by Howard Fast
Mark’s office had become his refuge. In the twenty-foot-square, walnut-paneled room on the top floor of the department store building, he was renewed and redeemed. He sat behind a polished mahogany desk, facing a large, leather-upholstered couch. There were two big leather chairs to set off the couch and an Oriental rug on the floor. On one wall were two large framed paintings of the projected passenger vessels, still unnamed. On another wall was a sentimental painting of the Oregon Queen. The same three paintings were duplicated in Dan’s office. Next to his desk was the newest model of a dictating machine, admired but almost never used. It made him too uneasy to dictate into a machine, and he much preferred giving the dictation in person to Miss Anderson.
Miss Polly Anderson had been his secretary for over a year now. She was a large, bosomy, easygoing woman in her early thirties. Somewhere in her life there had been a Mr. Anderson, but they had parted company and she was now alone. This much about her life Mark knew, that she lived alone and that she sang in the choir at the Lutheran Church; about his life, she knew every detail. She overflowed with sympathy; she ducked over him and anticipated his wants; she endured his moments of temper; she was intimate with the members of his family without ever having met them. She understood Martha’s desire to be an actress, Jake’s withdrawal, Clair’s odd position in the family, and of course Sarah’s displeasure with Mark’s behavior. Not that she ever criticized Sarah or any of the others; but she understood.
The day after his talk with Sarah about Jake, at half-past five in the afternoon Miss Anderson came into his office to ask him whether there was anything more before she left for the day. He looked at her bleakly and shook his head.
“You’re miserable,” she said. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Can you make my son remember that I’m his father? He’s been home more than two weeks and he hasn’t said ten words to me.”
“Mr. Levy, you know he’s said more than ten words to you. Give him time.”
“That’s what Sarah tells me.”
“And she’s right.”
“She’s always right and I’m always wrong. What have I ever asked from her? Polly, would you believe it–I have been married twenty-two years and I have never looked at another woman.”
“You have looked at me, I hope.”
He looked at her now. “How would you like to have dinner with me?” he demanded suddenly.
“Oh?”
“Not oh. Yes or no? Or have you got another appointment?”
“Won’t they be expecting you at home?”
“Polly, they don’t expect me anymore. They’re not even excited when I show up.”
“Mr. L, I have a large steak in my icebox, and I’m a good cook, and I have six quarts of real beer that I’ve been saving, so may I invite you instead to my place.”
“You’re sure I can’t take you to a fancy restaurant?”
“Come to my place. It’s comfortable. And we can talk better there.”
“Give me the address and I’ll meet you there,” Mark said. He couldn’t bring himself to leave with her, and after she had gone, he was filled with a sense of guilt and danger too. But along with the guilt there was excitement and anticipation, and the platitude he fed himself defined her as a kindly and sympathetic woman. It would go no further than dinner and talk.
Her apartment was in a clean, white frame building on Powell Street. It consisted of a tiny kitchen and a fairly large living room that doubled as bedroom. The bed had a flowered cretonne cover and was piled high with cretonne-covered pillows. She sat Mark down with a glass of beer and set about preparing dinner.
“I don’t drink much,” he told her, “but I love beer. That’s what brought me here, if you must know.”
“Not myself?” she asked from the kitchen.
“Of course, Polly. As a matter of fact, I know a place where you can still get good beer, but the food is terrible. You know, years ago, when we first started out as partners, Mr. Lavette and myself, we used to sit and put away three or four quarts between us. Well, we were younger then.”
“You’re still a young man, Mr. L. Everyone talks about how young you and Mr. Lavette are.”
“Forty-one, that’s not so young.”
“Oh, it is. It is indeed.”
The dinner was good, and he stuffed himself. He was only slightly surprised when she suggested that the bed was the only comfortable place to sit; and then he felt doubly foolish as he tried to assuage his conscience by allowing her to make all the overtures. He had the feeling that he was clumsy, mawkish in his lovemaking, conscious of his protruding belly as he undressed himself–as if he had only this moment realized that he had developed a paunch. He tried to assume some degree of sophistication, remarking that he was quite aware of the fact that his BVDs were the most ridiculous garment ever invented. Yet she was kind and warm and managed to put him at ease; and then he realized that in all truth she was grateful for his presence and for the makeshift bout of sexual intercourse that he provided.
She said afterward, “Mr. L, I sometimes think I am the loneliest woman on God’s earth.”
He caught the last ferry back to Sausalito, and standing there, looking at the black waters of the bay, he felt a surge of pity and remorse–not at what he had done, but because for at least a moment he had experienced the monumental sorrow of human existence.
Jake bought a secondhand Model T Ford, and he and Clair explored the dirt roads of Marin County and the Sonoma Valley. Their favorite spot was in the Muir Woods. To Clair, the grove of giant redwoods was like a sanctuary, and she realized that somehow this place eased the anguish that was blocked inside of Jake. He told her the story of William Kent’s thirty-year-long battle to save the splendid trees from the loggers. “It’s the only church of God I would give ten cents for,” Jake said, “and all the while Dan Lavette and my father were fattening on the corpses of the redwoods.”
“They weren’t the only ones,” Clair told him gently. “Half of San Francisco was built of redwood. You know that.”
His bitterness against Mark and Dan was something she simply could not comprehend; and she wondered whether it was just an outlet for a knot of nameless anger that he himself could not comprehend. She never pressed him to talk, to let out the worm that was gnawing at him, but one day, sprawled in the catboat that was becalmed out on the bay, the water momentarily glassy and still, she asked him about Maguire, whom he had mentioned so often in his letters.
“Funny about Maguire,” he said. “I haven’t thought about him for months, and then I dreamed about him last week. Bigoted, stupid sonofabitch–he grew up in Chicago and became a regular army top sergeant. He was drill sergeant in my unit, and he kept after me night and day, Jew bastard this, Jew bastard that–the only proper, prideful thing he had in his life was his hatred of Jews. And then it got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, and I got him in a quiet corner–we were already in France–and I beat the hell out of him. Great achievement. I was bigger and stronger and younger. He could have had my hide, but he never said one word about it, but after that he kind of worshiped the ground I walked on. Like I was his big brother. He never read a book. All he knew about women were whores. He boasted that he had come through five doses of the clap. He used to tell me about how he grew up in Chicago–a kind of unholy poverty of the body and soul that I couldn’t even imagine. He had been twisted and deprived and brutalized and depraved as much as one human being could be and still live. He had intercourse with his own sister at the age of thirteen. She was eleven. His father was a drunk who systematically beat him half to death, and at the age of fourteen he left home and became a spotter for a pimp. That was Joe Maguire, and do you know, we became closer than I have ever been with any man in my life. He was a damn good soldier, but more than that, under all the filth and crap there was something beautiful and wonderful. He saved my life once. Oh, hell, what’s the difference?”
“What happened to him, Jake?”
“He died.”
“I know that. Tell me how he died.”
“Why?” he demanded, almost belligerently. “What difference does it make?”
“Because until you do,” she said slowly, “until you let me into that part of you, there’s going to be a wall between us, and I don’t want any walls between us. Did you ever think about how I grew up, Jake, and what it meant for me to come into that great hacienda up there on the hill with Mark and Sarah? You know you made it possible. I think I fell in love with you the first day I was there.”
“Yeah? Well I think I fell in love with you that day I first saw you on the Oregon Queen.”
“No kidding? You remember that?”
“Would I forget it?”
“Tell me about Maguire.”
He didn’t look at her now. A faint whisper of wind picked up, and the limp sail began to flap. Jake leaned over the side of the boat, letting his hand trail in the water. “We were in a shell hole,” he said. “Nine of us. Pinned down by machine-gun fire. Our lieutenant was dead, his body on the lip of the hole with bullets slamming into it. You have to understand that the German gunner knew we were in the hole and he pinned us there. There was nothing we could do, but then some crazy bastard officer in another hole began screaming for us to clean out the gunner. I took half the men, Maguire took the others, and we made a rush for it. I don’t know why. For the life of me, I don’t know why. We went out in two directions, two dumps, which gave the gunner the choice. He chose Maguire, and he wiped him out with his men, all of them. I never saw any of them again.”
“And you, Jake? What happened to you?”
“You want to hear that?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” he whispered. “We got through, me and a skinny little kid from Palo Alto whose name was Fredericks. The others were killed. There was only one German left alive, a fat, round-faced kid with sandy hair and blue eyes–big, blue eyes. His helmet was off, and he was staring at us in complete terror when Fredericks and I dived into the hole and bayoneted him. My–bayonet–went–into–” He sat up and looked at her. “Into his face, Clair,” he said harshly. “I drove my bayonet into the center of his face.”
Her eyes met his squarely, and she would not look away. “All right, Jake. I’m glad you told me.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what shell shock is?”
“I read about it.”
“It’s a euphemism for insanity. In war nothing is called by its right name. I’m lucky. I was never wounded and my mind stayed together. Fredericks wasn’t. His mind went. He’s in a vets’ hospital and he’s finished. I telephoned his mother and tried to explain. You want me to talk about these things and I talked. Do you still want me to talk about them?”
“Yes,” she said flatly.
He took a deep breath and reached out for her hand. “You are one hell of a woman, Clair Harvey.”
“You’re one hell of a man, Jake Levy. Now let’s sail the boat. The wind is up”
“Why don’t we get married?” he said.
“It’s time you asked.”
“What kind of wedding do you want?”
“The same kind you want.”
“You know my mother and father will never forgive us,” he said.
“Sure they will.”
Three days later they packed a picnic lunch, drove across the Sonoma Valley to the tiny town of Napa, where they were married by the justice of the peace. Then they drove north through the Napa Valley. It was a clear, cool, beautiful day. Small clumps of cloud drifted across the sky, while their shadows raced crazily over the golden hills. They turned off the main road onto a dirt cart-track, the little Ford lumping and bumping its way along. They lunched in the shade of a grove of live oaks, spreading a blanket on the ground, lying side by side and watching the clouds meander across the blue sky.
“What a beautiful stinking world it is,” Clair said. “Why don’t you make me pregnant. I want to have at least eight kids, so we ought to start right away.”
“Here?” He pointed up the road, to where a pair of iron gates hung from two stone gateposts.
“No one’s watching. Not that I care if they are. We’re awfully good. We could give demonstrations.”
“God Almighty, I married a tramp.”
“You’re damn right you did, and it’s time you knew.”
Afterward, they walked up the road to the iron gates. Across the top of the gateway was spelled out HIGATE WINERY. A road, lined on either side with weed-grown rows of vine stumps that thrust out a tangle of green tendrils, led up the hillside to two old stone buildings. Tied onto the gate itself, a small sign rather hopefully and somewhat pathetically proclaimed, “Rooms for Rent.”
They looked at each other. “This is as close to paradise as we’ve ever been,” Clair said. The valley swept down beneath them to the golden hills in the east. Beyond the stone houses, the mountains climbed westward, covered with live oak and mesquite.
“We’ll give it a try,” Jake agreed.
They opened the gate and walked through up the road to the house. A small, stout man of about sixty was cranking an old truck that refused to start. He let go of the crank to watch their approach.
“This old sonofabitch is more trouble than it’s worth,” he said to Jake.
“You get in and work the spark and the throttle. I’ll crank,” Jake said.
The engine started. The fat man got out of the truck and shook hands enthusiastically.
“We just got married,” Clair said. “You’re renting rooms?”
“What else with this lousy, rotten, barbarian Volstead Act of theirs? You run a small winery and you’re lucky to keep body and soul together. Now they’ve scragged me, ruined me, destroyed me, driven a stake into my heart–that devil’s brew of temperance swine! You’re not temperance, are you? Because if you are, I’ll not have you dirtying the ground you stand on. I’ll drive you away like the devil himself.”
“We’re not temperance,” Clair replied, laughing. “Good heavens, no.”
“Tis nothing to laugh at.”
“I’m Jake Levy. This is my wife, Clair. Our car’s down there on the road, and we saw your sign.”
Now a small, round, red-cheeked lady came out of the building, wiping her hands on her apron.
“I’m Mike Gallagher” the fat man said. “There’s my wife, Mary. We got a clean room for two dollars a night, good bed, three dollars if you want breakfast, four dollars if you want dinner.”
“Oh, what an old skinflint you are,” his wife cried out. “A dollar for breakfast. That’s shameful.”
“You leave the business matters to me, old lady.”
“We’ll take it,” Jake said.
As they walked back down the hill to get their car, Clair said, “Oh, what a beautiful honeymoon! Who would have ever dreamed it would come out like this?”
Coming into the house on Willow Street, Dan announced to May Ling, “Well, young lady, I am off to Honolulu.”
“Oh, no, Danny. When?”
“Four days from now.”
“And how long will you be there?”
“Including the passage, I’ll be gone five weeks.”
“Five weeks? Oh, Danny, it’s too long.”
“Not at all.”
“And is she going with you?”
“Who is she?”
“The ice lady,” May Ling spat out.
“Oh, I do like you when you’re mad.”
“I am not mad. Only disgusted. You just haven’t enough sensitivity to know the difference. I just wish you were in China right now.”
“In China? Why?”
“Because then everyone would look at you and be filled with disgust and say, who is that enormous, oversized creature with a huge nose who walks like a man?”
“I didn’t know you felt that way about me,” he said, grinning.
“Well, I do. Is she going with you?”
“
No. She hates ships.She hates boats.”
“She also hates you, but you haven’t enough sense to know it. Are you going alone?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t grin at me. Who is going with you? Mark?”
“No.”
“Who?”
“You,” he said.
“Oh, Danny, don’t tease me, don’t.”
“I’m not teasing. You are going with me.”
She kept shaking her head.
“Will you please just listen to me. The passage is all arranged. You are to come as my secretary. Frank Anderson is a friend of mine, and we’re going to go on one of his ships, the Santa Barbara. She’s a twelve-thousand-ton cargo carrier, and she makes her run between here and Yokohama, with a stopover at Honolulu. She has two passenger cabins and a Japanese and Kanaka crew. As far as Anderson is concerned, it’s all up and above board. I’m taking my secretary. That makes sense. I have important business in Hawaii. You will get down to Pier Thirty-eight at the Embarcadero at ten o’clock on Friday morning and board the ship.”
May Ling stared at him. Then she sat down, still staring at him. Then their son, Joseph, almost three years old now, came into the room and embraced Dan’s leg. Dan swung him up into the air, and he howled with glee. May Ling’s mouth was open. Tears appeared and ran slowly down her cheeks.
“Now what in hell are you crying about?” He set down the child.
“Don’t cry, mommy,” the little boy said. She took him in her arms.
“And what about him?”
“He’ll stay with your mother. Your mother will love it.”
“Oh, Danny, it’s crazy.”
“Why?”
“I can’t. You know that I can’t. Where would we stay there? In those islands–”
“Those islands are a very civilized place. For three days, we’ll be the guests of the Noel family at their plantation. They’re the biggest sugar and pineapple growers in the islands, and I’m hoping that Christopher Noel will put up half the money for the hotel Mark and I are going to build on Waikiki Beach. For the rest of the time, we’ll find a hotel or we’ll be beachcombers or we’ll rent us some kind of craft and sail around the islands. My God, what in hell’s the difference? It’s you and me, together night and day for five weeks, and that’s all I care about.” He paused. “Well? Why are you still crying?”
