The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Jersey said, in a low voice to Annie, “She didn’t leave Kenneth for me. She just left him. I think she married me because I was the only one of their friends who didn’t worship him.”

  “Jersey! Tell Walter what Kenneth wrote you last month…that note. Tell him. Listen to this, Walter!”

  “I hated him,” Jersey whispered, putting the figurine in Annie’s lap and standing up. “He wrote, ‘Don’t let that Queen Bee breed off you. You know what happens to drones.’”

  Elmira shrieked some incomprehensible word, then rested her head on Walter’s shoulder. “Can you imagine?” she asked. “Our old Kenneth? So reactionary!”

  Annie’s father was a bit like that, always talking about women, how they destroyed men’s energies, demon brides, bent on begetting, materialists pretending to be romantics. What was the meaning of that word reactionary? Jersey might tell her. She turned to ask him but he was dragging an old mattress into a small room she hadn’t noticed earlier. Elmira nodded and smiled when Walter said the baby inside was sleepy too.

  “Who won the book?” asked Jersey, holding an armful of blankets. “You’re staying, aren’t you, Walter?”

  “Oh, I didn’t pay any attention,” said Elmira. She was sitting on the double bed, taking off her shoes. “Now, you can’t work any more tonight, Jersey,” she said petulantly. “The light will keep us all awake.”

  The mattress Annie and Walter were to use had been pushed beneath a little window. Walter walked around the room naked, his expression malicious. Annie undressed down to her pants and brassière, looking uneasily at the open doorway to the main room. The lights went out.

  They struggled for a few minutes, she and Walter; flesh struck flesh. Walter’s hand gripped her between her legs. “Oh, stop!” she whispered. “They’ll hear us!” “What do you think they think we’re doing?” he whispered back angrily. But he fell asleep at last, his back against hers.

  She heard sleepers’ breathing from the next room. Walter snored delicately. Annie lay inert, feeble with exhaustion. Watcher’s fatigue, she told herself. If only she wouldn’t watch people so much! The least change of their expressions, the slightest shift of their bodies, threads on their clothes, holes in their shoes, stains on their fingers, their dangerous and unpredictable glances, nose pickers, tooth suckers, cheek scratchers, aroused in her a macabre and anguished response! But to what? To what!

  Suddenly she heard the sound of singing. Raising herself carefully on one elbow so as not to awaken Walter, she looked down. Four people stood beneath a street lamp singing “Silent Night” to the darkened windows of MacDougal Street.

  They had coffee with the Lighters in the morning. Walter was sullen, and Elmira, apparently piqued by his lack of response, began to question him belligerently about when he was going to work again. “I’m shipping out,” he answered her snappishly.

  Just before they left, Jersey handed her a piece of paper. “It’s something I copied down a long time ago. It’s a description of a painting of Giotto’s, the Annunciation, I think.”

  She must have looked startled. “I don’t know,” he said, looking quickly back to Elmira and Walter, who were speaking in low voices near the drawing table. “I thought you might like it—a kind of Christmas present.” He smiled suddenly. “You’re nice,” he said. “Too nice for Vogel.”

  She put the scrap of paper in her handbag, her eyes on Jersey’s face. “Thank you,” she whispered. It had been a secret transaction.

  She arranged with Walter to meet him later in the afternoon at a restaurant on Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue, then she hurried off, uptown. On the subway, she took out the scrap of paper. It read: “An angel has entered by the door and knelt. In the silence between the andirons and the sideboard, the destiny of the world is to be decided.”

  She read it several times. How beautiful! How mysterious! Why had Jersey given it to her?

  But she began to worry about money—the destiny of the world had little enough to do with her.

  Back at the apartment, she opened the top drawer of a maple chest. Wrapped up inside a suitcase were her mother’s bracelets, two of them, thick gold bangles, one set with three small starshaped diamonds. Her mother’s only brother, Uncle Greg, had given them to Annie, counseling her somewhat circumspectly not to mention them to her father. She recalled how Bea, her father’s second wife, had once said to her, “Anyone married to your father, my girl, makes a fast acquaintance with hock shops…”

  Annie found a loan-company office a few blocks from the League. Cringing, she pushed the two bracelets across the counter toward the unforgiving scrutiny of a yellow-skinned man. He gave her thirty-five dollars and a ticket. “But—” she began to protest. “Gold’s a drug on the market,” he said.

  “The diamonds?”

  “Diamonds! They’re nothing but chips.”

  She went directly to May Landower’s where she found the older woman standing amid a welter of straw suitcases, blowing dust from a handful of books. The birds and the piano were gone. May was a shade drunk.

  “I was right about Thursday,” she said, speaking with her usual weighty emphasis. “I’ve looked it up in my horoscope. But we must make every effort to arrive in California on a Tuesday. Any Tuesday will do. I’m a Tuesday person. You can’t guess how much I’ve accomplished! I’ve sold my piano, the car is ready. I’ve broken entirely with my life here. I feel…I feel out in space, my dear, and have a drink to celebrate, will you? No? Thank God Christmas is over! How I remember the past! But—one must look to the future. In truth, there isn’t any. I had a nosebleed this morning. A good sign!”

  “I have over one hundred dollars,” Annie offered.

  “Oh,” said May, with a wave of her hands, “those things take care of themselves. I really can’t be bothered with money. Fate decides.”

  “I’ve never had so much,” Annie said, “all at one time.”

  “I used to live like a queen!” May cried, dropping the books on the floor. “I had thirty-two pairs of shoes, Balmain dresses. How unimportant it all is! All I need is a piano, a little fragment of nature, a bird, a plant…we must rid ourselves of the passion for material things. Freedom! I shall never cease to regret that you did not meet the swami…heavenly man…”

  “We are leaving in the morning?”

  “I have worked it out on the chart. Ten o’clock is auspicious. You will forgive me for not coming to pick you up? But I must leave from here.”

  Annie agreed to be at May’s by 9:30 for coffee—“so we won’t have to stop for a few hours until we escape the aura of this city. It extends farther than most people suspect!”

  She went back to Seventy-third Street, where she met Samuel on his way out. He was morose and cranky, pressing her for information as to the exact minute she planned to leave, and when she protested, he cried, “Listen, I’m not running this business for your beaux yeux! I’ve got to make a living. Nobody is going to take care of me when I’m an old lady!”

  Annie washed out her few undergarments and packed up her clothes in an old leather suitcase of her father’s. Its edges were worn and scuffed. But it was a handsome bag. Hefting it, she felt a jolt of excitement. She was actually going to California! She noticed her father’s tweed jacket hanging in the closet. She shut the closet door with a bang. Let the next tenant have it.

  The book Walter had given her to read, Man’s Fate, poked out from under the bed. Perhaps she would be able to finish it on the way west. She had read a few pages for Walter’s sake.

  She thought, as she hung her underwear over the bathtub rim to dry, of the loan-company man, how he had never looked at her once—if he had just glanced at her, she would have been less ashamed at pawning those last reminders of her mother’s existence. Then she remembered Uncle Greg.

  Oh, she ought to go and see him before she left! The bus to Nyack was only an hour, then a walk of a couple of miles up to the old house on the hill behind the cemetery. No. It was too late. But at least she would phone
him.

  She could see, as though her hand touched it, the bronze statue of lion and mouse that shared the table with the phone, which so seldom rang at this time of year—Uncle Greg’s slack season.

  After church, they would drive home in the Ford, the thick Sunday newspaper resting on the back seat, hiding among its folds the red and yellow pie-stealing Katzenjammer Kids and Maggie and Jiggs and Snuffy Smith and the hideous, chinless Gump family, and later, lying on her back after having consumed the “funnies” in a gulp, she would stare up at the lion, one paw outstretched toward but never touching the mouse. Near that table stood the radio, a big box with rodent features, two knobs for eyes and a dial for a mouth. After supper, she and Uncle Greg listened to Amos ‘n’ Andy, and before bedtime, she could look at the latest National Geographic on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Above the bookcase was a framed picture of Edwin Markham which, as evening came on, faded into the dark pussy-willow-patterned wallpaper her grandmother had loved so. Bedtime! A church bell rang. In memory, she went slowly upstairs, reluctant to leave the day—pausing to press her face against the stained-glass panes of a narrow window which, during the morning, bathed the oak stairs in a reddish glow, then up to the top, past the pier glass in the hall, down a passageway that smelled of the dried flower petals Uncle Greg stored in jars, to her own room. It had been her mother’s room too.

  She dropped the book into her suitcase; how awful everything was! Walter and Samuel and May and that stupid little Elmira! Grimacing and gabbing, caught like flies on flypaper in their own opinions about the world, about her, about fate.

  Yet those days with Uncle Greg had been shadowed with sadness—she could feel it now, rainy summer twilights coming across the cemetery like a slow tide, rising to the windows of the old house her grandfather had built, subduing the souls of the small girl and middle-aged man as they sat over their supper of canned salmon and boiled potatoes.

  Poor Uncle Gregory! After all that education—he’d actually gone to the University of Heidelberg—he’d ended up a gardener. He was often silent. Yet every gesture, every word had been informed by a quality of kindness, of long patience. And he had fits, always unexpected, of pure playfulness; they played hide-and-seek together sometimes, the old house livened up with racing footsteps and bursts of laughter. She’d spent many years with him. She’d gone to school in a red brick schoolhouse down the road; in the summers, in spring and fall, she’d gone the rounds with Uncle Greg, who worked on some of the estates down by the river where the rich people lived.

  “Uncle Sugared-Tomato” Annie’s father had called him because of the old man’s fondness for putting sugar on nearly everything, and Annie had laughed, if reluctantly, susceptible always to her father’s sense of the ridiculous even while she sensed its danger.

  She went out to a drugstore on Seventy-second Street and piled up change. The Nyack number rang a long time. He could be anywhere in the house, going through old trunks in the attic, reading in an upstairs room, then moving slowly, without much interest, to the phone. It might be work, he would think, although not likely at this time of year, and he needed the money. The little income left him by his father barely sufficed to repair the roof, pay the taxes. At last she heard his tentative light voice.

  “It’s Annie, Uncle Greg.”

  “Annie dear! I was only just thinking about you this morning! I was doing a little dusting and I came to the lion and the mouse. You remember? Is everything all right? Are you with your father?”

  “He’s married again. He’s gone to live in New Mexico.”

  “You’re alone, then? Are you alone?”

  “Well, in a way. But I’m going to California with a lady. She’s driving out there. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “I’ve never been to the western coast,” he said. “It’s new, you know, geologically speaking. Well…but does your father know where you’re going, Annie?”

  She hesitated. “I guess—he will know.”

  Uncle Greg coughed lightly. “Would you like to come here, Annie? I don’t like the thought of your being alone.”

  “I’m really not, Uncle Greg. But I wanted to call, to see how you are…I’ll write. I know I haven’t. But I will.” And she meant to, she made a resolution to write to him, no matter what.

  “I’m all right, Annie. You know. I go along. This is the quiet season for me. I’ve gotten very interested in George Washington. Have you ever read much about him? Well…I found some books I didn’t even know were in the house. I guess Father must have been interested in him too. Oh—I’m fine, really.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “The Hudson Valley is full of American history. I always said the Hudson was the most beautiful river, the noblest. You know, I’ve been on the Rhine and the Danube. But—Oh! such a terrible time in Germany! That awful common fellow. I hear him on the radio sometimes, those speeches. His is the voice of the cave, Annie. But—well, I have plans…a little history trip to Lake George in the spring, if I can manage it.”

  He had friends; she remembered them all, the ladies from the church who made him birthday cakes, old Mrs. Gerow who’d left him her mahogany sleigh bed in her will, all the people who used to give them Sunday dinners.

  “Uncle Greg, when I come back from California, I’ll come and stay awhile.”

  “I’ll be glad of that,” he said. “I just don’t like to think of you so alone.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m very consoled by George Washington,” he said. “You find something too, Annie, something that consoles you.”

  “I have a strange question to ask you. Do I have a middle name?”

  “That’s not so strange,” he replied. “Let me see. I have your birth certificate somewhere. I can go fetch it. It may have been Elizabeth, after your mother, you know. My mother loved the old names. My middle name is Luke. She was very fond of the Apostles.”

  They said good-by, each exercising a restraint for which the other was grateful. Annie walked down Broadway, thinking of her new name, a dark, fragrant name. The nearly empty shops gave the street an idle, post-Christmas dispirited look. Haunted by thoughts of Uncle Greg, worried about things she undoubtedly had forgotten to do in preparation for the next day, she turned into a movie house that was showing Wuthering Heights. Uncle Greg had given her the book years ago. Movies were like a faint thumbprint pressed on recollection; as handsome and intense as he was, the actor playing Heathcliff violated some private notion of her own.

  Afterward, she took a subway downtown to the restaurant on Twelfth Street. Walter was late. Annie sat in a corner, averting her gaze from the hopeful glances of men standing at the bar. Then Walter appeared in the door. She was startled at the pleasure she felt upon seeing him.

  As he held his hands around the candle on their table, she observed a small flat mole on one of his fingers. She touched it delicately—he stopped in the middle of something he was saying —and there was a yearning look on his face that seemed to have no connection with their gasping bodily struggles in hallways and on beds.

  For a while, he spoke of himself, of his father who lived in Sacramento and whom he hadn’t seen in eight years. He was a terrible man, Walter said. Once, when he’d taken some friends home from Berkeley—yes, he’d gone to college for a year—the old man had gotten into a rage because there’d been a ring of dirt in the bathtub, and he’d said Walter’s friends weren’t fit to be in houses. So Walter had told him what a petty bourgeois bastard he was with his nasty little real-estate business. He walked right out of that house and there’d not been a word between them all these years.

  A girl came in and went to the bar. Walter stared at her intently. Then, turned to Annie, he said, grinning, “I thought I recognized her back.”

  Annie shrank back into her chair. Walter grabbed her hands. “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re so easy to tease, baby!”

  “You always laugh at me…”

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’m
taking you uptown to meet a Spanish friend of mine.”

  “Another meeting?”

  “No. He lives in an international youth hostel up on the Drive where foreign students can stay while they go to school. There’re damn few youths among them. It’s worth the trip just to watch the Chinese students ignore the Japanese, and the Texans ducking behind furniture every time a Negro walks into the lobby.”

  “Couldn’t we just stay here? I am going away tomorrow…”

  “No,” he said amiably. “Anyhow, I’ll be seeing you sooner than you think. I went down to the NMU hiring hall today and I’ll probably get a Panama run to the West Coast.”

  Chapter 5

  The room Annie had rented, about which she had told Walter as little as possible that morning in San Diego, was on the second floor of a small stucco apartment house midway between Hollywood and Los Angeles. The area itself was desolate, and it throbbed day and night with sickly pulsation, as though Hollywood was continually flushing its rejects down the abject streets with their clumps of runt palmettos. Here were bit actors who’d never been successful enough to fail, dim luminaries from the silent movies who talked to themselves in rooms where they feared they would die, and old folk from all over the country who’d come to California, ending up in this backwash, with their mouse savings, hoping to stretch the money just a little further. Country boys and girls, escaping the deathly boredom of towns that had begun to die in the twenties, stayed a few days in sour rooms, never even unpacking their suitcases.

  Annie’s room held a few pieces of rickety furniture, a washbasin, a stove of sorts, a toilet in a closet, and the wall bed. She often wondered how the old people got their beds down at night, and she visualized grotesque scenes of struggle and defeat, the aged bodies hanging helplessly from the pull bar like dead fruit from a bough.

  The gray walls were smudged and thin; every sound carried from room to room. Perhaps the man next door would stay out all night as he occasionally did. But no sooner had she dropped her pocketbook on the three-legged maple table than she heard his voice, rumbling, thick and heated, filling her own room with foreign intonation. She stood motionless, waiting for the sound of the first blow, the dog’s yelp, the man’s rising cries, the tumble of movement as the dog ran about the room, trying, she guessed, to hide itself beneath and behind furniture, and the man’s heavy tread on the floor. The dog’s scream gained something of human anguish even as the man’s shout dropped into animal growls—there were thumps as things fell, crashes of objects thrown against the wall, then a small whimper but whether from the man or the dog, she couldn’t tell. Then it began all over again. Annie flung herself against the wall, beating it with her fists, crying, “Stop! Stop! Oh, God! Stop!”