Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  I called Lois at Perry’s from a phone booth in the lobby, to tell her I couldn’t make it on Thursday. “Date with Uncle Sam.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I’ll always remember you, Lois.”

  She wanted to know when the train left.

  I called Pogey to tell him I had enlisted, but Mrs. Malcolm said he wasn’t at home. I phoned Tully to ask if I could store my stuff in his basement, and if he could put me up for the little time I had left as a civilian.

  I didn’t know what to do about Bonny. It was as though if I kept moving I wouldn’t have to think about her.

  At the Buttons’ I told Mrs. Button I’d found another place and began packing. I toted out to Ol Paint my suitcases, laundry bag, tennis racket in its press, typewriter, box of manuscript, carbon copies and paper, two cartons of books and Black Mask magazines, and three A&P grocery bags jammed with clothes and shoes, to store at Tully’s.

  * * *

  Tully was sitting on his throne beside the wall of phonograph records, sucking on a Budweiser. On the table by the window was a sheaf of papers with a blue cardboard cover.

  His feet in brown wing tips were crossed before him. His knit tie was slipped two inches down from his collar, and the cuffs of his white shirt were turned back on his plump forearms. He was dressed as though he’d just come from church.

  I sat on the hassock by the big chair with my own bottle of beer.

  “My subpoena,” Tully said, indicating the papers on the table.

  “The HUAC!”

  “They are coming to San Diego. No doubt they have kept track of the complaints.” He looked solemn, like someone listening to the National Anthem. It occurred to me that he was proud of the subpoena, a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of disapproval.

  I whistled.

  “I will not be naming names,” Tully said pompously. “That of course is the ritual of humiliation. For having possessed unacceptable ideas, one is required to betray one’s friends in violation of Anglo-Saxon ethics.”

  “Will they send you to prison?”

  “Have you read Billy Budd, my boy?”

  So much to read yet!

  “Billy kills the evil Claggart because he is tongue-tied when falsely accused. So he is hanged.”

  I tried to figure out what he meant.

  “They will probably subpoena you also, my boy.”

  “Oh, no, they won’t.”

  He gave me a pop-eyed glance.

  I told him I’d enlisted.

  “Oh, dear God,” he groaned. “You haven’t done this for me?”

  I shook my head. Not for Tully.

  I had to tell Bonny I was leaving for the war at two-oh-two on Tuesday. I called her from the phone in the kitchen.

  “Bonny, I’m taking the train to Camp Roberts day after tomorrow.”

  “The war,” she said.

  “What I want,” I said, “is for you to write me letters, and I’ll write letters. Like soldiers and their girlfriends do. That’s what I want.”

  There was a pause, before she said, “All right.”

  What was wrong?

  She wanted to know when the train left, and said she’d be there.

  When I came out of the kitchen, Tully was still sitting on his throne. He turned to gaze at me with his baloney solemnity.

  “I know you haven’t had time to read Proust yet, my boy. He points out that every love affair is a reflection of the first, poignant love affair, the one you will no doubt be writing about. Right?”

  Shit.

  7

  I had lunch with my mother, and we arrived early at the depot. She wore black for Richie dead; she looked washed-out, her lipstick too dark red on her mouth. She was grieving for Richie and her dying mother, and she was frightened for her second son. She kept dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief and squeezing my hand.

  “I’m just sick you’re going off to be a doughboy like this,” she said.

  “You don’t say doughboy this war,” I said. “You say GI. Or dogface.” The Dogfaced Boy goes to war!

  “Please don’t get hurt, darling. I couldn’t stand it if you got hurt.”

  I put an arm around her to hug her. Richie had promised Liz he would not get killed.

  We strolled in the cool shed, along the olive-drab cars of the train aimed north. Like Manzanar, Camp Roberts was a couple of hundred miles north of LA, but off Highway 101, not 395.

  Headlines on the stack of papers in the kiosk by the door to the waiting room were ALLIES PLAN SECOND FRONT IN EUROPE.

  Another recruit, flanked by Mom and Pop, walked along beside the cars. We nodded to each other as I parked my blue bag beside the step of the car I was to board. Bonny ought to have been here by now.

  My mother and I, arm in arm, turned and walked back toward the brightness of the sun pouring into the open south end of the depot. She gripped my arm as though she didn’t intend to let me go. She was what she was. Everyone was what he or she was; we had all been made what we were. Richie and I and our father and the Depression, Bonny and her brother and her mother and father and their Rhodes. It seemed the kind of half-assed wisdom the Manual would make some smug point about.

  “I’ll write you,” I said. I was looking forward to writing to my mother, as the way things ought to be conducted in wartime, and to Bonny, too.

  “Of course you won’t. Richie never did.” She fished her handkerchief out of her purse again.

  There was Bonny!

  It wasn’t Bonny, it was Lois Meador trotting toward us, trim figure in a blue dress, a black raffia hat on her head. She was smiling her tight smile that I had realized was contrived to conceal her crooked tooth. The way she was! I introduced my ex-boss to my mother.

  Lois handed me a neatly wrapped packet, which I recognized as a product of Perry’s candy department.

  “Some chewy stuff for the train ride.” She rose to her toes to brush my cheek with her lips. “Take care of yourself. We are all looking forward to reading your books.”

  I saw my mother draw herself up straighter as the present Mrs. Edmund Daltrey came out of the waiting room. Weezie also wore black, and the two of them kissed and made over each other with an exchange of ‘haven’t seen you for so long!’s. Lois was introduced.

  “I talked to your father out on San Clemente Island by shortwave last night,” Weezie said to me. “They’re building an airfield there. He sends his love and best wishes. I’m to remind you that he started as a buck private in the last war and ended up a shavetail. He’ll expect you to do better than that!”

  To my mother and me, she said, “Captain Mahoney is certain Richie will be awarded the Navy Cross.”

  Posthumously. “Terrific!” I said. I couldn’t keep my eyes away from the door to the waiting room.

  It appeared certain that Midway had been a great American victory, the real turning point of the war in the Pacific. Those old, slow torpedo planes and defective torpedoes up against Haruna class battleships and the big Jap carriers. The whole squadron off the Yorktown had died, all the brave boys, beloved sons and brothers and lovers, the redeemed and the not. The dive bombers had sunk the Jap ships.

  Frank Tully strode toward us from the sun-bright Broadway entrance. He wore a tweed jacket, his knit tie, and pressed gray flannels, very dapper and stately. Maybe it was his new outfit for the HUAC interrogation. He carried a book under his arm.

  “Greetings, Ellen,” he said with a bow. He bowed again when he was introduced to Weezie and managed to say some good things about Richie Daltrey. I could see that Lois was anxious to get away. Tully handed over the book: Go Down, Moses.

  “Time you started reading Faulkner, my boy,” he said. “This is his latest. There’s a novelette in there, ‘The Bear,’ that will knock the private eyes right out of your head.”

  Richie and Liz Fletcher and Val Ferris had already done that. Thanking Tully, I tucked the book under my arm with Lois’s box of candy. Lois said good-bye, touched my chest, and was gone. I felt a
teary heating in my eyes as I handed over to Tully Ol Paint’s keys in their worn leather case, and the ownership certificate in its envelope—like a balloonist dropping off another sandbag of ballast. Tully would sell Ol Paint or keep it for the Saturday deliveries.

  More guys, with parents and girlfriends, were standing in groups along the platform. I checked on my blue bag, which looked small and deflated from here. Not much I needed to take into the Army with me!

  Had I told Bonny the wrong time?

  There came Pogey Malcolm in his blue blazer. He stuck his hand out, and I slapped mine into it. Old friend, tennis buddy, fellow writer, fraternity brother, and supporter. Thick and thin!

  “Hey, have a good war, Payt!”

  “You, too, Poge!” I had another rush of emotion with my brother in it, goggled and helmeted, gloved hand on the joystick as at two hundred feet and 135 knots the creaky old plane hurtled toward the vast gray flank of the Haruna class, with all those guns you saw in the newsreels banging away.

  Where was Bonny?

  Amy Perrine came out of the door of the waiting room. Bonny was with her, in her camel’s hair coat. Bonny tilted her head at me and at Amy, so I knew I was supposed to speak to Amy about Will Gates.

  We walked away from the others, Amy close beside me. I didn’t want to walk along the cars with Amy Perrine!

  “Listen, Amy,” I said. “Bob-O would want you to fall in love with some good guy,” I heard myself say. “Will Gates is a terrific guy.”

  She held up her hand to show me her ring. “I love him!” she squeaked, and I patted her shoulder.

  So we started back. Bonny stood alone, staight-backed. She had on a blue beret that covered her hair. There was a funny tight look around her mouth.

  Emmett Buckley and Mark Davis came at me, and I had to crack snappers with the brothers, who must have forgiven my trespasses because of my enlistment. Redeemed! It was some kind of awful retribution (for what?), my fraternity brothers come to see me off!

  I managed to get over to Bonny. “I’ll write you,” she said.

  “I’ll be at Camp Roberts. Maybe we could meet in LA—”

  “I don’t think I can do that.” She was looking at me as though she hardly knew me!

  “Bonny—”

  “I’m Barbara,” she said.

  Now there was a considerable crowd of young guys in their good-bye groups. It was clear I was not going to receive a good-bye kiss. Time to bail out of this shitpasture and climb aboard.

  I mounted into the coach, found a seat, and chucked my bag into the overhead rack. I made desperate grinning faces out the window as the train lurched and moved. People on the platform began to slip away, waving. Bonny stood alone, facing toward me. She stood very straight, chin up; she looked proud, she looked fearless. In her camel’s hair coat and her beret, for some reason I thought she looked like Joan of Arc.

  How could she have known about Lois Meador? How could she have known what had happened in the car with Liz on the way to LA? She couldn’t!

  It was a judgment. It was punishment. Bonny had loved me and I had fucked Lois Meador. It was a betrayal. I had lost my beloved. I had done it to myself. My prick had done it to me. Alice Hoagland lived right around the corner from Lois. Somebody had seen me and told Bonny. That was the way girls looked after each other. I couldn’t even weep.

  The car shook as the train picked up speed, headed for their fucking war.

  BOOK TWO

  Staying Alive

  Chapter 12

  1

  I wrote Bonny from Camp Roberts, from Fort Jackass, and from England. She always wrote back, but it was as though someone were writing the letters for her, someone named Barbara. I began to think that that new identity was what had happened to the Bonny Bonington I had been in love with and who I thought had been in love with me. I didn’t even know how to ask her what had gone wrong, though I was no longer certain the problem had been Lois Meador. Bonny’s letters were impersonal about us, as though there had never been any us, as though I were just some serviceman she wrote to dutifully.

  That summer of 1942, she had gone to live with her aunt Honey in Menlo Park, right next door to Palo Alto, where she was tutored in math and science so she could go into premed at Stanford University.

  She wrote of returning to San Diego at Christmastime. “San Diego doesn’t look very Christmassy, all palm trees and sunshine. Ginny Gormley and I ventured out to Mission Beach, but it was lonely and a chilly breeze blowing. We prowled through the shut-down shops and looked in at the taffy machine, and up at the roller coaster, and drove home. Party at the Hotel del, servicemen and local girls with gardenias in their hair. I notice I get a little more respect as a ‘Stanford girl,’ and I am careful not to make hurty comparisons to big-time San Francisco and this dreary burg where I have vowed my life will not be spent. Though I may confess that Marston’s doesn’t seem like much when one has gone shopping at the City of Paris. Aunt Honey took me on a clothes-buying spree! I am treated with more respect by my parents also. Imagine!”

  In another letter she had responded to my questions about the Stanford campus. “It’s like State only more so. Beautiful old buildings rather than fancied-up new buildings made to look like old buildings. When Leland Stanford Junior was dying he asked his father, the great railroad builder crook, to build a university where poor young men could get an education. This causes giggles when one thinks what one’s parents are coughing up to keep us poor students here.

  “After the boy died his parents went to Harvard to ask the president what it cost to build a university. The president of Harvard told them a university wasn’t just buildings and faculty, it was traditions and history, library books and janitors, sports and all that. But Leland Stanford said he just wanted to know what it cost for the campus, and the president told him some millions of dollars; a figure. And Leland Stanford said to Mrs. Stanford, ‘We can do it, Mama! We can do it!’ Isn’t that lovely?”

  Bonny used “lovely” ironically a lot, also “dreary” and “putrid.” “I think it’s really putrid when rich people get together and talk about how to make poor people poorer!” She hadn’t lost her democratic sympathies at a rich kids’ school, at least.

  She wrote that she and Aunt Honey had gone to see Macbeth in “the City,” and I wrote back, “Blow wind, come wrack, at least we’ll die with harness on our back!” Because it had been a kick to spout that in recruit training when we were suiting up for drill.

  For my part I wrote her just what I was involved in, and I tried to write it as well as I could, to make her see, as an author is required to make the reader see, because I had it in my mind that my letters were a kind of journal I was keeping. I wrote to Pogey and to my father that way, too, typing with carbons when I could get access to a typewriter, or just writing by hand and thinking to remember it all. Maybe I fictionalized a little, going for what should have happened rather than what actually happened, and I left out the universal Army adjectives.

  We crossed over the Channel shortly after D-day. We were held up for some weeks in the hedgerows, but with the St. Lo breakout we were off to the races.

  2

  Roaring across France in that August heat, six of us in a halftrack with a machine gun mounted on the cab, M-1s, carbines, captured machine pistols, grenades, and a case of calvados, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. We had made no contact with Jerries, though we had heard gunfire off to the north a couple of times. We just kept going. It was like a rolling vacation.

  We came into a little burg on a river beyond Orleans, maybe the Yonne, parked on a side street and jumped out under a sky as shiny blue as enamel. Cobbles slanted down to a colorless stretch of river, no one in evidence. We left Tallboy in the halftrack, and five of us trooped around the corner to a café-bar with a wooden sign showing a wine bottle and a bunch of purple grapes, and a locked door. Pappy Walton, called Pappy because he was thirty, banged on the door and hallooed in French until a wrinkled old lady with white
hair twisted up into a topknot like Jiggs’s Maggie opened up and bowed and muttered what we took to be welcome and stationed herself behind the bar. It was about three degrees cooler inside.

  We knew well enough the word bière, and four of us ordered bière and Pappy vin rouge. We sat at a plank table in an alcove that had a view of the river through a window of small panes.

  The old lady brought the beers and Pappy’s wine, bowing as she set out the glasses. We raised toasts to her, to France, and to each other. Of course we knew it would not go on this easy, but easy it had been so far, wheeling into little villes like this one, making sure we kept a retreat line open, although speed was the order. We were proud of ourselves, as though this one halftrack were winning the war. We never saw any officers, communicating by radio, and the orders were to keep going. So we kept going, winning the war by ourselves, Pappy the first sergeant and I a buck sergeant second in command. Later on Pappy was killed in the Bulge.

  We all stank of stale sweat, whiskered and dirty and feeling very tough. It was as though the personal stink combined with the pleasant sour stench of the beer and Pappy’s wine, and the whole wine-encrusted smell of the little bar aroused all the senses. The old woman behind the counter gazed at us anxiously.

  Tallboy hustled in the door carrying one of the machine pistols. “There’s a Jerry soldier down there!”

  Standing beside our table, he craned his helmeted head at the window, pointing. We all rose, too. There he was, down by the river, just his helmet showing.

  “Go shoot him,” Pappy said to me.

  “Hold on!” I said.

  “Yeah,” Ned said. “If there’s one Jerry there’s probably others. You don’t want to get anything started.”

  “You’d better get back to the halftrack,” Pappy said to Tallboy.

  “Probly a fucking regiment just over there,” Selden Orcutt said in South Carolinian.

  “I don’t think there’s any fucking regiment over there,” Pappy said. “I said go shoot him, Pat. That’s an order.”