SERGEANT SALINGER
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Jerome Charyn
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SERGEANT SALINGER
Jerome Charyn
First published in the United States in 2021 by
Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street
Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
© 2021 by Jerome Charyn
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Charyn, Jerome, author.
Title: Sergeant Salinger / Jerome Charyn.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2021
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002574 (print) | LCCN 2020002575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658825 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781942658740 (paperback paper) | ISBN 9781942658757 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-2010—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3553.H33 S47 2021 (print) | LCC PS3553.H33 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002574
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002575
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
hardcover ISBN: 978-1-942658-82-5
paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-74-0
ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-75-7
Contents
Prelude: Oona
Part One: Slapton Sands
Part Two: The Far Shore
Part Three: Cherbourg
Part Four: The Commandant of the Ritz
Part Five: The Green Hell
Part Six: Luxembourg, High and Low
Part Seven: Kaufering Lager IV
Part Eight: Krankenhaus 31
Part Nine: The Grand Inquisitor
Part Ten: Dracula’s Daughter
Part Eleven: Doris
Coda: Bloomingdale’s on Sleepy Hollow Lane
SERGEANT SALINGER
PRELUDE
Oona
April 1942
1.
VOLUPTU-U-U-U-U-OUS.
She was sixteen and entitled to sit at the king’s lair, Table 50, where Winchell presided. Tonight, on a whim, he wore his lieutenant commander’s uniform with his initials embroidered in gold near his heart. He was dying to serve on a battleship. But FDR said he was much more valuable writing his column and protecting the home front. He had vitriol for everyone—J. Edgar Hoover, Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, Mayor La Guardia, Ethel Barrymore, and Eugene O’Neill, the father of this voluptuous child.
She’d been coming to the Stork since she was fifteen and a half. Winchell called her “New York’s New Yorkiest debutante” in his column. She had dark lashes, dark eyes, and dark hair. She’d arrive at the Stork in her school uniform—she went to Brearley, the swankiest prep school on the Upper East Side. The headmistress had complained about her dual role, as a Brearley girl and nightclub debutante. But Winchell was her protector now, and he could ruin Brearley’s reputation with the bat of an eye. No one, not even the devil, wanted one of his barbs in “On Broadway,” with all its syndication rights. Winchell could drown Brearley in a sea of print.
He pretended to cover his eyes with his tiny, childish paws. “Oona, I can’t bear to look. You break my heart every damn day of the week.”
She pouted at him with her bloodred lips. “You wouldn’t be happy, Uncle Walt, unless I did.”
She had her own closet at the Stork, where she could park her Mary Janes and put on peep-toe pumps. She wore a strapless affair tonight that she had found while rummaging through Klein’s bargain basement. She couldn’t afford to shop at Saks, even if her daddy had won the Nobel Prize and was the most pampered playwright in the Free World. She’d only seen him once or twice since she was two. He’d abandoned her and had another wife—a real witch—while Oona and her mother had to live on crumbs at a crappy hotel.
Table 50 could seat Winchell and nine other souls, but since he was feuding with everybody except Frank Costello, the club’s master table looked like a gallery of ghosts. Costello sat in his usual spot, with his immaculate fingernails and silver hair. Next to him was Mr. B., the owner of the Stork. Mr. B. had been a bootlegger and had spent time in Leavenworth, but that didn’t keep high society away from the Stork. He was the one who had the idea of luring debutantes into the club. He called them “jelly beans,” with a touch of ridicule. But it was good business. They pulled in all the traffic. Besides, he liked the constant allure of young, pretty girls. And Oona was the prettiest and most voluptuous of them all—a timid tigress, ready to burst out of the seams of whatever dress she wore. She seemed distracted tonight, guarding the chair next to hers when she should have been concentrating on Winchell and his wants. He had made her a celebrity, a girl whose only career was to sit and pose at Table 50 while the Stork’s female photographers snapped her picture. Her daddy had seen shots of his debutante daughter in Redbook and Mademoiselle and the New York Post with her bosoms on display and her lips as swollen as a vampire about to suck some blood. He had telephoned Winchell at the Stork a month ago. The captains didn’t have to bother carrying a big black clunky phone into the Cub Room. Winchell always had a black telephone near him at Table 50. He took Eugene O’Neill’s call. The playwright said that Walter Winchell was turning his daughter into a whore, and that she would be much better off studying to be a nurse or getting a job in an airplane factory after she graduated from high school, or perhaps she could be the first lady announcer at Ebbets Field and dance with Leo Durocher when the Dodgers went to bed.
“Gene,” Winchell said, growing familiar with the playwright, “do ya know how many soljers and sailors populate the Stork every night? It’s a regular serviceman’s paradise. And your luscious daughter, sir, gives them a few moments
of delight just by sitting at the debutantes’ table … and dancing the rhumba with a general or two. I wouldn’t let your little girl dance with Durocher. Good night, good night, Mr. O’Neill,” he shouted within earshot of the entire Cub Room. And he didn’t attack O’Neill in his column when he could have. The Iceman Never Cometh. He wouldn’t dare.
FDR also telephoned him at the club. The Boss might want some political favor, and Winchell was prepared to deliver at any cost. But he didn’t like his debutante coveting an empty chair at Table 50. It unnerved him. He’d made the Stork, and could unmake it if he moved to another club, just as he could strip Oona of whatever polish she thought she had as the club’s Debutante of the Year.
And then this lanky boy sat down next to Oona, with big ears and olive skin and a Gypsy’s dark eyes. A tall Yid, Winchell muttered. He himself was a Yid who never got beyond the sixth grade.
“Oona darling, where did you find this squirt?” He didn’t wait for an answer, never did. He stared at Mr. B. “Sherm, how did Big Ears get through the gold chain? Did he fly into the Cub Room, like Dumbo?”
“He’s on Oona’s guest list,” Mr. B. said, having to pay court to Winchell at his own club.
“He’s still a squirt.”
“He is not,” Oona said, her shoulders bristling. “He’s one of my beaux, Sonny Salinger, the short-story writer. And you can call him Jerry or J. D. if you like.”
“I’ll call him ‘squirt.’”
Costello had to intervene. “Winchell, be nice to the kid. This isn’t a barroom brawl. Apologize to Oona and her boyfriend.”
Frank Costello didn’t own the Stork Club, even if some people thought he did. But he owned Manhattan. Every mobster south of Boston paid fealty to him.
“Apologize,” Costello sang, with a slight scratch of menace in his musical voice.
“I can’t,” Winchell said. “It’s not in my nature, Mr. Frank.”
“Sir,” Sonny said, standing up and towering over the table at six feet two and a half. “I can defend myself.”
“Call me Frank,” Costello said. “You’re a writer, and you should be afraid of Winchell. He could wreck your career. That’s what he is, a wrecker.”
“Damn right,” Winchell said.
Oona panicked over her latest cavalier. “Jerry’s had a story accepted by The New Yorker. They had to postpone the story on account of Pearl Harbor. They couldn’t publish a Christmas story after Pearl. He’s been in Esquire and—”
“We don’t need a list of Sonny’s accomplishments, sweetheart,” Costello said. “He’s welcome at the table. He’ll be our guest of honor.”
Winchell brooded for a moment.
“Hey, Sonny,” he said from under his elbow, “who would ya like to meet?”
Sonny wasn’t shy about his own worth as a writer. He’d told Oona how much he despised the Stork Club and all its glitter. The famous were like lapdogs waiting to lick and be licked. But he still grabbed at a chance to enter the lion’s den. It was a writer’s privilege, his education, his descent into the dirt.
He recognized Hemingway a few tables behind him, with that rugged handsomeness—this wasn’t the Hem he admired. He worshipped the apprentice in Hemingway, writing like a trapped panther in Paris cafés, not the sanctified and fêted “Papa” of Key West and Cuba. The panther had broken out of his cage. He must have come to Manhattan to meet with his publisher and rub elbows at the Stork. Early fame had ruined him.
“Isn’t that Mr. Hemingway sitting there?” he asked.
Winchell didn’t even bother to look behind him. “Hemmy,” he shouted, “come over here! A kid wants to meet ya, a member of your fan club—Sonny Salinger.”
Sonny heard a weak, high-pitched midwestern twang. “Winchell, I thought we were having a feud.”
“We are, Ernie boy. But I’m calling a truce.”
Hemingway rose up from his banquette with a boxer’s litheness and danced over to Table 50 on the balls of his feet. He kissed Oona’s hand with that resolute charm of his, that irrepressible smile. “How are you, Miss Oona? Has Sherm been looking after you?”
“Mr. Billingsley is very kind. He pays for all my meals.”
“As he should,” said Hemingway, “as he should. You’re his ideal ornament…. Hello, Mr. Frank.”
Sonny could feel Hemingway’s admiration for this prime minister of the mob who behaved like a country squire. “How are they treating you in Cuba, kiddo?”
“Swell,” Hemingway said. “I’ve been chasing Nazi submarines.”
“How many subs have you lassoed so far?” Winchell asked. “Five—six? Two dozen?”
Hemingway ignored him. He looked at Sonny Salinger with the same irrepressible smile. It was hard to resist. He had a shyness, despite the iron grip of his hand. “Pleased to meet you, kid.”
Sonny froze. He’d never been tongue-tied before, even in the tightest situation.
“Cardinal-Lemoine,” he finally blurted out. “Street where you lived, with Bumby and your first wife. I—I went on a pilgrimage to Paris, sat at your café on the place de la Contrescarpe. I gave a few centimes to the clochards. I only had a week, only one. That’s all my budget would allow, but I drank in as much as I could.”
Hem lost his enchanted smile. His eyes wandered. He wasn’t that young writer freezing his ass off in a café on the Contrescarpe, uncelebrated, with a wife and child, scribbling muscular, modernistic tales in a blue notebook.
“Contrescarpe,” Hem muttered. “It was a long time ago. I can’t work in cafés. I have a bad back. Have to stand when I write…. I don’t have Walter’s clout. FDR will send him anywhere. I’d have to join up as a war correspondent. What about you, Salinger?”
“Tried to enlist,” Sonny said. “They wouldn’t have me.”
He had a slight heart murmur, the docs had told him at his physical, and he was a ball-less wonder, born with an unde-scended testicle.
Winchell was seething. It was his table, and he was abandoned, left out of the little tête-à-tête. “What does your father do, Big Ears?”
Sonny would have liked to slap Winchell’s own big ears, but he was Oona’s guest. And he didn’t want her to be banished from Table 50 by this petty tyrant in his toy uniform.
“My father imports Polish ham,” Sonny said.
“Then he must be rich,” cackled the king of the Cub Room. “Where do ya live?”
“On Park Avenue,” Sonny said.
Winchell couldn’t stop cackling. “Mr. Frank, now I get it. Oona has brought her own playboy to the Stork.”
“Walter,” Costello said, “stop riding the kid. You can’t hold Park Avenue against him.”
Sonny could see that flair of madness in Winchell’s eyes, like a white-hot maze. “Who’s riding him? I’m the innocent party.”
“You’re always innocent,” Hemingway said. “Can I leave now, Walter?”
“No,” Winchell said with that same sinister flair. “Sit. Keep us company.”
Hem could have gone back to his own table—that’s how Sonny saw it. Hem was the most celebrated novelist we had, while poor Scott Fitzgerald, who had died over a year ago of a broken heart, was half-forgotten. Hem wasn’t a ghost, like Scott. He could have laughed in Winchell’s face, but he sat down at Table 50, a good little boy. He was angling to become a colonel with his own battalion. But the War Department was deaf to his pleas. And he knew how close Walter was to FDR. So he hunkered down and ate a chicken hamburger à la Walter Winchell, like everybody else at Winchell’s table. The chef prepared it with relish and onions and sweet potato pie. Walter drank Bordeaux and buttermilk.
Oona couldn’t sip wine while the Stork’s female photographers wandered about with their Speed Graphics. So she had an eggnog without the cognac and would steal a sip of wine from Walter’s glass whenever the Speed Graphics weren’t around.
Sonny swabbed his chicken burger in mustard, and Walter watched every swab.
“You’ll ruin your appetite, kid,” Walter said. �
�Mustard isn’t good for the sinuses—or the soul.”
No one was immune to Walter’s wrath, except perhaps Costello. But even Mr. Frank, powerful as he was, didn’t want to wind up a “lasty” in one of Walter’s columns—it was the kiss of death, to be the very last item in Winchell’s rat-tat-tat. Sonny could imagine his own obit in “On Broadway.” A certain snot-nosed scribbler with the initials J.D.S. was declared unphffft by his draft board for having one ball too little or one too many.
Phffft was Walter’s favorite word. It defined the end of something, the ultimate split. A marriage or a friendship could phffft, and so could your life or your career. But Walter used that word with an éclat all his own. He took one bite of his chicken hamburger, and as he passed a finger across his throat, like a man sentencing another man to the guillotine, he whispered, “Phfffft.”
Then he snarled at Mr. B. “Summon Bruno.”
All action froze at Table 50 until a huge man in a toque that looked like an enormous white mushroom lumbered up the stairs next to the bar—the kitchen was in the bowels of the club.
Bruno, who’d been Mr. B.’s chef for years, was even taller than Sonny, and reached the chandeliers in his magnificent hat. El Morocco wanted to steal him away, but he was devoted to Sherm. Still, he ignored all the maharajas at Table 50, including Frank Costello, Walter, and Mr. B., and bowed to Oona, with that white mushroom still covering his scalp.
“How are you, ma belle?”
She glanced at him with her dark eyes. “I’m in perfect shape, Bruno, but Uncle Walt is having a fit, and God knows why.”
And now the chef deigned to notice Walter with a flick of his brows. “What’s wrong, W.W.?”
“Everything,” Winchell said, his voice much more timid in the presence of that toque. “Your assistant didn’t grind the chicken in my burger. It tastes like oatmeal.”
Bruno removed a Lucky Strike from a silver case and stood there until Mr. B. found his cigarette lighter and prepared the flame. Then he sucked on his Lucky and blew smoke rings at Walter Winchell.
Sergeant Salinger Page 1