Gone to Soldiers (122 page)

“I can understand that,” Mrs. Augustine said. “The best of them is all wrapped up in himself and they all expect to be waited on hand and foot. Who does the cooking?”

“We both do. We alternate. We know how to cook different things. Every Sunday, we eat out.” To talk of their little habits and rituals made her feel less lonely.

Mrs. Augustine sighed. “It must be nice to come home and have somebody make supper for you, even just once.”

She did not think Mrs. Augustine exactly understood her relationship with Flo, but in essence she understood. Bernice felt she had received a blessing from the only real friend she had in Bentham Center. The Professor asked few questions. He held forth on the returning GIs and the chance for St. Thomas to develop into a college with higher standards. He pontificated on Truman and the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Germany. His eyes mostly rested on his wife's face. Gertrud waited on him and bustled around him. Her new stepmother made Bernice nervous, but Gertrud seemed to find her new position engrossing. On the phone, she did not identify herself as Bernice could remember Viola saying, “This is Viola Coates,” but rather, “This is Mrs. Professor Edward Coates.”

Bernice was packing everything of hers that she still cared about, old books, pictures, Jeff's paintings, her bicycle, to ship railroad express to San Francisco. She also took some of Jeff's clothes, his good tweed jacket, some shirts and sweaters and flannel pants. In his old room she tried on his jacket and pants. She did not really look like him, but she looked like his brother. Nobody challenged her appropriation.

She bicycled to the airport every day to work on her plane, for she had finally bought out the lawyer. She was going to fly it back, because she could sell it in California. Finally the last day, Mrs. Augustine drove her out (she had shipped off her bicycle that morning) and she took her plane up and headed west. It was a trip she had made many times, always in a faster and bigger plane and usually in the opposite direction. Still, to fly again was to be thoroughly alive.

Making love to Flo was like flying. When she lay between Flo's thighs, she felt herself at the controls of a sumptuous machine, she felt empowered. She, only she, could give such pleasure as she drove carefully but at high speeds the beautiful body of her love. When Flo made love to her, she felt flown, pressed through the air in a high magnificent arc. Sex with Flo was tender, passionate, gentle. It was another class of event than the sex she had known with Zach, for whole being to whole being they embraced, given into each other's eager care.

She had written Zach with her new address, the details of her life, but she was not confident she would ever hear from him. She was surprised one fall Friday when he called her at work, summoning her to the Mark Hopkins for supper. She got out of work early pleading a headache, so that she could greet Flo at the door changed out of her work clothes and carrying a glass of wine. As soon as Flo stepped inside, she started kissing her, rubbing her hands in the small of Flo's back and then rubbing her mons through the cloth in a way that always made Flo crazy for it. She was assuming if she was dealing with a relaxed and satisfied Flo, she would get a weaker reaction to her news. To think she had ever imagined she would not know how to please her. Because she had caught her right at the door, Flo had a strong tomato smell, but as she ate her, Flo's own sweet sea scent rose. Afterward, she mentioned the phone call.

Halfway to the shower, Flo put her hands on her hips. “Oh, lover boy calls, and you go running.”

“There's no love between Zach and me. Don't be jealous, sweet mama. I'm going to ask him for help.”

“Why should he help two lesbians?”

“Because he's queer too. He just might. Because he loved Jeff. Because he enjoyed being with me, if only in place of Jeff. Because he has money and power and sometimes it amuses him to play god. He might think what I have in mind is funny.”

“Alaska?”

Bernice pulled Flo into her arms, with Flo hanging back and turning her face away, refusing to look at Bernice. “You know it's okay here, but that's all it is. You working in the cannery all day, coming home with the last strength wrung out of you and with your hands all cut up. Someday you'll lose a finger. It's back-breaking work, and what do you make? Next to nothing. I hate being a secretary in a firm where I should be a pilot. I hate being grounded. We fly in bed, but everywhere else, we crawl on our bellies.”

“He'll just use you. You just want an excuse to go to bed with him.”

“If I have to fuck him, I will but I don't want to. Believe me, I won't, if he doesn't make me.”

“If you don't go, he can't make you.”

“If I don't go, we have no chance, no chance at all.”

Flo began to cry. “I don't want us to need
them
. Why can't we do it on our own?”

“We've applied for flying jobs everyplace people fly, every bloody place. Us and every other WASP. They won't let us fly. They want to push women out of the skies altogether—”

“Except that asshole who said I could be a stewardess, but you were too tall.” Flo tied herself into her dressing gown, shaking back her strawberry blond hair.

“And not pretty enough.” Bernice grinned. “Now don't cry, Flo baby. Don't cry. Likely I won't get anything out of him, but it's worth it to try, for us. For the two of us, I'll do anything in the world. You don't know the half of it yet. Now there's something you have to do before I go down there. Get the scissors. You're going to cut my hair all off, down to the skull.”

“Bernice, you can't do that. They'll fire you from work!”

“Tomorrow morning, we'll buy a wig. They'll like that better. Listen to me, Flo, I'm going to see him in full male drag. I have to.”

Flo wrung her hands. “Sometimes I want faith again. I grew up with hellfire and brimstone, and one day, it just wasn't there, the old guilt, the old glory. Now I wish I had it back, so I could spend the whole night on my knees praying. When I go around the house, when I'm worried sick about you, and I go saying, Oh, please, Oh please, don't let anything happen to my Bernice, I wonder who the hell I think I'm praying to, the doorknob?” Flo kissed her and sat her down with a towel draped around her shoulders. At the last moment, Bernice selected Jeff's tweed jacket, his woven tie.

Zach had given her his room number and told her to be there at seven. She was a little late and simply went on up. Her entrance was as startling as she had intended it to be. Zach stared, then flung up his hands. “I knew it, I knew it! Oh my prescient soul, if it isn't Mr. Bernard. Fascinating.” He waved her to a seat and went on staring. He was darkly tanned, but what attracted her attention was the other person in the room. He was young, although probably not as young as he looked, slight, with golden brown skin and a high-foreheaded sweet face, Oriental but not Chinese, she thought, not Japanese.

Zach spoke to him in a language that had many vowels; however, while Zach learned languages with ease, as he had boasted to her, he spoke them all with a strong American accent. The youth gracefully brought them a bottle and two glasses and then he put on his jacket and went out. Bernice stared after him.

“Just a little souvenir of my adventures in the creepy crawly Orient. He looks sweet, doesn't he? Oh, he is. But he's here partly because the French put a price on his head.” Zach was standing, looking her over as he talked. “Tran fought the Japanese for years and now he has to fight the French. So boring. We were helping his brave band and they were helping us. The word we gave all the pilots who went down in Indochina was
Vietminh
—we'd tell them to keep asking for the Vietminh, because the guerrillas would pick up our flyboys and ferry them back to us. But under Truman—do you like ice? I can't remember—we are now on the side of the French. Excruciating stupidity. OSS is being dismantled. No more fun and games for a while. The bastards at State and War think they can do it for themselves.”

She looked at his hand, but of course he was unlikely to wear a ring. “Are you married? Are congratulations in order?”

“I decided I don't care to live in London. It's threadbare. The smell of a second-rate power. More's doing here, and with our business raging into overseas expansion, I'd better base myself Stateside. I might marry into a San Francisco banking family. She's comely and well behaved and into redwood preservation. I'm also being courted by a richer and better-connected eastern family, although the lady in question would take more handling. Care to dispense advice?”

“Marry the redwood lady. You won't want to put the effort into the other.”

“I've been thinking along the same lines myself. However, I have to balance all the various openings I see. This is a time empires are crumbling and empires are being built.”

“If you do get heavily involved in business again, won't it seem tame after OSS?”

He sighed. “Still, it's all part of the same whole, I have to keep that in mind. Wild Bill Donovan himself is going corporate. I'll keep my hand in and wait for further developments, as they say. Well, dear heart, I'm sorry I couldn't make the ceremony. Was it touching and all that?”

She made her report. He had not commented on her costume after the first instant. She wondered if she had made a mistake, but remained careful how she sat, how she moved, how she stood. She was giving a performance, she must remember, a performance before an extremely critical audience. She made little attempt to alter her voice, just pitching it lower.

Finally he said, “You look like Jeff, and yet you don't. It's fascinating and sad. That poor bastard. He couldn't face being queer and he preferred to rush off from me and die. By the way, he killed himself, did you know?”

“He killed himself?”

“Cyanide capsules. We were all issued them, in case of not being able to hold up under torture—which he was subjected to. Quite understandable but still, leaves me wondering.”

She simply shook her head. She wanted to avoid arguing with him about Jeff, who was beyond their opinions. Zach was going on: “He was with a predominantly Jewish maquis, an odd lot, ill-armed but feisty. I worked with them for a couple of months myself and we were effective in harassing the Boches and raising merry hell. Liberated some towns, accepted the surrender of a garrison and other high times.” Zach sighed again, deeply. “Those were the days, dear heart. I love a spot of guerrilla fighting. If you have decent weapons, you can have so much fun scoring off the other side. You know the best I ever met? Fiji Islanders. They melt into the jungle. I couldn't keep up with them—me! If I were setting up an intelligence agency, I'd send men to train with the Fijis.”

“Jeff was dead before you got to France?”

“I was busy in Brittany till well after D-Day. I couldn't amble down to the south much before the Dragoon landings. When I got into the area, he'd been dead for a month. Frankly, he was running a sloppy operation. I could have saved his neck if we'd been together. I'm a professional and he never was.”

“He was a professional painter.”

“Even at that, a failure. However.” He rose and pointed to a crate leaning against one wall. “I salvaged some of his work. I took the liberty of having a couple framed for you.”

She had a pang of hot anger that he would keep what should be all hers and then dole out what he did not want, but then he had salvaged them as he said, and but for him, they would have been lost. She opened the box. In it were a study and two paintings of the same woman: one on a bicycle in a closely rendered landscape; another, three sketches of her face conversing; the third, her in bed, open shutters, open window, the bed table with a carafe and a gun, she on her side smiling like a cat with half-closed eyes, a long thin woman with rather large breasts for her weight, the landscape of stone and brush spread around her in a circle pressing in on the little room. “Who was she?”

“His local girlfriend. He was doing lots of portraits, which I think inferior to his landscapes.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was killed in a German raid on the encampment. Just a kid he was pronging, the way he always had some woman taking care of him.” Zach stood in front of her, hands on her shoulders. “The impersonation is passable but weak in minor points. You should make stronger eye contact and hold your chin up, not dipped.”

She corrected her posture. “Better?”

“Better is if you're still doing it that way in fifteen minutes. This is not how you dress normally, I take it, and probably not designed to stir my gonads. What do you want, my cagey darling? I take it you want something. Everybody does, sooner or later, and you've been marvelously accommodating.”

“I do want.”

“What?”

“I want false ID. I want a male identity.”

“My sainted aunt, why? Do you need a license to do whatever you've been doing in bed?”

“I have a license to fly but it won't do me any good as a woman. Zach, I love the woman I live with, but I need to fly. I want to go up to Alaska and start a bush airline. I can do it. I can fly anything, Zach, I'm checked out in everything the Army has. Now I can't get a job teaching beginners to circle the airport in a Piper Cub. Jeff made me his beneficiary and I saved money and so did Flo. But we need a man to run the operation, and that man has to be me. As a man, I could get a job tomorrow in Alaska.”

He sat down on the couch and laughed, quietly. “It's so farfetched, it's amusing. We aren't entirely shut down. Probably I could give you what you want—an identity. But you can't go back on it. Once we've set you up as Bernard X with a particular war record, and so on, Bernice has simply disappeared and you can't turn back into her when you break up with Flo and decide you just laid eyes on Mr. Right and want to make little babies.”