Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  Monday night we would spend a couple of hours listening to Art Tatum, who was playing at a bar on the Hollywood Strip, before starting back to San Diego. We were only cutting one day of school.

  * * *

  Aunt Rhoda, her mother’s sister, was Bonny’s favorite relative. I heard all about her on the drive to Los Angeles. She had been married to Uncle Doug, who had run off with a young woman, whom Bonny described as “a floozie.”

  Mrs. Farr seemed to have a good deal of money. She lived in a mansion on a Pasadena street of mansions and palm trees. A colored woman in a black-and-white uniform opened the door when we arrived, about ten o’clock, and embraced Bonny with a yelp of welcome. Mrs. Farr looked like Bonny’s mother except that she was hefty. She and Bonny talked excitedly about people I didn’t know, and finally I excused myself as excess baggage and the maid showed me to my room upstairs.

  I had a rubber tucked into the pocket of my wallet, and I lay awake in a big bedroom with windows that looked out on the trunks of palm trees, thinking about Bonny. The furniture, looming out of the shadows, seemed to have been made for giants. I lay with my eyes jammed open and a grip on the joystick as though I was bringing an airplane coming in for a landing, praying that Bonny would come—

  3

  North of Los Angeles the highway slashed like a ruled line across the desert. Wildflowers were in bloom, glazes of yellow, red, and purple. Bonny kept exclaiming, “Isn’t it beautiful!” and “Oh, they’re so lovely!”

  “It would have been lovely if you’d come in to see me last night.”

  “You were sawing wood.” She punched me in the side. “Some Casanova!”

  “Try me again tonight.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said, her lips parting in her solar smile. She laid her head on my shoulder. The wind whipped her hair into tight blond curls.

  She had brought her aunt’s wicker hamper with a picnic the cook had provided and a thermos of coffee. She sat on her bobby-socked ankles in her gray pleated skirt and sweater and poured coffee for us to share out of the chrome cap of the thermos.

  Ol Paint was stretching out on these no-traffic highways, but I kept the speed down to prolong this time with Bonny. Occasion for some poetry:

  “My vegetable love should grow

  Vaster than empires, and more slow;

  An hundred years should go to praise

  Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;

  Two hundred to adore each breast—”

  She punched me in the ribs again, and leaned against me to blow warm breath into my ear.

  “‘And thirty thousand for the rest,’” I said.

  “Stop that sexy stuff,” she said.

  I kept an eye out for motorcycle cops, who were apt to stop you and demand the purpose of your trip, when rubber was being conserved. I blessed Calvin’s uncle Red for the set of Mexican tires.

  Mountains hulked up on either side, ranges left and right, snow peaks, green slopes, water flashing everywhere. A chilly breeze poured off the mountains, and I stopped to put up Ol Paint’s top. Bonny pressed against me when I got back in. The radio station to which we were tuned crackled on and off, finally giving up.

  The sign read:

  MANZANAR

  RELOCATION

  CENTER

  Low tar-paper barracks extended back up the slope of the foothill, so many of them! Whirls of dust slunk along the rows of buildings, subsiding and building again. Two soldiers wearing white helmets manned the gate, revolvers in buttoned-down holsters on their hips. They passed us through. Words like “Relocation Center” didn’t mean much until you had seen the barracks, the soldiers in their white helmets, and the barbed wire.

  The first of the structures bore the sign RECEPTION. Two cars and two pickups were nosed into a barrier of whitewashed rocks. I could see some of the Japanese now, two young women walking on either side of an old man with a cane, then a group of young people. Trailing along with them was a kid who couldn’t have been more than four. A swirl of dust blew across the group, and the child began to run to catch up with the others. Two of the girls were laughing!

  In front of the Reception Center, flowers bloomed in a ring of whitewashed stones. I stopped Ol Paint and leaned my forehead against the steering wheel.

  When I raised my head, Bonny looked round-eyed anxious. “It’s awful!’ she said.

  “It’s because you can’t tell the bad ones from the good ones.”

  “It’s just the war,” Bonny said, as though I needed to be comforted.

  “It’s the LA Chamber of Commerce,” I said. “And some stupid general.” And Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed the order.

  Bonny accompanied me inside the Reception Center, keeping close beside me. A balding sergeant sat at a desk with a phone. Three other Caucasian civilians occupied straight chairs along the wall. The sergeant looked up names on sheets of paper in a clipboard and nodded to us to sit down.

  He spoke into the phone and said that Mr. Takahashi would be along directly.

  Bonny sat with her saddle shoes placed precisely side by side. I had a sensation of having introduced her to a new side of life. Except for reading Crime and Punishment on my recommendation, she had never had any lowlife experience. Except for the Clínica Orozco. Except for the dying sailor.

  And she whispered, “We’re awfully lucky, aren’t we?”

  “We’re not really involved,” I said. “We can turn around and go out the gate any time we want to. The only way we’re involved is that our government is doing this, and it’s us.”

  Bonny tucked her chin down as though she’d been reprimanded.

  Stan sauntered in wearing jeans, a jacket, penny loafers, and sweat socks.

  I rose to introduce Bonny. Stan greeted her coolly. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “We’ve got a picnic in the car,” Bonny said. She looked childish in her pleated skirt and bobby socks. She had brushed her hair until it gleamed.

  “I already ate,” Stan said. “I’m on the eleven-thirty shift. You have to eat with your shift.”

  He led us outside and past two of the buildings, to a bench braced against a west-facing wall, in a band of sun. We sat down together, Bonny between us with her arms wrapped around her knees.

  “What do you do all day?” I asked.

  “What you do in the pen,” Stan said. “Eat, sleep, daub around. Have meetings.”

  “Where’s Ben?”

  “He’s here. Where else would he be?” Brushing his fingers through his stiff hair, Stan said, “I appreciate your coming, Payt. Bonny.” He had seemed no different from anyone else at San Diego High, but now he was inexplicably foreign, shorter than I had remembered, and it was as though the scallops of flesh at the corners of his eyes had become more prominent.

  “Calvin wanted to come, too,” I said. “He wanted to bring his girls. Three of them.”

  “Whoops!” Stan said. “Could’ve thrown the ball around. BS’d like old times.”

  “The Tutti-frutti Backfield,” Bonny said, trying to enter in. I frowned at her.

  “Pretty rugged about Bob-O,” Stan said.

  I nodded. I took a breath. “Listen: How is it?”

  Stan considered. “It’s really hard on the old people. They’ve lost everything, most of them. It’s tough seeing your parents really broken down.”

  “Payton says you were in premed at UCLA,” Bonny said. “My brother was in premed at Stanford.”

  “How do you mean was?”

  “He went into the Coast Guard.”

  “Well, he’s in for the duration, too.”

  I was feeling an ache of discomfort in my shoulders trying to keep the conversation going.

  “The trouble is we keep telling each other how rotten it is,” Stan said. “We have meetings a couple of times a week to tell each other it’s unconstitutional. The trouble is you’re PO’d all the time. It’s all you think about.”

  He sat with his feet stretched out, hands jammed in his poc
kets. “The people in charge aren’t so bad,” he went on. “‘Cock-asians,’ we call them.” He gave Bonny an apologetic glance. “They didn’t do this to us. The Army and the president did. General DeWitt says a Jap is a Jap and it doesn’t matter whether he’s American or not.” He made a snarling sound.

  Bonny asked if anyone was doing anything.

  “Ben and some of the lawyers are trying to get something to the Supreme Court, but the government can do about anything it wants to in wartime. They even knocked out habeas corpus in the Civil War.” He leaned stiffly forward, his hands still trapped in his pockets. He looked relieved when two other fellows happened by. Everybody stood around Bonny, huddled on the bench.

  I said it was a beautiful valley.

  “It was until LA Water and Power stole all the water,” one of the others said.

  “Looks like plenty of water coming off the mountains.”

  “Headed for LA toilets.”

  The two others moved on. Bonny hugged her knees.

  “You still going to be a writer?” Stan wanted to know. “You ought to write about this place!” He swung his arm. “Except I guess you couldn’t do it unless you’d really been inside.”

  “To understand Social Reality you have to be inside it,” I said.

  Bonny glanced at me with her lips parted and the tip of her tongue touching the upper one.

  “Well, come on and I’ll show you around,” Stan said.

  “I knew a girl at Bishop,” Bonny said. “Mitzi Yamamoto.”

  “She’s here. We’ll go find her.”

  “I promised my brother I’d look up Ben,” I lied.

  * * *

  I managed to see Ben Takahashi alone while Stan took Bonny off to find her high school friend. Ben had a corner in one of the barracks partitioned into an office with olive drab blankets hung from wires. An office typewriter sat on a desk, and an Army cot was covered with another blanket. Ben wore black-rimmed glasses.

  “Richie told me to say hi.”

  Ben flipped a hand toward the cot in an invitation to sit down. His shoulders were slumped from bending over law books, and he was not very cordial. He had a trick of slipping his glasses half off, then back again.

  On the cot was one of the satin-faced pillows you could buy in the crummy shops along lower Broadway in San Diego. Embroidered in different colored threads was the message:

  THE AMERICAN BILL OF RIGHTS

  FREEDOM OF SPEECH FREEDOM OF RELIGION

  FREEDOM OF THE PRESS FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY

  WORTH FIGHTING FOR

  In the center was a figure of a Minuteman with his musket, outlined in red, white, and blue.

  I sat down and leaned on the pillow, trying to seem at ease. “Listen, Ben, I’ve got to find out about some things that happened to Richie in LA.”

  Ben turned his chair toward the cot with a jarring of legs. “We didn’t run in the same crowd at SC, Payt.”

  “He had a girlfriend named Val. She was a starlet or a feature player or something.”

  His eyes blinked behind the lenses of his glasses. “Sure. Val Ferris. Richie was proud of her. She was in some movies. I remember one called Castaways.”

  “Well, she killed herself. Maybe because she didn’t get a part in a movie Richie had to do with when he was working for that studio.”

  Ben slipped his glasses on his nose. “Can’t you ask Richie about this?”

  “He just says it didn’t have anything to do with him really, but some people thought it was his fault. There’s this kind of crazy stuntman guy—”

  “Probably there was somebody getting screwed over. Or maybe coke.”

  “Coke?”

  “Cocaine,” he said, and grinned in a queer squinty way. “In Hollywood there is always somebody getting screwed, literally and figuratively. And a lot of coke. That guy Richie worked for, David Lubin, was famous for all that.”

  I nodded, hoping he would keep going.

  “Richie was always hooked in with Hollywood people. There were guys like that at SC, that you knew they would end up in the Industry. Val Ferris loaded herself with bricks and drowned herself in Lubin’s swimming pool. It was one of those scandals the Industry is good at hushing up. David Lubin was Fontainebleau Films.”

  “So probably Val was getting screwed.”

  “You know what I mean, humiliated. Screwed out of something. I mean, there’s that terrible line between being someone and no one.”

  Calvin had said something like that.

  “How come people would think it was Richie’s fault?”

  “She’d been his girlfriend, though I think that was all over. But Richie was Lubin’s yes-man. It might be that. Maybe Richie—” He shook his head. “Lubin died of cancer a year or so ago.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, rising.

  “How is Richie, anyway?”

  “He’s instructing at Pensacola. He and Liz are getting married in June.” I pointed down at the embroidered pillow. “Everybody should have one.”

  “Everybody should have four,” Ben said.

  4

  The colored maid served dinner for Bonny and me and Mrs. Farr and her friend Colonel Bunker, a courtly old gent with a southern accent, and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Colonel Bunker considered himself an expert at mimicking the president: “Mah waff Ellynore, and mah littul dawg Fala…”

  After dinner we played mah-jong with a beautiful set of antique ivory tiles. I’d never played before, and my mind kept lurching off after Val Ferris and Hagen taking some kind of revenge on Liz, so I wasn’t much good.

  The colonel went home at nine thirty, and I excused myself also, leaving Bonny in conversation with her aunt over tiny cups of coffee. In bed I listened to the rattle of palm fronds in the wind and watched the massive shapes of the dressers and armoire afloat in darkness. For some reason I couldn’t get my mind off Val Ferris being fucked by Richie’s boss as well as my brother.

  It seemed that half the night had passed when the door opened on a vertical of lighted hallway. I heard the pad of a foot on the parquet, and imagined it on the carpet. I tried to keep from panting.

  Bonny fell onto the bed beside me, pinning me beneath the covers, her breath in my ear. She clove to me as I tried to struggle free.

  “Just lie there!” she whispered.

  I managed to half turn over, one arm around her; I felt as though I was lying on the keel of a China Clipper. I lay still even though my arm felt paralyzed. I could feel the warmth of Bonny’s body through the sheets and quilt.

  I tried to relax in her embrace, layers of fabric between us, electric prickle of her hair against my cheek.

  “How did you know it was wrong for us to fence those people up in that terrible place?” she whispered.

  Because my mother had brought The Grapes of Wrath home from the lending library when I was at an impressionable age? Because I’d been raised on the Knights of the Round Table, and Robin Hood? Because I’d played in the Tutti-frutti Backfield at San Diego High with Stan Takahashi? Because I worked at the brand?

  “It makes me so mad!” she said.

  “Lot of things to get mad about, once you start,” I said. Maybe someday I could tell her about Dessy and her San Francisco bosses, and the Tijuana whores and the Shetland pony, and David Lubin and Val Ferris; but I didn’t know enough about that yet.

  “I really got mad when they picketed the brand,” I said. “Maybe you don’t really feel it till it happens to you.”

  “What you said about Social Reality.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s hard when a sweet old man like Colonel Bunker makes fun of good people.”

  “It’s hard when good people sign orders to put the AJAs into a concentration camp.”

  She lay unreachably tight against me in her aunt’s guest bedroom. Finally I determined from her regular breathing that she was asleep. There was no way to disentangle myself and go into the bathroom in my desperation. I snapped awake time an
d again in a rhythm of arousal and subsidence. When I waked to gray dawn she was gone.

  5

  Breakfast was grapefruit, muffins, and coffee. Mrs. Farr wore a crisply rustling dressing gown, Bonny a white blouse with a loopy blue tie. When we said good-bye her aunt kissed me on the cheek and told me that Barbara had brought a very nice young man to visit.

  We drove to Hollywood and wandered along Hollywood Boulevard, looking in shoe store windows.

  A storefront displayed a recruiting poster in the form of a blown-up newspaper item: AVIATION CADET TRAINING. 100,000 MEN TO BE RECRUITED. OFFICERS TRAINING PLAN. Under smaller heads were the figures: $75 per month during training, $183 per month for ground officers, $245 per month for flying officers.

  Headlines blazed out of the racks of papers in a newsstand: STARVATION KILLING 1,200 GREEKS DAILY.

  Bonny stood beside me with her blond locks curving along her cheeks, shaking her head, blue eyes shocked. “I just hate the numbers!”

  Thirty-six thousand prisoners on Bataan.

  I said I liked the idea of $245 a month. “We could get married and live on that.”

  “I don’t want you to be a flier,” Bonny said. Johnny Pierce had died in Air Corps training.

  “Okay then.”

  “I mean it!” Today she was affectionate in public in a way she never was in San Diego, clinging to my arm and bumping hips as we wandered along the boulevard among sailors and soldiers and their girlfriends. We went to look at the tar pits and had lunch at Farmers Market.

  “Let’s go play some tennis,” I said. I reminded her that we had a standing invitation from Errol Flynn. It seemed to me that Bonny would do just fine in treacherous Hollywood terrain simply because she had classy tennis ground strokes.

  * * *

  When we had located Flynn’s place, we drove to the end of a nearby dirt track that looked out over the sprawl of the evil city. Bonny changed into her tennis dress inside Ol Paint while I paced outside the car. Then I changed. She was very quiet as I turned off Mulholland into Flynn’s domain, sitting up straight with one hand braced on the dashboard. Six or seven other cars were nosed up to a tall hedge that blocked off the tennis court, across a paved area from the house. Chrome and bright enamel winked in the sun. Ol Paint looked old and shabby among the other cars.