In the Company of Women

by Kate Christie

  “Yes, and the sweetest little jumper in maize and blue. I swear, drugstores are more like a civilian PX these days.”

  “I should have known better than to send you out alone with our spending money.”

  “I want her to look her best for my parents. Is that so wrong?”

  “They’re going to love her no matter what she’s wearing,” Brady said.

  “And you. They’re going to love you.”

  “Well, of course. How could they not?”

  CJ knew that her girlfriend’s confident exterior masked a worry she fully comprehended—she hadn’t met Brady’s parents yet either. They knew she existed, but as long as Brady remained “discreet” about her alternative lifestyle, they allowed her and Maddie a full role in Buchanan family life, albeit from afar. Almost as importantly, they hadn’t cut her off financially. GI benefits were covering the cost of CJ’s graduate program at UNC, but supporting two adults and a child on a teaching assistantship would have been much harder without Brady’s parents’ aid. Fortunately, the Buchanans’ friends outwardly accepted the story that Brady was too heartbroken over Nate to consider marrying anyone else. She had adopted the baby to ease some of her pain and to help out a less fortunate friend, and wasn’t that just like their generous-to-a-fault daughter?

  “It’ll be great,” CJ said, trying to reassure Brady with her eyes.

  “I know.”

  “Want me to take her back to the crib?”

  “I feel better having her in here with us. Is that paranoid?”

  “No, I think it’s parenting. And you’re a good little mother.”

  “You’re lucky she’s between us or I’d show you who’s little, all right.”

  “I’m shaking in my GI shoes.”

  “Damn right you are.” As CJ’s brow lifted, she corrected herself. “Dang right, I mean.”

  “Can you imagine if the first thing she says to my mother is a curse?”

  “I don’t know. It might take some of the heat off me.” As CJ raised a spare pillow, threatening to whack her, she held up a hand. “Shh! You know the rule: Never wake a sleeping baby.”

  A little while later they turned out the bedside lamps. CJ tried to relax, but her mind busied itself with conjuring up potential disasters for the following day. What if her mother refused to acknowledge Brady or Maddie? What if Pete or Rebecca, both back living at home after college, reacted badly? She and Brady had managed to insulate themselves in Chapel Hill among a community of scholars and liberal intellectuals who barely blinked at the idea of two women raising someone else’s illegitimate child together. Why had they felt the need to leave their safe cocoon? It was one thing for airline employees and hotel desk staff to assume they were merely good friends traveling together. Maddie’s presence made a man a required accessory to at least one of them in most people’s minds, and honestly, it was safer to go along with those assumptions than to challenge them. But Kalamazoo was a whole other ballgame.

  Since the war’s end, they had dutifully given her mother the space she needed. A week before mustering out of the WAC in late fall of 1945, CJ had called the history department at UNC to find out if they still had a spot for her. The department chair, a decorated veteran of the First World War, had thanked her for her service and offered her a place in the program to begin “as soon as you can get here.”

  “How’s spring semester?” CJ had replied, smiling across the table at the orderly in the Company D day room.

  “Wonderful,” the aging professor had said in his gravelly voice.

  Brady had gotten out three weeks before she had, and they had spent the remaining months of the year traveling to various corners of the United States to visit friends and family, including their brothers, all three of whom had returned unharmed, and their parents—separately. In January, they moved to Chapel Hill to begin a new adventure. Supremely tired of hiding their relationship, CJ had told the department chair about Brady during orientation week, offering him the option of rescinding her acceptance.

  He had stared at her across his heavy mahogany desk. “I would be offended if I didn’t know the prejudice you are accustomed to encountering in your private life. But it is exactly that, from my perspective—private. I hope you will not trouble yourself further on this matter, Miss Jamieson?”

  “No sir,” she’d said, and had left his office that afternoon lighter than she’d felt in years.

  People could surprise you. That’s what she was hoping would happen with her mother tomorrow when they showed up at the house. After her father had suffered a mild heart attack a few months earlier, CJ had flown in to be at his hospital bedside. That day, he had told her he wanted her home for the holidays—with Brady and Maddie, this time.

  “What about Mom?” she’d asked.

  He had shaken his head, looking gray but determined, machines at the bedside measuring his every breath and heartbeat. “Don’t worry about her. It’s time we met our granddaughter and your—companion. Is that what we should call her?”

  CJ had nodded, anxiety already rising. Given that her mother still barely looked at her when she visited, it was hard to imagine she’d appreciate being forced to confront the evidence of CJ’s lesbian existence.

  Her older brothers had already met Brady and their niece, as they rightfully considered Maddie. She had been afraid to tell them, but Joe had come to visit her shortly before Maddie arrived and she’d decided she ought to tell him before he became an uncle. After the war, he had rejoined the Cubs for a single unhappy season before retiring to become a coach at the minor league level. When his job brought him to North Carolina, she took him out to a bar, bought him a drink and gave him the lowdown.

  “You and Brady? As in, your roommate Brady?” he’d repeated, eyes momentarily widening.

  She’d nodded, peeling the paper from her bottle of beer in a nervous habit she’d picked up from said roommate.

  “Holy smokes.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe a girl as good looking as she is would go out with my little sister.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” CJ had shot back, and then she realized he was smiling around the side of his whiskey glass. “Wait, so you don’t mind?”

  “I’m a little jealous, maybe.” His eyes grew serious. “After everything I saw over there, I honestly don’t see what the big fuss is. Besides, we were a bunch of young, red-blooded men away from women for months at a time. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what went on in the dark. Of course, if you ever quote me on that, I’ll deny it.”

  Alec was a different case. Joe had offered to tell him about Brady and Maddie, and CJ had let him. She knew Alec didn’t approve, but he wasn’t overtly rude either. She’d take that over their mother’s habit of staring at her when she thought CJ was unaware, her expression more befitting of something in a Shakespearean tragedy than the rare family get-togethers they’d managed since the war.

  She was glad Joe would be there tomorrow, along with his wife, Alicia, a Hispanic woman whose brother he had coached in Chicago.

  “Thanks for taking the pressure off,” CJ had kidded him the night before his very Catholic wedding in a massive church on Chicago’s south side.

  He had half-hugged her. “What are big brothers for?”

  Alec would be there too, with his wife and twin baby boys in tow. Then again, they were always there—he’d bought a nearby farm and didn’t plan to leave Michigan ever again. His wife, Angie, had confided to CJ that she had other plans, but that she’d let him stay put for now. Joe had told her that Angie, whom CJ had known since kindergarten, had taken the news about her sister-in-law’s proclivities in stride. Apparently she had a favorite unmarried uncle in Chicago who lived with his male “friend.”

  Friend. Still awake, CJ turned on her side and gazed at the woman whom she thought of as her wife sleeping peacefully beside their daughter. After tomorrow, there would be no more pretending with the Michigan clan. Bringing Brady and Maddie home to the farm was the la
st major hurdle in CJ’s ongoing campaign to blend her pre- and post-war families.

  In the years since she and Brady had first found their way, stumbling, to each other, they had become accomplished at being gay. It wasn’t easy, of course. Being caught out could land you in prison or a psychiatric ward, and employers could fire you if they discovered your secret life. But lesbians, as CJ had learned to call women like them, and gay men had existed in the shadows of mainstream life for centuries, if not longer. The WAC had taught her how to evaluate potential danger spots—and people. In the aftermath of war, eluding the traps set by the government and conservative cultural factions became second nature.

  The country had changed significantly, and not just because the United States was the lone world power that wouldn’t have to rebuild. The war had displaced even more Americans than the Depression, bringing young men and women off the farms and out of the small towns and into cities and military units where they were forced to remake themselves far from the watchful eyes of their families and communities. At war’s end, those who didn’t want to return to their former lives didn’t, and the population in military demobilization centers like San Francisco and New York City grew exponentially—as did the gay and lesbian communities in those cities.

  Chapel Hill wasn’t San Francisco or New York, but as a university town it was home to an intellectual populace who didn’t particularly care about the broader culture’s view of race or sexuality. They had friends there, both gay and mainstream, and there were even other “roommates” raising children together. When she finished her PhD in the spring, she was sure they’d find a similar community to call home—western Massachusetts, for example. Brady’s mentor in Smith’s English department had not only helped get her first feature published in Scientific American, but she had also mentioned CJ’s dissertation topic to her colleagues, who had shown interest in adding an expert in slave narratives to the faculty. Northampton was a consummate college town where unmarried women were not all that uncommon, as CJ knew from the handful of pilgrimages they’d already made to Brady’s alma mater.

  Then again, Kalamazoo was a college town, and CJ’s mother was an educator. She and Brady couldn’t be the only homosexuals she’d ever encountered. After a chilly start, her mother had embraced Alicia and the Chicago in-laws. Was her father right? Was it time?

  “Hey.”

  CJ blinked in the dim light. She hadn’t realized Brady was awake. “What?”

  “It’ll be okay, you’ll see.”

  “I hope so. Guess we’ll know tomorrow.” She paused. “I told you we’d get here for Christmas one day.”

  “I think I was the one who told you we’d get here, Caroline.”

  She smiled in the dark. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Just warming up for Kalamazoo. Anyway, it’s a term of affection.”

  CJ reached across Maddie and took Brady’s hand. Then she closed her eyes and willed her mind to be quiet.

  Shortly before sunrise, she awoke disoriented in the strange room to hear Maddie whimpering. Beside her Brady shifted, consoling the child in a sleepy voice, “It’s okay, sweetie. Mimi and Mama are here.”

  Soon Maddie settled back down, and CJ lay in the semi-dark pondering the moment when, only a few hours from now, she would walk into her childhood home and introduce Brady and their daughter to the rest of her family. Brady’s words came back to her, and she decided then and there that no matter what happened in Kalamazoo, it really would be okay.

  Thanks to a quirk of fate, she and Brady had found each other on a military base in the wilds of West Texas, and they had made the decision jointly to stick it out through the war and ensuing peace to build a home and a life together. They were lucky, as they often reminded each other—they had Maddie and their friends and the unconditional support of more than a few family members.

  In the end, they were each other’s family. And that, she knew, would be more than enough to see them through whatever this day—or any other, for that matter—would bring.

  Author’s Note & References List

  When I was in college, I took an American women’s history class that changed my world view, and not only because of the course material. During discussion one day, a fellow student called out the instructor for failing to include lesbian history, readily available in the recent (at the time) publication of Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. I promptly went out and found a copy of Faderman’s groundbreaking work, set aside any and all homework, and devoured OGTL.

  Imagine my surprise when I reached the chapter on World War II and read, “During the war years…female independence and love between women were understood and undisturbed and even protected” (Faderman, 119). While the next sentence decries a return to the normalized American societal view of lesbians as “borderline psychotic,” I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of the Women’s Army Corps and other American women’s military units as a type of government-sponsored foray into progressive social norms.

  Allan Bérubé’s seminal history of gays and lesbians in the military during World War II, Coming Out Under Fire, further advances the view of the Women’s Army Corps as a temporarily safe space in which lesbians could come out and fall in love. This wasn’t the case for men in the military, of course, because Americans have always responded differently—and violently—to gay men. Once the war began to wind down, that safe space was quickly revoked. But for a few years, lesbian soldiers enjoyed a sense of freedom and value as they helped defend their nation against the Axis powers roaring across Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

  On a personal level, the idea of a same-sex, lesbian-friendly community captured my imagination because I had recently left a homophobic public high school in the socially conservative Midwest and journeyed to a private women’s college in liberal western Massachusetts. Like the soldiers in question, I had separated from my family and hometown and been given a chance to explore my same-sex attraction in a tolerant, all-women environment. Not to compare women’s colleges of the 1990s to sex-segregated military units of the 1940s or anything.

  Later that same year, my girlfriend, a philosophy major, and I both decided to apply to write an honors thesis. But like many philosophers, she was more attracted to discussion than to action. At least, that kind of action. By the end of the academic year, she had left me for a circus clown (really) and also given up on writing a thesis. I, on the other hand, had received a green light from my department to move forward with my proposal: an examination of American women’s military participation in WWII. For primary sources, I would rely on the letters of an alumna and the journal of a WAC captain, both of whom had served overseas during the war and later donated their papers to the college archives.

  As a senior, I conducted research and wrote my thesis, “Women in Combat Boots.” But this was 1993, before the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII renewed interest in the conflict, before the Internet existed as anything more than blinking green hypertext trails, before self-publishing made the memoirs of average people available, and long before Amazon set forth its endless inventory of obscure titles. I relied heavily on the archives collections and the handful of texts that had been written about American women’s military units. When I finished, I had one hundred twenty pages of dry description, analysis, and argument that I knew in my heart wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. What was? A love story, of course. Only instead of a raven-haired beauty and a handsome young male officer, my story would feature two young women who discovered each other—and themselves—in the WAC.

  The first draft of In the Company of Women arrived in 1998. But neither my research nor my writing skills were up to par, so I tucked the manuscript away with a promise: someday. Twenty-three years after I first read Faderman, the time finally felt right to revisit my WWII tale of lesbian love that was “understood and undisturbed and even protected.” Fortunately for me, by now the Internet, Amazon, and self-publi
shing had all muscled their way into existence. This time when I set out to tell the story of a Michigan farm girl and a California women’s college graduate who meet in the WAC and fall in love in the dusty reaches of West Texas, I had more than a dozen first-hand accounts at my disposal—not to mention all of the photos, videos, and letters housed in the National Archives and other online collections. Working at a university with unlimited access to academic titles helped too, and my first draft soon gave way to a second that featured the same characters and settings, but in all other ways appeared new.

  As I noted in my dedication, nearly 400,000 American women served in uniform during World War II. The most, by far, served in the Women’s Army Corps, so that’s where I set my story. Out of those who served in the WAC, a majority served in the Army Air Corps, precursor to the Air Force, so it seemed only natural to make one of my characters an Air Wac. Armed with Aileen Kilgore Henderson’s detailed account of life as an airplane mechanic at a Texas airfield and Anne Bosanko Green’s beautifully written letters home to Minnesota, as well as a dozen other memoirs and letter collections of those who had served on the home front, I set out to breathe life into my story.

  Too much life, or at least too much historical detail, as my editor and wife agreed during the revision process. But with their help, I managed to cut out some of the historical rambling. The result is this novel, set in a brief-lived era that found American women leaving home in droves, joining the military, and coming out with the support of their friends and colleagues. A brief period that Faderman, Bérubé, and other historians agree was critical to the development of the modern women’s and gay rights movements.

  What ITCOW is—and isn’t

  As a work of fiction, my book cleaves to a different set of rules than nonfiction works do. There are undoubtedly factual errors, and even times when I purposely conflated events to fit into my story’s timeline—for example, the arrival of additional WASPs at Bliss and the B-17 crash in Chapter Ten. While these and other events related in the novel actually occurred, the real-life events took place at different points in the war. Also, while Wacs did serve at Fort Bliss, I have no reason to believe that any female mechanics were assigned to Tow Target, or indeed that any of the Biggs Field WASPs fraternized with enlisted Air Wacs. This part of the story is an example of me taking liberty with the often sketchy accounting that plagues women’s history in general and lesbian history—and by extension, lesbian historical fiction—in particular.