by Oakley Hall
“Not many,” Richie said. “The Navy’s got a lot of money riding on them by then. Some do what we call a ‘technical flunk,’ run into each other, run into the ground. Flying’s easy and fun, but it can be unforgiving.”
Will said, “I had to wash out that fellow Greenberg last week. He was never going to make his bird, and there was no point wasting any more instructor time.”
Weezie asked what “his bird” meant.
“His wings,” Liz said, leaning against Richie. She smiled at me with her vivid face, but I was anxious about my father picking up on a Jewish name like Greenberg.
“One of our aircrahft is missing, Air Vice Marshal, sir!” Richie said.
“Oh, I say, have you counted carefully, Leftenant?” Will said.
The fact that everyone seemed to think these exchanges funnier than I did warned me that I was wrestling with a sulk.
Richie asked if I could find a date for Will for Saturday night so we could all go dancing at the Hotel del Coronado. Maybe Amy Perrine?
“You mentioned a boy named Greenberg you had to flunk,” our father said across the table to Will. “Are there many Jewish boys in flight training?”
It was like an engine revving up and gears engaging.
“Sure, there are some, Dad,” Richie said, and smoothly changed the subject by starting another Limey dialog with Will. It seemed there had been a couple of RAF observers at Pensacola, with whom Richie and Will had partied.
When Weezie and Liz were clearing away the dishes, I was appalled to hear myself saying to Will, “A friend of my mother’s is an Englishman like your RAF guys.” I knew better than to mention Mr. Levine! It was as though I were so rattled in this place, in this company, that I blurted out the one subject I must stay away from.
“Are you talking about that kike Levine?” my father said, tight-lipped, head tilted.
“Eddie,” Weezie said from the kitchen doorway.
Why did I have to defend Mr. Levine, who was not even my mother’s boyfriend anymore? I reminded myself that I was always off balance with my father and Weezie, the more so when Richie was on hand. I didn’t even know any Jews besides Mr. Levine, except for a guy named David Solomon in my French class.
“I hate that bigotry crap!” I said.
Richie glared at me, his long, heavy-eyebrows and face like our father’s, only his head was set straight on his neck.
I watched our father’s big construction-man’s hands fold his napkin and place it on the tablecloth before him.
Everybody looked frozen, Weezie in the kitchen doorway with her eyes swimming big at me behind her glasses, Liz behind her, Will with the shit-eating grin of pretending it was all a joke. Was it what I’d wanted?
“I mean, how come this house is full of hating people that aren’t named Daltrey?” I went on. “Jews and Commies. Kikes. Japs. I can’t even mention my friend Stan Takahashi without getting into a beef! What’re we fighting this war for, anyhow?”
“I don’t see you fighting it, son,” our father said.
“Never mind it, Brud,” Richie warned me.
“I’d think you’d mind it. You’re the one fighting for the Four Freedoms, or whatever it is we’re fighting for!”
I was on my feet, shoving my chair out of the way, retreating to the door, to get the hell out of the mess I’d made of my brother’s coming home. Richie caught me by the arm and swung me around.
“I can’t stand that bigot talk!” I threw at him. Weezie glared at me. I stumbled outside, hastening away down the walk to the avenue, where Richie had parked Ol Paint.
Driving across the salt flats where once Mr. Takahashi had had his fruit and vegetable stand, I warned myself to slow down. All that was needed to make the evening perfect was a speeding ticket.
Where was I headed, anyway? Bust in on Bonny and tell her what a prick I’d been at my father’s house? It was a nurse’s aide night. I turned into the lighted sprawl of Kenny’s big drive-in and went inside jingling the change in my pocket.
I gritted my teeth to think what they were saying about me back at Weezie’s house, Liz hearing them talk about me. That line from To Have and Have Not, Morgan to his wife: “They aren’t much good, are they, hon?” meaning their daughters.
I began sinking nickels into a pinball game, the shiny ball arcing over the top of the board, then dropping to bounce off the bumpers, numbers in satisfying thousands flashing on the display. I grasped the rails, urging the board right, jerking it left; TILT! I spent twenty minutes getting rid of my change before I went back outside.
Parked away from the service area, I leaned my head against the back of the seat and listened to the Ink Spots singing. I didn’t need a chapter meeting of the Alpha Betas to advise me that my attitudes were faulty. I had manipulated my father into sounding like a bigot, and then jerked off into a phony fit of righteousness. We hadn’t even been disputing over Jews, or about American Legion Post 5 and the First Amendment and Commie rags. No, we were talking about my father going broke in the Depression so that the house in Mission Hills was lost; we were talking about Richie Daltrey of the Great Expectations, the drowned suicide girlfriend and the scarred thumb. I don’t see you fighting it, my father had said, meaning another disappointment in his younger son the slacker.
I started the car, turning off Cole Porter’s cutesy rhymes, and drove out to Point Loma, and up of Rosecrans Boulevard to the Fletchers’ house, halting below the grand picture window that surveyed the Bay and the yachts of the movie stars. The expanse of plate glass glittered darkly. It was more of a house than the Boningtons’ in Mission Hills. A Navy captain more big-time than an ophthalmologist? Mrs. Fletcher had been rich.
I slumped in the seat, radio off to save the battery. I was wakened by a hand shaking my shoulder. “Brud!”
Behind Richie’s white-capped head in the window, I could see Liz in silhouette against the light from the streetlamp. Richie would have borrowed our father’s car.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Come on inside. Liz will give us a beer.”
The night seemed slow and mysterious as I followed my brother and Liz up brick steps in the slant of lawn beside the garage. Liz hurried past an ornamental lamppost with a skipping step, and it came to me that she must have skipped there just like that all her life.
Richie was two steps ahead of me, glints of white from his cap cover and his shirt cuffs swinging. I remembered so well Richie coming down from LA in his turbo-charged Cord, in his Desmond’s tweed jacket and gray flannels and glossy wingtips, with his golden-edged style out of a Renaissance painting. I had wanted to be just like that!
The Fletchers’ living room was dominated by the big window, muffled on this side by blackout curtains. There was a piano with a blue vase on top of it, overstuffed camelbacked furniture, green plants in pots, a blue and pink Oriental rug. Liz embraced me and brushed my cheek with her lips. I sat in a straight chair and accepted the cool cylinder of Coke she brought me. Richie faced me from the sofa, legs stretched out and a beer bottle in hand. A skinny white cat appeared to weave figure eights around Liz’s ankles, with small ecstatic cries. Liz turned on the big console phonograph, something classical, with muted horns.
“‘Bigot’ is pretty rugged, Brud,” Richie said in an earnest, big-brotherly voice.
“He sounds like Father Coughlin when he gets on the Jews! And Weezie really goes after the Japs!”
“Don’t tell me! Ben Takahashi happens to be a friend of mine.”
“She goes after the Japs the way you used to go after Okies.”
Richie raised his hands as though surrendering. “Listen, Brud: You’re the writer. You’re supposed to understand people. Jake Katz ruined Dad in that partnership they had.”
“Like Germans blaming Jews for losing the other war.”
“Jesus, Brud!”
“Your father hated David Lubin,” Liz said to Richie. She said to me, “David Lubin wanted Richie to be his son.”
Richie’s face
reddened. “That was all really stupid.”
I hadn’t known about that. I gripped my glass, thinking of someone trying to take Richie away from our father.
“Dad’s a good guy,” Richie said. “He loves us. You know that.”
“Sure, and you’re a real satisfaction to him. He thinks about you a lot. When he sees me, he gets a kind of wrinkle between his eyes like trying to remember who I am.”
“Cut it out!”
“I mean, you’re four years older. He and Mom were still married when you were a kid. He wasn’t chasing women yet. You didn’t just get in the way.”
The cat pounced light-footed into my lap and settled down, purring and making bread.
“Buffy likes Payton.” Liz said. She was watching me sympathetically, she who had lost her mother when she was a child, lost only one of her parents. Cut it out was right.
I said to her, “Maybe that’s the way it is in a divorce. One kid on the father’s side, and one on the mother’s. Richie thinks I’m hard on Dad, but he’s hard on Mom.”
“I know it,” Liz said.
“Well, he’s almost perfect.”
“Oh, I know that, too.”
“Fry head!” Richie said, grinning.
“Do you know what I thought after my mother died?” Liz said. “I thought they were just punishing me for being bad. For the longest time I thought she’d come back if I was just good enough.”
Tears burned in my eyes. Liz got up to change the record on the console, the cat leaping out of my lap to twist around her feet.
Richie leaned toward me with the severe tightening of his features, his younger-brother-advising expression. “Don’t your fraternity brothers object to your working for the brand?”
“That Commie rag?” I said. “Sure they do, but they’re too polite to mention it.” Like hell! It would be a major topic if I ever went to another tong meeting.
“Pays for my Desmond’s jackets,” I said.
“The local fraternities are pretty relaxed, I guess,” Richie said, who had belonged to a national at SC.
“Payton and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t make snotty remarks about our alma mater,” Liz said.
“A guy from a Legion post downtown came to tell us they were going to shut the brand down,” I said. “He called Tully and me Commies.”
“Isn’t he?” Richie said, hands clasped behind his head, the Superior Man.
Captain Fletcher came into the living room. He was dressed like a movie gentleman, in a foulard dressing gown and fancy embroidered slippers. His skimpy gray hair was carefully brushed, and I had a flash of him before the mirror slicking away with two military brushes.
Richie was already standing at attention, heels together, when I got to my feet.
“Am I intruding?’ Captain Fletcher asked.
“Of course not, sir.”
No doubt junior officers had to suck up to senior ones. Richie introduced me, and the captain let me hold a slack hand. Then he dusted his palms together as though ridding them of Daltrey germs.
So maybe Richie was no more popular with Captain Fletcher than I was with Mrs. Bonington. Probably it wasn’t Daltreys in particular but daughters’ boyfriends in general.
“I believe I will join you in a little restorative,” Captain Fletcher said.
I saw that Richie’s ears reddened during a discussion as to whether Liz or her father would get his drink. Finally the captain slippered out to the kitchen, having won some kind of advantage. Liz rolled her eyes at Richie. She had a hard, pouty expression.
Captain Fletcher returned with a stem glass full of dark tan liquor. He seated himself on the piano bench, arranging his dressing gown over his knees.
“Payton had a quarrel with his father,” Liz said, in a loaded sort of way.
“Ah, a Daltrey family crisis!” Captain Fletcher said. “Some children can be very severe when they discover evidence of human nature in their parents.”
Richie laughed dutifully.
Captain Fletcher frowned at the cat, who had settled on Liz’s lap. “Is it necessary that that smelly feline be included in this gathering?” He did not say it lightly.
“Not if she offends delicate nostrils,” Liz said. She did not say it lightly, either. She thrust Buffy from her lap with what seemed an overdramatic gesture. When the cat passed her father, tail aloft, he caught the tail and jerked the animal, squawling and writhing, off her feet. I thought that the captain had started to do this in fun, but his mood had changed in the process. His face turned set and ruddy, and he held the cat off her feet too long. When he let her, go she galloped out of the room.
“That was mean!” Liz said.
Dusting his hands together again, the Captain rose and strolled the length of the room, his stance indicating that he was defusing a situation his daughter had irrationally intensified. He slid the curtain back to stand gazing out at the lights of the bay.
Did Richie have to endure a Fletcher family crisis like this every time he came here?
“Mean!” Liz said again. Captain Fletcher’s shoulders twitched, but he didn’t turn. It seemed to me that Liz had gained some sort of power out of the cat abuse to balance her father’s advantage in getting his own drink. She was sitting up very straight.
“Can you see the Sirocco?” she asked.
“Impossible to make an identification at night, my dear.”
“We’ll probably see Errol at the Hotel del Saturday night. Richie wants to show his friend from Pensacola the San Diego sights.”
Her father kept an intelligence file on Flynn in his office at the destroyer base. It seemed to me that Liz was as hard-nosed as he was. At least I hadn’t mentioned Mr. Levine to my father on purpose.
“You are over twenty-one, my dear. I can hardly forbid you associations I think are pernicious. Only warn you.”
“Oh, you’ve certainly warned me.”
“It has been my experience that a man’s reputation will usually catch up with him,” Captain Fletcher said, still standing at the window.
Liz stared at his back, bright-eyed. She was a Liz I’d never seen before, and I thought she looked very beautiful with color in her cheeks, a set chin, and her sleek hair. Something passed between Richie and her, a sign to lay off, but she jerked her head in a negative.
Richie looked relieved when I said I had to be going.
Captain Fletcher turned with a saluting gesture. Liz sprang up to embrace me. Richie said he would walk me out to my car.
In the darkness between the porch light and the ivied lamppost at the corner of the garage, Richie halted to produce a cigaret and light it and wave out the match. I breathed an acrid sniff of smoke.
“What if that guy Hagen is at the Hotel del with Flynn Saturday night?” I said.
“Why would he be? Errol won’t put up with stuff like he pulled on the Sirocco that night.” Richie flipped up his hand with the cigaret in a good-night gesture and stood watching me as I stumbled on down the steps to Ol Paint.
5
Saturday night when I picked Bonny up for a triple date to the Hotel del Coronado, Mrs. Bonington invited me to come out with them on the Sun Bear the next day. It seemed a sign that they had decided to take me seriously as Bonny’s suitor. Probably there would be familial disputes, as with the Daltreys and the Fletchers.
Rain pattered on Ol Paint’s top, and the breath of the six of us jammed together steamed the inside of the windshield while the wipers scrubbed the outside. I had to keep clearing a patch of glass with the palm of my hand as I drove down to the ferry.
Will Gates was extravagantly courteous with Amy Perrine, handing her out of the backseat and, in the hotel, helping her off with her raincoat. Amy had taken some persuading to accept a date, but now she had a high, pretty flush to her cheeks as Will steered her down the red-carpet steps to the ballroom.
Bonny and I brought up the rear, Bonny in a new blue dress and her Add-A-Pearls. My brother preceded us with his quick-footed casual stride.
Of course the guys in his frat house at SC had sucked him along with them, making it sound like a party to go beat up on striking fruit tramps.
The Grapes of Wrath was a book that still stirred strong feelings. It would be inappropriate to praise it to Dr. and Mrs. Bonington aboard Sun Bear tomorrow, for instance.
I found myself looking at Liz’s bare shoulders in her white formal.
If we ran into Hagen tonight, it was Richie’s problem.
The band played “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” which might be a reproach to Amy. “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me!” Couples revolved on the gleaming floor with flecks of colored light drifting over them. More and more uniforms.
“Pretty soon everybody’s going to be in uniform,” I said. Then the Legionnaire Conley would be satisfied.
Bonny was quiet tonight, preoccupied, no smiles. She’d said she’d had a bad night at the hospital but hadn’t elaborated. Her mother was taking Charley’s absence hard, she said.
I swung her out onto the dance floor, marveling at the lightness of her, the delicate bones beneath the silken sheath of flesh.
Amy and Will Gates circled past us, Amy with her bare arms raised to her tall partner, who danced with his shoulders rounded over her as though afraid of damaging her.
“He’s nice,” Bonny said.
“Good guy.”
“I read your paper,” she said, head down as I guided her through the other dancing couples. What paper? Huckleberry Finn? She meant the brand.
“There was a column about children in Modesto. A teacher.”
“I wrote it.”
“I thought it was terrible,” Bonny said.
I suggest that you do not read it, if it offends you, Tully had said to Conley. I didn’t know whether Bonny considered the piece or its subject matter terrible.
“It’s supposed to be a come-on to get people interested in buying the paper,” I said to the top of her head. “It was important to Mr. Grooms, who started the brand.”
“My mother brought it home,” Bonny said.
I saw a connection with the invitation to a Day on the Bay that didn’t make me look forward to tomorrow.