There Should Have Been Castles Page 17

  “Do you?” She was still smiling, undismayed.

  “Yeah. You see, I don’t know about these things and—”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “Well, I think there’s a couple books I should read, and I think I ought to go home and brush up on my Sappho.”

  “You’re frightened.”

  “Well—I’m a little off guard.”

  “Is it because I’m black?”

  “No. It’s because I’m yellow.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Ginnie, you are a marvelous thing, truly.” And she started to glide toward me again.

  “Thank you, very much, but—I’ve got this dentist’s appointment and it’s in a half hour and—”

  “You’ll make it.”

  “—it’s in Phoenix. Arizona?”

  “Ginnie, we all have our little perversions, you know.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Mine is skin.”

  “Mine is being on time for dentists’ appointments.”

  Her smile was vanishing. “I’m not about to chase you around the room, Ginnie.”

  “I’m very sorry, Annice. I wish—but, I just—it’s not for me.”

  “I gather.”

  “So, er, though I’m terribly flattered and all—that you like my skin—you ought to see it in the summer, when it’s peeling. Looks awful, like a skinned rat.”

  “I understand.” She knew that the romance was over.

  “Also—I’m having my period, and—when I was a kid, in China—”

  “You may go now, Ginnie.”

  “I’m really very sorry, Annice.”

  “And please don’t come back.”

  “I guess not.”

  I got out of there and heard the door slam behind me. Then I bumped into Roland, which wasn’t exactly accidental because he was waiting for me. And I knew that he knew. I walked passed him and on into the big dressing room. It was empty.

  I sat down before the mirror and began removing that awful stage makeup that had, by then, turned into rainbow-smeared oatmeal. In the mirror I could see Roland come in. He stood behind me and we played the whole scene through the mirror, very dramatic.

  “I was hoping it could be avoided.”

  “Thanks for warning me, old buddy.”

  “Darling, if I told you ahead of time, you’d never have been able to dance.”

  “No, but I’d have been able to run.”

  “I was hoping that Annice would not give vent.”

  “Give what?”

  “Vent.”

  “What’s that, another Jewish word? Why don’t you people speak English?”

  “She gave vent, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah. She gave a whole lot of vent. She gave, and I vent. So it all worked out.”

  “Virginia, you did the right thing. You live with Annice, on the road? With that ‘skin’? She’d have you doing things that haven’t been invented yet.”

  “It’s just so damned unfair. I never would have turned black if it also meant I’ve have to be a dyke. Oh, well…I think stars should quit when they’re at the top.”

  I went back to the apartment, deep in philosophical thought. In less than eight hours I was out of the restaurant business and out of show business. Don was awake, waiting for me, and in a good frame of mind—not because anything particularly wonderful had happened to him that day, but only because he was aware of what a wet blanket he had become. I told him about what had happened and that I quit and that my restaurant had folded and that I didn’t want to live anymore and that the two of us were the losers of the world and that we should sign a suicide pact and climb to the top of the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco and plunge into the Hudson, leaving no notes, just bubbles.

  I was tired, punchy. Don helped me undress and led me to the shower, which I cried all through. He pulled me out before I could turn into a prune and wrapped me in a big towel. He led me to my room, helped me into my bed, pulled the covers up to my nose, gave me a daddy kiss, and said he loved me. I said I loved him, too, only I called him Ben.

  Poor Don, how that must have hurt. Poor Sy Fein whose lucky number was 577 only didn’t know it. Poor Bob Steinman, just a neatly folded flag in the front parlor bureau. Poor Sergeant Deyo, deader than last week’s news. Poor Little Rich Girl crying herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ben

  1951

  The deaths of Bob Steinman and Sergeant Deyo, coming so close together at a time when my own hold on reality was none too secure, had turned me self-destructively inward. I did my jobs, I did what I had to do to earn my keep in the Army, but I maintained very little contact with anyone other than Johnny and Tony. I was kept additionally off keel by the continuing news that Don was having as much trouble hanging on in the outside world as I was having hanging on in the Army.

  Facts became elusive, untrustworthy. If someone said it was Thursday, I had to think about it for a day or two before I could accept it. If someone said “Good morning,” I’d find myself thinking, “What did he mean by that?” Tony, a good Catholic, suggested that I have a chat with the chaplain. Johnny, a bad Catholic, said I’d be better off talking to Charlie McCarthy.

  My temper had an exceedingly short wick and I knew it. I had been an ornery loner my entire life and there, in the middle of more pointless humanity than I had ever before had to elbow around in, I was a vial of nitro with the jostle tolerance of a mile-high souffle.

  All that saved me from spontaneous combustion were those weekday nights and Sunday afternoons when I was able to get off the post. On most of those I went into Boston without Tony and Johnny. They were good about it, never felt hurt or acted miffed. My definition of a friend, from that point on, has always been someone who, out of love or loyalty, blindly elects to understand behavior in another human being that is incomprehensible, indefensible and maddening. They helped me, those two. Even alone, walking the Boston Common along any one of a dozen radii, I could feel Tony and Johnny alongside me. When my war with the Army was over, I would strike a medal for each of them—the Ben Webber Decoration for Unflinching Friendship Under Fire—the last recipient of which was Don Cook.

  I didn’t really know Boston except as a place to catch a bus to from Shirley, Massachusetts, having earlier switched over from an Army bus at Ayer, the whole trip so wretchedly long that it left precious little time to do anything other than stagger into the USO and sit in a corner and wonder why I had gone there in the first place.

  There were ladies (not many) at the USO piddling about, serving coffee and conversation in equally tepid doses. During World War II, I had heard, the USO really jumped. But WWII was over, and all the drama and romance surrounding it had eased into the history books with it. This “Korean thing” lacked the glamour of its predecessor. It didn’t have the dynamism and propulsion to inspire that its departed sibling had generated. And those of us poor khaki-clad slobs who inhabited it seemed more victimized than heroic. One had to look no further than the hostesses on the job. No heiresses or Beacon Hill Brahmins or high-cheekboned tennis-playing Celtic princesses had we, just itinerant housewives, high-school kids, petrifying matrons, and a couple of pratish alcoholics—with one exception.

  I never got her name my first two times there because I was never really alone with her, there being other eagle-eyed servicemen able to separate the pearls from the oysters. Also, where the other hostesses wore name badges that screamed their identities, she chose to go nameless, a decision I respected in that it paralleled my own feelings about the Army; “In a garden where all that grow are weeds, flaunt not your name but rather go nameless—in hopes that someone, anyone, may see you as a flower.”

  Anyway, either because she had been unaware of it and someone had reminded her that she wasn’t wearing her badge or because it was a rule that some USO official insisted be followed, when she smiled at me on that drizzly Sunday she was wearing a badge, and the name on the badge was Mrs. Barringer.

  I don’t
know how old she was. To this day I am an inept judge of a woman’s chronology. To me Deanna Durbin in her heyday looked a chubby fifty-five, while Ingrid Bergman, if she lives to be 109, will always be twenty-three in my heart. What did bother me was her marital status. Pretty presumptuous of me, I’m sure you’ll agree, to think that the “Mrs.” on her badge was all that would preclude her falling in love with me. But that was my initial reaction and my face must have shown it.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, her face cocked quizzically sideways so that only one green eye showed.

  “So that’s your name. Mrs. Barringer.”

  “Yes. What’s yours?”

  “Ben Webber.”

  “Some coffee, Ben?”

  “No. I’d just like to stand here and look at you.”

  “Then you’d better have some coffee.” And she drew a cup from an urn that, in a prior life, had been a deep-sea diver’s helmet. “Here you go.”

  “We’ve talked a few times before, you know.”

  “I know. You’re stationed at Fort Devens.”

  “Most of us here are.”

  “True,” she said, nodding at the A patch on my arm. “First Army.”

  “Yes. And I hope it’s the last.”

  “You’re always by yourself. You see? I do remember.”

  “Thank you. Sometimes I feel invisible.”

  “You’re hardly invisible.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She drew back. “It means we’re talking in a manner that is not all that proper, considering who and where we are.”

  “Well, I know who I am, but who are you?”

  Her smile was tinged with admiration. “All that charm—and you’re only a private?”

  “In civilian life I’m a general.”

  Two bumpkins came by and wanted coffee, so we were interrupted for a few moments. I took note of her figure when she turned away from me—so trim in flower-print blouse and navy-blue skirt. And how well she moved, likening the giving of doughnuts into the knighting of knaves. “I’m off in fifteen minutes.” She had turned back to me and was smiling.

  “Where can I meet you?” I knew I was being outrageous but I didn’t care. It was like a game that both of us knew we were playing, the young soldier and the beautiful lady. Hardly an original script but tried and true, and she wasn’t exactly discouraging me.

  “There’s a side entrance,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  “I’ve seen it, yes.”

  “I’ll meet you there, but—I do have to go home.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes.” And again she turned away, three sailors garnering her attention. So casually did she look away and not look back that it occurred to me that she would never show up, because she’d never remember, because I was simply not worth the remembering.

  Still, it was about as exciting a thing as had happened to me since last I saw dreamy Elizabeth Satterly glide past me in Pittsburgh. I went around to the side entrance. It opened on a street that hosted very little traffic. In fifteen minutes she appeared, out of the side door. As she did, an endless black barge of a limousine sidled up, stopped, and a liveried chauffeur popped out on cue, holding the door open for her.

  She took my arm without breaking stride. “Come on, Ben, I’ll drop you at the bus depot,” and I was sitting beside her in the moving limousine. She smiled coquettishly. “Like my flivver?”

  “Yeah. It’s cute.”

  A glass separated the front and rear sections and she spoke to the chauffeur through an intercom. “Fletcher, can we drop Private Webber at the bus depot?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Barringer.”

  “But I don’t want to go home,” I said, feigning a lower-lip sulk. “I want to go with you.”

  “Mr. Barringer might not appreciate that.”

  “Isn’t he playing golf or something?”

  “He doesn’t play golf or something.”

  “My bus isn’t for three hours.”

  “That’s the last bus. There’s four before that.”

  “Tell Fletcher to take us to Kansas City.”

  “You’re a very precocious young man.”

  “In that case, tell him to make it Chicago.”

  She said nothing, just slipped her arm through mine and pulled herself very close to me. It was an undeniable gesture of instant affection, unedited, candid, and clearly indicative of things to come. Then she bounced back to the way she was, as if to apologize for having taken such a liberty.

  “You can do that again, if you like,” I said.

  “Some other time.”

  “When?”

  “Some other time, I don’t know.” She moved further away, withdrawing her arm from mine. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not to be misinterpreted.” She spoke into the intercom again. “Can we go faster, Fletcher. Private Webber mustn’t miss his bus.”

  Fletcher, evidently having once driven at Indianapolis, sliced in and out of what traffic there was as if the passenger section was on fire and he wanted to stay ahead of the flames.

  “You’re trying to get rid of me,” I said. “That’s no way to treat a serviceman.”

  She was contrite. “Can we stop all the sparring, please?”

  To which I could think of no retort. We drove on, silently, inexorably toward the depot. She had so disarmed me that I began to fear that I was out of my league. A few phrases I might have said did come to mind, but vanished before they ever reached my lips.

  With her eyes on Fletcher’s rear-view mirror, she spoke to me without noticing me. “If I tell you where to reach me, if I give you a telephone number—can you remember it without writing it down here?”

  “Yes.”

  And looking out her window she said, “It’s a private number in Wellesley Hills. 534-9766. Do you have it?”

  “534-9766.”

  “If I’m not there, tell them you’re the Greenway Florist and ask when you can call back.”

  “All right.”

  Fletcher was guiding us into the bus depot. “If you don’t call,” she said, “it’s all right.”

  “If I don’t call—I’m dead.”

  Fletcher’s voice on the intercom: “We’re at the depot, Mrs. Barringer.”

  “Thank you, Fletcher.” She turned and smiled at me and drilled me like a secret agent. “Tell me the number again.”

  “534-9766.”

  “Well, then,” she said, her smile broadening, “here we are.”

  The car stopped and Fletcher was holding the door open for me. I smiled at her and played out the game. “Thank you for the lift, Mrs. Barringer. I’d have missed the bus for sure.”

  “My pleasure, Private Webber.”

  I watched the limousine pull away. It looked like the Queen Mary. Then I walked over to the bus which wouldn’t be leaving for forty minutes. I got on anyway. Moving from the limousine to the bus was like going from caviar to farina, and I had to convince myself that the whole thing had actually happened. I wrote her number down on two separate bits of paper, one of which I put into my shirt pocket—which I then buttoned—and the other of which I put into one of my back trouser pockets. I buttoned that one, too. Unless I lost my shirt and my ass, I would always have that Wellesley Hills number.

  The thought of Mrs. Barringer sustained me. It came with a rush in the morning and it sat on my shoulders through all the collecting hours of the day. It lay beside me at night on my painfully narrow cot—the flowers on the blouse dropping off one by one until the pair of us lay naked, clasped together in a bower of blossoms, Johnny once waking me with a rude shove to say, “It’s okay to hump your mattress, Benny-boy, but the fucking bed squeaks. So how’s about you go to the latrine and beat your pudding and let the rest of us monks sleep?”

  There were letters from Pittsburgh, from my parents with whom all was going well, letters I answered immediately rather than allow to gather because I knew that, should I ever fall behind, I’d n
ever catch up—and my parents deserved better than that. Funnily enough, I kept in closer contact with them in the Army than I ever had in New York, because they were more concerned and I was more dutiful.

  Luther Holdoffer, still an infernal figure, strutted less annoyingly that week because I knew that, come Sunday, I’d call that number in Wellesley Hills and speak with that fine lady and arrange a rendezvous and, in so doing, cause the foul sergeant to disperse like a fart on a breeze. And the earth, parched where he had stepped, would spring green in a miraculous reaffirmation of life and love. And it struck me that the time the army sliced from a draftee’s life could be made amazingly tolerable, providing that that man had some dream to retreat to—a face, a smile, an implied promise, a self-deception, even an outright lie. All that was required was a living creature with an honest-to-God identity to attach it to. A badge on a lapel would do, “Mrs. Barringer” immediately coming to mind.

  On Thursday of that week I received a letter from Ginnie Maitland:

  Dear Ben,

  You don’t know me but I know you because I’ve peeked at your letters to Don and, I must say, you do use naughty words. I think you know I’m living in your apartment and that I contribute to the rent which is why I’m writing.

  Don has been very low because nothing is happening for him and this morning, when I got up, I found that he was gone. He left this note which I think you should read before you read the rest of my letter.

  I turned to Don’s letter which Ginnie had clipped to hers.

  Dear Dancing Lady,

  I am off to Los Angeles, but don’t ask me why. I woke up at 3 A.M. and it seemed a good idea at the time, I’ve used up New York and I have to face it. I can’t get a job here even as a derelict, so why not give L.A. a shot?

  I know I’m hanging you with the rent money but maybe, if you write to Ben, he can knock over a PX and send you some loot.

  Please apologize to Ben and yourself for me, but I’m suffocating here so I’m heading West. I will send you post cards, and, hopefully, some sheckles to keep the bank from foreclosing, but until I do, please do whatever you can to keep the pad. The Landlord comes by the first of each month and asks no questions if you pay him in cash. Hail and farewell—