The Pacific and Other Stories (52 page)

Annalise made the tea for the last time. She lit an army stove that was so black it would never get clean no matter what anyone did to it. And yet the flames that arose were as pure and blue as the most perfect sapphire. She filled a battered aluminum kettle with water from the Jordan, still sweet. As it boiled, she laid out several boxes of
petits beurres
, the milk, the lemons, and the sugar.

She cut the lemons with a short bayonet that lay on the board they used as a table, and threw a box of tea in the water just as it began to bubble. This was the army. They liked their tea black and boiled, scalding and heavily sugared. And though it was army tea it had the humid scent of blooming yellow roses.

The mechanics came in quickly, took their cups and stacks of cookies, and left to catch the last light of afternoon because they didn’t have enough
lights to go around, and they had a never-ending line of vehicles to service and repair.

Shoshanna, Annalise, and the armorers stood fast in the ebb and flow of the distant music as the stove sang in the reddening light. Annalise would never return to the army. The expression was
leshahrir
, to be released, but to every soldier it meant to be free.

“So, Annalise,” said one of the armorers, a Moroccan, “what are you going to do? Are you going to get married?”

“How can she get married after knowing us?” the handsomest armorer interrupted. “How could she stand anyone else?”

They laughed at themselves, and it was endearing.

“Really, Annalise,” the handsome one said, “you’ll have to marry a student from the Technion. No one else would understand the way you talk when you try to tell people what you do. Electrons! Energy levels! Angstroms! What the hell are angstroms?”

“At the Technion, Shimon,” Annalise replied, so evenly in tone that no one would have guessed how long her heart had been broken, “the students are as young as you.”

“Then what about the professors?”

“They’re married.”

“All of them? Every single one?”

“The ones that are my age.”

“But there must be a few,” Shimon said, “one or two.”

“Yes, but it’s a matter of probabilities.”

“What are those?”

“That’s when you can’t—you know,” said the Moroccan. “A lot of those guys, they can’t—you know—because they go down in radioactive submarines and stuff.”

“You’re an idiot,” another armorer said. “An imbecile. Did any of your mother’s other children survive?”

“Everyone except me. They took my food.”

“She’ll visit,” Shoshanna said. “At least she can look in the window when she passes by, to see us slaving here.”

“Of course I’ll visit,” Annalise answered, knowing that she would not, with no reason to visit, that soon Shoshanna would be gone, the armorers replaced
by other armorers, the faces in the window those of strangers, the handwriting in the ledgers entirely new. “Of course I’ll visit,” she said. But those years were over.

In some senses they had ended long before. They had ended when she had not married in her twenties. They had ended when, by her early thirties, she had no children. They had ended when her mother had been taken from her. They had ended when she and her father had stayed close to the sea, and their memories had been unable to dry and blow away on the wind. They had ended on the raft, when the Australian had either been too shy to respond to her or perhaps had been repulsed by the fuse within her that made her what she was. She had already dismissed him, because she herself had been dismissed so many times before.

This tea was the last. For many years now the armorers had seemed to her like boys, and finally the passage of time had brought the moment when she would make the formal separation from them. From now on, when she passed soldiers on the street, she would feel no connection. She would have left them and floated up into old age far earlier than she might have suspected.

In the long silence before Annalise would put down her tea, stand, brush the crumbs from her skirt, and begin to say her good-byes, Shoshanna had begun to cry, and had thought, Well, this is just what women do when they say good-bye.

When she saw Shoshanna, Annalise herself almost cried, but decided not to do so in front of the armorers, lest they know what she cried for. So she rose, and she straightened, and she looked ahead, toward the singing.

There, in the window, was the Australian, peering into the dark interior. At first his barbaric, red-haired visage, bobbing in the window frame like a Visigoth’s, was somehow inexplicable—perhaps because, without his glasses, he himself could not see. With eyes reddened by study and salt water, and with great difficulty in focusing, he peered in at the armorers and the clerks at their tea.

This was not unusual, and Shoshanna averted her eyes, for when men looked in—soldiers from other commands, taxi drivers, students at the language academy—it was to see her.

The armorers watched him take his glasses from a rigid case, and saw
that, after he put them on, he smiled. Though at first one of them had been about to mock him, he was stopped by the Australian’s suddenly clear vision, by the powerful build, by his height, his evident self-possession, and by the air he had of someone coming strongly into his own.

Even Shoshanna was interested, a rare thing. But the Australian was looking right past Shoshanna and all her beauty. He was looking at the beauty of Annalise.

T
HIS WAS PROBABLY
the last place in the world for a factory. There were pine-covered hills and windy bluffs stopped still in a wavelike roll down to the Pacific, groves of fragrant trees with clay-red trunks and soft greenery that made a white sound in the wind, and a chain of boiling, fuming coves and bays in which the water—when it was not rocketing foam—was a miracle of glassy curves in cold blue or opalescent turquoise, depending upon the season and depending upon the light.

A dirt road went through the town and followed the sea from point to point as if it had been made for the naturalists who had come before the war to watch the seals, sea otters, and fleets of whales passing offshore. The road took three or four opportunities to travel into the hills and run through long valleys onto a series of flat mesas, as large as battlefields, which for a hundred years had been an excellent place for raising horses. And horses still pressed up against the fences or stood in family groupings in golden pastures as if there were no such thing as time, and as if many of the boys who had ridden them had never grown up and had never left. At least a dozen fishing boats had once bobbed at the pier and ridden the horizon, but they had been turned into minesweepers and sent to Pearl Harbor, San Diego, and the Aleutians.

The factory itself, a long low building in which more than five hundred women and several hundred men made aircraft instruments, had been built in two months, along with a forty-mile railroad spur that had been laid down to connect it to the Union Pacific main line. In this part of California the railroad had been used heavily only during the harvests and was usually rusty for the rest of the year. Now even the spur was gleaming and weedless, and small steam engines pulling several freight cars shuttled back and forth, their hammerlike exhalations silencing the cicadas, breaking up perfect afternoons, and shattering perfect nights.

The main halls and outbuildings were only a mile from the sea but were placed in such a way, taking up almost all of the level ground on the floor of a wide ravine, that they were out of the line of fire of naval guns. And because they were situated in a narrow trench between hills, they were protected from bombing.

“But what about landings?” a woman had asked an army officer who had been brought very early one morning to urge the night shift to maintain the blackout and keep silent about their work. Just after dawn the entire shift had finished up and gathered on the railroad siding.

“Who’s speaking, please?” the officer had asked, unable to see in the dim light who was putting the question.

“Do you want my name?” she asked back in surprise. She had not intended to say anything, and now everyone was listening to her.

Nor had the officer intended to ask her name. “Sure,” he answered. “You’re from the South.”

“That’s right,” she said. “South Carolina. My name is Paulette Ferry.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a precision welder.”

That she should have the word
precision
in her title seemed just. She was neat, handsome, and delicate. Every gesture seemed well considered. Her hands were small—hardly welder’s hands, even those of a precision welder.

“You don’t have to worry about troop landings,” the officer said. “It’s too far for the Japanese to come in a ship small enough to slip through our seaward defenses, and it’s too far for airplanes, too.”

He put his hands up to shield his eyes. The sun was rising, and as its rays
found bright paths between the firs, he was blinded. “The only danger here is sabotage. Three or four men could hike in with a few satchels of explosive and do a lot of damage. But the sea is clear. Japanese submarines just don’t have the range, and the navy’s out there, though you seldom see it. If you lived in San Francisco or San Diego, believe me, you’d see it. The harbors are choked with warships.”

Then the meeting dissolved, because the officer was eager to move on. He had to drive to Bakersfield and speak at two more factories, both of which were more vulnerable and more important than this one. And this place was so out of the way and so beautiful that it seemed to have nothing to do with the war.

B
EFORE HER HUSBAND LEFT
for the South Pacific he and Paulette had found a place for her to live, a small house above the ocean, on a cliff, looking out, where it seemed that nothing would be between them but air over water.

Though warships were seldom visible off the coast, she could see from her windows the freighters that moved silently within the naval cordon. Sometimes one of these ships would defy the blackout and become a castle of lights that glided on the horizon like a skater with a torch.

“Paulette,” he had said, when he was still in training at Parris Island, “after the war’s over, everything’s going to be different. When I get back—if I get back,” he added, because he knew that not all marine lieutenants were going to make it home—“I want to go to California. The light there is supposed to be extraordinary. I’ve heard that because of the light, living there is like living in a dream. I want to be in a place like that—not so much as a reward for seeing things through, but because we will already have been so disconnected from everything we know. Do you understand?”

She had understood, and she had come quickly to passionate agreement about California, swept into it not only by logic and hope but by the way he had looked at her when he had said “—if I get back.” For he thought truly nothing was as beautiful as Paulette in a storm, riding above it smoothly, just about to break.

When he was shifted from South Carolina to the marine base at Twenty-nine
Palms, they had their chance to go to California, and she rode out with him on the train. Rather than have them suffer the whole trip in a Pullman with stiff green curtains, her parents had paid for a compartment. Ever since Lee had been inducted, both sets of parents had fallen into a steady devotion. It seemed as if they would not be satisfied until they had given all their attention and everything they had to their children. Packages arrived almost daily for Paulette. War bonds accumulated for the baby that did not yet exist. Paulette’s father, a schoolteacher, was a good carpenter, and had vowed that when Lee got back, if they wanted him to, he would come out to California to help with his own hands in building them a house. Their parents were getting old. They moved and talked slowly now, but they were ferociously determined to protect their children, and though they could do little more than book railway compartments and buy war bonds, they did whatever they could, hoping that it would somehow keep Lee alive and prevent Paulette from becoming a widow at the age of twenty-six.

For three nearly speechless days in early September, the marine lieutenant and his young wife stared out the open window of their compartment as they crossed the country in perfect weather and north light. Magnificent thunderstorms would close on the train like Indian riders and then withdraw in favor of the clear. Oceans of wheat, the deserts, and the sky were gold, white, and infinitely blue. And at night, as the train charged across the empty prairie, its spotlight flashing against the tracks that lay ahead of it straight and true, the stars hung close and bright. Stunned by the beauty of all this, Paulette and Lee were intent upon remembering, because they wanted what they saw to give them strength, and because they knew that should things not turn out the way they wanted, this would have to have been enough.

Distant whirlwinds and dust storms, mountain rivers leaping coolly against the sides of their courses, four-hundred-mile straightaways, fifty-mile bends, massive canyons and defiles, still forests, and glowing lakes calmed them and set them up for their first view of the Pacific’s easy waves rolling onto the deserted beaches south of Los Angeles.

Paulette lived in a small white cottage that was next to an orange grove, and worked for six months on instrumentation for P-38s. The factory was a
mile away, and to get to it, she had to go through the ranks of trees. Lee thought that this might be dangerous, until one morning he accompanied her and was amazed to see several thousand women walking silently through the orange grove on their way to and from factories that worked around the clock.

Though Lee had more leave than he would have had as an enlisted man, he didn’t have much, and the occasional weekends, odd days, and one or two weeks when he came home during the half year at Twentynine Palms were as tightly packed as stage plays. At the beginning of each furlough the many hours ahead (they always broke the time into hours) seemed like great riches. But as the hours passed and only a few remained, Lee no less than Paulette would feel that they would soon be parting as if never to be reunited. He was stationed only a few hours away and they knew that he would try to be back in two weeks, but they knew as well that someday he would leave for the Pacific.