TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  ( ( ( · ) ) )

  THE

  BLACKOUT

  WALTZ

  ( ( ( 1 ) ) )

  THREE weeks had passed since the Schroeder boy’s death, and in that time his life had changed.

  He had a paying job now, and the work was so challenging that his days often obscured what his real purpose had been in coming here. Every morning he opened his eyes with the same conviction—today he’d find a way to talk to her. He’d drop by the little club where she sang, find a way to send her a note, perhaps wait in the dark place near the edge of the bandstand, and then, when she came off between sets, say something that she’d have to answer. His faith was always strongest before the dawn, but once the day began his sense of purpose slowly drained away. She was so incredibly distant that speech seemed impossible, so much like a stranger that he never once caught her acting. After three weeks he could think of just two possible reasons for her behavior—that she was afraid or that something had happened to her mind. If she was afraid she was very much afraid, and anything he might say could only make matters worse. Her silence gave a powerful message: stay away, don’t even begin to approach me. And so he did, and so he had to.

  His days were full. Six days a week he wrote continuity at Harford’s radio station, and on the seventh day he faced the horrors of the damned. Sundays stretched on in endless, lonely boredom, desolate and bleak. He was adrift in a sea of willing women and he cared nothing for any of them. It was his time off that drove him to despair: the Sundays, the nights, the mornings when he’d wake hours before the dawn and not be able to sleep again. In the stony darkness of his room he would make plans for the day, knowing that his best-laid schemes would come to nothing by nightfall.

  ( ( ( 2 ) ) )

  THE day began. In radio lingo it was called the dawn patrol, a term that defined the skeleton staff that was in the building when the first announcer arrived to put the station on the air. Radio had its own language and he had absorbed it. Chimes were the sounds that closed all shows on both NBC networks, and his continuity could not begin until they were heard. He knew what a board fade was—the gradual potting down of a scene till it faded from the air, indicating a time transition—and a cross fade meant less time passing or none at all, perhaps a shift of locale as one scene was potted down while another came up to replace it. A clambake was a show full of mistakes, and a cornfield was a soundstage filled with standing microphones. He had learned the importance of dampening the studio, hanging drapes to absorb sound, and a live studio was resonant as it stood. A good director like Maitland could walk into a room and clap his hands and know what needed to be hung or taken down, and when the director said, “Coming up,” he meant now, you’re on the air in ten seconds. Microphones were either hot or dead, but there were many varieties. There were directional mikes with three dead sides, eightball and saltshaker mikes, ribbon mikes and bullet mikes, dynamic mikes and parabolic mikes, and each gave a different sound from the same input. Jordan now knew how to make the sound of an actor talking in a cave, how easily a makeshift echo chamber could be devised by having actors speak into a microphone dangled inside a piano. He had learned these things as part of his job but they were also his diversion. It filled up the days.

  He had a routine. The daytime schedule was his responsibility, and from three o’clock on it was handled by the other writer. Phil Carmody was forty-five, a bleary-eyed veteran of the newspaper game who had matriculated in the Buffalo office of United Press. Barnet continued to function as program director while Kidd got his feet wet, and it didn’t take long for Jordan to fall under his thumb. “Do it again,” he would say, throwing Jordan’s continuity in the wastebasket. Never a hint of what was missing or wrong, just “Do it again.” Later, with Barnet well out of earshot, Carmody would tell anyone present that “this kid’s a helluva lot better writer than I am.” He needed Jordan to preserve his sanity. “Man, they’ve been working my ass off since the other guy quit last Christmas. My kids’ve forgotten what I look like.”

  In addition to everyday continuity, Carmody and Jordan wrote occasional commercials and scripted anything local that popped up in the schedule. Today, Monday, he knew without thinking that Evie Overdier did her Laura Leaf cooking show at ten fifteen. She did this three times a week, while on Tuesdays and Thursdays the same quarter hour was filled by a pair of retired vaudeville comics who sang Gay Nineties evergreens to their own piano accompaniment. Most of the other daytime slots were network originated, and his biggest challenge was making the continuity sound like something that hadn’t been said a thousand times before. This meant he had to listen to everything. Jokes that were ancient when Joe Miller wrote them down two hundred years ago. Musical hucksters, farm news, and The Breakfast Club. Continuing melodramas so fantastic that they defied any possibility of truth. He listened to junk he couldn’t have imagined, just so he could hoodwink the dependable nonthinkers from Maine to Virginia.

  At night he’d have dinner, sometimes with Carmody and his family, once or twice a week with Stoner in a downtown café, most often alone in his room. The station went dark for four hours each twenty-four-hour day. It signed off after Stoner’s show and came on again at sunrise. The two announcers Eastman and Stallworth alternated in the early morning: one or the other would arrive at five thirty, fire up the transmitter, log in on the F.C.C. sheet, and using the same small upstairs studio that Stoner had vacated a few hours before, put the station on the air as the sun broke over the sea.

  The first hour was a potpourri of recorded music, personal chatter, and occasional snatches of verse. Yesterday’s headlines, cribbed from the New York Times, filled the top of the hour, all read by the personality on duty. The whole package was billed as the Rise and Shine with Uncle Wally show. Both Eastman and Stallworth played Uncle Wally, and even people who knew them were amazed at how they could assume this singular fictitious entity with one perfect voice that was so unlike either of their own speaking voices. “I swear to God, I can’t tell the difference,” Rue said. “I get up and turn that show on and I don’t know which one of ’em’s doing it.”

  The network schedule began at eight o’clock, with Morgan Beatty and his world news roundup from New York. Most of the later morning was consumed by the soap serials: awful, mind-numbing things with titles like John’s Other Wife and Amanda of Honeymoon Hill. He knew Kendall had worked some of these shows and he’d been trying to pick out Kendall’s old roles where they still might exist. It was almost as if the man himself couldn’t be gone if a role he’d originated was still alive. He listened and tried to remember the names Kendall had told him, surprised at his own primitive superstition. The story lines came and went. The characters cheated, lied, flimflammed, and some of them got killed. At the turn of the month Kendall was still dead, without a trace of his life left on earth or in the air.

  It was clear by now that the station was undergoing some vast change that had been in the works for some time. The word was out that they were either giving up or losing the network, and a steady stream of job hunters had passed through the doors. By the end of May they had thirty employees, only a third of what Harford had employed in 1933 but up by 25 percent in just a month. A third announcer had been hired; there were bookkeepers and secretaries, new salesmen, and a traffic clerk. There were two telephone operators, a production man, and a new assistant engineer to replace Peter Schroeder, who had not returned. In early June, Kidd hired an organist named Leland Jewell, who could also play piano and didn’t seem to mind what strange hours he was asked to work. Jewell told Carmody that Kidd intended to hire an orchestra as well, and new rumors got started from that.

  To the actors the most exciting new arrival was Maitland, the director who had come in from Chicago just ahead of Kidd. “They seem to be old pals,” Rue said over beer. “Whatever’s happening, it’s almost like they’re coordinating it between them.” Maitland looked like Walt Whitman and had a reputation as an actor’s director. He was easygoing and friendly but
he had clashed at once with Barnet over details of the band broadcast. “You want it done that way, you talk to Jethro,” he had said. “On my soundstage we do it my way.”

  Of course, Barnet never took anything to Kidd, Rue said. “Everybody’s a little afraid of Kidd.”

  But Kidd’s arrival had brought them a semblance of cautious optimism. This morning he had reinstated staff meetings for the first time since Mrs. Harford’s death in 1936, and the big studio was packed with staff from both buildings. Kidd came in exactly at seven thirty, taking his place on a stool at the edge of the soundstage. He opened with a brief statement, introducing himself as if no one had heard of him, nodding his head slightly at the uneasy laughter, then telling them about his program to bring them to network capability. He asked for questions.

  Rue: “What about the rumor that we’re losing the network? Is that what this is about?”

  “That’s not a rumor,” Kidd said. “But like real rumors, it’s a little wrong. We’re not losing the network, we’re giving it up.”

  Barnet cleared his throat. “There’s a concern that we won’t last two months without NBC, even the poorboy side of it.”

  Kidd nodded. “A blind man can see that we’re losing money hand over fist. Just look at the log any morning—money is pouring out of here faster than the man can count it. What I can tell you for sure is that we are not going broke in two months. But our only long-range hope of making it is to give up the network. It may be our biggest asset but it’s also our biggest liability. The network affiliation is just killing us.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “It’s obvious. We can’t sell local time because the network’s got our best time slots locked in by contract, and the network doesn’t like us anymore because our signal’s so good that we’re encroaching into New York with the same national programs the home station carries. We can’t compete in New York with WJZ, and if we don’t get at least a piece of New York, you’re right, we can’t survive.”

  Kidd looked around the room. “That’s it in a nutshell. We’ve outgrown our local market and we never made those inroads in New York that were planned six years ago. Never mind why that didn’t happen— reasons don’t matter now. What’s important is what we do in August when we head out on our own. I’ve already told the sales staff and now I’m telling you all—do not think locally. That’s a fatal mistake; we’re too seasonal down here. Every year our advertising gets thinner and our expenses go up. That’s why we’re going our own way, and that means I’m looking for ideas. We need commercial shows we can sell, but I also want controversial, hard-hitting things that make people talk. I don’t care if you’re a secretary or the man who plays the organ, if you’ve got an idea, I want to hear about it.”

  The meeting broke up. In the hall Rue gripped his arm. “Hot damn, Jordan, did you just hear what I heard? Hot damn!” Her voice quivered and her face was flushed with excitement.

  ( ( ( 3 ) ) )

  HE was living in a rooming house now, a dreary place downtown. He was a block away from the club where she sang, yet he never went there. A dozen times he had gone to the door and turned away, pushed back as if some physical force had wedged itself between them. There was something so eerie in her behavior: it went beyond the strangeness of what she had done and even how she had done it. She seemed to be holding him back with the force of her will, and he walked on eggs, so wary of compromising her that he felt frozen, forever rooted in the woods at two o’clock in the morning.

  He had a car, a Hudson rattletrap ten years old, bought cheap from a newspaper ad with Kendall’s money. He didn’t drive it much—with an A-card he was entitled to only three gallons a week—but it gave him mobility. He had followed her home one night and had been past her house a hundred times since then. She lived on the beach south of town, in an older house well off the road. Several times he had seen her on the boardwalk but he never approached her. He watched from the entrance of the penny arcade, and she passed so damned near that he could see the breeze stirring the fine hair on her arms. Just a word from a well-hidden place might change everything. She would turn and their eyes would meet and she’d be forced to say something in a place where no one would see them. But suddenly Mrs. Flack appeared, coming up the boardwalk with an old man at her side. Jordan hadn’t seen her since that night of the horror show but he knew her at once. The old man had a limp and a chronic cough, which sounded from a distance like a series of small explosions . . . a casualty of the old World War, Jordan thought at once: a man damaged by shells and gas, he guessed; shells and gas and God knew what else. Holly walked past and there was nothing between them. Jordan stepped out of the penny arcade and they came toward him, but if Mrs. Flack recognized him she gave no sign. Holly was now far down the beach. Jordan turned into the square, and to the casual eye they were all strangers of the morning.

  ( ( ( 4 ) ))

  ON Tuesday he found a note on his typewriter summoning him to Barnet’s office. It was paper-clipped to his Uncle Wally script, demanding a rewrite, so he did that first; then, because it had thrown him behind, he had to hurry through the morning and would be under the gun all day. By the time he got to Barnet it was almost noon.

  “You certainly took your goddamn time getting here.”

  “Sorry. I got behind.”

  “Do it right the first time and you won’t always be in a pinch.”

  Barnet leaned over his desk. “For some reason Kidd wants me to push you into dramatic script writing. I’m going to give you a show to write that you can’t possibly screw up. Are you familiar with Freedom Road?”

  “It’s a Negro show, isn’t it? . . . airs Sunday morning.”

  “It’s a Negro show and we air it Sunday morning. You should have heard it by now.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Well, you’d better get familiar with it because you’re going to be writing it, starting a week from Sunday. It’s a quarter hour now but Kidd wants to expand it to thirty minutes. You’ll need to come in this week, meet the cast, and get some idea what they’re doing. We’ll need to change your day off.”

  “I don’t need a day off.”

  “Your day off will be Saturday. Don’t try to impress people by doing more than your share, Ten Eyck, just do what you do and do it right.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. I read your rewrite for this afternoon. It stinks. Do it again.”

  ( ( ( 5 ) ))

  HE worked until five and faced the bleak night alone. Maybe later, if he got groggy enough from too much beer and too little rest, maybe then he could flop in his bed and get a few hours’ sleep before his phantoms came calling. He walked out on the pier and listened to the music, had himself a sandwich, and tried to turn off his mind. But nothing worked, and two hours later he faced the same desolate night with the same desperate problem.

  Home. It could be worse. He came into the foyer and thought of jail.

  The landlord’s door was open as usual. The man was a sentinel, always alert when someone came into his hall.

  “Mr. Ten Eyck, I believe. Yes, you had a call this evening.”

  He felt a mild shock. Who would call him, and why?

  “A man. Wouldn’t leave his name, but was fairly insistent that you get the message. Said he’d call you again tomorrow night at ten, on the phone box in the square.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, but I can tell you this. It was a long-distance call.”

  Up in his room he lay in darkness, thinking about Holly and Kendall, a pair of Germans and an Irish thug, Mrs. Flack and her dead husband, and the little girl in Pennsylvania who had seen Holly talking with a blind man. At some point he fell asleep.

  ( ( ( 6 ) ) )

  IN the morning he was always at the front door by five o’clock. Everything ran on schedule at Harford. The janitor, a young black man named Eli Kain, came in at four fifteen, had the five-gallon coffeepot on by four thi
rty, and was always at the door to let him in. His first stop was the kitchen, where he’d sit and have his two cups and read the main section of yesterday’s Times. Sometimes, if Eli was on top of things, he’d follow Jordan into the kitchen and allow himself a cup. But he always drank it standing up, and always from a paper cup, never from one of the porcelain mugs used by the staff. Every morning the mugs were piled high in the sink for Eli to wash. This morning they gleamed on the shelf above the icebox.

  “Siddown, Eli,” Jordan said. “Rest your feet.”

  But Eli wouldn’t do that, and Jordan couldn’t insist without acknowledging the racial pecking order that had embarrassed him in his earliest days down south. You couldn’t assume the authority to grant him a chair; that was worse than the unspoken tenets that made him stand. He refolded the Times, careful to put it back in order. It was Eli’s newspaper, bought each morning for its theatrical section at the all-night newsstand on Chicago Avenue. By eight o’clock it would be appropriated by the staff—clipped and ripped, its items marked and passed around and often rewritten for radio use. But Eli always kept the Broadway page, and at eight o’clock, when the morning crew was just shifting into high gear and Eli’s day was half finished, he could usually be found alone, at the most distant table in the yard, eating from a brown bag and reading about the new plays opening in the city.

  Now he was drawing water for his mop bucket. Jordan had lingered a moment to ask a question. “What do you know about a show called Freedom Road, Eli?”