Adriane: The Sequel to A Taxi Romance

I am excited about where this novel is going but I had to pause and straighten out some of the errors in the timeline and where certain characters fit in. The writing process is what this blog is about and I am amazed that there are writers who can spill out words on the page in perfect order and don't get the story line mixed up. I get so involved with each situation and character and how he or she develops that I lose track of the wheres and whens of the whole sha-bang. Then I have to pause and go back over after I read it to someone and tweak, add or omit whole pages... save 'em for future reference and to meld in later or perhaps they are fodder for another novel all together. But I love it and wouldn't enjoy it as much if it worked out otherwise. I have always enjoyed the train ride more than arriving at the destination  but I am travel weary and ready by the time I have to get off at the station

The Price of Love

Harry Baker would have his hands full DE-institutionalizing his son but he also had his hands full with his own medical condition. He knew he had four, maybe five years or more if only he could quit smoking, before the emphysema that was gradually drowning him would take him under. He owed it to Iniga… he’d promised her that much… and these were the few kinds of promises men like Harry were honor bound to keep.  She was there in Walter Reed after he’d managed to verify, through Marcel Fournier, that she was a veteran of the resistance in France: a concentration camp survivor and, while in the resistance, a rescuer of American pilots during D-Day in Normandy. He’d done so when Gotson reached him through old contacts in the OSS and informed him she was suffering cancer in a flea-bag hotel in NY City.

He came onto her ward with a bouquet of flowers and a gnawing anxiety. Her skeletal frame was hardly discernible from the tubes, oxygen mask and wires to monitors. He put the flowers, Red Gladiolas, in a vase and sat by her as she slept.

She awoke with a start, “Hurrry?” she slurred…. sedated, trying to say through a thickened tongue, Harry.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“And, along comes the injustice of God.”

“What, Iniga?”

“That fate would shove your fuckin’ face in front of my eyes before I die.”

“Gratitude was never your strong suit…”

“I am grateful that I can tell you about our son.” Her contempt softened as she said, "Our Son".

Harry took note that the lines of premature age, and the darkened skin under her eyes wrought by cancer, had not withered away the beauty of her cupid bow lips or the steely determination of her grey eyes no longer framed by wild shocks of black Basque hair. Her eyes were set deep in the death’s skull of her shaved head but were still like his: those eyes were pleading. He wasn’t used to the sight of Iniga submitting to pain and it was most disconcerting to see her in physical weakness.

“He is in California…” she paused to take another hit off the oxygen mask; “A boy’s camp of some sort. He still has your name, Papa.”

“What do you want me to do about him?” Harry could tell, as soon as he protested, that any objections he might have would be vanity, but he tried… “He doesn’t know me.”

“He needs help. I had no idea of his situation…” she arose on one arm and spoke forcefully, “until we tracked down that damned wet-nurse.”

Harry saw again her fierce determination as she continued, “The cur left him at an orphanage in Los Angeles... like a donation … a bag of groceries!” she wheezed…”I was too weak to follow-up…. but I found out where he is now.”

Harry hadn’t given Nick much thought at all over the past sixteen years. He was honest with himself about it. Love wasn’t part of his vocabulary. It was an expense… a far too costly investment in time and energy to commit… to do what he knew he needed to do now. He needed to do it now because he realized… or allowed the realization… that deep recess of buried emotions… that he loved Iniga and in loving Iniga and his betrayal required something g of him.

“It is up to you Harry, find him.”

“I will.

“Try to give him a life Harry.”

“I will.”

“oh, yes, Harry…”

“Yes…”

“Thanks for the gladiolas.” She turned her head to the side “Now go away please, before I cry.”

Harry knew then what the rest of his life would be. He took the first flight from Dulles the next morning and never saw Iniga again.

Promises aside, Nicky had very little contact with his dad after Harry set him up in Charleston South Carolina with his new step-mom, Marilynn. Marylyn and Harry were separated and Harry was out of the picture for the most part. Nick had taken to studies under a tutor he’d been assigned and even managed to complete prep-school at Bishop England Catholic High School in South Carolina before Harry used his connections to get him into The Citadel. Noting Nicky’s physique and size, Harry hoped Nick would adapt and choose a military career and be primed for life there better than as a civilian in Ivy League colleges.

Nick loved the discipline at The Citadel more so than he did the studies and, because he was possibly the most physically intimidating “knob” on campus, he was not hazed as much as other Fourth Class Cadets there. However, engineering, mathematics, military history and instruction weren’t for him but, hell, Nick had already been institutionalized and anything, even the rigors of military school, was a good deal better than the dumbed-down kindergarten of Los Prietos. He decided, after his first year there, he had no desire for a military career nor did he have any academic aspirations. He discovered that a gift for gab opened doors for him that even the best colleges could. By this time, he had taken to the newly discovered privileges of wealth and the prestige that wearing the right clothes, driving the right car and living in the best neighborhood could avail him. He felt that he was wasting time sitting in classrooms when there was so much money to be made in the world beyond the walls of the Citadel.

While Nick was at The Citadel, and because Harry was hardly ever around much, Marilynn acquired a Realtors’ license and set up an office in Mount Pleasant. Nick fell right in with her after leaving the Academy and the two; Nick’s natural good looks, glib tongue and his innate ability to read other people; together with her pretentious airs and business acumen, made them a good team in the polite airs of Southern congeniality. Marilynn was a matronly southern-belle whose pretenses were less annoying to Nick than they might have been had he not already spent some time in The Citadel acquiring manners.

 Nick took his libido into town to the gay bars and picked up on an occasional prostitute too. He hadn’t the pedigree for the society girls and he was a twenty-seven year old bachelor with what would be a good prospect anywhere else but Charleston. While sitting at Dudley’s, complaining about his last affair that ended just when he thought he’d arrived, a real-estate acquaintance asked him, “Why honey, are you wasting your time with these stuck-up bitches in Charleston? You don’t have the pedigree for these Southern Belles…”

“Yeh, that’s true, but if only…”

“If only… if only, darlin’… if wishes were fishes.” Nicky listened out of boredom but paid attention when this swish with the fishes was on to something when he quoted the Beatles song, “You should get back to where you once belonged… Jo-Joe.”

“You mean California?”

“Oh sweetheart, you are getting warm…” he nuzzled up to Nick’s ear, “C’mon, Nicky, you know Santa Barbara is teeming with trust-fund babies who could care less about class distinction.”

“How do you know about Santa Barbara?” Nicky wiped the moisture from his ear with his sleeve.

The friend leaned back on his bar stool slurring, “Oh, they have one of the mo-ossst delightful gay-bars in the whole world, lover boy,” he then stood with his chest puffed out proudly, “go to the Pub and be sure to tell Frankie, Donny of Charleston says, ‘Hi there’.”

Settlements

 

Gotson had endured four years of torture, solitary confinement and deprivations that cannot be described. Harry observed the Civil War guidari, veteran of Guernica and the Battle of Madrid… Los Oscuros (the Dark Ones) with the infamous Galvan (who never surrendered), the Maquis of the Basque struggle, and the Resistance in France and Spain… The list is long and Harry had only respect for the man.

They met in a safe house of one of the enlaces as Harry spoke first to make arrangements… the betrayer with the betrayed, “We meet again, Gotson.”

“It is difficult to say why,” he answered, "but I am glad to see you again, Bird Dog,” Gotson's   frail frame sank into the easy chair on the other side of a small table. 

Harry watched, fascinated by the reed of an arm barely able to hold up the cup of tea Gotson seemed to relish. “Didn’t they try to fatten you up before they released you?”  Harry knew that his negotiations, bribes were resisted until… even for Iniga. The release came as uncustomary as it was unexpected.

“No, I expected the usual treatment,” setting the cup down and pointing to the back of his head… “You know, Ley de Fugas.”

Harry didn’t marvel at Gotson’s lack of bitterness. Even four years of unimaginable torture did not destroy the quality that preserved him through twenty years of post Civil War concentration camps in France, guerrilla warfare and, now, Caracremada: he never hated his enemy. Even the Stalinists back in Madrid or the PCE, when they kidnapped and assassinated, summarily judged and shot, resistance fighters in forty-four; or, when the Central Committee of the PCE suspended support for agrupaciones (guerrillas) in the early fifties: Harry had never heard a sour word spoken by Gotson against the Nazis, the Civil Guard, or the horrors committed by Franco’s Morrocan division. To Gotson, a soldier was a soldier. The horrors of war hardened him against the cruelties of humanity and it didn’t matter how viciously and inhumane they were they earned his respect: even mercenaries like Harry Baker.

The necessity of Harry’s meeting with Gotson to spirit him back into France, at the behest of Fournier, might have been less than an uneasy fellowship of the betrayed with the betrayer; but nothing tasted worse on Harry’s tongue than his betrayal of Iniga. She had to sit with the nuns in La Ventas until he could somehow spring her. He was compelled to devote himself whole heartedly to this task using whatever funds he’d earned in Gotson’s release to somehow get her out. His efforts finally came to a head after Nicholas was born in prison. Even Harry’s forged marriage certificate and testimony by the priest (he’d bribed to sign it to verify that the marriage took place) wasn’t enough for the stubborn mother superior.

Harry set little Nicky up in another safe-house when he was hatched until his mama was freed. Three months later she had been taken to the safe house by the bribed Padre and their first contact was a fiery one. He’d gotten the news that his efforts were successful via a phone call from the same bribed Padre. She was taking a bath when the wet nurse let Harry in the apartment.

“You can wait here, senor.” She gestured towards a straight backed chair next to Nicky’s cradle.

Harry didn’t even think of lifting the screen over the cradle to look in at his son like any proud father would.

 Harry had counted on his betrayal being a secret and that his affair with Iniga would bepick up where it had left off before she was arrested. He sat and waited as the wet nurse knocked on the bathroom door, “Senora, your husband is here.”

"I don't want to see him!"

The ruse that they were a happily married dissipated as he crossed the room and opened the bathroom door. He stood stunned at Iniga’s naked body. She looked better than the last time he’d seen her and he longed to hold her in his arms. She was still startled at the sudden opening and reached for a gun that was no longer there at all as one would always be before her arrest.

“What makes you imagine that you are welcome here?” she spat out the words with a contempt that was quite the opposite of Gotson’s angelic acceptance.

“Is this the gratitude I get for your freedom?” Harry knew this was a weak thing to ask but he had no words for the unaccustomed guilt her indignant posture extracted from his gut.

“You are alive now because I have no way to kill you, Harry,” she showed her palms as the hatred seethed from her cupid lips. Those cold steel-grey eyes diverted his to her firm breasts, wet hair, and then led to a scar that went down the length of her belly: a Caesarian birth, no doubt.

The conviction of her words left Harry with little to say. Words weren’t his strong suit and neither was the expression of emotion. He understood that she knew what had happened but he tried just one time to explain, “Gotson is in Biarritz.”

“That was your trade?” she looked up at him and his chest ached to lift her and press his body to hers.

“Yes.”

“Go, and take Nicholas with you,” she spoke with a determined voice but her steel grey eyes welled with tears. “I am going back.”

“No, I won’t take him, he needs a mother.” Harry made a desperate plea to her maternal instincts.

“Okay, but if you don’t take him you’ll never see him again.” She countered.

“You will die in the Pyrenees, Iniga, the US has a base in Rota now,” he had to make this one last argument, though he knew it would not mover her. “The CIA is very good at taking care of insurgents. Even if you win… look at Iran…” referring to Mohammad Mosaddegh’s parliamentary government, overthrown when oil was nationalized... before the CIA re-installed the Shah, “you think they will tolerate a Basque government run by anarchists or, worse, communists?”

“No, Harry, my time in La Ventas convinced me. My world is not yours,” she then added, “I can’t go back; we are guidari and we are as dead the minute we pick up a weapon to resist.”

Harry remembered the first time he and Iniga met in a cabin in the Pyrenees during the war. She was only a teen then with Gotson’s guerilla group… her frame so small a rifle would outweigh her but she carried a pack… and a fierce determination he just saw again. He let his eyes caress her body one more time before closing the door. He heard her from the bedroom say as he left the apartment and his son, Nicky, “Adios, Bird Dog, I love you,”

“Adios, my fiery angel.” He wasn’t used to poetic adieus and he hoped that leaving Nicky with her would hamper her revolutionary fervor. It would not be so. They would not see each other for over four decades as she lay dying. Nicky was lost to him too. She arranged for her wet nurse to care for him. She immigrated to the US with Nicky and put him at on the steps of a Catholic orphanage with his name on a tag pinned to his diaper a few days after her feet hit the ground off a Greyhound Bus in Los Angeles. A life begun in a sewer of betrayal, abandonment and deceit left Nicky with a perspective on life that can be understood under these circumstances.

Now, at sixteen, as Nick was approaching manhood after bouncing from the orphanage to foster homes… to another foster home… to another foster home… to Los Prietos Boys camp.  Harry Baker had his hands full de-institutionalizing his son.