Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  “Jesus!” Jack said as he watched her go.

  He was generally averse to making a play for other men’s women—partly because of his own embarrassment of riches, but even more because he believed, as he liked to say, that “none of them, however beautiful, is worth a confrontation with some raging cuckold.” But he watched this woman with such longing as she disappeared around a corner that I could tell that if he had a chance with her—Niccolo Fortunato or not—all such compunctions would be out the window.

  When we got to Harry Warner’s office his secretary handed Jack a note. He read it aloud: “I had to take a meeting. If l don’t keep an eye on my brother, he goes berserk. Anyway, why should my name be in the same newspaper article with those two shtarkers? Do it without me, okay?”

  “Okay.” Jack spoke to the paper as he tossed it in a wastebasket.

  Walking back to the parking lot, he kept talking about the girl, asking me, in that obsessive way he had when he was actually querying himself, what it was about her that was so distinctive.

  “I don’t know,” I finally replied. “Not enough protein?”

  “Come on, dammit, Lemmer, I’m serious.”

  Then we saw her sitting in the back seat of the Zephyr.

  Most of my life I have just allowed myself to be borne unresisting on the tide of the present moment, taking for granted extraordinary experiences that I should have realized at the time were mysterious and possibly filled with deep portent. A few times, however, I have understood that what I was witnessing was of such consequence that it would alter profoundly everything that came after. One such experience, as I have said, was that first meeting with Jack when we were boys. Another was seeing Valentina Moretti in the back seat of Jack’s 1941 Zephyr at Warners on that postwar September afternoon.

  I have never forgotten the forlorn way she was sitting—like an unclaimed human parcel someone had left for us. I’ve never forgotten the thousand-yard stare and the melancholy Mona Lisa smile as she absentmindedly worried her arm. Most of all, I have never forgotten the look on Jack’s face when he saw her—pure anticipation slightly shadowed by doubt, as if he suspected that he might soon discover the truth of the observation by Oscar Wilde he quoted so glibly about there being two types of tragedy in this world: not getting what you want, and getting it.

  I got into the front seat and was hit by her scent, Coty’s L’Aimant, whose notes of bergamot and geranium filled the car with latent drama. I saw Jack hesitate a second after opening the back door, giving himself one last chance to reconsider before sliding into the seat beside her.

  We all sat there in silence, jointly considering the gravity of what would come next. Then Jack said, “Drive, Billings.”

  “Where to, sir?” I played out the charade.

  “Wherever.”

  Seeing a street sign pointing to North Hollywood, which I mistakenly assumed was a part of Hollywood itself, I headed in that direction. As we left the tidy neighborhoods of Toluca Lake, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw that the girl was looking at the back of my head as if trying to identify me by the whorls of my cowlick.

  I heard her whisper to Jack, “He is truly a chauffeur, this Billings?” In all the time I knew her, she would never call me by any other name.

  If he had known her better, Jack would likely have replied, “No, this Billings is actually a distant member of the Jukes family my father is trying to rehabilitate,” or, “No, Billings is a defrocked priest who drives for me during the week and says Mass for deviants in a secret grotto near Sunset Boulevard on Sundays.”

  Instead he looked at her pensively and said simply, “Billings has been around forever.”

  As I continued west on Riverside Drive, Jack and Val stared out of their respective windows to keep from having to look at each other.

  Neither of them made a sound until I sneezed and she murmured, “Salve.”

  Then Jack directed me to Ventura Boulevard.

  It seemed like a long time passed before Jack asked her, “Where in Italy are you from?”

  “Naples and then Rome.”

  “Naples got knocked around pretty badly in the fall of ’43.”

  “Knocked around?” She was indignant. “Almost totally destroyed by the Americans, you mean. People live in caves because of your bombers.”

  Jack waited an interval and then tried again: “How is it that you speak English so well?”

  She didn’t say anything for a while, and I thought that maybe she was done talking for the day. When she finally spoke, her voice seemed to be coming over a long distance line.

  “My mother is a seamstress and when I am a girl, she became friends with an old English lady living in Naples and trades her embroidery for giving my brother Franco and me English lessons that taught us to say things like ‘with all due respect’ even if we disagree strongly with someone, and ‘sorry, you’re sitting in my chair’ when it is the person who is sitting there who should be sorry. Later when we move to Rome so my mother can work in a factory sewing uniforms for the soldiers Mussolini sends to Abyssinia, she saved her money to send me and Franco to a small American school where English is taught. I keep studying English later on at university.”

  “Whatever your mother did worked very well,” Jack said. “You will never be criticized for mispronouncing words as I sometimes am.”

  She gave him a confounded look, and then, allowing some time for a transition, she said, “Wherever we’re going, it is taking forever.”

  “As the Irish writer James Joyce says,” he replied, “the longest way round is the shortest way home.”

  He had a ragbag of such quotes that he deployed strategically to show people that he had erudition as well as dazzle. But Val’s only reaction was to lean her head against the window and close her eyes. When I glanced in the mirror again a little while later, the tic of a sleeping newborn’s involuntary smile was playing with the corners of her mouth, and Jack was staring at her, transfixed.

  After perhaps fifteen minutes, as we ventured deeper into the Valley, she jerked awake and looked around self-consciously. Jack leaned forward and said to me, “If you keep going this way, Billings, we’ll be in Arizona pretty soon,” then pointed at a sign for Topanga Canyon and told me to turn.

  We crested the hill and threaded down through a heavily wooded gorge, then suddenly hit the Pacific Coast Highway and were eye level with the infinity of water gleaming cerulean in the late afternoon. When I looked at Jack in the mirror, he gestured with his head to turn right toward Malibu.

  I assumed that he was heading us to the beach house, but when we were still several miles away he pointed at a ramshackle restaurant on the left side of the highway: “Pull into the parking lot here and we’ll watch the sunset.”

  The girl, who hadn’t said a word for half an hour, looked at the restaurant’s name, A Taste of the Sea, and listlessly mouthed the Italian translation: “Sapore del Mare.” The moment I stopped the car, she got out, kicked off her shoes and headed toward the water. Jack and I followed, the waves blowing a thin mist in our faces after smacking down on the sand.

  When we caught up to her, Jack pointed at the bloody sun whose slow-motion fall into the ocean was now perceptible to the naked eye.

  “Think it might hiss when it hits the water?” he nodded at it.

  She ignored him, still stuck in her own thoughts. “Did you know that today is my mother’s birthday?”

  “I had no idea.” Jack shot me a concerned look.

  Saying nothing more, Val picked up the hem of her dress and walked into the surf.

  I thought she might squeal coquettishly and let the waves play tag with her feet. But she walked straight out, slogging through the tide as if hypnotized.

  Soon she was in up to her waist and heading further out to where the water hit her chest. She began bobbing up and down, her face dipping into the water, her dress blossoming around her like a white sea-flower.

  Jack charged into the surf and I followed. The r
iptide cut me down and the water on my glasses distorted Jack as he high-stepped through the waves like a running back. He was wet up to his armpits when he reached the girl and grabbed her by the shoulder to keep her upright. She was coughing up seawater. Her wet hair curled on her neck and she had the look of someone in the clutches of petit mal.

  Jack used the surge of the waves to help him swim-walk her back to shore. When he got her up on the sand, she collapsed and lay there for a minute like a beached mermaid. Her face looked moon-blanched; her lips were a cyanotic purple.

  “Damn it, Lem, she’s freezing.” Jack snapped at me. “Go get my jacket.”

  When I returned with it from the car, she was back on her feet, shivering violently with one arm on Jack’s shoulder to keep from falling. He pulled the jacket over her. In drawing the lapels together he inadvertently brushed his fingers over one of her breasts.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, drawing his hand back quickly.

  Although still a little woozy, she looked at him squarely, enjoying his discomfort. She made a cup of one hand and rotated it back and forth slowly in the air.

  “American boys feel the breast as if they are squeezing a citrus.”

  “It was an accident,” Jack stammered.

  Then she seemed to sag: “Perhaps if I ate something…”

  I pulled a fresh pack of Beeman’s out of my pocket. She crammed four sticks into her mouth and chewed rapidly, gulping in the sugar. Then she spit out the wad just as a man and a woman holding hands walked by.

  “They will think I hock a loogie.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Jack couldn’t help laughing.

  “From the American GIs in Emilia. They teach me about hock a loogie. At first I think it is ‘hawk’ like the bird.” She pulled at the front of her wet dress to keep its cling from saying too much about her contours. “But what is a loogie and why would a hawk have anything to do with it?”

  “Good quesions.” Jack sent me another look of concern and started leading her toward the restaurant. “If we eat something maybe we’ll figure out some answers.”

  When we entered, the handful of early diners stared at us as if we were shipwreck survivors. We slid into a banquette, our wet clothes making squealing sounds on the Naugahyde. Val immediately grabbed rounds of melba toast from the cracker caddy, ripped open the wrappers, and crammed them into her mouth until her cheeks were puffed like a gerbil’s. She chewed methodically, not speaking until she had swallowed several mouthfuls.

  “My mother would be forty-five years of age today. She was born the year of the new century. She had me when she was just twenty and my brother Franco two years later.”

  She was speaking too loudly, causing Jack to look around nervously. He searched for a subject that would bring her down a notch.

  “Judging from ‘hock a loogie,’ you seem to speak American very well.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant: “I tell you already I learned English in an American school when I am a girl. I also study the language and the history and customs of the U.S. when I am at Sapienza University in Rome.”

  She stood abruptly and went to the table next to us and asked a middle-aged man who was smoking between courses for a cigarette. He looked at her apprehensively, handed over his nearly full pack of Chesterfields and said to keep it.

  Sitting back down, she put the cigarette between her lips and peeked up almost flirtatiously, inviting Jack to light it. Next came the orgasmic gasp as she drew the smoke into her lungs, expelled it through her mouth, French-inhaled it again into her nose and exhaled once more, then held the cigarette at arm’s length while picking languidly at a speck of tobacco on the tip of her tongue with her other hand.

  “I’m surprised you are a smoker,” Jack said after this kabuki had ended.

  “Why is that?”

  “It just doesn’t seem like you.”

  “But you have no idea at all of what is like me.”

  Her froideur caused him to excuse himself and head for the restroom. She watched him go, took another drag, and crushed the half-smoked Chesterfield, imprinted by her bloody kiss, in the ashtray.

  She saw me staring at the angry spot on her left forearm and covered it with her right hand.

  “If I had dressed myself I would have long sleeves. But the costume people at the studio says no sleeves for the role I play and then covers with makeup.”

  After Jack returned, she made the decision to take her hand away from the spot.

  “It’s where my number would have been.”

  “Number for what?” Jack looked at her forearm.

  “For dying.”

  “Dying?”

  “Yes. They made you register before they made you die. That is why I keep trying to rub the number off even though it was never put on.”

  Val now had her elbows on the table and was staring down at the Formica, aimlessly finger-curling the damp strands of hair that partly hid her face.

  “They were going to send me to the Polish camp where they sent my mother. The number on my mother’s arm was B12294. If I had been there when the numbers go on, mine probably would have been B12295 because I am always right next to her. Who knows? The tattoo is not usually thought of as a mortal wound—a few punctures with a needle that bleed a little before they’re washed with green ink. But the one they placed on my mother’s arm caused her death.”

  “You’re Jewish?” Jack said the word with the careful formality of someone who assumed that “Jew” was an epithet.

  “Yes.” She looked combative for a moment before continuing evenly, “Part of me is—through my mother. But a part was enough.”

  We were in uncharted territory. Anne Frank was still years away; Auschwitz was an unknown place not yet established as a synonym for unfathomable evil; and the night-and-fog films showing the matchstick bodies in hasty piles alongside the parchment skeletons of the living dead had not yet made the newsreels.

  Of course, there had been rumors the past few years that the Office of War Information was suppressing intelligence about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, for fear that it would affect the war effort. But although the GIs who had liberated the death camps were now returning with firsthand accounts, few of us yet had any idea of the magnitude of what had happened. While waiting for Jack at Union Station the previous morning, I’d been shocked by an LA Times story on the Nazis’ killing of the Jews of Europe that speculated “as many as 500,000 may have died.”

  When the waitress brought our food, Val moved hers around on her plate with a fork as if it were a construction project. After a long silence, she looked up at Jack and abruptly asked, “Do you believe in God?”

  This caught him off-guard and he blurted out in reply, “Do you?”

  “I believe it is not considered polite to answer a question with another question,” she said sternly.

  He gave a nervous laugh. “True, it’s just that nobody has asked me that since I was ten years old.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Yes, of course I believe in God,” he blustered.

  And he did, in the same way he believed in the Democratic Party: as a given, not to be questioned or even really thought about.

  “My brother Joe and I were altar boys.”

  “You have a brother?” She was suddenly alert. “Had. He died in the war.”

  “Oh, no.” She looked at Jack as if seeing him for the first time. “I have a brother too. He also died.”

  Then there was a flash flood of tears she tried to stop by waving a hand up and down in front of her face as if cooling hot food.

  “Franco had shiny black hair and a large nose. At our school the girls chase after him. He was always—what do you call it—a joke man? He is talking with my mother and me in the kitchen sometimes and then suddenly makes himself fall down. For no reason. Then he gets up and a few minutes later suddenly fall down again. Or he pretend a bee is chasing and runs around the room knocking everything over trying to get away. There is m
uch laughter. But he is also a very good violinist and when he wasn’t making us laugh could make us cry by playing from the concertos of Antonio Vivaldi.”

  “What happened?” Jack asked.

  She looked at him closely before answering, trying to make sure he was genuinely interested.

  “Even though he hates Duce, when war comes Franco joins the army because his friends from the orchestra he plays in have joined and he doesn’t want to disappoint. The last time my mother and I see him is on the day the 18th Bersaglieris stand at attention in Piazza del Popolo for a ceremony before they leave for Russia. Franco looks very handsome in his uniform and after the speaking and the band music finish he makes faces for our camera wearing one of the Bersaglieris’ big hats with the black grouse feathers. Then they march away. What could be worse for an Italian than to die in the freezing cold of that horrible place Stalingrad, fighting for one horrible man against another horrible man? My only defense is always to imagine that when the bullet or the bomb came for Franco he was thinking of a funny joke or humming a passage from L’estro armonico.”

  Watching as she wiped her cheeks with her wrists, Jack said, “So what about you? Do you believe in God?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t hesitate, although what had just been said gave the question a different weight than the same one when she had asked it.

  “But your mother and brother and all the others…”

  “Yes, I know,” she interrupted. “Hitler. Always Hitler. In doing the things he did, Hitler was trying to kill God, but for me he did not succeed. In spite of what happened, I always believe. I abide by the Latin phrase, Credo quia absurdum. Believing is not meant to be easy. I think that God watches. He is interested in us and the way we sometimes do things that even he cannot predict. Some of what we do must make God weep for shame. Other things must make him smile with delight.”

  “I’m with Pascal,” Jack was trying to impress her again. “I read about his wager when I was in college. Believe in God because you have everything to gain if you’re right and nothing to lose if you’re wrong.”