by Marge Piercy
It is as if an earthquake had its epicenter right under our little apartment, since he is back. He is rushing around seeing all his copains on the old radical papers and at the Poale Zion. They even sent a delegation to talk to the Jewish Communists, who are reputed not to be going along with the Stalin-Hitler pact like the rest of the party. In the old days, Papa would not even speak to the Communists, but now he is running around Paris conferring with every hothead. He has been handing around some sort of Jewish resistance brochure called Que Faire copied out by hand, full of horror stories and slogans like partout présent: be everywhere, and faire face: stand up to them. I am relieved that Papa is safe, although how long he will be safe acting as he does is another question. But I must say, until the twins were returned to us, thinner and bedraggled and full of stories of burning vehicles and abandoned babies and planes strafing the roads, things here were extremely peaceful with just Maman and me. She was worried sick but I comforted her, and I think she respects me more now.
14 septembre 1940
Myself, I believe in attaining an inner tranquility. I admit it is disturbing to walk through the streets and see posters on all the walls denouncing Jews en bloc and to see all those gross new newspapers that do nothing but wish all Jews death, Au Pilori, for example. But I practice a discipline as I go around, saying to myself, I know I am not dirty, I am not vile, I am as French as anybody else and as thoroughly imbued with French culture as any of my teachers, so it is not me that this vileness is aimed at and I will simply not accept it. To grow angry is to give power to those who attack. To ignore such an attack is to diminish the attacker, not oneself. We give those screamers their power by taking offense.
Papa and Maman are very upset because the citizenship of the Balabans has been revoked. They have only been in France since 1935, and they have had their French citizenship taken away from them. I am sorry for them, but I cannot think it is too strange. They do not seem to have made any effort to enter French society. They speak only Yiddish or Polish among their friends and are obviously foreigners even on the street. I feel that to be so conspicuous when living in another country is almost arrogant. I feel immensely sorry for the Balabans nonetheless.
2 octobre 1940
Now we are all ordered to go to the local police station and register as if we are prostitutes or criminals, and have a big ugly JUIF stamped across our identity cards. I announced at the breakfast table that I am simply not going to do it. I thought Papa and Maman would be shocked, but instead Papa said he would try to figure out what would happen if we did not obey. He thinks it isn’t a bad idea to refuse to register, if we can figure out how to avoid it. I know it’s meaningless, but I find being separated out and labeled in this way simply humiliating.
Marie Charlotte has been extremely strange with me lately. The last two times we were supposed to meet, she did not show up. She simply left me sitting there waiting. Finally I had it out with her yesterday. She said that she still loved me dearly, but that she had heard that others thought she was a Jew because she was always with me, and she was afraid. She did not want to bear such a label, especially since she was born and raised a good French Catholic and her mother felt it was her own fault because she stuck to me more closely than to her own kind.
9 octobre 1940
We are all duly registered, one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Since the defection of Marie Charlotte, I have been making friends with some young people I would have considered hoodlums last year. They are definitely not the respectable element, but they are not unintelligent and do not seem prejudiced, the way so many people one thought above that sort of thing have revealed themselves to be in the last months. They listen to jazz a great deal, especially American jazz, and affect a bohemian style of dress.
One thing that fascinates me about them is that they do not segregate themselves rigidly by age. Some of this new crowd I have been meeting are in the university, some like me in the final year of lycée, some no longer in school but not yet employed. The peculiarities of their style do not attract me, but their tolerance does. They do not seem anxiety-ridden to obey the German decrees and they do not care what I am, only who I am. For that, I respect them. They think I am too serious but they are going to set me right. I doubt that, but it soothes me to walk into the café Le Jazz Hot where they hang out and sit down with friends and feel welcome. These days to feel welcome is rare, and their languor conceals a courtesy I value.
Every day I feel less certain what is to become of us, all of us, and whether I shall ever get a chance to be anything at all, let alone deciding between becoming instructor or actress, for doors seem to close faster than I can prepare myself to enter them. I feel the way I imagine some creature of the tropics felt when the Ice Age descended and the glaciers loomed over what had been lush and pleasant banana forests. I feel as if I no longer truly belong to my family but have no new niche or role I have created, no place to go where I am truly at home. It is therefore not to be wondered at that I now spend more and more time with my new unrespectable friends at the café Le Jazz Hot.
ABRA 1
The Opening of Abra
For two hundred years, men in Abra’s family in Bath, Maine, had gone to sea. Abra went to New York.
At twenty-three, Abra considered her real life to have begun back in September of 1938. Then, at nineteen, she transferred from Smith to Barnard and finally made it to Manhattan, the glittering Oz of her childhood where she had always known she really belonged. Last year she had been accepted in graduate school at Columbia in political science. Abra did not consider herself true scholar material and could not quite imagine teaching, but graduate school was at once sufficient in itself—politics after all was the most exciting topic in the world—and moreover there were ninety percent males in her department among the graduate students and nothing but men on the faculty. Abra, growing up with brothers, found the situation of being the only woman in a room quite natural. Among men she perked up.
She had disposed of her virginity during her nineteenth summer out on Popham Point where her family had always summered, with a sweet local boy who had settled down by now to lobstering. He had wanted to marry her, and she had understood that to put a nice face upon her apparent acquiescence, she must pretend to be considering marriage, oh, on down the pike, of course, after graduation. Abra had transferred to Barnard that very fall and she had no intention of returning to Bath except of course on vacations when John had remained for two more years her delightful summer romance. Romance for Abra included good healthy acrobatic sex.
Now here she was, twenty-three, with a lively group of friends and her own apartment in the Village, a cosy Bank Street walk-up, a good relationship with her thesis advisor Professor Blumenthal and a stimulating new research assistantship with his pal Oscar Kahan in the sociology department. Her family was appalled at her taking an advanced degree; they viewed it as unwomanly and bound to result in her remaining a thwarted and sorrowful old maid. She was compared to one Abigail of dreaded memory who had been a bluestocking and an impassioned abolitionist and who had once actually made a public speech, bringing shame on the family by this wanton act, whereupon her father had locked her up for five years. Abra, who was in the process of fielding her sixth proposal of marriage, doubted she was headed for a lonely old age. The latest was from a young man she had met playing tennis and been seeing for the last two months.
“Now, what is all this, Hank? Are you trying to make an honest woman of me, some nonsense like that?”
He was sitting on the little Windsor chair in front of her whitewashed brick fireplace, in which a couple of birch logs from home were cheerfully combusting. The chair was undersized for him, giving him a grasshoppery look. “I think you’d make a good wife for me, Scotty. Your wildness is youth and high spirits, a colt acting up. You’ll settle in.”
A colt that hasn’t been broken yet, he means, Abra thought, smiling sweetly. “Do you think it’s an appropriate time for se
ttling down? The world is coming to pieces all around us.”
“All the more reason to establish a home base. I don’t for a moment believe even that madman Roosevelt is about to take us to war to pull England’s chestnuts out of the fire, but nonetheless, I could be called up at any moment.”
Sound the bugles, Abra thought. I’m supposed to sacrifice myself to your family notions because you may be called up as an officer? “I’d make a rotten wife. I’m involved in my own work and not about to scant it.”
“Haven’t you gone to school long enough? You’re a real woman, Scotty, and it’s time for you to live like one.”
“I’m rather keen on what I’m doing.” She heard herself talking in a different way with him, old inflections, old phrases. “I adore my thesis advisor Professor Blumenthal, and my topic interests me.” She was well aware the thesis she was writing on the Ladies’ Garment Workers Union did not interest Hank. “I have a position with Professor Kahan—”
A look of distaste crossed Hank’s blond aquiline features and he flexed his right arm, then his left, a nervous gesture that seemed automatic. “Kraut Jews, Scotty. Really.”
“Professor Blumenthal is a German-born Jew. So, I believe, was Marx.”
“Exactly. I can’t imagine why your family agrees to all this.”
Abra regarded him, deciding exactly how rude she was going to permit herself to be. This was her damned fault, getting involved with somebody from her own background. She had never done so before and resolved not to bother in future. The only advantage she could discover was that she could recite the conversation that would ensue before they played through its dreary predictability. She rose and walked over to the hall door, opened it and stood aside.
Hank looked at her blankly. “Somebody in the hall?”
“You, soon, I hope. Your coat is on the peg. Do put it on yourself.”
“What are you doing, Scotty? This is silly. You can’t turn me down. And not like this.”
“Watch me. I have no particular interest in marrying anybody. But you’re the last possibility I would entertain.”
“Scotty, you know we love each other.”
She had a flash of anger with herself, for getting into this debacle. She must give up playing tennis. She met the wrong sort of men on the courts. The men she picked up at rallies were more her sort. “I think we both made a small mistake, easily remedied. Don’t forget your hat.”
Slowly he backed out, still carrying his coat and hat, staring at her. Then he ran downstairs and if the outer door had been slammable, he would have slammed it. It shut at its own leisurely pace however, with a pneumatic sigh.
Abra reflected on the ruin of her Sunday. She tested the waters of her soul and found them only tepid. It would be a good day to stay home and make an effort to do more than refer to her thesis in public. Her class work would be completed soon, but she had not really settled down to writing. She looked around her small moderately bohemian digs with the Hopi vase and the Guatemalan molah and the African gazelle carving darker than night interspersed with bright chintz pillows and eighteenth-century pieces from the family attic. Hank did not belong here. She did.
It seemed to Abra that marriage was something that would fall to her lot at a certain age, as she had inherited her little trust fund at twenty-one from her grandfather Scott and as she would someday inherit her grandmother Woolrich’s ladder-back chairs and have to put them somewhere, along with a trust fund from that side, due at twenty-six. She believed that most of her women friends from college had married to acquire a place for themselves, an identity, but that she could make her own place.
She had no desire to be rich; her branch of the family had not stressed money per se, once their shipyard had gone under, unlike her uncle Frederick Woolrich, whom she had always liked, with his booming manner as if to be heard in a gale and his energy. She suspected Uncle Frederick was probably a good lay, but incest was not her particular vice. Rather the opposite. She should have told Hank politely that she had an exogamous personality. She hardly ever went for another blond and with Hank, the fire had simply not come down. A month with Hank was longer than a year with Slim, the Negro saxophone player, although in truth they had only seen each other on and off for eight months. Slim lived with a woman, who had eventually found out about Abra. Too bad. Before she had come to New York, the only nonwhites she had ever laid eyes on were two local Indian fishermen, but Abra considered she had that liberal heritage from scandalous Great-Great-Aunt Abigail to live up to.
Abra had grown up in Bath, in a family well known and well connected locally, if not nearly so well off as they had been a couple of generations back. There was a cove named for her father’s family (where the defunct shipyard had been) and an island named for her mother’s side. She had grown up with her two brothers in a prim white federal house on Washington Street with a cupola on top and portraits not of ancestors but of their ships, stiff formal oil paintings of the Ebeneezer Scott, the General Abraham Woolrich, in full unlikely sail upon static waves, alternating with naive local paintings of noted shipwrecks, the Mary Frances going down with all hands off Woolrich Island. Portraits of ancestors had not seemed necessary, since she was always being told she had Granny Abra Scott’s nose and Great-Uncle Timothy’s eyes. She had felt herself not so much placed as embedded in family expectations, the life before her a formal perennial bed planted with Everetts and Timothys and Toms and Mary Franceses and Abras, needing only occasional watering.
Summers had been the free and glorious times, always on the water, sailing or chugging among the elaboration of inlets and arms and bays of the Kennebec or lolling on the unusual (for Maine) sand beaches of their peninsula. Growing up they had even had a Civil War fort to play in, with spiral staircases and dungeons and parapets. They scrambled over the rocks, they clammed, they raced their cousins in catboats. The gap of two years between Everett, called Ready, and Abra which sprawled wide in Bath during the school year, closed at the summer house.
Every summer the New Yorkers came to the peninsula with their different accents, different values, different clothes and attitudes; with them came a freedom she found addictive. In Bath she was always under someone’s expectant or admonitory gaze, but out in the simpler stark house on the hill at Popham, she could always escape surveillance. It was a matter of sailing off to another island or rounding the bend. The Woolriches had their family compound on an island visible from her family’s wide front porch, and she could always say she was sailing over to her uncle’s. If the weather precluded sailing, then there was the forest of birch, oak and fir, the marshes, the dank swamps where she could lose herself. Privacy was only one hill away. The social rules that circumscribed the depth and frequency of every contact in Bath frayed in the summer world of fir and rock, of fog drifting in magic and chilly, the sun dazzling, the wind rising till she could feel herself a real person with a will and a future as potentially tumultuous and changeable as the cold sea that quickened her. She could not go to sea, as Ready would, so she chose an island instead that seemed to her as free and rich as the sea: Manhattan.
She ate in a Nedick’s, on her way to the fundraiser for Czech resistance. At the door of the rented hall, she met two friends, Djika and Karen Sue. Djika was the only other woman graduate student in her department. Karen Sue had been a bored southern belle in Memphis before contracting an inappropriate marriage her father had had annulled; an inheritance was keeping her in New York where she found life livelier. She had a big apartment on Riverside Drive where parties among the politicos they knew were often held.
It was an odd evening, the regulars the Party could call out for its fundraisers, folk singers, theater people and then a lot of Czech chorale groups and singers, many rousing speeches about the brave partisans. Up on the platform Abra contemplated hairy Jack Covington, who had once leaped upon her, satisfied himself with haste and rolled off, and then demanded to be waited on in the morning, sending her out for a bottle of orange juice, a pac
kage of Wheaties and light cream. She had spent a night with him after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union had reconstituted the Popular Front and she and her interventionist friends were speaking to the Communists again. She had endeavored to avoid a repeat ever since, although whenever he saw her he displayed that great toothy grin like the grille of a new truck and headed straight at her. That such a virile-looking ex-longshoreman should prove so perfunctory in bed was disappointing. She was amused to note that she found his speeches less moving than formerly. It was good that people generally knew little about the sexual habits of their politicians.
“Oh, Jack. That boy is a dundering bore,” Karen Sue drawled, giving the judgment at least two diphthongs. Abra wondered if her disillusionment were similarly based, but she had no intention of discussing her sexual life with Karen Sue. Abra believed in being a complete gentleman.
“So, have you begun to work for the great man yet?” Djika asked, leaning across Karen Sue.
“Tomorrow’s the first of the month, and that’s when Professor Kahan is starting me.”
“Seems absurd,” Djika said sourly, perhaps jealous of the appointment. “You start the first of December and then you’ll break off for vacation. Why not wait till the first of January?”
“Perhaps her professor doesn’t take a little old vacation,” Karen Sue said. “Just works his assistants to death fifty-two weeks in the year.”
“I’d just as soon get on with learning the job,” Abra said. “I’m curious as hell.” She had been introduced to Oscar Kahan at a conference on Fascism where he had spoken, eloquently she had thought, on the tension between the petty bourgeois base of German fascism and the growing amity between the Nazi party and the German industrial elite. Her own advisor, Professor Blumenthal, was a German refugee from the Frankfurt School. Kahan had been one of the few American-born speakers at the conference to present anything sophisticated. She had been extremely pleased when Blumenthal had recommended her to Kahan.
