Sergeant Salinger E-Book

Jerome Charyn

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 351

Beschreibung

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a 'spook,' with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

Leseprobe

Praise for Sergeant Salinger

‘Supremely engaging… A smoothly told, unexpectedly affecting foray into a lesser-known chapter of the literary giant’s life’– Kirkus (Starred Review)

‘In this literary tour de force… Charyn vividly portrays Sonny’s journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend’ – Publishers Weekly

‘Nuanced and acutely perceptive… Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject’– Booklist

‘Charyn peers into the traumas that formed the lifelong recluse and his enigmatic stories… An engaging and informative rendering of an important American author’ – Historical Novel Society

‘Charyn, who at 83 has had a remarkably prolific career, has an affinity for literary sphinxes… Sergeant Salinger is true to history… but in this novel, as with much of Salinger’s life, we have to accept a certain amount of mystery’– Washington Post

‘A tour de force… Charyn is a master of the written word’–Jewish Journal

‘Charyn deftly leaves the reader wondering whether Holden Caulfield’s teenage angst was really Salinger’s personification of post-traumatic stress disorder… Engrossing’ – Library Journal

‘Masterful… Grounded in biological fact and topped with a generous helping of imagination, Charyn’s novel wonderfully recreates the war years of J. D. Salinger’ – Michigan Daily

‘An in-depth look at one of our most celebrated of writers… Complex and full of intrigue’– Comics Grinder

‘Intense and absorbing’ – The Reporter

Praise for Jerome Charyn

‘Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination’ – William Giraldi

‘One of our most rewarding novelists’ – Larry McMurtry

‘Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy – a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons’ – New Yorker

‘One of our most intriguing fiction writers’ – O, The Oprah Magazine

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 soldiers 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 undescended 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, WW.?’

‘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.

‘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, WW., 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 mid-western 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 Juliet 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 maze-like 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 plebeian 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 riveted 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 cufflinks, 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, Jerry, 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 accordion-like 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.

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.