Gone to Soldiers (75 page)

“I can only pass messages on. I have no authority to command weapons for you, or believe me, I would. It's dangerous for you to be so lightly armed, I understand. But back in London, they don't understand.”

“Vendôme just helped me take a group of children to Spain, Papa—”

“In this weather?”

“One of our best people was caught, and the children could not stay where they were. They endangered everyone. I have been taking children over the Pyrénées for months.” I suppose I was sounding rather stilted, but I was boiling inside.” Vendôme is also my lover.”

That dropped like a bomb that falls and does not go off and you wait to see is it on a time delay, so that if you raise your head it will kill you. I believe both Jeff and Papa were far more embarrassed than I was. Jeff startled babbling, “She really shouldn't be still taking the children through because her description is all over the border and they have a price on her head. But we had no serious problems.”

No serious problems. Only my first dead child. I said nothing, as I knew his nervousness was speaking. For all he knew, perhaps Papa would pick up his rifle and shoot him to avenge the family honor. I was quite sure Papa would do nothing of the sort, although clearly he himself did not know quite how to behave.

Instead Papa said to me, “I am proud of you, the work you're doing. You have to judge when it is too hot for you to stay down. When it gets dangerous, you should come into the mountains with us. It's a hard life, but I think you would manage just fine.”

“She's tough and fit,” Jeff said. “I should say I am not married and that I am very serious about your daughter.”

Papa laughed, wiping his eyes. “She has a hard head. You don't look Jewish?”

“People always say I don't, Papa, but he isn't, and don't start on me again about that.”

“Have I said anything? After the war, we'll straighten everything out. You're in the Jewish underground and not Jewish?” Papa motioned for him to sit at the table. I was still standing. The boy with the Sten gun was on guard by the door. It was not embarrassing to talk in front of him any more than it would have been to talk in front of a large dog.

“I don't think they knew what they were sending me into, but it doesn't matter. We all fight the same war.”

I pulled out the third chair and sat. Papa opened the cupboard as if he knew where to look and brought out some armagnac and two glasses. Then he looked at me and brought a third. “Are you Catholic?”

“I'm nothing. I'm not even a Christian,” Jeff said.

“L'chaim.” We all clinked glasses. Papa said, “If the mother is Jewish, the children are Jewish. What would you think of that?”

“I have no tradition I want to hand on to them, except that they should want to be free and use their eyes.”

I have slept with this man two times and we have children already. Suddenly I felt compassion for both of them, trying to deal with each other and with me, who am not easy. “He's a painter, Papa. A real one.”

“What do you paint?”

“Landscapes.” He grinned. “And your daughter.”

I knew it was all right. Papa was focused on Jeff and not on me, and I have forgiven him, and punished him a little too, I know that. Now I could look from one face to the other and feel warmth in me that was not of the armagnac, but of my heart and my joy. With just the light of the little lamp burning and the fireplace, they both looked fine enough to melt anyone's bones.

Papa was thin under his heavy leather jacket and his clanking hardware. His beard makes his eyes burn from his face. We have the same coloring and the same nose. We have the same stubbornness too. I was sure he would have to like Jeff because I want him. I almost thought Papa would marry us off while he was here tonight, but he restrained himself. Perhaps he still hopes for a Jewish son-in-law. Perhaps he only hopes we will all survive. Perhaps like me he dreams of a different society afterward. Next time I see him, I will ask him. All too soon another armed man knocked on the door, a code knock, Beethoven's Fifth, and the boy with the Sten gun and Papa prepared to leave. I went to the door with them but they just melted into the night and were gone into silence before I could speak again. Then and only then I began to cry.

BERNICE 6

In Pursuit

The P-47 felt all engine to Bernice. The monstrous engine with its huge gleaming propeller blades blocked her view forward, so she had to maneuver in S-curves down the runway to see for takeoff. The first time she had flown at P-47, during a training course for pursuit aircraft at Brownsville, Texas, she had felt overwhelmed, frightened. She was given no time to get used to the power of the beast, because there was room in the little canopy for only one. Her first flight had been alone as all afterward would be.

The P-47 was a descendant of the plane in which Jacqueline Cochran had won races and set records before the war. The fighters were the fastest planes of all, the most advanced aircraft available, and she was flying them all the way from Long Beach, California, to Newark, New Jersey.

She was glad to be out of Romulus, where the local commander had mistrusted the WASPs and tried to keep them from flying anything but trainers. Actually, Lorraine and Helen back at Romulus were flying fighters now too. However in Great Falls, Montana, they had to hand them over to men. There the commander had dictated that women could not be trusted in Alaska, because there were too few women there and too many men who had not seen a woman in years. Alaska was forbidden to WASPs, and at the Canadian border, the women had to get out of the fighters.

Bernice was glad she had been reassigned, although she missed the tight group that had been her family for months. Flo had been transferred to Long Beach with her, but often they did not see each other for a week at a time.

February in Long Beach was perennial summer, but she flew into winter as she made her way east. She could not believe how fast the flight was in the pursuit plane. Commercial flights took two or three days to get from coast to coast, but she could reach Newark in one long day, weather permitting. Weather forbidding, it once took her five days. Gradually the white would overspread the landscape beneath her. If she took a more southerly route, she would fly for hours over areas that were white and then areas that were clear, browns, greys, sepia tones, the dark green of pine. She felt enormous power and clarity as she sped above the landscape that from a plane always appeared orderly, arranged, even the wilderness neatly sculptured and mowed. Then the clouds moved toward her in their serried rows and she was alone in a world of sunlight above, or tossed and bounced and shaken in high columns of swirling grey.

The first time she had climbed into the cockpit of a fighter, she had felt an immediate urge to pry herself back out. She had wanted to bolt. She could not possibly learn the use or the meaning of all those dials and switches, those levers and gauges, those buttons and knobs. Then she thought that fighters were flown by men who had to react in split seconds or die in flames, so she could surely learn to master the instruments' apparent complexity with no one shooting at her. She would not let herself be daunted and she would act at all times as if she felt complete confidence.

Bernice barely fit into the cockpit. Flo was more comfortable physically. Bernice imagined that the ideal fighter pilot ought to be small in stature: in fact, a woman rather lighter boned than herself, but she kept such heresies to share only with the other women pilots. She was extremely lucky to be stationed at Long Beach, for here they seemed to go less by the book and more by ability.

With many different airplane manufacturers located in the area, she would eventually get to fly every single fighter in production. Sometimes they did not return directly but might be given a trainer or other plane to deliver anywhere else in the continental United States, and might end up flying four or five different planes to destinations thousands of miles apart before reappearing at Long Beach to claim the next fighter for ferrying to Newark, whence the planes would be sent on to the war itself.

Mrs. Augustine reported that The Professor had solved his problems with a live-in housekeeper, a German refugee, “not a Jewish lady as I understand it, but the wife of a Socialist professor who was fired and came to the United States.” He had died of cancer, leaving his widow destitute. Her English, Mrs. Augustine reported, was patchy. “Sometimes I understand her, sometimes I don't. Your father talks German with her.”

Some of the neighbors would not speak to her, because of her being German. They thought she might be a spy. Her name was Mrs. Gertrud Ansheimer, and she had moved in with a little dog.

Bernice had some trouble imagining her father living with a dog, big or little, as he had nothing but contempt for pets. Jeff and she had been forbidden them as dirty and unnecessary.

Bernice soon received a note from her father, the first since she had left home. He did not say he forgave her, but he commenced as if he had been writing regularly. He complained about having to teach classes in which he could only be a step ahead of his students. He was teaching all the languages, from French to German to Italian (and you know, he wrote, how faulty my Italian remains), Spanish, and also navigation and algebra. He had taken brief courses in order to bone up on those subjects, but he still felt like an impostor.

“We have a pooch now, named Der Meistersinger because of the droll noises he produces when he wishes to go out or demands to be fed or given his doggy bone. He is a terrier of sorts and has been catching rats in the woodpile. Not your brown rats, but the local wood rats who seem to hang around the house in the winter. Very useful animal, this Meistersinger.”

Bernice hastened to write back an equally bland and factual letter about her work. She sent along a photograph of herself with Flo in front of a P-38 Flo had been about to ferry east.

“Notice my suntan,” she wrote on the back. “Today it's 92 here. My poor body must be horribly confused about the season. Ninety-two here this afternoon and in two days I'll be in a blizzard.”

Crisscrossing the United States seemed to confuse their bodies in other ways too. She missed a period entirely. If that had happened right after she had slept with Zach, she would have been convinced, in spite of his pronouncements of infertility, that she was pregnant. However, she doubted she could carry a sperm around hidden in some crevice for months, and when she finally brought up the subject, she discovered the other women pilots experienced the same dislocation. “Too close to the moon,” Flo hazarded.

Zach wrote occasionally. Sometimes he would send off an amusing account of some activity safe to describe, such as a rock-climbing expedition—presumably in some partisan context—when he was attacked by an irate nesting eagle. Twice he wrote her sexually explicit letters in French. Her French was excellent—her mother Viola had made sure of that from early childhood, as next to ancient Greek that had been her favorite language—but she lacked the precise vocabulary for sexual parts and action, and had to guess his meaning. Zach wrote that he liked to give the censors a workout and a little fun. He could not contemplate anything more boring than reading the average person's mail, unless it was being forced to listen to his phone conversations, or his sins in a confessional. Once he had had to pose as a priest and it seemed to him a lousy way to make a living. He felt there were few original sins, although he planned to see what he could manage in that line when next they got together.

He wrote, “I hear that your brother is alive and functioning, that's all I know. I still would like to kick him from here to Sunday. If he survives, you and I should gang up on him and beat him to a pulp for putting us through all this. My opinion is that you have the real brains of the family, and turn out to be surprisingly more fun to hump.”

Flo referred to them when they came as Bernice's love letters. Bernice found that an amusingly inaccurate label. Sometimes they were funny, sometimes petulant, often obscene, but never did they speak of love, which was just fine with her. She could still not quite believe what had happened between them, but her memories were strong.

For years she had masturbated by imagining herself in various movies which slowly brought her into a state of excitement. Now her masturbation was more efficient, relaxing her to sleep in fifteen minutes. She focused on one of the scenes with Zach. His body was as vivid and real to her as the dials on the instrument panel of the fighters she flew. Zach's blatant control and his streak of sadism made her feel flown. That was somehow potent. It was the ignition spark. No more vague glories of melting flesh.

Except when his occasional letters came or when she masturbated, she seldom thought of Zach. Her life was absorbing. She thought oftener of Jeff, with a rootless anxiety. Having no idea where he was or what he was doing, it was as if he had vanished. She presumed that any news would be bad news, and that it was better to exist without information, but daily she thought of him and hoped he was safe and thriving.

In the meantime, she was learning to shoot. They were required to carry a .45 sidearm, not to protect themselves but rather the extremely valuable planes equipped for combat, with a number of secret devices and instruments on board. Aside from delivering the plane promptly and safely, their other prime directive was to keep it from being stolen or examined by anyone unauthorized.

Helen wrote that she hated the ugly object and always took the bullets out and stored the .45 in the bottom of her suitcase. Flo already knew how to use a rifle. She liked to practice at a local range, where Bernice began going with her. Although Bernice considered the .45 inelegant, it was still an impressive piece of hardware, and she did not want to be excluded from its mastery.

Weapons had always been Jeff's prerogative. Learning to shoot had been one of his private pleasures, those jaunts into the countryside when he explored the male world and then the world of sex open to him but not to her, at the same time managing to denounce wordlessly The Professor's values. It had never occurred to Jeff to teach her to shoot, just as it had never occurred to her to ask to be taught.