by Howard Fast
Barbara didn’t deny it. There was a cold knot in the pit of her stomach when mentally she placed herself in Germany. Her strength and independence did not come from a lack of sensitivity. For years now, day after day, she had read the newspaper reports of life in Nazi Germany, not to mention the books on the subject that filled the French bookstalls. In her mind, it had become the place of ultimate horror, a gigantic and grotesque nightmare that had grown like a fetid mushroom out of the heart of Europe.
“But, you see,” Claude went on softly, “there is really no one but yourself we could turn to. You are not political. You never have been. You have no organizational connections, yet we trust you. When I told you Professor Schmidt’s name, I put his life in your hands. We know you.”
“And you know a hundred others,” Barbara said unhappily.
“Not really. Consider. You’re an American, and the Nazis are cultivating America with every bit of sleazy propaganda they can contrive. You are a correspondent, so you have a legitimate reason to go there and to interview. There is nothing on you in the Gestapo files. You are also the daughter of one of the great, wealthy families of America. You can’t imagine what kind of clout that will give you there. Barbara, I would die before I would ask you to step into a dangerous game. This isn’t dangerous. Nasty, perhaps. Any sewer is nasty and stinks to hell. On the other hand, you’re a writer, and this can be an experience well worth having. There’s profit along with the loss. And you might just be saving the lives of a good many decent people.”
“I think I’d like a cup of coffee,” Barbara said. “Will you join me?”
They shook their heads and sat in silence while she brewed the coffee. She had stopped thinking, stopped building protests within herself. She felt a dead, heavy weight inside of her, a kind of hopelessness. She was like a boat without a rudder, without an anchor. Everything and everyone went in and out of her life—her father, her mother, her brother, Dominick Salone, Marcel Duboise, Bernie Cohen. She suddenly felt an intense longing for the big, slow-moving, slow-speaking man, for his judgment, for his advice.
She drank the coffee strong and black. “It’s American coffee,” she explained. “I’m an addict. It comes of living alone. You turn either to drink or coffee.”
“I grew up with chicory,” Camille said, smiling. “You lose your taste for the real thing.” She was relaxed, gentle. The argument was over. Barbara had never particularly liked her before. She liked her now.
“If I were to go,” Barbara said, “and I am not committing myself to anything—but if I were crazy enough to do this, what makes you think that I could find out anything worth finding out about this Professor Schmidt? I’m no great judge of character. I can’t ask him outright.”
Claude shrugged. “I have faith in you.”
“I wish I did.”
“Can we take you to dinner?” Camille asked.
“No. No, I want to think about this whole thing. I have to think it through, and it’s better if I’m by myself.”
There were no more arguments, no more persuasion, and a while later, Camille and Claude left. Barbara took the wineglasses and her cup and saucer into the kitchen, washed them, and then decided that the floor of the kitchen was quite dirty. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? She got a pail of suds and a brush, and scrubbed the kitchen floor, obtaining a good deal of satisfaction out of the physical act of doing something. Then she took a bath, luxuriating in the steaming hot water. It was nine o’clock by the time she dried herself, combed her hair, and slipped into a robe, and now she felt ravenously hungry. She had a piece of chèvre and some bread that she warmed in the oven, and she sat in the kitchen, stuffing herself with cheese and hot, golden-crusted bread, and drinking what was left of the coffee. Afterward, she would recall that there were no interior discussions with herself during this time, no profound thoughts to weigh, one against the other. At half past nine, with the last crust of bread in her hand, she picked up the telephone and asked for the overseas operator. She then put through a person-to-person call to Frank Bradley, the editor of Manhattan Magazine.
It was well after ten when the telephone rang and the operator informed her that she had her party in New York.
It was a good connection. Bradley’s voice boomed out at her.
“I hear you quite well, Frank. You don’t have to shout.”
“Girl, you’ve become famous, and you’re deserting us. When are you arriving? Why didn’t you call me collect?”
“Because I’m rich, and I’m not arriving. I’ve decided to look the beast in the eyes. What would you say to a few ‘Letters from Berlin’?”
“I love you.”
“You know they censor everything. I’m no great political commentator.”
“Just write about the weather, the women, the food—anything you want. Or make notes and write the stuff in Paris.”
“How many words?”
“As many as you want. I love you.”
“I know that. You said it before.”
“How long will you stay?”
“I have no idea, Frank.”
“Now don’t get into trouble. Three publishers have been bugging me about doing your letters in a book. But I’m holding off until you get back. So just don’t get mixed up in anything, and write me something immortal.”
“What publishers?”
“That can wait. Now look, Barbara, I don’t want you to stick your neck out, and I know how you feel about those bastards, but if you could get an interview with Hitler or Ribbentrop or Himmler, or any one of those lice, it would be worth its weight in gold.”
“Frank, you’re crazy.”
“Like a fox, I am. You’re a beautiful woman, and that counts. Look, if it comes your way, grab it. If it doesn’t, I still love you.”
***
Dan observed his son Joseph occasionally with awe, frequently with admiration, and always with wonder that this tall, long-limbed creature, with the strange mixture of the Occident and the Orient written on his snub-nosed, serious face, could be a product of his loins. A few months past, a chain lift had snapped at the boatyard, and the raw link had gashed Dan’s arm from elbow to shoulder, not deeply, but nevertheless leaving a long, painful cut. They had bandaged it crudely out of a first aid kit, but when Dan got home, Joe—there on a day off—regarded it with disgust, removed the bandage, cleaned the wound, put it together with what he called plaster butterflies, and then rebandaged it. Half a year in medical school had not made him a doctor, but in Dan’s mind he was a repository of medical knowledge.
So-toy’s sight was failing, and Joe, with the aid of a medical flashlight, diagnosed the condition as cataracts, which was later confirmed by the ophthalmologist to whom May Ling brought her mother. Joe explained the required operation in great detail to his mother and father, thereby increasing Dan’s awe, and to the amazement of May Ling, he spelled out some of the facts to So-toy in Shanghainese.
“Where on earth did you learn to speak Shanghainese?” his mother asked him.
“I picked it up from Granny.”
“You picked it up? I’ve been around her all my life, and I don’t know much more than a hundred words.”
“Well, that’s the way it goes. Anyway, Mom, you know more than a hundred words. I like her. You can’t like someone and not want to talk. You know,” he added, “it’s funny, but I’m picking up some Cantonese. Whenever they get a Chinese patient in the ward and they can’t get through, they send for me. Mostly, it’s Cantonese.”
When May Ling told Dan about this, he said, “You know, it puts me in a hell of a spot. His school will wind up in a couple of weeks, and he’s got to earn some money this summer. I can put him on as a laborer and justify paying him twenty-five a week, but hell, I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“He’s a doctor. How the hell can I ask him to work in a boatyard
as a laborer?”
“Just ask him. That’s all.”
“Ah, no. I can’t.”
“Well, you won’t have to. He wrote to Jake Levy up at Higate, and Jake offered him a job for the time between semesters.”
“What? What kind of a job?”
“The same thing you’re afraid to offer him, digging irrigation ditches, picking, pruning—goodness, I don’t know. Whatever a hand does at a winery.”
“What is Jake willing to pay him?”
“You know,” May Ling said gently, touching Dan’s hand and smiling at him, “your son isn’t a doctor. He’s just a medical student. And if he appears to be very bright to you, it’s perfectly natural, because he has a very intelligent father.”
“Come on, I’m a boob and a roughneck. That’s all I’ve ever been.”
“I suppose so, but you’re an unusual boob and a remarkable roughneck, and that’s what counts.”
“Thank you. What’s Jake paying him?”
“Forty a month and keep. That’s what Jake pays, and Joe wouldn’t have him shown any favoritism because he’s your son. Anyway, Joe says it’s ten dollars a month more than most of the growers pay.”
“He’s got to be crazy!” Danny exploded. “I can pay him twice that!”
“Calm down, Danny. He wants to go to Higate.”
“Why?”
“You don’t notice things. Sally Levy’s been writing to him every week through the winter. I think he wants to be around her, that’s all.”
“Sally Levy? Jake’s kid? God Almighty, she can’t be more than ten years old!”
“Will you calm down. She’s almost fourteen.”
“Joe’s twenty-two. What in hell does he want with a kid of fourteen?”
“When you were twenty-five, I was only eighteen.”
“That’s different.”
“Why? You’re seven years older than I. Joe’s eight years older than Sally.”
“You were eighteen. Fourteen! God Almighty, that’s jailbait, and with Jake’s kid it stinks.”
“You are a hoodlum,” she said, smiling sadly. “You’ll never be civilized.”
“You call that civilized? A fourteen-year-old kid.”
“I just don’t want you to talk to Joe about this. His head is on right. Leave him alone. You remember what you said about Barbara. She had to be left alone. That goes for Joe too.”
“All right. All right. But I still don’t see it.”
He was not the only one. His son was almost equally confused about his own motives for going to Higate. He was not in love with Sally Levy, who was not yet fourteen years old. He was confident that he knew all about love, having found time during his first year in medical school to conceive a passion for two more girls, both of them as blond and blue-eyed as his college infatuations. But both passions were short-lived, coming to earth in two frantic bouts of lovemaking: once at night on the beach at Santa Monica, when it was so cold and wet that his true love shivered and shook all through it, begging him to get it over with so that she could put on her clothes and not freeze to death; and with the second girl, unconsummated when her parents came home early and informed her, in his presence, in very high decibels, that if they found this “Chink” in their house again, they’d call the cops. He took the insult philosophically, deciding that it was a question of time. Romance required time. As a college student, he had had all the time in the world, whereby his success. As a medical student, regardless of the depth of his passion, there simply was no time to make love properly. As a college student, he had been content to be mistaken for an American Indian, although their lot in Los Angeles was little better than the lot of the Chinese; in medical school, he affirmed his identity as a Chinese. For some reason, the eighteen-hour day of a medical student, instead of stultifying his sexual drive, increased it to a fever pitch. There were three middle-aged, cooperative nurses at the teaching hospital, but like a good many medical students, Joe had fallen prey to what was called “first-year hypochondria,” and having learned all the symptoms and details of venereal disease, he avoided promiscuous women like the plague.
All this went through his mind as he drove his father’s ancient Ford north from Los Angeles to the Napa Valley. Dan had given the Ford to Joe—the very first Model A 1929 vintage—and had replaced it with a secondhand 1935 Buick. Joe treasured the tiny car and its apparent ability to run forever, the odometer having given up at a hundred and ten thousand miles. He drove it without haste, and the long trip gave him time to ask himself just why he was going back to Higate and exactly what he felt for Sally Levy. It was not an easy question for him to answer; he only knew that he wanted to see her again, an admission that he modified with the arguments that he loved Northern California and that he wanted desperately to get away from home for a time.
Sally had written to him as regular as clockwork, every week, apologizing for the wretched scrawl of her handwriting with the excuse that she had been born left-handed and then forced in school to write with her right hand—a situation that her mother had attempted to reverse recently, but too late, since the scrawl from her left hand was even worse than that from the right.
Joe had discussed the matter with one of his professors, who admitted that so little was known about the alteration of a left-handed person into a right-handed person that no firm conclusion could be drawn, and then he asked whether the child in question was strange?
“Pretty strange,” Joe confessed, and the professor said, “Well, there you are.”
“Strange” was a rather generic term. Some of the letters Sally had written were very detailed, sensitive, and often quite beautiful. Once she had written two lines: “It’s all over, and I think you stink for not writing to me.” Another time she sent him two beautiful sonnets, which she claimed she had written, one of which began, “Unlike are we, unlike, o princely heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies.” Joe was so impressed with the language and the flight of fancy that he showed them to his mother. May Ling read them through, sighed, and studied her son thoughtfully.
“They’re great, don’t you think?” Joe asked her.
“Oh, indeed they are. I could never interest you in poetry. If I had, you would know that both these lovely poems were written a hundred years ago by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They were copied faithfully from her Sonnets from the Portuguese. That’s an unusual little girl, your Sally.”
“No. Why would she lie?”
“To impress you.”
“That dumb kid!”
“Not at all. At least she read the poems. That’s more than you can say.”
He wrote back to her, annoyed and accusing, and she replied, “So what! I could write poems just as good if I was her age.”
He came to wait for her letters, to read them eagerly. For his part, he replied about once a month, generally when she had become angry and threatened to stop writing.
Now, driving north, he decided to dismiss her from his thoughts. She was an interesting kid, a little crazy. He had no intention of allowing her to tag around after him as she had done the summer before. But when finally, late in the evening, almost at sundown, he arrived at Higate, having driven with just a few stops for fourteen hours, there she was, standing, watching, waiting, and the moment he got out of his car she ran toward him, stopped, and stood staring at him.
And he stared back. It was not entirely the physical change in Sally. She was still very slender, but the once-tangled flaxen hair was combed straight and fell only to her shoulders, bobbed straight across the front of her brow; she had developed breasts; instead of old, torn jeans she wore a cotton dress; and she had grown at least two inches. Yet more than these changes, it was the expression in the wide blue eyes, frightened, hopeful, wary.
“Hello, kid,” Joe said to her.
“I wish I could have got rid of the stinking freckles, because then
I might look all right, but there’s just no way. How do you think I look?”
“You look fine.”
“You don’t look like a doctor. You look just the same as last year. Do you want to kiss me?”
Joe walked over to her and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
“That’s some kiss,” she said.
He shook his head despairingly.
“Well, what do you think? You think I don’t know why you came back? Only you won’t go near me because I’m jailbait. That’s right. I know a lot more than you think.”
“My word, Sally,” he said desperately, “what do your mother and father think about all this?”
“They think I’m crazy, but they trust you. They know how stupid you are.”
“Yeah, stupid.”
“They said I could walk you around and show you the place just by myself.”
“But I have to go inside,” Joe said. “I have to say hello to your folks and your brothers.”
“You can do that later. There’s only about ten minutes of light left. We got a new truck and two new wells and a big new stainless steel aging tank. Don’t you want to see that?”
“I guess so.” Joe sighed. “I’ve been driving since six o’clock this morning.”
“You talk like an old man.”
“That’s what I am. I’m an old man.” He surrendered himself, and they began to walk along the dirt road that led up the slope. Now the sun had dropped behind the mountains to the west, and the hills had turned jet black, topped by a burning red fringe, but over to the east, on the other side of the Napa Valley, the setting sun still caught the hilltops, bathing them in a golden glow. Sally paused, and they both turned to look. They stood there in silence for a little while, and then Sally said, “I guess we’d better go back, because if I stay up here with you I’m going to cry or something the way I feel, which you couldn’t understand in a million years, even if you’re older than me, and I just finished reading Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser, so I know how stinking men are, and I don’t even care if you don’t look at me again, because you’ll be here all summer, and I can tell you this: Men don’t really know how to love anyone because all they’re interested in is the flesh, and I’ll eat a lot and stuff myself and get fat and sexy, and then you’ll look at me all right.”
