Lee put his hands on the table and leaned over. “I don’t want to ask you whether, you are going,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” said Abra. “I’m going.”
Lee sat opposite her at the table. “Don’t stay away from this house for long,” he said.
“My father and mother don’t want me here.”
“I only saw them once,” Lee said cynically. “They seemed to be good people. Sometimes, Abra, the strangest medicines are effective. I wonder if it would help if they knew Aron has just inherited over a hundred thousand dollars.”
Abra nodded gravely and fought to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up. “I think it would help,” she said. “I wonder how I could get the news to them.”
“My dear,” said Lee, “if I heard such a piece of news I think my first impulse would be to telephone someone. Maybe you’d have a bad connection.”
Abra nodded. “Would you tell her where the money came from?”
“That I would not,” said Lee.
She looked at the alarm clock hung on a nail on the wall. “Nearly five,” she said. “I’ll have to go. My father isn’t well. I thought Cal might get back from drill.”
“Come back very soon,” Lee said.
4
Cal was on the porch when she came out.
“Wait for me,” he said, and he went into the house and dropped his books.
“Take good care of Abra’s books,” Lee called from the kitchen.
The winter night blew in with frosty wind, and the street lamps with their sputtering carbons swung restlessly and made the shadows dart back and forth like a runner trying to steal second base. Men coming home from work buried their chins in their overcoats and hurried toward warmth. In the still night the monotonous scattering music of the skating rink could be heard from many blocks away.
Cal said, “Will you take your books for a minute, Abra? I want to unhook this collar. It’s cutting my head off.” He worked the hooks out of the. eyes and sighed with relief. “I’m all chafed,” he said and took her books back. The branches of the big palm tree in Berges’s front yard were lashing with a dry clatter, and a cat meowed over and over and over in front of some kitchen door closed against it.
Abra said, “I don’t think you make much of a soldier. You’re too independent.”
“I could be,” said Cal. “This drilling with old Krag-Jorgensens seems silly to me. When the time comes, and I take an interest, I’ll be good.”
“The tarts were wonderful,” said Abra. “I left one for you.”
“Thanks. I’ll bet Aron makes a good soldier.”
“Yes, he will—and the best-looking soldier in the army. When are we going for the azaleas?”
“Not until spring.”
“Let’s go early and take a lunch.”
“It might be raining.”
“Let’s go anyway, rain or shine.”
She took her books and went into her yard. “See you tomorrow,” she said.
He did not turn toward home. He walked in the nervous night past the high school and past the skating rink—a floor with a big tent over it, and a mechanical orchestra clanging away. Not a soul was skating. The old man who owned it sat miserably in his booth, flipping the end of a roll of tickets against his forefinger.
Main Street was deserted. The wind skidded papers on the sidewalk. Tom Meek, the constable, came out of Bell’s candy store and fell into step with Cal. “Better hook that tunic collar, soldier,” he said softly.
“Hello, Tom. The damn thing’s too tight.”
“I don’t see you around the town at night lately.”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me you reformed.”
“Maybe.”
Tom prided himself on his ability to kid people and make it sound serious. He said, “Sounds like you got a girl.”
Cal didn’t answer.
“I heard your brother faked his age and joined the army. Are you picking off his girl?”
“Oh, sure—sure,” said Cal.
Tom’s interest sharpened. “I nearly forgot,” he said. “I hear Will Hamilton is telling around you made fifteen thousand dollars in beans. That true?”
“Oh, sure,” said Cal.
“You’re just a kid. What are you going to do with all that money?”
Cal grinned at him. “I burned it up.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just set a match to it and burned it.”
Tom looked into his face. “Oh, yeah! Sure. Good thing to do. Got to go in here. Good night.” Tom Meek didn’t like people to kid him. “The young punk son of a bitch,” he said to himself. “He’s getting too smart for himself.”
Cal moved slowly along Main Street, looking in store windows. He wondered where Kate was buried. If he could find out, he thought he might take a bunch of flowers, and he laughed at himself for the impulse. Was it good or was he fooling himself? The Salinas wind would blow away a tombstone, let along a bunch of carnations. For some reason he remembered the Mexican name for carnations. Somebody must have told him when he was a kid. They were called Nails of Love—and marigolds, the Nails of Death. It was a word like nails—claveles. Maybe he’d better put marigolds on his mother’s grave. “I’m beginning to think like Aron,” he said to himself.
Chapter 54
1
The winter seemed reluctant to let go its bite. It hung on cold and wet and windy long after its time. And people repeated, “It’s those damned big guns they’re shooting off in France—spoiling the weather in the whole world.”
The grain was slow coming up in the Salinas Valley, and the wildflowers came so late that some people thought they wouldn’t come at all.
We knew—or at least we were confident—that on May Day, when all the Sunday School picnics took place in the Alisal, the wild azaleas that grew in the skirts of the stream would be in bloom. They were a part of May Day.
May Day was cold. The picnic was drenched out of existence by a freezing rain, and there wasn’t an-open blossom on the azalea trees. Two weeks later they still weren’t out.
Cal hadn’t known it would be like this when he had made azaleas the signal for his picnic, but once the symbol was set it could not be violated.
The Ford sat in Windham’s shed, its tires pumped up, and with two new dry cells to make it start easily on Bat. Lee was alerted to make sandwiches when the day came, and he got tired of waiting and stopped buying sandwich bread every two days.
“Why don’t you just go anyway?” he said.
“I can’t,” said Cal. “I said azaleas.”
“How will you know?”
“The Silacci boys live out there, and they come into school every day. They say it will be a week or ten days.”
“Oh, Lord!” said Lee. “Don’t overtrain your picnic.”
Adam’s health was slowly improving. The numbness was going from his hand. And he could read a little—a little more each day.
“It’s only when I get tired that the letters jump,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t get glasses to ruin my eyes. I knew my eyes were all right.”
Lee nodded and was glad. He had gone to San Francisco for the books he needed and had written for a number of separates. He knew about as much as was known about the anatomy of the brain and the symptoms and severities of lesion and thrombus. He had studied and asked questions with the same unwavering intensity as when he had trapped and pelted and cured a Hebrew verb. Dr. H. C. Murphy had got to know Lee very well and had gone from a professional impatience with a Chinese servant to a genuine admiration for a scholar. Dr. Murphy had even borrowed some of Lee’s news separates and reports on diagnosis and practice. He told Dr. Edwards, “That Chink knows more about the pathology of cerebral hemorrhage than I do, and I bet as much as you do.” He spoke with a kind of affectionate anger that this should be so. The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.
When Lee reported Adam’s improvement he said, “It does seem to me that the absorption is continuing—”
“I had a patient,” Dr. Murphy said, and he told a hopeful story.
“I’m always afraid of recurrence,” said Lee.
“That you have to leave with the Almighty,” said Dr. Murphy. “We can’t patch an artery like an inner tube. By the way, how do you get him to let you take his blood pressure?”
“I bet on his and he bets on mine. It’s better than horse racing.”
“Who wins?”
“Well, I could,” said Lee. “But I don’t. That would spoil the game—and the chart.”
“How do you keep him from getting excited?”
“It’s my own invention,” said Lee. “I call it conversational therapy.”
“Must take all your time.”
“It does,” said Lee.