and a white beard—rose spontaneously from his seat and began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He had a voice like Paul Robeson’s. The rest of us stood in silence while this man’s song shook the walls in doleful sorrow.
President Truman was quickly and quietly ushered in, with no majesty.
We all worked harder.
Still the war did not end.
—
On April 28, 1945, the burned-out, twisted hulk of my brother’s aircraft carrier sailed into the Brooklyn Navy Yard on her own
steam. The USS Franklin had somehow managed to limp and list halfway across the world, and through the Panama Canal—piloted by a skeleton crew—to arrive now at our “hospital.” Two thirds of her crew were dead, missing, or injured.
The Franklin was met at the docks by a Navy band playing a dirgeful hymn, and also by Peg and me.
We stood on the dock and saluted as we watched this wounded ship —which I thought of as my brother’s coffin—sailing home to be repaired, as best she could. But even I could tell, just by looking at that blackened, gutted pile of steel, that nobody would ever be able to fix this.
—
On May 7, 1945, Germany finally surrendered.
But the Japanese were still holding out, and they were holding out hard.
That week, Mrs. Levinson and I wrote a song for our workers called “One Down, One to Go.”
We kept working.
—
On June 20, 1945, the Queen Mary sailed into New York Harbor carrying fourteen thousand U.S. servicemen returning home from
Europe. Peg and I went to meet them at Pier 90, on the Upper West Side. Peg had painted a sign on the back of an old piece of scenery that said: “Hey, YOU! Welcome HOME!”
“Who are you welcoming home, specifically?” I asked.
“Every last one of them,” she said.
I initially hesitated to join her. The thought of seeing thousands of young men coming home—but none of them Walter—seemed too sad to bear. But she had insisted on it.
“It will be good for you,” she predicted. “More important, it will be good for them. They need to see our faces.”
I was glad I went, in the end. Very glad.
It was a delicious early summer day. I’d been living in New York for more than three years at that point, but I still wasn’t immune to the beauty of my city on a perfect blue-sky afternoon like this—one of those soft, warm days, when you can’t help but feel that the whole town loves you, and wants nothing but your happiness.
The sailors and soldiers (and nurses!) came streaming down the wharf in a delirious wave of celebration. They were met by a large cheering crowd, of which Peg and I constituted a small but enthusiastic delegation. She and I took turns waving her sign, and we cheered till our throats were hoarse. A band on the docks pounded out loud versions of the year’s popular songs. The servicemen were tossing balloons in the air, which I quickly realized were not balloons at all, but blown-up condoms. (I wasn’t the only one who realized this; I couldn’t help laughing as the mothers around me tried to stop their children from picking them up.)
One lanky, sleepy-eyed sailor paused to take a long look at me as he was walking by.
He grinned, and said in a broad southern accent, “Say, honey— what’s the name of this town anyhow?”
I grinned back. “We call it New York City, sailor.”
He pointed to some construction cranes on the other side of the wharf. He said, “Looks like it’ll be a nice enough place, once it’s finished.”
Then he slung his arm around my waist and kissed me—just like you’ve seen in that famous photo from Times Square, on VJ Day. (There was a lot of that going on that year.) But what you never saw in that photo was the girl’s reaction. I’ve always wondered how she felt about her kiss. We will never know, I suppose. But I can tell you how I felt about my kiss—which was long, expert, and considerably passionate.
Well, Angela, I liked it.
I really liked it. I kissed him right back, but then—out of the blue—I started weeping and I couldn’t stop. I buried my face in his neck, clung to him, and bathed him with tears. I cried for my brother, and for all the young men who would never come back. I cried for all the girls who had lost their sweethearts and their youth. I cried because we had given so many years to this infernal, eternal war. I cried because I was so goddamned tired. I cried because I missed kissing boys—and I wanted to kiss so many more of them!—but now I was an ancient hag of twenty-four, and what would become of me? I cried because it was such a beautiful day, and the sun was shining, and all of it was glorious, and none of it was fair.
This was not quite what the sailor had expected, I’m sure, when he’d initially grabbed me. But he rose to the occasion admirably.
“Honey,” he said in my ear, “you ain’t gotta cry no more. We’re the lucky ones.”
He held me tight, and let me boil forth my tears, until finally I got control of myself. Then he pulled back from the embrace, smiled, and said, “Now, how ’bout you let me have another?”
And we kissed again.
It would be three more months before the Japanese surrendered.
But in my mind—in my hazy, peach-colored, summer-day memory —the war ended in that very moment.
TWENTYSIX
As swiftly as I can, Angela, let me tell you about the next twenty years of my life.
I stayed in New York City (of course I did—where else would I go?), but it was not the same town anymore. So much changed, and so fast. Aunt Peg had warned me about this inevitability back in 1945. She’d said, “Everything is always different after a war ends. I’ve seen it before. If we are wise, we should all be prepared for adjustments.”
Well, she was certainly correct about that.
Postwar New York was a rich, hungry, impatient, and growing beast —especially in midtown, where whole neighborhoods of old brownstones and businesses were knocked down in order to make room for new office complexes and modern apartment buildings. You had to pick through rubble everywhere you walked—almost as though the city had been bombed, after all. Over the next few years, so many of the glamorous places I used to frequent with Celia Ray closed down and were replaced by twenty-story corporate towers. The Spotlite closed. The Downbeat Club closed. The Stork Club closed. Countless theaters closed. Those once-glimmering neighborhoods now looked like weird, broken mouths—with half the old teeth knocked out, and some shiny new false ones randomly stuck in.
But the biggest change happened in 1950—at least in our little circle. That’s when the Lily Playhouse closed.
Mind you, the Lily didn’t simply close: she was demolished. Our beautiful, crooked, bumbling fortress of a theater was destroyed by the city that year in order to make room for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In fact, our entire neighborhood was torn down. Within the doomed radius of what would eventually become the world’s ugliest bus terminal, every single theater, church, row house, restaurant, bar,
Chinese laundry, penny arcade, florist, tattoo parlor, and school—it all came down. Even Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions—gone.
Turned to dust right before our eyes.
At least the city did right by Peg. They offered her fifty-five thousand dollars for the building—which was pretty good cheese back in a time when most folks in our neighborhood were living on four thousand dollars a year. I wanted her to fight it, but she said, “There’s nothing to fight here.”
“I just can’t believe you can walk away from all this!” I wailed.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of walking away from, kiddo.”
Peg was dead right, by the way, about the fact that there was “nothing to fight here.” In taking over the neighborhood, the city was exercising a civic right called “the power of condemnation”—which is every bit as sinister and inescapable as it sounds. I had myself a good sulk over it, but Peg said, “Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end. The Lily has outlasted her glory, anyway.”
“That’s not true, Peg,” corrected Olive. “The Lily never had any glory.”
Both of them were right, in their way. We had been limping along since the war ended—barely making a living out of the building. Our shows were more sparsely attended than ever and our best talent had never returned to us after the war. (For instance: Benjamin, our composer, had elected to stay in Europe, settling down in Lyon with a Frenchwoman who owned a nightclub. We loved reading his letters— he was absolutely thriving as an impresario and bandleader—but we sure did miss his music.) What’s more, our neighborhood audience had outgrown us. People were more sophisticated now—even in Hell’s Kitchen. The war had blown the world wide open and filled the air with new ideas and tastes. Our shows had seemed dated even back when I first came to the city, but now they were like something out of the Pleistocene. Nobody wanted to watch cornball, vaudevillelike song- and-dance numbers anymore.
So, yes: whatever slight glory our theater had ever possessed, it was long gone by 1950.
Still, it was painful for me.