Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy Page A

hotel for the hundredth time, who had worked for the CCC and worked for the WPA and broken stone building a highway and harvested wheat, experienced a moment of resentment so strong he felt it could pierce his friend like a dagger of ice.
    But Zach did not get on with his own father any better than Jeff did with The Professor; Zach had early fallen into the second son, bad son, black sheep role. He had never fitted into the life laid out like a suit of formal clothes by a valet. Had he finally escaped?
    Jeff wanted to go home. Not to his father, who was a cold compulsive preoccupied with his own work and his own comfort, and who made him feel like a bad child who played truant. For all the years The Professor had spent dragging charges through the museums of Europe, he had no understanding of a son who painted. Jeff wanted to go home to Bernice, who was and wasn’t his mother. Of course she wasn’t, because they had had a real mother, that creature of flesh and intellect and humor and fussiness, the best faculty cook, who loved poetry and read it to them instead of silly children’s books, who read them the Pope translation of the Iliad and sometimes recited for them the Greek, whose lap never failed in its size and warmth.
    In another sense Bernice was his mother, because she was all he had had thereafter. They had raised each other. If only she had been his twin, a boy growing into man, they would roam the world together. Bernice would have made a handsome man. As it was, she was too tall for a woman, five nine, big-boned, a woman who could pull a plow. In another era, she would have been more appreciated, he thought. Picasso’s big squarish nudes of his recent classical period made Jeff think of his sister.
    Now he wanted to be with her, gathered into that intelligent warmth that was never entirely without judgment but never off-putting. He wanted coddling. He wanted to share with her the adventures that since he was a kid had been almost more satisfactory in the telling than in the living. Nothing was quite real until Bird received it. Instead here he was in Denver.
    If he hitched down to Boulder, he could get a ride when school let out for Christmas, but the thought of waiting that long made him shrivel with self-pity. He wanted to look at that last canvas he had completed, shipped to Bernice. He wanted to paint from the cliffs of Jumpers Mountain in the morning with a dusting of snow on the scene.
    He’d either hitchhike with truckers or ride the rails, but he never asked for money from home. The Professor was paid barely sufficient to maintain the household. War had put an end to his summer excursions, which had brought in as much as his nine months of teaching. Bernice made do, but Jeff knew how carefully she managed. He himself had vastly enjoyed that bourgeois summer life, hotels, restaurants, museums, playing the artist he really was. In Taos in the local uniform of Levi’s, bandanna and boots, social classes mixed, but still he was living as a ranch hand, not as a painter. That hurt.
    Bernice had been allowed to attend classes, but was not granted a degree by St. Thomas. The Professor would not allow her to work, even if she had been qualified for anything. He, Jeff, would always land on his feet. He was no remittance man, adventuring on a sure monthly check. He was also free. When he went home, it was because he longed for his sister, not because he expected anything of them. Now getting there was the little problem to be solved.
    Dolores had offered that haven at first, that warm place he sought with women. Women always seemed to pick him out in a crowd, at a party. One of the tedious aspects of being down and out was that the jobs he could fall into often kept him in an all-male enclave, and the truth was that most men had no idea how to live. They built no nests, they created no comfort, they made the worst out of their shortfalls. He liked to move in with a woman.
    He had not actually