City of Girls (32 page)

It was during the war that I became a New Yorker at last. I finally
learned my way around the city. I opened a bank account and got my own library card. I had a favorite cobbler now (and I needed one, because of leather rations) and I also had my own dentist. I made friends with my coworkers at the Yard, and we would eat together at the Cumberland Diner after our shift. (I was proud to be able to chip in at the end of those meals, when Mr. Gershon would say, “Folks,
let’s pass the hat.”) It was during the war, too, that I learned how to be comfortable sitting alone in a bar or restaurant. For many women, this is a strangely difficult thing to do, but eventually I mastered it. (The trick is to bring a book or newspaper, to ask for the best table nearest to the window, and to order your drink just as soon as you sit down.) Once I got the hang of it, I found
that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures.

I bought myself a bicycle for three dollars from a kid in Hell’s Kitchen, and this acquisition opened up my world considerably. Freedom of movement was everything, I was learning. I wanted to know that I could get out of New York quickly, in case of an attack. I rode my bike all over the city—it
was cheap and effective for running errands—but somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that I could outride the Luftwaffe if I had to. This brought me a certain delusional sense of safety.

I became an explorer of my vast urban surroundings. I prowled the
city extensively, and at such odd hours. I especially loved to walk around at night and catch glimpses through windows of strangers living
their lives. So many different dinnertimes, so many different work hours. Everyone was different ages, different races. Some people were resting, some laboring, some all alone, some celebrating in boisterous company. I never tired of moving through these scenes. I relished the sensation of being one small dot of humanity in a larger ocean of souls.

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the
very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there
is
no one center. The center is everywhere—wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers.

Somehow that was even more magical to know.

I didn’t pursue any men during the war.

For one thing, they were difficult to come by; most everyone was overseas. For another thing, I didn’t
feel like playing around. In keeping with the new spirit of seriousness and sacrifice that blanketed New York, I more or less put my sexual desire away from 1942 until 1945—the way you might cover your good furniture with sheets while you go off on vacation. (Except I wasn’t on vacation; all I did was work.) Soon I grew accustomed to moving about town without a male companion. I forgot that you were
supposed to be on a man’s arm at night, if you were a nice girl. This was a rule that seemed archaic now, and furthermore impossible to execute.

There simply weren’t enough men, Angela.

There weren’t enough arms.

One afternoon in early 1944, I was riding my bicycle through midtown when I saw my old boyfriend Anthony Roccella stepping
out of an arcade. Seeing his face was a shocker, but I should
have known I’d run into him someday. As any New Yorker can tell you, you will eventually run into
everyone
on the sidewalks of this city. For that reason, New York is a terrible town in which to have an enemy.

Anthony looked exactly the same. Hair pomaded, gum in his mouth, cocky smile on his face. He wasn’t in uniform, which was unusual for a man of his age in good health. He must have weaseled
his way out of service. (Of course.) He was with a girl—short, cute, blond. My heart did a quick rumba at the sight of him. He was the first man I’d laid eyes on in years who made me feel a rush of desire—but of course, that would make sense. I screeched to a stop just a few feet from him, and stared right at him. Something in me wanted to be seen by him. But he didn’t see me. Alternatively, he
saw me, but didn’t recognize me. (With my short hair and trousers, I didn’t look any more like the girl he used to know.) The final possibility, of course, is that he recognized me and elected not to pay me any mind.

That night, I burned with loneliness. I also burned with sexual longing—I will not lie about this. I took care of it myself, though. Thankfully, I had learned how to do that. (Every
woman should learn how to do that.)

As for Anthony, I never saw him or heard his name again. Walter Winchell had predicted that the kid would be a movie star. But he never made it.

Or who knows. Maybe he never even bothered to try.

Only a few weeks later, I was invited by one of our actors to a benefit at the Savoy Hotel to raise money for war orphans. Harry James and His Orchestra would be
playing, which was a fun enticement, so I beat down my tiredness and went to the party. I stayed for
just a short while as I didn’t know anybody there, and there weren’t any interesting-looking men to dance with. I decided it would be more fun to go home and sleep. But as I was walking out of the ballroom, I bumped straight into Edna Parker Watson.

“Excuse me,” I mumbled—but in the next instant,
my mind calculated that it was
her
.

I’d forgotten that she lived at the Savoy. I never would have gone there that night had I remembered.

She looked up at me and held my gaze. She was wearing a soft brown gabardine suit with a pert little tangerine blouse. Casually tossed over her shoulder was a gray rabbit stole. As ever, she looked immaculate.

“You are very excused,” she said, with a polite
smile.

This time there could be no pretending that I had not been identified. She knew exactly who I was. I was familiar enough with Edna’s face to have caught that quick shimmer of disturbance behind her mask of adamant calm.

For almost four years, I had pondered what I would say to her, if our paths ever crossed. But now all I could do was say, “Edna,” and reach for her arm.

“I’m terribly
sorry,” she said, “but I don’t believe you’re somebody I know.”

Then she walked away.

When we are young, Angela, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right—not by the passage of time, and not by our
most fervent wishes, either.

In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all.

After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain—yet somehow, still, we carry on.

TWENTY-FIVE

Now it was late 1944. I had turned twenty-four years old.

I kept working around the clock at the Navy Yard. I can’t remember ever taking a day off. I was squirreling away good money from my wartime wages, but I was exhausted, and there was nothing to spend it on anyway. I barely had the energy to play gin rummy with Peg and Olive in the evenings anymore. More than once, I fell asleep
during my evening commute and woke up in Harlem.

Everyone was bone weary.

Sleep became a golden commodity that everyone longed for but nobody had.

We knew we were winning the war—there was a lot of big talk about what a bruising we were giving the Germans and the Japanese—but we didn’t know when it would all be over. Not knowing, of course, didn’t stop anyone from running their mouths nonstop,
spreading fruitless gossip and speculation.

The war would end by Thanksgiving, they all said.

By Christmas, they all said.

But then 1945 rolled in, and the war wasn’t done yet.

Over at the Sammy cafeteria theater, we were still killing Hitler a dozen times a week in our propaganda shows, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down any.

Don’t worry, everyone said—it’ll all be sewn up by the
end of February.

In early March, my parents got a letter from my brother on his aircraft carrier somewhere in the South Pacific, saying, “You’ll be hearing talk of surrender soon. I’m sure of it.”

That was the last we ever heard from him.

Angela, I know that you—of all people—know about the USS
Franklin.
But I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know the name of my brother’s ship before we
got word that it had been hit by a kamikaze pilot on March 19, 1945, killing Walter and over eight hundred other men. Always the responsible one, Walter had never mentioned the name of the ship in his correspondence, in case his letters fell into enemy hands and state secrets were revealed. I knew only that he was on a large aircraft carrier somewhere in Asia, and that he had promised the war would
end soon.

My mother was the one who got the notice of his death. She was riding her horse in a field next to our house when she saw an old black car with one white, non-matching door come speeding up our driveway. It raced right past her, driving far too fast for the gravel road. This was unusual; country people know better than to speed down gravel roads next to grazing horses. But the car was
one she recognized. It belonged to Mike Roemer, the telegraph operator at Western Union. My mother stopped what she was doing and watched as both Mike and his wife stepped out of the car and knocked on her door.

The Roemers were not the sort of people with whom my mother
socialized. There was no reason they should be knocking on the Morrises’ door except one: a telegram must have come in, and
its contents were dire enough that the operator thought he should deliver the news himself—along with his wife, who had presumably come to offer womanly comfort to the grieving family.

My mother saw all of this, and she
knew
.

I have always wondered if Mother had an impulse in that moment to turn the horse around and ride like hell in the opposite direction—just to run straight away from that
horrible news. But my mother wasn’t that sort of person. What she did, instead, was to dismount and walk very slowly toward the house, leading her horse behind her. She told me later that she didn’t think it was prudent for her to be on top of an animal at an emotional moment like this. I can just see her—choosing her steps with care, handling her horse with her typical sense of conscientiousness.
She knew exactly what was waiting for her on the doorstep, and she was in no hurry to meet it. Until that telegram was handed over, her son was still alive.

The Roemers could wait for her. And they did.

By the time my mother reached the doorstep of our house, Mrs. Roemer—tears streaming down her face—had her arms open for an embrace.

Which my mother, needless to say, refused.

My parents didn’t
even have a funeral for Walter.

First of all, there was no body to be buried. The telegram notified us that Lieutenant Walter Morris had been buried at sea with full military honors. The telegram also requested that we not divulge the name of Walter’s ship or his station to our friends and family, so as not to accidentally “give aid to the enemy”—as though our neighbors in Clinton, New York,
were saboteurs and spies.

My mother didn’t want a funeral service without a body. She found it too grisly. And my father was too shattered by rage and sorrow to face his community in a state of mourning. He had railed so bitterly against America’s involvement in this war, and had fought against Walter’s enlistment, too. Now he refused to have a ceremony to honor the fact that the government had
stolen from him his greatest treasure.

I went home and spent a week with them. I did what I could for my parents, but they barely spoke to me. I asked if they wanted me to stay with them in Clinton—and I would have, too—but they looked at me as though I were a stranger.
What possible use could I be to them, if I stayed in Clinton?
If anything, I got the sense they wanted me to leave, so I wouldn’t
be staring at them all day in their grief. My presence seemed only to remind them that their son was dead.

If they ever thought that the wrong child had been taken from them—that the better and nobler child was gone while the less worthy one remained—I would forgive them for it. I sometimes had that thought myself.

Once I left, they were able to collapse back into their silence.

I probably
don’t need to tell you that they were never the same again.

Walter’s death utterly shocked me.

I swear to you, Angela, I’d never considered for a minute that my brother could be harmed or killed in this war. This may seem stupid and naïve of me, but if you knew Walter, you’d have understood my confidence. He had always been so competent, so powerful. He had brilliant instincts. He’d never even
been injured, in all his years of athletics. Even among his peers, he was seen as semimythical. What harm could ever befall him?

Not only that, I never worried about anybody who served under
Walter—although he did. (The one worrying subject my brother mentioned in his letters home was concern for his men’s safety and morale.) I figured anybody who was serving with Walter Morris was safe. He would
see to it.

But the problem, of course, was that Walter wasn’t in charge. He was a full lieutenant by then, yes, but the ship wasn’t in his hands. At the helm was Captain Leslie Gehres. The captain was the problem.

But you know all this already—don’t you, Angela?

At least I assume you do?

I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I really don’t know how much your father told you about any of this.

Peg and
I held our own ceremony for Walter in New York City, at the small Methodist church next to the Lily Playhouse. The minister had become a friend of Peg’s over the years, and he agreed to conduct a small service for my brother, remains or no remains. There were just a handful of us, but it was important for me that something be done in Walter’s name, and Peg had recognized that.

Peg and Olive were
there, of course, flanking me like the pillars they were. Mr. Herbert was there. Billy didn’t come, having moved back to Hollywood a year earlier when his Broadway production of
City of Girls
finally closed. Mr. Gershon, my Navy censor, came. My pianist from the Sammy cafeteria, Mrs. Levinson, also came. The entire Lowtsky family was there. (“Never saw so many Jews at a Methodist funeral,” said
Marjorie, scanning the room. This brought me a laugh. Thank you, Marjorie.) A few of Peg’s old friends came. Edna and Arthur Watson were not there. I suppose that should not have been a surprise, although I must admit I’d thought Edna might show up in support of Peg, at least.

The choir sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and I could not stop
crying. I felt a stunned sense of bereavement for Walter—not
so much for the brother I lost, but for the brother I’d never had. Aside from a few sweet, sun-dappled, early childhood memories of the two of us riding ponies together (and who knew if those memories were even accurate?), I had no tender recollections of this imposing figure with whom I’d allegedly shared my youth. Perhaps if my parents had expected less of him—if they’d allowed him to be
a regular little boy, instead of a
scion—
he and I could’ve become friends over the years, or confidants. But it was never to be. And now he was gone.

I cried all night but went back to work the next day.

A lot of people had to do that kind of thing during those years.

We cried, Angela, and then we worked.

On April 12, 1945, FDR died.

To me, this felt like another family member gone. I could
barely remember there ever having been another president. Whatever my father thought of the man, I loved him. Many loved him. Certainly in New York City, all of us did.

The mood the next day at the Yard was somber. At the Sammy cafeteria, I hung the stage with bunting (blackout curtains, actually) and had our actors read from years of Roosevelt’s speeches. At the end of the show, one of the steel
workers—a Caribbean man, with dark skin and a white beard—rose spontaneously from his seat and began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He had a voice like Paul Robeson’s. The rest of us stood in silence while this man’s song shook the walls in doleful sorrow.

President Truman was quickly and quietly ushered in, with no majesty.

We all worked harder.

Still the war did not end.

On April
28, 1945, the burned-out, twisted hulk of my brother’s aircraft carrier sailed into the Brooklyn Navy Yard on her own steam. The USS
Franklin
had somehow managed to limp and list halfway across the world, and through the Panama Canal—piloted by a skeleton crew—to arrive now at our “hospital.” Two thirds of her crew were dead, missing, or injured.

The
Franklin
was met at the docks by a Navy band
playing a dirgeful hymn, and also by Peg and me.

We stood on the dock and saluted as we watched this wounded ship—which I thought of as my brother’s coffin—sailing home to be repaired, as best she could. But even I could tell, just by looking at that blackened, gutted pile of steel, that nobody would ever be able to fix
this
.

On May 7, 1945, Germany finally surrendered.

But the Japanese were
still holding out, and they were holding out hard.

That week, Mrs. Levinson and I wrote a song for our workers called “One Down, One to Go.”

We kept working.

On June 20, 1945, the
Queen Mary
sailed into New York Harbor carrying fourteen thousand U.S. servicemen returning home from Europe. Peg and I went to meet them at Pier 90, on the Upper West Side. Peg had painted a sign on the back of an
old piece of scenery that said: “Hey, YOU! Welcome HOME!”

“Who are you welcoming home, specifically?” I asked.

“Every last one of them,” she said.

I initially hesitated to join her. The thought of seeing thousands of young men coming home—but none of them Walter—seemed too sad to bear. But she had insisted on it.

“It will be good for you,” she predicted. “More important, it will be good for
them
. They need to see our faces.”

I was glad I went, in the end. Very glad.

It was a delicious early summer day. I’d been living in New York for more than three years at that point, but I still wasn’t immune to the beauty of my city on a perfect blue-sky afternoon like this—one of those soft, warm days, when you can’t help but feel that the whole town loves you, and wants nothing but your happiness.

The sailors and soldiers (and nurses!) came streaming down the wharf in a delirious wave of celebration. They were met by a large cheering crowd, of which Peg and I constituted a small but enthusiastic delegation. She and I took turns waving her sign, and we cheered till our throats were hoarse. A band on the docks pounded out loud versions of the year’s popular songs. The servicemen were tossing
balloons in the air, which I quickly realized were not balloons at all, but blown-up condoms. (I wasn’t the only one who realized this; I couldn’t help laughing as the mothers around me tried to stop their children from picking them up.)

One lanky, sleepy-eyed sailor paused to take a long look at me as he was walking by.

He grinned, and said in a broad southern accent, “Say, honey—what’s the
name of this town anyhow?”

I grinned back. “We call it New York City, sailor.”

He pointed to some construction cranes on the other side of the wharf. He said, “Looks like it’ll be a nice enough place, once it’s finished.”

Then he slung his arm around my waist and kissed me—just like
you’ve seen in that famous photo from Times Square, on VJ Day. (There was a lot of that going on that year.)
But what you never saw in that photo was the girl’s reaction. I’ve always wondered how she felt about her kiss. We will never know, I suppose. But I can tell you how I felt about
my
kiss—which was long, expert, and considerably passionate.

Well, Angela, I liked it.

I
really
liked it. I kissed him right back, but then—out of the blue—I started weeping and I couldn’t stop. I buried my face in
his neck, clung to him, and bathed him with tears. I cried for my brother, and for all the young men who would never come back. I cried for all the girls who had lost their sweethearts and their youth. I cried because we had given so many years to this infernal, eternal war. I cried because I was so goddamned tired. I cried because I
missed
kissing boys—and I wanted to kiss so many more of them!—but
now I was an ancient hag of twenty-four, and what would become of me? I cried because it was such a beautiful day, and the sun was shining, and all of it was glorious, and none of it was fair.

This was not quite what the sailor had expected, I’m sure, when he’d initially grabbed me. But he rose to the occasion admirably.

“Honey,” he said in my ear, “you ain’t gotta cry no more. We’re the lucky
ones.”