Authors: Howard Fast
"Oh, no. No. Look, kid, I'm not an old man. You must not feel sorry for me. God damn it, no! I won't have that! Do you know when my life began to make sense, not much sense, but some sense?"
Joe shook his head.
"When I got enough guts to do what I wanted to do, what I had to do, when I was able to walk out of that house on Russian Hill in San Francisco and throw it away and want no part of it. Being a fishing hand—that's all right. I had to breathe a little. I could have dug ditches or cleaned toilets. It would still let me breathe a little. So if you want to go to college and medical school, you go. If you want to dig ditches, dig ditches. As long as you know what you have to do. It took me too long to find out."
After dinner that evening, after Joe had gone up to his room, leaving Dan and May Ling alone in the living room, May Ling asked Dan, "What did you say to Joe?"
"We talked."
"I'm glad. It changed you, both of you, I mean the way you are with each other."
"You noticed that?"
"Wouldn't I?" May Ling smiled.
"You're a damn smart Chinese lady."
"Thank you, Danny. Not for deciding that I'm smart, but for talking to him. Are you going down to San Pedro tonight? It's such a cold, wet night. I can't bear the thought of your going out on that boat."
"I'm not going."
"Oh?"
"I asked Pete Lomas for a week off, without pay." When she made no comment, Dan said, "We can afford it."
"Of course we can." Then she added, "We're not poor. It's time you had a vacation."
"I'm not taking a vacation."
"What is it, Danny?" she asked gently. "Do you want it again?"
"Do I want what?"
'The power and the glory."
"No. I want enough money to send the kid to medical school. Pete offered to sell me a half share in the boat. I don't want that, either. He's getting too old to fish. So am
I."
"We have enough money. My father—"
"I won't take your father's money. It may not seem like it, but Joe is my son."
May Ling rose and walked over to him and kissed him. "Dear Danny," she said, "I love you very much. Do whatever you have to do."
"That's what I said to the kid."
"I suppose it's all you can say to anyone. Come to bed now."
They had started upstairs when they heard the car pull into the driveway. They paused, and then the doorbell rang.
"It's eleven o'clock," May Ling said. She waited on the staircase while Dan went down into the living room, turned on the lights, and opened the door. Barbara stood there, smiling wanly. Dan stared at her, trying to make a reference of time and place, and then she was in his arms. He held her tightly, wordlessly. May Ling came down and closed the door behind her.
Then Dan let go of her, and she turned to May Ling and took her hand in both of her own, and said, "Dear darlings, both of you. I can't believe I'm here. I drove all the way down here from San Francisco and never stopped for anything but gas, and I kept having the nightmare that you wouldn't be here and the house wouldn't be here, because nothing ever stays the way it is—and now I'm starved. I haven't eaten all day."
It was past midnight. They sat in the kitchen, Barbara and Dan and May Ling, and for an hour Barbara had eaten her fill and narrated the history of her life during the six weeks since she had left Sarah Lawrence College. "So here I am," she said, "and every day since I got back to California I told myself that I would come down here to see you, and that's simply the way it was. I sat in my car outside that hateful house, and then I began to drive, and I just kept on driving. I should have come before, but each day I worked in the soup kitchen, it became more and more the center of my existence, and now I won't go back to John Whittier's house. I'll never go back there. That's over."
"Do you have any money?" Dan asked her.
"That makes no difference," May Ling said quickly. "She doesn't need money to stay here with us."
"I have a hundred dollars or so in my purse. That's left over from what I got for Sandy. You do forgive me for that," she said to Dan. "It's rotten to sell a gift—she was so beautiful—but I had to. Anyway, I have an allowance of forty dollars a week. The bank takes care of that. They send it to me, or I can pick it up there."
"You're still under age," Dan said. "Jean could cut off the allowance."
"She wouldn't do that. Mother's not vindictive."
"To what end?" May Ling asked. "Barbara's old enough to live alone."
"It's not that simple. Jean is Whittier's wife, and sooner or later, someone's going to uncover Barbara at that soup kitchen. That will make one hell of a front-page story, and they'll both hit the ceiling. Are you going back there?" he asked his daughter.
"I have to," Barbara said. "I can't walk out of it now. As crazy as it sounds, my forty dollars a week and whatever else I add to it keeps that place going. Oh, they get other food, but not enough. You can't imagine how poor those men are, how hungry. I know the union has other kitchens, but this one is my own burden."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I keep asking myself that. I feel guilty, but why doesn't Tom feel guilty? No, it's not only guilt. It's because, because now everything is very real. I romanticize it, but believe me, daddy, I know where I am and I know what I'm doing. I don't look at it through rose-colored glasses. Those longshoremen are crude and ignorant and very often nasty, and I'm not even sure I like them or being around them. But they're right, and they're fighting for their lives, and that waterfront is a filthy slave market—and I am not talking out of hearsay. For almost six weeks, I've been there and watched it and listened to them. Do you know what the shapeup is?"
Dan nodded.
"Of course you do. Well, they're not nature's noblemen. A lot of them are just drifters and plain bums, but they're human, and they work on the docks because there's no work anywhere else. Well, they shape up on the docks at dawn, even before six o'clock in the morning, and they stand there shivering in the cold until the foreman comes to hire his gang. And he takes those who kick back to him out of the pitiful few dollars they earn, and sometimes they don't pay in money but with a brass check, which the longshoreman has to cash in some wretched bar. And every bartender is a nickel man—"
"What's that?" May Ling asked.
"It means that the bartender takes a nickel out of every dollar's worth of the brass check he cashes, and he won't take the brass check unless the longshoreman buys a drink first, and the trick is to get them drinking. When it's over, they have nothing, and their wives and kids can starve. And each day it's the same, shape up and pray to God you'll be lucky enough to find a day of work, even for a brass check. And if they're lucky enough to be paid in real money, they can work nine or ten hours for four dollars. They talk to me. They tell me about men who have dropped dead from exhaustion. There's the loading hook, and they have to keep up with that hook, without even the time off to empty their bladders. You know, the people from the bakery union bring us their stale bread. I've seen longshoremen empty the tin bowls of stew we cook for them into tin cans they bring with them. All they eat is the two slices of bread each man gets. The rest goes home to feed their kids. So I'm not being romantic, am I? When I think of the Embarcadero now, I always think of it as they do, in one single phrase: the shithole of creation. And the ships tied up there belong to John Whittier and my mother."
"Suppose they belonged to me," Dan said. "Some of them did once. How would you feel then?"
Barbara thought about it for a while. "They were your ships once?"
"Some of them. I didn't use the shapeup. I used steady gangs. They worked better that way."
"If they were your ships," Barbara said, "I don't think I'd feel much different."
"The point is that you're Jean's daughter and Jean is Whittier's wife. It has to explode. Do you want that?"
"I don't care."
"What about college?"
"I don't know whether I want to go back. I really don't know."
"I want you to go back," Dan said.
"Daddy, listen to me. I'm not the same, and I don't think I'll ever be the same again. I don't truly know who I am or what I want, but I can't imagine myself back there at Sarah Lawrence."
"I think," May Ling said, "that we're all too tired to imagine anything properly. I think, Danny, you should call Whittier and tell him that Barbara is here, and then we should go to bed. We'll open a cot for you in the living room, Barbara. Is that all right?"
66
HOWARD FAST
"I'm so tired I could sleep on the floor."
"Did you know," Joe said to Barbara, "that to read and write Mandarin properly, one must know at least five thousand ideographs?"
"Well, that letter you sent me at college—"
"Full of errors."
"Yes, that's what Mr. Ming said."
"Who's Mr. Ming?"
"A laundryman in Yonkers."
"Oh, no."
"But he was the only one who could translate it, Joe." She burst out laughing while he stared at her tragically. "Oh, I'm sorry, Joe." She threw her arms around him and held him as he tried to pull away from her. "No, I won't let go until you say you forgive me."
"O.K. But don't laugh."
"Only because you're trying so hard to impress me, and the fact is that I am enormously impressed. Valedictorian. Chinese. Mandarin. Medical school. You're so smart it terrifies me, and you're one of the few boys I know who is at least five inches taller than I am."
"You're laughing at me again."
"I am not."
They were in his grandfather's rose garden. There, in a space of a few hundred square feet, Feng Wo had created a controlled wilderness of more than thirty varieties of roses—hybrid teas, Chinese tea-scented roses, evergreen and Polyantha, and manicured hedges of rugosa backed by frames of burning red ramblers. Now, in the early morning, the wet blooms gave off a powerful, heady fragrance that made Barbara feel that she had indeed awakened into a kind of a dream world.
"Do you know," Joe said, "I saw you once long ago. I guess I was only ten years old. That would have made you thirteen. We were still living in San Francisco, and I walked all the way to the house on Russian Hill and stood there, across the street."
"Then you knew where we lived?"
"A kid knows everything. They don't understand that. I must have stood there for almost an hour, and then you came out and got into the car. A big Rolls. You had a chauffeur who wore a gray uniform. You were wearing a white fur coat, and you had long hair then. I thought you
were the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. I think I fell in love with you, and I was very disturbed by the notion of being in love with my own sister."
'That's the nicest thing I ever heard."
"It's all crazy, Barbara. I can't get used to the idea. This is the third time in my life that I've seen you. It makes no sense. And now, if you don't go back to the Whittier place, what will you do?"
"How do you know I won't go back?"
"I sat on the stairs last night and heard the whole thing."
"Why didn't you come down?"
"I don't know. I was in my pajamas. I don't know. I suppose it was none of my business, but I heard it all. I think you're great. I wish you'd stay here—at least for a while, at least long enough for us to get to know each other a little."
"I'll come back. I promise you."
"Don't get hurt. Please. Don't let anything happen to you."
She kissed him impulsively. "You are absolutely darling, and I'm just glad that you're the way you are. Nothing will happen to me, Joe—except that I may grow up a little."
A few minutes later, May Ling called them into the house for breakfast. They were all at the kitchen table together, except for So-toy, who was very old-fashioned and would not sit down until after the men were fed. Feng Wo surrendered his Oriental inscrutability and responded with unconcealed delight to this tall, lovely, rosy-cheeked woman who was his beloved Dan Lavette's daughter, and Dan himself sat there, entranced with joy that these two children of his were together in the same house at the same table, chatting so easily with each other. In May Ling's mind, Jean had always been the "snow lady," her own somewhat malicious definition. May Ling was a very wise and compassionate woman, and now she fought down any impulse to resent Barbara or to see in her anything more than a physical resemblance to her mother. It was not easy. She forced herself to be very gentle, very concerned, begging Barbara to remain with them for at least a few days.
"I have a small study," Feng Wo said, "which I really do not need. My daughter considers me a scholar because
I have published some translations from the Chinese. Let us turn it into a bedroom. You will be very comfortable."
"That's so kind. Thank you," Barbara said. "But I must go back. I've taken on a job that may make no sense to any of you, but I must finish it."