CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

TWENTYFIVE

Now it was late 1944. I had turned twenty-four years old.

I kept working around the clock at the Navy Yard. I can’t remember ever taking a day off. I was squirreling away good money from my wartime wages, but I was exhausted, and there was

nothing to spend it on anyway. I barely had the energy to play gin rummy with Peg and Olive in the evenings anymore. More than once, I fell asleep during my evening commute and woke up in Harlem.

Everyone was bone weary.

Sleep became a golden commodity that everyone longed for but nobody had.

We knew we were winning the war—there was a lot of big talk about what a bruising we were giving the Germans and the Japanese—but we didn’t know when it would all be over. Not knowing, of course, didn’t stop anyone from running their mouths nonstop, spreading fruitless gossip and speculation.

The war would end by Thanksgiving, they all said.

By Christmas, they all said.

But then 1945 rolled in, and the war wasn’t done yet.

Over at the Sammy cafeteria theater, we were still killing Hitler a dozen times a week in our propaganda shows, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down any.

Don’t worry, everyone said—it’ll all be sewn up by the end of February.

In early March, my parents got a letter from my brother on his aircraft carrier somewhere in the South Pacific, saying, “You’ll be hearing talk of surrender soon. I’m sure of it.”

That was the last we ever heard from him.

—

Angela, I know that you—of all people—know about the USS Franklin. But I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t even know the

name of my brother’s ship before we got word that it had been hit by a kamikaze pilot on March 19, 1945, killing Walter and over eight hundred other men. Always the responsible one, Walter had never mentioned the name of the ship in his correspondence, in case his letters fell into enemy hands and state secrets were revealed. I knew only that he was on a large aircraft carrier somewhere in Asia, and that he had promised the war would end soon.

My mother was the one who got the notice of his death. She was riding her horse in a field next to our house when she saw an old black car with one white, non-matching door come speeding up our driveway. It raced right past her, driving far too fast for the gravel road. This was unusual; country people know better than to speed down gravel roads next to grazing horses. But the car was one she recognized. It belonged to Mike Roemer, the telegraph operator at Western Union. My mother stopped what she was doing and watched as both Mike and his wife stepped out of the car and knocked on her door.

The Roemers were not the sort of people with whom my mother socialized. There was no reason they should be knocking on the Morrises’ door except one: a telegram must have come in, and its contents were dire enough that the operator thought he should deliver the news himself—along with his wife, who had presumably come to offer womanly comfort to the grieving family.

My mother saw all of this, and she knew.

I have always wondered if Mother had an impulse in that moment to turn the horse around and ride like hell in the opposite direction— just to run straight away from that horrible news. But my mother wasn’t that sort of person. What she did, instead, was to dismount and walk very slowly toward the house, leading her horse behind her. She told me later that she didn’t think it was prudent for her to be on top of an animal at an emotional moment like this. I can just see her— choosing her steps with care, handling her horse with her typical sense of conscientiousness. She knew exactly what was waiting for her on the

doorstep, and she was in no hurry to meet it. Until that telegram was handed over, her son was still alive.

The Roemers could wait for her. And they did.

By the time my mother reached the doorstep of our house, Mrs. Roemer—tears streaming down her face—had her arms open for an embrace.

Which my mother, needless to say, refused.

—

My parents didn’t even have a funeral for Walter.

First of all, there was no body to be buried. The telegram notified us that Lieutenant Walter Morris had been buried at sea with full military honors. The telegram also requested that we not divulge the name of Walter’s ship or his station to our friends and family, so as not to accidentally “give aid to the enemy”—as though our neighbors in Clinton, New York, were saboteurs and spies.

My mother didn’t want a funeral service without a body. She found it too grisly. And my father was too shattered by rage and sorrow to face his community in a state of mourning. He had railed so bitterly against America’s involvement in this war, and had fought against Walter’s enlistment, too. Now he refused to have a ceremony to honor the fact that the government had stolen from him his greatest treasure.

I went home and spent a week with them. I did what I could for my parents, but they barely spoke to me. I asked if they wanted me to stay with them in Clinton—and I would have, too—but they looked at me as though I were a stranger. What possible use could I be to them, if I stayed in Clinton? If anything, I got the sense they wanted me to leave, so I wouldn’t be staring at them all day in their grief. My presence seemed only to remind them that their son was dead.

If they ever thought that the wrong child had been taken from them —that the better and nobler child was gone while the less worthy one remained—I would forgive them for it. I sometimes had that thought myself.

Once I left, they were able to collapse back into their silence.

I probably don’t need to tell you that they were never the same again.

—

Walter’s death utterly shocked me.

I swear to you, Angela, I’d never considered for a minute that my brother could be harmed or killed in this war. This may seem stupid and naïve of me, but if you knew Walter, you’d have understood my confidence. He had always been so competent, so powerful. He had brilliant instincts. He’d never even been injured, in all his years of athletics. Even among his peers, he was seen as semimythical. What harm could ever befall him?

Not only that, I never worried about anybody who served under Walter—although he did. (The one worrying subject my brother mentioned in his letters home was concern for his men’s safety and morale.) I figured anybody who was serving with Walter Morris was safe. He would see to it.

But the problem, of course, was that Walter wasn’t in charge. He was a full lieutenant by then, yes, but the ship wasn’t in his hands. At the helm was Captain Leslie Gehres. The captain was the problem.

But you know all this already—don’t you, Angela?

At least I assume you do?

I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I really don’t know how much your father told you about any of this.

—

Peg and I held our own ceremony for Walter in New York City, at the small Methodist church next to the Lily Playhouse. The

minister had become a friend of Peg’s over the years, and he agreed to conduct a small service for my brother, remains or no remains. There were just a handful of us, but it was important for me that something be done in Walter’s name, and Peg had recognized that.

Peg and Olive were there, of course, flanking me like the pillars they were. Mr. Herbert was there. Billy didn’t come, having moved back to Hollywood a year earlier when his Broadway production of City of Girls finally closed. Mr. Gershon, my Navy censor, came. My pianist from the Sammy cafeteria, Mrs. Levinson, also came. The entire Lowtsky family was there. (“Never saw so many Jews at a Methodist funeral,” said Marjorie, scanning the room. This brought me a laugh. Thank you, Marjorie.) A few of Peg’s old friends came. Edna and Arthur Watson were not there. I suppose that should not have been a surprise, although I must admit I’d thought Edna might show up in support of Peg, at least.

The choir sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and I could not stop crying. I felt a stunned sense of bereavement for Walter—not so much for the brother I lost, but for the brother I’d never had. Aside from a few sweet, sun-dappled, early childhood memories of the two of us riding ponies together (and who knew if those memories were even accurate?), I had no tender recollections of this imposing figure with whom I’d allegedly shared my youth. Perhaps if my parents had expected less of him—if they’d allowed him to be a regular little boy, instead of a scion—he and I could’ve become friends over the years, or confidants. But it was never to be. And now he was gone.

I cried all night but went back to work the next day.

A lot of people had to do that kind of thing during those years.

We cried, Angela, and then we worked.

—

On April 12, 1945, FDR died.

To me, this felt like another family member gone. I could barely remember there ever having been another president. Whatever my father thought of the man, I loved him. Many loved him. Certainly in New York City, all of us did.

The mood the next day at the Yard was somber. At the Sammy cafeteria, I hung the stage with bunting (blackout curtains, actually) and had our actors read from years of Roosevelt’s speeches. At the end of the show, one of the steel workers—a Caribbean man, with dark skin

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.