by Howard Fast
“Hold on! You’re telling me you want me to pose for a perfume ad for something I never even heard of?”
“Darling, it’s done all the time. Of course, if you don’t want to—Bill says you’re the boss.”
“I don’t want to,” Barbara said emphatically.
She stayed up half the night writing her talk for Sarah Lawrence. She had never before in her life spoken from a platform or made a public address anywhere under any circumstances, and now, facing a hall packed with eager, wide-eyed young women, she froze in terror, tried to speak, and discovered that no sound emerged from her paralyzed vocal cords. Good heavens, what do I do now? she asked herself. I suppose I could fall in a faint, but if I did, I’d probably fracture my skull. That would be just my luck. How—how did I ever get into this?
She took a deep breath, and then said slowly and deliberately, concentrating on making her vocal cords do what they were supposed to do, “You are all wondering, no doubt, why I am standing here in such grim silence. The answer is very simple. Until a moment ago, my vocal chords were paralyzed.” Unexpectedly, there was a ripple of applause and a burst of laughter. Barbara took courage. “Strangely, they’re the same vocal chords I’ve lived with all my life, so the reaction was unexpected. But understandable, since this is the first time I have ever made a public address in my life, and if I have anything to say about it, it will also be the last time.” Again, applause and laughter. Barbara still had not looked at her written address. She didn’t dare to; her memory of it was of a rigid, awkward, and pretentious reflection on writing, youth, and college days.
“I’m a bit afraid to listen to my voice, for fear it will go away, and if I talk rather quickly, it’s only to get something said before I go dumb again. I think it was Mark Twain who wrote about the man who discovered, with a good deal of awe and excitement, that he had been speaking prose all of his life. That just about sums up my knowledge of the art of writing. I never did better than a B in Lit, which is a reflection on my intelligence or lack of it, not on the local department, and then, when I was living in Paris, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and I was actually paid for writing a weekly ‘Letter from Paris.’” She went on, never looking at her notes, just talking.
“This morning, I was being interviewed by a radio announcer, and he asked me where I got my ideas. Being a writer or being interviewed seems to bring out the worst in me, and I replied that I got them from Schenectady, from the Schenectady Idea Service, to which I was a subscriber and to which I paid an annual fee of two hundred dollars. This upset him terribly, and he assured the listener that I was only joking and that there was no such institution as the Schenectady Idea Service.” She had to wait until the laughter and the applause died away. “Well, I really don’t have much more to say. I made some notes, but I don’t think they’re any good. It’s wonderful to be back here, and I sort of wish I had never left. I’m only half-educated, and perhaps someday I’ll have enough courage to come back and finish college.”
To Barbara’s amazement, her talk was a huge success. Hildy Lang looked at her with new respect, and those of the faculty whom she had once known crowded around with praise and congratulations. Being back there on the campus was like a dream, things familiar and things strange, and the strange and the familiar mixed and haunting. It was only seven years since she had been here last, but they were like an eternity—the students so incredibly young, the faculty so unchanged. A group of students gathered around her; they were here in this lovely place, and the world outside was a threatening, terrifying mystery. They wanted to touch, to speak to, to question, to communicate with someone who had actually been to the lair of the beast, to the place called Germany. She had seen these men called the SS with her own eyes; she had actually walked on the streets of Berlin. Would it ever end? Would England fall? Would we be in the war? Could the Nazis invade the United States?
Barbara realized that she knew so little. She had fled from war and horror. The world was entering into a dance of death beyond the bloodiest dreams of the past, and she could not cope with it. To kill an insect tortured her. She had no answers. She could only say, “I hope for something, some way for it to stop. But I don’t know—”
Hildy Lang rescued her. Hildy had no problems with war and peace, with life and death. There was a cocktail party scheduled for five o’clock at the Algonquin, and the car was waiting. “Those kids will eat you up,” Hildy told her. “Anyway, that is a crazy place, that Sarah Lawrence, absolutely insane.”
Almost a hundred men and women were crowded into the two-room suite at the Algonquin, and Barbara was belly to belly but hardly face to face with a small, fat man who came up to her shoulder, the dean of the literary critics, who informed her didactically that her book was by no means a novel. “And why call it that?” he demanded. “It’s a personal history. You lived it, and you put down what you lived. That poses a problem, young woman. Where to now?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Barbara said. She had downed two drinks with the deliberate intention of getting drunk—as the only alternative to fleeing the place. She was a poor drinker. The third drink, in her hand, promised the desired effect. “San Francisco, I think, but I’m not sure.”
Over her shoulder, someone was saying, “Lewisite—that’s the answer. One can of Lewisite on Berlin and that does it, every man, woman, and child dead. Then you build an iron fence around the place and label it, ‘Here lies Berlin, executed for crimes against civilization.’”
Barbara squeezed around to see who was speaking. A stout woman was shrilly defending her position. Barbara tried to escape, and the dean of literary critics followed her. “Hemingway,” he said, “participates. You observe. The curse of inherited wealth.”
Halliday rescued her. “I want you to meet Bruman. He’s on the Sun, and he wants to do a special feature.”
“We are beyond Steinbeck,” Bruman was saying. “He is already an anachronism. We are beyond weeping for the Okies. Hitler has solved the unemployment problem. Ah, Miss Lavette! Beauty and the brain! Not Roosevelt and his New Deal, but Adolf Hitler. Bless the ironies of history. What would a writer do without them? Did you meet the Führer, Miss Lavette? You must tell me all about him.”
At last it was over, and Barbara and Halliday sat in the empty room amid the litter, Barbara drunk, sick to her stomach, tired, wanting nothing so much as to be left alone. Halliday patted her hand and assured her that she had performed splendidly.
“But I’m not a performer,” she said woefully.
“Let’s have some dinner, and then you’ll feel better. I know a place in the Village where they have marvelous steaks—steak, Bermuda onions, sliced tomatoes, baked potatoes—”
“Oh, no, please.”
In the taxi, she tried to think, to put her muddled mind in order. Halliday was holding her hand, stroking it gently with his forefinger. “You’re a patient, lovely wonder of a woman,” he said, leaning toward her and kissing her on her cheek, and Barbara said to herself hopelessly, Oh, Christ, he’s on the way, and the last thing in the world I want right now is someone trying to make love to me, and he’s my publisher, and I’m so drunk I can’t even think straight.
“Mr. Halliday,” she said primly, “what on earth is Lewisite?”
“Lewisite?”
“Someone was talking about dropping it on Berlin.”
“Really? It’s a kind of devilish gas. They say that one canister of it could wipe out an entire city. The trouble is, the Germans have it too. Everyone has it. Good heavens, we don’t want to talk about Lewisite. Have you ever been to the Village?”
“Once, long ago. I don’t know it well.”
“It’s a charming place. Not the way it was twenty years ago, but still a charming place. Suppose we stroll a bit and get the cobwebs out of our heads. It doesn’t have to be a steakhouse. There are half a dozen good restaurants to choose f
rom.”
“I hate to say this,” Barbara said, “but I think I must go back to the hotel and go to bed. I’m a rotten drinker, and it’s taken every ounce of self-control I have not to throw up right here in the taxi.”
It was more than an excuse. It was a reality. “There’s always tomorrow,” Halliday said, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Suppose we keep your schedule down to a minimum. Tomorrow is publication day, and I had thought we might wait up for the morning papers. I think there’ll be reviews in both the Times and the Tribune—good ones, I’m sure.”
Back in the hotel, feeling stupid and totally disgusted with herself, Barbara hung over the toilet, vomiting up five cocktails and an assortment of canapes. Then she crawled into bed and had a night of restless sleep and bad dreams. It was past ten when Halliday called and said with excitement, “Absolute jackpot, my dear. Listen to this from the Times: ‘A totally disarming and deeply sensitive picture of Europe in the years before the war. The chapter on Berlin is unlike anything yet written about the Nazis, an understatement that makes the reader cringe with horror. Miss Lavette’s command of her material is extraordinary in a new novelist,’ and more of the same. The Tribune goes even further. Quote: ‘Miss Lavette’s book is more than a first novel. It’s a sensitive, deeply moving record of a young woman’s encounter with life and death. The love scenes, while explicit, are never prurient, and throughout the book there is a feeling of tenderness and compassion that is quite remarkable in a woman of twenty-seven. Not for years has this critic read a first novel of such sensitivity and promise.’ End quote. There you are. What have you got to say to that?”
“It’s lovely. Mr. Halliday, are you pleased with it?”
“Pleased? Barbara, I’m delighted!”
“Then you won’t be provoked with me. I’m going home today. Back to the Coast.”
“Oh, no. No, Barbara. You can’t.”
She put down the phone, pulled out her suitcase, and began to pack. She felt wretched, utterly worthless, and could not understand why the glowing reviews were meaningless to her.
***
Some two decades before, in the early twenties, Dan Lavette had entered into a business arrangement with Christopher and Ralph Noel, two brothers who were large landowners and even larger financial tycoons on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Together with Dan, they had created one of the first great tourist hotels on Waikiki Beach at a time when it was still a lovely and sparsely used stretch of sand. It was Dan’s notion that Hawaii, given the proper combination of cruise ships and hotels, could become a winter sunland for western America that would serve the same purpose that Florida served for the East. With the aid of the Noels’ capital, the hotel came into being, and with the Depression, Dan’s share in it went down the drain. However, there had been no bitterness in his abdication to the Noel interests, so that when Christopher Noel heard that Dan was coming to Hawaii with his wife, he had insisted that they be his guests.
Noel’s chauffeur picked them up at the pier in Honolulu and drove them to the bungalow, a euphemism for the rambling twenty-two-room bamboo and hardwood home of the Noel family situated on two thousand acres of white beach, green lawn, and pineapple fields. The last time Dan and May Ling had been here, twenty years before, a sense of gaiety and relaxation had pervaded the place. The Noels then had a great luau, a Hawaiian feast, with several hundred guests. They had appeared to be living in an eternal now, without care or thought of the future. Twenty years older, the Noels had lost the carefree and bright blush of youth. Their children were at school on the mainland, and at dinner, the first evening after the Lavettes’ arrival, Christopher Noel expressed their anxieties.
“We’re living in a fool’s paradise,” he told Dan. “Back there on the mainland, they don’t understand how wide open we are. This war is spreading over the earth like a disease, and the damn Japs are cuddling up to Hitler. When I was in Washington a few months ago, I tried to make them understand that. I spoke to Harry Hopkins, damned arrogant bastard. Looks at me and tells me, ‘We don’t expect Japan to enter the war. It’s against her interest. The Japanese could not fight a major war.’ No resources. Hell, Japan’s got half of China for resources, but just try to make them understand that.”
They were dining on the broad verandah of the Noel house, facing the white beach, the turbulent combers, with the setting sun turning a lacework of clouds on the horizon into a fantasy of red and lavender beauty. No talk of war could rob May Ling of her feeling of peace and beauty. This place was locked in her memories as the most wonderful spot on earth, and nothing could change that.
The group at dinner consisted of Christopher and Ralph Noel, both of them tall, slender, aristocratic-looking men, their blond hair turned white with the years; their wives, both of them curiously alike, small, dark pretty women, carefully gowned, carefully coiffured; Jerry Kamilee, an enormous, fleshy Hawaiian; his wife, part Hawaiian, part Japanese; and Dan and May Ling.
May Ling wore an old-fashioned, ankle-length Chinese gown of white silk, split at the sides and embroidered with gold thread in a design of pagodas, arched bridges, and tiny maidens with sunshades. Dan had brought the dress back with him after a trip to San Francisco, refusing to reveal what it had cost, and tonight was the first time May Ling had worn it.
“You, little lady,” Kamilee said to her, “have sold your soul to the devil. We grow old and fat and tired, but you look no different than when we saw you twenty years ago.”
“Ah, if that were only true,” May Ling said. “Believe me, the enchantment is here. I listen to you men talk and grumble, and I suppose Adam grumbled the same way in Paradise. The truth is that there is no time here. It stands still.”
“Oh, listen to her,” Christopher Noel’s wife said. Her name was Elii, and her family had been four generations in the Islands. “No, my dear. Time doesn’t stand still. I have a mirror that proves it every day.”
“She is right about one thing,” Ralph Noel decided. “Here is the place. Stay here, Danny. My word, what do you have on the mainland that can compare to this?”
“A damn shipyard, for one thing. We’re beginning to build them almost as fast as the U-boats sink them.”
“What is the word back there? Are we going into this thing or not?”
“Our problem,” said Kamilee, “is Japan. We underestimate them. Half of Haiti’s family”—indicating his wife—“is Japanese. I know them a little. They are smart as hell, make no mistake, and damn near anything we can do, they can do better. And they want these islands. Jesus God, how they want these islands!”
“But there’s no reason on earth for them to go to war with us,” May Ling protested.
“When did reason have any part in making war? As far as they’re concerned, it’s their ocean. They want us out of it. Manifest destiny. They’re sick with destiny. We sit here and grow pineapples and watch the sunsets and get fat and content. The truth is, we couldn’t defend these islands against a troop of boy scouts.”
“I still want to know what Dan knows,” Christopher Noel said.
“What I know,” Dan said, “consists of a mud flat called Terminal Island in San Pedro. A few years ago, Sam Goldberg—you remember him, my lawyer in San Francisco, dead now, poor guy—well, a few years ago, we took over a shipyard on Terminal Island. The bank practically gave it to us. Every shipyard on the Coast was dead, decaying, bankrupt, rotting away. Not a ship being built anywhere. Now—well, on our way out here, May Ling read me Coleridge’s poem ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ I met up with my own ancient mariner. His name is Admiral Emery Scott Land, and he heads up a thing called the Maritime Commission, and he’s been sitting on my back ever since. He’s a man with a single obsession—ships. Now you want to know how insane this world is, I can tell you. A few years ago, you could walk along the waterfront in Wilmington, San Pedro, Long Beach, you’d see maybe two, three thousand men, just sitting, dying, ro
tting, pleading for a chance to clean a latrine. Now I have two men I pay a wage to, and they have one job. Find men. Find something that can walk and talk. They drive a truck through Orange County and L.A. County, and they stop men on the street, in the fields, anywhere, and ask them if they want a job with good pay. You ask me when we’re going into this war? We’ve been in it. We’re feeding England and arming England, and we’re creating the biggest damn shipbuilding industry the world ever saw. And there’s no way out. Suddenly, the Depression’s over, and there’s more money around than you can count.”
“And Japan, Danny?”
“Before this is over, mark my word, there won’t be a foot of ground on this earth that isn’t involved.”
That night, lying next to Dan, listening to the thunder of the breakers outside, May Ling said, “Danny, it’s all changed—here at the Noels’. They’ve become old and tired and frightened.”
“Time passes. People get older.”
“But not this time, not here in Hawaii. I don’t want to be old now. When we go back to the mainland, I shall become properly old and withered and take up knitting and do whatever an old woman should do.”
“You are the strangest damn woman.”
“I am. I am indeed. But right now, I feel very young and happy. Let’s get away from here, Danny.”
“Right. As soon as the yawl is seaworthy, off we go.”
But the yawl, called the Kahana, had been up on the racks for a year now. It had to be caulked and painted and fitted with new rigging. Christopher Noel would not hear of Dan taking it out until it was completely seaworthy. He was somewhat dubious about Dan handling it without another man in the crew, but Dan insisted that May Ling was as good as any man on a boat. He had no intention of allowing any intrusion into their privacy.
