Two

SHE MET HIM the day of the All-America Liberty Loan parade.

The sky! The cloudless, godsent sky. The breeze that set flags snapping like applause. There were flags hauled up church spires and draped from windowsills, flags clasped in toddlers' pudgy fists; a teamster's horse had stars and stripes inked on its blinders.

Frieda carried a pint-sized flag glued to a stick, as did every girl in the Jordan Marsh contingent. They waited on the Common, near the corner of Charles and Beacon, with the other department-store delegations. Nearby, a boy in a tweed reefer sold frankfurters (though they couldn't, of course, be called that any longer). "Liberty sausages!" cried the boy from his cart. "Take a bite out of the kaiser. Profits to the Red Cross. Liberty sausages!" The meaty steam swirled and lifted and joined with the scent of the eager, milling crowd. Gulping it all, Frieda felt a glorious sort of hunger that had nothing whatsoever to do with food (a want that deepened even as she fed it): hunger for connection, for this mighty communal motion, hunger stripped of all anxiety.

Normally by this hour she'd be famished. On eight dollars a week to cover groceries and rent, plus shoes and waists suitable for work—and with prices so frightfully war-inflated—she never had enough to make ends meet. Even with washing her own laundry at home, stringing bloomers on a line above the sink, something almost always had to go, and most commonly that thing was lunch. But Lou, an ace at scrimping and living beyond her means, had taught Frieda the gumdrop trick. Three gumdrops at noon—a penny each at the Milk Street sweetshop—and you could fool your stomach into feeling full; only after the break, too late to spend more, did hunger exact its retribution. (Seventeen cents saved of a lunch that would cost twenty, times six, was a dollar-plus per week. With luck, those savings paid for a Sunday at Revere Beach: some fellow would make good on her initial investment, treating her to ice cream and a boat ride. Or she might splurge on a picture show at Scollay Square—the new Hazards of Helen, in which Helen jumps her car onto a barge, was just colossal.) By day's end, Frieda was dizzy, and mere blinking taxed her strength, but this was how a girl on her own could make it.

Today, though, she was sharp, her vision magnified—amazing what a full hot lunch could do. Jordan Marsh, along with every other downtown store, had closed at noon in honor of the pageant, and employees were supplied with free meals. Frieda, who hadn't tasted meat this whole week, gobbled heaps of red flannel hash (each bite made more flavorful, as was true so often now, by her awareness of its not being kosher). Like the poster girl for Hoover's wheat-conservation plan, she downed three slices of Defender Bran bread.

During coffee, the floorwalkers distributed sashes for each Jordan's girl to wear: BRUNETTES AND BLONDES, BUY LIBERTY BONDS. "And to top things off, literally," said the head of operations, "we're also going to give you girls these." From his jacket he pulled a khaki trench cap. "Who says an army can't be pretty?"

Lou, sitting beside Frieda with their chums from the department, immediately began to grouse. If there wasn't money, as the bigwigs claimed, for any raise in wages, and no budget for overtime pay, where'd they found the dough for all this sprigging? Out of the girls' paychecks, that was where! And for what? For these idiotic sashes.

Frieda had never contradicted Lou—Lou, who'd been a better sister in the few weeks of their friendship than Frieda's real sister, Hannah, had managed in a lifetime. But now Frieda rose to her full sitting height, and she told Lou, "I'd proudly pay for mine." She said it not so much for the sake of patriotism (though she counted herself ready to do her part), but because there was no place she wanted to be more than with these girls, gaily parading, on display.

This Liberty Day, this first anniversary of America's entry into the great world war, marked for Frieda something more personal: a month since her arrival, her escape. Before, still living under Mama's heavy thumb, she'd have wasted this day caged in shul. (A parade on Shabbos? Bist du meshuga?) Then, after hours in the women's balcony, her head sore from the strident drone of Hebrew, she'd trudge with Mama back to their apartment. Mama would draw shut the drapes she'd sewn from castoff sheets and daven in the cabbage-stinking gloom.

What if Frieda hadn't fled? By today she'd be Mrs. Pinchas Hirsch. The deal he'd made with Mama called for marriage straightaway, before Sefirah, the weeks when weddings aren't allowed. Mama, without consulting her, agreed: Hirsch had piles of money, and his boys needed a mother; only a fool would let the chance pass.

Frieda, a mother? And wife to a man more than twice her age, whose ears sprouted curling gray hairs?

Thank goodness, no, today she wasn't Frieda Hirsch, nor Friedaleh, cooped up in Mama's rooms. She was Miss Mintz, Ladies' Undergarments bundler. A girl who had chosen her own course.

Turning now toward the wind that poked litter across the Common, Frieda let it part her brown curls. She perched the cap on her head, then raked it left a bit, hoping to look as sharp as it made her feel. Lou donned her cap, too ("No sense spoiling the sport, I guess"), and pinned it to the hair she worked so diligently to keep blond. "Hup two three," Lou bellowed, mockmarching in place with an eye toward the leafless maple trees, which a dozen Polish boys had claimed as bleachers. One of the boys kissed the tight bud of his closed fingers, which then spread precociously to bloom. "Hey, ksiezniczko," shouted the boy on the branch above him.

"Hear that?" said Lou. "They adore you."

"No, you," said Frieda, wondering what they'd been called. But didn't everyone love everyone today? In a crowd like this, how could someone not? This was what she'd dreamed of when she ran away from home: the chance to adore and be adored by everyone, with no boundaries, no allegiance but to now. "Can't believe it," she said. "It's all of Boston."

"More," Lou called. "Papers say a million."

Frieda was wrestling with the notion of a million—the number of avid nerves within her skin?—when bugles sounded, and suddenly, with a whomp and roar of steel, came a tank: a real tank, crushing along. "Hail Britannia," called the crowd to the nobby British soldier who saluted from the tank's open porthole.

Next came Mayor Peters and the Sons of Saint George, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Frieda rose to her tiptoes and glimpsed a Mercer Runabout (she'd never seen one outside of the movies) with a sharp-jawed starlet at the wheel. Mabel Normand? Could it be? The one who raced speedsters on screen?

Then the floats, built on motor trucks and on horse-drawn wagon beds, all guided by drivers in costume: Lady Libertys, Uncle Sams, Minutemen. The Electric Supply Jobbers' float featured an effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm strapped into a genuine electric chair. "Electrocute Bill!" the men shouted. The crowd, in response, raised a din of vengeful screams, and a jobber, fist clenched, flipped the switch. Voltage arced greenly through the sky.

Frieda read the next float's banner: SHIPSHAPE WINS! EMPLOYEES OF THE FORE RIVER SHIPYARD. The men wore grime-encrusted jeans and sleeveless undershirts, their pistonlike arms smeared with grease. With pneumatic guns they riveted sheets of bright steel: the bulkhead of an actual destroyer.

Lou pointed to the one with ginger hair. "How'd you like to be riveted by him?"

But Frieda was thinking of Papa and his ropy butcher's arms, burled with muscle from years of cleaver wielding. The skin at his elbow's crook, where she used to rest her head, and his smell: blood and sweat and reassurance. A year he'd been gone, but still she saw him in every strapping man. Would he have marched today? Yes, she could see him with a flag pinned to his apron. Or, if not—if Mama had demanded he stay home—at least he'd have encouraged Frieda's presence. "Let her," he used to say in his touchingly accented English whenever Frieda begged for scraps of freedom. "Did we sail across an ocean to raise our daughter in 'Smother Russia'?"

Finally the call came, and with a bustle of petticoats their division stepped onto Beacon Street. They joined just in front of the Navy Yard band, which played "The Marseillaise" and "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and a new song she'd never heard before:

What are you going to do for Uncle Sammy?
What are you going to do to help the boys?

None of them knew a thing about marching—they were shopgirls, they hadn't trained for this—yet somehow they squared into perfect formation, game pieces all in a row. Each wore her sash and her starchy trench cap and a sky blue dress with pleated skirts. Tubby, thin, tall: all the same. Frieda, without quite planning to, found herself in front, her smile the very first that people saw.

They clopped up Beacon past the stolid old mansions that today looked about to burst their walls: windows full of waving arms, roofs teeming. Topping the hill's crest, they came upon the State House, whose dome flashed in the clean April sun. A reviewing stand was festooned with eagle busts and miles of stripe. For Frieda, the stand called to mind a frosted birthday cake, with the dignitaries, in their top hats, like candles.

"He's staring at you," said Lou above the roar.

"Who?"

"The governor, there. Or is it Coolidge?"

He had kind eyes and a chin so cleft you could have hidden nickels in it. Frieda smiled at him, and he smiled back, and she sensed that an agreement had been sealed. He would deliver victory and peace and happiness as long as she maintained this fervent spirit: openhearted, burnishing, alive. This was what she'd do to help the boys.

Down School Street then, and the crowd tightened; their cheers made a hot breeze. Frieda cheered, too: "Buy a bond! For the boys!"

"I'll buy that," yelled a constable with huge tufts of sideburns.

"Hip hip for brunettes and blondes," said his partner.

Amid the passing blur, patches of clarity drew her eye: a man with raised arms, a rip in his suit exposed; a boy who grinned so wide she saw his molars.

And what did these spectators see of Frieda? The West End youngster with brooding tea-dark eyes, her shoulders pinched with fear and acquiescence? Or a new girl, made golden by the sun? Frieda felt expanded, stretched past her normal limits—a balloon that the crowd's breath was filling.

At thirteen, when her body began its changes, she had wanted to take flight from all that flesh. Would her hips and her thighs now thicken like Mama's? Would her chest be ballasted with weight? But her body's growth brought her, in these subsequent years, to a shape nothing at all like her mother's, a shape of smirky curves, just shy of fullness. Was it the justshyness that made men look at her that way—how they stared at her now on Beacon Street—as if wanting to give her something, to make additions? She felt their stares as a giddy, ticklish pull, as when the Atlantic Avenue El rounded a bend with extra speed. Something had been welling deep inside her for so long—something like liquid, like a soul; now it rose toward every inch of skin.

She saw the soldier then. Or he saw her.

He stood on the curb among a dozen other doughboys, and though they all sported the same uniform, his distinguished itself with a slightly different tint, as if the cloth were flesh and his was flushed with blood. He had a bowfront nose (like hers, but even longer), a puppy's unruly wet grin.

She stared a second. More. She wasn't sure if she was being dared, or daring.

His face seemed to say that he'd been searching for a phrase—on the tip of his tongue, driving him insane—and bingo! he'd remembered it finally: her.

Lou was asking something, trying to steal Frieda's attention—"Way, way up, geez, see how high?"—and Frieda, still gazing at the soldier, briskly nodded, for height was precisely what she'd gained: a mountaintop reached without a climb. This must be pure dreaming—a dime-novel folly (she'd read all of Laura Jean Libbey): the moment I fell in love at first sight—but did dream-love bring this gritty, fresh-kill taste? Frieda swallowed. Swallowed urgently again.

The soldier was still staring. Smiling hard. He pointed the gun of his hand and pulled the trigger.

The Navy band blared another chorus:

If you're going to be a sympathetic miser,
The kind that only lends a lot of noise,
You're no better than the one who loves the Kaiser—
So what are you going to do to help the boys?

The next verse was drowned out by a growling from above, a sound like anger caught in someone's throat. Frieda, peering up—half a mile, it must have been—saw what Lou had urged her to look at: an airplane, vulturing above them. She'd never seen an airplane flying and was surprised by its jerkiness. It teetered and swooped and righted itself again—a flaw in the diamond-face of sky.

Then, with a morbid cough of engines, the plane plunged, and a hatch opened, and out dropped the bombs. Frieda ducked. So did Lou. Desperately grabbing. Each trying to crouch beneath the other.

But the bombs dawdled, flitting on the breeze like outsized snowflakes. Paper! A shrapnel of propaganda. Frieda grabbed a broadside from the air. Soldiers Give Their Lives. What Will YOU Give?

Rising from her cower, she looked back at the doughboy. He had caught a paper missile, too; he crumpled it and tossed it straight at her. She wanted to say something—her name? a solemn oath?—but a whistle sent the column marching forward; the press of the ranks behind her forced her on. In her last glimpse, the soldier was extravagantly laughing—at her, it seemed, but also at himself—laughing because what better option was there?