by Ann Packer
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To Jane
CONTENTS
1. California Live Oak
2. The Party
3. Robert
4. The Crusade
5. Rebecca
6. The Studio
7. Ryan
8. The Piece
9. James
10. The House
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1
CALIFORNIA LIVE OAK
Bill Blair received his discharge from the navy on a September morning in 1954. He’d served on hospital ships off Inchon and Pusan, Korea, for two years and then completed his service at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, a cluster of wooden barracks on a grassy hillside in Oakland, California.
On the afternoon of his discharge, he borrowed a convertible and headed across the Bay Bridge, an unplanned adventure that seemed like just the ticket for a fellow with some time on his hands. The sky was the same lovely shade of blue as the hyacinths in the bridal bouquet at his sister’s wedding four months earlier. He’d gotten a weekend’s leave and made it home to Michigan in time for a pre-wedding family breakfast at which his years of service were so celebrated that the very thing he’d sought from the trip, a return to the life he’d known before open wounds and gangrenous limbs and amputations, slipped finally and irrevocably out of his grasp. Outside the church, he stood with his parents in his dress blues and felt as lonely as he ever had in his life.
He’d first seen San Francisco from the deck of the U.S.S. Haven under a sky choked with clouds. Now, as he drove, he found himself drawn less to the bright downtown than to the low-lying hills beyond it, beribboned with candy-colored houses. He stayed on the highway, heading for the next set of hills, and soon he was moving alongside the pale bay, approaching the airport. Seagulls swooped out of the sky, tiny icons of the aircraft landing on the glittering tarmac. This was the first convertible he’d ever driven, and despite all his time at sea he’d never had quite such a confrontation with the wind. His face was pummeled, his hair blown flatter than the bunk of an enlisted man. Up ahead of him, on the prow of the car, the noble brave Pontiac bore down on the unknown with an attitude of calm determination.
Leaving the bay shore, Bill meandered for a mile or two until he found the King’s Highway, or so it would be called if the name were rendered in English—this he knew from the bits of Spanish he’d picked up in Oakland. El Camino Real. This king’s highway boasted car lots and supermarkets, nothing to fill Bill’s heart, but every so often a vista opened and included the sudden rise of yet more hills, some thickly forested, others the color of hay bales in autumn. He pointed the chrome Indian westward and drove through neighborhoods of brand-new houses that seemed like decoys for something marvelous he would discover soon.
Twisting past a golf course, he entered a grove of pines. Narrow roads split off and disappeared around curves and up hills. On an impulse he followed one of these, winding among low-hanging branches with leaves like tiny silver spears. When he slowed down, a smell of earth and bark came to him, and overlaying that something pleasantly medicinal, the inside of a pharmacy staffed by wood creatures. The road leveled off, and a path beckoned him to leave the car and make his way to a clearing where a magnificent oak tree stood guard.
He was the grandson of a farmer on his mother’s side and a doctor on his father’s, both third-generation Michiganders. As a boy, he’d expected a life like that of his father, the doctor’s son, who’d gone to work at a local bank and was now president and chairman of the board, a man who dressed in a suit and tie every day and had the house painted biannually because it was important to keep up appearances. Bill’s mother was an exemplary housekeeper, using vinegar to make the windows sparkle and bleach to keep the bedsheets bright on the line. Known locally as the gal whose one visit to Chicago had left her half-blind after a small rock kicked up by a streetcar struck her in the eye, she had a glass eyeball with a blue iris two or three shades lighter than her true eye color, an asymmetry that made her shy with strangers and unassailable to her children. Bill had grown up believing virtue was a ticket to contentment, but the war had exploded that notion, and he needed something to replace it.
The oak was the most splendid tree he’d ever seen, its gnarled branches snaking every which way. He would learn later that it was a California live oak, species Quercus agrifolia, or sharp-leaved oak, and the ground beneath it was carpeted with curled, brittle leaves and peculiar elongated acorns. An idea had been forming during his last months of service that his skills and training could be adapted toward a type of medicine that might, over time, supplant his memories of men blown open with bodies that wouldn’t be subjected to such violence: the bodies of children. He would have to do a second residency in pediatrics, but he did not mind the idea of deferring his work life for a few more years. A period of preparation more or less equal to the number of months he’d given the navy might in some way cancel that experience and return him to the confidence and optimism he’d felt on the day he received his sheepskin from the University of Michigan Medical School, the best he could hope for now that his family had mistaken him for a hero. He surveyed the land in front of him and slipped into a reverie in which he was surrounded by children, dozens of them, darting between trees, throwing balls, jumping in leaf piles, calling “olly olly oxen free”—more children than he could father himself but not nearly as many as he could help.
With the assistance of a gift from his father, he put a down payment on the 3.1 acres surrounding the oak tree against a total purchase price that would be laughable a few decades later, when the value of the land had increased by a factor of three hundred. He had no funds left to build anything on the property, and for the next couple of years he saw it only rarely, when he could steal time from the eighteen-hour days and eighty-hour weeks at UCSF, where he was learning the intricacies of health and illness in the young. He lived in a furnished apartment on Frederick Street, where he did little other than sleep the sleep of the exhausted.
From his paternal grandfather he had inherited a 1935 Hamilton Seckron dual-dial doctor’s watch. Throughout the war he’d used the second hand to measure the pulse of the injured men he treated, and the habit had stayed with him, so that when the watch stopped working during rounds one morning, he found time the very next day to take it to be repaired.
Reliable Clock and Watch was on Cole Street, a cramped shop with a battered swing counter dividing the entry area from the cash register and the workbench, each of which was occupied: the bench by a bespectacled balding man wearing a blue butcher’s apron over a white shirt and tie; and the counter by a slender, gawky girl with messy dark hair and a cameo pin fastened to her blouse.
The girl was Penny Greenway, and the man was her uncle, a bachelor who’d invited his sister’s daughter to come from her home in Sacramento to work for him in exchange for room and board and twenty-five dollars a week. Penny had been with him for six months, and along with a little bookkeeping and a few rudimentary dishes to serve him for dinner, she’d learned that time was not just a property of physics but also a receptacle for loneliness.
Initially, she had been somewhat reluctant to accept his offer. He was kind, but through her childhood he’d barely spoken to her, and in fact never spoke much to anyone when he came to vi
sit, only sitting after dinner with her parents and nodding when her mother told him news about people they’d known long before. Penny had had no plans, though, and no beaux, and she viewed his invitation as a solution to the problem that was her life. Desperate to leave home, she said yes with the false certainty that he couldn’t be as taciturn as he seemed.
Bill had the air of a hurried businessman, and she was surprised when he went to the trouble of explaining that he was a doctor and needed the second hand for his work. He smiled and waited while she peered at the face of the watch, and she was struck by the way his hurry seemed to vanish, replaced by a kind, keen patience. Her uncle came forward from the repair bench and looked the watch over, frowning in his characteristic way, and she felt an urge to reassure the man that his watch would be right as rain again. Instead, she pulled out a ticket and asked him for his address, and she blushed when he said he lived just around the corner, in an apartment upstairs from the coffee shop where she took her break every afternoon. He said his clothes smelled of hamburger grease but the rent was cheap and he hadn’t cooked a meal in over a year.
A few days later, they ran into each other at the coffee shop. “Now we’ll see each other all the time,” he said as he held the door for her, and she said, “Though until you have your watch back it’ll be hard to measure.” It took him a moment to react, and she liked the way his plain brown eyes narrowed briefly and then widened again as he smiled.
He came back to the shop the following week. Strapping on his repaired watch, he beamed at the steady spinning of the second hand and said, “Well done,” but in a voice so soft she couldn’t tell if he was speaking to himself or her. She was tongue-tied and wished she could think of another joke.
“She’s partial to pie,” her uncle said, coming forward from his bench and using his soft red cloth to wipe oil from his thickened fingertips. He looked at Bill and said, “You can take her for thirty minutes.”
Embarrassed, Penny stood still until her uncle gave her a push toward the closet. She pulled her coat from its hook and was about to put it on when Bill took it from her and held it behind her for her arms to find.
“Do you want pie?” he said when they were on the sidewalk.
She shook her head.
“Coffee?”
She looked up and found his eyes focused on hers, gentle and wary. “Let’s go this way,” she said, and they turned away from the coffee shop and walked two blocks without talking, Bill making sure he didn’t outpace her. He was perplexed by what had occurred back at the shop and even more so by his cooperation with it, when he had charts to update from morning rounds and clinic starting in an hour. Yet, seeing how her hair drifted in front of her face, he imagined pushing it back with his fingers.
They came to the corner of Stanyan and Parnassus, where cars raced by in both directions.
“I like pie,” she said, “but I can’t bake one.”
“ ‘Billy Boy’?” he said with a smile, and she had an idea, brief but intense, that he’d come into the shop only to court her.
Up until this point she had lived mostly inside herself, with the world of other people a destination more attractive in the abstract than in reality. At school she had limited herself to one friend at a time, switching every few years. Her classmates viewed her as studious because they had no other way to think about a girl who said little but was well mannered enough to blend in. In fact, she was indifferent to her schoolwork and earned mediocre grades.
She had never liked a boy, and the kisses she’d seen on movie screens suggested the whole business would require more hot breath than she could tolerate. In her experience, men smelled like soap in the morning and it went downhill from there. Her uncle smelled worse than her father, probably because of the cigars he smoked after dinner. Every night he sat in the parlor that looked onto Taraval Street and smoked his cigar and listened to polka music on the hi-fi. He kept time on the arm of his chair, boom-duh-duh, boom-duh-duh, drumming with his palm until Penny had to leave the room so she wouldn’t scream. She wondered what it would be like to have Bill Blair sitting in the chair instead. She imagined he would have a lot of interesting things to say.
“Have you been across the Golden Gate Bridge?” she asked him.
“Across it, no. I’ve been under it. I’d like to go across it someday. I’d like to walk across it. Would you?”
She’d been thinking of a ride in a handsome car, with herself wearing new lipstick, but she nodded enthusiastically and said, “Yes, that’s my dream!”
He smiled and put his hand behind her elbow, signaling that they should cross the street. He liked the way she held her head, cocked slightly to the side. She was dark, whereas his mother and sister were fair.
Bill’s first experience with a woman had taken place at a whorehouse in Yokosuka, a ten-minute visit that had given him all the satisfaction of a trapped burp finally making its way up his esophagus and out of his mouth. He’d never gone back, despite the ribbing he got from the other men, who seemed to view the availability of the “hostesses,” as they were sometimes called, as the equivalent of a mandate. Since moving to San Francisco, he had taken out four or five nurses, but in each there had been something missing, a quality resembling hunger, though he could not have identified it that way. Even so, he might have continued with any one of them had she pursued him, but he was so reserved that they were all a little relieved when they didn’t hear from him again.
His celibacy bothered him no more than the occasional desire he felt for a better dinner than he could get at the coffee shop downstairs. He knew he would have a home someday in which he would enjoy good, nourishing meals, and in the same way he knew there would be a woman to share his bed once the grueling work of his residency was behind him.
Within weeks of meeting her he began to wonder if this woman might be Penny. She had a yearning attitude toward life that struck him as sweet and answerable, and she was lovely to kiss, the way her eyelashes felt against his jaw once their mouths had parted. “There now,” he often said at such moments, and she laughed in a way that seemed to appreciate rather than object to his diffidence.
She begged him for stories of his boyhood, and when his birthday came around, ten months after they met, she presented him with a collage she’d made from photographs she secretly requested from his mother. “But how did you think to write to her?” he asked. “And how did you find the address?” She said being happy gave her good ideas. For her part, his mother had been delighted by the young lady’s request and, a few weeks later, emboldened by hope, she decided to send him a snapshot of herself as a young woman holding him as an infant. It was 1928, and he was wearing a long lace dress. “Father was so very proud,” she wrote on the back of the photo, the closest she could come to suggesting that Bill get down to the business of starting his own family. His sister had been married three years by then and was still childless, and their mother had begun to despair of having grandchildren.
Penny was an only child who for company during her school years had drawn pictures of the children she expected to bear. On the day Bill proposed to her, she handed him a portfolio containing a sampling of these sketches, and he was moved and intrigued by her having chosen to include two boys and one girl rather than the one of each most people would have selected. “Three, then?” he said, and she said, “Yes, don’t you think?”
They were married at a small ceremony in Sacramento and received her parents’ friends’ good wishes at a late-morning reception where coffee was served from a large silver urn. Bill’s side was represented only by a colleague from the hospital; his parents and sister had never flown, and he had convinced them to forgo the long, tiring trip in favor of a more leisurely visit that he and Penny would make to Michigan. He believed he was looking out for them, and perhaps he was, but it also suited him to take Penny as his wife without his family’s witness, though he would have denied this had anyone s
uggested it.
Penny’s head fit perfectly into the hollow of his shoulder, and they spent their first year together in a state of deep contentment. At the end of the day, when he came in from work and found her in the kitchen with a cookbook open and a smudge of flour on her jaw, he was tempted to set aside his trust in science and believe, if only for the moment, that it was fate that had led him on the long road from Michigan to Korea to this woman. Every night she sat with him while he bathed, often leaning over the side of the tub and scrubbing his shoulders with a sudsy washcloth. If he leaned back against the porcelain, she sometimes abandoned the washcloth and reached into the water to stroke him. This thrilled him, but his greatest pleasure came when, at the peak moment of his attentions in bed, she threw her head back and sighed. Matrimony, he began to think, was a cure for an illness he hadn’t known he had.
As for Penny, it seemed to her that the formlessness of her life until now had been a kind of prepayment for the many perfections of her husband: the perfection of his good black hair, the perfection of his even temperament, the perfection of his voice on the telephone consulting about an ill child. “I know it’s frightening,” he said into the phone one night as she lay next to him in bed, “but I’m going to tell you how to bring the fever down now, all right? The baby will be fine, and you’ll feel better, too.” Once the call was finished, he pulled Penny back into his arms, and while he murmured apologies for the interruption and moved his lips and tongue down her neck, she decided it was the last part of what he’d said to the worried mother—“and you’ll feel better, too”—that made him such a good, kind man.
Only one thing troubled her, but it sometimes troubled her a great deal: she didn’t always know what he was thinking. Often, almost daily, she would say, “Me for your thoughts”—me, since she was Penny. And he would say, “Oh, just daydreaming” or “Oh, my thoughts aren’t worth near that much.”
