Gone to Soldiers

by Marge Piercy

  She was staring, when the woman gave her a quick hard look, not at all apologetic or demure. Normally, Bernice would have been deeply embarrassed and turned away, but she was wide open this morning to her feelings, to the world. Instead of turning away, she smiled at the woman. The woman looked at her again, looked her over openly and tipped her a wink. Then she swirled haughtily and strode off.

  Zach did not notice and Bernice, still jolted, said nothing. “I wouldn’t half mind going back to Greece,” Zach was saying. “I was shunting about the Aegean in early forty-one for the limeys on caiques in the Dodekanisa. I get positively drunk on Mediterranean light. Sexually for a woman it must be the pits, but for a man it’s sumptuous.”

  Perhaps it was the both of them being in uniform: that for a woman felt like a bit of disguise, cross dressing. A uniform held you in. It was a kind of bondage but also a kind of power. The uniform was a license to do things that people out of uniform were not permitted. It said you were part of a large powerful armed group. It spoke of obedience to that group and immunity from punishment for doing what you were told. A true woman would not be in uniform but in frills and ruffles and flowery chiffon. Bernice was at once shaken and passionately intrigued. She had a set of liberal sentences in her head about Negroes, but never had she met one in any real way, face-to-face and honestly. The WASPs were all white, something she had thus far so taken for granted as not to have noticed.

  “Sometimes, dear heart, I indulge in fantasies of retiring there for a life of healthy vice on an island where like the local British milord I would be a petty king, disregarded in important decisions but pandered to nicely. A lifetime supply of eager twelve-year-olds. The trouble is, I get bored on that diet. There’s no edge. Not that I crave companions who may slit my throat, but if I was turned on by soft weakness, I’d be all for the ladies, right?”

  She scarcely listened, her mind still on the woman and her wink. She had shared for a moment something new, something almost unimaginable. “Women have a great deal of unused physical strength and stamina.”

  “Do you feel unused, dear heart? Wait till we get back to the hotel. I have a horniness on me like the great unicorn himself. I never fuck in Washington.”

  “Why? Aren’t there the same opportunities as elsewhere?” Opportunities, she thought. I have sex only when I am with him, common as eclipses of the moon.

  “But I always have the feeling the FBI is taking notes. They keep sexual dossiers on everybody. No thanks. It isn’t that you can’t get away with the same things, it’s that you’ll get pegged and everybody knows. I prefer to be officially hetero in Washington, lest I bung up my chances.”

  This time he took her in the ass, but as he assaulted her clitoris at the same time, she liked it. It was a new way to be sore, anyhow. Then they ordered up a huge lunch. “I am sadly undernourished,” he said. “Accompanying partisans is a healthy life if you don’t get shot. Then it becomes rapidly unhealthy. When my divorce comes through, I am contemplating marrying a British female—I’m reliably informed that’s the sex you have to marry, though I’ve never been able to figure out just why—eldest daughter of a viscount with no male heirs. White elephant of a country place dating back to the dark ages of nasty baronial architecture and no doubt costing as much to run as the duchy of Luxembourg, but also some nice factories in Birmingham which are doing quite well in the war. A widow. Husband bought it on the Prince of Wales off Singapore.”

  She realized he was watching her while eating heartily. Why? Then she realized he was checking her reaction to his announcement that he was contemplating marriage to another woman. Did he imagine she would mind? “Why are you in such a hurry to get married? I’d hate marriage, myself. I wouldn’t do it for anything.”

  “It rolls the family off my back. It provides that veneer of respectability society demands. Now a British girl, she expects her husband to be buggering the butler and the footman. So much better training than my first wife. She didn’t like sex all that much, but she was deeply offended by my little habits.” He stood, abruptly. “So, you don’t care if I marry the lady? Actually her name is Sylvia. She looks like a horse and she even whinnies, but she’s not stupid. She likes plants. I think she fucks trees, actually, and her true emotional relationship is with the gardening staff. The war did not so much deprive her of her husband as of her head gardener. You won’t get jealous?”

  Bernice only smiled. She was mildly offended that he felt the need to check her out. “Zach, what earthly difference could it make to me whether you’re married to your present wife or another one?”

  “Quite so. Pass the wine. I have to take off at midnight tonight, but I have a ticket for you to California. The old boys network is intact, and I pulled a few strings. Unless they want you in Newark.” He raised his glass to her. “To the best lay in the U.S. of A. I brought you a present.” He pointed with his glass toward a chair in the corner.

  She got up and wandered over to investigate. She found on the chair a coarsely woven woolen bag. In it was a black leather sheaf. From inside that, she drew out a steel dagger, about eight inches long and finely worked with intaglio decoration around the hilt. The hilt itself was fashioned of some hard wood bound over with leather and set with two stones on each side. “It’s gorgeous. It looks old.”

  “I think it’s Turkish, eighteenth century. Those are opals. Not first quality, but real. It’s quite lethal, to defend your honor with, dear heart. I thought you’d enjoy it. One of Tito’s chappies had it. I traded a BAR.”

  “You’re right, I like it immensely.” It felt ancient, decadent, powerful in her hand. It felt like eight inches of commandable death. She did like it. It seemed such an unlikely thing to have. My lover gave me a dagger. Very cautiously she fingered the edge and drew blood. She licked the blood from her finger and slid the knife into its sheath.

  “If you ever have to use it, remember not to strike down but up. It’s harder to defend against and it hits vital organs more easily,” he said in a conversational tone, demonstrating with a butter knife against her belly. “Tonight I have procured us tickets to La Traviata with Licia Albanese. I adore opera. It’s in such immensely bad taste and yet it’s so thrilling—like life, pussy. Now let’s go cruise the Village and sip some espresso and see if there’s any decent cannoli left.”

  LOUISE 8

  I Could Not Love Thee, Dear, So Much

  D-Day and K-Day fell in the same week. Both were an equal surprise. The former was good news; not so, the latter.

  K-Day began with a phone call from Kay Saturday afternoon. “Mother,” Kay’s voice sounded both distant and uncharacteristically timid. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  Louise experienced a flicker of guilt, because Daniel and she had just come in from bicycling and had taken a bath together, nuzzling like two large erotic babies. They had been about to slide into bed. She clutched her robe tighter. “Is anything wrong, Kay? Are you studying for finals?”

  “Mommy,” Kay said, her voice curdling with what sounded like suppressed giggles, “I got married this afternoon.”

  She had, it developed, married an air force bombardier about to go off to Europe. He had been training near Hadley, at Westover Air Force base. They had left school Thursday and driven south until they came to Alabama, where they could be married without parental consent.

  “Don’t feel left out, Mommy, it’s just that you would have tried to persuade me not to, and that would have been no use. Robby and I just didn’t have time to bother. We know we’re right together, and tomorrow he has to go off to war!”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a little town in Alabama. Sweetheart, what’s the name of this town? Anyhow, Robby has to report tomorrow. We’re leaving and we have to drive all night, so please wire me some money at school because I borrowed fifty dollars.”

  When Louise got off the phone, she sat and cursed in a low fierce voice while Daniel watched her, amazed. He had never heard her say more than damn and had
not had the opportunity to hear some of the more colorful epithets stored away from her street kid days in Cleveland. Afterward, she got drunk and he finally made supper and lots of black coffee.

  Fuming, she wired the money. She could hardly bring herself to open the letter from Kay that arrived three days later, then read it over and over again, trying to find some shred of hope. When Robby returned, they would no doubt be divorced. She concentrated on persuading Kay that marriage did not mean she should abandon her course of study. Her daughter was now Mrs. Robert H. Dixon. He was not even Jewish. She didn’t know what he was, and she doubted that Kay had any idea. She felt thoroughly defeated. What could she have done? Sat on Kay like a giant auk’s egg? According to the laws of the enlightened state of Alabama, her daughter was old enough to marry, and that was what she had done.

  Louise was bored by Washington. She found the atmosphere male in the dullest staunchest way, rather like the federal architecture. She could not persuade herself she was having any impact on the policies of OWI either in regard to women or in regard to Jews in camps or as potential immigrants.

  The men she worked with opened doors for her and offered her cigarettes, told her how sweet she was looking, begged her to pick out birthday presents for wives and girlfriends, asked her out to dine and made an occasional pro forma pass. They also ignored any suggestions she made as if she had not spoken. She imagined sometimes simply resigning and returning to her friends and her apartment and her secretary in New York; but she would have felt as if she were shirking. Daniel would have been hurt, and he could not abandon whatever he secretly did.

  She loved him, surprisingly: not in the romantic way she had tried to love Claude, not in the all-encompassing way she had loved Oscar. At first she thought it was similar to how she loved Kay, with a wary eye, a lack of illusion, a focused caring, but she realized she was fooling herself. Loving Daniel had more joy in it than her daughter had given her since Kay had been twelve. With him, she was relatively carefree. She would not be spending her life with him, so she did not feel deeply implicated in his habits, his decisions, his deep structures of belief or disbelief.

  How secret was the work Daniel did only became apparent to her when she was being vetted herself. One day she had a call from her agent Charley, asking her if she would like to take a leave of absence from OWI and go off as a war correspondent for Collier’s. They felt the time was ripe for sending a woman over: The Luce publications had several, Clare Boothe Luce and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. The Herald Tribune had sent Marguerite Higgins. With increasing numbers of women in uniform, they wanted her to report on the war to the folks at home, with a woman’s eye for what their men were going through. Was she interested?

  From the tremendous jolt of relief that brought her to her feet and started her pacing her cubicle in a sugar rush of energy, she knew how sick she had become of OWI. She was tired of sitting in committees with men who did not listen—hardly ever to each other and never to her—and who made the decisions they formed as if she were not present, increasingly selling propaganda to the public. Lately the Pentagon was pushing a line that blamed any shortages at the front on the unions, although from reports she knew that logistical failures of the Army, their own delivery system, were at fault. Still it looked as if OWI would not only fail to tell the truth, it would push a falsehood designed to divide the working class, those in the Army from those in the plants. Her enthusiasm for OWI had dried up.

  She had to be investigated by the War Department before she could be accredited. She was questioned about her marriage, her trip to the Soviet Union, her relationship to Jewish organizations and, surprisingly, in great detail about Daniel and what she knew about what he was doing. Since she knew nothing, she told the questioners that repeatedly. Finally, it seemed to be Daniel who caused them the most concern. She almost wanted to beg him to tell her what he really did for the Navy, but at the same time, she wanted less than ever to be informed. Now she could honestly claim ignorance.

  Finally the authorization came through. Daniel knew something was up, because he too had been questioned, but she had asked him to wait for an explanation. The day she got her Army credentials, she gave notice to OWI—where the news of her planned departure was greeted with thinly veiled relief—and took the train for New York to sit down to a discussion about exactly where she would go.

  New York dazzled and stank under the flame that seemed to drip from the mid-June sun, the asphalt soft and tarry, sticking to the thin soles of her high-heeled sandals. What Collier’s wanted was first a piece on the wounded and the medical corps in the European theater. Collier’s thought that families back home would like to read about how their boys were being cared for. They also had in mind a real Annette Hollander Sinclair piece about the boys at the front, or as close to it as seemed reasonable. Pathos, heartbreak, rapture, loneliness, the iconography of home. They wanted her in France.

  She had to be equipped fast. Back she went to Washington. The War Department, among its other duties, prescribed exactly what a war correspondent could wear: the blouse, field cap, jacket, pants of an officer but with little insignia that said WAR CORRESPONDENT and, in her case, a skirt for more formal attire. With her new uniform ordered, fitted and in the works, she now had to tell Daniel.

  She found herself stymied as to how to break the news. Although he said nothing about his work to her, she complained freely to him. He knew her dissatisfactions. Obviously he had been worried the post would not continue. When in doubt, she thought, make a meal. She roasted a chicken, using her last egg in the stuffing. She rarely did serious cooking, as the tiny kitchen was not designed for a lot of purposeful activity. The stove had only three burners and an oven smaller than her breadbox at home. Nonetheless, she made a supper she felt proud of.

  He was late coming home. She held the meal and fussed, pacing. She even had candles and a bottle of local wine from Maryland, not good but red and wet. When he arrived, she escorted him straight to the table. “I was getting worried this might be one of your late nights, and I might have to sit down and toast myself.”

  He lifted one dark brow at her. “What brings this on?”

  She thought, since they grilled him, he has been waiting. “I have good news and bad news.”

  He drained his glass, winced and poured more. “Let’s hear the bad, first. You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  “For a while. I’m going over as a war correspondent, for Collier’s, accredited to General Bradley’s First Army.”

  His face went completely blank. She felt her stomach contract with empathetic pain. He said nothing at all for a while, and she could think of no words to mitigate the rupture. He said finally, “You’ll get into action and I never will.”

  “They aren’t going to make a soldier out of me—and I remain suspicious just how near the front I’ll be permitted. Daniel, I don’t have any desire to leave you. But I’m accomplishing nothing in Washington. This is an incredible chance. I have to seize it. It won’t come again.”

  “Have you told your daughter?”

  “Mrs. Robert Dixon? I’ll write her. I did call my ex-mother-in-law. She’s happy to rush into the breach. She’s just remarried and she’s feeling guilty—a retired dentist. She wants to fuss over Kay. She is, of course, appalled by the marriage, but determined to be cheery.”

  “If Kay hadn’t eloped with that bombardier, you wouldn’t have left the country.”

  “I don’t know,” Louise said honestly. “But as it is, I feel too great a desire to wring her neck to be of much use.” She got up and came around the table. “Eat your supper, Daniel, please. I wanted it to be nice tonight.”

  “Is this our last supper?”

  “No, I don’t go off for two more days. Come, you know you won’t get rid of me so easily. When I return, I’ll run to see you—if you still want. By then you’ll be in love with somebody else.”

  “Are you going to see your ex-husband?”

  “I don’t
expect to. But my comings and goings will no longer be under my control.”

  He started eating, although slowly, as if doing her a favor. She beamed at him. She could imagine someone quizzing her about Daniel and asking if he did not look like Oscar years before. The eyes were similar, the almost black eyes, the cheekbones, the black hair; but Oscar’s was only slightly wavy and Daniel’s was all tight curls, the pelt of a black lamb. Their bodily presence differed sharply. Daniel was tall and rangy, lightly built, agile, a little stooped as if he had grown tall too early and become self-conscious about the amount of space he took up. In China, he must have seemed even taller. He was gentler than Oscar, more vulnerable and less well defended. His emotions could spin him around.

  This was the first time in her life she had left a relationship while it was good, and for reasons that had nothing to do with the man’s infidelity. Daniel had been faithful and she would miss him keenly. The line of her work tugged her forward and away. She could not fool herself that anything was likely to bring them together again. She would not come back to Washington. Even if postwar events delivered him to New York, he was too young not to have fallen in love again long before then. She wished him nothing but well. She wished she could carry from her whole life only Daniel with her, Daniel and her typewriter. But she could not sacrifice for a relationship she did not believe could endure long regardless.

  Surprisingly, Daniel announced that he wanted to take over her apartment. Certainly that simplified moving out. By July second she was sitting in the bucket seat of a Liberator facing a scowling major, who glowered at her, muttered and chewed his mustache all through the four days it took them to reach Casablanca. From there she caught a plane two days later to Scotland, and then to London at last, where she was to report in and receive her further travel orders.