Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

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.

  He walked down to the Thames through the light his eyes identified as late afternoon, although it was past supper. The long pearlescent twilight would soon wash the sky across. The light was dull and orangey, beaten copper, a bowl in which his mother stood before him whisking egg whites for a meringue. It was winter and hot in the kitchen. Bernice was cutting lemons with intense concentration.

  He would like to go straight to Bernice now. He would like to run to her and throw himself down with his head in her ample lap and pour out his anger against Zach. She would make him feel how silly it was to allow Zach’s anger to touch him. He wanted soothing. How chaste he had been. Since Mary, he had been with no woman besides a few whores in Algiers. Without his sister, he needed a lover to comfort him. He had been stupidly withholding himself from any entanglement, as if that would bring Mary back.

  Yet his wanting was far too specific to be satisfied. If he only wanted a woman, he could find one easily enough. London was full of lonely women looking for company. Many of them were curious about Americans, who projected a certain glamour. What he really wanted was to complain to his sister or his lover; his sister was thousands of miles away at an airfield; his lover was dead. He had never collected those mementoes Tom Knacker had promised him. He needed nothing to jog his memory. London was studded with little time delay fuses that evoked specific walks, meals, conversations about Constable or Whistler or Blake.

  He did not know if Zach were right to accuse him of nurturing his grief to make it grow. Was he mourning Mary or was he mourning the life as an artist he had experienced with her or was he mourning that fantasy briefly fulfilled of his stunted youth? Did it matter? His grief was genuine enough. He wanted what he could no longer have. He compared himself to the refugees he encountered around OSS London and their governments in exile. The present was only a stratagem to find a way back: back where anyone else could see they would never go. Warsaw of 1937. Paris of 1938. Berlin of 1932. He, who only wanted London of 1942, was out of luck too.

  Now London was an irritant, representing what he couldn’t have while constantly reminding him of what he had lost. He was painting some, without passion. He cursed Zach freshly, turning on Royal Hospital Road heading for the tube. When he had returned and looked at his paintings of the previous fall, he had been excited and almost dismayed by them. They were better than anything he had previously done, with a power he had never before attained. Now Zach was telling him his best was third-rate.

  There were restaurants, there were pubs where intelligence people went, like those in any other profession—convenient to the offices and likely to shelter acquaintances. After a sketchy Greek supper he washed up in an OSS pub and looked around for company. Friends of Zach he did not wish to deal with. He imagined them sneering at him: thinks he’s a painter, isn’t that a rip. He thought of joining a group of R & A scholars, but they were a closed company, involved in some esoteric political discussion.

  A young blond woman from Labor Branch was sitting with a couple from R & A, involved with each other and ignoring her. He had met her, he knew, at a recent party. Zach had danced with her before disappearing with somebody’s younger brother. She had been with a man, yes, Oscar Kahan, who was running a project. The girl was here without anyone to pay her attention, drinking with a fixed broody expression.

  Usually women picked him up, as Mary had at an exhibit. After fending off the gentle approaches of women for two months, he could hardly complain none were standing around waiting for him to change his mind. On those occasions when he had to make an approach, he sought a woman who looked as if she wanted or needed something, because he might be it. The problem was he could not think of her name. Catching his eye, she waved perfunctorily back, then returned her gaze to the far wall, over the heads of the men at the bar. He remembered her eyes, because of the unusual darkness and brilliance of their blue. Name, name?

  He strolled to the table, nodding at the couple. “That party in Knightsbridge two weeks ago, I believe. You’re in Labor Branch, aren’t you? Barbara?”

  “Good try. I can tell I impressed you. No, the name is Abra. Don’t apologize. I don’t remember yours at all.”

  “Jeff. Jeff Coates.”

  “SO?”

  “Had been. I transferred to SI.” Recapture initiative. “How long have you been in London, Abra?” See, I have it right this time.

  An hour later when he suggested a pub that he was sure she would find amusing, so different from the London she had seen so far, she acquiesced but remarked as they walked into the dark street, “Frankly, I’m spending time with you because my lover is out with an old flame, but I have no intention of carrying revenge too far. So I’m a waste of your time.”

  “Not if it makes it pass,” he said. Her bluntness pleased him. “I’m trying to forget a dead woman, who’s a lot more real to me than you are.”

  “That sounds like a story you might want to tell me.”

  “When we get to my pub. It’s on the river. Do you know Chelsea?”

  “I don’t think I’ve been there yet. That’s where the writers used to live, isn’t it? Carlyle? Rossetti? Oscar Wilde.”

  “Painters too. You should let me show you London. What’s left of it.” He laughed, taking her arm. “I used to be a professional tourist guide, summers. We shepherded students and teachers through Europe, explaining the difference between Romanesque and Gothic, moving them through customs, finding clean toilets, dealing with their stomach- and heartaches.”

  “Which is worse?” Abra laughed sharply, letting him keep her arm.

  “Surely that depends on how bad each is? Watch your footing.” The street was pocked with bomb craters. It was strange to walk across a city in the rosy grey twilight of late evening, among buildings hiding behind blackout curtains that made them appear deserted, like Mediterranean villages in the afternoon, starkly shuttered. “If we have a bad stomach, we fear dying of food poisoning. If we have a heartache, we think of suicide.” Actually he had never considered suicide in his life.

  “Not me. I think of murder.”

  “Then your grief is less than the wound to your self-esteem.”

  “Tell that to Othello, why don’t you?”

  Her voice was merry, crisp, with the roughness of country honey. He was suddenly aroused. Her hair looked silver in the etiolated twilight as they stumbled through the broken streets. He could feel her against him, her cotton dress flimsy and the flesh beneath spare but sufficient. He stopped and pulled her into his arms to kiss her. He judged that she had drunk a fair amount, but not enough not to blur her awareness of what she was doing. She was surprised, standing stiffly in his embrace for a moment, then leisurely kissing him back. After a few moments, she gave him a little push and stepped away.

  “Now, now. That indicates you have hopes I don’t share.”

  “A kiss is always in order at this time of night.”

  “You’re an accomplished picker-upper, aren’t you?” She peered at him, cocking her head. “You’re used to women adoring you. So’s Oscar.”

  “I thought this was a vacation from him. Voilà, my pub.” His local, as opposed to the pub where he met OSS personnel, was right on the Thames a few blocks from his flat. The King’s Head and Eight Bells had windows upstairs overlooking the river and a paneled bar downstairs, a far cry from the bars he had wast
ed evenings in back home.

  She liked it, as he had bet she would, and they settled down to observe the scene and chat. He told her what he felt like divulging, mostly about being a painter and the deaths with a bit of the hard times for decorative relief. She was not as sympathetic as the women he liked best. She tended to view things critically and with amusement. Listening to her story, he considered her spoiled, the darling of an old New England family and accustomed to getting what she wanted when she wanted it, from toys to boats to men.

  Still, he continued to find her attractive, even the abrasive quality of her mind serving to distract him. She had done whatever she pleased, he thought, going to school because that amused her, dabbling in radical politics when that was exciting, exercising a good appetite, joining OSS. Not quite rich, of a lesser rank than Zach. He had learned not to confuse choice with power. In the old days of family tours, he had met occasional women with that streak of fresh-faced adventurism, and often he had enjoyed their company and their beds.

  When he finally steered her out of the pub, he headed her toward his flat. Night had finally fallen, a night darker than any city night he had known, a plush black that filled the eyes. She was not accustomed to it and had to trust him for guidance. Yet she was not completely disoriented, as she said, nodding toward the river, grey wavering silk in the night, “We didn’t come from this direction.”

  “Would you like tea or a nightcap? I’m close at hand. I’m afraid the last train may have passed the station.”

  “Don’t assume I am drunker or stupider than I am. I am trying to decide if exercising my freedom actually creates that freedom, or only makes clear to me I no longer have it.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to find out?” He would prefer to go home with her, but probably she was sharing a flat with other OSS girls. He must take her with him, because he wanted her presence to release him from the obligation of dealing with Zach. The anger and pain were there in a tight coil, tension unreleased. “Do you want to be alone? I don’t. The lack of what you want is more boring—”

  “More boring than taking what you don’t want in lieu of what you do?”

  “But you do want it more than a little. You’re tempted. Curious.”

  “In the old days, I wouldn’t have hesitated to act on mild curiosity,” she said with a broad yawn. “Love is a hobble, that’s clear.”

  “Good, I’m glad you decided in my favor.”

  She laughed but did not argue further. She went along, as he had been sure she would. The momentum was useful. A scent of peonies in the front yard, ghostly white plump smears. She admired the flat, said a passing hello to Zach and was ushered at once into Jeff’s room.

  The sex itself was pleasant but of no great excitement. They were both tired and the spark of compulsion was missing. He liked her trim athletic body nonetheless, and her sexual confidence, her gaiety in bed, her smile of relaxation afterward. They slept. He appreciated the insulation from Zach.

  In the morning he had a message to report to SI. They were shipping him off to Kent for intensive French language review, the latest radio techniques, the most recent information on Gestapo, Abwehr and collaborative French police procedures. He was to be infiltrated into the south of France by summer’s end.

  That was what they said. He knew of course the same problem remained: how? SI lacked planes. The American Army wasn’t about to give them any. British intelligence didn’t want American agents entering France, and thus denied them transport. SI had had good agents trained and ready to go, sitting about twiddling and twitching for at least a month.

  When he saw the plane to take him to France, he’d believe he was going. Until then, he was glad to get out of London, but he suspected in two months, he’d be back again, a tremendously well-trained agent trekking from office to pub to flat. Maybe by that time, he would be able to stand the sight of Zach’s slightly ravaged handsome face again, but at the moment he doubted that softening of his anger.

  NAOMI 5

  One Hot Week

  Naomi thought that Paris had never gotten as hot as Detroit. School was still in session. Today was June 21 and the air felt like a pool of hot oil. She dragged herself to school through streets that felt crazy. Cars were gunning their engines and peeling off with a screech of rubber. Broken glass lay on the sidewalk and Mr. Weinstein was boarding up what had been his store window. Obscenities leered from every wall.

  She was a little late, and so she didn’t notice how weird everybody was till she got into class. Graduation was this week and her classmates had been strutting around lording it over the lower grades and generally doing no work at all. They had rehearsal today; last night with Aunt Rose’s help, she had put the finishing touches to her yellow graduation dress. Ruthie and Aunt Rose had sat around the kitchen table with her, all their feet on a cake of ice in a washbasin with a towel folded on top.

  Now the colored kids were gathered on the near side of the classroom. The Poles were together muttering, the kids from Appalachia in one corner, the Jews against the back wall. Their teacher Miss Cahootie was not even in the room. She was out in the hall with a knot of teachers talking in loud whispers about Belle Isle and Them. They were coming with guns.

  She wondered if this was an invasion. She felt dizzy with fear. The papers all said that the Allies were winning, finally. The Russians were fighting back and the classroom map had turned from black to red on the eastern side. The Allies had conquered all of North Africa, turning the map blue. But papers lied. She still remembered the invincible Maginot Line.

  Why did she keep thinking about Paris in 1940? Because Detroit felt like that to her today, the adults gathered discussing in low hysterical voices what they thought the children did not know, while the children passed misinformation to each other. She spoke first to Clotilde, who was standing a little apart from the colored kids gathered whispering. “Clotilde, qu’est-ce qui se passe? Est-ce finalement la guerre?”

  “It’s some kind of war. The whites threw a colored mother and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge last night. Thousands of people were fighting, colored and white, on the bridge, and then a mob came to Paradise Valley.” Smoothing her skirt, Clotilde frowned. “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing. Our radio is broken, and my uncle Morris is still trying to find a tube so he can fix it.”

  Sandy was motioning frantically for her to join the group of Jewish children. Now they’ll come to take us away, she thought. They’ll separate us out the way they took Maman and Rivka. They were no longer in the last place she had dreamed about. The new place gave her worse dreams.

  “Don’t talk to them!” Sandy hissed at her. “They all have knives.”

  “Who?” Naomi looked around quickly. She did not see any police or men with knives.

  “The shvartzers. They all have knives.”

  Naomi looked over her shoulder at the ten colored children huddled against the wall, Clotilde in her white pinafore holding herself across the chest. Their teacher Miss Cahootie was still gossiping with the other teachers. From down the hall she could hear the sounds of other classrooms, more subdued than the glad roar which usually rose when teachers stepped out. “Knives? No more than you do.”

  “The Negroes are beating up on the whites. It started last night at Belle Isle—”

  “When the Negro mother was thrown in the river with her baby?”

  “What are you talking about? It was a white woman who had it done to her, you know?” Sandy whispered, “Like what we looked up the library that time, you know, before you took down Errol’s picture.”

  “Some nigger sailor raped a white woman,” Four Eyes Rosovsky said loudly. “That’s what started it.”

  “Started what?” Naomi felt completely lost. If it wasn’t the war, what was it? Everybody was scared, for she could smell that familiar ammoniac tang that she had first registered just before the Germans entered Paris.

  “The Negroes and the whites are fighting each other downtown and everypl
ace,” Sandy said breathlessly. “They’re beating up on each other and shooting and knifing each other. Mayor Jeffries called for everybody to stay home and be quiet if they don’t have to go to work, but gangs are roaming all over the city beating up on each other and looking for trouble.”

  Miss Cahootie came charging into the room, red-faced and wringing her hands. “Now, what is this, class? What are you doing all up out of your seats? Don’t think because you’re supposed to graduate this Friday that I can’t control you. Anybody who gets too big for his britches will miss his graduation, do you hear me? If you think I’m fooling, just try me. You’ll be the sorry one.”

  “She wouldn’t dare,” Sandy said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “I don’t care. Then I don’t have to wear my lousy yellow dress.”

  “Do you have something to say to the class, Naomi? Because you can just stand up and say it to everyone.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then you can keep your mouth shut. We’ll start with attendance. Ralph, you can take the attendance for me today.” Shoving the attendance book at a boy in the first row, Miss Cahootie suddenly bolted into the hall again. As Ralph was calling each name, making faces, she reappeared. “All right,” she said, grabbing the attendance book from Ralph, “if that’s the way you want it. We’ll start with our reading lesson.”

  In homeroom, they always had math and then spelling before reading. It was just another sign that the adults had lost their nerve. Miss Cahootie didn’t even tell them where to begin. When she called on Four Eyes and he started back two pages, so that they all knew what it said anyhow, she didn’t even notice.

  Sandy passed her a note. “Alvin says the shvartzers broke into his uncle’s store and stole all the furniture they could carry.”

  Why were these people acting as if they were in a city without government? Suppose the Germans or the Japanese really were coming? If it was the Japanese, maybe they wouldn’t pick her out to take away. She only followed the war in the Pacific because Ruthie did. Murray was always on some small island that was only a dot in the expanse of blue. She worried more about Europe, which reached much closer to Detroit and where Maman, Papa, Rivka and Jacqueline were lost. Leib was in Tunisia, in the infantry. Trudi thought that maybe he would be coming home, now that they had captured North Africa. That was the rumor, and in his last letter, Leib seemed to believe it too.