Jitterbug (17 page)

“You fix that post like I told you?” was his father’s greeting.

“Yes, sir. I took it out and sank a new one. It was all rotted.”

Standing on the ground in front of the porch he tried not to look up at the old man, nor down at his feet either. At eighteen he was aware of the power of the word
sir
, but also of the self-loathing it cost him to use it.

“Sink that wire good and tight? I didn’t buy good seed corn to feed the damn deer.”

“Yes, sir.” He didn’t point out that the ongoing construction at Willow Run had frightened away all the deer for a generation at least. That would have turned the conversation in the wrong direction. “I thought I’d go into town tonight, if I can have the truck.”

“Got holes in your shoes? Put in newspaper.”

“I’m going to Detroit, not Ypsi.”

“What’s in Detroit?”

“I’m taking Susan to the Michigan.”

“What’s wrong with the picture show in Ypsi?” His father had gone to see a movie only once since
The Jazz Singer.
He claimed the English came too fast for him to follow, but Gunther suspected it was the price of the ticket that kept him away. He’d bought one suit in his life, which he wore to funerals and meetings at the grange hall, and had stopped going to ball games when the price of hot dogs went to fifteen cents.

“Jimmy Dorsey’s playing live at the Michigan. Susan likes to dance.”

“She a jitterbug?” He pronounced the word in the tone he reserved for Jews and FDR.

“No, sir.”

He worked his mouth around his false teeth. His eyes were pale blue in a thicket of sharp creases that went all the way down to his chin when his face showed any expression at all. The irises were barely distinguishable from the whites. They were still fixed on the bomber plant. “What’s the picture?”

“
Lady of Burlesque.
”

“Sex show?”

“Pa, it’s Barbara Stanwyck.”

“You got four acres of corn to plant tomorrow.”

“I’ll be home early. There’s a curfew.”

“Put gas in it.”

Gunther thanked him and went inside to clean up. He put on his suit, brushed his hair straight back, and teased forth a lock to form an apostrophe above his right eye, like Clark Gable. He couldn’t do much about his square jaw and beefy neck, which had German farm boy all over them, and wished he had the confidence to carry off a silk scarf tucked into an open shirt collar, Ronald Colman style. His mother paused in the midst of setting the table to kiss him. Her face wore a perpetual worried look these days. She shared the secret of Gunther’s draft registration, and had a brother in the marines, whose infrequent letters she couldn’t share with the family for fear of arousing Baldur’s ire. She had a beaten-down quality that filled Gunther with sympathy and contempt.

The Model T truck stood in a bare patch of lawn, the grass long since killed by spilled oil from the crankcase. He advanced the spark, inserted the crank, being careful to align his thumb with the rest of his fingers to avoid breaking his arm, and wound the motor into life. By then his sweat had begun to attract mosquitoes; quickly he threw the crank onto the floorboards, swung into the driver’s seat, and slipped the clutch to lose the voracious insects in the slipstream. The night air felt cool on his face when he cranked open the windshield. It was heavy with the scent of turned earth and spread manure. He wondered if it smelled different in France and Italy.

Susan Moller lived in one of Ypsilanti s oldest houses, a spike-gabled Queen Anne on a quarter acre lot, once painted in a rainbow of pastels but now white with gray trim. A new six-foot board fence, not yet whitewashed; stood between it and the house next door, nearly as old but recently divided into apartments to take advantage of the housing shortage among workers at Willow Run. Susan’s father was the latest in a family line of area pharmacists going back to the Civil War.

She met Gunther at the door in a salmon-colored party dress with a white lace shawl over her bare shoulders. She was nearly as tall as her escort, but had formed the habit of standing with her head thrust forward to divert attention from her height. Tonight she wore her black hair pinned up. It struck off blue halos under the porch light. He helped her up into the seat, then slid in beside her and let out the clutch. Despite gas rationing he’d left the motor running. He hadn’t wanted to work up another sweat cranking it.

The Michigan Theater was an art deco palace in downtown Detroit, illuminated from below with searchlights like a church steeple and crusted over with gilt cherubs and bunches of grapes inside. The local band opening for Jimmy Dorsey onstage was good but derivative, playing a medley of familiar hits in imitation of the styles of the various famous orchestras that had recorded them. A temporary dance floor had been erected over the pit normally occupied by house musicians before the main feature, and a few couples were taking advantage of it. Most of the five thousand seats were filled with patrons conserving their energy for the star attraction.

The curtain rolled down on a spirited version of “Song of India.” Five minutes of murmuring conversation, anticipatory coughs, and suspenseful silence, then the unmistakable tootling of Jimmy Dorsey’s clarinet began the opening lick to “Contrasts,” the band’s theme; and as the brass and the rest of the woodwinds came in, the curtain rose on a cushion of music and thunderous applause. All the props used by the previous band had vanished, replaced by two rows of white music stands with the initials JD intertwined in gold on their faces.

The footlights and overheads flared off shining brass, white dinner jackets, glistening hair oil. Jimmy Dorsey, jug-eared and amiable, stood several yards back from the microphone on its stand as if unwilling to monopolize it, waving his clarinet like a baton when the reed was not actually in his mouth. The dance floor began to fill. By the time Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell swept out from the wings to sing “Tangerine,” there was barely room to maneuver. Gunther and Susan danced to “Amapola” and “Green Eyes,” but when Ray McKinley on drums laid down the rumbling beat for “Cow Cow Boogie,” Gunther acquiesced to a plea from a skinny caricature in a Michigan letterman’s sweater to cut in. Susan loved to jitterbug, and his feet were too accustomed to busting clods to keep up.

The movie program started on schedule, disappointing those who wanted the music to continue.
The March of Time
caught the president fishing at Warm Springs, showed Alice Faye and Phil Harris loading gear and personnel aboard a ship carrying a USO troupe to Pantelleria, and presented an “Arsenal of Democracy” feature on the bustling defense plants in California, New Jersey, Indiana, and Michigan, the sound track lost beneath applause when the audience recognized River Rouge, Willow Run, and Dodge Main. A Popeye cartoon followed, then the main feature,
Lady of Burlesque.
The movie, based on a murder mystery purportedly written by Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper, failed to charm Gunther. He guessed who the murderer was thirty minutes in and found the subject matter about as sexy as a Playtex ad in a magazine. On the way home he argued about it with Susan, who found it difficult to be critical of anything from Hollywood.

They made up, and as she snuggled in close to him he left the expressway and took the back roads. The hour was early. He knew of a clearing where they could be alone. She made no protest as he turned off the tree-lined road and bucked up over the natural berm. As he drew the brake, the truck’s lights fell on a dark patch on the ground fifty yards ahead, which lifted in a sudden, ragged cloud like a pile of dried leaves struck by a gust. The movement, and the harsh cacophony that accompanied it, startled Susan, whose nails dug into his biceps.

He patted her hand. His own heart was fluttering, but he made his voice calm. “It’s just crows. They must have found something.”

“What?” Her grip hadn’t relaxed.

“A deer, probably. Someone hit it and it crawled off there and died.” As he said it he remembered how long it had been since he’d seen a deer so close to Willow Run. He reached for the door handle.

She didn’t let go. “Don’t get out.”

“I’d better take a look.” Gently he pried her fingers loose and opened the door and stepped down.

A low ground mist smoked in the beams from the headlights. The bed of pine needles and last year’s leaves was damp. He hoped the moisture wouldn’t ruin his only good pair of shoes. Above him, the crows had perched in the trees, where they found courage to harangue him noisily. He smelled decayed flesh then, saw what the birds had been feeding on. He had just enough presence of mind to remember his date and step outside the light to vomit.

C
RAZY
H
ENRY, LOOKING SHOCKINGLY
frail in a full-dress tuxedo and butterfly collar too large for his wattled neck, entered the dining room of the Book-Cadillac Hotel on the arms of his wife Clara and Harry Bennett. Mrs. Ford was dressed all in black for her martyred son Edsel and the men had satin mourning bands sewn to their sleeves. It was obvious that Bennett and Clara were supporting the eighty-year-old patriarch of America’s number one automotive family between them; if they were to let go of his elbows he would collapse into a pile of brittle bones on the steps leading to the dais. Even his small sharp eyes, set deep beneath the mantel of his great bony brow, had taken on the luminescent quality of a wandering mind. He did not look like a man who had assumed complete control of his company in the wake of his son’s death. Nor had he, despite the claims of an army of press agents employed by the head office in Dearborn. Harry Bennett, bowlegged and short-coupled, had been calling all the shots from his office in the Ford Service Department since before Edsel Ford ascended to his paper presidency, and in the presence of Henrys failing health and weakening faculties had acquired authority unprecedented in the history of the one-man firm. It was Bennett who during the labor troubles of 1932 had ordered machine guns to be installed on the roofs of the Ford family residences at Fairlane and Gaukler Pointe. It was Bennett’s strikebreakers who beat up Richard Frankensteen and kicked Walter Reuther down the steps of the Miller Road overpass for distributing union literature in 1937. The fortunes of the world’s oldest and most famous manufacturer of automobiles—and now, of battleships and bombers—lay entirely in the hands of a man who didn’t know a carburetor from a chafing dish, and who could barely sign his own name to the deliveries of pornographic films he ordered by the case. Despite expensive tailoring, in evening dress he put Max Zagreb in mind of a midget wrestler at a formal wedding.

The dining room, paneled in hand-rubbed walnut and inlaid with marble and gold, had been transformed overnight with red-white-and-blue bunting and fanciful representations in pen and ink of Churchill, FDR, and Stalin looking with grim determination to the East. Even a blindfolded Justice had been inducted by way of a banner strung behind the dais, draped in Old Glory and directing squadrons of Ford B-24s and companies of Chrysler tanks with her sword. The martial atmosphere extended to the chandeliers, whose crystal pendants looked like bunches of bullets. Max Zagreb saw the spectacle for what it was and yet still felt his dick growing hard. By the same token he found it easy to sneer at Edward R. Murrow’s lump-throated descriptions of stiff-upper-lip Brits defying Goering’s Luftwaffe from the London Underground, but difficult to keep his chest from swelling with allied pride whenever he heard “The White Cliffs of Dover.”

He was there under orders. Mayor Jeffries had directed Commissioner Witherspoon to accompany him to the black-tie event to raise money to equip GIs with gas masks on the improved design, and the commissioner had in turn issued one of his infamous memos “requesting” inspectors and better to attend. However, when a chicken-pox epidemic claimed several members of the department brass, lieutenants and even some sergeants had been pressed into service. Some of Zagreb’s ambitious peers had rented full-dress outfits. He had selected his best blue suit and the black knitted necktie he wore to civilian funerals, and was gratified to observe a number of overweight precinct commanders struggling with their cummerbunds every time they got up or sat down.

It occurred to him, as the head table took shape, that a German potato-masher lobbed in that direction would deprive the Home Front of most of its generals. In addition to Henry, laboring to mount the steps to the platform with the help of his party, fellow auto pioneer Walter P. Chrysler, Liberty ship builder Henry Kaiser, and William Knudsen, former General Motors chief and now head of the federal Office of Production Management, and their wives had gathered behind a floral centerpiece the size of a washtub. Zagreb thought it symbolic of the new style of mechanized warfare that the only two warriors he recognized were Ford and Knudsen, and Knudsen only because he was decked out in the beribboned uniform that went with his special commission as a lieutenant general of the army. There wasn’t a Sergeant York or a T. E. Lawrence in the bunch.

He was seated at a large round table covered in white linen with a midget version of the head table’s centerpiece blocking his view of the diners opposite him. A miniature American flag surrounded by the French tricolor, the British Union Jack, and a forest of less recognizable pennants grew out of the pot, which he was willing to bet would go to the lucky guest whose ticket bore the magic number. He hoped it wasn’t him. The incentive of bringing home such a prize had gone with his wife; and if he contrived to forget it, someone was bound to be offended, and he would retire a lieutenant. Preparing for disaster, he surveyed his neighbors for the face of someone who would accept the gift of his good fortune in the spirit in which it was not intended.

The pickings held little promise. To his right sat a buxom woman with blinding white hair creamed and cooked into indestructible waves, with lace at her throat, silver-rimmed glasses, and so much powder on her liver spots it fell in a cloud to her dress every time she turned her head. If she accepted the centerpiece at all it would be to present it to a servant in lieu of a raise. Her escort, a pale bald man with a severe white fringe and thick glasses in heavy black frames, appeared to be withering inside his tuxedo. His starched shirt might have been the only thing preventing him from sliding under the table. He was nothing more than a fixture between the woman and the party with whom she was conducting an animated and powder-scattering conversation, the thin, well-preserved widow of an auto pioneer who had been dead since Coolidge. The widow’s severe tailored suit and plain silver jewelry did not suggest a love for flowers.