Darlene smiled and as she rose to go to the telephone booth she leaned over and planted a wet, smacking kiss on her man’s mouth.
Around noon the couple walked north along the shore until they reached the derelict wartime shipyards which had briefly made the sleepy little town a seething hub of industry. In the years since the 1945 a boat community of several hundred souls had tied up to the wartime wharfs and docks; in the wintery mists and the drizzle the assembled boats — everything from small yachts to motor cruisers, a brigantine to an old Navy PT boat — bobbed drably on the grey waters.
The lovers held hands but said little until they halted, surveying the rag tag fleet. In Sausalito there were ‘hill’ people and there were ‘boat’ people, and people in between who did not actually own land or property on ‘the hill’ or in Mill Valley or on Mount Tamalpais. The ‘hill’ was the rocky peninsula which anchored the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge; and countless picturesque white wood-frame houses were scattered across its eastern slopes below Route 101, separated from the bay by Bridgeway Drive.
Stopping by a low wall Gregory helped Darlene to squirm up onto it, and turned to take her in his arms. She was shorter than him by three-quarters of a head; perched on the wall they were eye to eye. Her thighs squeezed against him, holding him close as they kissed.
Darlene sighed, rested her check on his shoulder.
“You don’t know me, Gregory Sullivan,” she confessed in a tiny voice.
How much did anybody know about anybody after seven dates and three bouts of frantic coupling?
“I know I’m crazy about you.”
With extreme reluctance Darlene disentangled herself from the man.
“You’re Momma and Papa are movie stars,” she reminded him. “I’m just poor white trash to people like them…”
Gregory bit back the urge to instantly object.
He sat on the wall beside Darlene, staring out across the waters to where he knew San Francisco was shrouded in the fog.
“To me you are like some fairy princess,” he chuckled, pressing her hand in his. “My very own southern belle. I don’t know what my folks will make of us. Come to think about it I’ve never really known what they make of me, let alone anyone else.” He spoke unhurriedly, matching one confession with another. “My big brother Benjamin is a hot shot lawyer who, if my Ma is to believed, has his sights set on the State Legislature or Congress some time soon. David, my next biggest brother — well, he’s a certifiable genius compared to the rest of us — is a rocket scientist at Rice University in Texas. You’ve met Miranda, obviously,” he added with fond irony, “Miranda could be anything she wants. Me, I’m just Greg the schoolteacher and my folks don’t get it at all. Whatever,” he shrugged, “I know I’ve had it easy. I don’t leech off Ma and Pa but I could if I wanted. I’m lucky. I’m the guy I want to be doing a job I love, and now I’ve met my very own southern belle. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Leastways, that’s the way I look at it.”
Darlene was lost in her premonitions as she leaned against him in the circle of his left arm.
“Besides,” the man chuckled, “I still haven’t told you all about the history of Sausalito. All my other southern belles loved the story, I’m sure you will.”
The woman laughed. She knew there had been no other ‘southern belles’. In fact there had been few other girlfriends because Gregory Sullivan was the sort of guy who really was waiting for the right girl to come along. Some men needed to have a woman on their arm to feel like a ‘real’ man; Greg was not like that, perhaps, because he was lucky enough to be happy within himself.
Sometimes people needed to talk; today he needed to talk, another time it would be her turn if she ever gathered the courage to confront the truth of her life.
Gregory planted a kiss in her hair.
“We’re looking out across Richardson Bay,” he began, as if he was addressing a school day trip. “It was so named for a seafarer by the name of William A. Richardson, an Englishman, who had been wise enough to obtain Mexican citizenship because way back in his time this was Mexico, not America. If there was any justice in the world, which we both know there isn’t, the bay would be called after the fellow — well, the first European — who actually came ashore here. That would be a certain Don José de Cañizares, a Spanish gentleman. Although in the way of these things he wasn’t so much exploring as searching for booty. The Spanish set up a military garrison at what is now the Presidio in San Francisco a year later but basically, ignored this side of the Bay until Señor Richardson came on the scene. In those days the Spanish capital was in Monterrey and even though there were animals to hunt and trap, and great forests full of wood just right for shipbuilding, nobody had bothered to settle the northern side of the Golden Gate. Until that was, Señor Richardson came along in 1822.”
Darlene did not interrupt. She had no inclination to do anything but listen. The sound of Gregory’s voice soothed her fears and wrapped her in the comforting blanket of his world, and that was precisely where she wanted to be right then.
“About five thousand people live here nowadays but as recently at 1880 the population was less than five hundred. In those days Sausalito was a small fishing port with anchorages for a handful of racing yachts; even way back then the rich were different. The town hadn’t grown much since the end of the California gold rush in the early 1850s. By the 1880s well over two hundred and thirty thousand people lived across the Golden Gate in San Francisco but unless you had a boat it was a hundred mile trip over dirt roads from the big city to here.”
He planted more kisses in Darlene’s hair. Distracted he had to scrabble around in his memory to continue his story.
“I tell the kids in my classes the fable of how little old Sausalito eventually arrived in the modern world as a kind of object lesson in how things work. Nothing happens overnight, and nothing is simple or easy. It is sort of a contemporary morality fable.”
“I want to hear it,” Darlene murmured complacently.
“First of all the Post Office came to Sausalito. That was in 1870. One of the reasons it came to Sausalito was that the NPC — that’s the North Pacific Coast Railroad — was coming to the town and a terminus, a rail yard and a ferry dock was being planned. All of this was way before the Golden Gate Bridge was built, that didn’t open until 1937 remember. Bridgeway Drive used to be the stretch of Highway 101 leading straight down to the ferry port. In the twenties the road behind us would have been permanently blocked with cars queuing for the one of the big automobile roll on roll off ferries across to Pier 39 in San Francisco. One of the ferries on the Sausalito-San Francisco run was the Eureka, in the nineteen twenties and thirties she was the biggest double-ended ferryboat in the world.” He stopped talking momentarily and asked a question: “I bet you don’t know what Sausalito was really famous for back in the twenties?”
Darlene giggled.
“Bootlegging?”
“Clever girl,” Gregory cooed proudly.
Chapter 41
Dealey Plaza was built in 1940 on fifteen acres of land donated by Sarah Horton Cockrell, a businesswoman and philanthropist. It was a New Deal WPA — Works Projects Administration — program. Located on the western side of old downtown Dallas it occupied ground where three streets — Main Street, Elm Street and Commerce Street — meet to pass under a railroad bridge known locally as the ‘triple underpass’. The Plaza was named for George Bannerman Dealey, a man instrumental in founding the Southern Methodist University, for bringing a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank to the city and for at one time being the publisher of the Dallas Morning News.