TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  They wrapped it up in the late afternoon. He wanted to go on, would’ve gone through the weekend, but there was nothing left to do. Becky sighed and said, “Damn, we made it.” . . . The entire week was ready for air. No more rehearsals until the Hitler dress, Monday at seven.

  A sudden quiet fell over the soundstage. Only the five of them remained in the studio—Jordan and Livia, Becky, Stoner, and Rue— picking up stuff, putting things away. Soon even that was done and a vast chasm of time yawned before Monday night. The others felt it too: When Becky asked what they were doing tonight, he was surprised that none of them had plans. The early evening found them still together, walking on the beach, laughing at nothing, killing the hard time, in the grip of the coming week without feeling any need to talk about it. They drank beer on the boardwalk and ate together at the rooftop café, and the word “radio” was never said among them and nothing even hinting of shop talk.

  The season was waning, the crowds were gone. They had the roof to themselves and Rue pushed back the tables and fed nickels into the jukebox at the bottom of the stairs. They took turns dancing, overruling Jordan’s plea of two left feet, laughing when he stepped on them. The record changed and he shuffled across the floor with Livia while Harry James played “You Made Me Love You” up the stairwell to the evening stars. At one point she said, “I can’t figure you out, Jordan or Jack, whatever your name is.” But she held him close, as if she’d stopped trying.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Are you going to disappear too?”

  “What a question,” he said. But he answered it. “I might.”

  “Will you call me? . . . Keep in touch? Don’t answer that unless your word is good.”

  “It used to be. I’ve had to lie lately, but I don’t like it much.”

  “Then call me. That’s all. At some point, if you decide to drop off the earth, give me a call and let me know where you are. And what the hell happened.”

  At full dark night they were still walking, unwilling to break apart. Rue said, “I love you goddamn people,” and everyone laughed. “Don’t ask me why, you’re all such a pain in the ass, but I do.” Becky said, “I think the lady’s had one beer too many,” and they laughed again. They had reached her house, a small place on the beach not far from Holly’s. “Come on in, all of you, I’ll fix some coffee and send you safely on your way.”

  But inside there was still no feeling of hurry and no need to manufacture talk. Stoner had a show to do but that was more than two hours away.

  The telephone rang. Becky picked it up and said, “Yessir,” then stood speechless as if in shock.

  “That was Kidd,” she told them. “We made the front page.”

  It didn’t dawn on them what she was saying.

  “Palmer’s story is on the front page of the Sunday Times.”

  Now it dawned. Stoner whistled through his teeth and said, “Jesus.”

  “We made the front page,” Becky said.

  “We’re famous,” Rue said. “We’re famous, boys and girls.”

  “Kidd said it’s full of stuff like ‘powerful’ and ‘groundbreaking.’ ‘A legendary radio station goes back to its rabble-rousing roots.’ ‘Its opening week certain to spark raging controversy.’ ”

  “Wow, we’re famous.”

  “I guess it means we’ll have an audience,” Jordan said.

  “Are you kidding?” Stoner’s voice trembled. “Half the world will be listening to us Monday.”

  ( ( ( 18 ) ) )

  ENDLESS Sunday. He got through it somehow, alone.

  He arrived Monday morning at seven thirty and sat in his office with the Boer script, waiting for the staff to arrive. This was where his plan could quickly fall apart. He had never been to the mimeo room but he understood the protocol. It was something like a newspaper, where a reporter’s story goes through a system of editors. The reporter never jumps directly to the typesetter, and in radio the writer never goes to mimeo. The script is always seen by programming people, who read it and discuss it and then send it up. He had one advantage: this script had already been approved.

  At eight o’clock sharp he took his three rewritten pages across the building to the small room on the northwest corner. A woman he had seen only in passing nodded at him as he came in. She was in her forties and wore a name tag that said she was Harriet Simms.

  “Mr. Tenake, I believe. What brings you up to the north woods?”

  “I just need a few pages recut. I was told you’re the woman to see.”

  “You bet. You want ’em now?”

  He gave her a pleading smile. “Yesterday wouldn’t be too soon.”

  “Grab a seat, hon. Take about half an hour.”

  He was too nervous to sit. He stood just inside the door while she cut the stencils . . . tapping out the words, he hoped, without thinking what they said.

  “How many copies, hon?”

  “A dozen should do it.”

  He heard voices in the hall as people arrived for the day. They faded into the clatter of the mimeo when Harriet ran off his copies.

  “There ya go, hon.”

  “You’re a good woman, Harriet. I’d better get the stencils too.”

  For the first time he saw suspicion in her face. He shrugged and said, “We’re making lots of changes and I may have some more yet to come. I need to make sure everything’s accounted for. So the pages don’t get mixed up.”

  On the face of it this made no sense, but she handed over the stencils.

  “You’re sure this is okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He thanked her and left.

  Home free . . .

  Not quite.

  As he came out of the room, there was Barnet, talking to one of the office girls in the hall a few feet away.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Just getting some pages redone.”

  Barnet cut his eyes down to the stencils in his hand. “If there’s a problem, maybe I can help. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “No problem at all.”

  “Nice piece, by the way,” Barnet said to his back as he moved past.

  He stopped and turned.

  “In the Times,” Barnet said.

  “Yeah, it was. I seem to be having all the luck these days.”

  A close call.

  Now, if his real luck held, Barnet would take it no further. And if Barnet should ask Harriet what had just been done, Jordan had left nothing in the mimeo room that could be compared with the originals.

  In his office he cut the stencils into small pieces. He burned them in his wastebasket and crushed the ashes. Then he put the mimeo sheets in a file and locked the cabinet.

  Nothing to do now until the Hitler dress tonight. He had lunch with Maitland and they compared notes, and all that afternoon his sense of loss grew. He sat behind his locked door and pretended to write, keeping Becky and the world at bay.

  The show went off without a hitch. Dulaney felt the power of it rippling through the air.

  Zylla had outdone himself on the score. Hazel was perfect, Livia nothing less than brilliant in sound.

  The room was packed with people, all come to watch. At the end of it Harford leaned over the rail and smiled down on him. And in the back of the room he saw the two newspapermen, Butterfield of the Beachcomber and Palmer of the Times.

  Then it was over and the long night began.

  Then that was over.

  He opened his eyes after two hours’ sleep. It was Tuesday.

  ( ( ( 19 ) ) )

  HE had scheduled the Boer dress for late afternoon. Unusual for a final dress to be separated from its broadcast by five full hours, but it couldn’t be helped. Cumbersome, because it meant assembling the cast and orchestra twice. He had made up a lame excuse for it but no one had questioned him. No one questioned him about anything these days.

  He needed that gap in time, to make what he was about to do seem credible to Rue, who would read it. She must suspect noth
ing until she was on the air with the script in her face and no time to second-guess it. A dirty trick and he would have much to atone for, except for one small detail. He would never see her again after tonight.

  He spent the morning shutting down the house and preparing for a hasty escape. He would take with him the effects of their short life here. The scarf she had worn on the beach that day when she had followed him to the beer garden. The picture he had rescued from her house in Sadler. Her father’s watch, of course. In the kitchen drawer he found Carnahan’s final postcard and it tugged at his heart. It seemed to write a finish to her intentions, as if her own words had somehow failed to make them clear. She was never coming back . . . she was never even looking back.

  For the first time he opened her closet. She had left all her evening dresses, and he gathered them and folded them carefully in a box and put it in the trunk of his car. When the house had been stripped of her presence he wrapped his loaded gun in a rag and put it under the front seat. Then he locked up the house and shoved the key under the door.

  It was early afternoon when he arrived at the station. Becky had left a note taped to his door, a summary of the press on last night’s Hitler show. Raves in every New York newspaper. Tipped off by the Times, they had all been listening, and not a naysayer in the bunch. But this first show had been written for patriots and it would have been difficult for a critic to take issue with it.

  At three o’clock he went downstairs. The big studio was still empty, and he walked across the soundstage and clapped his hands and made a few adjustments to the drapes.

  Blake was the first to arrive. He was playing the lead, the goodhearted farm boy turned into a cold-blooded killer by a three-year war. He came to the empty producer’s table, looking for the scripts and suddenly at loose ends when they weren’t there. At three thirty Palmer came in and sat in the back row. Becky arrived, her arms full of scripts. The scripts were loose, each in a separate folder . . . easy to read, easy to rig. The cast trickled in and by four o’clock the orchestra was in place. Maitland had come to watch: he sat beside Stoner, out of the way in the booth, knowing that Jordan would direct from the floor. Kidd appeared in the open doorway, then stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him. Harford leaned out of the darkness on the balcony.

  Jordan called his cast together. “Okay, let’s do this right the first time, straight through without a stop.”

  He nodded at Zylla and the music began. Becky clicked on her stopwatch and an hour later they were done. A flawless dress, nonstop, just as he had ordered. “Fifty-nine fifteen,” Becky said.

  “Good. Now, cast, I’d like each of you to write your name on your script and leave it on the table with Miss Hart. I don’t want you to read it again, or even think about it, until airtime.”

  Jordan carried the scripts when he left. In his office, he replaced the three pages and burned the originals. Then he waited.

  He sat waiting for almost four hours.

  At eight thirty Becky knocked on his door. He sat perfectly still. She knocked again and called his name, urgently now. She rattled the doorknob, and a moment later he heard her hurrying away.

  He forced himself to stay where he was. Let it get good and crazy down there as the hour approached and he failed to arrive. Push it to the brink, to that point where they’d have to consider canceling the show. No sooner than that and for God’s sake no later.

  He could almost see the chaos building. Becky running in and out. Maitland out of the booth, willing to step in and direct it if someone could find the scripts. People swirling about, the orchestra tuning up, Kidd enraged, Harford anxious. All of them helpless in the face of the ticking clock.

  He looked at his watch. At quarter to nine he picked up the scripts and walked out of the room.

  Not a second to spare now. He clattered down the circular stairwell. Stopped to wedge open the outside fire door with a chair, then hurried on to the studio.

  Chaos, as he had imagined.

  He cut a swath through it. Becky popped up, yelling furiously over the din. He saw Kidd and Harford, Rue, Maitland, Stoner, Zylla.

  Zylla tapped his baton and the orchestra came to attention. Jordan went to center stage and doled out the scripts. It was six minutes to nine.

  He called the cast aside. Motioned Becky away and she shrank back, hurt, and sat at her table.

  Now the big lie. “We’ve found a memo from the author with some changes he intended to make.”

  He looked at Rue. “Most of it’s with your character . . . pages three and four. This shouldn’t give you any trouble. Just sight-read your way through it and you’ll be fine.”

  She nodded gravely, the good soldier, the old pro at twenty-one.

  He told Jane Shoemaker there would be no proxy to open the show. And the New York actor who would play Kruin would also have some changes. “Just read your way through them.”

  He looked at the clock. “The rest is exactly the same.”

  They scrambled to their microphones at 1:15, and the studio fell into that deep quiet as the clock ticked its way inside sixty seconds.

  Jordan took a long breath. The last face he saw was Livia’s. He smiled and gave her a victory sign.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The red light flashed. Jordan cued Eastman and the show was on the air.

  He cued Zylla. The music came up.

  He cued Rue.

  No proxy! . . . a shock to someone, but there was no time to look. Livia brought up the sound . . . the dusty, windy dirt streets at Germiston . . . the flapping of the tents . . . the muffled sounds of the hot, desolate boredom. Rue carried it alone through page two, sight-reading her way, her eyes always two lines ahead of her delivery, sweeping in what was yet to come. She turned the page and saw it at once. In that half second she saw everything. She knew what the change would do to her character, to her brother, to the play, to the point of it. She knew this faster than she could have said it and he could see it in her face. She read the last line of page two and looked to him for help.

  She was going to balk. She shook her head and made a tiny gesture of resistance, and Jordan got down in her face and made the hand signal to keep it going. She read the line without a break.

  “I loved a British soldier.”

  Now she trembled and took a long breath that wasn’t in the script. She looked at him again, almost pleading, and he coaxed her, the soul of kindness. She looked down at her script and never raised her head again.

  “I betrayed them all.”

  It was in. Let them cut him off the air now, it didn’t matter, the damage was done.

  He looked toward the door, where the light still flashed red. Back to the soundstage, where the show had settled into its natural rhythm. At the twenty-minute break he scanned the room and saw many shapes, but they were just specters in the heat of the moment.

  Another twenty minutes straight from the old script. Then the third shock, in the voice of Kruin. Margaret had never been raped. Her mother, her young sister . . . none of them raped. They had gone away to the north in the custody of the soldiers. The final scenes went skimming by, and the murder of the two British soldiers gave it a hollow feeling at the end.

  Music filled the studio and the shapes became people.

  There was Becky, too stunned to move. Rue, staring at the floor, taking no glory in her perfect performance. Kidd in the back of the room with his hand over his eyes, and Harford, still at the edge of the balcony, exactly where he’d been standing an hour ago.

  Dulaney hurled the script at them and walked out as the pages fluttered to the floor.

  Out in the parking lot he fetched his gun from under the seat. He stuck it in his belt and walked around the building, pulled open the fire door, and stepped inside.

  The door clicked shut and he stood there in the dark.

  ( ( ( 20 ) ) )

  HE felt his way to the crossing hall just below the circular staircase. There he stopped, looking down from the utility r
oom toward the studios and the lobby. The doors to Studio A had been propped open, throwing a bright beam of light into the hall, but no one had yet come out. It was more like a funeral than the end of a big broadcast, as quiet as if a hundred people had just vanished.

  Then Kidd appeared in the center of the light. He moved first one way and then the other, like a man who had lost his sense of direction.

  “Did you see which way he went?”

  Becky’s voice was teary. “I believe to his right, sir. Out through the lobby . . .”

  Kidd turned and vanished through the lobby doors and Becky came into the light looking tiny and tragic. A soft murmur arose in the distance as people finally began to talk. Now there was coughing and the clatter of musicians packing away their instruments.

  Palmer came into the doorway. “Miss Hart . . . could I ask you . . . what just happened in there?”

  “Not now, Mr. Palmer. Please.”

  “The play seemed strangely . . . pointless . . . Compared with the two scripts I read, it seemed to lack cohesion and power.”

  “Yessir. It did all that.”

  “You could sense the power in it. And then it seemed to just . . .”

  “Trickle away,” she said.

  “That’s it exactly. And that angry outburst by Mr. Ten Eyck at the end of it . . . as if someone tampered with it over his objections.”