Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  Pogey and Jimbo cut me, though Pogey rolled his eyes.

  I dropped by Mr. Chapman’s office to be exhorted on the importance of reading important literature and trying to write it. He seemed to think, like Tully, that I should be getting into the service so I could write a novel about love and war.

  * * *

  I waited for Liz coming across the Quad from her ten o’clock. She looked wonderful in pink, her hair done up in a scarf.

  “Richie phoned from San Francisco,” she said, her big dark eyes fixed on my face. She laid her hand on my chest, like Lois. Her perfume reminded me of Dessy. “He must be on his way to the fleet. He couldn’t say it right out.”

  The June wedding was screwed. Why was the wedding so important to me? Because there ought to be at least one happy ending, hero and heroine in one another’s arms as the music came up.

  I had begun reading The Pisan Manual again: “Know how to be all things to all men. A wise Proteus, he, who is learned with the learned, and with the pious, pious. It is the great way of winning all; for to be like is to be liked.” Was that the way Richie regulated his life, in LA one way, in San Diego another, in Pensacola still another, so that everyone liked him?

  Liz stood close to me, as though she was near-sighted.

  “He’ll be all right!” I said. How could Richie not be all right? But it appeared that another big naval battle was shaping up, and that was why he had been ordered to the fleet. Something hung in the air like static electricity that made my hair prickle. Richie had gone to the fleet with his slow TBF armed with a torpedo that only went off half the time.

  “Come over Sunday, Payton,” Liz said. “Please! We have to talk.” She stared at me, lips parted, as though she were breathing hard. “I’m scared!” she said.

  8

  The Nazis were winning the war in Russia, and the Japanese claimed that the Battle of the Coral Sea had been their victory. Third Street was quiet, sailors and Marines sticking close to their bases, or being shipped out like Richie! Rumors congealed in the winds off the Pacific. Pearl Harbor had been bombed again, the bombing hushed up. Seattle had been bombed. The Japs were invading the Aleutian Islands. An impatient, jagged waiting-to-hear overloaded the air.

  Something big was happening right now.

  Out of a job at Perry’s, I spent most afternoons at the brand, helping with the job printing. Tully had been unable to hire a printer to replace Tex. I tended Charlotte in my stiff-with-grease-and-ink overalls. It was as though my encounter with Lois had made me more comfortable with Charlotte, or the big old press easier with me. I had learned, if not how to please her, how not to displease her.

  When I phoned Bonny from the office, she answered on the second ring. When I said, “Bonny—” she hung up.

  9

  On my way out to Mission Beach on Friday night, I drove along Coast Highway to see the new barrage balloons. The squashed-looking gray toys floated apparently unattached around the sawtoothed roof of the Convair plant, and Lindbergh Field. I supposed they implied that aeriel bombardment was to be expected.

  My father’s posture was that nothing unpleasant had happened between us. He asked if I would like a beer. I asked for a Coke instead.

  “That’s great about your commission, Dad!”

  “Jock Mahoney says it’s ninety-eight percent sure,” he said, rubbing his big hands together. “It has been a long time coming!”

  “They are a fine outfit!”

  He was frowning as at a distant memory. “Heard your boss had a little go-round with Post Five.”

  “Well, you warned me.” I didn’t need to tell him that one of my mother’s old boyfriends, the labor goon, had fixed the picket line.

  “Bob Quinn is one of those fellows. His son was in the New Mexico National Guard that went to the Philippines a year or so ago.”

  Bataan!

  “Bob hasn’t heard anything since the surrender,” my father said. But he wasn’t really concerned about Bob Quinn’s son, either. “Say, Richie sure doesn’t like those torpedo bombers much.”

  “Too slow.”

  My father hadn’t heard from Liz that Richie had phoned from San Francisco on his way out to the fleet, and I didn’t tell him that. As I hadn’t told Liz of my conversation with Hagen.

  I didn’t bring up losing my girlfriend, my job at Perry’s, and my room at the Buttons house.

  At dinner Weezie spoke of the son of a friend, seventeen years old, who had enlisted in the Marines.

  I went home early, where I told Mr. and Mrs. Button that I was looking for a new place but hadn’t found anything yet.

  10

  Liz lay in a canvas chaise beneath a sun umbrella in her backyard, a psych text and her gray binder on the low table beside her. She was bare-legged, wearing a long-sleeved blouse, her hair tucked back with a silver clasp.

  Now I had to tell her of my conversation with Pancho Hagen, didn’t I?

  “I ran into Hagen out at the Yacht Club,” I said. “He and Val Ferris were friends when they were kids, up in the Valley.”

  Liz squeezed her eyes closed and drew one of her legs up. She didn’t say anything.

  “He blames Richie for what happened to her.”

  “She thought Richie could tell David Lubin what to do.” Liz said with her eyes closed. “Nobody told David Lubin what to do! He was dying. He did die! I don’t see how she could think Richie could do anything for her.”

  I watched the rise and fall of her small bosom. Just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl as a poor one, Richie had said. I found myself pitying Val Ferris, who had not been rich, who was from Hanford, who lived inside Social Reality where Elizabeth Fletcher and Richie Daltrey had never lived. Or maybe Richie did now, out with the fleet.

  “She’d been David Lubin’s mistress!” Liz said.

  And she’d been Richie’s mistress before that. I cleared my throat and said, “She’d been Richie’s LA girlfriend.”

  “He introduced them.”

  I gazed out at the blue sparkle of the Bay, with the gray toy balloons rising around it. Liz laid a hand on my knee.

  “She was crazy!” she said. “Richie said she’d taken pills a couple of times, but she always let someone know in time to get pumped out. No one has to feel responsible for a crazy person!”

  She craned her neck to look past me, and I turned to see Captain Fletcher coming around the corner of his house wearing his uniform with its gold braid and his white-crowned cap. He walked stiffly, as though he had a bad back, and he carried a folded newspaper.

  I found myself rising to attention. He nodded to me. Frowning down at Liz, he looked as though he were sucking in his gut.

  “There’s been a naval action near Midway Island,” he announced. “It appears that a Jap carrier and a battleship have been sunk.”

  Haruna class?

  “Richie’s in it!” Liz said.

  Her father showed us the headlines:

  JAPANESE NAVAL FORCE FLEEING PEARL HARBOR AVENGED, SAYS NIMITZ

  HAWAII INVASION THREAT SMASHED

  Good news!

  Chapter 11

  1

  Amy Perrine’s voice on the phone was so small I could hardly make out the words:

  “Will called me. A friend of his phoned him from Bremerton. He said Richie’s in a torpedo plane squadron in the Fifth Fleet. Payton, he said the torpedo planes are all missing in action.”

  When she hung up, I went back to my room to sit on the unmade bed staring at my typewriter. I ought to be doing something. I ought to phone my father. And Liz! Of course fliers were shot down. That was what was so good about Naval Air. When they went down at sea, they floated in rubber rafts until the PB2Ys spotted them and picked them up.

  I couldn’t phone my father with information some guy in Bremerton had phoned to Will Gates, who had phoned Amy Perrine, who had phoned me. A TBF down in the Pacific Ocean, Richie on his life raft—Missing in action wasn’t dead!

  I went back into the Buttons�
� living room to sit on the arm of the sofa and dial Liz’s number.

  Her father’s voice answered on the first ring. When I asked for Liz he said, “Lizzy is not here just now. Who is calling, please?”

  I hung up as though the receiver had burned my hand. Back in my room I sat on the bed again. I had promised Mrs. Button I would be out by the fifteenth. I straightened the covers on the bed, kicked the pile of laundry into the corner, and straightened the few pages of manuscript beside the typewriter. I sat down at the table with my French vocabulary.

  Maybe my father could find out about Richie through Captain Mahoney.

  I gave up trying to study and left the house just as a gray Navy sedan swung around the corner and pulled up behind Ol Paint. A chauffeur wearing a sailor cap sat at the wheel. Captain Fletcher piled out of the rear door, grim-faced.

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  He thrust his face at me. The tough-looking sailor watched from the front seat. How did Captain Fletcher know where I lived? Intelligence!

  “It was you who phoned just now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why did you hang up like that?”

  He pressed so close to me that I had to step back. “I didn’t like the way you sounded,” I said.

  It was his turn to back off. “My daughter has learned that your brother is missing in action. She is very disturbed. I want to know where to find her.”

  I just shook my head, squinting up at the sun trying to break through the high fog; the same sky that hung over Richie on his raft.

  This time I held my ground when Captain Fletcher pressed close to me, like Liz coming too close. Richie had said he was an SOB.

  “Lizzy is unbalanced, you know,” Captain Fletcher said, confiding suddenly. Everybody was unbalanced, crazy: Liz, Mrs. Malcolm, dead Dessy and dead Val Ferris.

  “I am afraid this news has thrown her completely. She has disappeared. I am concerned that she will harm herself!”

  I shook my head. What about my brother?

  “She has had a nervous breakdown, you know. She may be having one again. Does the term ‘manic-depressive’ mean anything to you, young man?”

  I knew who was unbalanced here.

  “There is a real possibility that she will come to physical harm,” Captain Fletcher said. “Her friends must help me see that she does not have to be put away.”

  I was to phone him if I heard anything from Liz.

  When the Navy sedan had disappeared up Meade Street, I went back inside. Mrs. Button intercepted me in the living room. She wore her flowered dress and her big hat for shopping at the A&P. Her plain, pink, big-toothed face was anxious.

  “Is something wrong, Payton?”

  “My brother’s missing in action.”

  She goggled dramatically.

  “Got to phone—” I said, escaping. I sat on the arm of the sofa, gripping the hard black shaft of the phone.

  My father was at Seabee headquarters, Weezie said.

  “Listen, Weezie, it looks like Richie’s missing in action. Maybe you’d better try to get word to Dad. Maybe Captain Mahoney can find out something.”

  “Oh, God!” Weezie said.

  I had no sooner hung up than the phone rang, seeming to jump in my hand. It was Liz’s careful, uninflected lisp. She sounded saner than anyone else I had talked to. “Payton, he’s dead. He was in a torpedo squadron on the Yorktown, and they were all shot down.”

  You come in at two hundred feet. The closer you get the more chance the torpedo has and the less chance you have.

  “Your father said he was only missing!”

  “A friend of his phoned. They’re all dead.” It was better when her voice tore apart. Her father had said she was a manic-depressive, she’d had a nervous breakdown, her friends had to help to see she didn’t have to be put away. Captain Fletcher was out of a British mystery novel.

  “What about my father?” she said.

  “He was here! He wanted to know where you are.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t know.”

  “He killed Richie! He got him transferred to the fleet so we couldn’t get married.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me! He made me say I forgive him! When I could get away I came over here. I’m at Alice’s.”

  Richie wasn’t dead. He was floating around on his raft out in the Pacific. He’d always been lucky. I stared at my white knuckles holding the phone.

  If anything happens to me I want you to look out for her, Richie had said.

  “I have to see you,” she said in the calm voice.

  Her friend Alice Hoagland lived in East San Diego, near Lois Meador’s little house. There was a movie theater nearby, on El Cajon Boulevard. “Can you get to the Cajon Theater from where you are? About ten o’clock? I’ve got to see my father; this is going to kill him.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ll be about halfway down the aisle on the left side.”

  Indistinctly, as though she had moved away from the phone, I heard her say, “What am I going to do?”

  When I had hung up I sat with my head in my hands thinking of Richie maybe dead and my grandmother dying, Liz and her father and Bonny who had to choose between me and her mother. Liz didn’t know what she was going to do. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  Mrs. Button stood just inside the front door with her big-brimmed hat shadowing her face. “This terrible war!” she said.

  2

  My father looked trim in his Seabees uniform, starched khaki, open collar showing a V of snowy T-shirt. A lieutenant’s double silver bars gleamed on the shoulders of his shirt. His face looked old.

  “Son.”

  I started to shake hands, but he raised his arms to embrace me. I hugged my father’s starched, taut body, feeling a grimace like a vise on my face that was phony at first, and then was not. Weezie watched.

  He released me.

  He said, “I’ve been trying to telephone Elizabeth, but Captain Fletcher doesn’t know where she is.”

  I said I’d talked to Liz. “Some friend of Richie’s phoned her to tell her Richie’d been—shot down. She’s run away. She says her father got Richie transferred to the fleet so they wouldn’t get married when she graduated.”

  My father stared at me as though he couldn’t take that in. Though his face was lined and his eyes red-rimmed, his head wasn’t canted in the familiar way.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  He seemed as shocked at the idea that someone might not like his son as by the fact that Richie had been shot down. Running in on a Haruna class battleship—

  “Sit down, sit down, son.” He waved me to a chair and sank into his own beside the radio. Weezie had disappeared into the kitchen. “I doubt that Captain Fletcher could have arranged such a thing,” he said.

  “Congratulations on the bars, Dad!”

  His fingers rose to touch one of the bars, as though to reassure himself. “What a terrible price to pay,” he said.

  So he equated the granting of his commission with the loss of his commissioned son. His country had issued the silver bars of his rehabilitation, but his son had been taken in exchange.

  I bent forward to reach a hand out to him. He grabbed it as though he were drowning.

  “Does your mother know?”

  “She was out when I phoned.”

  He slumped in his chair, grasping my hand. Weezie came out carrying drinks on a tray, ice cubes tinkling. My father cleared his throat and scraped his fingers through his cropped hair. “It was for his country,” he said.

  I lurched forward to kneel before his chair, and he hugged me to him, smelling of cigarets and aftershave. They were trying to force his shoulders to the mat again, killing his firstborn son! The firstborn was always the most important one. Surely I could understand that. Surely I could explain that to Bonny. I ought to understand that, who had
read more novels than everybody else in my family and had learned from them how to connect.

  “He was such a fine young man!” my father said. “He could’ve been anything in the world he wanted to be!”

  “Sure he could!”

  “He was there when his country needed him!”

  “He didn’t die in vain!” I said.

  * * *

  Where my father’s grief had been low-key and devastating, my mother’s was histrionic. She was grieving for her mother also, who had gone into a coma.

  Her new boyfriend was on hand to comfort her, Commander Parker, a skinny, balding guy in starched khaki like my father, only with gold leaves on his shoulders.

  I got away as soon as I could.

  * * *

  I had been seated in the Cajon Theater about five minutes, trying to pay attention to Gary Cooper killing Germans, when Liz slipped into the seat beside me with a scent of flowers and the electric touch of her fingers.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered. I was sick of seeing soldiers dying in World War I, advancing through barbed wire and bomb craters against machine guns. In Ol Paint, under the pale cover of the top, Liz sat an inch away from me. I turned a couple of corners and parked in the dense shadow of a pepper tree.

  “What’re you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m never going back!”

  “He was pretty rugged. He said you were unbalanced, you’d had a nervous breakdown and might have one again.” Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this!

  It was as though I could feel her determining not to become hysterical. She sat with her head bowed. Once she leaned against me, so that I didn’t know whether I was supposed to put my arm around her or not. Then she straightened.

  “Would he really try to put you—somewhere?”

  “He talks like that sometimes. He can’t do that. I’m twenty-three.”

  “My father thinks Richie must’ve been transferred to the fleet just because they were getting ready for a battle.”

  Her voice tightened a notch. “He told me he asked Uncle Harry to do it! He told me! He kept crying and holding me and saying how terrible he’d been. He’s done things like that before. When I had a date he’d fix it so I had to break it some way, then he’d cry and say he was terrible. Did he say I’d refused to go to see Dr. Lasansky?”