The Winter of Her Discontent (16 page)

“Dee-lish. I never get tired of roast beef. Or steak. Vinnie says I could eat a whole cow if you gave me a chance.”

I pushed my plate away. “I can't finish this.”

“That's what you said the last time,” said Jayne. “Why do you keep ordering it?”

“Because hope is all I have left. Besides, if we stop ordering meat on the days they still have it, they might think we won't notice it if they initiate meatless Wednesdays and Thursdays.” Sunday's paper had warned us of the problems the anticipated meat, butter, cheese, and fat ration was going to create when it started on April 1. In addition to worrying about the unsanitary conditions of any black market beef we were tempted to buy, the OPA was urging people not to start hoarding meat now in anticipation of what would be available later on.

“So you're saying it's going to be my fault?” said Jayne.

I shrugged. “You're the one who ordered the egg salad.”

Jayne finished off her sandwich, save her crusts, which she left in
the center of her plate. “I'd rather not have meat at all than order it and be disappointed by it.”

I tossed my crumpled napkin at her. “Close your head.”

“No, really. I'm tired of Spam, Wham, and deviled ham. When I have meat, I want it to be a steak. A good steak.”

“You should talk to Vinnie,” said Gloria. “He could get you whatever you wanted.”

“Including steak?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Gloria. “He supplies half the restaurants in Manhattan.”

“A
T LEAST NOW WE KNOW
why he's called the Butcher,” I said. It was just after six, and Jayne and I were on our way to the subway after a grueling afternoon at our respective rehearsals. “It's kind of a relief to know that it's only meat he's been slicing.”

“We don't know that for sure,” said Jayne. “After all, she thought the roast beef at Mancuso's was fabulous.”

We boarded the train and wedged ourselves into what little standing room remained. A vet with a pin for a leg offered to give us his seat, but we waved him down with a smile and a nod of thanks. I reached up for a strap to help me keep my balance, and Jayne grabbed on to a metal support within her grasping range.

I kept my voice low and continued our conversation. “So Gloria doesn't have a refined palate—so what.” The woman to the left of me reeked of Shalimar. The smell was so overpowering that I had to breathe through my mouth. “We've got the missing piece of the puzzle. Garvaggio is probably using the Bernhardt to unload his meat.” It was the perfect location for such a venture. Downtown, near all the good restaurants. “And I'll bet Al's gift was a sign.”

“The steaks?” asked Jayne. “How do you figure that?”

“He probably couldn't come right out and tell me that Garvaggio was the one who iced Paulette, so he gave me something that would lead back to him.”

Jayne shook her head at her feet. “You're reaching, Rosie. Sometimes a gift is just a gift.”

“But you agree with me about what Garvaggio is using the building for?”

Jayne adjusted her grip. “It's a good theory, but we need to prove it.”

“No problem—we'll take a look at the basement of the Bernhardt.”

Jayne's blond head bobbed in rhythm with the train. “So let's say we do that, survive the experience, and verify what he's doing; that doesn't answer all of our questions. If Garvaggio is using the Bernhardt for meat, why would he want to shut down the show? And why would he hurt Paulette? Or Olive?”

I hadn't the faintest idea. The train careened to a stop. I grabbed Jayne's arm and pulled her toward the doors.

“Where are we going?”

“Welfare Island. We're going to pay Olive a visit.”

We switched trains and headed toward East Seventy-eighth Street. There we boarded a ferry that took us to the one-mile-long island that had become home to a number of New York's hospitals including the Cancer Institute, Central Neurological Hospital, and the new Welfare Hospital for Chronic Diseases. It was also home to the city's many dependents, the aged, blind, and indigent. They lived out their days in their own mini-city that covered twenty acres.

It seemed like an ingenious idea to group all these centers of health care together, until you realized how isolated they were and how disheartening that had to be for their patients. Back when it was known as Blackwell's Island, Welfare Island used to be home to a number of the city's penitentiaries. I couldn't shake the feeling that the sick and old were being handled much as the criminals had been, literally being shipped off and forgotten about.

We stopped off at a vendor outside New York City Hospital and combined what money we had for a bouquet of red carnations, blue bachelor buttons, and baby's breath. The gal at the desk in the lobby told us which room number Olive was in and directed us to the elevator a corridor away. It was dinnertime on her floor, and all around us nurses in crisp white uniforms were delivering trays laden with soup
bowls bearing steaming liquid that smelled like dirty socks. Nonetheless, the mere sight of food made my stomach growl.

Olive was in the woman's ward in a large room that probably bore much in common with the field hospitals the wounded were experiencing abroad. We'd been given a bed number that we hunted out as we walked the wide aisle that separated the ill from the injured.

“Olive?” We paused before bed 39. Behind a curtain the mummy was attempting to spoon red gelatin into her mouth.

“Rosie? How nice of you to come by!” Olive was covered from head to toe in wide white bandages. One of her legs was suspended from the ceiling; an arm rested in a sling in front of her chest.

“This is Jayne Hamilton,” I said. “She's one of the dancers in the show.”

“Of course,” said Olive. “It's so nice to meet you.”

Jayne returned the greeting, then busied herself by putting the flowers in a spare water glass at Olive's side.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I look worse than I feel. They wanted to make sure I didn't get an infection so anything that was scraped, bumped, or bruised was wrapped in gauze.”

“I'll bet your pop had a hand in that.”

“He certainly encouraged the idea.”

I nodded at her tray of virtually untouched food. “How's the chow?”

“Inedible, I think. Either that or the accident did something awful to my taste buds.”

“Any idea when you'll be out of here?”

She shrugged, and her face instantly reflected regret at the motion. Any movement was painful. “Zelda and Izzie told me you're taking over for me.”

“Clearly, Friday was desperate.”

“No,” said Olive. “You'll do a great job. These things happen for a reason.”

“Did they tell you anything else? Like how strange I find it that so many accidents keep happening to people involved in the show?”

“They mentioned it.” A squeaking noise came from the other side of the drape. A man in blue overalls peeked his head around the curtain and waved at Olive. “Come in,” she said. “Meet my friends.”

He disappeared back into the corridor and the squeaking grew closer. A custodian's cart came into view, followed by the man we'd just seen.

“Rosie, Jayne—this is my pop, Kenneth Wright.”

He shook our hands and offered us each a radiant, toothless smile. His once-handsome face was marred by wrinkles; his skin was the same ash gray as his hair.

“Pleasure, ladies. S'always always nice to meet friends of Olive's.” He tipped his cap at us, gave Olive a kiss on the cheek, then both he and his cart left.

So much for assumptions. Olive's family didn't have the bees to keep her in nice clothes and expensive shoes. She was lucky she still had teeth.

“Do you have any idea who hit you?” asked Jayne.

“None. It all happened so fast.”

Someone dropped a tray two beds away. “Do you know what color the car was?” I asked.

“Zelda said it was black and the windows were dark.”

“Tinted?”

“Right.” She sighed and looked at the toes of the leg in traction. They wiggled at her in sympathy. “Anyway, one minute I was crossing the street, and the next minute the sound of an ambulance was bringing me round.”

“So that's it?” I asked. “You started crossing and the car slammed into you?”

The bandages at her forehead moved. “Not exactly. Zelda's shoe broke—for the second time that day—and I spun around to say something to her. I'd been teasing her about those ridiculous shoes since she bought them. I think I might've even taken a step toward her, and that's when the car hit me. It's funny how grateful I am for those dumb shoes now. Not only did they save Zelda, but from what the doctors say, they might've saved me.”

“How so?” asked Jayne.

“I guess it had something to do with the way the car threw me. If I'd been one step farther into the intersection, I would've been hit by oncoming traffic.”

 

“Whoever it was, wanted to kill her,” I said. Jayne and I were a block from the Shaw House, toting home a box of takeout Chinese. “That wasn't an accident designed to put her out of the show. They wanted to do away with her for good.”

“It could be a coincidence.”

“That a woman was murdered and one of her best friends almost killed within a week of each other? I'm not buying it. They've got to be connected. And I think we can rest assured that whatever that connection is, it isn't Al.”

We entered the building and paused before the mailboxes. I emptied my mind of all thoughts. I wouldn't wish for a letter. I wouldn't will it here. It had to come of its own volition.

The brass door swung open and a beautiful sight awaited me: V-mail!

“He's written back,” I told Jayne.

“Corporal Harrington?”

I examined the return address. “The one and only. Shall we?”

We went upstairs and I delayed the inevitable reading of the letter by changing into a pair of lounging pajamas, mixing us drinks, and refilling Churchill's food and water bowls.

“Enough already,” said Jayne.

We settled side by side on her bed, and while she created a picnic of rice, pork, and vegetables, I opened the letter with the handle of my comb.

“No black lines,” I said. I read slowly, savoring the text like it was a chocolate bar. A moldy chocolate bar peppered with worm holes.

This couldn't be right. I had to be misreading.

“He's dead.”

Jayne gasped and lifted her hand to her mouth. “Jack?”

“Corporal Harrington.” The letter was brief and to the point. My only contact with Jack's unit had been killed two days before I received his last letter. Another man at the field hospital had taken it upon himself to reply to me when my letter arrived. I read the last paragraph aloud: “I now nothing you seek obviously. Officially naive. We injoy lengthy letters. Correspond anytime. Like Ladies. Paul.”

I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. “Far be it for me to criticize someone who's fighting for our freedom, but is it just me or does this guy write like Tarzan?” I skimmed the letter a second time. “He spells like one too. Apparently, the navy doesn't teach you to spell
know
with a
k
or
enjoy
with an
e
.”

Jayne took the letter from me and reread it. “What kind of guy uses a condolence letter to pitch woo? For all he knows you were Corporal Harrington's girl and are stinging from the news that he's dead.”

I'd seen countless movies and read untold numbers of books that depicted a woman bursting into tears. On film she would be fine one moment and burying her head in her arms the next, the sounds of sobs instantly drawing the attention of those around her. I always thought that was a lousy bit of theatricality—everyone knows when they're going to cry. It's a gradual process that starts with tears stinging your eyes and the muscles about your mouth twitching whether you want them to or not. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't instantaneous. Or so I thought. Something in me snapped right then. I'd like to say it was grief over the loss of this unknown soldier, and maybe a little of it was, but more than anything I was overwhelmed with how absolutely helpless I'd become.

“Shhh, Rosie. It's all right.” Jayne tried to quell my sobs with soothing words and gentle touches. They didn't work. Her kindness only made me cry harder. “Jack's not dead.”

“We don't know that,” I whispered.

“Come on now. It's all going to work out. He'll come home.”

There it was again, those awful words I'd uttered myself when I
first received word that Jack was missing. It had become our national refrain: He'll come home. Did we really believe that, or would we realize that there were many women who hoped that to be the case, only to learn that he wouldn't, not alive anyway?

Had Corporal Harrington's wife thought that? Was she cursing her naïveté?

“Talk to me, Rosie. Tell me what's the matter.”

I shook my head. “Everything. Just…everything.”

Churchill joined us on my bed, drawn by the pork and the emotion. Jayne pushed him out of the path of the food, and the cat resentfully settled on his haunches and began to nibble on the edge of the letter. Let him eat it, I thought. Let him devour the news until he was as sick to his stomach as I was.

“Wait a minute.” Jayne grabbed a corner of the letter and delicately tried to remove it from Churchill's mouth. The cat was having none of it. She pulled with more force, and the corner he held on to ripped off, freeing the rest of the page. “Didn't you say you suggested a code to Corporal Harrington?”

I mopped at my eyes with the sleeve of my blouse. Why was she reminding me of this? To show me how ineffective I was? “Yeah. So?”

“So maybe we should look at that last paragraph again. For a man who knew his way around a word when the letter began, he sure does shift into Tarzan speak.”

I sat perfectly still, letting her words tumble about in my brain. Maybe all wasn't lost. “Read it to me again.” I fumbled under my bed for my box of stationery and a pen. As Jayne slowly reread the last paragraph to me, I jotted down the first letter of each word: INNYSOONWILLCALL. “You're a genius!”

“I'll remind you you said that.”

I smiled through the few tears that remained. They fell onto my scribblings, blurring the ink. “I mean it. I never would've noticed that. He's not illiterate. He's just really bad at constructing sentences out of code.” So Paul was coming here and wanted to see me. Why? “Should I write him back?”

“I would. You want to make sure he knows that you know that he's savvy to what's going on.”

While Jayne dished out our dinner, I blew my nose, picked up my pen, and started writing on a fresh piece of V-mail. “Dear Paul, Condolences are nice. Thanks. Weeping almost instantly terminated. Rosie.”