by Carson, Tom
“Edith, for God’s sake!” I demanded. “Why aren’t they getting the same pay as men holding the same rank?”
“Why, are you?”
“I’m not in uniform.”
“Those come in all kinds, my girl. I’ve been wearing this one since 1925. Find your shop and stick with it. I must say this morning made me miss my old nursing rig.”
“From where?”
“Italy! Back in the first war. Had the most dreadful roommate too. Lord, she threaded the boys like popcorn. Pam, I hope I don’t need to remind you my bill sat in committee for nearly a year. I’ll do something about pay grades when the time is ripe.”
“What about command authority? Honestly, what good is it even calling them officers when they can’t give anyone orders outside the Women’s Army Corps? Even Oveta Hobby can’t, and she’s in charge. Any dumb fuh—fool of a sergeant can tell her to go fly a kite. How could you let them get away with it?”
“They didn’t get away with anything. I did, and it took some doing, and I absolutely forbid you to bring up command authority in your article. Do you have any idea what a red flag that would be? They’d be asking me next if I wanted girls at West Point.”
“Don’t you?”
“Pam, Pam. The laughter would be ribald and the issue would be lost. I do think you ought to profile Oveta, though. Interesting woman, and the sooner this isn’t always about me, the better.”
“You know it’s ridiculous she’s only a colonel, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. I sometimes think it’s preposterous I’m not President, but that’s what the traffic will bear. Are you riding all the way back to Washington with me, dear? We’d have such oodles of time to discuss my imaginary Presidency after I’ve napped.”
“No, I change in Chicago. I’m on my way to Detroit.”
I spent three days there for “The Mighty Flowers.” (“Oh, no, not again. I’ll apologize to Bran,” my editor said, and I said, “The hell you will, Roy. I’ve had that fight.”) In my own regulation bandanna and less than form-fitting sack suit, I watched new Sherman tanks get trundled chassis by ring-scarred chassis along one assembly line until their gun-needlenosed turrets were lowered onto them from another. That tempted me into an analogy about bees descending on daisies and gardenias which I gather, see title, must’ve survived Roy’s edit. Not until the ETO would I learn our mighty flowers weren’t up to snuff design-wise, outgunned by most Panzers and blazing like matchbooks at one well-placed shell. But we built fifty thousand of them, Panama—and we won.
Gloria Kamenica is almost certainly dead, though. Cadging each other’s cigarettes in a typhoon-foamed tavern, she and her three henchwomen—galleon-hipped Anna, Myra, Billie: my private toast to my Columbian year—were a long way from maidenhood even then. Retrospectively breaking my heart, they were shy about showing re-muftied, once again “classy” me their homes, sending me back at closing time to my suddenly effete room at the Tuller despite Pam’s Rheingoldilocksy epiphany that I’d only capture Gloria if I could describe her cuke-unencumbered (Guadalcanal) tenement apartment.
The communal bathroom down the flavorful hall to which her sturdy legs carried her now dekerchiefed hair and robed peekabosom at the end of each long day. The fire escape she sometimes sat on for a final smoke and beer, listening to the trucks, the radio playing “Who Wouldn’t Love You” across the way and the 4-F down in 3-G banging his better half. Too tuckered and suddenly disconsolate to even find a nightgown, she crept into bed—and when I got back to Washington next, I was beside myself.
“Edith! Do you know the trick they’re pulling in Detroit these days?”
“That depends on which and whose. I’ll stick with a qualified yes unless the sun now comes up in the West there.”
“Even when they’re doing the identical work, management gives the women different job titles. Guess whose salary is smaller! And their union won’t do anything.”
“Dear me. You’ll be telling me next there isn’t one female shop steward in the whole plant.”
“Of course not, and the joke on me is that I spent years twitting away at cocktail parties about the wonderful, progressive labor movement. But all those idiots can think about is what’ll happen after the war.”
“What a coincidence! So am I. Oddly enough, so is the NAACP. It wasn’t easy getting the defense industry to open up all those skilled jobs to black folk, but manpower’s manpower. It’s going to be interesting to see what Los Angeles looks like by 1960, since I very much doubt they’re all champing at the bit to move back to the plantation once we’ve won this thing and so does my colleague from Watts. Have you been to California yet?”
But Regent’s had an actual Negro on the racial beat: light-skinned and bow-tied Jim Bond, a decorous ex-Communist whose scholarshipped voice retained only the faintest burr of his Mississippi upbringing. Jim and not Pam wrote “Collard Greens and Palm Trees,” along with “If We Holler, Let Us Go” and “The Black Hawks’ War.” When he came back from Tuskegee, I’d just got done writing up Jackie Cochran’s Guinea Pigs, and he and I did exchange one awfully wry grin in the halls. The only time we were at odds was when I heard he’d complained about my turning Joy Sterling, as I’d called her, into the viewpoint character for “The Fuse.”
“Jim, let’s have this out,” I said when I saw him after by Pamela Buchanan’s account of life at Huntsville Arsenal had come out. “I don’t think you’ve used a woman as your tailor’s dummy even once. What does it matter what color she is?”
“In Alabama? Did you try asking her that?”
“I didn’t need to, it was the thing’s given. I quoted her manager on all that instead.”
“Her white manager.”
“Yes! And he was my pincushion”—Regent’s-ese for a villain. “Did you even read it before you went storming off to Roy?”
“Twice. I was looking for one hint your little Joy was angry.”
“But she really wasn’t—” I floundered at Jim’s smile. “Oh, hell. You think she was putting on an act for me.”
“No, Pam. I know she was putting on an act for you.”
“Wouldn’t she have for you, though? For different reasons?”
“Sure. But we’d have both known it, which is fun.”
“I wasn’t down there for fun.”
“Are you sure? Pickaninny docility and all, you did make her sound like somebody I might not mind too much to meet.” Now drolly natty, he adjusted his bow tie. “I think it was ‘face of a Gauguin’ that did it.”
Posted by: Pam
And yes, Panama, speaking of art, the mimsies have seen them here and there. Those T-shirts that revive a famous image of a woman in a polka-dot kerchief rolling up her sleeve and flexing an arm, with a different face and “She Can Do It” replacing my way-back-when’s obsolete “We.” Andy Pond and I have agreed more than once that sometimes it’s just goddam strange to have lived so long.
Lord, I do wish I liked H*ll*ry better. Sent her some money last year, guessing I’d croak before she fucked it up. Quit once she cosponsored a flagburning amendment. How can anyone not grasp Old Glory does, has, and must stand for the right to torch it if you’re so inclined? Something I never have been, even now. I couldn’t.
I suppose you’ll vote for her too, bikini girl. By 2008 you’ll be old enough to lose your polling-booth cherry and she’ll inevitably run if Potusville hasn’t declared martial law by then. I wish I hadn’t spotted the Evita hidden in “inevitable,” but that’s what your Gramela gets for too many readings of I Was Dolly Haze’s Monster back in Beverly Hills in the Fifties.
Ostensibly scribbled by the perp, that true-crime confession was quite the nonfiction shocker in Ike’s day. Slavered over by the silly for its illicit licentiousness, it was reluctantly savored by the literary for its elusively elucidating pro
se. Hadn’t glanced at a page in decades until I fumbled forth my sunbleached copy from between The Producer’s Daughter and Brother Nicholas’s The Mountain and the Stream after your and your dad’s last visit to Washington. Kelquen’s tail drew a mustache on me as I painfully crouched.
Yes, well! Now it’s just you and me, Ard, my pet. Do you suppose a woman president would be worth sticking around for?
Naturally if she were me, the question would answer itself. Pamus, I’d be called. Talkily stalking the West Wing with my mobile bower. Would you like to be one of them, Panama? Special Assistant for Chen-Chen and Patois?
The pills from lunch do seem to be having their standard effect. It’s a pretty woozy hour as a rule here at the Rochambeau. I shouldn’t be posting at all, since Ard knows what I’ve spilled. But on the assumption this is the last day of my life, I don’t honestly care. Or shouldn’t, considering my nonbelief in any hereafter.
Speaking of which, my silly pre–Pearl Harbor roommate on Bank Street could really be extraordinarily silly. Do you know what that divine goose said once, resting her newly showered chin on poor Pam’s collarbone? This, with a nod at my typewriter as I clacked away at some pointless book review: “Do you suppose they’ll ever invent one of those that can contact the afterlife?”
“They have,” I said curtly, pulling the page. “And for God’s sake, go away, Dottie! Or at least put something on. I’m on deadline.”
Posted by: Pam
A sludge-voiced slow-eyed freckled blonde exile from coal country who’d never seen the sea put me on the trail that led me to exasperate Bruce Catton. Mellie Branch was her Regent’s name, and she was the tailor’s dummy in Pam’s New Orleans–datelined “Liberty Belles.” A random question over coffee—“Won’t let you work in the mine back home, huh?”—won a cascadingly freckled reply something like, “Oh, no! I’m too young and elfin, you see. But some do.”
It took me three months to make time to find out if Mellie was fibbing about the women she knew who’d put on miners’ helmets to free up their husbands and boyfriends to wear Army ones, since Roy hated blind alleys. Once I got there, it wasn’t easy to ingratiate myself. Riceville doesn’t welcome many strangers, and I was a five foot ten gal from up north whose cheapest overcoat, carefully chosen, and scarf still Hollywoodized me.
At least I knew better than to go around bellowing what I was after. I just loitered wherever I could, waiting as unobtrusively as possible to spot a woman who’d look to my uneducated eyes as if she might work in a coal mine. After a weekend of diner meals I ate in slow motion, practically memorizing the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Viv fit the bill: cinder-crisped hair yanked around without ceremony by a shrewd possum face, hefty in a mackinaw as she ordered coffee. You can scrub and scrub, and later I’d watch her try. After a few months, that dust isn’t on your skin—it’s in it.
She was plenty guarded, too. Yet if I was a long way from nattering about undergrounds with Raoul Aglion’s plucky little band, I’d also come a long one in my Columbian year. Rheingolding with Gloria, letting GIs down easy on slow-chugging trains: Pam’s third and hardest-won language was American.
I’d never speak it aboriginally, more like ab-derivatively. But I could fake it like a burglar playing plumber, and it was all preparation for getting Viv of Riceville, Tenn., to recommend blueberry over lemon meringue. And next to concede she wouldn’t mind a piece herself.
My main advantage was that being female meant I couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination—not only hers but oddly, salutes bounced off cunt caps or no salutes bounced off cunt caps, mine—be official. Another was the nametag on the striped peppermint blouse behind the counter. If it’d read “Joe” instead of “Jo,” I’d’ve been out a quarter in exchange for a grudging admission that it was a windy day.
Instead, after reglancing at Jo—still the nearest thing in sight to a cop—and visibly wrestling her opinion of me until she’d pinned it for a count of three, Viv finally said, “Well, I guess I could—maybe, maybe—get a couple of us together to gab at you if you want. Can you wait ’til next Sunday?”
I shook my head. “No—that’s not what you do. See what I mean? I need to go down with you, into the mine. Can you fix it?”
“Brother! That ain’t allowed.” And her pie plate was as empty as a Hoover campaign promise. My best guess was I had five seconds tops.
I rolled my eyes and leaned back. “Just look who’s talking, sister. Since when did that stop you?”
Made it. Viv’s eyes went crafty as we smirked at each other. But then her glance fell on my nails. Unlike the Elizabeth Ardennes tapping away at my Mac, which are as chipped as a summer camp’s Christmas lights, back then they were as saucily redcapped as ten little drummer boys.
“You go down with us, you’d have to stay down all day,” she warned. “Think you can handle that?”
My worst imaginings had had Pam back above ground and catching a Greyhound to the Knoxville train depot before noon. “Deal,” I said instantly. Anything else would’ve made that manicure Viv’s decisive, derisive, and final impression as she thanked me for the pie and rose.
“We don’t bring nobody back up unless his back’s broke,” she said, pleased. “Eat down there, too.”
It took her another day to talk the other wildcats into it and agree on how to sneak me in. The morning after that, stepping out of Riceville’s lone hotel into a dawn chill that bit like a cobalt T. Rex—and decked in a borrowed mackinaw and overalls whose hindering creaks made me imagine I knew how sculptures must feel when they’re still under wraps before the public’s big “Ah”—Pam became the covert center of a cuke-unencumbered huddle that shuffled me into the pit’s elevator cage past a shift boss distracted by Viv’s razzing about his sorry hat and sorrier cob.
If any of the men crowded in with us noticed I was Pamtraband, they kept it to themselves. But they were mostly watching their shoes. Then a bell rang and the cage started its descent so loudly I was petrified.
What in hell had I been thinking? The motor’s ratcheted gloating was at least mostly steady, unlike the runners’ interrupting shrieks of wheels on ungreased metal and the stranger thuds from farther down the abyss each time we unpleasantly paused. Under the cage’s canary-yellow light bulb, the faces packed around me looked like carvings, whittled by a knife that got blunter with distance until I realized my eyes were straining for some way to escape. When the gate opened and my fellow passengers startled me by turning alive again, we were eight hundred feet down.
In spite of knowing there’d been dozens more miners waiting behind us at the pit, I’d stubbornly kept imagining a single tunnel, no longer than Riceville’s lone hotel’s lone hall, with a couple of wheelbarrows’ worth of prop charcoal tipped over at the far end to mark what must, must be my room’s door. Before me stretched the chambers and railed passageways of Appalachia’s answer to the Louvre, and nobody’d seen fit to tell me earlier that down here blackness wasn’t a color but an element.
Not only was electricity’s sole purpose—suddenly grasped at last and for good—to illustrate, not even illuminate, bituminous blackness. What my frost-seared lungs were gulping was the taste of blackness. What I instantly dreaded was the sound of blackness cracking.
I’ve never spent a day in such terror, Panama. I’d do Omaha or even Huertgen over first. They happened outdoors, up where people belong.
“Stick with me awhile, Miz Buchanan,” Viv said. “Then we’ll sort of pass you around.”
To get up to the face on Gallery Eight, which was where my wildcats were working, we had to climb first into shuttle cars that clanked for a century on rails whose gleam got reprolonged at each curve. Then we were shunted onto a siding where wheeled coal gondolas the size of the Cardiff Giant’s coffin were waiting to be loaded and sent back down the track. Past that was another dim labyrinth of darkness headlamps could pierce an
d darkness they couldn’t, hacked like squares left solid in the mountain’s big crossword puzzle.
“Room an’ pillar,” Viv explained. “See, all that’s coal too. It’s what’s really holding the rest of this up.”
Not only was my voice a squeak, it was the dumbest question in the history of the industry. “Is it safe?”
“Haw. Hey, Tess! Miz Buchanan wants to know. ‘Is it safe?’”
“Why, sure,” Tess said with equanimity as she slumberlumbered along. “Right up to the ver’ second the whole danged works comes crashin’ down on our heads to kill us all without warnin’ or a prayer of rescue, mine work is safer’n golf.”
“There now. You see?” Viv asked. “You one of them lady golfers, Miz Buchanan?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I just only wish people didn’t keep laughin’ an’ makin’ merry so darn loud all the time down here,” said Tess. “Y’know that jimmies my concentration something fierce.”
“Now that’s a point of view. The singin’ is what gets to me. Naw, Miz Buchanan—we’re just teasin’ you a little. You go right ahead and sing if you want.”
Posted by: Pam
By midmorning I was almost used to how faces could be extinguished as they swiveled. Or no less unexpectedly bloom whole and real, snowwoman-eyed in a lamp’s beam and apparently bodiless: held up only by will and grime. Since I was working too even if it didn’t look like it to the men who’d learned by now I was an interloper, I’d started prodding my brain to find words to convey the quality of cold this deep underground: cold that wasn’t weather, had never known breeze or seasons, hadn’t even been air or experienced noise and motion until it was forced to exist as something other than earth. “Cold unaware it has a rival for humanity’s affections,” the printed version read, more archly than I’d like.
What kept getting harder to remember was that the coal I watched broken up into chunks once it had been extracted, then shoveled into barrows to crash into gondolas for the long sluice down the rails that ended with its unimaginable rise to unimaginable daylight, was the point. It seemed insane that nothing more than a few billion idiots’ need for fuel up on the surface explained this vast underground effort. The how and the what of it kept killing the why. A year ere I saw Anzio, it was Pam’s introduction to the nature of combat.