TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  “Goddammit, Maurice, are you drunk again?”

  “That’s rather a harsh term. Given my body weight, I might drink all night without reaching that happy state of oblivion. Besides, Miss Teasdale is working your show.”

  “It’s a two-man job. As you damn well know.”

  “Oh, bosh. What she lacks in experience she will counter with brilliance, as Lady Hazel so charmingly put it. Now, if you all will excuse me, I’m going home.”

  Both Poindexters left the room and Barnet pushed his way to the front. “What the hell was that all about? Goddammit, I’ve got a radio show to do in just over thirty minutes.” He looked at Livia. “How the hell are you going to do a scene that’s got fifteen goddamn effects in it?”

  “She will do it brilliantly,” Hazel said.

  “Well, she’d better figure out how to grow two more arms and another leg by eleven thirty.” He glared at Jordan. “As for you, how’d you like to get the hell out of here?”

  Suddenly Kidd was there on the soundstage, as if he’d materialized out of nowhere. Everything came to a stop for perhaps ten seconds while, one by one, they noticed that the door to the darkened director’s booth was open.

  “I guess I fell asleep in there,” Kidd said.

  No one believed him. He said, “Well, it’s been a long day and I’m tired,” but he didn’t look tired. His eyes were clear and alert as he looked from face to face. “So,” he said, “have a good show and I’ll see you all on Monday.”

  There was a chorus of “Yessir’s” and Kidd said, “Walk out with me, Mr. Ten Eyck.”

  In the hall, Becky Hart was ushering the last stragglers into Studio A. The building rumbled with crowd noise.

  “Were you going to stay and watch the show, Mr. Ten Eyck?”

  “I thought I would.”

  “That’s fine. Hold that door, miss.” Kidd stopped and studied Jordan’s face. “There isn’t much contentment here, is there?”

  “I think there are frustrations.”

  “Very diplomatic. Say what you think, isn’t that what we said?”

  “I’m not entitled to an opinion yet, I just got here. But some of these people might surprise you.”

  “They’d better.” Kidd’s eyes were steady, his face unfathomable. “Tomorrow, then,” he said, and he went on through the doors to the lobby.

  Becky was tugging at his shirt: the downbeat had begun. “Hurry, Jordan, the warm-up’s starting! We’re going on the air!”

  His heart turned over as he stepped into the studio. He burrowed into the crowd at the back of the room.

  And there she was.

  ( ( ( 13 ) ))

  THIS must be a dream, he thought. That woman on the bandstand can’t be the country girl I knew.

  She sat in a strapless Alice blue evening dress, looking casual and thoroughly professional. This is unreal, he thought again. I am dreaming it all.

  The man with the clarinet stood and looked at the clock. Seven minutes to airtime. The doors were locked and an announcer came to the microphone.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Thank you all for coming!”

  The cheering rose to a roaring peak.

  “My name is Bill Van Doren. It’s going to be my pleasant task tonight to introduce these seven marvelous musical talents, and to announce the numbers they will perform during the half-hour portion of the program that we will broadcast. The show will continue after the broadcast, for those who want to dance or just sit and listen. This is our gift to you, in these trying days we’re living in.”

  The crowd yelled. It was eager, enthused, hot.

  “One of my functions,” the announcer said, “is to host what we in radio call the audience warm-up. But if there ever was a crowd that needs no warming up, this is that crowd!”

  The place exploded.

  The announcer held up his hands and began his intros. The clarinet man bounded up and the audience shrieked its approval. The sax player stood to the right and did a little riff, and the clarinet chased him for a playful bar, and the crowd laughed. The trumpet man joined them, giving out with the thinnest wah-wah ever heard, and the crowd laughed again when they saw that his mute was the business end of a toilet plunger. The rhythm section trickled in: a bass and guitar and finally the drummer. With two minutes left, the announcer turned to Holly.

  “What can I possibly say about the lady who sings for us? I could tell you that she’s one of the most amazing people it’s ever been my good luck to know, but that doesn’t begin to tell her story. Many of you know it already. Two months ago she’d never sung a note professionally. Then one night during the amateur show at the pier, she came up and asked for a tryout. Those of you who were there that night will never forget the high voltage that ran through us all at the first sound of that incredible voice. But it’s more than that. She’s got style, class, and grace: an infallible ear for rhythm and a commanding instinct for whatever the boys throw at her. Without a lick of training, with no rehearsal whatever, she held us spellbound for almost an hour, till she ran out of songs. She’s got a fabulous future—we knew it then and we know it now, and I’m as overjoyed as you are to have been here at the start of it. A real Cinderella story. Ladies and gentlemen, I want the biggest hand you’ve got for the best band singer I know . . . Miss Hol-ly Ohhhhh-Har- ra!”

  The place went nuts. Bedlam, riot, hell breaking loose—nothing in his vocabulary fit the celebration he was watching.

  The clock was down to fifteen seconds—no chance of bringing the crowd under control for the opening—but somehow Jordan knew that proper was not what they wanted. In the booth the director raised his arms for more noise and Jordan thought, Christ, no one will hear the show.

  The announcer took the cue and stepped to the microphone with five seconds showing on the clock. “I’ve just been given a message!” he shouted to the crowd. “The Festival of the Sun will go on as always!”

  The red light flashed, and on this note of mindless joy they took to the air.

  The show opened at the peak of its chaos and he knew the timing had been masterful. The announcer boomed the opening signature across the studio—“The Windy City Seven is on the air!”—and it rode above the noise. Up came the theme, “Love Walked In,” and in the booth he could see the two men working: Stoner with his head down; the director talking tensely, calling the announcer back to the microphone with a gentle motion of his fingertips. It was all in the fingers: the director controlled the announcer, and the announcer controlled the crowd. Down went the noise: again came the introductions, the mischief laced with a bit of on-the-air formality. The first number began: “Sweet Lorraine.”

  Holly had four numbers in the half hour. She sang “The Glory of Love” and Jordan was amazed at her polish. She had a sixth sense for when to move and how: when to rise from her chair and start across the stage so that her song began exactly as she arrived at the microphone; when to whirl and toss her head to the crowd; when to bestow that radiant smile. The vocal ended, the announcer came and went, the band played again. Holly sang “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You”—wonderfully, he thought, able, now that the novelty was fading, to enjoy her startling artistry. She was singing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” when he happened to look up and see a man watching from the balcony. The man was alone in the shadows, the whiteness of his hands the most visible feature as he gripped the railing. Then his body leaned forward and for a moment his face passed in and out of the light. A slim man in a sport coat and dark glasses.

  The little girl’s blind man.

  The man stood still as Holly did her final number. She sang “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” and in the closing chorus she turned her face upward toward the balcony, where even the knuckles had drawn back in the dark.

  In the booth, Stoner and the director were laughing gaily, pleased with themselves. People milled about, thrilled with the broadcast and with the news that had launched it, and up on the soundstage the musicians were playing
a soft interlude, setting the mood for the postshow.

  A mob had gathered around her, many pressing close, asking for her autograph as if the fame that had been promised was already a fact. This is the time, he thought: go to her now, hidden in a forest of strangers.

  His head loomed above the crowd. She would certainly see him if she looked this way. Now he could hear her voice: she had said something to the man who had asked for her signature, and it was that speaking voice that took him back finally to the girl he had once known.

  There were a few dawdlers, tedious bores who tried to stake out the floor and regale her. She handled them masterfully, as if they were old friends or favorite uncles she hadn’t seen in ages, shaking their hands with both of hers and letting them go with a cocked head and a sad little frown, so perfect with the smiling eyes as they were pushed aside by the current of the crowd. He heard her say, “Hello, what’s your name?” There were two men ahead of him now and his heart was going like a jackhammer.

  Then she was there. She looked in his eyes and he saw . . . nothing.

  She took his hand. “Hello . . . what’s your name?”

  “Jack.”

  “You’re a big fellow, Jack. I hope you liked our music.”

  “Your music is incredible.”

  “Why, thank you, sir, that makes me feel just fine.”

  He handed her a paper he had picked up and a pencil he had in his pocket. Saw her write, To Jack, on a very special night, warmest regards, Holly O’Hara. She looked up and smiled and he was moved on by the current. Not once did she look in his wake. She had passed him through as if she had never seen his face before that moment.

  ( ( ( 14 ) ) )

  BY one o’clock it was over. The doors had been thrown open, the band was packing its instruments, and the crowd was breaking up and drifting reluctantly out of the building. Studio B was dark, the horror show now history and the cast long gone. Out in the yard a few people lingered, talking in twos and threes until the lights began blinking out.

  He saw the band leave in a small bus parked at the side door. Holly made her escape, bounding into the bus, and Jordan stood in the trees near the volleyball net and watched them drive away.

  There was no use trying to figure it out. There was nothing to be done until she came to him and told him what she wanted. But he couldn’t shake the chilling effect of their meeting.

  In his hotel he wished vaguely for a bottle of whiskey. It had been a long day and he craved something stronger than the brackish tap water from the room at the end of the hall. Tonight he would bed down with a troubled heart. There was no help for that, but he hoped sleep would find him, for he was usually disciplined enough not to brood over things he couldn’t change.

  The vision of Holly at the microphone was still vivid, but he found himself thinking about that man in the dark glasses. There was a feeling of compulsion there, a human bondage worthy of Maugham.

  At some point he locked his door and went down the hall to the bathroom. Brushed his teeth, drank some water, and then, coming back along the hall, he was gripped by that feeling he’d had this morning, that someone had been here. He felt sand under his feet and it was wet to his touch. Sand from the beach, not the dry stuff he might’ve brought in on his own clothes from the dunes.

  He listened at his door. Tried the knob and found it still locked. Let out his breath, took out his key, and opened it.

  At once he saw the note, a cheap notebook sheet folded twice and slipped under his door. It said: MEET ME LIGHTHOUSE 2 AM HOLLY.

  • • •

  Beyond the town the landscape was darkly extraterrestrial. The beach was densely overcast and the sky broken only by occasional lightning far away. He had no light and his journey was impossible except for the lighthouse, which cast its powerful beacon four times a minute.

  He knew there were beachfront bungalows all along this stretch south of town, but they were dark now, hidden without lights back in the trees. There was no sense of earthly reality: the terrain was starkly polar in the momentary flashes of black-and-white relief, but the wind off the sea was warm. The tide was out and coming in, the sand hard and damp, with only an occasional gully to slow him as he picked his way along.

  He was two miles south of town when he saw lights dancing ahead. It was the coast guard patrol, looking for little Hitlers crawling ashore from submarines. He scrambled up into the dunes and lay flat in the sand, and a moment later the horses passed less than twenty yards away. The man with the big light swept his beam across the water, out to the rolls of barbed wire and back. Pieces of conversation floated on the wind. “Man, that gal had a nice ass,” said the big light, and the others laughed. There was always some kinda nookie going on down at the point, and catching a pair of lovebirds in the middle of something was apparently high sport. Thoughts of nookie kept them from seeing his prints in the sand.

  He rolled out of the dunes and sprinted into the wind. A few minutes later he came to a deep gully. Water swirled around his hips.

  On the other side the lighthouse was suddenly upon him. The beam passed over his head and the blinding contrast was gone, as if he’d stepped through a prism from that harsh snowy frontier into a mellow navigable twilight. He could see the lighthouse half a mile away, the cylindrical shape of it rising 150 feet over the edge of the hook. He saw the hook itself, a long crooked piece of land clutching at the sea. And the coastland, vastly changed, with fewer trees and then none at all. There were no houses south of the gully. It had a wild, barren look, tidal and near the end swampy. Marsh pinched the beach to its last faint trace, a trivial sand spit that finally gave up and melted into the water.

  A soft rain had begun falling and the wind was dying in the east. The water in the cove was eerily calm, while waves rolled past on the other side to crash on the mainland a mile away. Now he saw the road, a plank-covered causeway that spanned the marsh, connected to the mainland by the bridge he had seen from the roof.

  Still there was no sign of life: no lights in the dark recesses of the lighthouse, which he guessed were windows in rooms below the lamp. He climbed an artificial embankment lined with stones, bringing him to the catwalk that led out to the lighthouse. A gate hung across it, locked with a chain, and there was a sign he was just able to see:

  U.S. COAST GUARD NO TRESPASSING

  His sense of unease was now acute. It had to be two o’clock—the clock in his head told him it was later than that. What if she’d been here and gone? If she had come and not found him here, would she have waited? He was willing to sit in the rain till dawn, but what troubled him now had little to do with wasting time in bad weather. This didn’t smell right, and that was it in a nutshell.

  He took her note out of his pocket but the cheap paper was breaking into soggy fragments impossible to read. It fell apart in his fingers—gone, he thought, which is what I ought to be. His gut told him to leave but his heart said stay. How could he leave till he knew why he’d come?

  He settled into a wide crack between two posts and he huddled there, a third post, deciding for want of a better answer to wait it out.

  The rain was steady now, pelting the water inside the hook like birdshot. Only his eyes moved, scanning the beach and the dunes. Occasionally he let his head turn slightly, to watch the marsh where it grew thick around the causeway. He didn’t know how long he’d stood there when he saw a flash of light. Imagination, he thought: that could happen even to a levelheaded man on a night like this. Ah Holly, he thought, and in that moment he saw the light again.

  The headlights of a car, unmistakable now, far back in the marsh. Two bold flicks with less than a second between them, then nothing. He eased down from the catwalk and followed the sandbar out to the edge of the causeway. This is it, he thought, looking into the pale, blurry road. That’s all there is. Take it or leave it.

  Of course he had to take it. But he couldn’t shake the notion that it wasn’t Holly waiting for him in the marsh.

  • • •


  The causeway swallowed him whole. A hell of frogs rose up around him. He could feel the rain but it made no sound. The surf dropped away, the wind dropped away. Nothing had the reality of its own noise in the land of the frogs. The place where you croak.

  And wasn’t it crazy how he couldn’t see three feet ahead but he could clearly make out the woods on the mainland, half a mile away? The light would come round and burn off the dark: his shadow would leap down on the bleached-white planking and then, before his eyes could adjust, the light would be gone again, leaving false bottoms under his feet and a sense of hills rising around him. The planking was uneven and he had the illusion of a railing, though he knew there was none.

  His sense of distance told him the car was parked a hundred yards deep in the marsh, at the edge of the island, just below the bridge. The road doglegged to the northwest, an immediate relief from the glare, though the causeway itself was now in continuous blackness. He felt himself rising through the marsh: his head came up out of the reeds on the long, gradual incline to the bridge. He had a tingling awareness of his naked vulnerability. Though he could still see nothing ahead, he himself must be starkly outlined against the light to anyone on the bridge, or even to a sharp pair of eyes in the woods across the creek.

  He could see the bridge now, the ghostly steel supports rising above him. And there was the car, looking like a toy left near the workings of a child’s Erector set. Nothing moved, on the bridge or beyond it, around the car or anywhere near it. It was less than thirty yards away. He stood in the half crouch, his muscles taut, waiting.

  Don’t move, he thought. Then he realized this had not been a thought. It was a voice.

  “I said don’t move. I’ve got a gun here.”

  The voice came from everywhere: the curse of the one-eared man. Bluff him, he thought: maybe it’s just some kid. “You’re buying a lot of trouble, pal.”