The Barbarous Coast (4 page)

“Wait,” George said. “I want to apologize to
him.”

“No. You stay in the car.”

I made a left turn onto the coast highway. It followed the contour of the brown bluffs, then gradually descended toward the sea. The beach cottages began, passing like an endless and dilapidated freight train.

“I know how terrible I look to you,” George blurted. “I’m not usually like this. I don’t go around flexing my muscles and threatening people.”

“That’s good.”

“Really,” he said. “It’s just—well, I’ve had a bad year.”

He told me about his bad year. It started at the Canadian National Exhibition, in August of the previous year. He was a sportswriter on the Toronto
Star
, and he was assigned to cover the aquacade. Hester was one of the featured tower divers. He’d never cared much about diving—football was his sport—but there was something special about Hester, a shine about her, a kind of phosphorescence. He went back to see her on his own time, and took her out after the show.

The third night, she came out of a two-and-a-half too soon, struck the water flat, and was pulled out unconscious. They took her away before he could get to her. She didn’t appear for her act the following night. He found her eventually in a hotel on lower Yonge Street. Both her eyes were black and bloodshot. She said she was through with diving. She’d lost her nerve.

She cried on his shoulder for some time. He didn’t know what to do to comfort her.

It was his first experience with a woman, except for a couple of times that didn’t count, in Montreal, with some of his football buddies. He asked her to marry him in the
course of the night. She accepted his proposal in the morning. They were married three days later.

Perhaps he hadn’t been as frank with Hester as he should have been. She’d assumed, from the way he spent money, that he had plenty of it. Maybe he’d let on that he was a fairly important figure in Toronto newspaper circles. He wasn’t. He was a cub, just one year out of college, at fifty-five dollars a week.

Hester had a hard time adjusting to life in a two-room flat on Spadina Avenue. One trouble was her eyes, which were a long time clearing. For weeks she wouldn’t leave the flat. She gave up grooming her hair, making up, even washing her face. She refused to cook for him. She said she’d lost her looks, lost her career, lost everything that made her life worth living.

“I’ll never forget last winter,” George Wall said.

There was such intensity in his voice, I turned to look at him. He didn’t meet my eyes. With a dreaming expression on his face, he was staring past me at the blue Pacific. Winter sunlight crumpled like foil on its surface.

“It was a cold winter,” he said. “The snow creaked under your feet and the hair froze in your nostrils. The frost grew thick on the windows. The oil furnace in the basement kept going out. Hester got quite chummy with the custodian of the building, a woman named Mrs. Bean who lived in the next flat. She started going to church with Mrs. Bean—some freakish little church that carried on in an old house on Bloor. I’d get home from work and hear them in the bedroom talking about redemption and reincarnation, stuff like that.

“One night after Mrs. Bean left, Hester told me that she was being punished for her sins. That was why she missed her dive and got stuck in Toronto with me. She said she had to purify herself so her next incarnation would be on a
higher level. For about a month after that, I slept on the chesterfield. Jesus, it was cold.

“On Christmas Eve she woke me up in the middle of the night and announced that she was purified. Christ had appeared in her sleep and forgiven all her sins. I didn’t take her seriously at first—how could I? I tried to kid her out of it, laugh it off. So she told me what she meant, about her sins.”

He didn’t go on.

“What did she mean?” I said.

“I’d just as soon not say.”

His voice was choked. I looked at him out of the corner of my eyes. Blood burned in his half-averted cheek and reddened his ear.

“Anyway,” he continued, “we had a kind of reconciliation. Hester dropped the phony-religious kick. Instead, she developed a sudden craze for dancing. Dance all night and sleep all day. I couldn’t stand the pace. I had to go to work and drum up the old enthusiasm for basketball and hockey and other childish pastimes. She got into the habit of going out by herself, down into the Village.”

“I thought you said you were living in Toronto.”

“Toronto has its own Village. It’s very much like the original in New York—on a smaller scale, of course. Hester got in with a gang of ballet buffs. She went overboard for dancing lessons, with a teacher by the name of Padraic Dane. She had her hair clipped short, and her ears pierced for earrings. She took to wearing white silk shirts and matador pants around the flat. She was always doing entrechats or whatever you call ’em. She’d ask me for things in French—not that she knew French—and when I didn’t catch on, she’d give me the silent treatment.

“She’d sit and stare at me without blinking for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. You’d think I was a piece of furniture that she was trying to think of a better place for.
Or maybe by that time I didn’t exist at all for her. You know?”

I knew. I’d had a wife and lost her in those silences. I didn’t tell George Wall, though. He went on talking, pouring out the words as though they’d been frozen in him for a long time and finally been thawed by the California sun. He probably would have spilled his soul that day to an iron post or a wooden Indian.

“I know now what she was doing,” he said. “She was getting her confidence back, in a crazy, unreal way, pulling herself together to make a break with me. The crowd she was playing with, Paddy Dane and his gang of pixies, were encouraging her to do it. I should have seen it coming.

“They put on some kind of a dance play late in the spring, in a little theater that used to be a church. Hester played the boy lead. I went to see it, couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was something about a split personality falling in love with itself. I heard them afterwards filling her up with nonsense about herself. They told her she was wasting herself in Toronto, married to a slob like me. She owed it to herself to go to New York, or back to Hollywood.

“We had a battle when she finally came home that night. I laid it on the line for her: she had to give up those people and their ideas. I told her she was going to drop her dancing lessons and her acting and stay home and wear ordinary women’s clothes and look after the flat and cook a few decent meals.”

He laughed unpleasantly. It sounded like broken edges rubbing together inside him.

“I’m a great master of feminine psychology,” he said. “In the morning after I left for work she went to the bank and drew out the money I’d saved towards a house and got on a plane for Chicago. I found that out by inquiring at the airport. She didn’t even leave me a note—I guess she was punishing me for
my
sins. I didn’t know where she’d gone.
I looked up some of her rum friends in the Village, but they didn’t know, either. She dropped them just as flat as she dropped me.

“I don’t know how I got through the next six months. We hadn’t been married long, and we hadn’t been close to each other, the way married people should be. But I was in love with her, I still am. I used to walk the streets half the night and every time I saw a girl with blond hair I’d get an electric shock. Whenever the telephone rang, I’d
know
that it was Hester. And then one night it was.

“It was Christmas night, the night before last. I was sitting in the flat by myself, trying not to think about her. I felt like a nervous breakdown getting ready to happen. Wherever I looked, I kept seeing her face on the wall. And then the telephone rang, and it was Hester. I told you what she said, that she was afraid of being killed and wanted to get out of California. You can imagine how I felt when she was cut off. I thought of calling the Los Angeles police, but there wasn’t much to go on. So I had the call traced, and caught the first plane I could get out of Toronto.”

“Why didn’t you do that six months ago?”

“I didn’t know where she was—she never wrote me.”

“You must have had some idea.”

“Yes, I thought she’d probably come back here. But I didn’t have the heart to track her down. I wasn’t making much sense there for a while. I pretty well convinced myself she was better off without me.” He added after a silence: “Maybe she is, at that.”

“All you can do is ask her. But first we have to find her.”

W
E
entered a dead-end street between the highway and the beach. The tires shuddered on the pitted asphalt. The cottages that lined the street were rundown and disreputable-looking, but the cars that stood in front of them were nearly all late models. When I turned off my engine, the only sound I could hear was the rumble and gasp of the sea below the cottages. Above them a few gulls circled, tattletale gray.

The one that Hester had lived in was a board-and-batten box which had an unused look, like a discarded container. Its walls had been scoured bare and grained by blowing sands. The cottage beside it was larger and better kept, but it was losing its paint, too.

“This is practically a slum,” George said. “I thought that Malibu was a famous resort.”

“Part of it is. This is the other part.”

We climbed the steps to Mrs. Lamb’s back porch, and I knocked on the rusty screen door. A heavy-bodied old woman in a wrapper opened the inside door. She had a pleasantly ugly bulldog face and a hennaed head, brash orange in the sun. An anti-wrinkle patch between her eyebrows gave her an air of calm eccentricity.

“Mrs. Lamb?”

She nodded. She held a cup of coffee in her hand, and she was chewing.

“I understand you rent the cottage next door.”

She swallowed whatever was in her mouth. I watched its passage down her withered throat. “I may as well tell you right off, I don’t rent stag. Now if you’re married, that’s
another matter.” She paused expectantly and took a second swallow, leaving a red half-moon on the rim of the cup.

“I’m not married.”

That was as far as I got.

“Too bad,” she said. Her nasal Kansas voice hummed on like a wire in a rushing wind: “I’m all for marriage myself, went out with four men in my lifetime and married two of them. The first one lasted thirty-three years, I guess I made him happy. He didn’t bother
me
with his Copenhagen snuff and his dirt around the house. It takes more than that to bother
me
. So when he died I married again, and that one wasn’t so bad. Could have been better, could have been worse. It was kind of a relief, though, when
he
died. He didn’t do a lick of work in seven years. Luckily I had the strength to support him.”

Her sharp eyes, ringed with concentric wrinkles, flicked from me to George Wall and back again. “You’re both nice-appearing young men, you ought to be able to find a girl willing to take a chance with you.” She smiled fiercely, swirled her remaining coffee around in the cup, and drank it down.

“I had a wife,” George Wall said heavily. “I’m looking for her now.”

“You don’t say. Why didn’t you say so?”

“I’ve been trying to.”

“Don’t get mad. I like a little sociability, don’t you? What’s her name?”

“Hester.”

Her eyes flattened. “Hester Campbell?”

“Hester Campbell Wall.”

“Well, I’ll be darned, I didn’t know she was married. What happened, did she run away?”

He nodded solemnly. “Last June.”

“What do you know? She’s got less sense than I thought she had, running away from a nice young fellow like you.”
She inspected his face intently through the screen, clucking in decrescendo. “ ’Course I never did give her credit for too much sense. She was always full of razzmatazz, ever since she was a kid.”

“Have you known her long?” I said.

“You bet I have. Her and her sister and her mother both. She was a hoity-toity one, her mother, always putting on airs.”

“Do you know where her mother is now?”

“Haven’t seen her for years, or the sister either.”

I looked at George Wall.

He shook his head. “I didn’t even know she had a mother. She never talked about her family. I thought she was an orphan.”

“She had one,” the old woman said. “Her and her sister, Rina, they were both well supplied with a mother. Mrs. Campbell was bound to make something out of those girls if it killed them. I don’t know how she afforded all those lessons she gave them—music lessons and dancing lessons and swimming lessons.”

“No husband?”

“Not when I knew her. She was clerking in the liquor store during the war, which is how we became acquainted, through my second. Mrs. Campbell was always bragging about her girls, but she didn’t really have their welfare at heart. She was what they call a movie-mother, I guess, trying to get her little girls to support her.”

“Does she still live here?”

“Not to my knowledge. She dropped out of sight years ago. Which didn’t break my heart.”

“And you don’t know where Hester is, either?”

“I haven’t laid eyes on the girl since September. She moved out, and that was that. We have some turnover in Malibu, I can tell you.”

“Where did she move to?” George said.

“That’s what I’d like to know.” Her gaze shifted to me: “Are you a relative, too?”

“No, I’m a private detective.”

She showed no surprise. “All right, I’ll talk to you, then. Come inside and have a cup of coffee. Your friend can wait outside.”

Wall didn’t argue; he merely looked disgruntled. Mrs. Lamb unhooked her screen door, and I followed her into the tiny white kitchen. The red plaid of the tablecloth was repeated in the curtains over the sink. Coffee was bubbling on an electric plate.

Mrs. Lamb poured some of it for me in a cup which didn’t match hers, and then some more for herself. She sat at the table, motioned to me to sit opposite.

“I couldn’t exist without coffee. I developed the habit when I ran the snack bar. Twenty-five cups a day, silly old woman.” But she sounded very tolerant of herself. “I do believe if I cut myself I’d bleed coffee. Mr. Finney—he’s my adviser at the Spiritualist Church—says I should switch to tea, but I say no. Mr. Finney, I told him, the day I have to give up my favorite vice, I’d just as soon lay down and fold my hands around a lily and pass on into another life.”