The Immigrants

by Howard Fast

  “Do you know, Danny,” she said to him, “I have never been with a man before, so this is going to be much harder for you than for me. But it’s also going to be beautiful. I know that because I know you. You still haven’t kissed me truly. Don’t you think you ought to?”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her, and then they stretched out on the bed, and he kissed her again and again, her lips parted, welcoming him. He lay there, looking at her, touching her face, her arms, her tiny breasts.

  “We’ll undress, Danny,” she whispered. “We’ll be naked.”

  It took only moments for her to slip out of her dress and her underthings, and while he struggled with his clothes, she took the spread off the bed and turned back the sheets. Then she let down her hair and it fell to her waist in a great black flood. Dan could not take his eyes off her. Her figure was slender and firm, her belly almost flat, her breasts small and firm, the nipples like budding roses in nests of old ivory. Naked like that, out of the straight, shapeless dresses she always wore, she appeared to Dan as the loveliest creature he had ever seen, not as another woman as his wife was a woman, but something out of another world and another time and place–an almost unreal person.

  She walked over and stood before him, tiny against his huge, muscular bulk, and he clasped her in his arms, pressing her to him. Then he lifted her and carried her to the bed.

  “Good God,” he said, “what do you weigh?”

  “A hundred and five pounds. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  “I’m two hundred.”

  “Good. You’re a proper man.”

  He lay down next to her and cradled her in his arms, and she pressed up against him, smiling with delight.

  “It doesn’t bother you that I’m married?”

  “No, but I don’t want you to talk about it. I just want you to make love to me.”

  It was two o’clock in the morning when they closed the door behind them and walked downstairs. Dan tossed the key onto the desk and said to the clerk, “We decided not to stay, buster.”

  May Ling curled up against him as they drove back to the city. They were silent for a while, relaxed, content, connected, and then May Ling asked him, “Do you still think you’re no good with women?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You were terribly good with me, and I’m just a skinny little virgin. I mean I was a virgin. Not now. You deflowered me, Dan Lavettee.”

  “You are the goddamndest girl.”

  “Why?”

  “The things you say. Anyway, you’re not skinny. You’re the way you are, and that’s right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Weren’t you afraid?” he asked her.

  “Should I have been?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “I was once.”

  “When was that?”

  “When we walked into the place. I half expected the clerk to say that they don’t take Chinks.” She touched his cheek. “If he had, Danny, what would you have done?”

  “I would have killed the sonofabitch.”

  “You’re still a roughneck, aren’t you?”

  He thought about it for a while before he answered. “No, I’m learning. I read books. I don’t say ain’t much anymore, and I’m learning how to make love to a woman.”

  Quite simply, Sarah Levy adopted Clair Harvey. It came about without prior planning or arrangement. Dan and Mark both liked and trusted Jack Harvey, who had been with them since they purchased the Oregon Queen; he had his captain’s papers; he was a good sailor and fiercely loyal; and when finally the Oceanic, the first of the new fleet of ships that Lavette and Levy had acquired, took off under their house flag, Harvey was in command. There was only one problem–what to do with Clair, and Sarah solved it by asking the girl whether she would like to stay with them at Sausalito? The ship was on a Western passage that would take it in due time entirely around the world, and it would be months before her father returned. Her strange childhood existence as a schooner brat on the coasters had come to an end; she could not live alone; and aside from her father she had no relative in the world. For all that she was amazingly independent and capable, and she was still only fifteen years old. Harvey put the problem to Sarah, who replied indignantly that she had never questioned the matter. Still, it had to have Clair’s agreement, and Jack Harvey had vaguely discussed the alternative of a girls’ boarding school.

  Clair had stayed with the Levys for three weeks after her father’s enormous bender, and then she had returned with him to their apartment in San Francisco when the school term began. One Saturday, Sarah took the ferry to town, and she and Clair had a long luncheon, just the two of them being very posh and ladylike at the Fairmont. Sarah saw herself in the long-legged, freckled, redheaded girl–the same fierce independence, the same kind of calm and certainty, withal a great pity for someone so totally alone in the world. Bit by bit, she drew out the story of Clair’s life, the shabby rooming houses between the voyages on the redwood lumber schooners, the intermittent schooling, the long waits at night for her father’s return. Finally, she made her proposal:

  “Mark and I have decided to ask you to live with us. You see, my dear, your father’s life is going to be very different now. He’ll be gone for months at a time.”

  “I know that,” she said. “But I can take care of myself, Sarah. Believe me, I always have.”

  “I’m sure you can. But your father’s worried sick.”

  “Jack worried?” She laughed. “He never worried about me before. He found some dumb girls’ school that he wants me to go to. Not on your life.”

  “Don’t you like our place in Sausalito?”

  “Like it? It’s like heaven. And Jake is great. I love Jake. But I can’t plant myself on you. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  An hour later, Clair agreed. Sarah reached across the table to take her hand, and Clair said, “My goodness, you’re crying. Please, please don’t cry. I won’t be any trouble. I’ll be a help to you, truly.”

  Marcy Callan persuaded Jean to join the Women’s Exposition Committee. Her election to that very select body was no problem, for as Marcy said, the thought of the committee without a Seldon upon it was impossible. While not a member of the committee–for obvious reasons–Manya Vladavich was frequently present at committee meetings. Her opinions were never uncertain, and while a number of the women resented her flamboyance, there was still in San Francisco at that time enough worship of anything that smacked of Paris for them to tolerate her. It also gave Manya the opportunity to spend time with Jean, and while Jean still experienced curious prickles of excitement at the very touch of Manya’s hand, she never again asked Manya to the house on Russian Hill, nor did she succumb to Manya’s pleas that they spend an evening together.

  Still and all, she found herself including Manya in the small “business” lunches that she and Marcy and a few other members of the committee held regularly. Manya was outspoken; she had opinions, of which she was certain; the others also had opinions, but with no conviction.

  At one of these lunches, at the Palace Hotel, Manya held forth on the subject of the Tower of Jewels, which she described as an “obscenity.” The Tower of Jewels, then still in the process of construction, was to be the central symbol of the 1915 exposition. The exposition itself had for its theme “The City of Domes,” projecting a dream city that would represent all nations–or at least a good many nations. The Tower of Jewels was an attempt to root the exposition in the culture of Mexico, and, in a vague way, it was planned as an Aztec tower which would be four hundred and thirty-three feet high when completed.

  Jean was inclined to agree with Manya’s definition of the Tower. The architect’s drawings, published widely in the newspapers, reminded her of nothing so much as an artist’s imaginative representation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which she had seen in The Book of Knowledge years ago; and she thought it unlikely that Babylon and Ancient Mexico had that much in common. The enormous Tower began, fr
om the ground up, as a sort of Arc de Triomphe, with an overly ornate wing of the Louvre fastened onto each side of the arch, and then on top of the arch a series of colonnaded structures, for all the world like some gigantic wedding cake decorated with neoclassical sculpture and fierce winged birds.

  “Eet is hideous and we must destroy it!” Manya announced. Marcy Callan, already an admirer of Manya’s, nodded eagerly. The two other women present looked at Jean.

  “It’s half built,” Jean said. “How do you propose to destroy it?”

  “With a petition. With ze publicity,” Manya declared.

  “That makes no sense,” Jean said. It was the first time she had ever directly rejected an opinion of Manya’s.

  “Maybe you think it is beautiful, dear Jean,” Manya said caustically.

  “I do not think it’s beautiful, but it’s all right.”

  “So now you are expert on architecture. You have seen so much in the world–yes?”

  “Manya, don’t be a fool!” Jean snapped. “There’s no way in the world that we can stop the construction of the Tower of Jewels. But even if we could, I’d be against it. Do you know what we’ve gone through for this exposition? After pouring millions into its preparation, this wretched war in Europe had to start. Well, thank God, now the European countries are only too eager to send us their treasures. At least they won’t be blown up by shell fire.”

  Dorothy Maclane, who was president of the Garden Club and thereby its representative on the Women’s Committee, said that, after all, it was the gardens not the Tower that defined the exposition, thirty thousand cypress, spruce, and acacia trees, forty-seven thousand rhododendrons, cineraria, and azaleas–“and chrysanthemums–well, one doesn’t count the number. And when you consider that there will be a hundred and thirty-five thousand jewels hanging from the Tower–”

  “Bravo!” Manya interrupted. “Will you also count daisies?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You are a very stupid woman.”

  “And you’re a bitch, Manya,” Jean said–at which Manya rose and stalked out of the dining room.

  There was a long moment of silence. Then Marcy Callan sighed and said, “She’s right about the Tower.”

  “And I’m right about her being a bitch,” Jean replied.

  From there on, Manya was absent from the committee lunch meetings, and, in all truth, Jean was relieved. She also had the good feeling that in some way she had contributed toward the success of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Due in part to the intervention of Dorothy Maclane, she was put on the steering committee, and for the next year, the exposition became the focus of her life. If it drew her still further away from Dan, it also created in her a sense of being a vital part of the artistic life of the city. She felt possessive of the Tower of Jewels–mentally embracing its flamboyance–and when the exposition closed at last, after ten months and nineteen million visitors, she felt an awful letdown that was akin to despair.

  A few weeks later, with hardly more than an incoherent statement that she was choking and would die unless she could breathe freely, she left Dan with the house and the servants and the children and took off on a visit to her Aunt Asquith in Boston. It was five weeks before she returned; but now her mood had changed, and when Dan met her at the train, she embraced him and praised him for his tolerance and forbearance.

  On the twenty-third of March 1917, the cargo ship Oceanic was torpedoed fourteen miles southeast of Southampton, England. She was carrying a cargo of food and munitions. The torpedo set off a chain reaction of explosions, and within minutes after the strike, the ship went down with all hands. There were no survivors. On the other hand, the loss of the ship did not even cause a financial tremor in the corporate structure of Levy & Lavette–a condition of international trade that requires explanation. For more than three years, cargo rates had been rising astronomically. By March of 1917, the bulk rate for cotton had climbed 3000 percent. The rate for wheat out of an Eastern port had increased thirty-five times, or 3500 percent, and out of San Francisco the increase was even greater. Dan and Mark had purchased the six-thousand-ton Oceanic for $350,000. Two additional ships of somewhat less than five thousand tons’ displacement were purchased in 1916, at the cost of $700,000 per ship, and three more in 1917 at the cost of $850,000 per ship. Shipping rates on munitions were higher than the actual cost of the munitions–the money flowing with the same insane mindlessness as the river of blood on the Western Front. No belligerent paused to question shipping costs, just as no belligerent paused to count or be concerned over the number of dead. And in the blood-soaked line of trenches, stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, killing and stalemate evened out in a mindless mass destruction that promised, in the eyes of some, to go on forever.

  Dan and Mark received the news of the sinking of the Oceanic in their offices on the afternoon of March 24, by cable from their London agent. A British destroyer had been witness to the submarine attack and had dropped depth charges, and the cable indicated that the U-boat had possibly been sunk. At the same time, the destroyer, which remained in the vicinity for several hours, had been able to find no survivors.

  Mark was reading the cable when Dan returned from lunch. He was sitting in an oak-paneled office, part of the suite that had been created in their remodeled warehouse the year before. There was a three-thousand-dollar Oriental rug on the floor, a wide window with a view of the bay, and an assortment of period furniture. On the walls were large framed photographs of the Oregon Queen, the Oceanic, and other ships. Mark’s desk was a great antique refectory table, and he sat bunched behind it, his face twisted with pain, looking much older than his thirty-seven years, a small, thin, tired man. He handed the cable to Dan without speaking.

  Dan read it, and then just stood there, shaking his head. “Jack’s dead,” he said. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “The whole crew–Jack and the whole crew.”

  “I suppose it had to come, but why the hell did it have to be him?”

  “Danny, where the hell is this taking us? It’s only the beginning.”

  “Where we decided to go, I guess.”

  “For what? We got more money than any person needs.”

  “We’ll be at war any day now. You know that.”

  “Then every dollar is soaked in American blood. Is that it?”

  “Did we make this?” Dan asked him. “Mark, did we make this stinking war? We can sell our ships to Whittier tomorrow. What then? Does it make us virtuous? Can you show me a dollar anywhere in this country today that doesn’t smell of blood? We didn’t kill Jack Harvey. The Huns killed him, and so help me God, if shipping’s going to win this war, I’ll make those bastards pay.”

  “Bastards, Huns–come on, Danny. All right–we’re in this up to our necks, and I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. Now I got to go to Sausalito and tell the kid her father’s dead. How in hell do you do that?”

  Some six months after he had first made love to May Ling in the inn at Broadmoor, Dan purchased a narrow Victorian house on Willow Street, within walking distance of the public library. He bought the house for forty-two hundred dollars and then spent another three thousand on renovations, restoring it to the original condition, retaining the stained-glass windows but doing no decorating. Now, after Mark had left to go to Sausalito, Dan drove to Willow Street, his thoughts going back to the day he first brought May Ling to the place. He had told her that he had a surprise for her. He parked his car then, picked her up at the library, and walked with her to the house. They had often talked about the Victorian houses, and he knew that she loved their style and character; and he opened the door, led her into the empty building, so shining clean and bright, cutting off her questions, leading her through room after room, up the stairs which were bathed in a red-gold glow from the stained-glass windows, to the main bedroom where a slanted bay looked out over a greenery-choked backyard.

  Finally, he allowed her to speak, asking, “Do you like i
t?”

  “Oh, Danny, it’s wonderful. Whose house is it?”

  “Yours.”

  “Oh, don’t do that. Don’t tease me. That’s my prerogative.”

  “I’m not teasing you. It’s yours. I bought it for you. It’s a gift. A place of your own. Because there’s no way we can go on without you having a place of your own, and if you think I’m ever going to let go of you, you’re crazy.”

  It was another week before Dan persuaded her to accept the house and to allow him to pay for decorating it and furnishing it. How she dealt with her parents he never knew–just as he did not know whether Feng Wo was at all aware of the affair. This was a part of her life she would not discuss with him. “This is a thing that I must do,” she would say whenever he brought up the subject, “and I must do it my own way and without destroying what exists between you and my father. So trust me.”

  And now he went to her with all his guilts and confusions, letting himself into the house with his key–since she was not yet back from work–and dropping into a chair in the parlor, which was the only place he felt secure and content. Sitting there, his thoughts turned to Jack Harvey, and in his mind’s eye, he could see him on the bridge of the Oceanic when the torpedo struck. It must have hit the hold where the three-inch shells had been stowed, for the Oceanic had unloaded and loaded again in Newark, retracing her way across the Atlantic, and then it must have been sheer unimaginable hell as the ship tore herself to pieces. He was awakened out of his brooding reverie by the sound of the door opening, and there was May Ling, her arms clutching bags of groceries.

  She smiled happily at him as he took the bags and led the way into the kitchen. “Danny, I didn’t expect you. What a good surprise! You will stay for dinner, won’t you.”

  “No, I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t. I have to get over to Sausalito tonight.”

  “But why?”

  “We lost the Oceanic. She went down off Southampton with all hands. Jack Harvey’s dead–the whole crew dead.”