David's War. Herbert Kastle
gave me the number. Didn’t you expect my call?’
‘I . . . I find myself surprised at everything that happens in relation to that foolish ad.’
He chuckled. ‘I’ve forgotten which ad was yours. Was it “Slim mature lady with masters . . .”?’
‘Please don’t repeat it! I wrote it as quickly as I could. The slim . . . that’s a Freudian response of some sort. I am slim, or relatively slim, now, but I wasn’t always. So I tend to overemphasize the quality. As for the rest . . . I based it on what the other ads said. Silly, wasn’t it?’ She laughed painfully.
‘Good enough to get me to answer.’
‘I didn’t mean to link you to the silliness . . .’
‘Look, Miss Goran, would you like to have lunch?’
‘Lunch is a fine idea. Lunch doesn’t commit us . . .’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘I can’t on a weekday. I teach elementary school.’ She paused. ‘Aren’t you available on weekends?’
Which was a way of asking if he was married. ‘Saturday or Sunday?’ he asked.
‘Saturday.’ And then, ‘We could meet half-way. From your zip code, I gather you’re in the Hollywood Hills or thereabouts. It’s a long drive to the shore.’
Which could have been consideration, or fear that he would end up in her apartment making a ‘headlong gallop toward intimacies’.
‘Whatever you’d like. But as long as you’re willing to drive in . . . Scandia, Ma Maison, Bistro Gardens, the Polo Lounge, just about all the fine restaurants are in my area. Pick one and we’ll meet there.’
‘I’ve never been to the Polo Lounge. It’s in the Beverly Hills Hotel, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Saturday noon, the Polo Lounge.’
‘I didn’t expect to be so royally treated . . . David!’
‘That’s all right, Rita.’ The excitement in her voice was the reason he had offered the well-known restaurants. She would see the way he dressed, the way the captains and waiters recognized and treated him; would learn his occupation, his position; would see the car he drove and the house in which he lived, if it went that far. So that there would be no chance of her finding him worn and pitiful.
‘Could I have your telephone number, David? In case I have to cancel at the last minute?’
‘Home or office?’ he asked, thinking she was still questioning his marital status. He supposed married men answered those ads often enough.
‘Well . . . home, unless you’re at the office on Saturdays.’
He gave it to her.
She said, ‘Thank you! I’m looking forward to meeting you!’
He said, ‘The same here,’ and, ‘Goodbye.’
He was no longer nervous . . . until he considered what could happen if Miss Goran turned out to be less frightened and shy than she seemed, and herself made ‘a headlong gallop toward intimacies’.
Then again, that was one of the reasons he had read the New York Review personals – wanting to try an intellectual, non-showbiz woman in a complete relationship.
It was time to shower, then relax with one of the novels he read in his continuing search for movie properties. After which he would watch the late news and go to sleep.
Dreamless sleep, he hoped.
Rita Goran also had occasional nightmares. They concerned William Goran, her late husband, and he would be beating her, as he had in real life, though real life was twelve years in the past.
An over-reaction, she felt, the dreams being far worse than the actual beatings.
Even labelling them ‘beatings’ was an over-reaction, an exaggeration. Only that once, during the February blizzard, when she had suggested he sell the business before it ruined them, had he done more than shout obscenities and slap her a few times. During the blizzard he had ‘experienced a breakdown’, as he termed it. He had punched her in the face with his fist, three times, so that she’d had to call Dr Giles. Giles rather than their regular doctor for two reasons: he was within walking distance that stormy winter’s day, and he didn’t know many of the people she and Will knew.
She was ashamed, terribly, that Rita Goran who had been brought up in a loving home, who had received a fine Hunter College education, who had thought she knew the man she had married, should have cuts and bruises and broken teeth.
Will had been so contrite, so sorry afterwards, weeping, kissing her hand, pleading for her forgiveness. Of course she forgave him, and of course she understood the terrible pressure under which he had been living since Goran’s Electrical Supply Depot had begun failing.
But he had continued to throw good money after bad, as Daddy used to say, some of it money Daddy had left her and which she had put aside for his grandson’s education. Her only child, Roger, who to this day couldn’t believe his father had actually done what he had seen on his mother’s face. Roger, who nevertheless suspected his mother in his father’s death.
The inheritance, as she called Daddy’s money, was in her name and couldn’t be withdrawn without her signature. Will had talked and talked, mostly at night in bed, wheedling it out of her a thousand or two at a time (and, yes, frightening it out of her by clenching his fists as he talked, by bending his face over hers, eyes bulging, neck muscles protruding, coming close to another ‘breakdown’) until nine thousand was gone and only eleven thousand remained of what was to send her brilliant son through medical school.
It was spring, a fragrant afternoon in May, and such days were magnificent in New York’s Hudson Valley; such days had helped Will convince her to move, from her beloved Manhattan with all its cultural advantages, sixty miles north to the outskirts of Fishkill. At three o’clock he came home in a frenzy and said she had to give him the entire eleven thousand ‘or the business is lost’.
She said she would put a second mortgage on their jointly owned home before robbing their son. He laughed wildly, clenching his fists (and she watched those fists, fighting the fear, the need to give him whatever he asked for). He said he had already put a second on the house, forging her signature on the bank papers; said he would forge her signature on a withdrawal slip the next morning if she didn’t ‘come to her senses and save the business’.
‘The business is beyond saving,’ she said. ‘I spoke to Mr Lowell at the bank . . .’
He slapped her, swiftly, before she could see it coming. He slapped her again, and though she anticipated this second slap she didn’t move, held by the strange lethargy his violence produced in her.
He pushed his face into hers, whispering, ‘If you make trouble, I’ll kill us both, I swear it. That business is my life. My life, understand, you stupid, selfish bitch?’
He would apologize later. He would cry and kiss her hand. But right now he was clenching his fists, and she said, ‘Yes, all right. In the morning we’ll save the business.’ When she knew the business was finished. When she knew he was a weakling unable to face a new start.
When she knew she hated him for what he was doing to their son; and even more for what he was doing to her.
She made dinner. Roger came home and they ate together and he went to his room to study, her brilliant son who, all the teachers said, was destined for medicine.
He had changed after his father’s death. He had lowered his goals, his dreams. He’d become an instructor in the New York State college system. He was now an associate professor . . . but what he could have been!
She hadn’t seen him since coming to California three years ago. She never heard from him unless she phoned. And those calls had become too unpleasant because