Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy

suspected, as much as he could get away with and taking it out of the care of the animals, the accommodations and food of the hired help and little irritating economies such as there never being toilet paper in the latrine the help used.
    What Quinlan had called him was not the reason for punching him, only the excuse. Quinlan, who lacked a gift for invective, called him a pinko fag. Jeff was a pinko because he supported Roosevelt’s economic policies, although he felt that the President was not pursuing them hard enough. He was a fag because he had avoided getting into bed with Mrs. Terwilligher, who was rich, as obnoxious as Quinlan and could not possibly like him any more than he could endure her. Jeff had made a practice of pretending he did not understand the help were to be sexually available to the vacationers, that sexual service was expected from the waitresses, chambermaids and trail hands, as they were called, who shepherded the overfed along careful scenic routes.
    Jeff had nothing in principle against the setup. When he had accompanied his father The Professor’s charges on their cultural rounds, he had viewed them as a harem from which to choose bedmates. He did not think The Professor had ever caught on, although Bernice knew. She was surprisingly broad-minded for a virgin. Poor Bernice. His Bird in a very plain cage.
    He shipped the two paintings he considered the best to Bernice along with his French easel, after paying off his local debts with canvases and leaving three at the gallery just in case. If they did sell, he was sure he’d never see the money, but at least they’d display them. As a landscape painter who worked relatively small, he was definitely unfashionable, but not unsellable. Still, he had not done his best work in Taos. He kept seeing work by other painters that seized the formal essence of the landscape, as O’Keeffe or Dasburg, or the tumultuous changes of sky and mountains, as Marin had done, always the Sacred Mountain. He had not made Taos his own. Its clarity had not crystallized him. He walked out of town and hitched a ride to Denver.
    He carried his few things on his back in a rucksack, easier to tote than a suitcase, but no Americans seemed to use them. In Denver he found a flop near the station. He fished a newspaper out of a trash can. The Russians were supposed to be counterattacking in the suburbs of Moscow. Zach had written from London, where he had gone with the idea of enlisting in the RAF, but they had turned him down. Too many ancient injuries? They might have considered Zach over the hill at twenty-eight. It was not that Zach hated the Nazis. His own family’s run of political ideas was not dissimilar. Jeff could easily imagine Zach’s father, Zachary Barrington Taylor the third—as Zach was the fourth—saying, “That Hitler is a trifle crude but he knows how to keep the workers in line,” and contributing to the party coffers. Zach simply was going where things looked lively. He loved flying. He had grown up on dreams of fighter duels from the World War and he wanted to take on the Red Baron. In recent years Zach had been doing something boring in the family insurance business in Chicago; that is, the Taylors had a controlling interest in that combine as well as numerous others, not to mention the Barrington domain of textiles and sugar. Zach had done his family duties, marrying and fathering a child. Jeff had nothing to do with the respectable side of Zach’s life. He would hardly be received there.
    Zach urged him to come over to England, but neglected to send tickets, which meant he was not serious. Zach must know Jeff had not the money to get himself home, let alone to Europe. What had the Depression meant to Zach: more riffraff in the streets? Jeff, whose life had been chopped up by the Depression into segments of manual labor and unemployment in diverse cities and landscapes, who was sleeping in a cubicle in a fleabag