Stage Door Canteen (6 page)

Down on the moon-bright river a ship gave a low, groaning warning and was answered by another. With their dimmed running lights they used their signals often to keep from running into each other.

Standing in the dark listening to Richard Rodger’s music, the night was filled with a sense of the city, unsettled in its near-blackness, the arteries of the rivers and the subways reaching out into the distant boroughs, the railroad trains coming in from the rest of the country, the airports, the military bases, the apartment houses and factories and sweatshops all moving and running and humming in the night, exerting a great effort. Because it had to be done. Because no one, even New York, knew what would be the end of it. This was a war that spread all over the world, more terrible than one could imagine. So terrible that day by day most people tried not to think about it. They just knew there had to be victory in the end.

There had to be.

Jenny put her hands over her eyes. It was silly to stay up late reading when she had an early call in the morning. If they would just make up their minds what they wanted, she told herself, shivering. She was sure she could do it. Whatever it was.

She closed the felt blackout drapes and started back to the bedroom to turn off the radio and then to sleep.

The four khaki-clad figures came out of the Waldorf-Astoria’s elevator and onto the fifteenth floor with a great show of trying to be quiet, except for the smallest figure, who flopped down to the floor and then was dragged back up again at virtually every step, while he yelled hoarsely that they fucking well better let him go, or he would kill all you frigging sons of bitches personally.

“Eugene, you little shit,” Sgt. Tom Weathersley, who as the biggest was doing most of the dragging, told him, “just stop your goddamn hollering, will you? The Waldorf told us one more time like this and they were going to throw us OUT.”

The crew’s navigator tried to grab Sgt. Struhbeck’s shoulder to shake him, emphasizing his message, but the smaller man broke his grip, and managed to reel away. On the other side Sgt. Walter Pettit, the crew’s tail gunner, hung onto Eugene Struhbeck’s left arm as he careened into the wall, hitting his forehead with a distinct thump, then bounded back into the navigator’s arms.

“I knew we should have put in a request for rooms closer to the elevator,” Wally Petitt panted. “As long as we’ve got Eugene with us there’s got to be some way of getting in and out without waking up the whole damned floor.”

LeTourneau, the bombardier who was bring up the rear, added, “Yeah, that information services captain is pissed off with us as it is.”

“Buddy, you shut your damned mouth.” The big navigator reached down and pulled Struhbeck back up from his knees. “We wouldn’t be doing this if you’d picked up Eugene in that canteen he goes to instead of letting him get into the bars. I’m going to bust your ass when we get through, you know that, don’t you?”

“Shit, now he’s bleeeding,” the tail gunner said. “He must’ve have banged his nose when he hit the wall.” Sgt. Struhbeck had seized the front of Weathersley’s military jacket in both hands and was hanging on to him. “Jesus, Tom, it’s messing up the hotel’s rug. Look down there!”

“You gotta tell them,” Sgt. Struhbeck was yelling, “you gotta tell them about those Jap ships. The ones they gave us all the medals for.”

“Don’t worry about the blood,” Weathersley said, taking the opportunity, while the other hung onto him, to drag the ball turret gunner a few steps. “You’n Buddy can come back with some towels from the bathroom and wipe it up.”

“Weathersley,” Sgt. Struhbeck was screaming, “you hear me? Tell them about the Jap ships. They weren’t destroyers or battleships, they were frigging supply boats! That’s what they gave us the medals for—frigging TRAWLERS!”

“Christ,” the bombardier complained, “he’s onto that again. Are we going to have to listen to that all night?”

“You shut up, too, LeTourneau,” the tail gunner told him, “you ain’t doing nothing back there. Either give us a hand before people start coming out into the hall to see what the hell’s going on, or shut your goddamned mouth.”

“We’re no frigging heroes,” Sgt. Struhbeck sobbed, sinking to his knees as Weathersley got out the room key and opened the door to their suite. “Y’hear that? I’m no frigging hero—it was all trawlers and a frigging minesweeper, wasn’t it?”

No one answered. The navigator and the tail gunner dragged Eugene Struhbeck up by his arms and slung him between them and carried him to the bed and laid him, as carefully as possible, upon it. Blood streamed from his nose. His eyes closed, Sgt. Struhbeck shouted drunkenly about medals and ships and no frigging war heroes.

Sgt. Weathersley bent over him. “Eugene,” he said, as he had many times before, “can you shut up and just listen? You are a war hero, Eugene, because you saved our lives. A war hero, you got that? The next time you get stinking drunk, the Waldorf-Astoria told us, they don’t care about Lieutenant MacElsmore and the war bond tour or anybody in Washington, they’re going to throw us out.” The tail gunner had fetched a wash cloth from the bathroom. He handed it to the navigator, who used it to wipe some of the blood from Sgt. Struhbeck’s’ nose and mouth.

They stepped back. But he had suddenly gone to sleep.

“Our soldiers and sailors are members of well disciplined units. But they are still and forever individuals—free individuals. They are farmers, workers, business men, professional men, artists, clerks.

They are the United States of America.

That is why they fight.

We, too, are the United States of America.

That is why we must work and sacrifice.

It is for them. It is for us. It is for victory.”

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1942
 

FOUR

“They were all New York Jews.” The voice came hollowly from inside the cabinet under the canteen’s kitchen sink. “All the families knew each other. Or if they didn’t exactly know each other, they had heard of each other. And they were such intellectuals, talented, also go-getters—believe me, they were the sort of Jews that Adolf Hitler, if he knew them, he wouldn’t wait to send them off quick to concentration camps.” His body turned slightly so that he could reach out of the space under the sink with one hand. “Sweetheart, in the tool box is a flat tin labeled ‘caulking,’ do you see it?”

“Yes.” Carefully, Jenny poked around in the metal tool box with its wrenches and other plumbing tools, found the can of caulking compound and leaned forward and put it into his outstretched hand. George Kanarakis, the salaried daytime kitchen manager, had been standing over them, watching. Now he leaned down, wiping his hands on a stained apron, to ask, “How’s it going?”

She smiled, brightly. “It’s almost finished. Mr. Levine cleaned out the pipe—the trap, and he said not to pour grease down it anymore.”

The kitchen manager looked relieved. “We’re so lucky to have him do this, it’s really an honor, I can’t thank him enough. Will you please tell him that? The only way we can get a plumber these days is if there’s a pipe broken open and flooding Forty Fourth Street and threatening to drown somebody. ‘Use a plunger,’ is what they tell us, ‘there’s a war on.’ The sink’s been full of dirty water for two days, we’ve had to bail it out with a bucket.”

“Yes I know.” Jenny tried not to think about the sink’s previous condition; her knees were beginning to hurt from kneeling on the kitchen’s linoleum. But George Kanarakis was right: Moishe Levine, star of New York’s Lower East Side Yiddish Art Theater, also known as Martin Levin when he played Broadway, had been a godsend. He was not only an experienced, if unlicensed, handyman/plumber, he was also donating his invaluable time to the canteen.

“William Hammerstein,” he was saying from under the sink, “the son of the great Oscar Hammerstein the First, was a brilliant, conservative man, he way he dressed you couldn’t tell him from a banker. Each day he got on the Broadway streetcar to ride downtown to Longacre Square, which is now Times Square, to manage the Victoria, the largest and best vaudeville theatre in the entire country. But he had a hard time with the old man, his father. Oscar Hammerstein took the profits his sons made, Arthur and William, from the Hammerstein theaters and used it for schemes that usually lost money. Big money, like trying to put the Metropolitan Opera out of business by building a bigger opera house a few blocks away. Such nonsense. However, Mr. Oscar the First did build the Harlem Opera House where the uptown Jewish crowd was living at that time, prior to the First World War, which is now called the Apollo Theater. The old man was very flamboyant, he always wore this elegant top hat even inside, he never took it off, and sometimes he had such a temper he engaged in fist fights with people. The newspapers loved him, they were always doing caricatures of him, especially when he got into some disaster with his theater properties. It was very trying for William and Arthur, but Mr. Oscar was a first class promoter, he brought Nellie Melba to the United States very profitably, and other famous opera and stage stars. He was a giant in the theater of New York City at that time.”

Jenny took the wrench that he handed out to her. “Oscar Hammerstein was Mr. Hammerstein’s grandfather?”

Evidently he couldn’t hear her, for he went on, “What a world it was to be raised in, then! My father, just off the boat from Minsk, was playing a fiddle for nickles and dimes on a street corner in the Bowery, but these uptown Jews who were already second generation in New York City were the bourgeoisie, the Jewish middleclass, and making money. William Rodgers had a job as a customs inspector on the docks to work his way through medical school, living on his wife’s family, the Levys, until he finished. Can you imagine this, working a job on the New York City docks to support a family, living with your in-laws and going to medical school all at the same time? But that is the way they were back then. Believe me, in those days the only people who were working as hard as the Jews were the Italians. Eventually William Rodgers became a very wealthy doctor, and provided for his family not only with money but with a love for the theater, plus a beautiful, refined home with a piano. It was that piano on which Richard Rodgers learned to play as a child, and compose music.”

George, the kitchen manager, left them to open the back door for the afternoon milk delivery. Moishe Levine handed out the caulking can to Jenny, who wiped it off and put it back in the tool box.

“Of course in those days,” he continued in his deep baritone, “if you were prosperous you sent your wife and kids to the seashore or the mountains in the summer. At that time, something called the Weingarts Insitutute, a sort of world’s first summer camp, was opened up in the Catskills, so the wealthy middle-class Jews sent their sons there. It was at Weingarts that Dr. William’s sons, Richard Rodgers and his brother, spent their summers with other kids like Lorenz Hart and his brother Teddy, and the brothers David and Myron Selznick, who would later go to Hollywood and make pictures like Gone With The Wind. So in time these talented, hardworking people made more money and sent their kids to Columbia University, which is conveniently right there on the west side of Manhattan. Ockie and Reggie Hammerstein, old Oscar’s grandsons, were in classes at Columbia with Bennett Cerf and Morrie Ryskind, also Herman Mankiewicz, who, you may remember, was the screenwriter on last year’s turkey from Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, Lincoln Schuster, and again, the boy genius Larry Hart. What an English department Columbia had in those days, with such scholars and writers such as Howard Dietz, John Erskine and Carl van Doren! Van Doren was Ockie Hammerstein’s faculty advisor, it’s no wonder Ockie ended up as a writer.”

He backed out from under the sink and sat down facing her, a burly, black-bearded man. “Along the way there is of course, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, even Ziegfeld, who Richard Rodgers worked for once and dislikes very much. Now it’s the present day, and look, we see all this talent on fire because of another bunch of Jews that did Showboat and Porgy And Bess. Behold, suddenly this third generation is not only rich and middle-class, it is reinventing the new Jewish homeland—America!”

She had to laugh. Moishe Levine’s irreverent assessments were like the comedy “asides” of the Yiddish stage, funny but telling. “Is that what it is? Reinventing America?”

“Why not? Don’t the theater and the movies tell us what we are? Don’t millions think already that America’s Civil War is Gone With The Wind?” He shrugged. “Can Dick Rodgers and Ockie Hammerstein do it? Ah, that is another question. But look at what has already been done. On the stage, to my mind Showboat was more opera than operetta, it was dealing after all with the problem of race, which had never been done before, God forbid, in anything like a Broadway musical. Then of course right after Showboat comes along George Gershwin with a real opera, Porgy And Bess, which is not only an opera all the way through without a stop but is about Negro people. Regard—America turned inside out. Naturally the public is not enthusiastic about a Jew like Gershwin interpreting this great country. Even Negroes are not certain. Everyone stays away, and box office is poor, but believe me, history has been made.” He got to his feet, picking up the tool box, and offered her a hand up. “Now you and I, darling Miss Jenny Rose, are going to be a part of Mr. Richard Rodgers and Mr. Oscar Hammerstein the Second’s turn to interpret America again in the musical theater. Only this time it is not about southern entertainers on a showboat on the Mississippi or Negroes in a ghetto somewhere, but cowboys.”