by Howard Fast
He located his fear among all the other emotions that beset him. The fear was paramount–fear that May Ling had expunged him from her life. And why not? And then there were other alternatives of fear. May Ling could be dead. As much as he rejected the thought, it kept recurring. She could be married to someone else. Her love could have turned into hatred. He had seen love turn into hatred.
No use to think, he told himself. It was almost two years since he had left the house on Russian Hill, and for two years fear and doubt and his own peculiar need for self-flagellation had kept him away.
He left the interurban car at Vermont Avenue and walked to the campus. It was hot now, and he pulled off his sweater and carried it over his arm. At the campus, he experienced a momentary surge of terror, a feeling that his whole world was collapsing around him. The buildings were boarded up. The grounds had been uncared for, the plants dry and yellow and wasted–as if the University of California in Los Angeles had been flung on the dust heap of the Depression. But then common sense told him that universities do not vanish so easily, and he prowled around until he found a caretaker, who informed him that the entire university had moved to its new campus in the town of Westwood.
A red interurban car, bouncing and jolting, carried him to Westwood, and now a new fear assailed him. Why was he so certain that she remained in the same job? What if this were a dead end? What if nothing but dead ends awaited him?
He walked slowly and uncertainly across the campus, asking directions to the library. The place was bigger than the old campus, new parts of it still in construction, winding pathways and red brick buildings, boys and girls striding past him as if he did not exist. He reached the library and stood in front of it, and now that he was here, his courage failed him, and for perhaps ten minutes he stood without moving. It was almost four o’clock now. There was a pile of lumber about the height of a bench on the edge of the walk, and he went to it and sat there, unable to bring himself to enter the library building.
The minutes passed. He had a dollar Ingersol watch, and, sitting there, he was so high-strung, so desperate, that he could hear it ticking away in his watch pocket. He looked again, and it was four-fifteen. He rose to go to the library and then dropped back onto the pile of lumber. Students drifted by and in and out of the library, and still he waited.
At four-thirty, May Ling came out of the building. She wore a pleated gray skirt that fell to below her knees, a white blouse, and a black sweater. Her long hair had been bobbed. There was a distance of about twenty yards between where he sat and the front of the library, and with the distance, she appeared almost girllike, the same slender, ivory-skinned girl he had met in the apartment in San Francisco in another life and in another time.
She stood there a moment, breathing the fresh air, and he had a sudden sense of panic. She would turn and walk away, never seeing him, and he would remain frozen where he was. But then she looked at him. She remained frozen for a long moment, and finally she walked over to where he was. He stood up, facing her, and she paused about four feet from him, studying him, the heavy work shoes, the twill trousers, the white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the strong, muscular brown arms and the lean face. She had never seen his face so lean, the skin drawn tight over the ridges of bone. He was not the same man, and yet he was. She came closer and reached out and touched his cheek, in a gesture so typical that he felt tears welling into his eyes. He was unable to speak. He just stood there, staring at her, noticing now that age had not left her untouched, the gray streaks in her hair, the tiny wrinkles around her eyes. The dark eyes met his, directly, searchingly; and suddenly he felt weak and totally drained. He moved back and sat down on the stack of boards, covering his face with his hands, trying to control the dry sobs that wracked his body. He had not been able to weep since he was a child.
May Ling sat down next to him. For almost ten minutes, the two of them sat there in silence, neither speaking. Then May Ling said, “I thought you were dead.” Her voice was a whisper. “It was like being dead myself. I read about what had happened to the company, and I waited, and then I telephoned Stephan Cassala at San Mateo, and he told me that Mark had died and you disappeared–”
“Mark died?” he asked woefully. “Oh, my God! When?”
“Four months ago, I guess. He had a heart attack.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Where were you, Danny?”
“In jail.”
“Oh, no. No.”
“I’m all right now. I was there only three months. But Mark–oh, Christ, this lousy, rotten world!”
“It’s a good, beautiful world, Danny.”
“We’re here and Mark’s dead. He wasn’t old. He was fifty-one.”
“We’re here, Danny. I wept enough for you.”
He was crying openly at last. Students passing by turned to look at the big, brown-faced man who sat weeping next to a small Chinese woman who clutched his hand so tightly.
“Don’t, Danny, please.”
He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Poor Sarah,” he said. “Is she all right?”
“I think so. I don’t know.”
Then he remembered and said to her, “God, you’re not married, are you?”
“Who would marry me, Danny?”
He was grinning and weeping at once, rubbing his eyes. “I got a job,” he said. “I’m a fisherman again.” He shook his head and bent to hide the tears that started again. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. God Almighty, I can’t sit here crying.”
“Come home with me, Danny.”
She took his arm, and he rose and walked with her. Even the pain of knowing that Mark was dead could not lessen his sense of being, of existing, the knowledge that this strange, small Chinese woman whose name was May Ling and who was in some way a part of himself was here beside him.
When the University of California in Los Angeles moved to its new campus in Westwood Village, Westwood was still a place of open fields of barley and corn, orange groves, and rolling hills. But hard on the move came the real-estate developers, bloodhounds on the first scent, and soon small tracts of houses began to spring up around the campus. May Ling had bought one of these houses. It was a pretty, two-story frame house, with a living room, dining room, and library on the first floor and four bedrooms on the floor above. The price was sixteen thousand dollars, with an eleven-thousand-dollar mortgage and a cash payment of only five thousand dollars. There was a garden plot in the rear, with a big live oak. Altogether, it was a pleasant, comfortable house, and within easy walking distance of the campus. Dan walked there with May Ling, slowly, hand in hand.
Bit by bit, he told her what had happened, broadly, not in detail. The details would come later. She knew him well enough not to ask why he had waited. She understood his fears–in particular the deep fear of facing his son.
“We’ll work it out,” she told him. They were in sight of the house now.
“Does he remember me?”
“Of course he remembers you. It’s only five years.”
“Or a hundred years. What does he feel about me?”
“He’s fourteen, Danny. He doesn’t know himself what he feels. But he’s a good boy. He’s earnest and thoughtful.”
“What about your father?”
“Danny, Danny, he worships the ground you walk on. Don’t you know that?”
“I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
They went into the house. Dan stood awkwardly in the living room, looking at bright chintz, white curtains, and on a table in a corner a picture of himself and May Ling, taken in Hawaii.
“Daddy,” May Ling called out, “there’s an old friend here I want you to meet. Mama, you too.”
Feng Wo came out of the library, balder, thinner, somewhat stooped, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, peering over his glasses at Dan. He stared, then recovered himself, and smiled. “Mr. Lavette,” he said, bowing slightly, “what a pleasure! What an unexpected pleasure! I welco
me you to our poor home.”
So-Toy appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She stopped short when she saw Dan and just stared. Her husband said something to her in Chinese, and she nodded. Then she began to cry and ran back into the kitchen.
“She will be all right,” Feng Wo said.
“Where’s Joe?” May Ling asked.
“In his room, I think.”
May Ling took Dan’s hand and led him upstairs. The door to the boy’s room was closed. May Ling knocked.
“Come on in.”
May Ling opened the door. The boy was sprawled on his bed, reading. Dan would hardly have recognized him, a big, long-limbed boy who turned to look at them inquiringly. Then he rose and stood facing Dan, tall, almost as tall as Dan, with oversized hands and feet. He just stood there, staring.
Dan shook his head and clenched his fists.
“I don’t know what to say,” the boy muttered.
“Neither do I,” Dan whispered.
“I missed you,” the boy said haltingly. “Mama thought you were dead.”
“I missed you.”
The boy nodded.
“You’ve grown.”
The boy nodded again.
“I don’t know what you feel about me,” Dan said, speaking with great difficulty. “It’s no use saying I’m sorry, but I am. I’m sorry. I should have been with you.”
The boy sat down on the bed, staring at the floor. May Ling took Dan’s arm and motioned to the door. Dan followed her out of the room, and she closed the door behind her.
“He hates me,” Dan said.
“Oh, Danny, he has a scrapbook filled with pictures of you out of magazines and newspapers. He doesn’t hate you. Give it time.”
May Ling’s mother retreated into the kitchen and cooked. When they sat down at the dinner table, the five of them, May Ling refused to participate in the silence. The silence was not for her, and her heart was singing its own song; and if the tall, lean, sunburned man who sat next to her was a stranger to everyone else, he was no stranger to her. There was food enough for a dozen hungry people. She launched into the story of their first encounter, of how she had described each dish explicitly; and the memory set her to giggling. Her son looked at her uncomprehendingly. He had never seen his mother quite like this. Feng Wo watched and listened in silence, a shadow of fear and worry in his eyes. It went through his mind that only a reckless person surrenders to happiness. His daughter was not a reckless person, and no one had yet asked whether Daniel Lavette would go away again. And where had he been?
Dan began to talk. He was a fisherman, he told them. He fished for mackerel out of San Pedro–and then he told how the boats went out and how they rigged the nets and took in the fish, and how they fought the sea when the sea fought them, and how it was to battle through the storm and cold waves. He had never talked about these things before. He had spent his life forgetting. Now he talked with a compulsive necessity, trying somehow to explain that he was content. But it was something he was unable to explain. Feng Wo said to himself that he required no explanations; where a man’s life is an obligation to a deed, a word, an action that has not been taken before, the obligation is not conditional. So-Toy, a tiny, wizened Chinese lady, listened without wholly comprehending, and her grandson, Joseph Lavette, let himself be swept into the man’s words. He would remember this night all his life, the great sunburned man who was his father, who had ruled the ships that sailed the seas and the planes that sailed the skies, and who was now a fisherman and content to be a fisherman, talking so slowly and intently about how it was to be a fisherman, with all of his past thrown away. The boy did not know how. It puzzled him that an empire could be cast aside, yet vaguely he understood what his father was trying to say. His mother had given him a sense of the fitness of things, a sense of the single lifetime length that spanned this place called California and which had produced him, one-half Chinese, one-quarter Italian, one-quarter French, to be an inheritor not of wealth or power, but of the tangled human forces that motivated these people.
May Ling watched and listened to the single man she had loved and given herself to in the one lifetime she lived. She understood silence and the practice of silence, and that was one of the links with Dan Lavette. He was not an articulate man. When he spoke of what he was and what he did and what he felt inside of himself, the words had to be torn out of his gut. She sensed what this day had been to him and what she had added to the burden by telling him of Mark Levy’s death. His life had been smashed and battered, and that was necessary. There was no other way for him to come to an accounting with himself. She understood the illusion of free will, and finally, in his own way and in his own good time, he had arrived at that understanding. It was a great triumph that he was celebrating, but that knowledge would be for the two of them and only for the two of them.
Thus she said almost nothing after he began to speak, only listened. And Dan, glancing sidewise at her, the tiny nose, the perfectly formed small mouth, the delicate image of a woman who might have been formed from porcelain, sensed her calm, her knowledge of the moment, and realized that there was really no need to explain, that what had been had been. Even if he had never returned, they would have been together.
They were married in City Hall, with Feng Wo and his wife as witnesses and with a silent, happy fourteen-year-old boy to complete the wedding party. The clerk was somewhat puzzled that a woman whose name was Mrs. Lavette was marrying a man named Mr. Lavette.
“You’re not related?” he asked her.
“Not as blood relations,” May Ling replied, smiling.
“Then you were married to another Mr. Lavette?”
“Not legally married, no. We simply lived together,” May Ling said brightly. “But he went away a long time ago.”
The clerk consulted with another clerk. “You are not at this time married?”
“Oh, no, not at all.”
“And you?” he asked Dan.
“I’m not married.”
“It’s unusual,” the clerk muttered. But in the end, the citadels of bureaucracy crumbled, and they were married. The five of them celebrated with a wedding luncheon in a Chinese restaurant near City Hall, where So-Toy complained about the dreadful food and where May Ling remarked that everything tasted like ambrosia, something So-Toy did not understand at all. With a down payment of twenty dollars, Dan had purchased a used 1930 Ford sedan, and after lunch they got into it and drove back to Westwood. May Ling suggested that they devote the rest of the afternoon to a honeymoon of sorts, so after depositing Feng Wo and his wife and young Joseph at the house in Westwood, Dan and May Ling drove out to Santa Monica Beach. Hand in hand, they walked along the beach, and then they sat down together on a rock and watched the waves. Except for the swooping, screaming gulls, the beach was deserted. It was already late in the afternoon. They had been silent for a time, an easy silence that was without awkwardness, the presence of each other being sufficient. And then May Ling asked him, “How do you feel about Jean?”
“I like her. A long time ago, I thought I was in love with her. But I never liked her. I think I do now.”
“What changed it, Danny?”
“Leaving her, I suppose.”
“And all the rest of it, what they call the good life–you haven’t any regrets?”
“I could do it again,” he said. “I’m not just talking. I thought about it when I sat there in front of the fire in the lot at San Pedro. There was an old man sitting next to me. He said something about four days without shaving makes a bum. I didn’t sleep most of that night, and I thought about it. Start over. Get back to San Francisco. That was no problem. I could ride the rails. I left two suitcases at Mark’s house, shirts, ties, suits, shoes. You want the trappings, and then you walk out and make a deal. You don’t even need money, only the bluff and the arrogance and knowing how the game is played. There are twenty men in San Francisco who’d make a deal with me. Ships, planes, land. Why even a thing like t
his bridge over the Golden Gate that they’ve been talking about for years. I don’t know one damn thing about bridges, but I know half a dozen engineering outfits that would be as impressed as hell if I walked into their offices and told them to start drawing up plans for the bridge. Then I’d bull my way into the group that’s been talking the bridge all these years, and I’d convince them that I would make it happen, and by God, it would happen.”
“But you didn’t go back to San Francisco.”
“You asked me if I had regrets. It’s not a case of regretting anything, May Ling. It’s something else. I can’t put it into words. When you told me about Mark, the first thing I thought was that Jean killed him when she called our loans and washed us out. But I was wrong. Mark and me, we began to die a long time ago. No. I would have died there in San Pedro or in some flophouse along Main Street before I’d go back At least it would be a death of my own choosing.”
Then, again, they sat in silence, watching a red sun sink to the lip of the ocean. The evening chill rolled in from the sea, and Dan put his arm around May Ling and drew her to him.
On the twenty-eighth of December, in 1933, early in the afternoon, Dan drove up to the house in Westwood, back from San Pedro. He wore his work clothes, stained blue jeans and a blue denim shirt, and he smelled of fish and brine. May Ling met him as he got out of the old Ford, and after he had kissed her and she had made her face at the rank smell of him, she said, “Wait, Danny. There’s someone inside.”
He stared at her, puzzled.
“Your daughter, Barbara.”
“No!”
“Just think about it a moment. She’s on her Christmas vacation from college in the East, and she came down here by herself to see you. Drove down. That’s her car, across the street there. She’s inside, and she’s a very nervous, frightened child. Now if you want to, you can go in through the kitchen door and wash up there and I’ll bring you some fresh clothes.”