L.A. 46, page 6
Sweeping the tenants remaining in the lanai with a superior glance, Vera got up from her chair and started to cross to the elevator only to be stopped by Mr. Mazeric.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “But I wonder if by any chance you have seen Mrs. Mazeric this afternoon?”
“No,” Vera said. “I haven’t.”
She continued on to the elevator and rode up to the third floor with Mr. Romero and a black-haired girl and a five- or six-year-old boy whom the black-haired girl called Pepe.
The fighter was carrying a cheap suitcase in either hand. She’d never seen either the girl or the child before. They’d almost reached the third floor before Romero, tardily, remembered his manners.
“Mrs. Wylie, my wife and son. Alicia, Mrs. Wylie.”
“How do you do,” Alicia smiled.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Vera said.
Despite her attempt to be friendly, both the girl and the child had been crying recently. “I’ll bet she’s his wife,” Vera thought. “I’ll just bet she’s his wife.”
The girl looked more like a Mexican tart to her. It proved what she’d thought down in the lanai. There were too many, many too many foreigners in Los Angeles. No matter how much rent you paid, you couldn’t get away from them. Tarts and foreigners and two-legged wolves on the prowl. And Romero was one of the worst offenders. He was always bringing strange girls into the building and making a play for those already in it. Time after time she’d warned Ruby:
“Don’t you ever have anything to do with Mr. Romero. Don’t you ever even talk to him while Tom and I are gone. Don’t you ever have anything to do with any man or boy. All they do is sweet-talk you and get you pregnant and you get stuck with a brat you don’t want. And I want you to be different. I want you to amount to something.”
Vera watched the man and woman and child walk down the hemp runner of the third floor balcony. There was one other small matter. Even if the girl was his wife, Romero needn’t think he could bring a child into the building. It said right in the lease, “No Pets” and “No Children Under Fifteen.” If the boy wasn’t gone in the morning, she’d damn well speak to Mrs. Malloy about him. After all, when a couple was paying as much rent as she and Tom were, they had some rights.
Vera unlocked the door of her apartment and crossed the white rug in the living room to the white leather chair in front of the sliding glass door leading out onto the small private patio that had been one of the reasons she’d insisted on renting the apartment although the rent had been a lot more than she and Tom had intended to pay. She’d never had such a pretty apartment before. She’d had very few beautiful things.
She stood caressing the back of the chair for a moment, then opened the sliding door and walked out on the patio and stood looking at the acres of lights and listening to the muted roar of the rush-hour traffic on the boulevard.
Sights and sounds had always played an important part in her life. There were nights when she couldn’t sleep, when she lay awake remembering the mysterious small sounds in the night she’d heard when she’d been a little girl. Ruby hadn’t even been born, and she and her father and mother had been living in the clapboard shack near Chickasha on the dust-covered acres her father had persisted in trying to farm long after most of their friends and neighbors had left. The far-off baying of a hound . . . the lonely sound of a locomotive whistle as it sounded for a distant crossing . . . the soft pelt of the windblown dust against her closed window . . . closer by, the terse whispers in the unlighted bedroom on the other side of the paper-thin wall:
“No, Charlie.”
“Why not?”
“The kid may still be awake.”
“She’s been in bed for an hour.”
“I know. But—”
“But what?”
“We did. Last night.”
“That was last night. Besides, what else is there to do in this Godforsaken country?”
“Then let’s load up the truck and go somewhere else.”
“Go where?”
“Where everyone else has gone.”
“You mean sell out and go to California?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, no.”
“Why?”
“Because this is my land. I was born on it. I aim to die here. Now, come on. Be reasonable, Viola.”
“Well, all right. But get it over.”
Then only the howl of the dog, the far-off whistling of the train, the sibilant sifting of the windblown dust, and the whispers turned to terse breathing and short expulsions of breath until the final drawn-out mutual sigh. Men.
Vera reentered the living room and closed the sliding door and walked into Ruby’s bedroom. It was in its usual chaotic state, discarded dresses lying on the bed, the dressing table a mess of spilled powder and scattered cosmetics. Vera hung up the dresses and tidied the dressing table.
This is my land. I was born on it. I aim to die here. And that was just what her father had done, died of hard work, without a dollar in the bank or a whole suit of clothes to his name. But not before he’d fathered Ruby.
She reached into the pocket of the dress she’d changed into when she came home, and brought out her package of cigarettes and the note Ruby had left on the kitchen table.
She put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, then reread the note, a smile playing over her lips.
Dear Vera:
You will be pleased to know that one of my classmates, the nice girl I told you about, the one whose father is a lawyer, is giving a party at her house and I have been invited
I may be a little late coming home, but please don’t worry about me.
Your loving sister,
Ruby
Vera returned the note to her pocket. It was as nice a note as anyone would want to read. The penmanship was good. There were no misspelled words. It was written on a sheet of the perfumed stationery that had been one of the presents she and Tom gave Ruby on her birthday. Ruby was worth every sacrifice she and Tom were making for her. It gave her a warm feeling just to know there would be at least one lady in the family. The smile left her lips as she glanced at her watch and walked out into the kitchen to start supper for Tom. There’d been a time, though, when she’d been afraid that Ruby might be marked.
That had been on the hot July afternoon when she’d been ten and Ruby two, six months after their father died. All they’d had to eat for a week had been a little dry pone and what few greens the drought had spared when Mr. Cronkite, the man from the bank, had driven out to the farm to talk to her mother about the due payments on the small chattel mortgage she’d taken out on the few sticks of furniture they owned.
She could see him as clearly as if it had been yesterday. He was a florid-faced, dapper little man, half her mother’s size, wearing a light summer suit and flashy purple socks and oxblood shoes.
When her mother saw him drive up in his dusty Ford, the corners of her mouth turned down and she told Vera, “Take the baby out in the yard and play.”
She played for a few minutes. Then, curious, after warning Ruby to be quiet, she peered into the house through a crack in one of the sagging wooden shutters that had been closed in a futile attempt to keep out some of the heat.
Vera touched the back of her hand to her cheek. Even now she’d been married to Tom for ten years, her face felt hot and flushed and she got a hard knot in her groin whenever she thought of that afternoon. Perhaps a man like Dr. Gam could explain it. She couldn’t. It had been like something out of a movie the dirty old Greek down in the lanai might have made.
At first there hadn’t been much to see. Mr. Cronkite and her mother just sat on two of the chairs. He mopped at his bald head with his handkerchief from time to time while he told her what a fine-looking woman she was, how he’d always admired big women, how much influence he had at the bank, and how if she could see her way clear to being nice to him he was almost certain he could arrange an extension of the loan and maybe even find a few dollars for her.
They talked for perhaps ten minutes. Then the man from the bank moved his chair next to hers and, still talking earnestly but in a lower voice, he squeezed her big breasts and patted her nates and kept trying to put his hand under her skirt until her mother stood up and said:
“All right. If I have to, I have to. But don’t expect me to enjoy it.”
Then she crossed the room and pulled her dress over her head and after she unbuttoned her camisole and stepped out of her petticoat she lay back naked crosswise on the brass double bed, her face turned away from the window.
It took Mr. Cronkite longer to undress. He folded his coat and shirt and pants neatly on one of the chairs, breathing hard and pausing from time to time to admire the woman on the bed while he undressed. Then, stripped to his purple socks and yellow shoes and a sweat-stained undershirt, while she and Ruby watched, Ruby squirming in her arms and wanting to know what the man was doing to Mama, the man from the bank, already randy and ready to go, sat on the bed beside their mother. He played with and kissed the big mounds of flesh and handled and examined and worried at her private parts until he became even more excited. Then, while she lay with her face still averted, after arranging her legs to suit him, he eased himself down on top of her.
Vera’s thin lips firmed. She’d seen animals serviced. She’d listened to her father and mother for years. But this was the first time she’d seen a man and a woman close coupled and the sight of Mr. Cronkite’s rigid protruding flesh, huge out of all proportion to the rest of him, first disappearing into then emerging briefly from the hairy patch between her mother’s thighs, had at the same time so excited and disgusted her that despite Ruby’s protests she’d had to leave the window and be sick.
It had gone on like that all afternoon. Every time she stood barefooted in the hot dust outside the window, the man from the bank had been beating his lean flanks and scrawny buttocks even leaner. Then toward late afternoon when she peered through the crack in the shutter, she thought Mr. Cronkite had gone. At first all she’d been able to see was her mother lying with her back arched and her head thrown back and her eyes closed and her lips drawn away from her teeth as she made small, animal sounds in her throat. Then looking on down between the massive breasts and equally massive thighs and drawn-up knees, she’d seen the top of Mr. Cronkite’s bald head rising and falling industriously, like a banty rooster pecking corn.
After that she’d been too embarrassed and ashamed to look in the window again. All she knew was it had been dark when Mr. Cronkite came out of the house and climbed into his Ford. After he’d driven away, her mother lighted the coal oil lamp and called her and Ruby in as if nothing had happened. The only signs that anything had happened were the sickeningly sweet smell in the room, the faraway look in her mother’s eyes, and the big beads of sweat still trickling down between the flaccid breasts once more modestly covered by her cotton camisole and dress. None of them had said anything for a few minutes, then Ruby began to cry because she was hungry and her mother had given Vera five limp one-dollar bills and sent her down to the crossroad store to pay something on their back bill and get a few of the things they so desperately needed.
Kerosene for the stove. Side meat and beans. A sack of grits. Condensed milk and corn meal. A half pound of chickory coffee. Ten cents’ worth of candy for the baby.
She never mentioned what she had seen to her mother. Her mother never volunteered any information. Ruby had been too young to remember. To the best of her knowledge, her mother had never seen Mr. Cronkite again. Possibly because two weeks later the bank had “regretfully” foreclosed on both the farm and the chattel mortgage and she and her mother and Ruby had moved into Chickasha and her mother had gotten a job in a store. Then, eventually, when she was sixteen, she met and married Tom and after he’d come back from Korea they moved to California and when her mother died she brought Ruby out to live with them.
Vera itched and scratched where she itched, then hacked and spit in the sink and rinsed the phlegm down the drain with cold water. It had all happened years ago but she still had trouble restraining her indignation. Just thinking of the incident outraged every fiber of her being and her fine sense of propriety.
“The cheap Oakie son of a bitch,” she swore as she filled the percolator with water, then spooned coffee into the top of it. “The least he could have done was take off his shoes and give her twenty dollars.”
7
Paul Mazeric returned to the Casa del Sol at seven o’clock. At seven-fifteen he was still searching for his wife. It had been a long day. He was hot. He was tired. He was hungry. He was more than a little provoked with Eva as he searched the apartment again to make certain she hadn’t left a note for him. She usually did that much when she went out of an afternoon and there was a possibility that she might be detained. She either left a note or she left word with Mrs. Katz.
He insisted on that. The least a man could expect when he came home was to find his meal and his wife waiting for him, or, failing her physical presence, word where she had gone and when he might expect her. Nor did Eva’s youth and pregnancy excuse her. After all, she was only three months enceinte. Mazeric made up his mind to speak firmly to her when she did come home. It was all very well for Eva to talk about them becoming Americanized, but in the husband-wife relationship there was one all-important Magyar custom, the one that demanded a wife at all times be observant of and subservient to her husband’s wishes.
In Mazeric’s opinion, American women had too much freedom and self-determination and idle time on their hands. Failing to find a note, he walked down the balcony to make certain that Mr. and Mrs. Katz hadn’t returned to the building without his seeing them. The windows of their apartment were dark. There was nothing written on the message pad Mrs. Katz always left on their door. The chances were the couple had gone out to eat. If that was the case, the chances were they wouldn’t return much before nine o’clock.
Mazeric walked back to his own apartment, running one hand along the rail and looking down into the enclosed garden surrounding the pool. The lanai, most of the other tenants called it. Not that, architecturally speaking, it bore any resemblance to one. Technically, as any educated person knew, Lanai was the name of one of the smaller Hawaiian islands and, spelled with a lower case Z, the Hawaiian name for a porch.
In front of the door of his apartment, Mazeric, a big man, lean but powerfully built, with hair as blond as his wife’s, lit a cigarette and stood gripping the rail with both hands as he watched the Edens swim one of the twenty laps of the pool they always swam before dinner.
After the heat of the day, the water looked cool and inviting. Even now that the sun had gone down, the dry wind continued to blow off the desert and the temperature had dropped only a few degrees. Mazeric was tempted to change into his swim trunks and join the Edens in the pool. Unfortunately, he couldn’t spare the time. As soon as Eva came home and he had eaten, he had his homework to do. Because the rush of orders at the shop had kept him working twelve to fourteen hours a day for the last three months, he still hadn’t learned to recite the names of the presidents in their chronological order. He was still more than a little fuzzy on a number of important dates and the precise differentiation between the duties of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government. And it stated distinctly in the pamphlet he’d been given that every applicant for naturalization must:
Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the history, and the principles and form of government, of the United States.
Mazeric smiled grimly as he continued to watch the Edens. That plus being a person of good moral character who wasn’t a habitual drunkard, an adulterer, a polygamist, sexually immoral, a violator of criminal law, one whose income came principally from illegal gambling, or had been in prison for more than 180 days or who had been convicted of murder. All this to be vouched for by two credible witnesses.
It was a big order to ask of a man who had been a member of the Hungarian underground for as many years as he had. True, he wasn’t a drunkard or an adulterer or a polygamist but he had spent more than 180 days in prison and he had been convicted of murder. He’d killed perhaps forty or fifty men, possibly twice that number. Fortunately, he doubted that the Immigration and Naturalization Service would consider the People’s Police and the N.K.V.D. men, who had charged him with the crimes, credible witnesses.
Then there was the other qualification for citizenship. The proviso read, “When the court grants naturalization, the applicant takes an oath of allegiance to the United States, obligating him to bear arms on its behalf.”
Mazeric considered the step he was taking. Given his choice, he would prefer to remain Hungarian. He didn’t like a number of things about America, particularly some of its customs. But America had been good to him. When he’d skipped over the Hungarian border with the Russians breathing down his neck and a firing squad waiting for him back in Budapest and, in time, had been admitted to the United States under the Refugee Emergency Program, he’d found a second home whose enemies were his. If it ever came to a shooting war, and he hoped it would, he would be very happy to extend the number of days he’d spent blowing up Russian installations, firing a submachine gun from the rooftops, and hurling Molotov cocktails in the streets of Budapest.
