Next to Love (6 page)

MILLIE LIES IN THE NARROW
bed in Pete’s old bedroom, spooned around him. When they first came back to his parents’ house from their weekend honeymoon, he joked about all the times he lay in this bed, staring at the pennants and trophies and team pictures, thinking of her, imagining the then forbidden and now permitted. Hubba, hubba, he’d whisper as he got into bed beside her, and she’d giggle, and they’d hush each other because his parents were just down the hall. They tried to be quiet, but the bed creaked and the headboard pounded against the wall, until Pete put a pillow behind it to muffle the sound.

The bed is silent now, though they set up quite a racket a little while ago. He sleeps. She cannot. She does not mind. She will have plenty of time to sleep after he’s gone. She closes her eyes against the thought, but the tears seep out. She tightens her grip around him. He goes on sleeping. She wishes she could fall asleep. No, she doesn’t. She does not want to waste the minutes she has left with him.

The thought goes through her like a sob. The tears come faster. They run down her cheeks and onto his shoulder. Her body convulses with them. She will not do this. She will not wake him up with her crying. She will not spoil their last night together.

She looks at the clock. It is four-thirty. She gets out of bed and goes down the hall to the bathroom. By the time she comes back, he is awake. And she is bathed and dressed and wearing a big perfectly lipsticked smile. Nobody likes a gloomy Gertie.

“Hiya, beautiful,” he says. His voice is a pitch-perfect imitation of all the normal times he has said it.

IT IS ALMOST DAWN
by the time Claude turns on the ignition and they start back to town. It would be different if they were married. They would not have to stay up half the night in a car. But now that the black sky is curling along its edge like a charred scrap of paper, and a thin ribbon of gray lies beneath it, marriage is beside the point. All that matters is that he is leaving. Marriage is no insurance against that.

THREE

MARCH
1942

A
FTER THE MEN GO BACK TO CAMP, THE WOMEN CLOSE RANKS
. Babe is working at Diamond’s, but on Tuesdays and Sundays, her days off, she and Millie and Grace go window-shopping, or to Swallow’s for a soda or hot chocolate, or sit in Grace’s kitchen and talk about the war. Not about the fall of the Philippines, or the fighting in North Africa, or even the German U-boats off the East Coast that are sinking ships in view of civilians on shore, but about the exhaustion, boredom, and inanity of army life that fill the letters they get from camp. The men, who in the past rarely wrote more than a mother-forced thank-you note—except for Charlie, who made a living at the impersonal who, what, when, where, why, and how—are suddenly gushing words, even words of love.

The women try to shore one another up. They are not always successful. Grace is short-tempered, even with the baby. Millie is so fiercely bright she sets their teeth on edge. Babe is more cynical than ever, or so the other two say.

The weather does not help. It seems to be in cahoots with the times. While the men were home on leave, they lived in a tropical climate. Though the thermometer outside registered below freezing, in the living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms, the air was sultry, the breezes were soft, and a hectic moon burned down on them round the clock. But once the men left, the heavens opened, and the snow, sleet, and freezing rain came down. The women awaken to battleship-gray mornings and turn on the lights at four in the afternoon. Outdoors, the wind stings their faces; indoors, the clanking heat from the radiators turns their skin to parchment. Grace bundles the baby in layer upon layer until she looks like a small fat mummy, tucks her under blankets in the carriage, and pushes her along the snow-narrowed sidewalks, down one side of the street and up the other, because the books say that no matter what the weather, babies need fresh air. Babe listens to the sucking sounds galoshes make on the marble first floor of Diamond’s and thinks they sound like sobs. Millie sits in her childhood room—after Pete left, she moved from his parents’ house on the west side to her aunt and uncle’s smaller place five blocks away—and makes lists on long yellow legal pads. On the left, she writes the reasons in favor; on the right, the arguments against. As the weeks pass and she gets her period, the column on the left grows longer and the one on the right shrinks. She wants a baby, and if that means following Pete to camp, she will follow him, no matter what the government, or her aunt and uncle, or Pete’s parents, or even Pete say.

The three women debate the issue endlessly.

“It’s unpatriotic,” Grace says as she puts Amy in the high chair and draws it close to the kitchen table.

“She’s not exactly hoarding,” Babe points out.

“The government says wives shouldn’t follow their husbands to the camps,” Grace insists.

Babe does not answer. If wives should not follow the men to the camps, girlfriends cannot, not if they want to remain nice girls, as she is still supposed to be. Wives use the words
camp follower
as a badge of daring and devotion. Girlfriends steer clear of the expression.

They sit in silence for a moment, until Babe notices the hum of a vacuum cleaner overhead.

“Who’s upstairs?”

“Naomi Hart.”

“Naomi Hart works for you?”

“She really works for Charlie’s mother, but King thought I could use some help. With this big house and the baby and all. Just a morning or two a week.”

“Doesn’t it make you uncomfortable?” Millie asks.

Doesn’t it make Naomi uncomfortable, Babe thinks. If she had not got the job at Diamond’s, it would have been the five-and-dime, and if the five-and-dime had not come through—until the war started in Europe, no one was hiring—she would have been cleaning other women’s houses, if she was lucky. She wonders if that’s why Grace cannot meet her eyes.

“I told King I didn’t feel right having a girl I’d sat next to in homeroom cleaning my house, but he said he was going to send someone and wouldn’t I rather have Naomi get the money than some stranger. Heaven knows she needs it. And this way she can bring her little boy with her when her mother can’t take him.” Grace scrapes the oatmeal from around Amy’s mouth and spoons it in. “Her husband is stationed somewhere in Mississippi. She says it’s rough on colored soldiers—”

“Negro soldiers,” Babe interrupts.

“… rough on Negro soldiers down there. She told me some terrible stories, but King says not to believe everything I hear.” Grace turns to Millie. “Naomi says Frank forbid her to go down there to be with him.”

“Well, Pete’s in North Carolina, and I’m not colored. Negro. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

Sometimes, Babe thinks, Millie’s willful sunniness is like a nail going down the blackboard of experience.

“Do you have any idea what you’ll be letting yourself in for?” Grace asks. “The trains and buses are mobbed. Charlie says the town is a hellhole. You’ll never find a room. Even if you do, you’ll only get to see Pete a couple of hours a night.”

“That’s a couple of hours more than I have now,” Millie says. “It’s enough to make a baby.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Grace insists.

“Dangerous?” Babe asks.

“The trains are full of soldiers,” Grace explains. “And you’ll be alone.”

“As if all those perfectly nice boys are going to turn into ruffians the minute they leave home. Besides, I’m an army wife.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Babe asks.

“Pete says the men will go up to strange girls on the street and say the most awful things, but if the girls are wives of other servicemen, it’s hands off. They know you’re another man’s property.”

“That’s sweet.” Grace’s voice softens.

Babe does not think it’s sweet, but she doesn’t know why. It can’t be only that she is not a wife.

“Pete’s brother thinks I should go,” Millie says.

“I don’t believe it,” Grace answers. “Mac is too sensible.”

“That proves it’s a good idea. He even offered to give me money for the trip, if I needed it.”

Babe shakes her head. “Just because he said he’d stake you doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a good idea.”

“Why else would he offer?”

“Because he still has a few months before he finishes medical school. After that, he’ll end up in a hospital, maybe here, maybe in England or Hawaii, at worst behind the lines. Meanwhile, his kid brother, and his best friend Charlie, and lots of other boys he grew up with will be fighting the war. Mac’s loan is guilt money.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” Millie insists. “He wouldn’t offer if he didn’t think I should go.”

Four days later, Babe gets the telegram. It is the first cable she has ever received. Maybe that’s why later, after Claude ships out, she applies for the job in the Western Union office. Maybe she is trying to hold on to some of the innocence of that wire.

DEAREST BABE STOP I MADE A BIG MISTAKE STOP HAVE WEDDING RING STOP HOW SOON CAN YOU GET HERE TO SLIP INTO IT STOP ALL MY LOVE CLAUDE

She gives notice at Diamond’s that afternoon. Then she studies the timetables, though she knows she cannot count on them. Trains are shunted off to sidings to let soldiers and priority materials through. Departures are delayed. Arrival times mean nothing. She wires Claude to tell him when she is leaving, and says she’ll cable again when she gets to Virginia or North Carolina.

LATER, IN ONE
of the rooming houses Babe will pass through that year—perhaps the fourth or the fifth, she never can remember—the landlady, a sour woman who collected injustices the way others did scrap metal, will tell her that army wives are good-for-nothings, and no present-company-excluded either.

“All they want to do is smoke cigarettes and sleep with their husbands.”

“I don’t smoke,” Babe says.

But the landlady is not entirely wrong. Those raw recruits and the wives who follow them live an abnormal hothouse existence in the run-down small towns that were never meant for an influx of desperate young men and women carrying mortality around with them like their battered suitcases, tired babies, and threadbare hope. If you’re lucky, you get to see your husband for a few hours each night and maybe an overnight on the weekend. When you’re unlucky, you bathe as best you can in the communal bathroom, then dress and sit alone in your room, waiting, because at the last minute he pulled KP or guard duty and has no way in heaven to let you know he is not coming. Life on the base is hard and boring, and life in town is unpleasant and boring, but the difficulty and the boredom take different forms. The husbands speak the language of drills, marches, and officers who don’t know which end is up; the wives speak the dialect of carping landladies, dirty bathrooms with no hot water to wash their hair, and endless spirit-killing games of bridge. Since there is no common tongue between them, they communicate in sex. It is all the men, who are exhausted from training, brutalized by anonymity, and starving for a woman’s touch that will remind them who they are, want after a lousy day on the base. It is all the girls, who are lonely and homesick and longing to be held, can give them, besides doing their laundry.

The trip from Massachusetts to North Carolina takes her seventy-seven hours. If you count the other layover, it takes longer than that. Often, she cannot find a seat on the trains. Passengers perch on suitcases in the aisles and stand in vestibules. Two hours is a short wait for the dining car. The men selling sandwiches and coffee run out halfway through the train. But the boys, and the other girls who are going to see them, make up for the hardship, or maybe they simply endure it together.

Soldiers and sailors give her their seats, and make standing room for her in the vestibule, and offer her drinks. Most of them have bottles stashed somewhere in their duffels or on their persons, and who can blame them? They urge her to have a pick-me-up in the morning, produce nips in the afternoon, and say, come on, have a few drinks, at night. When there are other wives—that is the way she thinks of herself now—in the group, she accepts. They also offer her encouragement. They tell her it’s swell of her to go south to be with Claude. They say he’ll be in seventh heaven to see her. And when she walks the aisles to the ladies’ room or the dining car or just for exercise, they say, some gams, and look at those pins, and hubba hubba. She bought a new suit for the trip, and the narrow short skirt and austere jacket mandated by the war restrictions flatter her. She has left the pink tulle for her sister Brigit. Brigit has narrow slope shoulders and a tiny waist.

Mostly the boys want to talk and to show her pictures of their wives and sweethearts and families. They tell her where they come from; and ask where she’s going; and say the army is hell, and the army isn’t so bad, and the trouble with the army is. She knows she will never see any of them again, not the boys, not the wives, but sitting side by side in those worn seats, waiting shoulder-to-shoulder in lines for the dining car and the washroom, careening against one another as they try to navigate the crowded aisles, she feels part of something. And all the time she is saving up stories to tell Claude.