Gone to Soldiers (37 page)

She walked into a coffee shop filled with sailors, but she saw no place to sit and realized she was too excited to eat. She got a coffee to go and drank it sitting in the Public Garden. Boston was not as cold as Bentham Center, but had it been below zero, she would not have cared. Couples huddled earnestly talking or desperately necking on the benches, sailors and their girls. Thanksgiving was coming soon and she had ordered a turkey from the Garfinkles, who raised them. She wondered how Jeff was managing in London. She did not think the English celebrated Thanksgiving.

She tried to imagine what might impress Jacqueline Cochran, but she could think of nothing special about herself, except that she had managed to get her commercial license. If Cochran knew how many boring papers she had typed on how many late nights and through how many dreary afternoons, she would be moved a little. Perhaps.

Her heroine had been Amelia Earhart, but that did not mean she did not admire Jacqueline Cochran, who had come up from poverty, who had won the Bendix Air Race in 1938, the only woman in the race, Los Angeles to Cleveland in eight hours, ten minutes and thirty-one seconds, landing with less than three gallons of gas left in her tank. Climbing over a ferocious storm, to twenty-two thousand feet in an unpressurized cockpit—that was how she had won that famous race. The next plane did not arrive for an hour. After that Bernice had put up her photo next to Amelia Earhart.

At twelve-thirty Bernice could wait no longer, for fear of being late. She headed for the Ritz where she huddled in the lobby waiting till she could persuade herself it was all right to go up. In her old grey coat, she felt conspicuously dowdy. She kept imagining she would be asked to leave. Finally at five to one she had herself announced and took the elevator.

Cochran had the room partially set up as an office, a big desk and chairs, files, a secretary in the next room, but it was still and obviously a well-appointed suite. Bernice had not expected the woman she saw at that walnut desk, an exquisite woman whose mink coat was tossed artfully over the back of her chair, made up like a model, with blond hair in gentle ringlets and brown eyes set off by mascara. In short, Cochran was stunning and dressed like someone Bernice would see in a movie, in a pale mauve suit with a watered silk blouse. Bernice had a momentary urge to weep. Cochran was never going to accept her. Bernice tried to remember that this was the woman who had set a record climbing to thirty-three thousand feet in an unpressurized plane, sucking oxygen from a tube with the temperature in the unheated cockpit sixty degrees below zero. This was the woman who would test anything, new types of oxygen masks, engine superchargers, spark plugs, airplane fuel and wing designs, who was absolutely fearless in taking risks and trying out whatever the inventors could produce.

Cochran had her file on the desk. “You were flying for the Civil Air Patrol?”

“Yes, but they've grounded us now.”

“When did you start flying?”

The first questions were obvious but the later ones, not so. Cochran asked about relationships with men. She seemed pleased that Bernice lived with her father, a respectable professor. “Will he object to your going?”

Bernice spoke carefully. “He's very eager to contribute to the war effort. My brother's in the Office of Strategic Services overseas. My father has been trying to get a war post in Washington. I feel sure he'd be excited if I could join the WFTD.” Bernice felt proud of her wording. The Professor would certainly be excited: she had not lied.

“Some of the questions I've asked I know have surprised you, but we have to be very careful with our girls. The public suspects women who fly planes of being racy and fast, chasing around a man's world, as if the skies could be anyone's monopoly. I'm as interested in the character of my girls as I am in their flying experience. Any breath of scandal and we'll lose an irreplaceable opportunity for women.”

“All I want to do is fly,” Bernice said with complete honesty. “It's the thing I do best, and the only time I feel completely happy is when I'm up there. It's the best work and the best play in the world to me. Nothing competes with it. All I ask is the chance to do it. I'll work hard and I'll learn anything we have to learn.”

Cochran smiled at her. “I think that might be arranged, Miss Coates. Good day. You'll be hearing from us.”

Bernice did not arrive home in time to fix The Professor's supper, but she had arranged with Mrs. Augustine next door to invite him over, confessing where she was going. She gathered that he went and ate heartily.

“She's a better cook than you are,” The Professor said, glowering out of his favorite chair by the Westinghouse console.

“Then you enjoyed your supper, and no problem,” Bernice said in that falsely cheerful tone she was always adopting with him.

“I don't want to eat at the Augustines' table. He smokes a stinking pipe with his coffee. I want to eat at my own table.”

“That summons was important. If the government needs me, I must go.”

“Your duty is here. You don't have to run off looking for useful work.”

“I have a skill that few women have had a chance to acquire. Now suddenly it's worth something.”

“They aren't looking for a girl like you. If they write you again, I will answer them. You're needed at home. They'll understand.” The Professor erected the fence of
Christian Science Monitor
before his face. He read the
Globe
in the morning and the
Christian Science Monitor
every evening. A few moments later his voice issued from behind the paper. “Imitating your brother is a ridiculous thing for a big sensible girl like you to indulge in. The house has been better managed since you left off chasing out to the airport.” When she still did not reply, he actually put the paper down to look at her. “They don't need a silly overgrown girl running around airports, and this woman, whoever she is, is just a flash in the pan.”

She would not engage him. She saw no use in arguing. She merely had to collect the mail every day before he saw it.

The trouble was as the weeks went by, she could not be sure that a letter had not come and been answered by The Professor. She did not dare ask her father or write Cochran's office. She baked some cookies from a recipe that used potatoes. They came out better than most such efforts, and she presented some to the postman and then told him exactly what the envelope would say. She begged him to give her the letter personally.

This postman was not the same one, for he had been in the reserves, but an old man who pulled the mail around in a child's wagon. She did not know if he would do as she asked, but five days before Christmas, the letter came. It told her to report to Westover Air Force Base on January third for a physical examination, Form 64, the same rigorous physical that combat pilots received. If she passed, she was in.

She read the letter standing on the walk she had shoveled yesterday, while the old mailman pulled his grandson's wagon down the block delivering Christmas cards in large bundles. Then she ran next door, just as she was in her slippers, old jumper and no coat, to Mrs. Augustine's kitchen.

Mrs. Augustine looked for her glasses until Bernice found them for her on the windowsill between the begonia and the Dutchman's breeches. Mrs. Augustine read through the letter twice before handing it respectfully back to Bernice. “Your mother Viola would be very proud of you. What's The Professor going to say?”

“He'll try to forbid me to go.”

“Will you let him?”

“I'll feel guilty, but if they want me, I'm going. I could sound really patriotic, but the truth is, I love to fly and this is my chance. If I fly for this outfit all through the war, then afterward I have to have a crack at commercial aviation. I do want to help win the war, and I'm not doing a thing here, but above all, I want to fly.”

“You've given him your youth, Bernice. Get out while you can.”

Bernice wanted to embrace Mrs. Augustine, but it was too many years since she had embraced anyone. The only person in the world she ever hugged was her brother. She could not think of anything to say except to repeat to Mrs. Augustine her thanks for the understanding. Mrs. Augustine looked so drab, a plump middle-aged woman with greying brown hair up in an untidy bun, a woman who put up twenty different kinds of preserves, conserves, relishes, chutneys, canned fruit, the best cook on the block, that no one would expect her to entertain wild fantasies or encourage them.

Mrs. Augustine saw her to the door. “Your father can eat with us. He's not the most agreeable man, but I don't mind. Or I can take his supper over in a covered dish. You go fly your planes. I know a lady who'll clean for him and do the laundry. She talks too much, but he won't be around when she's working. Between us, Bernice, we'll figure it out.”

Christmas was a sour time. This was the first year Jeff had not come home for the holidays, nor had they had word from him in a while. All she could think about was her physical on January third. She continued calisthenics, although her class at the college was suspended for vacation. She cooked, she baked, she scavenged. They had a tree with real candles, as they always did, dangerous but beautiful. They exchanged their few presents and the radio alternated carols with news. The invasion of North Africa seemed to be proceeding less smoothly, with the British and Americans bogged down attacking Tunis. On the Eastern Front, desperate fighting continued at Stalingrad. In the Pacific, desperate fighting continued on Guadalcanal. Some right-wing general had been assassinated in Algiers, but the killer, a young French student, had already been captured.

A Form 64 physical exam took all day, with her running from lab to lab with two other women in hospital coats, while the Army closed off the hospital section by section presumably to protect them. It was a big flap, but she was doing all right. She was certainly healthy: big and strong and healthy. That had always sounded like a curse, but today it was a blessing.

Two weeks later the notice came that she was to report in Texas to Class 43-4 at Houston Municipal Airport on February 1, 1943. She would have to pay her own way there. That was a problem.

She had borrowed two hundred dollars from Mrs. Augustine when she was getting her commercial license. Since she had been forcibly grounded in September, she had been doing a lot of typing, although half of her regular customers had left. She finally repaid Mrs. Augustine just before Christmas. Now she had only two weeks in which to earn the money to get herself to Texas. She had sixteen dollars. Today she would learn exactly what the fare was, and she would get that money, if she had to rob a bank. After all, Jeff had ridden the rails. If that's what she had to do, that's what she would do. She was off to Texas in two weeks, no matter what.

She began making arrangements long before she broke the news to her father. The Professor simply did not believe her. “You're not going.”

“But I am.” She heard her own cheerful voice and thought she would have hated to be talked to in that empty vacuous way, but there was no intimacy between them. They simply could not communicate in any other way than by his issuing commands de haut en bas and by her replying in that fake cheerful tone as if totally unaware of his anger. They were caught in a bad family game that might change if their lives changed, not otherwise. She was not so much his daughter as his servant: the poor replacement for the wife he had loved, the only human being with whom he had been able to be intimate and affectionate. She should not have stayed home with him, she said to herself; perhaps that had not been filial duty but laziness. If she had gone off, he would have married again. Now he was too set in his ways.

“I forbid it,” he said loudly. “I mean this.”

“Father, I'm way overage. This time it's not my duty to stay, but to go.” The clichés of wartime dripped from her tongue grey and fatty as melted lard, but she would not be shamed into dispensing with them.

On January 31 she left. The Professor had stopped speaking to her and did not see her off. Mrs. Augustine drove her to the station. Bernice had written last week to Jeff at his military code address, but judging from the letter that had arrived Saturday, he had not got hers yet, although he had received the cookies and the woolen muffler she had knit for him: a useless gift as he was obviously in North Africa from hints in his letters. Well, she would write him from Houston and she would have plenty to tell him, for a change, something more exciting than the chrysanthemums have been killed by the frost, or the last red-winged blackbirds have gone south. Something more than nature notes and the sardonic comments on her life she could never resist.

Mrs. Augustine kept beaming at her. “Have a good time, dear Bernice, and be proud of yourself.” The day before there had been a storm, but the tracks had been cleared and the morning glittered like freshly washed cut crystal, the Waterford goblets she was leaving behind. Ahead of her was Texas, land of the six-gun and the Women's Flying Training Detachment, and planes, planes, planes. Mrs. Augustine stood on tiptoes to give her a brief but firm kiss on the lips, handing her her lunch in a tea towel. “Good luck!”

MURRAY 1

One More River to Cross

Murray was shipped to Samoa to reinforce the 7th Marines, who were supposed to be transferred to New Zealand. On September 14 they sailed out of Espíritu Santo on five transports accompanied by two supply ships and a cruiser and destroyer escort. Soon afterward they came under attack from submarines and bombers.

They arrived at dawn four days later on a long island that rose to a jagged ridge. The shores—studded with twisted metal wrecks of ships and planes—offered spacious, elegant groves of coconut palms, but the breeze off the land was sour, fetid. It smelled like the icebox when his family came back from vacation and discovered they'd left food inside to spoil. They landed without difficulty and were marched inland. The men who greeted them or more often did not bother to acknowledge their arrival were another matter. Murray did not want to stare, but he could feel the reaction of the men around him, and it was no different from his own: horror. Are we going to look like that? The marines who had been holding the beachhead on the island were filthy skeletons. They were hairy, skinny, stinking: the gutted hulks of young men. The island was called Guadalcanal.