university medical school. John eventually wanted to study veterinary medicine, but that was out of the question now. The Fletcher School of Pharmacology would serve as good preveterinary training, didn't Mr. Fletcher agree?
Mr. Fletcher did indeed. He took Marcella's registration fees, and she and Johnny were enrolled for the fall semester. It was that simple. Except, he explained, for the matter of her records. The schools had a reputation to uphold, and before the semester started he wanted to be sure that Marcella was bright and competent enough to tackle the curriculum. Perhaps if they got together socially he could gently quiz her on her academic background, get to know her better, and satisfy himself that she was up to Fletcher School of Nursing standards. Would that be possible? Marcella smiled in anticipation of playing the game.
'Of course,' she said.
Marcella played the game well. Her scholastic performance was so superior and her hold over Willard Fletcher so absolute that after three semesters of study she had convinced her benefactor-lover to forge complete academic records going back to the first grade at various secondary schools in the Bronx.
Her fake transcript in hand, she applied to the nursing school of New York University, where she was immediately accepted.
She continued to be the nominal mistress of Willard Fletcher until she was well established at N.Y.U. Then she dropped him like a hot rock, causing an awful scene in the banquet room of a large Atlantic City hotel where they were attending a convention of medical supply wholesalers.
Marcella took her nurse's cap in June of 1931. Johnny was graduated from pharmacy school a year later, with scholastic honors and a codeine habit.
It was the height of the Depression, and their frugally spent money had run out. Marcella considered her options again: med school was out, for now. Money was too tight. She took a job at Bellevue Hospital, patching up derelicts brought to the emergency room. Johnny went to work in the hospital pharmacy, compounding the sedative mixtures used to knock the mental patients into harmless oblivion. He himself remained in a state of oblivion in his off-hours, only he wasn't so harmless—the once-gentle giant, now almost seven feet tall, had become a fearsome barroom brawler. Marcella was continually bailing him out of jail and taking him home to their Brooklyn Heights apartment, where she would stroke his battered head as he whimpered for his dead father.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Will Berglund was a twenty-nine-year-old English teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Marcella DeVries was the head nurse at a Catholic hospital on Staten Island, and Johnny DeVries was New York City's leading supplier of illegal codeine.
War brought forth in these disparate individuals the same rush of patriotism that seized millions of other Americans. Will joined the army, received a commission, and was sent to the Pacific. His career as a soldier ended quickly: he caught mortar fire in both lower legs and was repatriated to the naval hospital at San Diego, California, where he underwent several operations and extensive therapy to restore his shattered nerve tissue.
It was there, in the hospital, that he was reunited with Marcella, now a thirty-year-old Wave lieutenant. The events of the previous fifteen years were shunted aside. Will loved Marcella as fiercely now, in her white uniform, as he had when she wore the gingham dresses of her childhood. Time and place and the necessity of healing obliterated the familial bloodletting of Tunnel City, and Marcella and Will again became lovers; the changing of bandages and emptying of bedpans metamorphosed into a late night love ritual that cleansed and healed them both. For the first time in their lives, their mutual small-town ghost was consigned to oblivion.
Johnny DeVries rounded out the San Diego triumvirate. A pharmacist's mate second-class assigned to the hospital pharmacy, he dispatched palliative compounds to the ships moored at the San Diego Naval Yard and moonlighted by running marijuana over the border from Tijuana. Johnny had modified his drug use, switching from codeine to reefers, and his violent behavior modified along with it. The seven-foot brawler was now content to spend his evenings in the Coronado Bay apartment he shared with Marcella and Will.
Marcella and Will would talk, and Will would gamely trundle across the living room to strengthen his now brace-clad legs, and Johnny would smoke hop in his bedroom and listen to Glenn Miller records.
The happy trio stayed together until the spring of 1943, when Marcella met the man who was to shatter her illusions and her life.
'When he walked and spoke, you knew that he knew; that he understood all of life's dark secrets—on the level of animal instinct—some highly attuned animal superior to man,' Marcella wrote to Will years later. 'He is the handsomest man I have ever seen; and he knows it and knows that you know it—and he respects you for your supreme good taste and treats you as an equal for wanting to know what it is he knows.'
Marcella's infatuation and curiosity took flight, and three days after meeting Doc Harris, she announced to Will: 'I cannot be with you. I have met a man I want to the exclusion of all else.' It was brutally final. Will, who had known that Marcella would ultimately have to move on, accepted it. He moved out of the apartment and back to the hospital. He received his medical discharge a week later and returned to Wisconsin.
Doc Harris was a genius, Marcella decided. He could think two steps ahead of her, and of course she bordered on genius herself. He spoke five languages to her three, he knew more about medicine than she did, he could drink her under the table and never show it, he could dance like Gene Kelly, and at forty-five could do a hundred one-handed push-ups. He was a god. He had won twenty-nine fights as a professional light heavyweight during the Jack Dempsey era, he could lampoon small-town mores better than she and Will at their best, and he could cook Chinese food.
And he was enigmatic, willfully so: 'I'm a walking euphemism,' he told Marcella. 'When I tell you I run a chauffeur service, it may or may not be the literal truth. When I tell you I use my medical background to benefit man, look for the riddle. When you wonder at my connections to the big brass here in Dago, wonder at what I can do for them that they can't do for themselves.'
Marcella's mind ran with many possibilities regarding her new lover: he was a gangster, a high-ranking navy deserter, a remittance man devoted to a life of anonymous good. No explanation satisfied her, and she constantly thought about the literal truths she knew regarding this man who had taken over her life. She knew that he had been born near Chicago in 1898, that he had attended public schools there; that he had been a hero in World War I. She knew that he had never married because he had never found a woman to match the force of his personality. She knew that he had plenty of money but never worked. She knew that he had worked at odd jobs, gaining life experience after leaving med school at the beginning of the Depression. She knew that his small beachfront apartment was filled with the books she herself had read and loved. And she knew that she loved him.
One night in the summer of 1943 the lovers went walking on the beach near San Diego. Doc told Marcella that he was resettling in the Los Angeles area; that he had the 'opportunity of a lifetime' there. His only regret, he said, was that they would have to part. Temporarily, of course—he would come down to Dago to visit. He wanted to be with her every spare moment; she was the only woman who had come close to touching the core of his heart.
Marcella, moved to the core of
She beamed at Doc, who marveled aloud for several minutes at Marcella's gifts of manipulation. Finally he took her hand. 'Will you marry me?' he asked. Marcella said yes.
They honeymooned in San Francisco, and moved to a spacious apartment in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Marcella, newly promoted to lieutenant commander, took over her duties at the naval hospital, as did Petty Officer John DeVries, who had rented an apartment near the newlyweds.
It went well for a while: the Allies had turned the tide, and it was now only a matter of time before Germany and Japan capitulated, Marcella was satisfied with her supervisory duties, and Johnny and Doc had become great friends.
Doc had become the father that Johnny had lost. The two would spin off together in Doc's LaSalle convertible for long, aimless jaunts all over the L.A. basin. That was the trouble, Marcella decided. Doc was never around, and when he was he was deliberately mysterious and darkly elliptical.
