Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  Sol removed his spectacles. His jaws were trembling. “Billy Samuels, you’re insane. Get the hell out of here.”

  “Dad, wait,” Sonny said, with the blank, wild-eyed stare that Sylvia recalled from Krankenhaus 31. “I don’t have my uniform, Billy. I had to surrender my badge and my armband to the CIC. All I have is an Eisenhower jacket with bloodstains on the collar.”

  “Beautiful,” Billy said. “That would add a little menace.”

  Sonny remembered wearing that Eisenhower as a windbreaker on the Ethan Allen. It was his last memento of the war.

  “I could pay a thousand dollars—cash,” Billy said, winking at Sylvia. “Don’t I get to kiss the bride?”

  “No,” Sylvia said. “We will have to kiss another time, Herr Billy.”

  “There is no other time,” Sol said. “Billy, my boy was in a clinic. He can’t come with you to the Scheherazade. It’s madness.”

  Billy banged his elbows on the table. The silverware shook. “Let’s negotiate.”

  Sol pointed to the front door. “Out, I said.”

  “Not a chance. I haven’t had my dessert.”

  Billy turned and appealed to Doris. “Help me. You were my wife. We shared certain vows…. We made love right under this table.”

  “I’ll return some of your love,” Doris said, and poked him in the ribs. He fell back, and Sol shoved him out the door, with the help of Maja and Miriam. It was like the last time, six or seven years ago, when he owed a bundle to some other poets’ society of swindlers, and went into the master bedroom, ransacked all the drawers, and nearly walked out with a fistful of cash and securities. Maja caught him in the act and screamed. The Salingers swooped down upon Billy and had him banished from the building for three whole years.

  6.

  SONNY SLIPPED OUT THE BACK DOOR in his Eisenhower and sat in the service car. Corporal Benson was waiting outside in his jeep. He’d come all the way from Pennsylvania.

  “Corporal, how’s civilian life?”

  “Aw, it ain’t so terrific. I run a hardware store, with my battle stars in the window. No one’s really heard of the CIC—not one article in the news. We were a couple of ghosts, and that’s how we went right through the war. Where are we goin’, Sarge?”

  “To the Scheherazade,” Sonny said.

  They drove down Park Avenue in their jeep, the corporal marveling at the floral gardens in the little island that went along the entire length of the boulevard, with row after row of tall buildings on either side with the same majestic look that grew monotonous after a while.

  He turned right and rode onto the ramp at Eighty-fifth Street that delivered them into Central Park. They had the only jeep in town, as far as the corporal could tell. Drivers saluted them and whistled at Sonny in his sergeant’s stripes. “Hurray, soljer boy!”

  Benson asked about the clot of barnlike buildings and stables on the left side of the Eighty-sixth Street Transverse Road, with its gathering of horses. “Sarge, is that some fucking lost platoon?”

  “No,” Sonny said. “It’s the Central Park Precinct—with its horse patrol.”

  It had once been his favorite spot in the park, even more crucial than the old carousel of gallant hand-carved horses that went up and down a series of greased poles.

  He’d go on field trips with Doris into the park and visit this quaint precinct that most New Yorkers had never heard about. Sonny was eight at the time and Doris fifteen, a flapper with dark eyes, like a long and lean Clara Bow. Doris had become the household pet of this hidden precinct, with Sonny as her tagalong partner. She would dance the Charleston or the Black Bottom or do the Shimmy Shake for the detective squad and members of the horse patrol in the muster room. They couldn’t take their eyes off Doris and her frenzied moves, the way she would kick out a leg and flap her arms while she stood with her chin near her knees. Sometimes Sonny would dance along with her. But he couldn’t do the Shimmy Shake, not like sis. Afterward, the stable hands, who were also cops, would let Sonny climb onto a horse and ride along the narrow lanes, like a lone jockey.

  Doris had a crush on a young detective with a drooping mustache who called himself Vic. Years later, Sonny would say that Vic reminded him of Billy Budd, the foretopman in Melville’s sea tale. This young detective had Billy Budd’s innocent, almost angelic smile, though he carried a blackjack, and must have cracked many a skull. He also stuttered, like Melville’s sailor. But he wouldn’t allow any of the other detectives to fondle Doris or whisper in her ear. He protected her at the precinct.

  Still, his wife arrived one afternoon while Doris was doing the Black Bottom, and she put an end to the performance. “Vic,” she said in a savage but modulated voice, “get this baby bitch outa here.”

  The Billy Budd of Central Park shrugged his shoulders.

  “Sweetheart, it was only f-f-f-f-un.”

  “I’ll show you fun,” she said, and whacked him with her pocketbook. He didn’t flinch once. He escorted Doris and Sonny out of this precinct of refurbished stables with little windows for the horses’ heads. Doris sulked, and Sonny had to steer her away from the traffic on the transverse and lead her along to the West Eighties, where they lived at the time.

  “I’m so ashamed,” she blubbered, and never went back to the Central Park Precinct….

  Sonny remembered the look of desolation on Doris when she no longer had her young detective and free rein of the horse patrol. Billy Samuels became her suitor several years after that, Billy with his bouquets and his cockeyed schemes to make a buck in some fanciful market. He was always scheming, always alert about hard cash. He would gamble and lose a tiny fortune, and Doris would have to bail him out. But Billy had a kind of zest that the Salingers never had….

  The two ex-soldiers left the park a few blocks north of the old redbrick Museum of Natural History, and found the Scheherazade on Amsterdam, near a nursing home and a string of ramshackle hotels. It wasn’t the kind of cafeteria with the aplomb of Schrafft’s. Sonny could never have ordered a butterscotch sundae at the Scheherazade. It was quite dark inside. He and Benson had to find the poets’ corner. And there they were, in their suspenders; curiously enough, this poets’ lair reminded Sonny of Table 50 at the Stork. But Winchell didn’t preside here, not among these gangster-poets. He recognized another man in the shadows, the baron de Boeldieu, that caïd from Le Sphinx, on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet.

  “Boldy, what the hell are you doing in Manhattan?”

  But it wasn’t Boeldieu, just someone in velvet who happened to look like him. His name was Andrei. There was also a poetess who wore white paint, like Sonny’s own German wife. She was called Michaela. The other poets sat in the semidarkness and never uttered a sound. They all seemed to know who he was.

  It was Sonny who had to speak. “I’m here to settle Billy Samuels’ account.”

  The poets cackled at their Table 50. “That’s inconsequential,” said Andrei, who seemed to be the president of this little society. “It was only a lure, Sergeant, to bring you here. Billy was our bait. Tell us your secrets.”

  Sonny was baffled. He had imagined these Scheherazadians discussing the fire that a poet had to collect between every word—ex-Sergeant Salinger had lost whatever he had. Language lived in that fire and that fire alone. It didn’t matter that the Roumanians were thieves and draft dodgers, as long as they were guardians of that feathery flame. He wanted to commune with them in his Eisenhower jacket, bang his way back into the drumbeat of words.

  “I have no secrets,” Sonny said, “none.”

  “Then what use are you to us?” asked Michaela with the white face.

  “We’ve been sitting here for months,” said Andrei in his velvet jacket. “Yes, we’ve cut an occasional throat. It serves as inspiration. It was wonderful during the war. We operated in the middle of a blackout. We were all air-raid wardens, registered and certified. It was beautiful during the blackouts.”

  “A heavenly nest,” whispered Michaela with her eyes shut. “We wrote al
l the time.”

  “We didn’t have one dry spell,” said Andrei, “not one.”

  “And what happened?” the corporal asked. There weren’t any poets’ societies in Pennsylvania.

  “Peace,” Andrei said. “That’s what happened. No more ration stamps. We had to return our wardens’ helmets. We couldn’t forage in the dark. We all went cold—and completely flat.”

  And Sonny had to plead with this fraudulent society of poets. “What secrets could I possibly have? I’m absent without leave as a writer, AWOL.”

  “But you must have a secret,” Andrei insisted, “you must.”

  Perhaps, Sonny thought, dancing on his feet, as if he were back at the station house with Doris, doing the Black Bottom, perhaps it was that imperceivable lick of fire caught in a sudden freeze. That was it. Sonny wanted to write sentences that would scorch the reader’s soul like shards of burning ice. But he was impotent, even in his Eisenhower.

  The Roumanian poets weren’t shielded at the Scheherazade. There was a police raid, detectives and patrolmen from the Central Park precinct, who charged into this cafeteria with shotguns and billy clubs, and a couple of crowbars. They were looking for illegal merchandise, and they found a storeroom full of stuff. Sonny recognized Doris’ old flame, that young detective, Vic, who had a paunch now and dull, watery eyes.

  “Sergeant, what are you doing here with this g-g-g-gang?”

  “Reminiscing,” he said.

  “Well, you ought to reminisce somewhere else. This is a mean bunch.”

  “But they’re poets,” Sonny said.

  “When they aren’t burglars and g-g-guns for hire.”

  Sonny couldn’t resist. “Don’t you remember me? I was the squirt who played with your handcuffs a long time ago. My sister, Doris, danced for you in the muster room … until your wife broke up her act.”

  The dull, watery eyes didn’t blink once. “I don’t remember any D-d-d-doris.”

  It pained Sonny. The gift of remembrance was all he ever had. But nothing he said could bring Billy Budd back to that moment in the muster room almost twenty years earlier, when Sonny was a pisser in short pants.

  The poets were led out of the Scheherazade in handcuffs. Language depended on their largesse. These poets couldn’t produce without their plunder. They were as impotent as Sonny in peacetime, adrift without their wardens’ helmets.

  He marched out of the cavelike cafeteria with Corporal Benson. They got back into the jeep, but Sonny couldn’t seem to sit still. He ballooned upward, was swept right out of his seat. He couldn’t even say good-bye to the soldier who’d escorted him back from Krankenhaus 31, when he still had the shakes.

  Buffeted by the wind, he lost sight of the corporal, and flew among the water tanks above the palatial apartment houses of Central Park West, where many of the silent-movie stars still lived, forgotten in their fifteen-room flats. He crossed over the Central Park Reservoir, which looked like a bright green layer of faultless glass from his altitude, and arrived at the castle on Ninety-fifth and Park, with its crenellated towers and turrets, like some trick façade from the Middle Ages, an abandoned movie set. The Squadron A Armory, as it was called, had been designed and built to mimic a thirteenth-century French fortress, Sonny was once told by the castle’s night watchman. Gentlemen soldiers from the armory, most of whom had lived on Park Avenue and were polo players, had fought in the First World War. The armory fell into disuse after that, and served as an occasional indoor polo grounds. But its drill hall and dressage field had become Sonny’s private playground, after he had moved to 1133, a secret home he shared with his sister once or twice, before she was engaged to that wastrel with the mustache, Billy Samuels, the wholesale grocer who retailed whatever he stole from his most current employer.

  Sonny touched ground in the ruins of the castle. But he wasn’t wearing his sergeant’s olive drab. He was a boy again with a fifteen-year-old sister, with whom he shared a bathroom, a sister with reddish brown hair and his own sad eyes. It was the Salinger look, which might have gone back for centuries in some Eastern European settlement, at least on his father’s side. And there was another person in this revamped polo grounds for Park Avenue players—a witch with a painted face who looked more and more like Sylvia. The witch had appealed to the child in Sonny, appealed to him now. She could feel the turbulence in his mind with her fingertips.

  “Kinder,” she said, “you must come with me.”

  “But where are we going, Auntie?” Doris asked, wiser than Sonny.

  She smiled under that white mask. “Does it really matter?”

  “I have school, Auntie Sylvia,” Doris said.

  “Ach,” the witch said, “I will teach you what no school can teach.”

  “And what is that?” asked Sonny Salinger, gullible as ever.

  “How not to exist.”

  Sonny screamed. He hadn’t left his chair at the dining room table.

  “What’s wrong?” Miriam asked. “Sol, he’s ashen. Go to the medicine chest. Get him a bicarb.”

  “I’m fine,” Sonny said. “I was dreaming. Happens all the time. Your soul decides to travel. It has no anchor. It always comes back.”

  “Bicarb,” Sol said, bemused by his son’s mishegas. “It’s the best remedy for runaway souls.”

  “Dad,” he said, staring at his wife’s painted face. “I’ll bet it is.”

  PART ELEVEN

  Doris

  July 1946

  1.

  THEY GOT SYLVIA A BERTH on the Queen Mary, second class. She didn’t want to stay another week with the Salingers, so Miriam decided to use her own ingenuity and some of her son’s counterintelligence craft. She avoided the travel agency on Madison, since the clerks there were very inquisitive and might discover Sylvia’s ultimate fate, and reveal it to everybody. Therefore, Miriam went down to the Cunard Line on lower Broadway to book a cabin on the Queen, paid in hundred-dollar bills, and left the ticket for Sylvia in an envelope on the breakfast table. Sonny seemed in a daze, but the Salingers worked around him. He wouldn’t permit them to call her a Nazi.

  “But you interrogated her,” Miriam said, “you caught her in a dragnet and let her go free. And you falsified her papers. Isn’t that right, Solly?”

  Sol remained neutral. He would have liked Sylvia a little better if she hadn’t worn that white paint.

  “I’m telling you,” Myriam muttered, “Dracula’s Daughter.”

  “Mom,” Sonny said, “you promised not to say that ever again.”

  He was guilty as hell. He hadn’t touched Sylvia in months—desire had run to the wolves somewhere in a forest way beyond Sonny’s comprehension. He was trapped, bewildered, too. Perhaps he was still Sergeant Salinger of the CIC, in civilian garb, and she was the Fräulein he had once interrogated, now crystallized in his mind. He heard the wolves of desire howl from afar in his dead ear.

  It was her idea to return to Europe, and the Salingers supplied the fare. Sonny slept on the living room couch, and Sylvia occupied his old room. She paced most of the night, like a trapped panther. A deep anger began to build. She would appear at two in the morning, sit beside Sonny in her white paint. He would rouse himself and see the narrow slits of her amber eyes.

  “Did you ever love me, Sergeant Salinger?”

  He wasn’t even sure. Was he still mourning Oona and her abrupt departure from his life? But the image of her, that dark voluptuousness, grew fainter and fainter after his pilgrimage in Hürtgen Forest. He could no longer draw her outline on a windowpane at 1133. The art of Oona was gone.

  “I seduced you,” Sylvia said. “I did. I waited for you outside your headquarters. I saw how helpless you were. My tall, handsome American Gestapo agent. You did not have the will to arrest me. And I wanted French papers, forged or not forged. We arrived at an impasse, my poor darling. You could not stay in Germany, and I cannot remain in this Park Avenue prison. You have stopped writing, Sergeant Salinger. Is it really on account of me?”

  “
No,” he said, still half-asleep.

  “And yet my very existence seems to make you suffer. You fondle Benny all the time, like a lover … and have so little gentleness left for me.”

  Sonny couldn’t even say why. She’d been his German wife. They dashed about in a fire engine red Škoda, lived in an apartment at CIC headquarters with their schnauzer, and the sadness accumulated on his shoulders like a letter carrier’s sack. He attributed the sack to Sylvia, but it was really his. She stopped working at the clinic, or perhaps the clinic was frightened of her past association with Herr Doktor Fleck and had fired her. It made little difference. Caring for Sonny had become a full-time job.

  He’d gone with her and Benny on long walks in Central Park, and rarely said a word. She could see the strange fissure in his face, like a crack somewhere in his mental clock. He belonged on the ward with the German soldiers in Krankenhaus 31. He’d never healed, and perhaps he never would around her.

  “You will not write me, I’m sure, after a month. I already feel invisible.”

  He’d burrowed inward, into some armored but invalided core. She did not want him to accompany her to the piers. She’d miss Benny, not the Salingers, and might have insisted on taking the dog. Benny could have been a bargaining chip. But the dog would have complicated her departure, and she had her papers to worry about. And so she left Park Avenue early one morning, nuzzling Benny; she’d cried during half her stay in Manhattan. She did not kiss her CIC man good-bye. She never believed in sentimental departures. It was Doris who went downtown in a hired limousine with Sylvia and her steamer trunk. Doris was the strong one, made of Salinger steel. She’d watched Doris maneuver between her bosses and her underlings at Bloomingdale’s, like a lady matador. Doris knew when to linger and when to go for the kill. She flung aside her assistants as expendable items she could file away somewhere. Her underlings would follow her from floor to floor while Doris inspected every counter, and went to the display windows, shoving aside the window dressers and dressing the mannequins herself, a general amid her entourage. Sylvia could have dealt with Miriam and Sol, but Doris was a formidable foe.