Terminal Island

Chapter Two

TERMINAL ISLAND



“Maybe it’s not coming.”

“It’s coming. Be patient.”

“But it’s late!”

“No, my watch is fast.”

“I’m scared. What if it doesn’t come?”

“It’ll come. I promise.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, honey. I promise.”



San Pedro in the ’60s was a railway terminal by the sea, an industrial wasteland in which mile-long chains of freight cars, some with two or three locomotives at each end, clanged slowly along a creosote-smelling harbor front that was the Pacific gateway into America. This passage bustled day and night with massive cargo ships and muscular little tugboats, all plying the channel beneath the spindly arch of the great Vincent Thomas Bridge.

Overlooking this scene was the first of many crummy lodgings Henry Cadmus would occupy with his mother: the Del Monte Hotel, owned and operated by his grandparents.

For them, it was the last of their ill-fated ventures, which had begun with their migrating from southern Italy to the Belgian Congo in search of a better life, only to be interned as enemy aliens at the outbreak of World War II. When the war was finally over they and their twin daughters were deported to Brazil, where the prospects were not much better, and then made their way to the United States. In America they embarked on a final, futile stab at innkeeping, squandering their meager savings on a slum hotel that provided lodging to hardship cases and sailors and longshoremen sleeping off a bender.

That was where Henry Cadmus was born.

The Del Monte Hotel of Henry’s earliest memories was a huge, dim catacomb; a Spanish-tiled behemoth bracketed by sooty palm trees, deserted except for loving giants who loomed out of the dark to spoon-feed him mashed soft-boiled eggs and cut-up orange wedges weeping sugared juice. As he graduated to more substantial food, there were oily sardines and olives, crumbly goat cheese, imported chocolate coins and marzipan, pry-top tins of black prune paste or golden malt syrup, polenta, amaretto-flavored cookies, creamy avocado on buttered toast—flavors he would always associate with childhood. He remembers once choking on a butterscotch candy, and the gargantuan who was his grandfather hoisting him up by the ankles and shaking him until he expelled the lozenge. Another time he swallowed a penny—a wheat penny—which was never seen again.

As Henry got older and began to roam the hotel’s corridors, he took great interest in the gloomy surroundings, and was unperturbed by sights such as huge wharf rats crossing from one doorway to another, giant cockroaches and red centipedes in the showers, or clutches of blind pinky mice about to be flushed down a toilet as part of the ordinary housekeeping routine. He caught vague glimpses of bloody floors being mopped and his grandfather running up and down the stairs with a shotgun. Most vividly of all, Henry recalls once hiding with his mother under the bed as a strange man knocked on their door, calling softly, Vicki, open the door. Henry? Come out here, boy, I have a present for you. I can hear you in there—I know you’re both in there. Henry, come open the door so I can give you your birthday present. Come on out and we’ll go get cake and ice cream. After the man left, Vicki waited a good long time to make sure he was gone, telling Henry it was all a game, just a silly little game. When she finally opened the door the hallway was full of thick smoke—there was a fire somewhere. Trying not to breathe, they made their way out of the building to the front sidewalk, where she told him to sit still while she ran back in to help her parents and the other few tenants get out. Amid the commotion, Henry noticed the hotel’s big gray tomcat lying dead in the middle of the road. As firemen and policemen came and went, and Vicki flirted with them, he sat on the curb watching the cat’s curious metamorphosis from a familiar cat shape to a mangled pink pulp and finally—traffic taking its toll—to bits of flattened pelt curing in the sun.

The fire was blamed on Gladys. And since Gladys died in the fire, she made no defense. Of the mostly faceless tenants, Gladys was only one Henry ever remembers feeling close to. She was a hugely fat, sweet-natured African lady who was close friends with his grandparents and doted on him, always having a piece of butterscotch candy ready when wee Henry visited her squalid room. She told African stories and sang African songs and read people’s fortunes and had a collection of African masks and other artifacts that were deeply fascinating to Henry. Because of Gladys, he can never look at Aunt Jemima or any other mammy stereotype without a guilty rush of affection. Poor Gladys, who died smoking in bed…or so he was told. And why would they lie?

Of the other guests, he mainly remembers doors ajar and glimpses of beer bottles and stockinged feet propped on coffee tables beside clattering electric fans, and radio music wafting out to where young Henry lurked, peeping from the shadows.

One day he discovered he had cousins, Peter and Paul, one older and one younger than himself, whose parents brought them to live at the decaying keep so they could get to know their dying grandmother, and whose favorite game was sitting in adjoining stalls in the hotel’s echoing communal restroom and discussing all the whimsical things their turds resembled, as if describing constellations or cloud formations:

Ooh! Mine looks like an old man with whiskers!

Mine looks like a pointy wooden shoe!

I made a rattlesnake!

An only child, Henry was jealous of the clannishness of his cousins, as well as the sense of their being privy to a branch of the family from which he was strangely excluded. Also there was their rough-and-tumble boyishness, so different from his hesitance and general awkwardness.

This became only more pronounced as time went by, though to some degree he bonded with Peter—the two of them being the older ones. But any time Henry started to feel truly accepted or complacent about his position, there would be some little reminder of the barrier between them; evidence that he could never be one of them.

In the presence of their wizened elf of a grandmother, who spoke no English but only a peculiar mixture of Italian and Attic Greek, his cousins continued to natter fluently long after he had become estranged from that dialect, so that Henry could only tag along and nod, clumsily hanging on whatever sparse vocabulary he still possessed: “Buon giorno, Nonna. Come stai?” “Panta rhei, panta rhei.” But he was outside the loop, imagining that they were pityingly discussing him.

Over time the strange sticking point—the difference between them—became excruciatingly clear: Henry’s cousins had a father, while he did not. The sternly generous man who appeared from time to time to take them all on beach outings in his camper truck belonged to them, not him.

In some ways this was good. It meant that when they got into trouble, Henry didn’t have to share the whippings—as Peter and Paul were dragged off to face the leather belt, he could just retire to quarters with his mother. But his exemption from the bad was echoed in the good: it increasingly felt like charity.

Henry doesn’t remember exactly how or when the situation was explained, but at some point it came out that his own father died before he was born. This was not by itself a traumatic discovery—he did not feel the lack of a father, except insofar as it set him and his mother apart from the others. He did not want a father, per se. What he wanted was to be the same as everyone else.

But alike or not, his cousins were stuck with him, just as he was with them. Whether resentful or pitying, they had no other playmates, there being an extreme scarcity of children in the industrial gulag of the harbor district.

As the boys got older, approaching school age, their wanderings increased to encompass the street and the train yard beyond, so that they became spectators of the mechanized drama of the harbor, and connoisseurs of the varied modes of freight-hauling, their favorite being a spindly, spider-like truck that rolled along on tall struts which enabled it to drive over large cargo boxes, tuck them up underneath itself, and scoot off down the highway. To Henry and his cousins, the operator of this vehicle, seated up on his thrillingly high, exposed perch, was the monarch of the road, even more to be envied than the train engineers who waved back at them as they walked beside the tracks.

But there was still something that outshone the cargo trucks and all the other harbor commerce. That literally soared above the mundane activity of the terminal:

The gleaming white seaplanes of the Catalina ferry line.

These planes—classic specimens of the tubby, boat-like Grumman Goose, now to be found only in the aviation museum of the Smithsonian—would land and take off from the harbor many times a day, yet Henry never got over the thrill of seeing them, nor of hearing the roar of their fat, wing-mounted engines as they revved for take-off, wreathed in spray. There was magic about these things; the spectacle of their uncanny, amphibious flight so much like something out of the movies, and movies—especially given the proximity of Hollywood—were a big and increasing part of Henry’s early life.

Then, not long after Henry’s fifth birthday, the shit hit the fan.

He didn’t know what it was about, but his mother Vicki had a final falling-out with the family, a furious disagreement, and before Henry knew what was happening she had all their things packed up in a fat Yellow Cab, scooting in beside him and tearfully waving goodbye as they pulled away for all time from everyone he knew and the familiar, comforting gloom of the Del Monte Hotel.

We’ll be back, she called to her distraught, dying mother. Don’t worry, we’ll be back.

The next few years were a blur of pure chaos. Henry and Vicki lived from motel to motel (most apartment owners of the time disdaining children, much less single mothers), chasing jobs and cheap housing all over Greater Los Angeles, gaining and losing footholds until at last ending up where they began: overlooking the harbor.

Yes, they returned to San Pedro. Henry’s mother kept her promise; they had come back home.

But the Del Monte Hotel was gone.



“Didn’t I tell you it was coming?” his mother said.

Henry was eight years old now, almost nine, and thought he had seen it all. But everything past was prologue—all the disappointments and retreats, the winnowing of their possessions down to what could be carried on the bus—all of it shrank to insignificance before the wonderful vision that descended from the sky, banked overhead to kiss them with its hurtling shadow, and touched down not like a goose but like a white swan upon the water. It was their vision, coming for them. They had the tickets to prove it.

The magnificent sight of that seaplane as it waddled out of the harbor onto dry land, white keel dripping, fat black rubber wheels sloshing aground as it climbed the thickly-barnacled concrete ramp, was almost more than Henry’s pre-adolescent self could handle without bursting. Wow!—he was already closer than he ever imagined being to one of these aircraft, yet the threshold of reality would be pushed back still further, he knew; was about to be pushed beyond the limits of his imagining.

He watched awestruck as the plane executed a lazy taxi, propellers blasting spray off the tarmac as it presented its door to their cordoned-off boarding area under the flapping orange wind sock. With a final roar, the engines subsided.

The curved door behind the wing was opened, a step was lowered, and a smart-uniformed crewman emerged. At the same time, ground personnel opened the gate and briskly escorted the dozen or so passengers to the plane, checking seat assignments and directing Henry and his mother into the small cabin, up the narrow aisle.

Inside the fuselage it was cozy; the sound was muffled, and the curtained dimness—the bus smell and rows of fabric-padded seats—lent a feeling of homey familiarity.

Henry took his seat, really no different than a seat on the Greyhound Bus, and looked out the window at the sunlit terminal building and the big orange ball of the Union 76 station just beyond. The Del Monte Hotel was now only an empty lot, a bare patch on the hill, but he knew his mother was weepily staring in the direction it had been.

He wished she would forget about it. There was nothing there, and had never been. Not for them. But this, finally, was theirs; their moment, their future. No more crummy motels, no more crazy family, no more cockroach-ridden slums—this time they were moving to paradise. To Catalina Island!

It was the greatest moment of Henry’s life. He could never have imagined it would also be the precursor to the strangest and worst...or the last.