Stage Door Canteen (33 page)

He laughed. He put the beer bottle down by the side of the bed and half-turned to her. “What they didn’t know at the time was that we should have been in the dog house. We really messed up. The rest of our bombers had made their runs and dropped their bombs and turned back, and we were late on target. Joe had one engine out and we were at low altitude, with a lot of patchy fog, couldn’t see much of anything. Then Leon, God rest his soul, he says he sees a Jap submarine down there. So Buddy Le Tourneau, the bombardier, says hell yes, he sees it, too. And Joe is busy fighting engine number three that looks like it’s going to go, so he says go ahead, bomb the target. We dropped our bombs and started back, and that’s when the Zeros jumped us. It wasn’t until we got back to Midway and there was the Navy standing there waiting for us, that we found out we had tried to bomb one of our own subs. Turns out we only splashed a little water on them, but the Navy was mad as hell. A lot of things went wrong that day, there was a lot of messing up, but it seems like the Navy was happy to blame part of it on the Air Force.”

“Oh, Gene, that’s terrible.” She hiked across the bed on her knees and put her arms around him. “You don’t mean your plane tried to bomb an American submarine, do you? How awful!”

“Sugar, none of the B-17s hit anything that day, and we weren’t the only ones. The guys who have been in it before, back in the Philippines, say it’s always like that, war is chaos. But in the end we did enough damage, the Japanese lost a lot of ships and planes and they couldn’t go on and take Hawaii like they’d planned to. So we had a victory. A big one.”

She laid her cheek against his back. “Well, everything turned out all right, didn’t it? I don’t care what anybody says, what you did especially was wonderful, shooting down four Jap planes. And they gave all of you medals, didn’t they? I think it was heroic. I’m sure everybody in the whole country does.”

“We weren’t so damned heroic when we tried to sink one of our own submarines. That was a class A snafu, Dina. The Cincy Gal crew had to go meet the crew of the submarine on Midway’s north beach three days later. It was supposed to be a sort of smoothing-over ceremony or something, arranged by the Air Force and the Navy. But you could tell everybody was still pissed off.”

He said, without turning, “Dina, you need to put your dress back on. I didn’t bring you up here to have sex with you, I thought we discussed all that. I want to marry you, honey, I want you to be a virgin just like you are now, when we get married. I want our honeymoon to be something special.”

“I can’t get married right now,” she said in a small voice. “I really can’t.”

He turned to face her. “Don’t say that, Dina. I love you, and I want us to get married. I have big plans, because once this war is over I’m not going back to Texas.”

She stared at him. “Gene, everything’s changing for me, my whole life is different, don’t you understand that? I’m on Broadway now. I’ve got a job in a really big show by Mr. Oscar Hammerstein and Mr. Richard Rodgers. Agnes de Mille, hired me as a dancer for her ballet, and Away We Go is opening sometime next month. My God, it’s all my dreams come true. It’s my big chance!”

“I thought you were just an understudy.”

“‘Just an understudy?’ Are you crazy? For your information, jobs on Broadway just don’t grow on bushes! Do you know how long I’ve been taking dance and voice lessons? Since I was four!”

“You don’t have to yell, I can hear you.”

“Yeah, well I don’t think you’re listening.” She slid off the bed and went over to the ice bucket and got a bottle of beer. Her hands were trembling as she took the bottle opener and pried off the cap.

Gene came to stand beside her. “Dina, sweetheart, look.” He took her hand and put a small black velvet box into it. “I want to do everything right, don’t you understand? Open the box and look at what’s inside. I want us to get engaged. Then, just as soon as we can, we’ll get married.”

“What?” She handed him the bottle to hold and snatched the ring box and opened it. “Oh, my God! Gene, where’d you get the money to buy something like this?”

“I told you, I made some money in Hawaii.”

She slipped the diamond ring on her finger and held her hand out, looking at it. “It’s beautiful! It’s enormous, I can’t believe it, that you did something like this! I’ve never seen anything like it!” In the next instant she dropped her hand and turned away, twisting at the ring on her finger. “No, no, I can’t do this. I don’t want to get engaged, Gene, I’m not ready for it. It would ruin everything!”

He followed her across the room. “Dina, look at me, don’t run away. Can’t you see how much I love you? I’ve never loved anybody like this before, you’re every thing I ever wanted.” He was desperate. “Sweetheart, can’t you say you love me just a little?”

“I don’t know, please, I don’t know.” She put her arms around his neck and said, “Why don’t you just wait? You’re going overseas, and I’m with a new show, we don’t know how anything will work out. After years and years of working and studying I’ve got my foot in the door, you know? Everything’s up in the air—well, you know what I mean.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. He held himself rigid as she said, “Look, I want us to make love, I really do. I mean, I want it more than anything, Gene. I want you to have something to remember.”

He took her arms down from around his neck. “You mean you want to go to bed with me. Is that what’s this is all about? That you don’t want to get married, Dina, you don’t even want to get engaged, you just want to start sleeping around now that you’re on Broadway?”

Her mouth dropped open. “I didn’t say I was going to start sleeping around. Is that what you think I’m going to do?” She pulled the ring off, and put it back in the black velvet box and snapped it shut. “Here, take your ring back. Gene, if you loved me so much you wouldn’t talk to me like that!”

She held out the box but he didn’t take it. “You don’t think I can do anything for you, Dina, that’s the trouble. You think you’re throwing your life away, throwing away your big break if we get married. But you don’t know anything about it, girl. I’m being transferred to Hollywood, the First Motion Picture Film Unit in Culver City. I report to some guy called Ronald Reagan. He’s sort of a movie star. I can’t remember the name, but he was in some movie with a monkey in it.”

There was a sudden silence. Then Dina whispered, “Hollywood? You’re not—you’re not going overseas?” She looked confused. “You’re not going back into the fighting?”

“Hell no, the whole bunch of us—Buddy, Weathersley, Wally Pettit, the whole Cincy Gal crew, we’re going to make Air Force training films. Dina, don’t you see? I wanted us to get married before all this started, before we went to Hollywood, because I knew it would change a lot of things, being right in the middle of the movie business. They say the commanding officer, a guy named Wyler, is a famous film director. There are a lot of Hollywood stars and people working making Air Force training films out there. Hey, you’d be meeting important movie people, not being just an understudy on Broad—”

“You lied to me!” She backed away. “I can’t believe you did this to me you—you—rat!” She lifted her arm and threw the ring box at him. It bounced off his chest and fell to the floor. “Oh, my GOD—I was going to make love with you because you were going back to the war and start flying again and probably get killed! I was going to give you memories, something that you could cherish!”

She ran around the bed and picked up her dress from the floor and started to put it on. “I can’t believe I was so stupid! Look what I’ve done to myself—I nearly went to bed with you—you—rat!” She pulled the dress over her head, her voice muffled. “You are so rotten, Gene, they say you’re a hero and they gave you a lot of medals but you are really a first class b-bastard!’

When her head came through her face was flushed, hair disheveled, and she was crying. “You’re just trying to trick me into getting married to you! Oh—you’re such a conniving wheeler-dealer, Gene, you have been from the very first moment I met you! Stealing kisses right there in the canteen, telephoning me all the time and driving my family crazy! And all this money you’ve got—God knows where it came from!”

“Dina, will you calm down, baby?” He tried to block her way. “I told you where I got the money. What more—”

She pushed him aside. “You’re not going to Hollywood, I know you, that’s another lie!”

“You want to see my orders?” he shouted back. “Hold on a minute, I’ll just go get them so you can read them yourself.”

She yanked her coat and hat from the chair. “I’m not going to marry you, get that through your stupid head! I’m not going to marry somebody who lies to me the way you do.”

He stood in front of the door. “I’m not going to let you go. Jesus, after all this—it can’t end like this! I love you Dina! You’ll go out of here over my dead body!”

She stood her ground. “You let me out of here, Gene Struhbeck, or I’ll scream my head off! I’ll scream and scream and—and—the hotel will call the cops, and the Air Force will come and get you!”

“Jesus,” he said again.

He stepped aside. She grabbed the doorknob and jerked open the door. And left, slamming it shut.

By quarter to ten the snow was so deep in the area around the Red Hook docks that there were no taxicabs to be found, not even in front of the bars. After walking several blocks looking for one, and finding that even the buses had stopped running, Captain David Griffiths met a security guard from the pier where the Esher was berthed. The guard, who was going home, recognized him striding along in the snow, and pulled his car over to the curb to ask if he could give the captain a lift.

He jumped in, gratefully. Six hours on Long Island Sound had chilled him to the bone. Even the time he’d spent in the ship’s saloon with the chief engineer and his second, settling the remaining questions about hydraulic line repairs, and readying a request for a repeat trial run, hadn’t warmed him enough. He settled gratefully into the blast from the car’s heater.

“Going into Manhattan for a little recreation, captain?” The pier’s security guard shot him a friendly glance. “They got lots of good shows in Times Square opening for Christmas. The holidays are big in New York, you know, with people coming in from out-of-town. Ever been to the Christmas show at the Radio City Music Hall? You get the best movie around, then a stage show that’s like what you get in a Broadway musical review. You know, like the Ziegfeld Follies.”

There was a silence. David realized he was waiting for some sort of response. “Sorry, not going out on the town,” he told him. “Actually, I’m going back to the flat where I’ve been staying to pick up my gear.”

“No kidding.” The guard made a cluck of sympathy. “Hey, Captain, a young guy like you ought to have some time to relax a little, enjoy yourself while you can. It’s Christmas. And it’s going to be tough out there where you’re going.”

There was another silence. The car turned down a snowy street into one of the busier thoroughfares of south Brooklyn. “Staying in Manhattan, huh? Hope you had a nice place. Been in New York long?”

“Long enough.” He was still looking for a cab. The buses were running in the dimly-lighted shopping district, but none of them seemed to be going to Manhattan. The subway, he decided, seeing the signs that marked the entrance to the BMT.

He got out of the car and thanked the security guard, which wasn’t hard to do. The lift in his car was a bit of luck. It would have been a tiresome walk in the snow to the subway from the Red Hook piers.

The New York City underground, though, was complicated. After studying the map posted above a window in the car, he opted to change at Borough Hall for the train into Manhattan. It took several long frustrating minutes, and a false try on a crowded platform, where he eventually discovered the trains were going in the wrong direction. David Griffiths had never fully acquainted himself with the New York City subway system. He found he was regretting it.

The cars were crowded, and he had to stand. The lights flickered when the train passed over something on the tracks that broke the connection. The passengers in the harsh overhead light looked weary. All New Yorkers, David had noticed, had a look of exhaustion in contrast to their aggressive, even contentious, manner.

Hanging on the overhead strap the subway provided for standees, a muscle in his forearm began to twitch, a tic that had bothered him lately. An afternoon standing in the cold on the open bridge of the Esher hadn’t helped. Annoyed, he switched hands, sticking the other one in his coat pocket where it continued to spasm. He clenched the hand, and held it in a fist until at last the trembling went away.

He came up out of the dark tunnels of the subway into upper Broadway at 96th Street. The street widened here into a boulevard with double lanes of traffic and a grimy median planted with trees. Now everything was coated in pristine white, the heavy snowfall muffling the city’s usual clamor. A few buses were still running, almost empty of passengers. In some places people were strolling in the middle of the snow-clogged street. Fruit stands were still open, extending their bins of oranges and apples out over the sidewalks in banks of color. It was the night before Christmas Eve, the liquor stores were packed. He had to wait in line to buy a bottle of Scotch. A record store at 95th Street blared I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas over the crowded sidewalk.

He turned up the collar of his greatcoat against the cold and headed west from Broadway to Riverside Drive. The wind from the Hudson River sent gouts of driven snow up the hill and into his face. He remembered with growing anticipation that he had laid in a store of delicatessen ham and cheese to make sandwiches. Something he often did, since he was not much of a cook. And he had the bottle of Scotch.