Authors: Howard Fast
They set off down the Strada dell' Abbondanza, Barbara overcome with a curiosity that was insatiable. She was in and out of the houses, wandering through the gardens, fascinated by the ancient bakery, the frescos, the workshops.
Leone followed her dutifully, watching her with interest and saying little. She turned to him once, wondering whether he was bored.
“No, no, not at all.”
“But you've been here before.”
“Many times. But never with you.”
“That's very kind. But I could find a taxi back to Naples.”
“Nonsense. I am enjoying myself. But tell me, Barbara, what do you find so enchanting about this place?”
“I'm not sure â” They were approaching the amphitheater now. “May we go inside?”
“If you wish,” Leone agreed.
They went through the gate, onto the grassy floor of the great amphitheater, standing at the bottom with the tiers of seats rising all about them.
“You were saying?”
“I think it's the sense of a city where people had some purpose, where their community made sense. They lived in a place where their fathers and their grandfathers lived. It was a city, yet it was a place where they knew one another. We have something of that in San Francisco, but our city is so much bigger â” She was staring at the rows of seats. “This amphitheater is so big â I mean for so small a town.”
Leone nodded. “Big enough for the whole city â for all the grown ones and the children too. You see, this was their obsession, to sit here and see men slaughter each other.”
“Oh, no, not truly,” Barbara protested. “Shaw says it was all a charade, that gladiators did not kill each other.”
“I know what your George Bernard Shaw says, and he is a very clever man but he is wrong. They did kill each other. In the year fifty-nine, a pair of gladiators from the town of Nuceria were fighting two local gladiators in this very arena. There were about seven hundred Nucerians in the crowd who had come to see their gladiators fight. The rest of the seats, some twelve thousand of them, were filled with the citizens of Pompeii. Well, the crowd went crazy, as crowds do sometimes, and they set upon the Nucerians and slaughtered them, every last one of them. It was a terrible bloodbath. So you see, the life they lived cannot be defined by this bucolic, peaceful ruin.”
“Is that true, what you're telling me?” Barbara whispered.
“Absolutely. When we get back to the hotel, you'll find a history of Pompeii in the library there. You can check my facts.”
“But how could people create a city as beautiful as this and behave like animals?”
“Animals? No, animals do not do such things. People. Remember, I lived through the war.”
“So did I,” Barbara said softly. “I was in Germany. You're right, Umberto, animals don't do such things.”
Driving back to Naples, Leone said to her, “You love your husband â”
“Yes, I do.”
“Selfishly, I wish you hated him.”
“Do you hate your wife?”
“I neither love her nor do I hate her. She is my wife.”
Carson was dressing for dinner when Barbara came into their hotel suite. He kissed her and then remarked that she didn't look too happy with her second venture into antiquity.
“The arena down there threw me off, and I've been a bit blue ever since. I'll get over it. Just the thought of people enjoying the spectacle of men cutting each other to pieces.”
“They still enjoy football. I do.”
“It's not the same thing, hardly.”
“I suppose not, although future generations may not agree with you. Anyway, you got the archaeological bug out of your system. Did you take a cab? I'm rather nervous about you running all over southern Italy alone in a cab.”
“No, not this time. I met a lovely gentleman on the ferry, and he drove me down there.”
Carson paused in knotting his tie and turned to look at her. “Oh? Someone we know?”
She shook her head. “An Italian automaker, name of Umberto Leone.”
“Yes, I've seen him,” Carson said slowly. “Makes the Carlotta. How did it happen? Did he pick you up?”
“That's a nasty thing to say.”
“I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way.”
Barbara dropped into a chair and stared at Carson. “How did you mean it?”
“I was just wondering how you happen to meet a strange man who drives you down to Pompeii. It doesn't matter. Let's forget it.”
“It matters. I ran for the ferry this morning and jumped. He caught my arm and saved me a bath in the Bay of Naples. I thanked him. I'm not a child, Carson.”
“You're in a beautiful mood.”
“Right. I am in a rotten mood, and you're not helping. I don't want to make something out of this, because it's nothing. I met a charming man. He drove me down to Pompeii and he drove me back, and I love you and I married you, and I don't leap into bed with strangers.”
“Then you spent the day with him at Pompeii?”
“Yes!” she snapped, rising and going into the bathroom and locking the door behind her. A few minutes passed before she heard Carson's voice through the door.
“Barbara, how abject must my apology be?”
“Reasonably so.”
“I behaved like a horse's ass.”
“More or less.”
“Am I forgiven?”
“Yes. I'm hungry. You're forgiven.”
“Ischia,” Fred informed Sam, “is an island at the northern tip of the Bay of Naples. Capri is at the southern tip, and that's the one they sing about in songs, but it doesn't have the class of Ischia.”
“How do you know?”
“I read the guidebooks.”
“I been to Catalina,” Sam said.
“Son, you are a peasant. Catalina is for peasants. You know something, my lad, if I were one year older, we could both be heading for Ischia, lying in the sun, poolside at a classy hotel, picking up the exquisite little babes â what am I talking about? I bet you never laid a hand on a girl.”
“I tried with May Ling. She got sore.”
“May Ling,” Fred said with contempt. “May Ling is a stick. She doesn't even have tits. That's child molesting, and anyway you don't crap on your own doorstep. How old are you â thirteen?”
“That's right,” Sam agreed sadly.
“Oh well, give it time.”
“How come you could be heading for Ischia if you were a year older?”
“Well, by then I'll have about five hundred dollars saved up, and certainly my eighteenth birthday has to call for a small bundle from Grandma Jean, and what's more uplifting for a poor farm boy than a trip to Europe?”
“Have you spoken to your mother about it?”
“Oh, I'll talk her into it.”
“That'll be the day.”
They were sitting in Fred's room, which like Fred himself, commanded Sam's fervent admiration. Unlike Fred's brother's room, which was neat and clean â Joshua being a very sober and neat eleven-year-old â Fred's room was piled with books, fishing rods, snowshoes, bats, gloves, three basketballs, a huge medicine ball, and an assortment of Fred's clothes. Eloise never set foot in the room. Just to observe it through the open door set her to trembling. Once a week, a Chicano woman fought unsuccessfully to clean it. Sam had been given a job in the bottling plant, sorting corks, a position he took seriously and worked at with a will. He had never worked at any job before, and at the end of each week, he was given five dollars, his own money earned with his own hands. The hours were not long, and he was at Higate with people he loved.
“Anyway,” Fred said, “this Ischia is a great place, and there's no reason why your old lady shouldn't have some fun. You can't ask her to live alone for the rest of her life.”
“Why not? Anyway, she's not alone. I live with her.”
May Ling, age twelve, five feet and eight inches tall already, her black shoulder-cut hair and black bangs framing a face of near perfection, asked her mother why boys liked to touch girls. Sally, whose mind raced over a dozen rejoinders that fitted the question appropriately, found that none of them were adequate for this situation, and simply stared at her daughter for a very long moment. Twelve had no right to be that innocent, not in this enlightened or benighted â depending on how you looked at it â year of 1959. A few weeks later, telling Barbara about it, she confessed that she was baffled.
“If you were really speechless,” Barbara said, “then that was a first, wasn't it, Sally?”
“Now you're putting me on. I don't chatter anymore. What would you have said?”
“I'm trying to remember what I knew about sex when I was twelve. Of course, that was another age. But I do think that at twelve I had been pawed considerably if clumsily. Why don't you tell her how the whole thing works?”
They were in the living room of Barbara's house on Green Street in San Francisco, Sally in from Napa for a day in town. Sally was kinetic; only total exhaustion could keep her motionless. Now as she spoke, she moved constantly about the little room, catlike in her avoidance of the overstuffed Victorian pieces that had once belonged to Sam Goldberg, Dan Lavette's lawyer, and which Barbara preserved and treasured when she bought the old house. Barbara watched her movement enviously. She changed positions like a dancer, and in Sally's presence, Barbara always felt oversized and clodlike, although they were the same height.
“Tell her?” Sally exclaimed. “You have to be kidding. I couldn't face it â not with May Ling. Just looking at her makes me feel impure. Well, I am. I mean reasonably impure.”
Barbara began to laugh. “Impure. Sally, you are incredible.”
“I often think so. I've been writing poetry again â after years of avoiding it. I'm waiting for her to start menstruating. That's a good way to explain. I think she's late. Do Chinese menstruate late?”
“Will you please sit down,” Barbara begged her. “Sally, May Ling is one quarter Chinese.”
Sally dropped onto the couch.
“Do you want another drink?”
“Of course I do. I couldn't touch the stuff while I was carrying Danny or nursing him without Joe having a fit. A slight case of inebriation is absolutely necessary to living with your brother Joe. Don't look at me like that, Bobby. Have you ever tried living with a saint?”
“No, I guess not.” She filled Sally's glass from a pitcher of martinis. Sally was testing the couch.
“You're not selling this wonderful old sofa. If you are, I want it.”
“I'm not selling anything in the house. It's remaining just as it is. I'm giving you and Eloise keys, and you can use it whenever you're in town.”
“And how does Carson take your hanging on to this place? Doesn't it give him a tentative feeling?”
“You don't mince words, do you?”
“I'm sorry, Bobby. I get carried away.”
“Well, it's a lovely old house, and available houses in this neighborhood are as rare as hen's teeth. And better than a hotel room. We will be coming here a good deal. I don't know how much of Beverly Hills I can take. You lived there.”
“If you call it that. It wasn't the best time in my life.” But it was not until she was on her way out that Sally thought to ask Barbara about the honeymoon.
“It was good. It had its high moments.”
“And low ones, I suppose. That's the nature of honeymoons.”
The next morning, Barbara locked up the house to leave for Los Angeles. She had already loaded her car with all the luggage the trunk and the back seat could hold, and Sam was in the car, waiting impatiently. Barbara paused to look at the place. It was a small, narrow house, sitting on the slope of the hill, one of those marvelously decorated old wooden houses that had survived the 1906 earthquake undamaged. It was wonderfully ugly. There were two bay windows, triptych style, one above the other and dominating the front of the house. Two wooden Medusa heads, unexpectedly benign, crowned each window, and there were six steps up to the entranceway, which was framed by wooden columns, pseudo-Moorish. Over the doorway and the windows, every bit of wood was carved, and this improbable carving was repeated in the rows of dentils upon which the roof rested. The house was clapboard, painted white.
Barbara had first seen the house in 1934, when she had become involved in the great longshore strike, using her station wagon as a first aid depot for injured strikers. She had come to Sam Goldberg, who was her father's lawyer, for advice and sustenance. Seven years later, in 1941, after Sam Goldberg's death, she had bought the house from the estate. It was the place she returned to after her stint as a war correspondent. It was the place where she had lived with her husband until his death, and it had been home to Sam for the thirteen years of his life. When Carson suggested that she sell it, she was dumfounded. “You can't be serious,” she said.
“I am. You're my wife. Does it make sense to have a home of your own in San Francisco when we're living in Los Angeles?”
“It's not a home of my own,” Barbara argued. “It's a place for both of us. We don't need the money, and the taxes are inconsequential. It means so much to me â”
“That's it. You have to cut loose from the past sometime, Bobby.”
“Don't press it, please, darling,” Barbara begged him. “I can't sell that house. Try to understand. I did a lot of understanding about the Beverly Hills house.”
While they were on their honeymoon, Carson's real estate agents had been looking for a proper house. Carson had decided against Hancock Park. For one thing, it was too close to his parents; for another, it belonged to the past. In 1959, Beverly Hills was still elegant, as Los Angeles considered elegance; it was conveniently located in the vast sprawl of the city; and Carson considered it a very decent place for them to take up residence. Barbara's antipathy toward Beverly Hills, he felt, concerned the film crowd, and he argued that one could spend years in Beverly Hills without consorting with film people. Barbara doubted this. She felt that if she had to settle for Los Angeles, it should be toward the ocean, either in Santa Monica or in Pacific Palisades. Both places, Carson felt, were too far from the downtown center, and when finally Barbara saw the enormous stucco-covered mansion that Carson felt would constitute a proper home, she threw up her hands in despair.