Ten

"FELIX? SURE I KNOW HIM, everyone knows Felix." The redheaded soldier winks impishly at Frieda—or is the gesture intended for his pals?

The quartet of doughboys, when Frieda came upon them on this B&M train bound for Ayer, was deep in a contentious game of stud; she hesitated to interrupt their fun. But the redhead, Flynn—the big smoke of the bunch—told her no, delighted, have a seat.

The soldiers face one another in pairs across a table. The train hasn't yet left North Station.

"But you're sure," she asks, still standing, "he's the same?"

"Yeah, Felix: dapper guy, sort of"—Flynn looks to his chums, who stare back, pokerfaced—"sort of stocky?"

"No, he's tall, like a beanpole. Felix Morse."

"Morse, you say? The tall one? Tall and skinny?"

Frieda nods. "Writes songs. Plays with the band?"

"Sure, sure. The song guy. Great set of pipes. Him and me was on fatigue duty not ten days ago, building a road out past the snipers' range."

Frieda swoops into the slippery leather seat. "Oh you do, you really know him, then? Thank God."

Flynn inches closer to his seatmate, Komanetsky, but with three on the bench, it's still tight.

"See, I need him," Frieda says, "need to find him. But I don't know the first thing about how. Take this train, but after that I'm hopeless."

With a flicking of nimble fingers, Flynn deals a round. "Lucky for you," he says. "Stick with us."

The soldiers bet and bluff, the brakeman hollers, "All aboard!," and Frieda feels fortunate indeed. Felix's letter is tucked into her brassiere.

It took her not an hour after opening his package to recognize the proper course of action. The stumbling block, as usual, was money. She didn't have enough even to buy herself a meal, let alone a ticket to Camp Devens. All she owned of worth was Papa's brooch.

And she knew at once what she was meant to do.

Hadn't Papa visited her that very afternoon? She didn't need his jewelry to keep him close to her heart; he'd be there every time she shut her eyes.

At Keegan's—the same pawnshop where she'd traded Hirsch's ring—she got half of what she'd hoped, but more than plenty. After a late chophouse lunch of T-bone steak and bliss potatoes, she marched herself down to Filene's (good riddance to Jordan Marsh and all its finks). First she bought perfume—an emerald bottle called Zephyr—and ducked into the ladies' room to dab her neck and crotch. (She couldn't smell infection any longer on herself—when she wiped, the paper came up mostly clean—but maybe by now she was only accustomed to it. What if a salesgirl—what if Felix—could smell?)

She set about buying a whole new outfit. The boots were Russian calfskin with striking gray vamps, the hat trimmed with plumes of burnt goose. And the dress—"the very latest," said the chesty, milk-skinned salesgirl—was so chic that it had a name: Bubbles. ("See how the pattern looks like bubbles on blue sky? And the crêpe veiling—I think it's just colossal!")

On the train now, in her new clothes, Frieda feels even bolder than she hoped for yesterday when she bought them. All she carries is a bag with some waists and spare stockings, her toiletries, the Billy Watkins record. Her perfume smells extravagant and clean (so clean that she herself is almost fooled). And if the way these soldiers are reacting is a measure, she's certain to please Felix when he sees her.

Flynn says, "Mmm, ain't she fussed up somethin' fierce?"

Komanetsky, weak-chinned but with a certain skittish charm, sucks in his breath admiringly. The two across—Cooper and Tucci—raise their thumbs.

"But listen, doll. Tell me your name again?"

"Frieda."

"Right, Frieda. You sure you know what you're getting into?" Flynn's voice is a ringmaster's, all sovereignty and sway, but he corks it up to a confidential whisper. "Pretty girl like you, especially in them knockout clothes—the inspectors'll be on you like ants on applesauce."

Frieda's neck crawls. "What inspectors?"

"Jesus! You weren't kidding. You don't know nothing! The vice squad, O'Halloran and his boys. Plus all those social work ladies, from the committee on diddly-do. You gotta keep your eyes peeled. These trains are swarming with 'em."

"And once you get to Ayer, too," Komanetsky chimes in, "they're everywhere. Got every entrance covered."

"Some pose as jitney drivers," Tucci adds. "They'll nab you when you try to hire a ride."

"For what? I haven't done a thing."

Flynn takes her wrist and administers a gentle shake, like a father trying to wake his napping child. "Course you have. Weren't you born a girl? Plus that dress, that perfume—seems like you might do more."

She pulls her hand away. "But how do they know?"

"What, you think you're the very first? Think there ain't a hundred a day who just need to see their soldier?"

"It's no accident they put posters on this train," says Cooper, the fourth soldier, with an underbitten pout. He points a grimy finger up above.

One poster shows a mother in a spotless white apron, adding fruit to a freshly baked confection. "Remember the Folks at Home," reads the caption. "Go back to them physically fit and morally clean. Don't allow a whore to smirch your record." In the next one, a cherubic toddler spoons herself porridge. "Remember Your Future Children. Give 'em a chance. Don't start 'em out with a mortgage on body or mind."

How small she feels, how suddenly shrunken. She's seen—she must have seen—placards like this before, on subway cars, in movie hall lobbies, but she never bothered to pay them any mind. Now it's she they're referring to. Is it obvious to the soldiers? Even with the perfume? Even now.

Then she sees Cooper aping the toddler's blank expression. And Tucci, eyebrows bunched to a single hairy squiggle, wails in a mock ghostly voice, "Re-mem-ber!"

They think it's mishegoss; they're on her side! She grins at them and basks in their guffaws.

"Settled, then," says Flynn. "You're with us."

"But why risk it? You don't even know me."

"Nah, but we got imaginations, right? We can see ourselves as that lucky feller waitin' back at camp. We know what we'd want guys like us to do."

"And you think you can get me past the"—she can't quite say vice squad—"you know, keep me safe, at the station?"

"Trust me. Done it a dozen times."

There's his wink again—is it aimed at her or not?—like the punch line of a joke she didn't hear.

"New friends," Flynn toasts from a flask he unpockets. He checks for snoops, tosses back a gulp, and hands it over.

The flask has a silver-dollar shine. Warm from Flynn's body heat, the whiskey goes down soft. Frieda wipes her bottom lip. "New friends."

The train is in full trundle now, wheels singing on the tracks; the seat emits a furtive, quick vibration. A good half of the passengers are soldiers in their khakis, but plenty of civilians also ride. An avuncular man with a nicotine-stained beard plays pony with the small girl on his knee. Two spinsters write messages on postcards. Experimenting with expressions—not too smiley, not too stern—Frieda tries her best to blend in.

In deference to their guest, the soldiers quit poker, but the one-upping continues as they vie for Frieda's esteem. Tucci boasts of mounting his Kerensky gun in record time and beating his instructor in a race. Then he and Cooper argue about who "killed" the most "heinies" in a sham bayonet battle last week, and this feud leads, not quite logically, to Komanetsky's long account of sneaking back from weekend leave one Sunday in the middle of a rollicking rainstorm. ("Cats and dogs? Hell—pitchforks and hammer handles!")

At intervals, Frieda nods and murmurs her endorsement, but she's not paying much attention. She stares out at passing hedgerows and rolling fields. From the bank of open windows comes a rush of rural smells—apple blossoms, clover, upturned soil—the striving, athletic scents of spring. The carriage bumps, lurches from side to side.

She thinks then of Felix, of their ride to the Red Sox game, when the subway turned and tossed her up against him. His taut, lanky strength, his gutsy laugh. She imagines how she'll fall against him soon—this time on purpose—when he sees her and opens up his arms. ("There, there, darling, now I'm here.")

No, that's wrong, it won't be all that quaggy; he'll start in midstream, as if they never parted. (He's better than any dimeromance figment, for he's real.) "Ready?" he'll say, and without asking For what?—without caring—she'll nod, lock her arm in his, and follow. And because it was he who gave Frieda the disease, there won't be shame in saying why they can't do more than kiss. There won't be shame in letting Felix save her.

"Now, see," says Flynn, "you gone and bored her, Komanetsky. She ain't listened to a rap of what you said."

"No, I have," she says, "it's..." But she can't admit what.

"Bosh is what it is," says sneering Flynn. "Machine guns and bayonets and mud!"

Flynn hands her the flask again and watches as she sips, his cheeks flush with obvious satisfaction. With his firestorm hair and his lips that don't quite meet around the jut of his overcrowded teeth, Flynn is no Fairbanks, that's for sure. But there's something about him that's deviously appealing—the swagger of a truant on the hook from school.

"For a girl," he says, "a story's got to have some kind of moral. Girls want the good guys to win."

"Stuff a rag in it," says Tucci. "Quit trying to honey her."

But she's charmed enough to toss Flynn a bone. "No, you've got a point—which I guess is why girls don't like war stories. In wars, it seems like everyone's a bad guy."

"How do you mean?" says Cooper, bristling.

"Well, they're all trying to kill someone else."

"So girls're good," Flynn says, "and we're all beasts?"

"Is that what I said? I think you said it."

One side of his mouth curls cannily. He wipes his wet teeth on his sleeve. "Spry one, ain't she, boys? A real corker. But seems to me she can't think too lowly of all soldiers. Otherwise, why's she on this train?"

Admiring his quickness, Frieda concedes the point.

"See," he says to his mates, "it ain't a matter of changing a girl's mind. More like reminding her of what she thinks already. Reminding her that we're the good guys. So you tell her, say, 'bout that invitation from Mrs. What's-her-name."

"Mrs. Asquith?" says Cooper. "Down in Cambridge?"

"Exactly. Mrs. Asquith, the very one. So you tell her 'bout the 'bring a soldier home for dinner' business, where civilians take us in, give us a break from Army chow. Normally just one soldier, maybe two at a time. But Mrs. Asquith, don't she got a name to keep up high, wants the world to know how big she is."

"As if the world can't see," says Komanetsky. He gestures indelicately at his rear.

"So," Flynn says, "the old lady telephones to Devens, says she wants to have some soldiers over. Major Stebbins asks how many. 'Forty,' she says. He says, 'Forty?!' 'No, you're right, that's not enough. Fifty.' She tells Stebbins she'll be utterly delighted and blah blah blah ... as long as none of them are 'of Irish or Hebrew extraction.' 'Cause there's limits to everyone's charity, right, Frieda? Which means you and me—I'm guessing that you're Jewish? I knew it! Jewish hair is so pretty!—it means you and me'd be out of luck."

He chucks her on the chin, a kidding blow.

Jittering, the train slows for Lexington.

"'Wouldn't dream of it, Mrs. Asquith,'" Flynn says in the major's voice. "But what Stebbins don't tell her is, there's no Jews or Irish 'cause he's sending her fifty colored boys! A gang of 'em, up from Florida!"

"Niggers!" says Cooper, bright with mirth.

"What I wouldn'ta paid," Flynn says, "to see that old bag's face when fifty dinges stroll right up her—wait. Hold on. Everybody quit." His voice constricts again to hush-hush tones. "D'ya hear that? Listen up. Listen!"

With reluctant pings and hisses and a hot grind of steel, the train halts at the Lexington platform.

"What?" says Tucci. "What's the big to-do?"

"Shh," says Flynn. "O'Halloran. Heard him talking."

"Hell," says Komanetsky. "Here? You sure?"

Flynn's mouth puckers in disgust. "His weasely little voice, or I'll miss a bet. All right, doll, better come with me." He pushes Frieda roughly from the seat.

The men conduct a frantic, tight-lipped negotiation: Komanetsky is deputized to lead in Flynn's absence; Flynn will steal Frieda away to the toilet compartment's safety, and when all is clear Komanetsky will knock in code.

But wouldn't Frieda be safer—less suspect—going alone? Why does Flynn insist on coming with her? She's about to voice her doubts when Flynn cuffs her wrist and hurries her down the narrow aisle. Why so wild? Won't they draw attention? Yet Flynn's momentum can't be argued with. Rattled by the forcefulness of his double-time alarm—this cocked-up soldier scrabbling in fear—Frieda, too, succumbs to flaring panic.

She's shoved into the toilet room, Flynn at full tilt behind her. So close, she thinks. So very close to Felix, and now this.

Flynn shuts and locks the door and keeps the light off. The stall is dark and rankly ominous. Frieda hears an endless swirling hiss. A leak in the toilet? It sounds like threat itself: swift, infinite.

She listens above the noise for angry voices, clomping boots; she hears only the pulse of her compunction. On her neck, Flynn's breath is hot and smells of whiskey. His hand grips her wrist with sweaty force. And now she thinks she knows why he insisted on coming with her.

In the gloom, Frieda starts to lose track of up and down. Her mind swirls and hisses like the toilet.

"Okay?" whispers Flynn, looming closer.

Her throat crackles. She can't honestly say.

"Wait," he says.

She hears the word as weight. The darkness; his panting, sweaty bulk.

With a lurch, then another that jostles Flynn against her, the train resumes its journey down the tracks. The whistle's wail sounds thin and incomplete.

Would telling him she's infected keep Flynn from going further? I'm catching, she could say. ("Remember Your Future Children.") Just as she is gathering the courage to speak up, there's a knock—the knock—on the door. One long, three short, another long.

"Clear," says Komanetsky from outside.

Back in the main carriage, in the streaming springtime air, Frieda swoons with fluttering relief.

The men laud one another for teamwork in tight straits, and Frieda imagines how they'll tell the story—each time a little bit more epic. She pictures Flynn's false modesty when Felix sings his praises and insists on buying everyone a drink ("No really, Flynn, I owe you—all of you"). Later, alone with Felix, she'll admit she doubted Flynn: his too big smile, the way he tugged her wrist. "But sometimes," she'll say, "you just have to go on instinct. Trust in goodness, it'll come your way."

"Hold on—you think it's all that simple?"

And she'll say, "Worked that way when I met you."

"Goodness? But Frieda, I gave you this—this thing."

"Sure, but now you'll see to it I'm cured."

If there existed muggy misgivings before, now the atmosphere is crisp with goodwill. They ask Frieda's age, and she reports it as "Eighteen ... well almost, to be honest, just about," which causes an uproar of amusement. They sing "Good Morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip" and "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning." Then they teach her a brand-new soldier song:

We don't want the bacon, we don't want the bacon,
What we want is a piece of the Rhine.
We'll feed "Bill the Kaiser" with our Allied appetizer.
We'll have a wonderful time.

On the second pass, they bawdily improvise—"We don't want the ham, we don't want the ham, what we want is a peek at girly gams. We'll feed Sue and Liza with our doughboy appetizer. We'll have a wonderful time"—and they can barely complete the chorus for their chortling. Skirls of laughter spew from Frieda, too. At last she feels let in on the joke.

Stops are called for Concord, South Acton. Every mile is a mile closer to Felix.

***

At Ayer, Flynn acts as the battle-wise commander. "Hat off. Keep your face down. Don't smile." Frieda, only slightly more afraid than excited, is the eagerly obedient draftee.

Flynn hails a jitney driver he knows to be legit, who'll rush them out of view as fast as possible. Meantime, the other three will hike straight to camp, to inform Felix of where Frieda waits. "Remember," Tucci says, "you might be sitting for a while. Sundown, prob'ly. Daylight's just too chancy."

"So long," says Komanetsky. Cooper mumbles a quick "Good luck." Frieda allows herself an instant's grave smile.

"Off with you," Flynn calls grandly, and flashes his trademark wink.

This time it isn't caddish, Frieda thinks. It's a sign of faith. She winks at the soldiers, too.

The jitney is a jury-rigged Buick motor truck with a canvas roof over benches in the back. "Face down," Flynn reminds her. "Keep it down."

She stares at her hands, at the Billy Watkins record, until finally Flynn taps her knee.

"All clear."

The driver hightails over washboard-rutted lanes, looking back occasionally with a chapped, persistent smirk. Frieda can't discern from his puffy, half-closed eyes if he's bored or tantalized by some dark thought. She'd be scared of him, of his creepiness, but Flynn is here beside her, and she tells herself again: trust in goodness.

They stop before a tumbledown farmstead. The air hangs heavily with a steamy brown smell—manure, she thinks, but sharper than what horses drop in Boston, wilder, as if only half-digested.

"Ready?" Flynn says. "Here we go."

They strike off through the farmer's unmown field. A barefoot little girl, in overalls with no shirt, peeks from the forebay of the barn. Is she wondering how it feels to be a lady in a dress, walking with a strong redheaded soldier?

At the field's edge, their path is blocked by a rusty barbed-wire fence, and Frieda's almost pierced before Flynn comes to her rescue, prying wider the top and bottom strands to let her through. The woods are sparse at first—supple, upstart shrubs—then dense, with full-grown trees whose dark leaves block the sun. (Papa used to tell her tales of the forest back in Russia, fairy tales in which magic lurked within the lush old growth. Only having walked among the woods of Boston Common, Frieda never understood the mystery. Now she does.)

"Trees, trees, trees," she says.

Flynn shrugs. "Ask me, it's sort of nice."

"But how do you keep your way? I'm all turned 'round."

"I guess men have a better sense of direction." He snaps a hanging branch to clear the trail. "From when we had to hunt and make it back."

Frieda lets forth a slack laugh. "That's plain silly. You never had to do all that."

"Some things," he says, "you're born knowing."

They tromp deeper, bushwhacking, and despite the leafy shade, Frieda works up a pleasant sweat. Has she ever been this far from crowds and pavement? So much ground to cover, but at the end of it: Felix! She gives in to ecstatic disorientation.

The wind picks up. Her skin feels fresh and porous.

On the far side of a rise, they come upon a shack, with a single glassless window, an unhinged door. Walls of skewed clapboard prop a corrugated roof, the edge of which shows a rusty, skull-sized dent.

"This is where I'm meeting him?" she asks.

Flynn points with his chin. "Go on in."

"Maybe I'll just sit and wait outside." She scans the ground for a suitable stump or rock.

"Go on in," he urges her again.

Because he's gotten her safely all this way, she complies. The shack is not quite tall enough for her to stand upright; she stoops and feels her back muscles knot. The odor of urine-soaked wood overwhelms her—and another smell, too, at once dirty and clarified, like a stain that's been worried through with bleach.

"Not exactly the Copley Plaza, is it."

Flynn doesn't laugh. He says, "Get on the floor."

Her eyes have adjusted to the scanty, brindled light. Animal droppings are scattered all about. "The floor? Don't be silly. It's pure filth."

"I said get on the floor!" He knocks her down.

She lands on one knee. Gropes the air to save herself. Her bag drops and the Billy Watkins record. "I'll ruin my dress." Her voice is naked, flayed.

Now Flynn laughs, a quick disdainful "ha!"—the audible equivalent of his wink. "Is that all you've got left to ruin?"

"I don't understand," she says, but with a terrible tough finality, she does: She's a girl alone in the woods with a total stranger.

The bottle of Zephyr must have spilled when her bag dropped; the smell—too much at once—makes her gag.

He's on her now, a hand vising each shoulder, thumbs dug in. "You never thought I knew this Felix, did you really, doll? Not out of forty thousand men!"

Frieda's thoughts are choppy. Her breathing. "But you said. And the others. Komanetsky?"

"If I'm nice, next time I'll let him take the girl."

With a pinch to her neck he shoves her closer to the floor, on her hands and knees now, and he's behind her. Her hat falls off, her face is pressed to wood. Flynn yanks her dress up until the fabric rips. The sound must madden him: he rips more. A finger, maybe two, worms inside.

When Frieda gasps and tries to scream, his hand slams her mouth. Her gums sting with the tinny taste of blood.

"You're not gonna scream, no you're not." So close that his spit sprays her ear. "First off, nobody's gonna hear you if you do. Plus, I don't think you'd want 'em to. Who do you think's around here but inspectors?"

His thumb, his breath, press against her.

"So I don't have to hold your mouth now, do I, honey? I can let go and you'll keep the damn thing shut?"

In the instant he lets go, she bucks with all her might. Her skull clocks his jaw. He jolts back.

Scrambling, she turns herself, stands, blindly stomps. The heel of her new boot spikes his gut.

She doesn't scream—she can't—her throat is terror-choked, so it's Flynn's "fucking cunt" that she hears as she takes flight, plus the crack of Felix's record beneath his writhing.

Frieda's not aware of having found her way back, but here she is, after running for what seemed a full hour, pushing through the farmer's barbed-wire fence. Her dress hem catches on a barb and snags.

It's sundown (or is the dimming in her head?), and the grass sags with chill, viscous dew. From the barn comes the slop and hiss and moan of milking time. The farm girl sees her, stops, baldly gapes.

On the road now. Hampered by her straggling, torn dress. By the buzz in her ears: a sickly yellow seethe. (Not loud enough to quash the memory of Flynn's final shout: "You want this story's moral, doll? Here goes. If it walks like a whore and quacks like a whore, guess what?")

She doesn't see the inspector until he grabs her by the arm. "I said, miss," he snaps, "you'll have to come with me."