Land of Dreams: A Novel (26 page)
Read Land of Dreams: A Novel Online
Authors: Kate Kerrigan
The thought of calling Stan was just forming in my head when, in a coincidence that I could not decide if it was wonderful or terrible, he suddenly appeared at my back door.
We both acted as if there had been no absence in our friendship. I greeted him cheerily, and he wandered in and made himself at home at my kitchen table, as if he had never been away.
Inside, my heart was thumping in my chest, as I imagined his must be as well, although he gave no sign of it.
I had missed him. Not just his friendship and his company, but the idea that he found me enthralling. In his absence I had come to realize how important it was for me to be admired by Stan. I had come to not just enjoy but crave the attention of this interesting man. Despite myself, if I was utterly truthful, deep down I wanted him to love me. I had loved and lost so many men, and I was not a greedy woman, but there was something about the quality of this man that made me want more. Although I was careful to remain casual in my greeting of him, I was secretly thrilled that he had come back for me.
“Where is the delightful Bridie?” he inquired as I poured his tea and gave him a piece of apple tart. “I sincerely hope this is one of hers. You are a better painter than a maker of apple pies, I suspect.”
“Well, you suspect wrong,” I said. “I made this tart, and furthermore I seem to have given up painting altogether—especially now that my only subject has been interned.”
As soon as I mentioned Suri the flirtation stopped. We had been dancing around each other so nicely, but the playing stopped abruptly as I realized, to my horror, why it was that he had turned up so suddenly and with such perfect timing.
He laid down his teacup.
“Jackson was worried about how you reacted to the news about Suri,” he said. “He’s worried that you are a hothead—like Suri herself—and are going to do something stupid.”
Stan was looking at me in a way that I found so infuriatingly patronizing that I felt like kicking him out. I felt humiliated that I thought he had come here to win me back, when in fact he was here to warn me off! I would have started the fight to end all fights, except that I had already gone one step ahead of him and had decided I was in need of his help.
“Like try and get her out of a prison where she is being unjustly held, for no reason?”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“Oh, really? It seems simple enough to me,” I said, trying not to lace my voice with too much sarcasm. “Injustice is usually a fairly straightforward thing, based on simple prejudice and hatred—nothing complicated about it at all.
Fighting
injustice, on the other hand, can be complicated, because it requires courage and resourcefulness.”
“I can see you have both, Ellie,” Stan said, without a hint of sarcasm, “but perhaps you do not fully understand the circumstances.”
I was starting to get angry with these men. John had fought in the War of Independence in Ireland; Charles spent his life fighting for the cause of the workingman. What kind of men were these?
“Yes, there’s a war on. How
awfully
unsettling for everybody. That doesn’t make it right, Stan. That doesn’t make it right to lock people up for no reason and—”
Stan stood up suddenly and shouted over me, “Do you think I don’t know that?”
My turnaround was immediate; this was his war too. “I’m sorry, Stan, I shouldn’t have . . .”
He wasn’t listening. “I have friends in Poland, musicians, composers like me—better, finer, more talented men than me—and Hitler has locked them up, tortured them, for little more than having the wrong name, for being a Jew. Their women, their children too—nobody knows what has happened to them; many of them have disappeared. Every day I am more alone here in this stupid town. The ‘Polish Jew,’ the ‘American Jew,’ I don’t even know who I am anymore, but I am alive and I am free. So don’t talk to
me
about the injustice of war. The injustice is that I am alive and many of the people I have loved are dead—disappeared—because they stayed, they did not run away, they were not cowards like me; they loved Poland and they suffered for her. What have I done? I came to America to write vacuous music for vacuous people, and so every day inside I suffer. I suffer for what I have done in running away—for what I have
not
done for my country!”
I had never seen Stan so agitated, so emotionally het up.
I reached for the teapot and calmly poured a refill into his cup. Then, from where I was sitting, I reached to the kitchen countertop, took a cigarette out of the packet I always kept there, lit it and handed it over to him.
“You’re no coward, Stan,” I said.
He was not. I knew enough about men to be able to see it, even in his fearful expression of his own cowardice. Brave men always experienced such doubts about themselves; cowards were always full of their own courage, boasting about their acts of bravery until it came to actually displaying them, when they would make an excuse and scuttle off into a corner to hide.
“You can’t say that, Ellie,” he said, “you don’t know me.”
He said it in a way that made it clear he wished I did “know” him. There was no resentment in his voice, more the white flag of defeat, and for a moment I was afraid he might leave. I found I did not want him to go and quickly said, “I’ve been married twice, first to a solider—perhaps the bravest and most foolish man in Ireland—and second to a union activist, a man who died in service to the workingman. I know a brave man when I see one and, while I don’t know how you’d fare in a fistfight, I can tell that you’re no coward, Stan.”
His demeanor changed utterly and, finally, he sat down.
He reached to put his cigarette in the ashtray, and looked me directly in the eye. His face, which had been hardened with rage against himself a moment ago, was now warm and soft. He was in love with me. I had suspected Stan’s feelings, but now I could see it as clearly as if he had said the words out loud.
I identified the fact, but did not feel the need or desire, at that moment, to consider it one way or the other, because Suri’s situation was at the front of my mind.
Suri was a strong-minded woman like me, with a keen sense of injustice. I knew that of her. I had no interest in Jackson’s concerns as Suri’s husband, or in what Stan thought was the right or wrong thing to do. I knew I was right.
Perhaps Jackson was not aware how concerned Suri had been about the welfare of the old couple. Possibly she had not confided in him her plans to help them, because they were her late husband’s family; or perhaps, like me, she had found that sometimes we women inhibit the open expression of our determination, afraid that it might throw a cowardly light on our men. At the very least I wanted to see Suri face-to-face to discuss what could be done.
“And you love your country, you old idiot—sure, you never stop talking about the damned place.”
“That’s true,” Stan nodded. He was smiling too broadly, weak with love for me.
Although I brushed that thought aside, I could not help but seize the moment. I took a deep breath and said, “Surely that is all the more reason for you to help me talk to Suri.”
As if conscious that I may have seen the foolish, lovelorn way in which he had been gazing at me, Stan looked down at his feet before replying, “Of course—of course I’ll help you, Ellie.”
I headed off the following morning at first light. The journey, I calculated, would take me about four hours. I’d be there and back in a day.
The night before, Bridie had set about filling dozens of empty bottles with water for my journey, topping each of them with a cotton stop and holding them steady in a wide bucket in the back of the pickup, covered with a sheet.
“God knows what might happen to you, out there in the desert—wild animals and the like, you could get eaten alive. In any case, you’ll surely not get a drop of water or a bite to eat for days. It’ll be a miracle if you get back alive.”
“I will be back in time for dinner, Bridie. Will you quit panicking—it’s only a few miles up the road.”
“It’s the desert. Like Africa—or
worse
. Oh, I don’t like you heading off up there on your own. Would your foreign boyfriend not go with you? Not that he looks like he’d be much use . . .”
“Bridie, stop fussing! You’ll be all right here on your own for the day?”
“Sure, what could happen to me?”
With my family and the rest of Los Angeles sleeping, I headed out of the city as dawn was barely breaking. It was a straight run, and as the empty city streets gave way to the dusty highway, I began to wonder if I was doing the right thing.
Stan had also thought it foolish for me to leave so soon. What was the rush? Surely I could wait a few more days and give us both the chance to explore the official channels, before he had to resort to pulling his social strings at the studio.
“Hollywood is a strange place, Ellie. People who you think are your friends can turn on you when they think politics is involved. Everything is all about money here, and money is power.”
“You’re an important guy, Stan,” I reassured him. “You must know somebody in the studio who can talk to the mayor?”
“Of course,” he said, “but in one day? I’m not sure.”
“You’ll think of something, Stan—for me? I know you won’t let me down.”
He knew I was playing him, but he didn’t seem to mind and, if he did, I’m not sure I would have noticed. I had been so full of anxious energy yesterday, all het up with what I had to do—there was no way I could have stood still and waited for a few days for things to be made “official.” I had to keep moving. I knew I would not settle until I had seen my friend. This was my mission now: to rescue Suri, and her family, and bring them all back to Los Angeles, so that I could finish my portrait of her; the very thought of it made me feel like a hero.
Now, though, driving in the silence of the early morning, with the endless flat line of the highway in front of me, the expanse of sky lifting from muted gray to blue and soon to the harsh white light of the blistering California sun, overwhelming in its vastness, I wondered if perhaps I should have waited for a few days and made the journey having already investigated the bureaucratic ramifications (there were sure to be some), with all the correct paperwork and Stan traveling with me. Then again, I had always been impulsive—and look at all I had achieved because of it! Would I ever have come to America in the first place, had I waited for my first husband’s approval? I had rushed here again after his death—and started a homeless shelter and then a women’s cooperative charity foundation, purely to distract myself from my overwhelming grief at losing him. That was an act of impulsiveness and, although it had helped many other people, all it had done for me was delay the intensity and enormity of my sadness for another year.
Indeed, what was I doing now, in chasing off to rescue Suri? Perhaps rescuing Suri and her family was an homage to my second husband—to the work Charles had done all his life in fighting injustice. Here I was, standing up for something I believed was right—and perhaps it was all because of him? Perhaps this mission was in his name, not mine. My extraordinary husband who, although he had died at Pearl Harbor, would have been horrified for ordinary Japanese people to suffer in his name. It suddenly became clear to me that my second husband was the real driving force behind my wanting to take on this slightly crazy mission. I was carrying out Charles’s legacy. It was clear to me now, and I felt happier for it.
I looked at my watch and saw that I had been driving for an hour and a half. I had been so lost in my thoughts that I had not noticed the time passing. The straight dusty line of the roads, the flat scrub of the desert on either side of it, had given me no cause to concentrate on either my driving or the landscape, and I had nodded asleep for a moment. However, I had noticed a sign for a gas station some way back, and I needed to wake myself up, to make sure I didn’t miss it. Running out of gas in the desert was not on my agenda for the day!
I had long since finished the bottle of water propped on my dashboard and I decided to pull over to the side of the road, to look in the back for another. As I did so, I noticed something up ahead, rising out of the flat expanse of desert. As I drove toward it, I saw it was a huge rock with deep, wrinkled, creamy folds, like rolls of fatty skin on an enormous animal; on top of it was another flat rock, the color of blood.
I pulled the car over and stood in this extraordinary landscape. All around me were these bizarre red rock formations: one like the craggy face of an old man, eyes hollowed into deep crevices, with a shock of dry, red hair; another looked like the wet jaws of some crazed monster, foaming at the mouth, stopped midbite and turned to stone. I had never seen such shapes and colors—naked hills with not a scrap of life on them, yet their wrinkled shapes seemed to tell the story of age itself; volcanic shapes showing life halted midaction. And these red rocks were everywhere, as if animals had been slaughtered all about and their blood had been absorbed and had stained the salted rock; the sky behind them screamed a clashing blue. The expanse reminded me of the ocean off Fire Island except that, despite its tides and the way it absorbed the weather, the water was strangely consistent. This landscape changed utterly with every turn of the head, yet it was as mysterious and endless as the ocean.
I might have stood and stared all day, had I not more important business to attend to.
MANZANAR WAR RELOCATION CENTER.
The wooden sign was attached at its four corners to two stakes, like some medieval torture victim. It was pathetically small, given the vastness of the landscape it was in. All around was barren scrubland, and in front of me was a range of forbidding purple mountains. The road I was on had long since become dusty and potholed, as if indicating that there was no point in going any farther.