by Sydney Avey
“Hmm.” Burrs stuck in the blanket scratched her skin. Her ragged fingernails caught on the twisted cotton threads as she picked the stickers out and poked them down in the sand.
“Nope.” The hermit jabbed the wood in the fire pit with a stick. Sparks spit into the air. “They’re the highbrows. We’re the blessed poor.”
A burning ember floated down onto the blanket and smoldered. Leone beat her fingers on the smoke-blackened wound that ate into the loosely woven fabric. “That’s your answer? That’s who you are? A poor man?”
“Course that’s who I am. Honey, you can’t live a simple life unless you make peace with your lack.” He poked a stick in the fire till it caught, then pulled it out and watched it glow. “Your fancy friends come out here, looking for what? They bring their wealth and talent and ambition with them. What’s different?”
She stared at the curly gray hairs that smattered across his chest. That he could sit out here, bare from the waist up, astonished her.
“Don’t get me wrong girlie. Them folks been mighty generous to us, but they fool themselves to think there’s magic in this”—he threw his hands out toward the dunes—“place.” He tapped his sternum. “This is the place.”
The old man reached out, took Leone’s arm in a tight grip, and shook it. “Honey, you have to know what you lack before you can find room in your heart for”— he lowered his voice to a whisper—“magic.” He let her arm drop.
Even though it didn’t hurt, Leone rubbed her arm. Dribble raised his head and then tucked his nose under his tail.
“They want to change things.” Leone’s voice wavered. “They’re smart people who want to make life better for all of us.”
He snorted. “Listen to me. Some things you just can’t figure your way to. You get so far, and then you got to just let the magic happen. It don’t happen if you’re all filled up with yourself. Know what? In a few years, they will move on. Us? We’ll die off. The sand that blows on these dunes will cover all trace of us. What will be left? A few pottery shards resting alongside shell mounds the Chumash left behind.”
Again he fixed his fierce gaze on Leone. His eyes were like fingers of bright light probing deep and dark and painful places. “You can’t change anything if you don’t change yourself first. And you can’t change yourself if you don’t know what you lack.”
In the distance, car doors slammed. The old man got to his feet and began to scatter the dying embers. “Tide’s coming in. If you’re leaving tonight with any of them, you best get going.”
Leone looked at him through eyes blurry with drink or tears or both. “Thanks.” She got up on unsteady feet and faltered a little when Dribble stood and shook himself. They made their way back, and Leone shooed the dog up the porch steps. She walked around the side of the house and approached one of the cars idling in the parking area while the driver consulted a map. She tapped on the window.
“I can show you how to drive out of here if you will give me a ride into Halcyon.”
27 - Packing and Moving
27
Packing and Moving
Portland, 1934
The Great Depression may have ended Nellie’s career in the courts, but ample opportunity had presented itself elsewhere. Insurance firms like the American Fire and Casualty Company had taken a longer investment view, selecting stocks with more stable earnings. In her seventh decade, stability was more appealing than before. Her job in an insurance office, while not challenging, paid the bills and that was all right.
Most Saturdays, Nellie took the bus to Opal’s, and they shopped together, but today she sat at her daughter’s kitchen table while Opal wrapped dishware in newspaper and stacked them in boxes. Felix had succeeded in his campaign to move his little family to San Francisco. He wanted to be near his aging parents, who struggled to keep their Union Street art and frame shop open.
Something niggled at Nellie. “I thought you told me that Felix was French.”
“Well, they emigrated from Paris.”
“But Union Street, that’s the Fillmore district. Isn’t that the Jewish part of town?”
Opal pulled another coffee mug from the cupboard. She held it in her hand as if weighing the bulky piece of brown Buckeye Pottery, one of many mismatched pieces Felix had brought back from his travels.
“I don’t know; it might be.” She wrapped the mug and shoved it into the box. “We don’t talk about things like that. In this country, the Wolffs are just shopkeepers. Business people.”
“Well, you better start talking about it. The anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe could come to our shores.”
Opal froze. She turned to face Nellie. “Is that why you won’ t come with us? Because Felix is Jewish?”
Nellie drew herself up. Her left hand shook where it lay on the table, and her dark eyes glittered. “You know better than that. How could you say such a thing? I didn’t know until this moment that his family is Jewish.”
“Then why?”
Nellie slumped. She placed her right hand on top of her left to calm the bothersome tremor. Her voice shook.“Because I don’t want to be the old lady living off her daughter.” She fidgeted with a ring on her finger, a turquoise set in silver. “Someday it may come to that, but I’m not ready.”
Opal sat down at the table and reached for her mother’s hands. “I know, Mother, but please remember, you will always have a home with Felix and me if you need it.”
“Hmm.” Nellie pressed her lips into the barest of smiles and pulled her hand away. She pushed herself up from the table. “Can I help?” She carried her coffee cup to the sink, rinsed and dried it, wrapped it in newspaper, and set it in the packing box.
The two women worked together in silence for a moment, then spoke at the same time.
“Where did Felix take Jane?” Nellie asked.
“Have you gotten a postcard from Leone yet?” Opal wanted to know.
“Not a one.”
“Felix took Jane to the beach.” Opal glanced up at the clock and then washed her hands under the tap and began to make sandwiches.
Breathing hard, Nellie walked back to the table and lowered herself into a chair. “Do you have any idea where Leone is?”
The screen door rattled. Opal went to let the pawing tabby out and the eager spaniel in. The luscious scent of lilacs competed with the daily drama that played around Opal’s ankles—a hiss and a slap, followed by a yip and the clatter of toenails trying for traction on the floor. She continued to stand in the open doorway.
“I’m going to miss Oregon. We have been a family here. It will never be the same.” Opal drew in a deep breath, shut the door, and reached for a towel. Bending down to wipe the dog’s paws she said “But to answer your question, a postcard came last week. It didn’t say much. The postmark was Oceano. That’s about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles, I think.”
“Do you think she’s left Hollywood for good?”
Opal shrugged. “May have. She didn’t give me an address. I have no way of letting her know we’re moving. Maybe we’ll never see her again.”
“Not likely.” Nellie snorted. “What did she say?”
Opal pulled the card out of her apron pocket and handed it to Nellie. It was a black and white reproduction of a photo, a house set among sand dunes. Nellie looked at the image briefly and flipped it over. Her eyebrows inched up as she read aloud the one sentence scrawled across the back of the card. My oasis in beautiful mountains of sand. L. Nellie stared at the message for a long minute. Then she set it down on the table.
“That’s all she said? Her handwriting has gotten sloppy.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Looks like she spilled a drink on it. See here?” Nellie pointed to a dried splotch that had caused the signature to bleed into something unrecognizable. “I don’t think that’s tears. Whiskey is more like it.”
Opal hugged herself. “We know so little of her life. I don’t know what to think. She seemed so happy her firs
t year, even after the accident. When she stopped writing, I figured it was because she’d gotten so busy.”
“You kept writing to her, didn’t you?“
“Of course, but six months ago my letter was returned. Someone had written No longer at this address on the envelope.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to worry you. I figured we would hear from her eventually.”
“And now you have. Opal, she is a young woman finding her way. She’s no different than you or me at that age.”
“You can’t say that. I wrote to you every week.”
“Until you got pregnant.”
“You don’t think she’s pregnant …” Opal’s hand went to her mouth.
“No. Not likely.” Nellie reached up and pulled Opal’s arm down. “Don’t cover your mouth like that. I can hardly hear what you’re saying.”
A car door slammed in the driveway. Sounds of sobbing filled the air, growing louder as footfalls approached the door. Felix burst through the door carrying Jane, who had a trickle of blood running down her leg.
“What happened?” Opal grabbed a cloth towel, wet it and hurried over to blot the blood on the child’s knee.
“Oh, she fell on a rock and got a little cut on her knee, that’s all.” Felix handed the girl over. “She’ll be fine.”
Jane cried harder, gulping air and gripping her mother’s neck tightly. Opal set her down on the kitchen counter. She extracted herself from Jane’s chokehold and gently examined the wound.
“It’s just a little scrape. Calm down now.” Opal patted Jane’s shoulder, and the red-faced, teary-eyed girl’s heaves settled into snuffles.
“I’m going now.” Nellie stood up and pulled on her sweater.
Opal wiped the child’s tears away with her hand and reached for a tin of Band-Aids she kept ever at the ready. As Nellie passed by mother and child, she reached around Opal and patted Jane’s uninjured knee.
“Buck up there, little lady. You have to learn how to take the bumps in life. There will be a lot of them.”
Jane wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sniffed hard. She glared at her grandmother and jerked her knee away.
Nellie touched Opal’s shoulder lightly. “And you stop worrying. Leone is a smart, talented girl; she’s one tough cookie. She’ll write to us soon enough. And when she does, she’ll have stories to tell.”
28 - Disillusion
28
Disillusion
Oceano
Leone made fewer trips to the Dunes. She kept to herself in the hut, making no attempt at home improvements. The first copy of Dune Forum sat on the table next to typewriter. When she blanked while writing, she would turn to the poetry section in the magazine and stare at the page.
Symphony of Water
by Leone Barry
It lies there ...
As a brown hurting giant,
With the features of it
Thrust and sharp and static.
It is the thing between
An asking and an answer.
It is the shore....
The eye of a star is flashing us.
We are wailing, washing, wishing.
We are water.
O, waves that reach and waves that twist,
O, strange far promise of a fire....
It could be the last deceit.
It can last as long as night.
O, silver burning, silver eye....
Sing, you forms of foam.
We have toiled in blue deepness
And you are more than our dreams,
Careless and white,
Fading on the tide.
We are beauty.
We have mated with the sun
And our children lie
As young golden lights
Along our power.
A strangeness is with us.
It trembles to us.
It asks, it tells.
Shall we hate it with our storm,
Shall we love it with our peace?
Shall we....
O, straining, certain, sinking sea,
O, things that have been and will be....
Mother, mother,
Nestle us.
We fear the things we are.
We fear the things we do.
We do not understand.
Our laughter lives and dies.
Our sorrow lives on
And in and on.
Things fall to us.
And we to them.
And we wonder, wonder.
We would be soft and sweet
And satin on your breast.
Mother, nestle us.
Father, we have broken our brother....
It has become the terrible shine,
The shining terror
Of our motion.
Father....
A greatness has entered us.
It is almost a sound.
And yet....
Be still.
It is the voice of us,
So sighing, sobbing, singing,
That we have not known it as our own.
“We are going, we must go.
We are going. We must go.”
Knowledge breaks.
We gather the things that we are.
And we are tears, and we are dew,
And we are rain, and we are sweat.
We are every running river,
We are every soaring sea.
We belong, we belong....
O, blood of every sorrow
Beating, beating.
O, blood of every joy
Racing, racing.
We are wailing, washing, wishing.
We are water.
It lies there....
It knew our going,
It knows our coming.
And it waits,
With open, splendid arms.
We move .. .
Our life beats us on
In blue and green
And great final gray.
We kill
As we rise and rush.
We die
As we flash and fall.
We live
As we go on and on and on....
O, star beyond our reach,
O, pain beyond our soul.
It lies there ...
We break and writhe
And fade upon it.
It is the thing between
An asking and an answer.
It is the shore....
Would she ever be able to write something so beautiful again? She turned back a few pages and reread her credit.
LEONE BARRY lives not far from the Dunes in a little hut perched on a cliff where she is writing a novel of great promise. She is twenty-three, and the DUNE FORUM banks on the fact that one day she will be known to all the reading world.
Gavin made that up. He knew nothing of what she was writing. Still, it was good of him to publish her poem. The first issue had attracted much attention and submissions from well-known poets piled up on his desk. She glared at the empty paper in her typewriter.
The old hermit’s words had stayed with her. She had always thought of lack as the absence of something you needed or wanted, but he seemed to be addressing some universal character deficiency. She stood up from the table, water glass in hand. In the few steps it took her to get from the table to the washstand basin, the glass slipped from her grasp and shattered on the rough wood floor. Earlier in the day, she’d dropped and broken her coffee mug. Not only did she lack imagination for the morning’s work, she also seemed to lack the ability to hold onto cups and glasses.
Leone swept up the broken glass and tossed it into the garbage alongside the brown pottery shards. Perhaps a walk down the winding dirt path and a visit to the thrift shop would lift her spirits.
Halfway to town, she spotted something shiny nestled in coastal buckwheat and deep-pink verbena. Stepping off the path, she bent down to investigate and pulled a dented tin cup fr
om the bristle of foliage. Tossed aside by a hobo; it would do. By the time she returned to the hut, she was breathing hard from the uphill exertion. She dropped into her chair at the table and set the cup in front of her. Round with a broad handle, it looked like the cups soldiers used in movies she’d seen. She stared at it. Stained and dirty. Empty. What had the hermit said? Something about magic A prayer formed on her lips. Fill my cup with magic.
Voices outside jolted her from her reverie. No one ever came to the hut. She looked out the window and then threw open the door. Two young women leaned on each other, panting.
“How did you find me?”
“Good God, Leone, whatever possessed you to live up here?” Rosemary pushed through the doorway.
“We’re on a little holiday. We thought we’d look you up.” Rosemary’s companion followed.
“How did you find me?” Leone stepped aside. The room soon filled with chatter that had become unfamiliar to her.
“We bandied your name about town. We should have asked how far up the trail you were. We had to park the car and leave it.”
“Do you have any water?” Rosemary’s friend gasped and held her side. “Oh boy, I must be out of shape.”
Leone washed out the tin cup and filled it from a stone jug with a train painted on the front. While her friend downed the cup of water, Rosemary swigged directly from the jug and set it back down. “Before I forget, I have a message for you. Your mother called the Studio Club asking for you. She didn’t seem to know you’d left LA.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I would give you the message.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted you to know that they have moved to San Francisco.”
Rosemary’s companion refreshed the tin cup, dipped her fingers into the water, and patted her forehead and cheeks. “Whew.”
“Who’s your friend?” Leone narrowed her eyes at Rosemary.
“Sorry, thought you’d remember. Evelyn moved into the club just before you left. But listen, your grandmother is still in Portland, and I guess she’s not doing well.”
“Hey,” Evelyn barged in. “What say we all walk back down to the car and drive out to the Dunes. I’m dying to see Moy Mell. I hear the parties out there last for days.” She looked around the room. “Where’s the bathroom?”
