by Howard Fast
“You want to sell her to me?”
“I want to sell her today.”
Mackenzie stared at her thoughtfully for a long moment. They were standing next to her car, a 1933 Ford station wagon, at the edge of the dirt road that led to the stables. Mackenzie looked at the car, ran a hand over the fender, and asked her, “What happened to your Buick?”
It was none of his damn business, Barbara thought. He was moving in. The careful wall of separation had collapsed. He had decided that she was in trouble, and he was breaking ground.
“Do you want to buy Sandy?” she said. She had no intention of talking about the car; there would be trouble enough with the car thing when her mother returned. The Buick convertible had been a gift from her mother on her eighteenth birthday, but it was nothing she could drive to the soup kitchen on Bryant Street, no way to explain a car like that, and anyway, the luggage compartment was too small for her purposes. She had sold it and bought the Ford station wagon.
“Let’s go over to the barn and have a look at her.”
“No. I don’t want to see Sandy again. Will you buy her?”
“I’m just the trainer here, Miss Lavette. I ain’t got the kind of money you find in the club. I suppose I could buy her.” He rubbed his chin and thought about it. “I’ll give you four hundred for her.”
“Oh, no. You must be kidding. The saddle alone cost a hundred and fifty.”
“Throwing the saddle in?”
“Sandy’s worth a thousand. You know that.”
He shook his head. “That’s too rich for my blood. Throw in the saddle, and I’ll give you five hundred.”
“Why, Mac? You know what Sandy’s worth.”
“I told you, I’m just the trainer. You want to wait a week or two, this lady from Flintridge might give you seven hundred. Wait for the auction, maybe you’ll get that much, maybe more.”
“Will you pay me cash? Today?”
“I’ll pay you cash,” he said.
***
Barbara drove north from Menlo Park, tears running down her cheeks and five hundred dollars in her purse. I will not weep over a horse, she told herself. I will not, I will not. Or was she weeping for herself and out of her own fear? After all, she had been nine months without Sandy, and giving very little thought to the animal, if the truth be told. It was the act of selling her, and selling her to that miserable Mackenzie, that chilled her—even more than the act of selling her car, her emerald pin, and her gold bracelet. In time they would all return, her mother, John Whittier, and her brother Tom. Her mother noticed everything. She would come directly to the point. “Why, Barbara, did you sell that beautiful Buick roadster and buy that wretched Ford?” The fact that it was a very special and splendid birthday gift made the surreptitious sale even more heinous. “And where is your bracelet? And what else have you sold? And what kind of trouble are you in?” Barbara was a poor liar and badly versed in the art. She would simply tell the truth and then whatever might happen would happen.
She told herself that she had done nothing wrong. She had acted out of love and compassion. Or had she? Or was the action taken out of loathing for her own way of life and everything that had surrounded her? If so, it was a very sudden loathing. A few months ago she had been a reasonably content college student. Then she had returned to a home that wasn’t hers, yet now she wondered whether even the house on Russian Hill had ever been hers in any real sense. Or is any home of the parents the home of the child? Now she was pitying herself, and that sort of thing simply disgusted her. Her mother’s friends pitied themselves; she could remember overhearing their conversations, recalling her own annoyance at the wives of millionaires who pitied themselves in the America of the 1930s.
She hadn’t gone to Bryant Street by accident. She loved the waterfront, the Embarcadero, the docks, the fishing boats, the big steamers, the freighters, the great luxury liners. It was all part of the mythology of her strange childhood, of the father she had never really known. This had been his place, where he started as a hand on his own father’s fishing boat, out of which he built his empire of wealth and ships. And then he left it, abandoned it, and not comprehending that, Barbara made a quixotic act of nobility out of it. To have and surrender, to find something real, to sacrifice meaningfully—all this raced around inside her, tinged with romantic dreams, novels she had read, discussions with her friends at college, and piled childishly into a confusion and despair at odds with her basically cheerful nature.
And then one day she stood outside the soup kitchen on Bryant Street, just stood there and watched as the striking longshoremen lined up to be fed. She had a vivid imagination, and her romantic notion of the working class had been shaped mainly by the novels of Jack London and Upton Sinclair. All of which led to her meeting Dominick Salone.
He had paused next to her and said, “Lady, is something wrong?”
He was her own height, skinny, the dark flesh of his face drawn tightly over the bones, deep set, dark, intense eyes, a small nose, a head of black, unruly hair, and, curiously in one so young, a nest of wrinkles at either end of his wide mouth. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four. He wore blue jeans and a stained green woolen windbreaker over a T-shirt.
She just stared at him.
“Because you’re crying, lady.”
“I am not.”
“Sure as hell you are. We got sympathizers, lady, but mostly they don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“O.K., O.K.” He shrugged and turned away.
Barbara touched her cheeks. They were wet. Then she called after him. “Mister!”
When he turned around, she was wiping her face with a handkerchief. He stood there, staring at her, and then she walked over to him.
“Could I ask you a question, mister?” she asked uneasily.
“My name’s Nick. Nick Salone. Don’t call me mister.”
She was taken totally aback by his reply. She stood silent for a moment or two, and he said, “Well?”
“My name’s Bobby.”
“All right, Bobby, ask.”
“What?”
“You said you wanted to ask me a question.”
She nodded at the kitchen. “How do you run it? I mean, where does the food come from?”
“What’s with you, sister? You work for a newspaper or something?”
“You’re suspicious of me.”
“You’re damn right. I’m suspicious of anyone who looks like you.”
“What do you mean? How do I look?”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Let it go. You want to know where the food comes from? It used to come from the union funds, but that’s gone. Washed out, used up. So it comes from wherever we can beg, borrow, or steal it.”
“Oh.” She said, almost primly, “Would it be all right if I brought you some food—as a contribution? I wouldn’t be hurting anyone’s feelings?”
“Hurting our feelings?”
“I don’t know about these things,” she said lamely.
“No, you wouldn’t be hurting nobody’s feelings.”
“Where would I bring it?”
He pointed to an alley alongside the storefront. “That leads back to the kitchen. Just bring it to the kitchen.”
That was how it began. Walking the few blocks to a grocery store, it occurred to Barbara that here she was in the twenty-first year of her life, yet never before had she entered a food store to buy anything more than a bag of pretzels or cookies or sausage for one of their late-night feasts in the dormitory back at school. She had never gone out to buy food as food, food to feed people who were hungry. Now she had about twelve dollars in her purse, and she had not the faintest notion of how much food one could buy for twelve dollars.
The man behind the counter in the small grocery store had a walrus mustache and wet blue eyes.
It was half an hour past noon, and there were no other customers in the store. The proprietor watched her, appraising her dubiously. Finally, when she continued to stand there without speaking, he said, “We don’t sell no cigarettes, miss.”
“I don’t want cigarettes.” She had read somewhere that beans possess a fine balance of nourishment, and in any case, beans and working people made some connection in her mind. “How much are beans?” she asked.
“Beans?”
“Yes, beans.”
“What kind of beans? I got lima beans, navy beans, pea beans, kidney beans, Mexican beans—what kind?”
“I don’t know,” she said unhappily.
“You ever cooked beans?”
“No.”
He was studying her suspiciously. They were all suspicious of her. She acted wrong, she looked wrong, she dressed wrong; and she was becoming acutely aware of this. Nevertheless, she pursued her course doggedly.
“If you were to cook beans, what would you cook?”
“I don’t give cooking lessons.”
“What are navy beans?” she asked desperately.
He reached down and held up a handful. “These.”
“All right. Give me twelve dollars’ worth.”
He stared at her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Lady, for twelve dollars you can buy a hundred-pound sack.”
“I can?”
“That’s right.”
“Then give me ten pounds.” Something recognizable caught her eyes. “How much is that salami?” she asked, pointing to where a row of them hung behind the counter.
“Twenty cents a pound. Each link is five pounds.”
Loaded down with all the food she could carry, she made her way back to the soup kitchen on Bryant Street, went into the alley and through the open kitchen door, where she set down the food, and fled. After that, two days passed before she could gather sufficient courage to return. Meanwhile, she informed herself. She went down to the kitchen of the house on Pacific Heights and addressed herself to Mrs. Britsky, the Polish cook who presided over the place, asking her where most of the food money was spent—with the excuse that she was preparing a paper for her return to school.
“Meat, meat,” Mrs. Britsky replied emphatically. “There’s a Depression, but that don’t mean they give it away. Always, your mama wants French style. Entrecote, fifty cents a pound; saddle of lamb, fifty-five cents; leg of lamb, forty-nine cents. You can die from such prices.”
“But isn’t there cheaper meat?”
“Cheaper meat for the Whittiers, go on!”
“Not for them. Just for my information. What would a poor family do? What would they buy?”
“You can buy beef heart for ten cents a pound, good meat if you cook it right, chuck for twenty-five cents, pork for thirty cents, breast of lamb for twelve cents.”
“Where do you buy it?”
“Darling, in a butcher shop, where else?”
Afterward, Barbara wondered whether any of it would have happened had she not been alone in the big house, with her mother and John Whittier and Tom away in the East. Partly, it was a game that had possessed and intrigued her, and that she found so much more exciting than the parties she was invited to and the dates with boring, empty-headed young men; and in another part it was her own vendetta against John Whittier, who owned half the cargo ships that made San Francisco their home port; and in still another part it was her quick, romantic sense of compassion and pity.
For her return to the soup kitchen, she bought a cheap, imitation leather purse and wore an old sweater, a plaid skirt, and brown loafers. She brought twenty pounds of soup meat. She knew that she was playing a game and that it was a little girl game, that she had hidden herself behind a sort of Halloween mask, but that knowledge did not make the game less exciting. Dominick Salone was there that time, sitting on a fruit box and peeling potatoes, and after his initial surprise at seeing her, he grinned. The kitchen was a makeshift affair at the back of the store, and the cooking was done on an old coal stove. There was one other woman in the place, a stout Mexican woman whose name was Irma, and four men besides Salone, all of them longshoremen. They made a big fuss over the meat, and Salone introduced Barbara to the others. That was when she told them her name was Winter. She had also invented her own cover story, that she was a bookkeeper in the big L & L Department Store, and that she worked the four-to-twelve-midnight shift, closing the books for the day’s sales. The L & L store on Market Street had been founded by her father, Dan Lavette, and his partner, Marcus Levy, and she had at least a vague knowledge of its operation. The job, as she invented it, accounted for her free time during the day, and she explained the money she spent for food as money collected from workers at the store.
That day she offered to help Dominick peel potatoes, and afterward she shared the beef stew that fed the striking longshoremen. That was the beginning.
It was a beginning threaded through with illusions. One illusion concerned the nobility of the longshoremen. She invested them with qualities that she felt she had found in her father, uprightness, quietude of suffering, morality. Another illusion concerned Dominick Salone, again as a variant of her father, who had started as a fisherman and had married a daughter of the Seldons of Nob Hill. Still another illusion concerned what she felt was a cloak of invisibility that she had thrown about herself, making the game of being another person with another life and background all the more enticing. The relationship with Salone had gone no further than their exchanges in the kitchen, and then one day he walked with her down to the docks at the end of Townsend Street and pointed out Harry Bridges to her. Bridges, leading the strike, was Salone’s hero, not a “phony,” not “some lousy smart aleck” making a career out of the labor movement, but a plain longshoreman like himself. “The best goddamn man I ever knew in my life,” Salone said. “There’s nobody else like Limo, nobody.”
“Why do you call him Limo?” Barbara asked.
“He’s a limey, from Australia.”
Looking at Bridges, Barbara realized how much like Dominick Salone he was, skinny, the same height, a narrow hatchet face, large pointed nose, dark hair that was combed flat over his head, held tight in the wind by Vaseline—contrasting both of them with the boys she knew in what was still called in the city the “Nob Hill set,” the tall, well-fleshed, well-fed, athletic young men who kept horses at Menlo Park and sailed their boats on San Francisco Bay.
“You think a lot of Bridges, don’t you?”
“I told you—the best man I ever knew.”
They walked along in a world that was only a few miles from her home, yet another world entirely, looking at ships that her stepfather and her mother owned, ships tied to the docks and walled off by the lines of bitter-faced pickets. Salone talked slowly, throwing out the words in bits and pieces, sometimes glancing at her, but making no move toward her, no advances, not even taking her hand.
As for what she felt about him, if anything at all beyond the curiosity his strangeness and difference aroused in her, Barbara simply did not know. And now, weeks later, driving north from Menlo Park after she had sold her horse and wept for the horse and for herself, she still knew no more of the reality of this thing into which she had plunged. She remembered Oscar Wilde’s story “The Happy Prince,” about the gold- and jewel-encrusted prince whose statue loomed high over some European city, and the sparrow who brought the prince stories of poverty and suffering. Each time, the prince surrendered a bit of gold or a jewel to be sold to ease the misery of the poor—until finally only the leaden core of the statue remained. She made the comparison with herself, and then was wise enough and sane enough to burst into laughter at her own sentimentality.
“What a dreadful, impossible ass I am!” she said aloud. “I don’t blame Mother for losing patience with me.”
She was honest e
nough with herself to recognize that in selling everything of value she owned—jewels, trinkets, car, and now the horse—she had experienced more satisfaction and plain excitement than ever before in her life. It was really a very easy game. She had never known hunger, never wanted for money to exist, and each night she went home to the great barn of a mansion on Pacific Heights.
***
At the age of seventeen, Joseph Lavette was six feet and one inch in height and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. The coach of the football team at University High in Westwood in Los Angeles singled him out and pressed him to try for the team. Joseph refused. He was a gentle, soft-spoken boy, introverted and not very physical, in spite of his large, heavily muscled frame. The coach, loath to relinquish what he considered a prime physical specimen, went into a lecture on the natural football abilities of the American Indian. It was an understandable error. With his black, slightly Oriental eyes, his straight black hair, and his brown skin, Joe might well have been taken for an Indian; and Lavette, a French-Italian name, might well have been something out of the Northwest.
“I’m not an Indian,” he said. “I’m Chinese. It doesn’t work the same way. We make rotten football players. Anyway, I just haven’t got the time.”
“With a name like Lavette?” the coach snorted.
“My father is Italian. My mother is Chinese.”
The time he hoarded so preciously was spent with books and with his grandfather, Feng Wo. He was a voracious reader, and he consumed everything he could get his hands on, almost without discrimination. As for his grandfather, two years before this, Feng Wo had decided that although he himself would live out his life on this land of the barbarian, it by no means meant that his grandson must of necessity grow up as a barbarian. Whereupon he raised the subject quite formally and very politely at the family dinner table, stating that if Mr. Lavette agreed, he would like to teach his grandson, Joseph, to read, write, and to speak that most ancient and commendable of all languages, called Mandarin. Being Chinese, Feng Wo did not ask for the opinion or consent of either May Ling, Joseph’s mother, or Joseph himself.