Rumors of Peace (14 page)

I
N SPITE OF EVERYTHING
, there was Peter's furlough to look forward to. He would be coming home the first week in October, only for two or three days because it would take him two days to get here by train and the same back. But even to see him for two or three hours would be something.

The late summer heat was intense. At night, when Dad came home from work, the house was as stifling as it was in the daytime. But he said it was cool compared to the hulls of ships when you were working inside them, and everything was relative. This was something Helen Maria often said—everything was relative. But it seemed to me that either a thing was or it wasn't, and it shouldn't make any difference how it compared to something else. Yet here was Dad saying how cool the house was, while Mama and I roasted. It was something to think about. As for Peggy, the heat made her irritable, and she complained constantly about her triumph, which had been great but inconclusive. The Towks now said hi to her in the hall, but no one asked her to eat lunch, or to join a committee, or to go to a party. It was because she was in a dumbbell class. She set about to change that.

In study hall, while I sketched exploding Zeros with pieces of Jap flying through the air, Peggy bent over her homework. Nothing could
break her concentration, not whispers or offers of gum or covertly produced comic books, though I tried them all. After school she went home loaded down with books.

She bored me. I bored her. Yet I cherished the hope that she would somehow change back to what she had been and like me for what I was, green hair and all. Looking at the slim cheek bent over a text, I felt pangs of nostalgia for my old, fat, ignorant Peggy.

Others didn't. Mrs. Miller praised her. Her parents praised her. Helen Maria praised her.

“I'm very impressed,” the genius told me, while Peggy smiled at the floor with ill-concealed satisfaction. “It's a remarkable breakthrough. But I always knew she had it in her; it was just a matter of application. And what, if I may ask, has become of your own academic resolution?”

I had planned to improve, but somehow, improvement had lost importance. I stood thinking of a newspaper item I had read earlier that day.

War on Japs Just Begun

                       
Don't start selling your war bonds. The war in the South Pacific is only a prelude to the fight that is to come. We will lose thousands of men, scores of ships, hundreds of planes, and tons of supplies before we even make a dent. . . .

It made it seem useless to pore over the irrelevancies of schoolbooks. I shrugged my shoulders at Helen Maria's question.

“You didn't even finish
War and Peace,
did you?”

“No. It was too hard.”

She gave me a cool look and turned her attention back to Peggy.

A messenger boy from Western Union handed me a telegram through the screen door. My heart lunged. Telegrams brought catastrophic news, and I saw through the cellophane slot of this one that it was from Missouri. I ran through the house into the backyard, where Mama was talking with a neighbor over the fence. Biting my lip, I held out the yellow envelope.

She took it, saying to the neighbor, “It's from Peter, when he'll be coming in.”

She read it, and a look of disappointment came over her face. “No, he can't come,” she said slowly. “He's got the flu.”

We went back into the house together.

“Could he come after?” I asked.

“I don't think they can do that,” she said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “He'll be going overseas.”

“We won't get to see him at all before he goes?”

“I don't think so, Suse.” She sat with her chin in her hand, looking down at the green oilcloth.

A letter came a few days later. He was in the infirmary and mad as hell to spend his furlough there. It wasn't even bad flu, but they kept him in bed with a thermometer in his mouth. The only time the Army showed concern about you was when you didn't want them to. And he had wanted so much to get out here and see us all before shipping out. They had gotten their orders. They were going to England.

England. Not the bloody, steaming jungles of the Pacific. And not Italy either. But England, which hadn't even been bombed in more than a year. Thank God. Thank God for England.

“And what will they do in England?” asked Helen Maria. You could tell she was jealous, she didn't want anyone else to get there.

“Guard it maybe,” I smiled. “Save Oxford for you.”

But she had no sense of humor when it came to Oxford.

I began wondering myself what they were going to do there. And gradually I came to understand that they were going to prepare for an invasion of Europe. It was what Dad thought. It was what the newspapers thought. Far from being a safe harbor, England was to be the launching place.

With Peggy locked away studying every day after school, I got back into the habit of going down to the library, where there was a variety of newspapers and magazines to read. I was looking specifically for news about the invasion, but 1 read everything that pertained to the war.

One unbearably hot afternoon I sat back, socked in the face by a brief article in
Time.
It explained that dragged-out silence in Italy this summer. It said that the Italian surrender had been preceded by a long
conference in Lisbon between Italian emissaries and the Allies.

My concept of surrender was vastly different. The head of the collapsing army shoved a scrawled note of defeat into the hand of a messenger to take to the enemy encampment. There, waving his white flag at a blood-spattered, hate-filled sentry, the messenger begged to be taken to the commanding general. Through smoke and corpses he was led, and in a bullet-torn tent, with bloodshot eyes and bags beneath them, the general read the note with such violent scorn and joy that the messenger before him shook with terror.

These enemies had sat around a polished conference table. They had shuffled papers, sipped glasses of water, calmly gone over points. How could they hold themselves back, they whose armies had been at each other's throats since North Africa? How could they keep from flinging themselves across the table and smashing each other's faces? Why had the Polish family been killed if these leaders didn't even let go with a clenched fist? In such restraint, in such cordiality, there was something more horrifying than death itself. I scraped my chair back and left.

The buildings glared bone white, their shadows long, black, sharp-edged. Oil-blackened Shell workers were walking home, swinging their empty lunch pails. Cannery women in tomato-stained slacks, their hair bound up in kerchiefs, made for the Ferry Street bars. Shopgirls in thin flowered summer dresses strolled arm in arm, their pompadours wilted. Soldiers squinted, smiled, whistled, their summer khakis darkened with sweat under the arms and down the spine. They squinted at me too; they always did, because of my hair. I returned their looks today, shading my eyes with my hand, thinking, “Go home. Get on the train. Why should you fight if they sit around a table like that?”

Then I was certain I had lost my mind. God help us if our army got on a train and went home! Had I forgotten the bombers? And the Jap spies filtering back this minute from detention camps? But something was frighteningly wrong, out of kilter, and I kept walking, head down, passing from glaring pavement to black shadow, trying to grab hold of what it was.

There at the end of Ferry Street stood the four-thirty train from Berkeley. The old signal man in baggy trousers waved his red flag in slow arcs as the warning bell went
dingdingdingding
and soldiers with
duffel bags ran down the USO steps to the surging khaki crowd by the train; the depot doors kept flinging open, their windows flashing like diamonds; from the open windows of the USO Glenn Miller's band music floated through the scorching air. The crowd pushed noisily in the heat and dust, yelling at each other, clattering up the steel steps into the train, hanging out the open windows. Then there was an explosive hiss, steam rose up around the engine, and the conductor cried, “All aboard! All aboard!”

From this hectic scene Helen Maria was rapidly emerging, her books against her chest. I watched her. In an ordinary summer dress and no shawl she looked like anybody else, except for her walk, very fast, and with her head high. Soldiers smiled and whistled, and one kept blocking her as she tried to pass. Eyes fixed haughtily above him, she stepped off the curb and continued along the gutter at an unbroken pace, returning to the pavement when she had left him behind. She took notice of nothing. Not the clacking billiard rooms, or the barbershop with its many moose heads inside, or the mysterious bail bond offices, or the sleazy hotels, or the noisy bars one after another. On she came, oblivious. I tapped her shoulder as she passed.

“You know the conference in Lisbon?”

“I do not,” she said, as I fell in alongside her. That was a nice thing about Helen Maria, you didn't have to waste time with greetings and small talk.

“After the fall of Sicily. A meeting between Italian emissaries and the Allies.”

She was usually bored by my concern with things military, but it may have been the urgency in my voice that caused her to raise a responsive brow.

“They discussed the terms of Italy's surrender,” I said. “They
discussed
They were
enemies,
and they sat there politely discussing!”

The brow dropped. “What do you want them to do? Shoot one another?”

“Yes! Or why should the soldiers? If those big ones don't hate each other, why should the soldiers?”

“I believe I once explained to you that war is an economics-based
phenomenon. Those in charge have nothing against each other on an emotional level.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“What's more, soldiers don't hate each other either.”

I looked at the brilliant green eyes, astonished to hear a genius say anything so hopelessly, so embarrassingly incorrect.

“Let's take Verdun,” she continued, shifting the sweaty books in her arms. “On Christmas Day the Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches, and the Germans out of theirs, and throwing their rifles to the mud, they proceeded to have a jolly game of soccer.”

“You don't expect me to believe that.”

“Don't you know about the friendships that were struck up in bomb craters? Yank and Kraut sharing rations, exchanging family snapshots?”

“I'm trying to be serious!”

“God, it's like talking to a wall. Go to your history books if you don't think I'm serious. Read about war, if you're so interested in it. Read about Verdun.”

“Verdun wasn't an important war,” I said defensively.

“Verdun was not a war! My God, don't you know anything? Verdun was the longest, bloodiest battle of World War One. A field where they lived like rats. Not important, indeed! They'd be so charmed to hear it, the million or more who died there.”

My face burned, but I kept to my course. “Don't tell me they didn't hate each other. Don't tell me they would have stayed there if they didn't hate each other.”

“That's exactly what I am telling you.”

I could have struck her. How was I to talk with someone who would not use reason? “Then why
did
they stay there?” I snapped, to force her into a corner.

“Because they were told to.”

I did strike her then, except that it was my own thigh, meant as the back of her calm, smug head.

“Let's cut through the park,” she suggested, turning. I could not speak for anger, and all at once the heat was choking, intolerable. Then the scorching air, colorless and glaring as gravel, went out like a light
bulb as we were enveloped by cool, lofty greenness. Except that it was not really cool, just not boiling, as if you were walking through tepid water. Old men in rolled sleeves sat on benches. Young mothers in shorts rolled flushed babies along in buggies. Soldiers lay asleep on the lawns, children playing among them. I still clutched my anger, not knowing what to do with it, and was further angered to see that Helen Maria was enjoying the shade without a care in the world. Sinking down on the grass, she put her books aside and pushed her damp hair from her forehead.

“Well, what are you standing for? Are you still annoyed because they played soccer at Verdun?”

I sat down sullenly.

“Why do you insist that everyone burst with hatred?” she asked, lying back on an elbow. “Isn't it more practical not to hate, since the enemy will more than likely become the ally afterwards, and vice versa?”

Again I was electrified by the urge to strike her. I yanked up a handful of the short grass. When I spoke, my voice came out oddly pinched. “You make it sound like a game.”

“Because that's what it is.”

“It is not!”

I sat mangling the grass in my palm, trying to get my voice under control. I said quietly, “They hate us, and we hate them. We hate them, and we'll always hate them.”

“Ah,” she said reflectively. “Hatred as something to hold it all together. To give it point. Since nothing else does.”

“It's not to give it anything. It's how it is.”

“Fascinating,” she nodded slowly. “Yes, I quite understand.”

I nodded too, feeling calmer, as if I had narrowly escaped obliteration. Now the soccer game faded, and the shared snapshots, and the prescribed, ratlike dying. All sank back under the strong, comprehensible tide of vengeance and bloodlust.

“Tell me something,” Helen Maria said suddenly. “Why are you so interested in our gardener?” But she didn't wait for an answer. “Sometimes he has trouble, people take him for a Japanese. Once a woman visiting across the street came over and made a very unpleasant scene with Jack. Well, to me Annuncio looks like a Filipino, but I don't
know. Sometimes I wonder. Do you, too? Is that why you look at him?”