Rumors of Peace

To the memory of my mother and father

I
N LATER LIFE
, when I grew up and went out into the world, I was astonished to hear people speak of California as if it had no seasons.

Winter was long, it brought huge rains that swelled the creek to a brown torrent and made lakes of backyards, and it brought tule fog so thick that lights burned through the day, gleaming dim and haggard along the streets. Then suddenly one morning the trees stood sunlit, their bark still black and sodden, but tightly budded, and within a week, through banks of poppies, the creek flashed clear as quartz. Summer moved in fast and stayed long; the creek dried out to a powdery gulch, backyards cracked like clay, under a white boiling sky the town lay bleached and blistered in a drone of gnats; then abruptly the sky cooled, grew high and clear like blue glass, gutters of yellow leaves swirled, carried higher each day by winds that finally shook the windows, and once more the rain and fog engulfed us.

I liked the different kinds of weather, and though I myself was not methodical—my sister often informed me of this—I liked the weather in its ordained cycle. Whenever a gray day appeared in June, or a brilliant one in December, I felt uneasy, as if God had lost His bearings.

In the dark I plagued my sister with questions. She had metal curlers in her hair and lay with her back to me.

“Karla. Who's God?”

She would drag the pillow over her head.

I would stick my head under the pillow. “Tell me.”

Silence.

Karla was a kind and generous sister, but at night she wished to sleep. And it was then that my questions came to me.

“Tell me.”

Silence.

I would lie back again. I had no religious bent at all, yet God had wormed His way into my thoughts. At Sunday school we learned about Christ, but He was only the son. I wished to get to the source. My parents said God was the spirit of kindness in each of us, but there must be more. Otherwise, why did the local nuns cause a fit of respect in even the worst Ferry Street drunk? Why did people say God damn, God knows, and God help us? But I was never able to put it all together.

One afternoon, walking by the construction site of our first skyscraper, a three-story union hall, I decided to climb up. At the structure's top, at the very edge, I looked out. Many-colored roofs and bright green trees stretched to the glassy bay. The big dry hills rolled golden into the distance. The sky was huge, blue, intoxicating.

After that I found I no longer asked about God, so I supposed that I must have caught sight of Him up there.

But for all the impact of that view, I never gave much thought to my surroundings. Thirty miles east of San Francisco, hemmed in by two high ranges of hills and the Suisun Bay, its population a fixed 5,000, Mendoza was as familiar and absolute as my face. We had an old yellow train depot, a long tarry wharf, and a large white ferry. We had a stone courthouse with a dome, an L-shaped Woolworth's with creaking floors, and a small dim library that smelled of flour paste. We had a tule marsh, eucalyptus groves, and tall scruffy palms, and we had steep dry hills that you could slide down on a piece of cardboard.

We also had Shell Oil refinery. It was our main feature, our reason for existence, but it was of no account to me. First, my dad did not work there, but at a body shop off Main Street. Second, the glaring storage tanks and belching smokestacks were not rewarding to look at, so why look at them?

That the whole area was industrial escaped me. Within a ten-mile radius stood Shell Oil, Standard Oil, Union Oil, the Hercules Powder Plant, the Benicia Arsenal, the Port Chicago Ammunition Dump, and Mare Island Navy Yard. When you took a Sunday drive, you could not help seeing these ugly, boring blots. But they quickly faded into the abundant countryside, and you forgot them.

My dad drove an old 1931 Model A Ford, black and shiny and high off the ground, so that you had a good view. When I was small, the whole family went on Sunday drives together, but by the time I was ten, in 1941, my sister was seventeen and my brother sixteen, and they had begun going their own ways. Karla wanted to be a painter and to study at the Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco. Peter wanted to be a great drummer like Gene Krupa and tour the nation. Soon they would both go out into the world. But I felt that our way of life, like the seasons, should not alter.

I was happy, except for school, which sometimes caused me to run away. The varnished rows of desks, the cold, busy squeak of chalk on blackboard, George Washington's pale eyelids drooping at us from the wall—all this inspired me with a hopeless sense of wasted time, my object in life being to climb and swing from trees and other high things. I had thick yellow calluses on my palms that I sliced off with a razor blade. I planned to be a trapeze artist. With such an ambition, school could only be an intolerable bore, and so on occasion I ran away; but already at the outskirts of town the vast unknown wilted me, and I had to turn back.

I eked out passing marks, but I was late for class each morning, though our house stood directly opposite the grammar school. It was the bars and handwalkers I couldn't resist.

“You can play
after
school,” my parents tried to drill into me.

I had no clue to their logic. What existed was the ever-fresh charm of the morning playground. This tardiness was the only sore spot between my parents and me, but though I regretted their unhappiness and disliked their scoldings, I never changed. And at least there were sometimes long periods during which the teacher seemed to grow numb to the sight of me sneaking breathlessly into my seat. No complaints were sent home then. I breathed easily, and life was as it should be.

Like all neighborhoods, ours had a gang held loosely together by grass-fights, kickball, and faulty judgment. We built an airplane from old planks and tried to send it off a garage roof with struggling round-eyed Mario Pelegrino aboard (it was finally launched pilotless and nose-dived to the ground). We traded comic books, slid down the hills, and on Saturday afternoons hurried to the State Theater matinee, where we sent up wild cheers as the lights dimmed.

Of this gang, most of whom I have forgotten, excitable Ezio Pelegrino was my best friend. Mario was his brother, older than the rest of us, but with the mind and body of a small child. He had a coarse, squinty little face and was beloved by his mother. Now and again he took it into his mind to urinate in the street, and then a scandalized mother would appear at the Pelegrino door with the savage in tow, mouth cheerfully agape. A stout widow with black hair in a bun, Mrs. Pelegrino would shoot Mario a stern look while gathering him tenderly to her.
“Scusa, scusa,
” she always apologized, “he just a little bit cuckoo.” We all liked Mario, even if we had tried to send him off in the airplane, and he followed us everywhere, except to the wharf. The waves scared him.

I always went with my dad when he fished for bass from the wharf. My dad was husky and warm to the touch. He was bald, with a fringe of sandy hair. He had a large nose like an Indian's, and sky blue eyes. When he fished, he was silent, like all the others who sat along the side with their poles. They never cared that the bass was so oily from Shell you couldn't eat it. They just liked to fish. Around the pier the water was brown and choppy, but farther out it was green and smooth. When I was very small, I thought the opposite shore was Denmark, the place my parents came from. Then I learned that it was only Benicia, a town like our own, and my brother showed me where Denmark was on his world map. I remembered it as a purple dot on the other side of an immense blue ocean.

When I was nine, I came home from school one spring afternoon and found Mama sitting at the kitchen table, her face in her hands. She was crying. She said Denmark had been invaded by the Germans. I understood that this must be a terrible thing, but the purple dot
was so far away, the blue ocean so immense, that I could not feel the terribleness in my bones. I just felt sorry for Mama, whose face was so unhappy.

The next letter we received from Danish relatives was stamped on the envelope with the German word
Ge
ö
ffnet
and an eagle standing on a swastika. The sheets inside were mutilated by scissors. I held the sheets up between my fingers and touched them with curiosity. And then suddenly wherever I turned I was confronted by this war across the ocean. Between Charlie McCarthy and Kate Smith the airwaves crackled with news of some desperate place called Dunkirk. At the matinee,
Pinocchio
was accompanied by a
Time Marches On
newsreel showing long gray columns of troops with cannons. In
Life
magazine there were pictures going back to the start of this war—apparently it had already been going on for many months—and I looked at rubble and smoke and the bodies of a potato-digging family lying dead and blood-spattered in a Polish field.

But when the magazine was closed, the radio turned off, the newsreel over, the vast barrier of the ocean returned. Mendoza was what existed. This which was real. This which you could hear and smell and touch. And gradually the war in Europe became just another part of the daily background, familiar but unpressing, one more thing belonging to the grown-ups with their eternal talk of politics and jobs and wages.

When I grew up, I realized that I and the Depression had been born almost together, but I was never aware of its existence. In our neighborhood everyone was the same, neither rich nor poor. We lived in small rented frame houses. There were always pennies for jawbreakers and a dime for the Saturday matinee. If I never knew a child with a radio of his own or a bicycle bought firsthand, I never knew one who went to bed hungry. When the Okies had rumbled through town in their dusty trucks, I had thought them glamorous, like Gypsies—the children sitting high and swaying on a heap of belongings. It never crossed my mind that they had troubles.

My own troubles loomed large at times. There was my constant tardiness. There was Ezio saying that Mario would probably die before eighteen. There were occasional shouting arguments between my parents,
from which I fled. But then the domestic spat would pass, my teacher would sink into her numb phase, Mario was still far from eighteen, and life rolled on smoothly, as it was meant to.

On winter evenings, after slopping through my homework, I curled up with Andersen's fairy tales. A fire crackled in the wood stove, and there came a pleasant muted din from the cellar, where Peter was relegated with his snare drum. Karla sat sketching at the dining-room table, and from the radio came the wise, confident voices of
Information, Please,
which my parents listened to over their evening coffee. When summer came, we moved out onto the front porch in the evenings. The crickets chirped from the dry grass. My dad's cigar glowed in the dark, an orange dot. From somewhere in the distance you could hear a game of kick-the-can. The night air was warm, the sky thick with stars.