Gone to Soldiers (45 page)

Naomi stood outside trying to listen. She could hear their voices, but with a Saturday baby bawling in the next room, she could only make out the anger in their voices.

When Ruthie came into their room, she asked Naomi to tell her exactly what Duvey had done. Naomi answered all her questions, still trying to tell if Ruthie was mad at her. “You were only trying to help Mama and make a little money,” Ruthie said sadly. “When an older person tells you to do something, it's hard not to. You feel in the wrong. But Duvey was taking advantage of you. If Duvey or any other man does anything like that to you again, you tell me. I'll break their neck for you.” Ruthie stood at the bureau brushing her hair with smart savage strokes. “Now I'm too mad to sleep. I don't think he'll bother you again. Monday you go back to school, right? Good. I will take him his damned coffee tomorrow morning. And I'll spit in it.”

Still the whole thing made Naomi feel as if she had done something bad. The only thing she liked was that she had fifty cents to spend on makeup at the dimestore with Sandy. She could pick out a Cutex lipstick and a matching fingernail polish and polish remover—to take off the polish before she went home. Then she wouldn't have to borrow Sandy's stupid Passionate Pink lipstick all the time. She could get a red one.

Maybe she was not alone. Maybe she did belong to Ruthie, because Ruthie worried about her. In the house crammed with squalling babies and sleeping men, only Ruthie thought about her. She loved Ruthie more than anybody except Maman and Papa and Rivka. More than Jacqueline, maybe.

Ruthie suggested that Naomi go over to Trudi's for the day. Rose objected. “I need her to help me today. What are you doing out of bed?”

“Let her have a little fun. She deserves to get out of the house. It's not fair to demand too much of her.”

Indeed the next morning Ruthie set her alarm and got up only two hours after she went to bed, grimly made Duvey's breakfast, took it in to him and then went back to sleep. Naomi still felt what happened must be partly her fault, but mostly she felt that Ruthie loved her and would take care of her. She suspected that Ruthie had said something to Trudi, because Trudi insisted she stay to dinner there Sunday night. Monday morning Naomi went back to school. When she got home, she worried that Duvey would be angry with her.

He didn't seem angry. Instead he kept saying she was his favorite. He winked at her and cuffed her lightly. He told her all about Iceland, with volcanoes, and Malta, with cliffs and ruins and strange deep ruts in the rock so old nobody knew who had made them, and Scotland where men wore skirts when they got dressed up. He gave her a handful of foreign coins.

Naomi was careful not to go into his room. That was easy, because he was still asleep when she went to school in the morning, and when she came home in the late afternoon, he was sitting around the living room with the
Detroit Free Press
or out, if the kiddies had got on his nerves. He came home for supper, then went out and stayed out late.

“That Ruthie,” Duvey said to her. “She sticks her nose in where she isn't wanted. She's a ballbuster.”

Naomi turned her face away. She would not say a word against Ruthie. Ruthie was the one who cared about her.

Sometimes she remembered that Duvey had said she was pretty now. She stared into the little mirror in their bedroom to see if she had changed, but the same Naomi looked back. If she wore her new red lipstick, Satan, she would look better. Still she did not want Duvey to push himself against her again or to make his mouth hard against hers and stick his fat tongue in her mouth. She had just wanted to hear him talk about being a sailor and to tell her she made coffee just right, the way it should be—because the way she knew how to do things, everyone kept telling her was the wrong way. She could not imagine wanting to do secret dirty things with Duvey. He was just an uncle, but she could not help enjoying his stories and that he had called her pretty, even if he hadn't meant it.

Nonetheless although she lined up with Rose and Sharon and Ruthie to kiss him good-bye and waved and waved as he went off down the block with his duffle bag, she was glad he was gone. Now the babies would nap in his room and she would not have to worry about whether she was guilty because of what Duvey wanted to do after his coffee. She could relax and go on with her knitting. None of her projects had been a success—lumpy mittens, a shapeless scarf—but this one would be different, a warm hat for Ruthie. She had not told anyone what it was, although Trudi teased her to know. It was green like Ruthie's eyes, and it would be beautiful.

LOUISE 4

Something Old and Something New

“Mrs. Shaunessy's youngest daughter just had a baby, and the father's overseas, so I let her take the week off.” Louise stood on a chair to put the roasting pan away. “I still think we should have had Kay help clean up. She does as little as she can get away with.” Her images of how the evening would go after the Thanksgiving afternoon dinner had been exploded by Oscar already. She had hoped they would all three talk about Kay's rising intrasigence and her recently discovered pregnancy, for Louise was ready to admit she needed help from Oscar.

“Why not let her see the movie with her girlfriend? I thought we needed to talk.” Oscar let the dirty dishwater out of the sink and dried his hands. “Here's the cover.” He passed it up to her.

When she turned to get off the chair, he put his hands on her waist to assist her down and instead pulled her against him. As he kissed her and his familiar body engulfed hers, she felt herself turning butter-soft. It was an ongoing return of the sexuality that had been the core of her life, this man with whom she had made love for fifteen years almost every day. The solidity of his body was familiar, its heft, its heat, as if he had a natural temperature above the human. Then her anger came scalding back. She yanked away from him. “You've never been much of a parent, Oscar, but you might at least pretend to take an interest in Kay's problems. I need help.”

“And I need you. And maybe Kay needs both of us.”

“You can't need me. You'll have a live-in lover in Washington soon, if you haven't had time to find one already.” She tossed her apron away and marched into the living room, flinging herself in an armchair.

“Oh, come on, Louise. You always did like Washington. You'd have a ball there. OWI is after you. Why not go back to Washington together?”

She wanted to kill him, she wanted to kick him right in the balls. All she could see in her mind were those evenings he had spent with Madeleine, Madeleine says, Madeleine believes, Madeleine interprets Freud to mean such and so. Him coming home to kiss her with that scent clinging to him, damned Parma violets. Madeleine was tall, blond, wore lavender and grey and smelled, discreetly, of violets. Her voice was low, husky. It was said Jung had been in love with her. Oscar certainly was, so besotted he could not keep from talking about her. Now that Madeleine had left him for the money-rich pastures of Hollywood, he wanted Louise back. How dare he?

“Oscar, I thought you had taken that attractive helper of yours with you. Won't she oblige?”

Oscar grinned. “In about five minutes. You know that I don't get involved with students. I have some scruples, even if you never thought I had enough.”

“Because it might prove professionally inconvenient. Right?” Louise tossed back her hair. It made her furious that she was insulting him and he was looking at her breasts. The way he looked at her made her feel as if he were touching her. It was unfair. It had nothing to do with what she wanted from Oscar. She wanted to call him a pig bastard and break a dish on his head, but if she did that, they would end up in bed. They had had some rare fights in the old days and they always finished in bed. That was one reason her rising temper was making Oscar smile. Damn him. “If you've been too busy to find someone yet, someone will find you. Women always do, Oscar. You attract women like a garbage truck draws flies.”

He laughed. “Then it's not my fault, is it? I have always been true to you in my fashion, and that's what's real. You're the only wife I want.”

“I was always true to you, Oscar, but did you think I would sit for the next forty years being true to a man who left me? I'm true still—but not to you. I am not about to be unfaithful to the man in my life with you—or anybody else. I don't break my own rules.”

Oscar wasn't smiling now. His eyes closed to slits. His skin got redder. He spoke in a silky soft voice. “And who is this lucky man? You're not making this kind of fuss about that wizened little prick, Dennis Winterbottom? You can't be faithful to a lapdog.”

She had actually got through to him. Now she felt good. She felt like giggling. “No, I am not talking about Dennis Winterhaven.”

“Who is it?”

“None of your business, Oscar.”

“How do I know it wasn't this man who got Kay pregnant?”

“Oscar, don't be vile. Kay doesn't know him, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh. You're supposed to be involved with this jerk, and he doesn't even care enough about you to deal with problems in your life?”

“Why should he, when you don't, and Kay is your flesh and blood daughter?”

Oscar knelt at the liquor cabinet rooting around, came out with a bottle of bourbon—which he never drank—and poured a healthy splash into his wineglass. He asked, as if conversationally, “An old friend of ours, no doubt? Half the men we know would have done anything to get you into bed. Fred Bauer. I bet it's Fred. He was always trying to get his hands on you. He used to kiss you hello, he used to kiss you good-bye. I used to wonder how he could bear to go off to the john without kissing you.”

“Oscar, remember all the lectures you gave me about jealousy, how ignoble and unnecessary and primitive an emotion it is?”

“Damn it, Louie, I never asked you to live like a nun. But I want you. So you've had an affair. So it's not finished. Neither are we finished.”

“No, because we have unfinished business, the daughter we made.”

“Charley! It's your agent Charley. He's been in love with you for ten years.”

“Oscar! Charley is homosexual. You don't know my friend. Now listen! Kay has to have an abortion, but she's evolved a romantic masochistic fantasy in which she brings the baby into the world and the father is dead—while in truth she may not be sure which of several men is the father—and she suffers gloriously in her own melodrama, without thinking she actually then has to raise the child for the next eighteen to twenty-two years.”

“I'll talk to her. Tonight when she comes home from the movies, I'll deal with it. I can arrange it with a doctor who's very good.”

“He'll use an anesthetic? I couldn't bear for her to go through that pain.” She had thought Oscar would know a good abortionist.

“I'll go with her if she wants me to. Are you sure I don't know the man?”

“Will you really do that? She won't listen to me. Somehow I got off on the wrong foot with her when I found it out. I was shocked. I dealt with my shock by becoming very practical, and I accidentally oversold her on the difficulties and gave her that intoxicating whiff of martyrdom.”

“Kay's at a difficult age, Louie, and nothing you do with her comes out right. This too will pass. She'll love you again, because we both know you've been a good mother.”

Louise felt tears briefly heat the inside of her eyes. “I don't know that, really. I keep thinking of things I did badly.”

Oscar knelt in front of her, taking her hands in his. “We both did many things well and many things badly. But the worst thing we ever did was to let go.”

“What's past is gone, Oscar. I'm sorry through and through that you didn't think this way three years ago, but our lives have diverged.”

“He must not live in New York, if he's never met Kay.”

“Oscar, there's something I have to tell you. He has some connections left that reach into France. I asked him to find out about Gloria.”

“Is she all right?”

“She's on their country estate. Her husband, the baron, is doing business with the Nazis. So long as he doesn't divorce her, she's probably safe, but it's not a comfortable situation.”

“That mildewed weasel. What's he doing?”

“Promoting the new German culture, the New Europe. Everything masculine, heroic, squared off, men are men and women stay home pregnant, and Jews are dogs. He puts on displays of muscle-bound sculpture and patriotic paintings. He's become a cultural impresario.”

Oscar rose, paced. He drank off his bourbon and paced more. “I wonder if there's any way to get her out?”

“I don't see how. Probably she's in little danger, unless the baron chooses to get rid of her.”

“He married her because she's beautiful and was notorious in that little beau monde. Now she's a liability. I don't trust him to hang on. After all, she doesn't have her own money.” He strode from one end of the living room to the other, absently running his hand along the back of the couch they had selected together when they moved here, when he got the job at Columbia in 1935. “I hate to think of her vulnerable.”

“Do you want me to try to find out more?”

“Is he in OSS too?”

“No. He's connected with OWI—”

“As you are.”

“Not officially. They want me to take on a more active role. I've been working on the writers' board, but they want me actually producing propaganda, and I have to brood on that longer—”

“Why would someone in OWI have links into France?”

“I said he was connected with OWI, not that he works for them. He has connections in French intelligence. De Gaulle's people, I suspect.”

“He's French, uh?” Oscar frowned, for the first time a little daunted.