Stage Door Canteen (25 page)

Shivering, she got her diaphragm kit out of the suitcase and laid it in the sink. Her fingers were stiff, she knew she was hurrying too much. She squeezed the tube of K-Y jelly and most of it landed in the sink, not on the rubber disk’s outer circle. This was the part she hated. It always took her a while to get over the discomfort of having it inside her. Desire fled completely, that was the rotten part. One had to be lucky enough to have it coaxed back.

She said, “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided Captain Griffiths looks like something out of Gaumont-British casting—you know, the brooding lead actor who plays some incredibly handsome, besieged hero. Like Laurence Oliver doing Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights. Of course, playing the role to the hilt, the captain says almost nothing. When he does speak, it’s in one of those clipped British accents. You know, like his jaws are wired together.”

She lifted her leg and put one foot on the toilet seat and folded the slippery diaphragm coated with K-Y jelly and inserted it, wincing. After a moment she straightened up and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She looked flushed from the cold bath, but it was rather becoming. Not bad, not bad at all. She pulled the bobby pins out of her hair and it tumbled to her shoulders. The diaphragm felt all right. It had to be in just so. That was another thing to worry about. Hurry, hurry, she told herself.

“I’m sure we’ll get on fine, the captain seems to want to stay out of my way. Oh, Brad, don’t get me wrong, I’m not making fun of him, God forbid! I mean, Mrs. Maclaren at the Seamen’s Church Institute has written me all sorts of nice little notes assuring me he’ll be no trouble at all. He’s been in the hospital, it seems. And that when they manage to get the boilers here for his ship he’s anxious to get back to sea. She’s the one who told me he lost his wife and two little girls when he went to meet them at a tea shop in London. When he got there everything was gone, the entire building, just a great big hole in the ground.”

She got the silk teddy out of the suitcase and put it on, not bothering with the scandalously brief panties. The black tissue silk nightie was totally transparent, shaped like a vest, and it tied over her breastbone. The rest hung free, showing her belly button and triangle of dark, curly pubic hair when she moved.

“It hasn’t been a great week, actually,” she called. “The rumor went around that we would have to shut down rehearsals for lack of financial backing, and Dick Rodgers had to issue a statement saying it wasn’t so. Then we had a god-awful session at the canteen, and it was all my fault, I’m sorry to say. These meetings are usually so humdrum. Ann Bennett is not the most dynamic person in the world, and frankly neither are the others. If it weren’t for Carmen Thompson, who can be sort of a sparkplug, I suppose we would just sort of sit there. Anyway, one of the damned doctors’ wives made a really offensive remark about the colored WAACS we had in the canteen last week. She called them jigaboos, the nasty tart, and then tried to cover it up by saying it was a joke. Which is wasn’t. The upshot of the whole thing was that Maude Prydwyn, our high school teacher, asked about colored Stage Door Canteen hostesses, and why didn’t we have them. Which is a darned good question.”

She turned out the bathroom light and came out of the bathroom. She stopped a few feet from the bed.

“Oh no,” Jenny said.

He was still fully dressed, even his shoes. Lying motionless with his right hand steadying the highball glass of scotch and water on his chest. His eyes were closed.

“Brad, darling,” she said, bending over him. “You’re not passed out, are you?” She pulled the glass out of his fingers and set it down on the night table. “Sweetheart, you’re just asleep, aren’t you? Wake up.”

She sat down beside him on the bed, the tissue silk black nightie falling away seductively to expose her legs. But there was no one to see. She sighed.

She bent over him to loosen his tie, then unfastened the top buttons of his uniform shirt. His body felt so good she let her fingers trail down to his belt. She pulled out his shirttail, tugging at it so that he stirred, his lips moving. He muttered something.

“Darling, it’s me, just wake up and look at me, will you please?” She climbed onto the bed beside him, remembering what he’d said about sleepless nights, about moving crates with Brownlee when they packed up the ISPD office. She reached over the side of the bed and lifted the bottle of scotch and held it at eye level. It was about a third empty. Not all that much; she’d had a drink, too. “Oh drat, this day is cursed! I hate Washington. Brad, I’m here, sweetheart, open your eyes and look at me!”

As if in answer, his eyelids fluttered. At the same time he half-turned to her, throwing a heavy arm over her shoulders. She wriggled out from under it and pressed closer, sliding down beside him on the bed. She unbuckled his belt, pulled down the zipper in his trousers and opened the front of his khaki underwear shorts.

“Brad,” she whispered. She bent over him. Her lips found his slightly open mouth. She kissed him deeply, touching her tongue against his teeth. She licked the inside of his upper lip. Stirring, he made a slight rasping sound, and swallowed

She watched him for a long moment. She sat up, opened the fly of his underwear shorts and took him in her hand. He began to swell instantly, big and potent. She gently pulled down the elastic band of his shorts until she could bend down and kiss him on his belly. He grunted at the touch of her mouth; one leg twitched. She put her mouth on him, covering the tip, both hands cupping him, feeling him grow harder, straining. But not awake.

“Oh damn,” she whispered. She pressed herself against him, nude except for the wisps of black silk lingerie she’d brought from New York. The hard length of his body felt exciting against her bare skin.

But it was no use.

She sat up and reached down to grab the edge of the taffeta bedspread. She fell back, pulling it over them. The coverlet was lined with rough, flannel-like cotton. She curled against the solid presence that was Bradford Haller, her husband, the Air Force’s Major Haller, now snoring softly. Somewhere the rain beat down with a loud, steady drumming. She held him, silky-soft, almost hot to the touch, in her hand. Jenny closed her eyes.

The sound of a telephone woke them.

Brad started violently. In the next second he was out of the bed and on his feet, blinking, peering into the far corners of the room, “Where is it?” he rasped. “Where’s the telephone?”

Jenny raised herself to her elbow, pulling herself from a dark well of restful bliss into the bedroom’s bright electric light. She couldn’t remember feeling so exhausted. She realized they were in a house in Silver Springs.

The telephone was ringing and ringing.

“It must be here somewhere. Quick, Jen, did you notice where the damned telephone is?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled her hair back from her face. “It isn’t in here.”

“Right.” He rushed out of the bedroom.

The telephone was in the hallway. She heard the ringing stop abruptly. Then his voice, “Hello? Oh, yeah, everything’s fine.” A pause. “No, I’m glad you did. No, actually it’s a good idea, we need to get going. Yeah, I think so, I have Pilaro’s map.” Another pause. Then, explosively, “What? No, no—you’re right, Larry, I need to get out there before they do. Right, right, we’re leaving now.”

Only seconds passed. Then she saw him in the doorway. She’d gotten out of bed. She saw his eyes widen when he took in the nightie.

He said, distracted, “Get your clothes on. Nevermind, Jen, you can finish dressing in the car. That was Brownlee on the phone, they’ve just found out the big brass is taking this flight, Arnold and General Spaatz. I’ve got to be at Bolling right away. Tony Pilaro will meet us at the gate at Bolling and drive you back in Sandover’s car.”

She watched him tuck in his shirt, zip up his pants, never taking his eyes from her. “Dress in the car?” She hadn’t moved. “Brad, I can’t dress in the car.”

“You sure as hell can’t wear that.” He started for the bathroom. “What is that thing?”

She picked up her panties and stockings from the chair and, still sleep-fogged, sat down on the bed to put them on. She felt as though she were moving in slow motion. “‘That thing’ is a nightie from Henri Bendel’s and it cost a fortune. It was supposed to guarantee my husband would make mad, passionate love to me. But we didn’t do anything, we spent all the time sleeping!” Her voice rose. “I don’t know how this could have happened.”

He came to the bathroom door, rapidly combing his hair. “Jen, I’m so damned sorry. How could I—”

“You don’t have to explain. I know how everybody pitched in so generously so we could have sex. I’m not ungrateful, really I’m not.”

“Jenny, for God’s sake, don’t start that. We’re late as hell.”

“My suit is in there, on the hanger on the back of the door.” She bent, fastening the garter belt to the top of her stockings. “Just hand it to me.”

It took several minutes to straighten up the room. They worked together in hurried silence, turning back the bedspread, emptying the ashtray, taking the glasses to the kitchen, putting the bottle of scotch back in the suitcase.

At the front door Brad turned the deadbolt and handed Jenny the keys. Then, unexpectedly, he reached out, pulled her into his arms and kissed her, hard.

“I could make love to you a dozen times right now, Jen,” he whispered against her mouth. “Well three, maybe four. God, I keep seeing that black thing you were wearing.”

She pulled away. “Oh, I’ll wear it again, I promise. When you come back.” She picked up the suitcase. “Please, Brad, you said we had to hurry.”

It had stopped raining. The dark sky was full of stars, but there was a cold wind blowing. The car was cold, too; he couldn’t find the switch to the heater. “I’ll look for the knobs,” Jenny told him. “Just drive the car.”

He turned into Shadowlawn, going fast enough to make the Chevy’s tires squeal. “Jenny, I’m sorry, really I am, this isn’t way the evening should have ended, the last time before I go overseas. Hell, what can I say? I shouldn’t have had those drinks. Not at McDooley’s anyway, I should have waited and drunk Hammerstein’s Scotch when we got to the house.”

She had found the heater knob. When she turned it on, a gust of hot air came out at their feet. “You were really tired. So was I.”

“Tired?” He shot her a quick look. “You think I’m an alcoholic, don’t you?”

She waited a moment. Then she said, “Well, I think the war is getting to you. That’s what you said, isn’t it?” She added quickly, “I don’t suppose there’s any way you can escape it.”

He gave the steering wheel a sharp jerk as they rounded a corner. “Sorry I bore you. It isn’t shop talk about the New York theater is it? I keep forgetting.”

They drove for several blocks before he said, in a different voice, “I can’t tell you what’s really going on, Jen, I can’t. But being in the Pentagon, in the belly of the beast, has been an education. I have this damnable faculty like most in my business to stand back and look at the whole picture. I see the incredible insanity of it all. War is insane. God, Jen, do you know how many kids we’re going to slaughter before this ends? World War One nearly wiped out a generation in Europe and England. Think what this one is going to do. Roosevelt and Stalin want a frontal assault on Belgium or France for next year, which means thousands of troops coming ashore to retake everything that the Germans hold. It’s going to be hell. In fact, hell really doesn’t describe it. And after that, we still have the Japanese to go.”

“But we can’t stop fighting the war, Brad, darling. My God, they attacked us, remember?”

“No, we can’t stop fighting the war. We’re in the grip of the lunatics who started it. ‘Destroy the world’ is not an empty phrase.”

“We turn here.” She had Sgt. Pilaro’s map, holding it up to the light on the dashboard. If they were in such a hurry—and they were—it seemed they had an alarmingly long way to go before they reached Bolling Air Force Base.

“Churchill and Roosevelt are pushing for a meeting with Stalin in North Africa in January. ISPD has been churning out position papers to argue that we can’t let the Japs consolidate their positions in the Pacific while sacrificing American troops on several fronts in Europe. Jen, do you know what kind of fighters the Japs are? When our forces finally surrendered at Bataan and Corregidor the Japs abused them, starved them, beat them up. American prisoners, who had fought until they ran out of ammunition and food and everything but guts, were considered by the Japs to be cowards because they didn’t die, for God’s sake! We’re up against an oriental mindset that is committed to fight and die. They mean it literally. Their soldiers are told, ‘Don’t come back.’ That’s what the home folks expect of them.”

They were on the main thoroughfare, but traffic was heavy, and the brownout made reading street signs difficult. At a traffic light in Silver Springs, Jenny handed him Sgt Pilaro’s map. “I can’t do this.” Her voice trembled. “Besides, I think we’re lost.”

“Jenny, don’t cry.” He turned to look at her. “We’re not lost, I’ve been in Washington before, so not to worry. Just don’t get upset. Please, sweetheart.”

“I’m not upset.” She wiped her eyes and put her hand on his thigh and left it there. There was not much else she could do.

They were to meet Captain Larry Brownlee and Sergeant Pilaro outside the gates at Bolling Air Force Base, but Brad had to turn the car around and come back toward the D.C. highway before he saw that Brownlee had pulled off to the side of the road and was waiting there to flag them down. He brought the Chevy to a stop and jumped out. Jenny got out on her side and ran around the front. They met in the glare of the headlights, like conspirators in a movie.