“I can tell. Shall I close this door?” I said as we went back into the house.
“No, leave it open for him, he likes to patrol the place when I’m not here. Or take a swim. Or chase a rabbit. I lock the front door but it’s for show. No thief in his right mind would take him on.”
She turned on a couple of lights and we headed for the door.
“I’ve always had shepherds,” she said, leading me toward the door. “My first was Buck. I named him after the dog in Call of the Wild.”
“Buck was a malamute,” I said.
“Not in my head he wasn’t,” she said with an arrogant lift of her chin.
When we got outside, she turned toward the carport and tossed me her car keys.
“Let’s take the Phaeton,” she said. “You drive.”
“Aww,” I said, “and I’ve got the company’s best car.”
“How did you swing that?”
“I have to go up the coast early in the morning.”
“Is this about Verna?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll be back tomorrow night late.” And dropped it at that.
We made small talk as I kept the car in third gear and wound our way down to Sunset Boulevard, where I turned left, heading up to Hollywood. A block or two from Grauman’s I pulled down a side street and parked in front of Harry’s Absolutely Genuine New York Delicatessen.
British sink Bismarck
And the subhead:
Nazi juggernaut blown from sea;
ENGLISH fleet avenges hood loss
I threw a dime in the cigar box on top of the papers and took two.
Harry’s was just what it claimed to be. Black and white tile floors, red leather booths, white linoleum tabletops, wooden chairs with heart-shaped backs. Lots of light. The smell of salami and pastrami mixed with the rich aroma of the bakery.
Harry, at the front counter slicing turkey, looked up and yowled, “Hey, Zee, where ya been? I thought you died.”
“I’ve been busy, Harry.”
“So, you don’t eat when you’re busy?” He shook his head in disapproval. “Better not let Mama hear.”
“Where is she?”
“Home with the grandkids. It’s Tuesday. Who goes to the deli on Tuesday? Sit anywhere, Zee. Menus on the tables tonight.”
We sat across from each other in one of the front booths and I gave Millie one of the two newspapers I’d picked up by the entrance. Her mouth was agape as she scanned the headline about the Bismarck.
I started reading the story. British dive-bombers had jammed the rudder of Germany’s proudest battleship and it had circled helplessly while the British closed in and blew it to bits. According to the account, the Bismarck lost 2,400 men in its final battle.
Harry came to the table and read the headline over my shoulder.
“Harry, this is my friend Millie,” I said. He stepped back, looked her over, and put his hand over his heart.
“Beautiful, exquisite,” he said, rolling his eyes. “My heart goes pitty-pat. What you think, Zee. You think we get into this war?”
“You want to live in a world with Hitler on one side of us and T?oj?o on the other?” I asked.
A two-column yarn in the lower left corner of the front page described a near riot caused by America Firsters, pacifists who were against America getting into the war, and a group of American Legionnaires. There was a photo of angry men in overseas caps yelling at a group of businessmen carrying signs that said lindbergh says stay out of europe, and an ugly cartoon of a leering Roosevelt with Death swinging a scythe behind him and a caption that read roosevelt the warmonger.
“Now there’s an irony. A bunch of business types on a picket line calling Roosevelt a warmonger, and the British and Nazis are blowing each other up in the North Sea.”
“Corned beef and cabbage is the special,” Harry said, to loosen up the tension. “I musta had a premonition you were coming, Zee.”
“Sounds good to me,” Millie said, and handed him her menu.
“On two, with draft beer,” I said.
“Splendid,” Harry said, and rushed off to the kitchen to get our dinner.
Millie shuddered. “Every day it’s something awful,” she said, turning her attention back to a war which couldn’t be too far away. “My heart stops every time I see that photograph of the Nazis marching past the Eiffel Tower.” She paused, and added, “You think we’ll get into it, don’t you?”
“Just a question of time.” I nodded.
“Will you have to go?” she asked me.
I shrugged, trying to brush it off.
“Do you remember the war?” she asked.
Did I remember it? Oh, yeah.
“I was nine years old when my father went off to France,” I told her. “I had a poster in my room. Uncle Sam without his top hat and coat. An angry Uncle Sam pointing straight at me and saying ‘I Want You.’ It scared me to look at it. Every day was a dread, every time the telegraph kid came down the street on his bicycle, we prayed it wouldn’t stop at our house. I’d lie in bed at night and cry. I cried every night because I didn’t think it was possible for my father to survive.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching across the table and taking my hand. “Did he?”
“What was left of him,” I said.
I didn’t tell her about the day my dad came home. My dad was a big guy with a crazy Irish sense of humor. The man who got off the train was like a shadow of that man. He had been gassed and it had reduced him to a wraith with sunken eyes who had seen a thousand horrors. His hands shook and he coughed a lot. He couldn’t hold a job. He wouldn’t talk about the war. I know now my dad had been dying. It took him twelve years, but each day he died a little more, until his lungs finally gave out. My mother died along with him. She lasted three years longer, the last two in such misery I still try to block it out of my mind.
This war, when it came, would be worse.
So I just said, “Sometimes I think it would be worse to wait at home than be in the middle of it.”
“I’ve already lost someone in Europe,” she said, staring blankly at the newspaper.
“When?”
“Nineteen forty. My cousin Hugh. Crazy cousin Hugh.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was always crazy about airplanes. Learned to fly when he was a kid. When they formed the Eagle Squadron he raced off to London and joined up. I got a card from him after his first flight. He had shot down a Messerschmitt his first time out and he was so proud. Two days later he went down over France.”
“I’m sorry.” It sounded pitifully inadequate. I decided to lighten things up.
“I saw his picture in the living room. ‘Mill the Pill’?”
It got a laugh out of her.
“That’s what he called me. Hugh was the hell-raiser in the family and I was Miss Proper. Growing up we fought like brother and sister, but when I was a teenager going to school back East he took me in hand.”
“So you turned into a hell-raiser, too?”
“I’m still trying.”
“And what’s the most audacious thing you ever did?”
She thought about it for a full minute.
“I sneaked over the wall at Miss Brownington’s School for Girls and went to see King Kong at the Radio City Music Hall.”
I faked surprise. “Wow!” I said.
“That was a major step for me, sir,” she said haughtily. “I could have been expelled.”
Not likely, I thought. Not when your father owns half of Montana.
The marquee said “Special Preview Tonight” and there was a long line at Grauman’s Theater when we got there, plus the usual crowd of tourists looking at the wide walkway leading to the ticket booth with all the hand- and footprints of the stars immortalized in concrete. Frank was standing in the entrance in his tuxedo, smiling as the paying customers streamed in. He waved us over and led us into an almost full house. There were three rows toward the back roped off in velvet for the special guests.
Most of those seated in the “velvet rows” were studio execs. Producers, flacks, and their friends. The stars, if they showed up, would come in when the house lights dimmed.