Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  This scatter—letters, carnations, and rotting boxes of Godiva—was everywhere.

  Agnes couldn’t seem to collect the boxes or throw the carnations and white petals into the trash. Sonny kept gnawing at Oona. A light was snapped on. Agnes Boulton stood there without a stitch, her own Lady Godiva in the veiled light of a corner lamp, at the very edge of the foyer. Sonny tried not to stare, but she could have been Oona’s older sister.

  “Aggie, I’d like to marry your daughter,” Sonny blurted.

  Agnes Boulton had met Sonny several times. They’d had hot chocolate at Rumpelmayer’s, chicken pie at Schrafft’s. Agnes was also a writer, and had sold her first story at sixteen. She wrote for pulp magazines, like Blue Book and Argosy, and none of her tales could tantalize Sonny—there was nothing but static between the words, and the words themselves were composed of tinsel. He couldn’t tell her that, of course.

  Finally, with one rhythmical sweep, Agnes Boulton put on the sheerest nightgown Sonny had ever seen, a nightgown that didn’t bother to hide her nipples or her narrow hips.

  “Sonny darling,” she said, with a brogue she must have picked up from the Provincetown Players, “my little Oona is sixteen.”

  “Mama,” Oona said, “I’m taller than you are.”

  “Never mind. Will you have your nuptials while you’re studying for your final exams? It’s out of the question.”

  “I know it’s out of the question,” Oona said. “Still, Sonny is my business.”

  Agnes Boulton had a crying fit right in the foyer. “What would your father say!”

  “Who could tell?” she snarled, with a wrinkled nose that couldn’t impair her beauty. “I didn’t think I had one.”

  “You mustn’t say that,” Agnes Boulton moaned, “not in front of this boy. We are a family—the O’Neills.”

  She pointed to the posters of Eugene O’Neill’s plays on the foyer walls—she carried them with her from hotel to hotel. Sonny liked the poster of Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones, wearing a bone white uniform, with his arms stretching out to some strange infinity.

  “Mother,” Oona said, “live in your mausoleum. Your husband has one wife too many.”

  “Child,” Agnes Boulton said, “that’s cruel, very cruel.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m in the same scenario as you…. Now say good night to my fiancé and go back to bed.”

  Agnes Boulton was crying again, and Oona had to lend her a handkerchief. “He’s not your fiancé.”

  Agnes wandered back into her bedroom in her bare feet, while Oona dug her tongue into Sonny’s mouth for an instant; it felt like a violent wet bird that paralyzed him with rapture as she shoved him out the door.

  “That was a gas, telling Mama that you wanted to marry me.”

  “But it’s true,” Sonny had to insist.

  Her nose wrinkled again. “Are you deaf, darling boy? Will we have a postal marriage? I’ll be out in California.”

  Sonny was silent in that slatternly corridor with its peeling wallpaper. “But you might come back,” he muttered.

  “To this dump?” she said. “Not a chance…. Oh, I couldn’t give you up, Sonny, not when you can do the rhumba like that. My God, I almost peed in my pants. And Uncle Walt is fond of you. He thinks you can take over his column while he’s on vacation. Now go! I’ll meet you at the Stork.”

  Sonny pretended to smile. “No more museums, no more Russian movies?”

  “Who has the time?”

  “But when, Oona, when will we meet?”

  “Golly,” she said, ruminating with a scratch of her jawbone. “I have midterms, and a lot of commitments to Uncle Walt and Mr. B. It’s not that simple being Debutante of the Year at the Stork. I’ll leave a note in your mailbox, like I always do.”

  She wrapped Sonny inside the wings of her coat, and while old men wandered about in their pajamas, she ground her left hip against his groin, licked his earlobe with a salty tongue, said, “I’m taken with you, Sonny Salinger, I really am, and that’s the problem. But you’re a luxury I can’t afford—not until I’m an established movie star.”

  Then Oona freed him from her own embrace and hopscotched across the corridor to her mother’s door.

  3.

  IT WAS WELL PAST THREE by the time Sonny walked home from the Weylin. He kept seeing posters of Uncle Sam in the same red foulard and top hat.

  SONNY SALINGER WE WANT YOU

  The night doorman had to let him in, or Sonny could never have gotten inside his father’s citadel at 1133 Park Avenue.

  “Good morning, young Mr. Salinger.”

  The doorman took him upstairs in 1133’s unadorned elevator car.

  The Salingers never locked their front door, even when they went to the Plaza in Daytona for weeks at a time. So Sonny walked into the apartment with all the quiet grace of a cat burglar. His mother and father sat like sentinels in the sunken living room, wearing identical silk gowns—Sol and Miriam, née Marie. Sol had been a traveling salesman from Chicago, a tall, handsome devil, fond of Arrow shirts, who found her on a farm in Iowa, an Irish beauty with red hair, and he ran off with her. They operated a nickelodeon in Chicago—Marie became Miriam to appease his parents, though she never really converted to Judaism. The nickelodeon failed. He stumbled into import/export, was soon a success, managing J. S. Hoffman & Company’s eastern branch—Sol Salinger, Manhattan’s lord of unkosher cheese and ham.

  “Look who we have here,” Sol said, “the bon vivant himself.” His ears were as large and fully flowered as his son’s. They both had the same olive skin. “Where the hell were you? Your mother was worried.”

  “I was at the Stork Club—with Walter Winchell.”

  “That bum. He sends his poison darts wherever he can. The guy doesn’t miss.”

  “Winchell wants me to write for him,” Sonny said. “To be his ghost.”

  Sol broke into one of his demonic laughing fits, and Miriam had to pummel his back. “You poor schmuck,” Sol said, tears of rage in his eyes. “Winchell wants you to wipe his ass.”

  “Solly,” Miriam said. “You shouldn’t use such language.” Her hair was as red as it had ever been, even if she had to dye it at the roots.

  “I found the girl I want to live with for the rest of my life,” Sonny said.

  “Who?” Sol asked. “Sophie Tucker or Ethel Barrymore?”

  “No,” Sonny said. “It’s Eugene O’Neill’s daughter.”

  “You mean the little shiksa who waits downstairs for you and leaves notes with the doorman? Why doesn’t she come upstairs like a decent girl and introduce herself to your parents?”

  “Dad, she doesn’t have a minute to spare. She goes to Brearley. Oona leaves notes for me after class. That’s how we meet.”

  Sol suffered another laughing spell. “She’s a slut,” he said, “Brearley or no Brearley. Boy oh boy, I’ve seen pictures of her in the Mirror with her boobs on the table.”

  Miriam had to pummel his back again. “Solly, that’s not fair. She’s a child, and photographers take advantage of her. You shouldn’t be so disrespectful. Apologize to Sonny.”

  “Apologize for what? Your precious boy, who scribbles at home like a little rabbi, is in love with a debutante who likes to flaunt her looks. Christ, a war is going on. The Krauts and the Nips are knocking the crap out of us. We haven’t had one victory, not one. Roosevelt is having conniptions. And our Sonny decides to become a troubadour.”

  “Stop it, Sol,” Miriam said, her temples pulsing under that crown of red hair. They were like a comedy act, with Sonny as their stooge. She swiped a cigarette from a gold box on the glass coffee table beside their divan, a Pall Mall, lit it with trembling fingers, and said, “Show him the paper.”

  “What paper?”

  “That letter,” she said, “from the president of the United States.”

  Sol handed him a wrinkled letter—it was Sonny’s draft notice. He’d been reclassified, and was suddenly deemed fit for service. His slight heart murmur no lo
nger mattered to Uncle Sam now that the military was in disarray.

  ORDER OF INDUCTION To Jerome David Salinger GREETINGS …

  A tangle of emotions whipped right through Sonny—euphoria, fear, vertigo, and a rumbling anger against Sol.

  “Dad, that letter was addressed to me. You had no right to open it.”

  “I didn’t,” Sol pleaded. “Your mother did.”

  Miriam clawed at her heart, with the cigarette still in her mouth. “We were frightened, Sonny—so official. With the president’s own seal. We worried they might deport you.”

  “Deport me for what? Publishing short stories?”

  “Sonny,” Sol said, “don’t be such a smart-ass. Why would Roosevelt write to you when you were classified as unfit for service?”

  “Dad, that letter wasn’t really from Roosevelt. My draft board just borrowed his name. I’m on a goddamn list. And my number came up—it was like a spin of the wheel. Call me lucky—or unlucky.”

  “Go figure,” Sol said. “We have an Einstein in the house. He has every sort of theorem in his big fat brain. But a feast is required—dinner at Lüchow’s. How many sons do I have, and how often do they get inducted?”

  “I’d rather go to Schrafft’s,” Miriam said, with a vacant, terrified look.

  “Come on,” Sol said. “Schrafft’s is for widows and maiden aunts.”

  “But I could be a widow … if Sonny is stolen from me.”

  Now Sol covered his eyes and rocked back and forth, back and forth. “Miriam, what are you saying? There are no widows here.” And he tried to escort his wife into the bedroom, the belt of his gown trailing on the carpet. But Miriam broke free and wrapped her arms around Sonny.

  “I won’t let that malingerer Roosevelt have him.”

  Sol was bewildered. “Miriam, are you a mental? Why do you call FDR a malingerer?”

  “Because he stole my boy, and never bothered to prepare for this war.”

  Sonny had to remove his mother’s arms from around his neck. She nearly tottered, and he had to hold her up, but he wasn’t thinking of Miriam or Sol, or Uncle Sam, or his induction notice, really a calling card to Fort Dix, in the heartland of New Jersey—with its endless airstrips, firing ranges, and marshlands, where an inductee like Jerome David Salinger might get lost and never be found again. Sonny didn’t give a damn. He didn’t even care about surviving the war. He was preoccupied with one thing alone—his interrupted romance with Oona O’Neill.

  4.

  OONA WAS IN A FOREST, and she wore nothing but a fisherman’s net. And right in the middle of the forest was Table 50, but it didn’t have any chairs, except one. There were mirrors hanging from the tree trunks. A man sat down, seized the chair for himself. Oona didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing a white toque, like Bruno, Mr. B.’s chef, but it wasn’t Bruno, wasn’t Bruno at all. There were deep red gouges on his cheeks, as if his face had been set on fire with a torch. It was Uncle Walt, without his usual truculence. He was shivering in his tiny kingdom at Table 50, in the forest. And then she realized that the forest itself was on a river of ice. Knights with steel on their noses stood behind the trees, like the ones from Alexander Nevsky. But these knights hadn’t come to battle. They watched Uncle Walt.

  A bell rang and dragged Oona from her dream. It was the house phone. She cursed, got out of bed in her flannel gown, crossed the living room in a slight daze, and picked up the phone. The night manager was on the line.

  “Christ, Charles, do ya know what time it is?”

  “Sure, Little Mum, it’s five-oh-six A.M. on the dot. And you have a young gentleman downstairs. He’s quite persistent. He won’t leave. I could summon the house dick. But I wouldn’t want to create a scandal. I believe he’s wearing pajamas under his topcoat. It’s most irregular.”

  “Did he offer you a name?”

  “Yes, Little Mum. ‘Sherman Billingsley.’”

  Oona giggled to herself. “Show him up, Charles.”

  “I will, Little Mum, I most certainly will. I believe it’s the same young gentleman who accompanied you a bit earlier.”

  “Charles,” she said, “I know damn well who it is—my fiancé. I lost him for a couple of hours.”

  She hung up the house phone and waited for Sonny near the door. He knocked once, timidly, like some trickster summoned to the dean’s office at a second-rate college. She opened the door, and there he was—Sonny in a topcoat and pajamas, a fedora perched over one eye.

  “My pirate,” she said, “my very own pirate—in his pajamas. Well, come on in.”

  They tiptoed across a vast territory of furniture and tottering towers of Godiva chocolates and entered Oona’s bedroom. It was mostly barren except for a framed photo beside her bed of Oona and her father on a beach, taken when she was one or two. She was sitting on his shoulders, and the playwright had a mischievous smile beneath his mustache.

  “Well, Sonny, that’s quite chivalrous, to visit me twice the very same night. Charles almost sent for the house detective.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” he said with a measure of pain. “You’re in the middle of exams, and the next time you leave a message with my doorman, I’ll be gone.”

  Oona could barely tell what was on his mind—perhaps he was stuck somewhere inside one of his own stories.

  “Well, where will ya be?”

  “At Fort Dix.”

  She looked at his draft notice, which he had carried with him in its original envelope. “I thought …”

  “Oona, I was lying in bed, in my pajamas, smoking one of mother’s Pall Malls, and I realized I might never see you again. So I came over—on a whim. No, it was more than a whim. I had to see you.”

  “Private Sherman Billingsley in his pajamas.”

  She shucked off his topcoat and pulled him down onto her narrow bed. She wasn’t wearing her undies, and the torturous lines of a garter belt. He tried not to peek at her nipples and pubic hair that rose up through the wrinkles of her flannel gown. “Poor little civilian soldier,” she said as she batted off his fedora, clutched him by his big ears, and placed him near the taunt outline of her left nipple.

  And Sonny began to suckle like some kind of satyr. He didn’t even attempt to remove her nightgown. She had to protect her status as the alluring ice queen of Table 50—Sonny knew that. She moaned like a little girl and kept clutching his ears. A good part of her gown was covered with spittle.

  “Sonny,” she whispered, “you’d better stop.”

  He hiked up her gown to the middle of her thighs and caressed her calves. She shivered, and shoved him away.

  “Oona, what if Uncle Sam grabs me and I vanish into the void?”

  “I have a solution,” she said.

  She guided his hand under her gown again, as if it belonged to a blind man, and let it rove against the silk between her legs—for a second. It was Sonny who was shivering now. This moment, he realized, the touch of Oona’s silk on his fingertips, would remain with him—a live, electric wound. She had the erotic power of a sixteen-year-old witch.

  “You can’t stay here, Sonny, in my bed. Mama will kill us, even if she admires you. She’s read all your stories, and underlines every other word in green ink.”

  “Why?”

  “To cannibalize your gifts, I suppose. She steals from everybody.”

  So he put on his topcoat over the pajamas, looking like some ridiculous cavalier. Oona would grieve, mourn his absence at Table 50, especially to Uncle Walt.

  “I’ll write,” he said.

  “You’d better!”

  And then she began to sob. “I’ll miss you, Sonny Salinger. I never had a beau who went away—just like that.”

  She heard a crackling sound in her mother’s bedroom. She threw Sonny out the door, licked both his eyelids like a feline on the prowl, whispered, “Don’t forget me,” and rushed back inside.

  Agnes Boulton stumbled about in her sleeping mask. “Is there a problem, dear?”

  “No, Mother. Ch
arles rang us. He said there was a prowler on the premises. But it was a false alarm. Go back to bed!”

  Oona returned to her bedroom. She didn’t want to dream of a forest with mirrors hanging from the tree trunks and knights with steel on their noses. None of her beaux ever dropped her or ran away to war. She had to remind herself that Sonny’s draft notice wasn’t a slap in the face. She panicked, as if she were still in that forest of mirrors. Sonny’s doorman had become her letter box. But what if Sonny was sent to some camp in the interior, and the doorman didn’t know his latest address?

  He’d left his fedora—it sat on her bed. She put on the hat and gazed at herself in the mirror.

  She saluted the face she saw. Then she tossed the hat across the room, curled up, and went back to bed. She didn’t dream of knights with steel noses. She didn’t dream at all.

  PART ONE

  Slapton Sands

  April–May 1944

  1.

  SAL-IN-GER!”

  The young corporal had raced up the winding stairs of the castle and stood against the stone wall to catch his breath. He was looking for Sonny, the granddad of his regiment, billeted with a bunch of nineteen-year-olds.

  “Sergeant, New York is calling. Come quick. You don’t want to lose the connection, sir.”

  “Corporal Benson, you don’t have to keep saying sir to a noncommissioned officer. You might wound your larynx.”

  “I understand, sir, but come quick. Captain gives me hell if someone misses a call.”

  Sonny followed the young corporal down the winding stairs—it was the remains of a medieval castle with murder holes for archers. He imagined these archers as the elite foot soldiers and snipers of their own era, sworn to the earls of Devon or some other panoply of gangster princes. A single archer could command the terrain in front of the castle from one hole and couldn’t be touched or attacked.