by Oakley Hall
“We rarely did. Dan would be on call, or I would. We went to bed at different times.”
“Too bad,” I said.
Tijuana, the tourist section anyway, was not much changed from the Tijuana I remembered, no signs of maquiladora evils. Some bigger, more garish signs, traffic lights. I parked the Jag in a lot and with Bonny walked along past tourist shops, some touts beckoning, windows of silver, of leather jackets, of curios, tourists in twos and threes, shoeshine and chewing-gum salesboys, Mexican girls in jeans, on a corner a photographer with a cart hitched to a donkey painted with zebra stripes. The poisonous air smelled only of car exhaust.
We were to meet Miss Muñoz at Caesar’s. I recalled that it was at the old Caesar’s Hotel that Caesar salad had been invented. Rita Hayworth had been discovered dancing at the Foreign Club here. Bonny and I had come down to the Clínica Orozco on gynecology business in 1942.
Miss Muñoz wore jeans and a leather jacket. She had short black hair and a round face. She knew who we were on sight.
“Señora Rothenberg?”
Bonny introduced me.
“Señor Daltrey,” Miss Muñoz said, shaking hands with a firm grip. “Come, we will have a margarita and speak on this matter. You have brought money?”
“I have brought money,” I said. I did not wholly believe in my granddaughter yet, nor did I feel any real connection, except fictional, with the pathetic convict Laura Mason, my new daughter.
We were seated in a semicircular brown leather booth, margaritas ordered. Miss Muñoz addressed herself to me, more comfortable speaking to the male than the female in the case, although it was Bonny who had engaged her.
“You see, Señor Daltrey, Señor Serrato must be satisfied that this child is an American child, not a Mexican child.”
She proffered her card to me. The law firm was Serrato Hnos.
Bonny snapped opened her purse, brought out a folded square of paper, and handed it to Miss Muñoz.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Birth certificate. The father is an American citizen,” she said to Miss Muñoz. “Of Mexican heritage.”
Miss Muñoz glanced briefly at the birth certificate, refolded it, and handed it back. “That is very well, Señora Rothenberg. And the father, you say, is in Mexico?”
“In Oaxaca, we believe,” Bonny said. She was sitting up very straight, her lips tucked in severely at the corners. There was considerable street noise from Avenida Independencia outside, a couple of drunk Americans in Hawaiian shirts in noisy conversation at the bar.
Miss Muñoz looked pleased when our margaritas arrived.
“It has been arranged,” she said. “Señor Alberto Chaves is in policía custody for a day or two. This required a bit moneda, you understand, which has been entered on the cuenta.”
“That is fine,” Bonny said.
“He is a bad actor?” I said.
This had to be explained. “Yes, bad!” Miss Munoz said. “Señor Serrato thought he might find himself unsatisfied with the moneda agreed upon.”
“I see,” I said.
“I have survey the casa,” Miss Munoz went on. “It is in very ugly part of town. It is not agreeable part of town for gringos. It is part of Tijuana where gringos may be exposed to unpleasantness. I say this because if it is wished I will perform the payment and bring the child.”
I didn’t look at Bonny. “I would like to come along,” I said.
“I will also,” Bonny said. “Have you seen the child?” she said to Miss Muñoz.
“Yes, I did, señora. She is a pretty child, but of little energy. I think this must be because of the bites.”
“The bites?” I said.
“How do you say—picaduras de pulgas.”
“Fleabites,” I said.
“Good God!” Bonny said.
There was a reflective moment of sucking margaritas through the furnished straws.
“And tell me, please,” Miss Muñoz said. “What is to become of the child when you have taken her to Estados Unidos?”
Bonny said firmly, “Mr. Daltrey and I will see that she is cared for. I have a daughter who may take her.”
“And I,” I said.
Miss Muñoz nodded as though crossing an item off on a list. “You have American car?” she wanted to know.
“English,” I said.
“It will be best if we use Mexico car. I have policía to drive.”
* * *
It was indeed a part of Tijuana not agreeable to gringos, very Social Reality. Winding rutted streets curving uphill in long swoops with sharp junctions, down into a populous gully, then up again, alongside stripped cars, trash along the cutbanks, shacks, Mexican music squawking from ghetto blasters, young men in groups on street corners, smoking, watching us, women hurrying, always carrying something.
Our policía was a heavyset fellow in a blue Yale sweatshirt and a cloth cap. He stopped before a shack with a rusting corrugated iron roof, a veranda stacked with collapsed cardboard boxes, windows with shades drawn like closed eyes.
Bonny blew her breath out in a sigh.
I have knee trouble detaching myself from a tight-quarters car. Taking Bonny’s arm, I straightened my shoulders and tried to walk, looking respectable, if not formidable, under the gaze of a pair of young men who had appeared on the other side of the street, one in a hooded sweatshirt. Our policía sauntered over to them. Miss Muñoz led us to the veranda.
A woman with a bruised swollen face and frightened eyes opened the door a slice. Miss Muñoz spoke peremptory Spanish. I didn’t understand her words or the reply, but Miss Muñoz turned to me with a finger raised. I handed her the wad of bills in the Hotel del Coronado envelope.
Behind us more men had assembled. The sun beat down under the roof of the veranda with a kind of coppery resonance.
The woman took the envelope from Miss Muñoz and tried to close the door again, saying, “Momento,” but Miss Muñoz inserted herself inside, again with the monitory finger raised to Bonny and me. Someone called out from the assembly across the street. I was sweating in the sun.
“What did he say?” Bonny wanted to know, clinging to her handbag like a life preserver.
“Don’t know.”
Then Miss Muñoz was back with a child in a complicated white dress and shiny black shoes, a child who looked up at me with astonishing blue eyes in a small beautiful tan face. Her forehead was sprinkled with scabs under brushed and bowed brown hair. Her eyes were so full of intelligence I almost staggered.
She murmured something.
“What does she say?” I asked Miss Muñoz.
“Dice, ‘Are you my daddy now?’”
It seemed crucial not to lie. I bent to take her little paw and pat it between my two hands.
Bonny took her other hand, and we walked her back to the car under the gaze of the assembly across the street, which now included two women. Our policía stalked before them, hustling back as we loaded into the backseat. Miss Muñoz sat shotgun, head up, grim-faced.
“Vamos!” she said. The young man in the hooded sweatshirt lumbered closer to glare in the car window as we passed him.
Bonny blew out her breath. The child sat between us with her elbows drawn in, smoothing at the lap of her dress. I could smell her.
“Eaten alive,” Bonny said in a stifled voice. “Fleas. Lice. Scabies,” she whispered as though to herself. “I left my bag at the hotel!” she complained.
We were delivered back to Caesar’s, where Bonny leaned over the hood writing a check to Miss Muñoz. Holding the child’s hand, I started back toward the Jaguar in its parking lot.
“Go to my momma?” the child said.
I could feel the prickle of tears; how to respond to that? “Honey, we are surely going in her direction.”
“But we—” The words trailed off.
“We are going to the United States,” I said, and prayed that would suffice.
She pulled a little at my hand.
“Listen, tot,” I
said, “I am your grandfather. The lady is your grandmother. Your mother’s mother and father. We love you very much. We have come to bring you back to the United States, where you will be safe and happy.”
The intelligent eyes gleamed doubtfully up at me.
Bonny caught up with us, striding, swinging her purse. We loaded into the Jaguar, the child between us sharing Bonny’s seat. I headed for the border, into the line of waiting cars glacially moving toward customs and immigration. Bonny gave our grandaughter her bracelet to hold.
“Pretty,” the child whispered.
When we were four cars away from the gate, Bonny said casually, “Little one, will you sit here on the floor for a while so we can play hide-and-seek?”
She helped our child to seat herself on the floor mat in front of her seat, then extended her legs and spread her skirt to hide her, in high smuggler mode.
The immigration officer, with his bristly little mustache, looked in my window. “Where were you born?” he asked.
“San Diego,” I said.
“San Diego,” Bonny said.
We were waved on through.
Back in the USA our granddaughter was raised to share Bonny’s seat again, with a seat belt around the two of them.
“Are you comfortable, honey?” I said.
“I not Honey, I Gaby!” the child said. “Go to my momma now?”
“First we’re going to a hotel and take a bath, Gaby,” I said.
Bonny sat with her hands pressed to her cheeks.
I knew what had shaken her. I’m not Bonny, I’m Barbara. Only connect, said E. M. Forster.
“It was when you changed,” I said. “When you said you weren’t Bonny.”
“I was pregnant. It was the end of the world!”
“Mine, too,” I said.
“When I realized the trap had snapped closed the scales fell from my eyes—whatever scales are—I saw woman’s estate so clearly. My mother in her misery was able to make everyone around her miserable. Because she was only meat. That was Johnny’s ugly word—meat. A girlfriend was the boy’s meat. Gloria and I were meat to those docs at Stanford Med. Well, I was never going to be anyone’s meat! I was never going to be Bonny again. I elbowed my way through life! I had put on the red shoes, and I couldn’t stop dancing. They were so glad to get this female meat cleaver off their ethics committee! But in fact pregnant meant I had to get out of San Diego!” she said.
I nodded.
“Last night you said you were starting another novel. Am I to be in it?”
Gaby was craning her neck to look up at her.
“Afraid so,” I said.
“Do you take me seriously, Payton? I have some accomplishments also, you know. I sit on ob-gyn committees at Stanford and UC Medical. I was cited on the Peninsula ‘Best Doctors’ list. I have been an associate in Doctors with Wings for eleven years. Do you know that this country has the highest infant mortality rates of any industrialized country in the world except China? Due to the lack of prenatal and postnatal care. I chair a Planned Parenthood committee working with Senator Findley trying to get legislation—” She grinned suddenly. “In the Sudan they had a name for me that translates as Madam Doctor Good Person!”
I said, “Madam Doctor Good Person, I will tell you the accomplishments that please me most. We’ve hardly seen each other for forty-five years, and yet we are parents, and grandparents of a beautiful little fleabitten granddaughter.”
“With so little effort!” Bonny said, laughing.
“Would a family dinner with a bottle of Montrachet be out of order?”
“First I must go after these bites with Neosporin. Then!”
“We’re all going to a nice place and take a bath and have dinner, Gaby,” I said.
Gaby seemed to be humming. She was singing in a small, secret voice, hunched into a ball on Bonny’s seat between us, twisting the bracelet between her grubby hands.
“That is such a pretty song, little cupid girl,” Bonny said.
“I Gaby!” our tot corrected her.
“Insistence on her identity may mean her identity’s been threatened,” I said. “We don’t know what went on in Tijuana.” I tried not to sound pompous. “There is a famous case, a fellow who could fend off a bout of insanity by saying his name over and over. You would know about that, I guess.”
“I Gaby!” Gaby insisted, her face raised tight-lipped to me.
“I guess I’m Bonny,” Bonny said.
I wondered how rough it was going to be.
Last night nothing significant as to the future had been enunciated, but everything had been significant. Personal relations: good. Long-postponed sex relations: good. Conversation: wide-ranging between bouts of lovemaking. Past: deplored, subject of laughter. Politics: okay. Religion: not discussed. Social responsibilities: agreement. Environment: ditto. Some feminist paranoia. I could discuss suffragist history intelligently, but perhaps with not enough partisan heat. Tacit disagreement on the literary quality of The Golden Notebook, enthusiastic agreement on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Agreement on opera. Could theater vs. the symphony be an issue? Golf vs. tennis? When her mother died, she intended to dedicate her inheritance to establishing a prenatal clinic for unmarried young women, mainly black or Latino, on an already selected site in East Palo Alto. My own future was concerned with a novel for which I had no title, no plot, some preused characters, a handful of scenes, and considerable dread.
In the end, happy-ever-after was surely not going to be as simple as golf vs. tennis.
I was amused at retracing a route we had taken forty years ago to rid Bonny’s womb of a trespasser. Maybe but for the war there might have been another gynecology trip in Ol Paint, with a bundle in a bassinet. Instead we had Gabriella.
I laid my open hand on the leather seat in front of Gaby. Bonny guided her hand around the child’s back to slip it into mine.
It was growing dark as we freewayed on up into San Diego, lights on and a flood of beams coming toward us, banks of red taillights ahead. We arched over the high bridge toward Coronado, heading to the Hotel del Coronado with its big bathtub in my bathroom, those lights sparkling and gleaming in the oncoming darkness like the Emerald City of Oz.
Also by Oakley Hall
NOVELS
Separations 1997
Apaches 1986
The Coming of the Kid 1985
The Children of the Sun 1983
Lullaby 1982
The Bad Lands 1978
The Adelita 1975
Report from Beau Harbor 1972
The Pleasure Garden 1966
The Downhill Racers 1962
Warlock 1958
Mardios Beach 1955
Corpus of Joe Bailey 1953
So Many Doors 1950
Libretto for the Opera Angle of Repose 1976
(from the novel by Wallace Stegner)
MYSTERIES
Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades
Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings
Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks
Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls
Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots
A Game for Eagles
(AS JASON MANOR)
The Tramplers
The Pawns of Fear
The Red Jaguar
Too Dead to Run
(AS O.M. HALL)
Murder City
NONFICTION
The Art and Craft of Novel Writing
How Fiction Works
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
LOVE AND WAR IN CALIFORNIA. Copyright © 2006 by Oakley Hall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical article
s or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Two chapters from this book appeared, in different form, in Cottonwood and The Santa Monica Review.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
ISBN-10: 0-312-35762-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35762-7
First Edition: April 2007
eISBN 9781466881471
First eBook edition: August 2014
