* * *
—
“I don’t understand why it has to be that I’m more a woman than a woman,” Leo said to Eddie a month after they met. They were in Leo’s barracks, Leo standing near the stove and Eddie wedged into a corner among the bunks, as there was nowhere else he could fit himself. The rooms were sixteen by twenty-four and housed fifteen men. Leo had a tin cup full of hot water from the laundry, a special favor from one of the guys there, and a sliver of Red Cross soap and was scrubbing at his makeup. “After the match, Lieutenant Bork or Brox or whatever it is, the religious one who won’t shut up about being from Pittsburgh, told me there wouldn’t have been any call for Eve—like Eve-in-the-garden Eve—if I’d been there! It would have been a different kind of original sin, no doubt, but I think he’s confused. About a few things.”
Leo had spent the afternoon sauntering around in a skirt and wig and shirt tied around his ribs, holding up scorecards for a boxing match while hundreds of kriegies hooted and hollered and shouted lewd suggestions.
Eddie said, “I hope someday someone tells Lieutenant Brock how babies are made.”
“Guys just want to reassure themselves it doesn’t mean anything if they think about me while they’re spanking it. I’m more woman than a woman, after all! I’m femininity distilled down to its purest, tittiest essence.”
“I think most of them just miss girls more than they know what to do with.”
“Fine, but that’s not my problem. Do I think they all want to suck my dick? No. Do I think most of them wouldn’t turn down getting their dick sucked by me at this point? Well.” He craned his face toward Eddie. “Did I get it all?”
Eddie dipped his thumb in the water and wiped at the corner of Leo’s eye. “Just something here.” He put his big hand around the back of Leo’s head and kissed him.
Leo pulled away. “Someone will come in.”
“Someone always comes in.”
Leo was, to Eddie’s mind, surprisingly shy about their relationship. There were one or two other couples in the camp—real couples—and they were generally tolerated as long as they maintained some semblance of discretion, which was a low bar in a place so crowded. There were other kinds of relationships, too: paired-off straight men as devoted and sexless as old spinsters, for example, or serious partnerships based entirely around food sharing. There were strictly sexual liaisons between camp queers, between queers and squares, between obliging squares. There were swapped favors of all kinds, all varieties of love. There were murky, confusing friendships that ended in bewilderment or hurt feelings or fistfights.
“After the war,” Eddie said, “the first thing I want to do is find a room, a clean room that doesn’t smell like a latrine—”
“It’s worse than ever right now, isn’t it?” said Leo.
“—a clean room with a bed with clean sheets and a door that both locks and unlocks, and I want to spend a whole night with you. I want to be completely naked, and I want to take my time.”
Leo patted his cheek. “Sounds great.”
“And the next night, and the night after that.”
Hamble, England
November 1943
Five months after Jamie sailed from San Francisco
“A man came looking for you,” one of the other pilots said as Marian sat down in the Hamble mess for lunch.
Marian took a bite of bubble and squeak. “What man?” She had gone to White Waltham for a few weeks in September to upgrade to heavy twin-engines, Class IV, and instead of being sent back to Ratcliffe, she’d been reassigned to Hamble, the all-female No. 15 ferry pool, not far from Southampton, near the Vickers Supermarine factories from which Spitfires and twin-engine bombers emerged as steadily as eggs from a henhouse. The town was pleasantly quaint. The airfield lay between the River Hamble and Southampton Water, blanketed by industrial smog and surrounded by balloon barrages.
“Couldn’t say,” said the girl. “I didn’t see him. Nancy did and told me to pass on the message.”
“Where’s Nancy?”
“I think she was off for Belfast. Apparently he came by this morning. Must be keen, your fellow.”
“I don’t have a fellow. Did she say anything else? His name?”
“Let me think.” The girl angled her eyes up to the ceiling, scouring her memory. “No, that’s it.”
Another pilot greeted them and sat. Marian ate pensively, letting the conversation pass her by. If Ruth were at the table, she would not have allowed Marian to be so unsociable, but Ruth had been summoned to White Waltham just as Marian finished there and, after her upgrade, had been sent back to Ratcliffe. They’d fallen out of sync again, mostly just logistically, though they were also handling their prolonged separation differently. Ruth wrote Marian long letters full of coded longing and more explicit reproach for what she called Marian’s stoicism. Marian’s replies were brief and unadorned, mostly about the flying. It wasn’t that Marian didn’t miss Ruth. Rather, she took her missing and sealed it away. Her natural inclination was to carry on, to think of other things. Of course, Ruth was also burdened by worry about Eddie. Word had come eventually that he was alive in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Then a Red Cross postcard had come from Eddie himself saying nothing more than that he was in Stalag Luft I.