Chapter 14
All that summer and into the fall I was content to loaf there on the beach. My hands lost their stiffness only slowly and it was a long time before I could do anything. During the week we lived mostly by ourselves, and on weekends people would come down and we would have parties that sometimes lasted all night and ended with going down to the beach to swim at dawn. When Leo was gone on his business trips we didn’t see as many people and we lived like hermits, sleeping and swimming when we felt like it and eating at odd hours, and then when he came back the house would be full of people over the weekend. Gradually I found out what the business was: he bought carload lots of tomatoes and lettuce in Imperial Valley and shipped them east, and he had an interest in some orange ranches around Fullerton. Once in a while he would make a trip north to buy produce in Fresno or Visalia. For some reason it always seemed to me an odd business for Leo to be in, and actually it seemed that he had got into it more or less by accident. He had come from a typical orthodox family, back in Philadelphia or somewhere, but when he was about twenty he decided he wanted to be a poet. This caused the usual family crisis; his father thundered old-fashioned patriarchal threats and his mother fainted, and finally Leo went to New York by himself and rented a furnished room off Sheridan Square. He wrote poems at night and in the daytime he worked in a vegetable store on Seventh Avenue. The poems were not very good but one of them was published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, I looked it up once and it was the typical kind of free verse they were writing in the Village in those days, a kind of imitation Sandburg. In 1917 he joined the Army and spent twenty months in France. When he came back the first thing he did was get married. His wife was a French teacher in a high school in Queens and before that, when she was a girl, she had won some kind of a local beauty contest and had her picture in the paper. I saw the clipping once with her photograph: a rather prim girl with an ethereal and fragile kind of beauty, much like her daughters except that her eyes were blue and her hair was lighter. Leo’s family never forgave him for marrying a Gentile and I don’t think they even wrote to him after that. He went back to work in the vegetable store, but he saw he couldn’t support a wife that way, especially when it turned out almost immediately she was going to have a baby. Instead he came out west and with a little money his wife had saved up he went into the brokerage business in Imperial Valley. For several years they lived in El Centro and the two girls were born there. Leo had enough sense to see that he was a bad poet but he could be a good produce broker. He made a lot of money in the twenty years he had been in the business; he had gone broke two or three times, I think, but by the time I knew him he was a millionaire. He bought the Laguna house in 1930, in the middle of the Depression. He had always liked the Monterey pines that grew native along the California coast, and he bought the Laguna place partly because the soil was right for them there and because there were already two or three on the cliff. He planted more pines, and everything else that was tough and hardy and would grow without much care: manzanita, live oak, sumac, sage, wild grape. Now it was like a miniature forest on the hillside, the trunks of the pines twisted and gnarled by the winter storms. When Leo got home from a trip the first thing he would do was turn on the sprinklers, the big rainbirds that threw a stream of water a hundred feet or more, and then when he had everything soaked he would wander around the rest of the afternoon smacking the pines with the flat of his hand and jerking at the branches to see if any had been broken by the wind. When you looked out through the window, especially on a misty day, it was hard to tell Leo from the pines; he looked as though he was built out of knots and as strong as living wood and his short stiff hair was like pine needles. He even smelled like them, although probably this came from socking the trees with his hands.
Leo made a lot of money mainly because he enjoyed making it, but he was never quite sure how to spend it. He liked to eat well and he bought a car about once every five years, but he didn’t know what to do with the rest of it and for years he turned it over to his wife and forgot about it. Whatever his relatives in Philadelphia thought, she was an excellent wife for Leo in at least two ways: she was attractive and she was very good at spending money. She used to stay at the Del Coronado on San Diego Bay for two or three weeks every winter, and she visited Europe once a year and bought her clothes in Paris. Her French was perfect; in Paris nobody took her for a schoolteacher and in Coronado they took her for a European. This was partly because her one affectation was signing her name in the French manner: Mme Madeleine Halévy. I saw it once written on a letter she had never sent, in violet ink in a fine precise hand. You might say it was a slight affectation too to name her elder daughter Ariane, although this soon got shortened to something more breezy and a little less Proustian. On the whole, from what I could gather, it was a very satisfactory marriage. She died in 1934, however, and after that Leo had to count on his daughters to spend his money for him. He saw to it they had a good education so they would have expensive tastes. Ary went to Scripps in Claremont and later to the University of Grenoble; she learned to ski at Cortina and to ride in England. All this got rid of quite a lot of the money, although not as fast as Leo had hoped. “My God, the stuff is like moss on a ship’s bottom,” he told me once. “Even giving it away is hard work. It takes a woman to get rid of it. I don’t know how they do it, but they’re damned clever at it.”
This was in one of our muscatel dialogues. That summer whenever he was home we would sit out in the pines drinking California muscatel and talking about women, science, and how to get rid of money. I found him easier to talk to in a way than Ary or Suzanne. He seemed to take a liking to me; I think he had always wanted a son, probably so he would have somebody to leave his pine trees to, and besides he didn’t know anybody else who would listen to him while he talked about these things. When Maurice and the others were around he growled good-naturedly in monosyllables, countered their kidding, and never said what he really thought. In a way he was closer to his daughters than most fathers are, but he didn’t really understand women very well. “I tell you, Ben, they reason like a corkscrew, it’s impossible to teach them how to drive a car, and they wear their coats with the fur on the outside. It’s beyond the grasp of a mere male. Do you know, I lived with my wife for sixteen years and I never found out what she did for two hours every night in the bathroom. Sometimes I think she had an artificial leg.”
I had my own stories about the inscrutability of women, but they weren’t stories I could tell Leo, at least not yet. “Would you like it any better if you understood them?” I asked. “You could always have bored a hole in the bathroom wall.”
“They wash their faces with cold cream instead of with soap and water,” he went on cheerfully, “they always lose one glove but never two, and they produce magic wounds in the rhythm of the moon cycle, exactly twenty-eight days. At least I think they do, I’ve never really understood it. I guess that’s why we have to have them; without them everything would be too neat and reasonable. Can you imagine living in a world without women?”
“Yes. I lived in one once,” I told him. I wondered if I had said too much and I was afraid he was going to ask me what I meant, but he only lifted one eyebrow as he always did and went on drinking wine, as though we agreed perfectly between males that they were charmingly batty, or as he put it, pre-Aristotelian, and there was nothing you could do about it. “Madeleine,” he told me, “Madeleine could never find her key to the front door but she had a power like seventeen sorceresses. She only had to unfasten one snap of her dress and bang, the guard of honor came to attention.” This made him sad, thinking about it, and he filled up his muscatel glass again.
Leo had never seen the inside of a university but he was an educated man, the first one I had ever met. The house was full of books, and he seemed to have read everything from Talmudic philosophy to mathematics and modern physics. It was he who told me about Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty and what this had to do with muscatel, women, and the human predicament in general. Back in the nineteenth century the scientists used to think that everything in the universe was predictable. Everything went around in circles and followed laws, and if you wanted to know where any particle in the universe was at any particular time theoretically you could just look at a logarithm table. But Heisenberg proved that there were some particles you couldn’t pin down exactly. There was one formula for their velocity and another one for their position, but you couldn’t apply them both at once. In the end the universe eluded mathematics. “I tell you, Ben, if the physicists can’t even keep track of a particle how can you keep track of a human mind? Freud, Pavlov, the behaviorists, they’re trying to unscrew the inscrutable. St. Teresa did better.” I had read Freud but I had to make a mental note to look up Pavlov and St. Teresa.
“Have you ever read the De Rerum Natural?”
I admitted that it had been a long time ago. “Lucretius had the same idea. There’s nothing but atoms and void. The atoms are falling through space, but some of them swerve as they fall, and that’s how everything starts. They only swerve a little, and Lucretius doesn’t explain why they do it, in fact he says he doesn’t know. But it all comes from that.” This was the land of atoms, he thought, that women were made of.
Lucretius, I found from Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy, was an Epicurean, and after a while I began to see that this was what Leo was too. He left stoicism to anybody who wanted it, and when he felt like having emotions he had them. I never saw him angry, but he could start laughing at something he had thought of, sitting all by himself in a room. When he felt grief he didn’t bother to hide it any more than he would hide the pain of cutting his hand with a knife. Once we had a freak rainstorm in July and I looked out through the window and saw him sitting in the rain with the tears pouring down his cheeks, looking out at the sea. You couldn’t tell the tears from the rain except that he kept knocking them away with his hand, the way you would never brush away raindrops. Ary told me later that her mother had died in a summer storm like that; the telephone wires were down and that was why they couldn’t call a doctor. Summer storms are very rare in California, and probably the time I saw him out weeping in the pines was the first time it had rained in July since 1934. Once I figured out that I had run away from home in Utah almost on the same day that Leo’s wife died, the day he had known he would never have a son. I had started looking for him at the exact moment he started looking for me. What kind of atoms were these that worked in their orbits so purposefully? Heisenberg should investigate astrology, or perhaps he should look into the ways of that ingenious old ironist, God.
Most of the other houses near us on the beach south of town belonged to Los Angeles people who came down only on weekends and in the summer. Maurice had a large place with an unlimited number of bedrooms and he almost always had guests on the weekends, Hollywood people or the kind that Ary called Cadillac bohemians. Often he would bring these people over for dinner, or for drinks later in the evening, At first I couldn’t see why he was always “hovering around,” as he himself put it, and then I began to understand that he liked our house for a number of rather complicated reasons. Ever since he had been coming to Laguna he had always been mildly sentimental about Ary; they were old friends now and he felt easy and relaxed with her. In a way he seemed to know her better than I did. All week he had to deal with the egomaniacs and stuffed shirts and fairies in the film world, and we were the only people he knew outside of Hollywood. He liked Leo because he had the impression Leo was a practical man and did something concrete; he wasn’t quite sure just what it was Leo did but he thought of him vaguely as having his fingers in the good black earth and making things grow. (“Yeah,” said Leo, “I’ve got a callus on my ear from phoning long distance to New York.”) He was interested in me for the same reason, because I was “real” (there was a joke) and had been out in the Pacific in the real war, not the one they hooked up on the Fox lot. Maurice had enough insight to see that everything in Hollywood was more or less fake, including himself, and we were his non-fakes. After a while I found out that everybody in Hollywood needed this; some of them bought ranches in Montana, some of them picked up hitchhikers on the highway and some went to skid-row bars and got beat up by jackrollers, but they all had a terrible hunger to know what the “real” world was like.
Anyhow Maurice himself was about as real as the papier-mâché sets he designed but he was harmless and I found that I liked him too. I even got so that I enjoyed the weekend parties, and began to learn what sounds to make at them and how to act with the others. Often on the weekends Oliver and Kelly would sleep in our guest room; Oliver was a college teacher and didn’t have any money, and they were the only ones in our gang of steady friends who didn’t have a house on the shore. No one seemed to notice whether Oliver had any money or that his car was ten years old, and he and Kelly stayed with us on weekends and ate our food (I thought of it as my food too now) without any particular self-consciousness. I used to spend a lot of time talking with Oliver, although if anyone had suggested to me five years before that I had anything in common with a creative writing teacher I probably would have socked him in the nose. We used to argue about Henry Miller; I admired him and Oliver said he was a pornographic Booth Tarkington. In this way we got along fine.
There were a lot of different people that summer and some of them I forgot almost as soon as I had met them, others I remembered. One Saturday night we were having cocktails with Oliver and Kelly, and around eight o’clock Maurice appeared with a couple called the Widdisons and an extraordinarily pretty girl we had never seen before. The Widdisons had already been down once or twice; it seemed that Janet Widdison had a little money and ran a small avant-garde theatre off La Cienega Boulevard, and her husband Keene experimented around making surrealistic films and off-beat documentaries. For a long time I thought that he was just a dilettante amusing himself with his wife’s money, and then I found out that some of his films had won international prizes in Europe, at Venice and at Cannes. In any case Widdison didn’t look like an artist; he drove a Cadillac and he looked like a parody of a capitalist in a left-wing newspaper. As for the girl, Maurice introduced her as Marta but he wouldn’t tell us her last name. He claimed we only wanted to debauch her. She looked very young to be going around with Maurice.
“How would it debauch her if we know her last name?”
“Oh well, you know, you’d ring her up on the phone and start asking her places. This way only I know where to find her.”
“And what is your name, my dear?” Oliver asked her.
“Kopnick,” she admitted candidly.
“But don’t go looking for it in the phone book, old chap. The studio thought up a much better one.”
“You see,” Kelly put it to her practically, “the question is, would you rather be debauched by us or by Maurice?”
“Well, Maurice is very nice, but the studio said if I wanted a romance they would find me a Van Johnson type and clear it with Hedda first.”
“Gad, what self-sacrifice. If only we had had that singleness of purpose when we were young. All right, go off and drink Coca-Cola with the freckle-faced boy if you must. Heartless nymph, I was counting on you to console me in my old age.”
“I’d love to console you, Maurice darling, but there’s a clause against it in my contract.”
“You’ll never know what you’ve missed. Si jeunesse savait...1”
“Don’t forget the rest of it, old boy,” Oliver reminded him. “Si vieillesse pouvait.2”
They went on like this through several rounds of margaritas. Leo was gone on a trip so I was acting as barman. When I wasn’t fixing drinks I amused myself by looking at Marta, who was really spectacularly pretty. We all sat admiring her, in fact, until it was absolutely necessary to do something about dinner. Oliver wouldn’t go to the Victor Hugo because he had on his old corduroy jacket with chalk on the elbows, and Janet Widdison refused to go down on the beach and cook steaks because she was wearing a cocktail dress. Finally it was decided we would go to Delie’s, a kind of rathskeller and German restaurant on the highway outside of town. The great advantage of Delie’s was that it was only about a quarter of a mile away and we could walk, which avoided misunderstandings with the state highway patrol. We set off in a procession down the lane that ran along the cliff a block or so from the highway: the Widdisons and Kelly ahead, Oliver with Marta, and the rest of us bringing up the rear. Ary, who was walking with Maurice, was trying to find out exactly what the situation was with Marta. They had both had several margaritas and the conversation was slightly oblique.
“But I thought she came with you,” I could hear her saying behind me.
“Came where?”
“I mean I thought she was with you.”
“Oh, you mean in the Biblical sense. Well, it’s sort of comme ci comme ça, darling.”
“But still, why do you let her walk with Oliver?”
“Darling, what would I say to her? I’m terrified of the child.”
They fell a little farther behind and I couldn’t hear them. Ahead of me Oliver was telling Marta about Herrick, who was a country parson and thought you ought to gather rosebuds around the time you were twenty. Marta seemed to find this an enchanting idea.
Somehow I had paired off with Suzanne. “You know,” she was telling me, “I used to be the ingenue around here until that infant arrived.”
“Well, we all have to grow up sometime. Besides she is spectacular.”
“You too?”
“I mean objectively.”
“Let’s take it subjectively.”
“Subjectively,” I had to admit, “she’s still spectacular.”
It was a mild summer night, dark except for the starlight, and absolutely calm. After ten minutes down the lane we found ourselves at Delie’s, where we all ordered sauerbraten and potato pancakes with dark bitter German beer. After dinner, slivovitz, which I had never had before and which tasted like vodka slightly flavored with prune juice. On the effects of this stimulant Oliver, Maurice, and Widdison got into an involved argument about Rene Clair.
“What do you mean, who is Rene Clair? I’ll tell you who Rene Clair is. He’s just the Chaplin of France, that’s all. No, that’s sacrilege. Chaplin is the Rene Clair of America.”
“All right, tell me one thing. Do you know a picture called A nous la liberté?”
“Of course I know it. Where do you think I’ve been all these years?”
“All right. Did A nous la liberté come before or after Modem Times?”
“What difference does it make which came before?”
“I’m just asking you which came before, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s an asinine question. Clair made A nous la liberté at a time when—well, at a time when the possibilities of surrealism had hardly even been explored for the cinema. He also made a picture which, for all your erudition, you probably haven’t heard of, called Sous les toits de Paris—”
“What about Cocteau?” Maurice interrupted him.
“Well, what about him? Who the devil is talking about Cocteau?”
“Well, I mean to say, you talk about the possibilities of surrealism hardly having been explored and all that, whereas as a mattrafact Cocteau made Le sang d’un poète back in—I think it was ’25—”
“Oh well, that was just an experimental.”
“Well, what the blazes is A nous la liberté if it isn’t an experimental?”
“I’ll tell you what the blazes it is. It’s a good film, that’s what it is. A good film with no arty Cocteauesque pretensions, and a lot more subtle than anything Chaplin ever did. Chaplin was a good clown, maybe the greatest clown, but he couldn’t direct other people and he never understood sound.”
“Well, why should he understand sound? What’s so wonderful about sound?”
“I know, a silent-film crank. I’ve met a million of them. Sound is just the fourth dimension of the cinema, that’s all.”
“Oh brother, when people start talking about fourth dimensions. . . And what do you use words like cinema for? Why don’t you say movies like everybody else?”
At this point a small but very loud German band began playing right in our ears. There was nothing to do but dance. Oliver paired off with Suzanne and Maurice with Kelly, and I was given a polka lesson by Marta. I was a clumsy dancer and I felt rather foolish, but still it was pleasant feeling rather foolish while a pretty girl taught me something I didn’t know. Marta smelled like fresh linen and strawberry sherbert, and sang me my instructions: “Left left left. Plink plink plink. Now we shift to right, plink plink.”
By this time the evening had taken on a thoroughly Teutonic tone and Oliver was getting nostalgic about his student days at Gottingen. He began singing lieder in a spurious baritone:
Ich weiss nicht was soli es bedeuten,
Dass ich so traurig bin.3
He really had a surprisingly good voice, even though it was an octave lower than he normally spoke. Everybody turned to look at him, and finally he was enticed up to the platform to sing with the band “Du bist wie eine Blume” and several other pieces of Gemütlichkeit. It was only with difficulty that we pulled him off the platform and got him out the door into the night air. He had drunk more slivovitz than we thought.
“I thought when I married a poet,” Kelly was complaining, “I would spend my life with somebody quiet and retiring who would not make a public spectacle of himself.”
“Now lay off poor Oliver,” I defended him. “He was wonderful. Professor, your talents are wasted in education.”
“Ja, weil ich Gesangvogel bin,”4 he said modestly.
“Oh, don’t encourage him. Next he’ll want to stand on his head.”
“I wouldn’t dream of standing on my head. I am perfectly familiar with the distinction which Aristotle makes in his Poetics between art and spectacle.”
It was decided that what we needed was something bracing to neutralize all that Mitteleuropean slivovitz. “Black coffee for you, songbird,” Kelly told Oliver. We went back down the lane toward the Coast Inn, which was on the highway only a few hundred yards from the house. Myron, the barman, recognized us as soon as we came in and began setting up brandy-and-benedictines with coffee, our usual nightcap. After the first round of these Oliver told him to skip the coffee. It was the middle of the vacation season and Saturday night, and the room was full of city people and Marines from Camp Pendleton. We couldn’t get a table and there was barely elbow room for us at the bar.
“Mr. Davenant, is that little girl over twenty-one?” Myron asked as we were passing Marta her third drink.
“Of course she is. Are you over twenty-one, dear?”
“I’m almost sure I am, but all the records were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake.”
“Mr. Davenant, I’ll have to see some identification.”
Amid a great deal of confusion Janet Widdison’s driver’s license was passed behind backs, brought to the front, and shown to Myron. Janet had been born in 1902 in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“Okay, Mr. Davenant,” said Myron. “I have to check, you know.”
It was almost two o’clock. Most of the crowd in the room had been drinking all evening and one group of Marines over by the door was getting a little loud. Three of them looked like recruits and the fourth was a little older, a sergeant with a lean tanned face and a collection of battle ribbons. Over the noise in the room I caught several words I hadn’t heard recently, and I wondered if the others noticed. They did. After the next obscenity there was a silence, and then Kelly inquired quite innocently, “I wonder what that one means.”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” said Ary.
Myron went over and told the Marines to quiet down.
“Go screw yourself, Gwendolyn,” we heard one of them telling him. He was a short cocky kid who didn’t look old enough to be out of high school, but he had a face like Jimmy Cagney and the mannerisms to go with it. It was obvious he had been drinking more than he was used to.
“We’d better leave,” said Janet.
But the sergeant was talking to Cagney. He didn’t look very much older than the other three, but they seemed to respect him, or at least they listened when he talked. Evidently he was giving Cagney a lecture on etiquette. Cagney with elaborate contempt lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth, as though he wasn’t paying any attention, but at least for a while he quieted down.
It was almost closing time and the crowd was beginning to thin out. Janet and Marta went off to the powder room, and on their way back the trouble with the Marines began again. This time Cagney reached out and took Marta’s arm as she went by.
“What’s your hurry, hey? Lissen, you going around with those squares?”
One of the other Marines, a red-headed boy who hadn’t been drinking so much and was still cheerful, began trying to start a conversation with her. “What’s your name, huh? Lissen, I’ll bet you’re an actress or something.”
But Cagney was in no mood for amenities. He wanted to get to the point, or perhaps he just wanted to start a fight. “Come on, Agnes, let’s go upstairs and kick the gong,” we heard him saying.
Maurice set down his glass and went over with his most Mayfair manner. “Old chap, I’m sure it’s inadvertent, but you seem to have hold of the young lady’s arm.”
“Beat it, Clarence.”
I put down my glass and started over too. The sergeant was trying to hold Cagney but he jerked his arm free. When I was still a few feet away Maurice raised his hands in an ineffective girlish gesture and Cagney knocked him flat. Oliver and Widdison were coming too but they were too far away. Another Marine was moving in on my left and Marta dealt him a shrewd kick on the shin; he stopped and began hopping on one foot. Cagney stepped over Maurice’s legs and swung hard at me. I bent and seized the wrist as it went by and twisted it, and down he went; he was drunk and off balance anyhow and ready to fall. He and Maurice were together on the floor in a heap. “There, smart ass,” I heard Ary say calmly in the confusion.
Before Cagney could get up the sergeant had hold of one of his arms and Myron had the other. It was all over. Myron pushed all the Marines outside. For the first time I realized how much I had hurt my burned hand; it was stinging like fury and I began massaging it with my fingers.
“Whyncha let me at that one sonabitch?” Cagney was complaining. “The one with the scars, I’ll get him when he comes out if I hafta wait all night.”
With an odd emotion I watched them yanking and pulling this small fierce animal out the door. I was perfectly sober now. I hadn’t had time to get angry or even feel any particular hostility, instead I felt a great detachment, a kind of clarity, as though a part of me were doing this and another part standing by and watching. I remembered the night I had swung at Victor in his cabin, and how easily he had seized my wrist and thrown me to the floor: “Agh, before you hit an old man you’d better go learn how.” I knew that for Cagney I was just a Babbitt, smug and soft, with money in my pocket and women to go to bed with; I had forgotten a lot of things but I hadn’t forgotten how it was to be twenty years old and violent and bitter and resent the fat and privileged, the ones who had it made. I had an impulse to follow Cagney out the door and say something to him, but I decided not to. What was it I wanted to tell him anyhow? That the world was out to get you? Or just not to lead with his left so high?
“Riffraff,” said Myron. “Those are from Camp Pendleton. The ones from El Toro, they’re not so bad.”
“What the hell, Myron. They were probably just lonely and looking for a girl.”
But Myron was a barman, and he divided all humanity into those who were likely to break his glassware and those who weren’t. “Pardon me, Mr. Davenant, but you’ve probably led a rather sheltered life. I mean, you’ve gone to college and all and met a lot of people, but living like you do there’s a certain side of life you don’t see. What I mean is, you spend your time mainly with nice people and you’re more or less isolated from the other side of it. Now you take these kids, they’re just riffraff, they belong down on the waterfront. That’s a part of life you probably haven’t seen very much of.” I think he wondered why I grinned so much.
It was time for Myron to close anyhow and everyone was leaving. When we went outside Cagney had disappeared, but the sergeant and another Marine were still waiting for us. The sergeant stopped us and began embarking into a long-winded and rather emotional apology. “Sir, I’m sorry about what happened and I don’t want you to hold this against the Corps. You understand, these kids are just recruits, they’re not combat Marines. They’ve hardly got the milk off their chins yet.” He was around twenty-two himself. “I’m ashamed of the way they behave. I told them they were a disgrace to the uniform. Listen, sir, I want to tell you something.” He had his hand on my shoulder in case I tried to get away. “I want to tell you something now, I fought in the Corps all the way across the Pacific, I was with the First Division on New Guinea and Guadalcanal and I never saw a combat Marine insult a civilian, I don’t care, gooks or anybody. We weren’t fighting for our sixty-five a month, we were fighting for the honor of the Corps.”
It was impossible not to believe in his sincerity; he had tears in his eyes. “Sir,” he went on, “I think the Corps owes an apology to the young lady and to all of you. I wish it never had happened. Sit, I hope you understand me, I’ve been around myself and I’ve got nothing against raising hell and having a good time. But I wouldn’t ever make a remark like that to a decent girl and I hope nobody in the Corps would. So sir, I hope you’ll forget all this and the honor of the Corps won’t be stained by what happened tonight.” He went on about the honor of the Corps for about fifteen minutes. He was wonderful; Kelly wanted to take him home with us but he wouldn’t come.
We walked back down the lane to the house, Kelly still saying in the dark, “That sergeant was a cherub. I could have eaten him up.” In the kitchen we found Leo, who had just got back from his trip and was malting himself a meal out of cheese and a big loaf of sheepherder bread. Kelly and Janet were hungry too, so we all started eating cheese and Ary made some coffee.
Maurice and Oliver were explaining to Leo what had happened. “It was a deuce of a row. Here was Marta being violated by this enormous soldier, and Ben and I plunged in with bared fists.”
“The soldier was a Marine of less than average size, and he knocked you flat.”
“Well, I said it was a deuce of a row, didn’t I? My God, it was like an old Bill Hart serial, with everybody hitting people with breakaway chairs and falling over the bar. I was lying doggo on the floor, you know, to stay out of the strife, and the next thing I knew this particularly enormous soldier flew over me and his head struck the wall with a sickening thud.”
“The only sickening thud I heard was your ass hitting the floor.” It was impressive,” said Kelly. “Ben darling, where did you learn that trick?”
“I took judo at the University of Washington.”
“I tell you, Ben was wonderful. I’m glad one of us boozehounds has some character.”
“I’m not sure that a barroom brawl is the final test of one’s character,” Ary remarked carefully. “In fact some people might feel that to be too good at it casts doubt on one’s breeding.”
“Speaking of breeding,” I told her, “it seems to me that at the height of the excitement I heard you use a very vulgar expression.” This quieted her for a while, but the others went on talking about it for a half an hour.
“Tell him about the sergeant,” said Kelly. “O, that sergeant was an Easter egg.”
Leo couldn’t get it all straight. “So as I understand it, the two of you set on this one unarmed Marine?”
I kept trying to explain that the one Marine was just mixed up and the rest of them were perfect gentlemen. “The one Marta kicked was just going over to the cigarette machine. It was a misunderstanding.”
Marta denied kicking anybody, and Oliver claimed he had been in the thick of it from the beginning.
“Ah, you’re a bunch of drunks,” Leo told us. “Why don’t you all go nude swimming or something and sober up?”
This was considered a brilliant idea, and in the end Leo came with us. It was a moonless night, the beach almost invisible in the faint starlight, and the water was warm. But it was not warm when you came out, it was cold as hell, and we all wrapped up in towels while Leo built a fire. Widdison was smoking a cigar and with his towel draped around him he looked like a kind of parody of a Roman senator. On the other side of the fire Marta was explaining that she wanted to play serious parts and didn’t see why they kept casting her as an ingenue. “You’re absolutely right,” Oliver was telling her. “You’re absolutely right.”
“That Sergeant was a lollipop,” sighed Kelly for the tenth time.
“All right, but I don’t know why Myron lets them come in there anyhow. They cause nothing but trouble. The Coast Inn used to be a nice place before all that gang started coming up from Pendleton.”
“Where do you want them to go, Widdison?” I asked him.
“Why don’t they just drink beer on the base? They’ve got their clubs and everything.”
“Wait a minute.” I wasn’t quite sure why I was defending the Marines, but Widdison was acting a little pompous and I felt it was important to show him where he was wrong. “Let’s look at this thing fairly and stop acting like a lot of smug Pillars of Society. Those kids don’t want to be Marines; they’re in the service because there’s a war on. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this up in Hollywood. If they weren’t in Laguna the Japanese Marines would be—would you like that any better? Sure, they’re just a bunch of kids and they probably don’t come from very good families, but those same kids are fighting right now, tonight, out in the Pacific and in North Africa so we can go on enjoying the Coast Inn and spending our money.” I must have sounded like an OWI broadcast with lyrics by Norman Corwin. “And what were we doing tonight? Getting drunk and singing German songs. I’m no militarist, believe me, but if we had any sense of fairness instead of asking Myron to throw those kids out we would all sing the Marine Hymn.”
“I’m sorry, Ben,” said Widdison. “I forgot you were a veteran.”
“I’m not talking about me, goddam it. Anyhow what I did out in the Pacific was not very much, and I probably caused more trouble than I was worth. I’m a civilian now like the rest of you. We’re lucky. Those kids aren’t so lucky—of those four who were in the bar tonight, one or two won’t come out of the war alive. Sure, it’s too bad Marta was insulted. I was twenty years old once too. Were you?”
There was a silence. Finally Janet said, “He’s right, Keene. My God, when I think of that sergeant apologizing to us—that boy who was on Guadalcanal while we were riding around in our Cadillacs and drinking black-market scotch—”
They all agreed with her in a chorus, sounding like the sextet from Lucia, and Widdison even apologized to me—to me! everybody was apologizing to me tonight. I had convinced them without even half trying. Who was I to teach these people things, these people who had gone to college and had their names on screen credits? I had always been wrong before, I had been wrong for so many years I had almost got used to it and it seemed like the normal side for me to be on. Now here I was on the side of all the right ideas, and the others listened to me and agreed, a little ashamed. It felt funny, being one of the right-minded. I didn’t quite understand why I was coming out for patriotism and courage and idealism anyhow, unless it was out of some obscure feeling that I was the one who ought to apologize to the sergeant, this idealist with tears in his eyes who had fought in the jungle across the sound those long nights when I lay asleep under the pandanus tree. It was too much for me and perhaps it was a mistake to get sober. I went up to the house and got a bottle of cognac and some paper cups.
“To the honor of the Corps,” proposed Oliver.
They all drank and I drank with them. I didn’t say much after that, but the others went on drinking the cognac out of paper cups and talking for another hour until it was almost dawn. It felt good, sitting there by the fire listening to them and feeling Ary’s warmth next to me, that night after I had eaten and drunk well and defended beauty and innocence with my fists and then made my little speech and convinced the others, but I still wasn’t sure whose side I was on. The sergeant’s? The Pillars of Society? Cagney’s?
