Star (19 page)

The world was full of exciting places she wanted to see, and San Francisco was only the first stop, and after that, who knew where the winds of fortune would take her.

The bus stopped at Third and Townsend and she got out and looked around. Everything looked busy, and exciting, and dirty. She had only been to San Francisco twice, once with her father when she was a child, and once with Hiroko and Boyd when they christened the baby. But this was a different part of town, and it was seedy and ugly. There were drunks lying on the street, cars rushing by, there was a smell of beer and wine and unwashed bodies, but still she felt a sense of adventure. She bought a map at the bus station and a newspaper and sat down to study them, as passersby glanced at her. She was simply dressed, with her old suitcase in her hand, but she was still very striking. And she knew she had to find a room before nightfall. The question was where, and she had absolutely no idea where to start looking. There were several rooms advertised, and boarding rooms in Chinatown, but she wasn’t sure where to start. She just had to take a chance and start somewhere. She picked out two addresses and went outside to hail a cab, and she asked
the driver which of the two neighborhoods was safer. He recognized instantly that she was from out of town, and he stared at her in her blue dress, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked young, but he had never seen anyone as pretty as she was. He wondered what she was doing in San Francisco all alone, he had a granddaughter her age, and he wouldn’t have liked her hanging out at Third and Townsend.

He looked at the paper for her, and suggested a listing Crystal hadn’t even noticed. It was in an Italian district near Telegraph Hill, somewhere in North Beach.

“Let’s try this one first. It sounds better than the other two, and it shouldn’t be too expensive.” She didn’t notice that he never threw the flag. He could afford to give a little gift to a kid like her. He wasn’t going to charge her a dime, she was so young and pretty he wanted to help her. “You here to visit friends?” He suddenly wondered if she was a runaway, but she didn’t look as though she was hiding from anyone. She just looked like a young kid in the big city for the first time, as he glanced at her again in the mirror. She told him she wasn’t visiting anyone, with a cautious look in his direction, and she tried to look confident as they chatted. She didn’t want him to know how green she was. “Where you from?”

“The Alexander Valley. North of Napa.” She felt sad as she said the words. It seemed days instead of hours since she’d left it.

“Just visiting?”

“No,” she said quietly, looking out the window. “I’m going to live here.” For a while. And then who knew? The world was waiting to open its doors to her, just as her father had promised. And yet the pain of leaving the old world was still fresh as they drove toward North Beach.

They crossed Market Street and looked east. He drove
her past the piers on the Embarcadero, and then back up through Chinatown, and beyond it to North Beach, where the address was. It was a small, simple house with clean curtains in the windows, and two old women were sitting on the stoop, talking animatedly, their hair pulled tightly back in buns, wearing aprons over their black dresses. They reminded her for an instant of Grandma Minerva, and then she forced the thought from her mind. Her days in the valley, and all its memories and people were behind her. She thanked the driver, and asked him how much she owed him.

“Nothing … it’s all right….” He sounded gruff and he looked embarrassed, but he wouldn’t let her pay him. She was just a kid after all, and so pretty and so young, it had been nice just looking at her. She thanked him and he watched as she approached the two old ladies, carrying her suitcase. And then he drove away, whistling to himself, hoping she’d be okay. She was young, but she was a real beauty, and she looked like she could take care of herself. The two old women noticed it too as she asked them about the room for rent. They stared at her for a minute before answering her, and said something to each other in Italian.

“Excuse me?” She looked suddenly even younger as she set her suitcase down, and a halo of pale hair seemed to frame her face. The two women were staring at her and she wondered what they were thinking. “The room? … do you know anything about it?”

“How come you not in school?” The older of the two eyed her suspiciously, fingering her apron. She had big black eyes, and a face covered with wrinkles.

“I graduated last year,” she lied, and the women continued to look her over. “Could I see the room?” She wasn’t going to let them intimidate her.

“Maybe. You got a job?” She sat back against the steps
and Crystal smiled, trying to show a confidence she didn’t quite feel yet. What if she needed a job to get a room, what would she do then? She was beginning to panic, but decided to tell the truth, at least part of it. She had to.

“Not yet. I just got here this afternoon. I’m going to start looking for a job as soon as I find a room.”

“Where you from?”

“A few hours north of here.”

“Your mama and papa know you’re here?” Like the cabdriver, she wondered if Crystal had run away from them, but Crystal shook her head with eyes that told the old woman nothing.

“My parents are dead.” She said it with such quiet strength that for a moment the woman didn’t speak. And then slowly she stood up, still staring at her. She had never seen a girl who looked quite like her, the pale hair, the long legs, the delicately carved face. She looks like a movie star, she had said to her friend in Sicilian.

“I’ll show you the room. You see if you gonna like it.”

“Thank you.” Crystal looked quiet and self-possessed as she picked up her suitcase.

It was a tiny airless room. There were four of them on one floor in what had once been the woman’s home. Now there was a total of six rooms that the old woman was renting, and all of them shared a single bathroom. The woman herself had the only room with its own bath. It was on the main floor, next to the kitchen, which, for another five dollars a month, the tenants were allowed to use. The room itself was forty-five dollars a month, and it was bare and looked out on the building behind it. But to Crystal, it was worth it. She didn’t know where else to go. And it was clean enough. There was a heavy lock on the door, and she sensed that she would be safe here, with
the old woman watching the comings and goings of her boarders.

“You pay me one month in advance, cash. And you wanna move out, you give me two weeks notice.” Not that they ever did. They came and they went, but she kept the place clean, and she only tolerated decent people. No drunks, no prostitutes, no men who dragged women in. She only wanted clean, quiet types, like Crystal. There were two elderly men, and a young girl living off the third floor, and on the same floor as Crystal’s room there were three girls, and a young man who sold insurance. “You don’t get a job, you can’t keep the room, unless you got enough money without one.”

“I’ll find work as soon as I can.” Crystal looked her squarely in the eye. She peeled four tens and five singles out of her billfold. It was the money she had earned working at the diner, and she was grateful she had saved it. The other girls her age spent it on nylons and movies and sodas, but Crystal had saved almost every penny she earned, and had hidden it from her mother. “Are there any restaurants near here looking for help?”

The old woman laughed. There were plenty of them, but she knew none of them would hire Crystal. “You speak Italian?”

Crystal shook her head with a smile. “No, I don’t.”

“Then you gotta look somewhere else. They don’t hire girls like you around here.” She was too pretty and too young, and they only hired Italian men to be waiters in the restaurants in North Beach. “Maybe downtown.” But when Crystal began looking the next afternoon, none of the places she tried wanted to hire her, even though she told them that she’d had experience in a diner. They just laughed, and most of them wouldn’t even let her leave the number of the pay phone at Mrs. Castagna’s. She was discouraged as she bought a sandwich and took
it back to her room, and Mrs. Castagna was sitting on the steps as usual, watching her tenants come and go, and chattering with the people she knew on the street, in her own dialect.

“You find a job?” She eyed Crystal as she walked slowly up the stairs. Her feet hurt in her uncomfortable shoes, and the blue dress looked as wilted as she did. And she shivered in the chill air as the fog rolled in. It was May, but it was a lot colder than it had been in the valley, and she wasn’t used to it yet. She lit the little gas stove in her room with a nickel. Mrs. Castagna saw to it that her tenants got nothing for free. She wasn’t going to support anyone. She had raised ten children in that house, and they were grown and gone now. She was making good use of their rooms, and the house brought her a decent income. Unlike Crystal, who counted her dwindling funds with nervous fingers as she sat in the room’s only chair, and looked at the crucifix over the bed. The only other decoration was a colored drawing of the Virgin Mary, painted by one of Mrs. Castagna’s daughters, who, Crystal later learned, was in a convent. The others were married and had kids, and visited home frequently on Sundays.

Crystal pounded the streets for two weeks, and was beginning to panic at not having found a job yet. She had started to wonder if she ever would, as she walked home late one night. She had tried to find a job in Chinatown, as a cashier, or even a dishwasher, but they only laughed at her, as they had two days before in North Beach. She was always the wrong color, the wrong sex, and spoke the wrong language. But that night, she walked home through the famous Barbary Coast. There were nightclubs and restaurants, and couples walking down the street arm in arm, laughing and talking. Unlike North Beach, it seemed bright and alive, and a great deal flashier.
She was wearing a blue skirt and a white blouse, and the white pumps she’d had for years, and a sweater she had borrowed from Mrs. Castagna. It was black, like everything else she owned, and ten sizes too big, but the old woman felt sorry for her, shivering in the cold at night. The only other thing she had that was warm was an old sheepskin jacket she used to wear riding in the early mornings with her father. Her wardrobe was a far cry from what she saw women wearing in stylish San Francisco. But she didn’t care anymore. All she wanted was a job, doing anything, scrubbing floors if she had to. It was a far cry from her dreams of Hollywood, but she had to eat and pay Mrs. Castagna. She had to earn a living somehow. She had decided to try the hotels the following week but thought she’d give the restaurants one last try, as she stood outside an elaborate facade with a sign that said simply
HARRY’S.
Everything was garish here, and there was a smaller sign that promised a floor show.

Crystal wandered hesitantly inside, oblivious to the stares of the couples who were leaving. They were well dressed and a number of the women wore low-cut dresses. She stood for a long time watching a man on the stage with two musicians accompanying him as he sang Cole Porter’s “Too Darn Hot.” And then the headwaiter hurried over to her, and asked her brusquely what she wanted.

“You can’t come in here unless you’re joining a party.” They didn’t want hookers at Harry’s, or rubberneckers who stood in the doorway catching the show for nothing, but it was obvious, even to him, that Crystal was no hooker. In her outsized sweater and worn-out clothes, she looked more like an orphan. “What do you want?”

She looked him straight in the eye, and tried to pretend her knees weren’t shaking. “A job. I’ll do anything. Wash dishes, wait on tables, anything … I need a job very
badly.” He started to say something to her, and then looked at her more closely. She was so pretty it made your heart ache just to look at her, and her eyes seemed to reach out and touch you. He had been about to turn her away, and then suddenly he wondered if Harry would like her. He glanced at his watch and wondered if the boss would still be upstairs, but it was too late, and he knew that he wasn’t.

“You ever work in a restaurant before?” He straightened his bow tie and kept an eye on the tables, but his eyes kept coming back to her. She had a face that made you want to stop and stare at her for a lifetime. But she seemed totally unaware of the effect she had had on him. There was an openness about her and a certain gutsiness, despite her obvious nervousness, and he instantly liked her. “Ever been a waitress?”

“Yes.” For fear that he’d turn her away, she didn’t tell him it had been in a diner.

And then he looked at her more closely. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” She told the lie as though she wouldn’t know how to tell one.

He started to shake his head at her, glancing at the door through which she had entered. “You gotta be twenty-one to work here. It’s the law.”

“Then I’m twenty-one … please …” Her voice was gentle and her incredible blue eyes smiled as part of him melted. “Please … no one will ever know.”

“Christ,” he almost groaned, “the boss will kill me.” But she sensed that he was relenting.

“I’ll work hard. I swear I will. Just try me for a few days … a week … anything …” Her eyes reached out to him and he knew he couldn’t turn her down. She was just too pretty, so vulnerable and so young, and something told him she needed the job and
would work hard. What the hell, he could tell Harry he didn’t know. And they could can her if she was no good. He glanced back at her, and saw her watching him with earnest concentration.