The Immigrants (39 page)

“Darling, you are the most incredible bitch.”

“Then that lovely child wasn’t your daughter?”

“Shall we have lunch?”

“Certainly.”

“Tomorrow then. I’ll pick you up.”

Now, why did I agree? Jean asked herself, and could find no other answer except that she was bored and that Alan Brocker was entertaining. He had a quality not too frequently found in men, the ability to gossip and to whet his gossip with acid. She also felt a pleasant sense of superiority. When she had first met Brocker, he was the teacher, sophisticated, knowledgeable, and in command. But nothing about him appeared to have changed very much, whereas Jean had changed a great deal. She saw him now as an ineffectual, permanent adolescent, and she enjoyed the sense of being in command.

“At least he will be amusing,” she decided.

At lunch the following day, Jean said to him, “How old are you these days, dear Alan?”

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“How old are you, my dear?”

“Thirty-seven. I make no secret of it.”

“I’m only forty-three, my love. We are both of us in our prime.”

“Then wouldn’t you say that child you were squiring yesterday is somewhat underdone? How old is she? Eighteen?”

“Twenty.”

“And she’s earned an evening wrap. How very tal ented!”

“My dear Jean, are you moralizing?”

“Heaven forbid! It would become me poorly, don’t you think?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Anyway, thank you for accusing me of moralizing and not of jealousy.”

“Jealousy? My dear, you cut me out of your life.”

“You were never in my life, dear Alan.”

“Let’s stop being nasty and catch up. What are those two handsome children of yours up to?”

“Children? Yes, I suppose so. Barbara is thirteen. Jazz, films, and horses. There seems to be something valid underneath all that, but when and where I don’t know. As for Tom, well, he’s just beautiful. Almost six teen, six feet, and the apple of my eye, if you must know. I adore him. He has brains and character and looks, not his father’s, I may say.”

“I would say you’ve found a substitute.”

“For whom?” she asked coldly.

“For the fisherman.”

“You do hate him, don’t you?”

“Don’t you, Jean?” he asked her.

She stared at him, shuddering inwardly at the thought of being married to this man who sat across the table from her. What an aimless, mindless, contemptible crea ture he was! And how strange that in all the years she had known him, she had never passed judgment upon him. Yet he amused her, and she could talk to him and

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spend time with him without being bored—and of course she was not married to him, which was the deci sive factor.

“Why should I hate him?” she wondered aloud.

“He keeps you prisoner.”

“Or do I keep him prisoner? Think about it, Alan.”

“Why, I can’t imagine. You are still the most beauti ful and engaging woman in San Francisco. And by the way, he does occasionally escape.”

“Oh?”

“You do not know about the incident at Harry’s bar?”

“You mean that wretched speakeasy? What inci dent?”

“As I hear it, your husband wrecked the place a few weeks ago.

Became offensive and they tried to throw him out. Five or six of them. He put two of them in the hospital and got himself beat up and arrested. It took Sunny Jim in person to get him out of it.”

“And when was this?”

“About two weeks ago from what I hear.”

“Two weeks ago,” she said slowly, thinking of the scar on his cheek and the supposed auto accident. “Six men—really? My dear Alan, what would you do if six men attacked you?”

“I would not become offensive in a speakeasy.”

“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. But if six men—or two men— attacked you?”

“I’d yell for help.”

“You would,” she said.

Dan sat in front of the fire and stared into the flames. He was sitting in the room that was called a library at times and a study at other times, with a wall of books he had not read, with half a dozen expensive oil paint ings on the walls, paintings he had not

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selected and was totally indifferent to, and he was engaged in a sort of introspection—a process somewhat unusual for a man who was not greatly introspective. His thoughts were confused and aimless, and if he had possessed the con cept, he might have been asking himself who he was and where he was. But he lived in a time prior to the public airing of that question, and it never occurred to him that he did not know who we was.

Yet the aching desire simply to be pressed in upon him, and he found his memories in the flames. The mo ments with May Ling stood out most sharply; they ex isted; they were etched out of the confusion: the tiny house on Willow Street which exhibited in every corner the imprint of her personality, a day when they walked hand in hand on Ocean Beach, an evening on Tele graph Hill, next to Coit Tower, with the whole incredible panorama of San Francisco spread beneath them, the luau in Hawaii and the days on the boat when they sailed in the Islands. The memories stabbed painfully, yet they were real and everything else was an illusion.

He became conscious of someone else in the room, and he glanced up to see Jean. It was quite late, past eleven o’clock. He had dined out and come home to what appeared to be an empty house. Now Jean ap peared wearing a pale green negligee under a robe of white lace. He had learned what things cost; the bill for the robe and negligee would be at least five hundred dollars.

“Hello, Dan,” she said, dropping onto the couch where he sat.

“You look very lonely.”

“It’s part of being alone, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.” She reached over and touched the scar on his cheek. “It healed nicely. I think the scar is rather cosmetic.”

“I could live without it,” Dan said.

“I heard about the fight at Harry’s bar. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

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“I don’t know. A drunken barroom brawl isn’t the happiest kind of thing. I guess we’re used to lying to each other.”

“I haven’t had to lie. You never question anything I do.”

“Why should I?”

“We’re married, Dan. We’ve been married a long time.”

He nodded. “I wonder sometimes how many people are married the way we are?”

“Quite a few.”

“It’s harder when you’re poor. Money greases the skids, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been poor.”

“Were you disgusted with me?” he asked. “Or are you past that?”

“No. I thought it was rather wonderful—six men against one.”

“Only five. No, it wasn’t wonderful. It was stupid and vicious— on my part.”

“The strange thing is, you drink so little.” When he made no reply to this, she said, “You know, I found a flask in Tom’s room.

Filled with that rotgut they sell.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I threw it away.”

“You didn’t say anything to him?”

“You might.”

“I barely know him,” Dan said bitterly.

“He’s a nice boy, Danny.”

It was the first time she had called him Danny in years. He looked at her curiously, realizing that until this moment he had not seen her, only a woman in a green negligee and a white lace robe, but not herself. Now, seeing her in the low lamplight, the fire casting its play of light and shade on her face, he remembered her—as if time had never touched her. Yet the longing, the hunger for her, the ache inside of him whenever he looked at her—that was gone. He was married to a strange woman he had never known or caressed or

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kissed. He was empty, used up and depleted, and his only desire was that she should go away and leave him to stare into the fire.

“Danny,” she said softly, “come to bed with me.”

He stared at her, unable to conceal his astonishment.

“I know.” She smiled. “It’s been a long time.”

“Just like that—come to bed with me, Danny?”

“How else?”

“Jesus Christ, I don’t know. Ask me who I am. Or do you go to bed with strangers?”

“What a rotten thing to say!”

“O.K. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But you did.”

“Oh, what the hell! It’s going to become a fight, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“I don’t know what I want. I’m no use to you, Jean. In bed or out of bed.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you’re a bastard?”

“It has occurred to me. Yes.”

A week later, Thomas Seldon Lavette, age fifteen and a half, was preparing to leave for his second year at the Groton School for boys in Massachusetts. His father and mother were to drive him to Oakland, where he would take the train for the East. His trunk had gone on ahead, and he was sitting in his room dressed in gray flannels and a blue blazer, bolting his tennis racket frame, when his father entered the room. Tom was a tall, slender boy, six feet in height, with blue eyes and blond hair. He had a narrow, handsome face and good skin that had escaped the acne that attacked so many boys of his age. Dan always felt uneasy in his presence, prey to a sense of strangeness and inferiority. It was dif ficult for

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him to communicate, and in all truth he had seen little of the boy during the past five years and al most nothing of him during the past twelve months, when he had been either away at school or playing ten nis at the club—the San Francisco Golf Club where Dan rarely appeared—or riding with his sister and their friends.

Now Dan stood in his room, awkward, wishing he had not left this until now and trying to work out how to say what he felt he must say.

“Time to go, Dad?” Tom asked him.

“Almost. I want to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot.”

“The flask of bootleg booze your mother found in your room.”

“She threw it away. The flask cost twelve dollars.”

“Don’t you think you’re a little young to drink that rotgut?” Dan asked him.

“It wasn’t rotgut. It was good whiskey.”

“You’re not sixteen yet.”

“I don’t drink that much. All the fellows carry a flask. So I had one. So what?”

“You don’t see anything wrong with it?”

“No.”

“I do. I think it stinks.”

“You would.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only that your notions of morality are most pecu liar.”

“I would still like to know what you mean.”

“That’s all I’m going to say.” He went back to tight ening the bolts on the tennis racket frame.

“God damn it,” Dan said, “when I ask you a ques tion, I expect an answer. Don’t tell me that’s all you’re going to say. I happen to be your father.”

“You happen to be.”

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“Now what in hell does that mean?”

“I should be grateful for that damn flask!” the boy cried, his voice rising to the edge of hysteria. “Without it, a year could go by and you wouldn’t speak to me. When did you last talk to me about anything? Why don’t you ever tell me I do something right? Why don’t you tell me it makes a difference if I’m alive or dead? Because it doesn’t make any difference! Not to you!”

Shaken by the outburst, Dan stared at his son, plead ing inwardly for the boy’s love, thinking,
My God, you’re my son, my own flesh and
blood. Give me a chance. Talk to me with love. Let me talk to you. Tell me
how. I don’t know how. God Almighty, I don’t know how.
Every muscle in his body strained toward the boy with the desire to embrace him, to take the boy in his arms, yet he could not, any more than he could find words to say. He stood there for perhaps a minute while the boy held the tennis racket in his shaking hands; then Dan turned and left the room.

During the drive to the railroad station, he was silent, as was his son.

The Marin County Players, an unpaid group of amateur acting enthusiasts under the direction of Dameon Fenwick, presented three performances of
Romeo and Ju liet
at the high school auditorium.

Martha played Juliet, and Stephen Cassala, who had heard about the per formance from Mark, managed to be there for two out of the three evenings. For the first performance, he sat in the audience and watched and then left quietly. The second time, he made his way backstage and managed to have a few words with Martha. He told her in no uncertain terms, with an air of sophisticated backlog knowledge, that she was the best Juliet he had ever seen. It was quite true; he had never seen the play be fore, so he might have said

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with equal truth that she was the worst. Martha, still in make-up, high on her per formance and flattered that this handsome friend of her father’s, an older man—Stephan was thirty-two—had seen fit to make the trip to Sausalito just to see her per form, threw her arms around Stephan and kissed him.

“What a dear man you are!” she exclaimed. “Did you really think I was good?”

“Splendid. Absolutely splendid.”

“Oh, I needed that so badly. You don’t know what you’ve done for me. Ten days from now, I’m leaving for Hollywood, and, Steve, I’m scared.”

“Hollywood? But why?”

“Because that’s where an actress must be. The only place.

There’s nothing here. I would curl up and die if I had to stay in this place.”

“But you’re an actress, not one of those idiots in film.”

“Steve, don’t you know what’s happening? Silent pic tures are finished. Everyone says so. In another year or two, every motion picture will be a talkie. And I can talk.”

For the next three or four days, Stephan wracked his mind for a valid reason to go to Sausalito. He was filled with guilt and confusion, compounded by the arrival of his infant son and the bliss of his wife, Joanna. She was totally submissive and totally content. She no longer suggested that they move out of the house at San Mateo; indeed, she dreaded the thought of being separated from Rosa and Maria, and, now that she had a son, she felt that her existence was justified. She never ques tioned the nights that Stephan spent in San Francisco. Her husband was soft-spoken, gentle, and kind to her. She asked for no more, and thereby condemned him to the tortures of guilt.