Early Warning

Even more current and confusing was Janet and Lucas’s growing attachment to the Peoples Temple. Eloise liked all of these youngsters. Janet, child of the bourgeoisie; Lucas, child of the working class but with artistic aspirations; Cat, child of the lower middle class with hopes of self-betterment; Marla, a beauty, which was a class of its own no matter what Julius would have said. There was also Jorge, whose father had been a doctor in Mexico City, but who had died when Jorge was two, so Jorge had picked vegetables in the Salinas Valley with his cousins until some kind church group put him in school; it turned out he was good at science and math, and so now he was taking pre-med courses at SF State. Someone whom Eloise had only met once was Lena, a runaway from North Dakota, whom the others knew from the Temple. Maybe she was sixteen. She was, apparently, much appreciated for her blond good looks by Reverend Jones. She might be shaping into a full-fledged member of the Lumpenproletariat, but, then, militant feminism asked you to resist categorizing prostitutes as morally suspect merely because they worked in the sex trade. Truly, Eloise was beyond her depth politically, as she suspected Julius, and even Karl Marx, would have been. What she did was offer advice from time to time and hope for the best. What she also did was worry.

She worried because, one visit to the Temple and one look at “Reverend” Jones, and she knew what she was seeing — Joe Stalin from Indiana, the sort of fellow who sucked down a few ideas and then vomited them forth, now irreparably contaminated by the poisons of his very own body. And soul, for that matter, if you believed in souls, which, as a materialist, Eloise did not. It made no difference at all to her that Willie Brown had called the man “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao”—that was campaign bullshit. Or that this kid Jerry Brown sucked up to the fellow, too. Now that they were in office, she thought, they would be running from the Temple fast enough. Jones was crazy and getting crazier, and you didn’t have to be a former member of the CPUSA to perceive that.

Saving Marla was easy: having put off her escape to Paris for a year, in hopes that her two new one-acts would be produced by the Berkeley Rep, Marla just needed a little push. Well, a medium-sized push. She had used most of her savings to produce the two plays at a coffeehouse in Berkeley — no reviews, small audiences, net loss of $487.32. Eloise had liked the plays, both set in a classroom. In the first play, Lucas walked around, drumming on a desk, dancing, drawing, searching here and there, evidently out of control. A teacher’s voiceover gave him increasingly impatient instructions, until, finally, he sat down at his desk and read, resentfully, from an old first-grade reader, with Dick, Jane, and Spot on the cover. But he gave up, slumped slowly to the floor of the stage, and lay there for a long moment as the lights got brighter and brighter. The play was only fifteen minutes long, but Lucas was convincing and affecting in his role. In the second, Marla played herself, as a six-year-old child. It took place in the same classroom, and a short woman, maybe five feet tall, played the teacher. But Marla was perfect as a six-year-old — lolling in her chair, asking in a loud voice to go to the bathroom, interrupting the (imaginary) recitations of the (imaginary) other children, making addition mistakes on the board, sitting on a stool in the corner with a dunce cap on her head. She was so beautiful and elegant as she went through this performance that you really were shocked when the teacher caned her. But apparently, no one in Berkeley was interested in the childhoods of black children as portrayed by a woman playwright. This season, the Rep was doing Shakespeare, Noël Coward, Our Town, yawn.

And so, when Eloise got her tiny little portion of Gary’s sale of her father’s farm — twenty thousand dollars it was — she called Marla up and offered to invest in her French career — do not tell Janet — and she gave her two grand and bought her a one-way ticket to Paris. Marla was grateful but nervous; the only thing she said that was worrisome was that Reverend Jones thought that when nuclear war came, and you could be sure it would, Paris would go up in, not smoke, but radioactive gases. “No,” said Eloise, “it will not. Even Hitler wanted to preserve Paris.” And so she put the girl on the plane, and off she went.