TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  The final thirty minutes took no time at all. Holly sang a magnificent national anthem and it ended in a crushing wall of silence. Maitland had ordered that thirty seconds of dead air before Stoner threw it back to the network. At nine thirty Stoner gave a thumbs-up and the place exploded with ecstatic relief.

  Rick Gary embraced Rue and was now shaking hands with everyone. The doors opened and Barnet came in with his little company from upstairs. Hazel stood off to one side, her perfect performance as the scarf woman already forgotten in the hundred and one perfect things that had gone into the show. Pauline crossed the stage to give her compliments to the maestro. Poindexter sat alone where he’d been all night and Livia began packing her things away. Jordan looked up to the balcony and Harford gave him a small wave before vanishing somewhere into the wall.

  People milled about, the cast mingling with musicians and audience. The babble spilled into the halls, where Becky Hart began easing people toward the doors. There was still a band show to do later tonight and the room had to be cleared.

  At last Kidd called them all together for a talk. Kudos to everyone. “Miss Nicholas, you were exactly right for this part and I never should have thought otherwise. Mr. Brinker, Mr. Stallworth, Mr. Eastman, Miss Kemble, Mrs. Flack . . .” His eyes went around the room. . . . “To Mr. Stoner and our two most capable directors, Mr. Zylla and his incredible musical aggregation, to Mr. Poindexter and Miss Teasdale in sound—our thanks to you all. To Mr. Ten Eyck, whose powerful script came out of the blue only on Tuesday and made us all remember why we do this and what it’s all about. To Miss Holly O’Hara, who carried the day with the wonder of her voice. And a special thanks to Mr. Rick Gary, who passed up two network jobs tonight so he could come down here and help us out.”

  The glow of fellowship and accomplishment was heavy in the room and no one wanted to leave. Suddenly Jordan felt a presence at his right elbow. “Well, Jordan, we pulled it off,” Maitland said. “You look as if you never had a doubt.”

  “I don’t know why but I never did.”

  “The world’s your oyster now and you’re just starting to know it. In a real way this was your show, not mine. You’re going to be one of those people we were talking about. The ones for whom nothing ever goes wrong.”

  They said hello to Miss O’Hara, who had come up to join them.

  “The woman who made us,” Maitland said. “You know Jordan, Miss O’Hara?”

  Miss O’Hara smiled brilliantly. “Hello, Jordan. Of course we know each other.”

  ( ( ( 2 ) ) )

  THEY knew each other well. There was no loneliness now, not in the way he had known it before. None of that aching lack, of the empty bed and the empty nights, never a hand to push him away. The word love did no justice to what he felt for her, it was too easy to use on too many things that were temporary and cheap, as if she could be equated to apple pie or a change in the weather. There was nothing about her that he didn’t love. It was scary how strong the feeling was and how fast it grew, like nothing he had ever known or imagined. She was even a beautiful drunk.

  On a Sunday night in June she surprised him with a private celebration of his birthday. She had never been drunk and it didn’t take long for that happy high to arrive. She had bought a cake, elegantly decorated with thirty-three candles, and had a present gift wrapped in a little box. It was her father’s watch, gold-plated with a matching fob and the name CARNAHAN engraved on its face. He was touched, almost to tears, but she hushed him with her fingers to his lips. She showed him how it opened, how it had to be set from the inside, and they sat mesmerized by the delicate jeweled workings swinging back and forth in the candlelight. “It belonged to my grandfather,” she said. “He was a conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad, so it’s probably a pretty good piece. It’s been in my family for fifty years.”

  There wasn’t a hint of self-pity when she said, “Now there’s no more family, so I want you to have it.”

  A keepsake, she said. A remembrance.

  Dulaney didn’t tell her but of course it was her he wanted, not a remembrance. He knew if he said this the delicate mood she’d been trying to create would turn melancholy and vanish. She said, “Happy birthday, old man,” and for one crazy moment they hugged like the old friends they were. Then she kissed him, and the way she flicked her tongue was not at all old-friendly, nor was the way her smile turned sultry. “I’ve got another present for you, Dulaney. That one I’ll dole out later.”

  These were the oddest days of his life, forever colored by both her presence and her distance. They were together yet not together, she was his yet she belonged to no one, she had given him the greatest joy and at the same time there was a sorrow upon them that was never far away. This was a truth she never let waver. Their time was short; these days would pass and she’d be gone.

  Dulaney knew not to argue when she told him she was cursed. She had on her side the fact that everyone who had loved her had died badly, and if he tried to make her confront it she would get shaky and agitated. The key to everything, he thought, was the drowning of her sister and the crushing guilt she had carried for fifteen years. “You can’t imagine the horror,” she had told him. “That moment when you know she’s gone, and it’s your fault. You just can’t imagine.”

  The whiskey loosened her for a time and made her seem happy again. “Now for your second present,” she said later. “I’m going to vamp you, Dulaney. Would you like that?” She closed her eyes and put her hands behind her head, bunched up her hair, and gripped it tight. Her underarms were smooth as glass, her breasts pulled tight against the sleeveless top she wore. She made a rosebud with her mouth, like a kiss. Looking at her, he felt a shiver run through him; and she opened her eyes and trembled, and he knew the same ripple had gone through her.

  He could taste the whiskey on her tongue, he could see it in her eyes. She smiled, her face all friendly and sad, funny and dreamy and drunk in the same moment. She hiked off her top and wiggled out of her shorts, and her head bobbed. In the distant heights she wavered unsteadily. Her hands groped and joined them together. “Here we are . . . here we are . . . here we are . . .”

  They shuddered at the same time and her face went mushy and her nipples got tiny and hard. A long last push, the vamp’s postscript.

  “Happy birthday, old man.”

  Later, still wide awake, they dressed and walked to town in the dark. Sat over coffee in the all-night diner and watched the lights blink off along the pier. At some point he had to tell her what he’d been thinking, that she had been wrong about Harford from the beginning. When it came up on its own, as it usually did when they began to talk, he figured the time was now.

  She was looking through the plate glass window at the dark world. “He will drive me crazy if I let him. I get the feeling he’s out there, watching us. He’s always there.”

  Dulaney let a moment pass. Then he said it. “I don’t think it’s him. At least, not for the reasons you thought.”

  He saw the annoyance in her eyes and pushed ahead with his case.

  “You’ve been going on the notion that what your father wrote on that postcard had to be taken literally. If he said he interviewed with Harford, that had to mean the two of them had a face-to-face meeting at some point.”

  “What else could it mean?”

  “That your dad was already caught up in the spirit of the station when he wrote that. When he said, I went out and interviewed with Harford, that might mean nothing more than he went there and applied for the job.”

  “He said he saw Harford.”

  “But everyone calls the station Harford. It’s insider slang. Maybe he thought he’d told you that. I saw Harford might only mean that he got a tour of the building.”

  She hadn’t known that, and the news was disheartening.

  “Damn. If that’s true, I’m right back where I started from.”

  “No you’re not. I won’t ever let you go back there again.”

  At the counter he noti
ced the headline on the Times, which had just been thrown off the truck from New York.

  FBI SEIZES 8 SABOTEURS LANDED BY U-BOATS

  “Looks like we’re in big trouble,” she said. “Hitler’s coming after us.”

  “Not with those boys.” He looked down the column of newsprint. “Hoover got those bastards almost as soon as they got here.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sure Hitler’s got lots more where they came from.”

  ( ( ( 3 ) ) )

  AN air of fate hung over everything they did. Sometimes he’d catch her watching him sadly, as if he had already become part of her past. Then she’d come hug him to her breast and they’d lose themselves in an hour’s lovemaking. At noon they talked. About her father and Harford and the station. About Kendall and how he had appeared in Dulaney’s life, how he had died in Holly’s house, and what this might mean. Only once had she mentioned Dulaney’s legal predicament and what might happen if he was caught. She had no illusions about the harshness of the criminal justice system in the year 1942. She knew what he could expect from the people of California. He could do five years. A miner she knew was doing ten years for escape. “His original crime had been something silly, like yours. It started as a fight in a bar. But of course there was a woman in his life to make it worse. He had a frail-looking child bride eight months into a dangerous pregnancy, so he escaped, broke out to be with his wife. They said he used a gun in the breakout.”

  “A gun always doubles the judgment.”

  “But at his trial he swore there’d been no gun. I believed him because I knew him. But the deputies were all against him.”

  “Not surprising,” he said. “Deputies never like to admit that you got away easy.”

  “And they’ll do that to you.”

  “Maybe.”

  Anyway, there was no use beating it to death. It served no useful purpose to worry about what couldn’t be helped. So life went on; he went to work by day and at night she did the same, and for those who pried they stuck to their story: that they had met working together on the war bond show and nature took its course. For now it was enough that they no longer had to hide, that they were together and it was common knowledge. Let them kill us, but if they do they’d better get us both, because the one who’s left will burn this place to the ground.

  But she kept her word. Never once in those days did she ask him to leave. She wouldn’t leave and so he couldn’t, and some things went without saying.

  Today she was angry. She had overheard some gossip, her own boys talking too much in the club, and she had walked out of the rehearsal and left them hanging. “They were talking about us,” she said, and that’s all she would tell him. Dulaney could piece it together for himself. The prevailing view was that she had been willing to sacrifice what could have been her own major career for the sake of his minor one, so God bless Jordan Ten Eyck for keeping her here. “Let them talk,” he said. “They’re only interested because we’re such a good beauty-and-the-beast story.” She made a face and turned away from him. “If that’s true, it’s because they haven’t figured out yet which of us is the beast.”

  No, he said, people just liked to talk, and they would always talk about someone whose past was shrouded in mystery. They still didn’t know who she was or where she’d come from. Rumor had it that she had turned down at least three offers to go with big-name bands in New York. One was a fabulous deal with a recording contract and a twice-a-week network airshot from Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook. It was the break of a lifetime but the man had told her she had to take it or leave it. “When you need someone, you need her now,” she said. “You don’t need her a year from now, if she can satisfy herself even then about the matter of her father’s death.” She looked at Dulaney over a flickering lamp. “The funny part is, I don’t seem to care much.”

  “There’ll be time later. You’ll still have your voice.”

  She reached over and took his hand, touching it to her lips. “That’s the great thing about you, Jack. You’re always on my side and you never ask for anything.”

  “There’s nothing more to want.”

  “But you’ve never even asked about the man you saw in my house that morning. Weren’t you curious? . . . Didn’t you wonder?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “Were you jealous, Dulaney? Did you suffer?”

  He told her how terribly he had suffered, how jealous he had been.

  “Good.” She laughed wickedly. “I should let you wonder about that.”

  But the night ended happily. The man was an agent, down from New York to twist her arm. He had been there less than an hour.

  ( ( ( 4 ) ) )

  SOMETIMES she woke him, but just as often he was up and working when she got home in the early morning. He seldom slept more than five hours: four was normal, and he could go for a week on three hours a night without getting fatigued. His best writing time was the three-hour block beginning at 2 or 3 A.M., after four hours of deep sleep. His eyes would open to entire scenes playing across the black universe, concepts that had come so vividly to life after years of stewing in his blood, waiting for him to discover a perfect medium for their use. He would get up at once, pausing only to dress and make coffee; then he’d sit at her kitchen table with the doors wide open and the roar of the surf loud in the room, and he’d write out his vision in longhand, as fast as he could make the words. Later in his cubicle he would put it all into script, and in this typewritten rewrite the thing would come truly to life and take its final form for the air.

  In the two weeks following the war bond show he had written a new script every day. Six of these were self-contained plays, stories with no intent to expand or continue. Four were for the colored show, giving him a backlog that would carry them well into August. The other five were the opening chapters of his Dark Silver racetracker serial, which he would finish this morning and turn in as a unit.

  He knew Kidd was astonished at his versatility and pace, and there were days when he surprised himself. Kidd was stockpiling his scripts, hoarding them for the lean times when the station would separate from the network and need all the muscle it could get. Each morning at ten Becky Hart would drift through the bullpen and almost invariably he’d have something new for her to take down to Kidd. “They’re excited that you’re doing a serial,” she told him. “Those things can be real audience grabbers.”

  He had now directed three of the Negro shows without help and was beginning to feel at home on the soundstage. The Times had taken note of it: twice they had praised the show’s writing and courage, in small squibs down in the radio column. Rue had come in for high praise in her dual role as the Grimké sisters, and Ali Marek was taking to radio in quantum leaps. The work itself was invigorating. Except for the specter of Carnahan, these were the days of his life. Kidd was giving him almost unlimited freedom. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” Becky had said. “That’s the word from the mountain.”

  He was free of continuity, of time clocks, and the heavy hand of Clay Barnet. Kidd now encouraged him to develop his own projects, certain that what he did would at least be good air, and at best he had written some things that would rattle the timbers of New York radio when they aired next month. But there was always a greater purpose in his life. He walked the halls at odd hours and looked in dark corners.

  He wrote in the morning, and in the afternoon he drifted around watching everyone, acquainting himself with all the different pieces that went into a good broadcast. He spent time in the booth with Maitland, watching the old man direct. He sat on the rooftop with Stoner and discussed the pivotal role of the engineer. “I’m your righthand man, champ,” Stoner said, squeaking back in his chair. “Just leave all the technical stuff to me and you worry about the story and the sound and the music.”

  He got a crash course from Zylla on the uses of music in drama, then spent an afternoon with Livia in the sound room between the first-floor studios. A new door had been adde
d, giving direct access to both soundstages. Dozens of symphonies and miscellaneous recordings, from jazz to classics, from white-hot trumpet solos to lush strings and harps, were being added to the record library, so that a musical background of almost any kind could be created in the absence of a live orchestra. All the sound effects records were being replaced. “Ours were terrible,” Livia said. “We hadn’t upgraded them in years; they were so scratchy it made me cringe every time I used them.”

  That night, alone at Holly’s kitchen, he thought about it all, and in the morning he awoke with a powerful new story ready to write. He saw Carnahan marching in a group of faceless men under guard, and suddenly he knew that what he had was the first of his prison camp stories.

  There before him was a long straight set of railroad tracks, shimmering in the sun. A sign flashed in his face and he had just a glimpse of the word MAYNARD before it changed and became FLORENCE. He was in a small town in upstate South Carolina, where a train packed with ragtag prisoners was being unloaded by men in gray. The prisoners were prodded along at gunpoint, sometime in the autumn of 1864. Sherman was cutting across Georgia and the Rebels had decided to evacuate their prison camp at Andersonville, leaving behind the sick and dying. Among the able-bodied who could walk, there was a lightness of spirit and a feeling of hope. Wherever they were going, it could only be a far better place than the hellhole they’d come from. The war was all but over. All we’ve got to do, Carnahan said as they trudged up the dusty road leading out of Florence, is hang on for a little longer. Dulaney couldn’t see the face of the man he spoke to, they were both somewhere far ahead in the column of men, but he knew Carnahan’s voice and the profile was clear: the only one wearing a modern-day fedora.