Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

“Handle minority contracts and such out of the mayor’s office,” Calvin said. “Child here had the usual whitey-fiction minority problem. Black sidekick stuck in his book to show what a fine no-prejudice fellow the hero is.”

  I grinned at him. He didn’t grin back. I hoped he was joking. My character Jack with his black friend, and his gay friend; to show he was a good guy? I hardly remembered how I had thought about the lineup of characters.

  Finally Calvin winked.

  “It was just such politically correct characterizations of fifties fiction that helped this country move along politically,” Jon said.

  Defended by an English lit Ph.D.! Drinks arrived and were distributed. Calvin signed the tab.

  I was oddly gratified to be among the characters of my last novel.

  A young man appeared out of the shadows of the corridor, approaching me. He looked Hollywood, a shock of black hair over an old-young face modishly decorated with a growth of whiskers, a black suit over a black T-shirt.

  “Payton Daltrey? Congratulations on your novel being republished! A lot of us always knew it was a classic.”

  I thanked him.

  “I’m Jamey Fletcher.” The name meant nothing to me. A slim blonde beautiful as a candle flame had appeared behind him.

  “I’m Elizabeth Fletcher’s son. This is Maria Pemberton. Payton Daltrey, Maria.”

  Hers was a name, face, and figure one might have run across in a People magazine in the barbershop.

  “Liz’s son!” I said, and wrung his hand. Introductions were made, chairs arranged. Everyone seemed to be watching me, not Liz’s son.

  “Liz’s son by whom?” I asked.

  “Martin Ayoob. I prefer to use my mother’s name. He was a studio exec at Twentieth Century. I’m Fletcher Properties. We option film rights and provide a script and maybe a star, and offer the package to a studio. Guess what I’m interested in, Payton!” He glanced around him with a bright expression. Miss Pemberton slumped languidly in her chair.

  “Your mother was interested in it also.”

  He barked a laugh. “She was way too old for Eve!”

  The waitress returned, and he ordered Pellegrino water for himself, a fancy vodka for the blonde. Mrs. Pogey was leaning forward, watching him intently.

  “It’s historical, but historical’s okay just now,” Jamey said.

  Bonny said to me, “Did Liz approach you about making a film of your novel?”

  “She did.”

  Jamey was nodding vigorously.

  “And you turned her down?” Bonny said.

  “I did. She wanted Eve to be the main character.”

  “San Diego’s proud of that lady!” Calvin said, hands spreadfingered over his considerable belly. “Who was it called her Miss Lovely Lips?”

  “Louella Parsons, surely,” Mrs. Pogey said.

  “We’re concentrating on Jack and Lyn,” Jamey said. “Milly Grover’s available for Lyn.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” Mrs. Pogey said, impressed.

  I warned myself against thinking of Jamey Fletcher as a character in my new novel, who was thinking of my old novel as a film.

  He said to me, “I have a fellow working on a treatment. Do you want to see it before we talk?”

  I shook my head. “Just talk to my agent. It sounds fine to me. He’s Bernie Oster.”

  “I know Bernie!” Jamey said. Drinks came. Miss Pemberton sipped hers. She and Jamey spoke admiringly of the young star Millicent Grover. I was trying to recall the emotions I had felt against Liz making over the character of Eve.

  “These all friends of my mother’s, Payton?” Jamey asked, smiling around at the assembled. Pogey raised a finger. After a moment Bonny did also.

  “Miss Lovely Lips helped put San Diego on the map!” Calvin said. “Her and the child here. She’d hang out with Errol Flynn on his yacht!”

  Jamey had a way of nodding as though to some interior monolog.

  “Your mother was a protegée of Errol Flynn’s,” Mrs Pogey said.

  “She loved him! You know, he made her get out and meet other men in order to marry someone who could hustle her career along better than he could. That was my father. Lucky for me! But Flynn was always part of her life! She took me along to his memorial service. I was thirteen, fourteen. She wept!”

  I said, “She was surely a bankable star when she was interested in Gates of Bone.”

  “She knew how to be a star!” Jamey said.

  “Jamey’s proud of his mom,” Miss Pemberton said, holding her glass of vodka up before her face as if in a toast.

  “Proud of my mom!” Jamey said, nodding.

  * * *

  Bonny and I escaped to my room for a highball. She stood facing me, glass in hand, her face tight.

  “Her name is Laura Mason,” she said. “She is in the state prison at Corcoran.”

  Dear God! “Drugs?” I asked.

  “Marijuana.” She paced, halting to gaze out the window at night and palm trees. “Eighty percent of the women in prison in this country were convicted on drug charges,” she went on. “In this country with five percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of its convicts. Women are punished with longer terms because the men often have information they can exchange for reduced sentences. The drug war!”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing for her, I don’t think. But there’s a child. Gabriella.”

  I sat perched watching her, highball in hand. She gestured with her free hand to some thought she did not speak aloud, holding the highball glass to her chest.

  “Did you see Laura?” I asked.

  “I went to see her.”

  “Is she ours?”

  “She surely is. She had found out who I was before she went to prison but hadn’t acted upon it. Her adoptive mother had died, so she went looking for her birth mother.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “I liked her, though maybe that is only nature at work. She claims she is not guilty. Her lover, her child’s father, is an American-born Mexican named Rodolfo Herrera. She was working as a clerk in a sports shop helping him to earn a degree in accounting at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. She didn’t know he was dealing marijuana. The police raided their apartment and found the stash in his car. He’d been out in her car with the child in the car seat, and he came back, saw the police cruisers, and fled to Mexico. The child is now with his sister in Tijuana. Laura is afraid the sister’s brute of a husband is abusing the child. I said we’d rescue her. Will you come with me?”

  “Sure.”

  Bonny blew out her breath with a sigh. She sat down. “When will you be finished being famous?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “We’ll go down Monday. That’s what I told the lawyer in Tijuana, anyway. Payton, I have no idea what she’s like. She was just a pathetic female in prison garb. She has blue eyes. She is slightly plump. She seemed intelligent. She’s forty-four. Her child is three. I thought she was telling the truth. She cosigned for a loan with Rodolfo to pay for his tuition and books at the college, and he used that money to buy pot instead. To deal. Those terrible Rockefeller mandatory sentencing laws have put her in prison for twelve years for cosigning that note.”

  “What do we do about the child?”

  “Through Chuck Hennings in Palo Alto, I contacted a law firm in Tijuana that deals with things like this. They will take care of getting the child away from the sister. We’ll have to pay her two thousand dollars. There will be the lawyer’s fees and some expenses. Up for it?”

  “Up for it.”

  She rose to pace again. I admired her competence. I wondered what it would be like to live with it. She sipped her highball as she paced, halting again to gaze out the window south toward Mexico.

  “What was it like in the Sudan?” I asked.

  “It was an absolute horror with a few bright spots. One must cling to the bright spots.”

  “I suspect you were one,” I said.

 
She sighed again. “I’m not sure of that, I have a difficult time with male managers. I heard the chief of the mission say, ‘Just what we need, an effing female gynecologist!’ We were in a Moslem country where a female’s private parts range from her neck to her instep. A hundred women had been raped by the Arabs. What could a male gynecologist have done? I’m afraid I railed at him.”

  She turned. Her face was tight and tragic. “Payton, I’m sorry I have no better news about our daughter.”

  “What will we do with the child if we bring her back?”

  “My second daughter might take her.”

  Or my daughter, Dinny.

  Bonny said, “Did you really turn Liz down when she wanted to make a movie of your book?”

  “I did.”

  She stood looking down at me. I knew what she was thinking because it was what I was thinking. But she said, “I’m going to leave now. You know, I’ve never forgotten what you said once, ‘If there wasn’t any danger of pregnancy, or anybody getting screwed up, or people finding out—Then!’ But I’m a troubled mother. Do you understand?”

  I said I understood. Tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara said at the end of Gone with the Wind, was another day.

  Bonny slipped out the door.

  * * *

  The next afternoon I drove with Jon back over the high bridge across the Bay to San Diego, to the Historical Society headquarters in Balboa Park, for my reading.

  Jonathan Daltrey’s stance with me was, I had always thought, one of veiled condescension. As a professor of English, he was used to dealing with authors of considerably more stature than his father.

  “What’s a MacGuffin?” he asked. “It’s a word you used in your last note.”

  “It’s a Hollywood term. Hitchcock, I think. It’s the thing everybody is looking for. The good guys and bad guys. Like the Maltese falcon.”

  “It is not listed in my dictionary of rhetorical devices.”

  “I’ll bet it isn’t,” I said. “It’s the Holy Grail. It’s the White Whale. It’s your old true love whom, because of some dramatic, romantic, or symbolic events, you are unable to forget.”

  His eyes bugged a little. “I understand that Dr. Rothenberg is related to your Lyn Burton.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I always assumed the book was a reflection of your own early life. I read it again, Dad. It’s good! But tell me; why did you back off from the happy ending?”

  “Maybe I was trying not to be commercial,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t want a happy-ending novel. Maybe I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

  “Seemed to me you knew what you were doing,” Jon said.

  “I was no genius, you see,” I rattled on. “I was a quarter genius, like a quarter horse. Good for short sprints but not a long haul.”

  “You were a genius to Dinny and me. Are.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Mother said it was tough having a genius around the house. She had to explain to Dinny and me that you were actually working when you were lying on the couch reading Time magazine.”

  “And just how is your mother these days?”

  He took a deep breath. “Dad, I am trying to tell you that Dinny and I are proud of you and your career, and you change the subject!”

  “Sorry,” I said, hot mist in my eyes. “Thanks,” I said.

  * * *

  There was a lecture room containing about forty people on clinky metal folding chairs. There was Pogey and his wife, who had come from Dallas; there was my son from Madison; there were three Alpha Betas from my years at State; there were other familiar faces. And there was Dr. Barbara Rothenberg with her head of shining hair, in a blue jacket and skirt, in the second row.

  Some had brought books for me to sign, among them a number of battered copies of Gates of Bone breaking loose from the boards. I signed a lot of books. There was a new edition in press!

  A young San Diego novelist with a gold ring in his ear begged me to read his novel in galleys, so as to give him a blurb. He had caught me at a vulnerable time.

  I stood at the podium, gave a humorous, phony little preamble to show I was one of the folks, and began to read from the first chapter of Gates:

  “The first time I saw Lyn Burton, the young woman with whom I have been concerned for much of my long life, the first time I paid attention to her, anyway, was December 8, 1941. We were all in the Caff at San Diego State College that Monday morning, listening to the terrible news on the radio, the losses, the deaths, the Day of Infamy, the declaration of war. The Japs! We drank coffee or Cokes and listened to the bad news. No one knew then how much more bad news we were going to hear before some good news began to filter through—”

  * * *

  Back at the Hotel del Coronado, Jon departed for the airport. I had a drink with Pogey and Mrs. Pogey before they, too, departed.

  Bonny and I had dinner alone together, with a bottle of Montrachet. There was some strain, which I counted on the wine to dispel: Bonny uptight about tomorrow, as I was also. Time for some poetry:

  “We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.”

  “What’s that, Payton?”

  “It’s T. S. Eliot. Referring to Tijuana, our destination tomorrow.”

  Female faces are enhanced by candlelight, as is well known. I didn’t know how to tell Bonny I liked her sexagenarian looks. Her bosom might once have ridden some inches higher on her chest, and the hand she laid there from time to time was not the hand of a young woman. I remembered once observing that hand half-cupped before her on a table. The neat perfection of it had made the backs of my legs curdle. Her head was a helmet of sleek silver hair that had once been a golden helmet, and the pad of flesh beneath her chin was not the baby fat I had observed the first time I had taken notice of her, but a reminder that the skull shrinks with age. Her face had always had that golden glow of youth, health, sun, orange juice, and Mission Hills, and if that glow did not emanate from it now it was still locked in my eyes.

  There was a flick of blue behind her glasses as she glanced back to meet my gaze.

  “I used to rant about molestations,” I said. “Maybe you remember.”

  “Indeed I do remember!”

  “When I went to Tijuana with Calvin to look for an abortionist, we dropped in at the huge Tijuana brothel. At that time young girls from the interior were sent up to the Molino Rojo to make money to send home. Some of them had to commit sex acts with animals for a show.”

  “I don’t remember you ranting about that.”

  “Times have changed, you see. Now the young girls from the interior are sent up to the border to work in the maquiladoras. Do you know what they are?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Many are owned by Americans. As we know, the only thing wrong with capitalism is the greed of capitalists. There’s no minimum wage in the maquiladoras; there’s no OSHA. They are horrible sweatshops, and their effluent has poisoned the Tijuana River to a dangerous degree—and the Tijuana air. Not to speak of the workers. It is known that the girls in these sweatshops have to show their foreman their Tampax every month to prove they are not pregnant. Now, is that progress over having to screw dogs and ponies, or not?”

  “Yes, Payton,” Bonny said. “I suppose it is.” Her face was creased with unhappiness, I thought for me rather than for the girls from the interior. I hadn’t wanted to make her unhappy with my heavy-handed ironies.

  “I see you are still a little nutty about molestation,” she said lightly.

  “Oh, I am!” I said. “Let me tell you another one. This concerns the Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa. Do you know of the Maharishi? Meditation, the Beatles, all that?”

  “Yes, Payton, I do,” she said, watching me anxiously over her pressed-together fingertips.

  “They practice levitation there,” I went on
. “It takes some intense meditation, as you can imagine. The men practice levitation under the Golden Dome. But the women have to levitate in the women’s gym!”

  Her face convulsed in laughter.

  “Tell me, what could be wrong with mixed levitation?”

  She continued laughing. It was as though she were getting over something.

  She sobered to say, “In the Sudan, the Arabs murdered the men and raped the women separately.” She leaned toward me. “But let me tell you about med school forty years ago. The teaching docs set up a seminar for just Gloria and me. The subject was something to do with male sexuality. We were told it was not proper for a mixed group of students to discuss the subject.”

  We laughed together, and finished the wine, and everything was just fine. In the elevator Bonny said, “Why me?”

  “It was always you,” I said.

  Epilogue

  “Could this be a tot we are going to rescue?” I asked Bonny, as we sailed south on the freeway toward the border.

  Her face inclined toward me.

  “An abused tot,” I said.

  “I hated it when you were writing those pieces,” she said.

  “I went from writing about molested tots to writing about molested nations. I was trying to save nations when I should have been trying to save tots.”

  “Well, that is what we are doing,” Bonny said. “Surely we can make her world a better place. Is that what you mean?”

  In Tijuana a palmist had warned me to take care that love did not triumph over wisdom, and said that only the wise could transcend their gender.

  “Try not to do any harm, anyway,” I said.

  At the border we were waved through by a stout, brown-uniformed Mexican in a salty brown cap. I felt a crunch of guilt at our conspiracy as soon as we were across the border in heavy traffic. I could see that Bonny’s fingers were white clutching her handbag to her lap.

  “Were you happily married?” she asked.

  “The second time.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you. So you were not?”

  She shook her head. “My fault. Well, circumstance. Did you sleep in the same bed?”

  “Yes.”