The Road Taken (9 page)

Alcohol had long since become legal again, and everyone had a silver cocktail shaker and a book that gave recipes for all sorts of fanciful mixed drinks, and they smoked cigarettes nonstop because it was sophisticated. Luckys, Camels, to break the ice, to keep you thin. These parties were an entertaining change from their usually austere lives as responsible parents, and Rose and Ben enjoyed them. Celia, who liked parties, had fun too. But Harriette, although some of the men later asked her out, never seemed happy at all.

“Will you do something with her?” Celia asked Rose. “Talk to her. I don’t want her to be like me—too independent. I want her to be like you.”

Rose was not sure if that was to be taken as a compliment or an insult, but she invited Harriette to a nearby restaurant for lunch so they could talk, away from everyone else. “What’s wrong?” Rose asked. “Tell me. You can trust me.”

“You won’t understand,” Harriette said.

“Well, try me.”

“There
is
someone in my life.”

“But?”

“My mother will never stand for it. My father will have a heart attack. This would kill him.”

“What would kill him?”

“My friend . . . the man I’m in love with . . . he’s married,” Harriette said.

Married! No wonder she was so sad and never looked at any eligible young men. And of course Harriette couldn’t tell anyone; it would be a scandal if the story came out in their close-knit little town. Rose was very surprised and deeply sorry, but not as shocked as one might have expected her to be. She considered herself a rather worldly woman now, who lived in Greenwich Village, in New York City, where anything could happen and did, and she supposed Harriette thought so too, which was why she had been chosen as the confidante. “Who is he?” she asked.

“One of the men I work for. I’d rather not say.”

“Oh, Harriette. Is he going to get a divorce?”

“He can’t. There are children.”

“But this will lead nowhere,” Rose said.

“I don’t care.”

“You will ruin your life.”

“That’s what my mother would say.”

“And she’d be right.”

“I thought you would understand.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Rose said. Harriette looked relieved. “Are you . . . ?” Rose began, and stopped. It wasn’t her business and she had no right to pry.

“Sleeping with him?” Harriette said. “Yes.”

She was only fourteen years older than her half sister, but suddenly Rose felt old. She herself had been so pure, such a virgin when she got married, and it had taken a while for Ben with his patience and kindness to show her that sex between a man and a woman could be a powerful thing. Once you understood that, you were tied to the man who had shown you, in a way you were tied to no one else. Yet even now, after all these years, when they were out of the bedroom she and Ben never discussed what happened when they were in it. What occurred between them was a part of the night, as if he thought it was a part of their darker natures.

“Are you upset?” Harriette said.

“A little. But it’s a fact, and I can’t change it.” She wondered if other men were like Ben, or if Harriette’s lover was lusty and romantic. “Do you . . . I hope you . . . take precautions?” Rose asked.

“French letters?” She saw Rose’s bewildered look and smiled. “Condoms, Rose. And yes, I do.”

Rose knew she could not even tell Ben. In his own way he was more old-fashioned than she was, and she knew he would think much less of Harriette. The truth would come out eventually, she was sure of it, and who would marry Harriette then? Her married man would abandon her, or he would not, and in either case her reputation would be ruined.

As they walked back to the house Rose looked long and hard at Harriette: her slim body, her relaxed walk, her now cheerful face. How could she be so happy, so nonchalant? In the presence of this fallen woman, her “little” half sister, she was suddenly, shockingly, filled with all sorts of erotic thoughts and fantasies. Rose had once thought she was tragically in love forever, but she now knew that she herself could never throw everything away for love, or sex. Did that mean the love or sex she had experienced in her life fell far short of what was possible? She would never know. She had a family of her own now, she was happy. But she could understand why other women would hate the “home wrecker,” and why other men would want to seduce her. Whether or not Harriette and her illicit lover knew things that would always be hidden to her older sister and her courtly husband, and to their more conventional neighbors, was not the issue. They made people doubt their own sense of peace.

Chapter Eleven

Despite everything that was happening in Europe, the American people did not want another war, whatever the cost of staying out; they remembered too well how the Great War that had ended over twenty years ago had taken its toll. They continued with their ordinary lives, in a kind of half restless fantasy. Meanwhile, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tied down by strict neutrality acts and aware that the danger of the aggression abroad would eventually harm the United States, campaigned, argued, and warned the country to wake up. Isolationists and interventionists argued hotly through 1940 and 1941, but then there was nothing to argue about because on December 7th the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. America was at war again.

This was the good war, the virtuous war, and finally, even a popular one. Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo were clearly evil and the Allies were clearly good. A struggle between good and evil is always virtuous, heroic. And furthermore, unlike the Great War (which was now called World War I), this war was too close for comfort. The enemy was capable of flying over our soil, bombing our cities. There were air raid drills, air raid shelters, blackouts. Almost all the nation’s men under thirty-five were drafted, and many who could have been exempt because of family obligations or age enlisted. You had to be pretty sick to be classified 4-F, because you could always do a desk job. Women enlisted too. Other women went to work in factories and war plants to take the place of the fighting men who were away. Rosie the Riveter, in her turban or snood, making bullets, was suddenly no longer denigrated as the weaker sex.

“They’re either too young or too old,” the song went. “What’s good is in the Army, what’s left will never harm me.”

Rose covered the glass doors that led to their dining room with black packing tape, in case a bomb would shatter them. Ben was an air raid warden, who watched on top of their building every night, flashlight in hand, to make sure the blackout was complete. Hugh, who had been saved from the draft by one year because he was now thirty-six, surprised everyone by enlisting.

“You don’t have to,” Rose said.

“I do. I want to do my part.”

Somehow she could not imagine Hugh in the Army, certainly not in battle, and perhaps the Army felt the same way because Hugh was sent to Newport News, Virginia, to be in charge of uniforms. “Perfect for him,” Celia said when Rose told her. “He’ll probably try to redesign them.”

“Why are you always so mean about Hugh?” Rose said. He had come home on leave, his hair cut short, his chest filled out from doing pushups, and he looked proud and patriotic. He seemed unexpectedly masculine, the actor in his new role, his great, world-class, costume drama. Perhaps, Rose thought, the war had brought out the best in him. She was proud of him and she loved him.

Peggy and Joan wrote to him regularly, and he always wrote back, cheerful, funny letters, which they saved. Rose remembered herself, so long ago, writing to Tom at Fort Riley, deluding herself that he was out of danger, and she prayed for Hugh to be safe and well.

There was gas rationing now, and food rationing: hardly any sugar or coffee, meatless Tuesdays and Thursdays—Papa, the butcher, was so popular lately, everyone trying to get on his good side to buy what little meat there was—and there were plastic bags of strange-looking white margarine with a little blob of yellow coloring in them, which the housewife would knead until it was all yellow, although it still didn’t look or taste like butter. There was clothes rationing and shoe rationing. The flapper skirts of the twenties had dropped to a dowdy mid shin length in the sad Depression thirties, but now they were short and narrow again because the Army needed the cloth. The military look was completed by large shoulder pads.

Once again, Celia and Maude rolled bandages for the Red Cross, while this time Peggy and Joan, age thirteen and ten, collected the tinfoil wrappers from packs of cigarettes and chewing gum, for the war effort, hoping to hand in enough to rate a pair of wings from the AWVS uniform, since collecting enough scrap metal for an entire uniform was out of the question because you had to get so much. In addition, the girls had chores to do at home, because the family’s cleaning woman was welding parts for bombers. And Rose was in the park again with a baby stroller, for lively three-year-old Ginger, comparing notes with her friends, worrying about feedings and discipline, confused and annoyed that child psychology rules seemed to change with every baby, as if the doctors themselves had no idea.

The medical miracle of the war was penicillin. First discovered in 1928, a bacteria-killing mold made from bread, it became the first successful antibiotic, refined and used on the battlefields for the wounded and then becoming part of every doctor’s arsenal for infectious diseases. Pneumonia and septicemia were no longer death sentences.
Alfred would still have been with us,
Rose thought, and was sure Celia was thinking the same thing, although they never mentioned it. No one ever spoke of Alfred; the subject was just too painful for Celia, even now after all these years.

And there were other medical strides into the future. Blood plasma could be stored to transfuse the wounded instead of whole blood. A new generation of doctors was improving plastic surgery through reconstruction. And the Strang Clinic in New York City was the first to introduce the Pap test, a vaginal smear test for the early detection of cervical cancer, which, like penicillin, had been discovered in 1928 but only now in the 1940s was able to be used. It was a routine test, and Rose and Elsie and several other women in the neighborhood were sent for it; after their initial nervousness at the very idea of such a procedure, about even having to think about such a terrifying thing as cancer, they were relieved to be diagnosed normal.

That summer, at the beach, a friend of Rose’s and Elsie’s in the neighborhood was struck on the breast by a medicine ball, and the doctor, when examining the bruise, found a lump. Their friend had a mastectomy, the first person Rose had ever known with cancer; or perhaps there had been many—the stomach pains, the coughing, the broken bones, the weakness and bleeding—whom she had not known about. In the park while they sat with their children, the women friends all talked about it nervously. Breast cancer, they were sure, came from a blow to the breast, among other things. Everyone knew that, and this was proof of it. You had to be careful. Never stand too close to a door; someone could open it and hit you.

Surgery for cancer, they were all convinced, was sure to spread the malignancy by exposing it to the air. Better to leave things alone. Uterine cancer, which was what they called everything “down there,” came from having your babies at home.

“Diaphragms give you cancer,” Rose said.

“Really?”

“My doctor told me that years ago.”

“But people use them,” Elsie murmured.

“People don’t know.”

“Is it because they’re dirty or because they irritate you?” another woman asked.

“I guess both,” Rose said. They spent another moment in silence, thinking about the lethal foreign object.

Elsie lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “It’s awful that they would give us something like that and not tell us,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“Dreadful,” the other women agreed.

The more you thought things were easier, the more confusing they became. Birth control was legal now, birth control information having been ruled by the Supreme Court no longer obscene. The scandalous tampon had been introduced, causing religious leaders to claim it destroyed virginity and encouraged masturbation. When Rose was a girl she hadn’t thought women
could
masturbate; they didn’t have what boys had, so what would you touch? The year before, when Peggy turned twelve, Rose had decided she couldn’t wait any longer to tell her two older daughters the facts of life. Peggy was ready to become a woman, while Joan was still a tomboy, but Rose thought it best to tell them both at the same time, so the older one wouldn’t get the younger one confused.

There was a booklet called “What Every Girl Should Know,” put out by one of the makers of sanitary napkins, and Rose got one for Peggy and Joan. Besides the usual story of the birds and bees, there was a drawing of a uterus in the booklet, and she thought how lucky her daughters were to have the sex education she had missed.

Peggy already knew.

“How could you know?” Rose said sternly. “Have you been talking in the gutter?”

“If school is the gutter, yes.”

“Who in school?”

Peggy shrugged. “Most of us know, that’s all.”

Rose sighed. She felt a little bit of a failure. She had been so pleased to think she was a modern mother, and it was too late. She wondered if years ago some of her own friends at school had known about these things and simply hadn’t told her.

She was relieved that in some ways Peggy was still a little girl. When she got her periods Peggy was too shy to buy sanitary napkins in the drugstore, because there was a male clerk, so Rose got them for her. Rose then discovered Peggy was even embarrassed to ask the clerk for deodorant, and had made Joan buy it. Joan didn’t mind; she was eager to grow up.

Ben was making money again. Peggy entered a private, progressive high school; when it was Joan’s turn she would go too. Peggy’s freshman year, when she was fourteen, her school gave her class sex education (a bit late, Rose thought), the boys and girls separately, of course. A female nurse, in a white uniform, came to address the girls. As Peggy related it later, after telling them the names of the male and female private parts, the nurse drew a large V on the blackboard. “V stands for Victory Girl,” the nurse said. “A Victory Girl is a teenager who goes down to Times Square and sleeps with sailors because they’re going off to war. Don’t be a Victory Girl.”

The girls had rolled their eyes and stifled their giggles. They had heard of Victory Girls, of course, the farewell gesture had become a kind of craze; but they didn’t know any and certainly wouldn’t think of becoming one. Those girls were a joke. How could anyone dream
they
might do such a thing? Who would want to sleep with
them
anyway? What kind of prize would this acned teenager with braces and rubber bands on her teeth be for a sailor’s last stateside memory?

Rose did not know whether she should be concerned because the nurse was so out of line, or relieved that Peggy thought the whole thing was hilarious. Soldiers and sailors, after all, were teenagers, too. The war had made everyone wild.