But a few weeks later, the New Britain fighting still in the headlines, they were back. Duggan, now a lieutenant colonel, was wearing a new Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit and had a tremendous tale to tell. They had gone in with the first wave, it seemed (though it was never really explained what they were doing there), and Duggan had been hit in the knee with shrapnel and would have bled to death if Sergeant Bissell hadn’t carried him back to an emergency aid station. The story and Duggan’s wound grew with each telling, although for a man who had been at death’s door such a short time before, he looked remarkably fit. I tried to get Luther alone and pin him down, but either he had received a thorough briefing from Duggan or he had heard the old man tell the story so often he had come to believe it. “Believe me, you would have been proud of the old man,” he told me. “I must have carried him almost a mile to the beach, and not a peep out of him.”
“Luther, are you sure this whole thing didn’t take place in a bar in Honolulu?” Tom wanted to know. “Maybe it was the Royal Hawaiian you carried him to.”
Luther just waited with his pained face until the laughter died down. “Gentlemen,” he said, “before this thing is over, I hope you’ll all get a chance to go up front with the old man.”
During their fourteen-day leave, Duggan took Luther to 21, a place he had always wanted to go, and introduced him to Jack and Mac, to Quent Reynolds, to John O’Hara, to everybody as “the man who saved my life.”
Lennie Lyons devoted a paragraph to Luther, and Adela Rogers St. John gushed over two columns on the inseparable bond between these two Broadway heroes.
Eventually the excitement wore off and we all plugged away again, with all the jokes about the chair-borne soldiers and wearing the red-and-black ribbon for action with a typewriter. Once in a while, of course, work halted for military ceremonies, like the Saturday morning Duggan presented Luther with his second bronze star. For this event Luther’s wife came all the way from Brooklyn. She was a sweet-faced, homey-looking woman who never should have tried to get dressed up. For the occasion she was wearing an orchid corsage Duggan had sent her. The three of them smiled for the news photographers. I still have a picture of it clipped from the Daily News, with Duggan upstaging Luther a little as he pins the medal on him, while Mrs. Bissell looks on proudly.
Then all of a sudden our entire outfit, penned up so long that the real war seemed as if it were being fought on another planet, got the word that we were moving out to the Pacific. Duggan, on his last trip out, had made a number with MacArthur (that’s how these things were done, I came to find), and as a result we were all going to work the Philippines invasion, beaming radio messages to Filipino resistance groups.
The week before we shoved off, a strange thing happened. Mrs. Bissell came in and asked to see Duggan alone. She was in there a long time, maybe twenty minutes, and when she came out she walked right on through without even stopping to nod at those of us she had met. I happened to follow her into Duggan’s office, for a regular conference. He held forth for four or five minutes, as he often did, about the importance of the work we were doing, and then, with an expression of martyrdom, he said, “You know, sometimes I’m disappointed in human nature. So few people ever measure up to their responsibilities. Take Mrs. Bissell, for instance. She just asked me not to take Luther back overseas, because, she says, he isn’t what he used to be.”
“So what did you say, Colonel?” I said.
“What could I say?” Duggan wanted to know. “Why, it would break Luther’s heart to be left behind. I just wouldn’t tell an old campaigner like Luther that he was going to have to miss out on the Philippines show.”
Just to keep the records straight I grabbed a cup of coffee with Luther at the snack bar one morning and put the question to him about our expedition.
“Well, I don’t know,” Luther said, and I thought there was more weariness in his voice than usual. “I seen a lot of places and a lot of fighting in my time. And I already been to the Pacific. Them islands is all the same. But if the old man thinks he needs me …”
The old man needs you to make his coffee, snap to attention, and hang up his breeches, I thought to myself.
But no matter how anxious or reluctant Luther was to return to the wars, he played his part to the hilt all the way over. On the C-54 going to Honolulu, when Tom, who had had a hard night in San Francisco, dropped into the first of two reclining seats (it was a bucket job), Luther spoke right up. “The Colonel isn’t aboard yet, Captain,” he reminded Tom. “Don’t you think you’d better wait and see where the old man wants to ride?”
And when we landed at Hickam, Luther wanted to line us up and call the roll, even though there weren’t a dozen of us. But after bouncing around on those buckets for twenty-four hours, we were in no mood for military sport, not even to indulge Sergeant Bissell.
But it was when we shoved off from the staging area with regular components of the 6th Army that Duggan and Luther really began to express themselves. Any way you looked at it we were a freak outfit, not slated to hit the beach until after it had been secured; and in cases like that, when you’re among fighting men tuning up for an invasion, discretion is not only the better but the only part of valor. But the way Duggan and Luther behaved, and no doubt felt, the Colonel (he had made his full colonelcy) and the Sergeant were MacArthur and his chief of staff about to throw their army into the jaws of death. At Luther’s suggestion, several inspections were held on the afterdeck, with thousands of jeering GI’s on hand to watch the comic opera. Every time we passed Duggan on deck we were supposed to salute, although even combat officers were dispensing with the formality except upon first greeting in the morning. But the pay-off came when Duggan called us together for instruction from Luther on hand-to-hand combat.
“These Japs are tricky,” Duggan said, standing on a hatch with the sun highlighting his strong face like a baby spot. “Even if we’re back in Headquarters territory, you can never tell when the Nips will make a surprise night raid. I want every one of my men to know how to defend himself if necessary. I don’t want to have to live with myself after this show is over if I have to think I lost a man through carelessness. So every afternoon until we land I’ve asked Sergeant Bissell to give you an hour of routine judo.”
“Can you show us how to wrest a typewriter from a Jap in hand-to-hand psychological warfare?” Jack called.
Everybody laughed except Duggan and Luther. “You can save the comedy for when you go back to Lindy’s,” Duggan said. “Whether you realize it or not, gentlemen, this is a matter of life and death.”
Everybody passed whispered jokes around to everybody else. It was like hearing Duggan in one of his plays telling another character that some hoked-up situation was life or death. He made it sound convincing because he read his lines so well. But actually you knew that this was just a theatre and that the character, if he did, subsequently, fall lifeless across the apron, would rise again the moment the curtain was down.
We got to Leyte with very little trouble. The Kamikazes gave some of the ships around us a shaking up, but the landing turned out to be easier than anybody expected. The first five waves went in with practically no opposition. Our outfit went in with the sixth, all except Duggan and Luther, who were waiting to go in with MacArthur and Osmena.
Even though resistance was light, there was plenty of confusion on the beach as the various HQ’s tried to set themselves up. We had a portable radio transmitter and started beaming our stuff as soon as we got ashore. Duggan and Luther showed up a couple of hours later. I didn’t have time to ask whether Luther had saved his life yet or not. Duggan and Luther inspected our position, and then a terrible thing was discovered. Luther had forgotten the coffee, the “joe,” as he and Duggan called it. Luther was ordered back to the Quartermaster tent to get some more. It was growing dark by that time. There wasn’t too much happening on the beach. It looked more like the aftermath of a Rose Bowl game than a battle, with jeeps, trucks, half-tracks, tanks,
everything the army had that moved pouring out of LST’s and getting snarled in traffic jams as the beachmasters muffed their signals in the dark. Out at sea a terrific naval battle seemed to be going on, but the only casualties I saw on the beach were from occasional snipers in the palm trees. There was one sniper who winged a couple near our transmitter before somebody picked him off. He fell practically at Duggan’s feet, a little man with a face we would have called cute if he had been a houseboy.
“Maybe we’ve moved up a little too close, Al,” Duggan said. His voice sounded unnaturally high and the careful enunciation was gone.
I was scared, too, even though this was still a long way from actual combat, but I said, “Close? This isn’t close. Not for an outfit that’s supposed to be ready for action behind enemy lines.”
“It’s not myself I’m thinking about,” Duggan said. “It’s the equipment. And none of you men has been exposed to battle conditions before.”
A few minutes later Colonel Talley happened to pass by in a jeep. He was on MacArthur’s staff, one of the men through whom Duggan worked the deal that got us here. “We’ve just taken the airstrip, Josh,” Talley said. From the way he said it you could see that he enjoyed the intimacy of calling a stage celebrity Josh. “I’m flying back to Guam on the first plane out. Be back in a day or so. Want to come along?”
Duggan looked at the dead Jap, looked out at the darkening night with the lightninglike flashes on the horizon, and then addressed us all without looking directly into any one face. “Might not be a bad idea for me to hop over to Guam,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to have a talk with Colonel Partridge. Tom, you’ll be in command until I return. Carry on, men. And God bless you!”
About an hour later Luther came. He had the coffee but he had had a hard time finding us in the dark. When he came into our transmitting shack, he was breathing hard, and his face looked old.
“Well, it was tough going, but I got the old man’s coffee, Lieutenant,” he said. Then, when he didn’t see him, “By the way, where is the Colonel?”
“He’s gone back to Guam,” I said.
“No kidding, Lieutenant, where is he?” Luther said.
“I said he’s gone back to Guam, Luther,” I said.
He looked around like a little boy who’s lost his parents in a department store. “But he—the old man—he wouldn’t go without me.”
“He left with Colonel Talley,” Tom said. “Maybe you can still catch him at MacArthur’s HQ.”
“Sure, that’s it, that’s it,” Luther said. “He’s probably waiting for me up there. Hell, the old man wouldn’t go anywhere without me.” He stood up, and for the first time since I had known him I saw that he was deeply shaken. His face had gone very white, and his head was almost imperceptibly shaking like an old man’s. It wasn’t that he was frightened. He was undermined, humiliated, deeply embarrassed. We were all sitting around the shack, in the most informal dress and position—just a bunch of radio guys who happened to draw a somewhat inconvenient assignment. But Luther came to attention, saluted us just like a scene from Journey’s End, and said: “Thank you for the information, sir. Good night, gentlemen.”
We kept knocking out our radio stuff all night, telling Filipino guerrillas what was happening and where they could tie in to our advance patrols, and about five A.M. while we were trying to keep awake with the help of that coffee Luther had brought for Duggan the night before, an MP came to the door and said he wanted an officer from the radio outfit to follow him. I followed him down the beach, threading my way through ack-ack outfits, stalled jeeps, supply dumps, and all the rest of the amazing gear that man drags with him onto enemy beaches, until at last we came to a little clump of sandbrush, where Luther was lying.
“One of your men?” the MP said.
Sprawled there on his side with his smashed spectacles lying near by, he didn’t look very impressive any more. He didn’t look the way a hero is supposed to look. He just looked crumpled, deflated, like a doorman who falls asleep on the job.
“A sniper?” I said.
“No, one of our trucks,” the MP said. “Ran into him last night in the dark. The driver wasn’t using his lights, of course, and I guess the old man couldn’t see so good, anyway. Thought maybe since he was one of your guys you’d want to take him up to your camp and bury him.” I don’t remember what I thought about as I carried him back. I don’t remember thinking anything one way or another. I just carried him back. We dug a grave for him in the sand, and then we lowered him down, facing the USA. Then, since nobody had anything to say, we all just stood at attention for one minute of silence. Luther should have seen us. It was the most military moment of our entire pseudomilitary careers.
I suppose the one thought in all our minds was, Thank God, Duggan isn’t here to give us the curtain speech. But if Luther had to go, too bad he couldn’t have gone in style, storming a Jap machine-gun nest. Well, by the time Duggan got back to “21” he was sure to have Luther storming a half dozen machine-gun nests.
Saluting the grave and listening to the bugler blow his tinny requiem, I couldn’t help thinking: This isn’t on the level. We’re really back on that empty Broadway stage and my show-business mind is jumping way ahead of Duggan’s inaugural address. After all, nobody dies in an outfit like ours. Nobody is supposed to die. We wear soldier suits and we salute and call each other by our military titles. But it’s all a charade, the kind of charade that only Duggan and Luther really know how to play—the kind of charade that Colonel Duggan, on his way to Zodiac, Illinois, to decorate Luther’s widow, has to go on playing alone, now that the soft and faithful flesh of Luther Bissell lies in its sandy and unnecessary grave.
MEAL TICKET
THE OLD MAN HAD just come in off the docks with Eddie and they were drinking beer in the kitchen. The old lady didn’t like them drinking beer in her kitchen—precious little work space in these cold-water flats—but it was better than having them drink themselves into the blind staggers down at Paddy’s Waterfront Bar & Grill. She didn’t like them sitting there slopping it down until they were too full to stand up straight and she’d have to shake some life into them so Pop could grope his way to bed while Eddie wandered out into the night in search of such evils as only the Devil knew.
Eddie was saying, “Pop, what gives with our West Side boys these days—can’t punch their way outa a paper bag. Last night that Mickey Cochrane, a real chumpola, and he’s supposed to be the pride of the West Side. Harlem—Little Italy—that’s where they got the fighters now. Jeez, in my day …”
The old lady looked up from the meat loaf she was preparing, but she didn’t say anything. She had heard all she wanted to hear about his day. She remembered all too well the days of glory for Eddie (Honeyboy) Finneran. He had been the “crowd-pleasing kayo artist from the West Side” then, making three, sometimes four thousand dollars a fight. In his best year, ’42, he had earned nearly thirty thousand. Quite a take for the son of a longshoreman who had worked hard all his life for his two or three thousand a year. Ma hadn’t gone for the fighting. She hadn’t been impressed when Eddie said, “Just think, Ma, in forty-five minutes Friday night I’ll make more money than the old man makes in a whole year.”
Pop would go to the fights, and their older daughter Molly and her husband Leo, but not Ma. She’d stay home with Vince, the baby of the family, and wait for the excitement to be over. One night when Eddie was fighting Joey Kaplan, his East Side rival, and she was worried for him because the sports writers had wondered if Honey-boy Finneran wasn’t “being taken along too fast,” that night she had turned on the radio for a minute and she heard: “Finneran’s got a bad gash over his right eye—but he keeps boring in—lots of heart—and another hard right hand to Finneran’s eye!” She had heard the hoarse, blood-thirsty yowl of the crowd and that was enough. She had snapped the radio off and waited. Pop came home late and very drunk because the referee had stopped the fight in the ninth to save Honeyboy from further punishment. “Ma
gine a skinny little sheeney from the East Side lickin’ our Honeyboy,” the old man said. For days he had stayed away from his favorite saloons, he was that ashamed. And Eddie had hid out in a hotel until his face looked good enough for him to come home. Stayed up in a hotel and belted whiskey with all the trash of the neighborhood, man and woman alike, who were perfectly content to tell Eddie how he would have beaten the little East Side Jew-boy if only for some lousy breaks, all the while helping Eddie get rid of his more-money-in-forty-five-minutes-than-Pop-made-in-a-year.
Oh yes, Ma remembered his days all right. She remembered how he made thirty thousand in the ring and lost it in the horse rooms. And she remembered how Pop quit work because Eddie was a main-eventer at the Garden and what was the sense of making a lousy ten dollars a day when Eddie had a grand on him all the time. She remembered how Pop spent nearly all his waking time in the bars buying drinks for his longshore pals and reviewing Honeyboy’s triumphs round by round. And she remembered how a cold-water flat wasn’t good enough for the Finnerans any more, how Eddie insisted they move away from their old block between 10th and 11th, even over Ma’s objections. She had lived there since before Eddie was born and if she needed help or company there was always Mrs. Boyle and Mrs. Hanrahan right in the building, and Fred the janitor was a friend of theirs, and she liked to know that Father Corcoran was just around the corner. But they had moved because Eddie was proud and the money was burning his pocket, and because Pop and Molly had argued that if Eddie was so famous why shouldn’t they have a taste of better things? Yes, and Ma remembered, not with bitterness but with a sense of realism, how long those better things had lasted. Less than two years after Eddie’s retirement Pop was back in the shape-up again, kicking back to the hiring boss to make sure of a day’s pay, and the Finnerans were back in their railroad flat. And what did Eddie—their briefly famous Honeyboy—have to show for it but a flattened nose and one bad eye and a state of mind that wasn’t exactly punchy, but wasn’t quite up to normal, either? Eddie was excitable, unstable, with fits of delusion, and his vision was turned in upon the past. He lived more in his day than in the present and he had no capacity for work. The quick big money of his ring purses had spoiled him for ordinary living. A docker’s wage was sucker’s work. Not vicious enough for crime or conscientious enough for honest labor, he had drifted through the years of his retirement in search of a soft touch—working for the books, doing a little gambling, tied into the numbers racket on the waterfront. Ma hated to think the word, for she had tried to bring her children up to fear God and honor their responsibilities, but Eddie Finneran was a bum. So she said nothing while they sat at the table talking fights and the dearth of good Irish fighters on the West Side and the glories of the old days when the wearers of the green dominated the ring, Mickey Walker and Tommy Loughran, Jimmy McLarnin and Billy Conn.