by Howard Fast
“What do you mean, loaded?”
“You’re telling me you don’t know? Is this Marty Spizer or some jerk?”
“Come on, come on, don’t play games.”
“Her old man is Marcus Levy. San Francisco.”
“And who the hell is Marcus Levy?”
“For you, Marty, there is obviously nothing west of the Hudson River.”
“Except for this shithole.”
“Marcus Levy is one of the L’s of a thing called Levy and Lavette, which owns the biggest department store in California, not to mention a shipping line and maybe half the land in California and maybe a few other goodies too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Like hell I am. Talk to her sometime instead of spitting at her.”
“You schmuck!” Spizer burst out. “You dumb mick schmuck! You let me ride her all this time and you never tell me I’m shitting in a pot of gold. Where are your brains?”
“I’ll tell you where yours are, you dumb bastard. In your asshole.”
That same day, Marty Spizer asked Martha to have lunch with him. She looked at him dumfounded and speechless.
“Say yes, honey,” he told her gently. “The initiation is over. You’re going to be an actress.”
He took her to Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, playing expansively the role of tour guide and knowledgeable citizen. Sitting across the table from her, summoning up every bit of charm he had ever seen or heard, he said to her, “I suppose you wondered why I put you through those two weeks of hazing?”
Her eyes welling with tears, Martha shook her head. “I don’t understand it at all. Maybe I am rotten, but I’m no worse than most of the kids.”
“Martha,” he said earnestly, “you’re a damn sight better than any of them. You got a natural talent, a gift, a glow. That is precisely why I leaned on you. I had to shock you into letting go. I had to give you what Stanislavsky calls a sense of your interior. I had to hit you to make you know you are alive, and I may say that you know it, baby.”
“Then you don’t think I’m hopeless?”
“Hopeless? Are you kidding?”
She was biting her lip, trying to hold back the tears. “I was so miserable–so wretchedly miserable.”
“Exactly. You were feeling, you were alive. All right, that’s over. Phase one is done. Now we make you an actress.”
Gregory Pastore was one of those virtuoso painters who appears to have enormous reservoirs of skill in their hands yet very little in the head or the heart. He completed both portraits of Jean Lavette at about the same time. The clothed portrait, which depicted her in a Grecian type of blue gown, barefoot, her splendid hair loose, evoked echoes of Eakins whom she admired so much–as Pastore well knew–but it had a sleek perfection which Eakins would have found distasteful and dishonest. By now Jean’s taste in painting had developed to a point where she was aware of the incipient vulgarity in trompe l’oeil when applied to the human figure; nevertheless, she was sufficiently self-oriented to react to the beauty of the woman in the long canvas. What it lacked in truth, it made up for in sheer perfection, and that certainly did not displease her.
The nude Jean was a better painting, bold and lusty, filled with life and flesh instead of perfection. Pastore had fleshed out her breasts and her hips, bent her head forward so that her features were unrecognizable behind a wave of her fine honey-colored hair, and laid one hand provocatively on the pubic tuft.
“It’s a damn good painting,” she said when he showed her, finally, the finished product. “What do you want for it?”
“You or three thousand dollars,” he replied, grinning with pleasure. “And that’s a princely–a kingly–price for any woman.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Become my mistress for one month, and it’s yours free. Otherwise, three thousand clams.”
“In other words, if the price is right,” Jean said, not at all disturbed by his offer, “any woman is a whore?”
“I’ve always thought so.”
“Perhaps. Only you don’t appeal to me that way, Gregory. And you don’t bathe.”
“You are a bitch, you know.”
“Oh? Anyway, I want it. Bring both paintings to my home tomorrow. I’ll have a check for you.”
“Three thousand.”
“I heard you the first time.”
When the paintings arrived on the following day, Jean hung the full-length clothed portrait of herself at one end of the living room between a John Marin landscape and a Charles Sheeler industrial scene. A big Renoir nude that had occupied the same space was moved into Dan’s study, to take its shadowy place with the Winslow Homers and the Frederic Remingtons, works by artists whom Jean tolerated grudgingly. A few years before, Jean had enlarged the living room, ripped out all the molding, created plain walls of a pale ivory tint, and installed ceiling spotlights. The Queen Anne antiques went the way of the molding and were replaced by pieces in the Chinese style. She had gone through a period of Japanese prints, but now she tired of them and relegated them to other rooms. Her collection now included over thirty paintings, eighteen of which she felt were as good as any modern collection in San Francisco.
The nude went to her bedroom, where it kept company with a second Renoir nude, a Picasso of the Blue Period, and two Degas ballet scenes. For the two weeks after it was hung, Dan had no occasion to set foot in her bedroom. When finally he did and saw the painting, he stared at it for a few minutes before he asked her whether it was a painting of herself.
“What nonsense! Does it look like me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m amazed you remember.”
“I remember,” he said.
“And if it is me, does that disturb you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Yet it mattered. It chipped away at his self-respect, his shrinking sense of himself as a male creature, and at his confused, anxious, and complex musings on morality. The morass deepened one day when, passing the open door of Jean’s bedroom, he saw Barbara standing there staring at the picture. His first instinct was to escape unnoticed. His daughter was fourteen years old, already ripening into womanhood, tall, lissome, and increasingly foreign to him.
He stopped in the hallway, turned, and forced himself to walk into the room. Barbara glanced at him and then returned her gaze to the painting. He was embarrassed; apparently, she was not.
“It’s mother, isn’t it?” Barbara said.
“No.”
She faced him now. “You don’t think so? Did she tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it looks like her. I should think you’d be in a perfect pet about it.”
“It’s not your mother, and I don’t think you have any business in her room.”
“The door was open,” Barbara replied, and then stalked out past him; and he stood looking after her, wondering why every approach to his daughter went wrong.
The new line of credit at the Seldon Bank passed two million dollars before the airline–West Coast Air, as they decided to call it–was ready to begin service. New problems kept cropping up: limousines at either end, service within the airplane, sky-high insurance rates, and above all the rumors that another twelve-passenger plane was being developed that would put the Ford Trimotor out of business. Dan spent a hundred thousand dollars on two of the best aircraft designers in the business and set them to work to invent a faster and quieter plane than the Ford. With this and the complexities of terminals, pilots, mechanics, transportation, franchises, and a hundred unforeseen problems that occurred because no one west of the Rockies had ever operated a passenger service before, it was not until mid-1928 that the airline opened for business.
By that time, even Dan’s enormous calm had been splintered. He would get to bed night after night at two or three in the morning and then find that he was unable to sleep; he would toss and turn until dawn and an hour later be in his car headed out to the new airfield. In
the midst of all this, the Sacramento, the largest and newest of their passenger liners, was rammed by a cargo ship in New York City’s Lower Bay, and Dan had to spend three and a half agonizing days on the train to New York and then three more weeks seeing the situation unsnarled and the ship into dry dock for repairs.
When at last the great day came and the big Ford Trimotor stood shining in the California sunshine, Dan was miserable rather than pleased or exultant, exhausted, taking pant in the ceremony with a kind of dulled indifference. It was a good turnout, all things considered, with almost a thousand people present to watch the great silver bird take to the air and inaugurate a new era. His children were away at school, but Jean was there, as beautiful as ever and the center of attention, not only for the photographers but for Mayor Rolph, Governor Clement Young, her father, and her friends. Both the mayor and the governor spoke, and then Mark, who had declined to be one of the twelve on the first flight–as had Jean–read a short speech that Dan had been too busy to write. A troubled Sarah kissed Dan, hugged him to her, and said, “I wish you weren’t going up in that crazy thing, Danny.” The Dumphy Marching Band played, people waved and shouted and clapped their hands, and Dan climbed into the plane, along with Sam Goldberg, who had begged to be given one of the seats, Jerry Belton, in charge of promotion and the author of Mark’s speech, Toby Bench, the radio commentator, and eight newspapermen and photographers. Dan made his way up to the pilot’s compartment, where he told Bill Henley, war ace and his chief pilot, “This is it, Billy, and for Christ’s sake, let’s give them something to talk about. Smooth and easy.”
“O.K., boss.” Henley grinned and turned on the ignition. The three motors roared into life, a deafening sound; and back in his seat, next to Sam Goldberg, Dan breathed a sigh of relief and cast his eyes around at eleven, white-faced, tight-lipped people. The passengers partook of so total a sense of terror that Dan burst out laughing, and Goldberg yelled at him, “What’s to laugh? Let me out of this deathtrap!”
Jean watched the great silver plane roar down the runway and lift off, so easily and gracefully, lifting up higher and higher, effortlessly, and something caught in her throat and for a moment she regretted that she had declined Dan’s invitation to come with him. But only for a moment. As Dan had said, it didn’t matter.
Martha, accompanied by a now-devoted Marty Spizer, was in the crowd that welcomed the Ford Trimotor as it floated, light as a leaf, into the Los Angeles airport. There, on a lesser scale, the San Francisco scene was repeated, to the sound of wild cheering at, according to the mayor, “the opening of a new era–a time when we can think of San Francisco and Los Angeles as sister cities.”
“That’s Danny, the tall man with the black, curly hair,” Martha told Spizer excitedly, pushing through the crowd. “Daddy was supposed to be with him, but I don’t see him.”
“He’s one big sonofabitch,” Spizer said.
“He’s a pussycat, and he’s my dear, dear friend. Come on.”
As they tried to make their way through the crowd of press and celebrities that surrounded Dan, Spizer said, “What gives between you and this guy? You couldn’t wait to get down here.”
“He’s Danny. I’ve adored him since I was a kid.”
When Dan spotted her, he pushed through the crowd and swung her up in his arms. “Baby, I’ve missed you.”
“Where’s daddy?”
“He chickened out.”
“And Jean?”
“Same thing. Old Goldberg here was the only one with guts enough to make it. Sam,” he said to Goldberg, who stood beside him, thanking God that firm earth was beneath his feet, “you remember Mark’s daughter, Martha?”
Martha introduced Marty Spizer as “the director and producer,” and then Dan told them not to go. He’d get through the rest of the formalities and they’d all have dinner together. “Whatever you say,” Goldberg agreed. “But I’m taking the train back.”
“Hold it down,” Dan said. “We’re in business now.”
The four of them had dinner at the Biltmore. By that time, Dan’s ebullience had washed out. All that day, under the excitement and the glory of the first scheduled flight, was the knowledge that he would be in the city where May Ling lived. It was now seven months since he had seen her, and during that period he had been to Los Angeles four times, and each time he fought it out with himself and willed himself not to see her, and came out of the struggle sick and lonely and frustrated. And now it was in him again, the same sickness, the same loneliness, the same unbearable hopelessness. Goldberg left to catch his train, and Spizer talked about himself and the film business and talking pictures and the opportunities for investment. Dan listened without hearing. When the dinner was over, he invented a business meeting, and Martha, kissing him, whispered, “You’re so glum, Danny. You shouldn’t be. It’s your day of victory.”
Spizer had gone to the men’s room. “What about him?” Dan asked.
“He runs the school. He’s brilliant. Don’t you like him?”
“Just watch your step, baby.”
“Danny, I’m a grown woman.”
In his room at the Biltmore, Dan sprawled on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He was forty years old, and if anyone ever had, he had surely dreamed the American dream. This was 1928, only forty years since his mother and father had climbed out of steerage onto Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, a French-Italian fisherman with an Italian wife, penniless, without a word of English, bewildered, friendless in the world of New York’s East Side. The story of what had happened to them had been told and retold to him, the days of semistarvation in New York, his father recruited into a labor gang for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the line over the mountains into San Francisco, the first sight of San Francisco, the golden city on the bay, the struggle to live, to survive, to be, and the day at long last when he and his father put out to work in their own boat–and all of it over in the flaming eruption of the earthquake.
That memory was real and vivid. He had only to close his eyes to taste the salt spray and to hear his father singing out, in his Marseille dialect, “Rejette les petits, coco!” Out went the crabs too small to matter. He could hear his father’s booming bass voice. He never sang on the way out, but only when they had their catch and were coming in with the wind. He never sang when they used the motor. He despised the motor. “Le cochon qui fume,” he called it. But when the wind was in their sails and the boat rode low with the catch, his father’s voice would boom out over the water, off-key but powerful enough to be heard across the bay. He tried to bring to mind that one day off San Mateo when he had his own son, Thomas, out in the cutter, but the memory was vague and misty, as were all the memories of his life except those times with May Ling. All the rest was a dream and apparently without meaning, yet as he lay there on the hotel bed, half dozing, he resented and rejected this. He had come out of nothing, and he had made himself a king, a veritable emperor. He ruled a fleet of great passenger liners, an airline, a majestic department store, a splendid resort hotel, property, land, and he dispensed the food of life to hundreds of men and women who labored at his will. True, Mark Levy was his partner and friend, but Mark was like a shadow. It was of his own making and his own doing that he controlled twenty million dollars of property–and how could that be a dream and meaningless? He was welcomed in Washington and in New York; people kowtowed to him, and he was surrounded by servile men who were ready to agree with anything he said, and he lived in a mansion on Russian Hill and his wife was far and widely admitted to be one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco.
Yet he was as alone as anyone on the face of the earth, lying alone and fully clothed in a dark room in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, so bereft of passion that he had neither the will nor the desire to call a bellhop and give him the twenty dollars that would bring a floozie to his room to warm his bed. He wanted no woman except one.
He fell asleep, and when he awakened, the first gray light of the morning was seeping in
to the room. He showered and put on fresh clothes. Outside his window, the sky was filled with a turbulence of racing clouds. It had apparently rained all night, and this was one of those rare and welcome days in Los Angeles when the air was clean and cold, the sky silver gray. After he had dressed, he called Bill Henley, asleep in another room at the Biltmore, awakened him, and said, “Take her home nice and easy, Billy. I won’t be going with you. Tell Mr. Levy I’ll be back tomorrow.”
He had eaten almost nothing at dinner the night before, and he was hungry. He made a breakfast out of fried eggs and steak and home-fried potatoes and drank two cups of coffee. At the desk, he asked how far it was to the U.C.L.A. campus at Melrose and Vermont.
“Too far to walk, Mr. Lavette–like everything in L.A. I’ll call you a cab.”
He felt lightheaded, foolish, wonderful, looking out of the cab windows at the sprawling, strange stucco city. San Francisco was a city of hills, with great open vistas to be seen from the hilltops. This place was precisely the reverse, a bowl surrounded on three sides by hills and mountains, yet for some reason it excited and pleased him. The day was so clear, the air so fine that the great humps of the San Gabriels were clearly visible to the east, while ahead of him, at the end of Vermont Avenue, miles away yet as prominent as a gate at the street’s end was the green wall of the Hollywood Hills. He saw and noticed things with the eyes of a delighted child, the huge, clanging green streetcars, the shacks on Vermont Avenue and beyond them, where the land rolled up to end the bowl, candy-cane mansions of pink and white, the profusion of roses and ferns and palms contrasting so oddly with the one-story shabby bungalows–and the cars, so many automobiles of every variety, and beyond the houses the wooden derricks pumping the oil that fed the cars. It was raw, new, different, and it intrigued him, perhaps most of all because it was a place where May Ling and his son lived.
Then he was filled with apprehension and he began to rehearse conversations inside of his head. He was almost trembling when the cab dropped him at the edge of the campus.
