Early Warning (42 page)

“Fuck you,” said Michael.

“Oh,” said Ivy. “Me, too. Me, too. Can we have a pancake?”

“Two pancakes,” said Richie. He helped Ivy to her feet and gave his hand to Marnie, who stood up, shook herself like a dog, and said, “Wow, did you see that guy I was dancing with? He was like Cyd Charisse or something. Taller, though.” She kept mumbling. Richie put an arm around each girl and steered them toward the door. As planned, Michael stumbled after them, muttering, “Fuck, fuck. Fuck.” He almost hit the pavement where the parking lot met Old York Road, but Richie stuck with the girls and put them both in front, only then opening the rear door and kind of pouring Michael into the back seat. Michael curled up and let out a moan. Marnie said, “He really is an alcoholic, you know.”

“I know,” said Richie. Marnie closed her eyes, but Ivy seemed revived. She took Richie's hand and squeezed it.

At the New Hope Diner, Richie helped the girls up the steps, in the door, then to the second booth, Marnie to the left of him, Ivy to the right of him, himself squeezed cozily in between. Marnie was hungry now, too. The waitress kept yawning into her pad. By the time the food arrived, Michael had staggered in. Through the window, Richie could dimly see that he had left the car door open.
Michael didn't order anything—he ate half of Richie's bun and one of Marnie's slices of bacon. He drank a cup of coffee. He said, “You know what the fuck really pisses me off?”

“What, babe?” said Marnie.

“This faggot sits next to me at that bar there? And I say, Watch your fag, faggot, and he's got this long ash on his cigarette, and he drops it right onto my pants.”

Richie laughed.

“Don't laugh! There's a big fucking hole.” He scooted out of the seat and stood up. Sure enough, on the front of the right leg of his pants was a blackened hole about a quarter-inch wide. The polyester fibers had burned and melted. “Hurt, too. I shoulda punched the guy out, but I thought I was gonna fall off my stool.” He coughed.

Both Ivy and Marnie rolled their eyes.

By the time they got back to Michael's apartment, it was very late, but there was a parking spot in front of the entrance. Richie was fine—not drunk at all. With the girls' help, he heaved Michael out of the car and through the door, into the elevator, up one floor. He was stiff—in its stupor, his body still possessed the tension of finely tuned anger and pride. Richie dropped on the couch, and Marnie took off his shoes. Ivy found a blanket and threw it over him.

When Michael was well and truly taken care of, Richie said, “Okay, sweeties, it's after five. I'm tired. Want to take a nap?” He opened the door to Michael's bedroom. The bed looked inviting—made, at least, no clothes strewn all over it. Marnie yawned, and Ivy said, “I want the left side. I just can only sleep on the left side.”

“I get the middle,” Richie said.

—

THE LAWYER
, who worked from a walnut-paneled office in his very enormous Gothic pile of a house in North Usherton, was Frank's long-ago chemistry lab partner. He'd always been nervous about what was smoking in the beakers but didn't mind writing up the results. Frank shook his hand heartily, and listened to him yammer on about how proud everyone was of Frank, he'd really made something of himself, a life to be envied, not so narrow as that of a small-town lawyer, six kids, though, and all of them doing fine, the eldest boy down in
South Florida now, first grandchild—he sighed, apparently in spite of himself. And this house, well, it took as much upkeep as any farm. A half-acre front yard—

Joe and Jesse came in—Joseph Walter Langdon; “Jesse,” not “Joe, junior.” The three of them sat at the table. Jesse gave him a grin, was glad to see him. Joe shook his hand without saying anything. Frank had done a good turn, and everyone was a little surprised at it, including Frank.

The lawyer came back in as they sat down, and spread the papers that they were to sign in front of them. Frank had been right, as usual. Lillian had willingly given her portion of the farm to Joe. Henry had said, “Tell me what a farm is again?” and laughed. He knew they would never sell the place anyway, so why think of it as money? Paul, of course, had nearly knocked Claire over in his rush to put his hands on the $260,000 Uncle Jens had paid for her share (after inheritance taxes). Gary and Aunt Angela had been plenty grateful in the end to take their money, too—Gary was planning on buying his own rig. Andy had made no objection; her Higher Power and her friends in AA thought it was the right thing to do, and besides, she was indifferent to money as long as her charge account at Bergdorf's was free and clear. Frank smiled at Jesse and said, “Got your dollar?”

Jesse pulled a dollar out of his pocket, and Frank frowned, then said, “I've changed my mind. I think I'm going to charge you ten.”

Solemnly, Jesse said, “I have that. I was going to—”

But then they all laughed, and Frank shrugged, saying, “Go ahead, buy yourself some lunch.”

“I was going to buy gas.”

They all signed the deeds, and Frank received his one-dollar “consideration” and put it in his inside jacket pocket. He said, “Okay, I suppose I'll invest this in computers.”

Everyone laughed again.

The lawyer swept up the papers and stacked them together. He congratulated Joe and Jesse, now joint owners of a very nice farm, and, as they all left the office, he put his finger on Frank's arm. “I have to tell you, I've seen a lot of grief and fury in this office. Glad to see this one stay together and remain a family farm.”

Frank smacked him on the back in a friendly way, then followed
his brother and nephew onto the porch and down the long driveway. They paused when they got to the street. It was late afternoon, but the air was still bright and flat with dust. Joe said, “Never thought that would be so easy. When John died, my heart sank, I gotta tell you.”

“Who's going to live over in their house?” Only two houses now—the kit house where Joe and Lois lived with Minnie, and this old Vogel-Augsberger place.

“It's in pretty good shape,” said Joe. “John told me it was built by a famous bricklayer who'd come over from Bavaria after learning his trade there. I guess he made the bricks himself.”

Frank said, “Remember the story Opa used to tell about the brick maker who refused to give the king an extra brick?”

Jesse said, “What was that?”

“Well, every time the brick maker took his bricks from the kiln, he set aside a certain number for the king, and at the end of the year, he pushed them in his wheelbarrow to the castle. They were fine bricks, of an unusual color, and after the king had received them for many years, he decided to build a house with them, with an arched doorway as an entrance. But after the house was built, the builder was one brick shy—the very brick he needed as the keystone of the arch. He wanted all the bricks to match, so he sent his representative to the brick maker to demand one last brick. However, since the brick maker had paid his taxes, he asked that the king pay him one aureus—that's a gold coin—for the brick. The representative sent a messenger to the king, and when the king, who was walking around the new house, heard the message, he became enraged at the arrogance of the brick maker. He sent the messenger back to arrest the brick maker and throw him into the dungeon. He kept walking around and around the new house, and after a while he was so angry at the pride of this mere common brick maker that he decided that he wanted to go and demand the brick himself. And so the king rushed out of the house, and as he did so, his crown hit the top of the arch, and the arch, being unsecured, collapsed on top of him and killed him.”

“I don't remember that story,” said Joe.

“Is there a moral?” said Jesse.

“Sometimes it's easier to pay,” said Frank. “ ‘Do the easier thing' was always Opa's moral. He was a happy man.”

Frank did not want to be thanked. What he wanted was just this thing that he was now getting: Jesse laughing at his story, this knowledge that his money had gone for something worthwhile at last, that, against all odds, he was a good man, that happiness could be bought—if not his, then Jesse's and, yes, Joe's. Joe and Jesse got into the same car, Jesse driving, and waved as they drove off. Frank stood for another moment or two, not knowing quite where to go for the evening.

A
S OLD AS
she was and as much as she had seen, Eloise understood politics less and less. How blithely she and Julius had once discussed whether, in America, class was the most important political divide, or race. Julius held out for class—he was a traditionalist, wasn't he?—and Eloise insisted on race. But neither of them had any idea what they were talking about—they had learned it all from books. In 1920s Chicago, they had been know-it-all tourists, writing articles and tracts extrapolated from the theories of Germans living in England. How was she to think about the Zebra killings, converted Muslim black boys walking around San Francisco, torturing and shooting random white women and old men because they were white and white people were devils? She thought several things, and one of them was, why not, really, given the past and present cruelties that whites perpetrated on blacks? Another of them was, if women were equal to men, then why were their murders more affecting? And another of them was that religion was not just the opiate of the people but an out-and-out poison; and still another was, I hope I don't get shot walking down Shattuck, thinking about whether I should wash the car. And what was she supposed to think about the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst?

Even more current and confusing was Janet and Lucas's growing attachment to the Peoples Temple. Eloise liked all of these youngsters.
Janet, child of the bourgeoisie; Lucas, child of the working class but with artistic aspirations; Cat, child of the lower middle class with hopes of self-betterment; Marla, a beauty, which was a class of its own no matter what Julius would have said. There was also Jorge, whose father had been a doctor in Mexico City, but who had died when Jorge was two, so Jorge had picked vegetables in the Salinas Valley with his cousins until some kind church group put him in school; it turned out he was good at science and math, and so now he was taking pre-med courses at SF State. Someone whom Eloise had only met once was Lena, a runaway from North Dakota, whom the others knew from the Temple. Maybe she was sixteen. She was, apparently, much appreciated for her blond good looks by Reverend Jones. She might be shaping into a full-fledged member of the Lumpenproletariat, but, then, militant feminism asked you to resist categorizing prostitutes as morally suspect merely because they worked in the sex trade. Truly, Eloise was beyond her depth politically, as she suspected Julius, and even Karl Marx, would have been. What she did was offer advice from time to time and hope for the best. What she also did was worry.

She worried because, one visit to the Temple and one look at “Reverend” Jones, and she knew what she was seeing—Joe Stalin from Indiana, the sort of fellow who sucked down a few ideas and then vomited them forth, now irreparably contaminated by the poisons of his very own body. And soul, for that matter, if you believed in souls, which, as a materialist, Eloise did not. It made no difference at all to her that Willie Brown had called the man “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao”—that was campaign bullshit. Or that this kid Jerry Brown sucked up to the fellow, too. Now that they were in office, she thought, they would be running from the Temple fast enough. Jones was crazy and getting crazier, and you didn't have to be a former member of the CPUSA to perceive that.

Saving Marla was easy: having put off her escape to Paris for a year, in hopes that her two new one-acts would be produced by the Berkeley Rep, Marla just needed a little push. Well, a medium-sized push. She had used most of her savings to produce the two plays at a coffeehouse in Berkeley—no reviews, small audiences, net loss of $487.32. Eloise had liked the plays, both set in a classroom. In the first
play, Lucas walked around, drumming on a desk, dancing, drawing, searching here and there, evidently out of control. A teacher's voiceover gave him increasingly impatient instructions, until, finally, he sat down at his desk and read, resentfully, from an old first-grade reader, with Dick, Jane, and Spot on the cover. But he gave up, slumped slowly to the floor of the stage, and lay there for a long moment as the lights got brighter and brighter. The play was only fifteen minutes long, but Lucas was convincing and affecting in his role. In the second, Marla played herself, as a six-year-old child. It took place in the same classroom, and a short woman, maybe five feet tall, played the teacher. But Marla was perfect as a six-year-old—lolling in her chair, asking in a loud voice to go to the bathroom, interrupting the (imaginary) recitations of the (imaginary) other children, making addition mistakes on the board, sitting on a stool in the corner with a dunce cap on her head. She was so beautiful and elegant as she went through this performance that you really were shocked when the teacher caned her. But apparently, no one in Berkeley was interested in the childhoods of black children as portrayed by a woman playwright. This season, the Rep was doing Shakespeare, Noël Coward,
Our Town
, yawn.

And so, when Eloise got her tiny little portion of Gary's sale of her father's farm—twenty thousand dollars it was—she called Marla up and offered to invest in her French career—do
not
tell Janet—and she gave her two grand and bought her a one-way ticket to Paris. Marla was grateful but nervous; the only thing she said that was worrisome was that Reverend Jones thought that when nuclear war came, and you could be sure it would, Paris would go up in, not smoke, but radioactive gases. “No,” said Eloise, “it will not. Even Hitler wanted to preserve Paris.” And so she put the girl on the plane, and off she went.

Cat was harder. She had grown up in an all-black town in Texas and moved to California against her parents' wishes. She had then done a few things she now regretted. But she was devoted to the Temple, and to Jones. She saw herself as Janet's “sponsor,” and Jones had given her some responsibilities that she took very seriously, including looking after his small children two days a week. Cat was vague about who the mothers of these children were—“We are all their mothers” was what she said, “and Reverend Jones is their father,
as he is our father.” When she wasn't talking about the Temple—who was in and who was out, who was betraying and who was loyal—she loved to talk about cooking and jogging, two of Eloise's hobbies. Cat also liked Janet very much, and did not like Lucas very much. Eloise could not understand why, but she thought it had something to do with the Temple.

Eloise loved Lucas. Of course, she loved Janet, too—Janet reminded her so much of Rosanna, though her hair was dark and she was five seven, not five two. She had some of Rosanna's mannerisms: when she had said something she really meant, she stood up straight and flared her nostrils, and she always sat with her knees together and her feet together, never slouching. Eloise, who had spent years refusing to let Rosanna tell her what to do, but admiring her older sister's looks and self-assurance, was always struck by the resemblance. When Lucas was onstage, she watched the women in the audience staring at him. He was like Cary Grant. There was a being inside of him that was a version of himself; that being was so charming that you could not help being attracted to it, but it had a separate existence from his everyday self. The question Eloise worried about was whether the Stalin from Indiana had noticed the charismatic Lucas, and marked Lucas as a threat or a rival. If so, Eloise thought, Lucas might be in danger, but when she said this aloud to herself, she laughed. Everyone else in town, it seemed, saw Reverend Jones as a powerful force for good in the community. His followers loved him, spoke well of him, reported over and over that their lives had changed under the influence of his loving congregation. They'd found friendship, self-discipline, hope. If they revered him, what was the harm in that? If race was the most important divide in America, then why should Eloise be suspicious of a man who had been more successful than any other in bringing black and white together under one roof, and making them comfortable and accepting of one another?

—

JANET WAS GLAD
in spite of herself that she and Lucas didn't own much, because she saw how difficult it was for some of the Temple members to turn over their possessions to communal ownership. There was one couple she was watching when they donated their house on Potrero Hill. The house was to be set up as a commune. The
man had a look on his face like he was happy to get rid of the thing, but the woman cried. Janet watched her; she cried for a long time, and the man just glanced at her every so often, as though he was disappointed in her and waiting for her to stop. When children were turned over to communal care, there was a lot of crying; Janet didn't think she herself would be able to take that so she was glad she and Lucas didn't have children. She also didn't agree with the paddling, but in that she thought she might be wrong, since just about everyone she knew had been spanked or whipped as a child by their own parents, so why not by their caretakers at the church? Reverend Jones was sympathetic but strict—you had to start the new world sometime; eventually, sometime became now. Didn't those who worshipped Jesus suffer for their revelations? No one was asking the members of the Temple to be flayed alive, shot with arrows, or broken on the wheel (Reverend Jones laughed aloud). Only to share. Only to understand that there was plenty to go around, no matter what it was. Only to give up the onerous responsibility that was possession and take up the freedom that was connection.

Janet also knew that right now, for Lucas, giving up what he possessed was more difficult than it was for her. She didn't say a thing about it—she didn't even let a facial expression about it cross her countenance. When he said that the drums were his, they were. When he said that his money was his, it was. When he said that his recordings of his favorite music were his, they were. Whatever pressure Lucas was to feel, it was not going to come from Janet. One night, when they had something of an argument about the Temple, Lucas said that he wasn't going to sign anything and he expected Janet not to sign anything, either, even a blank piece of paper. If she wanted them to attend like all of their friends, then they had to be free to come and go; he had to be free to do his gigs. There would be no signing. Lucas said that one woman, Joyce someone, had told him that the papers were confessions of child molestation that the reverend would then use against you if you were disloyal and tried to leave the Temple, but Janet and Lucas agreed that this was such a ridiculous and paranoid idea that the woman must be making it up. People made a lot of things up about Reverend Jones—that he called himself God, that he said he could cure cancer, that he kept all the money for himself, that he threatened one woman in a service with a poisonous snake—but
Janet had never seen any of this, and neither had Lucas. There was a lot of pressure to go to services more than one day a week, but, after all, her mother sometimes went to AA meetings three or four days a week, and what was the difference, really? The 25 percent tithe was difficult in a way, but when Janet looked around the congregation at the smiling faces of old folks and some others, like Jorge, who had nothing, she could not think of what else to spend her money on, so why not hand it over?

Today she was all right, too. Last night, it had been difficult to stand there and be shouted at by Cat, by Lena, and by Reverend Jones, told that she was vain and foolish and selfish, that she thought only of Janet Langdon and never of others, that she seemed unable to learn any of the lessons the reverend was trying to teach her. She was evasive or stupid, take your pick—which was worse in the end? If she was really looking for the truth, what was she waiting for? Where was her purse? Hand it over. What were these silly things she kept to herself? Just vanity and childishness. No one was asking her to walk down the street naked, just penniless. What would be so bad about that? People all over the world did it all the time, and their souls thrived on it. To give is to receive—how long would it take her to learn that? If her boyfriend, Lucas, was holding her back, get rid of the fellow; it would be better for the both of them. Go ahead and nod and say yes; no one believes you; we all know you; we all know how hard-hearted and selfish you are; you deserve nothing until you have nothing, and then something will come of it. And so on. Until after midnight. Lucas had sat quietly, looking on, and then left at some point. Finally, when she was really crying, down on her knees with her hands over her face, Reverend Jones came over, took her hand, lifted her up, and put his arms around her. He said to cry it out—every tear was a drop of selfishness pouring forth, making room for the humility that was the true grace of God. Surely she didn't want to remain as she had begun, the corrupt child of a corrupt world? No, he could tell that she did not; he loved her; he could see the precious light dawning in her eyes.