could hear the music all the way from Sands Street. Our props were vegetable crates, and our “dressing room” was the back corner of the kitchen, right next to the dishwasher’s station. As for our actors, they were not exactly the cream of the crop. Most of New York’s showbiz community had either gone off to battle or gotten good industrial jobs since the advent of the war. This meant that the only people left for us to recruit were the sorts of folks whom Olive, not very kindly, called “the lost and the lame.” (To which Peg replied, also not very kindly, “How does that differ from any other theater company?”)
So we improvised. We had men in their sixties playing young swains. We had hefty middle-aged women playing the parts of ingénues, or boys. We couldn’t pay our players nearly as much as they could earn working on the line, so we were constantly losing our actors and dancers to the Navy Yard itself. Some pretty young girl would be singing a song on our stage one day, and the next day you’d see her eating at Sammy on her lunch break, with her hair up in a bandanna and coveralls on. She’d have a wrench in her pocket and a hearty paycheck on its way. It’s tough to get a girl back in the spotlight once she’s seen a hearty paycheck—and we didn’t even have a spotlight.
Putting together costumes was, of course, my primary job, although I also wrote the occasional script, and even sometimes penned a song lyric or two. My work had never been more difficult. I had virtually no budget, and, because of the war, there was a nationwide shortage of all the materials I needed. It wasn’t just fabrics that were scarce; you couldn’t get buttons, zippers, or hooks and eyes, either. I became ferociously inventive. In my most shining moment, I created a vest for the character of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy using some two-toned jacquard damask I’d ripped from a rotting, overstuffed couch I’d found on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street one morning, awaiting removal to the dump. (I won’t pretend that the costume smelled good, but our king really looked like a king—and that’s saying something, given the fact that he was portrayed by a sunken-chested old man who only one hour before showtime had been cooking beans in the Sammy kitchen.)
Needless to say, I became a fixture at Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions—even more than before the war. Marjorie Lowtsky, who was now in high school, became my partner in costuming. She was my fixer, really. Lowtsky’s now had a contract to sell textiles and rags to the military, so even they didn’t have as much volume or variety to choose from anymore—but they were still the best game in town. So I gave Marjorie a small cut of my salary and she culled and saved the choicest materials for me. Truly, I could not have done my job without her help. Despite our age difference, the two of us grew genuinely fond of each other as the war dragged on, and I soon came to think of her as a friend—although an odd one.
I can still remember the first time I ever shared a cigarette with Marjorie. I was standing on the loading dock of her parents’ warehouse in the dead of winter, taking a break from sorting through the bins in order to have a quiet smoke.
“Let me have a drag of that?” came a voice next to me.
I looked down, and there was little Marjorie Lowtsky—all ninety-five pounds of her—wrapped up in one of those absurdly giant raccoon fur coats that fraternity boys used to wear to football games in the 1920s. On her head, a Canadian Mountie’s hat.
“I’m not giving you a cigarette,” I said. “You’re only sixteen!”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’ve already been smoking for ten years.”
Charmed, I caved in to her demands and handed over the smoke. She inhaled it with impressive expertise, and said, “This war isn’t satisfying me, Vivian.” She was gazing out at the alleyway with an air of world-weariness that I couldn’t help but find comical. “I’m displeased with it.”
“Displeased with it, are you?” I was trying not to smile. “Well, then, you should do something about it! Write a strongly worded letter to your congressman. Go talk to the president. Put this thing to an end.”