Gone to Soldiers (83 page)

Ruthie liked welding, liked working in the mask and gloves so that no one could guess her sex, liked the sense of being wrapped up in the tools and accouterments of her new trade. She was good and fast, and so was Vivian. When they learned new tricks, they taught each other.

Vivian wanted to continue after the war; she liked welding and she was making good money. Her one ambition was to get on the day shift, so that she could work the same hours as her husband when he came back from the Army. She didn't worry as much about him as Ruthie did about Murray, because he was working in transportation. “They asked him what he did in civilian life. He said he built auto bodies. So they put him in the repair shop for jeeps and trucks. If he hadn't used to work on this old Nash,” Vivian rapped the steering wheel, “I don't think he would have known the first thing. I figure he's okay if anybody is. He's in Palermo.”

Murray sounded safe for the moment. He was back on Guadalcanal training. He said it was a different place, with movies and ice cream and real barracks. He talked a lot about his buddy Jack. He drew a picture of a land crab, which he said were like enormous cockroaches, got into everything and when they were crushed, stank of rotten fish. He did not mention his friend Harvey any longer, although she had asked about him.

Naomi had been having such bad nightmares that Ruthie had invited her to sleep in the upper bunk again. Naomi continued using Duvey's old room for doing her homework but seemed a little afraid of sleeping there, mumbling about a dead man's bed. Ruthie understood. At one point in her childhood, she would weep if she had to take the garbage out to the alley, because she developed a morbid fear of the rats scurrying there.

Naomi was asleep when she came in from work, so Ruthie undressed in the bathroom and slipped into her bunk. If she had studying to do or an exam the next morning, she could turn on a pinup lamp attached to the bedpost, prop her pillow against the wall and work without disturbing Naomi. Naomi moaned in her sleep and sometimes woke crying. Ruthie would stand beside the bunk brushing Naomi's curly hair to soothe her, rubbing her shoulders.

Leib had been sent back to the States, to the government hospital in Ann Arbor, where they were getting ready to fit him with an artificial right foot. Trudi, who went up to see him every weekend, said he was a real hero about his foot. He was supposed to be discharged within a month. She had not been permitted to bring baby David, but she gave Leib twenty photos: baby David eating, baby David with a rattle, baby David in the arms of every relative down to second cousin.

“What's a foot?” she said to Ruthie. “Wouldn't you trade a foot any day to have Murray safe at home?”

It was a barbaric idea, trading parts of the man you loved for safety. “Will he be able to walk?”

“So he'll walk with a limp. He can't run bases or play basketball, but he's a grown man, who needs that? He'll get disability, but it's not like he's a cripple. When I think what could have happened to him! His mother goes up there and cries. I think that's disgusting. I try to kid him around, so he knows he's still my husband and I'm crazy to get him home.”

Trudi was working at the Henry Ford Hospital four nights a week. The hospitals were so short on help, they were glad to hire her back part time. She was toilet-training David in a hurry, as she had promised Leib. It made for a lot of yelling and crying, with Trudi's mother scolding her for abusing her son with her haste.

Trudi wanted to quit her job and she wanted to move out of her parents' house, but she recognized she could not expect to do both, at least not until Leib was completely well and settled in a job. She asked everybody she met about apartments. Detroit was tight. Apartments had been split and split again into tiny studios, and the smallest of those was rented too. Sometimes people slept in shifts in the same beds. No basement apartment squeezed in a former coalbin or wedged under dripping pipes was too dark or humid, and no room prized into an attic, barely heated and uninsulated, was too cold and drafty to rent.

Trudi was readying herself for Leib's homecoming. She had gone on a diet and had a permanent. She was even trying to remember to wear gloves when she washed dishes and baby clothes so that her hands would be soft, the way they said in the magazines, and so her nails would grow long. When Trudi got dressed up to see Leib in Ann Arbor, Ruthie felt very plain next to her, as if like Naomi she were a girl watching a woman. She did not own a dress like the ones Trudi put on for Leib, with peplums, flounces, draping that emphasized Trudi's curves. Trudi even wore perfume.

Ruthie had no desire to trick herself up the way Trudi did, and no one to get dressed up that way for. Dating had been mostly a source of anxiety, so she never missed it. Her idea of fun was to put her feet in a basin of hot water with Epsom salts and read a book that wasn't for school, to look at
Life
and drink hot cocoa, to sit with Naomi's head on her shoulder and listen to Jack Benny and Rochester, to go to a good double feature.

Nonetheless, sometimes when Trudi was getting ready, she missed that sense of doing something for your man, of having a man who was looking forward to seeing you, of that pleasurable ache of anticipation. She had had pitifully little time with Murray. They had made love three times in twenty-four hours, and that had been that. Trudi had a marriage, a baby, and now her husband back; Ruthie had only the blurring memory of hasty couplings in a backseat and on a blanket. Her favorite photo of Murray she had taken at the big fountain in the zoo, right after they had got off the little train that chugged around between stations marked Alaska and Africa. She remembered evenings spent in movie theaters and in coffee shops just before he left for boot camp. Sometimes she thought she was living on dreams too fragile to survive so much handling.

It had rained all Monday, all Tuesday, a hard pelting often horizontal rain that overflowed the clogged gutters and flooded the underpasses and the streets. Her galoshes had worn through and leaked, but could not be replaced because they were made of rubber. Her shoes stayed sodden. Her coat had that wet wool smell and so did her skirt. There was a lot of absenteeism at Briggs, blamed on the flu.

Finally Wednesday the rain stopped, but the sky did not clear. It hung a hundred feet in the air sagging like a fat belly and obliterating the tops of buildings. She had to wait a long time for a bus, since there had been some trouble on the line. The buses were wearing out and could not be replaced, like so much else.

When she got home, she walked into chaos. Sharon was crying and Rose was wringing her hands. “What's wrong?” Her heart seized.

“A lady from the welfare came.” Rose rolled her hands in her apron. “She says we can't have the babies here and we're going to jail for it. It's a crime to take care of babies without a license like they charge for and inspect you. Anyway, we could never get a license, she said it herself.”

“How did they find out?”

“Mrs. Rosenthal,” Sharon said. “The dyed-blond bitch turned us in. What business is it of hers? Just because all she wants to do all day is lie on the sofa and listen to soap operas and then wax the floor, while her husband sells fish, she's got no call to stick her long bony nose in our lives!”

“We never hurt those little babies,” Rose said. “How can they tell us we're not fit? I raised three babies of my own, and Sharon has two. I know ten times as much about babies as that dried-up prune.”

Ruthie's second thought was whether Rose's brush with the law would come back to haunt her in social work, but she put that aside. “Mama, they may fine you, and they're probably going to close you down, but they can't put you in jail.”

“She said what we're doing is against the law, and the state is going to persecute us.”

“It's a minor offense, Mama. I'll get all the facts, don't worry, don't fuss.”

“But what are we going to do for money?” Sharon wailed. “I can't live on those allotment checks. My rent is that much right off the top.”

“Maybe I can get you into the plant,” Ruthie said. “They're always hiring.”

“With the children so young? Arty would never forgive me.”

“Mama can take care of them. She's had a lot of experience.” Ruthie tried to make them smile. “I'll see what all this means. Don't worry. If you have to go to court, I'll go to court with you. We'll get a lawyer. How about Mr. Untermeyer who's on Tata's immigration committee?”

“Laws, courts, police, this isn't good.” Rose sat down heavily, twisting her hands in her apron. “This means tsuris, more tsuris. At least they didn't see Naomi. I don't want them getting interested in what she's doing here. That's all we need.”

Ruthie wanted to go to bed and sleep for a week and wake with all problems solved and the house restored to calm, but she must eat swiftly and get ready for eight hours of welding. Tomorrow she would have to cut classes and go downtown. Whatever she could smooth over, the nursery was closed, permanently. The working mothers would have to make other arrangements and Mama and Sharon were unemployed.

That would mean less money coming in, especially for Sharon, who'd have to take a job. Ruthie's mind was juggling expenses and income and trying to make everything come out, as she changed for work and got herself together. No point worrying now. At work, she must concentrate, or she'd end up cooked in a hospital bed like Mary Lou. Troubles came down like the infernal and incessant cold rain, far more than anybody needed to make things grow.

BERNICE 7

Major Mischief

In April the WASPs at the Air Transport Command Base in Long Beach got their uniforms, although unfortunately for Bernice and her squadron, in winter wool and not yet in summer weight. When she first put on her uniform, she had an enormous desire to be photographed, as did Flo and everybody else. Loretta, one of the WASPs whose husband was overseas, took their pictures with a Brownie box camera. Bernice waited impatiently the week until the film was ready. Every one of them not off with a plane went along with Loretta to the Long Beach drugstore to pick up the prints.

The uniform was handsome, designed by Cochran herself: not khaki, not military drab or sickly green, but a deep, dark and vivid blue. Against it the gold of the wings and WASP insignia glinted handsomely. The women with curls had trouble with the caps, but Bernice just stuck hers on at a racy angle. She was also in luck because large sizes were plentiful. The uniform came with skirt and slacks: enormously practical, Bernice thought, and wished all women's suits would offer that choice. However, the Army still balked at outfitting women. Everything under the uniform was their problem, and they received no more ration stamps than other civilians for shoes, which they bought with their own money.

“Listen, don't complain,” Flo said. “Imagine what the military's idea of a bra would look like. Probably come with thumbtacks to hold it on.”

Bernice loved her snapshot, posed in front of a P-51 Mustang. She had a bunch of prints made and sent one to The Professor and his housekeeper. His letters came regularly but sounded disjointed. Bernice imagined her father sitting at his desk, asking his housekeeper, What shall I say next? and her prompting him, Tell her about the flood downtown. Say that the Narzisse are blooming. Bernice could hear her voice coming through in the occasional German words in the letters. The Professor did not know the English name of the bulbs Viola had planted almost twenty years ago, still faithfully poking up through the myrtle and among the evergreens. They had not existed as daffodils to him before his housekeeper labeled them Narzisse.

She had prints made for Jeff and for Zach and sent them off to the old addresses in London. She had last heard from Jeff in August. Zach wrote her occasionally, but she had not had a letter since early March. She did not take his silence personally.

Ferrying was going to be a lot easier when she was stuck in little towns that were violently suspicious of a woman alone, especially one who arrived flying a plane and claimed to be working for the Air Corps. A uniform, even when people didn't know what kind it was, provided a sort of license. A great many people thought badly of women in the military. A real woman wouldn't do that; they must be tarts or perverts. Nonetheless, the uniform guaranteed that she would not be arrested by some leering sheriff on loitering or soliciting charges immediately upon flying in, as had happened to two WASPs in Alabama. It meant not being hassled in restaurants or bars because she was wearing slacks and not a skirt. It meant a little more respect from the guys in airports. For her, looking in the mirror, it meant one more step toward being a professional.

Maybe when they were given ranks and accepted into the Air Forces, maybe she would stay on after the war. Her squadron commander thought that militarization would come any day, and then they would be regular officers. Bernice had no qualms. She knew she was serving herself and only secondarily serving her country, but she never refused an assignment, she got the planes there as fast as the weather permitted, and she flew in rough weather as in smooth. She did not care that the blue serge was ridiculously hot for California, she wore it and sweated gladly.

The next trip into Newark, there was a message waiting for her: a phone number and the initial Z.
Swiftly
was all it said. She called at once from a pay phone, feeding quarters, dimes and nickels in as it turned out to be a Washington number.

“Ah, you've blown in!” Zach trumpeted. “Top drawer. I should be able to tie things up here and toddle up on the eight o'clock train. I have a reservation at the Waldorf, so go check in as Mrs. Zachary Barrington Taylor.”

“You're using your own name? Suppose your wife finds out?”

“We're in mutual pursuit of a divorce. She's marrying a lesser Du Pont, but still a Du Pont, and I'm at long last to be dispensed with. I'm trying to satisfy the lawyers' requirements and the government's too whilst I am briefly in God's country. You can nap while you wait, but be prepared to be rousted. Oh, and order some champagne before room service closes. Be seeing you.”