Rumors of Peace (11 page)

V
ERY SHORTLY
, even before his eighteenth birthday in June, Peter would have to report to Oakland for his physical. I wished him failing eyesight, punctured eardrums, flat feet, and even—it was terrible—a very small but real heart murmur, like the one Dumb Donny Woodall said his 4-F cousin had.

At dinner I would urge these many infirmities upon my own brother, staring across my plate at his unsuspecting face, until at last I was so consumed by guilt I had to give it up. By the time he left for Oakland, driving off with Dad one cold predawn morning, I had pinned everything on a happy error. The overworked army doctors would swing around from their probing and tapping, and in their haste, on Peter's report sheet, a check mark would accidentally be dashed off by 4-F instead of 1-A.

Since the notification would not come for several weeks, there was a good while yet to brood hopefully on the Army's capacities for mistakes.

Peggy no longer wore her cherished Clara Bebb uniform but, like everyone else, went in for sloppy Joe sweaters and jangling charm bracelets. She also wanted to wear her hair free, but when it was unplaited, she looked as if she had been plugged into an electric socket. She also wanted to be slender, but she liked to eat. She said these things would
change by themselves when she turned thirteen; she said you got smoothed out when you entered your teens, it was the way things went. She put such stock in her approaching birthday, June 3, and mentioned the date so often that it began to take root in my mind as something of international importance. It was in fact a date that would precede many significant events: Peter's own birthday, his high school graduation, Helen Maria's university graduation, and, possibly, Peggy's and my promotion into eighth grade.

The more Peggy talked about the miraculous gateway of June 3, the more my thoughts centered on it, and fortified by the recent Allied victory in North Africa, I decided that on that day all across the globe, the white flags of the enemy would appear. They would appear for Peter, and for the soldiers and the Polish families and the army horses, and for myself, and even for Helen Maria, who wanted only to sail for England. A world of people sailing, like white swans let out after winter.

The morning of June 3 unfolded without news of a cease-fire. It was a Saturday; the house was quiet. Dad was working at Moore's overtime. Peter had gone to his job at Buster Brown's. Mama was ironing my good dress for the party. The war would end later, I decided. Around dusk, when the first pale stars came out.

The party took place in Peggy's back garden. Her braids were pinned up, and she wore an expression of beaming, adult charm. The whole class came. Even Peggy's parents put in an appearance, Mr. Hatton bringing out some folding chairs with the defensive glare of someone stepping into a lunatic asylum, and his wife, with genial squints through her cigarette smoke, hurriedly pouring the orangeade. Helen Maria did not attend.

It was a very loud, fine party. Peggy's charm disappeared at once; she talked with her mouth full; she opened her gifts with shrill cries, waving around a comic book or hair ribbon, and got up a game of tag that went strong all afternoon. But toward the end she did something odd, suddenly announcing that she must thank Dumb Donny with a kiss for his penholder. Perspiring with heat and jubilation, she chased him up against a plum tree and pressed her puckered lips against his mouth. That she would want to kiss anyone, I didn't approve of. But that she would want to kiss Dumb Donny Woodall—who slid from
her grasp with a frightened snort—that was truly insane, unless it was that he was small and weak and could be experimented on.

But it didn't ruin the party. There was more tag, more cake and orangeade, and I went home at dusk as the stars came out.

At midnight, the war still in progress, I closed my eyes with bitter, yet somehow not unexpected disappointment. Now but for the grace of a careless check mark, the mailbox would yield up the long stone gray envelope of a draft notice.

The week progressed to its cold conclusions. Helen Maria graduated
summa cum laude,
with no Oxford to go to. Peggy and I barely scraped into the next grade. And Peter, even before receiving his diploma or celebrating his birthday, took from the mailbox not a long gray envelope, as I had envisioned it, but a short white one.

Greetings, it said.

After days of brooding over her situation, of fidgeting and pacing, the genius joined Peggy and me for a walk downtown. People looked at her. She dressed in a grown-up, citified way, with an artistic dash, and though she didn't have on her fringed shawl, she wore a dramatic scarf pinned with a scarab. They were probably also looking at the way she walked, for she went rapidly along with her head in the air. Soldiers jumped aside with exaggerated courtesy, and one even bowed deeply, after which whistles and laughter went up behind her. She never broke her stride. Her eyes were hard.

“What is there to see on this street!”

“We could go down to the wharf,” I suggested.

“What will I do on a wharf!”

Eager for her to meet Peter, I tricked her into Buster Brown's by not mentioning that my brother worked there. Though Peter was surprised to see me bring her in, he was friendly; but Helen Maria suffered the introduction with such staggering hauteur that I didn't know which shocked me more, her face or Peter's, which lit up with amusement.

She flung out the door, Peggy and I hurrying behind.

“Don't take me to meet people! I don't want to meet people!”

On the leafy residential sidewalks she calmed down, but she was
distracted, brooding. Of course, she would start graduate work at Cal right away, she said, but there was so little in her field offered in summer. Nothing to sink her teeth into. Why couldn't she be at Oxford!

That night I asked Peter what he had thought of her.

“Quite a dish.”

“A dish?” I had never thought of Helen Maria as a dish.

“Looks like Gene Tierney. Too bad she's such a character.”

“She's not a character, she's a genius.”

“So you keep telling me. So what's she hanging around with a couple of twelve-year-olds for?”

“Peggy's not twelve. She's thirteen.”

In the restless days before her summer courses began, Helen Maria came out with us often. She discovered places she was interested in, like Al's secondhand store filled with old books, and the Catholic church, through whose dim interior she would lead us, condemning superstitions and describing carnal priests often ringingly enough to lift and turn a devout head, and the courthouse with its Corinthian columns, the only building in town she sanctioned.

One day she even ventured to the Saturday matinee with us. She had a book under her arm—
Faust,
it was called, written in German—because she meant to go to the ladies' room and read if she didn't like the picture, which was
The Leopard Man.
She stood in the tumultuous line with a revolted expression on her face, but once inside, she loosened up, whereas I immediately tightened, for though I had sat through countless matinees without being bombed, I still crowded down the aisle with dark fatalism. About five minutes into
The Leopard Man,
Helen Maria retreated to the ladies' room. She told us afterward that the picture was jejune and to look the word up in the dictionary. But she came with us the next Saturday, and the next.

I realized why when I happened to glance at her as she handed her ticket to Mr. Tatanian, the manager. When he returned the stub to her palm, her face reddened, and with lowered eyes she darted him a smile, swinging around and bumping headlong into me.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Your face is all red,” said Peggy.

“Whose face!” she snapped, and plunged into the crowd.

I thought about Mr. Tatanian during the movie. He had a strange color, as though he had been steeped in root beer, and sad, sour, heavy-lidded eyes, and bushy hair streaked with gray. He was silent and lumbering, and he was considered a cheapskate because he collected the tickets himself. It had also been said (by Ezio) that he did things with the usherettes in his office, but I never saw him look at them with lust, though they were glamorous in their flaring trousers and short red jackets covered with gold braid. Except that Mr. Tatanian kicked you out once in a while, he was no one at all to give any thought to.

In his army notification, Peter had not been told what date he would be inducted. It was more waiting in the dark, but he didn't seem to mind. He had decided it would be pointless to start a summer course at college and have to leave midterm, so he was working full time at Buster Brown's, and on Saturday nights he went off with friends to the bowling alley or took a date to the State Theater. He said if it weren't for gas rationing, they could all pile into somebody's jalopy and zip down to Oakland or even to San Francisco; but they were stuck, and I knew that like Helen Maria, he found Mendoza lacking. But he took it with better grace. Maybe it was because he had more than two friends.

It seemed stupid that I had once thought the war was old and worn-out just because of some faded posters. More soldiers than ever clogged the streets, Dad's shipyard was going full blast,
Life
's pages still choked on smoke and corpses, and in Helen Maria's salon one day I had listened with dismay as she mentioned a Seven Years' War, a Thirty Years' War, a Hundred Years' War.

One morning another short white envelope arrived. Peter was to be inducted for active service on August 14.

With Peggy beside me, I looked out the bus window on our way to the first day of the Red Cross swimming program. The outskirts of town had grown from a couple of gasoline stations and roadside taverns to a sprawl of trailers and grocery stores. The town of Concord had tripled in size, its surrounding orchards replaced by row after row of
heat-blistered wartime housing. Quonset hut schools had sprung up, even a Quonset hut movie theater. The whole place was like a military post that went on for miles, swallowing up the countryside. But gradually the cool green walnut and pear orchards resumed, and the big dry hills with their dottings of scrub oak, and finally we were jolting through the dust of the dirt road, and the sparkling pool burst into sight.

How long a separation it had been, how like paradise to smell the perfume of the chlorine and to sprint madly from the dressing room in a running dive over the side. The cold, engulfing roar and the clear green depths with sunlight dappling down like coins sinking and turning. When I had no more breath left, I shot up into the joyous confusion and looked for Peggy, who had been smitten by an Esther Williams movie and meant to perfect her style and become an aqua star. I expected much from this graduate of Clara Bebb's turquoise pool, who in addition had spent all her summers at Lake Tahoe, but she was an earnest, splashy swimmer who progressed toward me in a maelstrom, head up and eyes tightly closed.

“How do you like it!” I cried.

“Terrific!” she cried back, continuing on her stormy way.

Panting and goose-pimpled, she paid eager attention to our instructor—an athletic young woman in a black swimsuit and black bathing cap, a whistle clenched between strong, bared teeth—and at the end of the day she flopped down in the bus, damp, candy-laden, in the same soaring spirits as I.

If it weren't for August 14, this day would have had to be counted as one of life's perfect gifts.

J
ULY
11:

Sicily Invaded!

Far from winding things up over there, they were starting a new front. Having filched Peter's world map, which he never looked at anymore, I unfolded it on my bed and studied it. What were they doing in Sicily? Why did they keep fighting in places so far from Germany? North Africa, Russia, now Sicily. If they couldn't load the troops onto planes and drop them on Berlin, which would seem the sensible thing, why at least didn't they aim for some invasion spot where they wouldn't
have so far to march to Berlin? Up there, by the town of Genoa. Or better yet, Holland. That would make more sense than Sicily.

Even after Helen Maria had started her summer courses, she kept coming to the Saturday matinees with us. She began bringing Mr. Tatanian's name up in an offhand way, the way she might have made some casual remark on the ticket seller or the usherettes, except it was never them, just Mr. Tatanian.

She wrote a poem entitled “To the Nation of Armenia” and read it aloud to us. It was about ancient battles and kings, but I knew it had to do with Mr. Tatanian because one of her casual comments was that his name was Armenian. She probably thought we weren't smart enough to put two and two together. But it wasn't hard, and it bothered me that a genius was in love with somebody who had been collecting tickets in the State Theater doorway for as long as I could remember. After the reading of the poem Peggy left the room to make a sandwich, and I took my courage in my hands.

“Do you like Mr. Tatanian?”

Helen Maria looked neither surprised nor displeased by the question. She merely said, “Chemistry is a strange thing.”

“Chemistry?”

“Body chemistry. Your feelings simply cry out to a stranger. There's no accounting for it. You're completely and utterly at its mercy.”

A picture of an epileptic flashed through my mind. You walked by some man, maybe a toothless wino, and suddenly your body cried out to him and you went into a fit even as you stared at him in horror. You might even wind up marrying him.

“Would you marry him?”

“Certainly not. I don't intend to marry.”

“But if your body chemistry cried out, if you couldn't live without him—”

“My dear friend, haven't you heard of free love?”

“No. What is it?”

“It is this. If you can't live without a man, you live with him, but you don't ask permission from church and state. You are above that. That is free love.”