Against the Wind

by Bodie Thoene

  Nobby: Anything I can do for you while you’re visiting England?

  Pablo: I hear Hedy Lamarr is here, and I’d love to meet her.

  Nobby: Hedy Lamarr, eh? Okay. Get on a train.

  Pablo: A train? Why?

  Nobby: ’Cause the line forms in Scotland!

  I came out onstage to thunderous applause and laughter. Mariah sang Gershwin tunes, I played my violin, and Raquel tap-danced.

  The highest compliment we could receive was when Nobby declared, “Well, girlies, you wowed ’em again!”

  Late one afternoon I emerged from an air raid shelter and hurried toward our shabby boardinghouse as the fire brigade clanged past. As I rounded the corner, I suddenly realized that once again I was homeless. Incendiary bombs had hailed down fire and brimstone on our street. Flames leapt from every window of our dwelling. Our landlady stood weeping on the sidewalk.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Awl-right? Awl-right! Me precious lovely ’ouse is up in flames an’ m’lady wants t’ know if I’m…what?”

  “Is anyone injured?” I tried again gently.

  “Anyone? Anyone injured! No person, if that’s what y’ means. But me little cat…aye! Me little sweet kitty! Ohhhhh! Poor Tabby! Look! Look! I’d give me ’ouse an’ gladly for the sake of me little Tabby!” She wept profuse and sincere tears. I knew she meant what she said about trading the house for the cat. But I knew that nothing could survive in such a fierce blaze.

  “I’m so very sorry.” I patted her shoulder. “It is good no one—no human, I mean—was killed.”

  “Me Tabby! Poor, poor little dear. I found ’er abandoned in the rubbish heap an’ nursed her from a tiny kitten. She was like a child. Like a child!”

  The frantic search for undamaged water mains was useless. At last the officials simply turned and began to warn the spectators to stand back before the walls collapsed. My landlady wailed on in grief for her cat.

  I did not mention that I was once again without clothes to wear. Even the loss of Raquel’s red dress was nothing compared to the death of the tabby.

  On the opposite side of the perimeter, I recognized Murphy standing near a policeman. I waved, hoping he would see I was uninjured.

  In his arms he cradled something small and orange. I yelled, “Murphy, hold onto that cat!”

  He raised his head at the same moment the landlady shrieked like some sort of horrible banshee and waved her arms. “Me Tabby! He’s got me Tabby. Oh Lord! Lord have mercy! Bless my soul, she’s alive. Alive!”

  Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shouted, “Meet us round the corner! Bring the cat! At the White Hart Pub!”

  Someone relayed the message to him, and he set out down a side street, while I clasped the arm of our blubbering proprietress and we hurried away from the collapsing building.

  We rounded the corner at the same moment as Murphy spotted us a block away. The cat was snuggled safely in his arms as he approached the White Hart.

  “Lord love you! LORD! Love you! You’ve saved me darlin’ girl!” cried the woman, breaking free and running toward him. She smothered the cat in kisses and wrested her from Murphy’s arms. “I raised her from a kitten, I did. Found her in the rubbish heap and nursed her meself…now look! Not even the Nazis can kill her. It’s true indeed what they say about a cat and nine lives and all that.”

  She left Murphy and me and wandered off.

  “Well, then, you’re a hero,” I said to Murphy. “Saved the cat.”

  “She was out wandering about when I walked up. I scooped her into my arms, and she began to purr.”

  “You have that way about you.”

  “Glad she made it out. Glad no one was in the bonfire.”

  We watched the landlady stagger off, whispering in the yellow cat’s ears.

  “No one killed,” I repeated. “But I’m left with the clothes on my back, I’m afraid. Mariah’s blue dress and nothing more. We’ve lost the umbrella too.”

  “Elisa, you know I will always love you…even with no clothes.”

  “Thanks. But…Raquel’s red dress.” I mourned slightly. “I won’t be able to borrow anything from anyone anymore.”

  “It’s becoming a problem.”

  “And where shall we sleep tonight? Back at St. Mark’s? Loralei’s office?”

  “No. I’ve got good news, Elisa. TENS has found us decent lodgings.”

  “I wish I could have got the red frock out of the other place before it burned down.”

  “If ever a building needed renovating, that was it. Come on. I’ve already got us checked in to the new hotel.” He dangled a key.

  “Is it better than the last?”

  “It’s still standing.”

  “As long as I’m not sharing the WC with twelve other lodgers.”

  He eyed me from under the brim of his fedora. “How would you like your own bathtub?”

  “It couldn’t be possible in London. And I know I’m not in heaven yet!”

  “Well, then? How do you feel about the Savoy?”

  That evening in the posh Savoy River Room I danced the conga in Mariah’s plain navy day dress. In the powder room, I explained to a wealthy American woman in furs that I had twice lost my wardrobe to bombings. I could see the awe and admiration in her eyes.

  When the siren sounded, Murphy and I tramped down among the rich and famous to the reinforced steel and concrete bomb shelter. Hours passed. The hotel orchestra improvised jazz numbers as the barrage raged above the Thames.

  The all-clear sounded, and we made our way back upstairs. Miraculously, the Savoy was undamaged, though buildings all around were stricken.

  It was after midnight. The elevator was out of service, so we set our faces to the long journey up six flights to our room.

  Murphy, in a move he had practiced with the landlady’s cat, scooped me up and carried me over the threshold and laid me gently on the bed.

  “I am purring,” I whispered.

  “Just what I hoped to hear.” He kissed me, turned out the lights, and opened the blackout curtains. The golden glow from enormous fires on the river flickered against the wall like soft, romantic firelight. Murphy turned on the radio and searched for mellow music while I undressed.

  “I told you.” He turned down the sheets. “See…I love you even with no clothes at all.”

  We made love fiercely, then lay back exhausted and content after the most horrific day. How could it be, I wondered, as I heard Judy Garland’s voice from the radio?

  London burned as she sweetly sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

  Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me; deliver me from those who work evil, and save me from bloodthirsty men.

  PSALM 59:1–2 ESV

  VIENNA, AUSTRIA

  DECEMBER 21, 1937

  How things have changed in Austria in only a year. Disguised Nazis stream over the border at the same steady rate as Jews fleeing from Hitler in Germany and refugees from the Spanish Civil War. There are protests about Jewish musicians from Nazi sympathizers in the Austrian government. I pray that what happened in Germany will not happen in Vienna, yet I am beginning to feel it is inevitable.

  I am so proud of Rudy Dorbransky. He is our concertmaster, the leading musician of our orchestra. Tonight he proves his leadership.

  We are all onstage, waiting for the performance to commence. Just after Rudy steps out of the wings some madman in the upper gallery shouts, “No Jews on our stage! Heil Hitler!” and “Germany for Germans!”

  Then he shoots at Rudy!

  The bullet strikes the stage and more shots follow. Through the fusillade Rudy protects the Guarnerius.

  Rudy is not hurt, but someone calls for a doctor. Someone has been wounded.

  A dozen men beat and wrestle the shooter to the ground. He is hauled away shouting, “Germany and Austria are one! Death to the Jews!”

  “A crazy man,” I say.

  Leah is crying and hugg
ing Rudy. She says to me, “If Hitler comes, he’ll have forty thousand crazy men just like that one with him.”

  Rudy raises his violin and the auditorium falls silent. “Herr Wertheim is wounded. A flesh wound only. He will recover.”

  Applause from the concertgoers.

  Rudy continues, “The criminal is behind bars. We pray he will never recover.”

  Much clapping and tears of joy.

  Rudy flourishes the violin. “Our instruments are undamaged. Let the concert continue. It is the Biedermeier thing to do.”

  Biedermeier: simple and graceful. In Vienna, it means we are family and we pull together.

  Wild applause and cheering.

  We play as never before and receive six curtain calls and a continuous roll of applause. Austrian spirit as displayed by Rudy will never fall to Nazi oppression.

  Leah is wrong.

  John Murphy is wrong.

  He is in the audience and sees it all.

  He meets Leah and me at the stage door after the concert. He offers to buy us coffee at the Hotel Sacher. He says he has bought tickets for every performance until the sixth of January.

  I remember last year when I sent him away, telling him the concerts were all sold out.

  Leah, pleading the excuse that Shimon is home ill, deserts me.

  I ask Mr. Murphy if he is a music lover.

  He asks about my father and my mother and tells me again I should not still be in Vienna. He says what happens tonight proves it.

  Then he grows very forward. “I feel responsible for you,” he says. “Like I need to look after you.”

  This after I haven’t seen him for a year!

  When he teases me about how we met on the train, I slap his face. When he apologizes and says, “Good night,” I correct him and say, “Good-bye.” Then, with great dignity, I depart and leave him frozen there on the sidewalk.

  But secretly, I wish he would follow me….

  5 A traditional Gypsy song, recited in a lecture entitled “Deep Song,” by Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada, Spain, on Feb 19, 1922, and translated by A.S. Kline, © 2008. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/DeepSong.htm

  8

  LONDON BLITZ

  SUMMER 1940

  There was a saying that the only way a man could get out of the infantry was on a stretcher or six feet under. That was also the only way civilians could escape the front lines of the Battle of Britain.

  In those difficult days there were more civilians wounded during the Blitz than soldiers on the battlefield. Hospital wards overflowed into great houses of private estates, where volunteers were recruited to fill in for the lack of medical personnel.

  On our days off from the BBC, Mariah, Raquel, and I continued to do our bit. Our performers auxiliary often traveled outside of London to military and civilian hospitals.

  Raquel was the custodian of the three young girls with whom she had escaped from Fascist Spain, and then from Paris just ahead of the Nazis. Mariah lived with her widowed sister, Patsy, and Patsy’s two small children. Raquel’s three girls stayed with Patsy when we traveled out to entertain the wounded.

  At least one day a week I kissed my darling Murphy farewell at Paddington Station and set off to perform in person for the wounded and the heartsick.

  Mariah’s sparkling green eyes, copper red hair, and Irish sense of humor made her a favorite among the young soldiers when she sang.

  I played wild gypsy tunes on my violin while voluptuous Raquel danced flamenco on drab, disinfected linoleum floors between the beds of crowded wards.

  A doctor was overheard to say, “If that dance doesn’t make them rise up and walk, nothing will.”

  Our little trio was a hit, always ending our schtick with a Barcelona-Dubliner-Viennese version of “There’ll Always Be an England.”

  At first I spoke very little to the patients for fear my German accent would make them uncomfortable. But I smiled a lot, and smiles begat smiles.

  On our last tour we had a lineup of sixteen engagements in three days. The night before our first performance we were in Cambridge in our hotel room. Mariah determined she would help me speak English to the soldiers with a correct accent.

  “Like this, darlin’.” Mariah flashed her perfect white teeth at me as we sat cross-legged in our nightgowns on the bed. “You look a lad straight in the eye and say, ‘Now tell me where you’re from, darlin’ boy.’”

  I tried to capture her lyrical Celtic inflection while continuing to smile sweetly.

  “No. You’ll be terrorizin’ the poor lads. They’ll be thinkin’ they’ve awakened in enemy territory.”

  Raquel interrupted my poor recital, her smoky Latin voice thick with disapproval. “Eleesa! You have such an ear for music! Yet you cannot hear the words is not correct? No, no!”

  I tried again, smiling ever more sweetly, attempting to soften my heavy Teutonic consonants.

  Mariah’s thick mane wagged. “It’ll never do! Y’sound like Marlene Dietrich tryin’ t’ blend in at a Galway pub.”

  Raquel agreed. “Sí. Most unappetizing accent. The Germans. All of them. Speak of love like they are clearing their throats.”

  Mariah nodded. “Right. Clearin’ dere troats.”

  Raquel instructed, “Eleesa, you must try to speak like this.”

  Mariah sniffed and cocked an eyebrow at Raquel. “Hush now. Don’t you be tellin’ her how t’ speak proper English, Raquel. Sure, you’ll be havin’ her soundin’ like Carmen Miranda. We’ll have to put your frutti-tutti hat on her head.”

  My accent was hopeless in those days. I was too freshly escaped from Vienna to fit in comfortably in any English conversation. “I’ll just smile and play my violin.”

  Mariah clucked her tongue and surrendered. “Hopeless all right.”

  Raquel narrowed her eyes and reached into her bag for a red blouse. She held it up to me for size. “Yes. Wear something low-cut, eh? A little off the shoulder. Like a gypsy. You wear this. Men will not notice your accent. Tell them you are Hungarian.”

  “May I say Czech?” I giggled. “Prague. One of my passports was Czech.”

  Mariah agreed, “Sure, darlin’. Hungary. Prague. Whatever y’like, then. Smile and bat your eyelashes. They’ll never know the difference.”

  As Mariah and I howled with laughter, Raquel hiked her gown, showing her gorgeous legs, and sashayed around the room in demonstration of the proper way to greet a wounded soldier. “See? He will throw away his crutches and follow you out of the hospital.”

  My lessons in proper pronunciation came to an end when a knock sounded at the door. Had we been too loud?

  Mariah opened it a crack.

  The innkeeper’s wife peered in suspiciously. “There’s a trunk call. London. A man, American sounding.”

  Mariah tossed her hair. “Well then, for one of us, is it?”

  The woman replied, “Are you Missus Murphy?”

  Mariah swept her hand toward me. “Murphy. Such a nice Irish name, isn’t it? Elisa darlin’, you’re bein’ paged.”

  I smiled and, without uttering a sound, threw a dressing gown over my nightclothes and followed the dour woman down the narrow stairs to an old-fashioned telephone on the wall beside a cluttered desk.

  It was Murphy on the line, sounding very far away and very excited. “Elisa! BBC just contacted me. Looking for you. Something’s up, honey! Big things. You and the girls get back down here to London on the two o’clock train tomorrow.”

  The bulbous nose of the BBC’s headquarters pushed into Portland Place like the prow of a ship run aground right before colliding with Oxford Street. “More like a wedge of cheese, if you ask me,” Murphy intoned irreverently.

  Armed soldiers parading out front confirmed the fact the British government believed Broadcasting House was a top priority target for sabotage, but it was also in German bombsights. The amount of destruction in the surrounding neighborhoods supported this opinion. Even before air raids on London became commonplace, Br
oadcasting House was attacked. A nearby block of flats had been leveled by an explosion that narrowly missed a crop of moviegoers watching Gone with the Wind.

  Above the entryway, statues of Shakespeare’s Prospero, the magician, and Ariel, the spirit of the air, peeked out of sandbag colonnades like typical Londoners of the day. The stone images from The Tempest showed brave faces and stiff upper lips but still sought shelter as needed.

  We were led through a series of recently installed steel blast doors and down multiple flights of stairs to the third sub-basement. Stiff upper lips were all very well for public morale, but the actual business of broadcasting went on from belowground.

  The air was fetid and reeked of the aroma of over-boiled cabbage drifting from the cafeteria sadly misplaced one floor above us. “How the Brits can turn somethin’ as delightful as cabbage into this,” Mariah waved her hand around her head, “is beyond me.”

  “It is not altogether their fault,” Raquel said, touching a perfumed handkerchief to her nose. “Proper cooking of cabbage requires a window, I think.”

  We assembled in a makeshift conference room. It was furnished with a threadbare camelback sofa, a desk apparently rescued from a reformatory from the amount of initials carved into its scarred surface, and a half circle of mismatched chairs.

  One of the chairs was occupied by Cedric Barrett, a playwright for both the London stage and BBC radio dramas. The author, in tweed coat and spectacles, smoked a pipe that challenged the cabbage odor, and thankfully was actually an improvement.

  Mariah, Raquel, and I took the sofa. Where had Murphy gone? He disappeared without warning at the last turning in the subterranean maze.

  When he reappeared moments later he apologized. “Ed Murrow is setting up a broadcast down the hall. I had to say hello.”

  Opposite us, across the table, were two men: Eugene McDonald, assistant chairman of ENSA, and another figure I did not recognize—American from his tan complexion and well-tailored clothing.