“But who was he?” demanded Ruth.
Marian said nothing. How could she explain Barclay?
Eddie’s warm, mournful eyes lingered on Marian. “We’ve interrogated Marian enough. Now we should dance.” He stood and held out a hand to Marian.
“So you’re both going to abandon me?” Ruth said. “The drinks haven’t come yet.”
“Ruthie, for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never had a problem finding someone to dance with,” Eddie said.
* * *
—
Out in the night again, Marian turned to say a quick goodbye to Ruth and Eddie, to flee from the sight of them going off together, but the brief flaring glow of someone’s cigarette lighter caught them embracing. Not kissing but holding each other tightly. The lighter snapped closed; the murk swallowed them. Ruth called her name.
“I’m here,” Marian said.
“Where?”
“Right here.”
Ruth had her by the arm. “Let’s go. I hate goodbyes.”
“Why aren’t you going with him?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand why you lied about being married.”
They walked a little way down the street in the general direction of the Red Cross Club. “Don’t you love him?” Marian asked. “It seems like you do.”
“Of course I do. He’s Eddie. What’s not to love? Didn’t you love your husband?”
Dawn was soaking through the cloud. Shapes were coalescing, different grades of shadow. “At the end I hated him.”
“But in the beginning?”
“Maybe in the beginning.”
“You could have just told me you were married,” Ruth said. “You’re not so special that everything has to be a secret.”
“I don’t think I’m special.”
Ruth let out a derisive snort. “You do so. And that’s why you know you can drop people, and they’ll still come back. You were right, too. I came crawling as soon as you snapped your fingers.”
“That’s not it at all.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Why won’t you answer me about Eddie? Don’t you sleep together?”
“Why do you care, Marian? Oh!” In the dimness, Ruth tripped over the outstretched leg of a soldier passed out on the sidewalk and lurched down hard onto her hands and knees.
“Oh!” Marian echoed. She knelt beside Ruth. “Are you all right?”
Ruth sat up, shaking out her hands. “Yes, but it stings.” The drunk hadn’t moved, and Ruth poked his leg. He stirred, curling up. “Guess he’s not dead,” she said.
“We should move so no one does the same to you.” Marian took Ruth’s arm, hoisting her up. They sat in a doorway on a low granite step. Marian caught the smell of urine from somewhere and of smoke and morning damp. Ruth’s palms were raw and gritty, her stockings torn at the knees and streaked with blood. Gently Marian took Ruth’s hand, turned it over, and kissed her knuckles. She felt like a Spitfire held too long on the ground. She needed to move, to act, or she would boil over.
“It’s not like that with Eddie and me,” Ruth said. “We do love each other, but we’re different. We don’t—it’s not romantic between us. Sometimes it’s easier to be married because married people seem like everyone else. No one asks questions. Or not as many. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“I think so,” Marian said, and she teetered for a final moment before she leaned over and kissed Ruth, who kissed back without hesitation. It was an ordinary kiss, in some ways—the wetness of a mouth, the blindness.
A two-note whistle broke them apart. An American airman swayed by, leering bemusedly. “Room for me?”
“Not even a little,” Ruth said. “Go home.”
“Come on, girls, be nice.”
Marian got to her feet, pulling Ruth with her. As they hurried down the street, holding hands, Ruth gasped as though she’d suddenly remembered something.
“What?” said Marian.
Ruth lifted the hand Marian was holding, scraped from her fall. “You’re hurting me.”
Marian had been squeezing without realizing it. “I’m sorry.” She kissed the knuckles again.
“It’s getting light,” Ruth said, gently reclaiming her hand. “People will see.”
Ratcliffe Hall, Leicestershire, England
April 1943
One month after Marian met Eddie, one month before the Battle of Attu
“Have you heard about the night witches?” Ruth asked, lying on her back in bed at Ratcliffe Hall.
Marian shook her head. She was wedged between Ruth and the wall, propped on an elbow, her other hand stroking Ruth’s belly under the blankets.
“Russian girls in old biplanes,” Ruth said. “They have a whole regiment of them. They fly over German lines at night and drop bombs by hand. They cut their engines and glide in—whoosh in the dark, like a broomstick passing over. Of course they get killed like crazy.”
“At least they’re doing something useful.”
“So are we.”
“Mostly I sit around waiting for the weather to clear.”
“This is useful,” Ruth said as she pushed Marian’s hand downward. “Maybe we’re night witches, too.”
Marian smiled, pulled her hand back up. “They called me a witch in Alaska, as a joke, because I could get where I wanted even in bad weather.” But she was thinking of Barclay, too, how he’d half believed her when she’d claimed to have cast a spell on her womb.
“It just means they were scared of you.”
“Maybe.” Her thumb brushed the underside of Ruth’s breast, and Ruth lifted her ribs encouragingly. “Do you think any of the other ATA girls do this?”
“Yes. Well, I don’t know. I could name a couple who’d certainly like to, whether they know it or not.” Ruth had been smiling but turned serious. “It’s so expected for girls to like men that most of them never stop to think if they really do. Wasn’t that how it was for you?” She waited, beseechingly, for Marian to agree. She seemed unable to stop herself from seeking reassurances that Marian hadn’t enjoyed sleeping with men, or at least that she preferred sleeping with Ruth.
“I guess,” Marian said. “Sort of.”
“There’s always been girls like us hidden in the nooks and crannies.”
“I don’t exactly know what kind of girl I am,” Marian said. She had trouble with that word, girl, but woman didn’t feel quite right, either, applied to herself. Being a woman seemed to suggest a person who owned baking pans and a string of pearls.
“People make assumptions. Did I tell you the name of my high school? Our Lady of the Assumption.”
“You did.”
“The nuns only ever told us it was a sin to let boys touch us. They never said anything about girls.” She sounded amused and spiteful.
“It seems to me you knew yourself better from the beginning than most people ever do.”
“Maybe,” Ruth said, “but some of that’s just being headstrong.”
Ruth had told Marian she’d known from childhood she preferred women. She’d been a wily little thing, canny enough to keep her mouth shut and start figuring out how to get what she wanted without being run out of her little Catholic parish in her little Michigan town with pitchforks.
“Did Eddie always know, too?” For Marian had finally come to understand the nature of Ruth’s marriage.
“I wouldn’t want to speak for him.” A silence. “Think how much had to happen for you and me to meet.”
“Well,” Marian said, “there had to be a war.”
“And of course this completely justifies that.”
Ruth, full of dark laughter, had let her voice get loud, and Marian shushed her. They looked at each other,
listening, but no sound came from the other rooms above the garage.
“They wouldn’t think anything of me being in here, anyway,” Ruth said in a whisper. “Just two gals having a late-night chat.”
This was true. In the month since their first kiss, every night they’d both been at Ratcliffe they’d wound up in one or the other of their beds. The visitor had to return to her own room at some point—a maid brought tea in the mornings—but so far no one had seemed to notice anything.
Once, by a stroke of good luck, they’d been caught out together the same night in Lossiemouth and had found a pub whose dour proprietress had informed them brusquely that “You’ll have to share a room. It’ll be cozy, I’m afraid.”
“I suppose we can manage,” Ruth had said, “if we must.”
There was glee to be taken from the subterfuge, from the world’s lack of imagination, and Ruth showed her how to take it, though Marian knew that for Ruth there was also bitterness at the necessity of secrecy. People had begun asking them if they were sisters, even though they looked nothing alike: Ruth short and buxom and dark; Marian tall, narrow, and fair. “They’re picking up on our closeness,” Ruth said, “but they don’t know what to make of it, so they draw the only conclusion they can think of.”
Yes, Ruth always said, we’re sisters.
Not that Marian could imagine wanting to flaunt their relationship. She didn’t wish she could write to Jamie and tell him she was in love because no part of her wanted to face his surprise, his consternation. She didn’t think he would berate her for being immoral—as an artist he knew all types—but she thought he would be uncomfortable in a way that would wear a groove between them. The groove would deepen and widen into a chasm bigger than the immense wedge of the planet that already separated them. He wouldn’t be able to keep from imagining what she and Ruth did together, and she feared that revulsion would inevitably creep in, grow on his idea of her like mildew.
She wouldn’t say she’d discovered a firm preference for women, but neither would she now confidently say that she preferred men. In this moment she would choose Ruth over anyone, but still she missed, a little bit, the inherent imbalance of power she’d felt with a man, the momentum toward submission, toward breaching, the demanding solidity of a cock. She tried not to let herself think about Barclay. After him, with other men, even Caleb, he’d reverberated in her like an echo, sometimes only faintly, sometimes as violently and shockingly as a gunshot in a canyon thought to be empty. With Ruth, though, no echoes intruded. With Ruth, the act was more egalitarian and, surprisingly, in some ways more carnal, driven by a grasping sort of resourcefulness, a blind determination to merge.
The first few times they were together, Marian hadn’t put her mouth on Ruth, but when she finally did, she’d found saltiness, pungency, flesh inside flesh, a rawness unlike anything on a man’s body. Her own clitoris, as much as she had ever confronted it, had struck her as embarrassing and extravagantly ugly, like a turkey’s wattle, but Ruth was clearly pleased with her own and smitten with Marian’s. She treated the little flap as important, central, even deserving of reverence. An idol in a hidden shrine.
* * *
—
When the stars aligned, they went out in London with Eddie. Ducking into crowded, smoky rooms, loud with jazz and yeasty with spilled liquor, Marian got the same giddy, feral thrill she’d had as a child when embarking on some adventure with Jamie and Caleb: rambunctious joy heightened by the conspiratorial nature of their triangle. Marian knew Ruth had told Eddie they’d become lovers, something Eddie acknowledged only subtly, by directing a welcoming, brotherly warmth at Marian. She imagined he must have affairs of his own. How could he watch planes just like his, flown by men he knew, burn and fall, and not seek pleasure, release, comfort, life?
“Marian saved my life, you know,” Ruth said one night in May, arching a dramatic eyebrow as she sipped from her cocktail. They were celebrating Eddie’s return from his fifteenth combat mission. If he survived twenty-five, he could go home.
Eddie turned to Marian with mild curiosity. People were saving each other’s lives all the time. “How’d you do that?”
“Don’t look at me,” Marian said. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Yesterday I was taking a Fairchild from White Waltham to Preston—” Ruth cut herself off, reached across the table to touch Eddie’s arm, said in a sweet schoolteacher’s voice, “You might not know this, Eddie, but to get there you have to fly through the Liverpool corridor. Do you know what that is?”
Amused, he said, “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“It’s a strip of air space two and a half miles wide between the Liverpool balloon barrage and the one at Warrington. Anyway, I’d already gone in when out of nowhere, I was in cloud. Truly out of nowhere. One minute, clear sailing. The next, nothing but white. It turns out it has to do with the dew point. Some strange phenomenon.”
“Did Marian change the dew point?” Eddie said. “Is she the god of weather?”
“Almost,” said Ruth.
“Marian must be the sun, then. She came and burned away the cloud.”
“No, but she had taught me a few things about flying on instruments.”
“I didn’t think you were listening!” Marian said. She turned to Eddie, explained, “She would only let me try to teach her in pubs and was always changing the subject. I barely told her anything.”
“You told me that if I got caught in cloud, I should straighten up, get back on course, turn very slowly and shallowly around to the reciprocal, and then try to dive under.”
“Anyone could have told you that.”
“But no one bothered except you. So I did it, but the only problem was that I got down to five hundred feet and the mist hadn’t thinned at all. So then I thought I’d go over, but the cloud went up forever. I went to seventy-five hundred feet, and I was still in it.”
“You should have bailed out,” said Eddie.
“I thought about it,” Ruth said, “and I might have, except I’d been late to catch the taxi plane and hadn’t had time to change into my trousers, so I was wearing my uniform skirt and, just between us three, I’d run out of clean undies and wasn’t wearing any.” She looked between them. “You see the problem.”
“Ruth,” Eddie said, “given the choice between death and gliding down with your unmentionables out, you should have chosen the latter. Actually, I’m almost surprised you didn’t relish the opportunity to be a scandal.”
“Me too,” Ruth said thoughtfully. “In retrospect, I think I didn’t want to be so helpless. Anyway, I just…flew along, hoping a hole would open up.”
“I’m on the edge of my seat,” Eddie said, “even though it appears you survived.”
“I saw a thinning. Or, I thought I did. I might have imagined it. I had no idea where I was. When I dove, I could have been plowing right into the balloons or a hillside.” She stopped talking. Eddie took her hand.
“You had the windup,” Eddie said.
“I did. I really did.” Ruth’s voice wavered. “You know, when it’s happening you’re concentrating so hard you can’t really feel anything, but later it hits you, and it’s like you have a chill and can’t get warm again.”
“Give me a bit of advice, Marian,” Eddie said. “Anything. For luck. What do I need to know? What will save my life?”
“It was only common sense, what I told Ruth.”
“That’s not advice. Come on.”
Marian considered, said, “My first flying teacher told me to learn when to ignore my instincts and give in when I wanted to resist, and resist when I wanted to give in. He wasn’t really talking about flying, though. And he died not long after in a crash.”
Eddie laughed. “My strong instinct is to ignore this terrible advice, but maybe that means I should take it. You’ve given me a conundrum.”
<
br /> * * *
—
A week later: word that Eddie’s plane had been shot down. He was classified as missing. Ruth lay on her bed, the telegram discarded on the floor. “His seventeenth mission,” she said to Marian, who sat stroking her back. “How can they expect anyone to survive twenty-five? It’s inhumane. You should have seen them look at me when the telegram came, like I was being rude for crying. Why doesn’t anyone cry here?”
“People are afraid if they start they’ll never stop.”
A few days later, when Ruth was delivering a Spitfire, she detoured and landed at Eddie’s base, feigning a mechanical problem. In the hangar and the ops room, she badgered anyone she could find for information. Crew members in other planes had reported seeing three parachutes before Eddie’s plane exploded, she learned. But no one could know whose they’d been.
Pacific Ocean
June 1943
A few weeks later
A troopship slid under the Golden Gate Bridge, heading to sea. From where Jamie stood at a high railing, the decks looked mossed over with men, a carpet of khaki-and-green bodies as dense as sod. They didn’t know their destination. A piercing evening brightness glanced off the whitecaps and the wheeling seabirds and the Golden Gate’s orange-red towers, one of which was about to be swallowed by a bank of fog pouring down over the Presidio. The water glowed milky jade until the fog caught the ship. Jamie went below.
The ship had once been an ocean liner, but all the furnishings and fittings had been removed; in their place, bunks were stacked everywhere, tight as baker’s trays. The windows and portholes had been boarded over or painted black. On the decks, where couples might once have strolled arm in arm, heaped-up sandbags encircled outdated antiaircraft guns. It wasn’t a new ship, nor fast enough to rely on speed for defense—not like the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth—and so a destroyer dogged along with it. The hull and superstructure had been painted gray, effacing the vessel’s name on the bow and stern, and it was not until the second day, when he saw some soldiers using an old life ring to keep their dice from rolling away, that Jamie learned the ship’s name. Maria Fortuna.
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