I had giggled in appreciation, not at Joe’s limp joke but for the fact that he recognized the prettiness of the jitterbug dancer as being shallow, because I was newly married and scared of any pretty girl in this Navy town of pretty girls.
The face was shallow, remindful too. I bent down, remembering San Diego old town in the ’40’s, tough, vital and bombastic. Navy uniforms. Off-limits nightclubs. My God! The jitterbug was a wild dance and this girl the wildest.
I brought the magnifying glass close so that the face fell apart in newsprint dots and remembered her impossible name, Pansy Field. Flying legs, tapping feet, the rhythmic clap of the audience, Pansy Field...
“The one The Congressman’s off his nut about,” Joe had told me. “He’s thinking of marrying her if she can prove she’s pure enough for him.” I remembered, after not remembering all these years, the commotion over Joe’s commanding officer, nick-named “The Congressman” because he was a politician’s son and therefore news, as was the fact that he was courting Pansy Field, an off-limits nightclub entertainer.
Now I knew this photograph, the stamp pictures and news photo were all of Pansy Field. What I had to find out was why she was pasted here with The Congressman on the shoulders of the woman he really married.
“She hasn’t got a brain in her head,” Joe told me and I had pressed my knee close to his under the quarter-sized table, glad I had the brains if not jitterbug prettiness to offer him, and shouted to be heard over the brass and the cymbals, “She doesn’t need any. She’s doing all right without them.” But she had needed brains if this picture of Pansy Field was also the picture of Mary Oliphant and I was sure that it was.
There had been no portraits of Mary in her home. None at all. No snapshots in albums. No albums. No memories, unless these news magazines were her memories doctored into wishful thinking. I closed my eyes tight and allowed myself to see the brief shallow beauty of Pansy Field buried beneath the years of Mary Oliphant’s purposeful neglect.
That newsprint photo had looked out of the front page of a San Diego paper, and I remembered Joe saying, “Well, this tears it with The Congressman. He can’t afford to get tied up with anything that might hurt the future he’s got all laid out for himself...”
But I don’t remember what it was all about or anything of the trial that was to follow because Joe’s ship moved out and I refused to read the newspapers filled with war, and was no longer a part of the frenzied crowd trying to forget it in smoky off-limits night clubs watching a crazy jitterbug routine.
After Hiroshima and once Joe was home, we put that time behind us, never talking of the town when we left it or the people we had known there. We never saw the town again until Susan elected to enter the university at San Diego and later married a San Diegan. Then we saw it often, but never any of the people until I saw Pansy Field when Mary Oliphant moved into the house two doors away from me.
So now I would have to go back and read the accounts I had not read then and find out what happened when Mary looked like Pansy.
I phoned Susan and told her I was on my way. I had the car tuned up and packed the thirty-two magazines, the photograph, newspaper copy and the stamp pictures in a suitcase and took off.
Then I spent two weeks in the back rooms of the two leading newspaper offices in San Diego and found out why Mary Oliphant pasted Pansy Field’s head on the wife of The Congressman, and the reason for her murder.
“How do you even know this Pansy-Whatever and the woman who was your neighbor are the same?” Susan asked me.
“It was in the paper,” I said.
“What was in the paper?”
“Well, she was a witness at the trial”
“What trial?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, “this trial I’ve been checking back on. Happened in ’44, and Pansy Field was a witness. The prosecuting attorney asked her name and she said it was Pansy Field. Then the attorney said, ‘Your legal name, not your stage name,’ and she said it was Mary Oliphant.”
“What was she a witness to?” asked Susan.
“Murder,” I said.
That was an overstatement actually, made for effect. What she was supposed to be was an alibi witness for the man accused of murder. I tried to describe for Susan what this town was like during the war years, and the little off-limits nightclub where an apartment building now stands.
“Mary Oliphant won a jitterbug contest,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Jitterbug was a dance,” I said and showed her a few steps.
“That’s weird,” she said.
“Well, anyway, she was good at it. And it came out in the trial that she’d won this contest and was hired by these two men to perform in their nightclub.”
“What two men?”
“The one who was murdered and the other accused of his murder.”
Susan looked confused.
“They were partners,” I explained, “and when one of them was killed, in the nightclub after hours, it was naturally assumed that his partner had done it. So they arrested him and he said he couldn’t have done it because he was with Pansy Field in her room a block away and she said he wasn’t there at all.”
“What was he killed with? The man who was killed, I mean.”
“A gun.”
“Well. How about fingerprints on the gun?”
“It was never found. But the prosecution claimed it could only have been the partner.”
“Why?”
“Because of Pansy Field. She was supposed to have been — well, have been their you-know-what.”
“No. What?” said Susan wickedly. She is very well aware that I am of the old school and can’t say things right out like young people can.
“Well, their girlfriend,” I compromised and she laughed.
“But Pansy denied it. According to the papers she said she was just a jitterbug dancer and that was all. And that man was never in her room, the one accused of murder. Never, she said. No man ever had been. She claimed she was alone and sound asleep that night. That’s what she said from the beginning. But, by then, The Congressman had been shipped out...”
“The congressman?” Susan clapped her hand to her head. “What congressman? You mean the one you showed me in the pictures with those horrible pasted heads?”
“Actually, yes,” I said. “But then he was just called that. He was your daddy’s commanding officer and they all called him The Congressman because he was the son of a politician,” at which Susan laughed again, but I couldn’t see anything funny, “and he planned to go into politics too, which he apparently did, after the war. That was another thing I looked up. His name. At least, the name of your daddy’s commanding officer when they were shipped out and there it was, the same name as the one in the magazines. So what do you think of that?”
“I don’t know what to think of it,” said Susan. “I don’t even know what this congressman or whatever had to do with anything.”
“He was in love with Pansy Field, that’s all. I remember your daddy saying he’d probably marry her if she could prove she was pure enough for him.”
“Daddy?” cried Susan, shocked.
“For heaven’s sake no. The Congressman, his exec. Your daddy was the one who said it. And then he said, when it first came out in the paper, the murder, that is, before the trial with Pansy’s picture — I showed that to you, indicating she was involved, some way at least, then your daddy said something about that would tear it with the Congressman, that he couldn’t tie onto anything that might hurt the future he had all laid out for himself, and I guess it certainly did, but she was stuck with the lie so she repeated it all during the trial.”