Meet Me at Infinity (44 page)

I’ve been amazed at the warm, kind, friendly reaction I’ve been getting, even from the most unlikely people. I worried deeply about what had unwittingly become a major deception. I wrote at once to everyone I could think of who might feel I’d let them go out on a cracked limb. They couldn’t have been nicer. If someone does feel griped, they haven’t gotten it to me. The only problem seems to be that now I’m expected to produce something somehow grander, more insightful, more “real.” Well, if I knew how, I would—the trouble is that the Tip did all I could in that line. If there is something—other than “Sisters”—which is going to burst forth from my liberated gonads, it hasn’t peeped yet. In fact, I may be written out for a while. With each story I dug deeper and deeper into more emotional stuff, and some of it started to hurt pretty bad. “Slow Music” reads like a musical fadeout or coda to Tiptree’s group of work.

Now, I’ve got one more thing to add to this terrible monologue. In a funny way, I found that as Tip I could be useful to my fellow female writers. There were times when Tiptree (male) queried anthology editors on why nothing from this or that female writer was being used. And as an old gent I may have been more helpful to sisters who were fighting depression than another woman could. They had to brace up and respond to my courtly compliments—Tip was quite a flirt—and they knew somebody quite different valued them. Whereas just another woman coming in with sympathy and admiration tends to dissolve in a mutual embrace of woe.

Now, adieu, dear Jeff and Ann—and remember to keep this in the usual baggie. The cucarachas here have now evolved to the point where when you step on one it carries you four feet before you can get off. Outside the Caribbean is in roaring high tide, storms are chasing themselves overhead, the palm trees lit up olive and white by great bursts of lighting. And the generator is, as usual, failing. May you never be the same.

—compiled from letters between November 23, 1976, and November 24, 1977

One of the things Alii Sheldon could share with her friends that James Tiptree couldn’t was her first published story, which had been in
The New Yorker
(November 16,1946) under the name Alice Bradley. She complained that “it was astounding how they edited me into
New Yorkerese”
but since her manuscript no longer exists, all we have is the
New Yorkerese
version. She sent me the story on December 10,1976, with the following letter:

Hey, maybe you’d like to see an Army-life story published in
The New Yorker
in 1945 or 6 by Alice Bradley? Very heart-rending, plus slightly funny. All ABS ever wrote except before WW II when I was art editor on the
Chicago Sun.

‘The Lucky Ones” was written at a time when our treatment of the D.P.s—the hordes of miserable people wrenched from their homelands by the Nazis—was a Cause, you know, like Help the Biafrans, only it was a USA problem, what
we
were doing or not doing. (They cut out the part about the girls having been used as ten-year-old “service facilities” for the German troops.) I didn’t write it because I thought I was a writer, but to try and tell people what “DP.” really meant. Jesus, Jeff, it was awful. And one could do so little. We ended by forcibly shipping loads of them back to the Soviets, who promptly shot them… after extracting all possible work. (Because they had been contaminated by seeing the free world, namely us, see.)

Also I put in a funny, true part about my nearly giving my brand-new husband a black eye by saluting in alarm whenever he emerged from dressing in the bathroom. Daytimes, I was supposed to go through ten people to get to see him. My relation with him has always given me a wondrous view of what goes on at the top, or “policy-making” levels, while I knew from experience what goes on at the bottom, or policy-carrying-out-more-or-less levels.

I went to Germany last year in late September, with several thousand other American soldiers, including my husband, a colonel, who moved in a higher sphere than mine. We all belonged to a big theatre headquarters which was transferred from France to form a permanent occupational command in the American Zone. Before we left France, I had just enough Wac points to go home and my husband had an astronomical total of points, but I was anxious to finish a report I had been working on for some time and he wanted to see his section through a reorganization crisis. So we elected to go to Germany for a short time. In view of our imminent return home, I was granted permission to live with him in a small senior officers’ billet in the town we were moving to, along with five or six other colonels from the headquarters.

The prospect intimidated me, as I was a very recent captain, with a marked arm reflex to live colonels (I never did get used to my husband in full regalia). However, I was somewhat comforted when I learned that there would be one other captain living there, as billeting officer. This was Captain Providence, a bouncing young man who spoke rapid-fire, emotional German, which his war assignments had given him plenty of opportunity to perfect. He turned out to be invaluable, because I was unable to wrench a German verb out of the infinitive, and my husband spoke a form of German good only for indicating desired services and making slow, stately comments on the scenery.

The headquarters town had been a solidly prosperous German spa. It contained what had been only third-class air objectives, but it had had the misfortune to receive one heavy going-over near the end of the war, which had reduced about a third of it to ruins. The civilian casualties, however, had been relatively light.

On the afternoon the colonel and I drove in from France, the last of the headquarters convoys were still rumbling into town. The German winter was moving in, too, with cold, continuous rain. It was a depressing scene. The wet streets were hung with mist and choked with rubble in many places. Low clouds slid through the blackened holes in the roofless shells of gutted buildings. Most of the homes could be described as substantial, but none of them could be called gracious. They were of a somehow monstrous cubic shape and loaded with ornaments—plaster eagles, lion gate posts, fake caryatids, and iron cupids relieving themselves in fountains. The undamaged houses exhaled an air of sullen sculleries and apoplectic parlors. The damaged ones were grotesque without being pathetic.

We passed a small park containing a battered statue of Bismarck, climbed the hill in back of the town where the officers’ billet area was, and drew up at last in front of our house. It belonged to one Herr Doktor Groenecke, whose name plate was on the garden wall. The house was dun-colored, square, and high, and had two turrets.

At the top of the front steps were two doors side by side, one for the family and one for the servants. We entered through the family’s door, which was open, and found ourselves in a cheerless vestibule lined with gray tile. From a bead-curtained archway on one side came damp-dishcloth smells and
gemutlich
laughter. We walked on into the dimness of a large, high-ceilinged living room, illuminated by a cold yellow light from overhead. I looked up, and involuntarily ducked from under a menacing ebony chandelier as big as a summerhouse and set with imitation candles. The furniture was ponderous and upholstered in green. On the walls I could make out several acres of oil paintings in heavy gilt frames.

Over in a corner of the room, a huge chair began to move. At first, I could not see what was behind it, then it turned and revealed a small girl, who was sitting on the floor and pushing with her back. She saw us, gasped, got up, tried to curtsy and almost fell over, and then grabbed up a mop and pail and fled past us out of the room. She was blond, about the size of an American fourteen-year-old, with a curiously misshapen little figure. Her nose and cheeks were bright pink and her stockings were torn. As she passed me, I smelled perspiration.

We hallooed. Captain Providence rushed in, followed by a pallid little man with a face like an old jockey’s. The latter, the captain explained, was the German houseman furnished by the Military Government. He took our bags eagerly and started with us upstairs to the two rooms we were to live in.

In the upper hallway, under a vast chromo of heroic ducks in a purple pond, a door stood open, and on each side of it crouched a small, dark-haired girl. They were polishing the big brass knobs and softly humming a song in unison. One was wearing a nondescript blue dress, the other a skirt and torn black sweater. When they saw us, the humming stopped and they bent their heads and polished faster. We continued past them into our quarters.

The other colonels were already in the house, and we joined them at dinner around a long table set with Dr. Groenecke’s elaborate china. During the meal, Captain Providence briefed my husband and me on the servants, and his observations were later amplified by my own.

Fritz, the little man who had taken our bags, had been a sergeant in a German artillery unit that had spent two winters in Russia. Then there were Bubi, a beardless, blond table waiter, also lately of the Wehrmacht and once a steward on the
Europa;
a grim gardener, paid by Groenecke; a fat female cook, whose soups invariably had half an inch of grease on top; a tanned, sinuous pantry girl, who complained that our G.I.s were fresh; several unknown and smelly entities who came in to wash dishes; and an old, thin-faced German woman, who did the laundry. She acted very sad and martyred, and talked in a sharp, obsequious whine, complaining to anyone who would listen that she had never done any menial work before and that she had had six servants herself. She did not mention that she had been quite cordial to the local Nazis.

Besides this constellation of the defeated, there were the three little girls my husband and I had seen. They were D.P.s—Displaced Persons—assigned by the Military Government to work in the house. Their names were Tilli, Hanni, and Sophie. They cleaned the whole house from top to bottom every day, in the old-fashioned manner—on their knees, with big brushes in their small, rough hands. They were from Poland, and only Hanni spoke German. Sophie, the little blonde we had seen downstairs, did not speak even ordinary Polish but a dialect known only to Tilli. They lived over our garage, in what had been a storeroom. The Germans went home every night, because they were not allowed to sleep in the area.

For the next few days, my husband and I were very busy at our respective jobs in the headquarters and were seldom at home. But we did catch occasional glimpses of the small D.P.s, trooping through the dark passageways with great stacks of bedding, swabbing down the stone steps, rolling up the vast carpets to make an island of furniture in the middle of a room while they cleaned the floors, or continuing the interminable polishing of the brassware—always humming a little Polish song. I asked Captain Providence to find out more about them. How old were they? Why were they in Germany? He gave me that I-hope-you’re-not-going-to-cause-trouble look which women in the Army get to know well, but a few evenings later he came upstairs with a full account.

The oldest, Tilli, was twenty-two, the youngest nineteen. That was Sophie, who spoke only the dialect. The Germans had taken them away from their homes shortly after the fall of Poland. Tilli came from Lwow, Hanni from some town whose name I couldn’t catch, and Sophie from the country south of Warsaw. Sophie had seen her mother and father killed in their garden when she was taken. Tilli’s mother was Jewish; both her parents had been taken away and she had not heard of them since. Hanni’s mother was a widow, and very old; she had not been molested when the Germans came, but Hanni had not heard from her for four years. The three had met for the first time when the M.G. assigned them to our house.

Where had the Germans taken them first?

Captain Providence looked uneasy, and I realized it was better not to press for an answer. In the case of Tilli and Hanni, it was fairly clear. They both looked very wise and experienced. But Sophie was something different. Looking at her face, one saw a peasant’s child, out of the feudal darkness of the sixteenth century. She was no more equipped to meet life than an American child of six. I reflected that five years ago, when she had been taken, she had been fourteen. She must have been a pretty little thing.

Whatever had happened at first, the three had ended as unpaid laborers—as slaves; to be accurate. They had been sent to farms. I remembered seeing the German edict to the owners of foreign labor. It stated in its opening paragraph, “The Polish peasant is an animal.” The instructions covered food, shelter, efficient utilization, and death, in the order named.

It was evident that all of our three had been fed less than the great German horses or the fat swine. I suppose they spent the winters in some cold loft or hay barn. That was the instruction—like animals.

Were they getting enough to eat now, I asked. Captain Providence intimated that there had been a little trouble but that it had been vigorously put to rights. Was it necessary that they work so hard? There was, it seemed, no way of stopping them; the work was easy, they insisted, compared to what they had become used to, and they were happy in the warm house. I started looking for spare skirts and sweaters.

The next weeks passed quickly. The colonel and I were always about to leave and always busier than ever. Our replacements did not arrive. The winter closed down with forty-five consecutive days of solid fog that dripped ice. Coal was short, and the M.G. turned the electricity off all day except at mealtimes. We worked by candlelight. Outside the headquarters, the Germans dug sporadically in the rubble for firewood.

At five o’clock on a pouring black afternoon, there came a scratching on my bedroom door. I called to whoever it was to come in. It was Sophie—but scarcely recognizable. Her face was gray, her eyes and nose swollen, her pale, silky hair hanging in strings. She was wearing a skirt which I had given her a few weeks before. It had been a pretty good fit then, but now it was so tight in the waist that she couldn’t fasten it.

“Madame!” she whispered. “Madame!” It was a wail, a tiny, hopeless wail. Suddenly, she seized my hand, pressed it to her lips, and went down in a heap on her knees: I got her into a chair and gave her a handkerchief. She was shaking all over, her eyes streaming tears, the soot from her nose running in the tears down her face. I put an arm around her pinched shoulders.