Gone to Soldiers (72 page)

Ruthie croaked, “Be glad he's alive. He's hurt enough to get out of the war, so be glad. He's alive and coming home.”

Would she receive such a telegram? No, if it happened, his parents would hear. Did she wish for a wound that would save his life? Who wouldn't wish for it? But what price would she pay for his life: a leg, an arm, paralysis? She could not sweet-talk Trudi into calm. Trudi had plenty to fear.

She slept and dreamed that all that came home of Murray was a head in a cage, a talking head that watched her with sad eyes as she rushed to and fro in the house. She woke sweating. Her fever was breaking. If she was not too weak, if she could crawl out of bed, in the morning she must return to school and to the factory.

LOUISE 7

Toward a True Appreciation of Chinese Food

In the drab middle of sleety January, Louise flew out to the West Coast on assignment. This time there would be no gossipy vacation in Claude's little expatriate world, and she found herself depressed and resentful of the interminable delays, bumped off planes in Chicago, again in Kansas City to spend the night huddled in drafty waiting rooms hungry, cold, exhausted and fending off attentions of bored and overfed businessmen who seemed to be doing very well indeed out of the war. Taking three days to get across the country was nothing to complain at length about; nonetheless she felt dirty, messy, with a sore stomach and tired eyes.

Lonesome and impinged upon at once, it was not any of her fellow travelers for whose company she longed, but she attempted to keep up a facade of conviviality. Finally she pretended to suffer a bad cold and was left alone to her reading. She had T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets
. The ideas seemed to her willfully medieval but the music of the lines sang in her ears. She was also reading the former drama critic of the
Partisan Review
, who had come out with a book that was somewhere between short stories and novel,
The Company She Keeps
. The author, Mary McCarthy, wrote with a matter-of-factness about sex in ways that intrigued and fascinated Louise as a new level of discourse about women's lives.

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did, as conquest, as adventure—in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically than men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically.

She had a brief fantasy of writing about her own childhood, honestly, of writing about anti-Semitism and sexual abuse in foster families, but she grimaced, lowering her head to her book. It would not be permitted. It would be seen as too depressing. As a woman there were still far more things that could not be said than could be said; if they were said, they could not be heard. Madness lay that way. Forget it.

She finally arrived at Portland, where she was taken to the Bentley, an extremely civilized hotel that still kept up a passable grade of service in spite of the war. She had a bath, a good supper and a night's sleep followed by an ample breakfast and a second bath. Then she was picked up and taken to Vanport.

Vanport was the largest of the instant cities that had been put up overnight, four miles west of Portland. A car from the Kaiser shipyards drove her, while she scanned the press release. Nothing could have prepared her for the utter bleakness. Thirty-five thousand people were living in mud, out of which rose identical pale one-story wooden houses up on concrete blocks which were sinking or sunken in the primordial ooze. The Portland Housing Authority had thrown up the houses the year before, making this Oregon's second biggest city. Thrown up seemed the right word.

Vanport even had its own suburb, East Vanport, which stood on a swamp formerly a shabby golf course on a peninsula sticking into the Columbia River. That was perhaps the saving grace: the river was vast and handsome. The other saving grace was the rent: $7 a week for a studio and $11.55 for four rooms. Plenty of shack stores sold whatever the merchants could lay hands on to sell.

In the hospital she saw badly burned children. Many of the renters were not used to electric heat and electric stoves. They had had wood stoves all their lives, and they never thought to turn heaters or stoves off. Fires broke out in the little wooden houses that went up in minutes. Yet the inhabitants were cheerful. Most were earning what they called top dollar, with everybody in the family bringing home money, and they all had plans to live differently after the war. They were hardworking, likable people with heady ideas about what they would buy and what they would own and where they would live. Something began to strike Louise as she conducted her interviews, an observation that would never enter her articles. She had interviewed enough refugees to know what they thought they were fighting for: they were defeating Fascism or liberating their homeland or fighting for their own freedom to be whatever they were that had become illegal or dangerous, Jews or Masons or Communists or Socialists or Seventh-Day Adventists, avant-garde painters, surrealist writers. Or they were simply fighting like the Russians for survival, because the Germans planned to annihilate them.

But Americans were fighting for a higher standard of living. They were fighting their way out of the Depression. They were fighting for the goods they saw in advertisements and in movies about how the middle class lived. What these people saw in their future was not a new brotherhood of man (and certainly not of woman), but the wife back at home, a new car in the new garage of the new house in the new tract with grass this time. They saw themselves moving into an advertisement full of objects they had coveted, but never owned and seldom even touched. They were fighting for what they had not had before the war, a want list of specific objects with plenty of room to add more.

On the way back, she stopped in Detroit to visit another instant town, Willow Run. Snow was coming down hard, falling on the uncollected trash and rutted mud. It was even more dismal and undergoing a hushed-up typhoid epidemic, because of poor sewage facilities. Out in Washtenaw County, the workers who had poured in for the Ford Willow Run bomber facility were facing hostility from the farmers and townspeople around them, who viewed them as an army of occupation. The school was overcrowded and desperately understaffed. The women who did not work were going stir-crazy in their trailers or tiny huts. It was not instant city that had been created at Willow Run, but more obviously and strongly than at Vanport, instant slum. That she was going to say, as strongly as she knew how. These people had come to do a job and were being treated like cattle. She had seen German prisoners of war in the South better housed than these families.

They had fires here too, but a woman was being carted off bleeding copiously from between her legs because of a badly done or self-inflicted abortion. Remembering Kay, Louise wrung her hands unconsciously as she watched the woman carried on a stretcher along the street as the ambulance bearers talked about her as if she were a criminal, while her little children ran after them and the neighbors watched.

She decided since she was stuck in Detroit with a snowstorm delaying flying that she would call on the WASPs she had written about. Perhaps she could extract a follow-up piece from this visit.

She found Bernice and her sidekick Flo jubilant, for they had just received notice they were being transferred to another base, where they would be delivering not trainers but fighters, the top line of the best planes being produced. They would be among the first women ever to fly fighters; in fact, they would be the first pilots after the test pilots, and they had heard that an increasing number of women were being used for testing new as well as repaired planes. They were celebrating with gusto and some local moonshine, and they invited her to join them. The photos from the article she had written about them were on the barracks wall.

The raw whiskey shocked her mouth, but she drank it anyhow, trying to quiet voices in her head that warned of blindness from treated alcohol. Imagine putting poison in alcohol just so people couldn't use it to get drunk: the society that did that had a screw loose. Helen had a phonograph in the barracks—the daughter of the Republican newspaper publisher from Nebraska, was it?—that was playing Tommy Dorsey and the Andrews Sisters. Flo was trying to show Bernice how to do the lindy, but Bernice obviously did not want to learn. Finally Louise got up and danced with Flo. She used to dance at rent parties and fundraisers. Oscar had been a good dancer. Perhaps he still was. Claude waltzed and fox-trotted well, but could not lindy. Idly she wondered if anybody had ever taught Daniel how to dance.

She was a big hit. When she finally plunked down out of breath, she felt sober again and hastened to drink more of the white lightning, as they called it. Her feet were sore from the splintery boards of the barracks—she had kicked off her shoes long before—and her blouse was damp with sweat, but she had enjoyed doing something physical. She never seemed to lately.

Watching the young women at play, she brooded on her daughter. This year, Kay was her own person, even if that person found someone new to imitate every six weeks. She was currently in love with her French professor, who must be fifty and had a white beard like Santa Claus. She reported his opinions as holy writ. At Daniel she had turned up her nose. He was too young: this from an eighteen-year-old. In fact, Daniel had not put himself out to be charming to Kay, either. That tentative matchmaking had been a flop over Christmas vacation.

“He has a crush on you, Mother!” Kay had said as if reporting leprosy.

“Oh well,” Louise said. “He's much too young. Don't worry about it.”

“You knew!” Kay sounded shocked. She pulled on her hair, the way she had done since she was little when she was nervous or annoyed.

“Well, you do notice those things, dear. It's of no importance.”

“I think it's tacky.… Is Daddy going to marry that girl he has? Abra the horseface?”

“I have no idea, Kay. Actually I doubt it.”

“Abra—what kind of a jerkwater name is that? And why did he take her to England, if he isn't going to marry her?”

“He didn't take her, honey. The OSS sent them both. I suppose they need her too.” Actually she was sure Oscar had put in to have Abra Scott transferred with him, and why not? He never let go of anyone. He could hold on to Abra till she was forty-five and never marry her and never permit her to move in with him. Louise shuddered. “I believe she explained to you that Abra is a family name.”

“Why do you stick up for her? I think that's tacky too.”

“Abra tried very hard with me and I appreciate the effort. She never did me harm, and she found me a nice apartment in Washington, inadvertently.”

“What are you talking about?” Kay had looked aghast.

Louise realized at once that she had not told Kay the apartment had been Abra's, and that she could not. “A friend of hers knew about this.”

Kay turned away. “I hate it. Why don't you move back to New York, to our home?”

Remembering that conversation in a roomful of women midway between her age and her daughter's, she doubted Kay would ever return to live with her. Kay would marry young, she suspected. She would like that not to be true, because she considered Kay far too immature and far too silly around men to choose well; but she did not imagine she would be consulted. Let go as you must, she told herself, you have no other choice.

The vaunted romance society was selling was instant passion. The great romance happened all at once; it swept a woman off her feet. A true woman couldn't resist. You hardly knew who he was but you saw the uniform and the message was,
LOVE NOW
. Every man in uniform was entitled. Every woman was carried away.

It ended in real life with the woman carried away all right, bleeding on a stretcher. It ended up in those squalid maternity homes she had visited where sullen and overweight sixteen-year-olds were treated like ax murderers and read appropriate passages from the Bible by squinting evil-minded men and vindictive overstarched women. It had ended for Kay more safely but painfully enough in the offices of a Park Avenue physician. Yes, and her own stories were one more way of selling that hypnotism to women, love as a drug, a cure-all, a religion.

One outstanding thing about these WASPs was that they were engaged in their own romance. The country might know little and care less, but they were heroines in
their
story, and they shone with that confidence and that energy. Here in their barracks, they did not have to play at primness. They told the raunchy jokes she usually heard from men. They laughed, they drank, they danced with each other and they seemed for the most part pleased with themselves. Louise was surprised how relaxed she felt. Bernice sat beside her. They were among the two people the least drunk in the room, although both of them had been drinking steadily all evening.

“Do you like Washington?” Bernice asked her. “I've only been there once.”

“It's a younger town now. Everybody used to idle along in the southern way, two-hour lunches, gracious living, servants at your elbow. Now it's a short-tempered town in a hurry. I'll never really like it. Too much manners and power hunger, too little art and intellect.”

Helen stood in front of them, her face flushed, her hair tousled. She had been dancing with Mary Lou. “If you could stay any age forever, what age would you choose?”

“Right now plus a couple of months,” Bernice said. “Once we get into the cockpit of those fighters.”

“Twenty-five, twenty-six, I think,” Louise said.

“That's sad.” Bernice looked her in the eyes. “To want to go back. I can't think of anything I want to go back to. I want to hurry on forward.”