Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  Just as George was drafted we found a friendly, even a motherly house-owner, and Linda and I and our dog Vicky were in the new apartment by Christmas time. I wrapped Linda warmly, put her on her sled, and the three of us set off in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve to get a tree and a few decorations. I set up the tree and decorated it. Linda liked it, but she was soon sleepy, and I put her to bed. It was Vicky who loved the tree; he lay near it, nibbled it and guarded it. Linda and I were too deserted to feel merry that year.

  We went to visit George in Louisiana, where he was training for the infantry. Trains between Army training and factory centers were overcrowded, and our coach had overflowing toilets; no one cleared them, and the sewage pushed slowly down the aisle until there was no place to step. We drew our feet up on the seats and sat this way all the way to Texas, where we changed trains. It was a clear day, windy, ten degrees above zero. The train we were to board came into the station, but it let down no steps, and we could not get on until I pleaded with the conductor and he let us board the train. When we reached Alexandria, Louisiana, I found a taxi and we set off to find a hotel room. Suddenly I discovered that my traveler’s checks were not in my bag. Linda had been playing with them in the dressing room in the train, and there was a chance that I might find them. Back at the depot, the station-master located the car in the yard; I found the car, went to the dressing room, and there on the windowsill were the checks.

  We found a room and telephoned to George, who came dressed in uniform. Linda was over-impressed with the uniform, and she felt that George was a little strange. On the streets in Alexandria, blacks, even black soldiers, stepped off the sidewalk to walk in the street when they met a white. Their eyes never met our eyes; I had never been in the South before, and I didn’t like it. We walked along the levee of the Red River, which was red with mud that washed from the surrounding land. We saw huts of tenant farmers, black and white farmers living in poverty I had not seen before in the United States. The fields were vast, and the farm families seemed crowded into one corner of the truly enormous planted areas.

  On the way back to Detroit Linda had a fever, and I fought for a taxi to get to a hotel, then fought for a hotel room, which I shared with another young woman and her child. I called the hotel doctor and stayed in Chicago until Linda was well enough to travel.

  In Detroit Linda stood at our window, and as children we didn’t know passed she would say, “Bring me that one.” We were not long enough in any one place to invite anyone in, and as housing was very scarce Linda and I shared some of our empty rooms with Israelis who had come to the United States for training in agriculture, planning to return to a kibbutz. When the men volunteered into the U.S. Army, the women set up housekeeping with Linda and me.

  I decided to return to New York where I had friends and knew of a nursery school for Linda. We left behind all our furniture, taking with us only a camp bed, a couple of suitcases, and Vicky in a crate. In Grand Central Station in New York, Linda and I sat in the baggage room to await Vicky, who had been put on a different train. We watched the crates as they arrived, and at last one was set down with a tail sticking up between the cracks. “Vicky,” Linda called, and the tail wagged.

  Sunnyside, in Queens, had no shortage of houses, and we moved into an empty house. The grocer sent over forty orange crates, and we made a sort of play-house; it was like playing house in Montana when I was not much older than Linda. She was eager to be with other children, as she and I had been almost sole companions. We ate our meals on the front steps, weather permitting, and we talked to neighbors and to all the children. Linda was afraid I, too, would disappear as her father had, and she was afraid to have me out of her sight. At her school I sat with her and reassured her, as did the teacher, who said, “Mommies and Poppies always come home,” which reassured me too. We clung to each other. When we arrived in the mornings at the school Linda was still in her sleeping clothes because she refused to be dressed until she could play with the other children. We both soon had friends, and Linda was willing to be dressed and eager to go to nursery school.

  One day a young lieutenant stood looking out from a porch near our house where there was a sign for piano lessons. “Is there something wrong with the piano teacher?” I asked him.

  He answered, “No, but my aunt is old, and I must move her in with my family while I am away. All this furniture to get rid of . . .”

  When I told him our plight, he said, “I’ll ask the moving men to move the furniture over to your house when they come.” The little music teacher furnished our house, and we loved her marble-topped dressers, her Christmas ornaments, her knives and forks. I think of her sometimes, and of the shock she must have felt to be moved about, just as we had been.

  Stella and her little boy Steve shared our house with us. We lived together for perhaps a year while our husbands were both in the Army. But we remained isolated, even from each other; although we shared the household tasks, we were dazed, shocked women.

  I worked in an Army Post Office during the war, where I was older than the high-school kids who were working there. I asked one of them, “Do you remember the Depression? Do you remember eating only oatmeal, or only fish for days at a time?” When the girl looked puzzled I asked, “Did you ever sit on the furniture with it piled in the street?”

  She exclaimed, “I have always wondered—why was the furniture in the street? I must have been three years old or so. So that was the Depression!”

  George came home on furlough and visited Linda at her nursery school. The uniform made the little children envious of a father who was in uniform, and I suppose some mother told her child, “But Linda’s Daddy may be killed.”

  Linda came home in tears. “They say Poppie will be killed in the war.”

  “Say to them,” I told her, “their fathers are not good enough, they won’t even have them in the Army.”

  Attracted to two women alone and in need, men came to offer assistance. Our need was clear to Stella and me: we needed our husbands, and no other man was a substitute. Tension might have been relieved had we been friendlier, but we were determined that our men come home to us. Stella and I, frightened women, lived in a superstition that our resolve would bring home our men, and we would not break that resolve. Our children reflected this frightened, frightening household.

  George, meanwhile, was in the Vosges Mountains just south of the Battle of the Bulge. His company had been six weeks in the front lines without replacements; they had replaced a black regiment which had received heavy casualties behind the lines which held the front. For six weeks they went without change of clothing or showers, although they were warmly dressed. George tells, “Some G.I.’s walked around in their sleeping bags, with holes cut for legs. Supplies were ample, they only needed to ask and they received another sleeping bag to sleep in. And of course, our mail came to us wherever we were.”

  “We came down through the Vosges mountains into a town leveled by artillery fire and which had only a cellar remaining; into it my company crowded—not a good position to be in—and scouts had to be sent out immediately, as shells were still lobbing into the area. We found the town’s entire population huddled in the depths of the cellar on piles of coal and sacks of potatoes. They were fearful when they saw us crowding into their cellar too, and to calm their fears I went over and addressed them: a little speech in French as I was the only one in my company who spoke French—‘You do not need to be afraid just because you see us coming into your cellar, this is the way we fight!’ In the very back of the cellar a tiny, very old man came toward me, sliding down the pile of coal; edging his way among the people, he came up to me and touched my arm, saying, ‘A Yid? Speaks English, speaks French—but this soldiering now, that’s no business for a Jew.’

  “Somebody, probably the company messenger, came seeking me. ‘Hurry, Oppen, you have won a raffle—a three day pass to Paris; come quick!’ And we crawled and then ran bac
k to Company Headquarters, and he said, ‘Run, the truck is just leaving!’”

  George ran, clambered in over the tailgate, and with his steel helmet, gas mask and handgun was off to Paris. Dazed, he thought that the Company Command had probably picked him whether he had won the lottery or not because he was the one who spoke French and had been interpreter for the company all the way up from Marseilles. George was the one who loved France, as most G.I.’s did not. The truck stopped in Paris at the Place Pigalle (“Pig Alley” to the G.I.’s), where they were surrounded by the girls who came crowding around, asking for chocolate and soap and offering themselves. George walked through Paris to the Boulevards, where he looked on, incredulous, at the Boulevardiers, who, momentarily safe behind Allied front lines, sipped ersatz coffee and nibbled delicacies concocted of sawdust; as they daintily continued their cafe lives, on the kiosk were large beautiful, extravagant posters advertising Leger’s latest exhibit. George says, “I nearly went berserk; there was no way to express my anger at these Parisians who could care about such mediocrity at such a time.”

  Stella’s husband, a Frenchman, was parachuted into France in the first days of the Allied invasion. He was not heard from until war’s end, and Stella had months of anguished waiting. The War Department did not notify her of his death, so she hoped he lived, but the fear was monstrous. Our children played an endless game; Stevie rang the doorbell, and Linda answered. Stevie said, “It’s a letter from my Daddy.” And Stella watched this game. Her husband Pierre was found when Dachau was freed by U.S. troops, and after ten days in the hospital he was flown home. He was alive!

  George was wounded shortly before Victory Day in Europe. He somehow mailed me a letter before he reached the hospital, for the notice did not come from the War Department until six weeks later, informing me of his multiple wounds of face, back, and legs. I imagined the wounds and wrote to George, “You are to come home alive, no matter what the scars.”

  He wrote again when he was able. The wounds were many. An 88 mm. shell had exploded in a hole where he and two others took refuge; the two men in the hole with him were killed, and George lay wounded, pinned down by German fire. The Germans had retreated, and some platoons of Germans had probably been left behind to impede the advancing U.S. troops; they were shelling directly. George lay for hours, then crawled at night until he was picked up, put in a truck and taken to an aid station. He sent me the letter from the aid station before he was taken to the hospital. And still he did not come home. Months passed and our men were not getting out of the Army; the war was over, and still they did not come home. April 1945 was the date of victory in Europe and George did not return until the last of November 1945.

  In Manila at the war’s end demonstrations were held by soldiers who wanted to go home. In Army trucks they drove to centers where they marched in protest at being kept abroad. In Paris, U.S. soldiers began marching down the Champs Elysées; by the time they reached the Place de la Concorde they were a great parade of 5000 protesting soldiers. At home, those of us who were involved because our men did not come home circulated petitions in the street; we were hugged and greeted by other women who took the petitions and returned them to us filled with the names of women who wanted their men to come home. The demonstrations which began in Manila and spread to other centers were led by men who had been sent to the South Pacific when they were drafted because it was thought they would be in an unimportant sector, men who had been, in the phrase of the time, “premature anti-fascists.” Men were being held in all areas where the U.S. Armed Forces had men after the war was over. Both the U.S.S.R. and the United States maintained troops in Asia, where the struggle immediately at war’s end became one for division of the Orient. China was now an independent nation to be reckoned with, Japan was a vanquished enemy, and neither the Russian nor the United States government intended to leave that part of the world. U.S. troops boarded ships for what they thought was home, only to find themselves transported to the South China area. The demonstrations by our men abroad aroused support at home; and although to protest in uniform and use Army vehicles to transport men to the demonstrations was mutiny, those men who demonstrated were not tried for mutiny. They were not punished in any way; a regiment of blacks was threatened with court-martial, but the court-martial was quickly dropped because of the atmosphere at home, which opposed any further involvement in Asia and which forced the government to abandon the idea of war in Asia—until the United States became involved later in Korea, and still later, disastrously, in Vietnam. These defeats of the ruling United States government powers were forced by determined action, by people marching, by petitions and by protests against the attempts to conquer Asia.

  George was held in Le Havre from June until November. He tells of having their French francs taken from them in preparation for the return home, but months passed and they were still in the miserable Replacement Depots (“Repple Depples”) waiting. George and a major with whom he was friendly decided to try to get some money to send cables to wives and families, telling them of their plight. George and his friend took blankets, arms, boots, anything they could pick up around the barracks, and walked toward the gates, where the Military Policemen turned their backs! They knew, and agreed to the necessity of protesting in order to get home. George and his friend sold their contraband on the Black Market and sent wires to everyone they knew who might help them to get home— and the news spread.

  In 1974 we met Abe Chapman, who told us another side of the Manila demonstrations. He was in Manila, where the men in the armed services were not being demobilized although the war had ended. A group of G.I.’s understood that the U.S. and Russia were unwilling to get out of the Pacific area and China; these G.I.’s planned to hold a rally in Manila, but they didn’t know how to get the information to all the G.I.’s in the area concerning where and when the rally would be held. They mentioned the problem to Abe, a G.I. and editor of the Army’s G.I. newspaper, who said, “I’ll do something—I’ll get the word out.” He was free to publish without censorship the stories that came to him from United Press, Associated Press, or Reuter’s news agencies, but local stories had to be passed by the Army censor. Abe called the head of one of these news services and said, “I’ll give you a scoop on a tremendous story if you will promise to keep it secret where you got the story.” Promptly Abe received the news over the wire from the news service; the story of the demonstration was sent to every group in the armed services in the Pacific area in the tallest headlines in the G.I. newspapers. It was that demonstration and that news that swept around the world to George and to all G.I.’s waiting in Replacement Depots and in “lost” groups, while headlines in the U.S. papers proclaimed different numbers each day for the size of the armed services, with news stories that ships were not available to get them home. Men saw with their own eyes ships sail with a few men or a few Wacs (Women’s Auxiliary Corps) in empty ships, and when the authorities were questioned they replied, “Oh, we can’t put G.I.’s on ships with Wacs.”

  During those years Linda and I did not laugh much. In pictures we look like refugees—remote, thin and bleak. Linda looked like a little wild girl; she would not have her hair combed. When George came home at last I told him, “Linda does not understand what a joke is; laughter is threatening.” George made little jokes for her, and we laughed, but we needed time to recover our spirits. Linda also needed to learn that George and I were equal as her parents—she would turn to me for permission when George had already told her what she might do.

  New York City was not a place we understood in ways we needed to understand to bring up a child. George and I visited the school I would have chosen for her to attend in the fall; we tried to imagine what life was like for a child growing up on city streets, and we quailed from it. We needed to get out of New York City, where tension and too much argument had to be faced; we needed to get away from the scene of wartime living and be a family again. We needed to be free of close neighbors
and be together, just three of us, free of the tight living of New York City. We needed space, sky enough to see the sweep of it, stars at night, forests, to have a garden and ride horses.

  George had been through shattering and at the same time exhilarating years in France. He was emotionally sympathetic with the French and in an intimate conversation some of the time with peasants and with Free French in Merci le Bas, the village where his platoon was fighting toward the end of the war. George returned to a civilian life that knew nothing of the dangers and the horrors of war on home soil. G.I. patience was limited. Once I made out a check on my bank for George to cash; he stood in line at the window and was told to see the bank manager behind a little railing. George stood outside the railing and told the manager, “My wife has an account here, I am her husband, I want to cash the check.”

  The manager began, “We never cash checks for strangers—”

  What!” exploded George, “You won’t cash the check—” and he started over the railing. The manager quickly initialed the check.

  The stay-at-homes had no idea what it had been like to be a G.I. on a battlefield in a war. George and most G.I.’s were illegally armed; I didn’t know any who had not taken hand arms out of the services when they were discharged.

  We retrieved an old open trailer from New Jersey. George parked it at the curb in front of our house in Sunnyside and began to build it into a camping trailer for our trip west—we were going to California. Our neighbors were incredulous, and fathers brought sons on Sunday to watch George at work on the little camp trailer, making a place to sleep, a little shelf for a stove and food, a hitch for the car to pull it. They said, “That trailer will never make it over the Rocky Mountains.” At war’s end these neighbors were buying their first automobiles and learning how to drive them. In March 1946, we drove west. Linda stood behind the front seat and kept up a constant conversation, happy that she had us where she could touch us. We had barely started to be a family when the war came upon us, and Linda had had only stories of a father. Her love was for us, and to be with us was her life.