“Los Rowbles is how we say it. What number you want? ’Cause, you see, all the numbers under five hundred are below Buena Vista and all the numbers over five hundred are above Buena Vista.”
“Above?”
“That way, toward the mountains. Below is toward the ocean.”
“It’s 601-B, so I guess it’s above Buena Vista, then. Where’s Buena Vista?”
She laughed merrily. “You’re on Buena Vista!”
“Last time I looked it was San Jose.”
“San Jose turns into Buena Vista, so now it’s Buena Vista. Anyway, Los Robles is three blocks, maybe four blocks.”
She was interrupted by a great zooming and blatting of engines from two hot rods that had lined up at the intersection. They bragged at each other with their exhaust pipes, their huge rear tires like coiled haunches, and then burned rubber, blue smoke hovering at the spot where they had disappeared. She gave the blue cloud a brief glance and said, “See you around, now.”
“See you around, and thanks,” he said.
“My bunch hangs out at Jimmy’s Palace, on Concha, case you might want to drop by sometime. My name’s Dianne, but they call me Streaky ’cause of this dumb hair. There’s no bleach or anything in it.”
“My name’s John. Maybe I will.”
“Saturday nights, mostly.”
“Okay.”
“Bye now, John.” She took a few steps and turned to wave and smile, catching him looking at her, and smiled a little more at that.
“Bye, Dianne,” he said, and she walked on knowing that he looked at her tanned legs and strong bare back, her sexy swing of a walk, her garish hair that gave her a name. She’d put her hands on her breasts and looked at him with large, simple eyes, pretty-as-an-unfinished-picture eyes that gave him the suspicion that she was purely and playfully innocent, and that to go to Jimmy’s Palace on Concha, whatever it was, to see her again and try to charm her, was not in the mood of a man, or child, looking, or half looking, obliquely looking, for his father.
He would find Los Robles and ride past 601-B, then look for a place to stay, or temporarily stay. After that he had no plans. He turned onto Los Robles, seeing no oaks but lots of mulberry trees, which he had seen in the Army in Georgia. Unfamiliar little warblers caused their own private racket among the dark leaves. The houses along the uneven-numbered side of Los Robles had deep porches, some duplexes sharing a long veranda, the front doors side by side. Lawns here were a little less tended, scorched at the edges. There was 599. He saw 601, a dark brown shingled duplex, and then a car was broadside to him. There was no time to touch his brakes, or any controls other than to jerk his handlebars to the left. He rose in the air and his own taillight and license plate passed beneath him. He seemed to be in the air for a long time while the folded motorcycle continued its somersault below.
In the air before his return to the pavement his mind was imprinted by the slow, graceful movements of the machine below him as the world revolved. Then vision was a faster, nebulous spiral, a vortex in which he was an imperfect ball. He rolled and rolled, amazed by the force that his mass contained. Each contact with the street caused his inner lights to flicker as he was stunned and stunned again. He could not stop rolling and hurting. He dreaded the ghost wall or tree or car that would stop him and probably kill him, and heard nothing but the thudding of his joints. But finally he did stop, or had stopped sometime earlier, and with the light of day dingy he stood up to find his motorcycle on its side right next to him, so he pulled it over to the curb and stood it up to keep its fluids from bleeding out. His fluids, too, seemed unstable, sloshy.
“Are you all right? Are you all right?” a woman asked in a voice so fearful he wanted to reassure it, but then a red filter came over the light and he was, time having passed, looking up from the street at the wide, frantically caring face of a woman who knelt beside him, her hands clasped together in the attitude of prayer. “Dear God!” she said. “Dear God! Dear God!” In spite of the distortions of her anxiety she was smooth and large, her wide face full of a soft light that had no texture and made him seem small. He tried to get up, but she carefully pressed his shoulders down. Something had been put under his head and from it came perfume—something of her. All around, now, people had gathered among the grinning faces of cars. He turned his head aside, embarrassed, and vomited easily into the street. She wiped his mouth with an aromatic little handkerchief.
“You stay still,” she said. “I backed right smack in front of you and it’s all my fault. I always look and I don’t know why in heaven I forgot this one stupid time.”
“I’m all right,” he said.
“No, you’re not. You look like death warmed over. It’s a miracle if every bone in your body isn’t broken. We’ll just wait for the ambulance and then we’ll see.” She looked for the ambulance and he watched the smooth skin under her jaws and chin, feeling the largeness of her and her seamless warm light.
He was not all right; his knees and elbows were numb, and though tentative messages along the lengths of his nerves didn’t quite signal broken bones, except maybe something in one knee, he had been hammered on too hard. Something was wrong with his sense of the vertical and even of dimension, because this smooth giantess covered the sky above him, her dark hair a cloud. Or he had grown small in his weakness. She looked down upon him and caressed his face and neck, her hands as familiar and matter-of-fact with him as a mother’s with a baby. She was as vast as a movie, someone he must have seen acting out grand emotions on a screen. If he could think he might even give her a name, like Loretta Young, Myrna Loy, Joan Bennett—a name somewhere among those flawless American goddesses never to be seen in the flesh.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Should I know who you are?”
“I’m Bonnie Forester,” she said, “and I’m going to take care of you.”
21
One evening the members of the crew were all together at the beach. The sun had just gone behind Cascom Mountain and the rest of the earth—grass, stone, wood, sand, water and the almost palpable air—all was still radiant of the heat left by a summer day. They passed a big bar of Ivory soap among them, soaping off the grime caused by whatever tasks they’d done. In spite of their odd loyalties and infatuations, for the moment they felt that they were natives and that the guests of Cascom Manor were foreign to the valley and the blue lake. For one thing, none of the guests worked. None mowed, washed, sawed, dug, painted, scoured; none was, at least for this moment, as real as the crew was to itself.
Dibley watched Dory until the last moment before her eyes could touch his, then his shied off. She thought how “shy” seemed a clear and honest attribute, but whenever you met the shy they were always shy in impure and creepy ways. There was that writing in her window screen; love as irritation, as a sickness. She couldn’t be absolutely certain that it had been Dibley, or even that the words hadn’t been there for a year or more. There was not enough proof of his skulking on the porch roof to accuse him, to disrupt, with unpredictable, possibly frantic results, his difficult life.
He was a good worker, though, and knew how to do things, unlike the Princess and her guests—except for Werner, who did know how to sail. He and Yvonne were coming about between Merrihew and Pine islands now. The Princess couldn’t swim, Kasimir carboned the bottoms of pans, the Patricks couldn’t sail because, in some vacuum of conception, they couldn’t understand the leverage of moving air. She’d found the Princess trying to screw in a light bulb backwards, turning and turning the bulb the wrong way in a live socket. None of them except Jean Dorlean knew how to drive. Mrs. Patrick plugged a toilet and hadn’t the sense to do anything but run for help while her children crawled in the overflow and the ceiling of the library turned soggy. Jean Dorlean bragged about not being able to understand machines, as if that simple knowledge were contemptible. She didn’t despise their ignorances but couldn’t understand why they were indifferent to them, or even proud of them, as if they felt superior to compete
nce.
Debbie kept looking out to the lake, where the sailboat came about again in the mild wind. Yvonne had asked Werner to take her out because she wanted to talk to him, Cynthia said, about his attitude toward Debbie. He bullied Debbie, but she wouldn’t stay away from him. He pushed her off the dock, turned her upside down in the water until she came up choking, turned her over in her fleshy helplessness to reveal red finger marks on her thighs and a buttock freed from her swimming suit, yet she sputtered and laughed, and even though she looked flushed and unhappy she never got angry at him. She wanted his attention but what she got was rough treatment and jocosity, not the seriousness she wanted. When Dory asked her why she took it, Debbie inflated in wrath and said, “Mind your own business! Take a powder!”
Maybe there were times when Werner didn’t treat her like that, but never in the presence of others. He treated her with contempt, calling her German names she didn’t know the meanings of, always with laughter, as if he were embarrassed by her devotion.
When they’d all soaped up, as if by general agreement, or by tradition, they swam to the raft.
The water sped along her arms and thighs, high summer and the water her element, cool as her blood, fluid as John Hearne in his absence, she the lake he swam in. These moments came upon her unexpectedly, even in the midst of worries or pending decisions. Jealousy and sex, actual parts of him. She’d never thought of parts of him like that before when she wanted him. Now she allowed his tall flushed penis, silken, fluid, deep in her. Too far in, to the limit. Did she want to be hurt by him? Then she would know he was there.
On the raft she knew that Dibley shivered near her not in discomfort but in ecstasy. To be here in the clear air, nearly naked, near his beloved…Ick, sick, the sick virgin boy dying of rapture. She slid into the water and swam the few strokes to where she could stand and walk to shore.
Werner brought the sailboat in, raising the centerboard as the bow slid against the sand. “Werner,” she said to him without quite knowing what she would say next. She, too, would talk to him about Debbie.
Werner stood at attention in the tippy stern of the boat, saluted and said, “Werner Friedrich Joachim Roland Josef Graf von Ganz-Lengen, at your service!”
Yvonne, in Cynthia’s red bathing suit, stepped out of the boat with hippy grace and waded toward the raft. She turned back to Dory and gave her a sweet, worried smile before sliding forward to swim.
“Werner,” Dory said. “I want to talk to you.”
Werner pulled the sailboat farther up on the sand and again stood at attention, or nearly at attention; his ordinary posture was such that it was hard to tell what he meant by this pose. He said, “Of course, I jokingly gave you my full name and title. Here I’m plain Werner Ganz-Lengen and proud of it. In Germany I’m what you call a ‘hereditary count,’ even though my family’s estates are in the Russian Zone, so it’s cheerio to all that. Not that we’re paupers, you understand, or without influence. I’m not complaining in the slightest. It’s A-okay with me just to be alive and in the good old U.S. of A. Bet your boots!”
“It’s about Debbie,” she said.
He waved this away with a smile. “Just a little teasing, a little kidding around. Nothing to take seriously.”
“She has a crush on you. I hope you won’t…”
Werner laughed. They began to walk up the path toward Cascom Manor, Debbie no doubt watching them from the raft.
“I was just a child,” Werner said. “I didn’t want to leave my friends and my school and go to Germany. I played baseball and football and basketball. What did I know about Germany? I had such an American accent it made my mother angry. I was just a plain American boy.” He looked at her as if wanting a verdict, his little blue eyes waiting for a sign. “My heroes were the Yankees—Joe DiMaggio, not Adolf Hitler.”
“Yes,” she said, wondering what it was in Werner’s nature that made it difficult to feel sympathy for him. When he pled he was imperious; when he bragged he spoke as if to total agreement. He was unhappy now, but the sympathy she felt was floating, and wary.
“I never volunteered,” he said. “I was simply sent to Klagenfurt and enrolled, mainly because of my father and my title and the respectability this was supposed to have lent to those fanatics. Did I decide to be a cadet? I was even underage! But my father held the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves and swords when he fell at Rostov, and you can bet your bottom dollar he was an honorable soldier, first and last. The Liebstandarte was under Army command, remember—crack troops, an elite formation, nothing to do with Uncle Heini’s Totenkopfverbände and all that Völkisch drivel!”
“I don’t know what most of those words mean,” Dory said.
“They mean that the Waffen SS had nothing to do with the Allgemeine SS, the Sipo or the SD. Nothing! My father was a soldier first and last!”
“What’s all that got to do with you?”
“What? What? Me?” Werner stopped and looked down at her, standing straight in his bulgy blue trunks, the reddish fur standing out of goose bumps on his husky legs. She thought she saw a glimmer of fear in his pale eyes, just a wash of it. “We were always Christians! My great-grandfather was a bishop! It’s our sacred honor, my family’s sacred honor that has to do with me!”
“That’s not American,” she said. In the way he said “honor” was something immaculate, impersonal and cruel, like a blade—like the blade of the “dirk” he’d shown Debbie.
“I’m an American,” he said. “This was decided. Don’t you think it was decided at the interrogation camp? I was only seventeen! All we’d been given were Panzerfausts, finally. Twenty rounds in all for a Trupp of twenty children. We were just children, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t die!”
“But you didn’t die,” she said.
“They made us walk among the corpses. Do you know the stench? No! As if we had anything to do with it! Who are you to judge me, anyway? A girl? What did you do in the war? Did you freeze and go hungry? Did you hear the Katyushas?”
“I thought you were captured by the Americans.”
“You can think what you like! I am Werner Graf von Ganz-Lengen! What do I care what you think?”
But he wouldn’t leave her, and he seemed sustained by his prideful words. He became friendly and confidential again. “No, Dory. You simply can’t know how complicated it all was, but American Intelligence understood. The CID and the CIC—they understood. The world is very complicated now, you see.”
“Who is ‘Uncle Heini’?”
Werner laughed. “Reichsheini? Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. My father called him “The Sleazy Eminence’—in a letter! And do you think anything happened? Nothing. In my father’s regiment no one used SS titles. They wouldn’t think of it. My father was a colonel, never a Standartenführer!” He laughed, and kept laughing too long, alone in another context in spite of her silence. “Reichsheini!” he said. “An insult, a nickname for the chinless little connived!”
Himmler. She saw bones sticking from the inside into starved skin grainy as dirty canvas, stacks of corpses always in her mind gray, as if the sun never shone in Germany or in Poland. She’d been fourteen when all that had come into its gray light and been real, actually real—the slime of it, infecting the race she was born into. Even in her guiltlessness and helplessness there was a film on her own hands, an invisible grease no soap could cut. Imagine that intoxication with death, a sort of honey lust, cloying but seductive, their insignia the death’s-head. She felt cruel, perhaps unfair. “What do I care for your sacred honor and all that?” she said. “What do I care for your German honor? I don’t like the way you treat my sister and I want you to leave her alone. Is that too complicated?”
“Then tell your fat sister to stop showing herself to me. Does she think she’s attractive? She acts like a slut.”
She left him and went on to Cascom Manor.
She didn’t have to look for Debbie, who came to her room in a rage.
“What did you tell Wern
er?” she yelled, tears making her voice harsh—the voice that had the discordant volume of struck bronze. It was an assault, her voice, her big body and breasts too mature for her emotion. She was too big for the sympathy she ought to receive, always. Dory could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t insult her and hurt her even more.
“Well?” Debbie yelled. Surely she could be heard all through the house and over the grounds.
“I told him I didn’t like the way he’s been treating you.”
“What the hell do you know about it? What the stinking hell business is it…yours! Why can’t you leave me alone? Who asked you to butt in?”
“He said you keep showing yourself to him. What does that mean?”
“Oh, you bitch! You dirty bitch!”
Yes. How could Debbie ever forgive that? A brutal description of what she must have thought charming, flirtatious, secret. Her ugliness revealed. But Debbie wasn’t ugly until she screamed in injustice and pain.
“Deb, I’m sorry,” she said, but Debbie’s momentum of anger and passion took her out the door, which she slammed so hard plaster dust sifted down each side of the frame.
Now what would Debbie do? It would do no good to go to her, at least for a while, until she calmed down a little. She had stamped down the hall toward her and Cynthia’s room, so that was probably where she was sulking and brooding now, maybe packing her things to go home, maybe not. It all seemed so unnecessary, and Debbie was always in some overwrought state or other. Always. No, that wasn’t fair. Not always.
Even so, there were things that had to be done—tomorrow and the next day and the next—duties she had taken on. She went downstairs to the hall desk where she kept schedules and lists. It was dark outside now, so she turned on the lamp over the desk. Sometime tomorrow she would have to go into Leah for supplies.
Jean Dorlean came out of the living room. “Ah, our most efficient manageress,” he said. “Come in and talk to us.”
The Moon Pinnace Page 21