by Vanda
“You weren’t stupid, Max. You told me the guys in your group were always camping it up, and nobody seemed to care so—”
“Not the love letter. The love. How could Maxwell P. Harlington III let himself fall for some cute, scared, nineteen-year-old kid who thought he was grown up enough to fight in a war?”
“You’re gonna find him again.”
“Am I? Should I?”
I looked toward the kitchen to be sure Virginia wasn’t coming. “I’m gonna drink my tea fast and go. You should tell her by yourself.”
“Don’t drink too fast.” His hands were shaking as he pushed a Gitanes Brunes into the cigarette holder he always used.
Virginia returned and placed a silver tray with our tea on the coffee table. “I have honey there,” she said, pointing. “We still can’t get sugar, but maybe the honey—”
“That’s fine,” I dribbled some honey into my glass.
“I don’t have lemons, either.”
“No one has lemons these days, Virginia,” I reminded her. “It’s okay.”
“I just want Max to be happy.”
“I am, Virginia. I’m here, not there.”
“Yes, I suppose … that must have been awful for you.”
“Yes.”
We fell into an uncomfortable silence. Max chewed on his cigarette holder without lighting the cigarette. Virginia smiled too pleasantly, and the clock on the mantle ticked too rhythmically, and too loud.
“So, Max …” Virginia finally broke through the afternoon quiet. “You’re home.”
Max flicked a silver lighter at his Gitanes, “Yes.” He coughed out a puff of smoke. “These things are so strong they’re gonna kill me.”
“I thought you would wear your uniform. You look so lovely in it.”
“Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to, uh …” Was he going to do it now? I didn’t want to be here for this.
“I missed your letters,” Virginia continued. “They just stopped coming.”
Every week Virginia received a letter from Max. She’d keep the latest one tucked away in her brassiere, near her heart. When she and I were alone in the kitchen at the Stage Door Canteen, she’d slip it out and read it like she was reciting Lady Macbeth from a stage. For close to six months, no letters came from Max. I knew now that it was because Max was in an army hospital-prison, labeled a sexual psychopath, and couldn’t write to her.
“Oh, Max, let me show you.” She jumped up.
Max followed her to the window where his David once was. She moved her African violets off the windowsill. “Look,” she pointed to the service banner with the blue star hanging in the window. “I hung it for you. I know I’m not your wife, or your sister, or … I’m only your …” she whispered, “beard1, but …”
Max turned her to face him. “Don’t call yourself that. After all these years, you must know you’re more to me than that. Thank you for hanging that for me. I’m sure it’s what got me home.”
“I thought I lost you.” Tears slid down her face.
He lightly brushed her lips with his own. She knew it would never be more, but that afternoon, she glowed like any woman whose soldier had come home from the war.
I tiptoed out.
1 A woman who poses as a wife or girlfriend for a gay man so that his homosexuality isn’t discovered. More on this in Juliana (Book 1, 1941-1944) p. 365.
Chapter 3
I LOVED WATCHING Juliana put oil, or lotion, or whatever on her legs. I lay on her bed—in the bedroom that was only hers, not the one she shared with him—watching her through the open bathroom door, her foot propped up on the closed toilet seat. I wore my new vest, a pair of gray trousers with the zipper in front—Juliana’s tailor made them—and a tie with my fedora pushed way back on my head like a gumshoe in a crime picture.
Juliana’s hands slowly glided up from her delicate ankles, the lotion sliding over her perfectly shaped calves, her long fingers moving on to her slightly-muscled thighs. She pushed the lace of her underpants leg up a bit so she could massage the oil into that delicious place I loved to kiss, the place where her thigh met her rear. Then she started on the other leg.
“What is that stuff you’re putting on your legs?” I asked.
“Dorothy Gray’s Satura Lotion,” Juliana answered. “It captures the dew from the air to prevent aging. It’s been scientifically shown to …”
“Okay, that’s more than I wanted to know.”
She straightened up, drawing her white satin robe around her almost-nude body.
“Do you put that stuff on your legs so they’ll be soft for me?”
“No. I put this lotion on my legs, so they’ll be soft for me.”
“Not for him?”
She gave me one of her “don’t start” looks and took out another jar of stuff. She dipped her fingers in and rubbed it on her neck. “Orange flower tonic,” she said to the question marks in my eyes. “To prevent double chin.” She sighed, “I’m almost thirty. I can hardly say the words.”
“You’re only twenty-eight.”
She studied herself in the mirror as if expecting her face to suddenly collapse. “I just hope Richard comes home with a list of fresh songs for me to sing. There isn’t a moment to waste.”
“When does he get in?”
“He wasn’t sure which ship they’d be putting him on. A few days.”
She finished with the orange flower tonic and moved to the end table next to her bed. She took her hairbrush from the top drawer and stood near the bed brushing, in long strokes, the coal-black waves that bounced around her shoulders.
As she brushed, the robe fell open, and I could see her breasts. I kneeled on the bed, and put my arms around her waist, pulling her close to me. I kissed her stomach and started pulling her underpants down with my teeth, but she stepped back. “You better not. I went to confession yesterday. I need to take Holy Communion today.”
“Are we sinners?”
“You know my thoughts on that.”
“If we’re such sinners, why don’t we—you—just stop. Not that I want you to, ’cause I don’t, but—”
“I can’t help what I am.” She leaned over the dresser, looking into the mirror and putting on eyeliner.
“Well, if you can’t help who you are, then how can God expect you to be somebody else?”
She made a loud sigh. “You’ve got to go to college.”
“College? What does college have to do with it?”
“You keep asking me questions I can’t answer.” She wiggled into her girdle and hooked up her stockings. She hiked up her robe to her waist and twisted in front of the mirror. “Seams straight?” she asked.
“As always.”
Leaning over the dresser, she closed one eyelid and pulled a dark pencil across it.
I lay back on the bed, my hands under my head. “I don’t think college would give me answers to these kinds of questions.”
“You still should go.” She dabbed on brown eye shadow. “You’re the college type, and I think you’d like it. You need to start thinking about your future. You’re not getting any younger, you know. At twenty-two, you’re almost too old to go.”
She ran deep-red, almost-maroon lipstick over her lips and blotted them with a tissue.
“Once Richard comes home for good, I guess I won’t see you often.”
“You can come to the rehearsal studio and watch me rehearse. Richard likes you. Right after the New Year’s Eve party, he said he thought you were good for me.”
“So, he gave you permission to have sex with me?”
“Ha, ha, funny, funny. He goes on lots of business trips during the year. And there’s his mother and sister in Omaha. I never go with him on those visits.”
“I don’t like you having a secret life that doesn’t include me.”
“It’s not secret, Al. It’s business. He manages my career.” She threw her robe onto the chair near the dresser and put on her blue bra with the lacy top. She pulled her light
-blue dress over her head and cinched the matching belt. “Actually, you’re my secret life.”
“Are you going to let him make love to you?”
She picked up her lipstick and put it in the drawer. She picked up the mascara and put that in the drawer. When she went for the eye shadow I said, “Well?”
She put the eye shadow away and looked at me through the mirror. “That isn’t a very nice question to ask a person.”
“You are.”
“He’s my husband. A wife has certain duties …”
“Yeah, yeah, my mother tried to tell me all about those unpleasant duties when I almost got married. You remember my almost-wedding, don’t you? You were there. You kissed me when Henry walked—”
“No. You kissed me. I merely responded.”
“Do you like it with him?”
She pulled on her left glove, then her right.
“You do!” I said, slamming my fists against the bed.
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know how to answer your questions.” She looked in the mirror to fix the hatpin to the top of her wide-brimmed blue hat.
“It seems like a simple enough question. Not a question I have to go to college to get answered. Either you do, or you don’t.”
“I can’t talk about this right before communion. I haven’t been to church in weeks, and with Richard coming home …”
She slipped her feet into the heels with the straps that went across her foot. Such a delicate movement, a slender foot slipping into a high-heeled shoe. “How do I look?” she asked, standing at the end of the bed.
“Beautiful. You always look beautiful.”
“Not—old?”
“Oh, Juliana.” I threw a pillow at her.
She stepped out of the way of the pillow and picked up her handbag from the bed, letting it dangle from her wrist.
“Juliana, I …”
“Yes?” She was giving herself one last look in the mirror, adjusting things.
“You know—the way I feel, uh … for you and …”
“Alice,” she sighed.
“Uh, oh. You never call me Alice. Here it comes.”
“You know I don’t want to hear about those feelings. They’ll pass. A woman cannot feel that way for another woman. Those feelings are for husbands so that the couple can have babies. Let’s not bring it up again.”
“Yeah, sure.” She’d just sliced open my stomach with her nail file. Again.
“Don’t look like that.” She sat on the bed and ran her fingernails up my inner thigh. “I hate it when you look at me with those puppy-dog eyes. We can still have fun, can’t we?”
“Uh, Juliana,” I was looking at her hand still moving around my inner thigh, getting dangerously—or deliciously, depending on your perspective—close to … “Unless you plan on dumping church and finishing things, you’d better not …”
“Oh.” She pulled her hand away, “Sorry. Reflex.” She jumped up. “We have all of today to be together. Tell you what. When I get home, I’ll fix us a lunch and we’ll eat in the park. And tonight, let’s go to Tony’s for drinks. We’ll ask Riley and Warren to join us. They’re always up for a club.”
“I guess we do have to ask them, don’t we?”
“We can’t go unescorted, but once we’re seated, Riley will be with Warren and you’ll be with me.”
“Sure. It’ll be fun.”
“Exactly,” she spun around. “Tonight, we shall be terribly gay. And when we get home … who knows what loveliness we shall make.” She winked at me and headed for the door.
I crawled to the edge of the bed. “A kiss?”
“No. I’m going to church.”
* * *
Richard came home unexpectedly that afternoon, so we didn’t go on a picnic or to Tony’s, and we didn’t make any loveliness that night; I didn’t see Juliana alone again for four years.
Chapter 4
July 1945
MAX MOVED BACK to MacDougal Street and Virginia moved back to the uptown mansion with her mother. Max gave up on the dream he’d written to Virginia about during the war—the dream to own a world-class nightclub that would rival the Copa. Disqualified for government loans, he had no money to begin again. Most nights, he played the piano in a quiet little bar on Third Street, next to a dimly-lit establishment with no sign; we all knew it was gay. He may have given up on his dream, but my mind wouldn’t let go of it.
I sat on my couch in my Milligan Place apartment night after night, thinking. There had to be a way. The fern on the shelf next to War and Peace was wilting from my lack of attention. “Dreamer,” I heard my mother say one night. That’s what she called me when she wasn’t calling me demon. “You never pay attention to what’s real. You make up stuff in your head.” She was crazy and always seeing demons chasing her, so I figured I didn’t have to pay a lot of attention to her opinion.
The Japanese would surrender any day now. The war would be over. For so many years, it’d been the center of our lives. I could barely remember a time when it didn’t determine everything—what we wore, what we ate, what we talked about. I wasn’t sure I’d know how to live without it. Or that I wanted to. Oh, that’s ridiculous. Of course I wanted it to end. That’s all I thought about the whole time we’d been going through it, and yet, now … there was talk of the Stage Door Canteen closing soon. What would I do? The war and the Canteen gave me purpose. Without them …? A cold chill came through the July heat and pierced my chest. I reached out and grabbed Max’s dream. It was the only thing that could warm me, but he didn’t believe in it anymore. What if I did? What if I opened a nightclub? Oh sure, Max couldn’t get the money, but I thought I could. Big sigh.
I got up from the couch and walked over to the open window. The air was so still, it couldn’t budge the filmy curtain I had hanging there. I looked down on the little tree in the courtyard. I always got a sense of strength from that tree growing right through the cement. If that tree could do that, then why couldn’t I …? Maybe Max just wasn’t thinking right about this. Maybe there was another way we could … If I had my own nightclub, I could hire Juliana. Yes, that’s it! I jumped around my living room. No, wait! I skidded to a stop in front of the coffee table. There’s more. Of course. I knew what I had to do. In one flash it was all there, right in front of me. I would make Juliana a star! No, not just some star. A huge one. Bigger than even she could imagine! Yes! That’s it. Then she’d choose me. She’d have to. I’d be giving her the one thing she really wanted. There would be no reason to stay with Richard. She’d leave him, and she and I would be together FOREVER! I jumped around the room again, then skidded to a stop.
How? How would I make her into a star? I didn’t know. Those dark feelings crawled up my legs. The ones that made me think of knives and Mom and … No! I didn’t want to think about that. I’d figure it out somehow. I could do this. From some deep down place within me came a whisper, “Queer.”
“No!” I shouted. “This doesn’t make me that.”
* * *
One night, at Max’s place, he was looking sad and running his fingers over the keys of his piano, I said, “When I was a little kid, about eight … On one of the nights when my mother threw me out of the house and locked the door, I had to spend the night under our porch—”
“She really did that to you?” Max asked.
“Yeah. Anyway, one of those times, I …”
“How many times did she do that?”
“I don’t know. Lots. Listen. It was cold and wet under the porch, so maybe it was to keep myself warm, I started thinking things. Things to do with my future. And under that porch, I decided I had to do something absolutely, completely wonderful with my life.”
“Like what?” He played a chord.
“That was the problem. I didn’t know. I used to think maybe it was acting the classics on a Broadway stage, so I came to New York City. Then I found out that didn’t feel right for me. But working at the Stage Door Canteen with the stars, and the bands, an
d listening to your stories …”
“You think running a night club might be it?”
“Could be.”
“It’s not. Running a nightclub is dirty. Hidden under all that glamour is a pile of filth I wouldn’t want you knowing about. I was selfish to even bring you into my so-called dream.” He gulped down the scotch sitting in a shot glass on top of the piano.
“Virginia!” I squawked.
“What?”
“That’s where you can get the money for your club. Virginia.”
“No. She needs her father’s inheritance so her witch of a mother doesn’t keep her prisoner in that mansion for the rest of her life.” His fingers played a running scale up the keyboard.
“But you’ll make her more money.”
“You have no idea how risky owning a club is. I could fail.” His fingers ran down the scale.
“Max Harlington the Third never talks of failure. Max Harlington is the boy wonder of Broadway! Where is your arrogance? You were always the most arrogant, conceited—”
“Before the war! Before the damn army …!”
“But you won’t fail.”
“I could! Dammit, Al.” He slammed his fingers down on the keys in a loud chord.
“Don’t!” I yelled back, slamming my hand on the keys even louder, making an awful sound. “And dammit, yourself.”
“Don’t curse; it’s not lady-like.”
Chapter 5
August 1945
“COME IN, AL.” Shirl stood at her desk to welcome me, a cigar dangling from her mouth. She wore her usual dark suit and tie. “Why did you want to meet in my office? You should be at the pictures with the air conditioning. We could’ve met at my home in the evening when it’s cooler. Mercy would love to see you.”
“I just came from Gimbels, where it’s plenty cool, and I’d do just about anything to escape that crummy job. This is business, Shirl, so I thought your office was the best place.”
“Hmm, business. Have a seat.” Shirl and I sat with her large wooden desk between us. I took off my gloves and placed them in my purse.