Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Duvey’s nickname was Dave the Rave because of his success with women in port. Duvey had figured out while he was still in high school that the only women worth his time wanted it as much as he did, and so it was a matter of settling that you liked each other enough and when and where, and not a matter of begging and arm-twisting and promising what you hadn’t the wherewithal to deliver, Christmas in July.

  April 24 the convoy formed up. His ship was heavy with wheat, loaded in Montreal. They had sailed down the St. Lawrence, then waited off Halifax where this convoy was organized. Convoy HX-152 was impressive as it sailed out of the roads: thirty-four ships, escorted by an aged destroyer and three corvettes, about which sailors said they would roll their guts out on wet grass. The convoy was a handsome sight, a parade of ships out into the Atlantic with a light chop and mild sun on their faces. US-PBY Catalina patrol planes kept an eye on them from above. There was a former liner transporting Canadian troops, a tanker, a bunch of old tramps of varying registries, nationalities and degree of seaworthiness, a tidy Norwegian freighter with its own deck guns, looming freighters sprouting cargo booms.

  The Montauk itself was the newest boat he’d ever sailed on, a Liberty ship that had only gone out twice before. All the Liberty ships were slow, but they were okay, reliable unless something hit them amidships, in which case they broke open like a loaf of sliced bread. The crew’s quarters were in the deckhouse, four bunks to a room, forty-four on board including the officers. The deck machinery was steam driven and the engine was good. There were even tiled showers for the men. He’d been on ships where a bucket was all the clean you got.

  Fog shrouded them on the second day, till they couldn’t see their neighbors to either side or in front or back. Convoying was only beginning on the Caribbean and coastal routes, so it was new to Duvey. On the Great Lakes, you’d see another ship in the Detroit River or in the locks, but out on the lakes, you were never within hailing distance. It alarmed him to travel in such a herd of unwieldy cargo ships in a heavy fog, each ship closer to the others than he found safe or comfortable. They had no escort of planes overhead to watch for U-boats, but the day passed without an attack. The fog closed in around them thick and clammy and dank, air that felt like gaseous ice. Two of the ships suffered a near collision. One of the corvettes had to hang back to round up stragglers.

  They continued without air cover for the next four days, until at midnight on April 29/30, Duvey heard an explosion. Even through the fog he could see a column of flames that meant a tanker had been hit, probably the Fitzpatrick. He could hear firing. The destroyer was laying depth charges on the sub, by the sound of it. Heavy smoke drifted across the water, mixed with fog. The reek of petroleum made him feel a little sick. He heard another heavy explosion. His body stiffened against the impact. Any minute now the Montauk might be next. Automatically he touched the buttoned pocket with his papers and his cash tied in a knotted condom. If he survived torpedoing, he would have them; if he didn’t and the body washed up, he’d be identified.

  The destroyer reported oil release from depth-charging a U-boat, but half an hour later, the Belle Starr was torpedoed. She was badly damaged and drifting. The Montauk had to detour around.

  With no moon, no stars, no lights on any of the ships, they moved into a murk of smoke from burning ships and the damned smothering fog. All the ships were chattering to each other, for if they had tried to observe radio silence, they would have rammed each other and sailed right over the ship in front. That meant the U-boats, who were operating in one of the wolf packs he had been hearing scuttlebutt about, could home in on the signals of each ship in turn. The corvettes were bouncing around chasing after the subs like harrying dogs.

  In a short while the Montauk began to cross debris, the bits and pieces of what had been that day a ship full of living seamen. Vaguely to the right they could see flames on the waters, the sea itself on fire, blurred by the fog. Men were screaming over there. They began seeing the little red lights of seamen in the water, the lights that bobbed on their life jackets. During an attack they were not supposed to pick up survivors, but the captain decided since they weren’t under direct attack, they’d get whoever they could.

  The first men they hauled in had drowned in oil, oil clogging their lungs when they went into the water, but then they got three live ones, hideously covered and blinded by the oil, one burnt all down his side and smelling like a barbecue, but alive. Duvey volunteered to help scrape the oil off the poor bastards.

  On instructions then the captain swung off to the left and resumed steaming ahead. They could hear muffled underwater explosions in bursts. Depth charges. “That’s the hedgehog, buddy boy,” the bosun Hogan told him. “They fire it ahead in bursts. It’s their new toy, and it seems to do the trick better than those damned charges they had to fire aft.”

  Then in the burning lurid light of a ship on fire they saw the U-boat surface in a bubbling pool of scum and oil. One of the charging corvettes rammed it. The stern stood tall in the water, tail up, like a shark upside down, and then it sank straightaway and the oil slick spread over it.

  Duvey was glad he was not in the submarine service, no matter how dangerous was the merchant marine. He’d rather die up on the deck in a burst of fire or drown than be squashed like a bug in a can. He’d always had a pang of pity for the Black Gang down in the engine room. They never had a chance if a ship was hit. They were cooked right away. At least up on deck you might be able to jump for it. If you got into a lifeboat, you had a better chance, and even those poor kippered devils they’d just picked out of the water might just make it if their burns weren’t too widespread and if they hadn’t swallowed or breathed in too much oil.

  He realized he had not heard an explosion in maybe fifteen minutes. That didn’t in itself mean anything, only that the corvettes and the destroyer had lost contact with the U-boats and that the Germans were lying off waiting a better chance or a better sighting.

  He had hated in his life: mostly guys who had done him in, a big Polack who had made life miserable for him on his first berth, a mate who had tried to break him, Father Coughlin who spewed out his diarrhea of the mouth against Jews from all the radios in the Catholic neighborhoods around his own back in Detroit. Never had he hated anyone or anything with the sharp steely intensity with which he hated those arrogant Nazi sharks, the U-boats. They had opened the sea war by sinking an unarmed passenger liner, the Athenia, and then claimed the British had blown it up themselves for propaganda. They operated against unarmed merchant ships and it was good hunting and good times, easy aces for the captains with no one to shoot back.

  The next day they knew they were in the Greenland air gap, that six-hundred-mile stretch of sea where the planes based in Newfoundland could not reach them and they were not yet under the shield of the planes based in Iceland. But what use had they got from the so-called air cover when the fog had kept the planes grounded every day?

  However they had their first luck. In the morning, swells were rising, looming and crashing over the decks. The wind rushed out of the north bringing snow. The visibility was actually a little better and they could catch a glimpse of the San Martin to their right and the Lone Star to their left. Then the seas grew too high to see anything but the next wave toppling. The swells were longer on the Atlantic than he was used to on the Great Lakes and the waves were even higher, but when you came down to it, they hit no harder. The water was just as fucking icy and just as bloody wet. Storms broke oreboats in half on Michigan and Superior.

  They were making their way through a flotilla of icebergs, but they were safe from the U-boats, who could not surface to attack in this weather. Therefore they would outrun them. The convoy wasn’t making any great speed, but the U-boats could only make four knots an hour submerged and would fall behind the convoy. They might radio ahead to another wolf pack to stand by, but no attack could take place in heavy weather. In spite of the battering they took, Duvey preferred being shaken to pieces to being a
ttacked, so bring on the tempests.

  The pack ice they moved through was nothing like he had imagined. It was irregular, wild, a Grand Canyon of weird icy shapes, not white so much as blue and purple and grey and rust-colored. He’d seen plenty of ice on the Great Lakes, but this was stranger-looking, towering cliffs, floating ice castles, nightmare jungles and fairy-tale cities of ice. When the storm finally cleared, they had lost one vessel, the Eleftheria, straggling on behind them with engine trouble. She ought to catch up with the convoy when they reached Iceland.

  He had never seen a prettier sight than the planes roaring over them from the bases in Iceland. Now the convoy was under the air shield. When a U-boat attacked, it was immediately forced down by a bomber.

  They refueled at Iceland before sailing on to Southampton. There they heard that the Eleftheria had been torpedoed and gone down with all hands lost. It was a good time in port for Duvey because he scored a Soviet girlfriend, who was celebrating surviving the Murmansk run. The Russians had women on their ships, and everybody else envied them. There was a lot of visiting ship to ship, partying, gossiping, gambling, bargaining. They traded canned meat and fruit to the limeys in a westbound convoy for rum, so the Montauk steamed off for England with morale high.

  LOUISE 2

  The Dark Horse

  The train back from Washington was jammed beyond belief. Louise spent the trip squatting on her suitcase, wishing she had used the new leg paint Kay had shown her and not ruined one of her last pairs of stockings. Jammed in against her so closely she could smell vomit clinging to his shoes was a sailor. Exhausted, he slept standing, leaning first against her and then against the man on his other flank. It was hot for the middle of May—Washington felt subtropical already—and the train was unpleasantly rank, with servicemen sleeping even on the luggage racks.

  She had been attending a meeting of the Writers’ War Board. They were not part of the official government bureaucracy, although editors and publishers often assumed that they were, because they worked closely with the Office of Facts and Figures, which scuttlebutt said was about to be replaced by something more geared at putting out propaganda.

  She had been tapped to help organize the Magazine Bureau. She had little to do with the Confession Committee, but she worked with the group helping to establish guidelines for the women’s magazines and the magazines with a general readership: her own markets. Every three months, the board issued War Guide Supplements suggesting themes to push in magazine fiction and articles.

  She hardly recognized Washington from her previous visit as a tourist with Oscar and Kay. It seemed to have five times as many people in the same space. No matter what she had done, from waiting for a taxi to waiting for supper to waiting to use the bathroom, there was a long line. Washington felt like a phone booth into which too many people had crowded all at once to shout into a mouthpiece. It remained at its core a self-satisfied segregated little southern city with restaurants and hotels off-limits to Negroes and black and white schools and facilities. Nonetheless, it was full of fascinating men, perhaps now more than ever.

  Pennsylvania Station was mobbed with people in and out of uniform saying impassioned hellos and good-byes. She had sweated heavily into her suit and felt wilted and weary. She was looking for her daughter. She had asked Kay to meet her, as she had not only her suitcase but a briefcase and an extra cardboard box full of material she was toting back. She could not find a porter and dragged her load along the platform to the gate, and then peered around for Kay. Late, she supposed. She sat on her suitcase again feeling distinctly filthy, tired and unlovely. Where the hell was her damned daughter? She tried waiting for a pay phone, but the lines were simply too long to bother.

  Finally after half an hour had passed, she commandeered one of the few porters remaining and got herself into a taxi and headed uptown. New York was surprisingly uncrowded for four-thirty. Even six months ago, arriving at Pennsylvania Station and embarking in a taxi at that hour would have meant sitting in traffic and fuming her way uptown. Already there were markedly fewer cars on the streets of Manhattan, and traffic moved quickly. Now what had happened to Kay?

  Sensual relief flooded her as she entered the foyer of her suite. Home, home. In Washington, she had had to share a tiny room at the Mayflower that would obviously until this year have been a smallish single with Dorothy McMichaels, who under an array of pseudonyms spewed out two to four stories a month for the confession magazines. Dorothy was conservative, religious, a true believer in sexual sin and retribution, a loose-limbed loud-voiced woman who made Louise remember social workers she had known when she was an orphan being placed in foster homes in Cleveland.

  Louise did not enjoy remembering her childhood, hard, bleak and unfashionably Dickensian. Because of her Christian religiosity, Dorothy recalled to Louise one particular foster home where she had been better fed and better dressed than she was used to and far more terrorized, because the father of the household tried to put his hands into her panties whenever he caught her alone. He had been a deacon of the Methodist Church. The social workers had often ignored that Louise was Jewish for, as they said to each other loudly in her presence, she did not look it. Louise knew better. She looked like a Hungarian Jew, like photos of her mother taken before disease and dismal labor had eroded her beauty. Therefore Dorothy recalled to Louise more of her frightened and powerless earlier self than she cared to dwell on. Louise liked to remember her origins in her politics rather than in her emotions. She also liked her privacy and her comfort. Traveling had ceased to be enjoyable for the duration, as they were always saying.

  She made a quick review of the mail that had accumulated in an aggregation of easily toppled towers—sorted by Blanche—before hurrying back through the apartment calling, “Kay! Kay!”

  Her daughter was not in her room. Mrs. Shaunessy said that Kay had told her she could not meet her mother. “It would have been nice if she had bothered to tell me that! I waited half an hour for her,” Louise complained.

  Mrs. Shaunessy shook her head wearily. Although they were close in years—the housekeeper, who had two married daughters, was forty-one—Mrs. Shaunessy with her grey-streaked hair pulled back in a knot always seemed to Louise grandmotherly. “Well now, missus, Kay and I had words about her comings and goings. I will tell you that she used hard language to me. And that child refused to tell me where she was going this very afternoon, when school let out.”

  “What do you think is up? I’ll talk to her about her rudeness.”

  “It’s not my place to say, but if you ask me, it’s my opinion she’s chasing around after some boy. That’s how it all starts, at her age, missus. You know it.”

  “Kay?” She thought of her gawky long-limbed colt. “Somehow I doubt it, but I’ll get right on her and find out.”

  Was Kay punishing her for going out of town? She would have considered taking Kay along, but that would mean pulling her out of school, Elizabeth Irwin, and in wartime Washington, the accommodations were so tight she could not simply ask for a double and install her daughter. She would have given anything for a single room.

  Her own fastidiousness annoyed her. After all, sharing a room with a loud confession magazine writer was hardly on a par with the dangers European civilians and American servicemen were facing. At times she felt uncomfortable with how used to ease and comfort she had grown, how accustomed to clean fresh clothes that were in style and well made, a hot bath whenever she wished, a housekeeper to take care of Kay and herself, a secretary to handle her correspondence and type her manuscripts, clean light airy rooms well furnished and with a few good pieces of original art Oscar or she had chosen. She had grown used to all the bourgeois comforts, and she had raised Kay to expect them, a clean gracious well-lighted space in which to live and work, good and plentiful and varied food, a constant stream of stimulation in the form of concerts, books—the newest, the oldest, the best—and always intelligent and spirited conversation.

  She put on her smock
and slippers, casting herself into the chair that faced her walnut desk. She was extremely useful on the board, because the notion of what she wrote as propaganda was neither novel nor shocking to her. She preferred the new line to the old one: she was much closer to believing in working women as loving, responsible, even exciting citizens, than the line that had been pushed since she began publishing that the working woman was manipulative, selfish, dangerous to her family and society.

  In her family the women had always worked. In Hungary her grandmother was said to have run a poultry business. Her mother had worked in a canning factory until TB had carried her from Louise to a sanatorium and finally into early death. Oscar had never desired that she remain idle or make of the work of the house her whole existence. As he frequently said, he liked intelligent women and did not want a cow. What he did want, of course, was all of that intelligent woman’s full attention focused on him. Her work had been fine, so long as she would drop it as soon as he needed her to type his papers, to read and comment on them and improve his prose style, to rub his back and listen to his complaints about his colleagues.

  That was the reason they had had only one child. She had realized shortly after Kay’s birth that with his level of demands on her, she could barely cope. She had constantly to juggle what she knew Kay needed with what Oscar demanded. Should she talk to him about Kay’s insubordination? She was avoiding Oscar these days. Almost falling into bed with him had alarmed her sufficiently so that she had managed not to see him since then, except for a few moments when he came to collect Kay or drop her off.

  Kay appeared just before seven, for supper. “Where were you?” Louise followed her daughter to her room. “Why didn’t you meet me? I waited in Pennsylvania Station over half an hour for you.”