Gone to Soldiers (115 page)

She lay in the cavelike darkness of her room, imagining the streets of New York. At home, they would be celebrating, massed in Times Square. Sometimes she missed New York, but London had become her city too—and she found the survey work fascinating. Just lately she had been given more responsibility; one of her bosses had pronounced her reports literate, their highest compliment. She had a team under her. Soon they would be going over to Germany, which ought to be interesting. In some ways, it had been a disadvantage to her career to work with Oscar, because what she had done had become all his. Now she was on her own. Her work was visible.

The rain was over and the day warm and shining when Beverly appeared in the late morning, wearing not her uniform but a carefully saved linen frock, wrinkled but summery. Beverly had sandwiches and a thermos and a bottle of St. Emilion she had inveigled from somebody just returned from France. “I thought we'd go out in the streets with more people than you ever thought existed, and have a picnic. It's party day.”

The crowds were jolly and well behaved, people with children and babies and even dogs decked out with red, white and blue ribbons and rosettes and streamers, with paper hats perched on their heads, with flags on their prams and borne overhead, carried cheerfully waving in the hand. Bunting hung from the buildings. There were street musicians with violins and accordions and people who carried a cornet or a drum or a mouth organ to make a joyful noise. Others were banging on dustbin lids or old petrol drums. Groups were singing or just cheering.

They milled around with everybody else slowly circulating toward the palace where an announcement was expected. Then they drifted away. After their feet tired, they found an unoccupied patch of ground in St. James's Park and sat down for their picnic. Bells were ringing from all the churches. They saw few people drunk and none violent. For one thing, the pubs had already run out and closed. There weren't enough spirits available to get drunk.

All of London seemed as the day wore on like a perfect children's Halloween party. People had put on fancy dress or funny hats. In a little street in Chelsea a piano had been dragged outside and a community sing was going on featuring at the moment “Knees Up, Mother Brown.”

The bobbies looked on with polite approval as people tore down advertisements to build bonfires. Every street had one. In one street they were doing the Lambeth walk to a phonograph on a stoop. In another, children were leading a victory parade with drums and penny whistles. On the Thames tugs were blowing the V signal. As they wandered to Piccadilly, they came on a crowd of other Americans in a conga line and joined in, swung through the streets as she remembered holding on in the whip of childhood games.

She was happy and she was melancholy. She should have seen the end of this war with Oscar, at whose side she had gone through so much of it. Where was he? Would he think of her? The odds were that he was already in Germany, where she doubted they were celebrating. Her salvation was to put regrets aside and live in the present.

When the floodlights were turned on at Buckingham Palace, at the National Gallery, Whitehall, Big Ben, people cheered and little children oohed and aahed, for they had never seen city lighting. When Beverly and she were standing on the bridge near the tower of Big Ben watching it light up, a little girl next to them began to cry in fear. “It's burning,” she moaned into her mother's shoulder. “It's burning.”

She and Beverly rested on the embankment as the crowds swept past, moving in amiable eddies and quick good-natured charges. Everybody had their flags out, the few remaining French, the Belgians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Americans, the Australians, the Canadians. A woman in tweeds who ought to be wilting in the summery air stopped to tie her oxford and then marched off, waving a small Union Jack. Couples were kissing, standing tightly embraced as if to join right through their clothing.

Abra was reminded of her fantasy of the fall that she had dried up sexually. All day she had been in a vague state of sexual excitement, not really wishing to pick anyone up and comfortable in Beverly's partnership, but flush with health, with ripeness, with her own young and vigorous body. Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.

“Look!” Beverly cried, seizing her arm.

The fireworks were beginning, the first she had seen in four years, if she did not count the sometimes eerie beauty of the real thing. As each rosette of sparks and streamers burst upon the night sky, so much less black than it had been, a joy that was mostly youth and a sense of her own self swelled her chest.

RUTHIE 10

A Killing Frost

April twelfth was a Thursday. Ruthie delivered a paper in her Problems of Families seminar, dealing with changing patterns of child rearing in first- and second-generation immigrant families, which provoked far more controversy than she had imagined. It seemed evident to her that something was lost as well as gained when old patterns gave way to new ones. Therefore she found surprising the assumption on the part of most of her classmates and her professor that such alterations were always positive.

She defended her research and challenged their assumptions, but as she worked on the line, she was still vibrating internally from the debate. How dare those people think that everything done their way was superior? That foreign patterns meant stupidity? That everybody else in the world was always wrong? That those who dressed shabbily and lived in poverty were necessarily ignorant? That only not knowing better kept Italians actively Italian, and not proper white Protestants with Smith and Jones names?

They did think they were better, to the point where the lack of agreement on the part of anybody else astonished them. Oh, she had learned something about prejudice today. Maybe she had expected the vaunted neutrality of the social sciences to prove out. They had assumed that she was the one whose prejudices were clouding her vision, that she was engaged in special pleading. High up in the back of her head a wry voice proclaimed its lack of surprise and its savage amusement, but most of her was scandalized, scalded. She wanted to believe in goodwill—why? she asked herself, frowning behind the welder's mask. She loved the mask because it not only protected her eyes from sparks and hot metal, but because it protected her from other people's eyes. Did she have a need to believe in goodwill because she was a good person or because she was a lazy person and it was less work to assume others were well intentioned?

They could see nothing but superstition in family tales—bobbe-mysehs. The past was to be wiped away like dirt. Children were to have no notion where they sprang from, the histories that led to them, the people who had lived and died to make them.

When the public-address system announced an important message, everyone paused to listen. She had a moment of hope that the war in Europe at least was over. The troops had broken into Germany already. The newsreels were full of rapid advances. Maybe the Nazis had surrendered?

“Who's dead? What did he say?” Vivian pushed back her mask, frowning.

“He says the President is dead,” Ruthie repeated, staring around her. “The President?” she repeated, realizing what she had just said.

“Is that some kind of joke?” Vivian glared. “What President?”

But there was only one.

It was almost silent in the shop. The line had stopped. Somewhere a warning bell was still clanging and some piece of equipment was still moving, probably a lift. A swirl of voices rose and quieted as the PA system sputtered and then repeated the announcement. “According to The Associated Press, President Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage this afternoon at 3:55
P
.
M
. eastern war time. I repeat, the President is dead, of a cerebral hemorrhage. We picked up the news on the radio just a few moments ago, and we called WJR to confirm, but we couldn't get through. Then we called the
Free Press
. It's true.” The voice trailed off.

Vivian covered her mouth, her hand pressing hard. Ruth felt that absurd desire to smile that sometimes came to her in the midst of calamity, as if to ward off further blows, a grimace of appeasement. What would happen now? Would the war go on? Would everything grind to a halt?

She knew rationally that such a question was ridiculous. Of course the war would continue. Of course the government would continue. Who would be president? It took her a moment to remember the vice president's name. It had been Wallace, but Roosevelt had dumped him and taken a senator from Missouri to appease southerners who considered Wallace too radical, too truculent. “President Truman,” she said aloud. It sounded absurd. The President was Roosevelt. The President had always been Roosevelt except way back when she was a little girl and they were hungry all the time. His was the voice of government, that rich warm cocoa voice coming out of the radio and explaining how things would be and how they ought to be. Injustice meant the President didn't know, didn't have the facts, but always, you assumed he was on your side. If he knew, he would care, and he would try to make it better.

She remembered when Sharon had discovered that Marilyn thought that voice pouring like heat from the radio was G-d speaking. Sharon and she had tried to explain the difference between President Roosevelt and G-d, but she was not sure they had succeeded.

She looked around the shop, where men and women were openly weeping and others were smiling, those tight smiles of private pleasure. With a great lurch the line started and everybody rushed back to their positions. After all, there was still a war on.

The last Saturday in April, they all went to the movies to see
Since You Went Away
with Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones. Naomi was there with her boyfriend Alvin, sitting off to the side. After the Donald Duck cartoon about hoarding, the newsreels came on. It was the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, one of those camps she had read about. A terrible silence settled in the theater. Living skeletons stared from eyes as big in their gaunt heads as the eyes of nocturnal monkeys, of lemurs. Creatures of starvation and misery clutched their bones together staring without hope or recognition. Hills of bodies. Bodies heaped like garbage in a vast dump. Bulldozed graves. Mountains of worn shoes.

The Metro lion was roaring when out of the corner of her eye, Ruthie saw Naomi wandering up the aisle. Alvin looked after her, uncertain. Ruthie jumped up. As she had guessed, Naomi was not going to the women's room. She staggered from the theater and stood in the street, buffeted. Ruthie took her limp arm.

“I knew they were dead,” Naomi said, tears streaming down her face. She stumbled and fell against a parked car. Two men began to laugh at them, assuming Naomi was drunk. “It's my fault. I let go of her.”

Naomi wasn't making sense, but Ruthie could smell the guilt. “It isn't your fault. The Germans, they're the ones who did it, and they'd have done it to you if they caught you. If your mother died in a place like that, then her last thought must have been, at least one daughter of mine is safe, may The Name be praised.”

Naomi sat down on the curb, head hanging over the gutter. In a thickened voice she asked, “Why me? I'm the wrong one. I don't deserve!”

“We all deserve life. Let's go home.”

Alvin was standing uneasily behind them. “What's wrong? Why did she leave?”

“Her mother and sister were taken to such a camp.”

Alvin whistled. “Holy cow.”

Between them they bundled Naomi to her feet. Though it was only eight o'clock, the streets were already full of drunks, a couple screaming obscenities at each other, an aged colored man with a bottle muttering about blood, a clutch of prostitutes at each streetlamp. They got her around the corner and onto the residential street, but the sight of a bed of rotten tulips upset her freshly. Naomi slid from their hands and fell to the brown grass. A killer frost the week before had withered the spring flowers as they were opening, blasting the blossoms on the fruit trees. Alvin and she hoisted Naomi up between them again and bore her weight forward, her feet sometimes taking awkward steps, sometimes dragging. They had to stop frequently to rest, for she was dead weight. “Naomi, you're not alone,” Ruthie said insistently. “You have us. We're your family.”

“No, not alone,” Naomi repeated and laughed wildly at the same time she was still weeping. Snot ran down her face with her tears and she breathed with open mouth, looking swollen, drowned. “I hate myself! I'm the wrong one, the bad one!”

“Naomele, the Nazis aren't G-d. They don't reward or punish, they just kill. The duty you have is to live your life and be happy for your sisters and your mother and your father, live out their lives too. See for them, learn for them, love for them, have babies for them.”

Ruthie felt an odd pang as she spoke. Would Murray ever return? Would he come back to her real, not made of paper, of idle words, of strange dots on the blue bulge of the globe? Would she ever bear children of her own, or would G-d punish her for her fall, her trespass, by denying her fruitfulness? She was twenty-three. At her age, Rose had borne two children; at her age, Bubeh had already given birth to her own mother, Rose. But she had no babies, no husband. Only Naomi, who was growing up much too fast.

When they got Naomi to the house, she sent Alvin home and put her to bed. Somewhere in the cupboard must be the tea Grandma used to brew for nervous troubles and crises. Valerian she had grown with its rosy flowers on high stalks among the low thyme and parsley, boneset and mint. Ruthie sniffed at the old tea tins full of homemade remedies until she found the one she thought she remembered, then brewed up the tisane for Naomi. It should be made with honey, but they had none.