I was overcome with reverence.
I would plant my little life there and never abandon it again.
TWENTY-FOUR
The next morning, I woke up in Billy’s old room all over again. It was just me in the bed this time. No Celia, no hangover, no disasters.
I had to admit: it felt good to have the bed to myself.
For a while I listened to the sounds of the Lily Playhouse coming to life. Sounds I never thought I would hear again. Someone must have been running a bath, because the pipes were banging in protest. Two telephones were already ringing—one upstairs, and one in the offices below. I felt so happy, it made me light-headed.
I put on my robe and wandered forth to make myself some coffee. I found Mr. Herbert sitting at the kitchen table just like always—wearing his undershirt, staring at his notebook, drinking his Sanka, and composing his jokes for an upcoming show.
“Good morning, Mr. Herbert!” I said.
He looked up at me and—to my amazement—he actually smiled.
“I see you’ve been reinstated, Miss Morris,” he said. “Good.”
—
By noon that day, I was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Peg and Olive, getting oriented to the job at hand.
We’d taken the subway from midtown to the York Street station, then transferred to a streetcar. Over the next three years, I would make this commute nearly every day and in every kind of weather. I would share that commute with tens of thousands of other workers, all changing shifts like clockwork. The commute would become tedious, and sometimes spirit-breakingly exhausting. But on that day, it was all new and I was excited. I was outfitted in a snazzy lilac suit (although never again would I wear something so nice to that filthy, greasy destination) and my hair was clean and bouncy. I had my paperwork in order so that I could be officially inducted as a Navy employee (Bureau of Yards and Docks, Classification: Skilled Laborer). The job came with a salary of seventy cents an hour, which was a fortune for a girl my age. They even issued me my own pair of safety glasses—although my eyes were never in danger from anything more serious than Peg’s cigarette embers flying up in my face.
This would be my first real job—if you don’t count the work I did in my father’s office back in Clinton, which you shouldn’t.
I’d been nervous to see Olive again. I still felt so ashamed of myself for my shenanigans, and for having needed her to rescue me from the talons of Walter Winchell. I was afraid she might chastise me, or look upon me with contempt. I had my first moment alone with her that morning. She and Peg and I were walking downstairs, on our way out the door to Brooklyn. Peg had to run back up to get her thermos, so for a minute it had just been Olive and me standing there on the landing between the second and third floors of the playhouse. I decided this would be my opportunity to apologize, and to thank her for having gallantly saved me.
“Olive,” I began. “I owe you a great debt—”
“Oh, Vivian,” she interrupted, “don’t be so grasping.”
And that was the end of that.
We had a job to do, and there wasn’t any time for flimflam.
—
Specifically, our job was this:
We were assigned by the military to put on two shows a day at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in a bustling cafeteria located right on Wallabout Bay. You have to understand, Angela, that the Navy Yard was huge—the busiest in the world—with over two hundred acres of buildings and almost a hundred thousand employees working around the clock throughout the war years. There were over forty active cafeterias at the Yard and we were in charge of “entertainment and education” for just one of them. Our cafeteria was number 24, but everyone called it “Sammy.” (I was never clear on why. Maybe because they served so many sandwiches? Or maybe because our head cook was named Mr. Samuelson?) Sammy fed thousands of people a day—serving enormous piles of limp and tired food to equally limp and tired laborers.
It was our task to entertain these weary workers while they ate. But we were more than entertainers; we were also propagandists. The Navy filtered information and inspiration through us. We had to keep everyone angry and fired up at Hitler and Hirohito at all times (we killed Hitler so many times, in so many different skits, that I can’t believe the man wasn’t having nightmares about us all the way over there in Germany). But we also had to keep our workers concerned about the welfare of our boys overseas—reminding them that whenever they slacked off on the job, they put American sailors at risk. We had to issue warnings that spies were everywhere, and that loose lips sink ships. We had to give safety lessons and news updates. And in addition to all that, we had to deal with military censors who often sat in the front row of our performances to make sure we were not deviating from the party line. (My favorite censor was a genial man named Mr. Gershon. I spent so much time with him, we became like a family. I attended his son’s bar mitzvah.)
We had to communicate all this information to our workers in thirty minutes, twice a day.
For three years.
And we had to keep our material fresh and fun, or the audience might start throwing food at us. (“It’s good to be back in the field,” Peg said happily, the first time our audience started booing—and I think she truly meant it.) It was an impossible, thankless, exhausting job, and the Navy gave us precious little to work with, in terms of our “theater.” At the front of the cafeteria was a small stage—a platform, really, built of rough pine. We didn’t have a curtain or stage lighting, and our “orchestra” amounted to a honky-tonk stand-up piano played by a tiny old local named Mrs. Levinson who (incongruously) could pound those keys so hard you could hear the music all the way from Sands Street. Our props were vegetable crates, and our “dressing room” was the back corner of the kitchen, right next to the dishwasher’s station. As for our actors, they were not exactly the cream of the crop. Most of New York’s showbiz community had either gone off to battle or gotten good industrial jobs since the advent of the war. This meant that the only people left for us to recruit were the sorts of folks whom Olive, not very kindly, called “the lost and the lame.” (To which Peg replied, also not very kindly, “How does that differ from any other theater company?”)
So we improvised. We had men in their sixties playing young swains. We had hefty middle-aged women playing the parts of ingénues, or boys. We couldn’t pay our players nearly as much as they could earn working on the line, so we were constantly losing our actors and dancers to the Navy Yard itself. Some pretty young girl would be singing a song on our stage one day, and the next day you’d see her eating at Sammy on her lunch break, with her hair up in a bandanna and coveralls on. She’d have a wrench in her pocket and a hearty paycheck on its way. It’s tough to get a girl back in the spotlight once she’s seen a hearty paycheck—and we didn’t even have a spotlight.
Putting together costumes was, of course, my primary job, although I also wrote the occasional script, and even sometimes penned a song lyric or two. My work had never been more difficult. I had virtually no budget, and, because of the war, there was a nationwide shortage of all the materials I needed. It wasn’t just fabrics that were scarce; you couldn’t get buttons, zippers, or hooks and eyes, either. I became ferociously inventive. In my most shining moment, I created a vest for the character of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy using some two-toned jacquard damask I’d ripped from a rotting, overstuffed sofa I’d found on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street one morning, awaiting removal to the dump. (I won’t pretend that the costume smelled good, but our king really looked like a king—and that’s saying something, given the fact that he was portrayed by a sunken-chested old man who only one hour before showtime had been cooking beans in the Sammy kitchen.)