Gone to Soldiers (71 page)

“We can take care of their daughter,” Aunt Rose said, “the way we're doing.”

“The Joint is raising money. They take it as a loan. You give them money now, and after the war, they give it back. Why not? We can't buy anything with our savings. Maybe the money will find its way to help.”

“Morris, are we Rothschilds to be giving money away? Are we so rich?”

“For the first time in our lives, we're doing okay. What's the use handing it over to the banks? Jews give to everybody's charities. I see you give silver to the nuns when they come around. Who gives to the Joint but Jews? And now, it's more important than ever.” When he said that, he glanced toward Naomi, and Aunt Rose gave him a quick frown of warning. Something he wasn't to say.

Naomi was thinking about killing Nazis with a gun. That's what Morris meant that Papa did, and that was why he was in danger. Uncle Morris knew that was what the letter meant. She remembered Papa in his uniform going off to the army, looking handsome and serious. He could protect himself. He would survive. He would come and find Naomi, just as she had dreamed at first, riding his motorbike but in uniform. Even if she was not a good girl, he would not mind, but be glad anyhow because he had been shooting and killing and would not be so fussy about what she had been doing.

Maybe they would stay in Detroit, and Ruthie would live with them. Maybe they would go to Paris. Jacqueline would apologize for calling her Nadine all those years. Then there would be a loud ringing at the door, and Maman and Rivka, thin and pale, would stand there and Maman would say, I forgot my keys but here I am home and hungry.

Several times in the next few days she caught her aunt and uncle talking about the camps. When she entered the room, they changed the subject right away, so she took to being very quiet and waiting outside. Uncle Morris said that she would find out anyhow, because he was always bringing home pamphlets and Jewish newspapers. Aunt Rose said that most of the newspapers were in Yiddish. Uncle Morris said there was plenty in English around the house by now. That made Naomi smile, although the smile hurt as if her face were tearing, because both Rivka and she could read a little Yiddish. Papa had taught them the Hebrew alphabet years ago, and Maman used to get a Yiddish weekly. She could make out what the papers said, the gist of it, and sometimes there were photographs that had been smuggled out of German-occupied countries, of bodies machine-gunned in a ditch or Jews being pushed into freight cars. She was at once angry with her uncle and her aunt for thinking she did not know as much as they did about the camps, and grateful, for unlike G-d, at least they tried to keep the pain from her. At least they tried.

RUTHIE 6

What Is Given and What Is Taken Away

It was a fall of crisp nearly clear days and days of scudding granite grey clouds. The first frost had just ended the tomato canning when Arty was drafted. It happened almost too fast for them to register what was happening. Then the Army had taken him and he was gone, looking as ill at ease in his uniform as Murray had a year and a half before.

Ruthie had always had a sparring relationship with Duvey and a more workable one with Arty. Arty had been the good boy, not ambitious, not overly bright but diligent. He had married so young she could scarcely remember his days of dating. He seemed to have gone directly from boyish pastimes of baseball and street hockey to a man's responsibilities of marriage and family, while Duvey had remained the perennial adolescent. Arty never left home, only moving upstairs, and scarcely a day had passed in her life without seeing him.

Sharon lay in bed the day after he left and would not get up, although her own children were crying and Rose was distraught and overwhelmed. When Ruthie got home from the factory at eleven-thirty, Rose was waiting up to complain about Sharon.

Ruthie privately thought they should let Sharon collapse for a few days after which she would surely get up on her own. The volume of work, however, was more than Rose could handle. More importantly, she was furious with Sharon for taking to her bed over Arty's being drafted, when Rose had not left Sharon to manage alone when Duvey had been killed. Morris refused to get involved, insisting it was a matter for the women to settle. Rose said she couldn't manage one more day, and if Sharon didn't get up tomorrow, she would have to keep Naomi home from school to help her.

“But, Mama, I can't march upstairs now and talk to her. It's midnight.”

“
She
's not sleeping. Besides, who needs to sleep twenty-four hours a day? That's not a woman, that's a piece of furniture, a chair, a stuffed owl. Who needs a stuffed owl for a daughter-in-law? Oy, oy, my man is gone, so I'm going to bed like a princess?” Rose grabbed her by the elbow and took her into the bedroom where Morris softly snored. “Listen,” she whispered, poking Ruthie in the ribs.

Through the ceiling came the sound of a radio. Glenn Miller's “In the Mood.” Sharon wanted to deny reality. Ruthie could understand. She could imagine, as she climbed the steps reluctantly, pausing on the landing to make sour faces, that it would be heaven itself to go to bed and sleep for a week, a month, to snooze the war away. Maybe instead of routing Sharon out as she had been instructed, she would climb in beside her and give up at last: relinquish her ambitions, her hopes, her insane and exhausting schedule attending school, starting early for one full workday, and then going to the factory and working another full shift.

Still she could not let Rose keep Naomi out of school. Naomi was doing all right, but the language barrier remained. She might never be the student in English she could be in French. Naomi needed more schooling, not less. Ruthie could not let her be sacrificed to Sharon's indulgent grief.

Long ago Morris had put a stout lock on the outer door, so that the upstairs and downstairs apartments need not be locked from the stairwell. She followed the sound of Jimmy Dorsey's band to the master bedroom over her parents. Sharon was propped up in bed with her high school yearbooks, wedding photographs, summer snapshots and dance programs spread around her. Her face was red and swollen as if she had toothache. Wadded up handkerchiefs had been tossed into corners. “This is your make-believe ballroom bringing you cheek to cheek music to dance to, to dream by, to bring back stardust memories.…”

“Sharon!” Ruthie cleared her throat, sitting on the bench of Sharon's vanity. “Mama's very upset. She can't handle the nursery without you. It's too much work for her.”

“How could they take him? A father doing essential war work? It's not right. It's not fair. There's thousands of useless no-good men they could have taken. I could send them a list of twenty right in this neighborhood nobody would miss and a lot of women would thank them from the bottoms of their hearts.”

I'm too weary for this, Ruthie thought, words have left me. What went through her mind sitting there was that Sharon had a lot of room to herself and that it would be nice to have a vanity, if she ever got dressed up again. “Sharon, I can tell you from my own experience, it's better to keep busy, or you just can't stand it.”

“You're talking about some boyfriend. Maybe you'll marry him and maybe you won't. It's not the same thing, not one tenth the same thing!” Sharon sat up, clutching their formal wedding picture in its leather frame to her breasts.

“Think of Trudi, who had Leib go away two days after they were married, and he's not even home to see his baby. Come on. You helped get Mama into this. And you're going to need the money.”

Sharon put down the photo. “The Army pays less a month than he was making every week! What am I going to do? How can I live on an allotment?”

“You won't make it at all if you don't get out of bed and help Mama. I'm telling you, she can't manage. She'll have to find another woman from the neighborhood to work with her and split the money. She'll have to find someone right away.”

Sharon snapped off the radio. She pulled her mouth out thin. “All right. I hear you. But it isn't fair!”

Ruthie lay in bed, her joints aching as if she had fallen from a height. Long after she had come home, she could still feel the vibration of the line resonating through her. We do what we can, each of us, she said to the ceiling and to the distant and increasingly unreal Murray, we do what we can.

Maybe she was as unreal to Murray as he had become to her. Maybe he had stopped loving her. He did not have to marry her. Maybe he would not view her getting her college degree as contributing to their common future, but would be resentful of a woman who had acquired the education to which they both aspired. Maybe he would want a younger or more glamorous woman. What would become of her? She would have thrown away her virginity and would remain alone. One of her professors at Wayne had lectured the women in his course that they were a lost generation, doomed to spinsterhood. He had orated over them in a mixture of pity and scorn as they sat taking notes.

Two fat tears slid from the corners of her eyes. Then she saw herself as silly as Sharon, clutching old dance programs. If Murray did not want her, she would still have her degree. She would be a professional. She would move into a little apartment of her own and she would take Naomi, yes, and she would save for Naomi to go to college at Wayne too. If Murray no longer wanted her, she would have her own life. She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately. If she lived just with Naomi, she could sleep late on weekends. She could sleep as late as she pleased.

The alarm was ringing beside the bed like a buzz saw biting into her head before she knew she had been asleep, and then it was time to rush again, again to rush and rush and rush.

Sundays she liked to go for an hour with Morris to the garden as a break from studying and because except for a hurried breakfast, she scarcely saw him Monday through Saturday. The victory gardens for their block were in vacant lots where three houses owned by the same brothers had been burned for insurance during the Depression. The steps for each house were still in place but the foundations had been filled in years before. One of the lots was an outdoor skating rink, a built-up rim of earth flooded every November when the weather turned cold enough to freeze hard. The other two were divided into many small vegetable plots.

Morris wanted to dig the carrots, the beets, the rutabagas, the parsnips. The week before, November had opened with the first snow, although it had melted by ten o'clock. Still it was a sign that winter was coming soon. She helped him and for a reward they got to talk.

“We know something about the deportations to the camps, how many Jews die there. I don't think Aunt Chava or Naomi's sister are still alive. If the rest of her family is in the Resistance, she's likely to be an orphan. I think, Ruthele, we have her for life and we better face that.”

“I'm sorry for her family, but I'm more than willing to keep Naomi.”

“Yeah, we'll keep her, don't worry. She's a good girl. We lost Duvey, we got her. Somewhere in G-d's mind, does it balance? I don't see how, but never mind.” Morris sighed.

“You miss Arty, don't you?” In his letters, Arty sounded unhappy. Most of the draftees were kids. He longed for his family. The food upset his stomach.

“We did the same kind of work, on the line. We're in different locals of the same union. I never had that with Duvey, just to be able to talk about what happens. Arty and I talked the same language.”

She wanted to say that she too worked on the line. “I always had trouble talking to Duvey too.”

“I wish they hadn't taken Arty. I don't think they should take fathers.” Morris shook his head. “War goes on long enough, they'll start on old guys like me. Hand us a gun and point us at the enemy.”

“Tata, you sound so discouraged, you scare me.”

“I need something to hope on.” He leaned on his spade. “The world is more evil than I gave it credit for when I was a young man. I thought, all we need is to get more civilized. But Germany's a cultured country, as cultured as any. I find myself thinking about the darkness in people, and I wonder how any good happens.”

“Tata, whatever the world is like, you're a good man. You try to be just. I try to be like you.”

“Like me.” He rubbed his bald spot. “
Arty
is like me, he won't make much of a soldier. They should have left him home. It isn't right for them to take one son and then put the last one in danger.”

A son, a son. As if she did not count. It was time for her to go back to her schoolwork. Morris would putter in the garden for hours. He talked about getting a little place in the country when he retired, where he could raise cabbages and tomatoes. Ruthie didn't believe him, because he had his organizations. Since the letter had come on thin paper for Naomi, he was even more insistent that American Jews must lobby the Roosevelt administration into saving European Jews. They must make the administration let in more than the tiny legal trickle which the State Department as a policy attempted to stop at the source in Europe. They must push for bombing of the railroads leading to the camps and bombing of the camps themselves. The Allies must denounce the killing of Jews. Now Morris had three meetings every week.

Thanksgiving came dismally. Tarawa was taken in the Pacific. Arty was still in Louisiana training. Heavy fighting, town by town, house by house, went on in Italy. An old atlas lay permanently on the kitchen counter so they could look up the places in the news. All week a freezing rain fell, sleet, wet snow changing back to sleet. Ice formed on the trees and branches cracked. First Sharon got a cold and then Rose, then Naomi, then Ruthie and Morris. It brought a middling fever and a sore throat.

Ruthie was in bed with a fever of 101.4 and a splitting headache when Trudi appeared with a telegram. Leib had been wounded in action at someplace called Monte Pantano. He was in the hospital in Naples, but he would be coming home. Trudi was weeping. She did not know whether to celebrate or mourn. “They don't say if he'll live, if he's okay, if he's half dead. What's the use of this? They don't even say when he's coming. How can I live, not knowing?”