Girl of My Dreams (63 page)

At Mike Quin's request, we had tea with Howard Pease, who had shipped out himself before he wrote novels for boys about the nautical adventures of his most famous character, Tod Moran. He was with the strikers all the way. “Greed is the only word in the shipowners' dictionary,” he said.

With Chinatown just down the hill from the Fairmont, we made a foray to nibble and look, and then, spotting a naked woman and man carved in ivory, coupling, made an about-face to the hotel. “Feral creatures, we come out of our hole and blink, then quickly scamper back to unionize,” Pammy said as we were peeling off clothes before we'd even reached her suite. Kneeling, she began her ministrations while, with a free hand, she swung the door closed. We went to the aquarium, where the sea creatures in their form and motion appeared to me as wondrously diverse reproductive organs. Zipping back to the Fairmont where, with her hand on the back of my neck she guided me to the discovery of her moisture.

In sunglasses and a scarf that hid her head and chin, Pammy ventured into the city almost as disguised as a woman of Arabia, unrecognized as we climbed Filbert Street to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower, poking skywards in the shape of a firehose nozzle. “
Quelle érection
,” Pammy said, smiling, and in those green days of mine it was easy for me to smile back. Artists were finishing the politically charged murals so controversial that parts of them were painted over before the public was allowed inside. A bribe to a guard let us see the Rivera-like socialist realism scenes. A meat-packing plant, factory workers, a desperate man with a pistol holding up a blue-blood, a lunch counter as sad as a soup kitchen, a newsstand featuring
The Daily Worker
. “Could this country have as much class hatred as Europe?” I asked Pammy. “I think no,” she said, “not while the bosses have so many nuggets to throw the workers, which is why the word ‘peasant' is such an insult here.”

Fisherman's Wharf, with crab pots stacked by the hundreds and sidewalk vendors peddling their oysters and marinating ceviche, appeared to be a bridge to the nineteenth century. Puffing steam tugs stood off the Wharf looking like hippos, and a thousand fantail fishing boats bobbed in the harbor along with a few sampans the Chinese fishermen used. As we stood by the bow of a gillnetter that had come in with salmon, I handed my camera to a sailor who was happy to oblige for a dollar. Though he said she could almost be a movie star, he did not recognize Pammy. I looked at that photograph the other day and didn't recognize either of us.

The bridge to the twentieth century was just being built. The tower on the northern, or Marin County, side had already gone up. Pammy called it a mighty beacon beckoning us toward the future unknowable; she made the two words into a subjunctive speculation. The Golden Gate waterway was still unspanned, the crossing road itself a phantom, a figment of design. Construction on our side yielded only a giant column of concrete anchorage reaching deep for its relentless grip into the underwater floor of the southern shore of San Francisco Bay. The tower across the way in Marin proclaimed recovery; the lonely girders and half-built pylons on our side mumbled exhaustion, illustrating the Depression's chokehold. This was simply weekend idleness at the southern tower, which was being built second, but to our eyes the site signified the struggle between rebirth and decay. We gazed, wondered, didn't stay long.

At fine restaurants we sat in darkened corners, Pammy in a brimmed hat that shielded her features. Yet when we had lunch one day in a sunny cafeteria off Union Square, she was perfectly relaxed. Several poor people were getting free meals, and Pammy had me slip the manager fifty dollars. “Hard times make hard folks,” he said, “but I'll feed a few dozen more thanks to you and your friend.” For just a moment he glanced suspiciously over at Pammy, who had stayed seated. As we ate our custard, Pammy said Millie would love San Francisco, especially Coit Tower and this cafeteria with its bright paintings of waterscapes surrounding the city. She would bring her here soon; she said she'd never been away from Millie for more than two days.

Pammy was in full disguise, her face veiled, as she placed a wreath of red roses at the sidewalk shrine to the martyred union members in front of ILA headquarters. “POLICE MURDER” was chalked in large letters on each side of smaller lettering that read, “2 Union Men Killed—Shot in the Back.” The memorial was ringed with flowers and guarded by longshoremen, one of whom was Widdelstaedt, the would-be executioner of my earlier visit to the strike. I looked at him in fear and had to stifle an impulse to run from this tattooed beef with eyes and a long knife who had tried to kill me. He remembered my face though he couldn't place it and said, “How ya doin' pal? Thanks for you and the missus payin' tribute. Good to see ya again.”

Lighting a candle for her parents in the Episcopal Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, Pammy was recognized for the only time. A fashionably dressed woman in a dark gauzy veil of her own said to Pammy in a French accent, “
Alors, Mam'sell Millevoix
, I heard you were in town. Please be careful. Both sides are wrong, as always.”

Our talk spun through the universe. Doctors in Europe and the United States. The moral superiority and insufferability of vegetarians. Politics, of course: what you could have in a socialist state, what you'd give up. Hitler, Stalin, FDR. How Millie called the Nazis Nasties. The progress of the strike. Longshoremen were lucky to see $40 a week; Pammy made over a hundred times more. What kind of society organizes itself that way? Love: the love of the ethereal, such as God or an idea, love in friendship, love between a man and woman, between women, between men, the love of parent for child, the love of money and power and whether that was a base form of love, not really love at all, or simply, in the Freudian sense, a substitution for other forms of love that had been withheld. Millie: should she be encouraged to go into show business as she already wanted to do, or forbidden and made to go straight? George Sand, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield. She'd had dinner with Malraux in Paris; he'd invited her to go to Indochina but she hadn't. Writing versus painting versus composing. Everything but Mossy and the future; both of us stayed scrupulously away from those twin subjects that were both unrelated and related.

The night before the memorial parade, Sunday night, was sad in our unspoken knowledge we'd soon not be alone. Our lovemaking was careful, in some way valedictory. I didn't fall asleep though I heard her breathing softly, like a child. Once, also like a child, she whimpered. She stopped before I could put my arm around her.

In the morning at ILA headquarters, a long line of men and women, many with small children clinging to them, filed past the two coffins, both open. Many made the sign of the cross as they looked at the waxy, still faces in the coffins. Pammy did not. Her bearing was stately, public as she nodded at the figures in the caskets, her private communion with the labor martyrs. I felt like her consort. As they passed their dead comrades, a number of the ILA men raised one fist in a workers' salute. Many left small bunches of flowers. Uniformed sentries guarded the coffin of Howard Sperry, who was a World War veteran.

The coffins were carried down the stairway and placed on flatbed trucks. Three additional trucks followed bearing flowers. The dockworkers' own union band began the measured cadence of Beethoven's funeral march, not so much played as moaned.

As we formed up for the march, Mike Quin accompanied Pammy and me. He was turning the pages of the
San Francisco Examiner
, the Hearst paper that union members had more or less been forbidden to read. Quin was snickering. “Look at this, the dame's on some other planet, isn't she?” he said as he showed us what he meant. The long arm of Hollywood had reached up the coast. Louella Parsons was clucking at Pammy for her presence in San Francisco as much as for her absence from Jubilee: “The film colony's small but arrogant contingent at the Bay Area's criminal dock strike ought to have faces as red as their politics. Unfortunately, they're defiant and ungrateful for the fact they live in the greatest country in the world. Miss Millevoix—or should I call her Comrade?—remains on suspension at Jubilee, which is right where she belongs. Kudos to the execs on the Zangwill lot.” Pammy's face was stony. “Kudos wrapped in dollars,” she said.

I have never to this day seen anything like the funeral procession. The trucks moved slowly out onto San Francisco's main artery, Market Street. Forty thousand marchers followed. People moved in such dignified order it was as if lava were flowing and the wide boulevard were a canyon. No shouting, no horns blaring. We were in the presence of a booming silence. Many more thousands of spectators lined the sidewalks, but they weren't making noise either. “In life,” Mike Quin murmured to Pammy and me, “Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry wouldn't have been given a second glance on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but in death they're borne the length of Market Street in a reverent procession that would have been inconceivable to either of them.” Then Mike himself was silent. I began to hear, as the march progressed, a pitch arising from the throng that reminded me of a wordless hymn, without octave or tone, that was almost like humming.

“Now we know the sound,” Mike Quin said, “of one hand clapping.”

Pammy had been asked if she'd like to ride with the widows. She said this was their day, not hers, and she'd stay with the union members. Few marchers paid any attention to her. When I asked Quin about the absence of police and the regulation of the many thousands on the street and sidewalks by a few hundred dockworkers with no experience in traffic or crowd control, he looked at me as if I were a child. “Skinny,” he said, reverting to my earlier nickname, “the police aren't here because the longshoremen are policing themselves and everyone else. If any police were around you'd need a whole other police force to police
them
. Labor is burying its own today.”

We strode up Market Street a few more blocks before Quin told me a general strike was in the air. Bridges and the other union leaders planned a strike that would immobilize all workers and businesses in San Francisco and Oakland. I thought this was a crazy, quixotic idea that had no chance. Couldn't these fools see defeat when it was right in front of them, lying in the caskets they marched behind? The port would now be open to all ships; the longshoremen and seamen would have no choice but to return to work or lose their jobs for good. Unemployed strong-bodied men were about two dollars a dozen and easy to find in the midst of the Depression. “No,” Mike Quin said, “this parade is an entreaty, silently delivered, silently received. The long quiet march confirms the solid strength of the unions. The labor movement is resolved now, and resolve leads to resolution.” He walked on ahead to speak to an officer of the Teamsters.

By the time Pammy and I returned to the Fairmont Hotel, the incongruity of its juxtaposition with where we had been and what we had seen left both of us almost without air in our lungs. We sat in her suite with our thoughts, saying nothing, looking at each other, at the furniture, out the window. Pammy closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Whatever she was thinking, I was thinking about loss. The strike was lost. With the National Guard patrolling the waterfront alongside the police, it was clear the shipowners and dockowners—capital, in other words—had won. The woman across from me, the woman I loved, would go back to her own life the next day as a mother and a star, and she'd be lost to me as well. Absent without leave, I'd probably lose my job too. After a long while, still wordless, I got up and went out. I started to take a walk and then realized I had no energy, so I sat in the park a block from the Fairmont. I don't know how long I stayed there, ruminating on the bleakness of my future, and San Francisco's, and the labor movement's, when a woman in black, so shrouded and veiled she had to have come from a funeral herself if she wasn't hiding from the law, sat down beside me. Now what? I thought with annoyance.

“Why did you leave me?” a voice came from under the veil. “You left me all alone up there. Please don't leave me.”

“Jesus,” I said, turning to the veil, “I had no idea it was you.”

“Let's have dinner in the room tonight,” she said.

We walked a little, aimlessly following California Street a few blocks, then turning back to the hotel. For the first time, I felt I could have held Pammy's hand in public, but I did not. I ordered room service, and each of us picked at our food.

She fell asleep before I did. Though I scarcely knew it at the time, our lovemaking was that of an old married couple—this is what she wants, this is what he likes—each of us pleasing the other, then ourselves. I watched her sleep with the moon both lighting and shadowing her features. It was impossible to stop my mind from racing ahead. How would being back home change what was going on here? Would she still want me at all? What actually
was
going on here? Could I believe in it? How would we get back to Los Angeles in the morning? She whimpered once, as she had the night before, and I wanted to hold her and didn't want to wake her, so I did nothing. She whimpered again but stopped immediately. I saw the sky begin to lighten before I fell asleep. I dreamed of steak tartare, which gave me indigestion. When I finally awoke she was gone.

The note was on Fairmont stationery. Where had she found the six lilies it was clipped to? “I'm off, Sweet O,” the note read. “If you'll pardon my quoting myself, I still can't find the good in goodbye. You are to me what spring showers are to the hungry earth, bringing up blossoms in all kinds of unplanned spaces. Be patient, my cherished. Love all ways, Your PM.”

Nils Maynard, upstaging Largo Buchalter this time, had sent his plane for her. She was probably back in Los Angeles before I'd even had breakfast. As I left the city myself, the headline on the newspaper at the train station said, “Red Army Marches on San Francisco.”