Hold Tight (12 page)

Juke set the heavy tray on the table and looked around the room.

The card game had broken up now that more customers had arrived. The sailor Juke had baited was now flirting belligerently with one of the disguised Army officers. But Juke didn’t see Hank, his cracker, anywhere. Then he noticed that the other Army officer was gone.

Jealousy, like a hard bubble, swelled in his chest. And Juke instantly knew that despite all his care and sidestepping and smarts he had fallen in love with the cracker, and was going to pursue the man until he won him or broke a heart.

L
OVE WAS ENTWINED WITH
a good cause, and the cause looked stronger than ever. Rommel was smashing across North Africa. The Japs had been routed at Midway, but the Japanese only confused the issue. If Japan sued for peace, maybe Americans would see the situation in Europe more clearly. After all, it wasn’t Hitler who bombed Pearl Harbor. The early summer evening was beautiful.

Blair Rice boarded the Fifth Avenue bus at Seventy-Second Street, went up to the upper level and took a seat toward the back, as he had been instructed. He wore a straw boater this evening, as instructed. He disliked the unfashionable hat—it made him feel like his father—but it was the last week of June and his family and their acquaintances had left New York for the summer, war or no war. The city was his. The bus floated Blair through the city, past the enormous, blue-shadowed chateau of the Plaza where he had danced with debutantes. Past the sun-bronzed Savoy where he met his mother for tea, Bergdorf’s where his mother bought her prettiest clothes, Scribner’s where his father bought books on Egyptology. This was Blair’s city and today he felt more important than ever, full of love, charged with secrecy, entrusted with a mission. There was an opened pack of Luckies in his inside coat pocket. A piece of paper, rolled tight as a toothpick, had been slipped inside one of the cigarettes. What a cunning man Anna’s father was. Blair would show he could be as cunning. Part of him felt he was only playacting, but that was just the old observer in him, the Olympian intellectual, the connoisseur of action. Well, today he was not just appreciating an act, he was committing one.

Bands of gold, dusty sunlight crossed the avenue at each cross street. Except for a soldier and girl who cuddled at the front of the open deck, Blair floated alone above the shop windows and thin, dinner-hour traffic. His contact was to get on the bus somewhere in the Forties. It would be a woman. Anna hadn’t told him who the woman was or how they knew her or what she would do with the information in the cigarette. He wasn’t even told what the information was and only guessed it might be more cargo lists and shipping schedules, bits gathered by Anna in her conversations with sailors. Blair still disliked the easy way Anna had with other men, even if it were for a good cause. Blair loved the cause as much as he loved Anna, but it hurt his pride and propriety to see her so friendly with the
hoi polloi.

He reached Forty-Second Street without anyone new climbing to the upper deck. The bus idled at a stoplight and Blair watched the river of hats in the crosswalk below. Footsteps clocked their way up the metal stairs just as the bus lunged forward. A woman stood at the top step and gripped the railing while she looked at the empty seats. Thirtyish, she wore a floral print dress and white gloves. It had to be her. She took the seat in front of Blair’s.

Blair waited for her to turn around and ask about his hat. That was the password. Instead, she twisted sideways in her seat and pretended to watch the buildings glide past, while she took in Blair from the corner of her eye.

Blair stared at her, waiting for the woman to face him.

She slipped a hand into the wide neck of her dress and mopped her sticky back and shoulder. There was a gray handprint of sweat and dirt on her glove. Then she looked straight at Blair and smiled. “Was so hot in my apartment, had to get out. Get some air,” she said. “Nice and cool up here.” A few strands of hair blew loose from her bun.

“Yes,” Blair announced. Why didn’t she mention his hat? Had she forgotten? He adjusted the brim, to remind her. The waffled straw felt like a thick, stale cracker.

“Such awful weather we’re having. Not the heat so much as the humidity. But you certainly look cool as a cucumber.”

A subtle reference to his hat?

“We used to get out of the city in the summer, my husband and I. But now that Bill’s off in the Army…” She sighed and gazed at Blair, patiently, as if expecting something from him.

It had to be her. Blair couldn’t imagine any other woman talking to a complete stranger like this, except a floozie. This woman looked and sounded like a dull, proper housewife.

“When we first met, my husband had a hat just like that. You don’t see many men wearing them anymore.”

“May I offer you a cigarette?” Blair said.

“Don’t mind if I do. Why, thank you.”

Blair reached into his pocket, found the pack, then found the cigarette. He turned it over in his fingers, saw the faint pencil mark and passed the cigarette to the woman.

Her red nails brushed his fingers when she took it. But instead of dropping the cigarette into her purse,
she stuck it in her mouth.

Was she only faking for the benefit of anyone watching? But there was nobody up here to see them.

She looked at him, waiting. Then she said, “That’s okay,” opened her purse, took out a lighter and flicked the lighter with her thumb.

Blair watched in horror as the tip of the cigarette caught fire. She wasn’t the woman. He should snatch the cigarette from her lips before she smoked its secrets, but Blair was too stunned to move.

“Perfect,” sighed the woman, smoke pouring from her mouth and vanishing in the airstream. “A little breeze, a cigarette and a handsome young stranger.”

How could he have been so stupid? He wanted to get off immediately, but what if the cigarette didn’t draw right or went out and the woman noticed paper ash inside? He had to sit there and watch while this harlot smoked it down to nothing.

“Something the matter? You don’t look too good.”

“The atmosphere,” Blair mumbled.

“They have the right idea,” said the woman, pointing the cigarette at the couple towards the front. “That’s the only way to feel comfortable on hot, lonely evenings.”

She had almost smoked the cigarette down to her red fingernails, when she suddenly flicked the butt into the air. The bus was wheeling around the Washington Square Arch, turning in the traffic circle in the center of the park. Blair leaped up and grabbed the railing by the steps.

“You’re not going?” said the woman. “One more trip up the Avenue? Keep me company?”

Blair raced down the curved steps and jumped to the pavement as the bus slowed for the next stop. He didn’t look back to see if the woman got off to follow him. He crossed the circle to the curb where the butt would have landed.

He snatched up one butt, then another, then a third, then saw that the stone gutter was sprinkled with cigarette butts, tattered cigar ends, waxy candy wrappers. Where the hell were the street sweepers? He leaned over to grab up a cluster of butts and the hat dropped neatly from his head. It landed upside-down on its flat crown. He grabbed up the hat with both hands. Then he crushed it together between his hands, tried pulling it apart, then crushed it again. He stood at the curb, mangling and cursing the hat, trying to rip it in two, while Jewish couples and solitary bohemians glanced at him and continued their evening strolls. Finally, he took the hat, broken but whole, flung it into the bottom of a trash barrel and stepped angrily up the street, cursing the city, the war, himself.

It took him forever to find a taxi. The war spoiled even that, and the driver who finally picked him up was an unshaven clod who had to be told where the Yale Club was. Blair was meeting Anna there. He rode uptown dreading her. She was going to think him an idiot, a fool.

Looking perfectly sweet with her white purse and white polka-dotted blue dress, Anna sat in a leather chair in the wainscotted bar of the club, smiling and sniffing at a sloe gin fizz. An army officer sat in the next chair, chatting with her. Blair winced when he recognized the officer as a classmate.

“Darling. Hello.” Anna stood up and went up on her toes to kiss Blair on the cheek. “I was wondering what was keeping you. Luckily, I had Captain Jervis here to keep me company.”

Blair nodded at the captain. “Evening, Jervis.”

“If it isn’t old Puffed Rice. This delightful lady is yours? I never would’ve guessed. And why are you still here?”

“I decided to summer in the city this year.” Blair checked out Anna’s shoes and stockings, assuring himself she hadn’t worn anything that might embarrass him with a classmate.

“What I mean is, why aren’t you in uniform? Everybody else we know is. Except for Donald, of course. And we
know
about Donald. Uncle Sam reject your hide?” He was gloating over the possibility, Jervis, who had been too busy chasing waitresses in New Haven to know Abyssinia from Czechoslovakia.

Blair’s asthma, which had saved him from having to compromise himself, shamed him at moments like these. So he lied. “The Government couldn’t spare me for active duty. They felt I was more important where I was.”

“Which is…?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Hush-hush, huh?” Jervis hid his awe with a light laugh. “Well, if they can find uses for scrap metal, Puffey, I guess they can find a use for you.”

Blair produced a pained smile. At times like these, there was a terrible urge to tell smug fools what he was really doing. But tonight the urge only reminded him of his failure. He noticed Anna lightly frowning at him as she sat down again.

The waiter came over, silver tray under his white-jacketed arm. “What can I get you, Mr. Rice? We’ve been requested to push the rum, on account of the war, but the bar is still fully stocked.”

“Nothing for me, Ben. Thank you.” The waiter left and Blair turned to Anna. “Time for us to go, darling.”

“Can’t I finish my drink first?” Anna sweetly asked. “Captain Jervis was just telling me about his assignment to England. I’d love to see England. You
did
say England, didn’t you?” She picked up her drink and leaned toward Jervis.

“Did I?” Jervis lightly laughed again. “I should watch what I say in front of our government man here. Loose lips, right? But ‘over there,’ yes.”

Blair sat in the chair across from Anna, whose jaw was now set against him while she coldly looked at him.

Jervis remained carefully coy about his orders and Anna had to content herself with chitchat while she sipped half of her drink. She eventually bid the captain good night and said she hoped their paths crossed again before he shipped out.

“Without my old college chum, I trust,” said Jervis with a wink. “I think the two of us could have a high old time together.”

Blair bid Jervis good night and hurried Anna down to the street and the warm darkness.

“Oh, darling,” she murmured. “Why did you tell him you were with the Government? He was a real chatterbox until you got there.”

“He’s a silk-tie wolf, a Don Juan. I don’t think you should see him again.”

Anna sighed and took Blair’s arm. She held on to him affectionately as they walked, but also so they could speak to each other as softly as possible. “Don’t be jealous, dear. He’s no different from the others. I thought we’d cured you of being jealous.”

“I’m not jealous. I went to school with him and don’t trust him.”

“If you could be a little friendlier with your classmates, dear, I wouldn’t have to flirt with them.”

They were walking west, along another blacked-out cross street, the only light coming in patches from shop windows, the shadows of closed gates fanning over the sidewalk.

“Dim-out,” scoffed Blair. “Brownout, ration cards, war bonds, rum. None of it’s necessary. Nothing but a ruse by the Government to involve people in the war. If New York were bombed,
that
would wake people up.”

“How did it go?” asked Anna. “The meeting.”

Blair swallowed to clear the dryness in his throat, only there was nothing to swallow. “The woman never showed up.”

“Oh, God. You’re sure you were on the right bus?”

“Yes, it was the right damn bus! The woman just never got on it!”

“Don’t get angry, dear. I believe you.” She patted his shoulder with her free hand. “Papa’s been having a terrible time with those people. Luckily, he has better ways of getting his information out. We’ll just give the cigarette back to him and he’ll take care of it. Give it to me and I’ll put it in my purse, so we don’t forget.”

“I don’t have the cigarette. I destroyed it.”

“You…?”

“The woman never showed.” But he couldn’t tell her what really happened. “There was a man on the bus. Who kept watching me. He might have been a plainclothesman. So when the woman didn’t show, I decided better safe than sorry. I smoked the cigarette.”

“Blair,” she whined. “Who would follow
you?
Nobody’s going to—”

They had come to Fifth Avenue and could not continue talking. There was more light. Handfuls of pedestrians strolled past the clinging couple that stood on the corner, waiting for the traffic light to change. Blair looked down at Anna. She was scowling at the gutter. They crossed and were alone again in the shadows.

“The man kept looking at me,” Blair repeated. “Maybe it was nothing. But we can’t be too careful.”

“Papa spent so much time making up that cigarette,” said Anna sadly. “You sure you didn’t get nervous, want a cigarette and smoke that one by mistake?”

“No! Do you think I’m an idiot? I smoked it deliberately. I don’t smoke otherwise.” He preferred she think he did the wrong thing deliberately, not by accident or out of helplessness.

“I know you’re not an idiot. I love you,” Anna whispered. “I do. It just worries me what Papa’s going to say. He doesn’t trust you, sweetheart. He thinks you’re arrogant and have no common sense. He wonders if you’ll be any use at all to us.”

He tried to be angry with Anna’s father, a voice in the darkness, but it was like trying to be angry with Anna. Blair’s anger turned against himself and he felt ashamed. “I get you into the Yale Club,” he meekly reminded her.