Stage Door Canteen (28 page)

Ruth sighed. “Elise, I never heard of that place, whatever it’s called, in Poland.”

“Sobibor.”

“Okay, Sobibor.” She reached for a package of cigarettes on the table, drew one out and lit it. “It doesn’t ring a bell, and my geography is pretty damned good. Frankly, I—” She stopped. “Wait, not Max Kubelsky, the one Earnest Hemingway wrote about? The hero of Teruel?”

Elise looked confused. “Something like that, I don’t know. He is only Max to me. Max Kubelsky.”

“The Spanish Civil War, right? Didn’t he go to Moscow afterward?”

“No, no, I don’t know anything about that! Max is a writer now, he writes for magazines.” She was desperate; she held out the photograph. “I have this, if you will only look at it, please. Perhaps then you will believe me.”

Ruth sat back and drew a mouthful of smoke. “Sit down,” she said, letting go of the chair. “And put the photograph down, I’ve seen those before.” As Elise slipped into the seat she said, “Okay, so tell me the thing that brought you over that you’ve just got to speak to me about. The big story.”

Elise looked at her for a long moment. Then she held up the postcard-sized photograph. “They say it means nothing, that it could be anywhere, some other war. I don’t know. I have others, bigger ones for newspaper or the magazine reproduction, what they call ‘glossies.’ They are all bodies of people after they have been put in the death chambers. They take them, whole families, the mothers and fathers and children, and they tell them to strip naked in front of each other, that they are going to the showers and that the reason for it is that then they will be deloused. They give them a bar of soap to hold onto which they collect afterward. Poor, naked families, they cling to each other pitifully, the mother and father and children, so humiliated, so despairing like that before each other, and they go into the gas chambers and they die in each others’ arms, the mother holding the children, the fathers trying to embrace them all, to protect them from they don’t know what.” Her voice trailed away.

After a long moment Ruth McGowan said, “Let me see the damned photo.” She took it and held it up to the light. “Who told you this, all the stuff about the death camp and where it is and what they’re doing?”

“My father has friends in Canada. So has Arnold Foster of the Anti-Defamation League, they work together sometimes. The information comes from the people in Canada. But it is all true.”

Ruth McGowan reached for her purse, opened it, and stuck the picture inside. “I’ve heard something like this, we all have. Everybody in the news gathering business knows the Nazis have concentration camps, slave labor camps, maybe even extermination camps. But you’re right, officially nobody wants to talk about it. As a story it doesn’t exist.” She put out her cigarette in the ash tray. “For now. But that doesn’t mean someone won’t scoop it.”

Elise shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Ah, here comes the sergeant with the Cokes.” The AP correspondent stood up. “Look, I’m not going to Europe. I thought I was going to London, but I may be taking a detour thanks to General Eisenhower. What they’re saying now is that if everything works out and the Allies invade Italy, war correspondents will be in Europe sometime in the coming year. Do you know what I’m trying to tell you? I swear I will look all over hell and gone for this story. If it really does exist, if Sobibor or any place like it is really there, it will be one of the biggest news stories to come out of the war.”

“Hello there,” the Signal Corps sergeant said, looking over Elise. He handed Ruth her Coca Cola. “Is this a friend of yours?”

“Bud, you couldn’t be more right.” She took a long gulp of her soda. “If what she just told me is true, little Miss Ginsberg may be one of the biggest friends I ever had.”

“Use it up, wear it out,

Make it do, do without.”

—Wartime Saying

FIFTEEN

“Does this show,” Marty Levin wanted to know, “deserve a Christmas party?”

He crossed center stage, waving his arms, to where Jenny and Lee Dixon sat on folding chairs studying the changes made in one of their scenes. Many of the musical numbers had been trimmed, due to the length of the show’s running time, which now stretched to an unacceptable four and a half hours. Reuben Mamoulian and Richard Rogers were still not satisfied. More cuts had to be made.

As the Christmas holiday season approached, the cast of Away We Go were getting on each other’s nerves. It was inevitable, and Marty was no exception. It had been announced that the date for the try-out opening in New Haven had been shifted again, postponed with no future date given, an ominous sign. Richard Rodgers, although he could be the Rock of Gibraltar when he chose, daily grew more sarcastic and arbitrary. It was impossible, everyone complained, to deal with him. The latest cocktail party, where Dick did his usual turn playing the piano and Jenny and Marty Levin sang their Ado Annie and Ali Hakim songs, had produced only one offer of money, a sum so small they had all despaired. Oscar Hammerstein, on the other hand, still tinkered with the musical numbers, mulling over the idea of a “place” song for the chorus. Something, he said vaguely, about the town, or region. No one was enthusiastic about a new song. The show already had a song about a place, Everything’s Up To Date In Kansas City. There were rumors that more members of the cast would be let go. Agnes de Mille, who declared that she had been pushed to the edge of sanity with constant wrangling over every change, large or small, in her dances, had had such a raging, screaming row with Reuben Mamoulian over cuts in the Laurey’s Dream ballet that Marc Platt, her dance assistant, had to rushed her to a sink backstage to hold her head under the cold water tap. Finally Oscar Hammerstein removed himself from the fray by going to his country home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for a few days.

Now Marty boomed, “I ask you, does our little group of the cast of Away We Go deserve a supper buffet of naturally lavish proportions at Sardi’s for over the hundred people associated with this production, when the show can’t get its costumes out of hock? Is such an extravagance, not to mention celebration—and celebration for what, we should ask ourselves—warranted?”

“The costumes are here, Marty,” Jenny said without looking up, “they’re not in hock, the ballet people are already dancing in them.”

He snorted. “They have to get the ballet clothes so they can try them on and see if they work. Otherwise we would have to stop rehearsals.”

Lee Dixon said, “I thought the Christmas party at Sardi’s was being thrown for the cast by Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein. With their money.”

“It is, it is,” Jenny soothed him. “Marty’s just trying to be funny. Don’t listen to him.”

“Just so long as they don’t cut my dance,” Lee said. “‘Kansas City’ is one of the best numbers in the show. They should leave it alone.” Jittery with nervous energy, he tossed his script on an empty chair seat. “I need some coffee. Anybody want some coffee?”

When they shook their heads, he rushed off toward the backstage area. Marty said, “You should talk to Reuben, sweetheart, he needs to know.”

Jenny handed him his script. “Some of your lines are cut. Did you see?”

“Listen, darling, Reuben is blaming you for this shtick with Lee that doesn’t work, and you are saying nothing, nothing at all. How can you be this bold, very forward girl, Ado Annie, when you act like you are about to throw up when your boyfriend Will tries to kiss you?”

“Please, Marty, it will get better, I promise. We’re working on it.”

“You will promise?” He threw his hands in the air. “Darling Jenny, you do not need to be a saint already! Go to Reuben and tell him the kid is still drinking, and to cover it he’s eating garlic. Raw garlic, whole cloves of it. Because Reuben is blaming you, believe me.”

For a moment Jenny entertained the thought that Marty might be trying to warn her that she, too, might be on shaky ground. She quickly told herself the idea was silly. After all, she’d been one of the first hired, even before the book was completed. Ockie Hammerstein had expressly asked for her after she’d played Magnolia in the out of town revival of Showboat.

“I’ll do something, Marty, I just don’t want to add to everything else going on right now. Besides, Lee’s drinking because he’s worried Reuben or Dick Rodgers will cut his solo. Once he finds out for sure that’s not going to happen, it will get better. He’s such a sweet person, and a fantastic dancer. Nobody else could do the Kansas City number, I’m sure Dick and Reuben know that.”

He studied her for a long moment, head cocked to one side. Then he abruptly sat down in the seat next to her. “So how is the good Major Haller?” he asked. “Have you heard from him?”

“Not since his letter telling me he had arrived safely. Not a word since then.”

She’d read parts of Brad’s letter to Marty, especially Brad’s description of a London devastated by the blitz of 1940 and ‘41, but in a lull now that the Luftwaffe bombers had apparently been moved to the Russian front. The general feeling in England, though, was that it wasn’t over. That the fearsome bombing would return.

ISPD was quartered, from what Brad could cautiously describe in order to get past the military mail censor, in a small London hotel in the East End. They were using their rooms there as temporary offices. The staff was together: Captain Larry Brownlee, the WAAC corporals Margie and Eleanor. Malcolm Sandover was expected shortly. In his letter Brad had hinted again of the big meeting of Allied leaders to take place, probably in January, for which ISPD would be preparing material.

They were billeted in a hotel in the large working class district across the River Thames. East London, with its docks and power plants, had been particularly hard hit during the Blitz. Block after block, Brad wrote, looked as though an earthquake had flattened it, leaving piles of nothing but rubble. In some places there was not even a wall left standing. In London, they talked of the city’s civilian firemen as among the great heroes of the war. The bombs had turned the streets into infernos, but the firemen had gone in night after night during the Blitz, to fight the soaring, blocks-long fires and search for people trapped in the ruins. The indomitable bravery of the city’s firemen was one of the reasons London had managed to hold out against the Luftwaffe.

“I think,” Jenny said, “the reason that I haven’t had more than one letter from Brad is that he expected to be end up at General Eisenhower’s headquarters somewhere in North Africa. Algiers, I think, according to the newspapers. It’s funny, the newspapers can publish where Eisenhower is, but Brad can’t write it in a letter. Of course, if Brad’s moved there, all of my Christmas packages are going to end up in some Army post office. I could just cry. I bought Brad one of those big overseas Christmas gift boxes from Lord and Taylor guaranteed to have everything a serviceman would want, including rum cake and those little flat cans of anchovies. Then I went all-out, and baked Brad a big box of my grandmother’s Swedish Christmas cookies that he loves, even knowing they’d probably be cookie dust by the time he got them. I guess I needn’t have worried. Now he won’t even get that.”

“Poor darling,” he sympathized. “Now tell me, do you write the Major all about the boarder you have now, the Hamlet sea captain?”

She laughed. “Heathcliffe, not Hamlet. And I’ve changed my mind, he really doesn’t look all that much like Olivier. He’s not that pretty.” She turned in the chair to face him. “And just what is that crack supposed to mean, Marty?”

He threw up his hands in the familiar gesture. “Nothing, nothing, darling Jenny, I was only teasing. You I can tease, my angel. Tallulah Bankhead I wouldn’t tease about having a sea captain in her back bedroom, believe me. So, is the captain recovering nicely from his war wound?”

“It isn’t a war wound.” Jenny had already told Marty the reason for Captain Griffiths’s delay in New York. Not only had the freighter bringing the replacement boilers for his ship been sunk by the Germans, but the captain had been in the hospital, which had prevented him from being assigned another ship.

“Well, perhaps you could call it that,” she admitted. “The war probably caused it. He has an ulcer.”

“An ulcer?”

“Marty, don’t you dare laugh.”

He said, sincerely, “Darling, I am not laughing.”

“Good, because I am told being on a freighter in the North Atlantic is horrible. As dangerous as being in the middle of the fighting in North Africa or someplace. It’s the same thing.”

The captain had proved to be a nocturnal creature, something Jenny hadn’t counted on. The other bathroom was at the end of the hall next to his bedroom, an ostensibly ideal arrangement as it kept him at that end of the apartment. But she was still aware, especially very late at night, of doors opening and closing, no matter how softly, the faint sound of water running in the shower, the toilet flushing. A whisper, a sense, of footsteps on their way to the kitchen. At first the clandestine noises didn’t bother her even after so many months of being alone, missing Brad but no longer listening for familiar sounds.

Then she found she began to wait, perversely, for the telltale night murmurs. They began to invade her sleep. After a while Jenny came to realize that all this to some extent was her fault. It had become a habit to wake up out of a sound sleep, reach for the clock with its luminous dial and see that it was only two a.m. Or three-twenty. Our four-fifteen. And that whatever sound it had been—his footsteps, the radio in his room, the door closing—that had waked her, she was now anticipating the rest. The opening of the refrigerator door, the discreet rattle of the kettle against the stove’s burner, water running in the kitchen sink. She could hear it all and yet she couldn’t. She didn’t know what part was merely her imagination and what part the captain prowling about. She tried not to let it irritate her. But of course, after a while, it did.