Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  Bonny said, “Their lives are over. Their son doesn’t love them anymore. They might as well be dead.”

  I drove on up Presidio Drive past the Daltrey house above its slant of lawn. A kid’s tricycle was perched on the high porch under the porchlight.

  “Daddy always let Charley skipper the Sun Bear,” Bonny went on. “But I’m as good a sailor as he is! He’s really careless sometimes, and I’m just not. I’m good in school, and I’m not lazy, and I’m not lightweight. I wish I could go to med school, but it’s really hard for girls.”

  I’d never heard her say that before.

  “How did Charley ever get up the nerve to write that letter? That big girl must’ve made him do it. He was never going to be what Mother and Daddy wanted him to be. They keep blaming themselves. They go over it and over it. And it is their fault! They pushed him into the Coast Guard so he’d be safe. So he got shipped out to Australia and met this girl. They were always maneuvering him.”

  “Manipulating,” I said. “Where do you want to eat?”

  “I just had to get out of that morgue.” We drove along Fort Stockton Drive under the streetlights that stained her face with light like milk.

  In a back booth at Brady’s, she sat gazing at her hamburger as though she didn’t know what it was. She looked prim and pretty in her turquoise sweater that made the blue of her eyes leap out of her face when she glanced up.

  “Daddy doesn’t really care about his patients,” she said. “He just wants to make money so we can live in Mission Hills and belong to the Yacht Club. I wouldn’t be that kind of doctor.”

  I felt a chill of unease. I took a bite of my sandwich and mopped my lips with a paper napkin.

  “In China the peasants drown the baby girls because only boys are important,” Bonny observed.

  “Aren’t you going to eat your hamburger?”

  She looked down and nibbled a pickle round. “It’s so unfair,” she said.

  “‘Had I been born crested, not cloven, my lords, you would not treat me so,’” I said.

  Bonny stared at me with her mouth open.

  “That’s Queen Elizabeth talking to her advisers.”

  She laughed one loud “Ha!” and slapped her hand over her mouth.

  I found myself telling her about Dessy. “Her mother died on her fifth birthday, and her father died in an accident. Her stepmother didn’t like her, so she went to San Francisco to work in an office. She had to go to bed with her bosses to keep her job. So she got to be a prostitute. Tully says every year about three whores jump out the windows of that hotel down by the printshop.”

  “Oh, God!” Bonny whispered.

  “I think my mother had to go to bed with her boss, too.”

  Bonny covered her face with her hands. “I only think about myself!” she said through her hands. “Other people have real trouble— But you know what it’s like. When your parents are supposed to love you and they just don’t.”

  “I love you,” I said, and meant it.

  She let her hands slip down her face. “It’s all such a terrible sham!” she said. “Girls’re supposed to be virgins. So you can marry the right person and live in some Mission Hills. I mean, if people knew you were used goods, or pregnant, your life would be over! But, you know, my body is ready to have babies. It tells me so! It’s all such a big fake! I mean, I can tell that you want to do it with me, and I want to do it, too. That night coming back from LA, I wanted to, too. But we have to play this stupid game! I hate this stupid game!” she said, rising. She said in a low voice, “Let’s go to a motel and do it. I’ll get pregnant and we’ll have to get married and live in some stupid Army camp somewhere.”

  “I’m Navy,” I said.

  We went to see Wild Fire at the Pantages Theater. It was a film about two men in love with the same woman, one of them a forester/firefighter and the other a writer who banged away at his typewriter a lot. It was a good film, with John Garfield, Tyrone Power, and Susan Hayward, and in the credits the screenplay was by Esther Carnes.

  Parked on Point Loma looking at the moon over the Bay, I tried to joke Bonny out of her angry mood. “I just wish I knew what I am!” she said at one point. I took her home early.

  7

  I had been home about fifteen minutes when my mother phoned to say that my grandmother had had a stroke and was in the hospital. I got to Mercy Hospital in a hurry, where Bonny worked as a nurse’s aide two nights a week.

  My mother strode toward me in the waiting room, heels cracking on the tiles like revolver shots. She wore a navy blue suit and had her purse clasped in the crook of her arm like a football. She looked haggard.

  “My poor mom!” she said, embracing me. She reeked of Tabu.

  “What happened?”

  “Her right side is paralyzed, and she can only make some sounds. She managed to get the phone off the hook and dial my number. She said, ‘Pet—Pet—Pet—’ That’s what she called me when I was little. What if I hadn’t been home?”

  “Is she going to die?”

  “I don’t know, darling. Oh, I suppose she is!”

  My eyes were leaking as soon as I got into the hospital room, where Grandma Payton looked like an ancient doll in her high white bed, white hair done in plaits with blue ribbons.

  She was sweet-faced and unmoving, with her powdery cheeks, one side smiling, the other blank. When I saw the bandage on her temple, and some hair shaved for the adhesive tape, the backs of my legs crawled. The scene came to me, Grandma offering the tramp a plate with a sandwich on it at the back door, and the guy knocking her down and coming in to grab her purse—

  My mother plumped down in the chair beside the bed, clutching my grandmother’s hand. “How are you doing, Mom?”

  I leaned on the chair back, feeling big and awkward.

  My mother passed my grandmother’s hand to me as though it was a thing. It gripped my hand with a queer soft strength.

  My voice sounded too loud. “Hi, Grandma!”

  Her bright left eye was fixed on my face. My mother burrowed in her purse to produce a handkerchief with which to dab at her eyes. I fixed on the plaster and the bandage on my grandmother’s head. I had warned her not to give handouts to tramps.

  “I hoped you’d tell me a John Burgess story,” I said.

  “What’s that?” my mother said, swinging around.

  “He was a guy that lived in Richmond when Grandma was a girl.”

  “John Burgess! So you’ve been telling Buddy John Burgess stories, Mom.”

  The plump soft hand squeezed mine, half my grandmother’s face smiling, the other half dead and white. Shit, my throat had closed up. I was going to sob!

  My mother had to leave, and I stood with her a minute outside the door of the hospital room.

  “What happened to her head?”

  “I suppose she hit it when she fell.”

  “Listen, maybe some tramp beat up on her and robbed her. She was always feeding the tramps.” I sounded like my father ranting against Commies and Jews.

  She looked surprised. The possibility, maybe the surety, kept nagging at me when I went back inside and settled into the chair beside the bed, holding my grandmother’s hand. Some tramp who knew her for a soft touch because of the stacked-bricks sign left at her house, some IWW worker, someone inside Social Reality, someone dark-faced and foreign and poor, and she with her defenses turned the wrong way like the big guns at Singapore.

  “I’ll tell you a John Burgess story,” I said, and told her the story I was working on. “He has to go to Manzanar to talk to this old Japanese woman that used to work cleaning house for this Hollywood producer. He’s a guy who’s worked with child stars, and he’s really evil. He’s called the Doctor. The Japanese woman is really afraid to tell John Burgess anything. Then, when John Burgess leaves, this big black car trails him, and they stop him, but he keeps a revolver in a clip behind the glove compartment of his car. There’s this tough-talking dwarf in the car, and a big black-guy chauffeur. And t
he dwarf says to lay off if he knows what’s good for him. And he asks if the dwarf works for the Doctor, and the dwarf says, yes, he works for Doctor Death.”

  I flinched when I said that, but the hand squeezed mine and I rushed on. “The dwarf says he can get John’s leg broken for two hundred dollars, and John says—”

  Just then the nurse came in to say it was time for Mrs. Payton’s medication and rest.

  I rose and bent to kiss my grandmother good night. Past a blur of tearing in her open eye, I saw terror shrill as a scream. I embraced her unresponding bulk and felt her good hand gently patting, patting, comforting me.

  8

  At school I saw Liz crossing the Quad and caught up with her on an intersecting path. I told her my grandmother had had a stroke.

  “That sweet old lady!” Who didn’t like Liz because her dissatisfied eyes reminded her of her husband’s, because she thought Liz held the reins over Richie.

  Heading for the Caff, Liz walked close beside me in that way she had, head down, books and binder clutched to her chest, steps matched to mine. Always she seemed to walk or stand an inch closer than another might do. See how often she touches you, Herb Brownell had said.

  We settled at a table with mugs of coffee. Liz stirred sugar into hers. Her loosened hair showed off her cheekbones. She could look like a movie star, all right.

  Emmett Buckley, Mark Davis, and Jimbo Martin sat at a table over by the windows. Buck glanced toward me and inclined his nose away. Fuck you! There were just too many things besides the tong for me to handle just now.

  “Listen, Liz, what do you know about that girl who drowned herself?”

  The dark discs of her eyes fixed on mine. Her face looked suddenly misshapen.

  “We’re rehearsing for the Senior Project!” she said. “I just want to dance!” she said petulantly. “I don’t want to think about Val Ferris!” She wanted to be a star, whom people paid attention to, and Richie was supposed to help her with his connections in the industry. I remembered her body on the beach, not much on top, not even as much as Bonny had, but those long smooth legs you couldn’t keep your eyes away from. She’d had Band-Aids on her toes from ballet.

  My fraternity brothers were watching us. Bonny thought I was in love with Liz.

  She rose and came around the table to press her lips to my forehead. “You’re not supposed to worry me about anything. Richie said.”

  Buck Buckley was watching, one eyebrow raised, the three of them discussing us as Liz left the Caff. Fuck them.

  9

  It was a bad, no-concentration afternoon on the Mission Hills route. I mixed up two orders and had to go back and exchange them. I had changed my routing so the Emmetts were next to last, and everything was going badly today.

  I cursed at Bitsy, kicking sideways as I guided two heavy Perry’s boxes across the service yard. The little dog snarled with his usual nastiness.

  I leaned the boxes against the door frame, rapped once, then opened the door and carried my load inside.

  Mrs. Sims was on the phone, glowering at me. She held out the phone. “Here’s your boss.”

  I set the boxes down. “What’s the trouble?” Lois’s cool voice inquired in my ear.

  “I just got here,” I panted.

  “Late again!” Mrs. Sims said.

  “She says I’m late,” I told Lois. I cocked my wrist to look at my watch; almost four-thirty.

  “You’ll have to take the Emmetts earlier in your route,” Lois said, and hung up.

  “What’s she say?” Mrs. Sims demanded, facing me with her fists on her hips like the Powerful Katrinka.

  “Said I’d better take you earlier on my route.”

  “I want those groceries here by two thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what, boy?”

  “Okay you want your groceries by two thirty.”

  “You see that they are here then, hear?”

  I didn’t trust myself to respond, unloading onto the counter, one box emptied, and the bottom one up, meat packets in the refrigerator. I took up the boxes and started out. I slammed the door.

  I kicked my way across the service yard, threatening Bitsy with the boxes. Outside the gate I looked up at the sign: SERVICE. The wealthy and powerful abusing those who had been less aggressive in primary accumulation.

  * * *

  Lois pointed her pencil at me. “Don’t you slam the door on Mrs. Sims! I know she’s a dragon, but Mrs. Emmett will go straight to Mr. Perry!”

  * * *

  The evening papers were on the stands when I left Perry’s, banner headlines: BIG BATTLE LOOMS IN PACIFIC. I hurried up the hill to where I’d parked Ol Paint; it seemed that I was always on the run. It was as though I were holding on to some gigantic invisible dirigible that would jerk me off the ground at any moment.

  Chapter 10

  1

  Tex had been fired, and I was spending more time ministering to Charlotte’s tempers.

  I was sitting on the ledge of the pit extracting torn-up newsprint from the rollers when I looked up to see Calvin standing just inside the pressroom door. He wore his hat tipped over one eye, and a cheesy loafer jacket.

  “Hi, there, child!”

  I climbed out of the pit. “How’re things?”

  He rolled his hands out in a massive shoulder shrug. “Got the hump just now,” he said. “How about coming out for a Cuba libre?”

  “How about in half an hour? I’ve got to clean up here first.”

  “See you down at the Fremont.” The black pupils of his eyes danced away from meeting mine directly.

  “How’re your girls?”

  “What girls is that?” Calvin said. He jacked up his pants with his wrists and high-stepped out.

  When I had cleaned up Charlotte’s mess, scrubbed my hands and face in the washroom, and stepped out of my overalls, I went into the office. Tully sat with his suede shoes propped on the wastebasket, reading the paper: CORAL SEA BATTLE CALLED TURNING POINT IN PACIFIC. If you could believe the papers, we had won this one, saving Australia and Charley Bonington. But I would never forget the original announcement of the number of men captured on Bataan, and the back-pages revision of that number.

  I told Tully I was headed out for a drink with Calvin King.

  “Did I detect a cloud over the glass of fashion?” Tully said, without looking up from his reading.

  * * *

  I halted to case the occupants of the Fremont Bar before entering, like Natty Bumppo eagle-eyeing for hostiles. Calvin was seated at the end of the bar, twenty feet from a trio of Marines. It was early yet, or the swabbies would’ve spilled out onto 3rd Street.

  “How you doin, child? Gettin lots?”

  “About the same,” I said. One of the Marines scowled down at me. The bartender produced my Cuba libre.

  “What did you mean, what girls?” I asked.

  Calvin smoothed his hair with a tan hand. “All finished with that,” he said. “Bad luck when one of your ladies goes out the window. G-men on my trail, too,” he said. “Lookin for Calvin King. Just now I’m C. R. Goodrich.”

  “The draft?”

  He made a motion of slitting his throat. “I’m in, child. Enlisted. Takin the train to Camp Roberts tomorrow.”

  It seemed that Calvin’s mooring rope had snatched him off the ground before my own had. “Why the Army?” I asked.

  “I don’t like swabbies, and gyrenes don’t like colored.”

  I thought of the humiliations awaiting the King of Kings. I wondered if this was some kind of memorial to Dessy.

  I said I was sorry for what I’d said when Dessy died.

  “Never mind it, child,” he said, with his face turned away.

  “Good luck in the service,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Calvin said. We sipped our Cuba libres, not quite knowing how to say good-bye, when he was going into the Army and I remained a slacker.

  2

  My grandmother’s good eye was fixed on me fondl
y as I sat beside her bedside, holding her hand. The doctor had not given much hope for her recovery. If she got better, she would get better; if not, not. Bonny had phoned to say she had looked in on her last night and had the same prognosis from the nurse.

  I was feeling sympathy for Mrs. B. in her grief over her wayward son, and for my father waiting for his commission from the Seabees that never came through. And my grandmother waiting for what she was waiting for.

  The bandage on her temple had been replaced by a smaller rectangle of adhesive. My mother had gone out to her house in Hillcrest and found her purse with some money in it, no signs of robbery. I was even going to have to forgive the tramps I had maligned.

  Gripping the soft hand, I told my grandmother about the papers I had written for Mr. Chapman, Henry James last semester, and Mark Twain this. When I asked if she had read The Portrait of a Lady, there was a pressure from her hand. The bright eye was fixed on me.

  “Remember what that first scene shows about Isabel Archer? It’s the stuff a writer has to know how to do. This young woman in black comes out of the house, to where everybody’s hanging around in the garden. Ralph Touchett’s little dog barks at her until she snatches him up and holds him close to her face. That tells us a lot! She’s impulsive, she’s brave, she’s not afraid of being bitten. That’s what attracts Ralph Touchett to her! But she’s too trusting, she can get hurt.”

  A tear ran down her pale cheek, and I blotted it with a Kleenex from the bedside stand.

  “And remember in Huckleberry Finn when Huck and Jim have gone down the river together on the raft? They’re friends, but Jim’s an escaped slave, and it’s against the law to help a slave escape. They are somebody’s property. It’s stealing! To be an abolitionist then was like being a Commie now. It’s a crime and a sin for Huck to help Jim, but he is getting human feelings about somebody with different-colored skin. So he decides it’s right to help Jim, and he says, ‘All right, I’ll go to hell then!’”

  I went back to my John Burgess story, trying to push the plot along to entertain my grandmother in her hospital bed, and I could do it, unraveling it at the same time that I was patching it together, winging it.