I took a cab down the noisy narrow crowded streets to Union Square and got off in front of the awning-covered entrance to the St. Francis Hotel, the place I stayed nearly every time I came to the city. Someone from Albert Craven's office had already brought my bag and checked me in. It was a little past four, and instead of going up to the room, I decided to have a drink in the bar.
Some bars in San Francisco have a regular clientele where everyone knows everyone else; others, like the tourist traps in North Beach, lure wide-eyed, sweaty-palmed visitors to the dull perversions of live sex shows. Whatever intimacies were discussed in the bar just off the marble-columned lobby of the St. Francis remained the private affairs of its patrons. Well-heeled strangers, in the city for business or pleasure or both, used it as a meeting ground; those who spent their life in the city came here to have a drink in the anonymous quiet of a place that never changed.
In the superfluous habit of a lifetime, the bartender wiped down the already gleaming hard-varnished surface of the bar directly in front of me. Thin, of medium height, with a taut, lined face and wavy silver hair, he was a few years either side of seventy. He was always here, behind the bar, as permanent a fixture as the statue of victory high atop the column across the street in the middle of Union Square that celebrated Admiral Dewey's triumph in the Philippines.
“Welcome back,”he remarked as he brought me a scotch and soda. With a different towel he began to wipe the glasses that were standing upside down next to a small stainless steel sink just back of the bar.
“Do you remember everyone who comes in here?”I asked after I had taken a sip.
“You've been coming here a long time,”he replied as he finished drying one glass and picked up another. “Two or three times a year. You always come in late afternoon; you always come in alone; you always take that seat; and you always order a scotch and soda.”He put down the glass he had been working on and proceeded to the next, wiping first the inside, then the outside. “And you never have more than one,”he added.
“You live in the city?”I asked as I took another sip.
“My whole life,”he said, suggesting by the tone of his voice that he would not have wanted it any other way.
“Tell me something. Do you ever get out of the city—go anywhere else?”
His wiry gray-black eyebrows lifted up; his mouth curled down at the corners.
“I have a sister over in Marin. I visit her once in a while,”he said vaguely.
Perhaps because I had such a hard time imagining him anywhere other than behind that bar, or perhaps because I thought I saw a slight hint of amusement in his eyes over what he had just said, I asked him, “How long ago? When was the last time?”
Holding the glass up in front of his eyes, he examined it closely. “Five years ago this summer.”He made it sound like last weekend.
“Why is it that people who are born here, raised here, never want to leave?”
“Why would anyone ever want to leave San Francisco?”he replied with a shrug.
“But the city has changed. It isn't the way it used to be.”
He stopped what he was doing and leaned across the bar.
“If you had lived here as long as I have, you'd know that nothing has changed at all.”He knitted his brow and for a moment stared down at my glass. “I've been married to the same woman for fifty years,”he said, lifting his gaze. “She doesn't look the same way she did when I married her, but she hasn't changed: She's still a mystery. You see what I mean,”he said as he turned away. A woman sitting alone at the end of the bar needed another drink. She did not know it yet, but he did.
W
e drove across the Bay Bridge, away from the city, down on the lower deck where the only view from between the steel girders was of Berkeley to the left and Oakland—the there that Gertrude Stein claimed had no there—to the right. When you drove toward it on the upper deck, you could see the city stretching out from the Golden Gate on the right, running over the hills and down to the bay, beckoning to you like the end of every rainbow you had ever seen and every dancing dream you had ever had. It was another of the great vanities about San Francisco: the belief that after you left there was nothing else worth seeing and nothing else worth remembering.
Halfway across the blue-gray bridge, we passed through the tunnel that cut through the top of Yerba Buena Island and came out the other side, still high above the gray waters of the bay.
“You remember Grandpa?”Bobby asked, his right wrist draped casually over the top of the steering wheel.
I was watching out the window at the way the sunlight glanced off the silver surface of the water far below.
“A little,”I replied, thinking back to when I had been a very small boy. “I remember the chair he used to sit in, and I remember his knees, and I remember his hand when he would reach down and pat me on the head or give me a shiny half dollar.”
I turned and looked across at my cousin. “I don't have any memory at all of what he looked like, no memory of my own, nothing except the photographs I've seen.”
“He told me a story once when we were crossing the bridge,”said Bobby with a faraway look in his eye. “Two friends of his, guys he had known since they were kids together, died—right about here,”he said, gesturing with his hand toward the bridge. “It was back in l937, four years before the war. They were pouring cement into the piers that anchor the bridge. It was the longest bridge ever built—did you know that? Everyone who needed a job wanted to work on it. You did what you were told and you never complained, not if you wanted to keep working. They were pouring cement and something happened: The planks they were standing on gave way, or one of them slipped and the other one tried to grab him and fell with him—no one knows, or if they knew they didn't talk about it. They fell in— and this was the part I never forgot—everyone else kept working, kept pouring cement. Tw o men are falling, buried under an avalanche of wet concrete stone, and no one even tried to stop it. There was no reason to stop it. They were dead as soon as they fell. When Grandpa told me that, I kept trying to imagine what those two men he had grown up with must have felt, knowing that nothing could save them, that they had maybe two or three seconds left to live, two or three breaths left to take.”
Bobby looked across at me, a rueful smile on his mouth. “I remember the look on Grandpa's face when he told me. There wasn't any sadness, there wasn't any regret; there sure as hell wasn't any fear—not on his face! I don't think he was afraid of anything. No, it was more like he was proud of them, not because they died, but because they knew the risk, knew that one misstep meant death, and they were tough enough to do it anyway.”
He paused, his gaze fixed straight ahead, as we left the bridge and began to navigate a maze of interlocking freeways. Slowly, he shook his head and emitted a low, reluctant laugh. He glanced at me, a boyish grin on his face.
“Can you imagine if that happened today? It would be all over the television news, front-page story in the morning paper. There'd be an investigation, lawsuits: The thing would go on for years. But back then—just keep pouring the cement. There was a bridge to be built. I'm not sure it wasn't a better way to live.”
Threading his way through one interchange and then another, Bobby reached the Caldecott Tunnel and then, on the other side, got off at the Orinda exit. Cutting back under the freeway, he followed a narrow two-lane road through a three-block village. Circling past the country club, the road crossed in front of a small reservoir, disappeared around a corner, and then climbed into the oak-covered hills. About a mile later, the road dipped suddenly, careened off to the left, banked abruptly back to the right, and then, just beyond an intersection, banked back again. Bobby turned across the road through a pair of open gates and down the driveway. He parked in a garage connected by a tile-roofed breezeway to the house.
I stepped out of the car and onto the driveway. The air was fresh with the scent of the eucalyptus trees that ran along the edge of the road just beyond the adobe walls that circled the grounds. The house was a rambling two-story Spanish-style structure with white stucco walls covered with ivy that must have been growing there for years. It had been tied back and trained to grow around the windows, which were covered with an elaborate black iron grillwork of their own.
“You should have seen this place. Nobody had lived in it for years. It was a crumbling wreck, half the roof gone, cracks in the walls large enough to swallow your hand. I told my wife it looked like a Tijuana jail. I wouldn't have bought it on a bet,”he said as he led me toward the door. “But she loved it right from the start. She did everything to it. She had a talent for that kind of thing.”
While Bobby changed, I waited in the living room. Hand-knotted rugs were scattered over the Mexican paver-tile floor. Along the wall that faced across the room toward the windows, bookshelves, crammed to capacity, rose toward the dark wood-beamed ceiling.
“You have quite a collection,”I observed when Bobby, now dressed in an oxford shirt and a pair of khaki pants, returned. “Lawrence Durrell, James Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. I even saw a copy of Virginia Woolf.”
“They belonged to my wife,”he explained, waving his hand toward the hundreds of volumes stacked neatly together. “I probably haven't read more than a half dozen of them—and only those because she practically begged me to.”
He had put on a pair of cotton socks but no shoes. He still moved the same way he had when we were young: sort of soft, like he was gliding, up on the balls of his feet.
We went outside and sat at a round, glass-topped table under a blue umbrella next to a kidney-shaped pool. It was nearly seven in the evening, but the air had the hot smell of dry yellow straw and made you think that in this place, summer, instead of turning into fall, would go on forever. Beyond the pool, on the other side of the yard, across the narrow valley below, dark green oak trees, bent beneath the burden of the remorseless light, shielded with their shadows the tinder-dry, tan-colored hills. In a long lazy spiral, a solitary hawk, wings resting on the currents of an invisible wind, searched for prey.
Clutching a cold bottle of beer in his hand, Bobby slouched against the back of the white patio chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed one ankle over the other. His face raised toward the smoldering warmth of the blood-red sun, he closed his eyes. A cryptic smile edged across his lips.
“I liked the way you told Albert what your fee would be,”he said, his eyes still shut. “It reminded me of what I've always imagined our grandfather must have been like. You had that same look, a sort of calculated indifference; that look that lets everyone know there's nothing you need, nothing you want so much you have to have it; that tells everyone you're ready to walk away from anything, that you'll do things on your terms or not at all.”
His eyes snapped open and his head dropped to the side closest to me. “I have a picture of him, taken when he was about the age you are now. You look just like him. Dark hair, dark eyes— it's the eyes, mainly: detached, a little arrogant.”He flashed a smile. “I suppose
confident
would be a better word.”
He took a drink and then put the bottle down on the table. He stared across the close-cropped green lawn on the other side of the pool, out over the rolling hills in the distance.
“It's kind of ironic, isn't it? You become a great criminal lawyer, and he was a great criminal.”
My grandfather was an old man who wore a wool cardigan sweater and a flannel shirt. He sat in a rocking chair that had a brown leather seat and wide flat arms. I had no memory of him anywhere else—not even of him standing up—only in that chair, slowly rocking back and forth, a kindly old man who would never hurt a soul.
“He was a fisherman,”I said. “He had a fishing boat, didn't he?”I asked, wondering where I had first heard it and whether I had perhaps only imagined it.
“That was later, when he was much older, after he lost everything else. I don't quite know when it all started. In New Orleans, I guess. That's where he was from.”
Bobby looked at me a moment. “You didn't know anything about this, did you—where he was from; why he came here; what he did; what happened to him because of it?”
I did not know anything, and only now, when he asked, did it strike me as strange that I did not. My grandfather had died when I was still a boy, and I had a vague recollection that my mother had gone to his funeral. I do not remember that she said anything about him when she came back home to Portland, except that, in the phrase so often used to give comfort to others, it had been for the best. It never occurred to me to ask why this was so, why it was best that he had died. I assumed, I suppose, that he had been suffering or that there was no chance he would ever get better; though I had not been told he was ill and, beyond a few fragmentary allusions to his heart, never knew why he had passed away. I was still a boy, or rather, still a child; I believed in the things children were taught to believe: I believed in God, and I believed in heaven. That night, the night my mother came home and told me Grandpa had died and gone to heaven, I said the same prayer I said every night in the warm comfort of my bed; the prayer that when, after all these years of forgetfulness, I think about it again, gives me a different kind of comfort: the knowledge that there was once a time when I was still an innocent boy with a pure heart and a clean body who only wanted to do good. Only that night, while I heard through the wall the muffled tones of the argument my parents had every time my mother stayed away longer than she had said she would when she left, I took a chance and instead of asking for the usual blessings asked God to say hello to Grandpa.
“Where's he buried?”I asked Bobby.
It took him by surprise. “Do you want to go out there?” “Sometime while I'm here. I've never been there.”The sun was sinking below the western hills, burning the sky a brilliant reddish orange. The shadows on the hillside began to spread out from beneath the trees, crawling toward the coming night.