by Oakley Hall
“A friend of mine has to have an abortion,” she said in a little burst. “I thought you might know of someone—down there.”
I managed to say I’d ask around, very easy, although something swelled up in my chest to suffocate me, because sure as anything she was talking about her own self and Johnny Pierce.
So she’d had her reasons for going out with me, who had a job south of Broadway in San Diego.
“Could you find out about some doctor who does that? It’s for a friend of mine.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thanks,” she said, and opened the car door. She was hastening up the steps to the front door before I could get out to accompany her.
I waited until I saw the light come on in a second-story window, and then I started Ol Paint and drove home to my rented room in Normal Heights.
In the lighted window of the corner drugstore, as I turned into Meade Street, I could see the newspaper headlines: ROMMEL ESCAPES DESERT TRAP and MANPOWER GOAL 4 MILLION.
Chapter 2
1
Next morning, first thing, I went to see my grandmother. She lived in a white clapboard bungalow on Albatross Street in a neighborhood called Hillcrest, closer to downtown San Diego than Mission Hills, smaller houses, older cars along the curbs. I parked Ol Paint and trotted up the twenty-two steps. White wooden columns supported the roof of the little veranda, where two wicker chairs faced the street behind baskets of ferns. It seemed to me now that I could have been happy living here with my grandmother during my high school years if I hadn’t been so intent on being the Dogfaced Boy—which was what Richie had called me because of some long-suffering attitude of misery and loss.
Grandma Payton met me at the door, throwing up her arms in dramatic surprise like a Chinese happy god, as though my arrival were a wonder. She wore a shapeless flowered print dress, gray lisle stockings, and squashed-looking bedroom slippers. With her white hair stacked into a bun and rimless glasses on her nose, she resembled a cartoon grandmother.
When I embraced her, the smell of potpourri brought a rush of emotions. She directed me to the easy chair with its antimacassars and the scratchiness familiar to my bare elbows. She stood over me, hands clasped to her bosom, beaming. I wondered if Richie had been to see her.
“Shall I make a pot of tea, dear?”
“Great!”
She bustled into the kitchen while I sprawled in the chair with the pleasant guilt of being waited on. Over the fireplace was a murky painting of brown trees, an amber pond, and two brown and white deer, one drinking, one looking up startled. The glass-fronted bookcase was jammed with books in sets and single volumes: Kipling, Mark Twain, Richard Harding Davis, the American Winston Churchill, Beau Geste and Beau Sabreur, Alexandre Dumas, E. P. Roe, the Waverley novels.
On a card table beneath a floor lamp were my grandmother’s plans for the braces that would save parachutists from breaking their legs, a neatly drawn and lettered arrangement of springs, clamps, and boots. I was ashamed of having made fun to fraternity brothers of my grandmother’s contribution to the war effort.
When I left she would always tuck a dollar bill into my shirt pocket, which she referred to as “a picture of our first president”—a tip for coming by, like tips I sometimes received on my delivery route for Perry’s Fine Foods. I would accept it with weak protests and guilt, for she lived on a pension.
“It was so nice seeing Richard!” she said, returning with a tray holding cups, saucers, a sugar bowl, a creamer, and a teapot. “He brought that pretty young lady with him. They only stayed a minute! It does seem, with the war, that time isn’t what it used to be!”
“Don’t I know it!”
“And how is Eddie?” She had always been fond of my father.
“I’m going over there later.”
She poured the tea and settled into the chair facing me. Her husband had died in the Philippines, and she had sold the Payton farm in Indiana and brought my mother and Uncle Faye to San Diego, where my mother married a construction man named Edmund Daltrey.
From the stories she loved to tell, I was as familiar with the Richmond of her youth as I was with the San Diego of my own.
I took a deep breath and said, “Did girls who weren’t married get pregnant in Richmond?”
She looked startled. “Why, yes, dear, of course they did.”
“What did they do?”
“Why, sometimes there was a hurried wedding, and sometimes the young lady went to visit relatives in another part of the state.” She gazed at me solemnly over her glasses.
“Did they have abortions?”
“Oh, dear, sometimes they would try to do that themselves, and terrible things would happen. I remember—” But she stopped herself there.
“It’s a friend of mine’s girlfriend,” I said quickly. “I’m supposed to help find a doctor. I wonder if you could ask Dr. Bell what this girl should do.”
Dr. Bell was a jaunty old fellow with yellowing white hair, a false-teeth smile, and lots of jokes. He couldn’t drive anymore, so Grandma Payton would take him for rides in her chevy.
I knew I shouldn’t have asked it when her face turned pink.
“I just can’t do that, dear! I know he feels very strongly about the kind of doctors who do that.”
“Sure. Okay. Sorry.”
She sighed and said, “Faye and Ellen were so welcome when I found I was going to have them. And Ellen so much wanted you and Richard. But I don’t think parents should have babies unless they are prepared to just love them.”
Richie, as always, would know what to do, but I’d thought Dr. Bell might be a possibility.
Something had reminded my grandmother of her husband. “I wonder what you would have thought of Aaron, dear,” she said. “He was tall, like you and Richard, but he was so impatient. Anxious to get on with things. There were so few careers for young men in those days, and he just didn’t like farming. He’d want the corn to come up faster. Then the war with Spain came along, and he enlisted. Those poor boys died of diseases they know how to cure now.”
“Well, you are taking care of this family’s war effort,” I said, gesturing toward the plans of her invention on the card table.
“I didn’t tell you! An officer came to look at my braces, a Captain Jenkins, a very pleasant young man! He asked for a copy. I just sent it to him yesterday.”
I gaped at her. Could the Army actually be interested? My father pulled strings to get into the Seabees while my grandmother pulled no strings at all and the Army took her invention seriously enough to ask for a copy of her plans.
“That’s terrific!”
“He said they would have to be manufactured very small and light if they were to be useful.”
She sipped her tea and remarked how much Liz Fletcher reminded her of my grandfather. “Her eyes are like his. Looking to see if something exciting isn’t happening over there. He was never satisfied. There was always some wonderful thing that was going to happen if you were just over there.”
“I’ve never heard you criticize him before, Grandma!” My throat thickened to recall that she had never criticized me, who must have been an impossible little shit in my dogfaced miseries.
“Well, he had responsibilities! He said we weighed him down so he couldn’t make something of himself. So he went to be a soldier. He thought he would be a hero, and then everybody would pay attention.”
“You think Liz is like that?”
“Richard says she wants to be a movie star.”
“She’s going to be rich. She doesn’t need to be a movie star.” But I remembered Liz’s expression, aware of Errol Flynn’s admiration aboard the Sirocco.
“I don’t think being rich is what is important, dear. I think it’s people paying attention to you.” Her china-blue eyes blinked at me over her spectacles. “I do worry about Richard’s interest in such a wealthy young lady. I don’t like to see the wife holding the reins, you see.”
I’d never heard her criticize Richie before, either. It was another jolt, like Hagen shouting “throat-cutting studio cocksucker” at him in the cabin of the Sirocco.
When I got up to leave, I told her I would mow her lawn the next time I came over.
“Oh, you’re so busy, and I like to let the men who come by for a snack mow it. It makes them feel they haven’t had to take a handout, you see.”
“Listen, Grandma, I don’t think you should be feeding those tramps. You know, they leave some mark on the house so others will know you’re an easy touch.”
Her lips tightened as she said, “Well, I am an easy touch! This country has been just terrible to those men. They are veterans! They served their country, but their country will not serve them!”
My grandmother was more involved with social issues than my boss at the brand, who liked to pat himself on the back for his sympathies and compassions.
When I went back down the steps to Ol Paint, I turned to survey the front of the house. Beneath an evergreen bush at the corner of the steep lawn were two bricks, one stacked crosswise on top of the other. I separated them before I got in the car to head for Mission Beach for lunch with my father, my stepmother, and my brother.
I drove out through Mission Hills and past Bonny’s house on the way. The Boningtons’ Packard was in the driveway, the chrome bumper and fittings gleaming in the sun.
2
I felt the slam of the surf on Mission Beach through the soles of my shoes as I stood on the porch of my father and Weezie’s beach bungalow. Framed in the window beside the door was the big console radio with the black ceramic panther prowling on top. My father spent the war listening to the news on the radio.
Stretching a little I could see Richie, in faded blue trunks, sprawled in the wing chair with his bare ankles crossed. Our father was out of sight except for a spiral of gray smoke.
I could feel resonances of the past like the vibrations of the surf on the sand.
I remembered Richie in this same room years ago, before Weezie and our father got married. Our father had moved in with her, and Richie usually stayed with them when he came down from LA. This time Weezie and our father had gone off somewhere, and Richie and I were sitting on the couch in our swimming trunks, Richie wearing his USC jock T-shirt, humming along with the music from the radio. I was fourteen.
I told Richie I was thinking of running away.
That got his attention. “What’s the matter, Brud?”
“Weezie doesn’t like me much,” I said.
“She’s been damned good to Dad!”
“Well, she can’t stand me! And Mom’s got this cruddy little place in Logan Heights.”
Once when I’d heard late-night sounds from the living room where my mother was entertaining Bill Hutchinson, who was a big shot in the Teamsters’ Union, I sneaked into the kitchenette to crouch under the breakfast table and peer into the darkness. What I could see was my mother’s electric pale flesh with Mr. Hutchinson’s big belly looming over her, the motion, and her leg stretched up as though she were trying to touch the ceiling with her toes. I could hear her murmurs, as though she were quietly drowning.
I couldn’t tell Richie that, because he took our father’s side against our mother anyway. By being up at SC on a basketball scholarship, Richie had steered clear of the wreck the other Daltreys were mashed into.
“Mom ought to get a bigger place,” Richie said.
“She hasn’t got any money at all! Dad doesn’t give her anything!”
“He hasn’t got anything to give! You know that.”
“Well, it’s the cruds,” I said. I scrubbed my hand over my eyes. “I just feel like I’m in the way all the time!” I could feel the tears dribbling from my chin.
“Let’s give this some practical thought,” my brother said. His black hair was cropped short, and his face was brown and solemn. “How about coming up to LA to stay with me?”
LA!
“Maybe Jack and I’ll take an apartment up there instead of staying in the frat house. You can stay with us! Deliver papers or something. We’ll have a real bachelor place.”
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” Richie put an arm around me, and it was as though some big warm animal were turning and stretching inside my chest.
“We’ll do it! The Daltrey boys!”
Richie kept telling me we’d do it while I cried. I knew he didn’t mean it, but that didn’t matter. At least my brother cared about me when everybody else was too busy and worried and screwed up to bother.
* * *
I rapped and opened the front door. My father rose to greet me, with his anxious, lined face, a cigaret burning between his fingers, which were yellow from smoking. He was inches shorter than Richie, who didn’t get out of the wing chair. Weezie appeared in an apron and a blue dress. Her glasses caused her brown eyes to enlarge spookily when she looked straight at you.
The routine was gone through: “Well, son…, How are you, Dad…, Hi, Weezie…,” with Richie watching, grinning, scratching his shoulder. Our father indicated the sofa, and I sat down, leaning uncomfortably forward. Weezie joined me at a one-cushion remove, bringing her bag of yarn and big needles like bayonets. She was knitting a gray sweater for our father.
Richie settled back into the best chair, stretching with his hands reached above his head. He was at ease here, where he’d always been welcome, while I had to be careful not to act like a jerk because of old wrongs.
“Now they’re going to require a license to live on the coast,” our father said, who lived only a hundred feet from the ocean. It must have been the continuation of a conversation he’d been having with Richie. “I suppose it’s necessary. Aimed at enemy aliens. I see you are going to have to register for the draft, son,” he went on, nodding to me. “Twenty to forty-four now. Just misses me!”
“You don’t have to register if you’re in an officer program.”
He cocked his head judiciously. His whole stance was one of slants: the tilt of his head; his nose, broken in some construction accident, angling to one side; his habitual posture, one hand in his pocket and a lowered shoulder in an acceptance not so much of defeat as of more bad news received.
Tully, my boss at the brand, who had been one of my mother’s boyfriends, said my father had been destroyed by the capitalist boom-and-bust economy, by which he meant the Great Depression.
I remembered the terrible months after my father lost his job: the schemes; the new hopes; the dashed hopes; the garage my father and a friend named Jake Katz had bought, which had gone broke; the quarrels with my mother; the announcement that the house would have to be sold. My father had moved in with Weezie, who had a job with the school district.
Now my father was hoping to get a commission in the Seabees.
“Your responsibility to the Navy is to make passing grades and maintain normal progress toward your degree, as I understand it,” he said to me.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about enlisting,’ I said. Why had I said that? I didn’t mean that! Jerk!
“Oh, my goodness, Payton!” Weezie exclaimed, looking over at me with her eyes swimming behind her glasses.
“You’re not serious about that, son?”
“I guess it’s better for a writer to be an enlisted man.” This was the opinion of Frank Tully, and I knew it was stupid. Why did I need to poke at my father’s obsessions? Because he was always more concerned with Richie than with me?
“Where’d you get that idiot idea, Brud?” Richie drawled. His nostrils whitened as though he were trying to keep from laughing at me. “Throat-cutting studio cocksucker,” Hagen had called him.
Our father lit another Lucky Strike, looking worried. “I can’t urge you too strongly to get that commission, son. It’s too simple to say that it is the difference between horsemen and foot soldiers, but when officers came home from France in the AEF they found positions, not jobs. They’d had experience handling men. Enlisted men came
home to jobs.”
Richie and I knew that our father had come home from France a lieutenant. He kept his gold bars in a decorative metal box that had squatted on his dresser in the house in Mission Hills, along with his service ribbons with their stars for battles—the Argonne and Belleau Wood. Maybe they had been chucked by now, along with the German helmet with the bullet hole in the exact center of the forehead and its acrid, medicinal smell, which had been stored in the hall closet. In Edmund Daltrey’s long retreat from a position of Mission Hills affluence, so many of his possessions had been discarded or left behind.
“You went in a buck private, though, Dad,” I said.
“I didn’t have a college education like you and Rich. I was just a kid out of high school. Who wanted to help make the world safe for democracy.” He chuckled.
I saw that he was preparing for a speech, tapping the ash from his cigaret, pushing the sleeves up on his thick, pale arms, leaning forward.
“The way this country works—every family sees its children have a better chance in the world. Everyone came over from some old country sometime, and they knew it was their duty to see their kids had a better chance than they had. Of course it’s fine to be a writer,” he said, head tilted at me. “It’s an ability I never had. But you have to be able to make a living when times get tough! It was the people in the professions who were able to ride out the Depression.”
Wasn’t writing novels a profession? Didn’t Raymond Chandler make a living? Didn’t Hemingway? I said, “Well, Richie’s got a good profession while there’s a war on. And when he marries the richest girl in Point Loma he ought to be okay if times get tough.”
“Go fry your head,” Richie said, stretching again.
Our father was not to be deflected. “I would certainly take some courses at State that would help me in a profession like accounting, son.”
He’d been impressed by an A in algebra in high school. Maybe I’d bragged about it, trying to make him proud of me.
Weezie glanced over at me again, with her enlarged eyes, keeping out of this father-and-son advice and evasion. She was a Jap-hater, a subject she and I had tangled on. Long before the war she had prophesied that the scrap metal shipped to Japan would be returned in the form of shells and bombs. I hated the fact that she had been right.
