Taylor Duration

A Novel of World War II San Francisco
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9825132-6-2
Verlag: MaxM Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 222 Seiten

When former Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Taylor sent his novel to Charles Scribner & Sons in 1964 and it was returned unopened, he gave up. It sat in a box, still in the brown paper mailing wrapper, until his stepson discovered it in 2009. The Duration is set on a fictional newspaper, The Observer, in San Francisco during World War II and is an interesting look at life for a 4-F reporter during and life at newspapers in the 1940s-a life Taylor lived-he spent the war in L.A. as reporter for The Times. The hero, John Edwards divides his time between covering boring stories and drinking and having an affair with the wife of a Navy officer who is off in the Pacific Theater. Will he find love before the world finds peace?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taylor, Richard

Leseproben

[ TWO ] The gripman threw himself backward and tugged at the cable car’s big brake, standing two-thirds as tall as he did, Edwards, who was light on his feet, dropped from the step while the car was still in motion; the gripman, taking his cue like a figure in ballet, already was releasing the brake as Edwards leaped, and the car hardly lost way at all. With a pleasing sense of having propelled a whole carload of passengers on their way Edwards started up the hill toward Margaret’s apartment. Two girls in shipyard worker’s tin hats and bulky work clothes climbed the hill ahead of him. He passed dingy apartment houses, each with a “no vacancy” sign on the door; some of the signs originally had said the contrary, and had been converted by a “NO” written in at the top with fierce relish. Two blocks below the building where Margaret lived he stopped in at a corner liquor store. A man he didn’t know was buying something, so Edwards stared at the shelves where a few bottles of whiskey, survivors of better days, were jostled about by a crowd of rum bottles and Old Southern liquors. When the man Edwards didn’t recognize had gone out Edwards went over to the cash register and asked the store’s owner for cigarettes. The storekeeper was a large loud swaggering man who seemed as out of place in this neighborhood business as Long John would have been in his galley if Silver had been a loudmouth, but he must have had a different view of the matter, since he was in the store sixteen hours a day, six days a week. He reached beneath the counter and came up with two packs of a second-rate brand. Now and then he let loose a pack of Camels or Chesterfields. Edwards took what he was offered without comment, since it was 1943. He climbed on toward Margaret’s. The street, which had been steep, became precipitous; the last block before Edwards’ lovers’ abode was enough to make anybody puff, but Edwards didn’t, partly because he walked slowly, sparing himself, and partly because, like many newspapermen, he was lean, though he wasn’t one of the coughing unhealthy Irish ones, nor one of the restless quivering ones with long straight noses whose resemblance to bird dogs long ago became so widely noted that it congealed into a standard perception. He was a neat spare man, not very tall—a little over five feet seven, or five feet eight if you wanted to accept the official statistic he gave out. His hair was blond and carefully brushed with a pair of military brushes. He had confident blue eyes and a ruddy face. If you had blown him up with a bicycle pump he would have been formidable, one of those Front de Boeuf types who turn out to be fourth generation millionaires besides. Since he worked for his living, and was the size that he was, most people liked him. Margaret couldn’t put a light in her window to let him know that she was home, because of the blackout. They had arranged that when she arrived home she would black out her bedroom window, even if it was still light outside; if she wasn’t home the shade in her bedroom would be pulled halfway down. Of course Edwards had a key, which he used if he came by later at night, after working late; but he and Margaret had agreed, felicitating one another on their common sense in a slightly formal, slightly touchy manner: rather like a married couple reaching concord on what agreeable luxuries it’s necessary to cut from their household budget—that it wouldn’t do for him, around six o’clock when other tenants in the apartment house were coming home too, to be seen letting himself in with his own key. It was true the other tenants saw him arriving home with Margaret, nearly every evening; but it was a tolerant city at any time, and in this time of war and trouble most people were too busy or anxious, or too involved in something of their own that wouldn’t stand full daylight, to mind the business of others. Anyway, there was a feeling current that morals or at least moralizing, were somehow unpatriotic: censuring other people’s conduct was a luxury, and so it was out for the duration. Edwards might be a combat veteran, just discharged, who had suffered terrible nervous or physical damage on Guadalcanal, for which he was seeking to console himself with Margaret or he might be due to join the Army or Navy in the next thirty days specifically for some desperate mission from which he was unlikely to return. How could you know? Better not to meddle and be snubbed, or looked at as if you were suspected of spying. (Edwards was 4-F.) But his own key, openly displayed, would have been a different matter. It might have put the building’s owner, a clubwomanly widow who lived in the first apartment off the lobby as you came in from the front door, in a position where she might have felt that propriety wouldn’t permit her to look the other way. Edwards and Margaret tried to preserve appearances. He usually left her between five and six in the morning. This was riskier than it sounds, since shipyards and war plants were working around the clock, and people came and went at all hours; actually, he was safer on the mornings when he was working a late shift at the paper, and slept in until around nine-thirty. He avoided the elevator, and used the stairs, on which he could wait if he heard voices in the hall of the floor below. The stairs didn’t squeak, which was more than could be said for the springs on Margaret’s bed. Margaret worried about this, in the small hours of the night, but he thought that sometimes she took a fierce defiant joy in the sound they made. The blind in Margaret’s window was pulled halfway down, Edwards walked up the hill another block, to the top; from here the street slanted down to the bay. Between the apartment houses lining the street you could see only a slice of the bay, like light at the end of a tunnel; or really, since it was dark now, Edwards couldn’t see the bay at all: only memory enabled him to discern where the water began. In peacetime the dark out there would have had known dimensions imposed on it by the Alcatraz lighthouse, its revolving beam sweeping across the sky; lower down, he might have seen the masthead lights of a ship hurrying into port, with that air of mystery and importance they took on at this hour—N. Bonaparte, passage booked at Elba, might be aboard, or Roger Casement. A few lights did show at windows down the street; people were getting careless about the blackout now. It wasn’t like a year ago, in the spring of 1942, when his friends had been full of marvelously improbable theories of how the Japanese, come July and August, were going to bomb the city from aircraft carriers hidden in the fog banks which lie massively off the Golden Gate in the summer months. “We’ll be bombed by July,” pretty women said in bars, with all the authoritativeness conferred on them by Red Cross uniforms. Edwards turned around and walked down the hill toward Margaret’s. He was not so sure nowadays that this loitering was better than brazening out the business of the key. Sometimes, strolling around the block while waiting for Margaret, he met tenants going home to Margaret’s building, whose slight smiles suggested recognition of the walk of a man who’s killing time, not a man who’s heading for home. But the conversation with Margaret concerning the key had been a difficult one and he didn’t want to reopen it. He wanted to avoid discussions, wanted time for their relationship to take on body, until it seemed more normal and natural to her than her marriage, which, after all, had lasted only six months, so far as actually living with Harry was concerned. She had known Harry for three months before they were married, and was still married to him. Margaret came up the hill. He recognized her first as a glimmer of white gloves, then as a spill of blonde hair. They sometimes were mistaken for brother and sister. Edwards didn’t relish this, but deceived himself concerning the exact damage that was done to his pride: the real reason he disliked being thought Margaret’s brother was that he secretly feared people thought him her brother because he was barely taller than she. He recognized it could be useful if the apartment house tenants thought them brother and sister, but he doubted that the tenants did. He wasn’t above saying loudly in the hall, “Did you hear from mother today?”, but this was mostly to amuse Margaret, who laughed hard at the idea of incest because she couldn’t (most of the time) afford to find adultery funny. Margaret was carrying a bag of groceries; she looked fresh and her step was springy. Sometimes she came home dragging. Her work, as a secretary in a law firm, wasn’t really arduous, but she made it harder than it was and probably it was made harder for her. Except in the shipyards, where happy rustics from Arkansas and Oklahoma reveled incredulously in prosperity and wished only that every war could last a hundred years, civilian guilt sat heavily on the city. The Parkinson’s Law of wartime was that work expanded in proportion to the need of the worker, or his chief, to feel that anything could be anywhere nearly as important as risking your life. Margaret placed and spaced her semi-colons as if they were sniper’s bullets. She smiled at Edwards, shifted the groceries to her left arm, tucked her right hand under his arm. “Goodies, darling,” she said, “My nice little butcher had two lamb chops saved for me, and he wouldn’t take any stamps.” Margaret was an earnest and an honest girl, but she felt that...