ing the phones, the name printed on all the huge menus and the little
drinks cards, that was written in neon and lightbulbs across the facade,
the double name casting a backward glow and lighting the rooftop
garden along with the Chinese lanterns and palm-shaped torchères—
was stomping. It was the night that the band playing in the big
second-floor ballroom changed, and the new band (their pictures
inserted in the holders by the doors, the featured players tilting into the
picture frame as though coming out to get you with their gleaming
instruments and hair) was one everybody wanted to hear. The doormen
were overcome by the people moving in on them, many of them men in
uniform who of course got to go in, but what about the girls they claimed
were sisters and cousins too, leaning on their arms, and the couples in
evening clothes and opera capes who would certainly be buying a steak
300 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
dinner and a bottle of champagne, and—the hell, why not everybody,
even the unescorted dames you were supposed to be selective about.
Before the war the Lucky Duck had been a big and rather gloomy
Chinese restaurant, and still now there were bead curtains in the doors
to the cocktail bars and those big obscure plaques that were Chinese
good-luck signs (someone always claimed to know this); there was still
chow mein and chop suey and egg foo yung on the menus and little
cruets of inky soya sauce on the tables. People ate a lot there, but the
food wasn’t the draw; when Harold Weintraub, whom nobody had
ever heard of, decided to turn himself into Dave Chasen or Sherman
Billingsley, he bought the huge place and added an upper storey and
took over the five-and-dime next door too—nobody needed pots and
pans and clothespins and washboards for now, not around here anyway,
but they did need more room to have fun. “I want our uniformed ser-
vicemen to have a place where they can have fun,” Harold (a strangely
joyless and beaky fellow in drooping evening clothes) said to the papers
on opening night 1942. The new lights spelling out his name were
sadly unlit because of the blackout then in force. Harold was more suc-
cessful than he could have imagined, probably, and as the population
of the city almost doubled with war workers and servicemen the fun
got so intense that he spent his own time just trying to keep a lid on the
roiling pot so the authorities—the military police, city hall, the vice
squads, and the DAR—didn’t shut him down in favor of something
more wholesome, and quieter.
That amazing rolling thunder a big band could make when it started
a song with the thudding of the bass drum all alone, like a fast train
suddenly coming around a bend and into your ear: a kind of awed
moan would take over the crowd when they did that, and then all the
growling brass would stand and come in, like the same train picking
up speed and rushing closer, and the couples would pour onto the floor,
the drumming of their feet audible in the more bon ton nightclub
downstairs, where the crooner raised his eyes to the trembling chande-
lier in delight or dismay. Diane and the four girls she had quickly allied
with at the door (easier to pour in past the hulking guy in epaulettes in
a crowd) were swept out of their seats by a raiding party, three sailors,
a Navy pilot with that nice tan blouse and tie they wore, and a sad sack
soldier seeming no older than themselves. The girls couldn’t turn them
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 301
down, not with that surging rhythm sucking them all in, but they
tried—it was part of the game to say No a couple of times, they all
played it that way, even Diane knew that.
“Diane,” she’d said to the other girls as they shook hands over the
unbused table they’d claimed, giggling in glee about the dope at the
door and their rush upstairs. She recognized a couple of them, she
thought, probably from somewhere else on Fourth Avenue or Fifth
where they all came together and floated, waiting to see where they
could sneak in or who might come out and notice them. This was the
first time she’d tried the Duck (that’s what the other girls called it), and
she was filled now with a kind of buzzing brimming triumph that she
tried to hide under an above-it-all kind of smiling inattention.
Her Navy guy wasn’t much of a dancer. He pushed her around in a
halfhearted Lindy but mostly talked.
“You been here a lot?”
“Some.”
“My first time. You know they can fit five thousand people in this
place? What I hear.”
“And they all want to use the washrooms at once,” Diane said. It
was a crack somebody else had made and she was proud she remem-
bered it.
“What’s your name?”
“Diane.” She perceived he was talking in order to bend his cheek
nearer hers, to make himself heard over the band.
“Danny,” he said. “We both got a D and an N.”
“And an A, ” Diane said. Her name wasn’t Diane, it was Geraldine,
the most American name her parents could come up with. She’d been
staring at it one day, written on a school paper, and suddenly saw the
other name contained within it, the letters even in the right order, most
of them. It seemed like a gift, even a sign. She knew how to be Ameri-
can better than they ever would. She told Danny that she’d graduated
from high school the June before, but that wasn’t so either. She had a
year to go, and more than that if things went on the way they were
going, but she didn’t care, she just couldn’t see it, why it was important
now; she knew how much it meant to her parents, who told her all the
time that she represented her people and her community and had a
responsibility. Her brother’d got a beating when their father caught him
302 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
trying to get out of the house in a pair of pegged pants and a broad
fedora, watch chain swinging, the long collar points of his Hawaiian
shirt spread over his jacket lapels— pachuquismo, their father yelled
at him, you got a knife somewhere you punk you, but now he’d quit
school and joined the Army and what was he doing, picking tomatoes
on a government contract farm just like the braceros, so if that was
representing the family, Diane didn’t care: and the world was upside
down now and crazy and people just didn’t care and she was part of it.
Because nobody cared, it was easy to get into the Fourth Avenue bars
and get a Coke and then make it a Cuba libre, nobody cared, the bar-
tenders and the soldiers and the older girls watched you and they were
interested and you could see they liked it that you didn’t care either,
that you didn’t give a hoot, you could see it in their warm eyes and
smiles.
“You can meet some strange people in here,” Danny said. “You can
meet about anybody.”
“I guess.”
“I heard you could meet a morphodite in one bar. They come
here.”
“A what?”
“A morphodite. That’s a woman that’s half a man.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I swear. You’d never know, to look at her. Him. It.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Diane said.
He let her go at the song’s end with a little mock bow, and she
slipped from his attention to get back to the girls; though it seemed the
wrong way to proceed, she knew it was the way it was done.
“He really likes me,” one of them was saying. Her hair fell over her