Maybe I felt with Charlie, for the first time, that something was at risk with a guy. Maybe, too, the other boys had made me the littlest bit spoiled.
The diner did not help. The menus had coffee spill marks on them. The food did not come for ages. I was still stuffed with pistachios. I was not trying to be a prima donna when I asked for more water, but the waitress never brought it. Charlie asked nicely twice, but still no water. I could have demanded it for myself, I suppose, but nobody wanted to be that kind of girl in 1943.
Charlie apologized, he paid, and afterward he put back on the coat that made him look eleven years old. The walk to the theater was only three blocks, but in fresh snow it was a trudge. He sang a bit of some Italian song that sounded like a march. Which was funny, though I didn’t laugh. My hands were freezing, and somehow I blamed Charlie. No good-night kiss for this fella.
Then the theater saved the night. There was no line at the ticket counter, no one waiting for popcorn, and when we ambled into the half-lit rows of seats, we saw that we were alone. It must have been the snow. There was no one else in the whole place.
“I hope you don’t mind that I arranged a private viewing,” Charlie said with a big smile, his arms wide like a showman.
“So expensive,” I marveled. “You shouldn’t have.”
And we were friends again. For the newsreel, we sat right in the middle. It opened with the usual marching-band music, and the image of an eagle in an attack pose. The horns sounded flat, F notes bending sourly down toward E, but I blamed that on the projector. The news began with a launching of two new navy ships, which were gigantic. One of them, the announcer said, was the most heavily armed cruiser ever. Next we saw Red Cross volunteers packing boxes of food, medicine, and cigarettes for Allied prisoners of war. Gary Cooper, last year’s winner, awarded the 1943 Academy Award for best actor to Jimmy Cagney for his role in Yankee Doodle Dandy.
“I loved that picture,” Charlie whispered to me.
“Me too,” I whispered back. Then, I don’t know where the impulse came from, but I jumped up, running to the far right-hand side of the room and the back row. After a bewildered second, Charlie saw the game in it and trotted after me.
The movie was about a military ship that might be haunted, because the captain kept doing odd things. The first officer was supposed to be heroic, because he was handsome, but he kept striking poses in profile that made him look like a mannequin. At one point Charlie stood in the aisle and imitated one of the poses, his chest puffed out and chin pointed up, and when I laughed—as loud as I pleased—he ran across the center seats and sat on the far-left side, down front. Oh, I came skipping after him.
If that picture was actually suspenseful, we were having too much fun to notice. We sat in probably ten places, each time making more of a racket, each location tumbling into each other a bit more as we sat. As fun a date as I can remember.
At last the credits rolled, the end, and it was perfect, perfect. We sat in our front-row seats, not going anywhere.
“That is the best movie I have ever seen,” Charlie said.
“That is the best movie I have ever not seen,” I replied.
We stayed till the lights came up, and then a minute more. “Let’s wait till the crowd thins out,” he said. I was so pleased I could have pinched him.
Now, all these years later, I wish I could recall the name of that movie. I would gladly watch it, from the recliner in my little assisted-living apartment. Would it all come back to me? There is the moment I ran to the back. Here is when Charlie posed in the aisle. This is when our hands touched on the armrest between our seats. Could the silly scenes and weak dialogue replay that night? Or better, bring Charlie’s presence back to me? I would watch every movie made in 1943, no matter how boring, to have my hand accidentally brush against his for half a second one more time.
At last we idled up the aisle and he helped me on with my coat. As Charlie put on Frank’s, I realized he didn’t like it either. He was being a good sport. Outside, the snow had stopped, a plow truck came through tossing the mess to the curb.
I took his arm. “Sorry I was a pill at dinner.”
“They should have brought you more water,” he said. “I will never go back there.”
“Oh, had you been to that diner before?”
“No.” He laughed. “But I’m still not going back.”
We stopped for coffee, and made small talk, mostly about movies we liked. He checked his watch and suggested we mosey if we wanted to avoid the wrath of mother. Outside, the trees were draped with white. A man stood singing on a street corner, he wore a long tweed coat and Charlie dropped a coin in his hat.
We had crossed the street when the man began his next song.
Oh Danny boy, the pipes the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountainside.
It was a sentimental old tune but he had a good steady tenor, and the lilt of an Irish brogue. “That man has excellent pitch,” I said.
“Fine vibrato too,” Charlie replied.
Which caused me to pause in my walking and listen.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.
Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy I love you so.
I thought of my father, stationed in Southern California, his letters giving no hint of when he might come home. And my mother, no wonder she was bossy, without his ever-patient ear for her concerns. And Frank, not in the line of fire but not safe from bombs either, and far from Chicago. Sure, I wished I’d gone off to Oberlin to study the organ. But all these people were suffering in some way, and I was a silly, selfish girl. All I wanted was for us to be together, busy and arguing and talking about everything easily and casually like we did before the war.
All that time the man was singing, his breath rising like each note was a cloud, while Charlie had moved his arm up to around my shoulders.
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an “Ave” there for me.
However blue I might sometimes be, I still had boys and movies and home, girlfriends to gossip with. How much greater Daddy’s and Frank’s loneliness must be. It broke my heart a little, and on that snowy sidewalk I started to cry.
That’s when Charlie opened that stupid giant coat like the flaps were wings, and pulled me inside to his chest. I burrowed right against him. The sadness I’d been feeling for months, but telling myself over and over that I didn’t feel, all came pouring out of me, and I became a weepy, runny-nosed, sobbing mess.
Charlie put his skinny arms around me and held me close. “It’s okay,” he said, which was silly because he didn’t know what I was crying about. But my head fit right exactly in under his chin, while he wrapped all that extra coat around me, and kept saying it anyhow. “It’s okay, Brenda. It’s all going to be okay.”
6.
Late in the day, Santangelo shuffled through the gap in the desks with a manila folder under one arm. Charlie was not so much solving a trajectory problem as wrestling with it, his body curled around the papers, which made their own arc across his desk.
“Charlie,” Santangelo whispered. “Take a look.”