Rich White Americans

by Virginia Dale

  “I’ll bring it myself,” said Albert.

  “You’re so kind. Now I must go; Alexia needs me.” Alessandro left in a rush; it was almost as if he’d never been there. Albert was crestfallen.

  “Why did she have to get pregnant NOW?”

  “If she is pregnant and has the baby, they can make the movie afterwards,” I said, trying to console him.

  “Inny, you’re so naïve.” Albert’s normally composed face became downcast.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Things change so fast in Hollywood, and Alexia is going to fly back to Europe. I don’t know how long she’ll stay interested.”

  “If it’s a good script, she’ll want to make the movie,” I asserted.

  Albert smiled and reached for my hand. I kissed him gently on the forehead. He reached for the bubbly.

  We drove back to Berkeley in relative silence, each immersed in our own thoughts. I had another midterm coming up and then finals after Christmas vacation. I wondered how I could possibly spend it with my parents after our horrible falling out. They’d put me through the third degree, and I wasn’t in the mood to be yelled at. I decided to stay in Berkeley and lay low. I’d send them presents and a card. Maybe I’d just go home and let bygones be bygones.

  When we arrived, we saw Jerry’s car parked outside.

  “Sally and Jerry must be back from India.”

  “Delightful young couple,” rued Albert with a smirk.

  “She can stay with me.”

  “And you can stay with me.” Albert grinned and kissed me. I kissed him back, giggling. We’d have fun.

  Sure enough, as I unpacked my suitcase in our studio apartment, I heard a timid, Sally-like knock on the door. She came in, head down, her long bangs hanging lank and uncombed, obscuring most of her low brow and largish nose. She’d lost another round, I figured.

  “Tell me about your trip,” I said, plopping on the double bed and motioning for her to join me.

  “We had servants,” said Sally.

  “And…?” I smiled to encourage her.

  “Jerry made me fly in small planes with him. He knows they scare me to death.”

  “Do you love him, Sally?”

  “I’m afraid of him.”

  “Why don’t you leave him?”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You can stay here with me until you find a job and move away from here,” I suggested. “You could go back home.”

  "I’ve told my parents I’m still going to school at Berkeley.

  They’d find out I was lying. They’d find out I flunked out." I put my arm on hers and turned her to look me squarely in the face. Hers was hangdog, with her usually uncombed bangs hiding most of her features. She sniffled. I put my arm around her shoulders.

  “Crying won’t help, but sometimes it makes you feel better.”

  “I’m a washout; a failure. You’ve made your grades and stayed in Berkeley; you’ll graduate this spring. You have a future.”

  Her tears fell on her plain shirt dress, spotting it in places.

  “Does he hit you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  That did it. I shook her into a straight sitting position. “Sally, where is your self-respect? You made it through two years at Berkeley; you can go to a state college and finish your degree there. Your parents will give you the money; you know they will. You need to come clean with them.”

  Sally stared at me and heaved a huge gasp, gulping for air. Then, she started to sob. I let her cry. I had to fix dinner.

  “I’ve got some trout. Have you ever eaten trout?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. So this will be a first for both of us. Stop crying! Let’s have some fun. Come and help me.”

  Sally staggered into our small kitchen. I unwrapped the trout from the butcher paper. Much to my surprise, I discovered they were whole fish with their heads attached. I didn’t realize you could cook a whole fish, so I started trying to cut their heads off with a kitchen knife. They slid all over the sink. Sally started to laugh.

  “Now you laugh! This is the worst thing I’ve ever had to do!” I hacked away, making a hideous mess of one of the trout. I decided to put them in a bowl full of water, where they took on the semblance of live fish. It frightened me, for I had not yet related to anything other than the saran-wrapped meat in grocery stores. I loved the natural world. I didn’t want to participate in mangling it.

  “Boil them!” yelled Sally, recovering her voice.

  “You boil them!” I laughed at the grotesque mass of fish guts I’d created.

  I brushed aside my long hair that had fallen over my eyes and turned the burner on high. The water heated up and the fish, instead of swimming, turned white and accusatory. Their blue eyes turned white and popped out. Sally sniffled a bit, sitting on a kitchen chair. In the back of my mind I kept thinking about my exams I had to study for. Lovers, movie celebrities, and battered friends were secondary to my exams in real life. I wanted to do as well as possible at Berkeley and graduate. I always finished what I started, which included graduating from U.C. Berkeley, in 1964.

  Kathy began to practice her violin upstairs. Albert played Barbara Streisand’s ‘People Who Need People’ at full blast. His taste in music was impeccable. Perhaps because he’s black, I mused. Then, I realized that was a stupid thought and brushed it aside.

  “I need your help, Inny,” wafted through Sally’s sniffling.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I need to have an abortion.”

  “What?”

  Disconnected thoughts reeled through my already fatigued mind. Janey’s abortion in my double bed at my former apartment; Alexia Roma so radiantly pregnant that she turned down the role in Albert’s screenplay. Kennedy slumping backward, then forward, in the limousine with Jackie lurching to cover him from further gunfire. My mother calling Albert a nigger, tearing his beautiful Brooks Brothers shirt and chasing us out of my own home, which I realized wasn’t really mine but my parents’, because they were going to disinherit me. An orphan with parents. I laughed at the ludicrous thought of being raised by parents as inhumane as mine.

  “Please help me, Inny.”

  I looked from the fish, whose eyes had turned white and had popped out of their sockets in the boiling water, to Sally, slumped in misery, limp as my wet dishrag.

  “I’m trying to help you get away from Jerry! So now you tell me you need an abortion. Couldn’t you have gotten a birth control pill prescription? I… I… I have exams to take!”

  The door slammed open. Jerry barged in, a wild look in his eyes, blood-streaked from drinking. His largish, ungainly form headed towards Sally. “Come back to our apartment!” he yelled.

  “Don’t touch her!”

  “Wanna stop me?” He staggered towards me, taking a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. His eyes bulged. I could feel his breath on my face. It smelled of alcohol.

  “I know you hit Sally. I know all about your… your psycho, sick ways, and I won’t stand for it!”

  Jerry’s reddened, veiny eyes stared at me. “And you sleep with niggers!”

  “I make love with Albert Curtis!”

  Sally turned and started to slink towards the bathroom, placed conveniently next to the kitchen in our small studio.

  “Come back here, you silly… bitch!” growled Jerry.

  “Get out of here or I’ll call the police!” I yelled. Jerry opened his Swiss knife and lunged at me.

  Dodging him as best I could, I grabbed the nearest weapon, the pan full of boiling fish, and threw it at him. He howled as the hot water hit his chest, sending trout slithering all over the kitchen floor. He kept coming towards me with the knife. I grabbed a kitchen knife and raised it in the air, screaming, hitting a high C.

  Jerry lunged at me, grabbing the knife from my hand. I screamed again. He slashed at me but missed in his drunken stupor. I dodged, faster than him. He turned and walked like Frankenstein towards Sally, who shook like a
leaf in a storm.

  “No, Jerry, no! I’m sorry! I’ll never do it again!” screamed Sally, her face white as the belly of a dead fish.

  A gunshot rang out of nowhere. I felt the bullet whiz under my arm; Jerry clutched his chest and went down, spurting blood, which mixed with the boiled trout on the floor, creating a bloody mess.

  “Call the police!” I said.

  Albert ran down the stairs in time to catch the glimpse of a man with a gun in his hand, running down the brick pathway. When he burst in and saw Jerry bleeding on the floor of my studio, he ripped off his shirt and shredded it, staunching Jerry’s gushing wound with it. His father was a doctor; Albert knew how to do these things.

  I called the police and an ambulance, which arrived in short order along with most of the neighborhood.

  “Can we take him in your car?” I asked Albert.

  “He’s too far gone!” he said.

  Albert kneeled next to Jerry to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I ripped up a towel to replace Albert’s blood-soaked shirt. Jerry’s eyes rolled towards the back of his head.

  Sally howled and sobbed on my bed. Maria Delores ran down the brick path, yelling, “I told you she was a stupid Americana!” When she saw Jerry, she shut up, her face a mass of wrinkles and anger. Kathy stared from the doorway with other neighbors, aghast, her violin still in her hand.

  The ambulance team arrived and went to work.

  “What happened?” asked a paramedic.

  “Gunshot wound to the chest,” I said.

  Albert stood up as the ambulance crew put more gauze and bandages on Jerry’s wound while taking his pulse. They started an intravenous transfusion.

  “Fifty-fifty,” mumbled one of the ambulance crew. They placed Jerry on a stretcher, careful not to displace the intravenous or any of the other life-saving devices attached to his body just as two stocky Berkeley policemen arrived.

  “Don’t move!”

  “Life or death matter. Let’s go!” yelled one of the ambulance assistants. They hefted Jerry’s body on the stretcher out of my studio, down the brick pathway and into the ambulance, which sped away, sirens screaming into the freakish night.

  We stared at the police, who said, “Don’t move! We have to mark the spot where he fell.” We cleared a space for them. I watched with irritation as one of them made a chalk outline on the floor of the living room/bedroom section of my studio. The other called for backup over a walkie-talkie, a new device.

  “Do you have IDs?” asked the other.

  My mind flashed to my wallet, where I had my driver’s license. I felt relieved that I’d just renewed it when I turned twenty-one. I showed it to them. Sally had no I.D.

  “I lost it in India,” she blubbered. Her tear-streaked face turned bright red.

  “Yeah. Look, little lady, ya’ gotta show an I.D.” She cried harder. The officers exchanged looks and starting checking everyone else’s identification. When they got to Albert, they hesitated. “Haven’t we seen you someplace before, buddy?”

  “Please, call me Professor,” said Albert. “It is possible that we have met before. I teach large classes of students at Berkeley.”

  The police exchanged looks. “India and Africa. What next?” Spain was next, because Maria Delores had a passport in the main house, in front of our studios. One of the police officers escorted her to the house. “It’s the Americana’s fault!” she yelled. I wondered if she might be vaguely connected to this horror show. I’m sure the police did, too, as she rummaged around her disorganized purse, trying to find her passport.

  I decided it might not be a propitious moment to call Adrianne Koch, since she was overwhelmed by President Kennedys’ recent assassination, which she knew would change the course of history. So much had occurred since then. I began to feel faint.

  “I have to take a test tomorrow,” I protested.

  “I have to teach,” said Albert.

  “I have to play in the Berkeley Symphony,” said Kathy, her violin hanging limply by her side.

  My kitchen knife lay on the floor, near Jerry’s smaller Swiss Army knife. One of the officers picked them up with a cloth, so that they could take fingerprints.

  “Jerry was shot.” I said.

  “What’re those knives doing on the floor?”

  “We, um, Sally, um, he threatened me… for accusing him of mistreating my friend.” I motioned towards Sally, who cowered in the corner, on my bed, in a near-fetal position.

  “So you went after him with a knife?”

  “I tried to protect myself with a knife!”

  “Why are there TWO knives on the floor, young lady?”

  My mind turned to mush. I mumbled something about gutting trout, and yes, trying to protect my friend. The trout, still, were on the floor in spilled water.

  “And this guy shot him.” They turned to Albert.

  “I don’t own a gun, much less know how to shoot one! I’m an English professor!” He hesitated. “And that guy was an abuser!”

  I looked at Albert in surprise. He’d never called Jerry an abuser, although he hit and tormented Sally constantly. Albert heard it all, because he lived directly above them and noise came through the floorboards. But he’d never said anything before.

  “Yeah, sure. Okay, Buddy. We’re going to get a search warrant to look for the gun. All these studios, or whatever they are, will be thoroughly searched.”

  “Now if you’ll all kindly come to the police station for fingerprinting.”

  Albert, Kathy, Sally, Maria Dolores, and I stared at them as if they’d asked us to fly to Mars. Then, we followed them to the police car. We had very few options at this point. Sally blubbered about her parents finding out about her and Jerry; we hushed her.

  By midnight, the police were interrogating us at the station. It was a stuffy room with a sturdy wooden desk for the sergeant and less-sturdy chairs for potential inmates. Once again, Clark Kerr had to identify Albert as a member of the Berkeley faculty. Albert kept checking his watch. “I’ve got to teach two large English classes tomorrow…”

  The sergeant gave Albert a baleful stare and put an ink pad in front of him. “Your fingerprints, please.”

  Albert pressed his thumb into the pad. The sergeant removed it.

  “What about the rest?” he asked.

  “They’re not suspects,” drawled the sergeant. A couple of police officers smiled.

  “Why is Albert a suspect?” I asked.

  “He was at the scene of the crime,” said one of the police officers.

  “We were at the scene of the crime. Albert heard the gunshot and rushed downstairs to see what had happened.”

  The atmosphere grew thicker, the lights seemed brighter, and the glare made me feel faint. The officers jostled one another. Albert gave me a look of admiration.

  “Okay. Book her.”

  They took my fingerprints and eventually Sally’s and Maria Dolores’, over her shrill protests about being Spanish and exempt. Nothing made much sense.

  Sally bawled her head off and kept asking about Jerry, who was at Crowell Hospital in the Intensive Care Unit. Hell descended on us, but there was no gun; nothing except for a kitchen knife and a Swiss Army knife. We’d all heard a single gunshot. Albert had seen a stocky man of average height run down the brick alleyway.

  “He was white,” he’d added. The police gave him a suspicious look. Albert asked if he could use a phone.

  “That won’t be necessary. We have all the evidence necessary for the moment. One of your neighbors did say they saw a stocky white man get into a sports car and pull away at about the time of the shooting.”

  “Please, Officer, I have a test tomorrow,” I said.

  The police let us go home. No conga line. No bubbly. Just home, to a warm bed, and we were grateful for it; at least I was.

  “I have to keep a clear head for my exams,” I said to Albert.

  “Alessandro phoned. Alexia had another miscarriage. The deal’s off.”

>   “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.” We held hands in the backseat of the patrol car, next to Sally. Kathy rode in the front seat.

  “Who would shoot Jerry?” I mumbled, numbed to the core of my being.

  “Who would shoot John Kennedy?” responded Albert.

  We exchanged looks of commiseration. “I have something to tell you,” whispered Albert. “After your test is over.” He kissed me on the cheek. I kissed him back.

  We got out of the patrol car. I walked hand-in-hand with Albert. Sally walked with Maria Dolores.

  “I have to see Jerry,” she said.

  My life had changed, and so had hers, I suspected.

  “Why don’t you call the hospital? We all need to go to bed so we can function tomorrow,” I said.

  Sally hung her head, her bangs in her eyes. “Okay.”

  She walked into Jerry’s apartment. Maria Dolores went into the front house. Albert and I stayed in the hallway, stunned by the turn of events. Slowly, we climbed the steps to his studio and breathed a bit more freely.

  “You stood up for me,” he said.

  I kissed him. We embraced for a long time. I felt the tension flow out of my body.

  “You’d do the same for me.”

  “Do you want to spend the night in my little den of inequity?” His voice took on a lighter, more Albert-like tone.

  “Tomorrow night. I’ve got an exam tomorrow. You know how important exams are.” I smiled into his warm face.

  “Until tomorrow night.”

  We kissed.

  “I’ve got something to ask you.”

  “Do I prefer Barbara Streisand to Billy Holiday?” I quipped.

  He laughed and kissed me again. “Will you marry me?” He got down on his knee and looked at me like he would die if I said no. Marriage was the furthest thing from my mind, but I was moved. I kissed him and smiled.

  “Albert!” I giggled. “You’re so impulsive! I hadn’t thought about such a thing as marriage. But, anything can happen when people love each other.” I stared at his earnest face, his eyes penetrating mine. I couldn’t help but think of my mother’s words… ‘No one will love you.’

  “What about my…?” I faltered, hesitated. I couldn’t say ‘my mother.’ She’d been so horrid to him.