Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “I think volunteering was one of your all-time silly acts,” she said at last. “You have skills that are essential. I doubt if skulking about Germany pretending to be a Nazi is one of them.”

  “How would I know until I tried it?” He hugged her closer. “Never mind, they turned me down. So we send our Germans off and we stay.”

  “Oscar, they want to go. More than most soldiers do.”

  “No doubt.” He led the way down, toward the sprawling manor house built in the local granite, where they were billeted. She did not tell him she had had a similar conversation with Marlitt the day before, and had said, “But you swore you’d never go back to Germany. Never.”

  “For this, I am gladly forsworn.” Marlitt simmered with excitement under a veneer of calm. She was the oldest of the agents, the best educated, always a little aloof from the others, although friendly to Abra. “My husband would have been proud.” She did not mean Mr. Speyer.

  Oscar and she had been given adjoining rooms. Their liaison was so well established, they were treated as a couple. What would it take to release her? More strength than she had, perhaps. Oscar followed her into her room, not she thought from any strong intention but automatically, his mind still on the exiles, who had been tucked in bed early but who would be awakened by their trainer at odd intervals tonight, barking questions. “What is your name? Your address? Your birthplace? What color are the trolleys there? Where are your parents buried?”

  She felt the flowering of a tender relief that they had not taken him, for they might have. They sent off less likely men than Oscar as liaison to guerrillas. That young man she had spent a night with in Chelsea had been killed in France with the maquisards. His roommate the arrogant major was considered an expert on resistance movements.

  Receive what is given you, she thought, and got into bed with him without a word. They made love more fiercely, more passionately, than had been usual with them in a while. No matter what her head might decide, her body opened to him and imploded.

  Afterwards nonetheless she wept, lying sleepless beside him hearing the wind try the casements and tweak at the blackout curtains. Oscar she assumed was asleep but after a while he said, “It makes you unhappy now. You need someone your own age, Abra. I’m not what you really want.”

  “Oh, yes you are,” she said, trying to stop the flow of tears. “It’s the other way round.”

  He was silent a long time. “I don’t want to give you pain, Abra. Louise said I should marry you. Do you want that?”

  “Do I want you to marry me because Louise says you ought to? You must be out of your mind!”

  “But is she right? Would that make you happier?”

  “What do you want?” she mumbled, her face half buried in the pillow.

  “I want the war to end. I want to find Gloria. I imagine being home, but what home am I thinking of? Not the little apartment I had on West Fourth Street in the Village.”

  “What then? What do you want?” she insisted, muffled in the pillow.

  “Everything’s come apart, hasn’t it, for all of us? My mother’s remarried, my daughter’s married, my wife is halfway to Berlin and my sister’s in a concentration camp.”

  He didn’t say his ex-wife; he said his wife. But he’s never had another. Yet. Was he opening? Was this the miracle?

  “Maybe we should get married. Would it please you, if not your family? I’ve seen you getting sadder and grimmer. Would that help?”

  She could not answer. Six men had asked her to marry them before, and never had she been more than flattered and never had she hesitated to refuse. She doubted he was really bringing up the matter because Louise had sarcastically suggested he should. Perhaps he felt himself growing older and perhaps he did not want to end the war alone. Perhaps he did not want to return to New York and a little bachelor apartment to start all over again. His family had disintegrated, and he was preeminently a family man. He might be asking her to fill that vacuum.

  “I’m thinking about it,” she said, sitting up. Her tears had stopped. “I’m sorry I wept. I’ve never done that.”

  “Don’t be ashamed. It’s a draining time.” He lay down carefully, propping his side with a pillow where his ribs were taped. “My ribs are still sore, even though they’re healing, and it’s hard to find a comfortable position. Still, I always sleep better with you.”

  When she got up, it was the day everything had to be gone over a last time, pockets turned out, wallets emptied, clothes pulled wrong side to, seams examined: the wrong button, matchbook, key, coin, receipt, or laundry mark that could lead to suspicion and arrest given a last thorough inspection. At noon, she found it hard to eat, for the tension in the room. The closer it came to time to drop these poor bastards into Germany, the more insane it felt to her. They were delivering them to hell.

  Helga was in an expansive mood and kept proposing toasts. Her husband was more withdrawn, as was Marlitt, knitting at table’s end on a blue scarf. For several months, all the OSS personnel in the room had been bending over the Germans, instructing them, correcting them, questioning them, creating an environment for them, dressing them. They had stood in loco parentis and now they were sending their little family off to probable disaster.

  A whole apparatus had been created, called the Joan Eleanor system, whereby the agents inside Germany would use a new type of radio broadcasting a tight beam upwards, which they hoped would prove impossible to detect. A small plane would circle above with the equipment to pick up the message, so that long transmissions would be possible. Viewed now, not as a game but as something really about to happen in a hostile country, Abra began to feel as if she should jump to her feet and protest the patent absurdity. She kept quiet and drank more hard cider.

  It was late afternoon before she got time to herself. Since they arrived, she had wanted to venture out on the moor. She had never been on a moor and associated it with the Brontë sisters, but they had lived in Yorkshire. There were horses remaining in the stables, and she asked if she could ride one. The groom hesitated, then seeing from the way she approached the horses that she knew what she was doing, suggested she take the grey gelding, a sweet-faced riding horse of middle age. Abra set off.

  She had been warned against bogs, against fog, against attempting to penetrate far, against everything in fact except the Hound of the Baskervilles. The horse knew his way on the moor, so she let him take her where he thought she ought to go. It was obviously someone’s customary ride, which the horse remembered after who knew how many months or even years? Where were the inhabitants of the sprawling house with its overgrown gardens offering last blowsy roses? Their furniture remained, stolid and unexceptional, their family portraits the same. Someone had been an avid fisherman. Someone had liked to read about naval battles and collect model ships.

  She found Dartmoor starkly beautiful. There was no transition between the manor house and the moor. The gardens densely planted and thick with trees crowded around the stone house, its cottages, its pens and stables, its formal allée, and then beyond the stone fence, the vast moor began at once and stretched past the horizon. She passed nobody, although there were paths, bright green against the dark heather. In the distance she saw blackfaced sheep. Once two shaggy ponies whinnied and ran. A buzzard soared over her, hunting. The treeless hills were a deep rich brown, olive and purple, scarlet, densely furred with heather and bracken broken by outcroppings of granite, often piled up in the rough knobs they called tors. She passed an occasional brilliant and fervidly green bog, but stayed out as she had been warned. A kestrel stood in the air beating its wings blurry, as they had used to do long-ago summers in Maine. Everybody in the house had told her not to go out on the moor alone, but she had ridden by herself from age eleven on. Her uncle Woolrich kept horses. The sky was grey and low and might soon rain, yet did not.

  The horse brought her eventually to a row of standing stones beneath a tor and there paused and began to graze. She slid down, experimentally dropped her rei
ns and watched, but he did not move off. The time under the clock, yes, that had shaken Oscar more than he would let on. He had thought about his life and realized what a mistake he was making. It was the miracle she had hoped for, given now to her. He had turned to face her.

  She passed inside the double row of stones, touching each as she went. Old, old. Time had ground them down like a horse’s teeth. How confident she had been, the same at twelve as at twenty-two. The world was her birthday present, and she would want for nothing she set her heart on. The stone row mounted the hill and slowly she passed between them, a sense almost of fear gathering in her, a sense of strangeness, of power. This was not a New England pasture, not the stones of Fort Popham, where historic meant less than a hundred years old. From the top of the hill she could see circles of stone, pits and boundaries of something ancient. No one moved in the landscape, yet everywhere stood remnants of human will and desire.

  Over the crest the row continued dipping to a massive stone that culminated it, grey-green and roughly shaped like a diamond with a hole through it. As she came closer, the hole looked almost polished, as if many hands had worn away at it. It would have been big enough to pass a package through, or a baby, or a head. She thought of stepping back out of the row before she came to the squat looming rock, but she did not.

  She flung herself down on the heath and stared up until the standing stone seemed to sail across the sky carrying her forward, the earth turning faster under her bearing her toward night. I want to marry him, she thought. I want to. Once I marry him, I’ll be the wife. I’ll be the center. I will make him a home. I’ll make him happy.

  The stone loomed over her, squat, female, a wise woman mocking her folly. The sense of a presence was powerful. She did not feel so much alone as outnumbered. You’ll never be the wife, the stone said, you’ll always be the second wife, the imitation. Even if he doesn’t say it, he’ll always be thinking, Louise didn’t do it that way.

  But I’m flesh, she said to the stone. Flesh is stronger than memory.

  Is it? the stone asked. Is flesh stronger than idea?

  Why can’t I have him, why? she asked the stone, half imploring, half demanding.

  You can have him now if you want, but only the him you already have.

  Tears began rolling down her face again, into the base of the great female stone. It was as it was, her life, hard as rock and it would take more tears than she could summon to soften it. She would return to Oscar’s bed, because she would take the good that was offered her while not pretending it was the good she really craved. She lay with her head resting against the stone and oddly, as the tears dried, she smiled. Oscar was a rationalist through and through and he could never understand about the moor and the stone; but she had just discovered she was a pagan. Self-consciously, but with a pleasant sense of mischief and worship combined, she kissed the stone and pushed her head briefly through the hole.

  The horse nickered softly, coming over the hill dragging its reins. She ought not to have left him that way. She rolled to her feet, whistling to the horse. Then she turned and saluted the stone. She caught the horse, mounted him and fled. When she reached the manor house on the moor’s edge, the last supper was being prepared and Marlitt presented her with a beautiful wool scarf in shades of blue.

  RUTHIE 9

  Some Photo Opportunities and a Goose

  Ruthie received her B.A. in a hasty and unimpressive ceremony at the end of August. Now she was enrolled in the graduate school of social work. Although layoff jitters ran through Detroit every month, the sole change had been that she was working a forty-five- rather than a forty-eight-hour week. Only the women whose men were in Europe were optimistic. Nobody looking at the map of the Pacific expected the boys home soon.

  On the whole she found graduate school easier. She had only three classes. Compared to what she had been going through, her life seemed less harried. She did not have to wake until eight, which meant she got close to a full night’s sleep. Often she had lunch with classmates, sparing her mother the need to stretch the points and scarce meat or cheese. She felt as if she had been bent over for years and now she could straighten up. In truth, whatever her fellow students said, graduate school was easier and she could afford to take time and do a better job on her papers. She liked the little projects, interviewing neighborhood women on their experiences with welfare for a term paper.

  The cafeteria at school reminded her of Murray, of sitting with him in that intense staring before he had gone into the Marines. That brought him back to her, his gentleness, his warmth, his presence. She began to write him longer letters, improving on the automatic writing she had been dutifully turning out just before she got into bed. (I love you, I miss you, there was an accident at the factory Tuesday but we got an E for production again, it rained all week, Marilyn fell down the steps and cut her head.)

  A letter arrived from Murray, complaining that he had lost his only picture of her. He said he had lost all his gear when he had been wounded off Tinian, so would she please immediately send him a new photo or preferably a whole bunch of them, as many as she had. How many more battles would he have to fight? Murray had been sick once and wounded twice, and still he did not come home. Wasn’t there a point when a single marine would have been in enough battles to spare him? He still talked about Jack and now about Tiny and Slo Mo, but she thought he sounded lonely and sad.

  Leib had not really changed, so maybe Murray wouldn’t change either. Maybe he would return older, a little sadder, but the same gentle and intelligent and quietly strong man she had fallen in love with. She had to believe that. If only they were better at writing letters, so that they could conjure each other up on the page.

  That Sunday, Rose and Morris went off with Naomi in the old Hudson that belonged to Trudi’s parents, all five crammed in to look for a farmer who was reputed to have maybe a turkey or a goose. Rose had always roasted a goose for Thanksgiving, but this year she would settle for anything she could get, alive, dead or in between, so long as it had feathers. A crow maybe, was her parting comment as she pushed Naomi ahead of her to the rusting car.

  Ruthie decided it was time to do something about new photos for Murray. She sat in a kitchen chair with a towel draped around her while Sharon cut her hair. “Ruthie, I just don’t know what more I can do with you. I wish I could give you a nice finger wave, but your hair is kinky. I wonder sometimes if you shouldn’t, you know, get one of those kits the coloreds use and straighten your hair.”

  “I should complain? I don’t have to set it, I don’t have to curl it.”

  Afterwards Sharon and Trudi laid out Ruthie’s best dresses on the bed. They were not impressed. “You’ve been wearing this red taffeta number since we were in high school,” Trudi said. “We have to take you shopping.”

  Ruthie insisted on her pink chiffon. “Just take a couple of pictures, please. I want to send him a picture of me in this dress.”

  “A summer dress when it’s forty degrees out? He’ll think you’re crazy.”

  “No he won’t, I promise. It’s his favorite dress,” she babbled. “Please, just take a couple of pictures of me in it and then I’ll put on anything you tell me to. Okay?”

  Trudi had a Brownie box camera that had been Leib’s. With it he had taken a dozen pictures of Ruthie which she wished she could reclaim, if he still had them. She did not dare raise the subject with Trudi, who remained sensitive about Ruthie’s having gone out with Leib.

  “Where is Leib?” she asked cautiously, as Sharon zipped her into the pink chiffon. It was loose. Ruthie hoped she hadn’t lost weight on her bust. She suddenly wanted to make Murray love her, because she was sure he had come as close to forgetting her as she had to forgetting him.

  Trudi blew out her breath. “At a football game. Fatty got him two tickets to the Lions, and he took this guy Moose he met in Fatty’s bar. He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go.”

  “Do you like football?”

  “I hate it, and
I’d freeze to death in the stands. But I feel like he should ask me if I want to go, instead of going right ahead and asking Moose without saying boo to me.”

  “Is Moose Jewish?” Sharon asked.

  “Sure. But he’s a crook.” Trudi sighed heavily. “The doctor says Leib can’t stand all day on the line. I wish he’d go to school like you, Ruthie. The government passed this new bill where they’ll pay for it.”

  “Really?” Ruthie smoothed creases that came from the chiffon hanging undisturbed in her closet since that time with Murray. “I wonder if Murray knows? I’ll write him about it.”

  “I’ll show you the pamphlet the government sent Leib.”

  On the porch railing, Ruthie arranged herself with the coat open trying to smile at the camera as if it were Murray. She remembered the rich warm brown of his eyes with the little flecks of gold in the iris. Had she aged? Had she grown skinny, scrawny? It was as if her body had ceased to exist, and now she was trying to show it off.

  She did not know if she was still attractive. The men at the factory had got used to working with women and they knew who was interested and who was not. It had been a long time since any of them had pestered her, more than pro forma. Her classes were ninety percent women. She wondered if Murray would find her withered into an old maid. That was what Leib kept saying about her. Why should she believe Leib? She kept away from him. She spent time at Wayne partially because with the house so crowded, it was hard to study, and partially because she did not like being around Leib, and she never knew when he was going to appear. Yet everybody else seemed to think they were one happy family.

  Naomi spent a lot of time upstairs, baby-sitting. However, Ruthie was looking around for a better job for her. Child labor laws had been allowed to lapse for the duration, so kids were quitting school for factory jobs. She wanted to make sure that Naomi stayed in school, but she also thought it would be better if Naomi had a different job.