Mitla Pass (8 page)

The record ended. Gideon switched it off.

The Admiral filled his glass again and spoke, as though to himself. “I’ve never known a sane man who wasn’t afraid. I’ve never known a great man who didn’t have to conquer his greatest fears.”

It came time for them to leave, too soon. Gideon said goodbye and tastefully left the three of us alone. Mother would come back when the baby was due. We all fingered at the door. We had never lingered before over farewells. The Admiral patted my shoulder as though I were a junior officer who had done something commendable.

“You are glowing with happiness, Val. I’m glad. That boy is a good boy. I’ve seen a thousand like him, burning inside. He’s picked a rough passage for himself.”

“Will he ever do it, Dad?”

“He’ll face that book when he has built enough courage to face defeat.”

“Oh, Dad!” I cried and flung my arms around him. I wanted to tell him that there was so much we hadn’t ever said to each other. And now he was going to leave! Forever. Just when we were starting to say hello.

The Admiral’s hands remained at his side as I held him. He was awkward in my embrace, not knowing what to do. I longed for him to put his arms around me. He couldn’t. Yet I realized that he understood everything. And I suppose he did love me, in his own way.

I’m glad the Admiral lived long enough to see Roxanne born. He was in a wheelchair then. There wasn’t much left of him. When they put her into his arms, he held her quite tenderly for a long time ... and he looked at me and smiled ... as though he had been holding me.

G
LORY, GLORY, HALLELUJAH
! And yet another easy monthly payment book bites the dust. We were now the proud owners of our own sofa, a Monkey Ward fridge, and a secondhand Model A Ford, for which we paid eighty dollars cold hard cash. Now comes the Great Valerie Santini balancing act!

Do we go for dishes, towels, silver, and linens?

OR

Gideon longed for one of those new long-playing record machines.

HOWEVER

Roxy needed a ballet costume.

AND

If we could only get six more months out of the front tires.

If it all went according to schedule, we would have everything we ever wanted and it would be all paid off in three hundred and forty-five years, down considerably from the last accounting of four hundred and six years. We were making headway.

I hid money so that every week we had enough left over for a movie and a Chinese or El Globo dinner. On payday I’d hide another two dollars in nickels and dimes around the apartment for my own clothing fund and mad money.

Gideon’s job paid pretty well, seventy-five dollars a week. Otherwise it was rotten. He detested it, but he never brought it home, no matter how terrible his day had been.

Being poor was a new and growing experience for me. What I hadn’t realized was that you could be poor but deliriously happy at the same time. Every night when I heard him take the stairs three steps at a time I’d shiver a little bit. We’d meet in the doorway or out in the hall and he would hold me like we hadn’t seen each other for weeks. As soon as the apartment door was closed, he’d feel my backside or wherever he could get with his hand under my dress (I didn’t make it too difficult for him). In a few minutes Roxy would have him pinned down on the floor, fishing through his pockets for her prize.

I put Roxy to bed early. She was coming down with the sniffles. Besides, tonight was going to be a super special time. Mom and Dad were reading
The Kinsey Report
on human sexuality and were trying out something a little kinky. I mean stuff that twenty or thirty percent of the people were already into.

There was a little something else going on too. I skipped a period every now and again and usually it wasn’t cause for alarm.

Candlelight on the card table.
La Bohème
on the record player.
I’ve wanted it back so many times, Gideon. Where did it go? Jesus, we were so happy.

I served him wearing a knockout front-button sweater. He stared at me so adoringly, I blushed. For a long time I’d wondered why Gideon married me. I was on the tall side, blond, with a terrific pair of tits. I knew it made him feel good when I was at his side. He was proud of me, my college education, my old man being an Admiral. Through me, Gideon was thumbing his nose at something in his childhood. He wouldn’t talk about it, just as he wouldn’t talk about the war.

We talked about everything else. We couldn’t wait to be alone and talk. He was a very funny guy when he got a little tipsy and he knew something about everything going on in the world. A lot of times we’d talk without words. He’d put his arm about my shoulder and lay my head on his chest and we’d listen to those secondhand records and sip vino.

“You’ve been looking awfully beautiful lately, Val.”

He unbuttoned the sweater front and did all those nice sweet things to my breasts ...

“We pregnant?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Hey, how about that! I wouldn’t mind another little girl.”

“How come?”

“Little boys have to be little men the minute they’re born. The pressure is on for them to be tough—don’t cry—look how strong he is—he’ll be a hockey player, that one.”

“But I want your son.”

“But I don’t want my son to go to war,” he said. And I knew this came from way back and very deep.

“I’ve been thinking, honey. I can take a few brush-up art courses. You know, I really don’t have that many credits left to get my teacher’s certificate,” I said.

“There’s a ten-dollar pay raise coming and I’m getting an extra fiver a week as the union shop steward. Let’s try it this way for the time being.”

Roxanne ran a little temp and had a bad dream. I took her to bed with me and Gideon sacked out on our paid-for couch. During the night when she was restless and woke me I could see Gideon, his eyes open staring at us, so filled with love.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he answered.

“Squeeze in with us, honey,” I told him. I pushed my backside against his tummy and his arm went around the both of us. When Roxy’s fever dropped, I wished for an endless night.

G
IDEON AND
I had this crazy notion about living in Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge, even though it meant a long bus ride to the city. We would spend his days off driving around Marin, fantasizing that our dream house would appear.

Mill Valley was a sweet, cuddly little town with redwood stands, woodsy trails, running brooks, zillions of flowers, and an artsy village center.

Henry Perkins was a real estate salesman who worked the poor side of the tracks. He had long deduced from our Model A that we weren’t going into the high-rent district.

The house Mr. Perkins found for us was actually an abandoned weekend cottage and, as we say in the trade, needed a bit of work by a handyman. But dammit, it had a spacious yard with a big madrona tree and a front porch meant for a swing and the living room had a fireplace and there were really nice schools within walking distance and ... the price was right.

“Seven thousand four hundred dollars,” Mr. Perkins said, consulting his little book. Gulp!

“How much down?”

“This little beauty has a full G.I. loan. Nothing down and about a hundred bucks closing costs.”

“How much are the monthly payments?”

“On a 4 percent loan it comes to ... let’s see. Forty-one dollars and six cents a month, principal, interest, and insurance.”

Our hearts were in our throats. We had a hundred and four dollars in the bank.

What mistakes Gideon didn’t make as a carpenter, he made as a gardener, a painter, a plumber, and a bricklayer. But we attacked our little witch’s cottage until my belly got in the way, and by the time Penelope was born we had a warm, cozy, tiny piece of the world with a garden filled with roses.

G
IDEON HATED
his job. I mean, he hated it with a passion. Home delivery in newspaper parlance conjures up a nice, clean-cut, all-American image of yapping dogs and picket fences and smiles on the faces of satisfied subscribers. Why, some of our presidents were newspaper carriers, the classic apple-pie road from rags to riches.

It was a shit job.

There was an ugly circulation war among the four San Francisco newspapers. The game was rigged so that the newspaper boys got screwed right, left, and center.

District managers like Gideon came under unbearable pressure from an unsavory circulation department on the one side and the need to protect their paperboys on the other. His department floated on antacids and ulcer medication. Someone had a heart attack every six weeks.

Gideon and some of the other district managers became just as sleazy fighting the paper and seeing to it their boys didn’t suffer losses. To make matters worse, the men elected Gideon as the union shop steward so he had every other district manager’s misery to contend with as well as his own.

Winters were wet in San Francisco, but neither paperboys nor papers came waterproofed. The department became such a meat grinder that out of forty district managers, Gideon was third in seniority in a few short years. There was an inevitable moment when things reached a point where a wildcat walkout was being planned. This could mean bare-knuckle time, because the paper kept a lot of ex-fighters and toughs around to deal with such unrest.

As a ringleader of the “agitators,” Gideon was transferred to a fully certified skid row, a district of poor blacks, poorer Hispanics, winos, prostitutes, several save-your-soul missions, V.D. clinics, and five candy-store robberies a night.

“Hi, M
OM
!”

“Hello, Val. I just set my bags down. Can you make it for cocktails at six in the Garden Court? Gideon can join us for dinner when he gets off work.”

Mother and I had grown close, or at least as close as we were able. She adored Penny and Roxy, and Gideon never failed to bring a twinkle to her eye.

Scotch is one of the unsung perks that comes with motherhood. Lovely stuff. Over drinks in the Garden Court, Mom and I made plans for the girls to spend a month with her in Coronado when school was out and I’d join them for the last couple of weeks.

Mother was too elegant to come out with the forbidden subject, so I did.

“He doesn’t write anymore. When we first moved to Mill Valley he did some short pieces. The job has just taken all the starch out of him. To say nothing of the rejections. Oh God, I hate rejections. They are death sentences. How many death sentences can a man take?”

“Do you think he’s done with it forever?”

“Right now I do. He’d have to find another job. Maybe if he could get something in Marin, he would start writing again. As for me, I’ve decided to go back to school and pick up my credits as soon as we have Penny in kindergarten. Between the two of us, we can become comfortable in time.”

Mom grew uncharacteristically quiet and managed a sad smile.

“What’s on your mind, Mom?”

“Somewhere along the line, we all give up the dream, I suppose. The Admiral didn’t, but on the other hand he didn’t try to take a trip to the moon alone. Somehow I thought Gideon was going to make it.”

“We’re still very much in love. Sooner or later he’ll get his job situation squared away. Maybe he’ll try again.”

“The longer he waits, the tougher it becomes. And what if he realizes he’ll never be a writer?”

“Maybe Gideon got in over his head. Anyone who goes into writing has to find out somewhere along the line, he’s either naive or insane. It’s not going to be the end of our life.”

O
NE MORE
San Francisco winter and Gideon changed. A lot of his cockiness and bravado had turned into sulkiness. The fire in him was dying out and he was trying to find the way to cope with his defeat and still keep going.

One night he was packed home between a couple of his buddies, pissy-assed drunk, too crocked to drive the car. Was this a new phase of our marriage, or was the old Marine just bidding fond adieu to writing?

We did not communicate for a week, except through the girls. On his day off, he came into the kitchen sheepishly lugging his typewriter.

“I want a new typewriter,” he said. “How much can we swing?”

Pencil went to paper. Jesus, there was a dress I wanted so badly—I’d saved thirty dollars in hidden nickels and dimes. We were still paying off the washing machine.

“Three dollars,” I said.

Gideon got six dollars a week allowance. He’d cut it to five. The same day he took the Underwood to an office supply store in San Rafael. It was so old it had a right-hand carriage throw.

“This is the down payment. I can afford five bucks a month. Can I get a new machine?”

“I’ve got some real nice reconditioned models ...”

“I need a new typewriter. I’ve got a long book to write. I’ll throw in an autographed copy when it’s finished.”

“I don’t get rich from these kind of deals, buddy.”

“Yes or no?”

“You’re serious about this writing. I never sold a machine to a writer before.”

“You’re fucking A I’m serious. Marine’s honor.”

Gideon had said the magic words. The store owner was an ex-Marine. They stick together like Jews. Gideon came home with a Smith-Corona, unlocked the manuscript drawer, and took out the first pages of
Of Men in Battle.

W
HAT HAPPENED
to my man in the next three years, I wouldn’t have wished on a dog. Gideon arrived home about eight at night and he wrote in a little attic alcove until two or three in the morning. The alcove held a card table and the typewriter. It was situated next to a small bedroom belonging to the girls. His typing became their lullaby.

He was usually so exhausted he couldn’t speak coherently or walk down the steps alone. I had to undress him. On his day off, he’d work at the typewriter for seventeen or eighteen straight hours.

And so it came to pass that one night he wrote
THE END
and then he dedicated the manuscript to his “long-suffering wife” and the two of us got stiffed and agonized through a monumental hangover.

Next came the prelude to hell. Writer’s death. Rejection. Every trip to the post office box, you enter with fear in the throat, in the chest. Days and weeks and months go by and then—POW! ... that terrible little half sheet mimeographed form arrives saying “This doesn’t meet our current publishing needs.” Most of the time the signature is so blurred you can’t decipher it, other times there is no signature at all, just the form. No word of encouragement, no compliment, no hope. No explanation. Writing a personal letter apparently would mean no time for an editor to enjoy a martini. The publishing term for unsolicited manuscripts like Gideon’s was “junk mail,” the “sludge pile.”