Gone to Soldiers (54 page)

“Does that about cover it?”

“I try to be thorough.”

“You try to be a smart ass, and commonly you succeed. If I do go with him, I'll miss you.”

“You're missing me now,” Daniel said, taking her arm companionably.

On May 22, 1943, Oscar and Abra sailed out of New York on the
Queen Mary
, turned into a troop ship. They were not in the same cabin; rather they were each sharing a cabin with numerous others. Three other OSS women and eight nurses shared an eight-by-eight cabin with Abra, makeshift bunks thrown up with barely room to fit herself into her slot. The
Queen
being a fast ship, they did not travel in convoy but charged on alone. Abra was out to sea two days before it occurred to her they could actually be torpedoed. She was horrified to note that her first thought was how she and Oscar could end up in the same lifeboat.

Yet lined up at the railing watching the water break and sky alter, she enjoyed the time in limbo, talking, endlessly talking. Oscar admitted to her that one reason he had intrigued for the London posting—the first time he had not pretended it had emerged from the blue heavens like an angel descending—was that he nurtured vague hopes that once near Europe, he could get some word of his sister Gloria in occupied France. Through Louise he had learned something that led him to believe that surely there were ways in and ways out that he could exploit at least to learn her situation and at best to help her.

Every day was livened or rendered obnoxious, depending on what was interrupted, by lifeboat, fire, collision, enemy air and enemy sea attack drills. As many people as possible hid in the bathrooms after the first day. The boat was jammed. Except for the dining rooms, all the large rooms were dormitories. They were among the only civilians on board, along with half a dozen other OSS people. There were fourteen of them altogether, but the others had been given noncommissioned or commissioned officer status, and wore nondescript uniforms. They tended to keep together, as they had to tell other people cover stories. Meals occurred in four sittings, the last for the colored personnel. The
Queen
was segregated all ways.

She actually began to feel that she was approaching the war zone. She had been so muddled about whether Oscar was going to take her, whether he genuinely wanted to take her, that she had not focused on where she was headed. Evenings tended to be dull. A strict blackout was observed. No one was allowed on deck after dark. Sailors were stationed to block any conceivable area of privacy where the few women on board might copulate with the many men. They managed to make love exactly once by skipping their sitting at lunch, but there was time to think and time to talk.

“I was in Europe in thirty-eight during the summer. Ready—my middle brother—had just graduated from Annapolis, and my parents took us abroad to celebrate. I remember we came into Le Havre on the
Normandy
—my mother swore by French boats as having the best food. I know we spent time in Paris, Florence and Rome, where it was unbearably hot. I remember Nice and someplace with a Roman amphitheater where my parents had a dreadful row. Then we visited third cousins in Northumberland and in Edinburgh. My father had a prejudice against London, the same as he did against New York.”

“I've been in London, but not long enough to know it. I spent a good part of a year in Frankfurt, with Louise. We had no money, but we thumbed rides and rode third class on the slow trains. At the end we wandered around Italy. Later on we came back every couple of years. Besides Frankfurt, Paris is the European city I know best.”

“I can't say I got much out of the trip. I gawked at a mess of paintings and churches and ate great quantities of veal and pastries. Every single day I fought with my father or my mother.”

“What did you fight about in those days? Not politics?”

“I was a flaming radical, or so I imagined, for I'd never met any. I thought saying that I was a Socialist was rather risqué. It certainly exercised my father.”

“I've always enjoyed traveling, but it's better when you don't drag a child along.… Sometimes I wonder if Louise and I should ever have had Kay. Only children get too much attention or none.”

“Why did you, then? Just because that's what married people do?”

He grinned. “Exactly. At least on my part. I think Louise wanted a baby, although I never could grasp why. It wasn't as if her life was empty and needed filling.”

She waited to see if he was going to ask her if she ever wanted to have a child, but he did not. That was rude. Involved as they were, he ought to at least pretend to be interested in what she wanted long-term. Or was he afraid to leave an opening? Watching a squall blow up, she thought that perhaps he defended himself so well because he feared their intimacy. She had won to a relationship with him; she would win through to a fuller love.

They had to clear off the deck as it was time for the twice daily drill of the antiaircraft crews, shooting into space. Once and once only on their sixth day they saw the smoke of another ship. Oscar was feeling the frustration of prolonged chastity also. The way he took her arm had become quite desperate. He explored the ship incessantly without success. Even the lifeboats had guards posted to keep them from use as improvised bedrooms. “When we get to London,” Oscar said in her ear, “the first thing I'm going to find is a nice double bed. And a door that shuts.”

She worried too much, she decided, because love had come to her comparatively late. He told her he loved her; he showed his attraction every desirable way; he had taken her off to London with him. What more did she want? She tried to pack herself tight the way she had packed her trunk, everything folded or rolled in its place and the lid locked on. In London he would be far away from his ex-wife, his ex-girlfriends, his daughter, his mother, his brother and sisters. He would be with her and a handful of Americans, and they would become much closer.

LOUISE 5

Of the Essential and the Tangential

Louise swore at her alarm, but hauled herself up. She was determined to rise every morning before Kay, to prepare a proper hearty breakfast and present it with appropriate motherly behavior. She was not at her best upon waking, but she summoned up images of warm, understanding, efficient film mothers. She had been seeing too many movies lately, because it was something she and Kay could do together without friction. In addition, there were always films she ought to see because she knew someone who had had a hand in making them, Claude or an acquaintance she had met in Hollywood.

She had visited Claude several times, because Billy Wilder was filming one of her novelettes. Claude satisfied her on many levels, but they did not share a life or even a common context. With him she learned the pleasures of tangential relationships, but she knew quietly and without it being something she would find appropriate to convey to anyone else, how hollow that left a place that had once been well filled.

Claude thought in French; he dreamed in French landscapes. He lived in an exile world whose true coordinates were streets in another city, on another continent. There were women who would seek the exotic to love, who would follow a man willingly into another set of customs and expectations to achieve not only abnegation but a personal liberation in the abandonment of what they had been. Louise could imagine Kay doing that, escaping from her obsession with her father by running off with a sheik or a gaucho.

She prodded her melancholy warily, mistrustful that any good could come of pitying introspection. Her situation seemed obvious and neither ideal nor sad, a life to be lived, rich in friends, rich in work. No writer had financial security and no mother alone ever felt secure, but she made a good living. What would she change, if she could? She wished she had a better relationship with Kay. She wished Kay were—more responsible? less sullen? less self-pitying? more affectionate? All of the above, perhaps.

“Mommy, ugh, here I am.” Kay stumbled in, rumpled from sleep. Lately Kay had been calling her “Mommy” as she had not since she was ten. It was not so much a sign of Kay's dependence as of her willful sojourn in childhood. Kay one day dragged out her favorite doll (last seen in 1938) and placed it on her bed, where it sat in a pink organza dress. She reread her old favorites,
Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows
. She began braiding her hair, but girls at school teased her out of that affectation.

Louise bore with the regression, because it could not last past September when Kay would be going to Mount Holyoke College. This was an easy time to choose a college, because they all wanted students, although traveling was rough. Louise and Kay had visited a dozen colleges up and down the Eastern seaboard, from the University of Virginia to the University of Maine, but Kay had liked South Hadley, a pretty, placid New England town. “It seems very safe here,” Kay had said approvingly. They saw few young men, although many young women passed them on bicycles and on foot.

Louise had been almost sorry when Kay had chosen, because she had been enjoying their trips. Each college was a new experience providing them a topic of conversation. They could compare colleges in endless discussion; not endless, for the idyll had run out.

Louise had been pleased that she could offer this benign educational experience to her daughter. She had gone to night school herself and never managed to get her degree. She had hoped that Kay might attend Wellesley or Radcliffe, but Kay wanted a small college town.

It was not that Kay was less critical of her, as now poking her English muffin. “But why don't we have butter? Other people get it all the time. What's the use of being so thick with the government and all the time running off to Washington, if we can't do a little better with rationing?”

No, Kay was just as critical as before, but obviously enjoyed absorbing Louise's time and energy. In truth Louise sometimes enjoyed her daughter's company, but often did not. Kay was self-absorbed, and her conversation never strayed far from what she wanted or did not want, liked or did not like, what she thought this one or that one thought about her, or might do to or for her. Louise liked a greater degree of intellectual content and a higher degree of abstraction in discourse. Nonetheless, she gave and gave to Kay, aware that Kay would be leaving home in September and aware too how her sexual misadventures had left her even more insecure than she had been.

Louise was still in her bathrobe when Kay left for school. Glancing at the clock, she hastened to bathe and dress. With Oscar home, she would never have appeared at breakfast in deshabille. When the phone rang at ten to nine, she was sure it was Blanche with a problem. With her twins in school, Blanche worked from nine to three. But the voice that queried, “Louise?” was Oscar's familiar rumble.

“Oh, hello, Oscar,” she said, seeking as always an appropriate tone to use with him, neither artifically chilly nor encouraging. “How are you? Are you calling from Washington?”

“I'm at Grand Central Station in a booth. I'm off to London—”

“Can you tell me when, or is that a military secret?”

“I'm in New York for the next eight hours. I thought I'd come right up.”

She felt a cold panic. “Where is Abra, by the way?”

“Visiting her family.” He cleared his throat. “I thought I'd come by now and see you.”

“Oh, not right now, Oscar, I have an appointment.” She lied in a panic. She had not prepared herself to meet him. She could not face him at once, without armoring her nervous system.

“Oh.” He allowed himself to sound disappointed, forlorn. “An important appointment?”

“Professional.” After all, he was off to the war zone. She could not refuse to see him. “Kay just left for school. I'll try to reach her.”

“Oh, you shouldn't call her out of school.”

“I'll meet you for lunch.” She was not going to let him come to the apartment. “Twelve. That Spanish place you like?”

“Let's eat uptown. I haven't had decent Chinese in ages. What about the Harbin Inn?”

“Fine,” she said. “Then we can meet Kay at school.”

She really had considerable work. She had been writing less fiction and more journalism. Her present state of mind was better suited to the latter. That had been her original ambition, and the war was giving her an opening. She could exploit her name to write features on all aspects of women's work and lives.

She was off in two weeks to zigzag around the country for a piece on women fliers for
Collier's
. In the meantime, she owed
The Saturday Evening Post
a story, and she had to finish a rewrite on a
Times
magazine feature on children of working mothers. She had been quarreling with her editor, as he wanted something far more negative than she felt the material warranted. Psychologists she had interviewed had been gloomy and prognosticated doom for children not supervised by their mothers all of the time for all of their childhood, but her own observations of good nurseries and her interviews with families had persuaded her that children who spent their days with other children in a well-run center were probably more advanced socially and emotionally than children on whom their mother squatted all day, a brooding hen. As she had.

She arrived at lunch ten minutes late, from having changed her clothes three times. Oscar was already in a booth looking at his watch. After they had ordered and brought each other somewhat up to date, she said, “I'm sorry Abra couldn't be here. I enjoyed meeting her.”

“I'm sure you're sorry. You relish gloating over me. I wouldn't be with her, if you had come back to me.”

“Oscar! Come back? I wasn't aware I'd gone anyplace.”

She
had
liked Abra but mainly she had pitied her. What Abra had in abundance was energy, a vitality that shimmered, a bright liveliness not sufficient to protect her against Oscar. She was obviously crazy about him. For a decade he had been dealing with young people as a teacher, and he was very much in control. It was all too easy for him. He deserved more trouble than Abra was about to give him.