guilt of a vile attack three thousand miles away.
'It's too bad,' Michael said, 'isn't it?'
The gardener looked blankly at him, as though he had not understood at all.
'I mean,' said Michael, 'about the war.'
The man shrugged. 'Not too bad,' he said. 'Everybody say, 'naughty Japan, goddamn Japan'. But not too bad. Before, England wants, she take. America wants, she take. Now Japan wants.' He stared coldly at Michael, direct and challenging.
'She take.'
He turned, and turned the mower with him, and started across the lawn slowly, with the cut grass flying in a fragrant green spray around his ankles. Michael watched him for a moment, the bent humble back, the surprisingly powerful legs, bare up to the knee in torn shorts, the creased, sun-worn neck rising out of the colourless sweaty shirt.
Michael reflected. Perhaps a good citizen, in time of war, should report utterances like this to the proper authorities. Perhaps this aged Japanese gardener in his ragged clothes was really a full commander in the Japanese Navy, cleverly awaiting the arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro Harbour before showing his hand. Michael grinned. The movies, he thought; there was no escape for the modern mind from their onslaught.
He closed the french windows and went in and shaved. While he was shaving he tried to plan what he would do from now on. He had come to California with Thomas Cahoon, who was trying to cast a play. They were conferring about revisions with the author, too, Milton Sleeper, who could only work at night on the play, because he worked during the day for Warner Brothers as a scenario writer. 'Art,' Cahoon had said, acidly, 'is in great shape in the twentieth century. Goethe worked all day on a play, and Chekhov and Ibsen, but Milton Sleeper can only give it his evenings.'
Somehow, Michael thought, as he scraped at his face, when your country goes to war, you should be galvanized into some vast and furious action. You should pick up a gun, board a naval vessel, climb into a bomber for a five-thousand-mile flight, parachute into the enemy's capital…
But Cahoon needed him to put the play on. And, there was no escaping this fact, Michael needed the money. If he went into the Army now, his mother and father would probably starve, and there was Laura's alimony… Cahoon was giving him a percentage of the play this time, too. It was a small percentage, but if it was a hit it would mean that money would be coming in for a year or two. Perhaps the war would be short and the money would last it out. And if it was a tremendous smash, say, like Abie's Irish Rose or Tobacco Road, the war could stretch on indefinitely. It was a dreadful thing to think of, though – a war that ran as long as Tobacco Road.
Too bad he didn't have the money now, though. It would have been so satisfactory to go to the nearest Army post after hearing the news on the radio and enlist. It would have been a solid, unequivocal gesture which you could look back at with pride all your life. But there were only six hundred dollars in the bank, and the income-tax people were bothering him about his return in 1939, and Laura had been unpredictably greedy about the divorce settlement. He had to give her eighty dollars a week for her whole life, unless she got married, and she had taken all the cash he had in his account in New York. He wondered what happened to alimony when you joined the Army.
As Michael dressed he tried to think about other things. There was something inglorious about sitting, a little hung-over from last night's nervous drinking, in this over-fancy, pink-chiffon, rented bedroom, uneasily going over your finances on this morning of decision, like a book-keeper who has lifted fifty dollars from the till and is worrying about how to get it back before the auditors arrive. The men at the guns in Honolulu were probably in even worse financial straits, but he was sure they weren't worrying about it this morning. Still, it was impracticable to go down and enlist immediately. It was ridiculous, but patriotism, like almost every other generous activity, was easier for the rich, too.
Outside, across the street, on a vacant lot that rose quite steeply above the rest of the ground around it, there were two Army trucks and an anti-aircraft gun and soldiers in helmets were digging in. The gun, poking its long, covered muzzle up at the sky, and the busy soldiers scraping out an emplacement as though they were already under fire, struck Michael as incongruous and comic. This, too, must be a local phenomenon. It was impossible to believe that any place elsewhere in the country the Army was going to these melodramatic lengths. And, somehow, soldiers and guns had always seemed to Michael, as they did to most Americans, like instruments for a kind of boring, grown-up game, not like anything real. And this particular gun was stuck between a woman's Monday wash-line, brassieres and silk stockings and pantie girdles, and on the back door of a Spanish bungalow, with the morning's milk still on the steps.
Michael walked towards Wilshire Boulevard, towards the drugstore where he usually had his breakfast. There was a bank building on the corner, with a line of people outside the door, waiting for the bank to open. A young policeman was keeping them in order, saying over and over again, 'Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Keep your places. Don't worry. You'll all get your money.'
Michael went up to the policeman, curiously. 'What's going on here?' he asked.
The policeman looked sourly at him. 'The end of the line, Mister,' he said, pointing.
'I don't want to get inside,' said Michael. 'I haven't any money in this bank. Or,' and he grinned, 'in any other bank.'
The policeman smiled back at him, as though this expression of poverty had made sudden friends of them. 'They're gettin' it out,' he gestured with his head to the line of people, 'before the bombs fall on the vaults.'
Michael stared at the people in the line. They stared back with hostility, as though they suspected anyone who talked to the policeman of being in conspiracy to defraud them of their money. They were well dressed, and there were many women among them.
'Back east,' the policeman said in a loud, contemptuous stage whisper. 'They're all heading back east as soon as they get it out. I understand,' he said very loudly, so that everyone in the line could hear him, 'that ten Japanese divisions have landed at Santa Barbara. The Bank of America is going to be used as headquarters for the Japanese General Staff, starting tomorrow.'
'I'm going to report you,' a severe middle-aged woman in a pink dress and a wide blue straw hat said to the policeman. 'See if I don't.'
'The name, Lady, is McCarty,' said the policeman.
Michael smiled as he moved on towards his breakfast, but he walked reflectively past the plate-glass windows of the shops, some of which already had strips of plaster across them as a protection from blast. The rich, he thought, are more sensitive to disaster than others. They have more to lose and they are quicker to run. It would never occur to a poor man to leave the West Coast because there was a war on somewhere in the Pacific. Not out of patriotism, perhaps, or fortitude, but merely because he couldn't afford it.
He went into the drug-store and ordered orange juice, toast and coffee.
He met Cahoon at one o'clock at the famous restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was a large, dark room, done in the curving, startling style affected by movie-set designers. It looks, Michael thought, standing at the bar, surveying the crowded civilian room, in which one uniform, on a tall infantry sergeant, stood out strangely, it looks like a bathroom decorated by a Woolworth salesgirl for a Balkan queen. The image pleased him and he gazed with more favour on the tanned fat men in the tweed jackets and the smooth, powdered, beautiful women with startling hats who sat about the room, their eyes pecking at each new arrival.
There were rumours and anecdotes about the war already. A famous director walked through the room with a set face, whispering here and there that of course he didn't want it spread around, but we hadn't a ship in the Pacific, and a fleet had been spotted 300 miles off the Oregon coast. And a writer had heard a producer in the MGM barber-shop sputter, through the lather on his face, 'I'm so mad at those little yellow bastards, I feel like throwing up my job here and going – going…' The producer had hesitated, groping for the most violent symbol of his feeling of outrage and duty. Finally he had found it,' – going right to Washington.' The writer was having a great success with the story. He was going to table after table with it, cleverly leaving on the burst of laughter it provoked, to move on to new listeners.
Cahoon was quiet and abstracted and Michael could tell that he was in pain from his ulcer, although he insisted upon drinking an old-fashioned at the bar before going to their table. Michael had never seen Cahoon have a drink before.
