Gone to Soldiers (18 page)

Mrs. Hirsch was fifty, a gaunt woman with white hair braided around her head and nearsighted eyes the color of weak tea behind thick glasses, a habit of bending forward as if to hear, although her hearing seemed fine. They conducted the interview in German. Abra took notes in her usual mix of German and English. Mrs. Hirsch said that shortly after Marlitt had heard of the death of her husband, whose body she was not allowed to reclaim for proper burial, her only child, a boy of four, had taken sick.

It was one of those sudden childhood fevers that shoot up and up. He grew more feverish until he was having diarrhea every fifteen minutes. Then he began to vomit blood. He was pitiful. Jews were no longer allowed in regular hospitals, and the only Jewish hospital was full beyond stretching. A doctor who could no longer prescribe medicines came, but he could not bring down the fever, and while the family hovered over him, Marlitt held her son in his suffering and his convulsions. It took the boy two days to die, Mrs. Hirsch said. Marlitt went out of the room every few minutes to weep in the hall, for fear of frightening the child when he was conscious. When her son died, she said she would pay no more tears, ever. She would get them all out of Germany, she would tear up her roots that ran to the center of this familiar earth, and she would never return, not if she lived to be two hundred. Oh yes, Mrs. Hirsch said, she brought me here. She could not save my husband, her own husband or her child, but she saved her parents and she saved me.

BERNICE 2

Bernice on Patrol

Every Monday, every Wednesday and every Friday, Bernice hopped on her Schwinn bicycle at seven-thirty
A
.
M
. and set off in rain or sun or unseasonable flurries of late snow For the local airport, hoping that the weather would permit her to take off on time. She carried with her an old leather jacket of Jeff's—the plane of course was not heated—her lunch and a small plastic bottle with a funnel, into which she urinated and which she hid in her empty lunch bucket when she landed. She had no idea how other pilots managed, for she had worked out that method herself.

Bernice had never before considered herself especially fortunate to live in central Massachusetts rather than on the coast, but now she did. Women were not allowed to fly for the Civil Air Patrol over the coastal zone, as that was considered dangerous because of U-boats. The Civil Air Patrol officially looked askance at women flying for it at all. When Bernice had joined she had been sternly informed that only auxiliary functions were open to women, running the offices. She had almost given up, during weeks of typing and filing, but the need for pilots was great and Bernice had at least as much experience as most of the pilots flying for the Civil Air Patrol. She had persisted till now she flew regularly for them.

Sometime around the end of April or the middle of May she would finally log in two hundred hours flying time. She wanted that commercial license more than ever, but she did not have the money. The Civil Air Patrol volunteers were unpaid, and now she had much less time to type faculty papers. If she could finally earn her instructor's license, she might be hired by the War Service Training Program, which taught flying to students. They had kicked women students out of the program, but they still used women instructors.

Even if flying for the Civil Air Patrol was keeping her penniless, she had three days a week of bliss, and if The Professor was cranky about his supper on those nights, she had the excuse of rationing. Moreover, he could not fault her volunteering for the war effort.

What was hard was to return when she was supposed to, after flying her route inspecting power lines against sabotage and forested areas for fires. She felt an urge strong as she supposed the mating instinct was in deer or dogs, to continue, to fly on until she reached the far unknown ocean. She had an intimate view of the little wrinkled hills of her home, of the broad Connecticut, of the hawks migrating north and the flights of small birds, of the farmlands standing under their puddles, of the rain clouds massing over the Berkshires, of the updrafts around Mount Tom. For three days every week she was ecstatic and useful, at one with the fabric body that extended her own. She did not think there had been a time since the death of her mother, when she had been happy for three days of every week.

Sometimes she was called on other days to act as a courier for documents or chemicals or plasma, to impersonate an enemy bomber in an air raid, twice to search for a downed military plane. Her life had a purpose. She begged off the Sunday movies with Mrs. Augustine, for she needed to catch up with housework and the typing that could pay for her commercial license eventually, but not at all any longer impossibly. She had the same schedule that had used to pad out seven days now crammed into the remaining four. Above all she had three days of doing what she was born to do, three days when she put on the little plane like a flimsy extended body, insectlike around her, beautiful as a dragonfly although jeweled only to her, and burst into flight.

That evening when she bicycled home from the airport, stopping to buy flounder and place the white parcel neatly in her handlebar basket, a letter from Jeff was waiting on the table in the hall. He was still stuck down in Alabama hating every moment of his life vegetating there. Bernice had expected Jeff to be placed in the Army Air Corps, as the Army was supposed to be seeking pilots desperately, for even though Jeff had not flown in years, he had his license, but instead they had focused on his unsuspected talents as an instructor of rifle practice. He had been sent for officer training and was a second lieutenant apparently stuck on the range. He claimed to be entirely covered with Spanish moss. She had felt a mixture of envy and foreboding when they packed Jeff off on the train, but he was safe unless one of his students shot wildly, and far more bored than she was.

She was serving fish oftener these days, not only because red meat was rationed, but because fish was quick to prepare. She could not reach home after her patrol before seven. Unfortunately, The Professor was thus always home well before her on her flying days, and he was not pleased with the new regimen. As she hastily dumped her gear in the hall closet and rushed through the living room toward the kitchen, carrying her parcels, he fixed her with his best admonitory “You're going to flunk this course if you don't straighten out” glare. “Is there some reason you're even later than usual this evening?”

“There was a long line in the fish store. With meat rationed, everyone's eating more fish.”

“I certainly had noticed we are.”

Her way of dealing with her father's ill temper was pretending, since he did not come out directly and shout at her about what angered him, that she did not understand he was annoyed. Now she gave him a brief bleak meaningless smile and bolted for the kitchen.

“You aren't going to sit down to supper looking like a mechanic, are you?”

As if he had ever noticed what she wore. As if anyone ever cared. “Supper will be ready shortly.”

He snorted but said nothing more, turning the radio up. Every night she studied the war in the
Globe
, listened to the commentators and the analysts, studied the battle reports with the atlas volume of the thirteenth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
open on her lap. The Allies were clearly losing just about everyplace. On a map of the Philippines she had been following the steady erosion of the American and Philippine positions. In Africa, the battle seesawed but usually ended with the Allies in retreat.

Tonight the news was dreadful as she found herself moving ever more slowly about the large kitchen. General King had surrendered at Bataan. It sounded as if few of the forces had been successfully evacuated to Corregidor, where the Army still hoped to hold out. That fortress island was supposed to be impregnable. Something like ninety thousand Filipinos and Americans had surrendered to the Japanese. In Russia there was heavy fighting deep inside the country, with the Germans again advancing.

What would happen to them if they lost the war? The German army appeared invincible, and the Japanese had taken over Asia without difficulty. The decline of the West, she thought, but could not believe the Germans or the Japanese would really invade the United States. The first fear of invasion through California had diminished. The battles would be fought elsewhere, so what would defeat mean? Reparations? A search for scapegoats? Perhaps an American Nazi party blaming the Left or the Jews or colored people or who knows what vulnerable part of the population for the humiliation? Perhaps a return to the Great Depression?

Why did it feel so personal to lose? As if she herself were losing? She had a moment of fierce and despairing anger as she stood slicing the potatoes she had boiled that dawn into the fat rendered from Sunday's chicken, in which onions were already lightly browning. Yes, it smelled delicious and she did not give a damn. She did not want to cook potatoes lyonnaise while millions of people died and the world burned. She felt at once guilty and helpless, imprisoned. Even her flying felt absurd to her. Here she was enjoying the keenest pleasure she knew while in the Philippines emaciated soldiers were being marched to prison camps and in German-occupied Russia, partisans were hanged for daring to resist.

In the Soviet Union, women were flying in combat. Marina Reskova, the woman pilot and navigator, had formed three women's air regiments, one of fighters and two of bombers. In England, women were ferrying planes regularly. Here they wouldn't even let women fly domestically, in a support role. She longed to use her skill, her strength. She would not be afraid. She knew she could fight, if only she were given a chance.

She paused, fitting the pieces of fish dunked first in flour, then in eggy milk, then in cornmeal into the broiler pan. Could she kill? She thought so, but felt she needed evidence for her belief. She set traps for mice. She had taken part in the butchering of a pig at her paternal grandfather's farm. Her grandfather had slit the throat of the pig quickly and calmly, approaching the pig with the knife and simply passing the knife across the throat. The pig had walked away rather puzzled as the blood poured down, and then staggered to her knees. Two minutes later the pig had been dead, and Jeff and she had assisted in pouring boiling water over the carcass and scraping off the hair. The long incision and the extraction of the organs from the fat had fascinated rather than outraged her. Jeff was the more squeamish of the two, but they had both experienced the slaughter and butchering of the pig as an initiation ritual granted them rather than as a display of adult brutality.

Besides, would Jeff ever kill anyone? He was in the Army, but combat seemed at least as far from him in Alabama as from her in Bentham Center. She supposed you rarely had time in combat to philosophize. Probably you were trained to react, and you reacted. In the plane she did not stop to think about how to turn the wheel or how to step on the rudder; she read the few gauges and reacted. If she were in combat, surely the machine gun would respond when she activated it, and she would do that when threatened as automatically as dealing with the elevators or ailerons.

“A lot of the boys are enlisting at the end of this school year,” her father announced at supper. “I don't know if there's any point keeping this college open. But they may be starting a governmental program here, the administration says. I don't like so much paprika on the sole.”

“Sorry. I thought I'd try something different.” She had been thinking about killing and not noticed what her hand was doing. “Do you believe we're going to lose this war?”

“Nonsense,” The Professor thundered. “What kind of isolationist garbage have you been listening to? Despair is not productive.”

He would never discuss politics with her. She could not understand why, for he had discussed everything with her mother. As a daughter, she was forever immature to him. “The fish on the second layer aren't as heavily paprikaed.”

“Good. It disguises the flavor. Unless the fish were old?”

“No, no. They were perfectly fresh.”

Why did she brood about combat? Because she wanted to be tested by the war, to take a real part. Jeff might not be doing anything he viewed as valuable, but it was not his choice. He was enlisted in the anti-Fascist cause, and if the use to which he was put was not what he might have chosen, nonetheless he had the peaceful mind of someone fully involved.

Even The Professor felt the weight of longing to be useful. He had written to various governmental departments about his work during the First World War (as they were calling it now, for this was beginning to be called the Second). He had received acknowledgments that looked to be form letters. Every couple of weeks he dictated a letter about his qualifications and his desire to be of service directed to some bureau, letters she sent off with his resume to the addresses he furnished.

The Professor had put his old Austin up on blocks for the duration, a phrase local people had begun to use frequently. Closed for the duration. She realized he had pushed his plate away and was looking at her expectantly. “What do we have for dessert?”

“Dessert?” She had forgotten to make anything. “Let me start the coffee,” she temporized and fled to the kitchen. Make a fast cornstarch pudding? Sugar was rationed and she was not eager to expend their month's allotment. No cookies in the cupboard. She had used to keep a supply of goodies on hand for such moments, but nowadays that was called hoarding. Then she remembered that Mrs. Augustine had given her a pint of pears canned from the tree that stood in the Augustine's yard, not yet in bloom this year but just tipping the buds open. She found the pears, dousing them liberally with the remaining rum in the last bottle.

“What's that supposed to be?” he inquired icily, staring into his dish.

“You know with sugar rationed, I can't make the same desserts I used to. It's pears Mrs. Augustine put up soaked in rum.” Soaked for five minutes, but let that pass, she begged him silently.