Gone to Soldiers (109 page)

A WASP newsletter appeared with job information, but mostly it contained news of what was not open. TWA sent an interviewer, offering to hire WASPs as stewardesses. Schools offered jobs as counselors. Some of the women went for interviews as air controllers and were hired.

One night when fog kept her on the East Coast after she had delivered a Mustang to Newark, she wandered the streets of Greenwich Village, searching for something that she feared did not exist. Yet now and then she saw women on the streets who eyed her as the colored nurse had long ago, women who when she looked at them, looked right back.

It was eleven that night when she found a bar full of women, although at first she was not sure all of them were female. But they were, they were. She admired the style of some: jaunty, tough. She could look like that, if she tried. She had been drinking at the bar for half an hour, nursing a beer, when a woman her own height, a little thinner in a black turtleneck and overalls, leaned on the bar next to her and asked in a low-pitched voice, “Are you lonely, honey? I haven't seen you around here before. What's the uniform? Oh, you fly planes? That's exciting. I have a sweetheart who's a WAC, but she's overseas.… You can call me Frankie.”

Bernice went home with Frankie, not because of any instant attraction but because she had to learn what she was and how to make love to Flo. She was terrified of making a mistake, of hurting Flo. It turned out to be easy to make love with a woman. That facility astonished her. She could have figured it out if she had not been so frightened, but maybe she needed the permission to be what she was from other women like herself—just knowing that women who loved women had lives and jobs and apartments. Went on living and did not combust with pleasure and joy. She also learned what to call herself: she was a lesbian.

“The poor bastards,” Flo said. She was talking about the last class of Avenger Field, who were receiving their wings on December 7 and graduating into nothing. “At least we had the life for a while. They've knocked themselves out getting through training, and for what?”

“At least they don't know what they missed,” Bernice said. “We're the poor bastards. We had it all, and now we don't have a thing.”

Flo looked at her reproachfully and pointedly said nothing.

Bernice hastened to add, “Except our friendship. If we don't have a future, at least we don't have a future together.” She had not told Flo about her adventure in New York. Privacy did not come easily in the barracks, and she could hardly drag Flo off to a tourist court.

She still could not believe the WASPs were ending. After all, she was on a schedule that barely offered her a day off between ferrying a P-47 out and getting her butt back to grab another. As December ground toward Christmas, it seemed clear the war had hit a snag. The lines on the maps representing Allied advances became stationary. Surely a reprieve would come. The Army could not be so crazy as to throw away all the time and money spent training them. The men clamoring for her job were not yet trained to do it. If they had been good enough, they would have made it as pilots and have gone overseas long ago. They were the also-rans, and they were going to take these fast and beautiful planes from her.

It could not happen. They had done a good job. They had excelled. They were efficient, they had a better record than the men at delivering the planes. They could not be punished like this. They could not be dismissed when the need for them was glaring. President Roosevelt would step in. General Arnold would finally refuse to buckle under to the pressure. General Marshall would intervene. Somebody would see the way to a sane decision, now, at the very end.

The next time back to base, a letter in the familiar handwriting of The Professor was waiting. Bernice hesitated to open it. The disbanding had been in all the papers, and even though she had written nothing about it, he must know by now. He was going to be expecting her back in her old position doing her old tasks. “No,” she said aloud, glaring at the letter. Nobody paid any attention. They were all picking up bad news in the mail every day, and none of the women thought her standing there with a letter balled in her fist talking to it was unusual behavior.

Okay, get it over with. She walked outside. It was warm and the sun smote her across the face. Traveling back and forth across the country as she did, she was never used to the winter in the East or the summer in the West. She had a series of colds, and sometimes it was painful to take up the planes with her sinuses inflamed. A minor annoyance.

She sat on a crate and read the letter, preparing to remain calm before what was going to be The Professor's infuriating assumption that she would return to Bentham Center as his live-in maid.

Dear Daughter Bernice
,

I know you are very busy out there and so Gertrud and I did not think it appropriate to bother you beforehand, since the Government urges us not to take unnecessary trips these days anyhow
.

Nevertheless, Gertrud and I want you to hear our good news and rejoice with us. We were married last Saturday at the chapel in St. Thomas. It was a simple ceremony, as befits two middle-aged people such as ourselves, widower and widow
.

Gertrud was raised a Lutheran, but she had no objection to the Episcopal ceremony, even though St. Thomas has always tended to be somewhat high for my simple tastes. The wedding should clear up Gertrud's visa problems and our difficulty with the neighbors
.

Gertrud is a very fine woman and I know you will rejoice in our happiness when you meet her. She inquires if you are planning to come home for Christmas? I told her I don't imagine you can travel all that distance, but if you do plan to do so, let us know, and Gertrud will have your room ready. She is an excellent manager and a first-rate cook. I know your brother would also have liked her
.

Included in the letter was an engraved announcement of the wedding.

Bernice wandered off to the barracks, amused with herself, amused with The Professor. She was astounded that he should have remarried, almost two decades after Viola's death; but that he should marry his housekeeper seemed wholly appropriate. What she had failed to anticipate was that not only did she not want to go home, she could not. The Professor had replaced her, as the Air Corps dismissed her.

The only item in the letter she resented was the sentimental reference to Jeff. She could not imagine Jeff having rejoiced in The Professor's marriage. She could not communicate with her father about Jeff, no more after his death than during his life. He was hers, all hers, not her father's.

She did not hear from Zach. Often there were gaps of months in their correspondence. He was at war, and when he had an interlude, he would write her. She assumed that if he had heard about Jeff, he would have written her.

December nineteenth, Bernice flew her last fighter out of Long Beach. A line of planes were sitting on the runway waiting for someone to deliver them, but as of the next morning, they would go on sitting there until more pursuit pilots materialized. In Newark, she delivered her plane. Then she handed over her pistol, her parachute, her flying jacket. Toting a suitcase, she walked out the gate to hitch a ride to the train station.

Flo and she were lucky: they found temporary jobs near Columbus, Ohio, delivering surplus trainers that the Army was getting rid of to people all over the States. It was a stopgap, but they would be paid decent wages and they would be flying.

The first time Bernice took up the little rickety Fairchild PT-19, with its open cockpit and its tiny 175-horsepower motor, she felt like weeping. It was like riding a bicycle after driving a Ferrari. The poor little thing was open to the elements just like a bike and seemed about as speedy. It was in middling shape, at a generous estimate. She wondered how cheap these planes were going for. It had better be pretty cheap.

That made her wonder if the Army might not be disposing of something a little more useful, like maybe the C-87 Skytrain, the military version of the DC-3. In the last few months, the WASPs at her base had been allowed to learn every plane around, to give them a better shot at jobs, and both Flo and she were checked out in all available two- and four-engine planes.

Flying this wobbly little trainer was a sharp and painful comedown. At the same time, she was aware that Flo and she were among the handful of ex-WASPs still flying anything. Even Jacqueline Cochran had been offered a desk job at an airline. After this, what?

The trainers were two-seaters, but they flew them alone. Most of the planes had seen hard use. They were glanced at by a mechanic and then they were hers to deliver.

They stayed in a tourist court for the first week and a half, before they found a rooming house that would take them, sharing a twin-bedded room up on the third floor under the eaves. The room was cold, drafty and of reasonable height only in the middle. Bernice had to approach her bed at a stoop; if she wakened suddenly and sat up, she would bang her head on the rafters. If it had been possible to get laundry done in Columbus, they would have used their own linens, as those provided by their landlady consisted of grey shrouds with holes in them and towels thin enough to use as mosquito netting, should the ice age ever end: but the war ground on and the few laundries that still existed took no new customers.

With some shyness, they set up their temporary housekeeping, assigning one of the wobbly and mismatched bureaus to each, neither overburdened with clothes. How quickly Bernice had got accustomed to wearing that handsome blue uniform, and how uncomfortable and fussy by comparison she found women's clothes. She was happiest in her flying gear of voluminous overalls. She owned few dresses or skirts and resented the thought of having to spend her wages acquiring some.

The first Saturday night, Bernice bought a bottle of an unknown bourbon which was as harsh as she had suspected. With the radio turned to dance music, they were sitting together on Flo's bed drinking. How do I make a pass at another woman? Her memory of the woman in the bar did not help. She could hardly ask Flo if she were lonely. Instead, she put her arm around Flo's shoulders. “Tired?”

“Worn out,” Flo said. “I want to go back West when they lay us off.”

“Consider it arranged … How's your back? Would you like a massage?”

“I'd love one.” Flo turned away from her and took off her clothes, except for her panties, and then lay facedown on the bed. Bernice started out rubbing her shoulders, her middle back. She did that for a long time, straddling Flo's hips. Her own breath sounded loud as a steam locomotive in her ears. She could not rub Flo's back all night long, but this was her opening, if it was that. Was it?

Finally she dared let her hands move down to Flo's buttocks, kneading but also caressing. Flo made a little noise in her throat. Bernice let her hand brush the soft silky thigh. Flo said nothing. Bernice stared at her curly red brown pubic hair, just visible at the hem of her panties. She realized Flo was breathing hard also. She slowly brought her hand circling on the thigh, circling, circling, tracing up the inside. She was melting herself. Flo must know she was doing something besides a massage by now, she hoped, staring at the back that lay smooth and silky and silent and without expression. Finally she let her hand brush up to the curls. Flo moved then. She slid her thighs apart. She let Bernice's hand come home.

It had been a bad trip. In late February, the weather was rough. When she had landed in Cairo, Illinois, the mechanic on the ground had teased her about flying a Popsicle, because of the ice on the wings. She asked him to check the engine, because it seemed to her that it was running hot. She didn't like the way it had been acting. He said he'd look at it. Still, she was supposed to push on. She delivered as fast as she could because she knew how easily Flo and she could be replaced. If it was this bad getting a job now, what was it going to be like when the thousands of overseas pilots came home? How many of them would be seeking jobs in aviation? These rickety crates might be the last planes she was ever paid to fly. Yet she could not bear to believe that.

In the meantime, deliver the goods and deliver it on time. That would keep her in the air; that was all that would.

The next afternoon, under a lowering sky and with a smart crosswind, she was beginning a slow power descent into Lawrence, Kansas—where the plane was to be turned over to its new owner—when suddenly the engine quit cold. She was at about five hundred feet, so she had neither the time nor the space to think twice. Glancing frantically down over the side with the wind tearing her face raw, she cursed the engine. It had not been running well. She had thought shortly after takeoff that the mechanic at Cairo had done nothing to fix the problem she had noticed the day before, but she continued on her way. Why hadn't she followed up on that conversation? Why hadn't she turned back when she felt the plane not responding as it ought?

She was coming in over small fenced fields, looking frantically for a long enough area to land. Fences everyplace. Cattle pens. Houses. She had only three hundred feet of altitude left. She had to stall in over the fence of the field right in front of her, no choice, no time. What can I do, she thought, slip and fishtail? Can that save me? She was almost at the end of the field and the wheels hadn't touched. Trees ahead. I'm not going to make it. There's not enough room.

She felt a shuddering crack through her body as the tail broke through the treetops. Then there was a deafening, splintering crash and the plane hit the ground nose first. She had a moment of blankness and then she felt more than heard the silence. She was aware she was alive. Something was terribly wrong. She felt broken. Automatically she pushed her hand toward the instrument board to cut the switch. Hot oil was soaking her feet. Burning hot oil. She hurt, sharply and dully all at once. Gas was pouring out of a broken fuel line, loud raw smell in her head, in her mouth.