LITMIR.BIZ

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first bar fight of the night.

5

      RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

      Rainy Schulterman is wearing a dress in the bathroom. It is a perfectly nice dress, a young woman’s dress, a navy-blue dress with a white collar. She puts it on, twists the collar into place, and performs the necessary gymnastics to raise the zipper from her lower back to her neck. Then she resets the collar, runs smoothing hands down the front of the garment, and stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She moves this way and that, trying to see it from as many angles as possible, a little dance that causes her to brush against her mother’s brassieres, hanging from the shower curtain pole.

      She last wore this dress to attend her cousin’s bar mitzvah. It is her good dress, the only thing she can wear to a place like the Stork Club.

      “No,” Rainy says.

      She considers, face solemn, and decides to try the look with her hair down. She pulls a few strategic hairpins and her brown hair explodes out into its natural bristle brush.

      “No.”

      Her uniform hangs neatly from the hook on the back of the door, and in five minutes she is in her Class-A’s, complete with shiny men’s shoes and bright brass buttons. Three gold chevrons adorn each shoulder.

      She sighs with resignation and begins pinning her mad tumbleweed of hair back into place. Finally she settles her service cap, steadying it with a hairpin as well.

      Rainy steps out of the bathroom. Her mother is waiting.

      Her mother says nothing—nothing in actual words—but with sighs, rolled eyes, a mouth opened as if in shock, and with gestures of shoulders and hands, manages to convey her weary disappointment.

      “I was in uniform when he met me,” Rainy says defensively.

      “Oy.”

      “Mother.”

      “Is it so wrong I should miss my daughter, my little baby girl?”

      “Your daughter is right here,” Rainy says with teeth-gritting impatience.

      “My daughter wears a dress when she goes out, especially to the Stork Club. What if Walter Winchell is there and he sees you dressed like a man? And who is this boy you’re seeing? Is he a good boy?”

      “I don’t know yet.”

      “You go out dancing till all hours with a boy you don’t know?”

      Rainy’s father sticks his head around the corner. “What boy?”

      “He’s a nice Jewish boy,” Rainy says.

      “At least there’s that,” her mother says. Her shoulders slump. Her entire body is one big, middle-aged advertisement of disappointment and desolation. This disappointment at least is not really about Rainy, but rather her brother, Aryeh, a Marine, who married his pregnant shiksa girlfriend, Jane, before heading off to the Pacific. Their baby is expected momentarily.

      “You look beautiful, even in uniform,” Rainy’s father says, “and I don’t want you looking too beautiful in a dress with legs and arms and legs, giving this boy ideas.” He puts a hand over his heart. “I speak as a man when I say never trust any man.”

      Rainy is not worried about Halev Leventhal getting too familiar. What does worry her is speaking to her father. She’s put it off and put it off, each time looking for some perfect moment.

      She glances at the wall clock. She has time.

      “Get it over with,” she mutters. If she doesn’t get it over with the anxiety of it will ruin her night with Halev.

      Her date with Halev. That’s right, it is a date. Definitely a date.

      She waits until her mother decides the living room rug needs a quick vacuuming and pulls her father aside in the hallway outside her bedroom.

      “What, you need cab fare to come home if he gets fresh?” He starts to dig in his pants for his wallet.

      “Dad. I . . .”

      And now he knows this is not about producing a five-dollar bill for cab fare.

      “What is it, sweetheart?”

      “Dad, I love you and nothing will ever change that.”

      “Of course nothing will ever change that, what could change that?”

      “Vito Camporeale,” Rainy says.

      She watches in fascination as various options play out across her father’s face. Should he play dumb? Should he say it’s none of her business?

      “Dad, the people I work for want me to talk to the people you . . . someone you may know.”

      “Oh, Rainy,” he says, and sags back against the wall, head down on his chest. “Oy vey iz mir.”

      “Dad, listen to me. Daddy.” She waits until he raises a face she has never seen before, weary and defeated and ashamed. “Dad, you know the FBI found out and told Army Intelligence. I admit I was shocked, but do you think I really care if you run numbers? Everyone in the neighborhood plays a number.”

      He moans and scrubs his face with his palms.

      “The army wants something, and they think they can get it from this Vito Camporeale.”

      “It didn’t start out like this. I was working for one of our people, a Jewish businessman, but there was some deal and he gave the territory to the dagos. So . . . there is still rent to pay each month.” He shrugs.

      Rainy takes a moment to note that most of her father’s shame over running numbers stems from the fact that he’s no longer doing it for a Jewish mobster.

      “Listen, Dad, we need to talk about this now while Mother is vacuuming, I don’t want—”

      Her father waves his hand. “Oh, she knows. She’s my wife! Of course she knows.”

       This keeps getting stranger.

      “Okay, but we don’t want anyone to know who doesn’t have a need to know,” Rainy says. It takes her father a moment to figure out that by “we” she does not mean the family, but the army.

      “Of course,” he says, straightening up and sending a glance in the direction of his wife.

      “You just need to pass the word that we’d like one of our people to meet with him. No cops—this is not about the law.”

      That sounds strange coming out of her mouth, but she will have time to consider the moral question later.

      Her father nods. “I can tell someone who will tell someone . . .” He shrugs in a way that signals that after that it will be out of his hands. “But you, you don’t talk to Don Vito, you understand me? Some of those people, they’re animals, these dagos.”

      Rainy gives him a kiss on the cheek and the doorbell rings. “I’m just passing along a message,” she says, sure that she’s telling the truth. No one with any sense would strike a bargain with a three-striper. “Please do make the call as soon as possible. My colo—my superior officer is in a hurry.”

      Halev arrives looking perfectly respectable, wearing a dark suit and a yarmulke, shoes shined, hair combed, face scrubbed, fingernails trimmed, manner a bit intimidated and nervous. After enduring a thorough grilling from Rainy’s mother and father—an interrogation that is only slightly more gentle than what Rainy’s SS colonel endured—Rainy and Halev escape into the stairwell and finally into the glowing Manhattan night.

      “Sorry about all that,” Rainy says. She breathes a long exhalation of relief. She’s bearded her father in his den, and Halev has not been frightened

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