Authors: Howard Fast
"Oh, I love your language." May Ling sighed. "All the years I've spent civilizing you."
"Come out and spend a day with me on Terminal Island. One day will uncivilize you."
"I'm sure. Danny, you are a marvelous combination of tycoon, anarchist, and pacifist. Now listen to me."
"I always do."
"Then one time more. When I was twelve years old, and that was not too long ago, there was an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco. They took two Chinese, Sol Lee and David Jo, and they soaked them with gasoline and then they immolated them, burned them like torches."
"I remember," Dan said. "I saw it."
"And so you wrote off all of San Francisco. Human beings couldn't do such a thing."
"Drunken bastards from the Tenderloin."
"And what about the sober bastards who watched?"
"Yeah."
"So you choose between England and Germany," May Ling said gently. "Anyway, I don't think that's the point at all. I've known you a long time, and you can't live if you don't play their game."
"I gave up their game."
"Did you, Danny? We've always been honest with each other. You wanted the shipyard. Joe would have gone to medical school. I have enough savings for that. But you couldn't stay out of it."
"What are you telling me? That I'm a money-hungry sonofabitch?" he demanded angrily.
"Danny, when did money ever mean anything to you? It's not the money, it's Nob Hill. That's the way they measure things here, Danny. That's the way it is."
"And you're telling me I'm no different than I was thirty years ago?"
"Of course you're different, and you're the same, and I loved you so much then and I love you more now, and you're married to a withered old Chinese lady."
"Like hell I ami"
"Then we're not married. I don't care. Just take me to bed. It's been so long."
For Barbara, Los Angeles was not a city but a place. It was the place where her father lived, a place where she could live and work in quiet comfort, where the gentle presence of May Ling and the old lady, her mother, was comforting and reassuring; and she experienced this amorphous feeling more than ever after she returned from San Francisco. She yearned for San Francisco; it was a measured place where one was properly contained and evaluated. She had looked out of the window of her old bedroom in the house on Russian Hill, and all the city lay beneath her, a unit of high places jutting up from the bay, a thing that men had made deliberately and that they cherished and loved. It was a proper city properly divided, the rich in their place, the poor in their place, the social sets defined and walled in. But her yearning was a memory of childhood; she could not stay there or live there; and in the same way, she yearned for Paris, already a hazy dream.
At first it seemed to her that her soul had died with Marcel, that she could never awaken without a moist-eyed awareness of the emptiness in her bed, that she could never laugh or sing or have a feeling of joy again. Even the incident with Bernie Cohen had not lessened the ghost of Marcel. After her return from Germany, Paris had been an empty and desolate city, which she was only too happy to leave. Now, in the tiny study of the house in Westwood, she could hide from the real world and create her own world in the pages of a manuscript. She knew that her situation was a thing of the moment, that she could not think of this as her home, that she could not go on existing without direction. She was full of the memory of love, yet she could not bring herself to stretch out a hand to a man, to find a man, to make a date, to relate to a man. On two occasions, Dan brought one of the young architects from the Maritime Commission home with him. Obviously, he was thinking of Barbara, and her reaction was indifference or cool politeness.
Christmas of 1939 came and went. There was a tree, which May Ling and Barbara decorated, piles of presents, and from the Napa Valley, to stay with them for three days, Sally Levy. Barbara drove down to Union Station to meet her. Joe had attempted a precise description, but Barbara was unprepared for the pretty, slender young woman, her blond hair cut to shoulder length and bobbed across her brows, dressed in a proper gray woolen suit.
Barbara, after watching the girl stand forlornly next to her suitcase, approached her tentatively. "You're not Sally Levy, are you?"
"And you're Barbara," Sally said, throwing her arms around her. "Oh, I'm so glad to see you. I was sure they had forgotten, and this is such a huge station. It's very pretty and Spanish, but huge. You must be Barbara, because you're just as wonderful and beautiful as Joe said you were, and you're really glamorous because of all the great adventures you had, and you know, you're absolutely my idol, and you mustn't laugh at me. Joe always laughs at me."
In the car, she was interested in and enthusiastic about everything—freeways, palm trees, mountains, Barbara's car, the style of the houses—to the point where Barbara felt utterly exhausted before they ever reached Westwood. Sally's mind sputtered like a string of firecrackers. She leaped from subject to subject. She flung out a string of questions about Nazi Germany, and then she was off on the subject of love and romance before Barbara had a chance to answer. "You will read my poems," she said to Barbara. "They're really mine. I used to copy Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Campion and Emily Dickinson because Joe would never know the difference, but then May Ling found me out, and anyway I'm too grown up for that and I write my own now, and they're really very good. Do you think a man and a woman should sleep together before they get married?"
Barbara tried to grapple with this and keep her eyes on the road. "Well, doesn't it depend, Sally, on what kind of a relationship—I mean how old they are—"
"I am too young for anything. Do you realize that, Barbara, I am absolutely too young for anything. I'm surprised that you came for me instead of May Ling. They called May Ling five times before they let me come down here. You would think Joe was some kind of rapist. Did you ever read Havelock Ellis?"
"Good heavens! Did you?"
"Every word. You know, I've necked some, with some of the kids at school. You would understand that. I mean, just to see what it was like. They're idiots, and I hate pimples. Ugh. But I feel that the one man-one woman relationship is most satisfactory. Don't you? I mean when you come right down to it."
"Yes," Barbara said, "you're absolutely right."
Joe was waiting for them, standing in front of the house in Westwood. Sally was out of the car almost before it stopped moving; she ran to Joe and flung her arms around him. He stood there holding her, looking at Barbara hopelessly.
Thus Christmas came and went, and the year 1940 began. The novel Barbara was writing unfolded slowly. She wrote, corrected what she had written, and then as often as not destroyed it. The story was focused on herself: a young American girl leaves college and goes to Paris to study. But even though she had taken up a thread of events that she had already experienced and lived through, it was months before she was able to face this fact. When she did face it at last, she read through the hundred or so pages that she had written with a feeling of unhappiness and distaste. She then said to May Ling, "I've written over a hundred pages and I must have some other opinion. Will you read them, please?"
May Ling read the manuscript in a single evening. Barbara had retreated into her room, where she sat brooding and waiting for a verdict. Finally, the door opened. May Ling came in, put the manuscript on the desk, and sat down.
"You might as well tell me," Barbara said.
"Yes, I intend to."
"It's rotten, isn't it? I want the truth, May Ling. I don't want you to pull any punches. I want the absolute truth."
"I don't intend to lie to you, Bobby. I have too much respect for you to do that. You know, you write very well, solidly and professionally, and I suppose you could finish this story and have it published. A lot worse things have. been published, and people are very curious about Paris in the last years before the war. Your descriptions of Paris are splendid, but your character doesn't exist. She's cut out of cardboard. I know she's you. She has to be you. She may look different and have a different background than you had, but she is yourself. But the reader doesn't know who she is or what she is. Why are you afraid to look at yourself and examine yourself?"
"I'm not!"
"Oh, but you are. You've seen things and you've suffered, and you gave your heart to a man and watched him die, and I know how warm and emotional you are, but this is cold and manufactured. Why don't you write about yourself and out of your own suffering? You must."
"I know what I'm doing," Barbara burst out, on the edge of tears. "You don't have to tell me that. I know what I want to do."
May Ling came out of the room to face Dan's curious stare. "What happened?"
"I'm not sure. I think she'll be all right."
"You told her it was no good."
"I had to."
"Jesus, I wish you hadn't. How can you be sure?"
"I think I'm sure. I had to be honest with her."
After May Ling left, Barbara sat and looked at the manuscript. She sat there for over an hour, staring at it, thinking, hurting, trying to deal with her anger at May Ling. Her first reaction was to accuse May Ling. May Ling hated her, she always had, and this was her moment of revenge. How easy it was to read the agonizing work of months—and then to destroy it with a few clever words! She refused at first to remember her own reaction to what she had written. It took the best part of an hour to return to that and to ask herself whether May Ling should have lied? After all, she had made her own judgment, and she had used May Ling in the hope that May Ling would assure her that her own assessment of her work was worthless;
Slowly, methodically, Barbara began to shred the pages she had written. She filled the wastepaper basket with the torn bits of manuscript. Then she looked at her watch. It was just after 11:00
P.M
. She felt curiously lighthearted as she put a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter and began. By two in the morning she had completed three pages, which she now reread with grim satisfaction.
She decided to go on working. She needed coffee. She went into the kitchen, and there May Ling was, sitting at the kitchen table, an open book in front of her. The coffee was on the stove over a small fire. Barbara sat down beside her, and May Ling poured her a cup of coffee.
"I'm sorry," Barbara said. "I just behaved rotten."
"Or normally for once. You had every right to be angry and hurt and heartsick. Months of work gone down the drain. How else could you feel?"
"Oh, no—no, May Ling. You were right."
"What difference does that make? Barbara dear, must you be a saint? Saints are a fraud. People are the way they are and the way life makes them. You're so filled with guilts and self-judgments and self-denunciations that if you go on this way, you will wipe yourself out of existence. You have nothing to atone for. You did nothing evil to inherit that money."
"But that wasn't why I couldn't take it," Barbara exclaimed.
"Do you know why? Barbara darling, I loathe self-abnegation. There's nothing you've ever done or been that you can't face, and you don't have to be proud or ashamed of it, but just face the fact that it is you, and you are what you are. And if you can do that, the book will be good and your life will be good." May Ling rose. "And with that bit of advice, which I don't follow any too well myself, I'll go to bed."
"May Ling?"
Barbara embraced her, clutched the slender Chinese woman in her arms. "Oh, May Ling, I do love you so! Do you think I'll ever grow up?"
"I do. Yes, indeed I do."
The last yacht to come off the ways at Dan's shipyard was the
Isadora,
which had been built to the order of Richard Dyler, the film star. A hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, it was the best thing Dan had ever built, an oceangoing marvel. It had been anchored off the shipyard to be fitted, but a sudden shortage of parts, the coming into being of a thing called priorities, had put off the completion of the ship for months. At last it was done and tied to the dock at Wilmington, and Dyler had decided to celebrate with what he called a boat-warming party, and he invited Dan to come and bring his wife.
May Ling begged off. Her mother was ill in bed with a bronchial infection, and she told Dan that she couldn't leave her alone. Barbara volunteered to stay with the old woman, but May Ling had seized upon her mother's illness as a reason not to go to the kind of a party where she always felt she was a curiosity and an outsider. Dan said that he had an obligation to attend; Dyler still had a final payment of eighty-two thousand dollars to make, and Dan needed the money. May Ling then suggested that he take Barbara.
"It would be good for her," May Ling said. "She does nothing and goes nowhere and sees no one. She's become totally compulsive about that novel of hers. I think that a break would be the best thing in the world for her."
"I've tried before," Dan said.