Deep Purple (34 page)

He halted in front of the wooden steps, and she sprang from the car. “
Your company leaves a lot to be desired!” she gritted and slammed the car door. She heard the car screech off as she rushed up the steps. Once inside, she leaned against the door, breathless . . . weak . . . and hating Nick Godwin more than ever.

CHAPTER 45

W
hen the following Saturday came, Amanda half expected Nick to return to the Copper Queen Restaurant and was so edgy that she dropped a plate in the kitchen and later spilled wine on a tablecloth. "What’s wrong with you, Amanda?" Annie demanded, who was on break when Amanda rushed into the kitchen to get a clean tablecloth. She stubbed out her cigarette. “What’s happened to Miss Cool?"

“
Nothing,” Amanda snapped, irritated that she could let the thought of Nick unnerve her so, and hurried back through the swinging doors.

It was understandable, she told herself, that she would feel so helpless before Nick. Her childhood had been one of grandiose dreams
—of revenge and possession. And none of them had come to pass. She was still a poverty-encircled girl from the wrong side of the tracks . . . and Nick Godwin was Nick Godwin. The Godwins’ name in Arizona implied wealth—land, cattle, mines, the very substance of Cristo Rey and the state.

Even Lars, a giant of a Swede from Michigan, noted her preoccupation. He waited each weeknight to walk her home after the restaurant closed at ten, a deed for which her father was grateful. If she had worked in the Brewery Gulch, where rowdin
ess was the order of the day, she would have been more worried about the walk, but the Copper Queen area was perfectly safe.

Lars caught her shoulders and turned her to face him beneath a streetlamp. “
What is it, Amanda?” he asked in his thick English. “You don’t even half listen to what I’m saying.”

What
was
he saying? “I'm sorry, Lars. I guess it’s been a long, long day.”

He sighed. “
Only what I been trying to tell you for the last year now.”

She made her voice gentle. “
I’ve told you before, I don’t . . .” Lars released her and jammed his fists in his pocket. “I know—you won’t marry me because you don't wanna be poor the rest of your life. But tonight is different, Amanda. I was promoted today—to head foreman!”

His voice held such pride that it was difficu
lt for her to dampen his excitement over his news. Like her, he had his dreams. He already held a position on the local International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and planned to be mine superintendent one day.

And he had been awfully good to her
father. When Phelps Dodge laid Taro off because he could no longer do a miner’s full day’s work, Lars had arranged for him to get a job in the shower rooms, laundering the soiled towels and clothing stiff with mine dust. The free showers for the workers and freshly laundered work clothing was another appeasement by the company to the miners’ union.

She knew she could not lead Lars on, let him believe anything could ever come of their relationship. She laid her hand on his sleeve. “
That’s wonderful. I told you that you would make something of yourself one day.”

He turned eagerly on her. “
Then you'll do it—you'll marry me, Amanda dear?”

Slowly she shook her head. “
No, I can't, Lars." She hurried on. "As much as you want to become something, somebody, I want to escape the mines altogether—the pollution, the hopelessness, the raw towns. I want to rise out of my hole, also.”

He grimaced. "Is it I
’m not good enough for you, for a Jap’s daughter?"

She gasped. Lars was one of the few who knew, yet she had never expe
cted prejudice from him. But then she had discovered that the Cornish looked down on the bohunks, and the bohunks on the greasers.

He saw the pain in her eyes and grabbed her. “
I'm sorry, Amanda. I didn’t mean it that way. But I want you so, and it’s not fair. It’s hell being so close to you and no . . . is there someone else?’’ he asked fiercely.

She looked up into that Nordic face, usually so placid. “
Has your candle been dimming?” she teased, hoping to lighten the mood. There was an old miner’s superstition that if the miner’s lamp flickered, his sweetheart was cheating on him. More than one miner suddenly hurried home, presumably ill, so great was the belief in the superstition.

An embarrassed grin twitched his lips. “
I guess I play the fool, eh—
spela narr
? Come on, I best get you home, or your father will start swinging the samurai sword.”

He climbed the rickety steps to her shanty with her, and she kissed him lightly at the door. She knew he wanted to grab her and plant kisses all over her face, but he
ducked his head shyly and retreated down the steps. Watching him, she felt a pang of pity for the hopelessness of their relationship. Mining was Lars’s life; it consumed him as Cristo Rey did her.

Inside, she quietly crept through the dark to her side of t
he room, but her father’s nagging cough told her he was still awake. He never did let himself sleep until she returned, although he rose every morning at four. “Have you taken your medicine, Father?" she asked through the darkness.

“
That colored water? No!” She could hear the humor in his voice and did not chastise him. They both knew he had the miner’s disease, every miner did, but neither she nor her father would mention it to one another.

Once she had mentioned it, the year before, pleading with him to s
ee a doctor. He had looked right through her. Later, over dinner, he had said abruptly, “There is nothing to cure it”—“it” was his euphemism, for he would not deign to give the disease the power of a name. “I can quit the mines, but I shall nevertheless die. All of us die one day. So I shall work as long as my legs will carry me. Now do not mention this ugly thing again.”

After she undressed and stretched out on her mat, her father asked, "Will you marry Lars, daughter?"

After a moment she said, “No, Father. I want more from life than what a mere man can offer.”

Her father chuckled. “
In some ways, Amanda, you’re still immature compared to the other girls your age. They know more of men, understand better the opposite sex.”

But it was mere men, Amanda thought
bitterly, who two weeks later laid off her father because the union voted that no Orientals and no Mexicans could be employed. Lars tried to sway the workers against the ordinance but was unsuccessful. The emotional suffering her father experienced was greater than the occasional pain that nibbled away at his lungs. Taro, who had been so muscular, so strong and independent, who had taken care of her mother and raised herself, was rapidly showing and feeling his age.

He even had trouble using the chopsticks
as skillfully on the rice she set before him. “Father,” she teased, “you’re going to be forced at last to eat like a Caucasian.”

He smiled, but she could see the misery in his soul. She slammed down her own chopsticks. “
We're not going to let this defeat us! We’ll make the layoff work to our benefit!”

“
You sound like your mother,” he said quietly. “Her determination was both her rose and her thorn.”

“
But I am not my mother!”

She said no more, yet she could not help but think that she had let her emotions g
et in the way of what she wanted. She would not let her bitterness for the Godwin family or her love for Cristo Rey blind her to her priorities . . . climbing out of the mining society and making something of herself.

“
What do you suggest we do?” her father asked later that night, and she knew how rare it was for the Oriental male to accept that a female could think beyond the realm of children and home—not just the Oriental, she reminded herself, recalling some of Lars's chauvinistic attitudes toward her independence.

“
We’re moving to Tucson, Father. It’s large enough that I may be able to find some sort of secretarial job there to support us. And I can begin classes at the university in the evening.” She pressed on. “It’ll be tough, I know. We’ll probably live under worse conditions than here for a while, but at least we’ll have hope in Tucson.”

Taro
’s lips curved in a slight smile. “If you were anyone else, I would say you wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance. But maybe . . .” His stooped shoulders shrugged with his Oriental’s fatalism. “Maybe there you will find your karma.”

CHAPTER 46

A
manda found a house for rent at the edge of downtown Tucson in the
Barrio Libre
—the “free neighborhood” where lived the Mexicans and Chinese. The adobe was not much better than the shanty in Bisbee, but it did have two rooms curtained off, and the outhouse was much easier to reach than the one that had clung to the steep incline behind the shanty.

Getting a
ccepted into college was a little more difficult. She had an excellent transcript from Bisbee’s Central High, but the university’s counselor who reviewed her application wore a dubious expression.

“
Is there a problem?" she asked the bespectacled man as his face furrowed further.

He looked at her and dropped his gaze back to the sheaf of papers he seemed to shuffle aimlessly. “
Well, Miss Shima, you must realize we don’t have very many Oriental students enrolled in our curriculum. And the fact that you are opting for a career in law, which really is a man’s field, well . . .”

"What you
’re saying, Mr. Browne, is that I have two strikes against me already—my race and my sex?” she asked curtly.

“
No—no. But you must realize that while you do have very high grades, we can accept only a limited number of applicants. And we have no proof that, uh, you can afford the tuition and cost of the education. If you drop out we will have wasted space we could give to another.”

“
I won’t drop out, Mr. Browne, and I will have a job to support the cost of my education.” And support herself and her father, she did not add aloud.

“
You have a job now?”

“
I will have a job.”

Such a rash statement. In spite of the typing course she had taken in high school, she found that the offices whe
re she applied for a secretary's position had just hired a secretary only hours earlier. After days of looking, she tossed the want ads in the Armory Park trash barrel and caught a bus back to the university, spending precious money for the fare.

When she
reappeared at the counselor’s door, Mr. Browne glanced up and sighed, looking as if he were facing his nemesis. She crossed the room to stand before his desk. “Mr. Browne, your bulletin board advertises part-time jobs for students, I want one.”

“
You won’t take my advice, will you—go up to the State Teacher’s College at Tempe?”

“
No.” There she was—a female Oriental, her stomach knotting with hunger, begging for a job—and trying to behave in an assertive manner. “It’s only a two-year college, and I want a full education.”

He sighed again. “
Sit down. Miss Shima.” He got up and closed the door. The poor man’s shoulders were slumping when he returned to his seat. “As you said, you’ve two strikes against you. There’s no use pretending that your race isn’t going to hold you back. You and I both know it.”

He glanced up from beneath the bushy brows that lay atop the wire rims of his spectacles. “
But I’ll deny making that statement if you quote me.”

She sat rigidly, silently, and he continued, leaning forward on the de
sk, hands clasped. “If you'd be willing to change your last name and indicate that you're a Caucasian on application records, I can assure you I’d be able to find you employment somewhere.”

“
No. I won’t be robbed of the only thing I have left.”

His fingers
clasped and unclasped. After a moment, he said, “There’s a job available cleaning the dormitory bathrooms and toilets. Are you interested?"

The maid’s job did not earn enough money to enable Amanda to remain in college and support herself and her father. “I shall become the proverbial Oriental and take in laundry,” he told her with a wry smile as they counted out the last of their change they kept in a jade vase. It was only the beginning of her second semester at the university, and after she bought her books, there was simply no money left for food.

“
No, Father, we’ll sell the vase. That should keep us for some time.”

“
And then what shall we sell, my daughter?” he asked, his veined hand sweeping out to indicate the dismal barrenness of their adobe. “Since I left the mines my health is much better. There is no reason why I should not work. And I’d be much happier.”

Although her father was approaching his seventy-second birthday, she
knew he would be happier working. But getting started in the laundry business was slow. They scraped by. That winter things were so bleak financially that Amanda was reduced to putting a playing card in the bottom of one of her oxfords to cover the hole in its sole.

That same winter she and her father took a third member into their household
—a burr-haired mutt who had been following her when she made the cleaning rounds of the dormitories and sorority houses. The dog would sit patiently outside each building until Amanda reappeared with her mop and pail of cleaning utensils.

“
We’ll call him Trouble," she told her father the afternoon she brought the mongrel home. "He looks as half-starved as we are—and will only mean more trouble. But I want him.”

During th
ose lean years, which seemed to get only worse when war broke out in Europe toward the end of 1939, Amanda would read in the
Arizona Daily Star's
society page of how the decadent rich lived and think that it was like reading a fairy tale. There were the Little Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, who appeared almost weekly in royal photos now that their uncle, Edward VIII, had abdicated the throne for "the woman I love.”

Then there were the glittering publicity photos of New York
’s cafe society and titillating stories of extravaganzas thrown at the Stork Club, El Morocco, and 21 by such personalities as the Red-Hot Mama, Sophie Tucker, and Elsa Maxwell. Did such a world really exist?

What the Arizona wealthy did for amusement
—their balls and charities and scandals—afforded entertainment that was almost fictional for the poverty-stricken people of the state. They were tired of the depressing headlines chronicling the war in Europe or Roosevelt’s latest New Deal agencies to combat the terrible times.

For Am
anda the society columns provided something more, because occasionally she would read tidbits about the Godwins. Most of the new items dealt with Paul, president of the state's leading banking firm, and his wife. “Godwins Return East for the Summer” . . . “Arlene Godwin hosts ball at Cristo Rey for European War Effort.”

Amanda thought Paul
’s wife looked older than he, maybe fifty or so, but later columns whispered of her cancerous illness. And Amanda was sorry, for she thought the woman looked like someone she would have liked.

Sometimes she saw Nick
’s name in print. Though Paul occupied the Stronghold, it was Nick and his arrogance that somehow represented all that Cristo Rey was to her. Once she read that he had escorted one of Tucson’s debutantes to the Winter Ball and another time that he had graduated with the highest score on the Arizona bar exams.

She was not surprised. She knew he was shrewd and ambitious, as indicated by the young women she sometimes saw him with on campus . . . young women with expe
nsive wardrobes and, of course, those all-American features—blond, bright-blue eyes and sunny smiles.

Once or twice she sensed he saw her also, though she could not be certain. It was only a feeling of sudden heat, like the hot flashes that swept over olde
r women—and she would turn and find that he was near, usually walking in another direction with a couple of his friends. But with Nick off campus now, practicing law, she found it easier to concentrate on graduating and preparing for her LSAT exam. The day she received word of her acceptance into law school, she and her father quietly celebrated with a glass of sake.

Then, as 1939 slipped into 1940, both the Godwin brothers made headlines the same week. Tucson was surprised to wake up one morning and read t
hat Roosevelt had appointed one of her sons, Paul Godwin, as his economic adviser. With the article was a photo of a handsome middle-aged man and the announcement that Paul would be leaving shortly for Europe to accompany Prime Minister Chamberlain in his negotiations with Chancellor Adolf Hitler over the German claims on Czechoslovakia.

Paul
’s appointment shared the spotlight with the younger brother, Nick, whose engagement to one of the Boston line of Warrens, Danielle Stirling, was announced three days later. The paper carried a photo of the bride-to-be (a stunning sultry blonde) and what Amanda thought was a nauseating recital of how the handsome pair met—“The divine Danielle and her mother visited the Double U Dude Ranch this previous winter and were introduced to Tucson’s young lawyer through mutual friends. Mrs. Stirling informs us that her cousin, Arthur Sidney Warren, will give her daughter away at the wedding. We Tucsonians will have something to look forward to this fall.”

Amanda felt she knew ever
ything about Nick by the time she finished reading the various columns that appeared that summer detailing his courtship of “Warren’s Niece.” She swore she would not read another word about him, but it was as if he were an obsession with her, and so she would plow through another insipid column describing the novel “crazyjamas” Danielle Stirling wore to the Wild West Hayride Benefit for Crippled Children or the daring strapless gown she modeled at the Pioneers Ball—in order to linger over the sentences about Nick.

Eventually the length and number of those sentences exceeded those written about Danielle, for late that fall, after their wedding (with a last-rose-of-summer theme), Nick announced his candidacy for mayor.

“I will personally mount a campaign against him here in the Barrio,” Amanda told her father as she slowly wadded up the Daily's front page.

Her father set the coal iron on the board with a thud. “
My daughter, will you never learn to accept things you cannot change, or must you singe your wings against the flame like a foolish moth?”

She scratched Trouble between the ears and with a shrug opened the hornbook she should have been studying. “
Everyone must have a goal. And my education and triumph, however small it may be, over the Godwins are my goals. They are the only things that matter to me in life. And you, Father,” she added quickly, lovingly.

“
The first goal is commendable. The second is more than a waste of one’s time, which is more precious than jade. It is self-destroying. There is no room in a heart for both bitterness and love. Like oil and water, they will not mix.”

She wanted to cry out that his proverbs could not apply in a modem world gone mad, but her respect for him held her tongue. She cast down her lashes in the age-old way of the O
riental woman.

And in a way she knew her father was right. But it made it no easier when six months later Nick Godwin was elected by a landslide margin. She told herself it was the combination of the Godwin-Warren names and not the sweeping reforms Nick ha
d promised to carry out.

His name appeared in print quite often after that. And there drifted rumors of the various fortunes he made wheeling and dealing with the bankers and businessmen who were always willing to back his ventures. In the
Arizona Businessman
he candidly and insouciantly admitted to losing a cool thousand every once and a while, but such was his gambler’s devil-may-care charm that Amanda felt he could have been one of Hitler’s cronies and the Arizona populace would still have supported him.

She reminded herself she had priorities over following Nick
’s charismatic career, and finishing law school and passing the bar exam were most important to her at that moment. Nick Godwin and Cristo Rey would keep. And there was the more pressing issue of finding some type of evening employment, for with only a year left for her LL.B., she was now forced to take the rest of her hours in day classes.

She was only too glad to give up the janitorial job and was lucky enough to find within the week an ad for em
ployment at the Casablanca Restaurant—-singing, no less. Since she had no vocal training, only a music-appreciation course in college, she was terribly nervous when she auditioned against two other girls for the final selection.

One was a slinky honey-blonde with a pompadour hair style and the other was a vivacious redhead her own age who belted out
‘‘Tutti Frutti” with such enthusiasm that Amanda’s hopes sank to her toes.

When her time came, she sang a husky rendition of “
Deep Purple.” The crusty manager’s expression never altered; if anything he seemed to bite tighter on his stubby cigar, tilting its smoking tip up closer to his pug nose. The young man at the piano handed Amanda back her sheet music. “Great going!” he whispered with an encouraging wink.

“
But not great enough,” she said, watching the manager amble on bandy legs toward her. Sorry, but you're not the type we’re looking for—it would be the standard reply.

“
You got the job, doll,” he said without removing the cigar from between his nicotine-stained teeth. “Be here at six tomorrow evening—and with something that has a little more pizazz.” He waved the cigar now at her one suit, a blue twill that looked more suitable for church than a supper club.

She could not believe he
r good luck. “Thank you, sir!”

“
Mike’s the name.” He turned to the other two girls, saying, “That’s it, kids. Sorry.”

“
Congratulations,” the young man said and rose from the piano, closing the lid. “How about celebrating over a cup of coffee at the campus cantina?”

She knew she should catch the next bus back to the
Barrio
. Her father would be worried. But she did feel like celebrating. For so long it had been touch and go, doing without lunch, wearing shabby clothes. And now she had landed a good-paying job that would cover the expenses of the last leg of her education. “All right, I'd like that.”

Over coffee in one of the cantina
’s wooden booths she learned that Larry Willis was a senior majoring in economics. “I’m lucky enough to have a CPA firm ready to take me on as soon as I graduate,” he said. “How about you?”

He was a nice-looking young man with sandy hair and warm hazel eyes that made her remember that she was attractive, something she had forgotten in the rush from mops to books to laundry in the eve
ning. “I’m going for my Bachelor of Laws,” she told him.

“
Business or criminal?”

“
Neither—constitutional.”

Larry
’s lips formed a soundless whistle. “You don't take the easy route, do you?”

She smiled. “
It's something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now.”

“
In your spare time,” he quipped. "If you aren’t careful, Mike'll talk you into singing more than four nights a week."

She was caught up in the easy bantering; the time slipped away too quickly, and she had to leave. Larry walked her to the bus stop.
In the dim light of the streetlamp, he took her hand, saying softly, "Goodnight. Amanda. See you tomorrow.”

When she explained to her father that she had found a job, he was no longer so upset that she was three hours late. "You make me a proud father, Ama
nda. Do you see any of the other daughters of the
Barrio’s
families going to college? No, they get married and then have babies.”

“
Or have babies and then get married.” she teased, delighting in shocking him, although she knew she never really did despite his expressions of disapproval. After all, he and her mother had shared the same cabin without the benefit of marriage.

Still, Amanda found it difficult to believe that people then did not experience the same passionate love that young people now did. Obvi
ously, from the stories about the Ghost Lady, her grandmother also knew of that all-consuming love. Maybe one day so would she, though she doubted it. Cristo Rey consumed her as if it were her lover.

“
Things aren’t all that great,” Amanda suddenly wailed, remembering Mike’s last instructions. "I’ve got to have a dressy costume by tomorrow. Father!"

She had nothing appropriate
—all sweaters or blouses and short skirts, something her father deplored until she would halt him, reminding him she had a newspaper clipping with a drawing of her mother in men’s pants and the caption “Female Bandit Masquerades as Male.”

After Amanda rummaged through everything and was wringing her hands in despair, her father came from the front part of the house, holding something beh
ind him. She tilted her head to one side and narrowed her eyes. “All right, Father, what are you hiding?”