(One)
On Board USS Tangier
Task Force 14
1820 Hours 22 December 1941
“Now hear this,” the loudspeakers throughout the ship blared, harshly and metallically. “The smoking lamp is out. The smoking lamp is out.”
Staff Sergeant Joseph L. Howard, USMC, was on the bow of the Tangier when the announcement came. He was smoking a cigarette, looking out across the wide, gentle swells of the Pacific at the other ships of Task Force 14.
The USS Tangier, a seaplane tender pressed into duty as a troop transport, with the 4th Marine Defense Battalion on board, was in line behind the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, which flew the flag of Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, Commander of Task Force 14.
Behind the Tangier was the Neches, a fleet oiler, riding low in the water. The three ships considered most vulnerable to attack formed the center of Task Force 14. Sailing ahead of the Saratoga were the cruisers USS Astoria and USS Minneapolis. The cruiser USS San Francisco brought up the rear. The cruisers themselves were screened by nine destroyers.
Task Force 14 had put out from Pearl Harbor five days before, six days after the Japanese had attacked Pearl, under orders from Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander, to reinforce Wake Island.
Wake Island desperately needed reinforcement. Already there were what the Corps euphemistically referred to as “elements” of the 1st Marine Defense Battalion. These amounted to less than four hundred Marines, commanded by Major James P. S. Devereux. Devereux had two five-inch naval cannon, obsolete weapons removed from men-of-war; four three-inch antiaircraft cannon, only one of which had the necessary fire-control gear; twenty-four .50-caliber Browning machine guns; and maybe a hundred .30-caliber Brownings, mixed air- and water-cooled. That, plus individual small arms, was it.
Staff Sergeant Joe Howard knew what weaponry had been given to Major Devereux’s “elements” because he’d talked to the battalion’s ordnance sergeant. It had been decided, literally at the last minute, that the ordnance sergeant would be of more value to the Corps left behind at Pearl, doing what he could to get the newly formed 4th Defense Battalion’s weaponry up and running.
And he knew what Task Force 14 was carrying to reinforce Wake Island. In addition to the 4th Defense Battalion, at near full strength, and the Brewster Buffalos of VMF-211 that would fly off Saratoga and join what was left of the dozen Wildcats already on Wake, there were, aboard Tangier and in the holds of other ships, nine thousand rounds of five-inch ammunition; twelve thousand rounds of three-inch shells for the antiaircraft cannon; and three million rounds of .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition.
After the devastating, humiliating whipping they had taken at Pearl on December 7, the Navy and the Marine Corps were finally coming out to fight.
Howard took a final, deep drag on his Camel, then flicked the glowing coal from its end with his thumbnail. He carefully tore the cigarette paper down its length and let the wind scatter the tobacco away. Then he crumbled the paper into a tiny ball between his thumb and index fingers and let the wind take that away, too.
Howard was “under arms.” That is, he was wearing his steel helmet and a web belt from whose eyelets hung a canteen, a first-aid pouch, a magazine pouch for two pistol magazines, and a Model 1911A1 .45-caliber Colt pistol in a leather holster. The canteen was empty, as were the magazine pouch and the magazine in the .45. Ammunition had not been authorized for issue to the guard, much less to the troops, although there was a metal box in the guardroom with a couple of dozen five-round stripper clips of .30-06 ammunition for Springfield ’03 rifles and a half-dozen loaded seven-round .45 magazines.
Joe Howard had seen the Officer of the Guard slip one of the loaded magazines into his .45 just before guard mount. The Officer of the Guard was a second lieutenant, a twenty-one-year-old, six months out of Annapolis. Joe had wondered whom he thought he was going to have to shoot.
He hadn’t said anything, of course. Staff sergeants in the Marine Corps don’t question anything officers do, even twenty-one-year-old second lieutenants, unless it is really stupid and likely to hurt somebody. If Lieutenant Ellsworth Gripley felt that it was necessary to carry a loaded pistol in the performance of his duties as officer of the guard, that was his business.
Howard set his steel helmet at the appropriately jaunty angle for a sergeant of the guard and set out to find the Officer of the Guard. He was a little worried about Second Lieutenant Ellsworth Gripley, USMC. It had finally sunk in on the young officer that this wasn’t a maneuver; within forty-eight hours the 4th Defense Battalion would be ashore on Wake Island and engaging the Japanese, and he would be expected to perform like a Marine officer.
Lieutenant Gripley wasn’t afraid, Joe Howard thought. More like nervous. That was understandable. And he saw it as his duty to do what he could to make Gripley feel a little more sure of himself.
The ships making up Task Force 14 were, of course, blacked out to avoid detection by the enemy. One of the functions of the guard detail—in S/Sgt. Joe Howard’s opinion, the most important function—was to make sure that no one sneaked on deck after dark for a quick smoke. The glow of a cigarette coal was visible for incredibly long distances on a black night. Even so, there seemed to be a large number of people, including officers, who seemed unwilling, or unable, to believe that their cigarette was really going to put anyone in danger.
They seemed to think that maybe if three or four hundred people lined the ship’s rails, merrily puffing away, a Japanese submarine skipper could see this through a submarine periscope, but one little ol’ cigarette, carefully concealed in the hand? Not goddamned likely.
Because of his zealous enforcement of the no-smoking regulations, Howard had already earned a reputation among some of the officers as a rather insolent noncom. Marine officers are not accustomed to being firmly corrected by staff sergeants. Or to being threatened by them:
“Sir, if you don’t put that out right now, I’ll have to call the officer of the guard.”
When he had said that, the cigarettes were immediately put out. But in half a dozen instances, the officer had asked for his name and billet. He didn’t think the information had been requested so the officers could seek out the Headquarters Company commander to tell him what a fine job S/Sgt. Howard had been doing.
He had had less trouble with the enlisted men, although there were about ten times as many of them as there were officers. The lower-ranking Marines were either afraid of defying orders or of Japanese submarines—or probably of both. And Joe Howard was aware that most of the senior noncoms probably knew, as he did, just how far a cigarette coal could be seen at night and did not wish to end their war by drowning after being torpedoed.
And, besides, they would be in a shooting war soon enough. The word had leaked out of Officer’s Country, via a PFC orderly whom Joe had known at Quantico, that at 1800 hours they were about 550 miles from Wake Island. The Task Force was making about fifteen knots, which translated to mean they were then thirty-six hours steaming time from Wake. In other words, they should be at Wake at daybreak the day after tomorrow.
The ships in the center of the Task Force, the Saratoga, the Tangier, and the oiler, had been making course changes regularly, zigzagging across the Pacific so as to present as difficult a target as possible for any enemy submarine that might be stalking the Task Force. The cruisers and destroyers had been making course changes that were more frequent and of greater magnitude than those of the carrier and the ships following in its wake. The destroyers had been weaving in and out between the larger ships like sheepdogs guarding their flock.
Joe Howard had grown used to changes in course—the slight tilting of the deck, the slight change in the dull rumble of the engine, the change in the pitching and rolling of the Tangier—to the point where he paid almost no conscious attention to them.
But now, as he made his way aft along the portside boat deck, looking for Lieutenant Gripley, he slowly came to realize that this course change was somehow different. He stopped, putting his hand on the damp inboard bulkhead to steady himself.
For one thing, he thought, it’s taking a lot longer than they normally do.
And then he understood. The Tangier, and thus all of Task Force 14, was not changing course, but reversing course.
What the hell is that all about?
The Tangier’s public-address system, which never seemed to shut up, was now absolutely silent. If something was up, it certainly would have gone off, accompanied by harshly clanging bells, calling General Quarters.
He decided that nothing had happened, except that his imagination was running away with him.
He began moving aft again, telling himself that after he found Lieutenant Gripley, he would go to the guardroom and have a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee.
When he reached the rear of the boat deck, there was someone leaning on the railing beside the ladder to the main deck. At first he thought it was the guard posted there, and that he had deserted his post at least to the point of taking off his steel pot and assuming an unmilitary position. He was considering how badly to ream him when he saw the guard, steel pot in place, standing at parade rest.
Whoever was leaning on the rail was an officer—not Lieutenant Gripley, but somebody else.
When he got close, he saw that it was the Executive Officer of the 4th Defense Battalion. And when he heard Joe’s footsteps, he first turned his head, and then stood erect.
“Sergeant Howard, Sir. Sergeant of the Guard.”
“Yes,” the Exec said absently. “How are you tonight, Sergeant?”
It was not the expected response.
“Just getting a little air, Sergeant,” the Exec continued. “Stuffy in my cabin.”
“Yes, Sir,” Joe said.
“Trying to get my thoughts in order, actually,” the Exec said.
“Sir?” Joe asked, now wholly confused.
The Exec straightened.
“Sergeant,” he said. “At 2100 tonight, there was a radio from Pearl Harbor. Task Force 14 is to return to Pearl.”
“Sir?”
“Task Force 14 is ordered to return to Pearl. We have already reversed course.”
“But what about Wake Island?”
“It would appear, Sergeant,” the Exec said throatily, huskily, speaking with difficulty, “that Major Devereux and his men are going to have to make do with what they have.”
“Jesus Christ,” S/Sgt. Howard blurted. He knew, perhaps as well as anyone, what few arms and how little ammunition, and how few Marines, were at Major James P. S. Devereux’s command.
“Orders are orders, Sergeant,” the Exec said, and pushed his way past Joe Howard. There was not much light, but there was enough for Joe to see that tears were running down the Exec’s cheeks.
Goddamn them! Staff Sergeant Howard thought. How the hell can they turn around, knowing that unless we can reinforce Wake, the Japs will take it, and all those guys will be either dead or prisoners? Who the hell could be responsible for such a chickenshit order?
And then he thought: Who the fuck are you kidding? If we’d gone to Wake, when the first shot was fired, you’d be hiding behind the nearest rock, curled up like a fucking baby, and crying, the way you behaved on December seventh.
(Two)
Lakehurst Naval Air Station
Lakehurst, New Jersey
1605 Hours 1 January 1942
PFC Stephen M. Koffler, USMC, heard his relief coming, the crunch of their field shoes on the crusty snow, the corporal quietly counting cadence, long before he saw them. Koffler was eighteen years and two months old, weighed 145 pounds, and stood five feet seven inches tall.
The relief was marching across the front of the enormous airship hangar; and Koffler’s post, Number Four, was a marching post, back and forth, along the side of the hangar.
Permission had been granted to the guard to carry their Springfield 1903 caliber .30-06 rifles at sling arms, muzzle down. The idea was to keep snow out of the muzzle.
PFC Koffler unslung his piece and brought it to port arms. The moment he saw the corporal turn the corner, he issued his challenge: “Halt, who goes there?”
He had learned how to do this and a number of other things peculiar to the profession of arms generally, and to the United States Marine Corps specifically, at the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina, during the months of October and November and in the first weeks of December, but the first time he had done it for real was here in Lakehurst.
There were five rounds in the magazine of his rifle, and a total of forty more in the pockets of the “Belt, Web, Cartridge” he was wearing around his waist. His bayonet was fixed to the muzzle of his rifle. Sometimes, walking back and forth alongside the dirigible hangar, he had forgotten it was there and bumped into it with his lower leg.
“Corporal of the Guard,” the corporal called.
“Advance, Corporal of the Guard, to be recognized.”
The Corporal of the Guard ordered the guard detail to halt. When they had done that, he took another half-dozen steps toward PFC Koffler.
“Giblet,” PFC Koffler challenged.
“Gravy,” the Corporal of the Guard replied, giving the countersign.
When he had first been told the night’s challenge and countersign, PFC Koffler had been more than a little surprised. Somebody around here apparently had a sense of humor. There had been none of that at Parris Island, not with something as important as guard duty.
Not that what he was doing here at Lakehurst wasn’t serious. The hangar had been built to house dirigibles before PFC Stephen Koffler was born, back when the Navy had thought that enormous rigid airships were the wave of the future. It now held half a dozen Navy blimps, used to patrol the waters off New York harbor for German submarines. A blimp was a nonrigid airship, like a balloon. Last night in the guardhouse, PFC Koffler had heard that the first Navy nonrigid airship had been called the “A-Limp,” and the second model the “B-Limp.” That’s where the name had come from.
There were German submarines out there, and it was quite possible that German saboteurs would attempt to destroy the blimps in their hangar. There were a whole lot of Nazi sympathizers in New York’s Yorktown district. Before the war, they used to hire Madison Square Garden for their meetings.
Guarding the dirigible hangar and its blimps was not like guarding the recruit barracks at Parris Island. PFC Koffler had taken his responsibilities seriously.
“PFC Koffler, Post Four, Corporal,” Koffler said. “All is well.”
They went through the formalized ritual of changing the guard. The first Marine in the line behind the corporal marched up and held his Springfield at port arms while Koffler recited his Special Orders, then the Corporal of the Guard barked “Post,” and PFC Koffler marched away from his post and took up a position at the rear of the relief guard.
This was his last tour. He’d gone on duty, “stood guard mount,” at 1600 yesterday afternoon, and been assigned to the First Relief. He’d gone on guard at 1600, walked his post for two hours, and been relieved at 1800. Four hours later, at 2200, he had gone on again and walked his post until midnight, which was New Year’s. Then he’d had another four hours off, going back on at 0400 until 0600. Another four hours off until ten, then two hours more until noon, then four hours off, and then this, the final tour, two hours from 1400 to 1600.
It had not entered his mind to feel sorry for himself for having to walk around in below-zero weather on New Year’s Day, any more than it had entered his mind on Monday, when he’d gotten off the Sea Coast Limited train that had carried him from Parris Island, South Carolina, to Newark, that if he got on the subway, he could be home in thirty minutes.
It had been instilled in him at Parris Island that he no longer had any personal life that the Corps did not elect to grant him. He was not a candy-ass civilian anymore, he was a Marine. He could go home only when, and if, the Corps told him he could. You were supposed to get a leave home when you graduated from Parris Island, but that hadn’t happened. There was a war on.
Maybe he could get a leave, or at least a weekend liberty, while he was going to school at Lakehurst. Or when he graduated. If he graduated. He wasn’t holding his breath. For one thing, the sergeant major on Mainside at Parris Island, where he’d been transferred after graduating from Boot Camp, had really been pissed at him. They had gone through the records looking for people with drafting experience, and they’d found him and transferred him to Mainside to execute architectural drawings for new barracks. He hadn’t joined the Corps to be a draftsman. If he’d wanted to be a draftsman, he would have stayed with the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, where he had been a draftsman trainee in the Bus & Trolley Division.
There’d been an interesting notice on the bulletin board. Regulations said you had to read the bulletin board at least twice a day, so it wasn’t his fault he’d seen the notice. The notice had said that volunteers were being accepted for parachute duty. And that those volunteers who successfully completed the course of instruction at Lakehurst would receive an extra fifty dollars a month in pay. That was a lot of money. As a PFC, his total pay was forty-one dollars a month, thirty-six dollars plus five dollars for having qualified as Expert on the firing range with the Springfield.
So he had applied, which immediately pissed off the Sergeant Major, who needed a draftsman. “Let some other asshole jump out of goddamned airplanes,” the Sergeant Major yelled at him. The Sergeant Major was so pissed and he made so much noise that one of the officers came out to see what was going on.
“Well, you’ll have to let him apply, Sergeant Major,” the officer said, “if he wants to. Put on his application we need him here, but let him apply.”
Stephen Koffler felt sure that was the last he would ever hear of parachute school, but three days later the Sergeant Major called him into his office to tell him to pack his fucking gear and get his ass on the train, and he personally hoped Koffler would break his fucking neck the first time he jumped.
He never even left Pennsylvania Station when he got off the Sea Coast Limited at Newark. He just went downstairs from the tracks to ask Information about when the New Jersey Central train left for Lakehurst. They told him it would be another two and a half hours. While he was waiting, he got asked three times for his orders, twice by sailors wearing Shore Patrol brassards, and once even by fucking doggie MPs. Steve Koffler was already Marine enough to be convinced that the goddamned Army had no right to let their goddamned MPs ask a Marine anything.
When he got to Lakehurst, a truck carried him out to the Naval Air Station. And then the Charge of Quarters, a lean and mean-looking sergeant, told him where he could find a bunk, but that he’d have to do without a mattress cover, a pillow, and sheets because the supply room was locked up. He might even have to wait until after New Year’s.
In the morning, he had a brief encounter with the First Sergeant, who was lanky and mean-looking like the Charge of Quarters, just older. The First Sergeant said that he really hadn’t expected him, and that he thought the new class would trickle in over the next couple of days, but now that he had reported in, he should get his gear shipshape and be ready to stand guard mount at 1600.
Koffler spent the day getting ready for guard, pressing his green blouse and trousers and a khaki shirt and necktie, which he now knew was not a necktie but a “field scarf.” He restored the spit-shine on his better pair (of two pairs) of field shoes, and cleaned and lightly oiled his 1903 Springfield .30-06 rifle.
It had been pretty goddamned cold, walking up and down alongside the dirigible hangar, but there was hot coffee in the guardhouse when you’d done your two hours; and the Sergeant of the Guard had even come out twice with a thermos of coffee and fried-egg sandwiches, an act that really surprised Koffler, based on his previous experience with both sergeants and guard duty at Parris Island.
After the guard that was just relieved marched back to the guardhouse and turned in their ammunition, every round carefully counted and accounted for, Steve Koffler took a chance and asked the Sergeant of the Guard a question. He seemed like a pretty nice guy.
“What happens now? I mean, what am I supposed to do?”
“If I was you, kid, I’d make myself scarce around the billet. There’s always some sonofabitch looking for a work detail.”
“You mean we’re not restricted to the barracks?”
“No. Why should you be? You just get out of Parris Island?”
“Yeah.”
“It shows,” the Sergeant said.
“Where should I go to get away from the barracks?”
“You can go anyplace you can afford to go. It’s about an hour on the train to New York City, but you better be loaded, you want to go there.”
“How about Newark?”
“Why the hell would you want to go to Newark?”
“I live just outside, a town called East Orange.”
“You just came off Boot Camp leave, right?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘No’?”
“I mean I didn’t get any leave. When we graduated, they sent me to Mainside, and then they sent me here.”
“No shit? You’re supposed to get a leave, ten days at least.”
“Well, I didn’t get one.”
“I find out you’ve been shitting me, kid,” the Sergeant said, “I’ll have your ass.”
Then he picked up the telephone.
“I hope you’re really hung over, you old sonofabitch,” he said to whoever answered the phone.
There was a reply, and the Sergeant laughed.
“Hey, I just been talking to one of the kids who’s reporting in. I don’t know what happened, but they didn’t give him a leave out of Parris Island. He lives in Newark, or near it. Would it be OK with you if I told the CQ to give him a seventy-two-hour pass?”
There was a pause.
“He already pulled guard. We just got off.”
Something else was said that Koffler couldn’t hear.
“OK, Top, thanks,” the Sergeant of the Guard said, and hung up. “He was in a good mood. You get an extended seventy-two-hour pass.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Steve Koffler confessed.
“Well, you get one pass that runs from 1700 today until 1700 Sunday. That’s seventy-two hours. Then you tear that one up and throw it away, and go on the second one, which lasts until 0500 Monday. The First Sergeant says that nothing’s going on around here until then, anyway.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Now for Christsake, don’t do nothing like getting shitfaced and arrested.”
“I won’t.”
An hour later, PFC Stephen Koffler passed through the Marine guard at the gate and started walking toward the Lakehurst train station. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when a Chrysler convertible pulled to the side of the road ahead of him, and the door swung open. The driver was a naval officer, a young one.
“I’m going into New York City if that would be any help, son,” he said.
On the way to Newark, where the officer went out of his way to drive him into the city and drop him off at Pennsylvania Station, he told Koffler that he was a navigator on one of the blimps and had spent New Year’s Eve freezing his tail ten miles off the Jersey coast, down by Cape May, at the mouth of the Delaware River.
Steve told him he had just arrived to go to the parachute school. And the officer replied that Steve had more balls than he did. There was no way anybody could get him to jump out of an airplane unless it was gloriously in flames.
Steve caught the Bloomfield Avenue trolley in the basement of Penn Station and rode it up to the Park Avenue stop by Branch Brook Park in Newark. Then he got off, walked up to street level, and caught the Number 21 Park Avenue bus and took it twenty blocks west across the city line into East Orange. He got off at Nineteenth Street, right across from his apartment building.
Steve’s mother and her husband lived on the top floor of the four-story building, on the right side, in the apartment that overlooked the entranceway in the center of the U-shaped building. There were no lights on in the apartment, which meant they were out someplace; but there were lights on in the Marshall apartment, which was on the same side of the building, and a floor down.
He wondered if Bernice Marshall was home. He had known Bernice since the sixth grade, when his mother had married Ernie and they had moved into the apartment building at 121 Park Avenue. Bernice Marshall wasn’t his girlfriend or anything like that. What she was was a girl with a big set of knockers and dark hair, and she was built like somebody who would probably get fat when she got older. But she was a girl. And as Steve looked up at her apartment now, his mind’s eye was full of Bernice taking a sunbath on the roof of the building, with her boobs spilling out of her bathing suit.
Whenever the Marshall girls, Bernice and her sister Dianne, took sunbaths on the roof of the apartment, the males in the building usually found some excuse to go up there and smoke a cigarette and have a look. Dianne was a long-legged, long-haired blonde four years older than Bernice. She had run away to get married when she was a senior in East Orange High. And then she had had some kind of trouble and moved back home with her baby.
Dianne had gotten a job in the Ampere Branch of the Essex County Bank & Trust, right next door to where Mr. Marshall ran the Ampere One-Hour Martinizing Dry Cleaning & Laundry. Steve didn’t know what Bernice was doing. She’d tried to go to college, at Upsala, in East Orange, but just before he had joined the Marines, Steve remembered now, he’d heard that hadn’t worked out and that Bernice was going to try to get some kind of job.
It then occurred to him that he didn’t have a key to get in. His keys and every other thing he had owned as a civilian had been put into a box and shipped home from Parris Island the very first morning he was there, right after they’d given him a haircut and a set of utilities and a pair of boots. Even before the Corps had issued him the rest of his gear.
Jesus Christ!
There was a door on either side of the lobby of 121 Park Avenue, which could be opened if you had a key, or if someone in one of the apartments pushed a button. Or if you gave the brass plate on it a swift kick. That’s what Steve did next, giving him access to the first-floor foyer and stairwell.
He went up the stairs two at time. When he passed the third-floor landing, he could hear female laughter from the Marshall apartment, but couldn’t tell if it was Bernice or Dianne, or maybe even Mrs. Marshall.
More or less for the hell of it, he tried the door to his apartment. It was locked, as he thought it would be. Then he went up to the roof. With a lot of effort he pushed the door open against the snow that had accumulated up there.
What they called “the deck”—the place where Bernice and Dianne took their sunbaths—was a platform of boards with inch-wide spaces between them. Now it was covered with ice and snow, and it was slippery under his feet as he made his way across it to the fire escape.
There was a ladder down from the roof to the top level of the fire escape, which was right outside his room. He climbed down it and tried his windows. They were locked.
Just beyond the railing of the fire escape was the bathroom window. If that was locked, he didn’t know what the fuck he would do. He leaned over and pushed up on it, and it slid upward.
But to get through it meant you had to stand on the fire escape railing and support yourself on the bricks of the building, while you leaned far enough over until you could put your head and shoulders into the window without falling off. Then you gave a shove. After that, you could wiggle through and end up head-down in the bathtub.
Steve realized there was no way he could do that wearing his overcoat and brimmed cap and gloves. After he considered that, he decided he couldn’t make it wearing his blouse either; so he took all of them off and laid them on the steel-strap floor of the fire escape.
Then he was so goddamned cold he started to shiver.
When he stood up on the railing of the fire escape, he thought there was a very good chance that he was not going to make it, and that when his mother and her husband came home, they would find him smashed and bloody on the concrete of the entranceway four floors down, dead.
Sixty seconds later, he was in the bathtub, head down.
He pushed out of the way his mother’s underwear and stockings, hanging to dry over the tub, and found the light switch and flicked it on.
He saw himself in the mirror. He didn’t look familiar. There was no fat on his face anymore, and his eyes looked like they had sunk inward. But the big difference, he realized, was the hair. Before he’d enlisted, he had had long hair, worn in a pompadour, with sideburns. What he had now was hair not half an inch long, and no sideburns.
He went into his bedroom, opened the window, and reclaimed the rest of his uniform from the fire escape. He opened his closet and put the cap on the shelf, then found a heavy hanger for the overcoat and hung that on the pipe. It really looked strange in there, he thought, beside his red and white Mustangs Athletic Club jacket.
His “rig” was on the shelf. He had been interested in amateur radio since he was a high school freshman and had joined the Radio Club. By the time he was a sophomore, he had learned Morse code and joined the American Amateur Radio Relay League. He had built his first receiver when he was still a sophomore, and his first really good receiver when he was a junior. He had passed the Federal Communications Commission examination for his ham ticket and had then gone on and gotten his second-class radio telephone license when he was a senior.
Getting the money to build his first transmitter and the antenna that it needed had meant giving up a lot of nights out with the Mustangs, but finally he had it up and running in the early spring of his senior year. That had lasted a week, until the neighbors in the building found out what was causing all the static when they tried to listen to “Lowell Thomas and the News” and Fred Allen and “The Kate Smith Hour.” They’d bitched to the superintendent, and the super had made him take the antenna down from the roof.
His mother’s husband had acted as if he had done something criminal. He’d even bitched at him for just listening to the traffic on the twenty-meter band, refusing to understand that receivers don’t cause interference. The fights they had over that had been one of the reasons he had joined The Corps.
He took his Mustangs jacket off its hanger and slipped it on. It had a red velveteen body and white sleeves and red knit cuffs and collar. Mustangs Athletic Club was spelled out in flowing script on the back, and Mustang AC and Steve in smaller block letters on the front.
He closed the bedroom door to examine himself in the full-length, somewhat wavy mirror mounted on it. The Mustangs jacket didn’t look right; either it had shrunk or he had grown. It was tight across his shoulders and chest, and the cuffs seemed to ride too high on his arms. He took it off and noticed something else. It looked cheap. It looked like a cheap piece of shit.
That made him feel disloyal and sad.
He hung the jacket back up and put on his uniform blouse, then looked at himself again in the mirror. He looked right, and the PFC stripe and the glistening silver marksman badges didn’t look bad either. He had two, an Expert Medal with little medals reading RIFLE and PISTOL hanging under it, and a Sharpshooter medal with BAR hanging under it. He hadn’t made Expert with the Browning Automatic Rifle, but Sharpshooter was nothing to be ashamed of. He’d only made Marksman with the .30-caliber machine gun and mortar. They had a medal for that too, but he had elected not to wear it. Everybody who qualified—and you didn’t get to graduate from Parris Island if you didn’t qualify—was a Marksman, so why the fuck bother?
He went into the foyer, where the mystery of his missing mother and her husband was solved. There was a brochure on the table. Three Days and Three Nights, Including New Year’s Eve, at the Luxurious Beach Hotel, Asbury Park, N.J. Only $99.95 (Double Occupancy).
That’s where they were, not thirty miles from Lakehurst.
Christ, didn’t they know there was a war on? That the Japs had taken Wake Island two days before Christmas? That the Japs had invaded the Philippine Islands? That while they were sipping their fucking Seven-and-Seven in the Beach Hotel, there were German submarines right offshore, waiting to put torpedoes into American ships?
(Three)
121 Park Avenue
East Orange, New Jersey
2105 Hours 1 January 1942
What I’ll do, thought PFC Stephen Koffler, USMC, is get together with the guys, maybe get a couple of drinks.
He went to the telephone mounted on the wall in the kitchen and dialed from memory the number of his best buddy.
Mrs. Danielli told him Vinny was out someplace, she didn’t know where. She would tell him Steve had called, she said, and asked him to wish his mom and dad a happy New Year.
He started to call Toddy Feller, but remembered that his mother had written that Toddy had enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor Day.
He thought, unkindly, that at this very moment Toddy was probably on his hands and knees, his fat ass in the air, scrubbing a deck at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center with a tooth-brush.
He went back into his bedroom, where he now remembered seeing the package from Parris Island, unopened, on the closet shelf. He took it down, tore the paper off, and dug through it. There was dirty underwear and dirty socks, and the pants and shirt and shoes and toilet kit (a brand-new one) he’d taken to the post office when he’d enlisted.
And his keys. To the lobby door, to the mailbox in the lobby, to the apartment door, and to his locker in East Orange High School. He’d kept that one for a souvenir, even though it meant paying the bastards two-fifty for a key you could have made in Woolworth’s Five & Ten for a quarter.
He put the keys in his pocket and went out the front door and down the stairs to the Marshall apartment, on the floor below.
He heard conversation inside when the doorbell sounded, and then he heard someone who was probably Bernice say, “I wonder who that can be?” and then the door was opened.
Mr. Marshall looked at him a minute without recognition, until Steve spoke.
“Hello, Mr. Marshall, is Bernice around?”
“I’ll be damned!” Mr. Marshall said. “I didn’t recognize you. Hazel, you’ll never guess who it is!”
“So tell me,” Mrs. Hazel Marshall said.
“Come on in,” Mr. Marshall said, taking Steve’s arm, then putting his arm around his shoulder, as he led him into the living room.
“Recognize this United States Marine, anybody?” Mr. Marshall said.
“Why, my God, it’s Stevie,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Stevie, your mother and father are in Asbury Park!”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Oh, she’ll be heartbroken she missed you!” Mrs. Marshall said as she came to him and kissed him. Then she held him by both arms and looked at him intently. “You’ve changed.”
“Hello, Stevie,” Dianne Marshall said. “Remember me?”
“Yeah, sure. Hello, Dianne.”
“And this is Leonard,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Leonard Walters. He and Dianne are sort of keeping company.”
Leonard Walters looked like a candy-ass, Steve decided. Dianne looked good. She didn’t have big boobs like Bernice, but the ones she had pressed attractively against her sweater.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” Leonard said as he shook Steve’s hand. “You’re a Marine, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“How about a little something against the cold, Steve?” Mr. Marshall said.
“Charlie, he’s only seventeen.”
“Eighteen,” Steve corrected her. “I was hoping Bernice would be home.”
“She had a date,” Dianne said. “She’ll be sorry she missed you.”
“No big deal,” Steve said.
“Seven-and-Seven OK, Steve?”
Seven-and-Seven was Seagram’s Seven Crown Blended Whiskey and 7-Up. Steve hated it.
“No, thank you,” Steve said.
“See, I told you,” Mrs. Marshall said.
“How about a little Scotch, then? That’s what I’m having.”
“Scotch would be fine,” Steve said. He wasn’t even sure what it was, only that he had never had any before.
“Water or soda?”
“Soda, please.”
Dianne walked across the room to him.
“What are those things on your uniform, medals?”
“Marksmanship medals.”
She stood close to him and bent over and examined them carefully. He could see her scalp where she parted her hair; and he could smell her; and he could see the outline of her brassiere strap.
“I’m impressed,” she said, straightening, still so close he could feel the warmth of her breath and smell the Sen-Sen she had been chewing.
Mr. Marshall handed him a glass and Steve took a sip. It tasted like medicine.
“That’s all right, son?”
“Just fine,” Steve said.
Dianne walked away. He could see her rear end quiver; she was wearing calf-high boots. Steve thought that calf-high boots were highly erotic, ranking right up there with pictures he had seen in The Police Gazette in the barbershop, of women in brassieres and underpants and garter belts.
“So how do you like it in the Marines, Steve?” Mr. Marshall asked.
“I like it fine,” Steve said. That wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but he understood that he couldn’t say anything else.
“What have they got you doing?”
“Monday I start parachute school,” Steve said.
“I don’t know what that means,” Mr. Marshall said.
“The Corps is organizing parachute battalions,” Steve explained. “I volunteered for it.”
“You mean you’ll be jumping out of airplanes?” Mrs. Marshall asked.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Really?” Dianne asked. When he looked at her and nodded, she added, “I’ll be damned.”
“Dianne!” her mother said. “Try to remember you’re a lady.”
Steve sensed that Leonard wished he would leave, and while Steve thought Leonard was a candy-ass, fair was fair. If he had a date with some girl, he’d want to get her alone and away from her family and neighbors, too.
He refused Mr. Marshall’s offer to freshen his drink, and then left.
He called the Danielli house again, thinking that maybe Vinny had come back; but Mrs. Danielli said she hadn’t heard from him and didn’t expect to, as late as it was. He apologized for calling so late and turned the radio on.
He quickly grew bored with that. From his living room window he could see the candy store on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue but it was closed. So there was no place he could go without a car.
He had a damned good idea where Vinny was. He was up at The Lodge, on the mountain in West Orange, where you could get a drink even if you weren’t twenty-one. But getting one around here was an impossibility. They all knew who you were and how old you were. And you needed a car to get to The Lodge.
But then he remembered hearing that if you were in uniform you could get a drink, period. The idea began to grow on him. There was a bar by the Ampere station. His mother and her husband never went there, so the people there wouldn’t connect him with them.
It was worth a try. It was a shame to waste a seventy-two-hour pass sitting around listening to the radio all by yourself. If they wouldn’t serve him, he’d just leave. He’d turn red in the face, too; but that wouldn’t be too bad.
He put on his overcoat and his brimmed cap, turned the overcoat collar up against the cold wind, and walked to the bar by the Ampere station.
It was crowded and noisy. He pushed his cap back on his head, unbuttoned his overcoat, and found an empty seat at the bar.
“What’ll it be?” the bartender asked.
“Scotch and soda,” Steve said.
The bartender said, “You got it,” and went to make it. Steve took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and laid it on the bar.
When the bartender delivered the drink, he pushed the five-dollar bill back across the bar. “On the house,” he said.
Steve took a sip of the whiskey. It still tasted like medicine. Not as bad as the first one, but still bad. It was probably, he decided, another brand.
The bartender set another drink on the bar in front of Steve.
“From the lady and the gentleman at the end,” the bartender said. Steve looked down the bar to where a middle-aged couple had their glasses raised to him.
“My privilege,” the man called.
“God bless you!” the woman called.
Steve felt his face flush, and desperately hoped he wasn’t blushing to the point where it could be seen.
“Thank you,” he called.
It was the first time in his life that anyone had bought him a drink in a bar.
“You meeting somebody?” a male voice asked in his ear. He turned and saw that it was Leonard.
“No,” Steve said. “I just came in for a drink.”
“Whyn’tcha come sit with us?” Leonard asked, with a nod toward the wall. There was a wall-length padded seat there and tiny tables, eight or ten of them, in front of it. Dianne Marshall was sitting on the bench, smiling and waving at him.
“Wouldn’t I be in the way?”
“Don’t be silly,” Leonard said. “If we knew you were coming here, you could have come with us.”
Steve picked up his five-dollar bill and followed Leonard over. Dianne patted the seat next to her.
“You should have said something, Steve,” Dianne said, “about coming here. You could have come with us. What did you do, walk?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess you get a lot of that, walking, in the Marines, huh?” Leonard asked.
“Try a thirty-mile hike with full field equipment,” Steve said.
“Thirty miles?” Dianne asked.
“Right. It toughens you up.”
“I’ll bet it does,” Dianne said, and squeezed his leg over the knee.
She wasn’t, he saw, looking for any reaction from him. She was looking at Leonard, smiling. She relaxed her fingers, but didn’t take them from his leg.
She doesn’t mean anything by that, he decided solemnly. She has a boyfriend and I’m just the kid friend of her little sister. I mean, Jesus, she was married, and has a kid!
He was not used to drinking liquor; he started to feel it.
“It’s been a long day,” he announced. “I’m going to tuck it in.”
“You haven’t even danced with me yet!” Dianne protested.
“To tell you the truth, I’m a lousy dancer,” he said, getting up.
“Ah, I bet you’re not,” Dianne said.
“You better dance with her, kid, or she won’t let you go,” Leonard said.
“Don’t call me ‘kid,’” Steve said, nastily.
Jesus Christ, I am getting drunk. I better leave that fucking Scotch alone!
“Sorry, no offense,” Leonard said.
“What’s the matter with you, Lenny?” Dianne snapped. She got up and took Steve’s hand. “I’ll decide whether you’re a lousy dancer.”
She led him to the dance floor and turned around and opened her arms for him to hold her. And he danced with her. He was an awkward dancer, and he was wearing field shoes. And he got an erection.
“I think we better call this off,” he said, aware that his face felt really flushed now, and that it was probably visible, even in the dim light.
“Yes, I think maybe we should.”
He didn’t sit down again with them, just claimed his overcoat and brimmed cap and put them on. After that he shook hands with Leonard and left.
It was a ten-minute walk back to the apartment. Snow had started again, but it was still cold enough for him to feel that he was sobering up. He told himself he had made a mistake leaving, that maybe Dianne had meant something when she didn’t take her hand off his leg. And then came the really thrilling thought that she had felt his erection, and it hadn’t made her mad.
By the time he got to the apartment, however, and was shaking the snow off his overcoat and wiping it off the leather brim of his cap, he had changed his mind again. Dianne was twenty-what? Twenty-two at least, probably twenty-three. She was an ex-married woman, for Christsake. She had a boyfriend. His imagination was running wild, more than likely because he had had all those medicine-tasting Scotch-and-sodas.
The telephone rang.
It had to be Vinny Danielli. The sonofabitch had finally come home, and his mother had told him he had called.
“Hello, asshole, how the hell are you, you guinea bastard?”
“Steve?”
“Jesus!”
“It’s Dianne.”
“I know. I thought it was somebody else.”
“I sure hope so,” she said.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“We left right after you did. Leonard lives in Verona and was worried about getting home in the snow.”
“Oh.”
“Your parents get home?”
“They won’t be home until tomorrow sometime.”
“Mine are in bed,” she said. “And so’s Joey.”
Joey, Steve now recalled, was her little boy.
There was a long, awkward pause.
“You want to come up?” he heard himself asking.
Oh, my God, what did I say?
“To tell you the God’s honest truth, Steve, I’d love to,” Dianne said. “But what if anybody found out?”
“Who would find out?”
“I wouldn’t want Bernice to find out, for example. Not to mention my parents.”
“She wouldn’t get it from me,” Steve said, firmly. “Nobody would.”
“But, Jesus, if we got caught!” Dianne said, and then the phone clicked and went dead.
He felt his heart jump.
She wouldn’t come up. She’s had a couple of drinks, a couple of drinks too many, and it’s a crazy idea. Once she actually went so far as calling up, she realized that, and hung up. She absolutely would not come up.
The doorbell rang.
He ran and opened it, and she pushed past him, closing the door behind her and leaning on it. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe and slippers that looked like rabbits. She had a bottle of Scotch in her hand.
“I saw that you liked this,” she said, holding it up.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m glad you came.”
“Can I trust you? If one word of this got out, oh, Jesus!”
“Sure,” Steve said.
She leaned forward quickly and kissed him on the mouth.
“Leonard is a good man,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Leonard is a good man. I mean that. He’s really a good man, and he wants to marry me, and I probably will. But…can I tell you this?”
“Sure.”
“He thinks you should wait until you’re married,” she said. “I mean, maybe that’s all right if you’re a virgin. But I was married, you know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
“If I hadn’t come up here, were you going to do it to yourself?”
“What?”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“Yeah, probably,” he said. He had never confessed something like that to anyone before, not even to one of the guys.
“You didn’t, did you?” she asked, and then decided to seek, with her fingers, the answer to her own question.
“I think I would have killed you if you had,” she said a moment later, pleased with the firm proof she had found that he had not, at least recently, committed the sin of casting his seed upon the ground. “After I took a chance like this.”
“You want to come in my room?”
“There, and in the living room, and in every other place we can think of.” She pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, and this time her tongue sought his.
It took him a moment to take her meaning. It excited him. He wondered if she would be able to tell, her having been married and all, that he was a virgin.
Jesus, I’m really going to get laid.
(Four)
121 Park Avenue
East Orange, New Jersey
0830 Hours 2 January 1942
Dianne Marshall Norman woke up sick with the memory of what had happened between her and the kid upstairs. She knew why she had done it, but that didn’t excuse it, or make it right. She had done it because she was drunk. And she knew why she had gotten drunk; but that didn’t excuse it, or make getting drunk right, either.
Maybe she really was a slut, she thought, lying there in her bed with her eyes closed, hung over. A whore. That’s what Joe had called her when he’d caught her with Roddie Norman in the house at the shore. She’d been drunk then, too, and that had been the beginning of the end for her and Joe. He had moved out of their apartment two weeks later and gone to a lawyer about a divorce. And been a real sonofabitch about it, too.
His lawyer had told her father’s lawyer that Joe would pay child support, but that was it. He would keep the car and all the furniture and everything else, and he wouldn’t give her a dime. He would pay for her to go to Nevada for six weeks to get a divorce. If she didn’t agree to that, he would take her to Essex County Court in Newark and charge her with adultery with Roddie Norman, and it would be all over the papers.
Dianne didn’t think doing it with just one man (two, actually, but Joe didn’t know about Ed Bitter) really made her a whore or a slut. And there was no question in her mind that Joe had been fooling around himself. She’d even caught him at the Christmas office party feeling up the peroxide blonde, Angie Palmeri, who worked in the office of his father’s liquor store. And there had been a lot of times when he’d had to “work late” at the store and couldn’t come home, and she had driven by and he hadn’t been there.
What had happened with Roddie Norman wouldn’t have happened if everybody hadn’t been sitting around drinking Orange Blossoms all afternoon; it had been raining and they couldn’t go to the beach. And the real truth of the matter, not that anybody cared, was that she had been mad with Joe because he had been making eyes at Esther Norman all day and looking down her dress.
And then, because Roddie was taking a nap on the couch and Joey was asleep, Joe and Esther had gone to get Chinese takeout at the Peking Palace in Belmar. God only knew what those two had been up to when they were gone, but that’s when it had happened. Roddie had awakened and the phonograph had been playing and they’d started to dance, and the first thing she knew they had both been on the couch and he had her shorts off, and Joe had walked in.
Dianne sometimes thought that if Joe had been able to beat Roddie up, it wouldn’t have gone so far as the divorce. What actually happened was that Roddie knocked Joe on his backside with a punch that bloodied Joe’s nose. Getting beaten up by Roddie was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.
So she’d gone to the Lazy Q Dude Ranch, twenty miles outside of Reno, Nevada, for the six weeks it took to establish legal residence. Then she’d gotten the divorce and moved back home, where her parents treated her as though she had an “A” for “Adultery” painted on her forehead.
And then her father brought Leonard Walters home. Leonard sold dry cleaner’s supplies, everything from wire hangers and mothproof bags to the chemicals they used in the dry-cleaning process itself. She had seen him around, seen him looking at her, and knew that he was interested. That was really one way to get her life fixed up, she thought. But Leonard was the single most boring male human being Dianne had ever met.
Dianne’s father brought him home to a potluck supper. That was so much bull you-know-what. They just happened to have a pot roast for supper, and Bernice just happened not to be there, and they ate at the dining room table off the good china and a tablecloth, all usually reserved for Sunday dinner, if then.
It had been carefully planned, including a little dialogue between her mother and her father to explain Dianne’s situation. The story they fed Leonard used the phrase “Dianne’s mistake” a lot. But “Dianne’s mistake,” the way they told it, was not getting caught letting Roddie Norman in her pants, but in “foolishly running off to get married.”
In her parents’ version, Joe Norman had stolen her out of her cradle. And then, once he got her to elope with him—in the process throwing away her plans for college and a career—he started to abuse her and drink and run around with a wild crowd who drank and gambled and did other things that could not be discussed around a family dining table.
Leonard Walters not only swallowed the tale whole, but embarked on what he called “our courtship.” The courtship had not moved very rapidly, though. The reason was that Leonard’s name had been Waldowski before his parents changed it when they were naturalized. The Waldowskis were Polish and Roman Catholic, and Leonard’s mother was a large and formidable woman who did not believe Roman Catholics should marry outside The One True Faith. She knew that Dianne was a Methodist, but Leonard hadn’t told her about Dianne’s marriage, and she didn’t know about Little Joey either.
It was not now the time to tell her about it, Leonard said. “Let her learn to know you and love you.”
Leonard was pretty devout himself, and he did not believe in premarital or extramarital sex. In his view, the thing to do about sex and everything else was “wait until things straighten themselves out.”
On the day that PFC Stephen Koffler, USMC, entered her life, Dianne and Leonard had dinner, served precisely at noon, at the Walters’ house in Verona. It was a strain, relieved somewhat by several large glasses of wine.
Then they went to East Orange, where Dianne’s mother had promptly dragged her into the bedroom to deliver a recitation about how badly Joey had behaved while she was gone. After that she demanded a play-by-play account of all that was said at the Walters’ dinner. When Dianne explained that Leonard had not yet told his mother about Dianne and Joe, and, more important, about Joey, there followed a two-minute lecture about why Dianne should make him do that.
Once her mother let her go, Dianne went from the bedroom to the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. She laced her cup with a hooker of gin. By the time Steve Koffler marched in, looking really good in his Marine Corps uniform, she was on her fourth cup.
At first he remained the way she always had remembered him—“the kid upstairs,” a peer of Bernice’s, one of the mob of dirty-minded little boys who always came up to the deck on the roof to smirk and snicker behind their hands whenever she and Bernice tried to take a sunbath.
It was difficult for her to believe that he was really a Marine. Marines were men. Stevie Koffler, she thought, probably still played with himself.
That risqué thought, which just popped into her mind out of the blue, was obviously the seed for everything else that happened. A seed, she realized after it was over, more than adequately fertilized by the gin in her coffee.
It was immediately followed by the thought—not original to the moment—that playing with himself was what good old Leonard must be doing. Either that or he just didn’t care about women, another possibility that had occurred to her. She had tried to arouse Leonard more than once; and she’d worked at that as hard as she could without destroying his image of her as the innocent child bride snatched from her cradle by dirty old Joe Norman. But she’d had no luck with him at all.
Maybe Steve doesn’t play with himself. Marines are supposed to have women falling all over them.
When Steve Koffler walked into the Ampere Lounge & Grill an hour after that, there was proof of that theory. Dianne saw several women—all of them older than she was—look with interest at the Marine who walked up to the bar in that good-looking uniform, his hat cocked arrogantly on the back of his head.
And then, if you wanted to look at it that way, Leonard himself was responsible for what had happened. If he hadn’t gone to Steve at the bar and practically dragged him back to the table, Steve would have had a couple of drinks and gone home. Maybe with one of the women who had been looking at him.
But Leonard dragged him back to their table. And then she felt his leg. And it was all muscle. The couple of times she had squeezed Leonard’s leg, playfully, of course, it had been soft and flabby. Steve Koffler’s leg was muscular, even more muscular than Joe’s, and Joe had played football.
And then, when she danced with him, and that happened to him, and she knew that he wanted her, too…
She tried to talk herself out of it. She even went so far as to put on her nightgown after Leonard took her home and gave her the standard we-can-wait-until-we’re-married goodnight kiss. But then she decided to have a nightcap, so she could sleep. And when she stood in the kitchen drinking it, the telephone was right there, on the wall, in front of her nose.
Things, she told herself, always looked different in the morning. They did this morning. What they looked like this morning was that she’d gotten drunk and gone to bed with the kid upstairs. Marine or not, that’s what he was, the kid upstairs.
Christ, he can’t be any older than eighteen!
And what they’d done! What she’d done, right from the start, right after the first time, when it had been all over for him before she even got really started.
Joe had taught her that, and from the way Steve acted, she had taught him. That, and some other things she knew he had never done before.
Jesus, what if he starts telling people?
She had another unsettling thought: Sure as Christ made little apples, Steve Koffler is going to show up at my door.
She got out of bed and took a shower. When she came out, her father was in the kitchen.
“I promised Joe’s mother that I would take Joey over there,” she said. “Can I borrow the car?”
“Sure, honey,” her father said. “But be back by five, huh?”
“Sure.”
When she got back, a few minutes after five, she met Steve coming out of the apartment with his mother and his mother’s husband.
Steve’s mother didn’t like her. Dianne supposed, correctly, that Steve’s mother knew what had really happened with Joe Norman. So, as they passed each other, all Dianne got was a cold nod from Steve’s mother, and a grunt from the husband.
Steve didn’t know what to do. But then he turned around and ran back to her.
Dianne told him that she had to do things with her family that night and the next day. And she managed to avoid him the rest of the time he was home.