The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (41 page)

The only thing Peggy wished was that Roosevelt weren’t so coy about the chances the USA would get into the war. “On which side?” one of her friends asked, altogether seriously.

“Whichever side isn’t Hitler’s,” Peggy answered without the least hesitation.

“But—!” The other woman stared at her in horror undisguised. “That would mean fighting
for
Stalin and the Bolsheviks!”

“So what?” Peggy answered. “Winston Churchill said that if Hitler invaded hell, he’d try to give the Devil a good notice in the House of Commons.”

“He’s dead,” her friend reminded her. “He’s dead, and England doesn’t want to fight for Stalin. You ask me, Chamberlain’s no dope.”

Peggy didn’t blow up. She’d already had this argument more than once. By now, she was resigned to it. People who hadn’t been to Europe
and seen what Nazi Germany was like for themselves didn’t—couldn’t—believe it. Russia was the devil they knew, the radical state that wanted to bury capitalism forever. To most head-in-the-sand Americans, anything that wanted to smash the Reds seemed swell.

Her friend went on, “I only wish Willkie didn’t sound so much like That Man in the White House. He ought to give the New Deal a good, swift kick, is what he ought to do.”

“If you say so, Blanche,” Peggy said.

“I just did,” Blanche replied. “And I tell you, we’re getting some very
different
people donating to Bundles for Britain these days. Not everyone quit after the Big Switch the way you did.” She raised her nose in the air—only a little, but it got through. It also let Peggy see the sagging flesh under Blanche’s chin. Since her own jawline was still pretty good, she soaked up some
Schadenfreude
on that score.

“I’ll bet you are,” she said, feeling the need for a saucer of cream. “The ones who stand up and whinny when the band plays
‘Deutschland über Alles,’
I suppose.”

“It’s not like that.” Blanche’s voice went shrill. “But it is a different crowd. Hardly any of those people come in any more.”

“Why don’t you just call them Jews? The
Führer
does. ‘The Jews are our misfortune!’ ” She did her best to thunder like Hitler on the radio. It wasn’t very good. That had to be just as well. She didn’t want people jumping to their feet and screaming
“Sieg heil!”
every time she opened her mouth.

“I suppose they have to live somewhere, but I wish they were better at knowing their place,” Blanche said.

“They do in Germany. One of them made a mistake—he sold me something when he shouldn’t have. Then some brownshirts went into his shop and beat him up. He won’t do anything that rude and pushy any time soon,” Peggy said.

“Oh, come on. I don’t mean that. You know what I mean,” Blanche said.

“I know what Hitler means, too,” Peggy answered. Outside the café where they were not enjoying time together, well-dressed, well-fed people hurried by. Shop windows promised the moon—and they’d deliver
if you put down enough cash. Cars—so many cars!—whizzed up and down the street. Dealers were gearing up to start selling 1941 models. You could buy as much gas as you wanted, and for next to nothing. Rationing? Nobody on this side of the Atlantic had ever heard of rationing.

Blanche did have the grace to turn pink, if not red. “I don’t want to go as far as the Germans do.”

“I’m sure those people would be so glad to hear it,” Peggy said. The scary thing was that, in spite of being sarcastic, she was also right. Jews, these days, were pathetically grateful for any crumbs you threw them. Considering what they got in the
Reich
in place of crumbs, they had reason to be. Peggy smiled sweetly. “No yellow stars or anything?”

This time, Blanche really did redden. “I don’t know what to make of you any more. You’ve changed since you came back from Europe.
I
haven’t. The rest of our crowd hasn’t.”

Fools never do
. It sat on the tip of Peggy’s tongue, along with the last bite of a really good BLT. You couldn’t get anything like that in Berlin! But she swallowed the bite, and she swallowed the mean comeback, too. That might have been mature wisdom. Or it might just have meant she was too tired to argue all the time. She hadn’t given up. She was getting better at picking her spots.

She looked at her watch and stood up. “I’ve got to run.”

“So good to see you,” Blanche said with transparent relief. Peggy tossed two dollars on the table—you paid for atmosphere at this place—and got out as fast as she could with any manners, or perhaps a little faster than that.

Out on the sidewalk, she waved for a cab. She got one in nothing flat, and another taxi driver drove off with a scowl because he’d missed the fare. The guy behind the wheel was about twenty-five. “Where to, lady?” he asked.

She gave him her address. He put the Plymouth in gear and pulled back into traffic. In almost any country in Europe, he would have been in the army. His cab wouldn’t have been on the road any more, either. People in Berlin had stared at the one that took her from her hotel to the train station.

Shop windows, billboards, and neon signs all shouted at her as the taxi went along.
Buy!
they screamed.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
And people listened to them. There was a boy eating an ice-cream cone. There was a woman with her arms full of packages. There was a man in a sharp suit walking past shiny new cars at a Packard dealership while a salesman in a loud plaid jacket followed, a hungry smile on his face.

“So much stuff,” Peggy murmured. Anyone on the other side of the Atlantic who’d been making do with what he had since the war started would drop dead if he could see this. And the politicians over there who’d made people live like that would count themselves lucky if they didn’t get hanged from the closest lamppost.

“Wadja say, lady?” the cabbie asked.

Peggy was embarrassed; she hadn’t meant him to overhear. But she repeated herself, louder this time, adding, “I got back from Europe a little while ago. Seeing everything all lit up, people buying and selling like nobody’s business, still seems strange.”

“Boy, I bet,” the guy said. “Makes you glad you’re an American, huh?”

“Sure,” Peggy said, but she wondered how much she meant it. Maybe she’d stayed over there too long. No, for sure she’d stayed over there too long, but she wasn’t thinking of the usual reasons now. A couple of years in Europe made the good old USA’s displays of greed and abundance feel vulgar.

She could at least laugh at herself for her sudden attack of Puritanism. There was no inherent virtue in an empty belly, in a suit coat out at the elbows, in streets empty of cars because your country was using all the gas and steel and rubber it had to murder its neighbors. She saw that. But she also saw all this, and the excess turned her stomach.

The taxi pulled up in front of her house. Even the old familiar place seemed ridiculously large. Why did she and Herb need all this space? It wasn’t so much that they did need it. But they could afford it, and so they had it.

“Eighty-five cents, lady,” the driver said. She gave him a dollar. He started to make change. She waved for him not to bother. He nodded. “Thanks.”

She got out. He drove off. She walked up to the front door. She was
home. As she fumbled in her purse for the key, she wondered if she’d ever feel at home anywhere again.

MANILA
. It wasn’t as if Pete McGill had never been here before. Any leatherneck who’d been in the Corps for a while had come through the capital of the Philippines. It was like a halfway house between what you’d grown up with and the real, no-shit Orient. The wide streets and stately Spanish buildings reminded you of an American—or, more likely, a European—city. After more than a generation of U.S. rule, a lot of the natives understood English. You could buy burgers and Cokes.

But those natives were little and brown and had narrow eyes. Most of the time, they gabbled away in a language that sounded like barking dogs to Pete. Away from the wide thoroughfares, they lived in tiny tumbledown huts. What they ate when they weren’t cooking for you or shining your shoes had nothing to do with hamburgers—no, sirree!

And it was hot. And it was muggy. All the time—spring, summer, fall, winter. There was a rainy season and a less rainy season, and that was about as far as seasons went. But Jesus God, it was so green! If you turned your back on a bamboo plant, it would be six inches taller when you turned around again and gave it a second look. Armies of little brown gardeners kept the stately Spanish buildings from being swallowed by jungle.

Yeah, when you got to Manila, you realized you weren’t in Kansas any more. Or in the Bronx, which Pete had called home till the recruiting sergeant convinced him he’d get a better deal if he signed on the dotted line. He hadn’t needed much convincing. Anything that would get him the hell out of high school and pay him a little bit besides looked mighty goddamn good.

So now he was back in Manila, in the military hospital, under a lazy ceiling fan that did exactly nothing to fight the heat and humidity. He’d got himself wrecked on account of a terrorist bomb. He’d got the woman he loved killed. And all he could do was lie here and stew.

He wanted to murder the Chinamen who’d planted the bomb in the movie house. And he wanted to murder the Japs who ground down the Chinese till they started doing things like planting bombs in movie
houses. Give him a machine gun and enough ammo, and there wouldn’t be a Jap or a Chinaman left alive.

He even glared at the Filipino nurses who helped the Americans take care of him. They hadn’t had anything to do with the bomb, of course. The rational part of his mind understood that. But they were little and brown and had narrow eyes. They didn’t exactly look Chinese or Japanese, but he wasn’t inclined to be picky, not right then.

They gave him crutches and encouraged him to hobble down the hospital hallways. Hobble he did; he was looking for anything to do besides lie there like a sack of dried peas. Staying on his pins—and on the additional wooden pins with which he was fitted out—took everything he had in him. While he was upright, he was too busy concentrating on staying that way to have time to brood about Vera.

One of the American nurses looked a little like his lost love. That, of course, only rubbed salt in his wounds. What made it even worse was that Mary Anne wouldn’t shut up about her fiancé, an Army captain named Harold. Whether that was first name or last Pete wasn’t sure.

He didn’t bother asking. He hoped Harold ran into a wall facefirst. He hoped the Army man caught the pox in a Filipino whorehouse and gave it to Mary Anne. He hoped war started and the Japanese captured Harold and treated him the way they’d treated the swarms of Russians they’d captured in Manchukuo. Marched to death, beaten, shot on the road … The horror stories got more and more horrible as time went by.

All that because the nurse already had a fellow and was happy with him. Anybody who heard about Pete’s thoughts would have opined that he was a few turns around the bend. But nobody heard about them. When the doctors asked him how he was feeling, all they wanted to know was how badly his knitting bones still hurt. That, he told them. The other? Torture wouldn’t have dragged it out of him. The only thing more unmanly than talking about his emotions would have been putting on a dress and high heels.

As he had in Peking and Shanghai, he listened to ball games from the States on shortwave radio. The Indians and Tigers and Yankees were taking turns knocking one another out of first place. The Yanks had won four pennants in a row. Pete wanted the fifth one. You could take
the kid out of the Bronx, but you couldn’t take the Bronx—or the Bronx Bombers—out of the kid.

The radio didn’t talk about China much. The Japanese were supposed to be making gains south and west of Peking. But some kind of hideous disease had broken out in those parts, so Western reporters were even less eager to see for themselves than they would have been otherwise. Was it typhoid or typhus or plague or cholera? Nobody seemed to know for sure, or to care very much. Why worry? It was only killing Chinamen, and maybe Japs.

Pete wouldn’t have been sorry to hear that the whole Japanese Army had come down with the plague. He wanted to get news from Shanghai, but he never heard any. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to arrange a proper burial for Vera. He’d been too torn up to do anything at all, which was why they’d sent him here.

He hoped somebody’d taken care of it. Maybe the owner of the Golden Lotus, the club where she’d danced. He was a Jew; Pete knew that. She’d spoken of him with amused respect—he was ugly, but he was smart. Was he a good enough guy to reach into his pocket for what needed doing? Pete couldn’t begin to guess.

Most of the men on the ward with him were Army and Navy files from the Philippines. Like him, they figured a war with Japan was coming. Unlike him, they expected it to be easy.

“Piece of cake,” said a pilot who’d fractured this, that, and the other thing crash-landing a Boeing P-26 Peashooter. The fighter was obsolete, which didn’t mean the Army Air Force here wasn’t still flying it. Despite that, Frank Houlihan didn’t lack for confidence. “They make their shit out of tin cans and baby buggies. They try us on, we’ll wipe the floor with ’em.”

“They’ve been pounding the crap out of China. They’ve taken Vladi-watchacallit away from the Russians. They’re tougher than you think,” Pete said.

Houlihan didn’t want to hear it. “Slant-eyed little monkeys with stupid round glasses and buck teeth? Don’t make me laugh, man—it hurts when I do.”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard all that crap, too. You ever see ’em in action?” Pete said. “I’m telling you, those guys don’t know how to back up.”

“Hot damn,” Houlihan said. “If they don’t, we’ll teach ’em.”

The less the other guys on the ward had actually seen of the Japanese, the more certain they were that the United States would clean the clocks of Hirohito’s finest. Pete didn’t like Japs, which was putting it mildly. But anybody who didn’t think they were tough … well, as far as Pete could see, that fellow was getting too many pain shots.

You had to know your enemy. The men on his ward didn’t, and didn’t want to. Maybe that meant nothing. Pete couldn’t say for sure; he was only a lousy two-striper himself. But what if American admirals and generals had the same attitude as the men they led? That wouldn’t be so good.