Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  Gott, I should have taken lessons from this girl.

  She did not talk about her time with Sonny. That was spent material.

  “Doris, will he ever write again? You are my sister-in-law at the moment, so I have that privilege to ask.”

  Doris was very slow to answer. “He’ll write again, but meanwhile he has the willies.”

  Sylvia’s brows knit with consternation. She could not grasp this American slang. “Willies?”

  “Spooked,” Doris said. “My baby brother has been spooked by the war. Don’t worry. We’ll ride the Silver Meteor to Florida. He’ll bake in the sun, and the words will come back. Sonny fell, and you’ve become the victim of that fall.”

  “A victim with a wedding ring,” Sylvia said. “It was Sonny who picked the band. He was excited about the wedding—and our dog. My Vati was against marriage. He said you Americans are a barbaric tribe. But perhaps that is the fate of all conquerors.”

  Barbaric, Doris thought to herself. This bitch calls us barbaric.

  “Sonny isn’t much of a conqueror,” Doris said, with the same flicker of contempt she had bestowed upon the window dressers at Bloomingdale’s. But it only lasted for a moment. Sonny had always been a handful, even as a child. He had no business getting married to a Fräulein in a foreign town, no business getting married at all. He should have come back with Benny, and Benny alone. His letters had become chaotic and unreadable; lines disappeared on the page, as if he were writing in invisible ink. Doris had to puzzle out every word. Her brother was a hospital case with a bride.

  “I’m grateful,” Doris said.

  Sylvia laughed with a bitter ball of phlegm deep inside her throat. “Grateful for what, my soon-to-be-forgotten sister?”

  “That you brought him back to us in one piece.”

  “I was not his handler, Doris. I was his wife. I could have made a child with Sonny. That might have saved the marriage,” Sylvia said with a certain bravura.

  Doris’ dark eyes went even darker, with a hint of hate. “I doubt it, Sylvia. It would have been a disaster. He barely has the stamina to brush his teeth. How could he have raised a child?”

  Doris got out of the limo at Rector Street and paid the driver. “If Sonny doesn’t answer your letters, Sylvia, you can always count on me.” She stuffed an envelope with cash into Sylvia’s pocket and darted into the traffic without a proper kiss goodbye. Her sister-in-law was an entanglement that had to be torn apart from Sonny at whatever cost.

  Sylvia saluted Doris like a CIC agent from her half-open rear door and shouted, “Auf Wiedersehen.”

  Glad as she was to get rid of the last family member, she couldn’t stop crying. She had a false passport in her pocketbook, and a settlement from the Salingers, a bride’s purse of cold cash. A barbaric tribe, she told herself, and it seemed to soothe her. She should never have looked into his dark eyes at Krankenhaus 31. But Herr Doktor Fleck had begged her to watch over this young American who had committed himself to the clinic’s care.

  “Ein Spion,” the doctor said. And she had been foolish enough to volunteer, when she should have run from the Krankenhaus and this devil with the dark eyes.

  2.

  THEY RODE THE SILVER METEOR from Grand Central. The imprint of silver wings on both sides of the coaches and sleeping cars reminded Sonny of Buck Rogers. Doris insisted that Sol and Miriam not come along. She didn’t want all the complications of the Salinger clan, all the fuss. Miriam would have pestered him, asked about his chronic constipation, and supplied him with a bounty of Ex-Lax. And Sol would have wondered aloud if he was ready to work as an adman at Hoffman & Co. They wouldn’t have to mingle with other passengers. Doris had booked a private berth, a roomette, where Sonny could doze and she could sit beside him. But Sonny began to twitch after a while and wanted to go for a breather in the dining car.

  She worried that he might misbehave, not out of malice, but his own curious whim, and most travelers weren’t used to his arsenal of word tricks and weird observations. It was offseason, and the prices at the Sheraton Plaza in Daytona Beach were a steal. The lush hotel with its terraces and canopies—the Salingers’ favorite resort—had shut down during the war and been turned into a barracks for the Women’s Army Corps; it reopened, again as the Sheraton, with central air-conditioning and a refurbished lobby, but without its old allure. Doris wasn’t worried about the hotel and its private beach; it was the dining car on the Silver Meteor, with all its little snares, that she had to deal with. They were crossing the Appalachian foothills, and Sonny could see the wealth of forest from his spacious window in the dining car; he expected the Fourth Division to rise out of the crags and follow the path of the Silver Meteor in its rush toward Florida. Doris was a bit perturbed.

  Sonny kept staring at a man in uniform eating across the aisle.

  “Were you sent overseas?” Sonny asked.

  “I was stateside,” the man said, coming out of his own reverie, “instructing air cadets. I didn’t see much of the war. And you?”

  Sonny seemed frozen. “I missed all the action. I have an undescended testicle, and it decided to descend. Caused a big stink.”

  Doris managed to maneuver him from the table and steer him back to their berth without much of a fuss. She ordered breakfast and lunch in their little sleeper after that and they arrived in Orlando the next afternoon. A bus from the hotel was waiting for them across from the railroad tracks. They were the only passengers on the fifty-mile ride.

  3.

  IT WAS THE PRELUDE TO THE FALL SEASON, and Doris had to convince her boss that she could skip a week amid all the fury around Seventh Avenue, and its top designers, who still had to be courted, and the window dressers, who were a wayward band of children without her.

  “Doris, we’ll lose a beat. It’s a crippler, this change of season. The stylists are lost without you. We’ll have naked mannequins, for Chrissake.”

  “Charlie,” she said, “Mr. Dellavedova. I’ve collected all the paper, every trace—it’s like a coloring book, one-two-three. My brother’s a war hero. I can’t just abandon him.”

  “Was he at the Battle of the Bulge?” asked Mr. Dellavedova, a senior vice president at Bloomingdale’s.

  “Yes. He liberated Germany—in a jeep.”

  The displays would be in shambles if she was gone more than a week. But she had to take the chance, risk her own career. Sonny loved the beach and that burning sand. He never wore a bathrobe, just a towel across his shoulders. He sat right on the sand in his bathing trunks, but Doris had a beach chair. They did look like twins, but his skin was pale white, as if he’d gone through the war in an overcoat. His hair was browner than hers. She’d inherited a bit of red from Miriam. But they had the same dark eyes in deep sockets.

  The manager at the Sheraton Plaza was rather smug, and offered them a suite that looked out upon the parking lot, and the bellboys she knew by name were gone. But they hadn’t bulldozed the beach. The break of the water had always soothed Sonny. He sat there, relaxing, one wrinkle at a time. For a moment, he thought a silver string would rise right out of his navel and return him to Normandy, but nothing happened. No amphibious tanks appeared on the beach, no armless or legless boys, no barrage in his dead ear. But Doris was staring at him. He could feel the rivet of her brown eyes.

  “Sonny, that letter carrier’s sack you said was Sylvia’s. It’s where you carried your novel all through the war—about Holden Caulfield.”

  “He died,” Sonny said, “in the Pacific.”

  “I know, silly. It’s the adventures of a dead boy—before he died. You were always fond of ghosts.”

  “I’ll get back to it…. Sis, do you remember that detective from the Central Park Precinct?”

  Doris was suddenly uncomfortable on her beach chair. “What detective?”

  “Vic, Vic. You did the Black Bottom for him, and his wife came into the muster room, and …”

  “Oh, that Vic,” she said. “I forgot about him in five minutes.”
>
  His blondness was still like a stab. They’d never kissed, though he’d held her face in his hands once, and she could feel the shiver in his blue eyes. What was Billy Samuels to her, that pisher who came into her life and stole everything but her bloomers? And she had once danced for a blond detective, like the Salome of Central Park West, and never even knew his last name. How many buyers had she met at Bloomingdale’s, with their proposals, and invitations for this and that? But nothing struck her like the moment when she crossed that transverse in the park and entered a precinct that stank of horse manure and captured the first glance of her blond detective, who swiveled his shoulders and smiled like some tall cherub with stubble on his chin.

  “Sonny,” she asked, “what about you?”

  The beach was deserted, except for a few children sculpting a sand castle; there were four of them, a tiny tribe.

  “Vic reminded me of Billy Budd.”

  Doris laughed. “What does a detective with a wife who went bonkers have to do with Billy Budd?”

  “He had such gentle eyes, not like those other detectives. He was different.”

  She felt that stab again, and it bothered Doris, pissed her off, that whatever little romance she’d had in her life, whatever real hunger she’d had for a boy, should have happened in a goddamn converted stable in Central Park during her freshman year at high school. Doris was in her thirties now, midway on a rocket ride to some sanitarium for the enfeebled. And all she had in her treasure chest were Vic’s blue eyes.

  “Sonny …”

  But Sonny was gone.

  He went off to play with those four brats and their sand castle. Sonny felt like he was with a bunch of Seabees, or army engineers. These kids hadn’t built one castle but an entire city, a fortress town from some mythical future they had invented on their own. It had moats and rocket launchers and rivulets in the sand that must have served as this town’s convoluted water supply. It had endless winding streets that made Sonny think of Nuremberg. And then he realized that it wasn’t a town they had built but a cosmos that had flowered in their minds. The streets could have been stars, and the rivulets celestial gas. These builders couldn’t have been older than eight or nine—three boys and a girl. It was the girl who was the genius of this lot. She must have been bent a little by the war.

  He decided to interrogate her with all the hidden talent of a CIC man.

  “Miss,” he asked, “what are you and your builders building?” She squinted at him. “Don’t you dare patronize us,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Sonny Salinger.”

  She peered at him now through her thick lenses. She must have been very nearsighted. “Did you serve?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What rank did you hold?”

  “Staff sergeant,” he said.

  “Well,” she answered, “my dad saw action. He landed three months after D-Day…. What about you?”

  “I was with the second wave,” Sonny said. The four builders tried as best they could to mask their curiosity. “What second wave?”

  “On Utah Beach.”

  They marched around Sonny in the sand. “Can’t you tell, Sergeant Salinger? We’re rebuilding the continent—from scratch.”

  “I see,” Sonny said. “With rocket launchers and moats—to keep out the panzer divisions…. What’s your name?”

  “Dot,” she said. “That’s short for Dotty.” And she introduced her three other playmates and master builders. “That’s Robert and Matthew and Maxwell. Max is a refugee from the British Isles. My family is keeping him until he can relocate.”

  “Relocate?” Sonny asked.

  “His mother and father lost their lives in the London blitz. And we cannot locate his next of kin. And so we’ve been given custody of poor Max in the relocation program.”

  Sonny had never heard of such a program and he’d been dealing with war refugees.

  “Oh, it’s temporary, mind you,” Dot said. “His kin will be found. Mama is certain of that. But it was Max’s idea to rebuild the continent—to our liking and specifications.”

  “May I help?” Sonny asked.

  Dot took off her thick lenses and sized up Sonny. “You are awful tall, Sergeant Salinger, and tall people, in my limited experience, are rather clumsy. You might sabotage the project. Stumble all over Italy or Transylvania.”

  “I’ll try not to stumble,” Sonny said, though he couldn’t see the markings of Italy or Transylvania. All he could discern was a web of streets and houses and rivulets that widened in the sand into the cosmos of a continent. And so he stooped beside these four master builders, packing the wet sand until it turned into clay, and with his palm as a kind of trowel, he sculpted a tiny version of the Villa Oberwegner in Weißenberg.

  A woman with cream on her nose arrived. She had very broad shoulders and was wearing sandals and a white robe from the Sheraton Plaza.

  “Dorothy,” she shouted to the nearsighted girl, “why are you bothering this young gentleman?”

  “Oh, Mother,” Dot said, “he’s not a gentleman. He’s just one of our volunteers.”

  And Sonny had a sudden lightning bolt in his dead ear. “Hurricane,” he said.

  The woman seemed very suspicious. “I don’t …”

  “You saw Dorothy Lamour in Hurricane and that’s how you named your daughter.”

  “My God, are you a charlatan of some sort?” the woman asked. “How did you ever know?”

  “It’s simple,” Sonny said. “Hurricane was a big hit. And Dorothy was one of the most popular names of 1937.”

  “I’m enchanted,” the woman said. “But Dotty dear, you must come right now. And don’t forget Max.”

  “Oh, Mother,” the girl said, and she signaled to her companions, who proceeded to stomp on all the sand castles and demolish the continent they had built. And Sonny, who had been shaping with both hands for the past fifteen minutes, began to shiver.

  “You’re builders. Couldn’t you set aside one piece of your brand-new continent?”

  “Oh, Sergeant,” Dot said. “You are not a sand person. I can see that. The breakers will destroy it all. We’ll be back tomorrow and rebuild.”

  And she ran off with her mother and her three companions, while Sonny stood among the ruins and runnels in the sand as a kind of syncopation entered his skull. Not words, not lines of music, exactly, but musical beats, as if he were doing the Black Bottom right in the runnels.

  Dammit, here he was with a melody in the scoop of his hands.

  Slap your knees and dance a little,

  Slap your knees and dance a little,

  And d-o-o-o the Black Bottom …

  And he started to dance, like the Crazy Man of Daytona. There wasn’t one beach umbrella, one beach boy around. It was late in the afternoon, near dinnertime at the Sheraton Plaza. And then he heard the clap of other knees than his. Doris had joined him in the ruins of that vanished continent. She was singing and laughing and crying.

  “Oh, Sonny, we did have fun, didn’t we?”

  And he wished he knew how to answer Doris. He’d been through some insane baptism that he could never share with any other serviceman—or civilian. The sergeant with stripes he wasn’t supposed to display, the secret soldier. He’d seen the senseless killing at Slapton Sands and on the Far Shore. He’d survived Hürtgen and the Krankenhaus, mingled with a battalion of dead souls. Perhaps the soldier in him hadn’t survived, and that’s why he stayed so long in Nuremberg, a Nazi town—to linger with the dead. But he was with Doris now, in the middle of a dance.

  CODA

  Bloomingdale’s on Sleepy Hollow Lane

  February 1947

  1.

  DORIS, YOU’LL REDECORATE,” Mr. Dellavedova said, “and that’s that.”

  The bastards wanted her to redo all three tiers of Bloomingdale’s bargain basement, the “Downstairs Store,” as they had dubbed it, and took away most of her other privileges. That’s how they saw their fashion queen, who’d be
en to Paris, had a café crème with the finest couturieres, even stayed at the Ritz with Coco Chanel, before Coco was denounced as a collaborator.

  And now Doris was in a kind of temporary exile, underground at Bloomingdale’s. She couldn’t pick her own architect, but had to work with whoever was on hand. And still, she gave the Downstairs Store what was soon known as “the Doris punch, the Doris flair.” It didn’t matter that the entire edifice shook every seven or eight minutes, whenever an elevated train roared on the Third Avenue tracks; Bloomingdale’s was composed of several buildings that were cobbled together, so that above ground the floors buckled and didn’t match, but Doris could end that warp in her basement paradise with a pair of carpenters, and she did.

  No one ever suffered from vertigo in the Downstairs Store. She got rid of all the ugly bins that were crammed with mountains of merchandise. And she had a series of fashion islands installed at each level. She collaborated with Seventh Avenue, and had her own fashion shows in the basement, with models she borrowed from designers who were in her debt from some past favor bestowed.

  “Doris, it’s a miracle,” said Mr. Dellavedova. “There’s no difference between downstairs and upstairs—it’s just as classy.”

  They wanted to pluck her out of the basement and give her “an island” or two on an upstairs floor, where she could present her fashions shows, but Doris preferred to rule Downstairs. And she invited Sonny to her subterranean kingdom. She also helped him move out of 1133, right after his twenty-eighth birthday, and together they were able to find him new quarters in Tarrytown, twenty-five miles north of Manhattan, despite Miriam’s protests and Sol’s prediction that the boy with five battle stars would end up a bum in a garret. He did live in a loft, actually the rebuilt upper half of a garage near Central Avenue and Storm Street that supplied a curious comfort to Sonny, since it reminded him of the cages in Weißenberg, where the CIC kept its prisoners. Sonny’s loft had one tiny window, and he relished its single shaft of light—his morning moonbeam.