Time, Out of Time
15
Years passed. Years of regret and introspection; years of hitting hundreds of thousands of golf balls, of reading, of long walks along the beach with Night Train; years of trying to live like other people. Years of looking for something to which I could commit my life. Years of learning what works and what doesn't. But mostly, years of Lorna.
Lorna. Lorna Weinberg Underhill. My wife, my lover, my confidante, my anodyne, my substitute for the wonder. Actually, my definition of the wonder—the synthesis of absolute knowledge and continual surprise. My tender, mercurial, brittle Lorna. The very prototype of love's efficacy: if it doesn't work, try something else. If that doesn't work, try something else again. If that fails, review your options and search out your errors. Just keep going, Freddy; sooner or later, by choice or chance or rote, you will find something that will move you as much as being a policeman did.
Did? From late 1951 through late 1954 there was virtually not one moment when I wouldn't have rather been cruising Central Avenue, or Western or Wilshire or Pico or any L.A. street in a black-and-white, armed for bear and high on illusion.
When we returned from our three-day Mexican honeymoon, Korea had once again taken over as front page news, and Lorna and I moved into a big rambling house in Laurel Canyon. There was a yard for Night Train, a big bedroom with a balcony and a rustic view, and a sunken living room with French windows that would have done a chateau in Burgundy proud.
We played house for a month, reading poetry aloud and playing Scrabble and making love and dancing to 'The Tennessee Waltz.' But Lorna tired of it before I did and took the first law job she could get her hands on: legal counsel for Weinberg Productions, Inc. She didn't last long; she was constantly at loggerheads with her father on matters of money, morality, and the administration of movie 'justice.'
In May of '52 she quit and went to work for the Adlai Stevenson campaign. She was afire with the spirit of the intellectual Illinois governor, and even managed to wrangle a paying job as the campaign's legal adviser. The job lasted until it came to light that she was married to a 'Communist' ex-cop. Saddened, but no less justice-minded, she joined a Beverly Hills law firm that specialized in personal injury cases. My Lorna, champion of the poor bastard who got his thumb caught in the drill press.
Those first months of our marriage were very good. Big Sid accepted his goy son-in-law with a surprising magnanimity. He showed moral courage in bringing me out to Hillcrest to play golf at a time when I was still notorious. We played for money, and I made more than enough to hold up my half of the expenses of the Laurel Canyon love nest.
Lorna and I never discussed the Eddie Engels case. It was the pivotal event in both our lives, always hanging over us, but we never talked about it.
On our first night in the new house I broached the subject, in the interest of clearing the air. 'We paid for it, Lor. We paid for what we did.'
'No,' Lorna said. 'I was just an infatuated pencil-pusher. I got off easy. You paid, and it's a life sentence. I never want to discuss it again.'
Mercifully for me, Canfield and the Engels family never sued either the L.A.P.D. or me for false arrest or anything else. I waited for months, fearfully expecting a summons that would result in the opening of the whole filthy can of worms to public scrutiny, but it never came.
In February of 1955 I found out why, from a drunken, resentful Mike Breuning. I ran into him in the bar of a restaurant in Hollywood. Passed over again for lieutenant, he was waxing profane about the department and his mentor, Dudley Smith. He told me, between effusive apologies, that Dudley was the one who snatched my diary, and who put Internal Affairs onto Sarah Kefalvian the very day that Eddie Engels 'confessed.' Dudley was also the one who flew up to Seattle and dug through local police files and came up with a rap sheet on Lillian Engels that showed a dozen drunk arrests at lesbian bars in the Seattle area. He went straight to Wilhelm Engels with this and coerced him into dropping his lawsuit. The elder Engels had died of a heart attack sometime the following year.
From time to time I would suddenly realize that I was terrified, and that I had no control over my terror. Blinding memories of the bloody face of Eddie Engels would take me over and would not let me go, even as I rambled on about the weather to Lorna. Gradually the image would shift, and Engels's face would change into my own, and then it would be Dudley Smith and Dick Carlisle hitting
So the dead hovered over my wife and me, solidifying their presence as Lorna and I lived on. For years we loved, and it was worth the price in sorrow that my blind ambition had exacted from me and so many others. For a long while I wanted nothing that I didn't have, and I was moved, beyond movement by Lorna's willingness to give it to me. When I thought and thought and thought about it, and tried to reduce it to words, Lorna would read my mind and place fingertips to my lips and whisper softly the words I had once told her: 'Don't think, darling, please don't try to hurt it.' She always knew when the wonder was creeping into my consciousness, and she always circumvented it with love tinged with the slightest bit of fear.
That fear ran concurrent with our love; an undertow of guilt, a clandestine transit of many restive dead souls that seemed to give an almost spiritual weight to our lives—as though our joy were a communion for Eddie and Maggie and a vast constituency of the dead. We both felt this, but we never talked about it. We were both afraid that it would kill the joy for which we had worked so hard.
For a long time our destiny was manifest joy—joy in each other, in the sharing of our separate solitudes, in the spirit of loving contention that would end our arguments with us laughing in bed, Lorna's hands clamped over my mouth while she shrieked, 'No, no, tell me a story instead!'
I told her stories and she told me stories, and gradually the distinctions between my stories and Lorna's receded until they became one vast panorama of experience and more than a little fantasy.
Because somehow, in our fusion, we lost sight of ourselves as the separate entities that we were, and somehow, very strangely, that made us easy prey for the long unmentioned dead.
16
It started getting bad with Lorna gradually, so that there was no place to look for causes and no one to blame. It was just a series of smoldering resentments. Too much giving and too much taking; too much time spent away from each other; too much investing of fantasy qualities in each other. Too much hope and too much pride and too little willingness to change.
And too much thinking on my part. Early in '54 I told Lorna that. 'Our brains are a curse, Lor. I want to use my muscles and not my brain.' Lorna looked up from her breakfast coffee and scratched my arm distractedly. 'Then go ahead. You used to tell me 'Don't think,' remember?'
Construction work and later bricklaying was mindless and exhilarating. The men I worked with and drank beer with were vital and raw. But Lorna was aghast when I stuck to this kind of work for eight months, liking it more each day. She thought I was wasting the overactive brain that I was trying so hard to quiet. And her resentment grew. She couldn't stand the anomaly of a successful attorney married to a laborer husband. An ex-cop accused Communist, yes; a working stiff, no. I noted the contradiction of a champion of the 'working man' disdaining the very same in her own household.
'I didn't marry a hod carrier,' Lorna said coldly.
* * *
I was beginning to wonder who she did marry. I began to wonder who I married. I started to feel a
