by Howard Fast
Billy Clawson was glancing at her furtively, guiltily. She looked down at her breast, which May Ling was finally relinquishing, sucking mechanically and without enthusiasm, her pink face relaxed, her eyes closed, and she decided that it was well worth a furtive glance or two, a lovely, well-rounded breast. She covered it now and put May Ling into her carriage. “After all,” she said to Billy, “I never had what you might call a proper breast until I was almost seventeen, and why on earth women cover up the best part of them, I’ll never know.” She hooked her brassiere together and began to button her blouse. “Of course, it’s something the men worked out. What an unbelievable set of pious, hypocritical bastards you all are!”
“Do you always say such outrageous things?”
“My dear Billy, we’ve never really talked before. I’m being absolutely demure. Now what on earth brings you down here? This is the last place in the world I’d expect to see you, here in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. This is the barrio, Billy, the pits, the soft underbelly. Do you know, we treat more knife wounds than any other outpatient clinic in the city?”
“I came down to see Joe, and now I find that he’s not here but up in San Francisco. I heard his father had a heart attack. I’m frightfully sorry about that. I only met Mr. Lavette once or twice, but he appeared to be a very interesting man. Very vital. You don’t think of such people as being stricken.” Sally was smiling. Billy shook his head, confused.
“I’m sorry,” Sally said. “It’s the way you talk—forgive me. I’m not really lacking in compassion, Billy. I like Dan Lavette, and Joe says he’s going to be all right. Have you had lunch?”
More confused than ever, Billy shook his head again.
“Because I have an enormous sandwich here,” Sally said, unwrapping it. “Ham and cheese on rye. Please have half of it. I also have a thermos of coffee. I can’t bear the coffee they make here, so I bring my own. Please. It’s more than I can eat.”
It was his first more than casual encounter with Sally Lavette, and he was ill-prepared for it. He accepted half of the sandwich because he could think of no way to refuse.
“Could I help you?” Sally asked. “I mean, if you made the trip to see Joe? I’m sure he’ll be back tonight.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Billy said uneasily. “Or perhaps I should talk to you and not lay my burdens on Joe. I just had the notion that I might be of some use here, that there might be something here that I could do that would justify my going on from day to day. Does that sound crazy to you? I’m an Episcopal priest who actually can’t bear to set foot inside a church. Now I’ve never said that before, not aloud.”
“And you see,” Sally said gently, “God has not struck you dead.”
“Sometimes I wish He would. Trouble is, I don’t believe in Him very much. I don’t believe in anything. I never wanted it, but mother insisted that it was a way to avoid the draft. I ended up as an army chaplain in the Pacific—two long, bloody nightmarish years from Guadalcanal to the end. And since my discharge I’ve done nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just drift from day to day.”
Sally stared at him in amazement. This was not the man she had met half a dozen times, not the man they gossiped about, not the man she had heard Joe refer to with total contempt. What is wrong with me? she asked herself. Why do I see people without ever seeing them or knowing who they are? I’m not a poet. I’m an indifferent and blind fool.
“You see?” he asked uncertainly. “I admire Joe so much, and I think what he’s doing is wonderful. It means something. Nothing I do means anything. My father wants me to go into the business with him. I can’t tell him why it’s meaningless to me. Mother wants me to get a post in a church. She has dreams of Grace Cathedral. I’d be a stevedore on the docks before I’d let them trap me into a place like Grace Cathedral.”
“Then why aren’t you?” Sally asked him.
“Why aren’t I what?”
“A stevedore on the docks?”
“God knows. I suppose I haven’t got the guts, and I’d be taking the job from someone who needs it. I thought there might be work I could do here, in a place like this. I don’t need the money. I have enough money.”
“Do you know what kind of nasty, filthy work it is?” Sally asked.
“Not really, no.”
“I mean, what could you do, Billy? You haven’t any training.”
“I had two years in the Pacific, Sally. Do you think anyone in those hellish islands wanted an Episcopal priest? They wanted a medic, and that’s how I spent most of my time, as a volunteer medic. I don’t know much of anything, but I do know how to deal with a man whose body has been mangled. It’s the only worthwhile training I’ve had. And here no one knows me. I hate to say that’s important to me, but it is.”
He waited while Sally stared at him.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I’ll talk to Dr. Gonzales. He’s Joe’s partner.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?” Billy asked.
“No. Can you come back later, Billy? Or better yet, call us at home tonight. I’ll give you the number. I’d ask you to stay with us, but the house is tiny.”
“Oh, no, no. That’s not necessary. I’ll find a hotel. I’ll call you tonight. Absolutely.”
After he left, Sally told Frank Gonzales about him.
“Come on,” Gonzales said. “You got to be kidding. An Episcopal priest? Anyway, what the devil is an Episcopal priest? Like a Catholic priest? I thought they had ministers.”
“I guess it’s sort of the same thing as a minister. They can get married and all that. But, Frank, this poor guy is at the end of his rope.”
“I met him. Come on, Sally, what can he do for us?”
“There’s more work here than we can handle. Maybe he can get me off the receiving desk so I’ll have time to be a mother and a writer. You know what happens when we have a heavy day. He says he worked with the medics. He must know something.”
Gonzales shook his head. “He is just not it. This is the barrio. He’ll stay a day, and he’ll go.”
“He also comes from one of the richest families in Oakland, and you and Joe are running the most poverty-stricken clinic in California.”
“Come on, come on. We function. We pay wages. Still and all, you say he is loaded?”
“His father. I don’t know what he’s got.”
“Sally, you know what we could do with another ten, twenty thousand? O.K., I’ll talk to Joe about it.”
“And maybe you’re just saving his soul.”
“That’s another line of work.” He paused and looked at Sally. “You’re a good kid. Only you push it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Think about it.”
***
When Barbara got to the hospital, shortly after nine the following morning, Jean was already in the waiting room. She told Barbara that Dan was sleeping.
“How is he?”
“Better, they tell me. Who is with the baby?”
“Eloise. Was Joe here this morning?”
“Yes. He’s on his way back to Los Angeles.”
“When can I see him?”
“As soon as he wakes up, I guess.” Jean was making an effort to keep her voice light and controlled. “I think he’s going to be all right. I’ve had a bad time, Bobby. I want you to understand.”
“I do.”
“Yes. Perhaps more than I do, because all I could think about last night is that if he should die, that’s the end for me. That’s selfish, but then, I’ve always been selfish, haven’t I?”
“Mother, I’m not going to feed self-pity. If a person dies, the living feel it, not the dead. I think you love daddy very much, more than you ever dared admit to yourself, so it’s perfectly natural for you to feel that if he died, it would be the end of everything for you. Only it would not
be the end of everything.”
“You’re so damn sure of yourself!” Jean burst out unexpectedly, in a tone she had never taken with Barbara before. “Did it ever occur to you that my life has been no bed of roses, that I’ve messed it up as much as one human being can mess things up?”
“It has occurred to me, yes.”
“One small measure of happiness, having that man back for the last few years. After thirty years of misery. It went wrong from the very beginning, and neither of us knew why or how.”
She went on. Real or not, the agony poured out. It was a side of her mother Barbara had never seen before, nor was she ready to believe it entirely. For three decades, Jean Lavette had been, in her circle, the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, again by accolade of her small, tight circle; and she had moved and lived in that circle with relish and pleasure. Or had it been a pose and a game? In all the years Barbara could remember her mother, she had never before witnessed this descent into self-pity. The cool, austere, aloof Jean Lavette was beyond such things—or was she? Now she paraded her unhappiness before her daughter, a thousand nights of unspeakable loneliness, meaningless relationships, joyless gaiety. Barbara was cold inside. Suddenly, she wanted to be away from there. Somewhere in the world, there was reality. Jean’s plaint disgusted her, which in turn filled her with guilt and remorse. She was grateful when a nurse appeared and told them they could see Mr. Lavette.
Jean changed as they entered Dan’s room. Barbara was absolutely astounded at how a whining, petulant, aging woman could suddenly become erect and self-confident and young and attractive. She gave a silent cheer. Jean was amazing. Blessings on her, as she kissed Dan coolly and said, “You never do things by halves, do you, Danny boy? You had me quite terrified.”
“That makes two of us,” he said weakly. “Hello, Bobby. How does the old man look to you?”
“Not bad, daddy, not at all bad. How do you feel?”
“According to Joe, it was a mild attack. The worst part is that they’ll have me in bed here for weeks. But I’ll manage.”
A few minutes later, Jean excused herself and left the room. “Where is she going?” Dan asked Barbara.
“I think she went outside to cry. I’ve never seen mother cry. I don’t think anyone ever did until last night. It’s a pleasure she never permitted herself. I’m going to cry any moment now, but it’s never been a problem with me. She’s terribly upset. She’s very much in love with you. Did you know that? Or is that a dumb question?”
“It’s not a dumb question. I’ve never really been sure. You know, Bobby, when May Ling died, I thought death had lost all meaning for me. I didn’t care. Then when I met your mother, after all those years, I began to care again. We’ve led strange lives, the two of us. Last night I thought I was going to die. I didn’t want to. Life was very sweet.”
***
The flight across the country went more smoothly than Bernie had dared to expect. The March weather, so given to unanticipated storms, was as mild as a day in June. The planes stayed within sight of each other in a reasonably well kept wide pattern. They answered queries along the way and met with no interference.
They landed in Dodge City, Kansas, to refuel. Debts were being collected everywhere. Over thirty years before, a Jew named Glazer and an Irishman named Sweeney had smuggled four crates of rifles and ammunition into Dublin. Now Sweeney’s son, reasonably successful in the oil business and bearing a residual hatred of the British as well as an unpaid obligation to his father’s partner, had supplied four tanker trucks of aviation fuel at a quiet commercial airport sixteen miles from Dodge City.
Joe Sweeney, a big, slack-bellied man in his fifties, had a bottle of fine old Irish in his car, and he and Bernie each put down a paper cupful. “What I would give to go with you,” Sweeney said. “It’s purpose you got, sonny, and I got no fuckin’ purpose but to get drunk twice a week and pretend I’m a man.”
Bernie saw him standing there, waving with both arms, as the planes took off. The flight continued without incident, and late that afternoon they circled the airfield in New Jersey and received their landing instructions.
Bernie’s plane came in first, and Jerry Fox brought it in for one of those landings where it is almost impossible to say that you are no longer airborne. “Sonofabitch!” the pilot crowed. “What a beauty, what a daisy!” As they came down, Bernie noticed a cluster of men at the far end of the field, and two of the men came running to meet the plane while it was still in motion.
The airfield, lying in the sandy pine barrens of southern New Jersey, was neither large nor well equipped. It had two X-shaped runways, three hangars, and a wooden control tower. Half a dozen small planes were parked near the hangars. Fox took the whole length of the runway for his landing, then wheeled the plane off onto a parking sheet of asphalt. The two men were running clumsily but hard to intercept it. Bernie saw another group of men leave the hangar and start toward the plane. The second C-54 had landed and the third was coming in.
Bernie’s plane was still rolling.
“Leave enough room for the others,” Bernie shouted to Fox. Then he ran back through the plane and opened the door.
The first of the two men was shouting at him, but he couldn’t make out the words against the roar of the motors. The plane came to a stop, and Bernie dropped to the ground.
The running man, panting, middle-aged, bald, trying to get his breath, gasped, “Where’s Brodsky?”
Bernie pointed to the planes coming in.
“Who are you?”
“Cohen. I’m running the show, for the moment.”
“Bernie Cohen?”
“Right.”
The second man joined them. He was small, dark, dapper, breathless. “I’m Jack Feinstein,” said the bald man, handing Bernie a dollar bill. “Take this. No time for questions. Trust me.”
Bernie took the dollar bill.
“Trust me. No time for questions,” Feinstein gasped. He took a sheaf of folded papers out of his breast pocket and handed a pen to Bernie. “Sign right here. Trust me.”
The papers fluttered and rustled in the wind raised by the landing planes. “What in hell am I signing?” Bernie demanded. “And who are you?”
“Feinstein. Lawyer for the Haganah. Look.” He pointed to the four men walking toward them. “FBI and Customs. You got to sign before they get here. It’s a bill of sale. For a dollar and other valuable considerations, you are selling these ten planes to Señor Luis Montego. Lineas Aereas de Panama. For Christ’s sake, don’t stand there! Believe me.”
Brodsky was running across to them now. The four men were fifty yards away, walking quickly. “That’s Feinstein!” Brodsky yelled. “He’s O.K.!”
“Sign it, señor, sign it,” Montego begged him.
Bernie took the pen and signed.
“Initial here and here,” Feinstein said.
Bernie scribbled his initials. Feinstein handed the papers to Montego as the four men reached them. The last of the ten planes touched down. Brodsky, Jerry Fox, and Herb Goodman joined the group.
The four men, all in dark business suits and unsmiling, faced the growing group of pilots, navigators, and radio operators. One of them displayed a badge. “Fenton, United States Customs. I have an order here to impound these planes. That means they are not to be entered or moved and nothing is to be removed from them.”
“Let’s see your writ,” Feinstein said, still trying to catch his breath.
“Who are you?”
“Feinstein. Attorney.”
“Attorney for who?”
“Señor Luis Montego of Panama Airlines.”
“I don’t know how he comes into this,” the Customs man said, taking a paper out of his pocket. “Here’s the order. President Truman’s proclamation two seven seven six. That puts commercial planes under the Munitions Control Board.”
“Only,” said Feinstein, “when such planes are taken out of the country for implied military purposes.”
Another of the four men showed his badge. “Bently, Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to our information, these planes were purchased yesterday from one Cary Kennedy in Barstow, California, by one Bernie Cohen, to be removed from the United States.”
“So much for Kennedy and the word of God,” Bernie whispered to Brodsky.
“The sonofabitch!”
“If that is the case,” Feinstein said, “the planes are here. You have no right to impound the private property of a United States citizen.”
“Don’t be cute, Feinstein.”
“I’ll be cuter. The planes don’t belong to Cohen. They are the property of my client, Señor Luis Montego of Panama Airlines. In other words, they belong to a foreign commercial airline, and any attempt to impound them will cause no end of trouble, gentlemen. Señor Montego has with him all the permits and export licenses required by law. Will you show them the bill of sale, Señor Montego?”
Smiling, Montego handed Bently the bill of sale Bernie had just signed. Bently glanced at it, handed it to his associates, and said sourly, “It won’t wash, Feinstein. We know damn well what those planes are intended for, and it just won’t wash.”
Brodsky nudged Bernie. Two men had appeared and were slapping decals on the tail assembly of the planes. The decals read: Lineas Aereas de Panama.
“Stop that right there!” the Customs man yelled. Then he said to the FBI men, “Will you take some action? This is a scam. It’s a cheap, underhanded scam.”
“You know the law,” Feinstein said. “You need a court order to void Mr. Montego’s export license. When you find a federal judge and get an injunction against the shipment of these planes to Panama and show us that injunction, we will comply with it. Until then, we will resist by every means at our disposal any attempt to prevent the departure of these planes.”
“Are you going to let them pull this off?” Fenton demanded of Bently.