“Oh, him—Karl,” she muttered. “Poor Karl doesn’t bring out my dread. He’s not an enchanter—a Yankee devil. Karl cannot greet me with a love potion, not like my Sonny.”
There were no boundaries between peace and war. They’d pummel each other, and he’d promise never to see her again. He lay in exile at the Villa Oberwegner for a week and then returned to the Kehler Weg, dispatching all her suitors with a display of his badge.
“I’m CIC.”
They all fled Nuremberg in a nonce.
Thus it went on and on like some bitter Bavarian fairy tale of the American occupation, with Sylvia threatening to move to Berne, and Sonny wearing his holster while he made love.
It was dizzying, disastrous.
“Whore, I’ll leave you here.”
Sylvia laughed and laughed. “You can’t. What American Fräulein would caress your balls? I dare you. Name me one.”
They’d battle until he was all black-and-blue. And then Sylvia kneaded his forehead and taught him how to levitate. They rose above the rooftops of Weißenberg, crossed Bavaria in some endless wanderlust, while she whistled an old tune, and arrived irrevocably at Hürtgen Forest.
“I can’t go back, I can’t,” Sonny shouted into the vast summer foliage of white pines, his voice a feeble echo in the forest.
“But you are back, darling.”
And he had no answer as he clung to Sylvia and could conjure up the unregistered graves, the hellfire of each Kraut attack, the blistering cold, newbies going mad in the vanishing light, and the relentless whimper of the pines that was like his own private call of doom.
PART TEN
Dracula’s Daughter
May–June 1946
1.
MIRIAM WAS INCONSOLABLE.
She couldn’t understand why Sonny had stayed a whole year among Hitler’s tribe of people after the war had ended. Why didn’t he come home like other GIs? He’d been discharged last October, and still he stayed. Now he had a civilian contract with the CIC, hunting black marketeers and war criminals around Nuremberg, which even Miriam knew had once been the Nazi heartland, where Hitler had held his biggest rallies.
“Give him time, give him time,” Sol said, ticking away like a broken clock. “The boy’s confused.”
And Doris, the divorcée, chimed in: “He’s like a PI, Mama. Sonny’s our Sam Spade.”
It didn’t make sense. Miriam had knit him woolen socks all through the war, but she stopped knitting right after V-E Day. Why would Sam Spade need woolen socks? And then, like a punch in the solar plexus, this war bride appears right out of the blue—no announcements, no invitations, nothing. A French girl, Sonny said, Sylvie something. It sounded suspicious. What was a French girl doing in Nuremberg? Sonny called her a “letter carrier.” Miriam’s storytelling son was a teller of tall tales. But she hadn’t seen a published story by him in months. She perused the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and couldn’t find one mention of J. D. Salinger. He’d given up writing, God forbid. He sent a photo of the war bride. She was a brunette with pale skin and dark eyes, and Sonny asked her and Sol if they could see the hump she had on her shoulders—a letter carrier’s sack. It was another one of his mystifications.
“Mama,” Doris said after parsing the letter, “he’s ribbing you.”
“It’s torture,” Miriam said.
She couldn’t seem to get Sonny on the line. She had a working phone number, more than one, but the overseas operator could never connect her to Sonny himself. Sometimes she got a captain who had no idea where Sergeant Salinger was, or if he existed at all. But he did exist. Once he even called, pretending to be a general, and said that Sergeant Salinger was on secret maneuvers and would get in touch the moment he could.
“Sonny,” Miriam screamed into the phone, “you’re killing me. Can’t you admit who you are?”
He parroted the voice of the overseas operator. “Sorry, Mrs. Salinger, but your party has disappeared.” And the line went dead.
Several letters did come in a row, like a fleet of fighter-bombers. Sonny chatted with her as if he lived right next door, in Nuremberg. “Mom, we’re swell, we really are. Sylvie sends her love and a deep bonjour.” And then there was a long silence that pinched her vitals, until she couldn’t eat for days. And after another month of silence, a tiny scribble on a piece of GI tissue paper: Her boy was coming home with his war bride on a Liberty ship, the freighter Ethan Allen. They even had the landing schedule. They picked up Doris at Bloomingdale’s and rode down to the piers along the West Side Highway in Sol’s company car, a 1946 Cadillac Fleetwood sedan, borrowed for weddings and funerals and other important engagements, like Sonny’s return from Hitler Land. The highway had an eerie look. The Hudson was packed with Liberty ships that lay at anchor, like rusting carcasses with a vast scatter of smokestacks. Sol was moody, but Miriam was much too excited to remain silent.
“Doris, I haven’t seen my son the secret agent in so long, how will I recognize him?”
“Mother, he’s not a secret agent,” Doris insisted. She had Sonny’s cheekbones and great dark eyes.
“But that’s what I told Ralph.”
Ralph was the doorman at 1133, and a vast conduit of misinformation.
“And Ralph has told half the world,” Doris said, rolling her dark eyes like Eddie Cantor or Fanny Brice. “He’s not a secret agent; he hunted Nazis for a whole year and visited orphans at DP camps.”
They parked on West Street, in front of the piers, and waited while the Ethan Allen nestled into its berth like some night rider with darkened windows. It was puny, and Miriam couldn’t imagine it as a Liberty ship that had carried her son across the ocean with his war bride.
“I’m so excited,” Miriam said. She sat in the back of the sedan, on her own private cushions, like a reigning queen. While the passengers disembarked, a sudden anger seized her, a sense of betrayal, as if she’d never had a son. And then, there he was, her Sonny, coming down the gangplank with his bride and a big black mutt—a schnauzer, a Nazi dog. Miriam climbed out of the car, with Sol and Doris behind her, barely keeping up with her pace. Her arms flew like an engine out of control. But Miriam never lost sight of her target. She stared at this brunette creature with the pale skin and bloodred lips, at her hauteur, her swagger, and knew right away that this Sylvie wasn’t French. It was all a ruse. Sonny was a secret agent. He’d come out of Germany with a German war bride.
2.
SHE’D BEEN SEASICK FOR THE ENTIRE TWELVE DAYS of the crossing. He brought her cups of soup and strong black tea from the captain’s own cook. She never left the cabin, except at night, when he’d wrap her in a shawl, and they’d stand on the main deck as Sylvia breathed in the salty air, with the wind in her face and Benny at her side, on his leash. The schnauzer had his own passport, with a litany of shots from the veterinarian in Nuremberg and different stamps from government officials. The provost marshal had to agree and some guy from Special Services. Benny was like a liberated prisoner of war. If Sonny hadn’t been with counterintel, he could never have taken the dog.
The schnauzer had kept the marriage from unraveling. They loved the dog, doted on him. How the hell did it happen? That black dog appeared one day on the Kehler Weg, and wouldn’t leave Sonny’s side—it was utter, desperate devotion at first sight. Sonny didn’t have to think or brood. “Benny,” he barked at the dog, and Benny it was. The mutt belonged to both of them, and would growl at any of Sylvia’s other suitors. She had to send them away.
And so, in the midst of his Bavarian enterprise, Sonny had become the papa of a black dog with whiskers and a beard. Now he had to take care of Benny and Sylvia. Sonny wasn’t supposed to fraternize with German nationals. He could have been fined a hefty sum and sentenced to six months in the stockade. But he was much too clever for the Army of Occupation. He had Corporal Benson prepare a forged passport, and Sylvia became a French national overnight—Sylvie Louise Welter.
The corporal was going back to the States. He
wouldn’t consider another six months in Nuremberg with counterintel. “Sarge, I hate to leave you here alone. You’re like a baby.”
“But I’m not alone,” he insisted. “I have Sylvia.”
“That’s what I mean. You have Sylvia. She’ll tear your heart out. It’s an old Kraut trick. You should have put her in the cages when you had the chance.”
“Well,” Sonny said with a slight stutter, “we’re in lo-o-o-v-e. We levitate.”
“Levitate all you want, but love’s nothing in Nuremberg,” the corporal mused. “One more commodity. Everything’s for sale—everything.” He started to sniffle. Sonny had never seen him cry before, not in the Hürtgen, not at Kaufering IV, with all those corpses and skeletons on fire. But the corporal knew that he wouldn’t have survived without Sonny, wouldn’t have survived at all.
“Jesus, Sarge, ’member the time our own planes were shooting at us and we had to jump from our jeep right into a ditch? You broke your damn nose and it never healed right.”
Sonny laughed. “Ah, it’s only bent a little. I can still breathe through both nostrils … and become a movie idol.”
“But you have a sixth sense in battle, like the king of all the alley cats. You’re a spotter, Sarge. You know how to spot trouble. ’Member the time we were interrogating that Kraut with the eye patch and he whipped out a knife and went straight for my gullet? You were faster than Billy the Kid—whacked him right on the schnozzola.”
“It was pure chance.”
“No, no. It’s your sixth sense. But it sure ain’t there when it comes to the Fräuleins.”
The corporal ran off with his duffel bag to catch a bus to Zeppelin Field, the old Nazi rallying ground, which had been converted into an airstrip. Sonny watched and watched until the duffel bag disappeared, and then he realized how much he would miss this corporal from rural Pennsylvania who had never heard of Friedrich Nietzsche or Franz Kafka, and wasn’t even curious about Sonny’s stories in the Post.
He married Sylvia a month later. And now he was back in the land of Fleetwoods and Frigidaires, coming down a wooden plank with a seasick wife and their schnauzer, who had acted like a referee, holding the marriage partners together with a dog’s miraculous mirth. It was Benny who had the sixth sense, not ex-Sergeant Salinger, Benny who could paw at his mistress and master, bring them out of their gloom with some silly trick, like hiding Sonny’s hat, or stealing Sylvia’s sock. And at least Sonny could laugh, while Sylvia was terrified of this new country of conquerors and Sonny’s own conquering tribe, the Salingers.
But it was Sonny who seemed a bit shell-shocked, even with a big black dog who was half a clown. He was like poor Alicja, without a tongue. Sol stood in the background with his spectacles and trimmed mustache, as if he were staring at a stranger, or worse, a war criminal, and his illegitimate bride. It was Miriam and Doris who danced around Sonny and Sylvia at the bottom of the plank.
Sylvia had her usual pale skin and bloodred lips, and the dog had a long black beard and eyebrows that looked like chicken feathers. But Miriam was transfixed by Sonny.
“Sol,” she said, “they hurt my boy—look at his nose. Not even Joe Palooka ever had a nose like that. We’ll have to take him to Mount Sinai, right from the docks.”
Sonny would have to get used to her hyperbole again.
“Mother, it’s nothing,” he said.
She mimicked him. “Nothing, he says. Doris, you’re my witness. He comes back from Hitler’s hometown with a bride and a broken nose, and calls it nothing. Please, Sonny, introduce us to your wife—and your big black dog with the beard.”
He had his regrets, right on the pier, among the warehouses of West Street, but he couldn’t have signed up with CIC for another six months. He’d spent most of his time with young orphans in a DP camp outside Nuremberg, steering them through a bureaucratic maze, but these children were already marked no matter what Sonny did for them, no matter how hard he fought; they wore a numbered tag rather than a name. He organized volleyball matches for the boys, put on playlets for the little girls from a sister camp near Munich, helping them sew the costumes, providing whatever material he could, but orders came down from the provost that Sonny should stop interfering with “the internal business” of the DPs. He couldn’t stray from the master plan invented by the Army of Occupation and its diabolic clerks. This camp outside Nuremberg was a former SS barracks, with barbed wire and the odor of unwashed flesh. He fed these children contraband candy, allowed the more daring ones to smoke a Camel with him, his fingers stained with nicotine. He’d been smoking since he was seventeen.
“How are you today, Five two one B?”
“I was lucky, Herr Salinger,” said a Talmudic looking boy who’d risen from the dead at Dachau. “I did not have to wait so long outside the latrines. I could move my bowels. It is a wonder. But I wish we had some toilet paper.”
“There’s a short supply this week,” Sonny said, despairing that he was part of this regime. He could not create a family for 521B, who would go from a reconditioned SS barracks to some orphanage in Upper or Lower Silesia, where he would walk around in ill-fitting clogs and drink soup from a tin cup. And so Sonny quit and returned to America. And now he had to face what he didn’t want to face, the sovereignty of the Salingers.
“Mom, Dad, Doris, meet my Sylvie … and our Benny.”
He could feel that tinge of iciness, though Doris hid it better than Miriam and Sol. Doris was the worldly one. She’d made regular trips to Europe on the Queen Mary before the war, as empress of fashion at Bloomingdale’s, a fashion buyer at a very unfashionable store, which sat in exile, far removed from the emporiums of Fifth Avenue, such as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, and catered to the riffraff of Third Avenue and a maelstrom of Park Avenue maids.
She’d once been friendly with Coco Chanel, had visited all the fashion houses near the place Vendôme. She wore a summer cape that Coco’s couturieres had designed. She’d been Sonny’s ally all through childhood, though they fought a lot. She married Billy Samuels in 1935, a wholesale grocer who chased after every skirt in town until the Salingers got rid of him less than two years later. Billy was a blue-eyed Adonis, a ne’er-do-well who played Russian roulette with Doris’ life. Sonny admired him in some dark way—his zest, his willingness to destroy and create anew, his manicured mustache and fingernails like a mask of confidence. Sonny had none of this as he climbed down from the Ethan Allen. His hands still shook and his cheek still twitched.
It was Doris who sensed the root of his pain. He was rudderless, without his craft. And he had all the trappings of someone who had settled in. But he’d settled nowhere, and he had nowhere to settle—not Nuremberg, and not 1133 Park Avenue. And yet he was returning to his childhood nest, with a wife and a dog. Sonny’s homecoming, Doris sensed, was a subtle form of suicide.
3.
HE WAS SILENT ON THE RIDE UPTOWN, into the sinews of Manhattan. Yet it was almost surreal. Trained in reconnaissance at Fort Holabird, he couldn’t get rid of that hawkeye of his so easily as he calibrated each shift in the landscape—a hardware store on Columbus and Sixty-ninth where a hardware store had never been; a dinette that had once been a hole-in-the-wall; a candy shop on Madison that was reincarnated as a dry cleaner’s….
He had to bear the unbearable weight of the Salingers, with the schnauzer at his heels and Miriam planted between him and his wife. She clutched Sonny’s hand and gripped Sylvia’s, too, and wouldn’t let go. He would have had to strangle his own mother and still might not get free.
“Lovebirds,” she crooned. “Where did you lovebirds meet?”
“At the clinic,” Sylvia said.
“Clinic? What clinic?” Miriam asked.
Sonny broke his silence. “Mother, I had a breakdown. I wrote Doris—remember?”
Miriam was bewildered. “She said it was a rest cure … at a health spa for GIs.”
Doris had a subversive smile. “A health spa, Mama, in Nuremberg?”
“Solly,” Mir
iam said, “stop the car. I will not be jostled in so rude a fashion by my own son and daughter. There has to be a reckoning—right now.”
“Miriam,” Sol said, “we’re on Madison, in the middle of traffic.”
“That’s not my problem,” Miriam shouted, her coiffure ablaze, a nest of burning red snakes.
I will have to strangle her one day, Sonny muttered to himself. But it was Doris who was the real captain of the ship. “Mother,” she said, with the same subversive smile, “calm yourself, please. You’ll have your reckoning. We’ll settle this upstairs.”
And it was Doris who steered them home. They got out of the Fleetwood in front of 1133, and the doorman, Ralph, pranced out from under the green awning to welcome the half-forgotten war hero.
“Sergeant Salinger,” he said with a crisp salute, the blade of his hand striking the bill of his cap. “And your lovely bride. What an honor, sir.”
“Ralphie,” Miriam said, “pipe down. We’re not in the mood.”
And for a moment, with all that rattling, Sonny thought he was back in the Green Hell, where the bombardments never ceased. And it wasn’t Doris, his older “twin,” who rescued Sonny. While Sol went to park the company car, Sylvia seized Sonny’s arm and led him into this brick and limestone palace, taller than the Nuremberg Castle and the Frauenkirche—the Church of Our Lady—much, much taller. She was surrounded by men in uniforms, who looked like overdressed beetles. One of the beetles ran the elevator and drove them up to the Salingers’ palace apartment, with the help of a metal stick. Frau Salinger thanked this beetle, who stopped on the sixth floor, and they marched Sonny into the apartment, which wasn’t even locked. Scheiße, she muttered to herself, they don’t have locks and keys in America.
4.
THEY DIDN’T LIKE HER, THAT’S ALL. And it wouldn’t have mattered what she did or said. She got rid of that French veneer. And Sylvie was suddenly Sylvia again. But it wasn’t gemütlich to be a German war bride in America, not during the Nuremberg tribunals, when images of Dachau haunted every newsreel. The Salingers had a Hungarian live-in maid, Maja, and Sylvia recruited her as an ally. She had to use her own counterintel against the Salingers. Maja must have been forty-five or fifty. She had a narrow, pinched face, with swollen eyes. And she was a reservoir of information about the Salingers and the building, and America. They would meet in the maid’s room, while Maja did the ironing, and devour half a box of white Belgian chocolates that Doris had brought from Bloomingdale’s, and smoke Pall Malls from Sylvia’s pack, kept in a lizard skin pouch.
Sergeant Salinger Page 17
