The Immigrants

by Howard Fast

  “I would not become offensive in a speakeasy.”

  “No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. But if six men–or two men–attacked you?”

  “I’d yell for help.”

  “You would,” she said.

  Dan sat in front of the fire and stared into the flames. He was sitting in the room that was called a library at times and a study at other times, with a wall of books he had not read, with half a dozen expensive oil paintings on the walls, paintings he had not selected and was totally indifferent to, and he was engaged in a sort of introspection–a process somewhat unusual for a man who was not greatly introspective. His thoughts were confused and aimless, and if he had possessed the concept, he might have been asking himself who he was and where he was. But he lived in a time prior to the public airing of that question, and it never occurred to him that he did not know who he was.

  Yet the aching desire simply to be pressed in upon him, and he found his memories in the flames. The moments with May Ling stood out most sharply; they existed; they were etched out of the confusion: the tiny house on Willow Street which exhibited in every corner the imprint of her personality, a day when they walked hand in hand on Ocean Beach, an evening on Telegraph Hill, next to Coit Tower, with the whole incredible panorama of San Francisco spread beneath them, the luau in Hawaii and the days on the boat when they sailed in the Islands. The memories stabbed painfully, yet they were real and everything else was an illusion.

  He became conscious of someone else in the room, and he glanced up to see Jean. It was quite late, past eleven o’clock. He had dined out and come home to what appeared to be an empty house. Now Jean appeared wearing a pale green negligee under a robe of white lace. He had learned what things cost; the bill for the robe and negligee would be at least five hundred dollars.

  “Hello, Dan,” she said, dropping onto the couch where he sat. “You look very lonely.”

  “It’s part of being alone, isn’t it.”

  “I suppose so.” She reached over and touched the scar on his cheek. “It healed nicely. I think the scar is rather cosmetic.”

  “I could live without it,” Dan said.

  “I heard about the fight at Harry’s bar. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “I don’t know. A drunken barroom brawl isn’t the happiest kind of thing. I guess we’re used to lying to each other.”

  “I haven’t had to lie. You never question anything I do.”

  “Why should I?”

  “We’re married, Dan. We’ve been married a long time.”

  He nodded. “I wonder sometimes how many people are married the way we are?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “It’s harder when you’re poor. Money greases the skids, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been poor.”

  “Were you disgusted with me?” he asked. “Or are you past that?”

  “No. I thought it was rather wonderful–six men against one.”

  “Only five. No, it wasn’t wonderful. It was stupid and vicious–on my part.”

  “The strange thing is, you drink so little.” When he made no reply to this, she said, “You know, I found a flask in Tom’s room. Filled with that rotgut they sell.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I threw it away.”

  “You didn’t say anything to him?”

  “You might.”

  “I barely know him,” Dan said bitterly.

  “He’s a nice boy, Danny.”

  It was the first time she had called him Danny in years. He looked at her curiously, realizing that until this moment he had not seen her, only a woman in a green negligee and a white lace robe, but not herself. Now, seeing her in the low lamplight, the fire casting its play of light and shade on her face, he remembered her–as if time had never touched her. Yet the longing, the hunger for her, the ache inside of him whenever he looked at her–that was gone. He was married to a strange woman he had never known or caressed or kissed. He was empty, used up and depleted, and his only desire was that she should go away and leave him to stare into the fire.

  “Danny,” she said softly, “come to bed with me.”

  He stared at her, unable to conceal his astonishment.

  “I know.” She smiled. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Just like that–come to bed with me, Danny?”

  “How else?”

  “Jesus Christ, I don’t know. Ask me who I am. Or do you go to bed with strangers?”

  “What a rotten thing to say!”

  “O.K. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But you did.”

  “Oh, what the hell! It’s going to become a fight, isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “I don’t know what I want. I’m no use to you, Jean. In bed or out of bed”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you’re a bastard?”

  “It has occurred to me. Yes.”

  A week later, Thomas Joseph Lavette, age fifteen and a half, was preparing to leave for his second year at the Groton School for boys in Massachusetts. His father and mother were to drive him to Oakland, where he would take the train for the East. His trunk had gone on ahead, and he was sitting in his room dressed in gray flannels and a blue blazer, bolting his tennis racket frame, when his father entered the room. Tom was a tall, slender boy, six feet in height, with blue eyes and blond hair. He had a narrow, handsome face and good skin that had escaped the acne that attacked so many boys of his age. Dan always felt uneasy in his presence, prey to a sense of strangeness and inferiority. It was difficult for him to communicate, and in all truth he had seen little of the boy during the past five years and almost nothing of him during the past twelve months, when he had been either away at school or playing tennis at the club–the San Francisco Golf Club where Dan rarely appeared–or riding with his sister and their friends.

  Now Dan stood in his room, awkward, wishing he had not left this until now and trying to work out how to say what he felt he must say.

  “Time to go, dad?” Tom asked him.

  “Almost. I want to talk to you about something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The flask of bootleg booze your mother found in your room.”

  “She threw it away. The flask cost twelve dollars.”

  “Don’t you think you’re a little young to drink that rotgut?” Dan asked him.

  “It wasn’t rotgut. It was good whiskey.”

  “You’re not sixteen yet.”

  “I don’t drink that much. All the fellows carry a flask. So I had one. So what?”

  “You don’t see anything wrong with it?”

  “No.”

  “I do. I think it stinks.”

  “You would.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Only that your notions of morality are most peculiar.”

  “I would still like to know what you mean.”

  “That’s all I’m going to say.” He went back to tightening the bolts on the tennis racket frame.

  “God damn it,” Dan said, “when I ask you a question, I expect an answer. Don’t tell me that’s all you’re going to say. I happen to be your father.”

  “You happen to be.”

  “Now what in hell does that mean?”

  “I should be grateful for that damn flask!” the boy cried, his voice rising to the edge of hysteria. “Without it, a year could go by and you wouldn’t speak to me. When did you last talk to me about anything? Why don’t you ever tell me I do something right? Why don’t you tell me it makes a difference if I’m alive or dead? Because it doesn’t make any difference! Not to you!”

  Shaken by the outburst, Dan stared at his son, pleading inwardly for the boy’s love, thinking, My God, you’re my son, my own flesh and blood. Give me a chance. Talk to me with love. Let me talk to you. Tell me how. I don’t know how. God Almighty, I don’t know how. Every muscle in his body strained toward the boy with the
desire to embrace him, to take the boy in his arms, yet he could not, any more than he could find words to say. He stood there for perhaps a minute while the boy held the tennis racket in his shaking hands; then Dan turned and left the room.

  During the drive to the railroad station, he was silent, as was his son.

  The Marin County Players, an unpaid group of amateur acting enthusiasts under the direction of Dameon Fenwick, presented three performances of Romeo and Juliet at the high school auditorium. Martha played Juliet, and Stephan Cassala, who had heard about the performance from Mark, managed to be there for two out of the three evenings. For the first performance, he sat in the audience and watched and then left quietly. The second time, he made his way backstage and managed to have a few words with Martha. He told her in no uncertain terms, with an air of sophisticated backlog knowledge, that she was the best Juliet he had ever seen. It was quite true; he had never seen the play before, so he might have said with equal truth that she was the worst. Martha, still in make-up, high on her performance and flattered that this handsome friend of her father’s, an older man–Stephan was thirty-two–had seen fit to make the trip to Sausalito just to see her perform, threw her arms around Stephan and kissed him.

  “What a dear man you are!” she exclaimed. “Did you really think I was good?”

  “Splendid. Absolutely splendid.”

  “Oh, I needed that so badly. You don’t know what you’ve done for me. Ten days from now, I’m leaving for Hollywood, and, Steve, I’m scared”

  “Hollywood? But why?”

  “Because that’s where an actress must be. The only place. There’s nothing here. I would curl up and die if I had to stay in this place.”

  “But you’re an actress, not one of those idiots in film.”

  “Steve, don’t you know what’s happening? Silent pictures are finished. Everyone says so. In another year or two, every motion picture will be a talkie. And I can talk.”

  For the next three or four days, Stephan wracked his mind for a valid reason to go to Sausalito. He was filled with guilt and confusion, compounded by the arrival of his infant son and the bliss of his wife, Joanna. She was totally submissive and totally content. She no longer suggested that they move out of the house at San Mateo; indeed, she dreaded the thought of being separated from Rosa and Maria, and, now that she had a son, she felt that her existence was justified. She never questioned the nights that Stephan spent in San Francisco. Her husband was soft-spoken, gentle, and kind to her. She asked for no more, and thereby condemned him to the tortures of guilt.

  Yet strangely–or perhaps not so strangely–this tortured guilt brought zest and excitement to his life for the first time. He was in love. He had never been in love before, never idolized a woman, never thought of himself as a man who could complete a woman’s life; nor had he ever elevated a woman to an object of total desire and beauty. In all truth, Martha was not very beautiful. She had good features, her mother’s sparkling blue eyes, and straight brown hair that she wore in the tight shingled style so popular then. She had a good bust and good legs, but it was her air of excitement, her bubbling enthusiasm for life that fascinated Stephan. He made no plans; the very thought of leaving his wife, as a part of a deeply religious Catholic family, was so complex and preposterous that he could not even entertain it, and it was further complicated by the lifelong relationship between the Cassalas and the Levys and by the fact that he was Catholic and Martha was Jewish. For the moment, it was sufficient that he was in love, that the whole world was different, and that each morning he awakened, not to the dull, featureless prospect of another day but to a day of holding Martha Levy in his mind and his heart.

  By the third day after the performance of Romeo and Juliet Stephan had worked out a reasonable package of excuses and lies. He manufactured an appointment with a banker in San Rafael that had to take place on Saturday, and since the trip would take him through Sausalito, he asked Mark whether he could stop by for lunch and discuss a matter of business with him. He chose Saturday because Mark would be home that day, but he lacked the courage to ask that Martha be there too. On that score, he would have to chance it.

  It worked out well. Anthony Cassala had accepted the circumstances that took L&L into the Seldon Bank, both with its loans and its business, yet Danny and Mark continued to maintain an account of almost a hundred thousand dollars with Cassala. Now, sitting at lunch with Mark and Sarah and, fortune prevailing, with Martha as well, Stephan argued that the money ought to be used for some purpose, put into government bonds possibly. It earned no interest, and both he and his father felt a sense of guilt. Mark pushed his arguments aside. “Too fine a day to talk about it,” he said. “Anyway, Dan’s committed to this airline thing, so we may get at the money after all.”

  Sarah blocked her mind where money was concerned. She refused to think about it, to deal with it, or to face it. Forty-seven years old now, her fair hair was already beginning to be streaked with white. She still maintained her slender, youthful figure, but her face had aged. As the men talked, she watched Stephan, noticing that he could not keep his eyes from Martha, who was impatient with all this talk of money and banks. To Sarah, Hollywood was a festering sink of sin and corruption, and her anxiety increased as the day of Martha’s departure neared. Now Martha was telling Stephan about the New York School of Acting, where she had enrolled as a student. The school had just been organized under the direction of a man called Martin Spizer.

  When Martha first announced to her parents her intention of enrolling there, Sarah kept after Mark to make inquiries and find out something about it. Several phone calls to Los Angeles told him only that it was one of a dozen new schools that had mushroomed in Hollywood with the advent of talking pictures, and that it was apparently no better and no worse than most of the others. Martha chose it because a leaflet advertising it had been handed to her by Mr. Fenwick, her local drama teacher; and the whole subject was so alien and so distant from any area of Mark’s knowledge that he was finally content to let her abide by her own choice.

  “The trouble with the film stars,” Martha explained, “is that they can’t talk. Oh, it was just great when all they had to do was prance around and make faces–but now that people can hear them, well, it’s just open season for actors. Real actors.”

  “Providing,” Mark said, “that talking pictures ever become anything else but a novelty.”

  “Father, how can you close your eyes to it? Talking pictures are here to stay. Didn’t you see The Jazz Singer? And in Tenderloin, that ridiculous Dolores Costello, lisping.”

  “Darling,” Sarah said worriedly, “every pretty girl in America is dreaming about Hollywood. And so many of them go there. So many of them.”

  “But can they act?” She turned to Stephan. “Tell them what you think of my acting, Steve. They’ll listen to you.”

  “Did you ever see her act?” Sarah asked curiously.

  “He did. He came to see Romeo and Juliet.”

  “I saw the notice in the paper,” Stephan answered uneasily. “She was wonderful, I thought.”

  “And Steve’s seen half a dozen productions of Romeo and Juliet, and he thinks I was the best Juliet of the lot.”

  “Well, maybe not half a dozen,” Stephan said. “But she was great. I think she can act.”

  He had to be alone with her, if only for a few minutes. Before he left, he told Mark that he wanted to say goodby to Martha, since he might not see her again before she went to Los Angeles.

  “You’ll find her in the old gazebo, out on the lawn behind the house. She does her reading aloud out there. She can’t stand it if anyone comes near the place while she’s declaiming, but she might make an exception for you.”

  As Stephan walked toward the gazebo, he heard Martha. If one could criticize her acting, certainly her voice was powerful and far-reaching. She was doing Saint Joan, from Shaw’s play, which had come to San Francisco two years before.

  “If you command me to declare that a
ll that I have done and said, and all the visions and revelations I have had were not from God, then that is impossible: I will not declare it for anything in the world.” She saw him, and her face bubbled with laughter. “Oh, Steve, you heard me, and my secret is out. But I will be Saint Joan, if I have to wait ten years to play the part. I will. I must. They must make a great movie out of it, even if I have to go to Mr. Shaw and plead myself. I will get down on my knees. I will say, look at me, Mr. Shaw, am I not Saint Joan? No! Of course I wouldn’t do anything that silly. Are you leaving, Steve?”

  “I’m afraid I must.”

  “When will I see you again? Will you come to my first talkie?”

  “Before then I hope. Martha–”

  Her laughter stopped. “Is something wrong, Steve?”

  “No. No. Only–well, I have a little present for your going-away. You will accept a present from me, won’t you?”

  “I love presents.”

  Stephan reached into his pocket, took out a small, velvet-covered box, and opened it to reveal a diamond pendant on a gold chain. Martha stared as he slipped the chain over her neck.

  “Steve, you are insane. This must have cost a thousand dollars.”

  “What difference does it make what a gift costs?”

  “You know what difference it makes. How do I explain this to Mark and Sarah? What do I tell them? And why give it to me? I don’t understand you.”

  “I love you,” he said simply.

  “No. Oh, God, no. You’re absolutely out of your mind, Steve. You’re a married man. Your wife has just had a child.”

  “I know, I know,” he said unhappily, taking her hand. “You’re right. I never led up to this. You don’t just tell a woman you love her.”

  “You certainly don’t. What did I do to let this happen?”

  “Nothing. It just happened.”

  She took off the chain and handed it back to him. “I have to be honest, Steve. I’ve known you since we were kids. I always liked you, but I’m not in love with you, and I have no intentions of falling in love with anyone.”