Swing And Sway With Lester Deauville And The Stills-With Benny Goodman In Mind 

By Bradley Fox

“What the heck was that song that Peggy Lee sang in that movie we saw a few years ago when the war was on, the one that had every Hollywood star, male and female, at least on the male side the ones who were not in uniform anyway,” Delores LeBlanc asked her closest girlfriend, Anne Dubois, as they were sifting through some old albums and spotted an old Benny Goodman album, an album where Benny was working with a trio and without a vocalist so it must have been dated before the war.

“Is Why Don’t You Do Right the one you are thinking of where she was swaying to the beat and making all the guys bug-eyed and not just the ones on the screen? I had to rap Fred Allen on the knuckles [not literarily just an expression of hers] he was so buggy over her in that one. Of course he had just gotten off the transports from Europe and so any girl would have driven him buggy, including me that night where I couldn’t, wouldn’t stop him from doing what he wanted with me after we had had a few drinks at Jacques’ Grille over on High Street.”

“Yes, that’s the one” replied Delores with a chuckle, a knowing chuckle since she had had her hands full with Prescott Breslin, her sweetheart Marine when he had gotten back from the Pacific War, and like Anne she wouldn’t stop him from doing what he wanted with her, which she did not mention to Anne since she had a serious reputation as a good French-Canadian Catholic girl around the F-C neighborhoods of Olde Saco and did not want tell-everybody-in-the-world Anne to broadcast that fact like she did about her own affairs, like she did with Fred and the few other guys she bedded before she married Sean Riley out of the blue. (Not so “out of the blue” as time would tell since Seamus Riley was born seven months after the marriage ceremony. Fortunately Sean did the right thing and Anne did not have to go see “Aunt Emma” the usual excuse for why a young unmarried woman was not around the neighborhood for a while. The Aunt Emmas of the world had plenty of guests when the boys came back from the Pacific and European theaters and not everybody was savvy in Catholic-etched Olde Saco about “protection,” very naïve really. By the way the Dubois family were not happy that Anne had married an Irishman, married outside the F-C community. Some things never change.)     

The reason that Delores had let Prescott have his way with her, the reason that she was sorting old records was that come next Sunday afternoon she and Prescott were to be married and since they would only have small studio apartment over on Delacroix Street she needed to pick and choose what to save and what to discard since her parents in their own small place did not have room to store much and her room would be taken by Brigette in the time-honored practice among the seven LeBlanc children of the next oldest child getting the single bedroom that came with being the oldest still in the house. Since Brigette was the youngest that problem would be resolved when she moved out but she was only fourteen and so it would still be years before that room could be a storage area.     

“You know I think the name of that movie was Stagedoor Canteen,” Delores said to Anne thinking out loud. “We saw it together when you were going with Fred and I was trying to decide whether I wanted to stay with Prescott, stay with a none F-C guy which my parents were not happy about, and were very unhappy about the prospects of my marrying a guy from down in the hills of Kentucky, and a Protestant to boot. There was something forever about him and that was that. That’s why we are being married in the rectory of Saint Cecelia’s and not in the church since only practicing Catholics get that honor,” she continued.            

Then Delores got all wistful about how she and Prescott had met. It was really all up to Anne since she had persuaded Delores to go to the USO weekly dance held in Portland. She had not wanted to go having been both tired from working as a spinner in the MacAdams Textile Mill, a place where half the town worked, and during the war half the town’s women while the guys were in the service and having just broken up with Lenny La Croix because he wanted to have his hands all over her and at that time she wasn’t interested in letting vagabond Lenny have his way with her. But Anne finally persuaded her to go since Lester Deauville and the Stills, a be-bop band which covered many of Benny Goodman’s songs, was the featured act. And both Anne and Delores had been crazy for be-bopping Benny since they were teenagers.         

So once the dance started, once Lester and the boys heated up the joint, got everybody dancing with Huge Francois on the high heaven clarinet Anne and Delores jumped onto the dance floor and did their jitter-bug stuff. Then during a slow one, some Cole Porter tune, Prescott had come up and asked her to dance. She originally had determined to say no to any serviceman’s request to dance but something in that rich wavy black hair, those black eyes, and that slight Southern drawl which she had never heard before made her say yes. And then it was all Prescott’s play from there. And he made the most of it, was known among his fellow Marines as the “Sheik” for a reason. Not that night but on a subsequent date at the next USO dance. After that second dance night she would always associate Benny Goodman with Prescott, with her do-right man.