The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Helen’s curiosity had shifted perceptibly to reproach.

  “I want,” Annie began, trying to keep her eyes on the woman’s face but abashed, looking away, “well, what I want is a place I’ve not been, you know.” Called to account for herself, she instantly shared the suspicion about her reasons she suspected Helen felt. There had been—some time ago—that sudden strong intention. Had she said it to Theda? To Mike Eagle? “I’m going to Europe.” Why had she determined to go anywhere? Helen Sears was smiling faintly.

  “I’ve never been anyplace,” she said. “I sometimes think there isn’t any other place except here, that Europe or Mexico or the Fiji Islands are only places in the mind. Of course—”

  “I want a new start,” Annie broke in. “That’s what I meant.”

  Helen looked sternly at her watch. Annie got up to go.

  “Does he have any relatives anywhere except you?”

  “I remember there was a cousin. It was so long ago. She was married to someone in Providence, Rhode Island. I think they still must live there.”

  “You’ll have to go through his papers and find out what you can. He’s going to die, you know. It’s a tiresome business, funeral, all that. Do you suppose he made a will? There’s the house and the land. It’s probably worth something.”

  “Oh—don’t you see? I’ve been away! I don’t know about these things. How would I know?”

  “You’ll have to know, now. I’ll make him as comfortable as I can. But what about the house, his things? You can’t walk away. He was your uncle.”

  “He’s not dead yet!”

  “I’ve taken care of a murdering old woman for fifteen years! It’s her fault my father and brother went up in flames. I went to nursing school, hating it! Hating it! But that’s what I was meant to do. It was the only way I could see to her! She would have been in the madhouse if it weren’t for me. Do you imagine you can just go off to your England and forget such an obligation?”

  Helen Sears was standing near a glass case on the shelves of which reposed a number of steel instruments, some of them scissors with beaks like shrikes.

  “I won’t. I’m not. I can’t go for a while anyhow,” Annie protested. “You don’t understand. It’s that I don’t know what to do! And he’s breathing, right now. He might not die. How do you know he’ll die?”

  “I only take people when they’re dying,” cried Helen Sears, “so he must be dying!”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Annie shouted at her, holding up her hands in front of her chest. The woman might attack her! Fling that case at her! She was mad, as mad as her old mother. Helen was looking at her watch again. What could it tell her?

  “All right,” she said, her voice calm now. “Sorry to be so emotional. I have to deal with relatives, you see. All the time.” She emitted a lifeless little chuckle. “It quite turns one sour, cynical, you might say.”

  In her room at the Murray Hill Hotel, Annie stared for a long time at the telephone. It would only be nine o’clock in Los Angeles. Theda would be up and about. But what could Theda tell her? Did she want to be told anything? Only to hear Theda’s voice, to hear a friend’s voice!

  She knew what she had to do. She would have the photographs taken in the morning for the passport application she had picked up at Rockefeller Center. She would look for a room in the Village. The passport took two weeks, if she got one. She would have to find out about shipping lines. Then she would drive to Nyack, to the old house, and go through Uncle Greg’s desk.

  She looked at the application. The photographs were simple! And she’d have an address soon enough. But where could she get someone to be the identifying witness? She didn’t know anyone in this city. She began to fill in the application. A woman applicant must fill in this portion, it read. I was never married. I was last married on—a large ink blot spread out from the point of the pen where she was pressing down on the line. The room was cold. Theda said they would have a dossier on her.

  I intend to visit the following countries for the purposes indicated: England, she wrote.

  What purposes? The windows opposite her own were dark. It was raining dismally, weakly in the inner court. I will not be able to go, she thought. I have no identifying witness. Uncle Greg will linger on. I will find a room and it will start all over again. There’s always a room somewhere.

  She undressed and got into bed. The enormity of what she had wanted to do! She had in her folly imagined it was simply a matter of will, and a little cash. But papers. Photographs. Witness. Plan. Reason. Address. Oath. And a few miles up the Hudson, in that collapsing old house, was a desk with drawers full of papers, Uncle Greg’s getaway papers, a will, a deed, documents of death. She had already begun her own trail, marriage certificate and divorce decree, Social Security card, a dossier in Washington, petitions she had signed, employment records, driver’s license. Oh! God knows what traps she had long since set for herself, timed to be sprung months, years from now!

  What would happen to that house? Would he have left it to her? No, surely not. That would be willing her his own fate. She would not accept the house. She would hand the house over to Helen Sears—let her fill it with dying people to be made “comfortable.” Gradually, she grew less rigid. She drowsed. A name mumbled in her mind, struggled, an odd name. Jersey Lighter. She sat up in bed and reached for the telephone. Information gave her the number. He had liked her. He would remember her. Hadn’t he given her that paper? Something about an angel, andirons, the fate of the world? He would be her witness.

  ———

  Jersey Lighter was waiting for her in a booth close to the kitchen door of the Chinese restaurant where he had asked her to meet him. He didn’t see her at first; he was peering through his glasses at a menu which, as she slipped into the booth, he turned upside down. Then he stood up, bending awkwardly over the table.

  “How are you, Annie?” he asked gravely, as though only a few days had passed, not years. She shook his proffered hand. He picked up the menu again and sat down. “Are you interested in ideography? I’m teaching myself Chinese characters. It’s a good discipline for the hands.” She glanced at it briefly, seeing instead of the dirty menu card the faded sepia handwriting of the papers, postcards, and letters she had gone through that afternoon in the Nyack house. Her hands were still dusty; she hadn’t had time to stop off at the hotel and wash up. She pushed her hair back from her face, knowing she looked awful.

  “How is your baby?” she asked, trying to remember the name of Jersey Lighter’s wife.

  “Dandy,” he said. “We call her that. Her name is Daniela. Elmira likes foreign names.” There had been a slight emphasis on Elmira as though he’d known Annie had forgotten.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I couldn’t think of anyone else. It means going with me to the passport office. I hope you won’t mind.”

  “No. I’m glad to do it. It’s a slack time now. The spring windows will be along soon, but right now is fine. How was it? In California?”

  She must have looked her hopelessness at answering such a question for he smiled and said, “Never mind. It’s been a long time. You look as if you’d managed it. Walter’s in New York, you know. I saw him a few days ago. He told me he had written to someone out there to try and find you.”

  “Walter!” she exclaimed apprehensively.

  “He says he has to get the divorce decree from you.” He paused as a waiter came to their table. “What would you like?”

  “I don’t know. Could you order? Not too much of anything. I’m not hungry.”

  He told the waiter what to bring them without looking at the menu. Annie supposed he ate there often. Then he said, with the same quiet detachment she remembered from the night five years ago, “Walter is marrying again. That’s why he needs the decree.”

  She must have looked very shocked for him to touch her arm with his small neat hand. But he had mistaken her response. It was not the thought of Walter remarrying. It was the thought
of Walter himself. She laughed a little.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Only that for a moment, I couldn’t imagine Walter. I mean, that he’s real, walking around the city. I’m not—jealous.”

  How little Jersey had changed! The same mild expression, even the same gold-rimmed glasses. She remembered now how he had been sitting in a corner of that loft, peering down at a figurine of some sort.

  “Are you still making those—”

  “The figures. Yes. We’ve done well. Not as well as we had thought. The war interrupted it. The army didn’t take me. I had rheumatic fever when I was a child. I had to work in a machine shop down at Irving Place days. It was a place where they used industrial diamonds, for cutting and abrading. Nights, we made the figures and sold a few. Department stores go on forever. We managed.”

  “I worked in a shipbuilding plant for a while. I was supposed to run a drill press, but I left before I got around to it.”

  He smiled. “Well, a little practical knowledge never hurts. It might come in handy someday.”

  The waiter brought two small bowls of soup. She ate, grateful for the thin broth. She could not have swallowed much of substance. Jersey hadn’t asked her yet what she wanted a passport for, where she was going. She wondered if anything excited him, frightened him? Was it resignation that made him so calm? So undemanding?

  “I’ve had a strange day,” she said, thinking, He won’t mind hearing about it because it won’t touch him. “My uncle is very ill and I had to go to his house—where I lived as a child—and try to find his papers. For some reason, I never have even thought of people having to have papers. There were some white crackers in one of the desk drawers. They crumbled when I touched them. And another drawer full of big gray coins. But the postcards—there were dozens of them! From all over Europe. And the handwriting was so thin and spidery and in brown ink. I spent too much time reading them, about all those journeys so long ago. Some of them, my uncle had written to his mother when he was in Germany, that must have been before the First World War. And some were from people I never heard of. But I found one from my mother to Uncle Greg. I kept it.”

  “What did it say?” he asked.

  The waiter removed the bowls and brought them rice and two covered dishes.

  “It said, ‘We have found a lovely little house near the water. I am happy. Home at last.’”

  “Where was the little house?”

  “In Rockport, Massachusetts. And my father went back. He’s there now.”

  “Went back?”

  “My mother died when I was little. He married twice since then. Now he’s gone up there again.”

  Jersey put two small servings from the dishes on her plate. Steam rose briefly from the food, then subsided.

  “I think there must be a profound difference between people who like everything in one bowl and the ones who eat one potato and one chop as widely separated on their plate as possible. My mother put the muzzle of a shotgun in her mouth and blew her head off.”

  She gasped. He looked at her placidly and began to eat. Then he said, “I’m told it makes a difference to a child, how they die.”

  “Oh, you can’t feel that way! You—”

  Something flickered in his face. His eyes opened very wide, his nostrils flared. His face was slowly exploding! Then he bent over his food again and took another forkful. When he looked up, his features had assumed their familiar shape. “But I do,” he said. “I know I see things somewhat differently from other people. I have this thought that the shot that killed her shifted my balance. I can’t explain it. But then, I had a good father. Very good. As these things go. Tell me about the house, your uncle’s house.”

  “It was cold. The heat is off.”

  “When are you leaving the country?”

  “I have to find a ship. I have to find a room. You must have a place for them to send the passport to. It can’t be a hotel. I may not even get one. They turned me down a few years ago.”

  He looked thoughtful. Then he said, “I have some friends in the merchant marine, aside from Walter, that is, who’s really not a friend. I think the United States Lines have some partly converted ships that are going over. They were used as troop ships during the war. Now they’re taking some passengers. You might try them. And I know some people who’ve gotten passports, older than you, and I expect a lot more dangerous in the view of the State Department. You’re not very dangerous, are you?”

  He was teasing her a little, soberly, as was his way, she thought.

  “No. I wouldn’t think I was. But they did turn me down once.”

  “It’s all chance,” he said.

  “Could you go with me the day after tomorrow? To witness?”

  “In the morning. Where are you going to look for a room?”

  “Down here in the Village, I thought,” she said.

  “There’s a place on Morton Street, a little old tenement but very clean. An Italian couple look after it. You could try.”

  He walked with her to her subway. “You’ve helped so much,” she said.

  “Just information.”

  “Thanks for the dinner. I didn’t mean for you to pay.”

  They shook hands. He touched her arm lightly. “I did suffer,” he said. “The bewilderment was terrible. But one doesn’t suffer forever. How could anyone live then?”

  “Do you remember that piece of paper you gave me? What was written on it?” she asked shyly.

  For a moment, his face was illuminated by an unguarded smile.

  “The Giotto,” he murmured. “How nice you remembered.”

  “Is nine o’clock all right at the passport division?”

  “Fine,” he nodded.

  She spent the following morning walking around the Village. Jersey had neglected to give her the street number of the tenement on Morton, but she found one that might have been it. There were many such old narrow buildings, across their façades the black Z of a fire escape. An Italian woman showed her a room on the first floor. They walked back a long passageway, the floor of damp white tiles smelling of wet mop. The room was on an inner court. A screen of chicken wire covered the only window. “So’s the cats won’t get in,” said the old woman. There was, inexplicably, a circular plastic structure slit by a narrow opening in the middle of the room. “Somebody was going to put a shower there. Crazy,” said the woman. “How long you want it for?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Annie, afraid she wouldn’t rent the room if she knew the uncertainty of Annie’s plans.

  “It’s thirty dollars a month. You pay gas meter. See?” She put her hand on the surface of a water tank next to a large sink. “A quarter and you get hot water.” She whispered this last as though it were vaguely illicit. “But you got to tell me, how long?”

  “I just can’t—”

  “See, it’s a sublet. The fellow’s an Indian. Billy, he’s going back to the place—what’s it called? The reserve? And he’s only going for six weeks. So you see, that’s the trouble.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “You don’t have to pay electricity.”

  “When can I have it?”

  “Tonight.”

  The old woman walked to a sofa bed near the window. “He got dirty sheets, hunh?”

  “I’ll give you a month now.”

  “The toilet’s in there.” She pointed to a closed door. “The sink’s big enough to wash in. Billy don’t wash much.”

  “Do you want the money?”

  “Billy be right back. He went to the store. We wait.”

  They stood there silently for several minutes. The Italian woman folded her hands over her belly and appeared to doze. Annie calculated. She could make herself meals on the two-burner stove. It had been stupid to stay at the hotel—a waste of money. But if she moved in here tomorrow, if she was terribly careful, she wouldn’t have to get a temporary job. Of course, it all depended on the ship, when she could get one, how long before it sailed; it all depended too on t
he passport division; it all depended on Uncle Greg. Thirty days, she told herself. None of these questions could persist unanswered after thirty days. Did she mean for Uncle Greg to die in time? It wasn’t that, it couldn’t be. Helen Sears had said he’d only last a few days, at most. When she had gone to the nursing home yesterday, after the miserable hours in the old house, he had been in some curious region between sleep and consciousness, recognizing her one moment, forgetting where he was, who she was, in the next. Only once had his eyes cleared; she had started to hang up the bathrobe she had found in the house and brought him.

  “Not that one! Oh, Annie, not that old thing. I have a good robe. In your old closet. I kept it in there…I don’t know why …but I won’t wear that ugly thing. Now you go and get the good one.” It startled her, that unexpected clarity, his insistence. It had touched her, vanity enduring beyond all else. She had rummaged through his clothes. How neglected, squalid everything had been! How awful to grow old, to be so sick, alone, alone, with the sheets growing grayer, buttons gone from shirts—you get too old to bend and look beneath furniture—underwear in rags, suits holding the shape of an aging body, knees worn through.

  “I got another one coming up any day.” The Italian woman spoke suddenly. “Upstairs. A better room. He’s a hophead. He’s going to kill hisself.”

  “This is fine, fine…I really only need a place for a few weeks. I’m going abroad.”

  “What’s that? Where?”

  “To England. Then to Europe.”

  “My God! What are you gonna do that for?”

  She was saved from answering by the appearance of Billy, a large fat black-haired young man wearing dungarees and a red flannel shirt beneath his jacket. He ignored the two women, going directly to the stove where he dropped a small paper bag.

  “Billy, you got a tenant,” said the woman. “She’s gonna take your place.”

  Billy tore off his jacket, enormous shoulders hunching into view as he circled and dropped the garment on the bed.

  “Okay. She tell you how much? I get five for the furnishings. But I’ll take care of the electric. She tell you about the meter? I got some sheets at the laundry down the street. Clean. You can pick them up. I’ll be leaving in an hour.”