Stage Door Canteen (16 page)

I’ve told you about Madame X, haven’t I? You may remember her as the unforgettable star of stage and silent screen who raised such a big fuss in the press when she defied the terms of her film contract to have her wonder baby. Remember all those photographs of Wonder Baby in the hospital just a few days old, and Wonder Baby on his tricycle, growing up? Well, he’s grown now, and somewhere in England as a pilot with the Eighth Air Force. Madame X, who is as beautiful as ever, comes into the canteen to wash dishes and scrub the floors and clean out the garbage cans. This is nothing she’s assigned to. Ordinarily George Kanarakis would have a fit if any volunteer mucked around with his kitchen or his garbage cans. But poor Madame X seems to be doing some sort of weird penance. I suppose that’s right, there’s no other way to explain it—for the safety of her son in this terrible war. The canteen staff watches as those delicate white hands with their fabulous diamond rings wield the scrub brush in the dirtiest places. (I secretly think George saves the worst garbage cans for her.) Poor lady, she is breaking our hearts. On the other hand, someone said it was probably better that she does come in to do all this. Little Elise, the junior hostess who always seems to be around, pays her special attention and talks sympathetically to her in German. Yes, Madame X has been a staunch anti-Nazi since Hitler first came to power. Now you know who.

Oh yes, in the mail tonight along with your letter there is a communication addressed to me from the New York City war housing board. All the papers about the extra room in the apartment have been processed and forwarded to the Seamen’s Church Institute, an ancient charitable institution for sailors run by the Episcopal Church, now handling war housing for same. And they have an applicant. Not a military person in the sense one would think of them, I gather, but someone who operates oil tankers and freighters and so forth, what the newspapers describe as the ‘vital lifeline of this war.’ In this case a member of the British Merchant Navy. Housing is desperately needed, would I care to interview him, they want to know. He is Captain David Griffiths and he requires a place for somewhat less than two months. His ship is in New York for repairs, the lady on the telephone said, and it turns out the ship carrying spare boilers or something to New York was sunk, so he’s stuck until another ship can bring replacements for the replacements. Unforeseen delays. So I guess I now have a roomer. Darling Brad, rejoice in the thought that we have now officially done our patriotic duty, or at least part of it, in taking in sea-going Captain Griffiths. I hope the war housing board gives us a certificate of some sort. I want to frame it and hang it for after the war.

I love you and miss you. I won’t whine. I just want you to know that I think of you every moment, especially now. Don’t go overseas.

All my love, always,

Jen.

bokmark:Epigraph

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flack and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

—Randall Jarrell,

“Death Of A Ball Turret Gunner”

TEN

“Watch your step,” the WAAC corporal said, guiding Lt. Malcolm Sandover around a section of the floor portioned off with wooden boards resting on bricks. “The construction people spilled some acid here yesterday and it damaged the stone, I think it’s marble. They say they have to come back and replace all of it.” She gestured toward the hallway ahead of them lined, for the most part, with identical doors. “I just know it’s going to be beautiful when they get through, but it’s kind of spooky right now. This section is supposed to be the front of the finished building, although it’s hard to tell, really, from the overall shape, isn’t it? People are already complaining about getting lost. Have you heard the newspapers are calling this the Pentagon?”

“You’re right, it’s hard to find your way around,,” Sandover responded politely, “but it’s better than where we were before. Our unit, ISPD, is on the ground floor now, but when the Air Force first moved us in here they assigned us to a place in the second basement.”

“My goodness, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a second basement.” The little WAAC corporal turned into another corridor where the welcome sounds of human life, the clicking of typewriters, came to them. “I suppose that’s another level down?”

“I guess you would call it a sub-basement,” Malcolm Sandover said, looking around. He’d never been on the third floor of “A” building, the first to be built in the military’s giant complex. It was a truly a labyrinth in various stages of construction: some of the offices at the end of the hall were without doors, and there were sections of marble flooring waiting to be put down that were marked off, like the other area, with boards resting on bricks. “It’s impressive, though. This will be a damned big place when it’s finished.”

“Yes, well, it does take some getting used to,” the WAAC said. ‘It’s still better, though, than where General Arnold’s aides were before, in the old Munitions Building. There has to be a big improvement when the army and navy are in one place and not scattered in government buildings all over Washington. How did you make out down there in the basement? Were any of the elevators working?”

“Fire stairs,” he told her. “The elevators are not in yet. We used four flights of fire stairs, down two levels. One member of our office staff is claustrophobic, it was pretty hard on her. We understand now the sub basements are going to be used for bomb shelters.”

Privately, Lieutenant Sandover was still wondering why he’d been assigned a guide to the third floor of “A” section and the offices of an aide attached to Air Force General Hap Arnold’s staff. Although he was glad to get the assistance of a WAAC escort. All his prior experience had shown him that when the army sent you someplace it did so with only the vaguest instructions on how to get there, if that much, and let you stumble around on your own until you found out, sometimes by accident, sometimes by sheer luck, where you were supposed to be. If you were late, or couldn’t find the place at all, it was your fault and punishment was doled out accordingly.

“Even if it is enormous,” the WAAC corporal said, opening a door with a small file card, skewered to it by a thumbtack, that said LT. COLONEL MARCUS SINGLETARY, USAAF GEN. STAFF, “it’s going to be a lot better than having the war department scattered in buildings all over Washington. I don’t see how anybody managed ‘til now.”

The floor of the room inside was filled with unopened cardboard file boxes stacked one on top of each other, in places waist-high, and two oak desks. One desk was covered with miscellaneous office equipment that looked as though it had just recently been dumped there. A chunky man in the uniform of an Army Air Force Master Sergeant sat at the other. As Sandover came in and the WAAC corporal excused herself, the sergeant said brusquely and perhaps somewhat unnecessarily, “Watch the boxes, sir. We’re just moving in.”

“I’ll watch them,” Sandover said. “I’m Lieutenant Sandover from Major Haller’s ISPD office, and—”

“I know who you are, sir,” the chief interrupted him.

As Sandover moved between the cardboard files, the other got up. “If you’ll just wait here a moment, sir. We don’t have our intercom hooked up yet. I’ll go in and tell Colonel Singletary you’re here.”

It only took a moment. There was the sound of voices from the inner office and then the chief reappeared, holding the door open.

Sandover told himself he hadn’t known what to expect. Some senior career officer most probably, West Point command-staff bureaucratic type with rimless eyeglasses and a starchy manner; they were all over Washington. But what he saw behind the desk was the tense, sharp young face of a light colonel who appeared to be not a day over twenty-six.

Make that twenty-four, Sandover told himself. And there was something wrong with the face. The expressionless overlay of some recent injury and subsequent surgical repair had pared the nostrils thin and too wide open, and the skin over the cheekbones a strange glossy white. The left eye had a tight, minimal lower eyelid. His gaze dropped down to the hand that rested on the desk blotter, fingers tapping impatiently, and saw that the back was covered with a graft of glazed skin. The fingernails were small, deformed fragments that appeared to be in the process of growing back. Above the array of truly impressive decoration ribbons on the left breast of Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Singletary’s uniform that included the DFC, the Air Medal, and Asiatic-Pacific ribbon with a few stars, were gold Senior Pilot’s Wings. The eyes, he noted with something of a start, were glaring at him fiercely.

Belatedly, Lieutenant Malcolm Sandover remembered to come to attention and salute. The other continued to glare. “At ease,” the child colonel barked. “Well, lieutenant, what did you do before they let you into the army?” His voice was truculent. “It says here that you worked for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. Does that mean you were a reporter or something?”

“I was a sports editor, sir.” Malcolm looked around for a chair, and decided against it. With a certain amount of caution he said, “I guess you could call that a sort of reporter.”

“Sports editor?” the other repeated, scowling. The scarred hand shuffled through a pile of papers in what appeared to be an unsatisfactory search for something. “What kind of sports? You mean baseball, golf, boxing, that sort of stuff? Did you ever meet Babe Ruth?”

“Once,” Malcolm admitted. “He was pretty drunk.”

The other shot him a look. “Drunk?”

“It was at a Yankees baseball team press party.” He felt obliged to add, “The Babe wasn’t the only one.”

“Hmmm. Sit down, I told you ‘at ease,’ didn’t I? You meet anybody else? You meet Joe di Maggio?”

“Once or twice.” Malcolm Sandover pulled up a chair and sat down in it, arranging his long, lanky frame carefully, knees between another file carton and the side of the desk. “Nice guy. Very reserved. Although it is said he does well with the ladies.”

“Hmm,” the lieutenant colonel said again, fixing Sandover with his sharp black stare. He abruptly dropped his head, turning his attention again to the pile of papers before him. “I never was much interested in sports,” he observed. “Too busy fooling with airplanes.”

There was a silence while the lieutenant colonel’s left hand rummaged again through the papers, now pretty well scattered across his desk. “Well, anyway, lieutenant,” he said, “you have the information forwarded to you about the Cincy Gal crew, so all you have to do is report on any loose strings you might think need to be tied up. Sergeant Stoll outside is working on the TDY and all the rest of the stuff, and it should be ready by the time you report to Andrews today to fly out.” He leaned back and glowered at him. “Any questions?”

Malcolm Sandover realized from the other’s words that the Army Air Force was assigning him to temporary duty—TDY—to as he understood it, to fly out of Bolling Air Force Base there in the Washington area, probably that very day. Unfortunately, a lot that the lieutenant colonel seemed to assume had happened had, apparently, not happened. He could see that it was his duty as non-career Army, a non-pilot, and worst of all, newspaper sports writer from the suspect world of lurid journalism, to somehow clear up everything.

He struggled to phrase the problem in the most diplomatic terms he could think of. If such a thing was possible. It was not easy to tell a light colonel that it looked as though some of his unit’s paperwork had gone astray for some reason, and at that nobody in ISPD, much less Lieutenant Malcolm Sandover, who had now been summoned to his office, had any idea what he was talking about. Of course, that was providing the air combat veteran-child was in any mood to listen.

Malcolm was about to begin when Singletary placed his other arm, at the end of which was a formidable-looking prosthesis resembling a movable metal claw, on top of one pile of papers to hold them down, and began to sort them out.

“Sir,” Malcolm said, trying not to sound as momentarily distracted as he felt, “I regret to say have not seen any paperwork on the matter you’re referring to. Nor, I would think it safe to say, has Major Haller. That is, when Major Haller told me to report to your office the only message was that someone here on General Arnold’s staff wished me to report at once. The subject was unspecified.” He watched with some fascination as the appliance that functioned as Lieutanant Colonel Singletary’s right hand sorted through the papers on the desk, deftly seized a folder, and opened it. “In fact,” Malcolm went on, “I have to say the order from General Arnold’s office was unexpected because Major Haller’s unit, which is designated Air Force Information and Special Planning, had just recently been transferred under temporary orders to Colonel Wedemeyer’s Projects Planning Division. So for one of us to be called to report back to Air Force staff was—uh, I guess you could say, out of the ordinary.”

The officer across the desk could hardly wait for him to finish. “Yeah, yeah,” he said irritably, “don’t go on and on about it, will you? It’s mainly Brigadier Campbell’s request, he had the Cincy Gal crew when he ran gunnery school in Orlando. According to the brigadier they’re the hottest little sons of a bitches that ever climbed into a B-17. Besides, they’ve raised a lot of money for war bonds. Newspapers all over the country are crazy about them.”