Mitla Pass (7 page)

“Sort of.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“We’re lying together and we want to, and we don’t want to. We kind of do and we kind of don’t. We’re going crazy. Cripes.”

Mother’s glass lowered a full inch and her eyes became slightly watery as the whiskey hit its mark.

“What next?”

“I want you to like him.”

“You intend to marry this boy, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“The Admiral and I have discovered that young people are absolutely certain of their emotions and convictions. They’re also bullheaded and deaf. I take it we’re not being consulted, only informed.”

“I’ll listen,” I said.

“Gideon is extremely ambitious and he could be talented. I’m not a proper judge of that. I read his pages last night. They’re very crude. It takes years and years to become a writer. This boy hasn’t graduated from high school. He can’t get into college. He hasn’t got a chance in hell of becoming a novelist with that background.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“No, I don’t. He has a better chance of swimming across the Pacific. I suppose in time we’ll learn to live with a Jewish son-in-law. But neither the Admiral nor I will accept your unhappiness.”

I felt a sudden rage! “Mom, that’s a damned laugh. Neither one of you have known I’ve been alive for the last ten years. All right, so he doesn’t become a writer. I love him for dreaming about it. For daring it. Whatever, he’ll make a good living. I want him for the way he loves me ... for the way he touches me.”

Mother just stared at me, as though she had been struck.

“I need him for his tenderness,” I said.

She twiddled with her glass, spinning the ice cubes around, then held it out quickly as the waiter passed. She had been caught off guard. Darling Val never argued with either of them.

“That’s very unkind,” she said.

“All right, Mom. When was the last time the Admiral was tender to you?”

“Oh, don’t you know, darling, he and I have had our wild nights in the Orient. He knows his way around my body. Why the hell is it that all young people can’t believe their parents ever made love to each other?”

“Me,” I said, not believing the words were coming from my mouth. “What about loving me?”

“Great men have great weaknesses,” she answered. “No, don’t interrupt me, Valerie. Your father is an honorable man and a patriot. He’s one of the greatest in the world at what he does. And I don’t believe he’s ever been unfaithful to me in over thirty years. Perhaps I gave him too much and you too little. Families of men like these always have to pay a price. Do you really think your young man, Gideon, is all that much different from your father? I said don’t interrupt me, Val. ... The Admiral never got a word of love from his own father in his entire life. He doesn’t know how to say ‘I love you.’ But he does love, in his own way, and God knows I do. This man—your father—when he stands on the bridge of his flagship, a battle wagon, and puts a pair of binoculars to his eyes, he sees ships from horizon to horizon. Carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, planes overhead, submarines below. He, Bulldog Ballard, is the commander! What can I, as a wife, give him to compare? Just keep him fit and understand his weaknesses and love him for what he is.”

“Things are different with me and Gideon. The world is becoming different. This is going to be a two-career family. The minute he earns enough by writing, we’re off to Paris for me to finish my schooling.”

“Oh, Val, my darling, do you really believe that Gideon doesn’t have the same kind of ambition as your father? Do you really believe that you can match him if he starts to fly? To be on the bridge of that ship, he must have peace in his home. Maybe there is a brave new world beginning. I hear talk of it all the time, but I don’t understand it. I’m just a plain old Navy wife. My career is my man and that’s been more than enough for me.”

“Mom. We were married last week.”

She turned ashen. We were both underage. They could annul it if they wanted to.

“I’m sorry you didn’t think enough of us to come to us. Maybe you’ll manage your own family better than I managed mine.”

She left quickly to go to her room and cry it out. It was the first time in my life I had ever made a real defiant stand against my parents. Now, I was frightened.

G
IDEON AND
I had a tiny third-floor walk-up flat over a Chinese grocery on Larkin Street, on the edge of San Francisco’s tenderloin. Thirty-five dollars a month, furnished.

My introduction to my new father-in-law was a five-page letter, not unlike the Rocks and Shoals (the articles governing the United States Navy).

... I don’t know how much my sonny boy told you about his happy childhood in Philadelphia, but we are a very progressive family. I have no objection whatsoever that my son marries a
shiksa
(gentile) but he should not forget he is Jewish.

Enclosed are the recipes to make gefilte fish,
matzo brie, borsht, gadempta fleysh, tsimmes,
etc. when we meet personally, I’ll give you a test.

Mainly, you should see to it that Gideon writes to me every week. I hold you responsible. And it wouldn’t hurt a thing if you also correspond with me.

I don’t know why Gideon is boycotting Philadelphia. What’s so great about San Francisco?

From Gideon’s mother, a strange, simple message, “How could you do this to your mother?”

Gideon didn’t want to go back to Baltimore and Philly, even for a short visit as the war was coming to a close. “I’ll go back,” he said, “after my first book is published, and I’ll drive home in a Cadillac.”

Before the war ended, an event took place that should have tipped me off that I had married a wild man. Gideon had wangled a transfer from the hospital to duty at a supply depot in San Francisco. At that time the San Francisco
Examiner
and other Hearst newspapers were pushing for Douglas MacArthur, a soldier, to become supreme commander in the Pacific, placing him over the Navy and the Marines. A terrible front-page editorial was headlined
MARINES DIE NEEDLESSLY
and cited MacArthur’s skill at keeping down Army casualties. Of course it did not mention that the Marines were given by far the most dangerous islands to invade. Gideon and some three hundred enlisted Marines paid a visit to the
Examiner.
When the editor phoned the Shore Patrol for help—what do you know, not a single Navy or Marine officer of authority was left in town.

As the police arrived, I was told later, Gideon, as spokesman, grabbed the editor by his necktie and said, “The first cop that enters, we’re taking your presses apart.”

Result, the
Examiner
printed a retraction and the rest of the Hearst papers canceled the editorial. I recall this incident because it was the first time I saw Gideon refuse to back down, a situation that often would recur.

A
BEAUTIFUL LETTER
came from his sister, Molly. Molly wrote that she had waited for this day for so long. She said that many people loved Gideon and he had many good friends and caring relatives, but in a strange way, he was always very much alone. Molly said he desperately needed one person in this world he could call his own, someone to watch over him. And Molly wrote that she loved me because I loved Gideon.

Did I love Molly’s baby brother? Did I love him! Oh, I know all newlyweds are moonstruck with the wonderment of discovery, but we devoured each other. My tightly controlled emotions, disciplined by the untouching hands of my parents, had locked in my ability to show affection as effectively as if contained in a steel box. I never realized how tight it was and how tightly controlled my emotions had become. Love, deeply buried, erupted from me now.

We were slightly crazy. We tried everything, read every sex book we could get our hands on. He loved to make me blush when he came across something strange.

As soon as we sat down in a restaurant, our hands were under the tablecloth. We’d duck into alleyways. We’d make love on the ground in Muir Woods, just a few feet off the main walking path. Some of this doesn’t sound so wild now, but it was the 1940s, and modesty and whispers ranked over candor. Crazy costumes, mirrors, fantasy. Our fertile minds were seeking all the time. The first Christmas he was out of the service, we had a two-foot tree, pending poverty, and glorious, glorious love.

And then the dawn came up like thunder from the hoary hills of Oakland cross the bay!

We were mainly living on dreams, youthful ignorance, and veteran’s and unemployment benefits. I thought he would plunge into his novel. He tried for a short time, but finally threw it into a drawer and seldom took it out. Some call it writer’s block. I call it fear. He couldn’t admit to that.

Gideon embarked on a series of gigantic ventures, guaranteed to change the world. Only the world wasn’t quite ready for him. He formed a bogus Marine veterans’ organization with a membership of five, which enabled him to get a charter from the state, giving him nonprofit status and a number of veterans’ perks. The little bastard went out and rented the San Francisco Opera House to present his new play. He hustled scenery, costumes, got feature articles in the newspapers, received a waiver from the musicians’ and stagehands’ unions, passed out handbills, elbowed his way onto radio programs, wrote rave reviews in which he quoted from nonexistent papers in Chicago and New York. Result: seventy-four dollars in the box office and a thousand-dollar debt.

This shook him up so, he hid away in a fight gym in the tenderloin, played pinball machines every day, all day long, for three months.

Next, it was a veterans’ newspaper. This afforded him space to write. He wrote the entire paper, including four columns under different names. He telephoned far into the evenings, hustling ads from local businesses. It took six months for this enterprise to sink and add another thousand dollars to our debt.

Next came publication of a magazine offering “job opportunities” all over the world. The bunko squad came looking for him.

After which he wrote skits for a number of cabarets around North Beach. These were quite funny social commentaries. Unfortunately, the customers liked their entertainment a little more in the raw.

I was so damned in love with the guy that I believed each and every one of his cockamamy schemes right up to the day they busted.

And then I confronted him with those two magic words, “I’m pregnant.”

A
COUPLE OF
fight trainers he had befriended at the gym sent him to a Teamsters local and Gideon became circulation district manager for the San Francisco
Call-Bulletin,
an afternoon newspaper. He had between thirty and forty newspaper boys working for him in home delivery. Between my morning sickness and Gideon having a regular job, we were back in the real world and little by little climbed out of the hole. I had hoped that he would return to writing his novel, but the early disasters had left him gun-shy. He did write constantly, every spare moment, but they were short fiction and nonfiction pieces. He kept between fifteen and twenty of these constantly circulating in the mails from publication to publication. In the next two years, he collected four hundred and twenty-two rejection slips.

M
OTHER AND
I had kept in touch through the occasional letter and phone call. As I went into the eighth month of my pregnancy, we received a sudden message that she and the Admiral were going to pay as a visit. Panic city!

Our apartment, such as it was, was scarcely large enough to hold my belly. It had a closet-sized kitchenette, a one-person-at-a-time bathroom, and an all-purpose room with a pull-down Murphy bed. We ate at a card table on fold-up canvas director’s chairs.

I had dolled the place up with a couple of my own splashy paintings, some wild color, posters, and gypsy wall hangings. In addition to its collection of saloons, muggers, hookers, and other sleazy characters, the tenderloin had a number of flea market-type shops and used book and record stores. Some polished-up bric-a-brac and filled bookshelves gave the place a kind of kinky charm. Outside our window, life in the raw played out daily human dramas—fire trucks shifting gears on our hill rattling our building ... wife beaters ... husband beaters ... drunks passing out in our lobby ... warring gangs of alley cats ... and a couple of self-employed ladies of the night down our hall. I knew Mom and the Admiral were going to choke when they saw where and how we were living.

To my surprise, they didn’t seem to give a damn. My own insecurity was quickly replaced by concern over the way my father looked. He was dying. That accounted for the sudden peace visit. He had cancer and I was grateful they had come. Mom told me he had refused all pain medication. “With the pain,” he had told her, “at least I know I’m alive.”

Well, don’t you know that two years of dreading this visit was all for naught. It turned out to be the most wonderful evening I had ever had with them. We blew everything on the meal. The El Globo Restaurant put up a stupendous pot of take-out bouillabaisse and sold us the vino wholesale.

The room was bathed in candlelight flickering from Chianti bottles which had grown wax hairdos six inches thick, and there was a background of operatic music. We all proceeded to gorge ourselves and get loaded.

The Admiral and Gideon talked about the invasion of Tarawa like two old war buddies. Gideon had seen it from a Marine’s point of view and researched it further to use in his novel. The Admiral was impressed as hell.

“Well, why aren’t you working on your book?” Father asked with a bluntness I knew only too well. “It’s not going to write itself.”

I don’t think any of us were ready for Gideon’s answer. “I’m scared,” he said.

“Scared? To write?” Mother asked, with honest innocence.

“Everything I’ve ever wanted or dreamed of since I was a little boy depends on that book. What if it fails? Sometimes I think that if I didn’t make it, I’d want to die. I just can’t go through life being nobody. So, I’m scared.”

The room became terribly quiet. The Admiral looked long and hard at Gideon. “I know exactly what you’re saying,” he said.