Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She reeled on him. “Our grandfathers are stepbrothers, Nick Godwin. And the Stronghold is rightfully mine!”

  His gaze drilled into hers. “I see,” he said, grinding out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Tell me about it—the whole story.”

  “You don’t know anything about the Stronghold's history?” she asked, incredulous.

  "I want to hear it from you.”

  Tersely she began to relate her grandmother's story. “So you see,” she concluded, "the Stronghold rightfully belonged to the Davalos heirs, but Elizabeth Godwin made certain that your grandfather and father inherited it. She let nothing stand in the way, to the point of driving my mother from her home and eventually seeing that she was imprisoned.”

  Finished, she slumped weakly in the seat. Whatever reaction she had expected from Nick (perhaps prejudice upon learning of her Japanese heritage?), it was not one of amusement. He threw back his head, and deep laughter rolled out of that barreled chest. “My God, Mandy,” he said at last. "That’s the reason for this grudge—a silly family feud?”

  She snapped upright. In the darkness her eyes blazed their wrath. “That’s easy enough for you to say, isn’t it—as the king sits in his counting house, counting all the money!”

  She heard his dry chuckle. “The truth is, Mandy, I’m penniless.”

  “Try again,” she retorted. “This car isn’t a Model T Ford.”

  “To be exact, the Duesie’s borrowed from a friend. I had to find some way to get down to Bisbee, didn't I?”

  She heard the humor in his rumble-pitched voice but did not respond to it. “What about the Godwin fortune?’’ she demanded.

  “It all belongs to Paul—my stepbrother.”

  “Your stepbrother?” she asked, her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “Paul is the direct heir,” he replied patiently, while his gaze boldly roved over her. “His father married my mother after Fanny, Paul’s mother, died.”

  “But . . . but the Stronghold,” she stuttered. “You live there!”

  “Wrong again, honey, I only visit. Oh, Paul’s very generous. He's tried every way in the world to convince me I ought to live there. God knows it’s big enough. Of course, if Paul and his wife, Arlene, never have any children, I’ll inherit that monstrosity and the wealth that goes with it. But fortunes can be won and lost and won again. Its life’s game and not the cashing in of the chips that holds all the fun.” He caught one of her hands that lay knotted in her lap and pulled her across the seat to him. "Does that destroy the barriers you’ve erected?” he asked softly.

  She tried to yank free, but he held her fast. "No!” she hissed. “You're still a Godwin, and the Stronghold is still yours if you want it!”

  "Then maybe this will destroy the barriers,” he said, impatient now, and crushed her against him in a furious kiss. His mouth ground down on hers, smothering her protest so that it came out like a moan. She tried to push him away, but he was like a boulder. Then she went rigid as his tongue thrust inside her lips and stroked the roof of her mouth. After a moment he withdrew his tongue and. still holding her against him, kissed her lips again. His tongue lightly caressed the soft inner edges where his teeth had cut the first time.

  She tried to bite his lips, and he jerked away. She lashed out at him then, her palm resounding in the silence of the night and her blue-black hair that swayed halfway down her back fanning out around her.

  He shook her. “Damn’t!” he exploded, his jaw a smarting red. “Who do you think you are, sitting there with such a haughty flash in your eyes? Royalty?”

  He swung her from him and switched on the engine. Their anger filled the car, making it difficult for either to breathe normally on the trip back down into town. “Where do you live?” he snapped.

  “There,” she mumbled tersely. “Below Castle Rock.” It was a miner’s typical clapboard shack perched on naked stilts to escape the floods that deluged the canyon after a summer cloudburst.

  He halted in front of the wooden steps, and she sprang from the car. “Your company leaves a lot to be desired!” she gritted and slammed the car door. She heard the car screech off as she rushed up the steps. Once inside, she leaned against the door, breathless . . . weak . . . and hating Nick Godwin more than ever.

  CHAPTER 45

  When the following Saturday came, Amanda half expected Nick to return to the Copper Queen Restaurant and was so edgy that she dropped a plate in the kitchen and later spilled wine on a tablecloth. "What’s wrong with you, Amanda?" Annie demanded, who was on break when Amanda rushed into the kitchen to get a clean tablecloth. She stubbed out her cigarette. “What’s happened to Miss Cool?"

  “Nothing,” Amanda snapped, irritated that she could let the thought of Nick unnerve her so, and hurried back through the swinging doors.

  It was understandable, she told herself, that she would feel so helpless before Nick. Her childhood had been one of grandiose dreams—of revenge and possession. And none of them had come to pass. She was still a poverty-encircled girl from the wrong side of the tracks . . . and Nick Godwin was Nick Godwin. The Godwins’ name in Arizona implied wealth—land, cattle, mines, the very substance of Cristo Rey and the state.

  Even Lars, a giant of a Swede from Michigan, noted her preoccupation. He waited each weeknight to walk her home after the restaurant closed at ten, a deed for which her father was grateful. If she had worked in the Brewery Gulch, where rowdiness was the order of the day, she would have been more worried about the walk, but the Copper Queen area was perfectly safe.

  Lars caught her shoulders and turned her to face him beneath a streetlamp. “What is it, Amanda?” he asked in his thick English. “You don’t even half listen to what I’m saying.”

  What was he saying? “I'm sorry, Lars. I guess it’s been a long, long day.”

  He sighed. “Only what I been trying to tell you for the last year now.”

  She made her voice gentle. “I’ve told you before, I don’t . . .” Lars released her and jammed his fists in his pocket. “I know—you won’t marry me because you don't wanna be poor the rest of your life. But tonight is different, Amanda. I was promoted today—to head foreman!”

  His voice held such pride that it was difficult for her to dampen his excitement over his news. Like her, he had his dreams. He already held a position on the local International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and planned to be mine superintendent one day.

  And he had been awfully good to her father. When Phelps Dodge laid Taro off because he could no longer do a miner’s full day’s work, Lars had arranged for him to get a job in the shower rooms, laundering the soiled towels and clothing stiff with mine dust. The free showers for the workers and freshly laundered work clothing was another appeasement by the company to the miners’ union.

  She knew she could not lead Lars on, let him believe anything could ever come of their relationship. She laid her hand on his sleeve. “That’s wonderful. I told you that you would make something of yourself one day.”

  He turned eagerly on her. “Then you'll do it—you'll marry me, Amanda dear?”

  Slowly she shook her head. “No, I can't, Lars." She hurried on. "As much as you want to become something, somebody, I want to escape the mines altogether—the pollution, the hopelessness, the raw towns. I want to rise out of my hole, also.”

  He grimaced. "Is it I’m not good enough for you, for a Jap’s daughter?"

  She gasped. Lars was one of the few who knew, yet she had never expected prejudice from him. But then she had discovered that the Cornish looked down on the bohunks, and the bohunks on the greasers.

  He saw the pain in her eyes and grabbed her. “I'm sorry, Amanda. I didn’t mean it that way. But I want you so, and it’s not fair. It’s hell being so close to you and no . . . is there someone else?’’ he asked fiercely.

  She looked up into that Nordic face, usually so placid. “Has your candle been dimming?” she teased, hoping to lighten the mood. There was an old miner’s superstiti
on that if the miner’s lamp flickered, his sweetheart was cheating on him. More than one miner suddenly hurried home, presumably ill, so great was the belief in the superstition.

  An embarrassed grin twitched his lips. “I guess I play the fool, eh—spela narr? Come on, I best get you home, or your father will start swinging the samurai sword.”

  He climbed the rickety steps to her shanty with her, and she kissed him lightly at the door. She knew he wanted to grab her and plant kisses all over her face, but he ducked his head shyly and retreated down the steps. Watching him, she felt a pang of pity for the hopelessness of their relationship. Mining was Lars’s life; it consumed him as Cristo Rey did her.

  Inside, she quietly crept through the dark to her side of the room, but her father’s nagging cough told her he was still awake. He never did let himself sleep until she returned, although he rose every morning at four. “Have you taken your medicine, Father?" she asked through the darkness.

  “That colored water? No!” She could hear the humor in his voice and did not chastise him. They both knew he had the miner’s disease, every miner did, but neither she nor her father would mention it to one another.

  Once she had mentioned it, the year before, pleading with him to see a doctor. He had looked right through her. Later, over dinner, he had said abruptly, “There is nothing to cure it”—“it” was his euphemism, for he would not deign to give the disease the power of a name. “I can quit the mines, but I shall nevertheless die. All of us die one day. So I shall work as long as my legs will carry me. Now do not mention this ugly thing again.”

  After she undressed and stretched out on her mat, her father asked, "Will you marry Lars, daughter?"

  After a moment she said, “No, Father. I want more from life than what a mere man can offer.”

  Her father chuckled. “In some ways, Amanda, you’re still immature compared to the other girls your age. They know more of men, understand better the opposite sex.”

  But it was mere men, Amanda thought bitterly, who two weeks later laid off her father because the union voted that no Orientals and no Mexicans could be employed. Lars tried to sway the workers against the ordinance but was unsuccessful. The emotional suffering her father experienced was greater than the occasional pain that nibbled away at his lungs. Taro, who had been so muscular, so strong and independent, who had taken care of her mother and raised herself, was rapidly showing and feeling his age.

  He even had trouble using the chopsticks as skillfully on the rice she set before him. “Father,” she teased, “you’re going to be forced at last to eat like a Caucasian.”

  He smiled, but she could see the misery in his soul. She slammed down her own chopsticks. “We're not going to let this defeat us! We’ll make the layoff work to our benefit!”

  “You sound like your mother,” he said quietly. “Her determination was both her rose and her thorn.”

  “But I am not my mother!”

  She said no more, yet she could not help but think that she had let her emotions get in the way of what she wanted. She would not let her bitterness for the Godwin family or her love for Cristo Rey blind her to her priorities . . . climbing out of the mining society and making something of herself.

  “What do you suggest we do?” her father asked later that night, and she knew how rare it was for the Oriental male to accept that a female could think beyond the realm of children and home—not just the Oriental, she reminded herself, recalling some of Lars's chauvinistic attitudes toward her independence.

  “We’re moving to Tucson, Father. It’s large enough that I may be able to find some sort of secretarial job there to support us. And I can begin classes at the university in the evening.” She pressed on. “It’ll be tough, I know. We’ll probably live under worse conditions than here for a while, but at least we’ll have hope in Tucson.”

  Taro’s lips curved in a slight smile. “If you were anyone else, I would say you wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance. But maybe . . .” His stooped shoulders shrugged with his Oriental’s fatalism. “Maybe there you will find your karma.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Amanda found a house for rent at the edge of downtown Tucson in the Barrio Libre—the “free neighborhood” where lived the Mexicans and Chinese. The adobe was not much better than the shanty in Bisbee, but it did have two rooms curtained off, and the outhouse was much easier to reach than the one that had clung to the steep incline behind the shanty.

  Getting accepted into college was a little more difficult. She had an excellent transcript from Bisbee’s Central High, but the university’s counselor who reviewed her application wore a dubious expression.

  “Is there a problem?" she asked the bespectacled man as his face furrowed further.

  He looked at her and dropped his gaze back to the sheaf of papers he seemed to shuffle aimlessly. “Well, Miss Shima, you must realize we don’t have very many Oriental students enrolled in our curriculum. And the fact that you are opting for a career in law, which really is a man’s field, well . . .”

  "What you’re saying, Mr. Browne, is that I have two strikes against me already—my race and my sex?” she asked curtly.

  “No—no. But you must realize that while you do have very high grades, we can accept only a limited number of applicants. And we have no proof that, uh, you can afford the tuition and cost of the education. If you drop out we will have wasted space we could give to another.”

  “I won’t drop out, Mr. Browne, and I will have a job to support the cost of my education.” And support herself and her father, she did not add aloud.

  “You have a job now?”

  “I will have a job.”

  Such a rash statement. In spite of the typing course she had taken in high school, she found that the offices where she applied for a secretary's position had just hired a secretary only hours earlier. After days of looking, she tossed the want ads in the Armory Park trash barrel and caught a bus back to the university, spending precious money for the fare.

  When she reappeared at the counselor’s door, Mr. Browne glanced up and sighed, looking as if he were facing his nemesis. She crossed the room to stand before his desk. “Mr. Browne, your bulletin board advertises part-time jobs for students, I want one.”

  “You won’t take my advice, will you—go up to the State Teacher’s College at Tempe?”

  “No.” There she was—a female Oriental, her stomach knotting with hunger, begging for a job—and trying to behave in an assertive manner. “It’s only a two-year college, and I want a full education.”

  He sighed again. “Sit down. Miss Shima.” He got up and closed the door. The poor man’s shoulders were slumping when he returned to his seat. “As you said, you’ve two strikes against you. There’s no use pretending that your race isn’t going to hold you back. You and I both know it.”

  He glanced up from beneath the bushy brows that lay atop the wire rims of his spectacles. “But I’ll deny making that statement if you quote me.”

  She sat rigidly, silently, and he continued, leaning forward on the desk, hands clasped. “If you'd be willing to change your last name and indicate that you're a Caucasian on application records, I can assure you I’d be able to find you employment somewhere.”

  “No. I won’t be robbed of the only thing I have left.”

  His fingers clasped and unclasped. After a moment, he said, “There’s a job available cleaning the dormitory bathrooms and toilets. Are you interested?"

  The maid’s job did not earn enough money to enable Amanda to remain in college and support herself and her father. “I shall become the proverbial Oriental and take in laundry,” he told her with a wry smile as they counted out the last of their change they kept in a jade vase. It was only the beginning of her second semester at the university, and after she bought her books, there was simply no money left for food.

  “No, Father, we’ll sell the vase. That should keep us for some time.”

  “And then what shall we sell, my daught
er?” he asked, his veined hand sweeping out to indicate the dismal barrenness of their adobe. “Since I left the mines my health is much better. There is no reason why I should not work. And I’d be much happier.”

  Although her father was approaching his seventy-second birthday, she knew he would be happier working. But getting started in the laundry business was slow. They scraped by. That winter things were so bleak financially that Amanda was reduced to putting a playing card in the bottom of one of her oxfords to cover the hole in its sole.

  That same winter she and her father took a third member into their household—a burr-haired mutt who had been following her when she made the cleaning rounds of the dormitories and sorority houses. The dog would sit patiently outside each building until Amanda reappeared with her mop and pail of cleaning utensils.

  “We’ll call him Trouble," she told her father the afternoon she brought the mongrel home. "He looks as half-starved as we are—and will only mean more trouble. But I want him.”

  During those lean years, which seemed to get only worse when war broke out in Europe toward the end of 1939, Amanda would read in the Arizona Daily Star's society page of how the decadent rich lived and think that it was like reading a fairy tale. There were the Little Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, who appeared almost weekly in royal photos now that their uncle, Edward VIII, had abdicated the throne for "the woman I love.”

  Then there were the glittering publicity photos of New York’s cafe society and titillating stories of extravaganzas thrown at the Stork Club, El Morocco, and 21 by such personalities as the Red-Hot Mama, Sophie Tucker, and Elsa Maxwell. Did such a world really exist?

  What the Arizona wealthy did for amusement—their balls and charities and scandals—afforded entertainment that was almost fictional for the poverty-stricken people of the state. They were tired of the depressing headlines chronicling the war in Europe or Roosevelt’s latest New Deal agencies to combat the terrible times.