by Paula Fox
“I’m going to California tomorrow,” she said. “It’s warm there.” Then, her intent gaze following the man’s stumbling run back toward the Drive, she said, “Oh, he must feel the cold!” In a moment or two, the man was lost to view in the early December dusk. Hannibal touched her arm. “Come away. It’s too cold here. What’s your name? Walter is very crude not to have told me your name.”
“Annie,” she answered, still straining to see. “Does he have a place to go? His head looked shaved, completely shaved. Doesn’t someone take care of him?”
Walter had joined them, the paper refolded and held under his arm. Hannibal glanced at him, then at the girl. She was young like all of Walter’s girls. Her clothes were so shabby. How much he would like to kiss her young neck! But he could only make girls laugh. They liked his jokes, and when they laughed, in the midst of their laughter, he could touch their arms and hands, their hair, and they allowed him that, he supposed, as payment.
“Nobody takes care of anyone,” said Walter. “It’s part of the sickness of a capitalist society.”
“But can’t someone give him a coat?” Annie asked.
“Come on, baby. Leave the window. If you think he’s bad off, you should see the basket cases in the vet hospitals.”
“Yes,” Hannibal said, rubbing his fat clean hands together. “Let’s leave this room and have a coffee in that disgusting cafeteria. I have a phenomenal story, Walter, about Alberto and his two Chinese girls…”
Walter said, “No. I want to talk to you about the Spanish Refugee Committee.”
“I will not speak of Spanish committees,” Hannibal said. “Tomorrow perhaps. Not tonight.”
The Indians had gone. The chess players nodded over their board on which only a black king and his pawn and two white bishops and the white king remained.
As Walter made for the door, it opened, and a young boy of sixteen or seventeen entered the room and went to stand next to the grand piano. He averted his eyes as the two men and the girl passed him. Walter gave him a faintly contemptuous glance. When he saw that Annie had stopped to look at the boy, he took hold of her arm in his two hands and shook her. “Stop staring at people!” he said loudly. “Stop dreaming!”
Hannibal touched Annie’s hair and sighed. “How can you put up with such a coarse fellow, eh?” he asked, and laughed away the insult.
As the door closed, the boy sat down on the piano bench and began to play the opening chords of La Cathédrale engloutie. He touched the keys lightly, bending close over his hands as though afraid to attract the attention of the silent chess players in the corner.
Chapter 2
“How can there be a beginning?” Fern asked. “You’re born into someone’s life. You’re carried along, a nothing, flotsam. My first independent action, my own true beginning, was to join the party.”
Max closed the book from which he had been reading aloud and placed it between them on the front seat. Fern’s driving, frightening in the city traffic of Los Angeles, was now, on this country road, merely negligible. He had asked her twice to stop riding the brake pedal. Her short-fingered hands in their white gloves rested on the steering wheel with a tentativeness toward machinery he characterized to himself as feminine. Male chauvinism, he supposed. Yet he was touched by the gloves. She was wearing them because of the convention, the way a woman wears gloves to church—hands hidden from the Lord.
“What does he say?” she asked irritably, poking one finger down at the book. “That his birth was the first of his misfortunes? Sentimentality!”
“Because it cost his mother’s life,” Max said.
“It may have been his first luck,” she snapped back.
“Take your foot off the brake.”
The stubborn foot slid off reluctantly.
“You break away if you can—if you can,” she said. “I haven’t yet. Last week I was to Redlands. As soon as I walked in, my mother started up about the earthquake. That was eleven years ago. Then about the child that was murdered, her head stuffed into her schoolbag, and that was seven years ago. An earthquake and a murder! That’s my harmless little bourgeois mama! Anything to stop me from talking! I just mentioned the Spanish refugee camps in France, and she began to tremble. I could see her fingers shaking, and my father went out into the yard to play with his damn lemon tree! But God! I fall back into the same old rituals. I clear off the table after dinner as though I were beating the devil to the sink. You think we could sit around the table and have a proper, serious discussion? No! Joan Crawford’s divorced again or remarried or something. My stomach is a wreck. I tried to stop my mother from teaching my little niece that ghastly prayer—she’s only two—you know that prayer? ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray—’”
“There’s someone up there ahead. See? Sitting up against a tree,” Max said. “Fern, stop tormenting yourself about your family. Everyone’s got one.”
“It’s my weakness. I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“I thought I’d managed to distract you,” he said.
She glanced down at the book.
“With him?” she asked scornfully. “All that innate goodness of man? Back to nature?”
“That’s a dumb simplification,” Max said. “What you’re talking about was a point of argument he used in an essay. Try to get things right! He never held society could return to a state of natural innocence. Didn’t you even like the little story of the walnut tree?”
“I’ve never been faintly interested in Rousseau,” she said, clearly reproving him. “There’s too much for me to read that’s important.”
Max had a sudden picture of himself with his hands around Fern’s neck, just a little squeeze or two. But that was part of his own bourgeois problem, that profound sense of violation he so often suffered at his comrades’ boisterous or outraged dismissals of so many of the writers he secretly admired, had nourished himself with through the days of his adolescence. But his comrades were right, of course. There were more important things to think about now, to act on now. Later would be time enough.
“It’s a girl!” he exclaimed. “What’s she doing there? We’re hours from a town.”
“She was probably taking a walk and has sat down to rest,” Fern said, accelerating slightly.
“Slow down,” Max demanded. “Come on, Fern. Stop the car.” He took hold of her arm, sensing her impulse to drive on, not to get involved. Fern made a face, but she drew up at the side of the road and stopped a few yards from the immobile girl who did seem to be sleeping, her head back against the tree trunk, her eyes closed.
For a moment or two, Fern and Max were silent in the sudden stillness of the warm car. Fern did not look at the girl; her eyes were on the road ahead. Her thoughts, Max knew, reached out to the comrades as they threaded their way among the yellow-slatted camp chairs set up for the convention, thin but tenacious thoughts.
He had been reading paragraphs at random from the first book of Rousseau’s Confessions. It was not the first time he had ridden with Fern, and he knew how her driving affected him; he had read to take his mind off the possibility of a fatal collision. Once, on some trip, he’d asked to take the wheel. She’d exploded into rage, and the tact with which he’d made his request was laid waste by her accusation that it was his nervousness which made her drive so badly.
“Next time, I’ll fix you,” he said. “You’ll get the rural electrification program in the Ukraine…or the woman question.”
“Your levity is frowned upon in certain quarters,” she said stiffly.
“Oh, Fern!”
The sunlight, its heat intensified by the windshield, lay upon their laps, upon Fern’s gloved hands, their knees. Fern remarked that they should have eaten the hard-boiled eggs right away—the smell reminded her unpleasantly of school lunches. A car passed them slowly. Two Chinese were sitting in the front of the dusty black Packard.
“They’re going to the convention,”
said Fern. “I bet.”
“Comrade delegates from the Charlie Chan branch.”
“That’s chauvinistic…”
Max opened the door and got out. He stretched and yawned, watching the girl. She didn’t stir. He felt a faint prickling of his skin. Her bare legs were crossed, stretched out before her. The thick tweed suit she wore surprised him—it must be the only such suit in Southern California.
“Hello,” he said softly.
Her eyes opened. She smiled instantly and pressed closer to the tree, then her hand went up to her face to touch her own smile. She got to her feet as though there weren’t enough space to stand straight.
“We thought you might be in—” He hesitated. The word trouble had occurred to him, but in the face of her shyness it seemed too personal. “Difficulty,” he finished, explaining the we by waving back to the car at Fern, whose face could be glimpsed in outline through the dusty windshield. “You’re a long distance from anywhere.”
“I’m on my way to San Diego,” she said. “I’d gotten a ride from Los Angeles. But the man let me off here.” She looked back at the tree.
“Here?”
She said nothing. Her face was blank. He wasn’t going to get an explanation.
“We’ll take you,” he said. “We’re going to San Diego.”
“That’s so kind,” she said, smiling again, her tone formal. Then she seemed overcome by uncertainty, looking from him to the car.
“Fine,” he said, hearing a touch of stridency in his own voice, wondering at it, wondering why the girl was disconcerting.
“I’m meeting a friend there,” she said, her voice low.
The man who had dropped her by the road must have tried to do something to her, Max thought. She’d said “gotten a ride,” hadn’t she? “My friend is in the merchant marine. I had the name of the ship written down, but, I don’t know, I must have lost it. It was a simple name. I think it’s the Matson Line. Matson?” Now, she was almost whispering.
“There is such a shipping line,” he said. A bird trilled very close by. He and the girl both looked off at once into the trees. They listened, but the sound did not come again.
“My name is Max Shore,” he said, “and that’s Fern Diedrich there in the car.”
The girl nodded and brushed at her skirt. Someone had surely given her that suit, it fitted her so poorly. Folds of the thick fabric were bunched beneath the belt she had buckled around her waist. She touched her hair; short wisps stood straight up from the encircling braid. He thought, the braid doesn’t suit her at all; she doesn’t know what to do with her hair. She was tall, handsome perhaps. Bits of grass and smudges of earth clung to her legs. She couldn’t be over eighteen.
She preceded him to the car, looking back suddenly with her hand on the door as though to make sure it was still all right. He waved her in. She stooped, her black handbag, its leather cracked, hanging straight from one wrist.
Fern nodded to her shortly as she sank against the back seat. “Hello. Watch out! Don’t sit on the eggs,” she said. “I wish you’d eat them. The smell is driving me crazy.”
Max sighed. Cars were boring and alarming. There was still a distance to be traveled. The camp chairs were already set up in the hall; the more important people, people like his own wife, Eva, were already there, trying out the microphone. “Comrades…”
As Fern wrenched the car into second gear, Max asked, “What’s your name?”
“Annie.”
She had answered like a servant. Max regarded her questioningly, but she only lowered her head.
“Where are you going?” asked Fern.
“To meet a friend,” the girl replied. “He’s on a ship coming to San Diego sometime today. Maybe he’s already there.”
“How about your last name?” he pressed.
“Last night, did you see the planes?” Fern asked, turning for an instant to the back seat, her voice young, even girlish, with interest. The change of tone was so marked in contrast with the indifferent way she’d inquired after Annie’s destination that it broke Max’s preoccupation with the mystery of the girl’s presence on the road.
What kind of man, he wondered, might Fern have stashed away in San Francisco? Or was she another of those young-old girls for whom the party gave a world of reasons to explain all that was meager in their own lives? He was instantly ashamed. What if they were forlorn, discordant? It was their devotion that counted. Who was he to ask for purity? Yet Fern…Oh, Fern!
At breakfast that morning she had nearly shouted that she’d never spend a cent on clothes while there was still a single volume to add to her Marxist-Leninist library. And how bitterly she had gone on to denounce those girls who learned their politics in the beds of certain functionaries whose names she preferred not to mention at the moment, although, she managed to imply with a prig’s menace, she’d have something to say on the subject in due time. That she might be deficient in more than books seemed not to occur to her. But what an odd answer she’d given him when he’d suddenly asked her if she didn’t intend to marry someday.
“I want someone who isn’t even alive,” she had said in a submissive, confessional voice. Max had been astonished, thinking she’d had a love affair after all. Perhaps someone in the Lincoln Brigade who had left his bones in Spain, or, less romantic, someone else’s husband smashed up in a car wreck in Oakland. But a moment later, he’d known his speculations were foolish, and looking at her now as she drove the car without deference to what she was doing (gloved hands lifeless on the wheel, back stiff against the seat, foot riding on the brake pedal), he knew she’d meant exactly what she’d said. She wanted someone who wasn’t alive and never would be.
“The Japanese planes,” she was saying. “They flew over the city last night. Aren’t you from L.A.?”
“I live just outside it,” the girl said, “toward Hollywood.”
“They were so far up, I’ve never seen planes in the sky that far up. It’ll serve them right, selling scrap iron to a militarist regime, after Nanking, as if they didn’t know—”
“They? Them?” he asked, only to provoke her.
“American capitalists,” she said in a low furious voice.
He turned to look at the girl, and she smiled at once as though she had heard nothing surprising. Her teeth were small, even, neglected. The smile was a painful habit, he thought, like a tic—or a kind of camouflage.
“Annie, what’s your last name?” he asked once more.
“Gianfala,” she answered.
“The newspapers said that next time they’d bomb L.A.,” Fern said. “What a joke!”
“You’re Italian?” Max asked, looking at the fair skin and hair.
“One of my grandfathers,” she said.
“Are you hungry?”
But he was pressing her. He could see it in the way she pushed back against the car seat, and he felt an answering nervousness. He wished suddenly Fern had had her way, and they had not stopped. He folded his hands on his lap. Paper rustled. She was opening the lunch sack. Why was she so furtive?
“A joke in the sense they damn well might,” Fern said. “When an advanced monopoly capitalist society piles up armaments…Max, why do you tease me so much?”
In spite of himself, Max turned again. A brief glance showed him the girl looking at the egg in her hand. “Crack it on your elbow,” he advised softly.
“Thank God! She’s eating the eggs!” exclaimed Fern.
“…always thanking God.”
“Never mind, Max. I inhaled a lot of opium before I left the church,” Fern said sharply. “Don’t trip me up on little things like that. You’d do better with a little self-criticism.”
“With you around, I don’t need it,” he said wryly.
“Be sure and eat them both,” Fern called out to the girl.
“If you’re hungry,” Max added.
The girl finished both eggs and put the shell fragments back in the sack. Max lit a cigarette, then offered her one. She
took it quickly. It was the first vigorous gesture he’d seen her make, reaching out and grabbing the cigarette from his hand. She inhaled deeply. Fern removed one of her gloves and snapped her fingers. “I want one,” she said.
Fern had called a few days earlier from San Francisco, asking to be put up for the night and offering, in exchange, a ride down to the convention in San Diego. Although she had a brother who lived in Los Angeles, she couldn’t stay with him, she’d told Max’s wife, Eva, who’d banged the receiver down and said, “That family of hers! I wish she’d keep them out of party matters.”
“She was only asking for a room for the night,” Max had replied mildly.
“She’s a delegate! This isn’t a social arrangement. Do you know, I heard her bring up those people of hers at a party meeting one night? She dragged them into a discussion about democratic centralism, for God’s sake.”
“How?”
“How? I don’t know how. She just did, that’s all.”
Fern arrived several hours after Eva’s departure, just as Max was putting out the garbage. Eva had said, “Don’t leave the garbage lying around, Max. You’ll start reading and forget. Put it out, Max. Put it out.”
He had made up a bed in the living room for Fern while his two-year-old son, Thomas, had played with dusty potatoes on the floor. Later, after he’d put Thomas to bed, he and Fern ate the chile Eva had left and sat around talking for a while. The boredom he’d experienced had been so intense as to verge on the comic, but it assuaged the uneasiness he had begun to feel this last year in anticipation of any large gathering of party people.
He’d known Fern for years, since their senior year in high school. Eva had been in the same class. Unlike himself, the two girls had come from Depression-soured families; grateful to be in school, away from homes whose atmospheres had grown querulous with incomprehension. Fern’s father had been a bookbinder and, once out of work, moved through the little rooms of the house like an exiled prince, remarking acidly on the fine and dependable qualities of leather. Fern’s mother took domestic work—she called herself a housekeeper—to feed and clothe the family, and eventually, Mr. Diedrich found a place for himself in a small real-estate office in Redlands, where his withdrawn nature and a certain poise issuing from his long practice of an exacting craft gave clients the impression they were dealing with someone with class.