Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  It was always the same, like standing at the bottom of a deep well of noise, waiting for it all to come crashing down on you.

  A Sunday afternoon at the Polo Grounds, gray sky without any sun glare, not too cold, the grass mottled green and brown, spongy underfoot. He hadn’t gotten all the clumps of mud and grass from where they’d wedged between his cleats during the warm-up and now it was too late. He was waiting now, just waiting for the kaleidoscope to shake, for the game to begin.

  The crowd was standing and yelling behind a curtain of smoky haze. The radio station banner, the big white letters WHN on a navy-blue background, hung from the broadcast booth on the mezzanine level. He glanced over at the scoreboard where the other games were listed. There wasn’t any word yet from Washington or Chicago but he knew he’d keep checking instinctively as his own game ground onward.

  His helmet was pinching his ear, which was tender from last Sunday when somebody had knocked the helmet off in a plunge at the goal line and somebody else had kicked hell out of his head. His pads and jersey smelled like sweat from another century. By the end of the season they couldn’t clean the smell away anymore. Maybe winners had more sets of uniforms. He couldn’t believe the Giants smelled this crummy.

  Cassidy was the lone return man. Art Hannaford had gone down with a broken leg just before Halloween leaving Cassidy as the only kick returner. Everybody on the team had congratulated Art, laughing at what Cassidy was in for. Art had gone back to his job at a bottling company in Hoboken.

  Far away, on the horizon, beyond the drainage hump in the center of the field, the kicker moved up and the noise got louder, like the Twentieth Century Limited bashing through the bedroom wall, and he put his leg into the ball.

  The ball climbed up the flat, leaden sky, end over end, like a fly moving up a gray wall. He waited for his depth perception to click in so he could get an idea where the hell it was going to intersect with planet Earth.

  Kickoffs always scared him. Waiting, wondering what he was doing at twenty-nine, seven years out of Fordham, playing a kid’s game, wondering what would happen when the ball came down …

  The ground began to tremble. It was always the same but nobody who’d never been out there for the kickoff could quite believe it. It was like an earthquake he’d once sat through in a Los Angeles hotel. He’d been scared shitless then, too.

  It was doing a trapeze act up there, twisting and spinning in the gusts of wind, and he seemed to stand at the five-yard line for an eternity, waiting for it to top out. The Giants came down the field snorting and puffing and blowing like the horses Karin used to ride out near Princeton …

  There he was, waiting for the kickoff to come down, and the crowd was on its feet bellowing and the ground was shaking and he had one hell of a hangover and even then he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife.

  It was always the same.

  He met her at the Winter Olympic Games in 1936. His father, Paul Cassidy, had put him on the payroll for the trip, calling him a talent scout for the sake of his accountants and the tax people. The football season was over. It would be a perfect time for the two of them to pal around together, visit Paris, and meander down to Nice afterward, all the while scouting the talent.

  The talent that stopped Lew in his size tens was a twenty-year-old ice skater and the story going around Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the swanky German resort town where the Games were held, was that Adolf Hitler himself had his eye on her. In 1936 Adolf Hider’s name didn’t mean all that much to Lew except he was the guy running the whole damn country. The Germans seemed crazy about him and the posters of him on the walls were pretty striking. The Charlie Chaplin moustache didn’t seem funny—just somehow Germanic and authoritative. He seemed to have the country and the people revved up and everybody was having a fine time in Garmisch. The Führer thought the young skater, Karin Richter, was the answer to the twenty-four-year-old Norwegian Sonja Henie, who had brought her ballet training to the sport and revolutionized it while winning gold medals at Saint Moritz in 1928 and at Lake Placid in ’32.

  The Germans were hopeful that winter of ’36. But, as it turned out, Karin Richter skated well and looked exquisite, which wasn’t enough to get a medal, let alone dethrone Henie, who won again. Rumor had it that Hitler canceled a reception he’d been planning for her had she won, and maybe he had. She never found out for sure, not even when she got to know Dr. Josef Goebbels, who was busy by then arranging his own parties for her. But that came later. At the time, Cassidy turned on the charm and told her the Olympics hadn’t been a complete loss for her. She’d met him. She’d nodded patiently but didn’t know what he was talking about when he told her he was the star tailback of the Bulldogs. Which only made him work on her all the harder.

  Though he was the one who spotted her first, getting a good look at her early one morning when she was practicing at the rink just beyond the window of the hotel dining room where he was having breakfast, it was his father who approached her. Paul Cassidy was a movie producer back in Hollywood. He liked to insist that he was the first one with the idea of making Sonja Henie a movie star. Turned out he was a brick shy of a load in the money department but, then, that was the show business for you. If you were in the movie end of things, you didn’t even think about giving up. Paul Cassidy thought maybe he’d lucked into something when Lew dragged him out to the rink to watch through the morning mist the gorgeous girl doing her figure eights.

  She was certainly a good enough skater to build a lightweight movie career around and, to tell the truth, Paul had never seen her as doing Lady Macbeth. He was, however, looking past strictly ice-bound pictures, past her legs which were unusually long for a skater, past that cute little fanny where Lew’s observations had stopped for some time to catch their breath and deliver a heartfelt sigh. Paul was looking at her face because, though he might not know about skating, he sure as the devil knew about movies. He knew it was the face that mattered. A woman could be badly underslung, flat-chested, bowlegged, and overweight, with all her springs badly sprung, but if she had the face—well, she had the face, and that was what it took to do the heavy work in the movies. Karin Richter had the face, all right. Classically high cheekbones, a nose just less than haughty length, which made her more approachable, level eyebrows over solemn, oddly pale brown eyes. Her upper lip was thin, the lower full, hinting at a kind of permanent pout, thankfully unlike her temperament. It was a face as likely to stick in the memory as any he’d ever seen.

  Lew dropped like a stone into those bottomless brown eyes, the brown equivalent of the blue you sometimes saw in pure mountain lakes. He didn’t come up for air until he’d followed her back to Cologne, met her austere scientist father and faintly dismayed mother, and convinced her to marry him. They came back to the States together, Lew and Karin and Paul. Almost before she knew it she had a husband and a producer and was getting ready for a screen test.

  Herr Dokter Goebbels, who was Hitler’s propaganda expert in Berlin, had to be consulted by Paul Cassidy regarding his plans for Karin’s future on the silver screen. Goebbels made a big deal out of it, talking about the German film industry’s vitality and the opportunity it afforded beautiful young German actresses, which was where Paul remarked that while that was undeniably true and he bowed to no one in his respect for the German cinema, it was also true that Karin was a skater, not an actress.

  “Just for the sake of argument, Joe—you call me Paul, Joe,” Paul said over the cognac late one night after dinner with Goebbels and his wife, “let’s say the girl comes to Hollywood, does the test for me, and she’s got something up there on the screen. That magic which not one of us can resist. But she’s still a skater, see? So she learns her way around the camera in her first five, six pictures. We’ve taken the risks, we’re stuck with the kid if she just sort of lays there. You never heard of her, see? But if she can act, if she connects, well, then we work out a deal. You want her to come back, do a picture or two every now and then, no problem. If we’
re lucky, hell, she’s an international star. Whattaya say, Joe, why not let us take the risk for you?”

  Goebbels just laughed and grinned crookedly. He was a swarthy, funny-looking little geek with a clubfoot and damned if he didn’t wear his uniform to the dinner table. He limped across to where Cassidy sat uncomfortably on an austere chair, shook hands, said, “For our American friends, why not? How can I deny her the chance to go to Hollywood? I’d like to see it myself; perhaps someday it can be arranged. Who knows?”

  Later Goebbels saw him to the front door where a venerable Daimler-Benz and driver waited to return the movie producer to the Adlon. “Now listen to me, my friend,” Goebbels said, shaking a finger beneath his guest’s nose, all in mock seriousness, “I know about your movie business. All furriers and junk men and moneylenders—Jews, all of them. You take good care of our little girl, she’s your responsibility. Don’t let the Jews get their hands on her! And you make her a great star!” They shook hands again and Goebbels said, “Auf Wiedersehen, Paul,” and Cassidy went back to the hotel thinking about the impossibility of Goebbels’s final instructions. She should be a star … but no Jews could be involved. He shook his head. A contradiction in terms. So Goebbels didn’t know batshit about the movies, in Hollywood or Germany or anywhere else, apparently.

  When Lew and Karin were married up at Lake Placid in 1938, the good doctor took time off from helping Hitler devour Europe and sent a lengthy Teutonic wire from the Reichschancellery congratulating them on their mutual good fortune, wishing them a long and happy life together, and hoping they would soon visit him in the bride’s fatherland. He also sent about five hundred dollars’ worth of roses, which cleaned out all the florists for miles around the little church where the ceremony took place. Karin blushed and frowned. “More proof, the Nazis have no taste, no sense of restraint,” she said. She found them intolerably vulgar, from their manners to their uniforms to their torchlit rallies. “The only one I ever liked was Fat Hermann,” she’d once told Lew, referring to Reichsmarschall Göring, the epic hero of the Great War. “He bounced me on his knee once when I won a children’s skating competition. Pinned the little medal on my blouse.” That was the only good thing he’d ever heard her say about the Nazis. Lew figured Fat Hermann was overly fond of little girls but had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

  The warmth of Goebbels’s words as well as the sheer number of roses led Lew to believe that the propaganda minister had not seen the first Karin Richter picture which Paul Cassidy in his wisdom not only produced but wrote as well. It was called Murder Goes Skating. Lew never understood why stars like George Brent and James Gleason agreed to costar with Karin but apparently they both went back a long way with Paul. And they got a month in Sun Valley out of it. There had to be some reason. Murder on Ice followed a few months later, much the same kind of thing though Tom Tully signed on for the ride. Her third movie, Bless Your Heart, was a little Christmas number and she only had to skate in one scene where she was teaching kids at an orphanage with lots of nuns also taking to the ice. It was a marked improvement. Karin’s career looked more than just promising. She was an American citizen by then. It was 1939.

  While the German army was taking big bites out of the map of Europe, while Lew was playing his kid’s game, while Karin was letting Paul Cassidy try to make her a movie star, Herr Professor Ernst Richter, Karin’s father, was getting sick. The reports he sent were sketchy, reticent, and stoic but worrisome. It sounded serious: Nothing less would interfere with his government work and he admitted that it had. What it sounded like was cancer.

  Karin decided she had to go back to see him, to be with him if he needed her, since her mother had died not long after she and Lew had gotten married. What could Lew say? A father was a father and wouldn’t he have felt the same if it had been Paul? Europe was going to hell from the looks of things but everybody was saying it had gotten as bad as it was going to get. Hitler had the Lebensraum he’d been yelling about, and now it would all calm down. And, anyway, it was her father.

  She sailed from Pier 42 on the Hudson, bound for Lisbon on the American Export Line. She’d then catch a Lufthansa flight from Lisbon, heading into the heart of the Third Reich. Berlin. Then on to the family home in Cologne.

  There was only one big problem once she got there.

  They wouldn’t let her come back.

  No strong-arm Nazi stuff, just Dr. Goebbels feeling that a good German girl’s place was with her dying father, as he was sure she would agree. And as long as she was back home, he felt that it was only logical that she make a movie or two. He invited her to tea in Berlin, then went to Cologne to continue making his case. The troops, he said, would worship her as they devoted themselves to the greater glory of the fatherland. They needed such exemplary models of German womanhood to keep their morale up. He told her that her father needed her by his side if he were to continue his work as long as he could. Goebbels told her of the special laboratories which had been built for him, one in Cologne, one in the mountains. He arranged interviews for her with her father’s doctors, who were none other than the same men he, Himmler, Bormann, and—yes—even the Führer himself depended upon. He told her that all Germany needed her skill and beauty to fill the cinema screens. He wasn’t kidding but a snow job from a Nazi was like a death threat from anybody else.

  Lew decided it was time for the old football hero to make an end run and go rescue his wife.

  But Karin wrote begging him not to do anything rash. She begged him to stay in New York. She said that there were old family friends who had become Nazi sympathizers: not monsters, she wrote, just friends of her parents’ whom she’d known and trusted from her childhood. They assured her that there were no plans for a wider war, that it was all over, that peace in Europe was at hand. They told her that once Goebbels got a movie out of her she’d be welcome to come and go as she pleased and as her father’s condition warranted. They told her that her father worshiped her, depended on her, would fall like a leaf in winter without her. Stay, they told her, until the vigil was over, if that was the will of God. Make the movie, Liebchen. And don’t worry so much, you’ll put lines on that lovely face.

  The only thing she had to worry about, they told her, was an impetuous American husband who didn’t understand the way things stood in Germany. Keep him back home, her old family friends kept telling her, and the time will fly and you’ll be together again. Like little lovebirds. But if he comes barging into Germany making a fuss, they couldn’t be responsible for the consequences. To her father, to her, to her husband. They clucked and shook their heads and peered through their monocles. They were full of good advice.

  So Lew didn’t go.

  He waited and played football and read the papers and watched the Nazis club Europe damn near to death. He watched the Blitzkrieg and Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain from afar and counted the letters that got through from Karin.

  He never did find out if she made Goebbels’s movie but he supposed the Reichsminister had a lot on his mind in those days and maybe he’d just never gotten around to it.

  Paul said it probably wouldn’t have been worth a shit anyway since all the good Kraut moviemakers had escaped to Hollywood.

  Saturday night before the Giants game.

  Cassidy’s last letter from Karin had come through in September, posted by a friend passing through Lisbon. She told him not to worry, that her father’s condition had stabilized—it had turned out to be leukemia—and she was well enough, more or less untouched by the war. She hoped he knew how fouled up the mail was, what with Europe, North Africa, and the Atlantic all mired in one aspect of the war or another.

  He knew about the war, all right, probably a good deal more than she did. And he believed what she wrote about her present state of mind, how much she loved him, missed him, and thought about him. Yet, hearing from her so infrequently, he couldn’t help feeling pointless, empty, a man going through increasingly senseless motions. He began drinking more than was good
for him, had gotten in the habit of hanging around the nightclubs while trying to mask the emptiness, the worry, the loneliness.

  The fact was, without Terry Leary he might not have made it through the season. He sure as hell wouldn’t have had the best year of his career, not without Terry. Because it was always Terry there to rescue him from the black hound of depression, to listen while Lew opened the taps and poured out his troubles. Terry understood because he knew Karin, too, had been best man up at Lake Placid, struggling to control all those goddamn roses from Goebbels.

  Whenever Cassidy got too far down, Terry would make it his business to do the cheering up. “Gotta get you out of yourself,” he’d say, and nobody was better at that than Terry. He knew what was going on in New York: It was his style, his city. Another cop once told Cassidy: “That Terry, he’s got eyes in the back of his head. Eyes that see around corners. He knows what’s coming before it’s coming. That Terry, you gotta get up before breakfast to get ahead of him.”

  On Saturday nights, with games looming the next afternoon, Terry took it upon himself to keep Cassidy out of trouble. Hell, there was always somebody who wanted to outpunch or outdrink a football hero and Cassidy was a big man, easy to spot, an easy target. But Terry could see around corners, and besides, he was a tough guy by profession and inclination. A cop.

  Sometimes Terry’s magic worked and sometimes it didn’t.

  That Saturday night they began as they usually did with drinks at the Taft Hotel, Seventh and 50th. They met in the lobby, all combed and brushed with clocks on their socks and shines on their shoes. Terry had come directly from his regular weekly appointment at the Terminal Barber Shop, which wasn’t as ominous as it sounded. He was grinning, shooting the breeze with the cigarette girl and kidding the bellhops, wearing his smooth shit-eating Irish-malarkey grin, his ebony hair slicked straight back from his high square forehead. He was normally very pale but not since he’d discovered the Suntan Shave at Terminal where for half a buck you also got zapped by their new sunlamp. He’d developed of late a sort of pinkish-tan flesh tone, not quite Palm Beach but closer than any other cop gave a damn about getting. The tan went well with the belted camel’s-hair polo coat.