MY GRANDMOTHER told me to wait to tell my mother I’d met someone who’d caught my eye. She said, “Tell her and you’ll kick yourself. Wait awhile. Wait until she calms down.” Why was my mother agitated? She was overly preoccupied with whether or not Mr. Baines would give her an engagement ring for Christmas, and constant thoughts of this had ground her nerves down to the quick. It was as if she were walking about our house snarling, “How about the two of you leave me alone so I can worry in peace?” I knew even without being told that after the matter was settled, after he had proposed on Christmas, I could tell her a young man had finally shown more than an academic interest in me and that I intended to show him the same. Mr. Baines had all but bought radio time and billboard space announcing his intentions, but my mother still had enough insecurity left over from her marriage to my father to cause her to pace about, calculating the odds of a happy ending, sniping at my grandmother and me if we chewed and swallowed too loudly.
The evening of the hospital party, Mr. Baines took my mother to the YMCA to hear a program of Filipino Christmas music. Who would’ve thought there was such a thing? After they left the house, I was eager to go ahead to the hospital, but my grandmother made me stay home with her until a special homefront broadcast of Command Performance was over. She had been excited about it since she had read the announcement on the entertainment page of the paper that morning. It promised a “can‘t-miss, won’t-miss performance by Benny Goodman and a star-studded cast.” She never missed an opportunity to hear Benny Goodman. I remember sitting by the radio with my coat and gloves on, waiting for her to say she’d heard enough to please her, but she didn’t. All she said was, “Don’t worry. He’ll be there, and he’ll not go anywhere. It’s good to make him wait a little.” We listened to the whole program. It was by far the best time I’d ever seen my grandmother have listening to the radio. Benny Goodman played all his hits. Nelson Eddy sang “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” Johnny Mercer sang “Deep in the Heart of Texas” for what seemed like fifteen minutes, and Hazel Scott played the “Minute Waltz” through the regular way once and then announced, “Now I’m going to break it down.” It was eight o’clock when my grandmother let us leave.
By the time we reached the hospital, the party was going at full tilt. Louise Nutter greeted us very warmly and introduced us around to the doctors and their wives who had stopped by. Very nonchalantly, I asked her how the Hawkings boy was doing. She told me he was much better and would surely put in an appearance, as he had been caught earlier that day bribing an orderly to have the already overworked hospital laundry press his dress blues for the occasion. She added, “That’s just like him. I know a few nurses who’ll be relieved the day that one walks out of here.” I gathered that she believed his bribing the laundry was reflective of his pushy nature.
All the doctors seemed thrilled to see my grandmother, more or less lining up to talk to her. I didn’t see Tom anywhere, but as I listened to my grandmother’s conversations, my eyes roamed about the room. One surgeon engaged her in a long discussion about Sister Kenny. This woman was an Australian nurse, later made famous by Rosalind Russell, who revolutionized the treatment of infantile paralysis. My grandmother told the surgeon that she’d been performing the therapy for years. She described her method: Instead of immobilizing a patient’s legs, she’d wrap them in hot blankets and flex the feet, and thus the leg muscles, for intervals of five minutes, for an hour a day or for as long as the patient could stand it. The surgeon asked how it worked for her. She told him it wasn’t the miracle it was now trumped up to be, but it did make her patients more comfortable. He said he was amazed she had strayed from orthodox practice on her own authority. I could tell she was pleased with herself. She didn’t tell him anything like, “Oh, but I specialize in the unorthodox” or “I am a great believer in variations on a routine.” She didn’t respond in any way that would’ve been thoroughly appropriate and justified. She merely smiled and, in the most cordial way, invited herself into his operating room. She wanted to see some new method of cauterization she’d read about. He told her she was welcome anytime.
Then he brought up the subject of “the operating fool,” a California man who had recently been arrested for operating on people without a license. My grandmother said, “If you intend the story of his capture as a moral lesson to me, you can save your breath.” He started to tell her he had mentioned the story only because it was humorous, but he stopped when she began talking over him, listing her kitchen table surgeries, from the sawmill worker and the red thread on through five procedures for major lacerations, several amputations of toes and fingers, and one failed attempt at reattaching a finger lopped off by a bread knife. This attempt she blamed on the knife: “It was the serrated edge. That’s why I couldn’t do it.” The surgeon gently told her that reattaching appendages was beyond medical science. She said, “It might be, but I still think I could’ve done it had the woman been using a smooth-edge. I know I could have.” The surgeon had by then heard enough to let her have her way.
I excused myself to pour punch. I told my grandmother I’d be back when my shift was up. It seemed endless. A clot of young men started hanging about the refreshment table. They recognized me from having seen me on their wards, reading and writing letters, but unlike the young men I’d helped with letters, these five seemed intent on, as was said at the time, making me. If they weren’t telling me a sob story they were handing me a line. One held a bandaged hand up in front of my face and asked, “Know how this happened?” I remember I had to pull my head back to keep the hand from jabbing me in the nose. I said I was sorry but I didn’t know how he’d been hurt. “Guess. Just take a guess,” he said. From the smell on him, I suspected he had liquor hidden somewhere and this would make him overbearing and relentless. I was right. He wouldn’t let go. I kept saying I had no idea how he’d gotten hurt, although my instinct was that he’d been wounded not in a battle but in a bawdy-house brawl. His chums were saying things like, “Yeah, girlie. Take a shot at it.” This teasing persisted even as I was pouring punch for people who came up to the table. These people stared at us, but they would give me no relief. I finally said, “Listen, I’m really busy. How about you all find somebody else to quiz, okay?”
This made things worse. One of them said I was cute when I was mad. I threatened to have one of the military policemen who was guarding the fire exits arrest him. The one with the bad hand said, “For what? Trying to get to know you? You sure are a cold one, girlie.” They were of the unsavory sort who whipped up the zoot suit riots, much rougher characters than the hoodlums I’d always been so easily able to disperse in the school parking lot. I was used to saying, “Okay, guys, let’s pick up those bottles and butts and move along,” and having boys twice my size nod, bend over, pick up their litter, and throw it in a trashcan. I hadn’t changed since those days.
I like to think I had a demure way about me and didn’t appear to be fodder for this gang. But for all these fellows knew, I could’ve been secretly easy, and all they had to do was make me admit what I really wanted. I could’ve been one of those homefront girls they’d been hearing about who had grown so lonesome for a man that they would toss all morals aside and hop in the backseat. I could’ve been listening to too much Frank Sinatra, longing for romance, something trite like that. I could’ve been without my boyfriend for six months, and consequently so full of untapped passion that I was ready to explode. Or I could’ve been another Arlene, mindlessly ranging around, sampling whatever was handy.
I imagined Tom appearing, chivalrous and larger than life in his dress blues, telling these guys to go crawl back under their rocks, but he was nowhere to be seen. I remember glaring at my grandmother’s back as she held forth to her string of doctors, hoping I could will her to turn around and see me. She would’ve come over screaming and offered to castrate all five of them. But she wouldn’t turn around. Mrs. Nutter finally saw my plight and came over with an officer. He called the five by name and stripped them of radio, visiting, and general dayroom and recreational privileges for the next week. They responded with a sharp salute and moved away from the table, still in that one clot. Mrs. Nutter apologized, relieved me of the rest of my shift, and reminded me to tell my grandmother when hers started.
My grandmother had just left the group of people she had accumulated around her, and had taken a seat in a row of chairs set up against the wall. This put her in the middle of all the girls who had come that evening in hopes of finding a lonely single fellow and his allotment check. They had that look about them. Girls like these, who showed up at dances, went in carloads to the coast to wave troop ships off, and hung about downtown outside the Enlisted Men’s Recreation Room, were called “Allotment Annies.” This hospital group made as captive an audience as they were likely to find anywhere. Although the public was trained to spot such girls, the ones who had come to the hospital party didn’t seem to be suffering from their shameful reputation. Patients who could get around well enough to dance picked them off the wall, danced and chatted, and then delivered them back to wait for the next partner. The girls rotated in and out of their chairs so fast that I doubt the seats had time to get cold.
There was, or at least I hoped there was, a great visible distinction between these girls and me. I had on white gloves. They had bare hands. My hat had been made in Washington. Their hats appeared to be from Woolworth’s. I had on stockings. Most of these girls were wearing Liquid Stocking, and perspiration from all their dancing had streaked color down the back of their calves. I remember their purses especially: I was sure that for whatever was in them, they could’ve been left at home. If the girls had been asked to dump out the contents of their purses in the middle of the floor, think of everything that would’ve spilled out: nickels and pennies, hard candy, dime-store lipstick, rouge, and nail polish, compacts, rabbit’s feet, loose stale cigarettes, and butts they’d picked out of their fathers’ ashtrays and straightened out. I thought of how the young men who had harassed me could’ve saved themselves valuable wolfing time had they gravitated first to this crowd. And then I saw them, down at the far end of the row, working on a few of these girls, showing that fellow’s bandaged hand around. I wondered whether they were telling them about the stick-in-the-mud they’d run into over by the punch bowl.
I had to ask several girls to move down the row to open up a seat by my grandmother. Sitting there in the middle of them, she looked like a chaperone at a wayward girls’ school outing. When I sat down, she leaned over and said to me, “Look at this bunch. They’re wound up like nymphs at carnival time.” They were. They were all patting their feet to the music, snapping their fingers, waxing that horrible clove chewing gum that I had thought to be rationed. They seemed to have found a bottomless supply. As I sat there by them, I wondered how many of their fathers knew their daughters were out of the house. I had read accounts of parents in port towns locking their daughters inside when troop ships came in and then finding their daughters gone anyway, having pried open windows and shimmied down drain pipes. The girl beside me was sixteen going on twenty-two, all dolled up in an ill-fitting dress and that cheap makeup that grows orange with time. Her nails were chewed so low that her fingertips looked inflamed, and she kept trying secretly to smooth her makeup down onto her neck. I wondered whether she had pried nails out of her bedroom window, held her purse in her teeth, and let herself down the side of her house.
My grandmother was due to say something directly to the girls. She was due to tell the one beside her to go to the bathroom and wash that brown mess off her legs. She didn’t. I asked her how she felt about all this, all these wound-up girls trotting on and off the floor like dime-dancers. She told me it was no different from the First War. “Everybody’s morals went to hell,” she said. “You couldn’t go to a Grange party without seeing a girl doing a shake-down dance, showing her linen. And then two years later, orphanages were stacked to the roof.” She looked around the room and pointed out several couples who she said should’ve proceeded directly to the parking lot. “They could skip all the dancing and go climb in the car. For the duration of the war, sex is here to stay.”
Dr. Nutter came over and asked if he could get us anything. My grandmother said he could not, but he could tell her why he allowed entry to all these strumpets. She said, “It compromises the dignity of this hospital.” He said he knew but he couldn’t help it. The party was open to the public, and no harm was being done. She begged to differ, and then they entered a lengthy discussion on wartime morale and morals. My grandmother glanced at me, noticed my distracted state, and told me not to worry. She said, “He’ll be here.” So I sat there and waited, looking at the girls all around me, trying as best as I could not to make eye contact. Not only were they fast, they were tough, the kind of girls who might form a pack, follow me to the bathroom, and ask point-blank, “So, prissy, what do you think you’re looking at?”
I was busy looking at the girl with the chewed nails out of the corner of my eye, pretending to listen to my grandmother and Dr. Nutter, when a voice said, “Boy, you sure look bored.”
It was Tom, standing in front of my chair. He looked different, even better, upright and fully clothed. I told him hello, and no, I wasn’t bored, just a little tired. He told me he would have come sooner if he’d not had to wait forever for his uniform to get back from the laundry.
He said, “Just a minute,” and then spoke to the girl next to me. She was biting one of her nails so furiously that she seemed intent on chewing off her hand to the wrist. He asked her to move so he could sit down.
She obeyed him and slid over, still chewing. She didn’t stare at him the way I had the first time I met him. She didn’t try to make him. For all the loosening of morals going on that night, this girl was not loosening the social rule that forbade a poor southside girl with orange makeup and mangled, gloveless hands to flirt with somebody her mother might wait on at City Grill or her father might mop up after at a fraternity house.
When Tom sat down, Dr. Nutter greeted him and said he looked in fine shape. My grandmother said, “Yes, you give somebody a little of what they’re begging for, and they might start to come around. You can’t treat these boys all the same.” Dr. Nutter could feel an embarrassing lecture on varying pain thresholds coming his way, so he excused himself. My grandmother told us she’d rather talk to us anyway. She settled herself in for our conversation.
Tom told her how much better his back felt, and then stared off as if he didn’t know what else to say. He squinted, trying to think of something.
My grandmother saw what was happening to him and offered to help. “Why don’t you ask her to dance?” she said.
His ears turned red, and then he asked me. I told him I’d like nothing better. I hoped his lead was strong enough for me to follow without giving away the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. My grandmother told me to leave my scarf on my chair and my gloves on his, lest a couple of strumpets decided to steal our seats when she wasn’t looking.
He danced with assurance, and the slightly rigid manner with which he held his back gave his movements an air of dignity one didn’t usually see on a wartime dance floor. I figured he must have been given an extra dose of codeine that evening, the way he danced without grimacing the way he’d done when he propped himself up on his elbows. He even carried me through on a couple of sane jitterbugs, touching the small of my back and steering me out of the way of partners throwing each other around with such violent force that I wondered that their arms weren’t being yanked out of the sockets. Jitterbugging had just been outlawed on the Duke campus, not so much for moral reasons as because of the numbers of students landing in the infirmary with dislocated shoulders. The floor was so packed that when one couple moved, we all moved. Half of the young men had on uniforms, and the other half had on pajamas and green hospital robes. One hung on a pair of crutches, like a scarecrow, while his partner shook everything she had in front of him, reaching out to grab his hand every now and then to whip herself around. She appeared to be double-jointed.
Between numbers Tom pointed to the orchestra, a thrown-together group of 4-F musicians from the North Carolina Symphony, and told me the pianist was his sister. She had finished her exams early, and the minute she was home she was recruited to play with this group. He waved at her, and she gave him an okay sign with her fingers. I wondered what she had heard about me. I wondered whether he’d told her I was swell. Next we danced to the song my grandmother most despised. When I heard the opening strains of “White Christmas,” I looked at her to say, “Yes, I know you hate it, but I’m going to stay put. If you want me off the dance floor, you’ll have to drag me.” She made a face to show me how revolted she was, and then got up to start her shift at the punch bowl. Tom held me so close that I could separate all the odors on his skin, his soap and shaving cream and after-shave and his own scent, that sort of man’s scent that was foreign to me.
When the song was over, and he asked whether I’d like to keep going or sit down, I said, “Keep going. By all means.” Before the next song started, he pulled me over to the edge of the stage and whistled his sister over to us. She smiled very sweetly at me and leaned down so he could whisper in her ear. Then she walked away and spoke to the orchestra leader. The next two songs were “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “You Made Me Love You.” He told me they were the only slow numbers he could think of. He had noticed how self-conscious I was fast-dancing, and had wanted me to feel more at ease. I thought, If it keeps on like this, how did I ever rate to be so lucky?
While we were dancing, he asked about my life. I gave him a slim history, and when he asked why I wasn’t in college, I told him the truth: I hadn’t been able to leave home. He said, “Everybody’s got to do it sometime,” and then pressed his fingers, I could feel all five, into my back and changed the subject to symbols in The Magic Mountain. A young woman has never learned so much on a dance floor.
We danced until my grandmother’s shift was over. She looked ready to leave, and she busied herself with her coat and gloves to give me time to say good night. It must have taken everything she had for her not to rush up and ask him when, exactly, he planned to see me again. I told him how grand a time I’d had. I wanted to ask him whether he realized by now how thoroughly inevitable we were, but I asked him instead when he thought he’d be discharged from the hospital. He said he had two more days there. His medical evaluation had come through that morning, and because some shrapnel was lodged too close to his spine, he wasn’t being sent back into active duty. He was going to spend the next three weeks in Asheville, at the Grove Park Inn, where some German prisoners, all officers, had just been taken. He would be replacing the translator, who was taking a long holiday leave. He said, “The dogfaces have Christmas leave canceled, and this guy takes off more than Mr. Roosevelt.” I asked how he’d become so proficient in German, and he told me he had studied languages at Washington and Lee. After Christmas, he would come back to Raleigh and work in the recruitment center. I was still trying to process the part about his studying languages, when he asked what my plans were. I told him the truth. I was going to sit around the house and read, plot troop movements, write hospital letters, and hope somebody broke a leg or something so my grandmother and I would have something exciting to do.
This is what he said to me: “You left out writing me.”
Wasn’t that something for him to say?