“President Roosevelt is delighted at industrial and agricultural production,” the newsman said. “At a White House dinner last night, he said, ‘We are getting the tools we need for victory, and when we have them we will finish the job.’ The dinner menu included fried chicken, baked potatoes, and peas.”
Peggy chuckled. That was the kind of plain food any American family might eat. FDR liked fancier recipes. When what he ate made the news, though, he kept it simple.
After what the President had for dinner came the foreign news. The Germans were denying a Russian breakthrough in front of Minsk. Goebbels claimed Stalin was obviously lying, because the ground in Russia was too muddy to let anyone break through. That sounded reasonable. Of course, when you were talking about the two biggest liars in Europe-a prize for which the competition was steep-who could guess whether sounding reasonable meant anything?
“And, in the long-running civil war in Spain so closely tied to the wider European struggle, Nationalist radio has at last admitted the death of Marshal Sanjurjo,” the newsman went on. “A Nationalist statement says the marshal ‘died a martyr in the unending struggle against atheistic Bolshevism.’ No successor has been named. The Nationalists deny Republican reports of a power struggle among their generals.”
That they denied it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Peggy lit her first cigarette of the morning. The Spaniards didn’t tell lies the size of the ones that came out of Berlin and Moscow, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.
“Hitler and Mussolini have both expressed their regret over the loss of the man they have often called the liberator of Spain,” the newsman said. “What will happen there now without him remains to be seen.”
If Hitler and Mussolini missed Sanjurjo, Peggy didn’t need to take out a slide rule to calculate that she didn’t. The Spanish general’s war had given the bigger Fascist dictators-and Stalin-the chance to test their weapons and let their soldiers earn some combat experience. They’d all gone on to bigger and worse things, too.
She left the radio on while she did the dishes. The sports news was that the Phillies had fired their manager. The A’s were just as lousy. But, since ancient Connie Mack not only managed but also owned the team, chances were he wouldn’t give himself the old heave-ho. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t wound up in the cellar plenty of other times.
Commercials followed the news, and then an interview show at a war plant. It was so stupid and saccharine, it soon made Peggy spin the dial. She felt embarrassed she’d listened to it for even a few minutes. Plenty of people must, she supposed, or they wouldn’t leave it on the air. But if that was popular, the country had to be going to the dogs … didn’t it?
She washed some clothes. She hung them out on the line behind the house. It wasn’t warm any more. The wind blowing out of the north made the wet laundry flap. The clothes would dry fast, unless the wind brought rain with it.
When she went back in, she did some ironing, too. She thanked heaven for an iron you plugged into the wall, an iron that by God stayed hot. She’d learned to fight wrinkles with irons you had to heat on the stove, irons that cooled off to worthlessness by the time you carried them from the stove to the ironing board.
After the ironing, sweeping and dusting. Now that she had no one but herself for whom to keep the house neat, she did a better job of housekeeping than she had when Herb also lived here. She pictured him living in squalor in his apartment. She couldn’t make herself believe the picture, though. Even living alone, Herb wouldn’t be a slob. Any man who’d gone through the Army knew the basics of taking care of himself.
By the time she finished getting the place shipshape, it was almost noon. She stared at the clock on her nightstand as if it had done her wrong. And she felt it had. Didn’t she just finish breakfast? It seemed that way, but she was hungry for lunch.
She’d had ham for dinner the night before. Wax paper-wrapped leftovers sat in the icebox. She sliced some ham thin, put it on bread, added sweet pickles and mustard, and ate the sandwich. Another cup of coffee washed it down. That was heated up from the pot she’d made for breakfast, and on the bitter side. Next to what they called coffee in Europe, it was the nectar of the gods.
After lunch, she started an Agatha Christie mystery. It was pretty good, but the Englishwoman’s casual anti-Semitism grated in ways it wouldn’t have before Peggy saw how Hitler treated Jews in the countries he’d overrun-and in his own. She sighed and put the book down. She’d changed, all right.
Her life had turned inside out because she’d been stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic when Europe went up in flames. Well, sure, so did millions of other lives. But it wasn’t even as if she’d got hurt. She’d just got stuck.
And, because she’d got stuck, she wasn’t married to Herb any more. Her politics and her whole outlook on the world had changed. Why? Because she hadn’t packed up and headed for home a week earlier.
How many other lives took turns just as big from causes just as trivial? It made you wonder. It really did. In some world where she had taken a train back to France and sailed for America, was another Peggy, one who still wore a wedding ring, rattling around this house right now? Was that Peggy wondering what things would have been like if she’d stayed in Czechoslovakia till the war broke out?
This Peggy’s mouth twisted. “Trust me, kiddo-you wouldn’t’ve had a whole lot of fun,” she told the imaginary one, and tried to dismiss her from her own mind.
But, once summoned, that still-married Peggy didn’t want to be dismissed. Neither did the idea that had spawned her, even if it seemed to belong to the lurid pulp magazines with the gaudy covers and the wildly titled stories. Because the real Peggy was sure she couldn’t be the only one who conjured imaginary selves from the vasty deep. Everybody had places in his life where he could have done one thing but had done the other. Had he chosen differently, he would have had a different life story from then on out. How could you help wondering about the way that other movie would have run?
Peggy lit a cigarette to help herself think. It wasn’t only people, was it? It was countries, too. What would Germany be like right now if Hitler had got killed in the last war? He could have, easily. He’d been a runner-from what Herb said, about as dangerous a duty as you could find. But he’d come through, and the Reich was what it was because he had. If you dug enough, history had to be full of crazy things like that. Peggy decided she didn’t want to dig after all. She fixed herself a bourbon on the rocks. It helped, but not enough.
Louis Mirouze didn’t look quite so miserable as a kitten you tossed into a puddle. But that was only because the young lieutenant’s helmet kept his hair from going every which way like a soaked kitten’s.
Aristide Demange was sure he looked every bit as soggy himself. He doubted he looked miserable, though. His guess was that he looked pissed off. It wasn’t a wild guess. He usually looked pissed off, because he usually was pissed off. If you couldn’t find something to get pissed off about while you were in the Army, you weren’t half trying.
“Stupid cons,” he muttered. Just then, a raindrop came down right on the coal of his Gitane. The cigarette quit drawing. He spat it out in disgust and fired up another one.
“Sir?” Mirouze said.
“Stupid cons,” Demange repeated. “The cretins and syphilitic imbeciles who left us stuck in the mud here.”
“Oh,” Mirouze said. That would have been heresy to him not long before. Now he just shrugged. “Fuck ’em all.”