Girl of My Dreams

Finalement

Rumors met us at the hotel. Twelve people had been killed including four cops. No. Twenty had died, seven of them in a two-car crash as they raced to escape the war-torn city. No. The police are killing every picketer they can find. It’s a massacre. A message from Mike Quin said he wouldn’t be seeing us since he was writing an account of the day for the longshoremen’s newspaper. The desk clerk said he assumed we’d be leaving San Francisco immediately and asked if we wanted our bill.

“You should leave town, Miss Millevoix,” a bankerly looking man said to Pammy in the Fairmont’s lobby. “This will only be the beginning. A lot more of these radicals have to get their heads broken before the wretches know who’s boss.”

“Thank you,” Pammy said, trying to stay out of trouble.

“For your own good, Miss M,” the pin-striped man pursued. “The only way to solve this is by bloodshed. Violence is the language they understand. I’d turn machine guns on these lowlifes and mow them down like wheat.”

“That does sound extreme,” Pammy said, still holding herself in check, but she ventured a little further. “Don’t you think, sir, that the dockmen and the seamen and the others have a right to organize for better pay?”

The man puffed himself up and threw out his chin, fingering the gold watch chain draped across his girth. He may have stepped out of a cartoon labeled Big Capital. “You’re not one of those Hollywood bleeding hearts, are you?” he asked. “You look much too sensible. No, Miss Millevoix, if I’m hiring someone I hire him for what he’ll work for, not for what he and his cronies can extort from me by banding together into a so-called union that is in reality nothing more than a conspiracy against honest businessmen and private property. It’s my property, my business, and I’ll decide how often, how long, when and where a man I hire will work. When the gang of them strike and picket my property, that’s an instrument of violence itself, completely un-American. It’s pure Bolshevism. Not on these shores, thank you very much.”

We made our way into the bar. One of the bartender’s brothers was a longshoreman and the other was a policeman. He’d been on the phone with both, and he gave us the definitive word. Only two people had died—the unlucky Nick Bordoise and a longshoreman named Howard Sperry. Other longshoremen had been seriously wounded, but no policemen were badly hurt. Over a hundred union members had been taken to hospitals, but most of the wounded had straggled to their homes for fear of being arrested if they went to a hospital. “It’s a miracle more weren’t killed,” the bartender said.

Race and Teresa found us in the bar and said they were leaving. They thought all of us should get back to Los Angeles as fast as possible. “Anything we can learn to help us organize in Hollywood,” Teresa said, “we’ve already learned.” “In spades,” Race said. At that moment a messenger came for Pammy. He handed her a note. “We’ll be having a memorial on Monday for our fallen comrades,” the note read, “and we’d be honored by your presence. Will you stand with us? Perhaps a visit to the wounded over the weekend.” The note was signed, “Bridges of the Strike Committee.”

“Will you give Pammy some time to think about this?” I asked Teresa and Race.

“I don’t need any time,” Pammy said. “I’ll stand with the longshoremen.”

Teresa and Race were taking the night train to Los Angeles. “Y’all got her into this,” Race told me. “Now y’all better bodyguard her like she was the Queen of Sheba.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Pammy said.

That hurt my feelings, but I quickly said, “Nothing for me to do at the studio.”

Teresa, sensing I had just hurt Pammy’s feelings in return, said, “Owen, is that as gallant as you can be to my best friend? Pammy darling, I don’t think you should stay. This city is the most dangerous place on the continent.”

Pammy laughed for the first time all day. “Don’t worry, girls, Owen will be my chaperone and my life preserver.”

We had dinner in the hotel after Teresa and Race left, not talking much, not eating much. I suppose we were in shock. The conversation, if it can be called that, was artificial. “Will you have another glass of wine?” “No, thank you.” “Dessert?” “No.”

In the bar before Teresa and Race had left, all four of us had already shuddered at the horror we’d witnessed, already compared our afternoon certainties that we would be engulfed and unable to escape, already pitied those who didn’t escape, especially the tender, fervent Nick Bordoise, already sworn at the brutality of the police and the powers who sent them, already asked what were we doing at this luxury hotel while the strikers were wondering if they’d even have enough to eat for the next week, already vowed to donate to the strike fund, already debated how to use in Hollywood what we saw here. Now, alone with Pammy, my energy searched for an outlet and could find none.

She was uneasy too. She missed Millie yet she didn’t want Costanza to bring Millie up to a San Francisco in such upheaval. Weighing every word, praying for dinner to be over, I said staying in the city could hurt her in Hollywood where they hated Reds, particularly—I couldn’t say Mossy’s name—the, ah, studio heads. “That’s the last goddamned thing I care about,” she said.

Mercifully, the check arrived. We went to our separate rooms. She had a suite on the twelfth floor, I was in a single on the third.

I remembered I hadn’t asked her what time she wanted to get started in the morning. What did I mean by get started anyway? It wasn’t as if my services as an emissary to the strike were any longer needed. It was only Thursday night and we had nothing to do until the memorial service Harry Bridges had asked her to stay for on Monday. She’d visit the wounded as he asked, some combination of Florence Nightingale and Lady Bountiful. So we’d each go our separate ways in the morning? I’ll just call her room, I said to my brash self, and offer her the same kind of tour Mike Quin had given me on my earlier trip, the highs and lows of a great, majestic, elegant, corrupt, decadent city now in turmoil, kind of a fairy princess with syphilis.

Her line was busy. I read the papers about the strike. Almost all the stories were favorable to the group of businessmen calling themselves the Industrial Association, and unfavorable to the longshoremen, the seamen, and to a lesser degree the teamsters. Like the paperboy on the Embarcadero, the press was already calling this Bloody Thursday. “Blood ran red in the streets of San Francisco,” the Chronicle reporter began, calling this “the darkest day this city has known since the Earthquake of 1906 … a Gettysburg in the miniature. WAR IN SAN FRANCISCO!”

Fifteen hundred National Guard soldiers dispatched by the governor were patrolling the city, with five thousand more on the way. The commanding officer of the 250^th Coast Artillery announced the occupation of the waterfront and issued a warning: “In view of the fact that we are equipped with rifles, bayonets, automatic rifles and machine guns, which are all high-powered weapons, the Embarcadero will not be a safe place for persons whose reasons for being there are not sufficient to run the risk of serious injury.” The commander was quoted as saying his troops would show no mercy and he warned his own men that if any of them fired into the air instead of shooting to kill they would be court-martialed. Leafing through the paper, I thought, So the rebellion is over and the powerful have, no surprise, won. It was Jubilee Pictures writ large.

I called Pammy’s room again. Still busy. More accounts of the confrontation between strikers and police described the union members as attackers and rioters, the police as embattled peacekeepers. Once more I tried her line. Busy. I was sick of reading what other people wrote about where I’d been all day, and since she was on the phone I wouldn’t be waking her up by knocking on her door. Should I put my suit jacket on and be formal? Or would that be like an invitation to come back out again for a walk or drink? An invitation she’d be sure to turn down before I even issued it, humiliating me. I left my jacket off and put on a sweater. Trying to look relaxed.

The door swung open before I finished knocking. She was wearing a kimono, China red with blue flowers on it, that came to her knees. “Sorry,” I said, “your line was busy”—and now I began stammering—“I only came up to see what, I mean if you’d like tomorrow, in the morning I mean.”

“Enfin!” she said. “I thought I’d have to call you myself as soon as I’d said goodnight to Millie. What are you doing standing out there?”

My legs had gone into her suite and my arms had found their way to her shoulders, more or less by themselves. I was aware of no volition. She pulled me to her and faced me not with a smile but a look of necessity, inevitability. The kiss was warm, hungry. More—a new kiss, heart-stopping for me, heart-racing, heart-full. We were then on the couch. Then then then. Her kimono was coming off, her arms and shoulders, bare, appeared to radiate desire. Perhaps it was only desirability. I was clumsy but it didn’t matter. She was active, then she waited, pausing for me to take the lead, unaccustomed as I was. I took the lead, somehow I did that. Then she was aggressive, yet paused again as I went forward. I tore at the sweater I’d put on minutes earlier in my room, all unknowing. Always unknowing. I was thrusting. She was thrusting. We rolled off the couch, acrobatically, without becoming disengaged, and she laughed. We pumped and wrapped ourselves around each other until I forgot there were two of us.

Back on the couch, she said, “Finalement, one and one make one.”

“That’s my line,” I said.

“I was reading your mind.”

“I guess it’s a little too legible, isn’t it?”

“Around us the city is burning, and here we are fiddling.”

I was elated, helpless, guilty. Pammy put her head on my chest and breathed easily. How I envied, treasured, that breathing. I couldn’t think yet, but when I did I was thinking how could two people, not insensitive to their surroundings, have seen the terror, violence and pain of this day and then combine with passion so complete they were transformed into a new being with its own will and urgency and force?

“It happened in the war like this, too,” she said, and as I exhaled she quickly amended. “I mean not like this this, my Owen, but an elation of survival. You have been through a day when you feared, you expected really, to die and then you didn’t die, someone else died instead, like a sacrifice, and when the sun goes down you’re all of a sudden more alive, alert, and awake to the possibilities than you’ve ever been. Whether you’re sharing an apple stolen from an officer, a dark joke or a bed almost doesn’t matter. You’re connecting again with life, with the fact you didn’t die.”

“We should be with the wounded, or at least I should,” I said.

“There’s not much we can do. In France when I was at the blood bank, I knew what I was supposed to do, but there’s not that need here. The hospitals have the help they want, and not so many people are wounded as in war, in their bodies anyway.”

“I remember the blood bank, your mention of it. That must have been gruesome.”

“Less gruesome than San Francisco, actually. The poor damaged boys would be carried into our field hospital, gaping wounds, eyes full of fright, legs, arms and flesh torn, and we’d reassure them as much as possible while we transfused them, then we’d send them to real hospitals in the rear. A girl who worked with me kissed them all goodbye as we packed them off to safer places, so I started doing that too, usually a mother’s kiss on the forehead. They seemed to like that. San Francisco is worse in a way because even though it’s like a war only one side has an army.”

“It’s more serious now than when I was here a few weeks ago. The pickets then seemed to be letting off steam, and the owners were responding with violence but also jockeying for position. Now it’s war, civil war, class war, I don’t know.”

“No one would make a movie of this,” she said, “because the strikers would be heroes, the owners bad guys like the stripe suit in the lobby who wanted more workers killed. Any film would be too Red. The day can’t be shown to anyone who wasn’t here.”

This lighted moment was a release for me after the day of terror, after so much longing for her. Yet I thought or hoped it was a release for her too, revisiting the front to discharge it forever, where French boys, and then English ones, had been borne to her with blown off limbs, peeled away faces, geysering forth their life’s fluid as fast as she could replace it with transfusion.

We went to bed naturally, unspokenly, without my saying I wanted to spend the night in her room, without her inviting me. Without my willing it to happen, the circumference of my perception compressed to the room I was in. The only thing in my universe, I was thinking, is what Palmyra Millevoix and I together are, what we do, make, murmur, have. Nothing is between us, neither space nor time. Outside the world is falling apart. Inside, my world has shrunk to a point, a dot, where I have no thoughts or opinions or feelings beyond the sensation of light, and lightness.

This began a weekend I’ll remember after I’m dead. We made love again, and again, and somewhere fell asleep. We were beyond meaning, having entered the realm of being. I dreamed I was where I was.

In the morning I was more eager than ever, a terrible thirst beginning at last to be slaked. Yet it was Pammy who awoke to pounce on me, throbbing gaily, avidly, ardently with her thighs. She made cloudy sighs three or four times. She sank down on me. “Oh my,” she finally said.

“I’m trying hard not to say I love you,” I said.

“Keep trying,” she said, and when I looked forlorn, she added, “But so am I.” She gave a little laugh. “How many people, the world over, are, you know, unionizing at any one time?”

That struck me as a somewhat impersonal way of putting it. Were we, then, part of the labor movement? But then what struck me much harder was the recollection of the dream in which she had asked me this same question, only she’d said fucking instead of unionizing. I became dizzy with the thought that I was now living my dream.

We made some absurd calculations, national habits and frequency of sex, where it was night and where day, and where in between so people were waking up or not yet asleep. Deductions for night watchmen and workers on the lobster shift. The total was close to one hundred and fifty million who might be unionizing. “Then we’re not so special,” Pammy said, “since at any given moment oceans of people are doing this.”

Oceans! The same word she had used in my dream. Oceans of fucking couples.

“Uh huh,” I said as casually as possible, but what I was thinking was, ah, at long last part of the ocean.

“A first kiss lasts forever, doesn’t it?” she said. “Would you go so far as to say I’m really good in bed?”

Not wanting her to know how skimpy were my possibilities for comparison, I said, “If you insist, I guess I might admit that.”

“I’m spirited, cheerful, responsive, brisk, varied, and humorous.”

“I’m passionate,” I said, “and that’s all I can claim.”

“We’re working on that.”

I got up first while she hugged the pillow where I’d lain and closed her eyes.

The question of desire and desirability, which men jumble so enthusiastically, seized me. It is the way of most female stars that their desirability runs ahead of their desire. They look like they want you, are schooled to look that way, when most of the time they want to be left alone or to read a book or check their nail polish or play with their cat or curl up with a warm, but not hot and writhing, body. In this charged moment, I was the beneficiary of a lover whose desire equaled her desirability. Or appeared to.

I noticed now, for the first time, Pammy’s imperfections. She had a little notch at the top of her left ear, one eyebrow was lower than the other, her jaw—no getting around it—was too leonine. A tiny mole beneath her chin could be called a beauty mark, but it could also be called a flaw. I gazed at her and understood that in another woman to whom I’d made love, these observations could be the start of my stepping off the boat. How had I not seen these defects before, either when I sat next to her in her dressing room at the studio or at dinner, or when she swam in her pool, or on any of the limited, prized occasions when I’d been in her presence? Or, for God’s sake, when her face was twenty feet high in a close-up on the screen? Where were her ear, her overhanging upper lip, the little mark between her eyes then? Makeup, a great cameraman, my own blindness? Yet no one else, no executive or reviewer or reporter, had ever made a critical observation about her face that I knew of. Had she bewitched us all?

And—you will have guessed—I loved her more for these imperfections, if that’s what they were.

My eye and my heart pitched their own battle. My eye said it admired her the most and was the most discerning; my heart argued that it was the center and source of all feeling, and my eye would simply have to be quiet and follow my heart’s lead. To which my eye said you’d know nothing if I didn’t show all this to you. With that the two organs made peace, the one supplying sight, the other vision. I wished only for more flaws, anything to make the world think less of her so I could have her entirely to myself.

When, a little later, she came out of the shower, a towel around her hair and another sheathing her body, her face could have been her daughter’s, at most that of an older sister of Millie’s. She was still wet, girlish, smooth-cheeked, with unjaded sparkling eyes, curious. All there was was in front of her, of us.

I looked at her and turned away. I felt fright and hope. What about our predicament in San Francisco? She could be a target, or even I might be. Beyond that, what if I was just a fling for La Millevoix? That was something to be afraid of more than getting shot at the strike. But then hope—this is the beginning of the love of my life—filled me like a deep breath. My brain refused to let me relax.

She sang to me. A sad song relieved with a little folky cheer. It had been turned down by her publishers as well as the studio for a kind of archaism—hymnal affectation her recording company called it—and her dip into incest. They refused to let her record it and wouldn’t even allow it to be released as sheet music. But she sang it to me.

When I was young, so young and green

I lost my loves ere I was weaned,

My Pa to war, my Mum to drink,

My brother shut up in the county clink.

(and the refrain:)

All my life

I’ve seen strife

Strife and tears

Through all the years.

An uncle made his ward and then

Made me his woman when I was four and ten,

Four and ten no matter when,

I flew away from other men.

(the refrain again)

But then at length of twenty seasons

One love came who gave me reasons

To trust again, to soar aloft

On caresses and kisses that are so soft.

Now at last I’ve finally found

The love that makes my world go ’round.

With a child of joy we soon are blessed,

We give thanks for our treasure, for our gentle guest.

(a changed refrain:)

All my life

No more strife,

Strife and tears

Disappear from our years.

I had just a flyspeck of enough sense not to ask if there was anything autobiographical in what she had sung to me. A maudlin version of “Born Blue.”

Pammy received a message that Harry Bridges hoped she could appear at a rally Saturday and go to church on Sunday with Howard Sperry’s widow. The memorial parade for the two dead men, Sperry and Nick Bordoise, would be Monday morning. San Francisco was buzzing with talk that the port was indeed open—like an open wound, Pammy said. There were stirrings that the united labor movement was planning a general strike to shut down not merely the waterfront but the entire city.

What mattered to me was that except for Pammy’s brief services to the union and a couple of excursions I took with Mike Quin to deliver food to the longshoremen, she and I were left to ourselves. Quin scoffed at me, “If you can’t get a screen story out of what’s taken place here you can’t count your fingers.” I told him politics is death in Hollywood movies. “So it’s a love story between a striker and the daughter of a big shipowner. Romeo and Juliet still sells, no?” I said I’d already tried something like that. I did not add that it was a different love story that utterly consumed me.

It was not that I forgot the seriousness of the moment outside Pammy and me. I continued to have blasts of conscience all weekend at the pleasure I was taking while the city and the longshoremen suffered. My own turbulence, though, was that of selfish passion, unaccustomed passion that turned me into a fountain.

When I took food to the union men, I was surprised to see they were in a moment of what I can only recall as revolutionary joy. A sufficiently large number of them were galvanized by the shape their lives had been given not only by their own cause but also by the opposition itself. Even as they mourned the two dead men they were gaining force. I had no place among them. When I took a basket of food and supplies to Julia Bordoise, who lived in a rundown apartment, the widow was surrounded by her friends and neighbors. She was weeping softly, and two women had their arms around her. I left almost immediately, an unbidden outsider. When Pammy returned from the small missions the union leadership asked of her, she said anything happening in terms of negotiating or planning was happening very privately. “Anger is there,” she said, “but profound exhilaration is also there. Everyone now knows his part.”

At Mike Quin’s request, we had tea with Howard Pease, who had shipped out himself before he wrote novels for boys about the nautical adventures of his most famous character, Tod Moran. He was with the strikers all the way. “Greed is the only word in the shipowners’ dictionary,” he said.

With Chinatown just down the hill from the Fairmont, we made a foray to nibble and look, and then, spotting a naked woman and man carved in ivory, coupling, made an about-face to the hotel. “Feral creatures, we come out of our hole and blink, then quickly scamper back to unionize,” Pammy said as we were peeling off clothes before we’d even reached her suite. Kneeling, she began her ministrations while, with a free hand, she swung the door closed. We went to the aquarium, where the sea creatures in their form and motion appeared to me as wondrously diverse reproductive organs. Zipping back to the Fairmont where, with her hand on the back of my neck she guided me to the discovery of her moisture.

In sunglasses and a scarf that hid her head and chin, Pammy ventured into the city almost as disguised as a woman of Arabia, unrecognized as we climbed Filbert Street to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower, poking skywards in the shape of a firehose nozzle. “Quelle érection,” Pammy said, smiling, and in those green days of mine it was easy for me to smile back. Artists were finishing the politically charged murals so controversial that parts of them were painted over before the public was allowed inside. A bribe to a guard let us see the Rivera-like socialist realism scenes. A meat-packing plant, factory workers, a desperate man with a pistol holding up a blue-blood, a lunch counter as sad as a soup kitchen, a newsstand featuring The Daily Worker. “Could this country have as much class hatred as Europe?” I asked Pammy. “I think no,” she said, “not while the bosses have so many nuggets to throw the workers, which is why the word ‘peasant’ is such an insult here.”

Fisherman’s Wharf, with crab pots stacked by the hundreds and sidewalk vendors peddling their oysters and marinating ceviche, appeared to be a bridge to the nineteenth century. Puffing steam tugs stood off the Wharf looking like hippos, and a thousand fantail fishing boats bobbed in the harbor along with a few sampans the Chinese fishermen used. As we stood by the bow of a gillnetter that had come in with salmon, I handed my camera to a sailor who was happy to oblige for a dollar. Though he said she could almost be a movie star, he did not recognize Pammy. I looked at that photograph the other day and didn’t recognize either of us.

The bridge to the twentieth century was just being built. The tower on the northern, or Marin County, side had already gone up. Pammy called it a mighty beacon beckoning us toward the future unknowable; she made the two words into a subjunctive speculation. The Golden Gate waterway was still unspanned, the crossing road itself a phantom, a figment of design. Construction on our side yielded only a giant column of concrete anchorage reaching deep for its relentless grip into the underwater floor of the southern shore of San Francisco Bay. The tower across the way in Marin proclaimed recovery; the lonely girders and half-built pylons on our side mumbled exhaustion, illustrating the Depression’s chokehold. This was simply weekend idleness at the southern tower, which was being built second, but to our eyes the site signified the struggle between rebirth and decay. We gazed, wondered, didn’t stay long.

At fine restaurants we sat in darkened corners, Pammy in a brimmed hat that shielded her features. Yet when we had lunch one day in a sunny cafeteria off Union Square, she was perfectly relaxed. Several poor people were getting free meals, and Pammy had me slip the manager fifty dollars. “Hard times make hard folks,” he said, “but I’ll feed a few dozen more thanks to you and your friend.” For just a moment he glanced suspiciously over at Pammy, who had stayed seated. As we ate our custard, Pammy said Millie would love San Francisco, especially Coit Tower and this cafeteria with its bright paintings of waterscapes surrounding the city. She would bring her here soon; she said she’d never been away from Millie for more than two days.

Pammy was in full disguise, her face veiled, as she placed a wreath of red roses at the sidewalk shrine to the martyred union members in front of ILA headquarters. “POLICE MURDER” was chalked in large letters on each side of smaller lettering that read, “2 Union Men Killed—Shot in the Back.” The memorial was ringed with flowers and guarded by longshoremen, one of whom was Widdelstaedt, the would-be executioner of my earlier visit to the strike. I looked at him in fear and had to stifle an impulse to run from this tattooed beef with eyes and a long knife who had tried to kill me. He remembered my face though he couldn’t place it and said, “How ya doin’ pal? Thanks for you and the missus payin’ tribute. Good to see ya again.”

Lighting a candle for her parents in the Episcopal Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, Pammy was recognized for the only time. A fashionably dressed woman in a dark gauzy veil of her own said to Pammy in a French accent, “Alors, Mam’sell Millevoix, I heard you were in town. Please be careful. Both sides are wrong, as always.”

Our talk spun through the universe. Doctors in Europe and the United States. The moral superiority and insufferability of vegetarians. Politics, of course: what you could have in a socialist state, what you’d give up. Hitler, Stalin, FDR. How Millie called the Nazis Nasties. The progress of the strike. Longshoremen were lucky to see $40 a week; Pammy made over a hundred times more. What kind of society organizes itself that way? Love: the love of the ethereal, such as God or an idea, love in friendship, love between a man and woman, between women, between men, the love of parent for child, the love of money and power and whether that was a base form of love, not really love at all, or simply, in the Freudian sense, a substitution for other forms of love that had been withheld. Millie: should she be encouraged to go into show business as she already wanted to do, or forbidden and made to go straight? George Sand, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield. She’d had dinner with Malraux in Paris; he’d invited her to go to Indochina but she hadn’t. Writing versus painting versus composing. Everything but Mossy and the future; both of us stayed scrupulously away from those twin subjects that were both unrelated and related.

The night before the memorial parade, Sunday night, was sad in our unspoken knowledge we’d soon not be alone. Our lovemaking was careful, in some way valedictory. I didn’t fall asleep though I heard her breathing softly, like a child. Once, also like a child, she whimpered. She stopped before I could put my arm around her.

In the morning at ILA headquarters, a long line of men and women, many with small children clinging to them, filed past the two coffins, both open. Many made the sign of the cross as they looked at the waxy, still faces in the coffins. Pammy did not. Her bearing was stately, public as she nodded at the figures in the caskets, her private communion with the labor martyrs. I felt like her consort. As they passed their dead comrades, a number of the ILA men raised one fist in a workers’ salute. Many left small bunches of flowers. Uniformed sentries guarded the coffin of Howard Sperry, who was a World War veteran.

The coffins were carried down the stairway and placed on flatbed trucks. Three additional trucks followed bearing flowers. The dockworkers’ own union band began the measured cadence of Beethoven’s funeral march, not so much played as moaned.

As we formed up for the march, Mike Quin accompanied Pammy and me. He was turning the pages of the San Francisco Examiner, the Hearst paper that union members had more or less been forbidden to read. Quin was snickering. “Look at this, the dame’s on some other planet, isn’t she?” he said as he showed us what he meant. The long arm of Hollywood had reached up the coast. Louella Parsons was clucking at Pammy for her presence in San Francisco as much as for her absence from Jubilee: “The film colony’s small but arrogant contingent at the Bay Area’s criminal dock strike ought to have faces as red as their politics. Unfortunately, they’re defiant and ungrateful for the fact they live in the greatest country in the world. Miss Millevoix—or should I call her Comrade?—remains on suspension at Jubilee, which is right where she belongs. Kudos to the execs on the Zangwill lot.” Pammy’s face was stony. “Kudos wrapped in dollars,” she said.

I have never to this day seen anything like the funeral procession. The trucks moved slowly out onto San Francisco’s main artery, Market Street. Forty thousand marchers followed. People moved in such dignified order it was as if lava were flowing and the wide boulevard were a canyon. No shouting, no horns blaring. We were in the presence of a booming silence. Many more thousands of spectators lined the sidewalks, but they weren’t making noise either. “In life,” Mike Quin murmured to Pammy and me, “Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry wouldn’t have been given a second glance on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but in death they’re borne the length of Market Street in a reverent procession that would have been inconceivable to either of them.” Then Mike himself was silent. I began to hear, as the march progressed, a pitch arising from the throng that reminded me of a wordless hymn, without octave or tone, that was almost like humming.

“Now we know the sound,” Mike Quin said, “of one hand clapping.”

Pammy had been asked if she’d like to ride with the widows. She said this was their day, not hers, and she’d stay with the union members. Few marchers paid any attention to her. When I asked Quin about the absence of police and the regulation of the many thousands on the street and sidewalks by a few hundred dockworkers with no experience in traffic or crowd control, he looked at me as if I were a child. “Skinny,” he said, reverting to my earlier nickname, “the police aren’t here because the longshoremen are policing themselves and everyone else. If any police were around you’d need a whole other police force to police them. Labor is burying its own today.”

We strode up Market Street a few more blocks before Quin told me a general strike was in the air. Bridges and the other union leaders planned a strike that would immobilize all workers and businesses in San Francisco and Oakland. I thought this was a crazy, quixotic idea that had no chance. Couldn’t these fools see defeat when it was right in front of them, lying in the caskets they marched behind? The port would now be open to all ships; the longshoremen and seamen would have no choice but to return to work or lose their jobs for good. Unemployed strong-bodied men were about two dollars a dozen and easy to find in the midst of the Depression. “No,” Mike Quin said, “this parade is an entreaty, silently delivered, silently received. The long quiet march confirms the solid strength of the unions. The labor movement is resolved now, and resolve leads to resolution.” He walked on ahead to speak to an officer of the Teamsters.

By the time Pammy and I returned to the Fairmont Hotel, the incongruity of its juxtaposition with where we had been and what we had seen left both of us almost without air in our lungs. We sat in her suite with our thoughts, saying nothing, looking at each other, at the furniture, out the window. Pammy closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Whatever she was thinking, I was thinking about loss. The strike was lost. With the National Guard patrolling the waterfront alongside the police, it was clear the shipowners and dockowners—capital, in other words—had won. The woman across from me, the woman I loved, would go back to her own life the next day as a mother and a star, and she’d be lost to me as well. Absent without leave, I’d probably lose my job too. After a long while, still wordless, I got up and went out. I started to take a walk and then realized I had no energy, so I sat in the park a block from the Fairmont. I don’t know how long I stayed there, ruminating on the bleakness of my future, and San Francisco’s, and the labor movement’s, when a woman in black, so shrouded and veiled she had to have come from a funeral herself if she wasn’t hiding from the law, sat down beside me. Now what? I thought with annoyance.

“Why did you leave me?” a voice came from under the veil. “You left me all alone up there. Please don’t leave me.”

“Jesus,” I said, turning to the veil, “I had no idea it was you.”

“Let’s have dinner in the room tonight,” she said.

We walked a little, aimlessly following California Street a few blocks, then turning back to the hotel. For the first time, I felt I could have held Pammy’s hand in public, but I did not. I ordered room service, and each of us picked at our food.

She fell asleep before I did. Though I scarcely knew it at the time, our lovemaking was that of an old married couple—this is what she wants, this is what he likes—each of us pleasing the other, then ourselves. I watched her sleep with the moon both lighting and shadowing her features. It was impossible to stop my mind from racing ahead. How would being back home change what was going on here? Would she still want me at all? What actually was going on here? Could I believe in it? How would we get back to Los Angeles in the morning? She whimpered once, as she had the night before, and I wanted to hold her and didn’t want to wake her, so I did nothing. She whimpered again but stopped immediately. I saw the sky begin to lighten before I fell asleep. I dreamed of steak tartare, which gave me indigestion. When I finally awoke she was gone.

The note was on Fairmont stationery. Where had she found the six lilies it was clipped to? “I’m off, Sweet O,” the note read. “If you’ll pardon my quoting myself, I still can’t find the good in goodbye. You are to me what spring showers are to the hungry earth, bringing up blossoms in all kinds of unplanned spaces. Be patient, my cherished. Love all ways, Your PM.”

Nils Maynard, upstaging Largo Buchalter this time, had sent his plane for her. She was probably back in Los Angeles before I’d even had breakfast. As I left the city myself, the headline on the newspaper at the train station said, “Red Army Marches on San Francisco.”