“Anyways, Dwayne and me found out we needed to be someplace else at about the same time. My Pa would have killed me if I’d stayed another day longer; Dwayne, he just wanted another life, I think. So we skedaddled, took a bus up to Birmingham and jumped on the first Greyhound out of town. We couldn’t travel together, not until we got out west, but Dwayne and me, we looked out for each other. At the time we didn’t care if we got on a Greyhound going east or west or north, just so long as it wasn’t going any further south. When we got out west to California I earned money cleaning and waitressing, Dwayne tried to get work in auto shops. We scraped along. We were doing okay, I suppose, then this guy called Johnny Seiffert turned Dwayne’s head. He got him a couple of backing sessions at his studio. The pills were free when you were one of Johnny’s boys. Uppers, downers, and the ones that make you see and do things you don’t ever want your Mamma to know about. Thinking about it, Dwayne and me were finished that day him and Miranda got it together the night of the war at Johnny’s place on Haight Street.”
The man had been listening with mounting concern, humbled by the confessional tone of what he was learning.
“Miranda?” Gregory asked like an idiot before he realized he had opened his mouth.
Darlene groaned in anguish and squeezed the man’s hand so hard her nails dug in painfully.
“I thought you knew,” she bemoaned. “I’m sorry, I…”
Gregory resisted the temptation to say something trite, some kind of throwaway remark hurriedly designed to make Darlene feel better. Basically, he was not about to pull a remark like that off the shelf without thinking about it first and by then it would be too late.
“I knew Miranda had gone off the rails,” he confessed. “I didn’t know any of the details. Just that after the war she moved in with Aunt Molly and Uncle Harvey and last year she went back to college. My Ma and Pa were so relieved she was back, well, we all were that nobody wanted to upset her, or my Aunt and Uncle by asking any awkward questions…”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said…”
He patted her thigh.
“I won’t say anything to Miranda. Or anybody, I promise.”
Darlene sniffed a tear and he ached to wrap her in his arms.
Gregory ruminated, hating not being able to wave a magic wand and make Darlene’s terrors disappear in a puff of mystical smoke. The best piece of advice Uncle Harvey had ever given him was that ‘sometimes you have to stop talking about important stuff’. His Uncle was the wisest and the most reasonable man he had yet met in his relatively young life. Another of his axioms was: ‘The important stuff never goes away; that’s how you know it’s important. It’ll always still be there tomorrow so you don’t have to always fix it right now.’
He might have interpreted this as a justification for procrastination but that was not what his Uncle had been advocating. There was a big difference between prevaricating, obfuscating and putting off decisions because one was afraid of making a mistake; and creating a little ‘head room’ space in which one might, all things being equal, find the time and the wit to figure out the best way forward.
“I never finished telling you about the bootleggers of Sausalito,” he decided, his voice wry and mischievous. “Back in the day — Prohibition days, that is — bootleggers coming up or down the coast landed and stashed most of their hooch at Sausalito. It was famous for its so-called ‘rum-runners’. Positively notorious, in fact!”
Darlene was silent.
She liked the sound of his voice, and his soft Yankee drawl cut through with an odd core of something, for want of a better word, she thought of as ‘Englishness’. He had said his folks had sent him to the ‘best schools’ on the East Coast and he had been a year at Princeton before he came ‘back’ home to California just before the October War. She could imagine him standing in front of a class of eighth or ninth graders, fixing their attention and spinning tales carefully seeded with memorable way points, all the easier to recall the next day, week and year.
“Which brings me to Sally Stanford and the Valhalla Inn. We actually walked past it this morning, it’s at the corner of 2nd Street and Main Street. The address confuses people because actually 2nd Street is three or four blocks along Bridgeway. Sally Stanford bought the Valhalla Inn a few years back just before she started trying to get elected to the Council in Sausalito, much to the consternation of the good people of the town and, I might say, the amusement and entertainment of the rest of us.”
“Who is Sally Stanford?” Darlene asked, unable to stop herself.
Gregory chortled in the darkness.
“Let’s put it this way,” he guffawed gently, “between about 1940 and 1949 she ran the most famous bordello in San Francisco at 1144 Pine Street, a couple of blocks down from my Aunt and Uncle’s house, actually. After the United Nations was founded at a conference in the city in 1945 a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, a man called Herb Caen, remarked that ‘the United Nations was founded at Sally Stanford’s whorehouse’, if you’ll forgive my language…”
Darlene giggled.
“The legend is that so many of the delegates to the founding conference were Sally Stanford’s clients that during the conference there was a whole mess of secret informal meetings in the living room of 1144 Pine Street; and that those meetings were the difference between the United Nations getting set up and everybody going home and starting World War Three seventeen years early!”
“You’re making fun of me,” Darlene suggested, without minding in the least.
“Perish the thought,” he countered, “like a lot of these ‘legends’ there’s probably more than a grain of truth in it. Heck, Sally Stanford is ten times as real as most of the big men in the Bay Area. Of course, ‘Stanford’ isn’t her real name. Sally was born Mabel Janice Busby in Oregon and moved to the Bay in 1924. She would have been twenty or twenty-one at the time. Nobody is quite sure why she settled on ‘Stanford’ as a surname. Some people think it was because her house of ill repute on Pine Street was designed by an architect called Stanford White; another story is that one day she saw a headline saying that Stanford had won a football game. My favourite story is the one where she allegedly said something to the effect that ‘being a madam is like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.”
Darlene thought this was a little shocking and tried to stop giggling.
But that was very hard to do.
“Shutting down Sally Stanford’s den of iniquity on Pine Street was Governor Brown’s first big step on the ladder to the governorship,” Gregory went on. “It’s probably what got him elected Attorney General of California in 1950. I’d drive round and show you ‘the house’ but it was knocked down the year before the war and they’ve built condominiums on the site.”
“How come you know all this stuff, sweetheart?”
“I applied for two or three teaching jobs in the Bay Area before I got accepted at Sausalito. I thought I’d just turn up and I’d be welcomed with open arms but after a while I got wise; I learned everything I could about the area and the town the kids I’d be teaching came from. History, ethnicity, all the old myths and legends, and every arcane local customs. It was like a post-college research project and once I got started I couldn’t stop, I just wanted to know everything. It was awesome all the stuff I found out. Did you know that the foreshore we were walking along this morning was one of the ten biggest shipyards in the world in the middle of the Second World War?”