Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “Would I have a sous-chef prepare the chicken burgers at Table Fifty? I ground the chicken with my own two hands.”

  Walter was still suspicious. “Did you use the same kosher butcher?”

  “That butcher is on strike. Someone bombed the premises.”

  “Phffft,” Walter said without a whisper. “Then the tale is told. My burger is treif. I can always tell.”

  “Not exactly,” Bruno said. “Mr. Frank helped us find a butcher at a different location. And that butcher is certified by rabbinical law. But if you aren’t happy, W.W., I can have the busboys clear the table and serve you something else. Let’s say roast of veal à la Sonja Henie.”

  “Never mind,” Walter said. “We can’t interrupt a meal, just like that. But next time, I wanna be warned.”

  “I’ll have a note sent up from the kitchen,” Bruno said. “I promise.” And he winked at Oona. “Who’s this handsome young chap at your side? I’ve never seen him at the Stork.”

  “He’s my favorite suitor, Sonny Salinger.”

  Bruno laughed. “How many do you have?”

  “Dozens,” she said, defiant in front of that lopsided white hat. “But Sonny tops them all. Sonny takes me to museums—and took me to the Stanley once to see a Soviet film.”

  “Which Soviet film, ma belle?”

  Oona’s arm curled out like a delicious snake. “Oh, there were knights with steel on their noses, and they all fell into the ice….”

  “Alexander Nevsky,” Hem said, like a film scholar with a midwestern squall. “It was Eisenstein’s epic nod to Stalin. The prince of Novgorod destroys the Teutonic invaders in a decisive battle on the ice—I’ve watched that battle scene ten times. I memorized every shot.”

  “Hemmy, what are you talking about?” Walter grumbled.

  “Nothing,” Hemingway said as he dug his fork into the sweet potato pie.

  Bruno returned to his dungeon downstairs and left Table 50 to its feast of kosher chicken burgers. Sonny could have been sitting at a monk’s table. None of the camera girls came around. Everyone chewed in silence. Walter’s skin was pink under the chandeliers, like an irascible cherub. Sonny had come to a madhouse—filled with movie stars. He noticed Peter Lorre and Akim Tamiroff sitting at a corner banquette. He noticed Merle Oberon, watched her like a scavenger, as if he could feel her contours, grill into her flesh. He’d joined the drama club, Mask and Spur, at Valley Forge Military Academy. He played all the women’s roles in a company of male cadets. He was Juliette to a weak-chinned Romeo; he was Desdemona and Lady Macbeth, his face smeared with charcoal. He was also manager of the fencing team and a member of the French club. He wrote plays and stories with the help of a flashlight under his blanket after the bugler’s bedtime call. His mother sent him clippings of his favorite movie stars while he sat in rural Pennsylvania among the other cadets and imagined himself as Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper.

  Sonny had dreamt of a Hollywood career during his days at Mask and Spur, though his father considered acting a bum’s profession and wanted Sonny to follow him into the importing of cheese and Polish ham. Sonny acquiesced—a little, promising to learn at least two foreign languages. He spent nine months abroad after graduation, mostly in Vienna, where he lived with the Tinkelmans, in the Jewish quarter. He had a tiny room in their mazelike apartment on Dorotheergasse, and was smitten by the Tinkelmans’ blond daughter, Lisalein, who was already promised to another man, a student rabbi selected by her father.

  Lisa had translucent skin that glowed in the dark. She read Rilke, and was a terrible flirt. She wouldn’t meet with Sonny outside her father’s flat, and their rendezvous were a few stolen minutes in the maid’s closet, where they’d kiss while Lisa left Sonny to fumble in the great enigma of her undergarments, with their endless snaps and ribbons. They’d communicate with notes hidden under a pillow, or inside Sonny’s shoe. It exhausted him, this romance without a future and barely a present tense.

  He fled to Paris on a third-class ticket, arrived at the Gare de l’Est, with its blinding dome of light, like a religious awakening, took the Métro to the Panthéon, registered at the first fleabag hotel he could find, and prowled the streets like a panther, Hemingway’s panther; Sonny was searching for his own apprenticeship—in Paris. He slid along the slippery stones of the rue Mouffetard, with a chunk of bread and blue cheese in his fist, settled in a café on the Contrescarpe, and wrote. He could never be a purveyor of cheese and ham, like his father. He’d have to sacrifice Hollywood and an acting career. He’d been a scribbler at Valley Forge, since he was seventeen, with that flashlight under the blankets. And here he was at the Stork, among all the celebs, with Hemingway right across from him. Hem’s eyes were fluttering; his hands shook, as if he were about to have a seizure.

  Sonny realized that Hem had his own insane streak, like Walter. Hem was sick of Walter’s company, sick of having to pretend that he was at some royal table. But he wouldn’t excuse himself—that wasn’t a maneuver he admired. He was filled with tauromania. He wrote and lived like a matador.

  “Walter, what would happen if there was a whirlwind, and you lost every ghostwriter and press agent and gossiper in Manhattan? You’d freeze to death. You’d have to go off the air, and your column wouldn’t be worth shit.”

  “Watch your mouth,” said the mob’s prime minister with his silver hair. “We have a schoolgirl at the table.”

  “My apologies to Miss Oona,” Hem said. But his eyes still fluttered. “I was addressing the douchebag.”

  Walter took another bite of his chicken burger. “Hemmy, you don’t want to tangle with me. You’re not in my league, and you never were. I don’t need ghosts. Phffft! And you’re gone.”

  “Yeah,” Hemingway said. “I read you, Walter—religiously. I’m one of your biggest fans. You haven’t been so kind to Oona and her friends—you call them ‘debutramps.’”

  Spittle appeared on Walter’s lower lip. “I never wrote an unkind word about Oona O’Neill in my life.”

  The matador had a crooked smile, attacking with his own invisible lance. “What about that lasty of yours from a few weeks ago? I can repeat it word for word, Walter, word for word. ‘What luscious debutramp arrives at the Stork night after night and keeps her own wardrobe in Mr. B.’s personal closet? Is she or is she not one of the O’Neills?’”

  Walter lost his pink complexion. “I never said that…. Oona, he’s lying.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Uncle Walt.”

  “Hemmy, you can go back to your table now—class dismissed.”

  The matador crossed his arms and rocked in a chair quilted with satin. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Uncle Walt. I’m having a wallop of a time.”

  “I’m warning you,” the columnist said.

  Oona rose out of her chair like a sixteen-year-old goddess with her own festivity of flesh and interrupted Walter’s counterattack. “Jerry, let’s dance.”

  Walter was alarmed. He didn’t enjoy being abandoned by one of his protégées in the middle of a battle. He couldn’t thrive without an audience. Oona was ungrateful, a spoiled brat, like all the other little society sluts.

  “Wait,” he squealed. “You haven’t finished your burger.”

  But Sonny escorted her out of the Stork’s inner sanctum, and they passed through the plebian glass door of the main dining room, where all the “civilians” ate, drank, danced, and gossiped without a glimpse of Merle Oberon and Akim Tamiroff. It was an L-shaped room, with a terrific din that bounced off the mirrors and chandeliers. From time to time, Mr. B. would make his appearance, and signal to the waiter that a certain diplomat at Table 5 was to have a magnum of Piper-Heidsieck on the house. Otherwise he didn’t mingle with the civilians unless there happened to be a brawl. Then he would assume the icy air of a bootlegger and banish the guilty parties from his club for life. But he could sense that Oona would create a stir. She was in all the papers and fashion magazines, thanks to Sherman Billingsley and his roving camera girls. Men and women were rivete
d to her looks. A cub reporter had sneaked into Brearley and photographed Oona in her gym suit with a pair of hips that were like pliable knife blades. No prep school girl should have flowered like that—it was almost an assault on the nerves.

  So Mr. B. signaled for the society band to scat, and in an instant it was replaced on the tiny bandstand by Lenny’s Latin Rialtos. The citizens, who danced between courses, could catch the Rialtos’ rhythms like a regular heartbeat; it was a kind of tourist rhumba, where the dancers never missed a step. But Oona was different. Oona was trouble.

  Often she danced alone, and she forced the Rialtos to quicken their pace, or they couldn’t keep time to the flurry of her hips. Oona was their enchantress, and she came out onto the floor with Sonny Salinger, expecting to teach him a few tricks. But he seized her with alacrity, and she spun around him like a spindle on a silken thread. While she swayed, Sonny’s hips held to a tight line, forcing her into a pattern of alternating currents, very fast and very slow.

  “Jerry,” she whispered, barely able to catch her breath. The maracas were always one beat behind. The Rialtos could only find Sonny’s rhythm with a constant tapping of their toes. Soon there were no other dancers. The civilians couldn’t keep up with the clack of Oona’s heels. They returned to their tables and watched a rhumba that was beyond their own measure.

  “Jerry, gee whiz, when we were at the museum, I didn’t—”

  “Quiet, Oona,” he said, “or you’ll fall.”

  “Never would have figured that you could dance like that.”

  And as she stumbled, Sonny gathered her up in his arms and returned her faltering body to the rhythms he had imposed upon the Rialtos and their rattler on the bandstand.

  “Where’d you learn?”

  He held her motionless for an instant; the rattles stopped. “I have an older sister. Been doing the rhumba since I was five—with her and my mom.”

  “Alexander Nevsky,” she muttered in Sonny’s arms. “Ice.”

  And that’s when Sonny felt a persistent tap on his shoulder. It was the king of Table 50, the shyster himself, a head shorter than Sonny in his lieutenant commander’s uniform.

  “Big Ears, can I borrow Oona for a sec? I’d like to show the civilians what the rhumba is really like—à la Walter Winchell.”

  Sonny could have defied Winchell, sent him flying across the dance floor, but he would have hurt Oona, wrecked his own chances with her. He was crazy about this Brearley bombshell, possessed by her, lost in her wake. He wanted to marry Miss Oona O’Neill. But his own father had compared a short-story writer to a rag merchant. “Sonny, your margin is very slim. An editor dies, or catches bronchitis, and you’re out on the street.”

  So Sonny acquiesced and let Winchell clasp Oona with his childlike fingers. And he was startled by the columnist’s gusto. Winchell was a natural song and dance man. He took over the room with every stab of his hips. Oona was nothing more than his accomplice. He swayed with her, clutched her hand, and the Rialtos held to his heartless rhythm. Her exquisite beauty remained in the background somehow, divorced from the synchronized patter of his tiny feet. Winchell was the rhumba artist. Soon he let her hand slip, and performed a solo. Sonny could never have imagined this squat little guy as such a spark plug—a rooster without the wattles. The citizens couldn’t stop clapping. “Walter, Walter.” And suddenly all the swaying stopped. He took Sonny aside, left Oona flat in the middle of a rhumba.

  “I can give you a hundred a week,” Walter said.

  Sonny stared at him, utterly bewildered.

  “You can be my ghost,” Walter said. “I saw the look in Hemmy’s eyes—he recognizes talent.”

  “Hemingway hasn’t read a word I’ve written.”

  “Don’t be such a snob,” Walter said. “I’m not asking you to kibbitz, or find new material—you’ll polish whatever I have in the box.”

  “Like your own personal Spinoza,” Sonny said.

  “Call it whatever you like, Big Ears—a ghost is a ghost. You’ll never starve.”

  “I’m not starving now,” Sonny said.

  He returned to Oona and picked up where he had left off in his own Manhattan-style rhumba, learnt on the living room rug with his mother and sister as his dancing partners, while his father, Solomon—or Sol—Salinger, who was almost as handsome and tall as Sonny, in pearl gray suspenders and onyx cuff links, would mock his whole family, mimic every single one, and mutter, “What a bunch of troopers. My very own vaudeville act.”

  It was Sonny who was the real target of his attack, Sonny who wouldn’t follow him into imported ham and cheese and earn a proper living, but kept on writing stories, scratch by scratch, as “the Park Avenue bohemian.”

  Sonny hated Sol—no, he didn’t hate his dad, just couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. So the Stork Club was a kind of solace, with its cornucopia of ashtrays that seemed to disappear right off the tables, its magical crop of movie stars in the Cub Room, the accident of meeting “Hemmy,” the wordsmith matador he admired most when he himself started to write. Winchell was another matter—the guy he had to tolerate, like a pet rodent. But here he was with Oona, at the Stork, in a room full of mirrors, and once Winchell stopped dancing, his aura seemed to fade, and it was his dark-eyed “debutramp” who flashed wall-to-wall, her image multiplying and mutating in the glass as her voluptu-u-u-u-u-ous body rippled, until Sonny seized her hand, led her past Walter Winchell, past the cloakroom, where he collected her cashmere coat, past Mr. B.’s gold chain, and right out of the Stork.

  2.

  THEY WERE IN LA GUARDIA LAND NOW, and the mayor, who also served as the overlord of civil defense, believed in a perpetually-dark town, where streetlamps left a stuttering haze after the nearest Con Ed plant had been taken partially off the grid, while searchlights on the tallest rooftops, roaring with their own generators, tried to flag a rogue Messerschmitt that might suddenly appear in the blue-black sky in some mythical air raid. Sonny realized that the mayor was out of his mind. That mythical Messerschmitt would have had to refuel and refuel again and again on its voyage from a secret airstrip in occupied territory. But the Little Flower reigned in Manhattan, and his madness was law.

  Sherman Billingsley’s club was only five blocks from the suite that Oona occupied with her mother at the Hotel Weylin. But Cinderella needed her carriage. So Sonny hailed a Checker cab. They sat in a backseat as big as a forest, and kissed like a couple of lunatics, the cabbie spying on them in the mirror, his tongue wagging against his teeth. Oona was always passionate in a Checker cab. Sonny fumbled under her coat, while she sat with her legs in his lap and dug her hand under his shirt like a friendly Messerschmitt.

  They arrived at the Weylin in less than four minutes. Sonny was in a daze from his proximity to Oona’s flesh. Whatever she wore was like a mysterious sheath that sheltered her from the eyes and hands of overeager boys and men. She hadn’t slept with a single one of them, though she was drawn to Sonny’s brooding looks. My Heathcliff, she told herself, my Manhattan Gypsy.

  There were recruiting posters all over the place—in storefronts, on fire escapes, and right near the rumpled green canopy of the Weylin. It was invariably Uncle Sam, in a red foulard and a top hat with a blue ribbon that featured a white star, while he pointed a finger at whoever passed in front of his stern gaze. And Sonny thought he was going bonkers, because he could have sworn that Uncle Sam said:

  SONNY SALINGER I WANT YOU ENLIST NOW

  He went through the Weylin’s revolving door with Oona and into a lobby filled with broken floor tiles, settees and love seats with worn threads, and lamps with missing bulbs. The lobby was deserted except for the night manager, who stood behind his wire cage with a lurid grin.

  “Evening, Miss Oona. Will the young gentleman be accompanying you upstairs? Shall I ring madame?”

  “That won’t be necessary, Charles,” she told him. It was well past midnight, the Cinderella hour.

  Then she whispered in her suitor’s ear. “Oh, Je
rry, you know what will happen. We’ll fool around and …”

  Sonny’s throat was raw with desire. “I’ll only stay a couple of minutes, I promise.”

  She laughed, and her forehead sizzled with its own electric light. “You said five minutes the last time, and you stayed two hours. You woke Mama out of her beauty rest. She was wearing one of those silly masks that covered all her creams, and she said, ‘Oona dear, what the devil are you doing behind the couch?’ I had to keep you under my muskrat coat until Mama stumbled back to her room…. Jerry, I couldn’t go through that again. I’d have a heart attack. I’ll be leaving for California the minute I graduate; you know that.”

  “Then you’ve given up on the idea of Vassar.”

  He could have visited her at Poughkeepsie, stolen her from her dorm, this dark-eyed Cinderella of his. Poughkeepsie was close enough for him to plot—and plan, even propose, once he could afford a ring.

  “And what did college do for you, my little Ernest Hemingway? You’ve flunked out of more schools than I can count…. No, I intend to become an actress, and that’s final.”

  “I’m not Hemingway,” he had to mutter. “And you won’t have Uncle Walt to help guide your career out on the coast.”

  Somehow he’d gotten into the hotel’s rickety elevator with her.

  “There are plenty of Uncle Walts. I found one, and I’ll find another. And he’ll still mention me—from time to time.”

  The night elevator man, who wore a rumpled uniform that reeked of sweat, steered Oona and her beau up to the sixth floor. He opened the accordionlike gate and let them out of the car.

  “You can’t come in,” she said.

  Sonny pressed Oona against the wall while he gnawed at her.

  “Jesus, Jerry, I’m not a rabbit. You cannot eat my face.”

  Oona was giggling now. She opened the door with a kind of skeleton key and dragged Sonny inside. They stood in the dark. It was the Weylin, with its army of cockroaches and mice. The hotel had become a haven for prostitutes and bookmakers. Gangsters rented out entire floors and bankrolled Friday-night craps games that floated from suite to suite. Crusty old men in their seventies and eighties, who had long resided at the hotel, left carnations and boxes of Godiva chocolates on the doormat for Oona’s Mama, Agnes Boulton, who also had high cheekbones and was still a celebrated beauty. There were love letters, too, sometimes twenty pages long, like white petals buried in ink.