Rumors of Peace (13 page)

T
HE FIGHTING IN
S
ICILY
had not ended when August 14 arrived. I woke very early and lay quietly until I heard the house stir. Karla, home for the weekend, was still asleep. I raised the shade, put on my shorts and shirt, and woke her. “It's getting late.”

Breakfast was leisurely, jolly, almost like a Christmas morning breakfast. But the moment came. Chairs scraped back. Dad went out to the garage to get the car. The rest of us walked into the living room, where Peter's suitcase stood with his tweed jacket folded over it. He picked up the jacket and threw it over his shoulder and lifted the suitcase. Mama's eyes had reddened. He hugged her, kissed her cheek, then did the same to Karla. I went out and got in the back seat of the car, and Peter got in the front with Dad. As we drove off, Dad beeped the horn, and Peter leaned out, waving to Mama and Karla on the porch.

The draftees were gathered at the American Legion Hall, which was not a hall but a tiny brick building standing on a dry little lawn with a cannon on it, also little, painted gray. Dad parked behind a Silver Trailways bus. The draftees, twenty or thirty of them, were standing around or sitting on their suitcases on the lawn. A sergeant in summer khaki, sweating darkly under the arms, stood writing on a clipboard.

I reminded myself that the bus was only going to Camp Beale, near Sacramento. It was a sorting-out place before they were sent to basic
training, and basic training itself would take six weeks. Much could happen in that time, and I concentrated hard on my Sicilian theory; but it had no effect today. I watched Dad take his hands from the wheel and turn and shake hands with Peter and embrace him. Then Peter got out with his suitcase. I got out too, and he gave me a hard little hug—I saw the rim of his ear, the comb tracks in his hair. I got into the front seat with Dad, and we sat for a minute while Peter walked over to the others, turned, waved. Then Dad started the motor and drove around the bus, a rectangular blur of silver.

In white shorts, a paisley blouse knotted above her midriff, Karla sat out in the sun that afternoon. Her face was tilted back, her eyes under dark glasses. I sat next to her, at the old card table, shading
War and Peace
with my hand.

“You're turning into an intellectual,” Karla said.

I shook my head. “I'm stuck in Book One, and there are fourteen more of them and two epilogues.” But at least, having consulted the dictionary, I could say the word
epilogue
with confidence. Peggy, for instance, would not know what an epilogue was.

Peggy, at that moment, came around the corner of the house, wearing her blue skirt and crisp white blouse. “Hello, Karla.” Breathless, seating herself quickly, ignoring me. Karla, like Peter, expressed amazement at the change in her appearance, and Peggy sat there smiling and wide-eyed, smoothing a big lump above her forehead, supposedly a pompadour. She asked Karla all sorts of silly questions, about hairdos, and if sunbathing was good for you, and who was her favorite singer. I kept reading.

“Peter left today, didn't he?” she asked.

I closed my book. “This morning.”

“It's too bad. He was so nice.”

“What do you mean ‘was'? He still is. Nothing's happened to him!”

She traced her finger slowly on the tabletop. “I'll miss him.”

“What do you know about it? You're not even related.”

“Karla,” she asked, “do you have a boyfriend in the war?”

“Not exactly. Not a steady, just dates.”

“Karla, when they leave, do you miss them?”

“What do you keep saying her name for?” I said, “She knows what her name is.”

“Don't be so nasty,” Karla told me, getting up from her chair. “We'll all miss Peter, Peggy included.”

“You're not going in, are you?” Peggy asked, eyes filling with disappointment.

“I've got to, I'm red as a lobster. Good luck with the diet, Peggy. When you get to Hollywood, you'll be the new Rita Hayworth.”

Peggy smiled through her disappointment as the screen door closed. Why did they all encourage her when she was already so filled with herself? But I was luckier than she. I could write letters to Peter, and I could go inside to Karla, which I did. But even with Karla home, the house was like a shell today. Mama's eyes still looked red. Dad, who never talked a lot, was quieter than usual. The four of us sat on the front porch that night, as the stars came out one by one, and I kept seeing Peter standing on the dry little lawn with the cannon on it, his tweed jacket over his shoulder.

In the days that followed, I stayed close to Mama, to make her less lonely. But the one thing that might have brought her comfort I could not articulate. For as soon as I thought of putting my Sicilian theory into words, it lost all substance. I tried to make her happy in a different way. I said I would get straight A's when I went back to school. But if this made Mama happy, I didn't know; she said it was good news, but it was clear that it was too much for her to absorb. It was certainly too much for me to absorb, and I was thankful for the weeks that still hung between me and my return to school.

A
UG.
18:

Sicily Falls!

I waited. Nothing happened. The days went on, yellow and fierce already in early morning, bleached by noon to a colorless haze, and finally deepening to the plum blue stillness of evening, and nothing happened.

When
Life
came the next week, it summed up the Sicilian battle with photographs of dry hills like our own, ruined villages, dead bodies,
and close-ups of dusty captured Germans under the caption of “Hitler's Best.” Hitler's best had gone down in defeat, but the title of the article was “What Happens After the Sicilian Victory?” Nor were the newspapers or radio more enlightening. Nothing was happening.

Peter was sent to Camp Crowder, Missouri. He wrote that it was interesting. Some of the men were straight from the hills, and the first morning at breakfast one had stabbed another's hand to the table with a fork because he reached too close to his plate. He said his hair was shaved off, and it felt good because it was even hotter there than here. He was fine, and he hoped we were too, and he was looking forward to seeing us at the end of his training.

I wrote him back. I wrote about the swimming lessons ending, and about the vegetable garden, and how I meant to get good grades when I went back to school, and told him how much we were looking forward to his furlough.

Just before school started, Peggy had a relapse. I discovered her in Helen Maria's room with her hair tied back in a clump and a licorice stick hanging from her mouth. The genius was observing her sister's return with mixed pleasure and severity. “It's about time you came back down to earth. But it isn't necessary to revert totally. Don't go back to your overeating.”

“Don't worry,” said Peggy, chewing loudly. “You don't have anything to worry about.”

“I'm not worrying, Peggy. I have more important things to worry about than your diet.”

She lay down on her Persian spread and put a cigarette into her amber holder. But she didn't light it. It was too hot to smoke, almost too hot to talk. Through the glare of the French doors I saw Annuncio in his white sun helmet taking his tools from the shed.

“I've noticed that you have an unusual interest in our gardener. Have you read
Lady Chatterley's Lover?
I've read the unexpurgated edition, printed in Florence, 1928.”

“I see,” I answered, having picked up this phrase from Helen Maria herself, who used it when she was not interested. I was not interested
in Lady Whoever's lover, since he was probably not a Japanese passing for a Filipino. Anyway, Helen Maria was too hot to go on.

“I don't know why I'm not in England,” she muttered, fanning herself with an issue of the
American Linguist.

We sat in silence. A fly buzzed madly against the glass, trying to get out.

“May I let that fly out?” I asked my hostess.

“Certainly.”

I opened the French doors, feeling an oven blast in my face as the fly sped off. Annuncio smiled up from his raking. Hypocritically I waved and flopped down again.

“Suse is using her summer constructively, reading Leo Tolstoy,” Helen Maria was telling Peggy. “She will return to school enriched. One also hopes her general comprehension will benefit.”

“My grades, too,” I said.

“I'm getting good grades when I go back,” Peggy stated. “I mean it.”

“Good news from both of you. It's been a wonder to me that the two people I consort with most should be academic failures. It's an irony, if you know what I mean.”

We nodded. If we had not, she would have sent us to look up the word in her dictionary, and it was too hot for that. There was another sluggish silence. Peggy and I wandered out.

“Are you really going for good grades next year?” I asked.

“I don't want to stay in dumbbell class. Nobody in dumbbell class is popular.”

“Eudene is. Everybody likes her.”

“Eudene. Eudene's a
joke.
I'm talking about something else. You've got to have good grades or else you're just nothing. It's just lumped together that way—the kids who know how to act, the ones who count, they get good grades. I don't mean fantastic, that's just as bad as lousy, I mean just good. You've got to make College Prep. Then you're set.”

I had a feeling that the messy hair, the licorice stick—they weren't a real relapse. She spoke too seriously. She meant to be one who counted.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
6, when school began, there was still silence from Italy.

Waiting for Peggy on the entrance steps, my lunch in a paper bag, my binder carelessly held, I watched the bewildered seventh graders with a feeling of greatness. Yet it was warming to see these little old schoolyard playfellows of the past, and for a moment I wanted to run over and be one of them. But Peggy had arrived. “How do I look?” she asked. Her lips were bright orange, and so were her fingernails and toenails. She wore a bright orange dress and her white Wedgies and carried her dainty white purse, and she had gotten her hair shaped into a long, smooth curve topped by a superabundant pompadour. She hurried inside.

But there was too much confusion at the assembly for anyone to take notice of her, and afterward, with “On the Road to Mandalay” echoing in our ears, she was further disappointed to find that Mrs. Miller was teaching some eighth-grade subjects this year and would be our homeroom teacher again. Peggy felt it made our new status less exciting, but I was happy to see Mrs. Miller again and to see her put a deserved damper on my friend, whose spirits were zooming as the girls crowded around her with compliments on her fantastic change.

“Peggy,” she asked, “have your parents said you could wear lipstick?”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Miller.” The great round-eyed look. “I can even bring a note.”

Forged, of course. But Mrs. Miller believed her. “Well, I'm sure they don't mean for you to wear it so thick. Please wipe some of it off.”

Peggy did so, but when we went on to our next class, she said, “I like Mrs. Miller, but she's really behind the times.” And taking out her tube of Tangee and a little mirror, she reapplied it thick and bright.

At noon she led me out to the lawn.

“Aren't we eating at your house?” I asked.

“I don't eat lunch anymore.” Carefully she spread out the skirt of her dress and sat down. “Besides, I'm going to the noon dance.”

“You don't know how to dance.”

“I taught myself, with a booklet.”

“That won't be any good.”

But she wasn't listening. As I took my sandwich and apple from my bag, she leaned back on her elbows and gracefully threw her head back so that her profile was presented for everyone to admire. It was an admirable profile, I had to admit, almost as perfect as Helen Maria's, but with everything more upturned; by now she had lost pounds and pounds, and her neck was slender, and so were her arms, and her legs, too, crossed before her. But she had chosen a ninth grader haunt to sit in, and they all were too busy among themselves to notice her.

Suddenly her eyes narrowed. “I'll make him smile!” she exclaimed, catching her lower lip between her teeth. The Gestapo agent was coming along the walk.

“Are you crazy?”

She was already on her feet.

“What will you say?”

“Wait and see.” And round-eyed, demure, she walked over to him. “Oh, Mr. Lewis?”

His grim, sour face looked down.

“I have a message for you, Mr. Lewis. From Peter Hansen. You had him a few years ago in algebra?”

My eyes bulged.

“Well, he's a friend of mine, and he wants to study architecture
when he gets out of the service. And he said he learned more in your class than anywhere else, and that you changed the course of his life.”

“Hansen?” said Mr. Lewis, in his grim, sour voice.

“Peter Hansen.”

“Don't remember him.” He started past her but turned. There was the faintest touch of a smile on his hard lips. “But tell him fine. Good.”

“I will, Mr. Lewis,” said Peggy shyly, smiling back. She returned leisurely to my side. “Well?”

“Peter never said that. You lied.”

“So what, it made him feel good.”

“I don't count it.”

She didn't care. She was looking boldly in the direction of the gym. “Okay everybody, here I come!”

These weekly dances were apparently popular. The gym was already crowded, mostly with girls in a huge bunched-together group which Peggy pushed and elbowed her way through, dragging me behind. I saw there was another, smaller bunch against the wall, all boys. Then there was another bunch, very small, standing around the phonograph with Mother Basketball. These were The Ones Who Counted, to use Peggy's phrase, and the student body president himself was putting the first record on. “Paper Doll” began blaring from the loudspeaker, bouncing hollowly off the bare walls. The student body president strolled onto the dance floor with a neat button-nosed girl, and Others Who Counted followed, and then some of the boys against the wall began wandering over to us bunched-up girls. I felt Peggy's hand grab mine and crush it painfully, as it had at Buster Brown's. Her eyes were so excited she made me think of a horse filled with locoweed, wild to leap over the corral fence.

But when she was asked to dance, she exclaimed uh-uh! and jumped back and even crossed her arms in front of her. The boy was moonfaced, slow-moving, with a line of dark fuzz on his upper lip. He looked down at her crossed arms, blushed to the roots of his hair, and moved off.

“I hope they don't think I'd even con
sid
er him,” Peggy murmured, looking around worriedly.

“You hurt his feelings.”

“I did?” Surprise, remorse; she craned her neck to spot him, then swung back to the music. “Well, I can't just say yes to every single boy who comes along.”

But no one else asked her during the whole thirty-five minutes we stood there. It was I who danced.

Running around popping his gum, Dumb Donny grabbed me. Neither of us knew how to dance, but tangled up and scuffling, we progressed around the crowded floor, and it was exhilarating, like the days we all played together in the schoolyard, yet I also felt spasms of pride to be part of the noon dance, not that my partner was much: short, bony, with blond hair tarnished green from summer pools. In fact he looked just like me. But we were having a good time, and when the record ended I hurried back to the brilliant orange splotch of Peggy's dress.

“Did you see me dance?”

She didn't hear me. Her face was taut. Both hands held the strap of her white purse, as if for support. The walls began to reverberate with the last number. And suddenly she was gone from my side. I pushed through the crowd and caught up with her outside, hiding behind a pepper tree. She was crying bitterly, her face pressed against the rough bark. “What was wrong with them?” she sobbed. “I'm pretty, aren't I . . . ?”

But I didn't know anymore. Maybe she was too orange. Her pompadour too overwhelming. Her eyes too wild. Maybe she had scared them off.

“They're just stupid,” I said. “They wouldn't know how to act with somebody special.”

“You think so?” she asked, her eyes still streaming.

“Of course I do.”

We could hear Mother Basketball's whistle ending the dance. Now everyone would come pouring out the door toward us. Bent over, shielding her face with her hand, Peggy allowed me to lead her away, into the main building to the lavatory.

There she submerged her face in a basin of cold water. It seemed to calm her. She blotted-the skin dry. She repainted her lips and combed her hair. She looked at herself in the mirror, serious, cold.

“Fuck them.”

“What?” The word had an ugly, deep-cutting sound.

“You heard me. Fuck them.” This time she blushed as she said it and dropped her eyes, but whatever the word meant it seemed to do her good. She threw her things back into her purse and snapped it fiercely shut. “Bunch of jerks—wait till next time!”

She flung open the door and walked out.

S
EPT.
9:

Italian Surrender

Unconditional!

Allies Pouring In!

The long silence finished at last! The whole country ours! And as I threw the newspaper down, my theory was jubilantly vivid, like a newsreel in Technicolor. A week's march up purple Italy, another week to black Berlin, and then the yellow-infested islands of the Pacific.

“It was too big,” Peggy said the next day, patting a diminished pompadour. “I think it looks better this way.”

“It looks terrific!”

S
EPT.
10:

Allies Prepare

For Italy Battle!

Unwillingly I read further. General Eisenhower was appealing to the Italian people to drive the Germans from their soil; but the German army in Italy was powerful, and he realized there was no hope that the country would fall like a plum to the Allies.

“Maybe Mrs. Miller wasn't completely wrong. Maybe it was too gooey-looking. It's better just one layer like this.”

“I suppose so.”

S
EPT.
11:

Fierce Salerno Battle!

Salerno, way down there at the bottom, hundreds of miles from the northern border.

“Nobody wears Wedgies. Nobody who counts, anyway. You know what they wear? Loafers. With a penny stuck in front.”

I gave a shrug.

“Aren't you coming? What's wrong with you anyway?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, I'm going now. I want to get there early.”

She went off across the lawn. Her pompadour was down to a modest mound. She wore a pale blue dress; her lipstick was light, her nail polish gone. On her feet were well-polished brown loafers with a bright penny stuck in the front of each.

I kept sitting after I finished my lunch. I didn't feel like doing anything, but after a while curiosity sent me slowly over to the gym. I squeezed through the big bunch of girls like refugees huddled together for safety, but Peggy wasn't among them, and it was awhile before I even thought of glancing toward The Ones Who Counted—Towks, I was beginning to call them in my mind. There she was. Holding a record, smiling, talking.

I stared, trying to understand how she had managed it. Then, glancing at Mother Basketball, I saw how. Certainly, Peggy, you may help bring the records from my office. Just put them there by the phonograph. Oh, so-and-so, Peggy's giving us a hand. You know Peggy, don't you? And that was that. They probably didn't even connect her with pigtailed fatso from last year. She was a fresh new person. And now, as I watched, this fresh new person was led out on the dance floor by a tall Towk. I knew she must be bursting and fainting inside, but on her face was only a neat little sociable smile. What iron effort, what control; and I remembered that look she had given herself in the mirror, that deadly, cold look. And I remembered her bitter tears that day and Moonface's bitter blush, and I looked around at these chatting girls huddled for courage, and it seemed that there was no pleasure here at all, but that it was a battlefield of fear and pain and desperate measures. I turned and pushed my way back outside.

Four days later, when Salerno fell, it was clear that all progress north was to be made inch by bloody inch.