Stage Door Canteen (29 page)

Finally her curiosity won out. She told herself that she had to find out if it really was Captain Griffiths, the solitary and brooding, who was her restless night wanderer. Or more likely, that she was too tired from rehearsals for Away We Go and the show’s relentless problems and her nerves were playing tricks on her. But in her heart of hearts she knew she simply wanted to find out what Captain Griffiths was doing.

She had padded down the hall in her bare feet. The kitchen door was open, but he didn’t hear her coming.

He had just opened the refrigerator door to get a bottle of milk. Unfortunately, when he straightened up and saw her standing there the impact was drastic. He was pale, anyway. He suddenly looked as though he were about to faint.

“Captain Griffiths was getting up in the middle of the night,” Jenny said, “because his stomach hurt, I guess. The doctor has given him an ulcer diet. So he’s been fixing things in my kitchen in the wee small hours. Like hot milk, as though he hates to give in to it. I told you his wife and children were killed in the Blitz, didn’t I?” She thought a moment and said, “He has this strange air of doom. Gloom? Perhaps it’s just Welsh. I keep thinking I should go and reread Dylan Thomas.”

Actually, Jenny wasn’t sure what to think as the captain stood there in only the bottoms of his pajamas, barefoot and bare-chested, all white, muscled flesh and dark body hair, vastly different from the way he looked in his British merchant navy uniform. She was in her nightgown. They stared at each other in mutual alarm.

At that moment Lee came back, carrying his paper cup of coffee. “There’s going to be a call for auditions. It comes out in the trades tomorrow, Marc Platt just told me. It’s supposed to be for understudies, that’s what they say. But Christ, it’s just one more damned thing.” He gulped at his coffee. “So I saw Richard Rodgers just going out for lunch and I—I cornered him.”

They both stared at him. Jenny said, “Oh, Lee.”

“Well, what the hell, Jen. They say they’re auditioning for understudies but they may be replacements. That’s happened, you know. One minute you’re in your role rehearsing, and everything’s fine. The next minute you’re out.”

“I don’t have an understudy,” Jenny said.

“I just went up to him and asked him if they were going to cut my solo from the Kansas City number. And for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. You know the look he has, like you’re something lower than a cockroach if you dare speak to him without asking permission. And you know what he said? ‘No, it stays.’ Three words, that was it.”

He threw himself into one of the folding chairs, jerkily downing the last of the coffee. “Jesus, I’m a damned wreck. It’s been driving me crazy. That jazz dance is a piece if art, I couldn’t lose it, not now. ‘It stays.’ That’s all the great Richard Rodgers said.”

Marty sent her a look over Lee Dixon’s head. “Oh, Martry, don’t worry, you’re the last person to believe me,” she told him. “There could be no other Ali Hakim, everybody knows that.”

“And you, too, my darling,” he said quickly. “You’re perfect as Ado Annie,”

She wasn’t so sure.

The call for understudies was advertised in the trade papers for Wednesday, but a rumor persisted that some unannounced auditions had been held earlier, on Tuesday. When Jenny came in several members of the cast, mostly dancers, were standing in the back of the theater in street clothes, watching. Lee Dixon was not there, but Marty had taken a seat in the back row center with Leon Gross, one of the orchestra arrangers.

“Hey, sweetheart, look at these kids, they’re terrific,” Marty greeted her. “I understand they’re from some dance school in Brooklyn.”

Jenny slid into a seat. Four young girls in leotards were onstage doing a pas de quatre, the accompaniment supplied by a single upright piano. “Are they? I think Agnes knows the ballet maitre at one of them.”

The arranger said, “Agnes lost a dancer in Laurey’s Dream sequence. The girl went out to the West Coast to be with her husband who’s in the Marines. So there’s a slot to fill.”

“Was she upset?”

“You mean our Agnes? Certainly not. On a scale of one to ten it was only a twelve.”

Marty settled back in his seat with a grunt. “Look at these kids, they put so much into it. Look at the second on the left.”

The arranger said, “Not bad. But Agnes won’t hire her with those gorgeous legs. And she doesn’t have a big butt. Ugly asses are a requirement for this show. Ask Reuben.”

“Good heavens, I know her,” Jenny said. “Her name is Dina something, she’s a junior hostess at the canteen.”

“Hey, she made the cut.” Marty was watching the stage. “She’s a nice little dancer. When you see her, tell her congratulations.”

“Look, Richard Rodgers is going over to her,” the arranger said. “That was quick.”

“Richard had better watch out,” Jenny said. “She has a boyfriend in the Army Air Force. He’s a war hero.”

Marty chuckled. “Dick Rodgers doesn’t do hanky-panky. At least not before a show opens. He’s very discreet.”

Jenny didn’t stay. She knew the auditions would run on until at least five o’clock, and she was due for the monthly meeting of the Canteen’s senior hostesses. Besides, there was a certain tension in the air that she wanted to get away from.

It was snowing when she left the theater. She decided against walking, especially since she hadn’t worn her galoshes. She took the downtown bus instead of the subway, and sat at a window seat to watch the falling snow, hoping to shake some of her dismal feeling about the holidays, the first spent alone without Brad. The Broadway bus was crowded with shoppers. Going towards Times Square every street corner featured Santa Clauses in white beards and red suits standing by collection pots for war relief organizations. Mostly the USO. Lamposts were decorated with ropes of green plastic holly studded with red plastic berries rapidly accumulating a dusting of snow. The bus turned down Broadway and the view was of the lighted marquees for Christmas shows at the Paramount and the RKO. Times Square’s huge three story-high electric signs, now dark at night, winked through the snowy mist with beautiful girls smoking Viceroys and Lucky Strikes, or drinking Coca Cola.

Jenny got off at 44th Street and stopped by the newsstand to pick up a copy of Variety if Jake had one. She was curious to see if there was another call for understudies for Away We Go.

Jake was not behind the newsstand counter. In his place , framed by the covers of the latest magazines, was an elderly man in a mackinaw held closed by a safety pin. He said he was an employee of the New York News Service, and knew nothing of Jake Rosen. Only that he was substituting for him.

Jenny took the copy of Variety and paid him. “Is Jake on a Christmas vacation? Or something like that?”

Then she was suddenly reminded that one of Jake’s sons was in a tank corps in North Africa under the command of a general named Patton. There were headlines about the war there. Several people came up to buy newspapers. The relief man turned his attention to them.

Jenny moved away. It was slippery on the snowy sidewalks and she took small, careful steps in her high heels. When she was abreast of the entrance to the Stage Door Canteen she found a handful of soldiers already waiting. One of the khaki-clad figures was obviously in transit from some warmer climate, and didn’t have an Army overcoat.

“Goodness, you’ll freeze to death,” Jenny told them. “I think all of you should go to the Chock Full O’Nuts on the corner and have a cup of coffee and wait. The canteen isn’t open for another hour.”

“Is Dina Flaherty here tonight?” the one without the overcoat said. “I need to se her, it’s urgent.”

Jenny peered through the veil of snow. He looked tanned, older somehow. “Sergeant Struhbeck, what are you doing here? I thought you’d shipped out.”

“I called her house,” he said stubbornly. “No one was there. I have to get in touch with her. It’s—”

“Urgent,” she finished for him. It was always urgent.

“She’s a hostess here,” he reminded her.

“Yes, I know.”

She hadn’t had time to read the entire schedule for the week, so she didn’t know which junior hostesses were in the Canteen that night. She opened her mouth to tell him where he could find Dina Flaherty. Not at home. She’d been at the theater and had auditioned for the ballet for Away We Go and gotten the part, and perhaps was still there. But Jenny stopped.

For Dina it wasn’t just any job, it was a part in the theater, a Broadway musical to be exact. A show that was about to open. For students at the Brooklyn performing arts school it was the culmination of a dream, and years of hard work. The chance of a lifetime. She’d been through it herself.

“I don’t know,” Jenny said, honestly. He stared back at her, the message in the blue eyes the same. He had to find Dina Flaherty, junior hostess. It was urgent.

“I’ll have someone check the schedule,” she said, turning to descend the snow-covered steps, “and tell you what nights Dina’s here. If she’s in for tonight, I’ll send someone out to tell you.”

She stopped and looked back at them standing on the sidewalk above her. “Don’t wait out in the snow, will you, please? The director, Ann Bennett, has asked that you not stand outside the Canteen in really bad weather.”

“Okay,” someone said.

She knew they would, anyway.

SIXTEEN

Snow came on rather suddenly, the color and thickness of goose-down falling from a gray, horizonless sky. Captain David Griffiths watched through his binoculars as the snow softly absorbed the jagged teeth of lower Manhattan, the ferry slips at Battery Park, the ship channels of New York’s Upper Bay to Governor’s Island, and then beyond to Bedloes Island.

As visibility lessened, maritime traffic in the waters off the Brooklyn docks filled the snowy air with a multitude of voices: the hoarse warning roar of freighters, the hollow moan of bouys, the distinctive tenor blatting of the Staten Island ferry. On the Esher’s bridge, Captain David Griffiths heard the first mate’s order to start the foghorn. A second later the steel plates under his feet shook with the blast of the steam-generated signal. Through his binoculars he watched the Statue of Liberty, holding her unlit torch high, slowly melt into the gossamer snowflakes.

“No sunny sea voyage for us today, eh, captain?” the man at his shoulder said. “Snow’s going to be a bit of a bother?”

The Lloyds representative, down from Halifax to inspect the Esher’s repairs, was a portly, blonde young man in his thirties, a maritime insurance agent serving Britain’s war-ravaged merchant navy. Although Agent Childers had earlier expressed a desire to come along on the Esher’s trial run, he now looked, on the exposed bridge, wind-whipped and cold, and as if he now regretted the whole idea. In the chill reality of sea, snow, and absence of well-defined horizons, Agent Childers was obviously reminded of the U-boat menace he’d heard about. That even this close to shore, could be lurking somewhere.

David Griffiths made a noncommittal noise in answer to his question about the weather, and lowered the binoculars. At the onset of the snow flurries the wheelhouse had rung the engine room for reduced speed. Now, at a cautious five knots, the harbor pilot in charge of the Esher would take her into the East River and eventually north and east into Long Island Sound, perhaps as far as Montauk, to test not only the new boilers but generally put the freighter through her paces. Below, the chief and second engineer were monitoring the boilers in the company of a couple of senior supervisors from the Brooklyn shipyard that had installed them.

The Lloyds’ agent, as he had cheerfully announced before they left port, was more or less along for the ride. Except, of course, there was not much scenery at the moment, unless one was particularly fond of wind-driven bursts of snow. As for U-boats, there was actually little need for anyone to be nervous. It was hardly likely they’d encounter an enemy submarine in upper New York harbor. In fact the odds were against being tracked by a sub in the enclosed waters of Long Island Sound, where the Esher was headed. Although since summer the evidence of burning ships, the U-boats’ victims, could still be seen from some Long Island beaches.

The nation’s newspapers and newsreels had made virtually everyone aware of the German U-boat packs astonishing audacity. At the beginning of the war one of their commanders, KapitanCommander Gunther Prien, had shocked the world when he’d slipped his submarine through the bottleneck of the heavily-guarded British Royal Navy anchorage at Scapa Flow, and torpedoed and sunk the battleship Royal Oak and the light-plane carrier Pegasus.

That daring feat, and the attacks since then on the United States’ eastern coast, had people seeing German submarines everywhere.

The snow began to settle on the gray-painted outlines of the Esher. On the starboard side of the bridge the Royal Navy gun crew, bundled to the ears in arctic weather gear, stood stolidly at battle stations by their anti-aircraft gun. Above the bridge the Esher announced her identity and intentions with the Stars and Stripes, a courtesy flag in U.S. waters, and on the other side of it, the British merchant navy red ensign referred to as “the Red Duster.” Between them flew the letter “H’ for the pilot they had on board, and the letter “A” indicating they were undergoing sea trials and were warning other ships to stay clear. Beyond the flags the snow was now a thick, semi-translucent haze.