Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  “I understood that med school was an ordeal.”

  “A terrible hostility from the men students. The old complaint that women wouldn’t stay the course, they’d just get married and become housewives, so their medical education was wasted. You know, it was so bad I just wouldn’t quit!”

  Sorry. I didn’t enunciate it this time.

  “I’m so apologetic about the letters. I knew they must have been infuriating. But I was so intent on my ordeal and my goal, and we were supposed to write cheerfully to our men abroad. Someday. Someday I’ll tell all.”

  “Now.”

  “I’m going now,” she said, still leaning forward with her face in shadow. “This has been an emotionally exhausting evening. Please let me go. I shouldn’t have said that about Dan’s new wife,” she said. “I’m sure she is a perfectly nice young woman.”

  I went around to open the door for her.

  “Haven’t you tried to contact your daughter?”

  “Why, are you interested?”

  “Of course.”

  “I guess I thought it was her part to try to contact me!” She touched my arm, said, “Good night!” and hurried to her own car. The lights jumped out ahead; the motor roared. She was gone. I sat behind the wheel with a hand on my chest.

  * * *

  Back in San Francisco, I felt a curiosity about my new daughter that came in waves almost like the grief I had felt when Gretchen died. After some days I called Bonny in Palo Alto. The number did not answer, and there was no message. After a week I became concerned. I knew her Santa Monica daughter’s name was Pearsall. It took some detective work to acquire her telephone number.

  Ellen Pearsall had a cool voice. Her mother had flown to Paris.

  When I mentioned my name she warmed a little. “Of course I know of you, Mr. Daltrey. She belongs to a medical group called Doctors with Wings. There’s a group of them going to Africa. The Sudan! She volunteered as the Gynecologist. She’s too old to still be doing that, Mr. Daltrey!”

  “A good cause,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  * * *

  What would I have done if Bonny’s telegram had arrived promptly, deserted?

  * * *

  A phone call from Bonny, back from the Sudan, on my answering machine: “Payton, it’s Barbara. One of the other docs on this trip I’m just back from has an assistant who used to work in a private detective’s office. She says she can find anyone who is not actually trying to hide in four phone calls. I gave her what information I have, and we’ll see what she comes up with.”

  I called back to leave a message on Bonny’s machine. Good for you.

  Chapter 17

  1986

  Water in the West was a huge factor of man’s abuse of his planet—from the hydraulic miners washing the Sierra down to clog the rivers and the Bay, to Powell’s disregarded warnings on the poorly watered West, to the rape of the Owens Valley, to the San Joaquin Valley water wars. I had notebooks full of notes on a water-in-the-West project, sheafs of xerox copies, two shelves of books with bookmarks marking pertinent chapters. But I lacked the push to get started. Against my will a novel was stirring in my mind.

  The shock of a daughter of whose existence I had not known, coming into my life. Coming into a protagonist’s life.

  It was like some shaggy shy beast nine-tenths concealed from me, but whose existence I could not ignore. A French son? Or a daughter? Conceived during the war and bursting into a middle-aged man’s settled life, with what? Reproaches? Condemnations? Happy celebrations? Recriminations? Realizations of blinding joy? Retaliations? Epiphanies of longing?

  Not French. Not gay. Straight American. It began to seem, as this presence reluctantly, hugely, dragged itself a little further out of its concealment, that it was the story of a life not my life but close to it, of which San Diego before the call to war was the beginning, the war itself the brief middle, the after-war stretching out into—what? Ending—how? Certainly a change of course with the arrival of the by-blow offspring. And they were all in it, whom I had vowed I would never molest again!

  It was as though I were waiting for something to occur before I faced this intrusion into my life.

  * * *

  And here it was, a week after Bonny’s communication, a phone call from my agent in New York. American Literature, a prestigious literary journal, was publishing a series of “classic” American novels. Gates of Bone, cited by them as such a book, was just out of print from a university press and so available. This publication was a signal honor for my old novel. I was designated a novelist again.

  The phone call was followed by a letter informing me that I had been chosen by the San Diego Historical Society to receive its 1986 award for local writers and artists, specifically for my acclaimed 1958 San Diego novel Gates of Bone. Signed Marian Wright, President. I was to be honored at a dinner and presentation at the Hotel del Coronado on October 17. It was hoped that I would give a reading from Gates, or from other work that might pertain to San Diego, the next afternoon at the Historical Society’s headquarters in Balboa Park. There would be copies of my books for sale at that event.

  Gates was still remembered locally, apparently, and was to be republished nationally. It was time for me to go home to San Diego to be celebrated.

  There had been no more communications from Palo Alto on the subject of our daughter, but the assumption was that Bonny was working on it.

  * * *

  Along the interstate on the outskirts of San Diego, vast housing developments had blossomed, congealing around the east shore of Mission Bay. I angled off the freeway in Old Town and climbed into Mission Hills, checking to see if my pulse had quickened. The Boningtons’ house was as I remembered it, home of the golden girl of my youth.

  On up Presidio Drive to the Daltrey house, heart beating faster here, all right; smaller than recollection, front lawn less steep, the big plate-glass west window curtained. I remembered my father’s announcement that the house would have to be sold, because he had lost his job, because of the Depression; he had stood in the kitchen, with that slant of his shoulders in his checked shirt and necktie. I remembered the burn of outraged tears. (Or did I only remember the scene as I had fictionalized it, my father standing against the kitchen window with a kind of halo around his head and shoulders from the morning sun?) But surely I remembered the real estate man with his clipboard and snippy remarks. The sunroom, or son room, at the back of the house had been mine, where I’d learned to type copying out fight scenes from novels I’d read, for a one-of-a-kind anthology of heroic fights. Where was that historical document now?

  The trees along the streets were already in blossom, in February. I remembered the San Diego early bloom, the soft air, the spring high fogs my mother had hated.

  I drove on out of Mission Hills into Hillcrest, past the site of my grandmother’s bungalow, which had been replaced by a pinkish, Moorish apartment building; on past Grant School. Once a cemetery had adjoined it, where boys had gathered for fights. In some connection I couldn’t remember, the cemetery was called “the burying ground.”

  Confused trying to make my way back to the interstate from Hillcrest, I continued on downtown by routes engraved in the creases of my brain from my college after-school delivery job—elbow out the window, cap on the back of my head, patent leather bow tie stuffed in my breast pocket, headed back to Perry’s Fine Foods to unload empty grocery boxes and flirt with Lois Meador, the dispatcher. My spirits lightened as I cruised on down the long grade along the park as though finished with an afternoon’s deliveries.

  Downtown San Diego had been much redeveloped, the south-of-Broadway bar-and-whorehouse part of town of my other job, at “that Commie rag,” was now the scene of vast new constructions amid a flattened wasteland. San Diego had become a big renewing-itself city.

  * * *

  A high swoop of bridge crossed San Diego Bay to Coronado, from which the red roofs, cupolas, and turrets of the Hotel del Coronado were v
isible, another great intact pastness, whose lights at night, we had been told, had caused L. Frank Baum to dream of the Emerald City of Oz.

  The Hotel del had been the scene of Saturday night dances, of friends and girlfriends and the increasing preponderance of uniforms in those days, of my brother and the future movie goddess Liz Fletcher, and Errol Flynn and the yacht Sirocco; all changed, enlarged, new and disorienting now. I was delivered to a third-floor room with windows that gave a glimpse of tennis courts, a slice of bay, a tacking sailboat. I ordered a whiskey from room service to quiet my nerves.

  * * *

  The steps down into the ballroom were like a descent into memory, the space smaller than remembered, and no central reflecting globe sent flecks of colored light coursing over uniforms and bright formal gowns. Tables were set up for the banquet, and early guests milled around a wine bar. Approaching them, I limped slightly, as I was aware I did under stress. There was Pogey Malcolm threading the crowd toward me, lean as a marathon runner, brown visage creased with age and sun. We clasped hands and grinned at each other. My oldest friend.

  “Poge!”

  “Payt!”

  Men in dark suits and women in party dresses collected around us. Someone I recognized but couldn’t identify patted my shoulder. I was the center of attention of this clutch of locals, beaming at me, shaking my hand. Fraternity brothers from State! San Diego people!

  “Time to fess up, Payton Daltrey!” a heavyset fellow with a chin beard boomed at me. “Who is she?”

  “We’ve been speculating all these years. Who was she, Payton?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Eve Corey!”

  “Emma Bovary, actually,” I said.

  This produced merriment. I was feeling light-headed, as though some blood-pressure medication side effect had kicked in.

  “We figured out who Lyn was!” a lady with an exposure of pale bosom advised me. “You gave it away when you mentioned that her older sister had taken arsenic on the train down from SC. That had to be the older Roberts girl, right? So Lyn was Connie Roberts, right?”

  They hadn’t recognized Barbara Bonington! I cleared my throat and said, “My lips are sealed!”

  More merriment, more people.

  It had been decided who Jack was; not me, but Russell Ford, whom I’d known slightly. There were good reasons for Jack to be identified as Russell Ford. Of course Pogey, standing half behind some others, knew who the real characters were. And Bonny knew, who wasn’t here! I’d done better than I thought concealing the real in the fictional. Why did I feel disoriented and embarrassed?

  A glass of white wine was pressed on me.

  “Here’s to the famous author!” someone said.

  A plump lady from the Historical Society staff who had visited Tibet had read my Tibet book and wanted to compare notes.

  A humpbacked old gent with a head of white hair as fine as silk sidled up to me. “My name’s Meador,” he said. “You’ll remember Lois. She was sure proud of you, Mr. Daltrey. Bought your books. Lois passed away last year.”

  I remembered Lois with some damp and heat in the eyeballs. Lois! “Glad to meet you, Mr. Meador,” I said to the man I had cuckolded.

  “Ray,” he said, smiling, and moved away.

  “Glad to see you all!” I muttered.

  My son, Jon, the professor, appeared, a broad-shouldered young man in a blue blazer, hair rather long, pale Wisconsin face, Uncle Richie bar of eyebrows, straight-lipped mouth with deep-set corners of humor. We high-fived, which was the greeting he seemed to have decided to be proper for a father and son both in the literature racket. I must excuse Nora for not having come to San Diego for the festivities; parental duties in Madison. Sister Dinny also sent love and congratulations.

  Jon was thirteen, Diane eleven when their mother and I divorced. She had custody, and I had made myself too busy to play much of a role in their growing-up lives.

  Marian Wright was a gray-haired lady in teal blue with a short jacket. She named names, so that I began to connect faces. There was name-dropping and name-remembering. I didn’t mention Bonny but did inquire of the girlfriend before her, Martha Bailey.

  “Marty has not aged well,” Marian Wright said with a tight smile.

  Drugs? A sherry drunk?

  Pogey asked how the writing was going.

  “Between books,” I said.

  He flourished a hand at the scene around us. “Well, you are historical, that’s for sure.”

  “It seems a lot of people have been figuring out who everybody was, mostly wrong.”

  “Not all,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, and added quickly, “Actually I’ve been thinking about another novel.”

  He gave way to a dignified old fellow who had been a neighbor of the Daltreys on Presidio Drive and wanted me to know he collected my books. When could I inscribe them for him?

  “I’ll be glad to tomorrow,” I said. “At the reading at the Historical Society.”

  We were seated; wine was poured and soup served in a pleasant clamor of San Diego voices. At my table were Marian Wright and her husband, a husky chap with a toothbrush mustache; Pogey and Mrs. Pogey, who eyed me brightly; a fraternity brother and his wife; and my son, Jon, who offered a toast.

  Over dessert and coffee, Marian Wright proceeded to the podium and welcomed me back to San Diego. I was presented with a crystal slate engraved with my name, the name of my novel, and “First San Diego Writers and Artists Award, San Diego Historical Society, 1986.”

  I addressed in colloquial style the faces gazing up at me (I’d done this kind of thing before), easy but slightly diffident. I reminded them of Grant School in Hillcrest, the principal, Mr. Cable, with his hard right paw, the cemetery behind the school, where boys’ fights took place, and where I’d thought someone’s euphemism “burying ground” referred to the blackberry bushes that grew there, and where, during the war, one of the barrage balloons had been anchored.

  And there at a table in the back of the room, back from delivering babies in the Sudan, was Dr. Barbara Rothenberg, displaying a flash of gleaming silver hair. In a clamor of recollected emotions I thought her classy and handsome.

  After the festivities, I sat with Pogey in the bar off the lobby, pink tile floor beneath our feet, marble-topped table shaded by a rubber plant with narrow dark green leaves like spear points. Glancing toward the main lobby for a glimpse of Bonny, I had to recall that that had been an element of my friendship with Pogey—my not quite paying attention to the conversation because I hoped to see my girlfriend.

  The crystal plaque of my San Diego reknown rested on the table on its T-shaped foot.

  Pogey wore a starched white shirt, a Thai silk tie, and a thornproof tweed jacket too orange for my taste. A rich boy, he had always worn expensive clothes.

  He was stirring sugar into his coffee. His complexion was the result of time in the sun. His company took on projects all over the world.

  He said, “We were going to be writers together once, if you remember. I know writers write what you have to write. How did Bonny like the Abba-Zabba Bar?”

  “It has not been mentioned.”

  He grinned at me.

  “Epater les bourgeois,” I said.

  “What’s your new novel about, besides love and war?” he asked.

  “Generations.”

  He sat gazing at me with his brown eyes in his brown, creased patient face. “I suppose this one will also have your old left-liberal stance,” he said. “Do I remember Sam Goldwyn saying, ‘If you want to send a message, call Western Union?’”

  I said, “I remember what Handel said when someone congratulated him on the Messiah entertaining a vast audience. ‘I didn’t mean to entertain them, I meant to make them better!’”

  He chuckled and said, “Long time between novels!”

  “I was feeling bad about turning people I loved into characters.”

  “I was okay with it,” Pogey said. “Maybe it was tougher for
Bonny.”

  “It was toughest on my father, but he was dead by then.”

  Pogey’s chair scraped back as he stood to greet his wife, and there was Bonny approaching. She looked just the way I wanted her to look in beige silk. Jon showed up also, who didn’t resemble me particularly.

  Bonny’s face looked younger now that she had let her hair go silver. She had a way of raising her chin, which I realized was to minimize the loose flesh of her throat.

  A big black man with a formidable corporation and grizzled curly hair, wearing a five-hundred-dollar tan suit, approached me closer to me than was comfortable and said, “San Diego’s own prideful boy!”

  “Calvin!”

  “Congratulations, child!”

  I hesitated, but he did not; we embraced. There was a lot of him, solid meat and bone. He smelled good, too: He grinned at me out of his dark face, gold in his smile, saggy bags beneath his eyes.

  I introduced him to the assembled as Calvin King.

  “Goodrich,” he corrected me, shaking hands around. “Mayor sends his regards,” he said to me.

  Everyone was struck silent by this presence. I would never have recognized him as the slim, handsome young athlete who had been Calvin King. Many pounds, a darker face, and a great deal of dignity had been accumulated. Pogey would remember him; to Bonny he would only be someone I had talked about.

  “These folks in your book, too, child?” Calvin asked, cutting his baggy eyes from one to another. He seated himself with some fuss because of his bulk.

  “Not I,” Jon said, who looked at ease in this difficult company.

  “Nor I,” Mrs. Pogey said.

  Calvin said to Bonny, “You were the girlfriend, right?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Goodrich,” Bonny said. She seated herself with her fingertips propped together.

  “Cal,” Calvin advised her. He said to Pogey, “I remember you.”

  “You were the football player,” Pogey said.