Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s this creepy friend of Daddy’s who told him I’m manic-depressive. I’d rather die than be alone with Victor Lasansky! He’s not a doctor at all, he’s only a psychologist. So they’d better not try anything.”

  Then she was whispering, “Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!” I didn’t know whether she meant her father or Dr. Lasansky. She searched in her purse for a handkerchief. “He was going to take care of me. He was going to take care of everything. He promised me. He promised he wouldn’t get killed!”

  She had been damning Richie.

  Richie promising Liz he would not get killed seemed corny and pathetic. And Richie promising to make Liz a star seemed as jerk as Jack Warner offering Bonny a screen test. The Great Expectations! It was the Hollywood of Val Ferris drowning herself.

  “I’m so scared!” Liz said, leaning against me. “I’m scared of Daddy, and I’m scared of not having Richie—”

  I put my arm around her, and she swung toward me and mashed her wet cheek against mine. I could feel her trembling. Her arms snaked around me, holding me so tightly it was as though she thought Richie’s brother would now take care of her.

  She murmured, “I have to go to LA. Will you take me?”

  “Okay.” She had to get away from Captain Fletcher.

  She detached herself to sit with her face turned down and her hands in her lap. “I’m so worried about Buffy. My silly old cat! Could you go out to my house and get her and some things I need? I’ll make a list.

  “Daddy leaves for the base early every day,” she went on. “Would you take Bonny? She’ll know where to look for everything.”

  It seemed to me that Bonny would have to come with me because of Richie.

  3

  Bonny’s voice said in my ear, “That’s so terrible about Richie. I’ve been trying to call you.”

  It was as though I were getting some queer kind of credit for Richie dead. I explained Liz’s situation into the telephone, Bonny listening in that kind of silence she drew around herself whenever Liz was mentioned. She would come to the Fletcher house with me.

  I picked her up at eight thirty in the morning, and with Ol Paint’s top down we drove out to Point Loma. Bonny was bare-legged in pedal-pushers and a sweater. She sat apart from me with her chin tucked down. I was sick that I could think of nothing to say when there was so much to be said.

  I parked in the turnout in the alley behind the Fletchers’ house, looking down on the tile roof and brick chimney. The sun glistened on the upstairs windows.

  I led Bonny along the flagstone path around the side of the house. The key was under a flowerpot just beyond the front door. Bonny had Liz’s list.

  Trying to turn the key in the lock I muttered, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” It was the wrong key! I paused to glance out at the gray ships in the Bay as though swabbies might be spying through telescopes and phoning Destroyer Base Intelligence. Bonny’s eyes flashed at me out of her stiff face.

  The lock clicked finally, the door creaked open, and we slipped into the front hall. White balustered stairs rose to the right. Bonny followed me upstairs.

  Liz’s room faced on the alley, white net curtains on the windows, a bed with a frilly white coverlet, a white dresser, a dressing table with skinny bowed legs.

  I opened the closet and found the suitcase Liz had said would be there.

  “Look for the doll with the china head and a long white dress on,” Bonny whispered.

  Emma, who was going to be a movie star, was in the bed, her painted face showing against the pillow. On the bed was a note on beige stationery held down by a glass paperweight:

  Daddy is glad his girl has come home. Phone me at the base. Honey, I had to have the kitty put away. She wouldn’t stop yowling with you gone, and she made a mess on the stairs. Love, Daddy.

  I replaced the note under the paperweight and took the doll to Bonny, who had the suitcase heaped with clothes. She tucked the doll inside.

  “Let’s go!” I said. Captain Fletcher’s note had rattled me.

  I closed the suitcase, and we hurried downstairs. I tossed the case into the back of Ol Paint and backed and filled to turn around. I killed the engine, started up again, and got out of there in a hurry.

  “Amy’s in love with Will Gates,” Bonny said. “He wants to get married. I think she needs you to tell her it’s all right.”

  Because I’d been Bob-O’s friend.

  I stopped at the curb before the Boningtons’ house, and Bonny let herself out quickly. I got out to put the top back up. Stupid to have put it down in the first place as though Bonny and I were out for a last joyride before gas rationing clamped down.

  She stood watching me, hands clasped together at her waist.

  “I’m sorry I said that about you and your mother,” I said.

  She gave a nod of acknowledgment.

  I was suddenly furious at the balky top, always a pain to put back up. When I gave the bows of the top a yank, the fabric ripped straight down the center, a foot of broken threads with an inch of right angle at one end. Shit!

  Bonny looked comically concerned.

  “Guess it’s time for a new top,” I managed. I shoved the contraption back into the well and got in behind the wheel.

  It was as though I had to breathe deeply to keep from panting. “You thought it was terrible that I was writing those—tots columns. Because I didn’t know what I was writing about. But the rest of the stuff in the brand is about molesteds, too. Strikebreakers, Okies and Japs, and bad judges, and money more important than people, and power used to make people miserable. AJAs in a concentration camp, women and children and kids four years old. Because they have epicanthic folds on their eyes! And what’s going to happen to Calvin King in the Army because he’s colored! And those fourteen-year-old girl prostitutes in Tijuana with syphilis. I mean, it’s all connected!”

  Her face had turned pink and her mouth made an O, but she didn’t speak.

  “You know what you ought to do?” I said. “You ought to go up to Stanford in premed. You’d be a doctor. That’s what you ought to do.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  I mashed my foot on the accelerator, digging out of there before I said anything else stupid. In the mirror I could see her still standing at the curb.

  4

  I met Liz in the soda fountain of a drugstore next to the Cajon Theater. BATTERED JAP FLEET IN HIDING was the headline on the newspaper rack by the door. Liz wore a sweater set and a pleated skirt, with stockings and heels. She looked tired and not even pretty as she rose from her stool. She had a suitcase and a square toiletries case with her.

  I had to tell her about her father’s note. She cursed him so shockingly that I thought about the nervous breakdown he had mentioned. It wasn’t grief about Richie, it was her cat!

  She said more calmly, “Poor Buffy. God damn him!”

  * * *

  I led her outside to Ol Paint. I’d patched the top with strips of adhesive tape. It was not going to be like Liz and Richie driving around in the turbo-charged Cord.

  In the car she opened her purse and her wallet and laid a ten-dollar bill on the dashboard, saying it was for gas. “You are finally taking me away from all this,” she said.

  Heading out of San Diego she sat erect on the edge of her seat, gazing at the road ahead. Driving north through the beach towns she settled down with her head against my shoulder. Gradually her head slipped down until it lay on my leg. When I realized what she was doing I panted suddenly, glancing down at the pale V of the nape of her neck. Outside the car the thick, peeling trunks of the Leucadia eucalyptus fled by.

  When it was over Liz refastened the buttons, with a pat of finality there, and sat with her face averted.

  I prayed she would not tell me that Richie had liked that. I didn’t want to know that! Of course it was intended as a payment for my troubles in her behalf, but it had turned my nights with Lois Meador sour like milk left in the sun.
/>   * * *

  I’d thought I was taking Liz to her friend named Marjorie who lived in the San Fernando Valley, but she had changed her mind. In Hollywood, in the late afternoon, she directed me up into the hills and onto Mulholland Drive.

  “You’re not going to Flynn’s!” I braked Ol Paint almost to a stop. A horn brayed and a Cadillac swung around me, a man with a plaid cap giving me the finger.

  “Yes, I am!”

  It was as though I’d been betrayed. And Richie. “I’m not going to take you there!”

  “I’ll phone him to come get me!”

  It was like the ending of a good puzzle mystery, where you’d been given all the evidence and should have figured it out, but you’d been tricked into looking in the wrong direction.

  “Listen, Liz—”

  “He’ll help me. He likes me!”

  “Sure he does.” At least Flynn would defend her from her father, who was crazy. They were all crazy!

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Waiting until I graduate, and waiting for Richie to come home from the war. So we could—get started. Waiting and waiting. And now Richie’s dead!”

  There was the turn into Mulholland Farm. I swung the wheel, and the car drifted down toward the corner of the tennis court. The house lay across an expanse of asphalt paving in the late sunlight. A big red dog appeared, barking furiously.

  “That’s just Scout,” Liz said. Her familiarity with the dog made me feel easier.

  The dog braced his paws against Ol Paint’s door and stuck his muzzle into the open window, mouth open and pink tongue lolling. Liz scratched his chin. “Dear old Scout!”

  “I hope you have all the luck you need, Liz,” I said.

  She leaned over to brush my lips with hers. “Thanks,” she lisped. She had to push the dog aside to open the door and get out with her makeup case. I wrestled the suitcase from the back and set it down outside the car just as Flynn appeared. He wore a long-sleeved polo shirt with a scarf looped at the neck, and white flannels. The famous seducer of women raised an arm in greeting to the young Martin Eden.

  Liz ran toward him.

  As I drove up out of Mulholland Farm, Elizabeth Fletcher shrank in the rearview mirror, standing beside her luggage with Errol Flynn’s arm around her.

  5

  The address on the card Mrs. Carnes had given me was on Franklin Street in Hollywood. I parked in front of an apartment complex with two lofty evergreens on the front lawn, wondering what I wanted from her. It was almost dark, and I could see a lighted window of number 5 back at the base of the U. I walked in past an ornamental pool, my hand jingling the keys in my pocket.

  Mrs. Carnes opened the door to my ring, frowning as though she thought I was selling magazine subscriptions. She wore a navy blue pants suit with silver jewelry on her wrists. Her thick, fair, center-parted hair reminded me of a thatched roof.

  “It’s Richard Daltrey’s brother!” she exclaimed, and opened the door wider.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  The flesh of her face seemed to droop. “Please come in.”

  On the walls were paintings of blocky shapes in bright colors. A sunrise-colored shawl was draped over the piano. She showed me to an easy chair near the fireplace and seated herself opposite me, her navy blue knees together and her hands, palms flattened against each other, placed beneath her chin. Her face was thin, classy rather than good-looking, her nose a high-bridged blade. I had a sense of big-time.

  I told her all I knew to tell. I thought she had loved my brother in some way I didn’t want to have to think about.

  She went to make herself a martini and brought me back a glass of ginger ale. Her eyes were swollen.

  “He was a hero, then,” she said.

  “I guess so.” I was feeling teary also. I sipped the peppery liquid. She had a lot of books, two cases overflowing, books jammed horizontally on top of vertical ones, and piled on top of the case. I spotted The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and A Farewell to Arms.

  By the window was a table with a neat little portable on it, and a half-inch stack of paper beside the typewriter. The paper was bond, not the newsprint I used. She was writing something that would be made into a movie, or published.

  “You told me you were fond of him,” I said.

  “Yes, fond.”

  “There was a woman who killed herself.”

  “There was such a person,” she said, nodding.

  I took a breath. “It doesn’t sound like Richie acted very well.”

  “Let me reassure you that Richie acted as well as he was permitted to act in perfectly rotten circumstances.”

  “It sounds like Richie kind of pimped her for that Lubin guy.”

  Mrs. Carnes frowned gently. “David Lubin had many sexual partners. When he knew he was dying, sex became even more important to him. Val Ferris wanted a part in a film David planned to make. Richie introduced Val to David. It was a favor to her, actually. By that time he himself was no longer involved with her, although she may have thought he was indebted to her.”

  “It sounds like Richie kind of—” I didn’t know how to ask any of it.

  “It was Richie’s job to rid David of a nuisance. A considerable nuisance. A threat, really.”

  “What did he do?”

  Her forehead was creased as though there were too much to explain in order to make things clear to me, or else she was thinking of a way not to tell me what had happened.

  “He employed a private detective to investigate her past. She had a criminal record.”

  That was what private eyes really did, instead of investigating murder cases with sexy suspects.

  “I don’t know how much of Richie’s situation you understand,” Mrs. Carnes said. “David was his mentor. More than a mentor. Richie was David himself when young. Handsome, talented, full of promise. A kind of reinvigoration of the dying animal. Of course Richie was flattered by the role. When David was severely compromised, it was Richie’s duty to come to his aid.”

  I felt numb.

  “Suicide is often an act of aggression,” Mrs. Carnes said.

  “You blame Val Ferris?”

  She shook her head with a swing of her thick hair. “I blame this cruel industry that is founded upon the exploitation of youth and beauty and talent. I blame David Lubin, who had become a monster. Val was able to punish everyone by drowning herself. Richie was devastated.”

  “So he joined up.”

  “He was David’s heir apparent. He threw all that up. He has redeemed himself.”

  She set her glass down and knitted her long fingers together, gazing at me. Of course Richie had slept with her, with young starlets and not so young feature players and middle-aged screenwriters. Sophisticated LA blow-job sex.

  Esther Carnes shimmered in my eyes. Shit, I was crying! She rose, her bracelets clacking, and came to put her arms around me.

  I excused myself to go to the bathroom to take a leak and blow my nose and dry my wet face on a hard linen hand towel.

  Mrs. Carnes stood by the piano holding a fat little book. “Let me read you something. ‘The Sapient Man will not wait to be the sun in its setting. He will not wait until other men turn their backs on him to be buried, still alive, in their estimation. The man of Foresight puts his horse in the stable betimes and does not wait for it to fall in a race. The Beauty wisely cracks the mirror before it disillusions her.’”

  She was reading from the Manual. When she glanced up at me her eyes glistened and some black stuff had made marks on either side of them, like untidy brackets. She must think that passage referred to Richie! Off the taffrail when the voyage is over! I preferred Martin Eden to The Pisan Manual.

  “Did Richie give you that book?”

  “David Lubin gave it to me. He had based his life upon it, and it was a considerable life. David Lubin produced five great motion pictures!”

  “I hate those guys of Insight and Justice. Superior Men.”

  She put the b
ook down on the piano.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “I guess I could’ve figured it all out, but thanks.”

  “You must be proud of him. He was a part of the thin red line of young men who have sacrificed themselves to save their country from a ruthless evil!”

  I didn’t know whether she knew Liz, or knew of her, but I told her I had brought Richie’s girlfriend to Los Angeles, to Mulholland Farm. “She wants to be a movie star,” I said. “Richie was supposed to help her.”

  “Errol is certainly in a position to assist her career,” she said. “If you feel the need to worry about her for Richie’s sake, I advise you not to. She was to blame, too, you know.”

  I wanted to know why.

  “Your brother’s San Diego lady friend put enormous pressure on him. I believe some of the things we may decry would not have occurred if she had not always been urging Richie to forward his career. At every turn,” she added, with an harsh edge to her voice.

  Liz and Richie had ruined private eyes for me—Philip Marlowe turned into a HUAC investigator or a Hollywood dirt-digger, with Jeff Dodge and John Burgess only lousy imitations, copies of copies, as Mr. Chapman had pointed out. I could still think of Val Ferris as a victim.

  When Mrs. Carnes asked if she could take me out to dinner, I said I had to go home to San Diego, though it seemed there was nothing there to go home to.

  * * *

  In Long Beach the adhesive tape broke loose from the rip in the top, and the canvas began to flap. I knew it was tearing further, but there was nothing to do but drive on.

  6

  All that was necessary was to write a letter resigning from the midshipman’s program and enlist in the Army. Nothing to it. My father would think I had enlisted because my brother had been killed in action, which was probably no further from the truth than my own reason, which was because Ol Paint’s top had ripped.

  First I went to say good-bye to my grandmother. There seemed shockingly little bulk lumping up the bedclothes. Her face was slack and soft, with closed eyes and a shine of spittle at the corner of her mouth. I blotted it with my handkerchief before I went away.