In the Company of Women Read online

  “Whatcha reading?” a low voice enquired at her shoulder.

  CJ jumped. “Nothing,” she said, folding the newspaper quickly.

  “Funny, it looked like you were reading one of my articles.”

  “I might have skimmed it,” she said as she returned the Monitor to its rack.

  “And?” Brady prodded.

  “Not bad. For a Californian.”

  “Hey, now.” Brady whacked her shoulder.

  “Ow. You have brothers, don’t you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  They waved to the librarian and headed down the long, low-ceilinged hall to the outdoors, chatting about family as they went. CJ described growing up on a working farm outside the Kalamazoo city limits with a school teacher mother, two older brothers, a younger brother and a little sister. In turn, Brady described her upbringing in the hills of Los Angeles—businessman father who was rarely home, mother who kept busy with community work, one older brother, one younger, nannies, private schools and later, a Seven Sisters women’s college on the East Coast.

  “Which one?” CJ asked.

  “Smith, in western Massachusetts.”

  “My grandmother and aunts went to Wellesley.”

  “Really?”

  CJ read the surprise in her glance. “My mother comes from old Detroit money, but she left it all behind to attend teachers college and marry my dad. My grandmother wanted me to apply to Wellesley, but I picked U of M instead.”

  “Good thing you didn’t go to Wellesley, or I wouldn’t be able to be friends with you.”

  “Good thing then,” CJ said, her arm brushing Brady’s as they walked toward the still-distant WAC compound, low-heeled GI shoes crunching audibly on the gravel road.

  “Speaking of Smith,” Brady added, “did you know a woman at Chanute named Adele Talbot? She would have been in Admin.”

  “Sounds familiar,” CJ hedged.

  Adele, a wealthy Manhattanite, had seemed to derive untoward pleasure from complaining about the Midwest, military bureaucracy and anything else that caught her attention. She had further endeared herself by proclaiming that WAC mechanics and drivers were social anathema. Why she had joined the Army was anyone’s guess.

  “I couldn’t stand her,” Brady said.

  “Neither could I,” CJ confessed, laughing. “So what did you study?”

  “English, of course. You?”

  “History. Who’s your favorite writer?”

  “Depends. For fiction, the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen. Poetry, I’m a Byron girl all the way.”

  “Sounds like you’re a romantic.”

  “It would seem so. Who’s your favorite writer?”

  “Mary Wollstonecraft. And Mark Twain. Frederick Douglass too. Did you know that slave narratives are considered the only uniquely American literary form?”

  “I did know that. But I’m surprised a Michigan farm girl would.”

  “Hey, now,” CJ said, laughing again.

  They walked on, discussing books and classes they had loved until finally Brady paused.

  “You know what?” She glanced sideways at CJ. “I haven’t had a conversation like this since I joined the Army.”

  “Same here. When did you graduate?”

  “’42. You?”

  “In May.”

  She didn’t mention her decision to defer graduate school. She wasn’t sure why except that maybe she felt inexcusably naïve for the way everything had gone down, as if she should have seen it coming.

  At the gate to the women’s compound, they passed MPs who tugged on their caps, eyes glued to Brady.

  “Friends of yours?” CJ asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  In the mess hall, they had just joined the line when a pretty brunette PFC approached.

  “Where did you run off to, Brady?” she asked in a polished New England accent. “I didn’t see you in the usual spot.”

  “Sorry, couldn’t wait for my turn at a little SOS. By the way, this is CJ. She transferred in last night. CJ, this is Janice. She works in Personnel.”

  CJ nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

  “You too,” Janice said as they moved forward with the rest of the line. “What company are you in?”

  “D.” CJ glanced down the line. Lunch didn’t look too bad—soup, sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies. Lucky for them, soldiers weren’t impacted by home front rationing nearly as much as civilians were.

  “D?” Janice frowned slightly. “Isn’t that a maintenance company?”

  “CJ’s an airplane mechanic,” Brady said with what CJ found to be undue enthusiasm.

  Apparently so did Janice: “Oh,” she said coolly, and looked away.

  CJ resisted the urge to wrinkle her nose at Janice’s cold shoulder. Across the mess, she noticed Toby and Reggie waving.

  “Friends of yours?” Brady asked.

  “Squad mates. They’re mechanics too.”

  “Naturally.”

  Did she sound a tiny bit disappointed? Was it possible the Army’s pecking order frustrated her too?

  At the end of the line, Janice edged between them, gazing expectantly at Brady.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you,” CJ offered, pausing with tray in hand.

  “You too,” Brady said. “We should meet for a drink at the club sometime. What do you think?”

  CJ felt Janice watching her with a stare reminiscent of Charlie, the jealous Jeep driver.

  “Sure,” she said casually. “Why not?”

  “Good.” Brady smiled, her blue eyes warm. “I’ll see you soon, then.”

  CJ hoped so, but once again she held back the words that would give away her interest in their fledgling friendship. Was it that Brady Buchanan, Smith College graduate and Admin Wac, seemed out of her league? But that was silly. Brady was the one who had invited her on the Jeep ride, the one who had suggested they go for a drink.

  She nodded and turned away, wondering at herself as she crossed the mess to the table Toby, Kate and Reggie occupied with a group of familiar-looking women. It wasn’t like she believed social divisions had real merit. Her parents had raised her and her siblings to value all people equally, no matter their race, class or sex. At least in theory.

  “How do you know Brady Buchanan?” Reggie asked as she slid in beside CJ.

  “I met her at the PX this morning.”

  “Half the boys on base are in love with her,” Toby said. “She’s engaged to a soldier, though, so one wave of the ring and they back off. Usually.”

  Brady was attractive and already out of college, so it wasn’t surprising she would be engaged. But why hadn’t she mentioned something as significant as a fiancé?

  Toby interrupted CJ’s thoughts. “You still planning to join us for softball?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  She was stiff from her cross-country train adventure, but it would be fun to get hot and dusty and then clean up and maybe take a nap before evening mess. And after supper, rehash the game over drinks and smokes at the enlisted women’s club.

  As CJ ate, she recognized a familiar surge of guilt. Her stint in the Army so far had offered significantly more R&R than her brothers and their buddies had, and as an American, she already knew she was luckier than most people. Sure, she had signed over her personal freedom to the Army, which could move her anywhere it wanted without warning and assign her any work it deemed necessary. But she didn’t have to worry about her family or hometown being destroyed by bombing or, worse, occupation forces. She was learning new skills, exploring parts of the country she had only ever read about, and meeting new people with different outlooks. The war was a disruption to her previously comfortable life, but the interruption wasn’t necessarily unwelcome.

  She tamped down the guilt, as she always did, and finished her lunch quickly, looking forward to the afternoon ahead. She wouldn’t have thought it possible even a few days earlier, but she was already settling
into life at Bliss. Was it possible this place might actually manage to live up to its name?

  Chapter Three

  Back at the barracks after lunch, Toby called CJ over to her bunk, where she pulled a folded piece of khaki from her locker. The lockers here were full-sized closets instead of the footlocker she’d had at Chanute. Which meant it would be easier to hide contraband—like non-GI clothing, for example.

  “I managed to get hold of these before lunch,” Toby said. “Welcome to the Fort Bliss Sporting Club, as we like to call ourselves.”

  CJ unfolded the cloth. It was a pair of GI pants, cut off below the knees. “These are swell. In Illinois, we played in our PT kits. Talk about raspberries.”

  “You should still wear your PT kit,” Toby said. “But wear the pants instead of the bloomers. That way you won’t be gigged for being out of uniform.”

  All WAC recruits were issued knee-length, seersucker dresses with matching khaki bloomers to wear during the physical training component of the Army regimen. With short sleeves, a belt and buttons down the front, the dresses covered more real estate than CJ’s high school and college basketball uniforms had. The PT dress was intended to be worn during KP, latrine duty and garbage detail too, but with a skirt cut above the knees, it was deemed inappropriate for wear outside the WAC area.

  “By the way, what position do you play?”

  “Catcher.”

  “That’s jake.” Toby walloped her on the back. “You may have just made yourself the most popular replacement soldier at Bliss.”

  A little while later, they headed across the compound to the baseball diamond that former cavalry soldiers had staked out behind the officers’ quarters, located not far from the basketball court with its lone hoop. The WAC compound at Bliss had previously been home to a cavalry division, as had Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, an important WAC training post. A captain CJ knew at Chanute used to say, “Are we being trained to replace men or horses?”

  Sitting on the ground next to Toby and Reggie, CJ stretched her legs and watched women from various companies assemble on the playing field. Everyone wore PT dresses except Lieutenant Kelly, who wore her summer uniform minus the jacket and tie. Like the others, CJ wore her WAC fatigue hat to keep the sun—and her hair, cut above her collar according to regulation—out of her eyes.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  CJ squinted up at the Wac who loomed over her, blocking the sun. Then Brady dropped to the ground.

  “Are you following me?” CJ asked.

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “Smith girls play sports? I thought maybe all you did was drink tea and eat crumpets.”

  “A Smith gym teacher invented women’s basketball. But I should have known you would play. Not much else to do out in the country, is there?”

  “We’ll see who’s better,” CJ said, bending forward to grab her toes.

  “You betcha.”

  The lieutenant and a couple of sergeants disappeared into the garage behind the officers’ house and reappeared with bases, mitts, bats and balls. CJ looked the catcher’s equipment over. She’d played behind the plate ever since she started playing baseball with her brothers and their friends in the field behind the feed barn. At first they had made her play the position because no one else wanted to, but after a while, she started choosing it. For nearly a decade, she and her brothers had spent their summer evenings playing ball. Joe had always outshone everyone else, of course, even when they were little. A high school prep star in Kalamazoo, he hadn’t even finished a year at the University of Michigan when the Cubs signed him to their farm team.

  Unlike her eldest brother, CJ hadn’t had a professional sports career to disrupt her undergraduate education. Now here she was, six months out of college, getting ready to play ball with a bunch of ill-clad Army women on a lazy Saturday afternoon in West Texas. Sometimes, secretly, she could almost appreciate the social mores that kept women out of combat. If things had been different, she would have taken up arms alongside her brothers. She was relieved she wouldn’t have to, though. She wasn’t sure she would be able to kill a fellow human being—or live with herself afterward if she somehow managed it.

  Maintenance had enough people to field their own team. The stragglers, including Brady and a couple of other Admin Wacs, organized themselves into an opposing side, and the gathered women began to warm up. CJ’s team batted first. From the bench, CJ watched Brady warm up at catcher, impressed by her quickness and arm strength.

  Toby followed her gaze. “Normally she pitches, but Susie from the post office is away this weekend.”

  When it was her turn, CJ grabbed a bat and walked toward home plate. Ignoring Brady, she set her feet and took a few practice swings. A little rusty, but it would take more than a cross-country train journey to make her lose her swing.

  “Ready to strike out, Private?” Brady drawled as CJ squared up for the pitch.

  She glanced back at Brady, whose face was hidden by the catcher’s mask. “Strike out in slow pitch? That’ll be the day.”

  “Let’s see you put your money where your mouth is.” Brady pounded her glove.

  CJ squared up for the pitch again, leaning over the plate. The pitcher wound up and sent the ball hurtling through the air. CJ swung, muscles in her arms and back contracting—and missed the ball. Not even a tip.

  “Striiike,” the lieutenant announced.

  “Nice swing.” Brady snickered.

  CJ ground her teeth and planted her feet again. She was out of practice, that was all. On the next pitch, she shut Brady’s presence out of her mind and sent the ball sailing into left field for a stand-up double. Not bad for a farm girl.

  The next batter popped the ball up in foul territory, and Brady made a dramatic diving catch for the final out. CJ jogged in from second.

  “Show-off,” she said, watching Brady shed the bulky pads.

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “Hardly.” CJ picked up the discarded mitt.

  “You’re playing catcher?”

  “Yep. Now we get to see if you can hit, Buchanan.”

  Brady batted third. CJ waited until she’d faced up for the first pitch before murmuring, “Don’t strike out, crumpet girl.”

  Brady swung and missed, and then glared over her shoulder at CJ.

  “Nice swing.”

  On the next pitch, Brady hit a triple. Perhaps getting her riled was not the best strategy.

  The innings marched along. CJ and Brady razzed each other good-naturedly, talking tough and elbowing one another as they traded the catcher’s gear back and forth. In the end, CJ’s team won by three. Afterward, CJ helped Reggie and Toby collect the equipment and store it back in the garage.

  Brady was waiting for them when they emerged. “Hey,” she said, eyes fixed on CJ. “Good game, even if you did try to break my ankle on that one slide.”

  “Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat.”

  “What a quaint saying.” Brady arched an eyebrow. “Did you pick that up on the farm?”

  Laughing, CJ held out her hand. “Good game, seriously.”

  Brady squeezed her hand, smiling back. “You too.”

  “Were the two of you in basic together, by any chance?” Toby asked.

  CJ shook her head. “No. But do you know each other? Brady, this is Toby and Reggie.”

  They nodded at one another and then stood awkwardly for a moment.

  “I’m going back to the barracks,” Brady volunteered. “If you’re walking that way.”

  Toby slid her arm around CJ’s neck. “We are definitely walking that way.”

  “Where did you learn to play ball?” CJ asked Brady as they fell into step together.

  “My brothers. It was either learn to love what they did or spend a lot of time alone. I wasn’t an indoors kind of girl, anyway.”

  “Neither was I,” Reggie said, smiling at Brady and then ducking her head.

  Was she shy? This seemed an unexpe
cted development in the previously brash Italian American servicewoman.

  Brady probed like the skilled reporter she apparently was, and soon Reggie was sharing her story. She was the oldest of four girls. Her father had been invited to training camp with the Yankees, but he had busted up his knee in a motorcycle wreck one week before he was supposed to report. He’d wanted a son to take over where he left off, but he settled for Reggie, the most athletic of his daughters.

  CJ thought about volunteering that her brother was Joe Jamieson—yes, that Joe Jamieson—but swallowed the words before they could emerge into the Texas daylight. She wanted to be liked for herself, not for her well-known, eminently likable brother.

  “Have you heard about the professional women’s baseball league that started up over the summer?” Brady asked.

  “It’ll probably be a bust after the war,” Toby said.

  “After the war”—this was another favorite soldier conversation piece. Like everyone else, CJ wanted her brothers and the other boys back safely and prayed that the conflict would end sooner rather than later. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed in bomb strikes, artillery strikes, illegal executions, village massacres, slave labor camps. It went without saying that she wanted an end to the horror; that was why she had joined the military rather than take a job in a war factory or pursue some other method of contributing to the war effort. By becoming a soldier, she released a man to fight and therefore (in theory) directly helped the war effort. Or so the Army recruiter had assured her.

  And yet, there were certain changes the war had forced that she wished would endure. When the stock market crashed in ’29, American women were forced out of the workplace because, they were told, men needed a paycheck to support their families. Now, thanks to the war, women were back at work in record numbers and in a variety of positions traditionally denied the “lesser” sex. For those like her, whose dreams involved challenges other than marriage and raising a family, the war had engendered a level of freedom she doubted many had known before. So while of course she wanted the war to end, it was complicated—for the return of men like her brothers would signal an end to her relative freedom as a single woman in a world that preferred to define women as wives and mothers.