked farther out on the moors.
As she grew stronger they wandered from hut circle to menhir to stone row to stone circle and up on a tor for the long view, which always led on to more hut circles, more menhirs, more stone rows and other high rocky tors. Fortunately Oscar had a good map. Maps, he explained, had not been sold in England since the invasion scare in 1940 and had only just become legal again, however, they had always had maps in the big house, to guard against adventurous OSS personnel falling into bogs. Each morning it did not pour, they set out for a clapper bridge, a tor, a particular circle. The half-wild ponies began to recognize them and only moved a modest distance away.
He looked handsome and vigorous with the exercise, the fresh food, but she knew he was not sleeping well in his bag on the floor of the central room. She was up in the loft bedroom with a view out on the moor. Downstairs was the kitchen and the other room and a toilet. They bathed in a washtub in the kitchen. She thought that on the whole Oscar probably found it rougher camping than she did, after her months with the Army. For her it was a welcome halfway house between utter discomfort and utter comfort.
Letters from New York came for him via London OSS. “I’m fondly awaited back at Columbia. I have three classes, a graduate seminar. I don’t know how I’ll do it—bluff through with my old notes in a box somewhere. They say they’re expecting a lot of vets to enroll. That should be interesting, don’t you think? A different kind of student body. Not so naive. My publishers want me to spruce up my book on the Weimar Republic and the roots of Fascism, bring it up to date. That should keep me busy and off the streets all winter.”
“I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t see much scope for myself as a correspondent any longer.”
He wrote replies and went to town to post them. As the sun shone brightly, she dragged a chair outside. She half dozed, musing in the overgrown garden. Small fuzzy lavender daisies in busy clumps stuck up above the matt of weeds drawing bees. Something smelled sweet but she could not track it down. She had never had a garden, so she had never learned the names of plants. She had reference works at home that contained plates of garden flowers. When she needed to be accurate for one of her stories, she looked up an appropriate name, then forgot it five minutes later.
Reunion stories would be big. The man has been at war, but the parting had occurred earlier, perhaps the year war broke out. Were they divorced? No, too racy. Safer to have them engaged and ruptured. They break apart from selfish immaturity on both their parts. In this story, she has to have sinned against him (out of pride? immaturity?) as well as he against her. Is he maimed, wounded, like Rochester? Not this one.
She felt him standing behind her. He had returned from town and in her story trance, she had not heard him. She spoke without turning, her eyes on a raven passing over the long slope, “Love, I wonder if there’s a typewriter ribbon in the big house I could have? Mine’s so worn I can hardly use it.”
“I’ll check it out. Are you filing a story from here?”
“Not that kind of story. I’ve just had my first fictional idea in more than a year. I thought my mind had stopped working that way. That I’d lost my vein of fantasy that brings in the good dollars.”
“Perhaps I inspire you.” He sauntered around and stood with his back to the low stone wall that marked the end of the weedy garden and the beginning of the moor. “To fantasy if nothing else. Do you know what you j
ust called me?”
“Called you?”
“Love, you said.”
“I did?”
“Even our unintentional utterances, according to Freud, are indicative of our real desires.”
She laughed, clasping her hands behind her head. “Do you consider my real desire general or specific?”
“Louise, only you know by now if you want me or your young Navy man. If you want me, I’m yours. I can change my habits. I’m older, Lord knows. I can try to be wiser.”
Alas, poor Daniel, she thought, it’s no contest. My life is my life, of a piece. “I’m here with you, not with him. No?”
“Partly, partly.” He had pushed himself off the wall to stretch. The sun tipped his dark curls with copper. As he came toward her, his eyes had that hot molten expression she remembered, oh she remembered, down in her body she remembered.
She sighed noisily. “Is it all starting again?”
“Living? Yes, it’s starting again. Loving? Let me show you how it can be. Please, come to me.” He put his hands tentatively on her shoulders and then under her arms to lift her. Where his hands touched, her breasts ached, as if they filled suddenly with milk. Her body betrayed her, her body delivered her to him. Oh, nonsense, she scolded herself, letting him draw her up out of the chair. Why else did I come here? But for this, to heal into this. She tilted back her face and he kissed her. Honey in the belly, honey in the veins, honey in the womb. Someday, she thought, I’ll write about sex how it really is for women, not for the magazines but maybe a publisher would touch it. How everything thickens and quickens at once.
To say how, she thought, as they were in bed naked and tangled together, mouths joined and hips twisting to press and squirm closer, it is at its best impossible to tell where one body starts and the other begins. Animal magic. Choice made flesh.
“I won’t leave you again, I won’t! It was the stupidest thing I ever did in my life. I was a putz, a schmuck. I had an attitude that anything that was offered to me, I should try.”
He would be more faithful than he had been, he would be mostly faithful. She thought that he would try and maybe succeed. It would be the two of them alone together as it had not been for twenty years, and that would be in itself an adventure.
After they had made love, she fetched a bottle of the local hard cider for them to drink in bed, the quilt gathered around them. “It’s going to be interesting politically,” Oscar said. “We seem to have come out of the war feeling invincible. Prepared to pick up the White Man’s Burden with a vengeance. But things have been happening among the colored populations at home and everywhere, a new militancy that could continue demanding changes.”
“I visited an all-Negro tank outfit. They were fantastically decorated, given that they had to do five times as much to get any recognition. And they were deeply angry about how they’d been treated by the Army. All that’s going home too. But Collier’s wouldn’t let me write about it, saying nobody was interested in some Negro tankers.”
They settled down to filling each other in on what they had been noticing and thinking. Suddenly it was six-thirty and she was starving. They had talked for two hours without pausing. That moved her more than the lovemaking. She had a sense of roots deep in soil groping together. She was being healed to their common history, her life was coming back together. Her long anger was almost gone. Oh, in fights it would try to seep out in bitterness, but she would be wary. Miracles came seldom and rebirth more rarely yet and for countless and uncountable and never to be counted women like herself, her age, her body type, death had come from a machine gun, from blows of the butt end of a rifle, from poison gas, from poison injections, from starvation and typhus and neglect, from all the nasty ways to die warped minds in a violent and relentless system could devise. They had died of a lack of common respect and common love. They cried out to her, take him back and go live in peace as husband and wife and as Jews. Go make a home again and give thanks. Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
After they spent their first night sharing the bed, Oscar woke at dawn, shaken. “I was with the Army. We were pursuing the Nazis into Bavaria. We kept talking about Werewolf, the underground Himmler set up but never finished connecting.” He flinched, scrubbing at his eyes. “You probably guessed I was involved in counterintelligence work in Germany, seeking out Nazi cells. That’s what I was doing in Bavaria, when we met at the hunting lodge. But this was an absurd dream.”
“I don’t require you to dream in good taste, Oscar. Tell me about it.”
“The American colonel I was with, he was tall and blond and midwestern, brave and naive. We kept pursuing an SS officer. There were chase scenes, in and out of ruins. Finally we had him cornered. Then the SS turned into a real wolf and he leaped through the air and as his teeth sank into the American colonel’s throat, he disappeared into him.”
“‘What happened to the Nazi?’ I asked the colonel.
“‘What Nazi?’ The colonel just stared at me. ‘There’s no Nazi here.’ That’s all there was to it.” Oscar sat up, a dew of sweat on his forehead. “Silly dream. How are you feeling this morning?”
“Not silly. Witty, rather, in the sense that indeed where have they all gone? Every German was anti-Hitler. But he disappeared into the American?”
“Louise, I was for intervention. We had to fight Germany. There was no choice. It would have been better to do it in Spain than in North Africa, and better to do it in 1937 than in 1942, but we had to. But I do fear what the war has done to us. I do fear what I am beginning to understand of the bottom side of what we call progress and civilization.”
“We’ve both lost our certainties. Great gaping holes where they used to be.” She touched his cheek on which the tough dark hairs had grown during the night, an occasional white one gleaming. We shall grow old, she thought, and was oddly comforted. “To answer your question, I feel fine. From what was wrong with me physically, I am recovering. And we’ve begun to recover something as precious as health.”
“Our love?”
“That too. I was thinking of communication.”
RUTHIE 11
The Harvest
In July, Ruthie was laid off from Briggs. By that time most of the women had already gone, Rena first. Since Vivian had been let go, it had been increasingly hard for Ruthie to get to the factory, way on the east side, so she was not sorry. Vivian and Rena were trying to get jobs as welder and riveter respectively.
Not only were women being laid off en masse, but entry jobs were being redefined to involve heavy lifting, to exclude women from the factories. In a Flint auto plant, all the women were put on the graveyard shift in violation of seniority, and the UAW, which continued to address members as sirs and brothers, refused to fight for its women members. The auto plants were reconverting, preparing to roll out cars and trucks. When the women went to the unemployment office, officials told them that if they applied as welders or riveters, they could have their unemployment compensation terminated because they were unfairly limiting their employability. The U.S. Employment Service would only refer Vivian to what they called women’s jobs, and they kept trying to force Rena into being a maid or a cleaning lady.
Ruthie received unemployment as she was interviewing for social work. She was surprised how many of the agencies were reluctant to hire a woman except as a secretary. Once she would have been happy to get a secretarial job, but no more. She kept looking. She did well on the Civil Service exam. Detroit was shaken by a polio epidemic. Even on the hottest days, mothers feared letting their children go swimming in the parks or the river. People thought that was how it was transmitted.
The gas shortage had eased a little so that Morris could take his car out of storage. Leib worked on it with him until they had it running again. It was understood they would share it, since Leib had put so much time into running around for replacement parts. Leib volunteered to teach Naomi to drive, so Ruthie invited herself along to learn at the sa
me time and to keep an eye on Leib. Trudi knew how to drive, but she was getting too big to slip behind the wheel.
Ruthie was astonished to find out she liked to drive, and by early August, she had her license and so did Naomi. One sunny Saturday in August, they took turns driving into the country, taking the new expressway to Willow Run. It was a ghost town out there, the dormitories deserted, the little huts empty. She wondered if that was the sort of place Murray and she would have to live, if he still wanted her when he came back.
“Will you marry him when he comes home?” Naomi asked, as if she could read her mind.
“How do I know what will happen? What he’ll want? We haven’t laid eyes on each other for three years!”
“But if you do marry him, I’ll hardly ever see you.”
“Why won’t you see me, unless you go blind? And don’t marry me off before it happens. The war isn’t even over, kine-ahora, so let’s not talk about his coming home.”
Ruthie parked by a small lake where some colored people were fishing, a woman and two men, with a baby lying on a little rug in the grass. “Catch anything?” she called.
The woman answered her, a little wary but neither hostile nor friendly, “A couple of bullheads. No white folks’fish.”
Ruthie left the car and wandered with Naomi along a path under the pines that grew down almost to the water’s weedy edge, with blue green reeds standing up like thick grass, water lilies in a cove, then a stretch where the waves lapped on a crescent of gravelly sand.
“I wish I could read the whole journal,” Naomi said. “It’s all I have left. Of any of them.”