The Immigrants (44 page)

“Hold it down,” Dan said. “We’re in business now.”

The four of them had dinner at the Biltmore. By that time, Dan’s ebullience had washed out. All that day, under the excitement and the glory of the first sched uled flight, was the knowledge that he would be in the city where May Ling lived. It was now seven months since he had seen her, and during that period he had been to Los Angeles four times, and each time he fought it out with himself and willed himself not to see her, and came out of the struggle sick and lonely and frustrated. And now it was in him again, the same sick ness, the same loneliness, the same unbearable hopeless ness. Goldberg left to catch his train, and Spizer talked about himself and the film business and talking pictures and the opportunities for investment. Dan listened with out hearing. When the dinner was over, he invented a business meeting, and Martha, kissing him, whispered, “You’re so glum, Danny. You shouldn’t be. It’s your day of victory.”

Spizer had gone to the men’s room. “What about him?” Dan asked.

“He runs the school. He’s brilliant. Don’t you like him?”

“Just watch your step, baby.”

“Danny, I’m a grown woman.”

In his room at the Biltmore, Dan sprawled on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He was forty years old, and if anyone ever had, he had surely dreamed the American dream. This was 1928, only forty years since his mother and father had climbed out of steerage onto Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, a French-Italian fisherman with an Italian wife penniless, without a word of English, bewildered, friendless in the world of New York’s East Side. The story of what had happened to them had been told and retold to

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him, the days of semistarvation in New York, his father recruited into a labor gang for the Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe Railway, the line over the mountains into San Francisco, the first sight of San Francisco, the golden city on the bay, the struggle to live, to survive, to be, and the day at long last when he and his father put out to work in their own boat—and all of it over in the flaming eruption of the earthquake.

That memory was real and vivid. He had only to close his eyes to taste the salt spray and to hear his father singing out, in his Marseille dialect,
“Rejette les petits, coco!”
Out went the crabs too small to matter. He could hear his father’s booming bass voice. He never sang on the way out, but only when they had their catch and were coming in with the wind. He never sang when they used the motor.

He despised the motor.
“Le cochon qui fume,”
he called it. But when the wind was in their sails and the boat rode low with the catch, his father’s voice would boom out over the water, off-key but powerful enough to be heard across the bay. He tried to bring to mind that one day off San Mateo when he had his own son, Thomas, out in the cutter, but the memory was vague and misty, as were all the memories of his life except those times with May Ling. All the rest was a dream and apparently without meaning, yet as he lay there on the hotel bed, half dozing, he re sented and rejected this. He had come out of nothing, and he had made himself a king, a veritable emperor. He ruled a fleet of great passenger liners, an airline, a ma-jestic department store, a splendid resort hotel, property, land, and he dispensed the food of life to hundreds of men and women who labored at his will. True, Mark Levy was his partner and friend, but Mark was like a shadow. It was of his own making and his own doing that he controlled twenty million dollars of property— and how could that be a dream and meaningless? He was welcome in Washington and in New York; people kowtowed to him, and he was surrounded by servile men who were ready to agree with

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anything he said, and he lived in a mansion on Russian Hill and his wife was far and widely admitted to be one of the most beau tiful women in San Francisco.

Yet he was as alone as anyone on the face of the earth, lying alone and fully clothed in a dark room in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, so bereft of passion that he had neither the will nor the desire to call a bell hop and give him the twenty dollars that would bring a floozie to his room to warm his bed. He wanted no woman except one.

He fell asleep, and when he awakened, the first gray light of the morning was seeping into the room. He showered and put on fresh clothes. Outside his window, the sky was filled with a turbulence of racing clouds. It had apparently rained all night, and this was one of those rare and welcome days in Los Angeles when the air was clean and cold, the sky silver gray. After he had dressed, he called Bill Henley, asleep in another room at the Biltmore, awakened him, and said, “Take her home nice and easy, Billy. I won’t be going with you. Tell Mr. Levy I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He had eaten almost nothing at dinner the night be fore, and he was hungry. He made a breakfast out of fried eggs and steak and home-fried potatoes and drank two cups of coffee. At the desk, he asked how far it was to the U.C.L.A. campus at Melrose and Vermont.

“Too far to walk, Mr. Lavette—like everything in L.A. I’ll call you a cab.”

He felt lightheaded, foolish, wonderful, looking out of the cab windows at the sprawling, strange stucco city. San Francisco was a city of hills, with great open vistas to be seen from the hilltops. This place was precisely the reverse, a bowl surrounded on three sides by hills and mountains, yet for some reason it excited and pleased him.

The day was so clear, the air so fine that the great humps of the San Gabriels were clearly visible to the east, while ahead of him, at the

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end of Vermont Avenue, miles away yet as prominent as a gate at the street’s end was the green wall of the Hollywood Hills. He saw and noticed things with the eyes of a delighted child, the huge, clanging green streetcars, the shacks on Vermont Avenue, and, beyond them, where the land rolled up to end the bowl, candy-cane mansions of pink and white, the profusion of roses and ferns and palms contrast-ing so oddly with the one-story, shabby bunga lows—and the cars, so many automobiles of every vari ety, and beyond the houses the wooden derricks pump ing the oil that fed the cars. It was raw, new, different, and it intrigued him, perhaps most of all because it was a place where May Ling and his son lived.

Then he was filled with apprehension and he began to rehearse conversations inside of his head. He was al most trembling when the cab dropped him at the edge of the campus.

He made no judgment of the ugly, cream-colored Art Nouveau buildings, of the small campus with the city blocks of wood and stucco bungalows licking at the edge of it; it was ennobled because May Ling was in some way a part of it. He walked slowly across to the largest building, inquiring of some boys and girls who stood in front of the place where the library might be. They gave him directions, and he walked there in a sort of dream, transported back through the years to his first visit to the San Francisco library, where May Ling ruled the little cubbyhole of Oriental languages.

Then he en tered the building, and there she was, not different, not changed, sitting at the outgoing desk and stamping some books for a student. He stood there silently until she looked up, stared at him, and then smiled.

“Danny,” she said. No reproach. She turned to the librarian sitting beside her and said, rather tremulously, “An old friend. I’ll be back in a moment.” Then she came around the desk and steered him out to the front of the building.

“May I kiss you here?” he asked.

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“Danny, Danny, take me in your arms and kiss me. Yes. Yes.”

He took her in his arms, the smell, the feel of her, the touch of her lips—all of it unchanged as if there were no passage of time for them.

“Can we go somewhere, talk?”

“Yes, of course. It’s almost ten. I’ll take an early lunch at eleven-thirty, and then we’ll have a whole hour. Can you wait, Danny?”

“I’m here. Where would I go?”

“That’s nice. Yes.”

“I’ll be on that bench, over there,” he said, pointing. “You’ll see me when you come out.”

“Of course.”

“One thing—how’s Joey?”

“Big, strong, beautiful.”

“And your folks?”

“All right. Good. You wait for me, Danny.”

He sat down on the bench, stretching out his long legs, watching the students passing by, basking in his own euphoria, delighting in the sensation of a man of forty in love with all the excitement and fervor of a teenage boy. Would he wait for her? Just to sit there, facing a building which contained her presence, made his life richer than it had been in months. He was quite content. If she had said wait for me five hours, six hours, he would have been equally content.

At eleven-thirty she appeared, and he took her in his arms and kissed her again, and she said, “You know, we’re doing this in public, and if anyone asks me or sees me, I shall simply say that this is my husband. It’s time someone here saw the father of my child.”

“I want to hear that.”

“What?”

“This is Mr. Lavette, my husband.”

“You know, you’re like a kid, Danny. You pretend like a little boy.”

“You’re angry?”

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”No, no, no. I’m so happy. Now listen, I brought a sandwich, but I left it inside, because I am sure you want a proper lunch, because I remember how you eat.”

“How I eat!”

“And we can go to the faculty dining room. It’s just a little cafete-ria sort of place, but it’s all right. We’ll find a quiet corner.”

Sitting across from each other, ignoring their trays of food, they just stared at each other.

“You don’t change,” Dan said. “You don’t grow older, only more beautiful.”

“I’m thirty-four. That’s considered quite old in China.”

“I’m sure.”

“And you, Danny—you’re turning gray, and that’s distinguished.

But I think you’re putting on weight.”

“Nine, ten pounds. It’s nothing. I can carry it. Trou ble is, nothing costs money anymore. We have charge accounts in every good restaurant in San Francisco and in New York. So you just eat what you please and sign the check, and that’s what I can’t get used to. Funny, we got this damned empire, and it’s all like a game I’m playing.”

“Hopscotch to the top of Nob Hill?”

“But it’s the bottom, not the top, and you got to play the game again.”

“And the airline is part of the game. I read all about it in the paper. They had your picture there. Joe saw it.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. I’m never worried about what he says, only about what he doesn’t say.”

“God, how I miss him. Can I see him, baby—please?”

“What will you say to him if you see him, Dan? You’ll come with your arms filled with presents, but what will you say to him?”

“I could tell him I love him.”

“I don’t think he’d believe you, Dan.”

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“Do you believe me when I say that I love you—more than anything on earth?”

“I believe you love me. Not more than anything on earth. I think you love the game you’re playing more. And that’s the strange part of it. You’re not like the others, the Seldons, the Mellons, the Crockers, the Hearsts—all those uncrowned kings of this country.”

“How do you know I’m not? You don’t know them.

You only know me.”

“There’s a way to know things. And sometimes I think I know you better than you know yourself.”

“I sent you money four times. Why did you always send the checks back?”

“How did you get the scar on your cheek?”

“I got drunk and smashed up a speakeasy.”

“Oh, no—”

“Why did you send the money back?”

“Because I don’t need money, Danny. That’s the truth. I received nine thousand dollars for the house on Willow Street—which was a gift from you. And during those years we were together, I saved almost four thou sand dollars. You always gave me too much money.

And my father has his savings. I don’t need money, Danny. I need you. I need you because I’m only half alive without you. I’ve never been with another man, and I don’t want to be with another man.

There’s only you, and it’s been that way since the first time we met.

And if this hurts you, I’m selfish enough to want it to hurt, and I’m not going to salve your guilt by taking more money from you.

Anyway, money is meaningless to you. It always has been. You don’t give anything of yourself when you give me money.”

“Don’t be so damned logical!” he burst out.

“Then what should I do, dear love? I can’t be angry at you. I adore you.”

“Now look,” he began, “my airline is functioning now—”

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“Danny, stop! Don’t you think I know what you’re going to say?

Don’t you think I know what you had in mind with this airline of yours? You’re going to tell me that you’ll come to Los Angeles in four hours now and that we can see each other—”

“Yes, yes. Twice a week, three times a week. And in another year or two, the new planes will be in produc tion, and then it will be two and a half hours—”

“Danny!”

He stopped and stared at her. “What did I say?”

“Oh, Danny, Danny, this is a land where men don’t grow up.

Don’t you understand me? You’re not a little boy, working out a way to play hooky and not get caught. I love you. I call myself Mrs.

Lavette. My son is registered in school as Joseph Lavette. And I am not playing a game. You live with a woman you hate and who hates you. If there’s a shred of sanity on this earth, you are my husband.

You are the father of my child. That’s the whole of it. Come to me whenever you want to, but come to stay. I don’t care whether you divorce Jean or not, and I don’t even care whether you can marry me or not, or whether you’re the richest man on earth or penniless.

But when you come, you have to say to me, May Ling, I will not leave you again. Because I’m strong enough for everything else, but not for the leaving, Danny, not for the leaving.”