Stage Door Canteen (8 page)

As he started away he suddenly stopped, and whirled to say, “Forget what I told you, Miss Rose, but don’t look. Take my advice, don’t look at anything.”

It began to drizzle in late afternoon. The block on Forty Fourth Street between Times Square and Seventh Avenue glimmered with muted light against the wet, dimmed store fronts, headlights of passing taxis. The twilight deepened and turned into chill night. The line of U.S. and Allied servicemen formed on the sidewalk in front of the Stage Door Canteen in spite of the rain and waited patiently until, promptly at five thirty, Charlie Hanrahan threw open the front door. With more than usual eagerness they rushed down the steps.

The canteen staff had defied fuel rationing and turned up the heat but the low-ceilinged room was poorly ventilated; later in the evening when the crowds were thickest water vapor was visible, like halos, around the light bulbs.

In the canteen ladies’ room, Annemarie van Troup, the night’s leader of the Stage Door Canteen volunteer junior hostesses, looked in the mirror over the washbasins and moaned. “Look at my hair, will you? That’s the worst thing about a perm, even an end perm, it gets so frizzy when it rains. You’re so lucky,” she told Dina. “Your hair is naturally curly, isn’t it?”

Dina, whose thick black mane curled tightly in the damp, couldn’t think of anything to say. She stared at the other girl’s reflection in the mirror. Blonde, blue-eyed Annemarie van Troup was a debutante, or at least would be one next year according to the newspapers’ gossip columns. Newspapers featured her as a near-celebrity like the ones the girls from the Brooklyn Academy of the Performing Arts loved to talk about. Other than a certain self-assurance and her expensively understated clothes—she wore a pale blue pullover with a string of pearls and beige wool skirt and penny loafers—she seemed to Dina like any other eighteen year-old. The last name was a giveaway, though. There was even a park in lower Manhattan named after the aristocratic old Dutch van Troup family. Annemarie was Dina’s canteen “buddy,” pledged to show her around and be a helpful resource for the first week or so. Together they had checked the bulletin board, where someone signing themselves “A Vegetarian” wanted to swap meat and butter points for clothes rationing stamps, the Red Cross Blood Bank announced the hours in the Times Square area for blood donors, and there was a clipping posted of the famous news story about the member of a bomber shot down in the western Pacific who inflated his life raft and had an inspection ticket pop out with his mother’s—the defense plant inspector’s—name on it.

Annemarie showed Dina the closet with shelves where the striped aprons for the hostesses were stored, and Carmen Thompson’s station where volunteers signed in. They had already been through her catechism, the canteen orientation booklet.

“It’s the cardinal sin, you know,” she told Dina, “dating any of the fellows who come to the canteen. It’s not actually punishable by death, but that’s the way the committee wants you to think of it. You’re immediately asked to turn in your apron, total disgrace, and you have to leave. But it goes on anyway. One girl even got engaged. That time most of the junior hostesses knew about it, but nobody said anything. After all, how can you rat on one of us? There’s a war on!”

She said, frowning at her hair in the mirror, “Don’t forget to try to pick out the shy ones when you go outside. The canteen likes you to take the initiative with the GIs that hang back and would never ask you to dance on their own. You just go over to them and say, Hi, the Stage Door Canteen welcomes you tonight, would you like to dance? Most of the time they say yes. Then they step all over your feet. Because what they don’t tell you is the shy ones are the worst dancers. Or they can’t dance at all and pretend they do, and just want to sort of push you around to the music.”

Their eyes met in the mirror. Dina was freshening her lipstick. She ran her Revlon’s Cherries In The Snow up and down and around her partly-opened lips.

“But actually dancing,” the other went on, “is better than sitting down and trying to have a conversation with some of them. That’s when you get the Number One Question.”

Dina, making one last round with her lipstick, lifted her eyebrows inquiringly. The junior hostess sighed.

“They say, ‘I guess we all look alike to you.’ It makes you so sad, some of them are so sweet, especially the ones that know they’re going overseas. You want to say something that will make them think they’re something special, that you’ll remember them forever. Because that’s important to them, to have somebody remember them. That they were here.”

Dina said, after a moment’s silence, “What do you say to them?”

“Oh, you say that of course they don’t all look alike to you, that you will remember each and every one of them. And most of the time they just look at you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I hate it, but I can’t think of anything else to say. Because they all know you’re lying.”

They went out into the main room of the canteen. Dina didn’t have time to look for any servicemen who might be shyly hanging back, because a tall Army Air Force sergeant strode up and took her by the elbow to steer her away from the dance floor.

“Hi,” he said, his eyes taking her in with considerable interest. “It’s Dina, isn’t it?

He wasn’t the best-looking man Dina had ever seen but he was up there near the top of anybody’s list, with dark, curly hair and light gray eyes. Very sure of himself, the way he was looking her over.

“Yes, I’m Dina.” She pulled her arm out of his grip. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“Tom Weathersley,” he said, still staring, “I’m Tom Weathersley with Eugene’s bomber crew. He couldn’t come tonight, he’s got a busted nose and his eyes are swelled up. He can’t see. He wanted me to tell you.”

“Eugene?” The cocky little sergeant who’d danced the Lindy Hop with her. “He was in a fight?”

The grin widened. “Nah, actually, Eugene ran into a wall. I’m not kidding. So you’re Eugene’s girl. No wonder he wanted me to tell you he won’t be laid up too long.” His look continued to appraise her, warmly. “He said he’ll be in tomorrow night when the swelling goes down.”

Dina was aware Carmen Thompson, the supervisor of junior hostesses, was watching. “I’m not your friend’s girl,” she told him, “what gave you that idea?”

“Hey, what’s the matter? Eugene is a tough customer. In a fight, I’d rather have him on my side than three other guys. You know what he does, don’t you? He lays on his back in that plastic ball under the belly of the B-17 with his knees up around his ears, firing two fifty caliber machine guns, one with each hand, while the ball turret he’s in spins around so he can return fire from attacking planes. The Air Force picks feisty guys the size of Eugene because they’re the only ones who can fit into those things. There’s a little door in the plastic bubble, and if it falls off while he’s in the air, all that keeps Eugene from flying out into the clouds is one little bitty strap. That happened one time. There he was, hanging his backside out into a cold freezing slipstream and cranking like crazy to get that ball turret turned around so he could scramble back up into the bomber. I tell you, it took him two days to stop cussing.” Smiling, Sergeant Weathersley laid his smashed-down air force garrison cap on a nearby table and held out his hands. “C’mon, Miss Dina, how about a dance?”

She stared at him, confused. She didn’t mind dancing, although she didn’t particularly want to talk about Sgt. Struhbeck. However, she was still in her initial week of junior hostess probation and Carmen Thompson was watching. She floated into his arms, her heart pounding. Sgt. Weathersley was a different matter entirely. He smelled good, she thought somewhat dizzily: pressed wool khakis, soap, even after shave lotion. He also felt good, a big, solid, muscular body under her fingers.

He wasn’t a very good dancer; he stepped on her foot right away. Sergeant Weathersley wasn’t perfect, after all.

It didn’t help.

FIVE

October 10, 1942

Washington, D.C.

Sometime after midnight

Darling Jen:

God, how I miss you. I could fill up the pages describing how desperately I miss you and need you now that I have been sent to serve in this Oz-like wonderland of career politicians and professional military men called our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., but I won’t, because I’ve already written you all that. I’m penning this letter to you in the Shoreham Hotel bar. Larry Brownlee’s gone up to our room to go to bed, and since we have an understanding that we will not engage in any activity that will keep the other person awake, like writing letters, here I am nursing a Scotch and water in a dark corner of the cocktail lounge under the eagle eye of of a waiter who wants me to either order another drink or get the hell out and make room for a bunch of military types standing outside in the lobby waiting for a table. Even at this hour, which is almost one o’clock, Washington’s bars are crowded, the lobby is crowded, even the men’s john is crowded. I swear to you there’s a brigadier and a bird colonel in the Shoreham cocktail lounge toilet discussing something very earnestly, probably the coming North African invasion, by the urinals.

This week has been one of great variation (again) in the fortunes of my own unit, Army Air Force Information and Special Planning Division, known informally in General Arnold’s Pentagon air force structure as ISPD, or more often, as we of the actual staff of ISPD once thought clever and funny, INSIPID. A term we have learned, now, to treat with more respect.

Tuesday word came down from the office of General Arnold that the report that our Lt. Malcom Sandover, sometime sports editor for the St. Louis Post Dispatch—and now, thanks to the army air force, turned pragmatic political and military analyst—wrote on the wartime aims of the British Empire. Aims which appear to have deviated little since the Napoleonic War, and consist of playing empire politics no matter what desperate conflict the Brits and their allies may be involved. This report somehow attracted, because God knows we never anticipate anybody’s going to actually read these damned things, the attention of some command staffer who brought it to the attention of General Hap Arnold, who then passed it on to Army Chief of Staff General Marshall, who then recommended it to the CP (our leader, the Consummate Politician) over lunch, who is said to have read it and laughed. But who acknowledged that was a damned well-researched piece. That is, our documentation of the constant maneuvering of the British to protect and enlarge British interests no matter what else is going on, like a war. So when the president asked General Marshall who the unsung geniuses were who had put together this marvelous account of a century of British perfidy, General Marshall was ready with our names—mine, Captain Brownlee’s, Second Lt. Malcolm Sandover, Sergeant Pilaro and WAAC corporals Margie Hawes and Eleanor Schulman, i.e., the entire INSIPID office.

It turns out the President was so tickled to find talent of any sort in the Army Air Forces Information Services, that he ordered the chief of staff to assign us a whole new directive. As of now ISPD has been reorganized, which means we are Air Force personnel lent to the department of strategic planning headed by the new brigadier, General Albert C. Wedemeyer. We are to get new offices located where people can find us, in case they want to come visit and keep track of what we’re doing.

So late Thursday ISPD was uprooted from our snug haven in the basement area of the Pentagon and relocated in a first floor office that, like everything else, is still under construction, in an area designed eventually to be a navy officers’ lounge. I have a cubicle to myself, Sandover and Brownlee share a broom closet, and Sgt. Pilaro and the two WAAC corporals luxuriate in the main area that was going to be the lounge kitchenette. We are happy, if a little uncertain in our new glory. Because now, instead of laboring in the basement of this giant building as we have done for long months, on so-called summaries and condensations of military material that appeared to be leftover from World War One, and which the air force insists are intended for training manuals, we now have a Definitely Assigned Mission. Since we’re so damned smart, the army has decided, we can help them out with a very aggravating problem. There’s a big meeting coming up in he next few weeks between Churchill and the Consummate Politician (the President) and combined US and British chiefs of staff.

In the past, our side has found itself at a distinct disadvantage when the Brits let our top military brass get their views about strategy off their chests, and then counterattack, supported by an avalanche of documents and reports the Brits always bring along. Admiral King has complained that every time the American chiefs bring up a problem, the British have a paper ready to refute it. Since wrangling between the chiefs of staff is a major factor in policy making, where you hope to wear the other side down until they give in, this strategy buried our side under a blizzard of paper. Our aim now is not to get clobbered like this again by our friendly allies, the Brits. Who feel that they’ve fought Hitler for three years and ought to continue running things. And not rich, pushy, better-fed and equipped but appallingly uncouth Yanks.

So at this point, INSIPID is assigned to produce position papers on every conceivable subject our Allies can possibly come up with. I’m not kidding. Unlimited supplies of typewriters, paper and ink ribbons are at our disposal, I have supervised the carrying in of boxes of these supplies myself, with the knowledge that a whole typing pool from General Wedemeyer’s section is in reserve if some emergency should come up. Now all INSIPID has to do is churn out the military’s position on everything under the sun. Our main production for the upcoming meeting will be why an attack on southern France is strategically unsound, ditto an invasion of Italy. Our General Marshall has been quoted as saying the Mediterranean is a dark hole into which the Allied forces venture at their own peril. This anticipates Churchill’s “nibbling around the edges of Europe,” his pet project being victory through multiple campaigns in the Mediterranean and major assaults in Greece and the Balkans.