Gone to Soldiers (124 page)

“Not that kind of story. I've just had my first fictional idea in more than a year. I thought my mind had stopped working that way. That I'd lost my vein of fantasy that brings in the good dollars.”

“Perhaps I inspire you.” He sauntered around and stood with his back to the low stone wall that marked the end of the weedy garden and the beginning of the moor. “To fantasy if nothing else. Do you know what you just called me?”

“Called you?”

“Love, you said.”

“I did?”

“Even our unintentional utterances, according to Freud, are indicative of our real desires.”

She laughed, clasping her hands behind her head. “Do you consider my real desire general or specific?”

“Louise, only you know by now if you want me or your young Navy man. If you want me, I'm yours. I can change my habits. I'm older, Lord knows. I can try to be wiser.”

Alas, poor Daniel, she thought, it's no contest. My life is my life, of a piece. “I'm here with you, not with him. No?”

“Partly, partly.” He had pushed himself off the wall to stretch. The sun tipped his dark curls with copper. As he came toward her, his eyes had that hot molten expression she remembered, oh she remembered, down in her body she remembered.

She sighed noisily. “Is it all starting again?”

“Living? Yes, it's starting again. Loving? Let me show you how it can be. Please, come to me.” He put his hands tentatively on her shoulders and then under her arms to lift her. Where his hands touched, her breasts ached, as if they filled suddenly with milk. Her body betrayed her, her body delivered her to him. Oh, nonsense, she scolded herself, letting him draw her up out of the chair. Why else did I come here? But for this, to heal into this. She tilted back her face and he kissed her. Honey in the belly, honey in the veins, honey in the womb. Someday, she thought, I'll write about sex how it really is for women, not for the magazines but maybe a publisher would touch it. How everything thickens and quickens at once.

To say how, she thought, as they were in bed naked and tangled together, mouths joined and hips twisting to press and squirm closer, it is at its best impossible to tell where one body starts and the other begins. Animal magic. Choice made flesh.

“I won't leave you again, I won't! It was the stupidest thing I ever did in my life. I was a putz, a schmuck. I had an attitude that anything that was offered to me, I should try.”

He would be more faithful than he had been, he would be mostly faithful. She thought that he would try and maybe succeed. It would be the two of them alone together as it had not been for twenty years, and that would be in itself an adventure.

After they had made love, she fetched a bottle of the local hard cider for them to drink in bed, the quilt gathered around them. “It's going to be interesting politically,” Oscar said. “We seem to have come out of the war feeling invincible. Prepared to pick up the White Man's Burden with a vengeance. But things have been happening among the colored populations at home and everywhere, a new militancy that could continue demanding changes.”

“I visited an all-Negro tank outfit. They were fantastically decorated, given that they had to do five times as much to get any recognition. And they were deeply angry about how they'd been treated by the Army. All that's going home too. But
Collier's
wouldn't let me write about it, saying nobody was interested in some Negro tankers.”

They settled down to filling each other in on what they had been noticing and thinking. Suddenly it was six-thirty and she was starving. They had talked for two hours without pausing. That moved her more than the lovemaking. She had a sense of roots deep in soil groping together. She was being healed to their common history, her life was coming back together. Her long anger was almost gone. Oh, in fights it would try to seep out in bitterness, but she would be wary. Miracles came seldom and rebirth more rarely yet and for countless and uncountable and never to be counted women like herself, her age, her body type, death had come from a machine gun, from blows of the butt end of a rifle, from poison gas, from poison injections, from starvation and typhus and neglect, from all the nasty ways to die warped minds in a violent and relentless system could devise. They had died of a lack of common respect and common love. They cried out to her, take him back and go live in peace as husband and wife and as Jews. Go make a home again and give thanks. Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

After they spent their first night sharing the bed, Oscar woke at dawn, shaken. “I was with the Army. We were pursuing the Nazis into Bavaria. We kept talking about Werewolf, the underground Himmler set up but never finished connecting.” He flinched, scrubbing at his eyes. “You probably guessed I was involved in counterintelligence work in Germany, seeking out Nazi cells. That's what I was doing in Bavaria, when we met at the hunting lodge. But this was an absurd dream.”

“I don't require you to dream in good taste, Oscar. Tell me about it.”

“The American colonel I was with, he was tall and blond and midwestern, brave and naive. We kept pursuing an SS officer. There were chase scenes, in and out of ruins. Finally we had him cornered. Then the SS turned into a real wolf and he leaped through the air and as his teeth sank into the American colonel's throat, he disappeared into him.”

“‘What happened to the Nazi?' I asked the colonel.

“‘What Nazi?' The colonel just stared at me. ‘There's no Nazi here.' That's all there was to it.” Oscar sat up, a dew of sweat on his forehead. “Silly dream. How are you feeling this morning?”

“Not silly. Witty, rather, in the sense that indeed where have they all gone? Every German was anti-Hitler. But he disappeared into the American?”

“Louise, I was for intervention. We had to fight Germany. There was no choice. It would have been better to do it in Spain than in North Africa, and better to do it in 1937 than in 1942, but we had to. But I do fear what the war has done to us. I do fear what I am beginning to understand of the bottom side of what we call progress and civilization.”

“We've both lost our certainties. Great gaping holes where they used to be.” She touched his cheek on which the tough dark hairs had grown during the night, an occasional white one gleaming. We shall grow old, she thought, and was oddly comforted. “To answer your question, I feel fine. From what was wrong with me physically, I am recovering. And we've begun to recover something as precious as health.”

“Our love?”

“That too. I was thinking of communication.”

RUTHIE 11

The Harvest

In July, Ruthie was laid off from Briggs. By that time most of the women had already gone, Rena first. Since Vivian had been let go, it had been increasingly hard for Ruthie to get to the factory, way on the east side, so she was not sorry. Vivian and Rena were trying to get jobs as welder and riveter respectively.

Not only were women being laid off en masse, but entry jobs were being redefined to involve heavy lifting, to exclude women from the factories. In a Flint auto plant, all the women were put on the graveyard shift in violation of seniority, and the UAW, which continued to address members as sirs and brothers, refused to fight for its women members. The auto plants were reconverting, preparing to roll out cars and trucks. When the women went to the unemployment office, officials told them that if they applied as welders or riveters, they could have their unemployment compensation terminated because they were unfairly limiting their employability. The U.S. Employment Service would only refer Vivian to what they called women's jobs, and they kept trying to force Rena into being a maid or a cleaning lady.

Ruthie received unemployment as she was interviewing for social work. She was surprised how many of the agencies were reluctant to hire a woman except as a secretary. Once she would have been happy to get a secretarial job, but no more. She kept looking. She did well on the Civil Service exam. Detroit was shaken by a polio epidemic. Even on the hottest days, mothers feared letting their children go swimming in the parks or the river. People thought that was how it was transmitted.

The gas shortage had eased a little so that Morris could take his car out of storage. Leib worked on it with him until they had it running again. It was understood they would share it, since Leib had put so much time into running around for replacement parts. Leib volunteered to teach Naomi to drive, so Ruthie invited herself along to learn at the same time and to keep an eye on Leib. Trudi knew how to drive, but she was getting too big to slip behind the wheel.

Ruthie was astonished to find out she liked to drive, and by early August, she had her license and so did Naomi. One sunny Saturday in August, they took turns driving into the country, taking the new expressway to Willow Run. It was a ghost town out there, the dormitories deserted, the little huts empty. She wondered if that was the sort of place Murray and she would have to live, if he still wanted her when he came back.

“Will you marry him when he comes home?” Naomi asked, as if she could read her mind.

“How do I know what will happen? What he'll want? We haven't laid eyes on each other for three years!”

“But if you do marry him, I'll hardly ever see you.”

“Why won't you see me, unless you go blind? And don't marry me off before it happens. The war isn't even over, kine-ahora, so let's not talk about his coming home.”

Ruthie parked by a small lake where some colored people were fishing, a woman and two men, with a baby lying on a little rug in the grass. “Catch anything?” she called.

The woman answered her, a little wary but neither hostile nor friendly, “A couple of bullheads. No white folks'fish.”

Ruthie left the car and wandered with Naomi along a path under the pines that grew down almost to the water's weedy edge, with blue green reeds standing up like thick grass, water lilies in a cove, then a stretch where the waves lapped on a crescent of gravelly sand.

“I wish I could read the whole journal,” Naomi said. “It's all I have left. Of any of them.”

“I know you were working on breaking the code. I saw all those lists.”

“I can't do it. All I can figure out is a word or two. Sometimes I get furious at her, frustrated, because I can read it right up to the point where they leave Paris and go down to Toulouse, and she starts taking the children through the mountains. Then it becomes just nonsense, pages and pages of craziness where half the words make sense and the other half are just stuck in, like, I saw Daniela chair the red book outside the city.”

“Why did she do that?”

“She was scared she'd be captured and the Nazis would read her journal and learn too much.”

“You sound as if you feel very close to her.”

“How can you feel close to a dead person? Everybody in my family is dead. Why did they make me live if they were all going to die?”

“They could only save one. Why not you? You're very precious.”

“She used to hate us—the twins. Then she got all sentimental about us when she was underground. She even started calling us by our Jewish names, Naomi, Rivka. She forgot what we were really like—brats.”

Ruthie hugged her cousin, who stood unresponsive, staring off: her cousin who was four inches taller than she was and at least as full-figured suddenly, startlingly. “You're a very special person, a sweet and good and smart young woman, Naomi. Your parents would be proud of you, your mother, your father, your sister too.”

“Ha!” Naomi pulled sullenly away. “They'd hate me!” She started walking fast toward the car. “I want to drive now. It's my turn.”

On August 14, Morris came home from the factory at eleven in the morning, saying that the plant had closed to celebrate the end of the war. Rose was in the yard washing clothes with a scrubbing board and a brush. His work clothes were boiling in soapy water on the stove. She yanked off her soaked apron, although her faded cotton dress under it was just as wet across her full belly. Ruthie threw down the want ads to hurry after them into the street. A car passed honking its horn, the windows open and guys leaning out. “The war's over! The war's over!” Ta ta ta turn went the horn.

Sandy Rosenthal came running down the steps of the front house. “Is it true? Is it real this time?”

Everybody milled around. Ruthie felt as if she were going to fly apart. People were leaning out their windows shouting to each other. Around the end of the block came the sound of a drum. A ragged procession of neighborhood kids paraded down the sidewalk and then into the street, wagons, bikes, tricycles, a scooter, two dogs, one with a flag in his collar, a baby buggy decked with bunting. In the buggy was a struggling tabby stuffed into a baby dress. The children were blowing horns, banging on pot lids and trash can covers.

Everybody was kissing and hugging. Bells were ringing in the Polish Catholic church and in the African Methodist church nearby. A siren began to wail and from the through streets came a rising cacophony of honking and tooting. Detroit was preparing to party, from one end to the other. Everybody who could stand upright was getting ready to take to the streets.

Ruthie hugged Sharon. Then she ran off to Fenniman's bakery to fetch Naomi. She wanted to sing and dance, she wanted to run through the streets with everybody else. The end of dying, the end of killing, was that not a true holiday under the sun? A new world, the United Nations Morris kept talking about. Freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from persecution.

Right after Labor Day, Ruthie was hired by Aid to Dependent Children, which was undergoing a great expansion of caseload as women were being laid off or pushed into poorly paid jobs. She was hired to start the following Monday, and she did. Murray wrote he had high points and should be among the first marines home. Then the last week in September a wire came from San Francisco. He would be on a train arriving 7:54 Tuesday evening and she should come and meet him along with his parents.