Gone to Soldiers (6 page)

“Now, what is all this, Hank? Are you trying to make an honest woman of me, some nonsense like that?”

He was sitting on the little Windsor chair in front of her whitewashed brick fireplace, in which a couple of birch logs from home were cheerfully combusting. The chair was undersized for him, giving him a grasshoppery look. “I think you'd make a good wife for me, Scotty. Your wildness is youth and high spirits, a colt acting up. You'll settle in.”

A colt that hasn't been broken yet, he means, Abra thought, smiling sweetly. “Do you think it's an appropriate time for settling down? The world is coming to pieces all around us.”

“All the more reason to establish a home base. I don't for a moment believe even that madman Roosevelt is about to take us to war to pull England's chestnuts out of the fire, but nonetheless, I could be called up at any moment.”

Sound the bugles, Abra thought. I'm supposed to sacrifice myself to your family notions because you may be called up as an officer? “I'd make a rotten wife. I'm involved in my own work and not about to scant it.”

“Haven't you gone to school long enough? You're a real woman, Scotty, and it's time for you to live like one.”

“I'm rather keen on what I'm doing.” She heard herself talking in a different way with him, old inflections, old phrases. “I adore my thesis advisor Professor Blumenthal, and my topic interests me.” She was well aware the thesis she was writing on the Ladies' Garment Workers Union did not interest Hank. “I have a position with Professor Kahan—”

A look of distaste crossed Hank's blond aquiline features and he flexed his right arm, then his left, a nervous gesture that seemed automatic. “Kraut Jews, Scotty. Really.”

“Professor Blumenthal is a German-born Jew. So, I believe, was Marx.”

“Exactly. I can't imagine why your family agrees to all this.”

Abra regarded him, deciding exactly how rude she was going to permit herself to be. This was her damned fault, getting involved with somebody from her own background. She had never done so before and resolved not to bother in future. The only advantage she could discover was that she could recite the conversation that would ensue before they played through its dreary predictability. She rose and walked over to the hall door, opened it and stood aside.

Hank looked at her blankly. “Somebody in the hall?”

“You, soon, I hope. Your coat is on the peg. Do put it on yourself.”

“What are you doing, Scotty? This is silly. You can't turn me down. And not like this.”

“Watch me. I have no particular interest in marrying anybody. But you're the last possibility I would entertain.”

“Scotty, you know we love each other.”

She had a flash of anger with herself, for getting into this debacle. She must give up playing tennis. She met the wrong sort of men on the courts. The men she picked up at rallies were more her sort. “I think we both made a small mistake, easily remedied. Don't forget your hat.”

Slowly he backed out, still carrying his coat and hat, staring at her. Then he ran downstairs and if the outer door had been slammable, he would have slammed it. It shut at its own leisurely pace however, with a pneumatic sigh.

Abra reflected on the ruin of her Sunday. She tested the waters of her soul and found them only tepid. It would be a good day to stay home and make an effort to do more than refer to her thesis in public. Her class work would be completed soon, but she had not really settled down to writing. She looked around her small moderately bohemian digs with the Hopi vase and the Guatemalan molah and the African gazelle carving darker than night interspersed with bright chintz pillows and eighteenth-century pieces from the family attic. Hank did not belong here. She did.

It seemed to Abra that marriage was something that would fall to her lot at a certain age, as she had inherited her little trust fund at twenty-one from her grandfather Scott and as she would someday inherit her grandmother Woolrich's ladder-back chairs and have to put them somewhere, along with a trust fund from that side, due at twenty-six. She believed that most of her women friends from college had married to acquire a place for themselves, an identity, but that she could make her own place.

She had no desire to be rich; her branch of the family had not stressed money per se, once their shipyard had gone under, unlike her uncle Frederick Woolrich, whom she had always liked, with his booming manner as if to be heard in a gale and his energy. She suspected Uncle Frederick was probably a good lay, but incest was not her particular vice. Rather the opposite. She should have told Hank politely that she had an exogamous personality. She hardly ever went for another blond and with Hank, the fire had simply not come down. A month with Hank was longer than a year with Slim, the Negro saxophone player, although in truth they had only seen each other on and off for eight months. Slim lived with a woman, who had eventually found out about Abra. Too bad. Before she had come to New York, the only nonwhites she had ever laid eyes on were two local Indian fishermen, but Abra considered she had that liberal heritage from scandalous Great-Great-Aunt Abigail to live up to.

Abra had grown up in Bath, in a family well known and well connected locally, if not nearly so well off as they had been a couple of generations back. There was a cove named for her father's family (where the defunct shipyard had been) and an island named for her mother's side. She had grown up with her two brothers in a prim white federal house on Washington Street with a cupola on top and portraits not of ancestors but of their ships, stiff formal oil paintings of the
Ebeneezer Scott
, the
General Abraham Woolrich
, in full unlikely sail upon static waves, alternating with naive local paintings of noted shipwrecks, the
Mary Frances
going down with all hands off Woolrich Island. Portraits of ancestors had not seemed necessary, since she was always being told she had Granny Abra Scott's nose and Great-Uncle Timothy's eyes. She had felt herself not so much placed as embedded in family expectations, the life before her a formal perennial bed planted with Everetts and Timothys and Toms and Mary Franceses and Abras, needing only occasional watering.

Summers had been the free and glorious times, always on the water, sailing or chugging among the elaboration of inlets and arms and bays of the Kennebec or lolling on the unusual (for Maine) sand beaches of their peninsula. Growing up they had even had a Civil War fort to play in, with spiral staircases and dungeons and parapets. They scrambled over the rocks, they clammed, they raced their cousins in catboats. The gap of two years between Everett, called Ready, and Abra which sprawled wide in Bath during the school year, closed at the summer house.

Every summer the New Yorkers came to the peninsula with their different accents, different values, different clothes and attitudes; with them came a freedom she found addictive. In Bath she was always under someone's expectant or admonitory gaze, but out in the simpler stark house on the hill at Popham, she could always escape surveillance. It was a matter of sailing off to another island or rounding the bend. The Woolriches had their family compound on an island visible from her family's wide front porch, and she could always say she was sailing over to her uncle's. If the weather precluded sailing, then there was the forest of birch, oak and fir, the marshes, the dank swamps where she could lose herself. Privacy was only one hill away. The social rules that circumscribed the depth and frequency of every contact in Bath frayed in the summer world of fir and rock, of fog drifting in magic and chilly, the sun dazzling, the wind rising till she could feel herself a real person with a will and a future as potentially tumultuous and changeable as the cold sea that quickened her. She could not go to sea, as Ready would, so she chose an island instead that seemed to her as free and rich as the sea: Manhattan.

She ate in a Nedick's, on her way to the fundraiser for Czech resistance. At the door of the rented hall, she met two friends, Djika and Karen Sue. Djika was the only other woman graduate student in her department. Karen Sue had been a bored southern belle in Memphis before contracting an inappropriate marriage her father had had annulled; an inheritance was keeping her in New York where she found life livelier. She had a big apartment on Riverside Drive where parties among the politicos they knew were often held.

It was an odd evening, the regulars the Party could call out for its fundraisers, folk singers, theater people and then a lot of Czech chorale groups and singers, many rousing speeches about the brave partisans. Up on the platform Abra contemplated hairy Jack Covington, who had once leaped upon her, satisfied himself with haste and rolled off, and then demanded to be waited on in the morning, sending her out for a bottle of orange juice, a package of Wheaties and light cream. She had spent a night with him after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union had reconstituted the Popular Front and she and her interventionist friends were speaking to the Communists again. She had endeavored to avoid a repeat ever since, although whenever he saw her he displayed that great toothy grin like the grille of a new truck and headed straight at her. That such a virile-looking ex-longshoreman should prove so perfunctory in bed was disappointing. She was amused to note that she found his speeches less moving than formerly. It was good that people generally knew little about the sexual habits of their politicians.

“Oh, Jack. That boy is a dundering bore,” Karen Sue drawled, giving the judgment at least two diphthongs. Abra wondered if her disillusionment were similarly based, but she had no intention of discussing her sexual life with Karen Sue. Abra believed in being a complete gentleman.

“So, have you begun to work for the great man yet?” Djika asked, leaning across Karen Sue.

“Tomorrow's the first of the month, and that's when Professor Kahan is starting me.”

“Seems absurd,” Djika said sourly, perhaps jealous of the appointment. “You start the first of December and then you'll break off for vacation. Why not wait till the first of January?”

“Perhaps her professor doesn't take a little old vacation,” Karen Sue said. “Just works his assistants to death fifty-two weeks in the year.”

“I'd just as soon get on with learning the job,” Abra said. “I'm curious as hell.” She had been introduced to Oscar Kahan at a conference on Fascism where he had spoken, eloquently she had thought, on the tension between the petty bourgeois base of German fascism and the growing amity between the Nazi party and the German industrial elite. Her own advisor, Professor Blumenthal, was a German refugee from the Frankfurt School. Kahan had been one of the few American-born speakers at the conference to present anything sophisticated. She had been extremely pleased when Blumenthal had recommended her to Kahan.

“Is he married, honey child?” Karen Sue asked. It was always her first question.

“I never get involved with anyone in my field. I have an exogamous personality.” She had got to use her line after all.

“Then what do you talk about?” Djika asked scornfully. For the last two years, she had been enjoying an unhappy but fulfilling affair with a married professor, Stanley Beaupere. Although Abra was chary with details, Djika pressed upon both of them the exact words of Stanley Beaupere, demanding full intellectual attention and analysis. As his marriage unraveled, its seamier side was picked stitch by stitch for Djika's audience of two.

Djika was a refugee from Danzig, although it was hard to think of her as such. While Djika viewed herself as living almost in squalor, she actually lived more poshly than Abra, if less poshly than Karen Sue. Djika combined fervent Catholicism and fervent socialism, the former shared, the latter unshared with her family.

Djika was bright, and Abra valued her for that hard European-educated intelligence that seemed at once more pointed and broader-based than Abra was used to among her colleagues; she also found it a great convenience to be friendly with the only other woman in her department. At least she had someone to slip off to the ladies' room with. She had met Karen Sue at political parties, gradually realizing that she was the hostess. Not only did Karen Sue seem to grasp everything about clothes, designer, cut and fabric, but she was the only woman Abra knew who read
The Wall Street Journal
every morning, speculated in stocks and bonds and seemed to understand what she was doing. The contrast between Karen Sue's fluffy belle airs and her financial acumen amused Abra, who admired expertise per se. She had even enjoyed listening to John talk about lobstering, until she had asked all the more interesting questions.

She thought several times of telling Karen Sue and Djika about her proposal, but each time she did not speak. Why? She did not care to introduce the subject of Hank's anti-Semitism. She really had to get along with Djika, and she had her suspicions about Djika's attitudes. She also did not feel as if it would be in good taste to mock Hank, who after all had meant to do her an honor, however she had perceived the proposal. On consideration, it became her to keep her Sunday to herself.

Abra's first impression of Oscar Kahan was that he was smaller than she remembered from the conference, that he seemed to occupy more space than he did because of his energy. As he rose to shake her hand, his palm was firm and hot to the touch, his skin ruddy, hair curling on the back of his hands.

“We're conducting a series of interviews with refugees who were active in the unions or active politically in Europe. Your German is adequate?”

“Adequate is the word for it.”

“We'll try it out. What I want is someone to interview the women. Some of the questions I'm interested in having answered are personal, and I suspect we'll get further with a woman asking them.”

“May I ask why you aren't hiring a refugee to do the interviews? Look, I'm delighted you're willing to give me a try …”