Gone to Soldiers (100 page)

Bernice could only nod feebly, jealous that Emma could make free of Flo's cot while she had to watch herself now. It was the woman on the street in New York again, but worse. She had not been shocked when Zach told her he and Jeff had been lovers. Perhaps she thought of sex as something men owned and controlled, so it was natural they should do it with each other as well as with women. But to lust after another woman, she did not even know the name for that. Lorraine had suspected her of that in Romulus, that was why everybody had been so pleased when Zach appeared and started fucking her. It had meant to the other women that she was normal. They were wrong.

For the next weeks Flo and she went on just as before, but paying more attention to each other, watching out for each other. Bernice carefully observed all the other women. Several of them were married, their husbands in the service. Loretta lived from letter to letter. Some had fiancés overseas. One was a widow, her husband killed at Pearl Harbor. Emma's boyfriend, a mechanic at Newark, was saving to buy her a ring. No, the other women were all thinking of men, looking for a man, engaged or married to a man, or recovering from the loss of a man. Of the single women on the base, only Flo and Bernice did not perk up when some lounging idiot whistled or when some Air Corps lieutenant on his way through made a pass. They had both opted out.

Bernice felt in no way superior. She was no better pilot, no more loyal or affectionate or understanding, no braver than the other women, only different in that secret way. Zach had sensed that difference and now Flo sensed it, but neither had run from her.

Over the next few weeks, she asked herself what might have happened if the three women who had been in town had not walked in, but she knew very well nothing could happen. She did not know how to approach another woman. She had never been a sexual aggressor. Her experience was confined to Zach, who had enough aggression to fit out a squadron. How could one woman suddenly seize another? It seemed impolite. If there were other women like herself, how did they get together? The violent grappling and great heaving and grunting with Zach had nothing in common with what she felt for Flo, except for that aching deep in the belly, that wanting.

The WASPs were under attack. They must be loyal. They were under discipline. Bernice told herself so long as she was a WASP and in uniform, she would not think more about Flo and what might happen and how. She found her vow impossible to keep. Very well, she would let herself occasionally puzzle, imagine, dream, but would do nothing. Thus their life together continued as they slept on cots four feet apart with the storage table between. Most of the time they were off separately flying the fighters that had to be delivered to the war.

However when they were together, Bernice knew that she looked at Flo far more often and far more intently than she used to. She noticed things that had escaped her, the perfect curve of Flo's ear against her hair, conventionally called strawberry blond, but closer to peach or to apricot, and then the sudden fleshiness of the lobe and the little dot that was a hole, for Flo's ears had been pierced and she wore tiny garnet studs.

Flo's hands were strong and firm but smaller than her own. Sometimes she wanted so badly to take Flo's hands in her own and just hold them, feeling the small sweet bones, that she had to crush her hands together behind her back to hold them in control. She also noticed that Flo looked often at her. I am in love, Bernice thought with terror, finally in love for the first time in my life, but with a woman. What will become of us? What can become of us? Finally she missed something from home: the library of St. Thomas, where she had been accustomed to taking out books in her father's name or going casually back into the stacks and reading whenever her curiosity was aroused about dolphins or Patagonia or Catherine of Russia. Surely in the library information lurked about what she had become secretly.

She watched herself with other women, but she did not feel the same desire to stare nor did their bodies carry that magnetic charge, so that sometimes when she was near Flo, the hair on her arms would rise. No, she refined her observation of herself, she did not want women, she wanted one woman. Maybe that was better; maybe that was worse. Love was supposed to be a miracle and it had come to her finally and late, but not so much as a great fulfillment as a great mystery and a great puzzle which, she felt, Flo looked to her to solve for both of them. Sometimes she asked herself why she just couldn't be content being friends with Flo. Wasn't friendship wonderful enough? No, something hungry in her said, No, not enough. Only everything is enough.

LOUISE 10

The Biggest Party of the Season

It was tankers'weather—clear and dry—and warm enough so that Louise could remember it was August. For several days she had been riding with the artillery, but the advance was too rapid for them to shell the enemy without hitting their own troops. The Germans were fleeing before the oncoming army.

As an indubitably well-equipped army, one of its excesses was correspondents. Everywhere she went she stumbled over thirty of her colleagues. However, she was not here as a military reporter. Human interest and the woman's angle, that was what they wanted, and so far they were thrilled with her. There was United Artists interest in her piece on the nurses as the basis for a vehicle for June Alyson, her agent Charley wrote her. The Army was pleased,
Collier's
was pleased, Charley was pleased, her publisher was pleased and contemplating a collection of her war pieces.

She could hardly recognize herself. I come from a long ragged line of adaptable people, she thought, riding on an antitank gun or plodding up the road between signs that indicated whether the shoulders had or had not yet been cleared of mines. My ancestors were always having to leave one country for another, one life for another. Sometimes they were only allowed to be peasants and sometimes they were only allowed to be merchants and sometimes they were only allowed to be moneylenders and sometimes they were only allowed to work in factories, in sweatshops, in tanneries. Yet her adaptability shocked her, for in her image of herself, she was married, living comfortably in a New York apartment with husband and daughter, planning dinner parties and attending rallies and plays. Now Oscar was with a younger woman, her daughter had married a bombardier, and she was almost accustomed to sleeping in ditches and barns.

She talked to the nurses and the WACs, she talked to the young soldiers around her. Everywhere they were welcomed and feted. In bombed villages, people brought them flowers. The hedge-to-hedge and house-to-house fighting had given way to a mad dash forward. Instead of settling in and housekeeping in the mud as soldiers will, they had new quarters every night. They might be digging foxholes in an orchard or they might be put up in a lycée, but they hardly had time to look around, when they were off.

Living in physical discomfort, grabbing food when she could and eating it standing, sleeping in her clothes on the ground, washing in a helmet, she found herself hardening. She was back in her childhood: walk-up cold water rooms, the toilet in the hall. All the years of comfort, of luxury, of warm running water and soft upholstery and clean fine linen and meals at a table with bone china, her secretary, her mink, her pastel suits, all that had only been lent her and under it she was the same street urchin who spat away from the wind and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Under all the manners and the love and the men and the perfume, there was this sturdy body that could walk all day through the mud. She ached. All of the time, something always hurt, yet she kept up.

She thought sometimes of her father, that stocky hard-muscled Hungarian Jew who had worked in a coalyard and died in a street car accident. Fortunately she had inherited some version of her father's stamina and strength. Every day she needed it. She felt ageless, sexless. Her twelve-year-old self felt closer than the woman who had loved Daniel.

They didn't even worry about strafing, because the Luftwaffe had fled. The biggest problem were snipers who waited in trees, in orchards, behind stone walls. She was walking along interviewing a PFC from Milwaukee when he fell before she even registered the crack and whine. As she bent toward him instinctively, as if to catch him, a bullet creased the top of her helmet, throwing her off her feet.

That made little impression on her, because she considered that shooting at her was a stupid mistake. What upset her was that her interviewing the soldier might have kept him from being alert for the sniper. Finally, she did not think so. Nobody stayed alert all of the time, and the boys were in a victory mood, observing few precautions.

They were just outside Chartres, settling for the night on the edge of a traffic jam of vehicles, near an unharvested field of very ripe wheat. One of the farm-boys with the artillery was shocked, but a French girl told Louise the FFI—the army of the Resistance—had ordered them not to harvest until the Germans had gone. Louise had just got her C rations and perched on the hood of a burned-out truck to eat them. They had meatballs, dehydrated potatoes, canned peas poured together in the mess kit with stewed pears. If Louise had not been too hungry to refuse anything, she could not have eaten it. She imagined the food around them and sighed.

“It can't be. It can't be but it is. I'd heard you were around!” Claude was standing in front of her, peering into her face. “I can't believe they really let you come over!”

“I've been here three weeks, almost four. I'm not the only female correspondent.” She had not seen him since London.

“Would you like some vin du pays with that slop?” He pulled a bottle out of his trench coat pocket.

“I'd love it! Do you want to eat with the guys? There might be extra. We had some casualties this morning.”

“We've been foraging.” He motioned behind him. He had a jeep piled high with equipment, a driver in uniform but not very military looking sprawled at the wheel eating a baguette smeared with cheese. “That's rather extraordinary, what you're eating.”

She had another swig of the wine. “Better than K rations, no? I wonder if this generation will go home expecting to stir the cherry pie into the halibut.”

“The military life seems to suit you, but really, if you hadn't had your hair loose, I'd never have recognized you. If you'll forgive my saying so, you look like any other GI.” Claude seemed vaguely shocked and offended, as if she had let him down or fooled him.

“What are you doing here with a jeep full of movie equipment?”

“Making a doc for Time-Life. Want to know where we're going now?”

“Where?”

He moved closer and bent to her ear. “Paris,” he whispered.

“Oh, eventually, you mean. Aren't we all?”

“No, I mean
now
. I'll have to be my own cameraman, but that's how I started.”

“I know, you have a special invitation from General Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor.”

“You're out of date, Lulu. Stülpnagel's in prison, because he was implicated in that harebrained scheme to bump off Hitler, to use your American gangster phrase. No, it's von Choltitz.”

“The butcher of Sevastopol.”

“The FFI assures me I can get in. The Germans have lost control. For the last week, since the tenth of August, the railway workers have been on strike. On the thirteenth, von Choltitz tried to disarm the French police—he didn't trust them any longer. When the Germans came, the arms had simply disappeared.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Lulu, Paris is a big sponge. The Germans can't control it any longer. Paris is rising, as Paris always has risen. I'm going to film it.”

“May I come along?” Louise asked politely, but she was already determined she was going to seize this opportunity. The other correspondents were patronizing to her, but if she got into Paris ahead of all of them, that would end.

“There's going to be shooting. It will be highly dangerous. It would be a dreadful idea for you to come.”

“Claude, where do you suppose I've been for the past month? I can't be in more danger in Paris than I was in Normandy, and I want desperately to go. You want your film. I want my story.”

“Couriers go back and forth every day to Leclerc, de Gaulle's general, and to the FFI near Paris. They know Eisenhower means to bypass Paris, and the Resistance in Paris has been ordered by Allied Headquarters not to rise. But my friends tell me there's no way to keep the bread from rising. That's an old phrase from the commune, did you ever hear it?”

She looked at him carefully. He was ebullient, fizzing with excitement. He was going home, and he wanted to be there already. “I'm going with you,” she announced. “That's the price of my silence.” She spoke with a consciously flirtatious air, but she meant it, and she hoped that he might guess as much without her having to prove it. After all, her old association with Claude ought to be worth something, although she was quite sure he had no interest in renewing the affair. Like her, he just wanted to get to Paris in advance of everybody else.

She said good-bye to her artillerymen and climbed in the jeep, her pack and her portable typewriter and her bedroll ready to go. The driver, who greeted her in a Parisian accent, straightened himself up and they lurched off down the road. Louise assumed that they did not truly intend to drive through the lines in a jeep, but she was wrong. They stopped in every other village, where one or the other made frequent phone calls; accordingly, they wandered an erratic route, but after they left the Americans behind, they did not encounter the Germans.

“The post office is on strike,” Claude told her. “The civil service is on strike. The police are on strike. There are wall posters all over Paris calling for an insurrection. I hope we get there in time.”

It was raining but they were riding with the top down, so that they could roll out faster if they were attacked. She had no idea when they passed the actual front. They had essentially driven around it and the Germans were fleeing somewhere else. The scene resembled ordinary life far more than it resembled the previous fronts she had seen. When the Army had been pinned down near the coast, a company would really dig in. Near the front every piece of the topography took on great significance, every small irregularity representing either possible shelter or possible danger: an open field that exposed you to hostile fire, a culvert the enemy could ambush you from or infiltrate through. Every bush, every smashed tree, every ditch, every little meadow was known and sometimes named, as in the world of childhood.