Stage Door Canteen
by Maggie Davis[ Historical Fiction ]
New York City, the capital of the free world, is dark, its lights turned off as enemy submarines lurk offshore, as close as Coney Island. Three men--a gunner from a B-17 bomber who‘s a national hero, a magazine editor uprooted from civilian life and attached to the Allied High Command, and the violence-stalked captain of a Royal Merchant Navy freighter--find their destinies linked with three volunteer hostesses from New York’s famous Stage Door Canteen. Genevieve Rose is a beautiful Broadway star in an experimental Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that seems headed for disaster. Elise Ginsberg is an indomitable young refugee from Hitler’s terror. And Bernadine Flaherty is an ambitious, talented teenage dancer from Brooklyn hoping for her big show business break. Against Manhattan’s wartime glamor, GIs fresh from combat in North Africa and the Pacific find themselves dancing with the likes of the Stage Door Canteen’s Katherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. Food, whiskey and clothes are rationed, and spies are where one least expects to find them. Life is lived for the moment, love is passionate and often random, and those who can, snatch at a chance for happiness. For beyond the frenetic blackout, the entire world is fighting and dying.
Chapter One
The crowd coming up the stairs, from the black and gritty tubes of the subway and onto Times Square, blinked in surprise. A few stopped short. In the eerie dimness, everything on Broadway was there, and yet not there. This was not new, certainly not unknown, but it was still a surprise.
"Jeez," one of the sailors murmured, impressed.
Before their eyes Times Square and New York's theater district, the Horn and Hardart's Automat, the giant illuminated Camel cigarette sign that blew six-feet high smoke rings, the RKO, Paramount and other movie palaces that ordinarily lit the night with miles of neon tubing and thousands of light bulbs--even the band of the latest news that ran around the top of the New York Times building--was dark. Skyscrapers had suddenly become looming shadows. At ground level Times Square was shuttered tightly to muffle any stray spark of light. Even the streetlights had blinders in the form of metal hoods, and the top half of the headlights of taxis and buses were painted black.
At first, New York City had had no total blackout like the West Coast, which now, a year later, still feared a Japanese invasion. Or London, where after three years of war the inhabitants still groped through the pitch dark, except when there was light from fires set by German bombs. Eventually, though, there had been concern over New York's ?sky glow," which, it was realized, could be seen for miles out to sea. When Manhattan's skyscrapers were lit, enemy submarines could target Allied ships silhouetted against them, and launch their torpedoes. There were plenty of submarines out there: newspapers and the radio networks reported that Hitler's wolf packs lurked as fearfully close as Lower New York Bay and extended as far south as Atlantic City.
The East Coast of the United States, the War Department decided, would initiate a ?brown-out." A dimming, rather than a complete dousing of the lights. On the island of Manhattan there were suddenly darkened office towers, a lightless theater district. Macy's and Bloomingdale's went black. Blackout curtains appeared at every window. Civilian Defense air raid wardens, looking for leaks, patrolled the night. There was a war on.
New York City did its part.
