[Juliana 02.0] Olympus Nights on the Square

by Vanda

  The cops grabbed students, handcuffing them and dragging them to paddy wagons. The business! I can’t get arrested. I ran, stumbling over bodies on the ground, as cops were hitting them with clubs. I had to get out. Out! I pushed against arms, backs, stomachs. Smack! Something hit me. Legs, fists everywhere. Dull screams like distant howls. Run! Where? Pushing bodies. Go. Go. I was whisked out of the crowd of pressing elbows and billy clubs. Mindlessly running. A man holding my arm, running with me. We passed beyond the school gates and down the sidewalk. Blares of sirens screaming by us. Running, running, slowing. Leaning against a telephone pole catching my breath. “Gosh, what happened?” I asked between gulps of air.

  “You’re bleeding, and your dress is torn,” my unknown companion said. I felt the blood dripping down the side of my face. “What happened?”

  “The cops went nuts,” the young man with the curly, dark hair standing before me said. He looked to be around my age, twenty-six or so. He wore a rumpled white shirt, no tie, and brown, baggy corduroy pants.

  “I’m Aaron Martin Buckman.”

  “Aaron,” I mumbled like I was reciting an old Sunday school lesson. “Brother to Moses. Helped Moses speak to Pharoah.”

  “Are you Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “I thought only Jews talked Torah right after almost being stomped to death.”

  “When I was a kid, I read the Bible twice. Sometimes things from it pop out of me at odd times.”

  “Why twice?”

  “I was looking for a loophole.”

  “A loophole for what?”

  Then it dawned on me that he was probably Jewish. I couldn’t tell him I was looking for a loophole for the Jews so they’d get into Heaven even though they didn’t believe in Christ. It would sound so … I mean, the guy saved my life. “Nothing, Aaron,” was my lame response.

  “Call me Marty. Being Aaron is too much responsibility. Who are you?”

  ”Al, uh, Alice. Huffman. Thank you for getting me out of that.” I had no idea what we were talking about. I started to shake, and I wanted to get back downtown to people I knew.

  “Your first war?”

  “Is that what that was?”

  “Arresting college kids? Some of them aren’t more than eighteen. I think I should take you to the emergency room to get your head bandaged.”

  “I gotta work.”

  He held his folded handkerchief against my forehead. “What kinda work?”

  “Oh ... waitress.” I wasn’t sure why I lied, but it seemed like the right thing to do. “How about you?”

  “Student. Strange to be a student at my age.”

  “GI Bill?”

  “Yup. How about we get a bandage on your head and go get coffee?”

  “Can’t. Work. Remember?”

  “Just testing.”

  “Testing what?” The last thing I needed was to get involved with another man. If I were Catholic, I’d have to do about a thousand years in purgatory to make up for my sins against Danny and Henry. I gave him back his handkerchief. “I think it’s stopping.”

  “Tell me,” he whispered, “are you ...? What I mean is—I was wondering, if you—”

  “What?”

  He looked up the street and down and whispered, “Are you—a, well … you know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No?” He took a deep breath. “’Cause sometimes, I kinda feel—alone here. At school. So, I thought maybe you were a … too.”

  “A what?”

  “Well, a …” he spat the word, “communist.”

  “No! Heavens. Why would you think that? Are you?”

  “I might be.” He ran back toward the campus.

  * * *

  A communist, a communist, I repeated to myself as I hung from the porcelain strap in the crowded downtown IRT. A short, round woman jabbed me in the ribs with a mop handle. How could he be a red commie? He was nice to me. Well, he did say “might be.” How could a person “might be” a communist? I wished that lady would quit jabbing me. I was gonna punch her soon. I looked with envy at the people sitting peacefully on the red cushioned seats in front of me. Aren’t you either a communist or you’re not? Maybe he was trying to capture me, and make me like him. That’s what they do.

  My mind shot back to a smoky bar, Chumley’s. Four kids from the potato fields of Long Island. My best girlfriend, Aggie, told us, “They try to turn you into what they are, so you can never be normal again.” But when she said that, she didn’t mean communists. “Lady, will you please stop …”

  “I’m sorry. It’s hard to balance.” That’s when I saw she was pregnant, and I felt two feet tall. A man sitting in one of the cushioned seats hid his face behind his newspaper. “Hey!” I barked at him.

  He sheepishly got up, doffed his hat, and gave her his seat.

  By the time I pushed my way down Forty-Second Street through the crowds into the Mt. Olympus, I was a shaking mess. Shaking from my first sit-down strike with the police turning into monsters, and shaking with the thought of the man who saved me who might be a communist. Luckily, the Mt. Olympus wasn’t open for business yet.

  “Al, what happened?” Virginia Sales came running. She sat me at one of the tables and whispered, “Did someone beat you up for being a gay girl?”

  “I’m not a gay girl,” I whispered back.

  “Oh, that’s right. I keep forgetting.” She ran to the kitchen for ice.

  Everything inside me came unloosed, and I started to bawl. “Sit-down strike. At the school and—”

  “What’s a sit-down strike?” she called to me.

  “The students closed down the classes and ...” I rocked back and forth, “the police came …”

  “I would think so.” Virginia hurried back into the main room with a dishcloth filled with ice cubes, and held it to my forehead. “Students can’t simply decide to stop classes. It would be chaos. I hope you won’t get involved in something like that again.”

  “Have you ever known a communist?”

  “Good gracious, no. They’re evil people. Does your school let them in?”

  “The papers called Barney Josephson one. He didn’t seem evil to me. Did you know he was helping his brother, Leon, start a housing development like Levittown; only Barney and Leon’s place was gonna let Negroes in too. That sounds like something good, so how could they be communists? Did you know that Leon was involved in a plot to kill Hitler way back in ’35?”

  “Oh, my.”

  I remembered my friend Dickie, who came to the city to be a dancer. It was the one thing he wanted more than anything in the whole world. He came home from the war with a bad wound that killed his dream. If Leon had killed Hitler, then dear, sweet Dickie, who’d never hurt anyone, would be dancing on Broadway now.

  “Barney said after that, our government started following Leon around; but our government wouldn’t follow around a private citizen, would they, Virginia?”

  “I should say not.”

  “Besides, why would the government bother Leon for something that happened back in ’35? HUAC didn’t even exist then. But Barney said I was too young to know that things never start at the time when you first see them; they start much earlier, when you can’t see them. Does that sound right to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Virginia said, upset. “You’re asking me too many questions. Hold still and keep this ice on.”

  “Where’s Max?” I asked.

  “He found a boy on the corner, and you know—”

  “You didn’t stop him?” I jumped, up and the ice pack fell to the floor. “We open in a few hours!”

  “Stopping Max from that would be like trying to stop a moving truck with a pigeon feather.”

  “He can’t do that anymore, and not right before we open.”

  I ran outside and found one of his many boyfriends strutting down Forty-Second Street in a leather jacket, no shirt, his chest gloriously on display. “Hey, Little Boy,” I called, running after him. “Where’s
Max?”

  “How should I know? He’s nothing but a score to me. I don’t keep track of Maxie’s social calendar.”

  “Like heck you don’t. How would you even buy lunch without Max’s ‘patronage?’ Give.”

  “I know where he is.” A voice came from near my ankle. I looked down to see the Vet with no legs sitting in his wagon, his back leaned up against a dumpster. He held out a cup.

  “Where?” I jumped onto my knees.

  “It’s gonna cost ya, girl,” the grizzled man, old before his time, said. He smelled of stale tobacco and number 2.

  I reached into the pocket of my skirt, pulled out a nickel, and dropped it into his cup. “Where?”

  “Come on, Sister. You can do better than that. I’m a Vet. I lost my legs for you.”

  I found a dime in the bottom of my purse and dropped that in. “That’s it. There’s no more. Tell me quick, or I’m gonna start thinking you’re taking me for a ride.”

  He grinned, revealing a row of rotten upper teeth and no lowers. “Your boyfriend’s at The Astor Hotel bar.”

  His laugh followed me down the street and clung to me as I squeezed through the pressing crowds. I dashed into the hotel and into the bar. “Max!” I yelled as if he were about to jump off a roof. Well, he was. If Shirl found out … The whole bar of mostly men in suits stared at me.

  I threw my shoulders back and strode over to Max, sitting on a stool in his suit and tie, one hand gripping his fedora, the other wrapped around a Manhattan.

  “What are you doing?” Max asked.

  “We open in an hour. What are you doing?”

  “Having a drink.”

  “You can do that at the Mt. Olympus, but you don’t drink while you’re working. That’s the first thing you taught me.”

  He took a sip from his glass. “Cute. The one directly across from me on the other side of the bar. The blond. Don’t look! I don’t want him to know I’m interested. But what do you think?”

  “Max, you can’t do this. All your money, all your dreams will go down the sewer if you don’t pay attention to business.” Mine too, I thought.

  “You’re doing pretty good running things.”

  “I can’t run the club by myself. I don’t have your knowledge or experience.”

  “I can’t find him,” he said, looking into his glass. “I’ve contacted the war department and the VA. No one will tell me a thing.”

  “You’ve been trying to find the man you fell in love with in the army?”

  “Scott Elkins.”

  “You never told me.”

  “I didn’t want you to know what a sap I am.”

  I rubbed the back of his hand lying on the bar.

  “I didn’t want to ask too many questions. They may figure it out—what we were to each other—and slap him with a blue discharge, too, if he’s still in the service. I thought of calling the Chamber of Commerce of his town, but I can’t remember his town’s name. Armpit, West Virginia or something. West Virginia.” He sighed. “How could I have fallen for a kid from West Virginia? You think I should get a private detective?”

  I wrapped my hand around his. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  “Home?” He smiled.

  “Well …”

  He squeezed my hand. “Home.”

  Chapter 14

  April 1948

  IT TURNED OUT Aaron Martin Buckman was in my Music Appreciation class. I’d never noticed him, but he noticed me.

  “Did you read what the New York Times said about our strike?” Marty asked when we walked through the quadrangle. He wore wide-legged corduroy pants and a corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows, no tie. “They said it was caused by communist agitators?”

  “Yeah, I read that. But I wasn’t a communist agitator.”

  “Neither was anyone.”

  “No?” I stared at him.

  “Oh, that. I’m not a communist.”

  “You’re not?” I thought this might be a trick to take over my mind.

  “No. I think there was another question I wanted to ask you, but then the communist thing came out.”

  “What other question?”

  “Uh … thought maybe we might have something in common.”

  “Like what?”

  “You can’t think of anything?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I think if the communists are fighting for the little guys, like Jews, Negroes, and the working class, and even calling for equality between the sexes—”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It might not be such a bad thing.”

  I’d never heard anyone say anything good about communists before. I thought I’d better be careful around this guy. “What’s your major?” A safe question.

  “Theater.”

  “I used to act.” It slipped out, and I wished I could pull it back.

  “No kidding. Professionally?”

  “I was on Broadway once.” Was I bragging? Telling him this could lead him to my other life. A place I didn’t want him to be.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. The show closed in eight days. But I did do a lot of radio drama and radio commercials. That’s all in the past.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m living another life now.”

  “As a waitress? That doesn’t sound so—”

  “As a student.”

  “It seems like you could make a lot more money doing radio commercials than waiting tables, and some actors are getting jobs on TV. I heard they’re paying twenty-five dollars for a fifteen-minute show. That’s got to beat waiting tables.”

  Was he trying to capture me?

  “Well, you should, at least,” he continued, “try out for Of Thee I Sing that they’re doing here in the fall. I’m going to.”

  “Break a leg. My acting days are over. These days I …”

  “Yes?”

  “Wait tables and go to school.”

  “Hey, do you like music? Dancing? A friend of mine told me about this place where Mabel Mercer appears regularly. Don’t you love her? She’s my favorite nightclub singer. I don’t know when she’s gonna be there again, but when she is, you wanna go with me? The place is called, uh … uh …” He snapped his fingers. “Yes! Max’s Mt. Olympus.”

  “I’m gonna be busy.”

  Chapter 15

  August 1949

  SOME NIGHTS, I’D run home before the eight o’clock show to do my schoolwork and eat. I’d eat these new frozen meals that came out called TV dinners; you were sposed to eat them in front of your TV, but I still didn’t have one of those. I was glad to hide my head in a textbook or work sixteen hours in the club. Anything to drown out my longing for her. I’d begun to think I’d never make her into a star. What did I know about that? Maybe we’d never be together.

  One warm August afternoon in 1949, a boy on a bicycle pulled up in front of Max’s Mt. Olympus as I was unlocking the door. My arms were filled with groceries I planned to take home when I eventually went there. “Miss Huffman?” the boy said, jumping off his bicycle.

  “Yes?”

  “This is for you.” He handed me a lavender envelope and ran back to his bike.

  “Wait.” I rummaged through my purse while balancing oranges, Wonder Bread, and three cans of Green Giant peas. “I’ll give you—”

  “No. That’s been taken care of. She said not to take anything from you.” He hopped on his bike and was gone.

  She? I fumbled with the keys, and they fell to the ground. She? I bent to pick them up, and an orange fell out of the bag and rolled toward the sidewalk. I dashed after it and another fell out. She. She. To hell with the oranges. I let them roll away, found the right key, and opened the door.

  I flipped on the light and threw down my bundles. The envelope smelled of her perfume. I slid out the letter with her flowing handwriting. Broad circles and loops. I pictured her sitting at her desk in her room, her fountain pen floating over the thin lavender notepaper. She’d never
use the ballpoint I got her at the end of the war when Gimbels started selling them. I almost didn’t care what it said.

  My lungs were bursting with excitement from merely seeing those feminine circles and curlicues. It read:

  Al, come see me tomorrow. My place. We’ll be alone.

  Juliana.

  Chapter 16

  SHE LIFTED THE tray that held our tea glasses and sugar cubes from the counter. “I’ll take it,” I said, leading the way from the kitchenette to the couch and placing the tray on the coffee table. It’d been a long time since we’d sat in her parlor drinking Turkish tea from the little hand-blown glasses the Sultan’s son gave her mother decades ago.

  She didn’t approve of what I was wearing. I could tell as soon as she greeted me at the door. A hint of ‘how could you go out like that’ lingering briefly in her eyes. Maybe I wore my dark jacket with the heavy black skirt because I knew she’d hate it. Maybe I wore my hair, plastered down to the sides of my head with bobby pins, more severely than I ever really wore it because I knew it wouldn’t attract her. Maybe I wanted to show her that I was an independent career woman. Maybe I wanted to show her how much I didn’t need her.

  We sat on her couch sipping our tea, not talking. It was like we’d forgotten how to talk to each other. Four years is a long span in romance-time. I never knew how long until I sat on her couch, counting the painfully slow tick-tocks of the clock on her mantel. My eyes wandered aimlessly about the room, wondering why she’d asked me to come.

  Her curtains were burnt orange now, not green. The slipcovers on the furniture were now colored with swirls of brown and orange, and the lampshades had been changed to fit the room. The portrait of her mother-in-law, framed and severe, still hung on the wall near the window.

  Sun poured through the shades, growing hotter with each ticking moment of that damn clock. I looked at her sitting there in that airy green and white dress, one luscious leg crossed over the other. She had only sandals on her feet. Each toenail perfectly painted a pale, coral red with her lips painted to match. And there I sat in those ugly clothes, as if I was wearing a suit of armor. Her fingernails were rounded and had grown beyond the pads of her fingers. Could that mean she wasn’t seeing any girls? And she wasn’t wearing her wedding band.