Authors: Kathryn Miller Haines
Winter in June
Kathryn Miller Haines
For my sister Pam,
who's never been afraid to go halfway across
the world to find what she was looking for
And for Garrett,
who gives me a good reason to stay home
A Little Journey
Among Those Sailing
The Charity Nurse
What's in a Name?
Soldiers and Women
All the Comforts of Home
Neighbors
The Captain of the Watch
Soldiers and Women
The Life of an Actress
The Three of Us
Face the Music
Life and Death of an American
Bury the Dead
The Guest of Honor
The Command Performance
Watch Your Neighbor
Good-bye in the Night
Shadowed by Three
A Friend Indeed
Visit to a POW Camp
A Prisoner of War
The Wrong Man in the Right Place
Tattle Tales
Sailor, Beware!
Information Please
The Twin Sister
The Candy Shop
Shadowed by Three
Jack's Little Surprise
A Little Journey
May 1943
I was hoping we'd get champagne for our bon voyage. Instead, we got a corpse.
It wasn't the first hiccup our trip encountered. So far I'd been badgered by the government, humiliated by the passport office, and innoculated so many times I was afraid to drink water just in case I sprang a leak.
“Step to the side, please.”
And now my best pal Jayne and I were at the port of San Francisco waiting in a line that stretched at least half a mile so that we could board the
Queen of the Ocean
, a former cruise ship repurposed by the navy to carry us to the Pacific theater.
“Step to the side, miss.” A shore patrolman bumped into me as he tried to make his way up the dock and toward the ship.
“What's the rumble?” My dogs were barking, and I was crabby
and already tired of the way the stars and bars dictated who got treated well and who didn't. The SP didn't bother to answer me. He was the third one I'd seen breeze by, each of their pusses set in unyielding stone. The sun beat down on us, but the air was cool and breezy. We'd foolishly changed into summer dresses on the train, and I found myself longing for my wool cardigan.
“How long have we been standing here?” asked Jayne. No one had budged in almost an hour. I was starting to wonder if this whole thing wasn't some sort of military exercise designed to test our ability to stand for hours on end. I'm sure it would be a useful skill if the enemy decided to bombard our troops with bank lines. “I swear I'm going to pass out if I don't get to sit down soon,” she said.
More soldiers and sailors joined the line behind us. I can't say that I liked what I saw. These boys were so young that I would bet my right arm that at least half of them couldn't shave yet. As they waited in line, they smacked gum, told jokes, and read comic books bent over one hand so they could carry their bags with the other. I wondered if they were trying to catch inspiration from the wartime exploits of Mandrake the Magician and Joe Palooka, both of whom had been written into plots that had them enlisting so they could fight the Nazis fair and square. Or did that hit a little too close to home? Maybe they preferred Superman, who would never get a chance to wear a U.S. military uniform. Thanks to his vision he was classified as 4-F, probably because National Allied Publications knew it wouldn't be fair to show the Man of Steel in combat when the boys who revered him didn't possess the same superpowers.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to find a handsome boy looking down at me expectantly. His white Dixie cup cap was perched on the back of his head, forcing him to squint against the sun. “Is it true they found a body?”
“What?” If that was how he pitched woo, he had a lot to learn.
“We're hearing they found a woman dead in the water.”
“It's true,” said another fellow who wasn't with their group. He had a navy uniform and a baby face. “She's still down there. They're trying to fish her out from under the pier.”
“Yeah,” said his friend, a guy whose pale blond crew cut made him look bald in the sun. “I heard she'd been shot. The shore patrol's combing the boat looking for the culprit.”
I stepped out of line and scanned the port for a sign that what they said was true. People were everywhereâperhaps twenty thousand totalâeach one with a look on their face that said they had a job to do. It wasn't just the thousands of men and women who would be leaving from here to go to parts unknown loitering about the docks, but tons of food, supplies, and ammunitionâall made in America to serve the troops overseas. Immense pallets of powdered eggs and milk awaited loading. Impromptu stands were set up to provide soldiers with last-minute inoculations. Information kiosks directed those without orders to local hotels and other forms of entertainment to help them pass the time.
And then I saw her, facedown in the water. Her clothes billowed around her, deflated and looking for a way to take flight. If I hadn't known what I was looking for, I might have thought she was a doll lying discarded in the bay. A motorboat idled beside her, kicking up a current that made it seemâfor a momentâthat she still had life. The men in the boat used what looked like an enormous hook to catch hold of her skirt and pull her toward them.
“Oh, God,” said Jayne. “How awful.”
As the body was pulled toward the boat, the dead woman flipped over. Long tendrils of blond hair radiated from her head like a child's drawing of the sun. Even from our distance above her I could see that her eyes were open, still witnessing her terrifying last moments.
Jayne grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back into the line. “Don't watch,” she said. “Don't think about it.”
I tried to obey her, but the woman in the water held me under her spell. She looked familiar, or perhaps she wore the face of death so well that I just thought I knew her. After all, I'd seen it before. Death had a way of sticking with you.
The boy with the blond crew cut joined us and let out a low whistle as he took in the view. “Come on nowâthis ain't something
ladies should see.” He grabbed our hands and pulled us back into line. As he released us, he took us in top to tail, no doubt trying to figure out why we were in line boarding a military ship when we weren't wearing uniforms. “You're not Wacs, are you?”
“Nope,” said Jayne. “We're actresses.”
His brow furrowed. Apparently claiming to be actresses didn't immediately make our wartime role clear.
“We're in the USO camp shows,” said Jayne.
“Where you headed?”
“The Solomon Islands,” I said. “Foxhole circuit.”
He turned back to his friends. “Wow, fellows. These girls are in the USO.”
One of them pushed his trunk toward us and flipped it on its side to give us a bench to sit on. Our own luggageâonly fifty-three pounds as the United Service Organization had directedâwas with a porter who'd promised to get it on the ship before we left the harbor.
The men bombarded Jayne with questions, asking her who we knew, where we'd been, and what they might've seen us in. She answered them, listing a string of insignificant plays, minor stars, and New York boroughs most of them had never heard of. I didn't join in. My mind was in the water, doing the dog paddle to keep pace with the body.
Why did she look so familiar? I left the line and again went to the railing to observe the girl floating below. She was gone. Although I could no longer see it, I could hear the hum of the motorboat as it returned to shore. In the distance, the meat wagon wailed its warning. It rapidly encroached on us, pulling up to the dock in a cacophony of noise and flashing lights. The attendants left the cab and pulled a stretcher from the back of the truck. They were moving too quickly. Maybe they didn't know she was dead. Or maybe they'd been told to retrieve the body before it caused even more of a scene. After all, we didn't want soldiers thinking about death.
Eventually the boys ran out of things to jaw about and Jayne replaced idle chitchat with the slicks she'd brought along to enter
tain us on the trip. As I watched for signs of the returning stretcher, Jayne flipped through a copy of
Photoplay
.
“Unbelievable!” Her voice wrenched me out of my thoughts. I returned to the line and found her frowning at a magazine photo of a woman who wore a black velvet dress that was so tight part of her spilled onto a second page.
“What's the matter?” I asked.
“Did you know MGM dropped Gilda DeVane?”
I sat beside her and divided my attention between her and the wailing siren. “No. And I'm willing to bet that she doesn't know there's a dead girl floating in the bay.” Gilda DeVane was the very definition of Hollywood star. She'd gotten her start in musical comedies, but somebody somewhere realized she was dreadfully miscast in them and helped her carve out a reputation as the ultimate femme fatale. She had icy good looksâgreen eyes, blond hair, perfect figureâand a way of making you feel like you were doing something wrong every time she appeared onscreen. Her characters were hard women who did bad things, but at the end of the last reel they realized the error of their ways. In real life, if the slicks were to be believed, Gilda was like her onscreen persona, only without the rehabilitation. She skated around; she'd been married twice, engaged at least half a dozen times, and was the answer to almost every blind item that ran in the fan magazines. Her latest love was Van Lauer, a new face whom everyone thought would be the next Tyrone Power. He was a pretty boy with acting chops. And a wife.
“Well she's been dropped from her contract, though apparently Van Lauer's still got his,” said Jayne.
“Why wouldn't he?”
She sighed, not hiding her exasperation at my ignorance. Clearly I wasn't spending my time reading the right things. “Both of them were turning up late on set. It's been in all the papers.”
“Not the ones I've seen.” I read the article over her shoulder. Sure enough, the month before Metro Goldwyn Mayer had let one of their biggest female contract players go. The writer alluded to the relationship between DeVane and Lauer as the reason for her being
dropped, although if the rumor mill was to be believed, their relationship was kaput too. “Why didn't they fire Lauer?” I asked. “After all, he's the one with the wife and the scandal. They have to expect this kind of stuff from Gilda by now.”
Jayne shrugged. “Beats me.” The most likely answer was that he was the bigger breadwinner, or at least someone at MGM thought that he was. Gilda was on the way down, so rather than kowtowing to her, they gave in to his demands to show her the gate when the relationship hit the papers. Hollywood hypocrisy was one of the many reasons why I was firmly committed to staying in New York. Well, that and because Hollywood wasn't interested in me. “I hope she gets a bigger and better deal at Twentieth Century Fox,” said Jayne. She turned the page, where the dapper Van Lauer was pictured in an army air force uniform.
I pushed the magazine away. “Isn't that typical? He gets to be a hero, and she walks away a whore. It was certainly a better move than focusing on his acting career. I'd heard recently that the Oscar statue was undergoing a facelift due to wartime quotas. Instead of being made out of metal, it was now being produced out of plaster. It was an interesting metaphor for the way the war was reshaping Hollywood. It was no longer enough to be talented on film. The American public had finally realized that actors themselves were little more than painted plaster. What they wanted were real heroes fighting for our freedom, not people like Errol Flynnâwho was allegedly 4-Fâplaying them on the big screen. And that meant that pretend heroes better shape up and ship out if they wanted to continue to be viewed as important to our lives.
Enlisting was a brilliant move on Lauer's part. The war had caused a lot of terrible things, but it had also become the publicity opportunity that rehabilitated a thousand careers. No matter how bad a person was, all they had to do was join up, buy bonds, or pay a visit to a hospital full of vets, and the public instantly forgot whatever awful thing they'd been associated with. And it wasn't limited to Hollywood stars. After all, the American public was quick to forget that Charles Lindbergh had supported the Nazi party as soon as
he donned a uniform and went to fight for the Allies. The war could absolve anyone of their sins. Maybe even a murderer.
The ambulance attendants returned from the dock. The body had been strapped in and covered by a white sheet that fluttered in the breeze. One hand had worked itself free and hung limply, swaying back and forth as the men bobbed across the uneven boards. The woman's fingernails had been varnished Victory Red, and the color against the pallor of her skin made it lookâfor a momentâlike her hands were dripping with blood.
The meat wagon pulled away, and the shore patrol began to exit the ship. If they'd found the culprit, they didn't bother to bring him back with them. “Move along,” someone shouted at the front of the line, and suddenly the crowd began to inch forward. Jayne and I rose to our feet, eager to get out of the sun and onto the boat. We quickly left the pavement and walked onto the gangplank.
“This is it,” said Jayne.
“This is it,” I echoed. I slipped my hand into my pocket and palmed a photo I'd placed there just before we left New York. It was a picture of my ex-boyfriend Jack, the reason for this whole crazy trip. He wasn't wearing his navy uniform; this was Jack before the war, wearing an actor's smile to promote some play he was in. When he'd given me a copy of it, I'd stored it away in a drawer, thinking it strange that someone you saw everyday would provide you with something to remember him by. Perhaps he was more on the ball than I'd given him credit for.
My gaze wandered behind me to where soldiers and sailors were bidding farewell to family members who'd come to see them off. Each good-bye broke my heart a little, as mothers memorized their son's faces, wives begged for a kiss that lasted just a little longer, and children shed the tears everyone else was fighting to keep inside.
“No turning back,” said Jayne.
I wasn't sure if she was talking about us or them, though I suspected it was the former.
“Nope. No turning back.” I hadn't been able to sleep for the past
day, and I could tell that the adrenaline that had kept me going was about to take the run out. I knew what would happen then. The manic energy I'd used to get us here would dry up and in its place would be the well of emotions I'd fought for days to suppress. We were leaving America. We were leaving behind careers that were beginning to take off and housing that no one could guarantee would be held for us. We were leaving close friends, closer enemies, and a cat who had my number. We were leaving everything that was familiar and going to a strange land on a mission that was ill advised at best.