Stage Door Canteen (3 page)

Watching them, Jenny said to Elise, “You don’t happen to speak Norwegian or Danish, do you?”

The small, dark girl looked in their direction. “Don’t worry, they will ask for beer. When they find out we do not serve beer they will be astonished. Then they will leave.”

The crowd at the food line moved slowly. Jenny saw Master Sergeant Eugene Struhbeck pick up his tray with a sandwich, potato chips and coffee and start for a table. Then he saw the Norwegians and stopped short, eyes narrowing.

“Besides,” Elise was saying, “they are not Norwegians, they are Russians.”

On good nights, which were most nights, there was a reassuring rhythm to the Canteen’s operation. The early birds, who’d been waiting outside on 44th Street, were greeted by junior hostesses, then taken to the food counter or the milk bar, then settled at tables around the room. Music started up after approximately half an hour after opening, popular ballads that encouraged friendly talk.

A canteen orientation booklet for the junior hostesses instructed them in the basics of conversation with members of the U.S. and Allied forces. Almost one hundred percent of the servicemen and women using the Stage Door Canteen were away from home, and often lonesome. Therefore one could not go wrong bringing up familiar subjects such as relatives, girlfriends, school chums, hobbies, even a pet dog or cat. Subjects to be avoided were the hostess’s own background, aims and ambitions, problems, any other personal information. After that the war itself. Do not ask, the canteen guide warned, where the U.S. serviceman or woman or other member of the Allied forces has come from, or where he or she thinks he or she might be going.

This was all-important. A big poster on the wall over the food counter showed a sailor with a cautioning finger to his mouth and a torpedoed ship going down in the sea behind him. The poster said: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. One should absolutely discourage, junior hostesses were told, any questions about, or interest in, a possible date outside the Canteen. Dating was strictly forbidden. To break that rule meant immediate expulsion from the Canteen’s lists of volunteers.

By nine-o’clock the atmosphere invariably changed. Crowds by then were thicker and noisier, the music faster, the dance floor jammed. The staff dimmed the lights. At midnight all festivities ended abruptly. The dance floor cleared after the band played Good Night Sweetheart, the room emptied, tables were stacked, the junior hostesses turned in their aprons, the outside door was closed, and the trademark hanging globe stage door light that said Stage Door Canteen went out. Most nights this was a satisfactory if somewhat exhausting ending for everyone who volunteered at the Canteen. And, it was to be hoped, all those who had come there to enjoy it.

There were other nights, though—and in the four months Jenny had been volunteering at the canteen there had been quite a few—when nothing went right. Some vital member of the staff would be delayed on the commuter trains, or couldn’t show up due to an accident or sickness, or things went wrong in the kitchen. Such as no evening’s delivery of bottled Cokes. Or all the fuses blew in the entire 44th Street Theater Building when the microphone on the bandstand was plugged in. Or the military police had to be called for combative drunks who wouldn’t be turned away at the door.

Jenny had a sudden feeling this was going to be one of those nights when she saw Carmen Thompson squeezing her way to her through the crowd around the dance floor. When she got close enough, the supervisor of volunteers cried, “Miss Rose, what are you doing out here? Did you remember to call those girls in Brooklyn, the junior hostess volunteers? Four of them have showed up here, now!”

The band was in the middle of a driving rendition of Twelve O’Clock Jump. Two sailors got up from their table to do a fast jitterbug with a pair of hostesses. Sgt. Struhbeck, on the far side of the room, had picked a spot where he could balefully watch the Russian merchant seamen going through the food line. Communist was a controversial word in the United States; the Soviets had first been Hitler’s allies, now they had done an about face and were fighting courageously against invading German armies. But a lot of ingrained suspicion and confusion was still there.

Sgt. Struhbeck’s glare, Jenny noted, reflected something, but she couldn’t tell exactly what was behind that innocently boyish facade.

“The dean of their school,” Carmen Thompson shouted, “said someone here at the canteen told him the performing arts students could come in—into the canteen—for a look around before they began volunteering!”

“Good heavens, nobody told them that,” Jenny yelled back. “I certainly didn’t, I’ve been making ham sandwiches in the kitchen.”

“But Miss Rose, you’re not a kitchen volunteer, you work out here, at the milk bar!”

“You told me Katherine Hepburn was going to work at the milk bar tonight.”

“You’re not making sense.” The supervisor looked distracted. “These girls from Brooklyn just came in. If you’d done that telephoning they wouldn’t be here! What are we going to do with them? They think they’re going to stand around and watch, but they haven’t even filled out their applications. The committee will have fits! We have to get them to leave right now!”

“Get them to leave? Where are they?” Jenny really didn’t have to ask. The students from Brooklyn were the only females except the WAACs not wearing the signature Stage Door Canteen striped aprons. Now they stood at the edge of the dance floor watching the jitterbugging, four teenagers with teased pompadours and long flowing back hair, vivid makeup and short skirts. New York City girls, somewhat garish, endearingly pretty. Inwardly, she sighed. “All right, I’ll go talk to them.”

“No, no—don’t do that!” Carmen Thompson put out a restraining hand. “Really, we can’t upset them, we need them. We’re dreadfully short on junior hostesses.”

“I have no intention of upsetting them.” She winced. “Can’t we do something about the band?” The drummer was in he midst of a noisy and prolonged Gene Krupa-like solo. “What are they doing?”

Jenny saw that Sgt. Struhbeck had shifted his attention from the Soviet merchant sailors in the food line to the small group of performing arts students watching the jitterbugging. Finding something more fascinating there, he got to his feet. She watched the top of his head disappear in the mass of close-packed bodies. In a few seconds his small, khaki-clad figure emerged, leading a girl out onto the dance floor.

He’s going to dance, she realized. Sgt. Struhbeck wasn’t going to start a riot or create an international incident, he was going to dance the Lindy Hop with the prettiest of the performing arts girls.

He led his partner out onto the crowded floor, pulled her to him for a brief moment while he jiggled up and down to get the beat. Then he slung the girl out as far as he could and still keep his grip on her, his knees fanning back and forth like rubber. The other dancers, looking over their shoulders, made room. Hubba hubba, someone in the crowd of onlookers yelled.

Carmen Thompson came back. She put her mouth close to Jenny’s ear to shout, “Anne Bennett is here, she’s in the kitchen. She wants the band to take a break because it’s getting too rowdy out here.”

“What about the milk bar?” There was no one behind the counter.

“Oh, she’s here, she just came in.”

Jenny nodded. Rowdy was hardly the word; the dancers on the floor seemed to be caught up in a rivalry for the most daringly athletic versions of the Lindy Hop. The band’s saxophones squealed out piercing high notes while the drummer attacked his drums. One of the sailors lifted his partner, threw her across his right shoulder, her skirt hiking up to reveal pink underwear panties, then neatly fielded her as she rolled across his back and to her feet. The canteen cheered the maneuver; there was a round of applause. Sgt. Struhbeck promptly picked up his girl and bounced her in a sitting position against his left knee, then his right.

The drummer dove into a long-drawn-out riff. The four jitterbugging couples seemed to explode. As they flew apart, then came back together, Sgt. Struhbeck lifted his partner high in the air. The pretty brunette brought her feet together, toes pointed, her hair streaming out behind her as he dropped her lightly to her rump and slid her between his legs. Then something happened.

The surface of the wooden dance floor was waxed and polished to a slippery high gloss. The girl’s momentum going through the little sergeant’s legs made him stagger and lose his balance. He lost his grip and let her go. She skidded away on her bottom and kept going, right to the edge of the dance floor. The crowd howled. Fortunately, the group from the performing arts school caught her. They hauled the flushed girl to her feet as, with a final bleat of saxophones and drum beats, the band straggled to a stop.

Jenny took advantage of the lull to start through the crowd to give the musicians Anne Bennett’s message that now was the time to take a break. She was halfway across the room before she noticed a prolonged pause. It wasn’t just because the music had stopped. Attention seemed to be focused on the canteen’s entrance.

She turned.

The flight of stairs that descended from the street was broken by a small landing, followed by two more steps that right-angled into the basement room. Standing there, projecting a powerful feeling of tension, uncertainty, even hostility, were eight tall, muscular young Negro soldiers who could not have been more perfect if they’d been illustrations for a military regulation dress manual with their uniforms knife-edged, spotless; buttons, belt buckles and shoes mirror-bright, the ends of their ties neatly tucked into shirt fronts at exactly the correct position. And who were now almost visibly vibrating with the nervous audacity that had brought them, all eight of them, down the stairs and into if not forbidden, then at least unknown, territory.

Jenny had a sinking feeling. She quickly looked around. The Stage Door Canteen, run by famously liberal-minded theater people, was not the place to find any sort of color line. But as luck would have it there was no one in the room to prove it.

These were, she thought a little desperately, probably southern boys from military bases where there had been recent clashes over segregated, all-white facilities. Before she could properly collect her thoughts a blade-thin figure in gray slacks, white silk man-tailored shirt and gleaming, shoulder length hair the color of mink appeared in front of the young black servicemen standing in the canteen doorway.

“Ah, how wonderful you look,” trilled that inimitable voice in flat, silvery accents, “welcome to the Stage Door Canteen. Let me take you to the milk bar and show you the ice cream menu.” There was a pause and one hand lifted gracefully, beckoning them forward. “You do like ice cream, don’t you? Of course,” the great Hepburn said, not waiting for an answer, “everyone likes ice cream, I understand the favorite United States national flavor is vanilla although it’s not mine. Now, let’s not waste a minute.”

The young soldiers’ faces had shown surprise, then recognition. Then dawning disbelief. It couldn’t really be, their expressions said. Then, slowly, Yes it could, too. Because wasn’t this the place where you came to see famous movie stars and all? Wasn’t that why they were there? And didn’t it look like there wasn’t going to be any problem about getting in, either? Even though maybe they’d expected it?

In the hush the eight young soldiers followed the willowy figure of Katherine Hepburn across the room to view the ice cream selections at the milk bar.

A loud burst of talk started back up. At a table in the rear of the canteen known appropriately enough as “Siberia,” the Soviet seamen had settled down with cups of coffee, bottles of Coca-Cola, and a large communal plate of ham sandwiches. Although she looked for him, Jenny couldn’t find Master Sergeant Eugene Struhbeck, last seen in the crowd around the dance floor. The rest of the performing arts students had distributed themselves at a ringside table with appreciative sailors from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Elise materialized at Jenny’s elbow. “Mrs. Bennett says can you see her about doing some telephoning? She says you still have about an hour and it’s important because she doesn’t want any more of the girls from the Brooklyn academy to come in.”

Sgt. Struhbeck, Jenny saw. as the crowd parted for the briefest of moments, was leaning up against a pillar, talking animatedly to the prettiest of the Brooklyn girls. At the milk bar the eight young Negro soldiers listened raptly to Katherine Hepburn as they grouped around the counter. Some coast artillery GIs were being boisterous in the food line. The Soviet merchant seamen at their table in the back of the room suddenly broke into song. The Russians, Jenny remembered someone telling her, liked to sing.

“Yes,” she said to Elise, “tell Anne Bennett I’ll go to the back office and start telephoning the junior hostess girls right away.”

THREE

The lights, of course, were gone from Coney Island.

Where the great amusement park lay, in Kapitanleutnant Helmut-Lothar Ensmann’s memory and present reality, was revealed in his binoculars as a low-lying strip of land that was a darker, denser blot against a charcoal-colored sky and the slightly rolling sea of Lower New York Bay.

The kapitanleutnant had not expected to find lights. He had lived in New York as a child and knew, even if there had not been a war, that they would have been turned off after Labor Day, the official end of the Coney Island season. On the other hand, he also recalled, if the weather was good in September and temperatures mild, some of the big attractions like Luna and Steeplechase Parks would continue to draw crowds and stay open, at least on weekends, until October. He had been greatly disappointed one time when his father brought him all the way from Manhattan on the subway only to find brisk weather had been the signal for most of the attractions to put up their shutters, closing them down until spring.