Gone to Soldiers (76 page)

Carrying the pistol, she felt stronger. Why was a swagger built into it? Was it the myth of the West? Was it an artificial penis? Was it going against the grain of her upbringing? It can't hurt to know how to use it, even if I never need it, she told herself, and besides, it's a lot quicker than poison and surer than sleeping pills if I ever decide to check out in a hurry.

Death was never far away. One of the women test pilots had cashed it in two weeks before, at another California base. A woman who towed targets in the South had crashed, not from being hit by the live ammunition she faced daily but, scuttlebutt said, from sugar in the gas tank put in by one of the men at that base who hated the WASPs. They felt the WASPs were taking their safe or semisafe jobs and sending them into battle overseas—which was the point. Sometimes they just felt women couldn't be allowed to do what they did. That woman had died in flames for the right to fly.

No weapon could defend against sabotage by maintenance personnel or somebody else with a grudge and access to the hangar, but only the pursuit pilots had sidearms. It was one more way in which they felt chosen, special. When she came in for a pursuit-style landing at a hundred and twenty miles an hour dead-on and then climbed out of the plane, she could not help enjoying the shock, the whistles, the moans, when the pilots at the base saw that it was a woman flying a plane they might not be checked out to touch. Once again in Texas, that did not happen, because that time too she was taken for a man. Expectations were powerful and often controlled what people saw.

Nights in run-down tourist homes and seedy hotels were not amusing, but she could always read. Sometimes she read mysteries to relax, because there was nothing like a good locked room puzzle to engage her mind and make her forget a drab and often hostile little town. Sometimes she read Proust, a squat red Modern Library book. Other times she worked on a mail-order accountancy course she was taking.

With Flo, she talked about what they would do after the war. Bernice would not return to Bentham Center. “The only way I'm going back there is in a pine box,” she told Flo. “And then only if you don't heed my dying wishes. I want to be cremated and scattered from a plane over Long Beach. I like it here.”

Actually the perennial summer bored her, but she loved the work she was doing. They chatted about starting a back country airline, about teaching flying, about running an air circus. What they were sure of was that they were going to stay in flying. Maybe they'd get jobs as test pilots. Maybe they'd get jobs as commercial pilots. Everybody said that the aviation industry was going to take off after the war. Their base commander said every middle-class family would have a plane, just as they had a family car, and they would use it for long trips instead of driving. “Say you have to go from San Diego to San Francisco. Instead of a drive that would take two days, you'll hop in the family plane,” he explained to the group of WASPs.

“Whatever happens, we'll be in on the ground floor,” Flo said softly to Bernice. “We'll keep on flying.”

“No matter what,” Bernice agreed. “We'll keep on together.”

ABRA 7

The Loudest Rain

The Labor Branch was buzzing with energy these days, in preparation for the invasion in the late spring. Almost every night they worked late. Oscar was off at a meeting. Abra left work at nine with Wilhelm and one of the secretaries, Beverly, to drop in on a party for an R & A man back from Algiers. Beverly was a broad-faced drawling Idaho girl. Wilhelm had been a pipefitter in Cologne, a stooped but burly man with a great scar on his face, from a fight with the brown shirts.

She had left the party in a mews in Belgravia for home, when the sirens went off. Must be a practice air raid, she thought. Bombing in London was a thing of the past, just an occasional nuisance raid everybody ignored. Abra was used to rubble, to walking down a street and seeing a gap between buildings like a missing front tooth, to seeing facades with nothing but rapidly sprouting weeds behind the gaping orifices that had been windows, to buildings sliced in two with the rooms open to the cold rain.

She walked a little faster wondering idly what she was supposed to do, reflecting how much at home she had become in London, used to warm beer and cold bedrooms. Probably she should head for the Underground.

Oscar had not volunteered any information about tonight's meeting, some sort of inter-Allied intelligence huddle. He always hoped to learn more about his sister, Gloria. She seemed to be part of MI9 which kept aloof from the other agent networks, specializing in the retrieval of downed pilots and escaped military personnel. A great many women worked in and even ran the MI9 networks. The Germans and their French collaborators were zealously trying to roll them up. All of the time Oscar was a little worried about his sister, a sort of whine in the walls of his mind like a piece of machinery left running, a tension she could sense. He slowly collected what information he could and dreamed of crossing into France to find Gloria, but he was not trained for espionage or liaison work, and OSS had no intention of so training him. They needed him where he was. He was too valuable to be risked on personal odysseys.

Planes overhead, many. She heard a loud thud and the pavement beneath her shook. Suddenly she realized it was not a practice drill. London was being bombed. She felt quite unbelieving, staring up at the skies in which searchlights were crisscrossing and ack-ack guns were roaring into life. She watched the shells bursting. It was better than fireworks, really. The barrage balloons turned like silver dolphins among the lights. A big four-engine plane was caught in the beam of a searchlight and then another fixed on it, so it was trapped in their crossbeams. Rocket shells went off but it continued, unscathed. The plane dived but the lights stayed on it. Its belly opened and out tumbled an amazing number of objects like great seeds turning and falling lazily. A man grabbed her by the elbow.

“Come on, love, we'll hop it to the tube. Jerry's at it again. Come on, briskly.”

They ran down the street together, as the big guns in Hyde Park began barking. The pavement quivered as if a train were running beneath them. A bomb dropped extremely close. “Almost on us,” Abra gasped, running faster.

“Ah, no, love, don't think so. Half a mile maybe. There we are.”

They piled into the entrance of the Bond Street Underground station and ran down the steps into the crowd of people settling themselves, men, women, children, dogs, cats, a bird or two in a covered cage, babies squalling in arms and one nursing contentedly. The man who had run down the street with her sat down with friends who were saving him a place on a blanket. He gave her a wave and paid no more attention. She was grateful to him. Americans were not used to being bombed. They thought bombs were for other people.

The bombs came nearer. It was like something vast walking over houses, shaking the earth. Moloch the metal with feet of fire. It began to feel more personal, that someone up there was trying to kill them all. How safe really were the underground stations?

“Where're the Spitfires?” one man asked querulously. “Where's the Air Defense?”

“All over Germany doing the same to them, wouldn't you wager?” came a woman's nasal clipped tones.

“How long does it usually go on?” Abra asked.

“A Yank,” the woman said. “It's new to you, isn't it? Oh, sometimes it's over in forty-five minutes and sometimes it goes on all night.”

“The worst is,” the man said in his quavering voice, “when the all clear sounds and you go out, and then it starts again. That's the worst.”

Abra looked around, but she saw no one she recognized except her hairdresser and the newspaper vendor from the kiosk where she always bought her morning paper. He was playing checkers with a woman who must be his wife. Both of them had the loose skin of fat people who have lost a great deal of weight. It would be hard to remain really fat in London these days, Abra thought. She herself had lost weight, but it was hard to figure out how much. The British measured their weight in stones, and she always gave up before she figured hers out. She only knew her skirts had grown loose. She tried to think about stones and skirts and the interesting faces of people, quite a mix of social classes, but the bombs kept walking nearer, nearer. She could not think of anything else but the one that was going to fall next, here, on her. Bombs were shaking the walls. “Hitting Westminster hard. Tonight he's letting go a hogshead of the big ones.”

“Yes, tonight Jerry means it. He thought we forgot him.”

“Sounds like the ack-ack blokes got one.”

“Anybody for pinochle?”

“Harry, sit down straightaway and stop tormenting your sister. I'll box your ears if you don't behave.”

“Ooooh, that was a loud one.”

The ground shifted under her. The ceiling would split open, the girders descend in a fall of rock and masonry, burying them, crushing them. She had to use the bathroom. There was already a queue of thirty. She joined it. I would not like to die among strangers, she thought. I want to be with him. It occurred to her that Oscar could die, wherever he was out in London. After all, if that man hadn't grabbed her arm, she might have stood in the street watching the fireworks until one of them landed on her head. She tried to remember the splendid spectacle of the bombs turning in the air, but her throat closed. She could not swallow her saliva.

A man came stumbling down the steps bleeding from cuts on his scalp, his left cheek and his left arm. “Flying tigers,” she heard someone say as people gathered around him. She asked and was told that meant fragments of glass blown at you.

“Make way, I'm a doctor.” A woman left the queue and pushed her way through the crowd.

The noise was the worst, she thought. It made her feel claustrophobic. She felt as if her head would burst with the bombs. If only it would be quiet for a few minutes, just quiet enough to catch her breath and think again, just quiet enough so her head would stop ringing, she would feel restored. She kept imagining that the next bomb would drop directly on the Underground station and they would be buried under tons of rubble.

A woman who had joined the queue behind Abra was saying, “And one of the first bombs dropped on that cinema in Curzon Street full of people watching that new movie with Laurence Olivier and it was dreadful, the ceiling fallen and people screaming and trapped.…”

She wished for Oscar, his presence, the solidity and warmth of his body and the power and mercurial zest of his mind, to talk to her, to distract her, to comfort her. She did not want to die separated from him, in ignorance of his safety or danger. As she finally pressed forward into the overburdened toilet stall to relieve herself, she stared at the door scrawled with the names of fifty different couples.

It was two when the all clear sounded and she followed the crowd up into the street thick with smoke and all the varied burning smells of a hundred different materials and compounds ablaze, the stench of sewage from a burst main, the wail of fire sirens, of ambulances. Flames licked at the sky toward Hyde Park, where the antiaircraft batteries were still at last. She walked along Gilbert Street, but Weighhouse Street was roped off. A bomb had fallen right at the corner and sheared off part of a building. They were digging in the rubble looking for bodies. On the pavement lay something dark and sticky she did not want to see more closely. The street ahead was impassable with fallen masonry and a burning car. What a mess it makes, she thought and laughed at herself. She would have to go back to Oxford Street and round the long way.

At her corner, the sidewalk was covered with glass, glittering dully out into the middle of the road. She picked her way carefully. No bombs had dropped here, but the shock wave of one close by had broken windows. She was relieved to see her own building standing secure, dark behind its blackout curtains.

In her flat, one of her pictures had fallen from the wall and its glass broken. She was exhausted but not sleepy and went over the flat to check for other damage, turning on the electric fire in the sealed fireplace. The ivory walls were growing shabby, painted last probably in thirty-nine, as was the wan pastel floral chintz of the armchairs and sofa. One cushion had leaped to the middle of the floor. A vase that had belonged to the flat's owners, white china studded with raised roses, had broken, to her relief. Items of bric-a-brac had fallen. She supposed that interior decorating in a bombed city must take such problems into account. Was it really safe to go to bed? Perhaps it would all start again. Would she dream of the bombing? She was still righting the fallen objects and realigning the pictures that had lurched crooked on the walls when her phone rang.

“You're there, good. I was worried. I called the office and learned you'd left a couple of hours before the raid started.”

She was pleased that he worried. “I'd just dropped into a party and I was starting home. I was a bit naive. I stood in the street when the sirens went off gawking at the show. Where were you?”

“Quite safe. Don't worry. I wouldn't think anybody would mind if we came in a bit late tomorrow. How about ten?”

She agreed, wishing he would offer to come over, but it was, after all, three in the morning.

Abra began to notice the enormous number of Americans running around London, especially in Mayfair, outnumbering the native English and overwhelming them. She was suddenly not the exception she was used to being, but one of a herd trotting along. Even American women were no longer rarities, for she saw WACs and nurses everyplace.

After growing accustomed to British behavior, she shared certain amusements with the native Londoners, one being how often the Americans saluted each other. It could be dangerous on the streets, elbows always flying out. The Americans were louder, heftier, well-fed looking. Suddenly indeed there was more food in London. In the massive brick Grosvenor Hotel nearby, overlooking Hyde Park, a vast mess was established, the size of a dancehall serving a thousand at a time for fifty cents a meal cafeteria style, American pork chops, fried chicken, ice cream. She had not had ice cream since Washington. The regulars named it “Willow Run” after an aircraft plant outside Detroit, because of the assembly line approach to meals. Soon Abra would be able to take what meals she chose there, since Oscar had become a captain finally and she was in the process of being militarized and would get her rank in a week or two.