Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online

ancestors but of their ships, stiff formal oil paintings of the Ebeneezer Scott , the General Abraham Woolrich , in full unlikely sail upon static waves, alternating with naive local paintings of noted shipwrecks, the Mary Frances going down with all hands off Woolrich Island. Portraits of ancestors had not seemed necessary, since she was always being told she had Granny Abra Scott’s nose and Great-Uncle Timothy’s eyes. She had felt herself not so much placed as embedded in family expectations, the life before her a formal perennial bed planted with Everetts and Timothys and Toms and Mary Franceses and Abras, needing only occasional watering.
    Summers had been the free and glorious times, always on the water, sailing or chugging among the elaboration of inlets and arms and bays of the Kennebec or lolling on the unusual (for Maine) sand beaches of their peninsula. Growing up they had even had a Civil War fort to play in, with spiral staircases and dungeons and parapets. They scrambled over the rocks, they clammed, they raced their cousins in catboats. The gap of two years between Everett, called Ready, and Abra which sprawled wide in Bath during the school year, closed at the summer house.
    Every summer the New Yorkers came to the peninsula with their different accents, different values, different clothes and attitudes; with them came a freedom she found addictive. In Bath she was always under someone’s expectant or admonitory gaze, but out in the simpler stark house on the hill at Popham, she could always escape surveillance. It was a matter of sailing off to another island or rounding the bend. The Woolriches had their family compound on an island visible from her family’s wide front porch, and she could always say she was sailing over to her uncle’s. If the weather precluded sailing, then there was the forest of birch, oak and fir, the marshes, the dank swamps where she could lose herself. Privacy was only one hill away. The social rules that circumscribed the depth and frequency of every contact in Bath frayed in the summer world of fir and rock, of fog drifting in magic and chilly, the sun dazzling, the wind rising till she could feel herself a real person with a will and a future as potentially tumultuous and changeable as the cold sea that quickened her. She could not go to sea, as Ready would, so she chose an island instead that seemed to her as free and rich as the sea: Manhattan.
    She ate in a Nedick’s, on her way to the fundraiser for Czech resistance. At the door of the rented hall, she met two friends, Djika and Karen Sue. Djika was the only other woman graduate student in her department. Karen Sue had been a bored southern belle in Memphis before contracting an inappropriate marriage her father had had annulled; an inheritance was keeping her in New York where she found life livelier. She had a big apartment on Riverside Drive where parties among the politicos they knew were often held.
    It was an odd evening, the regulars the Party could call out for its fundraisers, folk singers, theater people and then a lot of Czech chorale groups and singers, many rousing speeches about the brave partisans. Up on the platform Abra contemplated hairy Jack Covington, who had once leaped upon her, satisfied himself with haste and rolled off, and then demanded to be waited on in the morning, sending her out for a bottle of orange juice, a package of Wheaties and light cream. She had spent a night with him after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union had reconstituted the Popular Front and she and her interventionist friends were speaking to the Communists again. She had endeavored to avoid a repeat ever since, although whenever he saw her he displayed that great toothy grin like the grille of a new truck and headed straight at her. That such a virile-looking ex-longshoreman should prove so perfunctory in bed was disappointing. She was amused to note that she found his speeches less moving than