Gone to Soldiers (28 page)

During that dance something was exchanged, because Ready muttered to Abra as he came back to the table that he was going to spend what remained of the night with Karen Sue. The next day he told her Karen Sue made him pretend to sleep on the couch until Eveline had gone to bed. He presumed that was the southern way, but pronounced Karen Sue a woman and a half. Then Abra put him on the train north to Maine.

That Wednesday, Djika, Karen Sue, Eveline and Abra sat sharing a chicken fricassee cooked by Karen Sue's housekeeper, wine punch and honeydew melon, with their shoes off and the windows pushed high and two fans turned on them. Stanley Beaupere had gone off to the Jersey shore with his wife and children on vacation, leaving Djika to fume in the city.

The sun was setting over New Jersey and the grey ships gathered in the river. “Every evening they collect there,” Karen Sue said dreamily. “In the morning they're all gone. It's got to be symbolic of something, the ships that vanish during the night.”

“Out on Cape Hatteras, you wouldn't believe the mayhem,” Eveline said, shaking her curls. “The beach is just dotted with wreckage and oily bodies.”

“I heard you were offered an assistantship in the fall by Blumenthal and you turned it down, Abra.” Djika fixed a stern gaze on her. “What's wrong with you? If we weren't at war, you'd wait forty years for such a chance.”

“I'm working full time at a government information office.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just researching and writing pamphlets.”

“What kind?” Djika asked.

Abra pulled out of her shoulder bag a pamphlet entitled
Potatoes for Patriotism
. She handed it over to Djika, knowing exactly what her friend would read:

By eating potatoes instead of wheat, the people of the United States can help win the war. We have not enough wheat for the Allies and ourselves. We have an abundance of potatoes. Wheat flour is a concentrated food and therefore good for shipping; potatoes are bulky and consequently not suited for limited shipping space
.…

The introduction was followed by pages of simple recipes. After potatoes baked, stuffed, boiled, steamed, riced, mashed, in cakes or puffs or pies or soup or salad or codfish balls, the more desperate offerings ensued: Potato loaf with ground peanuts and canned tomatoes. Mashed potatoes as substitute for bread crumbs in fish or meat loaf. Fish and potato loaf. Fish hash with cold mashed potatoes. Potato biscuits. Potato dumplings. Potato muffins. Potato pastry. Potato drop cookies. And then the finale, potato cake.

It was Abra's experience that no curiosity about her new job survived exposure to the potato pamphlet. Amused, Oscar had sent on a memo about her ingenuity. Each of the women in turn examined the pamphlet and looked at her with a mixture of pity and dismay. The subject immediately changed.

Aside from Djika, who still dwelt in mangled fidelity in the shadow of Stanley Beaupere's apparently well-built marriage, they were all lacking the companionship of men. Their male peers were disappearing from campus. At Columbia, the space between the buildings and under the trees that had always been social territory was turned now into parade grounds for midshipmen under military discipline and far too young for them. The usual pattern of their social lives was to spend most evenings not taken up by work or volunteering with their female friends. Then when some former boyfriend or acquaintance appeared on leave, the women dropped everything, stayed out till dawn and caught up on sleep after the hectic weekend.

“Abra, come on here for one little minute.” Karen Sue was beckoning to her. “I have something I want to see if it fits you, child.”

What Karen Sue wanted to fit on her was a promise she would not tell Ready that Karen Sue had been married. “It wasn't a real marriage, after all. I mean, nothing happened hardly, and an annulled marriage is one that never really was.”

Abra groaned. “But, Karen Sue, Ready doesn't think you were a virgin, right?”

“What he thinks in that regard need not concern us right now, Abra, and as surely as you're my true friend, I don't want you to discuss matters pertaining to my past life, which you don't know the real truth about anyhow, and therefore such talk can only cause trouble. Loose lips sink ships.”

Abra went home grumpy. She did not like being forced to choose between telling a truth to Ready that might or might not interest him, and displeasing Karen Sue, whom she truly liked. Damn Karen Sue, did she have designs on becoming Abra's sister-in-law? She couldn't quite picture it, but she wondered if Karen Sue could not, with a gold frame.

If she had told her friends exactly what she was doing, they would have been as puzzled as they were bored by the potato pamphlet. At the moment Oscar and she appeared to be in the old clothes business. They were still collecting oral histories of recent immigrants, especially those whose previous addresses or places of birth had military or industrial significance. They were also collecting wrist-watches, pens, razors, wallets, luggage, underwear, overcoats, shirts. They paid for everything and had a faintly plausible explanation: they were investigating the state of the German economy, and the workmanship and metals in a watch, or the type of cloth in a suit, could provide useful information. It was all bundled off to a warehouse in Washington, where this scavenged material was to outfit agents who would eventually be dropped behind enemy lines.

The information they collected, the reminiscences, also went off to Washington. The agent who had been carrying out this collection of information and rummage sale fodder before them had been transferred to London, where presumably he was engaged in something more to Oscar's liking. Every week Oscar took the train to Washington, not only to deliver the week's limp prizes, but to try to finagle or politick them into proper research and analysis work. The R & A division of OSS Washington, Oscar muttered, was rife with brilliant minds. They had to get posted to Washington.

Oscar was eating himself up. They worked long hours, attempting to do the best job they could, six, often seven days a week, but Oscar was marking time. He had not left Columbia to collect old clothes and was inclined to credit academic rivalries with what he saw as the waste of his talents. It was during his increasing frustration that he told her to call him Oscar, and indeed began to complain to her familiarly as to a wife or mistress. Abra, who was still finding the tales of the refugees fascinating, suffered less impatience. New York was her home, as it was Oscar's. Although she was resigned to a move to Washington, she was not chafing to be there.

She amused herself with watching the formality between them gradually abrade under the pressures he generated. She was Abra, he was Oscar. They ate lunch together at the deli downstairs on Madison Avenue, or she went out and brought back sandwiches. The day Oscar interviewed a Communist who had been in the merchant marine and so ready with details on German shipping that a whole dossier on him would go to OSS Washington, he took her to supper at a Spanish restaurant on Fourteenth Street. There the waiter seemed to know him and the manager came over and left a plate of tidbits as a present from the house, to nibble with their amontillado.

Oscar expanded with the food and the wine. Not that he became even slightly tipsy, he simply relaxed, and for him to relax meant to lay claim to her attention, to charm, to open up the personal as he had been careful never to do in the nine months of their proper relationship.

“There were four of us,” he was saying. “I'm the oldest. My brother Ben came next, and he's still in Pittsburgh, in the dry cleaning business. Then the two girls, Bessie, who's married to a dentist and big as both of us put together, a wonderful warm mother with five kids. Then my younger sister, Gloria.” He frowned at his plate of seafood.

“What is she doing?”

“I wish I knew. She's in Paris.”

“Still? Why didn't she leave before the war started?”

“The war started there two years before it started here, remember. She's married to a minor French aristocrat, and she's a fashion writer. Her business is what the French couturiers put out. I don't think it occurred to her that the war had any bearing on her life. And I don't know if it really does.” He rubbed his nose as if to polish it, frowning slightly.

“Do they have any children?”

“No, by agreement. He's a good deal older, and he has children by a previous marriage who stand to inherit.”

“If he's rich and aristocratic, he must be in a good position to protect her, wouldn't you think?”

“I hope so. It's hard not hearing anything. We've always kept in touch, all of us. I'll go to Pittsburgh in September for the High Holidays, to my mother. Gloria used to come over every two years, and I'd see her in Paris.” He tilted his head, pouring more of the coarse red wine. “What's your family like? Are you close?”

She had the sense as the dinner progressed that this was a place he had brought other women, and that part of the more personal tone of their evening was not calculation or decision on his part, but simply the fulfilling of an already established and comfortable pattern. She was amused. She suspected that both he and she were so accustomed to sitting across the table from lovers that each automatically brought that habit of warmth to the present table. Yet she was not marking time as so often she was when men talked about themselves, for her curiosity about Oscar had been honed by months of impersonal but energetic interaction.

She was pleased to tell him about Ready, about Roger, about her background, exotic to him as his was to her. He came from a family that seemed to have had little money to spare, but in which his education had come first. Perhaps the middle children had been sacrificed a bit, or perhaps they had simply lacked his brilliance or ambition. Then with Gloria, times had been easier and the others settled, so that everything that could be provided, was, and she sallied forth a beauty to conquer the world.

Yet the connections between each of them, dentist's wife, dry cleaning manager, academic and chic lady, seemed to hold in avid concern for each other. She caught spicy whiffs of emotion off that family, of tangled loves and hatreds and raised voices and tearful phone calls in the night. Yet Oscar seemed quite sure of his position, the oldest, the dearest, the distant center. His mother was alive and figured in his life. His father had died of a heart attack three years before. His mother, who must retain the family handsomeness, was considering marrying again, and all of the siblings except the exiled Gloria were passionately intriguing to further or prevent that marriage to a widower.

He spoke now of his ex-wife, but not as men usually referred to their previous spouses. “Louise is very strong, very bright, very able. You shouldn't judge her by those absurd stories she cranks out. She has a first-rate mind, and she's not shy about using it. She's very political, a progressive thinker.”

If she had drunk less wine, and if she did not still feel a little off balance with him, still with the professor and student, the boss and assistant dynamic operating between them and therefore to be forcefully overcome, she might have been less forthright in her questioning. “If you admire your ex-wife as much as you say, why aren't you still married?”

“That's hard to say. The divorce wasn't my idea.” Oscar rubbed his nose again. “Actually I was living with somebody else for a while, but it was nothing to make an enormous fuss about.”

Abra laughed. “I doubt if that was your wife's point of view.”

“It wasn't.” Oscar sighed. “I don't understand why women become so obsessed with minor adventures. I fully intended to come back.”

Abra felt as if she ought to reassure him that she did not expect fidelity, but after all, nothing had happened between them yet. She satisfied herself by saying simply, “I think marriage and the home are far more important to many women than they are, for instance, to me. Many younger women have a more independent stance and less rigid expectations.”

“I should have realized how important it was to Louise. She grew up without that security, and when it was threatened, she just wanted to cut me off.” Oscar shook his head. “I must see more of my daughter, Kay. I've been letting myself become overwhelmed. Especially if we are going off to Washington soon, that's more reason to carve out time for her.”

She definitely retained the feeling, as they ate their flan and drank a Spanish brandy, that they were moving in the direction of becoming more personal. Lovers or friends? She could not even tell if there were room in the crowded field of Oscar's life for an affair with her. It would be convenient, it would have that going for it, she thought. She wondered if she was going to have to make the first move.

What struck her was a sense that she was edging into a convoy, a mass, a herd of relationships. Unlike most of the men she met who had families only as background or possible interference, Oscar seemed to come trailing a host of people with whom he was still actively involved; and she had the uneasy feeling she could not see half of his life yet. Taking him for a lover looked not so much as if she were committing her usual solitary and private act but as if she were joining a tribe. His work might be clandestine, but his relationships appeared to be all out there in the full sunlight of mutual regard, jostling each other. His wife, his daughter, his mother, his sisters and brothers, his ex-lovers, his friends, they all seemed to be looking at her and waiting to see what was going to happen. Perhaps she was drunk, but she almost felt the hot regard of many dark eyes upon their conversation.

NAOMI 3

The Jaws Close

Leib stayed in Naomi's mind, making her feel a little guilty. Since she considered him far more attractive than Murray, she could not understand why Ruthie preferred Murray. She imagined that Trudi was killed in a sudden way without pain and Leib carried her off. She had no interest in the boys in her class, who sometimes picked on her and teased her and sang about how the girls of France wore tissue paper pants and other dirty nonsense. She was now the third tallest girl in class, the tallest white girl.