Irrepressible (16 page)

I
N FEBRUARY, BOB helped carry her suitcases (several unreliable-looking bags with torn handles tied with string) and Dinky’s tricycle to Union Station. He didn’t want her to go. He wasn’t sure he knew what he wanted, but certainly not a separation of three thousand miles. The station platform was the stage for a million farewells; swelling emotions, sweet words all were in order. The train corridors were crowded, everything booked solid. The baby, overexcited and tired of waiting, needed to be consoled. Being romantic wasn’t this couple’s métier; it was far easier to crack wise. “I didn’t expect to see matched luggage,” Bob said, “but you might at least have gotten matched shopping bags.” He took Decca’s laughter as an invitation to stand by her seat all the way to West Virginia. It had been hard enough leaving Washington, but here on the train, under the scrutinizing eyes of so many young soldiers, Decca recalled Virginia Durr’s maternal cautions. Not that she couldn’t take care of herself, but as long as Bob was along, she hadn’t had to see herself as a young, British widow.

Hitchhiking back to Washington later that day, Bob realized a guy would have to have a hole in his head to let as stunning and smart a woman as Decca out of his life, if there was anything he could do to prevent it. He understood she had to go, but it wasn’t over. She said she wanted to see him again, and they would write. He would follow her west as soon as he could.

On her road trip with Virginia to the 1940 Democratic Convention, Decca had gotten as far as Chicago. She had seen some of the vast nation’s byways, lavish forests, and meandering rivers. Now, waking up one morning to behold the Rockies was marvelous. The train carriage was a relatively comfortable place to pass the time with strangers she would never
meet again, no commitments required. Sometimes the train was overly hot; sometimes its heat failed and she’d wrap Dinky in all her sweaters at once. Their carriage and the corridors were always smoky. Lending matches and accepting cigarettes from your neighbor were harmless icebreakers, and Dinky—the little charmer—was also a great conversation starter in the dining car. Decca could always find a conversation to while away the restless hours. The long nights were for musing. If loneliness assailed her, she could tuck in the edges of her daughter’s blanket again.

Train seats were reserved primarily for travel in the national interest. But that could mean almost anything: families reuniting; couples honeymooning; students, priests, farm-machinery salesmen, high-society dolls, and newspaper reporters all needing to get somewhere for some reason. From coast to coast, men and women from every part of the armed services poured on and off. Businessmen rode the long leg and the short leg to clinch a deal. There were government workers like Decca who labored in the “field” (as the Office of Price Administration designated the area beyond the national headquarters). Some single ladies, older than Decca in black traveling hats, knit or read magazines. Some younger matrons just stared out the window on their way to or back from something they didn’t care to talk about. Once a conversation did commence, Decca’s accent was always the first line of inquiry. The train ride took three days.

At one point, she met Harold Smith, celebrated in those days as a well-known gambler and entrepreneur. He had recently opened a casino called Harold’s Club in Reno. She was going to San Francisco. He had worked the coast, and he knew it was a nice place, but it was old and couldn’t hold a candle to Reno. Not only was his little town the divorce capital of the country, but gambling there was legal. Just the place for a new start if that was what a person was looking for. Smith was a heavy drinker, a big gambler, and a crackerjack entrepreneur. He may have known of the Romillys and of Decca from the newspapers. Perhaps he considered her a good investment, with high return potential, or was just dazzled by her. In any case, he offered her a job in Reno at a munificent starting salary. What would her life have
become had she taken that alternative track? Not quite as radical a departure as assassinating Hitler, but . . . queen of a crime syndicate? Mob moll with a heart of gold? She graciously declined, leaving Smith somewhere in Nevada to another conquest.

 

WALKING ALONG THE San Francisco waterfront their first few days in town, Decca saw swarms of enlisted men on their way to meet their transport ships. She passed Red Cross stations where volunteers handed out coffee and doughnuts, perhaps a Women’s Army Corps band or a politician on a soapbox barking out bromides about patriotism and faith. Whole families crowded in to wave good-bye. Little children licked lollipops as older kids wove through the crowds on bicycles carrying messages, forgotten articles: shoes, a lost wristwatch, guitars. Wives and mothers tried to be brave or gave up trying and then tried again. Children laughed, cried; girlfriends sometimes a little dizzy from a beer or two staggered on their platform heels, shrieked to their vanishing lovers,
Write!
There were wolf packs of boys without anyone in particular to see them off, most of them on the make up to the minute they headed up their gangplanks. They would give a pretty girl the eye and whistle, and the girls out for a lark with their friends, or whose guy had already boarded, would wave.
So long boys, be good!
And they would wave back.
Don’t forget me, even if you don’t know me, don’t forget
. It must have been hard for Decca, all of these partings a reminder of the day she said good-bye to Esmond. She had stood on the pier at Martha’s Vineyard in a terrible lightning storm. It had rained and thundered for days. In San Francisco, even after a downpour, the slant of the earth, the fog, and all the alchemies of meteorology surrounded the city with a golden glow. How he would have loved this city.

Because of San Francisco’s reputation as a great liberty town and its location as an employment hub for war work and as a transit port, apartments were at a premium in 1943. Decca was lucky to rent a couple of basement rooms in Haight-Ashbury, which was then a working-class, predominantly Irish neighborhood. Her new home had some boarded-up windows and a
complicated, alley-side entry, but one overriding asset. Decca’s new landlady, Mrs. Betts, was warm and quirky. She held many homespun opinions, particularly regarding the lamentable state of modern marriage (Mr. Betts had disappeared, leaving her with several young children). Decca was relieved to attach herself to a household with playmates for Dinky and to find that Mrs. Betts was agreeable, for a small additional sum, to feed and care for her daughter while Decca went to work at the San Francisco office of the OPA.

She had only a few days to settle in. Above the city, Decca would have seen skies full of military air traffic. The grocery stores and bakery were rife with rumors about Japanese submarines targeting Los Angeles and Portland. She would have heard of Japanese neighbors, fruit and vegetable merchants whose shops were closed since they had left town or become interned. Even families who had been there forever, she learned, were sent by federal order to internment camps. But few people in the neighborhood asked direct questions, and in keeping with the prevalent mood in the United States, most people she spoke with were shockingly passive about the disappearance of their Japanese neighbors.

Decca inhaled the local newspapers (capitalist and Communist) for news as well as a sense of the local scene. Northern California had a literary constellation completely apart from the East Coast intellectual centers of New York and Boston. The poet Robinson Jeffers lived down the coast in Monterey; John Steinbeck came from Salinas. Prewar Carmel had been “Bloomsbury on the Pacific,” home to Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Judith Anderson, and Isadora Duncan. But one needn’t go down the coast to be ravished by beauty, and it was easy to see why it attracted poets (the rakish Kenneth Rexroth reminded some people of Esmond). In the society columns, she read about opera affairs, equestrian events, war benefit balls (stocked with beautiful ingenues who wore the long, fastidiously waved hair of those who didn’t need to work), and other high-toned entertainments for class enemies whom she hoped to avoid, but whose names she recognized from Kay Graham’s contact list. She tracked down a few of the famous old lefty haunts: Flor D’Italia in North Beach, Izzy Gomez’s on the
Embarcadero. “I’m getting to like Frisco a lot, there are the most marvelous restaurants & nightclubs,” she wrote to her mother. Meanwhile, she worried that she had made a terrible mistake. More than anything else, she was lonely. One morning, she came down with a fever. Her legs felt so wobbly, for days she couldn’t stand.

“Gee Decc, Don’t be sick anymore,” Bob wrote, “at least while I’m away. You’re so wonderful flushed with fever that I feel jumpy at the thought of missing it.” His amusing and sexy letters soon become her “only source of real pleasure and sustenance.” By the end of March, he told her he planned to quit his job and move to San Francisco.

IT WAS SPRING 1943. There was a visceral sense on the street that the whole war had turned. The six-month-long Battle of Stalingrad had ended in a Russian victory, and a new alliance with the Soviet Union begun. On Decca’s street, the plum blossoms were in bloom, and when the young Betts boys played soldier, they could use ripe lemons right off the tree for ammunition. Dinky adored her new friends, and Decca started buying a few pieces of furniture. In her letters to Bob, she captured Mrs. Betts’ homespun commiserations. Regarding Decca’s mysterious illness, she had opined, “Poor Mrs. Romilly, her throat’s gone to her knees.” On another occasion, the landlady confessed that the perverse Mr. Betts had somehow “ruined” her bladder. It was a scenario that Bob memorialized in verse: “In a fit of depravity he filled the wrong cavity . . . what’s the madder, you ruined my bladder, you took advantage of me.”

Decca’s first job in the San Francisco office of the OPA (its detractors called it the “Office for Persecuting Americans”) was as the only investigator in the Industrial Machinery Section. Just as in Washington, she learned on the job. On one hand, there was nobody to teach her the ropes, and on the other, there was no one to see that she didn’t know a damn thing about machinery. She had finally found her way to the rip-roaring West, though,
as she recounted in this letter to her mother: “The office here is very pleasant & I love my work. The other day I investigated a very tough character called Joe Fontes, a second-hand machine tool dealer, & after I left he called the office & said he would punch my nose if I came back! I did, but he didn’t.”

Decca believed deeply in the economic benefits of price regulation. In San Francisco as in Washington, the office staff divided left and right. The radicals like herself, who were for unionization and rent and price controls, were trying to achieve the extraordinary feat of holding “inflation down during wartime.” The conservatives, she saw as allied with business interests, like the apartment-house owners associations that fought rent control and undermined compliance.

Decca made her own new alliances—war work had thrown her together with another young woman her age. Doris Brin Marasse, whose friends called her Dobby, was short, trim, and focused. The daughter of a Jewish couple from Dallas, Dobby had discovered Marxism as a sorority girl at the University of California at Los Angeles. She was one of the first women to graduate from the University of California at Berkeley with a law degree. Most impressively, she was the president of the San Francisco chapter of the Federal Workers Union. Back in Washington, when Decca had enthusiastically joined her local, her sponsor was Al Bernstein. He had also moved to San Francisco to work as a senior West Coast investigator, and Dobby considered him her mentor in all things union. Sometimes after work, when most of the office had cleared out, the two young women sat on their desk-tops to smoke cigarettes and gossip. Decca knew Al Bernstein pretty well as a skillful organizer who had most famously helped unionize the Alcatraz Prison guards. Dobby admired the way Al stood up to the conservatives in the agency. He and his wife, Sylvia, held famous parties at their place in Potrero Hill. Occasionally, their whole apartment house would hold a party altogether. The downstairs neighbors would make delicious spaghetti or cioppino, and there would be dancing in the garage. Upstairs they just played a lot of poker—sometime at high stakes.

Dobby was only dimly aware of the Mitford celebrity. She was unsentimental and not easily awed, so Decca was able to replay bits of her life as she wanted it known unmediated by myth. She wanted to talk about Esmond, and she wanted to talk about Bob. She told Dobby that “she’d been restless and come to San Francisco because she needed a change.” Less than two years since Esmond’s death, Decca wondered aloud if it was too soon to be serious about this new man, and she preferred to concentrate on her job and union business. She suspected that Dobby was a Communist Party member and inferred her interest (there was some danger in appearing too interested, as one might be suspected as a spy). Meanwhile, Dobby, a member of several years’ standing, had quickly sized up Decca as a possible new recruit.