Mitla Pass (6 page)

I found myself having tea with a couple of the neighbors. Nice girls, South Africans. Part of their families stayed behind in Johannesburg to operate the family businesses. Earnings were sent to Israel where the other part of the family had immigrated and started up new enterprises. Lifetime Zionists with clear-cut goals.

Where was Gideon now?

“Little more tea, Dara?”

“Thanks, Val. Little jumpy today?”

I didn’t totally trust Dara Myerson. She was too gorgeous. They all flirted with Gideon.

I almost lost it. I dropped the kettle and grabbed the sink for support.

“Val, you look the color of paste.”

They helped me to the bedroom and Selma left to find Dr. Hartmann. Dara said she’d take the girls for the day and see to my meals.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“Just a little dizzy spell.”

“Are you starting your period? Is it premenstrual tension?” Roxy asked. Roxanne had become very worldly about menstruation. She was a lady-in-waiting, about to start up at any time. She carried a sanitary napkin around with her everyplace, in case the big event should occur.

Dr. Hartmann treated a lot of concentration camp survivors. His medical bag was full of goodies. The girls were gone and it became quite peaceful as the medication took hold ... wheeeee ... praise the Lord ... baby’s flying ...

The fucking clock had barely moved. It was only eleven in the morning. “Oh, cripes.” I breathed deeply. It hurt, bad. The only other time I remembered feeling this kind of pain was during those hours of waiting when Penelope’s life hung in the balance.

I focused in on the photograph on the dresser. There he is, staring down at me. Rear Admiral Warren Ballard and Mother. Mom’s big-brimmed hat was gushy with lace. Both of them had military stiff backs and white gloves. Their joint smiles registered .001 on the Richter scale. Bulldog Ballard.

San Francisco Bay Area, 1944-1953

H
IS SOFTEST TOUCH
felt like a blackjack. If it didn’t cruise at twenty-five knots, or wasn’t 90 proof, the Admiral usually wasn’t interested, particularly if it was a voice that came from inside a little girl. We were commodities. Mother was a grade A commodity. Sweet Sister Ellen was a commodity, bless her pissant soul. Brother Tom was no commodity. He was a
male!

But Tom let the old team down. Yea, Tom! Instead of following Bulldog Ballard into Annapolis, Tom was somewhere on a mountaintop in South America, teaching ungrateful Indians how to use fertilizer.

Anthropology! What the hell is anthropology! Married a God-damned Peruvian woman, half-Indian, that’s what!

“Best not to mention Tom this Christmas,” Mother had warned; “the Admiral’s maudlin about it.”

No such problems with Sweet Sister Ellen. Navy forever! Fred Barrington, now there’s as fine a young officer as this man’s navy has laid eyes on in ten years. That lad will be commanding a cruiser before he’s thirty-five. Yoicks! A cruiser before thirty-five! Sweet Sister Ellen, who, in secret, could outdrink the Admiral and Fine Lad Fred, had delivered a little boy. He was a little shit, but at last the Admiral knew the old tradition would live on despite brother Tom’s perfidy.

I was the baby. By the time it was my turn at bat, Sweet Sister Ellen had caved in and Brother Tom had waved his middle finger under the Admiral’s nose and jumped ship to South America.

Mother usually came down on Father’s side, so I spent my childhood learning the art of compromise and not rocking the boat. From the beginning, I was good in art—damned good, actually. My dreams of studying in Paris had to be set aside by the war. Besides, Mother and I hadn’t totally convinced the Admiral. I was good enough for Paris, mind you, but not quite ready. The really fine art schools in L.A. and New York were also just out of reach. I decided to spend the war getting ready for Paris.

Mills College, a sort of West Coast Vassar with a fairly snooty all-girl campus near San Francisco, seemed to be a good compromise. Pleased the hell out of the Admiral and kept peace in the home.

Home, incidentally, was Coronado Island, a ferry-boat hop over the bay from San Diego. Ships here, ships there, ships everywhere. All Navy, a yard wide. A retirement community, where old salts got rigor mortis before the final sail to the great beyond. Six commanders and five captains per square block. Flag officers on Ocean Boulevard. That’s where we lived, in a big old airy place with shiplap siding and the Fourth of July all year round.

At Mills I gloried in my first real taste of freedom. I studied art history (yawn), and studio art, and mostly boned up on my French so I could crack the Sorbonne after the war.

That’s when I met him. Gideon Zadok, Private First Class, USMC and well-known entrepreneur.

Gideon was a patient at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, just a skip and a holler down the road from the Mills College campus. So many poor wounded Marines and sailors so far from home needing a lot of tender loving care, and several hundred girls just coming into heat ... it was a lovely mutual arrangement. In those days old-fashioned chivalry still prevailed ... a few fierce French kisses, maybe a little squeeze of the tits, but nothing we couldn’t talk to Mother about. We just didn’t sack out unless the situation had reached a very serious stage. Christ, the world was demure then. It was nice.

Gideon didn’t talk much about his overseas duty. Over a period of time I got to know that he had had seven recurrences of malaria from Guadalcanal and had apparently taken some shrapnel in the shoulder. It wasn’t a bad wound, but a buddy of his at the hospital told me he kept it secret for two or three days until it became infected by the jungle atmosphere and was considered serious enough to earn him a Purple Heart. Later, on Tarawa, he caught dengue fever, a terribly painful disease in which all the joints in the body—knuckles, knees, toes, backbone—swell up.

Then there was something about his asthma. All told, he was just a plain worn-out warrior in need of a long healing period.

I arranged a party of girlfriends to go to the Oak Knoll Hospital to see his play. To my surprise, it was a terribly funny show, acted with skill and abandon. Loved the plot. A Marine detachment was shot into outer space, where they formed a colony on a distant planet. After several centuries the colony lost contact and they were eventually forgotten. Life was eternal out there. Every day for hundreds of years, the Marines woke up to reveille, did close-order drill, were spit and polish, and held inspections. They were rediscovered and returned to Earth. The last act, in which they discover sex with women, was hilarious. But after looking over the world, they opted to be returned to outer space and do close-order drill forever.

I don’t know why I kept dating this guy. He was a bit of a blowhard. Most Marines have a problem with modesty. I think I was also enchanted with being able to go out with enlisted men and finding out they weren’t all hairy apes. After I saw Gideon’s play, I began to wonder. What is it drawing me to him?

I’ll be seeing you

In all the old familiar places,

That this heart of mine embraces,

All day through ...

I hope there is still slow dancing when Roxanne and Penelope start dating. Their old mom can teach them the yins and yangs of it. A good part of my slow-dancing career had been in the arms of some ambitious young officer trying to zap the Admiral’s daughter. A lot of random clutching, sweating and, oh shit, here comes his erection.

But on the other hand, comrades, slow dancing can run a very close second to you know what. PFC Zadok really knew his way around the back alleys and gutter fighting and on a dance floor. He held you firmly but fairly, his antennae alert to pick up the faintest signal. After I decided I liked the way we fit, and stopped fighting it, I’d just wrap myself around him, feel his cheek, breathe hard, and sway like there was only one of us moving for two.

He knew a restaurant, within his means, over the bay in San Francisco. El Globo on Broadway, in the Italian North Beach section. It was actually a Portuguese bar with rooms over the top for visiting seamen. Behind the bar were a half-dozen booths in a room that served a family-style dinner for ninety-nine cents with wine.

We were getting quieter and quieter every time, just holding hands and looking at each other through the candle’s flame.

“How’s all this going to go down with the Admiral? Me being an enlisted man. And a Marine?”

“The Admiral and I are not that close. I don’t know. He had a ship shot out from under him at Midway. He’s seen too many of his own boys die and too many Marines scraped up from the beach. He’s lost a lot of his bigotry.”

“You want to keep on seeing me?”

I was about to say, “I’m not ready.” That’s what I’d always said before: “I could really go for you, buddy, but I’m not ready. Paris and all that.” I didn’t answer him.

“You want to hear a real deal breaker?” Gideon asked.

“Shoot.”

“I’m a Jew.”

I don’t know what he had to go through to say that, but a strange moment arrived between us. Suddenly it wasn’t fun and games any longer. I made a smart-assed remark like, “I thought you were some kind of weirdo.”

Gideon looked into the bar where a serious arm-wrestling contest was going on. “There’s our dinner and gas money. Lend me a couple of bucks, we’ll split the winnings.”

Oh, that little bastard was deceptive. He pinned three Portuguese sailors, all twice his size, and scooped up fifteen dollars from the bar.

I had access to a girlfriend’s car, which was in drydock most of the time because of the gas rationing until Gideon came along. He hustled enough ration stamps to keep the tank full. We got outside and I knew I’d have to give him some kind of answer.

“Let’s drive to someplace quiet,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

With all his bravado, Gideon had scarcely touched me. I felt very comfortable about being alone with him. I drove up to Twin Peaks. It was a rare night without fog and we could see the entire Bay area and bridges.

“Taken many poor sailors up here?”

“Oh, quite a few, but you’re my very first Marine Jew.”

He didn’t kiss me. I learned later that was all a part of the bastard’s strategy. He opened a large manila envelope and took out a small stack of pages.

“What’s that?”

“The first chapter of my novel. I’d like to read it to you.”

I found myself shaking. Everything was twinkling out there and an eager young man was sitting opposite me ready to throw down the gauntlet and challenge the world.

“What do you call it?”

“Of Men in Battle.”

When he finished reading, I just came apart and wept uncontrollably. It was so beautiful. I looked at Gideon Zadok, hard. Lord, what was this all about!

“Oh buddy,” I cried, “you’ve got me going.”

Gideon reached out and touched my cheek and told me not to cry. I never felt anything like his hand before. No one has ever touched me that way since, but him.

In that small cafe,

The park across the way,

The children’s carrousel.

The chestnut trees,

The wishing well,

I’ll be seeing you,

In every lovely summer’s day ...

“I love you, Gideon.”

“Me too, Val. And you’re going to live to see them all standing up and applauding when I enter the room. Even the Admiral.”

T
EA WITH
M
OTHER
at the stroke of four, Garden Court, Palace Hotel, and “try not to be late, dear.” Afternoon tea, gentle music under a high glass roof, amid flowers, potted trees, and fountain. Jane Ballard belonged in the Garden Court. She was pure Renoir in a frilly French collar and one of her smashing straw hats. Mother was a pale beauty, born to wear lavender and long strings of pearls.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, darling.”

A catch-up on the news. Father had been given the temporary rank of vice admiral and now commanded a task force, hundreds of ships. It was a monstrous-sized command, a fitting climax in the closing days of the war, to end a distinguished career.

Sweet Sister Ellen’s drinking problem had oozed out of the closet. Fred had been overseas for two years now and Sweet Sister Ellen was apparently doing a little of this and a little of that on the side. Thank God Ellen had Mom. But she’d always had Mom. It was Ellen’s deliberate pissant decision. I was envious, no doubt. It stuck in my craw.

Tom’s Peruvian wife was about to have their fourth child. Would we ever get to see them? Maybe, after the war. That wasn’t just idle talk. The Admiral had softened up a bit. He was corresponding regularly with Tom. Really! Bulldog Ballard relenting!

The evening before, Gideon and I had pooled our resources and taken Mother out to Shadows Restaurant on Telegraph Hill and he’d unleashed his charms on her.

“What do you think of him, Mom?”

“Oh, he’s a charmer, all right. Very clever boy.”

“I’m crazy about him.”

“That’s rather obvious. How far is this thing going to go?”

Silence. The orchestra switched to a medley of sentimental British war tunes ... “The White Cliffs of Dover”... “When the Lights Go On Again.” Tea arrived with “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Mother lit her long thin cigarette with a gold lighter embossed with a Navy ensign. Twenty-fifth anniversary present from Sweet Sister Ellen and Fred.

“Waiter,” Mom said, breaking the growing awkwardness.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Take this damned stuff away. I’d like a bourbon on the rocks, a double.”

I had an aversion to drinking. Mother and the Admiral drank enough for me. But we were getting down to brass tacks and nasty words could be in store. I dreaded it. “I’ll have a whiskey sour,” I said.

Now properly fortified, Mom popped the question. “Are you sleeping together, dear?”