Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  She bicycled to the airport every day to work on her plane, for she had finally bought out the lawyer. She was going to fly it back, because she could sell it in California. Finally the last day, Mrs. Augustine drove her out (she had shipped off her bicycle that morning) and she took her plane up and headed west. It was a trip she had made many times, always in a faster and bigger plane and usually in the opposite direction. Still, to fly again was to be thoroughly alive.

  Making love to Flo was like flying. When she lay between Flo’s thighs, she felt herself at the controls of a sumptuous machine, she felt empowered. She, only she, could give such pleasure as she drove carefully but at high speeds the beautiful body of her love. When Flo made love to her, she felt flown, pressed through the air in a high magnificent arc. Sex with Flo was tender, passionate, gentle. It was another class of event than the sex she had known with Zach, for whole being to whole being they embraced, given into each other’s eager care.

  She had written Zach with her new address, the details of her life, but she was not confident she would ever hear from him. She was surprised one fall Friday when he called her at work, summoning her to the Mark Hopkins for supper. She got out of work early pleading a headache, so that she could greet Flo at the door changed out of her work clothes and carrying a glass of wine. As soon as Flo stepped inside, she started kissing her, rubbing her hands in the small of Flo’s back and then rubbing her mons through the cloth in a way that always made Flo crazy for it. She was assuming if she was dealing with a relaxed and satisfied Flo, she would get a weaker reaction to her news. To think she had ever imagined she would not know how to please her. Because she had caught her right at the door, Flo had a strong tomato smell, but as she ate her, Flo’s own sweet sea scent rose. Afterward, she mentioned the phone call.

  Halfway to the shower, Flo put her hands on her hips. “Oh, lover boy calls, and you go running.”

  “There’s no love between Zach and me. Don’t be jealous, sweet mama. I’m going to ask him for help.”

  “Why should he help two lesbians?”

  “Because he’s queer too. He just might. Because he loved Jeff. Because he enjoyed being with me, if only in place of Jeff. Because he has money and power and sometimes it amuses him to play god. He might think what I have in mind is funny.”

  “Alaska?”

  Bernice pulled Flo into her arms, with Flo hanging back and turning her face away, refusing to look at Bernice. “You know it’s okay here, but that’s all it is. You working in the cannery all day, coming home with the last strength wrung out of you and with your hands all cut up. Someday you’ll lose a finger. It’s back-breaking work, and what do you make? Next to nothing. I hate being a secretary in a firm where I should be a pilot. I hate being grounded. We fly in bed, but everywhere else, we crawl on our bellies.”

  “He’ll just use you. You just want an excuse to go to bed with him.”

  “If I have to fuck him, I will but I don’t want to. Believe me, I won’t, if he doesn’t make me.”

  “If you don’t go, he can’t make you.”

  “If I don’t go, we have no chance, no chance at all.”

  Flo began to cry. “I don’t want us to need them. Why can’t we do it on our own?”

  “We’ve applied for flying jobs everyplace people fly, every bloody place. Us and every other WASP. They won’t let us fly. They want to push women out of the skies altogether—”

  “Except that asshole who said I could be a stewardess, but you were too tall.” Flo tied herself into her dressing gown, shaking back her strawberry blond hair.

  “And not pretty enough.” Bernice grinned. “Now don’t cry, Flo baby. Don’t cry. Likely I won’t get anything out of him, but it’s worth it to try, for us. For the two of us, I’ll do anything in the world. You don’t know the half of it yet. Now there’s something you have to do before I go down there. Get the scissors. You’re going to cut my hair all off, down to the skull.”

  “Bernice, you can’t do that. They’ll fire you from work!”

  “Tomorrow morning, we’ll buy a wig. They’ll like that better. Listen to me, Flo, I’m going to see him in full male drag. I have to.”

  Flo wrung her hands. “Sometimes I want faith again. I grew up with hellfire and brimstone, and one day, it just wasn’t there, the old guilt, the old glory. Now I wish I had it back, so I could spend the whole night on my knees praying. When I go around the house, when I’m worried sick about you, and I go saying, Oh, please, Oh please, don’t let anything happen to my Bernice, I wonder who the hell I think I’m praying to, the doorknob?” Flo kissed her and sat her down with a towel draped around her shoulders. At the last moment, Bernice selected Jeff’s tweed jacket, his woven tie.

  Zach had given her his room number and told her to be there at seven. She was a little late and simply went on up. Her entrance was as startling as she had intended it to be. Zach stared, then flung up his hands. “I knew it, I knew it! Oh my prescient soul, if it isn’t Mr. Bernard. Fascinating.” He waved her to a seat and went on staring. He was darkly tanned, but what attracted her attention was the other person in the room. He was young, although probably not as young as he looked, slight, with golden brown skin and a high-foreheaded sweet face, Oriental but not Chinese, she thought, not Japanese.

  Zach spoke to him in a language that had many vowels; however, while Zach learned languages with ease, as he had boasted to her, he spoke them all with a strong American accent. The youth gracefully brought them a bottle and two glasses and then he put on his jacket and went out. Bernice stared after him.

  “Just a little souvenir of my adventures in the creepy crawly Orient. He looks sweet, doesn’t he? Oh, he is. But he’s here partly because the French put a price on his head.” Zach was standing, looking her over as he talked. “Tran fought the Japanese for years and now he has to fight the French. So boring. We were helping his brave band and they were helping us. The word we gave all the pilots who went down in Indochina was Vietminh—we’d tell them to keep asking for the Vietminh, because the guerrillas would pick up our flyboys and ferry them back to us. But under Truman—do you like ice? I can’t remember—we are now on the side of the French. Excruciating stupidity. OSS is being dismantled. No more fun and games for a while. The bastards at State and War think they can do it for themselves.”

  She looked at his hand, but of course he was unlikely to wear a ring. “Are you married? Are congratulations in order?”

  “I decided I don’t care to live in London. It’s threadbare. The smell of a second-rate power. More’s doing here, and with our business raging into overseas expansion, I’d better base myself Stateside. I might marry into a San Francisco banking family. She’s comely and well behaved and into redwood preservation. I’m also being courted by a richer and better-connected eastern family, although the lady in question would take more handling. Care to dispense advice?”

  “Marry the redwood lady. You won’t want to put the effort into the other.”

  “I’ve been thinking along the same lines myself. However, I have to balance all the various openings I see. This is a time empires are crumbling and empires are being built.”

  “If you do get heavily involved in business again, won’t it seem tame after OSS?”

  He sighed. “Still, it’s all part of the same whole, I have to keep that in mind. Wild Bill Donovan himself is going corporate. I’ll keep my hand in and wait for further developments, as they say. Well, dear heart, I’m sorry I couldn’t make the ceremony. Was it touching and all that?”

  She made her report. He had not commented on her costume after the first instant. She wondered if she had made a mistake, but remained careful how she sat, how she moved, how she stood. She was giving a performance, she must remember, a performance before an extremely critical audience. She made little attempt to alter her voice, just pitching it lower.

  Finally he said, “You look like Jeff, and yet you don’t. It’s fascinating and sad. That poor bastard. He couldn�
�t face being queer and he preferred to rush off from me and die. By the way, he killed himself, did you know?”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Cyanide capsules. We were all issued them, in case of not being able to hold up under torture—which he was subjected to. Quite understandable but still, leaves me wondering.”

  She simply shook her head. She wanted to avoid arguing with him about Jeff, who was beyond their opinions. Zach was going on: “He was with a predominantly Jewish maquis, an odd lot, ill-armed but feisty. I worked with them for a couple of months myself and we were effective in harassing the Boches and raising merry hell. Liberated some towns, accepted the surrender of a garrison and other high times.” Zach sighed again, deeply. “Those were the days, dear heart. I love a spot of guerrilla fighting. If you have decent weapons, you can have so much fun scoring off the other side. You know the best I ever met? Fiji Islanders. They melt into the jungle. I couldn’t keep up with them—me! If I were setting up an intelligence agency, I’d send men to train with the Fijis.”

  “Jeff was dead before you got to France?”

  “I was busy in Brittany till well after D-Day. I couldn’t amble down to the south much before the Dragoon landings. When I got into the area, he’d been dead for a month. Frankly, he was running a sloppy operation. I could have saved his neck if we’d been together. I’m a professional and he never was.”

  “He was a professional painter.”

  “Even at that, a failure. However.” He rose and pointed to a crate leaning against one wall. “I salvaged some of his work. I took the liberty of having a couple framed for you.”

  She had a pang of hot anger that he would keep what should be all hers and then dole out what he did not want, but then he had salvaged them as he said, and but for him, they would have been lost. She opened the box. In it were a study and two paintings of the same woman: one on a bicycle in a closely rendered landscape; another, three sketches of her face conversing; the third, her in bed, open shutters, open window, the bed table with a carafe and a gun, she on her side smiling like a cat with half-closed eyes, a long thin woman with rather large breasts for her weight, the landscape of stone and brush spread around her in a circle pressing in on the little room. “Who was she?”

  “His local girlfriend. He was doing lots of portraits, which I think inferior to his landscapes.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was killed in a German raid on the encampment. Just a kid he was pronging, the way he always had some woman taking care of him.” Zach stood in front of her, hands on her shoulders. “The impersonation is passable but weak in minor points. You should make stronger eye contact and hold your chin up, not dipped.”

  She corrected her posture. “Better?”

  “Better is if you’re still doing it that way in fifteen minutes. This is not how you dress normally, I take it, and probably not designed to stir my gonads. What do you want, my cagey darling? I take it you want something. Everybody does, sooner or later, and you’ve been marvelously accommodating.”

  “I do want.”

  “What?”

  “I want false ID. I want a male identity.”

  “My sainted aunt, why? Do you need a license to do whatever you’ve been doing in bed?”

  “I have a license to fly but it won’t do me any good as a woman. Zach, I love the woman I live with, but I need to fly. I want to go up to Alaska and start a bush airline. I can do it. I can fly anything, Zach, I’m checked out in everything the Army has. Now I can’t get a job teaching beginners to circle the airport in a Piper Cub. Jeff made me his beneficiary and I saved money and so did Flo. But we need a man to run the operation, and that man has to be me. As a man, I could get a job tomorrow in Alaska.”

  He sat down on the couch and laughed, quietly. “It’s so farfetched, it’s amusing. We aren’t entirely shut down. Probably I could give you what you want—an identity. But you can’t go back on it. Once we’ve set you up as Bernard X with a particular war record, and so on, Bernice has simply disappeared and you can’t turn back into her when you break up with Flo and decide you just laid eyes on Mr. Right and want to make little babies.”

  “Zach, I think it’s fair to assume I will go to my grave with no more experience of men than you.”

  “I should think I might in some ways prove sufficient.” He grinned and lifted a hand to silence her. “Someone at the door. Presumably our supper. Do let them in.”

  As they sat down to prime rib, Zach would hear no more of her desires and plans. He regaled her with tales of his exploits in France, Yugoslavia and Indochina until they had finished the meal and the bottle of French burgundy he had ordered with it. He made occasional corrections. “The smile is a little too … effusive? Propitiating? The voice should stay pitched lower. It’s passable but could be better.”

  If he was giving her a critique to improve her performance, did that mean he would come through? Instinct warned her not to press him. Walk on through the evening, walk on.

  After supper, he began to question her about Alaska. She had been studying maps, reading everything she could lay her hands on. She had a map with her she spread on the table. She also had brochures of used planes. The Army was divesting itself of large quantities of cargo and transport planes. She was careful not to ask him for money. She needed more, but with a new identity, she might be able to borrow. The false identity, the honorable discharge, the flying record, the accouterments of an alien male identity only he could give her.

  “Think of my poor little friend, out there in the fog wandering. I think he was fooled by you. It’s amusing, isn’t it? But we won’t give him cause for jealousy. It’s too elegiac, isn’t it? Are you disappointed?”

  “Of course,” she lied firmly, “but it will make it easier at home for me too. Flo was being very jealous.”

  “I must meet her sometime,” he said languidly, grimacing at his watch. “Don’t you think in a way he has something of Jeff’s style? The litheness, the quick grace. Did you notice how he moves?”

  Bernice produced an encouraging noise, unable to recall any resemblance.

  “He’s an artist too. Writes poetry in French and Vietnamese. All the cultured ones have that veneer of French culture.” He looked at his watch again. “I told the little bugger to be back here in two hours, and it’s close to three. I don’t like that. Mommy must spank. Where would he take off to in a city he doesn’t know, in a foreign country? I must have patience with him. The Oriental mind knows not of clock time.”

  As she left he was glaring at his wrist, peering down the corridor after her in the direction of the elevator.

  It was a month later to the day when a package arrived registered mail from Overseas Enterprises Unlimited. In it was everything she needed to establish herself as Harry Edward Munster, formerly of Boston and the Army Air Corps, assigned to OSS during the war and honorably discharged as a captain with ratings up to four-engine planes. There was no note inside, but there was a letter of recommendation from Colonel Zachary Barrington Taylor who had been his commanding officer, and who said he could be relied upon at his new corporate address in Rockefeller Center for a more detailed reference.

  Bernice held the package and smiled into the mirror as she took off the wig she had been wearing to work. It might work. It just might. It would be an adventure to try it together, at least for a couple of years. She could always kill off Harry in an accident in the Alaska wilderness. What other chance did they have? What other choice?

  LOUISE 12

  The Second Gift

  In the three months since she had been brought to the dragon’s treasure in the mountain by Oscar, she had seen him three times rather formally. They made appointments to spend a day walking in the countryside or touring with his jeep, eating at any country inn still functioning. They were not lovers, but amazingly they had resumed being friends. She imagined that would be the shape of their relationship, perhaps until one of them died.

  She
had been in flooded Holland, in Denmark covering their remarkable resistance and their marked success in protecting Jews, in Norway to view the burned northern areas, in Paris to cover what Collier’s described as the rebirth of French fashion, and again and always back to the DP camps.

  Thanks to her own reporting and that of others, a fact-finding mission on the treatment of displaced persons arrived in July. She had talked to the Harrison Commission about events she had witnessed, including Patton’s use of German police and MPs to round up and beat Jews who had survived camps and were living in Munich and to force them into sealed boxcars for shipment to Poland, whence came tales of their murder. Thus she had rendered herself unwelcome as a correspondent. What was happening to the DPs in the camps, living on near starvation allotments of soup, bread, coffee and dehydrated food, behind barbed wire and guard towers, was the story she most wanted to cover; that was also the story in which magazines were least interested. Assignments were tapering off.

  She had just gone to Bergen-Belsen again to visit the community the Jews had created there of impromptu schools and workshops. She was driven by her vision of these people who had been stripped of home, possessions, work, family, friends, community, country, everyone and everything they had loved, all connections now smashed, murdered, gone. How much loss could any human endure? They were that measure.

  She had just finished interviewing a boy of fifteen who was frantic to find any surviving family when she was seized by cramps that doubled her over. She had dysentery from contaminated water. The doctor also told her she was suffering from total exhaustion, prescribing a month’s bed rest. She shrugged that off, but Oscar, who turned up on the fourth day, did not.

  The bug she had was stubborn or her resistance had been demolished by more than a year of living out of a duffle bag, no fresh food, catching what sleep she could on the ground, in barns, in empty ammunition trailers, in dripping tents, in bombed hotels where the plumbing had gone the way of the dinosaur. She was up and seated by the window in her hospital room reflecting to herself that her body was telling her something, perhaps that she was forty-two years old and not twenty-one and lacked an unfailing reservoir of strength to draw upon. Suddenly her body was charging her for the stress she had put it through. Then Oscar walked in carrying roses.