by Jack Cady
“Of course.” From the top of the Presidio the bay was like a blue exclamation above the trees and yellow stuccoed army houses. “Look,” I pointed. An aircraft carrier nosed from behind distant buildings, this according to the perspective.
“I know all about her.”
“I meant the carrier, they do not come here often.”
“I am telling about the girl.” Her voice was not pressing, not sharp, and the edge in it was an asking.
“Does it mean that much?” I was surprised.
“Yes. Without you, she is me. Except for a few years of age and some general supposing I’ve just described what you already know of me.”
“And I did not notice.” It was alarming. Loving someone, you forget that they have lived beyond you, lived in other places at other times.
“My father was short and half-Mexican and had religion and children.”
“His daughter became a poet.”
“I take credit for that,” she said, “and remember that the truth of a poem is not always consciously in the poet. There are deeper layers of the mind, and some of those layers are hungry.”
“The girl has touched you deeply.” I spoke quietly. The traffic was very heavy. My attention was constantly diverted.
“What does she want to misunderstand, or not know about people like us?”
“Us?” We were nearly home.
She would say nothing more. I parked the Porsche, we drank cappuccino and went to our apartment. That evening I listened to Bach who is fundamental and good. My wife worked in her room. The next day I went to the gallery.
It was to be one of my most successful weeks. I placed true work that was not bought on speculation. I worked on my copy of a Wyeth. My love is art and Americans make art. Wyeth and Arthur Miller have not been exceeded. I love beauty, an appreciator. That night my wife was absent. She works one night a week in adult education programs.
Aloneness is good sometimes. From our apartment it is possible to see a great part of San Francisco and the bay. With the arguable exceptions of Athens and Madrid it is the most beautiful city in the world.
I stood at the large windows. The bay was purple and green in the last lustre of fading light. The island lay like a stone. From the Marin County side lights began to appear. The Golden Gate, subject of thousands of poor paintings, stood defying paint in the smooth sheen of purpling water. Lights appeared on the Richmond Bridge. Turning, but not moving to the windows on the other side, I could see reflections of light in the tops of a few tall buildings. Our apartment is over the city. It would be necessary to cross the room to gaze into the streets where traffic, sex, and the famous restaurants spelled the occupations and excitements of the nighttime city.
Some of my wife’s work lay on a low table. I picked it up. Unfinished. Very abrupt, as she sometimes writes in anger or fear.
Vacuity sits in state surveying plunder,
and our lives are spent in dreams of Mercedes,
of tampered forests with selected trees,
that complement our roads . . . .
A fragment. We have spoken of this before, there is a bitterness in her about unnatural things that I do not understand. The constructions of men may be either ignored or used. A fine piece of engineering may be an exquisite thing. Precision automobiles are not the same as dishwashers. I do not understand her resentment.
When she returned I was glad. We went out for a late dinner. On the following Sunday we returned to the park.
We arrived early. The park seemed newly washed. Large sprinklers were still watering, the liquid arcs throwing crystal shatterings in the sunlight. We walked through the arboretum, allowing time for the grass to dry and the crowds to gather. My wife was abstracted. I respect her moods. Once, and I did not call her attention, there was a flash of orange far away on a cross path. We were to see the girl a little later.
She arrived about halfway through the band program, and she arrived with company. A younger man. It made me wish we had gone elsewhere. My wife was stunned.
They came down the same steps, passing between the ornamental plantings that border the short slopes. The flowers were orange and yellow and red. They would have framed her perfectly, except for the man. Her hat was again orange, but a different hat. She wore a light orange suit and she was a gentleness, a contrast to the man.
He was about thirty, dressed in expensive and tasteless clothes, an efficient haircut, and his eyes were not kind. His face was tense. His laugh loud. Doubtless a hard and honest worker; one who knew jokes, and resenting it, told them with near defiance because he did not understand the resentment.
“No,’’ my wife said. She turned to me. “Stop her.”
“You can’t stop people from talking and walking together.”
“I’ll stop her.” She stood, walked to the couple and spoke to them. The man looked like a plastic pressing of a poor sculpture beside the woman. For one shocking moment I was unable to distinguish between the two women, unable to believe that I knew one less intimately than the other.
The couple was nearly amazed. I am a San Franciscan and know San Franciscans. We may even applaud the unorthodox but we do not intrude on one another. It was slightly embarrassing, and then my wife returned with them. Three outlanders. Two were beautiful.
The girl’s name was Marie. I thought of Catholic missions. The man’s name was Jim and they had just met.
He appraised me and spoke of his job while watching my wife. I watched both women in turn.
“Have you just arrived in the city,” I asked her. The band was playing a march. The man was humming.
“Nearly a year.” She was very close. Her accent held touches of the red-neck South that did not match her low and musical voice. There is a vast range of southern accents.
“What do you want?” The man had stopped humming. He was using the ‘no nonsense’ voice of someone asking a price.
“To talk,” my wife said. “Our custom on Sunday is to try to spend some time with another couple.” There was a remarkable hatred in her voice. The Spanish intonations never quite leave. It was low, easily misunderstood, but the girl reacted. Watching. The man leaned forward. Interested. Too interested. I guessed his thought and was repulsed.
“Florida,” I said, and turned to the girl.
“Kentucky, near the Tennessee line. I have to go now.”
“Wait.” My wife reached and nearly touched her. “I want to know you and that is a true thing.”
“Chicago,” the man said, “and before that Indianapolis.” The band crashed and cymbaled to a halt.
“How you must miss the mountains.” I spoke carefully. “They are not as rugged as our western chain.”
“Mountains?” The man was startled. “In Illinois?”
“No.” The girl turned from my wife. Her face was tense, hard, and filled with restraint that would otherwise be tears. “They move like waves and they have trees all the way to the top,” she said.
She walked rapidly away. The man followed, caught up with her, and together they passed into the crowd and from our view. The band began a blaring show tune. My wife stood quietly.
“They have only just met,” I told her. “The girl is searching, not trapping. There is time for judgment.”
“There has been time.”
“I hope I understand.” I folded the blanket and stood beside her.
“I love her for being beautiful. Unique. I love that.”
“I love it too. She is like you.”
She looked at me and there were tears and gentleness, her soft hair partly obscuring her face. There was something else. My mind was assailed with a sudden horror. There was also a terrifying, a pagan impression of submission.
We walked in silence across the park. Usually I hold her hand because it is warm and narrow and beautiful. On this day I did not hold her hand and it seemed inestimably precious. The girl in the orange hat would be making initial decisions now, decisions that perhaps could be recalled.
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br /> “Then I am failing.” My voice was low.
“No. There is very much success. Please, let’s smile.”
She attempted a smile and I took her hand. We found the car and drove tonelessly through the sunlit streets between tall buildings that seemed monuments to easy and countless successes. The traffic was heavy and fast, continuous surprises of brightly painted steel. The sun reflected from tall columns of a thousand windows where men spoke of stocks and construction and insurance. I wondered, troubling, uncertain for the first time in our lives together. I tried to imagine just what were her inner and most unspeakable sorrows.
Israel and Earnest
The room was cold and the first wind of autumn rattled the window and there was death in that wind which was beautiful and also very sad. Shake, shake, went a hand, and then it went rattle, rattle. I moaned and a voice moaned back.
“Depart, Israel,” I said. “It is three o’clock in the morning and the truth of that is dark and severe, although, of course, it is also beautiful and very sad.”
“Up!” Israel hollered.
“. . . when the sun rises. For now it is three o’clock in the morning.”
“Moan,” he said. (For those who do not know him, Israel is the ghost whose job it is to haunt my house. He haunts my house beautifully and very truly and well. He is wonderfully good at the haunting and we have been through much together).
“That did it,” he said. “That did it, that did-dit.”
“Did what, hombre?”
He slapped me awake. “You have to quit reading Hemingway before going to sleep,” he explained. “And,” he added thoughtfully, “you got to get rid of the damn dog.”
“Oooof,” I added. “At three o’clock in the morning?” I yawned. Then a flicker of white drifted across the room. It was luminescent. It panted as it drifted.
“Arrrr . . .” I screamed, “a Ghost.”
“Where?” Israel yelped and made a dive to get under the bed. Israel is scared silly of ghosts.
“There,” I shrieked and pointed. The flicker of white slathered and simpered. It drooled and wagged its invisible tail. It seemed to bounce on its hind legs even if it did not have any. Then the flicker of white nuzzled closer and I began to sneeze.
“Oi,” Israel moaned. “They fool me too, and there are tons of them. You have failed me once too often, kid. I’m moving.”
“Don’t leave me,” I whimpered. “What is it?”
“Dog shed,” he said. “The dog you so proudly brought home is shedding. Explain yourself.”
“A long story.”
“I have until dawn.”
“A friend downtown . . . .” I began.
“Search for the woman,” he interrupted.
“All right,” I said. “I met a lady friend downtown. She told me that I was a crude man who owned cats and wrote nothing but cat stories. She said I was sarcastic about dogs.”
“Is she pretty?”
“They all are,” I sobbed. “Even the ones who are dog lovers. Or maybe them, especially.”
“You fool,” Israel laughed. “You blighted idiot. This is too much.” He rolled around on the floor whooping and laughing. “Jerk,” he giggled. “So to impress a lady you bought a dog and a bunch of Hemingway novels . . . .”
“Nothing in the books say a word about shed,” I protested. “They are brave and true books and they say nothing about shed.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Israel told me. “I’m not leaving. I’m staying around to see you handle this mess.”
“I’ll handle it all right. Yes sir. No-doubt-about-it.” But, I knew I was in trouble. “I’ll learn about dogs and write dog stories and all my readers will know that I am fair and just and not simply a friend of cats.”
“Two questions,” Israel said. “First, what does a Hemingway dog look like?”
“Lean and ranging and intelligent and serious and brave.”
“Second question. And you brought home a Samoyed?”
“Yes.”
“You see the difference?”
“That’s three questions,” I protested. “But, yes, I see the difference. At least I see it now.”
“Go back to sleep,” Israel told me. “Tomorrow I’ll teach you to roll over and fetch . . . and how to use a vacuum.”
Halloween 1942
I was ten years old in ’42, and trapped in the German-Lutheran wilderness of small town Indiana. Halloween of that year still lives in memory because threats of Hell spouted from every pulpit, while true fires of Hell rose above coal and wood-burning chimneys; and a real ghost walked.
In October of ’42 our town lay stunned as Hitler, having leveled Europe, marched on Russia. The Battle of Stalingrad thundered; bloodstained symbol of an adventure that would eventually cost a million, six hundred thousand lives. However, that many people, and more, were already dead before the Nazi thrust.
In that Indiana town, where lived many third and fourth generation Germans, our people wisely concentrated their fears and hatreds on Japan. The Rape of Nanking had worked its way into local thought. Bataan had fallen, and government censorship could not conceal the Bataan Death March. Nor could censors hide the battle of the Java Sea. Government news hawks made much of the Battle of the Coral Sea, but its turn-around-significance would not be understood for years. Jimmy Doolittle led a raid on Tokyo, lost men (of whom some were captured and executed as war criminals.) Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians fell to Japan; and Japan took Correigidor.
Difficult memories, these. It is also difficult to separate feelings about WWII from those of localized wars that have happened since. America would lose 33,529 of her people in Korea, above 60,000 in Vietnam; but in this war 406,000 were lost; and that in a nation of 100 million (today we are 267 million.)
In that small town, Halloween usually progressed with boring predictability. Kids went costumed, soaped windows, and youths sixteen years and up tipped over outhouses (yes, many people still had outhouses.) Occasionally, while stealing pumpkins to smash on porches, a miscreant would run into a farmer who carried a shotgun filled with rock salt. The blast tore the salt to dust, and the dust bored beneath skin so that the unlucky target “scratched where it didn’t itch” for weeks. But all of that, as I say, was “ordinarily”.
On this Halloween there were sixteen-year-olds, but few eighteen-year-olds, and almost no twenties. Those not in the Army were in the Navy, or the Army Air Corps; and it is with the Air Corps, and a piano, and a witch, that this story begins:
My family’s across-the-street-neighbor-lady lives in memory as The Widow, for her last name is lost. She was only a little dumpy, wore plain housedresses, and had become reclusive.
She had a son, Darrell, age eighteen, and a daughter, Janine. When he was alive, Darrell made model airplanes that really flew. During my growing-up, and because of the airplanes, he was one of my heroes. He went to war; an early casualty, his bomber blown to bits with no survivors.
To a ten-year-old, Janine seemed ancient, but I now know she could not have been more than twenty. Even in that small town, where—if anybody thought about art they felt threatened—it was known that Janine was a musical prodigy. On soft summer nights, with windows open, she would play ballads instead of classical exercises. Neighbors gathered on porches, watched lightning bugs, and listened to the best musical renditions that most of them would ever hear. After Darrell was killed there were no more ballads, and the music became subdued.
The witch was Mrs. Lydia Kale. She was, it was rumored, nothing but a fearful old country woman moved to town shortly after WWI; angry and bitter from a life spent in a place so small that people walked to church. No one knew why she came. No one cared.
To a ten-year-old she meant fright. Most people, I believe, remember at least one “mean lady” from their childhoods, but Mrs. Lydia Kale really was mean. She would grab a child, shake and mutter. She would even send curses when a kid passed on the sidewalk. She insulted preachers (no one else dared), and she
intimidated adults.
She remains a crazed figure, dressed as dark as night wings. Her hair did not flow in the wind; nothing like that. Her hair was as white as her clothes were black, and her hair was worn in a tight knot at the back of her head. No one knew what she hated most.
These, then, were the players in that Halloween when, dressed in an old bed sheet and wearing a “funny face” (our name for mask) I embarked after a warning:
“Do not,” my mother said, “go to any house with a gold star.” She was adamant.
During that war, families with sons in the service hung small flags in their windows. A silver star on a blue field meant a man still serving. A gold star meant a man dead. Some houses had both kinds.
What does a ten-year-old know? More, I think, than I believed when I sat down to write this small tale. I remember stepping into a wind-blown, leaf-blown night—7 PM but midnight dark—with dry leaves scurrying.
Something was wrong with the night. Other kids trotted past, laughing and whooping. Older kids hid in shadows, soaping windows, or suddenly appearing as they tried to scare each other. A normal Halloween, but something was wrong with the night.
I could not get in motion. I sat on a step at the side of the house feeling “wrong.” An adult would say that he felt depressed, perhaps beleaguered. Children did not then know such words.
I finally understood that it was Darrell. He moved out there in the night, standing in his own yard amidst gusts of wind, flying airplanes. I could, but vaguely, see him. I could feel him. I could even feel the balsa wings fight the wind, rise, and rise higher.
And what the hell did I know about death? All I knew was that Darrell would not hurt me. But he was supposed to be gone. Lost, somewhere in the South Pacific.
There came music in the wind, but only gradually. Janine, when at that keyboard, found comfort beyond religion, beyond philosophy. The music began as light finger exercises and light runs, the kind of practice that lifts wings.
They were, brother and older sister, somehow together. I don’t know, and never will, if Janine knew what was happening. I do know that for what seemed a long time I sat waiting. The planes rose into the wind, the rubber bands that drove them somehow never unwinding. They flew and flew. Music lifted them; and Darrell was no more than a moving shadow.