“You know where Dad died, don’t you?” he said to her finally. He told Jaime about the mistress, and explained that their entire life had been a sham, the happy family a lie. Her father had been screwing around for years. This one particular girlfriend he actually paid the rent for.
“Where did he get the money?” she heard herself asking, from the depths of her numbness.
Bill knew nothing about money. But he knew their father had died during intercourse and gone immediately into rigor, and that it had been difficult to get the body out of the apartment on Pine Street, the cops and ambulance attendants laughing and joking because they’d known old Farley Froward, everybody knew him, and everybody knew old Fairly Farley would have been just as callous and cracked just as many jokes.
“Where did you hear all this?” Jaime asked Bill. He grinned his mean little grin and said, “Weren’t you listening downstairs?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said meanly. This all made her feel as if she was somebody else, hovering in a corner of the room, looking down at the foolish humans. Including her, who hadn’t thought it was possible that her own father was unfaithful. Or that any woman would have him. Was her mother a fraud too?
“What about Mom?” she asked.
“Mom’s been putting up with it for years,” he said. “Why do you think she drinks so goddamn much?”
“I never thought about it.” Their father was dead, his ashes to be scattered into the Pacific in two days. She’d apparently known nothing about him.
“Do you have any other family secrets to tell me, before you fly away?”
He looked at her oddly. “What do you mean?”
“Is Mom dating other men? Is the house really rented? Is our name really Froward? Anything else I ought to know about myself?”
Her brother stood, his face reddening. “You don’t have to get shitty about it,” he said mysteriously, and left the room.
She had seen Charlie several times at school since their night of love and they’d even made love again, in the back of his De Soto, parked down by Lake Merced. This second episode had clarified things a bit, since she hadn’t known whether she meant anything to Charlie or was just a nice pretty young piece of ass. After some comical maneuvers they had an extremely passionate coupling, and at the end of it Charlie told her he loved her.
“Oh, don’t, Charlie,” she said, not really able to believe it. “You don’t have to say that.”
“I know it,” he said. “But I do.”
“I like you, Charlie,” she heard herself saying, “but I’m not ready for love.” It was like dialogue from a bad movie. Charlie laughed and said, “You don’t have to be ready for anything,” and drove her back to school.
Then her father died. She refused to withdraw from school. When she saw Charlie before their Clark class, he already knew about her father and held his hands out to her without saying anything. She put her head against his chest. One of the other boys in the class grinned at them and said, “It figures.”
“Never mind,” Charlie said to him, and put his arms around her. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“I need this,” she said, not knowing whether she meant the class or his arms. But she didn’t see Charlie over the holidays. She managed to get through the break by throwing herself into her schoolwork and writing, and she found herself spending a lot of time with her mother. She didn’t go to North Beach, and quite frankly thought about never seeing any of those people again, just drifting away from San Francisco. She could work at little jobs, observe life, write short stories to teach herself, and then move on to the novel.
They’d have to sell the house. They had Farley’s severance but they were deeply in debt. The good furnishings, the family car, a ’57 Buick, would also have to go. They’d end up broke and stripped. Edna had worked at the Chronicle a long time ago, but now she hated the paper and blamed its editors for Farley’s death. “They gave him high blood pressure and then they blew him out,” she said grimly to her daughter as they sat in what was still for the time being their living room. Both had glasses of wine. Edna didn’t seem to mind Jaime’s new habit of drinking. It made them closer.
“What are we going to do for money?” Jaime asked.
“I just don’t know,” Edna said. “I’m forty-four years old. I don’t think I can slim down and meet a breadwinner at this point in my life.” She chuckled and looked puckish. “I guess you’ll have to do it.”
“Marry a breadwinner?”
“Breadwinners are great,” her mother said. “Ooh! Bread! Did we win?”
Jaime laughed and laughed. But their problem was real. Her mother had said that if they sold the house and moved to a less expensive neighborhood, there would be enough money for Jaime to finish college. Neither spoke of about Edna’s lifelong desire to move the other way, into Pacific Heights proper. Her mother was never going to get what she wanted. Life was not going to give her anything more. For Edna, it was over.
“Oh, Mom,” she said sadly.
8.
Kenny Goss slept very little. His small wiry body didn’t seem to need it and his brain was always seething with thoughts. He had tried living with a girl once, but they had lasted only a few days. “You’re too intense,” she told him and left. Now he lived in a very small apartment on Jackson Street, near Larkin. It was on the second floor over a Chinese laundry, and all day when he was home he could hear the rumble of the machines and the voices of the family who ran the laundry, reassuring voices for Kenny. He had been raised to believe that the Chinese were filthy awful people, and every time a Chinese person proved his mother wrong he felt happy. He loved his mother, but he knew better now than to believe her. She didn’t just have it in for the Chinese: she hated Jews, Germans, Japanese, etc. and etc., professing to love only those countries that were primarily Catholic. Kenny had been raised a Catholic. He had even spent a few days in a Catholic orphanage over in Berkeley while his mother found them a place to live. But the minute he was old enough to think, he freed his mind of the overwhelming smothering craziness that was to him Catholicism. Whenever he saw his mother these days she’d remind him that he was bound for hell, and he would remind her that all he had to do was repent, confess, commune, and that was that. All in his most sarcastic voice.
On this particular morning Kenny was sitting in his car at 6:00 a.m., outside a house on Washington Street, waiting for the right time to run up to the front door and see if the people were awake yet. As was his usual habit, the night before he had picked up a copy of the bulldog edition of the Chronicle and read the ads, looking for anything that might be fruitful. This ad said, “Household furnishings for sale. Many good things,” and the address close enough to the high rent district to make Kenny interested. Not that he cared about furniture. Kenny was a book scout. He spent most of his spare time running around the Bay Area looking for underpriced used books. One of his tricks was to answer ads like this morning’s, looking around at the furniture but actually keeping his eye out for books. Often the people holding home furniture sales were in bad shape and didn’t know what they were doing. Sometimes the person who collected the books had died, and the widow wouldn’t know their value. He’d picked up quite a few good bargains this way, including a copy of Hike and the Aeroplane, a children’s book which had been Sinclair Lewis’s first published work. Kenny sold the copy he found, not mint, not even excellent, but very good, for one hundred and fifty dollars. He had paid fifty cents for it.
He sat in his old maroon ’49 Ford sipping coffee from his thermos cup and reading the morning Examiner by flashlight. This time of year the sun wouldn’t be up for another hour. It was cold, but Kenny was comfortable. Last night had been good. He sat up writing for several hours, the laundry below closed, the apartment building almost silent except for the usual quiet domestic sounds, and he had been able to churn out three whole pages. He was writing an insane little story about an old Chinese man who worked in a laundry every day and th
en went home to work on his invention, which was made of a lot of tiny moving parts, gears, wheels, pins, shafts, etc. No one was sure what the old man was making, but everyone was very respectful. Kenny wasn’t sure what the old man was making either, but he hoped his imagination would come to his rescue. He seemed to be coming near to the end of the story, and he still didn’t have any idea what the story was about. He had to trust himself, he knew. Writing blindly, following only impulse, was the secret to finding out what lay in the deepest parts of his mind. What his mother would call his soul, but which he preferred to call his essence.
He looked at his watch. Five to seven. He knew from experience that a lot of people would answer this ad and it was best to be early. Oddly, none of the other book scouts he knew had caught on to his trick of answering furniture ads. Usually he was the only one even slightly interested in the books. He got out of the car and saw his breath. It was a nice cold morning. He went up the steps and rang the doorbell. He hoped they wouldn’t be angry with him, but they usually weren’t. They wanted that sale to begin.
After a while a plump little woman in a gray sweatshirt and green slacks opened the door and looked out at him without saying anything.
“I’m here for the sale?” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She seemed a little strange, but she widened the opening and let him in. He could see right away that the furnishings were good. Persian rugs everywhere, Tiffany lamps, at least three of them in the living room, good-looking and well-cared-for antique furniture. He walked around the living room pretending to look at the furniture.
“I’m Mrs. Froward,” the woman said and gave him a moist hand. He realized she was drunk. At least she had booze on her breath.
“This is all such nice stuff,” he said, walking around. He looked at the pieces in the dining room. Still no books. This was actually a good sign. If a household like this had only a few books, usually they would be displayed in the living room. Of course they might have no books at all.
“Do you have any bookshelves for sale?” he asked her. “That’s what I’m looking for mostly.”
“This way.” She led him down the hall to their library. For Kenny, it was like walking into King Solomon’s mine. Everywhere he looked he saw beautiful books in their original dust wrappers. Names leaped out: Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway . . . He reached for a copy of The Sun Also Rises, in its original dust wrapper. The book was in excellent condition. He opened it to the copyright page and saw the letter A where he hoped to find it. First edition. He checked a Fitzgerald. First edition. He hoped his hand wasn’t trembling as he slid the Fitzgerald back into place. He turned and smiled at Mrs. Froward.
“Nice books,” he said. “Are you a collector?”
“My husband collected the books,” she said. “He’s gone now.”
Just exactly what Kenny hoped to hear. But something was bothering him. “I could buy all these books,” he heard himself saying. “If it’s cheap enough.”
“What do you think?” she asked. She sat down in a nice-looking leather chair, well-worn, probably where the dead guy sat and read over his collection. He looked around. Approximately two hundred books.
“I could give you fifty cents apiece,” he said. “A hundred dollars for the whole bunch. I could haul ’em out of here this morning.”
She looked up at him, and this time he saw the pain in her eyes, for only a second, but it was there. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’d be getting a lot of valuable books. I wasn’t actually thinking of selling the books, but we need the money.”
“Look,” he heard himself saying, “you’re gonna have a lot of furniture dealers here pretty soon. They’ll be trying to screw you, excuse me, but they’ll want to get all this really valuable stuff cheap. You have to be ready to bargain . . .” His heart sank as he listened to himself. But he couldn’t steal from an old drunk woman. It just wasn’t in him.
“You don’t know the value of any of this stuff, do you?” he asked her. He sat down on the little love seat, and noticed for the first time with a shock that the small painting on the wall in front of him was a Matisse. Or it looked like a Matisse. “Matisse?” he asked her and she nodded absently. She must have been up all night drinking. Her husband dies and she’s helpless. And then the scavengers arrive. Kenny sighed. If he had been a real businessman he would have made her an offer for everything in the house, screwed her blind and made a fortune. Instead, because he was a writer, because he needed to be a man of honor more than he needed the money, Kenny told Mrs. Froward the facts of life.
“Lady, you’re not in shape to sell your stuff, pardon me.”
“That’s true,” she said. “But sell it I must.”
He sighed again. Last chance to be a vulture. “Let me call you a reputable dealer,” he said. “Somebody who can take over and auction off your things for the right prices. It will take a while, but otherwise they’d take you to the cleaners.”
He telephoned Butterfield’s and told them what was going on. They were sending a man over, and meanwhile, Kenny would stop people at the door and tell them the sale was over.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.
“I don’t know, lady,” he said. He couldn’t tell her he was a man of honor, could he?
9.
Jaime thought her period had stopped because of the death of her father. But no, she was pregnant, and had obviously gotten pregnant on her first night of love. And to top that off, when she told her mother, Edna snapped, “Fine. Then you’re his responsibility. You can go live with him.”
“Oh, fine,” Jaime snapped back, thinking about Charlie’s luxurious apartment. On that first night Charlie had unzipped his sleeping bag and laid it on the floor next to the cot, and they made love on that. Later when she felt sleepy she just pulled some clothes over her and slept. But she could not imagine living like that. She was a middle-class girl. She was not used to poverty. And anyway she didn’t think Charlie was going to be happy about being a father. There was really no other choice. Abortions cost money.
She and her mother were living in the house while the realtors tried to sell it, and there were strangers in the house all the time. Most of the good stuff was gone, sold at auction, and the house was strange, full of odd echoes. It seemed as if her father were merely on vacation, and had gone off without them. She missed him, but she also felt a little resentful about his absence. Why didn’t he take us with him? She expected to see him coming in the front door, black topcoat collar up, wet gray felt hat pulled down to his eyes, specks of rain on his glasses and moustache. Her mother was busy selling things and looking for an apartment they could afford that wasn’t in a slum, and Jaime tried to do her schoolwork, pay attention in classes, and write. She’d been working on a short story about a girl much like herself. It wasn’t going very well and now seemed to have no point. Too much had happened to her since beginning the story. She threw the pages into her wastebasket. None of her personal furniture had been sold. Her room was intact, the only intact room in the house. The only one with a rug, though not a Persian. She hadn’t told Charlie she was pregnant yet. He’d pulled back after her father’s death, out of common decency, or because he found her too easy. When they ran into each other he always seemed friendly and concerned, but she made herself aloof, as if the death of her father had affected her deeply, as deeply as it might have affected a character in a Russian novel, although Jaime had read only one, Anna Karenina.
Then finally one day in class when Professor Clark was looking something up in a book, Charlie tapped her on the shoulder and she turned. His eyes seemed gold that day. “Hi,” he said to her.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, and turned back. Numbly she listened to Professor Clark reading from the Upanishads (they were reading A Passage to India) and waited for Charlie’s reaction, although he could hardly interrupt the lecture. Then he touched her on the shoulder, and she knew, just from that single touch, that everything was going to
be all right. She started to cry. At that moment Clark looked at her and must have seen the shine of the tears. His blue eyes widened, and he went back to reading. It’s not the lecture, Walt, she wanted to tell him. She got a Kleenex from her bag and blew her nose noisily.
“Gesundheit!” Charlie whispered and she felt his hand at the back of her neck. Clark grinned and kept on reading. When the bell rang Jaime stood up and turned to face Charlie. She knew her eyes looked terrible, but Charlie just pulled her in to him and she cried against his field jacket.
Of course his place would be no good for them. The family house had been snapped up, probably at bargain prices, and Jaime and her mother had to move out within a month. Edna seemed distracted and was drinking too much. Jaime couldn’t talk to her. She did not know whether this was the happiest time of her life, or the worst. Only when she was with Charlie did she feel good. Only with Charlie did she feel safe. And this was insane. What did she know about him? He was from a small town in Montana, Wain, Montana. His mother was dead and his father worked in a lumber yard. He’d been a soldier and had won a medal her father envied. She knew he was an enthusiastic writer with few literary skills, and finally, she knew everybody around State thought he was their most promising student. Probably because he was big and strong and had a nice smile.
They went outside to smoke a cigarette under the trees in the courtyard between HSS and the administration building. It was raining a little.
“I thought you might be,” he said.
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