Collected Stories, page 58
The Mazur house turned out to be a sort of Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style bungalow with Bauhaus extras. The picture window in front, showing fluted drapes glowing from the light inside, was obviously part of a remodeling job. So was the dim glass room that reached out along the side and threw the shadows of big cut-leaf philodendrons onto the lawn. A spotlight burned from under the low eaves into a flaming eucalyptus tree.
I heard voices through the door—pretty loud voices—but if it occurred to me that it was bad tactics to bring the Red Car kids straight out of San Quentin into a binge, I would have thought it Mazur’s lookout, or the committee’s. I was a spectator; I only took the pictures. It was 1946; I was just out of the army; I was a photographer for the Russell Foundation only while I waited for something better to turn up. If I had already stayed longer than I had expected to, that was Carol’s doing—don’t get the idea that I was either dedicated or involved. Juvenile delinquents, Mexican or otherwise, never appealed to me that much as a way of life. I was a professional photographer, Mr. Cool from up the coulee, in perfect health except for an infected frontal sinus, and my principal feeling as I stood on the Mazur doorstep was a hope that things would break up early and let me get home to bed. I found the Benzedrine inhaler in my pocket and dragged at it four or five times, until on the last drag the top of my head chilled suddenly as air came through. Then I replaced the cap and pushed my thumb against the doorbell. Nothing happened. I pushed it again.
This time steps—high heels—the bump of somebody running into something, an exclamation, the smash of breaking glass. I waited. After quite a pause the door opened, and I looked down on the platinum head of Debbie Mazur. She had reached up to open the door while she squatted by the puddle of her spilled drink. Some of her hair had come loose across her forehead. “Goddamn,” she said, brooding over the starlike puddle on the hardwood. She dabbed at her dress, pulled herself up by the doorknob and leaned against the door’s edge and laughed in a soft four-highball sort of way.
“Hi,” she said. “I know you.”
It was true, she did. She inspected me. “You’re Charlie Prescott, and we’ve been waiting for you. In a pig’s eye. Come in.”
She did not get out of the way but leaned in the opening, looking at me. “Oh, Carol!” she called without turning around. Her blue eyes were wide and innocent and by no means so dumb as they sometimes tried to look. She giggled. “I’m the girl that licked all the envelopes,” she said. “They’re giving me a Carnegie medal. Oh, Carol!”
She moved perhaps four inches and opened the door perhaps six. Her eyes took in my camera bag. “What’ve you been doing? Working? This late? You look like a goddamn doctor come to deliver the twins.” Disdainfully she kicked a fragment of glass across the hall. “Well, come in, come in, get a drink and shake the collective hand. This is a celebration. Virtue has triumphed, and sin is crushed to earth.”
She still didn’t move back, but I squeezed through and stepped across the puddle of glass and whiskey. It wasn’t quite clear to me whether she was keeping the door half closed because of noise and the neighbors or because she wanted me to rub up against her. This last I couldn’t help. I got a blast of bourbon and perfume, the glance of an amused blue eye, and a satisfactory glimpse of a plunging neckline where Mrs. Mazur’s obvious talents surged up under a froth of lace. Down below somewhere she must have been propped up like an overburdened fruit tree.
“I see,” I said (which was true).
Carol came out of the smoke and noise of the living room, and Debbie Mazur shut the door. Twiddling her fingers in farewell, intensely energetic, dressed for a calendar picture, she departed, saying, “Make yourself at home. I got to get a rag, I guess.” I put the camera bag behind the door.
“Ah, Charlie,” Carol said. “I ought to be kicked for letting you do that job alone. How’s your poor cold?”
“Just like id souds.” The inhaler had given me ninety seconds of relief; I was as thick again as a sock full of sand.
She reached up and pecked my cheek with a kiss. “Look oudt!” I said. “You’ll get it, for hell’s sake.”
Just at that moment Debbie Mazur appeared at the far end of the hall. “Ah, ah!” she said, and vanished again, flapping a tea towel.
“What was that?” I said. “Edvy?”
“Edvy,” Carol said. “Cub od id.”
Several partitions of the old bungalow must have been knocked out to make the big room we entered. From one side of it, steps went down into the glass solarium; at the far end, double doors opened into a book-lined study. The lights were spots and floods mounted on the walls to throw melodramatic blobs and ovals of brightness against the ceiling. Everybody was in a circle like Boy Scouts at a camporee.
We swam upstream against the voices until they paused and Guy Mazur stood up to reach across chairs and heads to shake hands. You have seen his type often enough, but hardly ever so perfect. He had the tanned skin and light-metal hair of the gracefully middle-aged Southern California demigod. I could imagine him in his earlier years, taking perfect back dives at the Coral Casino, or (for a gag, without losing his dignity) doing handstands and human pyramids with the acrobats and weight lifters on Muscle Beach. Maybe he was that means sana in corpore sano you hear about. Certainly the single word that most described him was “confidence”; he had the air of being utterly at ease while others watched. His voice was a bassoon that played the scales of conviction; it wooed and reconciled and persuaded and reassured. His handshake told you that he was your friend, truly your friend, and that he would always be there when you needed him, but would not push himself forward with a lot of insincere protestations. He was a lawyer associated, in some way I never quite understood, with one of the studios, but he must have given half his time to betterment committees. The campaign that freed the Red Car boys was his initiative from beginning to end; he was much in the papers; his name appeared on the letterheads of two dozen good causes.
“Charlie, my friend!” he said with crinkling eyes. “Glad you got here. This is a great day. We doed it, boy, we doed it.”
“Thanks to you,” I said.
“Thanks to a hell of a good committee. They can all take a deep, deep bow, no kidding. You know everybody?”
I didn’t, but it was easier to pretend I did. I shook some hands, waved at some people. Some I recognized: Jean Gauss, a radio sob sister, homely, freckled like a thrush; Pete Welling, a scriptwriter from MGM; a lawyer named Nemerov; a couple of church do-gooders; a graduate student from UCLA; some old-time radicals who looked as if they had done time with Debs. There were about a dozen of them, densely circled and deeply talkative, with glasses in their hands, and among them, oil trying its best to mix with water, looking grateful and trapped, were the Red Car boys and their chicks. The girls were as expected—little still-faced pachucas in tight skirts and high pompadours, wearing adjustable smiles. But the boys were changed from the last time I had seen them. San Quentin had sent them home without their drapes and their ducktails, and they looked like anybody’s teenagers, not the baby gangsters, tea pushers, and knife-wielding zoot-suiters that the newspapers used to foam about.
Guy Mazur let himself back into the sofa with a comradely hand on the shoulder of Dago Aguirre, while Dago, angel-faced and deer-eyed, saluted me with a raised can of beer. Then he half stood up and stretched a long way to shake hands. “Ese, Señor Pictures.” I waved at Chuey Bernal, out of reach on the other side. Chuey snapped to his feet, bowed stiffly three times. “Greetings, sir,” he said. “Hórale, jefe, hórale. Good evening. Hello.” He collapsed. From his cousin Lupe I got a sidelong smile provocativo; she was one of the prettiest, one I had photographed a good deal on the theory that if you are photographing Mexican poverty and social disruption, you may as well photograph it in a shape you would like to take to the movies. Away across the circle, outside of it really, Pepe Garcia was hunched confidentially close to a pachuca in a fringed skirt. From him I had what was his closest approach to a greeting—a backward jerk of the head, a thin smile, a glitter as black and expressionless as light flaking off a pair of obsidian chips. He had a high Aztec nose, a bladed face, and he was built long and limber, with a flexed look, a whiplike tension. I have seen a few boxers like that, middleweights at six feet one, with long arms and fast hands.
“I don’t think you know all the girls,” Carol was saying. “With Dago, that’s Luz Esposito. Lupe you know. And with Pepe, that’s Angelina Flores.” Nods, smiles, salutes. Luz gave me an open, friendly stare, and Lupe wrinkled her nose with laughter; we had a game going that she was my chick. And from Angelina I had exactly the opposite of Pepe’s cold glitter—a glance so hot and challenging that my hair prickled. God help the foolish and feeble; this one was a fiery furnace.
I dislike coming to parties late. There is a period during which all that you doused by your entrance has to come to a boil again, and in this case I couldn’t miss the perception that the committee and their rescued lambs were having difficulty finding grounds for conversation. Eventually I found myself behind the sofa where Dago and Luz sat, and they twisted around to talk to me.
“It’s good to see you out, Dago,” I said. “You ought to feel good. How’s your mother?”
It came out “bother,” but he was too polite to smile. He said that his mother was well and very happy, and his sisters also. I said that Carol and I had looked in now and then, when we could, and he shot me a look from under extravagantly long, curved eyelashes. He had eyes to melt girls down like candles in a heat wave. “You helped her live,” he said. “Much thanks.”
“It was Carol’s idea. And anyway we didn’t do much. Anybody would have done as much.”
“Nobody did,” Dago said. Beside him, Luz burst out that Miss Vaughn was terrific, terrific. She was one you could trust, she had this fairness and this big heart. Whenever she came into a room, something great happened, everything got happy like parades and flags. We looked across to where Carol was talking with Jean Gauss, and she worked her eyebrows at us questioningly. We all laughed. Luz said, looking sidelong, “You two go together, is that it?” I replied that I was working hard to get her to barry be, which set her off in screams. “Man,” she said sympathetically, “you got a real cold there. I mean, you’re really plugged.”
“What do you do now?” I asked Dago. “Got a job?”
“I might go up to Idaho. One of my uncles runs a potato farm for a guy. Sort of a mayordomo. Where my father was working when he got killed. It’s a year-round job. I could take my mother and sisters.”
“Coyote,” Luz said. “Me too!” I moved my hand to let Guy Mazur lean back in the sofa.
“You?” Dago said. “I guess you could be left behind all right.”
She beat on his chest. “You take me, cholo, you hear? Left behind, hey? I want to see Idaho, too. Surote, I’ll show you. I’ll chase you up there on a white horse. I’ll make you into a doll and stick you full of pins.”
Dago cringed away and reached his can of beer from between his feet. From beyond him on the sofa Guy Mazur said, turning, “Did I hear you say you’ve got a job?”
“Idaho!” Luz said. “Potatoes! Without me, he says. Jijole!”
“We can get you a job here,” Mazur said.
“Sure,” Dago said. “I guess so. I don’t know, though; this Idaho looks better for the mother and sisters.” His shoulder lifted delicately, and he shadowboxed a moment with the air. “I kind of like to get out of here. You spend a year in that quinta, too many people know you, the law is always around digging up some old bone. My dad liked Idaho, till that potato digger ran over him.”
Debbie Mazur came with a tray of highballs and wet cans of beer and bent her full armament two feet from Dago’s deer eyes. They never flickered. He took a can of beer and thanked her with his even, white-toothed smile, and Guy Mazur, with his arms spread along the sofa back, watched his young wife. His face was smooth, agreeable, half smiling, fond, possibly a bit insistent. When she held the tray toward him, he shook his head. The tray wobbled, and the drinks slopped. Debbie leaned (O shield her, shield sweet Christabel!) and sipped some from each glass, watching Guy all the time. His eyes seemed to indulge her, as if he were saying, Well, all right, if you must. Then the momentary untranslatable passage of eyes was broken off and Mazur was saying, “It isn’t entirely a matter of what any individual would like, right now. Maybe you could do more good staying.”
“More good?”
Mazur laughed and bent forward to straighten his trouser cuff and came up again. “Did you think we got you sprung so you could spend your time on the beach? Boy, you’re part of something now that’s bigger than you are. You’re going to help make the world safe for democracy.”
While Dago took a polite and attentive sip of beer, Debbie lingered with her tray. She said, “I should think if they could all get away, it’d be—”
“Action,” Mazur was saying to Dago. “Action, education, education, action. All the time. Never letting up.” His voice rode over Debbie’s and wiped it out, and if my eyes told me anything just then, they told me she could have slapped him. He never even noticed he had cut her off.
“We’ve got to learn to think of ourselves as part of something bigger. Sure it was important you should get out of jail. But it’s even more important we should make sure no such atmosphere of prejudice and race hatred ever gets created again. This town will never learn until the Mexican-Americans stand up and take the rights they’re entitled to, fight for ’em, put the bigots and the fascists down. We’ve got to organize the Mexican community and mold its weakness into strength, and you three are our strongest cards. If you run out, you weaken our hand.”
“The Red Car Committee isn’t disbanding, then?” I said, and got an incredulous look.
“Disband? Just when we’ve got them by the short hairs? When you’ve got them running, that’s when you turn loose the cavalry on them.”
He had the whole circle listening and nodding. In the middle of it, Debbie suddenly hoisted her tray up on one hand, and standing like the Statue of Liberty, she recited in a nasal, uninflected voice, “We are not disbanding until every racist is down his hole and every discriminatory ordinance is off the books and every sadist is fired from the police force. We are continuing our fight until every roller rink and swimming pool and movie house opens its doors to all alike. We shall not be content until school opportunities and job opportunities are as free to Mexican and colored and Japanese and Chinese and Filipino as to others. …”
Guy Mazur ironically applauded while the rest of us stared. It was like hearing a strip queen quote Spinoza. Words like those should come out of peaked immigrant faces, from throats encased in gray utility-weight sweaters. The words didn’t match the neckline here, or for that matter the complexion, which I was now convinced was her own, and which was like a Dutch barmaid’s. And neither the words nor the looks matched the tone, which was like the edge of a broken bottle.
Staring hotly at her husband, she said, “It seems to me these kids have had their share. If they want to drop it and go live a normal life somewhere, why not? You can’t stuff them and trot them out as examples of police discrimination all their lives. They’re people, for God’s sake!”
With a little grimace she passed her free hand across the faces of Luz and Dago. “I didn’t mean to talk about you behind your back.”
Neckline, calendar-cutie dress, platinum hair, and all, she was one of the few there who knew how it might feel to be a zoot-suiter just released from San Quentin and stuck in a room with a bunch of strangers to whom you owed too much. If you demetaled the hair and changed the dress and took the props out from under the figure, you might have quite a woman there.
We were all still, waiting for something. Carol had come around to the end of the sofa near me. From the other end Guy said lightly, “Sweetheart, you were always a great one for the sentimental approach. I’ll leave that to you, you do it so well, and you leave the strategy to me. These kids are too important to be private citizens.”
Debbie dropped her head sideward in dubious thought, looking at him across the lowered tray of glasses and cans. Her reflection in a beer can diverted her attention; she squinted and dropped her jaw in amazement; she put out her tongue and crossed her eyes. “Is this the face that licked a thousand envelopes?” she cried tragically, and like a relay runner passing the baton, she slapped a drink into the hand of the nearest committee member and lunged away. A brief uneasy silence swirled where she had been.
“The point is,” Guy said, “you are too important to duck out now. Of course, you can do what you like, but I hope you’ll see it the way we do.” His smooth gray head lifted, and he called, “Pepe, maybe you ought to hear this.” From the outer fringe of the circle Pepe lounged over and sat on the floor. His chick stood behind him, and he rolled his head back against her thighs.
“Now look,” Guy said. “We can’t get at the Mexican community through the politicians until we get rid of old Coyote on Horseback and the others. They’d sell out their own people any day. We’ll get them come election time. But first we have to work through the unions. We’ve got to break the logjam and organize the pickers, and we’ve got to work on every other union with any Mexican membership. We want every local in Greater Los Angeles to hear you kids talk. Here you are, guilty of nothing but being Mexican and wearing drapes and maybe having a rumble now and then with kids from some other neighborhood. A kid is found dead in the road one morning, and bang, because you’d been in a fight with his crowd, you’re in San Quentin for life. If it weren’t for this committee, you’d still be there. I’m not asking for gratitude. All I’m saying is that you owe something to your own people and this democracy we’re all trying to create. Ask yourselves if it wouldn’t be better to stick right here, take the jobs we’ll find you, and tell your story at a lot of meetings.”
