Rumors of Peace (38 page)

“Was ist ein
knack?” Ruth asked Helen Maria, and they slipped into
German, like the first time. But I didn't mind because I had pleasant thoughts to absorb myself in: what a nice day it had been, and how well Helen Maria had taken my involvement with Egon; and now, obligingly, she got up and said she would be back in a moment, going over to the students she had said hello to.

“I hear Egon's going to Nuremberg,” I said at once, to make the most of her absence.

Ruth nodded. “Yes. Or at least he hopes to. They must inform him if he has been accepted.”

“Just to watch them hang? You have to be accepted?”

The brown eyes took on a slightly narrowed, criticizing look, as if I had spoken frivolously.

“I don't mean to sound frivolous,” I said quickly. “I'm not belittling it. It would be great to watch, I'd like to watch myself. I'd like to see them starved and tortured first. They should be beaten with rubber hoses.”

She looked at me for a silent moment. Then she said, “You have an ugly way of speaking.”

My face reddened, as if she had slapped it. “Well,” I ventured in defense, “war is ugly. . . .”

“Yes, and you would do well not to babble about it.”

I, a babbler? I who had existed with war night and day for years, who had felt every minute of its terrors and sufferings and lived only for the moment when it would be over? I was no babbler; only to this woman who was always so strange and unpleasant, who must have a demented streak. There was no way of holding a conversation, I realized that; I could only hope to calm the atmosphere before Helen Maria returned.

I had lowered my eyes to the checked tablecloth; I raised them now, to the unpleasant face. “I don't know what I said wrong, Ruth. But I didn't mean to offend you. I apologize.”

She took a sip of her wine, slowly, still looking at me. Then she gave a nod. “It is not necessary. It is perhaps I who am not used to the way Americans speak. We will talk of something else.” And she set her glass down and tried to think of something else to talk about. “So you will become a translator, like Egon?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “I think I should talk to him about it. Do you know when he's leaving?”

“Perhaps now, perhaps later. It is uncertain. He must be accepted. He has applied as interpreter.”

“Oh,” I said. “And I suppose he's coming back?”

“I would think so. He would not want to stay there.”

“Do you think it will be a long trial?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I think it will be long.”

“I hope the food comes soon.” Helen Maria was pulling her chair out. “I'm starved from all that walking.”

“Eat well now,” said Ruth. “In England they serve
Dreck.”

They both saw me off at the station. I gave Helen Maria a hug and held out my hand to Ruth, who crushed it in her stern grip. But she smiled.
“Au revoir,
” she said,
“reviens
à la maison sain et sauf.”

And Helen Maria said, “Come down again. On a Saturday, and stay over.”

I seemed to have passed a test; I had been invited back. “I will!” I said as I climbed aboard. “It was a wonderful day, thanks a million!”

            
Dear Egon,

                
I was in Berkeley yesterday, and I saw your cousin Ruth, who said you weren't sure when you were leaving. If you should be leaving any minute, I could come down right away and wish you bon voyage. It's an easy trip by train. I know you're busy getting ready and I wouldn't want to interfere, so I could meet you on a street corner and say bon voyage, if you were going on an errand anyway, so that I wouldn't take time from your preparations. It's just a thought. Ruth says she thinks it will be a long trial.

Votre bonne camarade,

Suse

When the swimming program started, I did something I thought I would never do: I wore a bathing cap. My skull felt tight and deafened, and I looked like a pinhead; but I didn't want to say good-bye to Egon with green hair.

I was in lifesaving class this year and was special aide to Peggy's bête noire with her clenched teeth and blasting whistle. An instructor in my own right, I enjoyed my position of greatness, yet I missed my old freedom when I was unimportant and could slip away unnoticed for long underwater voyages. With power came clamps; it was the opposite of what you would have expected.

But when everyone else had climbed out and was heading for the dressing rooms, I stayed behind, pulled off my cap for just one plunge, and soared, unimportant and irresponsible, over the side, feeling the great green whoosh in my ears, the green rush slitting my eyes, the depth and perfect silence of this perfect world whose sunlight, dappling down in pale turning coins, I slid through like a fish.

J
ULY
14:

1,000 Yank Carrier Planes

Hit North Japan Targets!

J
ULY
18:

Mighty Allied Fleet

Fires War Factories!

J
ULY
19:

Carrier Planes Blast

Remains of Jap Navy!

It had been hard to wait for victory while Germany crumbled, but not as hard as it was now, waiting the second time around. Sometimes, for no particular reason, you felt you could smell the last day of battle in the summer air, and your heart jolted with realization of the whole thing over; then you sank back waiting again, maybe for years, and the contrast was too much. You grew weary of the black headlines, the big numbers, the exclamation points. When you heard about signs going up in the valley, “Japs, go back where you came from!” or read about a Jap couple returning to Los Angeles, escorted from the train by armed guards for their own safety, you almost wanted to say, for God's sake, leave them alone, enough.

                
Well, it's way past your six weeks' victory date [I wrote Don], so you won't collect your dime. I don't want to bet again, I'm sick of war. I always have been, but now I've begun to imagine the crust of the earth soaked through with blood like wet sand. I suppose that's morbid, so I'll refrain from saying more and ruining your carefree life up there galloping on the range.

                
I told you about my trip to Berkeley, well, I'm going back in early August for another visit. My girlfriend's boardinghouse is giving her a going-away barbecue party, and she's invited me. I'll miss a day of swimming because I'm going on a Sunday and staying
through Monday, but it will be worth it. I'll write you about it. Thank you for your last letter. I'm glad you're not sending any more poems, they're really painful.

Suse

He would answer by return mail, but it wasn't a letter from Don I wanted.

In the late afternoon, when the shade of the house crept over the old card table in the backyard, Mama and I would bring out our pitcher of lemonade and sit down. We talked about its being a year since the Port Chicago explosion. The crickets chirped in the cooling dry grass, and I thought of how they had fallen silent on my walk back, and how beautiful the deep blue night sky had been, and how I was going to be happy forever. I was less of a fool now. Like someone on a wild airplane flight, I had dropped from height to height until I now saw everything clear, steady, unvarnished. No one was happy forever. That was in the realm of magic, the same realm as world peace unfolding without effort. What you had to have faith in was what they had said at the UN: constructive thought, creativeness, and cooperation, and that was what I saw, flying low, steady and clear-eyed.

But the war had to end first. Nothing could begin until the war ended. Until then I would still lie in bed at night with my ears half listening for the air raid siren. Until then the Polish family would be lying out in the open. Because when I spread my hand on the warm tabletop, I still saw them that way. I had somehow thought that when the war in Europe was over, I would see them at peace under a headstone, with grass and flowers growing over them; but that hadn't happened, and I knew they wouldn't be laid to rest until the end.

J
ULY
24:

1,000 Carrier Planes Hit

Largest Jap Naval Base!!

Two exclamation points. Someday the whole headline would be nothing but exclamation points. No words, no sense, just exclamation points going on forever.

There had been a letter from Don, but no letter from Egon. I was waiting for one, and I kept waiting for one; but now a change of direction slowly took place in this waiting. I was no longer waiting for a letter from Berkeley because it was a fact I must face with my new realism: he was no longer there. He had received word, packed, and gone before my note ever reached him. What I waited for now, bitterly disappointed, but patient, because there was no other course to take, was a letter from Nuremberg.

Downtown a strange sight met my eyes. The side of Sheriff O'Toole's office was bare in the pounding heat. The stucco was discolored, the exposed ground damp and dark. I stood there for a long time, staring, then walked on. At the corner I whirled around and looked back. The broad, bare, discolored wall, with the sun pounding against it.

Sheriff O'Toole would never have taken down his sandbags unless the end were in sight. And these old posters along the street, still hanging from storefronts and fences, faded almost white. “Deliver Us from Evil,” “Back the Attack!”, “The Walls Have Ears.” So old, so unbelievably old, and now they would be taken down, too.

J
ULY
27:

U. S., Britain, China Give

Japan Surrender Ultimatum!

Quit or Be Destroyed!

Prompt and utter destruction, said President Truman, was the alternative to unconditional surrender.

“What do you think he means?” I said at the dinner table. “Prompt and utter destruction—how can we all of a sudden promptly and utterly destroy them?”

“You've got me, Suse,” Dad said. “Maybe it's a bluff.”

It must be. Yet the sandbags were down, I smelled ceasefire in the air, I felt it in my blood. The Japs were going to surrender because they didn't know if the bluff was real or not and they didn't dare take a chance. It was a great bluff, and it was going to work. It was a stroke of genius.

J
ULY
28:

Carrier Toll for Week—

752 Jap Ships, 928 Planes!

Why didn't they surrender? Were they going to call our bluff?

A
UG.
2:

Mightiest B-29 Fleet Strikes—

800 Fire Four Honshu Cities!

They weren't going to surrender. They had called our bluff, and the war was going to go on forever.

A
UG.
4:

Streetcar Strike Dispute

To Go Before Grand Jury

I lowered the newspaper with the same feeling I had had when I saw Sheriff O'Toole's blank wall. A headline that was not a war headline? Since Pearl Harbor there had never once been such a thing. A streetcar dispute . . . how beautiful it looked, like a poem.

And so it was true, what I had smelled in the air was real; it was surrender coming, it was peace.

I
WORE MY
S
UNDAY DRESS
, newly washed and starched. My hair, unchlorinated, was also washed, and my shoulder bag was polished to a deep gleam with Johnson's wax. In it, lying near but not cramping Egon's letters, were my toothbrush, a tin container of Ipana tooth powder, and a clean washcloth, wrapped in wax paper. Helen Maria would supply pajamas. She said to bring, primarily, a good appetite.

The big dark-shingled house was up and busy. The door swung open at my first knock, and a girl in a bathrobe, holding a carpet sweeper, said come in and proceeded to attack the hall runner. In the living room to my right there was a flurry of activity, people busily dusting and tidying up. Helen Maria, in her old sea-green robe, which was rather soiled and had a cigarette burn on front, came over waving a dustrag.

“It's our housemother. She goes insane over the mess at the most inconvenient times. Go to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee. I'll be along.”

In the kitchen a radio was playing loud Benny Goodman music, and half a dozen girls, or women, I wasn't sure which, were doing dishes and carrying garbage out and bumping into each other. The one who was directing must be the housemother; she was old and wore a lot of makeup like Mrs. Kerr, but had a long braid down her back like a schoolgirl and wore some kind of peasant outfit. She boomed at me in
the door. “You must be Hatton's friend, don't mind us, we're all at sixes and sevens! Come in, have some coffee! If there's a clean cup—”

She took me over to the table, a clean cup was supplied, and she poured my coffee, something the way Eudene poured coffee. “I'm Pendleton,” she introduced herself, setting the pot down.

“I'm—Hansen.”

“Have you ever seen such a mess? And they want to have a party? You'd think they were a bunch of freshmen!”

But she looked good-natured as she said this, and the girls didn't seem cowed. One threw a wilted lettuce leaf in her direction. They seemed an easygoing lot, and I began to feel at ease; then Ruth came in from the back porch with a bucket of water and a mop, and I felt completely at home, waving hello to someone I knew.

“Comment allez-vous?”
I asked her as she wrung out the mop.

“
Ça va.
Ça va.”

“Avez-vous
heard from
votre cousin?”

“Comment?”

“Have you had a letter from Egon yet?”

“A letter? Why? He is not gone.”

I felt a conflicting rush of emotion—still here, I could still see him! But still here, and never answered my letter.

“I thought he'd gone. . . .”

“In one week he goes. Stand back, I must have room!” And she swung the mop around to make space among the busy feet.

Don had once mailed in a Wheaties box top for a baseball picture, which he had never received. He told me that a long time ago, and I remembered it now. The U.S. mails were not infallible. I knew I wasn't being realistic; but it seemed that I must concentrate on that undelivered baseball picture or else the party would be dust and ashes in my mouth, and it wouldn't be fair to Helen Maria if I brooded through her special day. Nor was it a wild fantasy I was grabbing at: it was a solid fact that that baseball picture had not been delivered, and the more I dwelled on this fact, the better I felt. By the time the house was back in order so was I. Helen Maria and I went up to her garret.

Her grandmother's big black trunk, with all its foreign stickers, stood open and partly filled in the middle of the room. There were suitcases on the bed, clothes draped over chairs, book-filled boxes on the floor. The walls were stripped bare; the closet stood open and half empty.

“I suppose I'm a bit early in packing,” said Helen Maria, lifting up some dresses, looking for something. “But I can't seem to keep from it.”

I was reminded of when she had packed to move down here, restless and eager to leave, walking around, unable to find anything. “Actually,” she said, rummaging through a suitcase, “you'll find this less a barbecue party than a potato salad party. We have invested in three tons of potatoes and only half an ounce of steak, rationing being what it is. But I think it'll be fun. Ah, here,” she murmured, pulling out a slip and a pair of stockings. “Well, you're looking very sprightly. Did you get some coffee? You met Pendleton?”

“Yes. She's nice. She looks like a bohemian.”

“Oh, Pendleton is that. She studied art on the Left Bank years ago and never recovered. Where are my shoes? She's not bad in a quasi-Braque sort of way, but the representational's beyond her. Sit down, you'll have to clear off a chair. She has a Christ on the cross who looks like an arthritic banana. Where are my—ah, there! Read something if you like. Then we'll set up your cot. I'm off to take my shower.”

The party was held on the lawn of the backyard, and the food was mostly potato salad, as Helen Maria had said, with only the smallest bit of steak for each; but it didn't matter since there were also two chocolate cakes which Ruth had baked, and an endless supply of Pepsi-Cola and orange soda, and wine if you cared for that sort of thing.

People strolled around with glasses in their hands or sat in little groups on the grass with plates in their laps, a cosmopolitan lot: refugee types, and women in Indian saris and men with black beards and turbans, and a Scotsman who could have passed for an Englishman in his dark blue blazer like Roger's, and two Chinese girls in long slitted dresses. Helen Maria looked beautiful in a simple white dress with a gardenia behind her ear, and she was very happy, sipping wine and talking with everyone and laughing. She introduced me all around, and everyone
was very pleasant, and Ruth was very pleasant too, cutting me a large wedge of chocolate cake, and even a second large wedge, her hair worn loose and free, her stout form outfitted in a big polka dot dress with strings of pearls. She drank a good deal of wine and grew red-faced and mellow and eventually sank down in the arms of a bespectacled refugee type, who it later turned out was her intended.

Helen Maria's boyfriend was there too, the new one. At first glance he looked heart-wrenchingly like Egon; but on second glance his dark hair was not so dark, and his blue eyes were not so light, and he was taller, thinner, and he had no accent, being from Los Angeles, and no lines around his mouth. He was like a poor twin, but decent enough. He was very fond of Helen Maria, I could tell; she seemed to like him too, but not in a special way. She would find someone really good at Oxford.

The sun blazed down, sparkling in the tall evergreens, whose cool dark blue shade moved slowly across the lawn as the day lengthened. Glasses and bottles clinked, voices were lifted, I could hear Pendleton booming with laughter. The orange soda glittered in my glass as I drank from it, the sky soaring blue and boundless above the trees, and then suddenly everyone began to sing.

                     
For she's a jolly good fellow,

                     
For she's a jolly good fellow,

                     
For she's a jolly good fel-low. . . .

                     
Which nobody can deny!

                     
Which nobody can deny. . . .

And Helen Maria, pleased and smiling and embarrassed, looked around at all the faces, and at the ground, listening as we sang on to the last rousing line. Then she cried. I had never seen her cry. It was very swift. A couple of hard blinks, a swipe of the hand across the eyes, and then she was thanking us all, smiling and shaking hands with everyone who crowded up to wish her a happy voyage.

Though most of the guests left early in the evening, some stayed on, and the party moved inside with more potato salad, more wine, and dancing. I was thankful they didn't jitterbug, but of course they
were too cosmopolitan for that. They did the fox-trot mostly, and I could manage that once I had some wine and got my courage up. At first no one asked me, seeming to think I preferred to sit there with the potato salad and remaining cake; but Helen Maria brought the boyfriend over, and there I was, doing the fox-trot to “Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?” with his arms around me, and they were Egon's arms if I narrowed my eyes slightly so that his face was blurred; I crunched his toes a few times but he didn't mind, he was very decent, and it was an exciting dance, after which I danced with one of the turbans, who had fierce dark eyes and smiled flashingly through his black beard, and that was exciting too. After that I danced with Ruth's intended, and then I danced with everyone.

It was a party that didn't want to end, nor did I want it to. Sometimes it almost died out, with everyone collapsing on sofas or the floor, smoking and drinking wine, and guests yawning and departing; but new ones would come through the front door, and a new record was put on, and everything started up again fresh and lively. I kept awake by going down the hall to the bathroom and splashing my face with cold water, which left me ready for anything. But by four o'clock even that didn't work, and it was a joy to see the party breaking up, though it had been a joy of a party.

I staggered up the stairs behind Helen Maria to the garret, where I pulled off my dress and fell to the cot in my slip. But I couldn't seem to fall asleep. I lay looking at the window, at the dark sky thick with stars, reliving the party until the stars had gone and it was almost daylight.