Letty Fox (78 page)

Conscription fell like an iron rain on our young men; they ran to cover, they hid in cellars and workshops. The hardier at once began pouring into special courses and mushroom workshops all over the greater city; the idle, squatters upon their parents' property, college boys, bore the glamour of grease and overalls. The men had something male to do and sprouted eaglets' wings; the girls at first had an inspired look—the country had something to do. But a good many, also, saw what it meant in flesh and blood. Bobby, for instance, rang me up in a frenzied way and begged me to meet him at once in a bar, to leave work in the middle of the afternoon and come to discuss his future with him. It was nearly four; I said I had a headache. I told the girls it was a man who was going to be called and an old friend. He was sitting at the bar with a Scotch-and-soda in front of him; he said irritably, “I didn't know when you'd be here; I've been waiting half an hour.”

“I got away from work as soon as I could.”

I had wondered, coming along, if he was going to propose marriage, for it looked like the quick way out to a lot of men I knew. He kept looking at himself in the mirror, his face dark and lengthy, and occasionally coughed hollowly.

“You have caught a cold, Bobby.”

He hunched over his drink and waved to me to drink mine. After he had ordered another he said, “I want your advice; you know me pretty well. This damn war has got me worried; they'll rake me in.”

Well, I thought, no choice is offered us, we're just pushed into everything and so life is all dreary aimlessness to the Bobbies. Why should they like the war? Of course, Bobby is not exactly a hero, but his parents worked hard nineteen or twenty years to make him like this. He isn't the ideal husband, but he's a nice enough boy. It's no use crying over spilt milk, I said, to myself; I'll seize the occasion by the forelock, if I can; all I need is a footing—from then on, I'll know what to do. Thus, I was very happy, comradely, gentle with Bobby and knowing him so well, I thought we would soon be man and wife. A married woman is doing her duty to the state and is happy, glad not to have to worry about the moral and financial problems of each new day. I admit it would be better if the state did it for us, but there is no state but just a man; that is our system. I thought my troubles were at an end, in short. Bobby was perspiring, sitting at the bar, tearing his hair and looking tragically into the bar mirror when I got there. He wrung my hand and pulled me onto the stool beside him.

“It's come,” he said, looking at me wildly, slantwise under his low, neat, clever forehead, his eyes darting to the mirror and to me. “What'll we do now? They've got us.”

“Who do you mean?”

“The tribal gods, the things of wood and stone—” he said, fiercely. “Let's get a table! I've got to talk this thing out.”

“Maybe they'll reject you.”

“They'll take me, I've got one year medical training; they'll take me to mop up blood and pus in their hospitals.”

“You could get a worse berth than that!”

He took no notice of me, drinking his Scotch-and-soda in gulps and snapping his fingers, and sourly ordering more.

“We're in it; not you—you're a girl!—but even you girls, a whole swag of you'll live to be old maids.” He stared at the floor, drenched with bile; “another lost generation! They're all lost nowadays. What do we have them for?”

“Have generations you mean?” I laughed in a sultry style for I was feeling the day rich in possibilities.

“Yes; you wouldn't have kids just to get them blown to hell; no woman would.”

“The way things are, I'd say, if I can't have anything else, I'll have kids; at least that is something I got out of living.”

“Yes, a woman's view,” he said darkly; “the old biological urge; that's living on the instinctive level.”

“If you're not instinctive why this cringing on the part of all you guys; if you all refused to march, they couldn't march you. But you're afraid of criticism.”

“Afraid of dungeons dark and deep and the firing squad, you mean,” he said; “you don't know what they can do to us. I've thought about war a lot. I guess it was fear of blood made me a medical student.”

“Hooey!” I cried, peevishly; “you went in because your father and uncles can grease the slipways for you, when you leave drydock.” He hunched over the table, put his hand to his chest and coughed, without answering me or raising his eyes.

“Drink went the wrong way?”

“It's my lungs,” he murmured presently, “I'm afraid it's a goner.” “Which one?”

The liquor had worked in him, and now, as usual, inspiration visited him.

“A little perforation,” said he, mournfully, “gives one more penetration. I would have made a good medico, but now I don't know whether I'll be able to finish the course, even if those mass-murderers don't take me. The passion of the sick, the fever of the man who's spitting up his guts. Do you know what that is? No, you're too healthy. To us, so much health seems a kind of deformity, as if you were born all in one piece.”

“Is it serious, Bobby?” I asked, with a note of alarm, feeling ashamed that I had secretly thought him weak, trifling, spoiled.

“Passion sweated out into bloody handkerchiefs and sputum bottles,” he said, taking fresh energy from his glass, “man spewing death, the moribund preternaturally like superman, fire in his blood and his entrails torn by his own breath knifing through— symbolizing, solemnizing our fated and ominous mission—man to make man perish from the earth. Death everywhere. They won't let me die of my sickness. No, by the awful hose spewing fire. We make a show: the vaudeville act between the risen curtains has gripped us all. War! ‘Come in, you yellow dogs, and put on a uniform.' The bands play. The audience of mothers and sweethearts claps with frenzy. ‘Come on, sucker, show those lousy jerks, those subhuman apes across the Rhine.' Thus, the common invectives, slinking in and out of bars, watching for the detective, ‘Have you registered? Where's your selective service card? What's your name? What's your nation? What's your destination?' To the last, we'll answer, ‘Hell,' no matter where they give us a boat ticket to.”

“But, Bobby, maybe they won't send you across; it's just preparedness. And besides, if you've got tuberculosis, why anyone— they wouldn't even take you for hospital orderly.”

He tapped his chest and said hollowly, “That's the trouble; I know what I feel, but there's just the shadow there, on the plate; it's a spot there—or two cicatrices—just a spot they would hardly call a vacuole—they're taking men who oughtn't to be in at all. Let's eat something; I may as well eat in a restaurant, while I can; I'll probably be in a sanitarium soon.”

“What? You will,” I cried.

“Yes,” he continued, reading the menu and his mouth full of bread. “My family'll do what it can to get me into a rest home, I suppose; that ought to convince them. And if not—Ravioli, Scallopini with mushrooms and two glasses of red ink—Well, if not, I'll be in the craphouse too. The laundries of the U.S. army must be one bad smell; think of the mountains of tainted drawers when the news comes through daily; for it isn't rag-chewing any more, or the dear old rag, but another sort of rag the boys are interested in. People dead, killed in action, kids you went to class with and swapped smut and shortcuts with, men missing, what does that mean? Concentration camps, the dirthole, some chap my age and sort lying on the dirt with festering wounds and yelling for water and dying of starvation; men with skulls for heads and long useless bones that can't walk because there's nothing to hold the bones together, heaps, men with all the skin charred off them, like steaks, in oil baths—that means us, me, Letty—!” and his voice had a faint shriek—“and I must fight. God! When will the strength come to us to fight, to maim, to kill—for no reason, for no guy believes you've got to do that for your mother and sister; no, just for butchery, cruel, heartless savagery!”

“Gee, it's awful,” I murmured, not knowing where to look, and feeling very miserable. “But it's awful for everyone, I mean; and they're burning up the civilian populations too now; they say this is probably the last war with armies.”

“It's not fear so much,” he went on, emptying his glass of water. “I'm compassionate for others because I've compassion for myself too. The spirit of the Nazi and the goon is, Be tough yourself and slug the other guy. All good doctors suffer themselves. It makes you think. Bloodshed is not moral.”

“It may simply become a necessity,” I murmured.

“Yes, a credo too simple. Overshadowed—impotent—when we know what we must do to ourselves and—and the threat to our homes, our lives, and I admit—our part in the straightening out of things. But who tangled them?”

“The crooks and the lethargic.”

“The last generation,” he said, leaning his head on his hand as he plucked up a collop with his fork; “I wish we need have nothing to do with each other: the last generation and us. We all wish that.”

“Well, it's up to us; I'm taking a hand in my own life.”

“You won't get anywhere unless you conform to them; where have you got? You're trying to get through the jungle alone, when there's a highroad being laid down by tractors and masses of men, right beside you—but only by men in uniforms. What's the answer? There isn't any? You see, Letty, you're a girl, you just want to get married and that settles things for you, doesn't it?”

“I guess so—more or less.”

“Yes,” he sighed; “and you're healthy too; it's like having only one eye, or trying to look through glass eyes. Besides, it's the fate of women to lose their identity, enter the herd as Mrs. X or Y, isn't it? Do you mind that?”

“No.”

“Yes, yes; but we too! We'll be numbered, called up, registered, branded like cattle, entrained and shipped into slavery more or less long—years for some, eternity for others. Think of it! No life of our own.”

“Look—but—well, isn't there such a thing as mass-feeling, Bobby? I mean, I thought men liked to be with other men; I thought that was a kind of bracing experience; and then you'll see other countries perhaps—well, other sorts of people anyway, and rub shoulders with all kinds of men; you know, I sometimes feel it's a bit mean the way we live, seeing absolutely no one but each other; we just live in a narrow lane, it's as bad as a bookworm burrowing through a library: we're men-worms, we just burrow through men, blind to all but our own set. I know I want to marry and that'll tie me up a bit tighter than I am tied now, but if they offered me a job overseas, in Buenos Aires or Kamchatka, I wouldn't mind “

He said gloomily, picking up the lumps of sugar and throwing them back into the sugar bowl, “That's what you think; that's because you expect a man to emerge from behind a rock or tree and take you out for a good time: that's a girl's view of things.”

“But there are John Reeds and, well, Pancho Villas—and things—” I said lamely—“and Lenins, and practically everyone seems to have had a heroic grandpa in the Civil War; well, you see what I mean—”

He put his hand to his side, and coughed painfully, “It's this damn spot; I'm afraid I'm not of the stuff that heroes are made of; I don't believe there is anyone but an ordinary punk under anyone's skin.”

“Well, don't think I'm flag-wagging,” I said, “or that I'm not a realist.”

He coughed desperately, drank his glass of wine to the bottom, and beckoned the waiter. He complained about the wine and ordered some more for himself. “Pasteur said wine is a disinfectant for the stomach and bowels, and I suppose if I help one part of my anatomy, I help the other parts.” He was in a terrible state and filled me with pity. When we walked out, it was nearly dark, and I put my arm through his, and soothed him with friendly words; he probably wouldn't be accepted, he was studying for medicine; I'd heard that would help. But he said they were shoveling the lads in, you couldn't get exemptions like last time. His attention was only distracted from his discourse from time to time by things written on fences and walls. His eye would dart aside, and every block or two he would point out something interesting. “Say, haven't you got over toilet-literature?” I asked him. He said seriously that it was one of the oldest forms of literature in the world and you could still find personal remarks about men and women two thousand years dead in the excavations of Greece and Italy. “It makes you think,” he muttered, “when you think of dying yourself; it makes you want to scribble on all the walls, Jake Jones, so that maybe something, just a wall-scrawl, will last after you. Maybe two thousand years. Who knows?”

“Not in New York,” said I.

“That's what those smart guys thought in Herculaneum, too,” he said; “it's just, you see, Letty, that I've joined the ages.”

“Well, wait till they call you, Bobby, for God's sake.”

“And naturally, a man like me has no future; I was right not to try to read it. I had a forewarning.”

He coughed and put his hand to his chest, then he spat in the gutter. I could not help but feel that he was overacting it a bit, but did not dare to say anything. He pointed out an arrow, with a little design in chalk on the brick wall we were passing. Farther down he read a series of chalk-declarations, saying, “Emmeline stinks,” “Izzie stinks,” “Bobby stinks.” “Prophetic,” he said, shaking his head.

I seemed to cheer him up, though, for he called for me every night for a week or so, and even after that we went out a lot, eating, drinking, and rolling home in the early morning hours, which did not seem very good for his health, but he had turned reckless. I began to weary of his “spot” story, for instead of brushing it aside for the gruesomely unmentionable topic it was, he improved it every day and reveled in physical details and prophecies of corruption in which he outdid the joyous, black masters of groaning in English literature. For all I know, he looked them up; I never thought of that then, but became tired of a long tirade against everything which never mentioned me; I should have been glad even of a good stout denunciation; but he treated my character as negligible. I was born a woman, hence a cipher. I was convinced that he was a dependent who especially needed a woman of his own, but I could say nothing to convince him of that. I asked him why we shouldn't get married, in view of our close friendship and physical liking for each other. He would only ask hollowly if such a thing would be fair—to me, to him? He could not take on responsibilities. I said honestly, “Bobby, I admit I always meant to take up housekeeping when I married; for I am tired with knocking round the world; I've pounded the sidewalks for jobs and hurt my shins against every obstacle, and heard all the naughty words and seen the seamy side of quite a lot of men; but if it's the responsibility that's worrying you, then I'll forget it. I'll keep on working. What the hell—we're supposed to anyhow now; it's not good for the birth rate, but at least a woman has some sort of thing to live for, she's got an address she's proud of, not some hole in a wall. I like to be decent; and in the table of decency, a husband comes before anything else. So, if it's that alone that's bothering you, I'll work for you while you're making your way, going through college, or sitting in a sanitarium, or going to the wars, or whatever it is.”