Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [16]
The fucking clock had barely moved. It was only eleven in the morning. “Oh, cripes.” I breathed deeply. It hurt, bad. The only other time I remembered feeling this kind of pain was during those hours of waiting when Penelope’s life hung in the balance.
I focused in on the photograph on the dresser. There he is, staring down at me. Rear Admiral Warren Ballard and Mother. Mom’s big-brimmed hat was gushy with lace. Both of them had military stiff backs and white gloves. Their joint smiles registered .001 on the Richter scale. Bulldog Ballard.
San Francisco Bay Area, 1944-1953
HIS SOFTEST TOUCH felt like a blackjack. If it didn’t cruise at twenty-five knots, or wasn’t 90 proof, the Admiral usually wasn’t interested, particularly if it was a voice that came from inside a little girl. We were commodities. Mother was a grade A commodity. Sweet Sister Ellen was a commodity, bless her pissant soul. Brother Tom was no commodity. He was a male!
But Tom let the old team down. Yea, Tom! Instead of following Bulldog Ballard into Annapolis, Tom was somewhere on a mountaintop in South America, teaching ungrateful Indians how to use fertilizer.
Anthropology! What the hell is anthropology! Married a God-damned Peruvian woman, half-Indian, that’s what!
“Best not to mention Tom this Christmas,” Mother had warned; “the Admiral’s maudlin about it.”
No such problems with Sweet Sister Ellen. Navy forever! Fred Barrington, now there’s as fine a young officer as this man’s navy has laid eyes on in ten years. That lad will be commanding a cruiser before he’s thirty-five. Yoicks! A cruiser before thirty-five! Sweet Sister Ellen, who, in secret, could outdrink the Admiral and Fine Lad Fred, had delivered a little boy. He was a little shit, but at last the Admiral knew the old tradition would live on despite brother Tom’s perfidy.
I was the baby. By the time it was my turn at bat, Sweet Sister Ellen had caved in and Brother Tom had waved his middle finger under the Admiral’s nose and jumped ship to South America.
Mother usually came down on Father’s side, so I spent my childhood learning the art of compromise and not rocking the boat. From the beginning, I was good in art—damned good, actually. My dreams of studying in Paris had to be set aside by the war. Besides, Mother and I hadn’t totally convinced the Admiral. I was good enough for Paris, mind you, but not quite ready. The really fine art schools in L.A. and New York were also just out of reach. I decided to spend the war getting ready for Paris.
Mills College, a sort of West Coast Vassar with a fairly snooty all-girl campus near San Francisco, seemed to be a good compromise. Pleased the hell out of the Admiral and kept peace in the home.
Home, incidentally, was Coronado Island, a ferry-boat hop over the bay from San Diego. Ships here, ships there, ships everywhere. All Navy, a yard wide. A retirement community, where old salts got rigor mortis before the final sail to the great beyond. Six commanders and five captains per square block. Flag officers on Ocean Boulevard. That’s where we lived, in a big old airy place with shiplap siding and the Fourth of July all year round.
At Mills I gloried in my first real taste of freedom. I studied art history (yawn), and studio art, and mostly boned up on my French so I could crack the Sorbonne after the war.
That’s when I met him. Gideon Zadok, Private First Class, USMC and well-known entrepreneur.
Gideon was a patient at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, just a skip and a holler down the road from the Mills College campus. So many poor wounded Marines and sailors so far from home needing a lot of tender loving care, and several hundred girls just coming into heat ... it was a lovely mutual arrangement. In those days old-fashioned chivalry still prevailed ... a few fierce French kisses, maybe a little squeeze of the tits, but nothing we couldn’t talk to Mother about. We just didn’t sack out unless the situation