The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Eva’s father, a master plumber, cried between bouts of sodden drunkenness that if it hadn’t been for his damned kids, all female, he could have weathered the bad times like a man instead of taking goddamned Roosevelt handouts.

  But Max’s family had tracts of timber, theirs for several generations; his father had owned a newspaper in a town in the north of Oregon. They did with one car instead of two, one maid instead of three—it was hardly deprivation, Max had once been fond of saying until Eva told him he was just showing off. One of Max’s uncles, in trying to recoup what he’d lost in the stock market, had schemed his way into a madhouse, carrying with him, until a male attendant wrenched it from his hands, a suitcase bulging with an ugly metal invention which, he’d sworn, the government was preventing him from patenting because certain inventor rivals were in highly placed positions. During the year of his father’s long dying from cancer of the bladder, Max had been sent to live with an aunt in Los Angeles to finish out his senior high-school year. He received his diploma half an hour after his father had died in a Portland hospital, Mrs. Shore standing by the bed, the wool of an unfinished sweater she’d been knitting trailing from her fingers. Only his aunt had come to Max’s graduation. There had been enough money for Max to go to the University at Berkeley. He had married Eva there during his junior year.

  His wife and Fern shared one characteristic, as different as they were in all other ways. They both liked to give orders to men. Suspecting something irresolute and captious underlying their bossiness, he put up with it good-humoredly. He was inclined to put up with a good many unpleasant things in people if he sensed they were really uncertain about what they were doing.

  Fern had been tired last night, and she looked better when she was tired. The morning’s energy, her bursts of excitement at the coming convention gave her a look of craving he found repugnant. Although she and Eva were around the same age, Fern looked older. Fern would age fast, he thought, looking at her profile. She glanced at him with a touch of challenge as though she’d suspected what was in his mind.

  She’d been a pretty little girl in a sharp, brunette way, dark and fast-moving, her narrow feet shod in saddle shoes, the tips always carefully whitened, the brown saddle gleaming with polish. She wore no ornaments, only plain blouses or her sweater “set.” She wasn’t as trim these days as she had once been. Her worn-down heels, the stains on her clothes, the uneven hems of her dresses bespoke neglect. But she still wore gloves. Those gloves!

  Eva had not been as pretty, except for a striking small-waisted figure and beautiful narrow ankles. In the darkened rooms where she and Max made love any time they could, he would forget her sharp voice, its complacency fed and fattened by meals of Engels and R. Palme Dutt, by party meetings in dusty boardinghouse rooms in Berkeley, by faction and dissension and discussion. In those days, only a few years ago, that eager, fresh-skinned, heavyfleshed girl, every feature of her round face imprinted on his neck and shoulder and belly, seemed to have no connection with the young functionary tough, la commandante, as he called her. But she was loving with their son—a kind of sexual romanticism excluded the infant from the daylight world of politics and tied him to those darkened rooms of love and its motions.

  But, he thought, most of the party women, especially the younger ones like Eva and Fern, suffered a touch of disjunction in their beings. He didn’t understand it. Last night, out of his boredom perhaps, out of a deliberate misreading of “Comrade,” he had looked at her with a certain tentative sexual inquiry. He hadn’t been fully aware of it himself. But she must have sensed something. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, she’d arisen and said, “I need my rest.” Her voice had been high, thin; she’d avoided his eyes. At first, he wondered if the chile had given her indigestion. He’d observed before that she was one to pick at food and push it away. There was a lot of distaste in Fern.

  But later, when the planes had waked them both, and they had gone to the window to look up at the play of searchlights, her excitement at this event—it was unprecedented, those tiny planes pinned between earth and the night sky—had illuminated a momentarily unguarded side of her nature. Yet afterward, listening to the radio news bulletins which insistently proclaimed the planes to have been Japanese, she had assumed her usual postures, scolding imperialism, “pointing out” the inherent contradictions of capitalism, the contradictions of her own nature left abandoned by the window where the curtains had fallen back into place.

  “Max! Are you deaf? I asked you if it’s true that Ethel is sick? I heard she wasn’t coming.”

  “Ethel?” he asked wonderingly. He had forgotten where he was, where he was going. She poked him with that hand so quick to poke. He looked resentfully at her hand, then at her. She nodded briefly toward the back seat. No names, Max realized, that was what she meant. He was a little amused, mostly irritated. Who did she think that poor stray was? An FBI plant? A Trotskyite infiltrator?

  “She’s had a recurrence of the old trouble,” he answered, annoyed at being circumspect, and conscious of the self-importance that tends to swell a voice that brings bad news. The old trouble —eleven knife wounds. Ethel Schaeffer, who in 1911 had taken part in the mass strikes which had organized the needle-trades industry in New York, who, in the twenties, along with other comrades, almost succeeded in taking over the union from Dubinsky, who nearly died, a real heroine. She was the only comrade he’d ever known who could speak of “the bosses” without making him flinch. A very small woman with silver hair and gray eyes, she had a single-mindedness of purpose that invested the most banal political slogan with the exaltation of her own commitment. Her voice was a caress; the students who clustered around her after her classes at the L.A. party school seemed, by contrast, oafish, inauthentic. A clean little mother from Eastern Europe, scarred like a saint, undefiled by secret irresolutions. He loved her for the unity of her being; he envied her for it. And she was a kind of monster—like all saints.

  He wasn’t a good Communist; he knew that.

  “I love her,” Fern said vehemently. “She’s a great woman!”

  “She is unique,” he said dryly.

  “That’s the kind of compliment she would detest.”

  “Could I trouble you for another cigarette?” asked the girl. Max handed her his pack. He glanced at the handbag on the seat next to her. The catch was broken, the bag gaped open. He saw a half-empty pack of Camels. He felt bad at her inept chiseling. Was there any money in the bag? His curiosity to see what was in it was so intense, he had to turn away.

  “Is your friend an officer?” he asked, thinking, There is probably nothing in the bag, a comb, a lipstick, a key to a door.

  “A.B.,” said the girl, then, “Able-bodied seaman.” She spoke as though practicing a foreign phrase.

  “He’s from the West Coast?” Fern asked, a touch of interest in her voice.

  “New York.”

  Fern looked meaningfully at Max. “I heard a vile story about Bull Curran,” she said in a low voice. “Vile!”

  “Oh, yes,” the girl said eagerly. “He’s president of the National Maritime Union.”

  Fern grimaced.

  “Let it go,” Max said coldly, then to the girl, “It’s not a passenger ship then, is it? A freighter?”

  “I think so,” the girl replied, then bravely, taking a chance, “Yes. It must be a freighter. But there are tankers, too. It could be a tanker.”

  He couldn’t place her accent. It wasn’t uneducated, yet it didn’t tell him anything about her either. He couldn’t account for her at all. Why did he want to account for her? Fern, stupidly wary, was speaking of organizational matters. He caught the drift. She might as well use pig Latin. He was suddenly aware he was squinting and he realized, surprised, that they were already on the coastal road, traveling through the glare of sky and sea.

  Fern went on and on…the Hollywood comrades preoccupied her, she was saying. They were so unstable, so superficial. And some of the European refugees—those Germ
an Jews—who had slipped into the film industry had brought with them the poison of the Social-Democratic party, unsettling the soft-brained New York swimming-pool Jews with their hysterical, vicious anti-Bolshevik attacks on Comrade Stalin’s tactics.

  Max’s mother had said, last August after the Hitler-Stalin pact, “So now you’ve swallowed Hitler too! What a digestive system my son has!”

  He had argued with her, argued against the sardonic stare of those narrow blue eyes, but then, knowing his passionate self-defense to be familial, not political, had given it up. Eva, who had been with him, had gone on shouting, waving her hands while his mother watched her imperturbably. Max knew she thought Eva “common,” even worse, dull. But she doted on her grandson. When Thomas was born, Mrs. Shore stopped arguing with Eva; she just listened, waiting for the baby to be brought to her arms. Max had been happy then—he had watched the baby for hours. Yet there had been some reservation in him, a touch of dread as he gazed at his child. This morning, just before he and Fern had left, he’d taken Thomas to the neighbor who often cared for him when he and Eva were away. Making the practical, ordinary arrangements in the neighbor’s oilcloth-smelling kitchen, he’d felt a great wrench as though he might never see the child again.

  There were many who had not swallowed Hitler, friends he could no longer see. He looked at Fern’s thin mouth, opening, closing, opening, closing…He was violently irritated. Beyond Fern’s voice, the unsettling malaise of the girl in the back seat, the heated interior of the car, was the glittering Pacific, the white sand of the shingle far below, the cloudless May sky, a string of sea gulls riding the wind. He was sick of women.

  “The Nazis are in Belgium today,” he interrupted Fern. She opened her mouth. Impulsively he placed his hand over her lips.

  “Is this your first trip to San Diego?” he asked the girl.

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes so wide she looked blind. “I’ve never seen this part of the coast before.”

  His hand fell from Fern’s mouth. He felt a faint dampness on his fingers as though her words had left a foggy imprint on them. Fern smiled angrily. “I sometimes wonder, Max, just what you’re up to.”

  So did he.

  They had reached the outskirts of San Diego, and he suggested to Fern that she drive as close as she could to the waterfront.

  “We haven’t got time,” she said.

  Yes, he thought, she is yearning for those camp chairs, the thrilling silence that followed the opening speaker’s first word, “Comrades…”

  “We do have time,” he said.

  The girl leaned forward; Max felt the proximity of her face just behind his shoulder.

  “I wonder if you know where I can get a room in L.A. or Hollywood?” she asked. “I have a place now, out on Hollywood Boulevard. But there’s a man next door who beats his dog all night. I can’t sleep, the dog cries so.”

  Fern glanced quickly at Max; her mouth twitched with incipient laughter.

  “That’s dreadful,” Max said.

  “They’re so helpless,” the girl murmured.

  Fern’s face seemed to swell, but not with laughter. It was indignation. “There are worse things in the world than crying dogs,” she said.

  “The man’s German, I think,” the girl said apologetically.

  “I know an actor who’s planning to leave for New York next month,” Max said. “Although you can’t tell about actors. He has a room on Sycamore Street. I’ll write down his name and you can call him. I’ve forgotten the number. He may know of something, even if you can’t get his room.”

  “I pay eight dollars a week now. I can’t really pay more than that,” the girl said.

  “You’d better stick with what you have,” Fern said. “You can’t get anything for less than that.”

  “His name is Jake Cranford,” Max continued. “You can tell him I gave you his name.” He needn’t have added that last part, giving the girl a link to him. It was taking on too much; he’d done it only to spite Fern.

  Fern pulled up to the curb. “You won’t have much of a walk from here,” she said.

  Max could smell the oily waters of the harbor. It always excited him; the waterfront was the first place he went in any city he visited. He had stood on wharves in San Francisco, in New York, in Boston, in Seattle, staring down at the parrot colors of oil stains moved back and forth by the tides, sighting along a hawser until, with a thrill of delight, he saw the great bulwark of a ship rising above him.

  It was the waterfront that had brought him into the party. He had been in his senior year at Berkeley in 1934, just six years ago, when the maritime workers struck. Half dreaming among the leaning stacks of books in the Sather Gate Bookshop, he had been awakened from his languor by a classmate who had snatched away the book he’d been holding in his hands. “My God! A general strike!” the man had cried. “What the hell are you reading Stephen Crane for? Let’s go!”

  Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, blending insensibly into the ranks of the longshoremen in their white caps and blue workshirts, into Harry Bridges, into the silent ships at rest, into the fear and hilarity, the joy at the real conflict that was coming; yes, it had been extraordinary, like the quiet that precedes an earthquake, the air breathless, the earth waiting.

  “Thank you,” the girl was saying, moving to the door. “I’m so grateful. I don’t know how I’d have gotten here without you.”

  “Someone would have picked you up,” Fern said, looking the girl full in the face. The girl flushed as though accused.

  She got out of the car, dragging the ugly handbag after her.

  “Good-by,” she said to Max, smiling.

  “Call Jake!” he cried as Fern shifted into gear. The girl had walked a few steps away when she suddenly turned. “Wait!” she called back. “Your name? What is your last name?”

  “Shore,” he called out from the window. “Max Shore.”

  She nodded and turned and walked away. He continued to watch her as Fern pulled the car awkwardly out into the street. He was struck suddenly, after all that smiling, those apologies, by a curious conviction that the girl was stubborn, that she had will. Almost at once, he missed her presence and he was bewildered by the force of his feeling.

  Fern said, unexpectedly, “Well, Max, you’re kind. I’ll say that for you.”

  Max, astonished by Fern’s compliment, thought of Rousseau’s priest, M. de Pontverre, about whom he had remarked, “a kind man, he certainly was not a good man.”

  I am not a good man, Max thought, without much regret, only a sense of something lost, lost too long ago for mourning. He sighed and turned his thoughts toward the convention.

  Chapter 3

  “Cormack Traveler came in this morning. Couldn’t be Matson, kiddie,” said the man. “That’s passenger lines.” He waved a curved hook at the docks. “That’s the only one’s due in today. Nobody come off it yet.”

  Annie didn’t know where to stand and wait. She didn’t want to ask any more questions of the hard-faced man with the wide leather strap around his wrist and the menacing hook. A man pushing a loaded dolly passed between them, and Annie moved back to lean against the wall of a dispatcher’s shed. After the dolly had gone, she saw the man with the hook swing off to join a group of men in work clothes who were watching the slow descent of cargo from a boom on the deck of a ship called the Molly Good. The net fell to the ground, a dozen hooks flashed in the sunlight as the men moved forward. Just beyond the aft section of the Molly Good, she saw the Cormack Traveler, whose decks appeared deserted. Then a man walked to the rail wearing a dark-blue watch cap. She was too far away to see whether it was Walter Vogel. She took a few steps forward and a young man cried out, “Look out, my beauty!” He was bent beneath the sack he carried on his back but as he went by, grinning, he reached out a large square hand toward her. She went back to the shed. Walter had written that she might have to wait; there was no telling when he’d come ashore.

  It had grown very warm, and the tweed suit stol
en for her by Johnnie Bliss from the Paramount costume department hugged her body like a rough-skinned animal. The boards of the shed, gray, splintered, salt-worn, glistened with heat; she felt sweat on her neck and face. When she rubbed her cheeks, her fingers came away stained with orange Max Factor make-up. She had hoped to look so dashing! So light! Johnnie had brought her the suit wrapped in newspapers. She had wanted to look new, unapproachable. No! Indifferent! That was it. Good clothes could make you indifferent.

  She lit a Camel and smoked it as if she were thinking about something complicated. Men said things to her. She puffed. A new worry assailed her—had Max Shore known she’d had her own cigarettes? He’d looked at her handbag so often. Had he suspected? But he’d been so kind—she could have explained it all, not having any money, really any at all, how you did things that were shameful.

  An arm went around her neck. Walter’s face sunk into her neck between shoulder and chin, her sweaty neck. “Annie, Annie,” he muttered, and with his arm around her waist pulled her away from the shed, back into the hot sunlight. They looked at each other for a moment. Four months after and three thousand miles from where they’d first met, she suspected he was already beginning to laugh at her. He was tanned and plumper. She was dazzled by his presence. He took her hand and they walked away from the docks.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Your make-up is running.”

  “I got a job. And a room. But it’s not very wonderful.”

  “Poor Annie,” he said, and put his head against hers. “Not very wonderful,” he mimicked. “Why don’t you learn to talk straight.”