Establishment (45 page)

She drove through the gates of the winery. May Ling got out of the car and stood in front of a big Airedale, unperturbed by the fact that the dog licked her face. Sally walked into her mother's house and into the kitchen. A moment later she was in Clair's arms—was Joe still there?—telling herself that it was so simple if one can remember, if one can feel oneself. Clair said yes, he was still there. He was not leaving until tomorrow. Her grandchild watched the two of them.

“You and Billy,” Clair asked directly, “were you together—in love—how was it?” She had always been that way, direct and without embellishment.

“I think he loved me. I don't know. I don't seem to know much about anything. Where's Eloise?”

“In her house.”

“I'll leave May Ling with you.”

Sally went to Eloise.

“They all die,” Eloise whispered. “The world is so sick. He was my brother and I hardly knew him. I cried a lot, but I cried for the little boy I remember.”

“I know.”

“What was he like? Isn't it sad? I have to ask you what he was like.”

“I suppose he was the most decent man I ever met,” Sally said. “He was a stranger here. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“He was a stranger on earth, and he made the best of it. I don't know how else to put it.” Sally began to cry, and the crying turned into racking sobs.

Eloise waited.

“I didn't even know he went back into the army,” Sally sobbed. “He walked away, and then the whole world forgot me. Why did they forget me? I didn't want to hurt anyone.”

Only half aware of what lay behind her misery, Eloise cradled her and comforted her. Sally was alive. The dead didn't suffer. Eloise had hardly known her brother. Even in the years between the two wars she had seen him only twice. People laughed at him.

She asked desperately, “Why did people always laugh at Billy?”

“I never laughed at him,” Sally said.

“I always felt that he was running away.”

“Yes, he was.”

They sat without speaking for a little while; and then Sally said she had to wash her face.

“Joe is here,” Eloise said through the sound of running water.

“Yes, I know.” She toweled her face, rubbing the skin fiercely.

“You look lovely,” Eloise said, feeling she had to say something, that she could not stand there with Sally in silence. “You don't need make-up. I suppose you do when you make a movie.”

She was not Sally; she was a film star. All the disconnected thoughts of Eloise, all her grief and half grief and guilt—all of it was skewered by her being alone in her house with a famous film star. Death had bewildered and upset her, and this thing upset and bewildered her even more.

“I'm Sally.” It came almost harshly. “I'm your sister-in-law. I don't give a damn about movies!”

“You're angry. Did I make you angry? I'm sorry.”

“Oh, no, no, darling. Not you, ever.” She threw her arms around Eloise and kissed her. “You're like Billy, and Adam is the luckiest man in the world. I sometimes think he's the only lucky man in the world.”

“So is Joe,” Eloise said lamely.

“Why? Because he's married to a bitch?”

Eloise couldn't cope with her. Sally shook her head. “Can't I help?” Eloise pleaded, and suddenly Sally was overtaken by a mixture of envy and anger—envy mostly—of someone like this gentle, yielding woman who could not bear to see someone else in pain or frustration.

“No, I'll be all right, love, believe me. It's coming home that's so damn terrible, but you wouldn't understand that and I can't explain it. I have to be with myself for a little while, and then I'll be all right.”

“But you'll stay? You won't go back right away?”

“I don't know,” Sally said.

She almost bolted from Eloise's house. It was the house that Adam had built for his wife, quarry stone to match the old buildings of the winery, furniture upholstered in flowered chintz, curtains of dotted Swiss, hooked rugs on the floor—a house built to conform with everyone's notion of a muted American dream. Yet Sally forced herself to condition her contempt and confront it. Eloise was no fool. She probably knew more about modern art than anyone Sally had ever known, more than Jean, who had been her teacher. “Then what is it?” Sally asked herself. “Am I jealous? Am I afraid?”

She had not seen her father yet, nor did she want to see him right now. Jake and Adam were in one of the buildings of the winery. Sally began to climb the hillside between the rows of new-leafed vines. Back down below her, she could see Clair and May Ling and Eloise's two children. She thought her mother was calling her, but she wasn't sure; she ignored the drifting sound and climbed higher and higher toward a clump of eucalyptus that Jake and Clair had planted almost thirty years before. When she reached the cluster of trees, she saw Joe sprawled on the ground, his back to one of the trees.

She was amazed to see him. Somehow she had put it out of her mind that he was also at Higate; but to Joe it was even more of a surprise, and he stared at her speechlessly, as if she were not real and any word or response on his part would cause her to vanish.

She walked over to him. “Hello, husband,” she said. Still Joe seemed unable to speak. “I took the plane to San Francisco and drove up here when I heard that Billy was dead. I brought May Ling with me. She's down there with mother.”

Joe nodded dully and clambered to his feet. Sally noticed how bad his color was. He was pale and drawn. He had lost weight. “Did Frank call you?” he wondered.

“No, I got a letter from the doctor who took care of Billy. Billy asked him to write to me,” she said deliberately. “Oh, this is great. We don't see each other for months, and it isn't even ‘Hello, Sally, I'm glad to see you.'”

“I am glad to see you.”

“Now that I've prompted you.” She turned on her heel.

“Where are you going?”

“Back down there. To collect the kid and go home. I don't belong here.”

“Please—please wait,” Joe said. “Please. Let's talk a little. Don't confront me like this and then run away. I can't stand that. Please don't.”

She hesitated, wavered.

“Please, Sally. I love you more than anything on earth. If you walk away from me now, my life walks away. I'm not just saying that. I'm telling you the truth, and you know how hard it is for me to talk like this.”

She didn't move. He went over to her and touched her very gently, very tentatively. Then he put his arms around her and she pressed her body against him, whispering, “Oh, Joey, you sweet dumb bastard. You never did a bad thing to me except screw up my whole rotten life.”

“I guess that's the truth,” he admitted. He held her, and they were both silent for a while, and then he said, “Let's sit down here and just talk a little and see if we can make some sense out of all this.”

He sat down again with his back to a tree, and Sally leaned against him, pulling his arms around her. But the talk didn't come, and they sat there quietly as the afternoon light faded and a chill crept into the air.

“I keep saying it in my mind,” he said at last, “but I know you can't quit.”

“I don't know what it is, Joey. I keep trying to explain it in my mind so I could say it, but I can't. All I know is that when I go to the studio in the morning I'm alive, and I have to be alive. Other people don't, but I do. I don't give a damn about the rest of it—the idiot fans, the hoopla, the fame. Believe me, I don't. It's reading a script and seeing it in your mind and knowing you can turn into the person they're writing about—and everything else stinks, and Beverly Hills, you can have it—but, Joey, I love acting so! I do love it!”

“Do you want to divorce me?”

“No. Oh, you're dumb, dumb. I love you. I want us to live together and go to bed together and make love together, that's what I want.”

“In Beverly Hills?”

“Joey, does that make any difference? Will one patient in your clinic suffer because you live in a house in Beverly Hills?”

“Where you pay the taxes and you pay the help and you pay the mortgage. Sally, I take a hundred dollars a week out of the clinic's funds. Frank takes the same. Do I let you support me?”

“Would that be so terrible? They pay me half a million dollars a picture now, not because I'm worth it. You're worth ten times what I'm worth, but that's the way it is in this crazy business. I could give half of what I earn to the clinic and still have enough to live on. I don't need money. I wear Levi's and work shirts, and they dress me at the studio—”

“And you live in a hundred-thousand-dollar house.”

“Will you give it a try, please, Joey?”

“Let's stay here a few days and get to know each other again. Will you do that, Sally?”

“Yes.”

“And then we'll see.”

***

It was toward the end of her fifth week in prison, a few days after the first visiting day, that real depression set in, a thing Barbara had never experienced before. There had been times during her life when she had been depressed, anxious, overwhelmed by grief, but none of it had been like this. She ate only enough food to stay alive; she stopped caring. A core of indifference took over her being, and the world around her became totally bleak and meaningless. During the hours when she was not working in the garden or the greenhouse, she lay on her cot, staring at the ceiling. On the second day of this, Annie Lou Baker came into her room and pulled a chair up next to her bed.

“Honey child,” the black woman said, “you got stir sickness, you got heavy time on you, and you got to come out of this or you never gonna build no time. Always comes with the visitors. God be praised, ain't no one gives a fuck about me. Trouble is, you been fighting your time ever since you come in here. I seen it. You don't build no time by fighting it. You got to look at them motherfuckers and say, ‘They is the man and I is me.' Don't make no difference them dry cunts sweet talk you and come off like ladies. They ain't no ladies. Hell, sister, what would a lady be doing in this shithole? Trouble with you, Bobby girl, is you never had your ass peeled before. You got class, and that makes doing time a heavy, heavy thing. But honey child, you done knocked five weeks out of the six months already. Six months. I could build me six months standing on one foot, but then, I is a nigger and you ain't, and that makes a difference. Another thing, you got to stop feeling you been put on. It eats you up. Me, I could figure the same thing. I get a call from this pimp to bring three floozies out to Vegas, and it is a federal rap for transporting working girls across the state line. Is that a pisshole thing or not? O.K., so I am here for two years. I need a rest. Don't work on it, girl, just don't work on it.”

“I'll be all right,” Barbara said.

“Only if you let yourself be all right. Who come to visit you?”

“My father.”

“Big sonofabitch with white hair?”

“Yes.”

“That's what does it. Every time.”

Annie Lou left, and Barbara lay on her cot, wondering whether Annie Lou was right. She didn't realize that Annie Lou had struck a chord, that her own mind was occupied, and that the pit into which she had plunged was beginning to lighten. It was not what she thought about or what she wondered about, but simply that she could think or wonder. She thought about the visiting day and her increasing excitement as it approached. Ellie had warned her, “Sister, visiting days are like the man. They lean on you. They don't help.” Barbara rejected the thought. She couldn't sleep the night before the visiting day, she was so eager to see her father, to talk to him, to hear all the news from his lips, to have him tell her how Sammy was, how her house was, how the city was—how, indeed, the world was.

And then the reaction and the depression began to set in even before Dan arrived, and when she finally did see him, all she could think about were the empty shipyards. The whole thing flashed into her mind as a formed symbol, the great, sprawling shipyards where Dan Lavette had built ships that saved the Allied cause, and now on the same island, in the same place, his daughter crucified. Of course Barbara did not consciously deal with it in that manner. She was sensible enough to know that the war would have taken much the same course even without Dan Lavette's shipyard, and that if the ships had to be built, someone else would have built them, nor was she sufficiently self-indulgent to see herself as a martyr crucified; nevertheless the symbol came and went, leaving its shadow, and when she saw Dan, she was so overwhelmed with self-pity that she had to fight to keep back her tears, and while she told herself that the pity was for her father, it was in fact self-pity, pure and simple, and it began the period of depression.

Dan and Barbara sat together in the visitors' room. That was not too bad; she could hold his hand in hers, touch it and examine it.

He looked at her sharply. “Are you all right, Bobby?”

“Yes, just fine, daddy.”

“Is it awful?”

“No, it's pretty decent. Better than I could have imagined.”

“How's the food?”

“Good. Quite good.”

Afterward, back in San Francisco, Dan said to Jean, “The awful thing is that she didn't ask me anything.”

“Didn't she ask about Sammy?”

“When I opened it up. When I told her how he was. Like when I told her about you or Joe. It kills me. Jean, it kills me! What the devil is wrong? What's happened to her? What have they done to her?”

“I don't think they've done anything to her, and from what you tell me, it's not a place where they do awful things to people. I think Barbara is very unhappy and quite depressed, and I can't say that I blame her. Poor child. I want to go down there, Dan, next time. If only she would let us bring Sam to see her.”