Hold Tight

by Christopher Bram

  “Oh, that,” said Mr. Rice. “Grossly exaggerated. And it’s not as though we don’t have anti-semitism here, too. Just look at our country clubs and resorts. Anti-semitism is so declassé, but it’s being used to discredit the National Socialists’ good work.”

  She let Mr. Rice do all the talking, staring into his stern blue eyes without incriminating herself. He spoke at length on the question of whether Roosevelt was a fool or a knave, betraying his class the way he had. He then compared the leveling effects of Bolshevism and democracy.

  The maitre d’ reappeared. “Your table’s ready, Mr. Rice. I apologize for the disturbance earlier, sir.” He did not look at Anna, who he knew had arrived with the “disturbance.”

  Mr. Rice merely nodded and turned back to Anna. “It’s so rare one gets to meet someone so intelligent, I hate to end this. You said you’re waiting for someone?”

  “Yes, but they’re already a half hour late. I wonder if I’ve been stood up.”

  “Would you care to join me? For another drink maybe? Until your party arrives.”

  “Your wife or girlfriend won’t be joining you?”

  Mr. Rice laughed. “Hardly. I’m unmarried and quite unattached.”

  Anna hid her joy by resisting his kind invitation a moment longer, then accepted his arm; she left the bar with Mr. Rice.

  The room seemed finer than ever when she actually entered it, and on the arm of such an important, elegant man. He nodded at a table they passed, grudgingly. The maitre d’ led them to a banquette on a dais in the corner, zebra-striped seats around a white tablecloth. Anna asked Blair—she thought of him as Blair now—if there were anyone here tonight she should know about.

  “Not really,” he said, looking over the tables. “Whom do you see here?”

  Anna explained she rarely went out, what with being away at Bryn Mawr.

  “It was much nicer last year. So many men from good families have caught war fever and enlisted. The idiots. In their place you get these social climbers in uniform.” He angrily nodded at an Army officer laughing at the next table.

  Anna suddenly wondered if Blair was one of them. They were everywhere, so why not this wealthy young man who admired Hitler and hated the war? But an agent would not be as outspoken about his beliefs as Blair was. That was a pity, because it would be wonderful working with such a man, the two of you bound together in your shared secret. Which gave Anna an idea. It was a dangerous idea, but it would not go away.

  After they ordered their drinks, Blair talked more about himself—Yale and Park Avenue, his doddering father and once wonderful mother, his misery during the Nazi-Soviet pact, his elation the day Hitler invaded Russia.

  A man with a bloodshot nose came up to their table, accompanied by a pretty girl with bare shoulders and a pale, half-familiar face. They were selling raffle tickets to benefit the Red Cross. Blair politely refused, saying he had already donated his mother to that organization.

  “Oh, please, Blair. Pretty please with ice cream on it,” whined the girl.

  And Anna recognized who she was.

  “You old fud,” said the girl when Blair remained adamant. She then sailed off to the next table, dutifully followed by the little man.

  “Wasn’t that Brenda Frazier?” Anna whispered. “The debutante?”

  Blair made an apologetic hum. “I once took her out when I was in college.”

  Such connections took Anna’s breath away. She assumed all famous people knew each other—Brenda Frazier, movie stars, congressmen and presidents. She wished her father were here to hear this, but Anna was on her own. “You must know scads of important people,” she began.

  “Not really. Well, I suppose some might think the people I know are important.”

  “Have you ever thought about, oh, using your position to do good?”

  “What can I do?” said Blair. “That’s my tragedy. Knowing what’s right and not being able to do anything about it.”

  “I’m sure there’s something you could do.”

  Blair narrowed his eyes at her. “What a funny girl you are.” He lightly laughed. “Anyway, blowing up bridges and things is hardly my line.”

  “But you probably hear things that would help the men who blow up bridges.” Anna knew of no saboteurs, but that seemed to be the language Blair understood.

  “Perhaps. I do hear things.” He smiled, sheepishly. “It has crossed my mind. Once or twice, when I read about such goings-on in the newspaper. But how does one make himself available? There’s no listing in the phone book for Nazi spy rings. Unlike the Communist Party.”

  Anna hesitated. She glanced around the room, then reached beneath the table and found Blair’s hand.

  It was her usual act to keep a sailor or merchant marine talking, to lead them on. But when Blair’s hand slowly turned over and his fingers lightly pressed her fingers into his cool palm, she was the one who felt changed. She had to do this; it was the right thing to do.

  Blair gently smiled, then stared at their clasped hands. When he looked up at her, his cool, handsome face was tense with understanding, doubt and hope.

  “Blair?” she whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Two weeks later, Thomas Blair Rice, III, of El Morocco, the Stork Club and 21, sat in a saloon off the boardwalk at Coney Island. The sidings were down, but the breeze that blew in from the darkening beach and ocean was not enough to clear away the saloon’s stink of beer, cigars and b.o. He wished Anna had chosen a nicer place for him to meet her father. He had certainly taken her to enough nice places since the night they met. Even their bench in Central Park would have been better. They were late and Blair was nervous enough already. If they didn’t come before the blackout, they would never find him.

  Out in the twilight, people clattered in herds along the wide, bare boardwalk. In the smokey light inside the saloon, they drank, yammered and laughed, as if they didn’t know there was a war, not even the handful of men in uniform. The only sign of the war was the jukebox, raspberrying the room again with “In Der Fuhrer’s Face.” Cattle, Blair thought. Luckily for them, he was coming down from his tower of intellect and class to save them from their leaders.

  “Nine o’clock! Lights out!” Wardens shouted up and down the boardwalk. The saloon went black. Even that was a lark for the masses. They giggled and hooted; someone made ghost noises. To the right of his table, a man and woman shamelessly moaned together. Blair was disgusted by his picture of what they might be doing. He was infuriated over wasting an hour here without meeting Anna or her father. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The ocean and sky were two dark shades of blue beyond the partially blackened globes of the streetlamps outside. Cigarette ends winked around the room. Someone struck a match, held it high and called for more beer. Blair thought about getting up and feeling his way out.

  “You’re Anna’s young man?”

  Blair jumped an inch off his chair. He had not heard anyone sit at his table.

  “Yes. Of course. Is that you, Mr. Krull?” Anna had told him her real name at their second meeting.

  “Speak softly. I can hear you.” The man’s voice came from the side of the table toward the wall, so there was no silhouette, only a low, softly accented voice. There was a whiff of sen-sen when the man leaned closer. “Anna’s told me much about you. You want to help us?”

  “Yes. Where is Anna?”

  “She’s here. She pointed you out to me. She will join you, after I leave.” A sigh. “Sad when a father and daughter cannot be seen together too frequently.”

  “Anna speaks very highly of you. I respect that in a woman.”

  The man ignored the compliment. “I want to discover what you can do for us. You were at Yale?”

  “Class of Forty,” said Blair.

  “And you were in—What club? Skull and Crossbones?”

  “Skull and Bones,” Blair corrected him. “And not a club, a society.”

  “Then you are close friends with some very prestigious people?”


  “Close, no. I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone from school. They were too naive, too ignorant.” So ignorant they never accepted him in Skull and Bones, but Anna and her father didn’t need to know that.

  “Surely you kept one friend from then?”

  “No. Everyone I knew were Popular Front dupes or worse. None of them understood how Hitler had saved Germany from Bolshevism, or how—”

  “Admirable principles,” the voice said sharply. “But we must keep them to ourselves. People get ideas.”

  Blair was sorry. He had looked forward to talking politics with a real Nazi.

  Anna’s father wanted to talk about Blair. “Friends? Family? Surely you know someone highly placed in the government.”

  “No. My family, God bless them, has never dirtied its hands in politics. Cousin John’s in the Navy, but we stopped speaking to each other a year ago.”

  “Hmmm. And what line of work are you in?”

  “None at present. I was in advertising briefly, but I couldn’t bear the dishonesty.”

  “What a difficult young man you are.”

  Blair laughed. “Not difficult. Just principled.”

  “You’re not what I expected.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Nevertheless, I think you can help us. People above suspicion are rare, and a man of your class? I understand you belong to several exclusive clubs?”

  Blair proudly listed them.

  “You are attracted to my daughter?”

  The question took Blair by surprise. “Yes. Yes, I admit I find Anna attractive, sir.”

  “Would you say you are in love with her?”

  Blair opened his mouth, but couldn’t say anything. He cleared his throat. “I like your daughter, yes. Uh, isn’t this awfully personal?”

  “I want only to understand your feelings for her. But you do care about her?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Then you must be very careful in your talk. Not just for your sake, but for Anna’s. We do not want anything happening to her. A little loose talk and—”

  “You can trust me with Anna,” Blair said. “I’m very careful about what I say. And my feelings for her are of the highest—”

  Before Blair could finish, the chatter around them broke into shouts of “Look!” “Out there!”

  Out on the horizon, faint sparks of color flashed, red and yellow scratches of light at the line where the sky met the ocean. A ship had been torpedoed outside the Narrows.

  Silence passed over the room as everyone looked out in wonder. There was only a trumpet solo on the jukebox, then a faint rumble like thunder. All at once, people started talking again, questioning, guessing, laughing nervously.

  Blair turned back to Anna’s father. “Uh, some of your work?”

  No answer.

  Blair realized he no longer smelled sen-sen. He cautiously reached into the darkness and—felt the ribs of an empty chair.

  “A light, my love?”

  A woman’s voice on his left! Anna’s?

  Blair fumbled with his matches and finally struck one. Anna’s face flared up beside him, black-lashed blue eyes and white skin. She was comfortingly beautiful.

  “Thank God,” he said. “You startled me.”

  She smiled as she steered his hand over and lit her cigarette on his match. “Thank you.” She blew the match out, but her small hand held on to his in the dark. “Did you have a good talk with Papa?”

  “Very much. I wish we could’ve spoken longer. But he never gave me an assignment.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time for that. I hope.”

  “Oh, yes. I think the three of us will get along beautifully.”

  Anna’s hand clutched tighter. Each time she drew on her cigarette, a soft red face glowed beside him. Without the colors of her makeup, Blair could see the young girl she really was. She never smoked in front of her father, she said. She was still her father’s girl, which pleased Blair. The war had loosened the morals of so many women, but not Anna’s. He occasionally thought about sleeping with her and was relieved to know she could never sink to that.

  She was unlike any woman he had ever met, neither a giggly tease nor an obsequious tramp, and Blair thought he was in love with her. Or maybe it was the cause and world behind her that he loved. When she first told him what she was, he feared she was making fun of him, or that she was another screwball trying to make herself interesting. But she was real, it was real. After being alone with his wisdom for so long the wisdom had turned sour, Blair found Anna, who brought love and political action into his life, in a single glorious explosion. He already thought about marrying her, only he did not know enough about her background.

  “Let’s get away from here,” he said. “Catch a cab back to Manhattan. Go someplace where I can be myself again.” He missed the shell of composure the right kind of nightclub gave him.

  “Can we wait a little first? We shouldn’t leave too soon after Papa.”

  “Of course.”

  There was a new thudding out over the ocean, deep and steady. Destroyers hunted for a U-boat, their depth charges detonating below the horizon.

  Anna sighed and squeezed his hand again. “Poor guys,” she said. “All of them.”

  Blair admired her pity and decided he felt pity too. It was as sad as it was shameful that men who should be fighting side by side were killing each other. If it took defeat to shake his country awake, Blair was willing to do all he could to bring about that defeat. But one did not have to be vicious.

  They held hands in the dark and listened to explosions deep beneath the ocean. It was wonderful. They had each other and the great task before them.

  5

  “NEW GUINEA,” SAID THE voice, and there was a gray hillside, a palm tree like a great burnt match and the blackened bodies of midgets in a ditch. “Fried Jap,” the voice called them. An American with sooty face, white eyes and teeth grinned at the camera. “All in a day’s work for this happy GI.”

  Hank wanted to meet the GI, have a beer with him, kill Japs with him and feel like brothers. Hank felt funny having the GI out there while he sat safe and cool in the Lyric Theater, sock feet propped on the balcony railing. His half-empty seabag filled the seat beside him. This might be his last trip to the movies for weeks, but Hank fidgeted with the impatience and embarrassment that always came over him during the newsreel. Funny. On the McCoy all he ever thought about was getting into port and getting laid. Now that he was getting laid regularly, and starting a duty where he would do nothing but get laid, all he thought about was getting back to the tin can. He was homesick for familiar faces, crowded quarters and a routine so solid you felt free to grouse about it, like a family, without that grousing leading to distrust or doubt. Hank disliked doubt; it was too much like thinking. And it seemed unclean right now, what with the war and all.

  Even one of the cartoons today included the war: a frantic black duck with a Hitler moustache. There was nothing about the war in the feature, but it was about a suffering woman, a secret marriage to a man who soon dies, a baby put up for adoption, and Hank quickly lost interest. Down below and up here in the balcony, the usual men began to move around.

  Hank had been coming here regularly since his release from the brig a month ago, while he lived at the Y and waited for the Navy to make up its mind. Hurry up and wait, as they said, and it was already June. Coming to this theater was what had gotten him into trouble in the first place, but Hank liked to stick to places he knew. He needed at least one familiar landmark in his life now that everything else was confusion. And he was lonely, a little nervous—about what, he wasn’t sure—and bored. Sex was a fine way of forgetting yourself for an hour or so. He was more watchful now, more careful where he went and with whom. This city wasn’t as free and easy as he had thought that first day, but a little caution was all Hank needed to have a good time. There had been a couple of guys who were so much fun naked that Hank saw them more than once before they left town or simply
disappeared. The city was a giant railroad depot that people passed through on their way to the war. Only Hank remained behind.

  A young man suddenly sat in the aisle seat beside him. The young man squirmed, tapped his fingers on his knees, then promptly got up again. Hank turned to watch the slender silhouette climb the aisle toward the smokey projector beam that fanned overhead. There wasn’t enough time before he met Commander Mason. Hank had come here today only because he had nowhere else to go after checking out of the Y. And maybe as a way of saying goodbye to the place. When he couldn’t follow the young man, Hank suddenly resented what the Navy was doing with him, but only for a moment.

  They had chosen Hank and nobody else for their special assignment. He wanted to be proud of that, but it still felt peculiar. What he did with whom had always been as private as what he dreamed when he was asleep—and usually as impossible to keep track of. But people were suddenly treating his sex life as something that made Hank odd and useful. He wasn’t accustomed to so much attention, especially from people who had no intention of going to bed with him. Over the past month, Mason had met twice with Hank, privately. They met in the bar at the Hotel Astor, which was around the corner and seemed to have its share of men like Hank. The first time, Hank couldn’t help wondering if the commander, who came dressed in civvies, wanted to get laid himself. But no, the officer was all cold curiosity beneath his oily smiles, as impersonal as a Navy doctor sticking his finger up your ass. He met Hank in secret because agents might be watching the building and would notice the comings and goings of someone as distinctive as Hank, or so he said. Hank preferred to believe him. He disliked Mason, disliked his way of repeating over and over what was expected of Hank, as if Hank were too stupid to remember.

  But none of that should matter. There was a war on and Hank wanted to help them catch their spies as quickly as possible, so he could get back to the McCoy. His only real crime, Hank thought, was slugging that Shore Patrol—this sex business was only a sideline, an accident. Working at this house should square away his trouble with the Shore Patrol. That should be more important to him now than any uneasiness over the Navy’s interest in his sex life. And the war took all kinds of unimportant, personal things and made them important. Kitchen fats, old tin cans, newspapers—why not sex?