In Broken Times

WHEN he bade me good-by, Walter handed me his laundry and promised to rejoin me in two days, and “Don’t,” he said, “don’t go anywhere for longer than forty minutes without letting your mother know where to find you.”

So I took his wash to the Chinese laundry and spent some more futile hours hunting for a portable gift. Mother had been smarter: she had contrived him wrist warmers and a chess set he could hold in the palm of one hand and an extraordinary hotwater bottle that worked with chemicals. I could find nothing. I was not to see him until Wednesday, and there seemed to be little to do. So I turned, as always, to the practice barre, and buried myself in Carnegie Hall. There, in the animated decay of that compost heap, amid the rotted, the forlorn, and the germinating, with lungs jumping and sweat pouring, once more I warmed my heart. I didn’t have to explain to dancing colleagues. I could say, “Stand further back,” or “After you,” or “Which leg?” and much had been exchanged in the way of brotherly endeavor and encouragement.

When class was done, there was still the rest of the afternoon to be got through, so I went into the Carnegie drugstore and began writing a letter an important one which was to say everything I had not yet made clear and was to last through the war and be carried in his duffle bag. I phoned Mother as requested, and she said no news but to come have dinner with her and not to mope, a suggestion that struck me as a sheer impossibility. There were, I figured, forty-eight more hours to be got through somehow before we met again.

I found myself standing and talking to emptiness in all sorts of places, frequently the open street, until at last I slipped into “Aunt Clemmy’s” restaurant below my studio and had a lugubrious meal, swallowing hard on the soup and blotting the magazines with bad tears. Around nine the place shut up and I was forced to leave. And so, wearily, I went upstairs.

Someone seemed to be inside talking.

He was there, in greatcoat and muffler, sitting at the phone. “Never mind,” he said into the phone, “my idiot wife has just come in,” and he hung up. Then he stared at me without moving. “Darling,” he said, “we had two hours. Now we have twenty minutes.” All the while I had been downstairs weeping, he had been upstairs phoning every number in my telephone book. He had reached the M’s — Motley and Mainbocher.

He lay down on the bed without taking off his coat. He was not even smoking. I sat beside him and held his hand. “How long?”

“Two years, probably.”

“Mightn’t you have a furlough sooner?”

“No.”

So then the time came and I tied a handkerchief around my head and went with him in a taxi. I did not get out at the Pennsylvania Station. He took his great bags and became a khaki back and went through the doors.

We had had in all — in broken times — just ten weeks.

It was not until two nights later that I heard the great ship calling all through the dawn as the convoy put to sea. For two days and two nights it lay in the river. He was within sight of my house and unable to send a message. How many men lined those rails, staring at the dimmed lights of apartments and hotels while the ships around them silently and invisibly gathered? And the women within the city listened and listened and then they heard it, and when daylight came they phoned one another. This was the pattern throughout the war; the cessation of all news and the waiting and then a sound or a radio message and the women phoning at dawn.

Martha Graham called in the morning. “We must now love him with all our hearts. I’ll be over later.”

With the morning came an unexpected visitor, an admiral, the husband of a lifelong friend. I received him in my bathrobe, too listless to dress. I gave him the paltry little bottle of Scotch I had managed to find, and he sat down genially.

“Now, what do you suppose I did last night?”

I shook my head.

“I went to see Oklahoma!”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“And whom do you suppose I was with? Don’t try to talk. I’ll tell you. The skipper of Walter’s convoy, and I called to explain that he is one of the best admirals in the fleet and one of the most experienced and careful — a brilliant seaman — and his war record is splendid. Walter could not be in better hands.”

I was breathing again.

“And I’ll tell you more because I know you’ll keep your mouth shut. He’s going to the European Theater and not to the East, and he’s going to be stationed first in a not too exposed position.”

“England?”

“The admiral liked your dances very much. And now don’t you open your lips to anyone, not even your mother or your sister, or anyone at all. And thank you very much for the whisky.”

My sister Margaret, who was a veteran in the experience, said to me that day, “Now you begin living in the future. You’ll plan and arrange, but whatever you do plan and whomever you meet will be held in trust. You will experience nothing fully at the moment. But you will not lose it; it will be here for you later.”

Martha Graham came, as she said she would.

“As long as you have him, nothing ever again will not be fun,” she said.

“I’m not pretty and no housekeeper at all.”

“He loves you.”

“I don’t know how I’ll look by the time he gets back.”

“He loves you. My dear, my dear, he’s gone to dreadful things. Keep close to him. Hang on with all your hope.”

“I don’t know how to get through two years.”

“He has to get through the two years also, don’t forget. Millions of women feel just the same. Of course, that doesn’t help you. Nothing really helps. There’s only this. Everyone’s in it. Would you asked to be spared? Would you want to live outside the passion of these times?”

“No,” I said, and entered the waiting with my sisters.

Two weeks after he’d gone, it seemed he had been gone six months; a year later it seemed the same, neither more nor less. It never got worse, it never got better. It stretched.

The women developed instinctive means of communication between themselves. Compulsions seized us to talk about our men, quite as though they were new babies, to strangers, to anyone, to read snatches of letters aloud, hugging the personal sections to our dresses in secret gloating and brooding; needs to hear the men’s names mentioned, to have their luck toasted at table (even by strangers), to seize on any little token — a chocolate bar, a tin of peanuts, chewing gum, a book — to snatch it and mail it, explaining carefully why and naming the man by name; needs to compare situations with any woman — saleswoman, waitress, bus conductor. We met and knew one another, utter strangers standing side by side reading headlines at the news stalls; we met waiting at the post office holding our packages; we met in the grocery shops weighing Christmas boxes (five pounds maximum for each man) and watching one another, deciding what could be afforded and what not, and recognizing the look that anything could damn well be afforded, even the very poor deciding this.

This is not the way the history books will tell the war story, but this is the way we knew it.

Soldiers were given definite psychological training and preparation, and when they were sent overseas they were more or less ready. But no one prepared the women. We were given orders, though. We were told that the least we could do for the folks who were really taking the brunt was to be gay and to write only that life progressed vigorously back home. On the other hand, we were urged not to let them think they were not missed hourly. This imposed a nice balance in style.

We were told that what we who were left at home could do in the name of shared suffering was to live the best possible common-sense lives, tell the truth, mind our business, and keep ourselves in order for the weary ones. But we woke in the night frightened. We awoke so frightened we were amazed. We stopped in the day and bit our lips with anger and helplessness. There were sudden tempers and tears; there were unpredictable shortness of speech and collapses of energy.

Any sign of emotion or tenderness unmanned us instantly, any kindness or any cruelty. A Christmas carol was just damned-well unbearable, and when the turkey was carved, every woman avoided every other woman’s eyes as she fought not to make a spectacle of herself. The sight of a new baby stopped us cold. There were idiotic scenes of no dignity, as, for instance, the time I discovered that a picture of me was going to be published in Life and that it was highly unflattering. I rushed to the editor’s office and wept and explained that my husband was handsome and overseas, that we’d just been married, and that I could not risk having such a picture of me broadcast; and I wept so hard, the editor tore the negative in front of me.

Again, there was the first wedding I attended after his departure — two members of the Ballet Theatre Company — and again my silly uncontrollable weeping started, Lucia Chase, who was a widow, and I clinging together until Antony Tudor pulled us apart and kissed us and made us laugh. As a bereft mother explained it, “There is a knife standing in each heart and it needs but the careless touch of a finger or a breath to twist the blade.”

And some of the touches were not so careless. For dark, personal reasons many people could not resist this chance at cruelty. There were the intellectuals who demanded aggressively if we believed in war and asked across our dinner tables whether we relished the idea of being the widows of dead heroes. There were men of peace who fulminated against destruction and argued that no idea was worth fighting for that leveled Cassino or Dresden. There were the men who wrote pornographic books and sold them as exact campaign experiences. There were the newscasters who, after the fourth Martini, swore with something akin to professional pride that the war would last another eight years. There were our consciences urging us to throw up everything and join the forces, accepting any routine job at all, and the ensuing nightly struggle for wisdom and sanity.

There was the constant obscene and morbid curiosity as to just how we were managing to bear up. Many a wife has hung up the telephone or walked away on an indecency — mainly from other, less involved women. We who were in it never, under any circumstances, violated one another’s privacy. This much we could do for one another.

The loss was total — one part of it was not more unbearable than another, whether one lay frightened in the bankrupt bed, wondering as the great nights stretched open all around, or whether one heard a passing remark in the street and realized there was no one to share the joke.

How the months rolled by! Flow the months stood heavy! Every morning I adjusted the little headache that was the token of my loneliness and his proxy. It lived in my brain like a mouse, ft was a very little headache, but it was almost never absent and it nibbled on the string of my life.

I spent what time I could alone. There were many hours to be alone, in hotel bedrooms, in restaurants, walking in strange streets, in churches. Sometimes I reread my marriage lines.

I remained throughout this progress snappy, hysterical, changeable, and frantic. Learning to love is difficult for some, particularly for anyone who had put such a reliance on hating. Anger demanded nothing but energy and was replenished in manifold ways, with brilliance of speech, bright cheeks, flashing eyes, racing blood, and adrenalin to the heart, and always with action antic in spite and the quick battle laugh. The fever engendered was almost like ecstasy — almost, but never quite. Work withered, friends fell off, and when the great need arose, I could neither trust nor give — not wholly, not enough, not without caution or asking for a tallied account. I kept saying like a litany: “All the world’s a mirror, and all the men and women merely me.” I’d been, it seems, too long before the ballet glass. I had broken the glass and, like the girl in the fairy story, I was frightened.

Sometimes I perceived clearly and sometimes I raged. The adhesions of habit make bitter breaking; it is a tearing of the mind, tissue by tissue, a ripping to exposure, and one returns and returns to patch up the hurt ends into the old web. I think this is what is meant by being reborn, and there is nothing less likely or harder come by.

It seemed to me that I had devoted years to running away, lashing through time, fitful and ambitious — chasing, chasing — never stopping, careful never to make a mistake or be caught, and here I was, ringed by death, swung out in catastrophe, with another life in my keeping. If I fell this time, both fell, and as we dangled between lives we tried to weave as though with breath and by will alone a cord of perceptions that would outlast time. What we were was of no account nor in what ways we had failed; but what we hoped to be, that was the power. And that was still the mystery. There had been no time for gay ways of learning, for doing things together, for sharing work or play, for meeting friends. Perhaps somehow this lack would make the suspension easier, there being for us no daily patterns to rupture. But oh, how bitter was the deprivation of the first experiences! Never to have seen a job of work through or shared any neighborly experience. There were going to be no little jokes and no daily teasing, and no physical kindness to ease the learning. We were going to have to make a marriage by faith, to become seasoned and experienced partners while we had forgotten the sound of each other’s voices. And so we tried.

It was only at night, when I was quiet and listening to the war news, that I knew peace as I sat with my glass of sherry, writing to the A.P.O. number. Only then, and when his letters came.

THE message that he had arrived safely was delivered on Christmas Eve, three weeks after his departure. I was in Chicago with Ballet Theatre. The mail clerk and the porter and a bellboy all called together as I entered the hotel lobby from a long rehearsal. I grabbed the desk and fought for breath, and they said, “That’s fine, Miss. That’s all right now. That’s fine. You can have your Christmas.” The message was from an unknown place and read simply, “Arrived Merry Xmas.” That was all.

The first letter came two weeks after that, and the postman climbed the stairs and beat on my door in Greenwich Village. “Wake up. There’s news!” Thereafter he did just this when there was such news, or sometimes he ran after me down the street calling and waving. I would turn and race to meet him, and there, like water in the desert, was the beloved handwriting — and I would look forward to the unknown message instead of the already memorized ones.

The first letter said in part: “I read the letter you put in my knapsack. I was sitting up on deck looking out over [deleted by censor] in the cloudstrained moonlight. Men lined the rail the length of the ship. There was a little space between each man, enough to show how profoundly alone he was and how private he wished to be with his thoughts. I could almost collect those thoughts in my hands, they were so palpable. At night when my boys are all asleep, knotted into strange, deformed shapes in their too short bunks or spread around grotesquely over barrack bags and blankets on the deck, I look at them in the unearthly glow of the blue emergency light, hear them moan and mutter in their sleep, and I wish them very well indeed.”

In the studio there was a stillness now, the sound of no one. The mechanical punctuation of a telephone meant only that I was not out of communication, but when it stopped, the stillness settled. Sometimes a soldier’s cap passing down the street brought a reflection of excitement. I recalled how it had been. I recalled with my senses, as when memory rouses to smell or sound. Occasionally, very rarely, because there had been so little time for the depositing of clues, I came upon a tangible hint, like a cigarette, or a button, or a telephone number on the back of an envelope — and I marveled, as I always do, how the shell endures when the unique life is gone.

An unexpected neighbor moved in to bear me company through this trial and to fill the loneliness; and it was music.

In the flat directly overhead a young man, then unknown, Grant Johannesen, began practicing for his Town Hall debut. So now when I came home I heard, as I stepped into the closed emptiness of my rooms, the stern and hearty reminders of endeavor. There were scales, all kinds of scales, in octaves, descending, ascending, chromatic, arpeggio. His hands were strong, his touch firm and kind. No radio can do this — no recording. The living sound was clean of all electrical insistence. It was personal and temporary and it would pass away and never be repeated. And there were mistakes, thank God. It was a human performance.

He played Brahms, all the great intermezzi — the Brahms that Walter so loved — and I sat below in the first chair I had bought as a start toward a permanent home and listened with tears of gratitude and benison slipping from my tight eyes. Then I went upstairs and left a note under his door to thank him.

The war raged in every quarter of the globe, but life seemed to be stilled inside my studio as I sat alone. In the daytime working, at night with the curtains drawn, the fire lit‚ the traffic quiet, and no phones, I sat writing my long letters, which were my only moments of vitality. And I fell asleep with his letters spread over the coverlet or in a packet under my hand. I fell asleep planning what it would be like when this trance-like state was over, when the suspension would be ended — this strange death in life with all decisions postponed, all conclusions and developments arrested.