Stage Door Canteen by Maggie Davis Read Free Book Online

bedroom was filled with its glow.
    She got out of bed and went down the hallway and through the tiny fin de siecle foyer with its improbable full-sized marble mantel and fireplace, to the living room and the windows that overlooked Riverside Park. She was freezing in just her nightgown, but heat conservation was a priority and the ancient steam radiators wouldn’t begin chattering until seven a.m. She opened the blackout drapes for the view that always delighted, the bright, metallic shine of the river and the moonlit cliffs of the Palisades.
    One of the apartment’s glories, besides its location in a Stanford White-designed building, its high-ceilinged rooms and two working fireplaces, was that it overlooked, spectacularly, the Hudson River. They had signed the lease for it in October of 1940 when Brad had moved up to executive editor at the magazine, and before the Army had claimed him. Now, she was periodically reminded by something called the New York City War Housing Board, seven spacious rooms and two baths, rent-controlled, heat-rationed and with a leaky tub in the front bathroom was, in overcrowded wartime New York, something so desirable it was virtually priceless. And that it would be grossly unpatriotic not to list it for additional occupancy. That is, the forms to be filled out in triplicate explained, rent out one of the apartment’s unused bedrooms to someone in a war occupation listed as “essential.”
    Jenny knew that eventually she would have to comply with the war housing board’s request, but for the time being she reveled in having the apartment to herself.
    She pressed her forehead against the cold window glass. The radio was playing in the bedroom, a Rodgers and Hart tune, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was. She suddenly thought of Brad asleep in his hotel room in Washington that he shared with another air force command staffer, after a day spent in what he referred to as the frustrating, serpentine coils of the War Department. The first months they were separated the telephone bills had been enormous, the hunger for each other and the resentment at the war for keeping them apart, still fresh. Now , since they had learned that everyone, eventually, gets accustomed to the unbearable, telephone calls were mostly confined to weekends and letters made do on the other days of the week. But that didn’t mean they didn’t miss each other. They had only been married four and a half years; now that he was in Washington she was lonesome, longing to talk to him, to touch him. Sex was, somewhat to her surprise, as painfully, needfully missed as everything else. She had thought, until this separation, that loving companionship was the glue that held together their marriage. Now on dark nights alone in the apartment there were wild fantasies of Brad’s naked body beside her, there in the bed, that startled her. Lusting after one’s own husband? She was finding the war was capable of anything. Good, solid Brad, fine husband, friend, and the intelligent, witty, talented former managing editor of one of the nation’s most respected finance magazines. Who was now Major Haller, attached to General Arnold’s administrative staff in the building that was beginning to be called the Pentagon because of its unsual shape, undeniably dashing, handsome, even somewhat gorgeous in his United States Army Air Force pinks. The last leave he’d had in New York the women in the Palm Court of the Plaza, when they’d gone there for drinks, had virtually fallen out of their seats looking at him. God knows. Jenny told herself, what women were doing in Washington. He said he never went alone to bars. She wanted to believe him.
    Below, on the West Side Highway, the tiny moving lights were cars with shrouded headlights. Beyond that, on the surface of the silver river, was the ship traffic that, on moonless nights, would be almost invisible: freighters now called Liberty ships, long-waisted tankers, tugs with barges. An occasional