The Doomsters

3

THE MORNING TURNED hot and bright. The brown September hills on the horizon looked like broken adobe walls you could almost reach out and touch. My car went miles before the hills changed position.

As we drove through the valley, Carl Hallman talked to me about his family. His father had come west before the first war, with enough inherited money to buy a small orange grove outside of Purissima. The old man was a frugal Pennsylvania German, and by the time of his death he’d expanded his holdings to several thousand acres. The main single addition to the original grove had come from his wife, Alicia, who was the descendant of an old land-grant family.

I asked Carl if his mother was still alive.

“No. Mother died, a long time ago.”

He didn’t want to talk about his mother. Perhaps he had loved her too much, or not enough. He went on talking about his father instead, with a kind of rebellious passion, as though he was still living in his father’s shadow. Jeremiah Hallman had been a power in the county, to some extent in the state: founding head of the water association, secretary of the growers’ co-operative, head of his party’s county central committee, state senator for a decade, and local political boss to the end of his life.

A successful man who had failed to transmit the genes of success to his two sons.

Carl’s older brother Jerry was a non-practicing lawyer. For a few months after he graduated from law school, Jerry had had his shingle out in Purissima. He’d lost several cases, made several enemies and no friends, and retired to the family ranch. There he consoled himself with a greenhouseful of cymbidium orchids and dreams of eventual greatness in some unnamed field of activity. Prematurely old in his middle thirties, Jerry was dominated by his wife, Zinnie, a blonde divorcee of uncertain origin who had married him five years ago.

Carl was bitter on the subject of his brother and sister-in-law, and almost equally bitter about himself. He believed that he’d failed his father all the way down the line. When Jerry petered out, the Senator planned to turn over the ranch to Carl, and sent Carl to Davis to study agriculture. Not being interested in agriculture, Carl flunked out. His real interest was philosophy, he said.

Carl managed to talk his father into letting him go to Berkeley. There he met his present wife, a girl he’d known in high school, and shortly after his twenty-first birthday he married her, in spite of the family’s objections. It was a dirty trick to play on Mildred. Mildred was another of the people he had failed. She thought that she was getting a whole man, but right at the start of their marriage, within a couple of months, he had his first big breakdown.

Carl spoke in bitter self-contempt. I took my eyes from the road and looked at him. He wouldn’t meet my look: “I didn’t mean to tell you about my other – that other breakdown. Anyway, it doesn’t prove I’m crazy. Mildred never thought I was, and she knows me better than anybody. It was the strain I was under – working all day and studying half the night. I wanted to be something great, someone even Father would respect – a medical missionary or something like that. I was trying to get together enough credits for admission to medical school, and studying theology at the same time, and – Well, it was too much for me. I cracked up, and had to be taken home. So there we were.”

I glanced at him again. We’d passed through the last of the long string of suburbs, and were in the open country. To the right of the highway, the valley lay wide and peaceful under the bright sky, and the hills had stepped backwards into blueness. Carl was paying no attention to the external world. He had a queer air of being confined, almost as though he were trapped in the past, or in himself. He said: “It was a rough two years, for all of us. Especially for Mildred. She did her best to put a good face on it, but it wasn’t what she had planned to do with her life, keeping house for in-laws in a dead country hole. And I was no use to her. For months I was so depressed that I could hardly bear to get up and face the daylight. What there was of it. I know it can’t be true, but the way I remember those months, it was cloudy and dark every day. So dark that I could hardly see to shave when I got up at noon.

“The other people in the house were like gray ghosts around me, even Mildred, and I was the grayest ghost of all. Even the house was rotting away. I used to wish for an earthquake, to knock it down and bury us all at once – Father and me and Mildred and Jerry and Zinnie. I thought a good deal about killing myself, but I didn’t have the gumption.

“If I’d had any gumption, or any sense, I’d have gone for treatment then. Mildred wanted me to, but I was too ashamed to admit I needed it. Father wouldn’t have stood for it, anyway. It would have disgraced the family. He thought psychiatry was a confidence game, that all I really needed was hard work. He kept telling me that I was pampering myself, just as Mother had, and that I’d come to the same bad end if I didn’t get out in the open air and make a man of myself.”

He snickered dolefully, and paused. I wanted to ask him how his mother had died. I hesitated to. The boy was digging pretty deep as it was, and I didn’t want him to break through into something he couldn’t handle. Since he’d told me of his earlier breakdown and the suicidal depression that followed it, my main idea was to get him back to the hospital in one mental piece. It was only a few miles more to the turnoff, and I could hardly wait.

“Eventually,” Carl was saying, “I did go to work on the ranch. Father had been slowing down, with some sort of heart condition, and I took over some of his supervisory duties. I didn’t mind the work itself, out in the groves with the pickers, and I suppose it did me some good at that. But in the long run it only led to more trouble.

“Father and I could never see eye to eye on anything. He was in orange-growing to make money, the more money the better. He never thought in terms of the human cost. I couldn’t stand to see the way the orange-pickers were treated. Whole families, men and women and kids, herded into open trucks and hauled around like cattle. Paid by the box, hired by the day, then shunted on their way. A lot of them were wetbacks, without any legal rights. Which suited Father fine. It didn’t suit me at all. I told Father what I thought of his lousy labor policy. I told him that this was a civilized country in the middle of the twentieth century and he had no right to push people around like peons, cut them off from employment if they asked for a living wage. I told him he was a spoiled old man, and I wasn’t going to sit idly by and let him oppress the Mexican people, and defraud the Japanese!”

“The Japanese?” I said.

Carl’s speech had been coming in a faster rhythm, so fast that I could hardly follow it. There was an evangelical light in his eye. His face was flushed and hot.

“Yes. I’m ashamed to say it, but my father cheated some of his own best friends, Japanese people. When I was a kid, before the War, there used to be quite a few of them in our county. They had hundreds of acres of truck gardens between our ranch and town. They’re nearly all gone now. They were driven out during the War, and never came back. Father bought up their land at a few cents on the dollar.

“I told him when I got my share of the ranch, I’d give those people their property back. I’d hire detectives to trace them and bring them back and give them what was theirs. I intended to do it, too. That’s why I’m not going to let Jerry cheat me out of the property. It doesn’t belong to us, you see. We’ve got to give it back. We’ve got to set things right, between us and the land, between us and other people.

“Father said that was nonsense, that he’d bought the land perfectly honestly. In fact, he thought that my ideas were crazy. They all did, even Mildred. We had a big scene about it that last night. It was terrible, with Jerry and Zinnie trying to turn him against me, and Mildred in the middle, trying to make peace. Poor Mildred, she was always in the middle. And I guess she was right, I wasn’t making too much sense. If I had been, I’d have realized that Father was a sick man. Whether I was right or wrong – and of course I was right – Father couldn’t stand that kind of a family ruction.”

I turned off the highway to the right, onto a road which curved back through an underpass, across flat fields, past a giant hedge of eucalyptus trees. The trees looked ancient and sorrowful; the fields were empty.