Authors: Howard Fast
She signed the letter "Barbara," as if no term of endearment could add to what she had written, something Dan understood very well indeed.
"How is daughter Barbara?" So-toy asked him.
"Good. Yes, she's fine."
I have stepped into the pages of
Alice in Wonderland,
Barbara told herself; yet she had been here and lived in this San Francisco mansion before, and nine months away was not such a long time. She was playing a role, not they. She was having dinner in the pretentious dining room with her mother and her stepfather, John Whittier, and while it was true that the room was somewhat larger and more elegant than the dining room in the house where she grew up on Russian Hill, when her mother was still married to Dan Lavette, the difference was not all that great. The mahogany table was no longer. It was true that they had not had a butler on Russian Hill, but this was by no means her first dinner in the Whittier house, and the position she occupied between her mother at one end of the long table and John Whittier at the other was not particularly novel. Why then did she feel totally disconnected from this world, a stranger, an intruder? The plain fact of the matter was that she was a daughter of the very rich and had been from the moment of her birth, so how could she sit in judgment? But I am not sitting in judgment, she assured herself, I am simply very uncomfortable and filled with guilt, and I don't know why.
Jean was not an insensitive person, and Barbara realized that she had planned a simple but delicious dinner that would be quite different from the institutional food at school: a clear soup, then a planked steak with scalloped potatoes and asparagus, and ice cream for dessert, remembering Barbara's passion for ice cream. Knox, the butler, brought in the ice cream, a gallon brick sitting in a tureen of lovely pale ivory Limoges. He served a portion of the ice cream to each of them and then put the tureen down in front of Jean and left the room.
John Whittier was holding forth on the waterfront strike, which had been called in San Francisco just two weeks before Barbara's return. Whittier was not a conversationalist; he had small ability to listen to anything he was not saying himself; and when he spoke, especially in anger, he tended to be carried away and lose the threads of his discourse. It always helped him to be accusative.
"Don't tell me you can understand why they're striking," he said to Barbara.
"But I can."
"Because you don't understand one damn thing about it," he went on. "That's the trouble with a place like Sarah Lawrence. I told your mother that. It's not only a wretched substitute for education, it's a communist substitute. It's anarchy—and I'm not saying that because of what it has cost your mother and myself personally."
"Leave me out of it, dear," Jean said softly. "I left the bank this morning. I am through with business." She smiled.
"Hardly, my dear," Whittier said. "Like it or not, this family is the largest shipowner on the West Coast, and for two weeks we haven't moved one damn pound of cargo out of this port. Do you know what that has cost us?"
He directed this at Barbara. She shook her head, her eyes fixed on the mound of ice cream in the Limoges tureen. It was melting. No one noticed that it was melting. No one cared that it was melting.
"Would a million dollars shock you? Or does a million dollars mean absolutely nothing to you? What do they teach you back there in school? That Karl Marx was a saint? Or do we have our own living saint in Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Do you know what longshoremen are? Have you ever met a longshoreman? Have you ever smelled one?"
"John," Jean said.
"The dregs of this city, and we've put the bread in their mouths all these years, and this is our repayment— to be destroyed! And you can understand why they're striking—"
Listening to this, Barbara watched the ice cream melt. In back of her mind, there was the memory of Professor Franklin's Sociology II, where he made the point that the rich are incapable of understanding the rich. It had been a non sequitur then, and now suddenly it made sense. A gallon of ice cream, melted, could only be thrown away.
"Mother," she said, "the ice cream is melting."
Jean's slight smile remained unchanged. She was watching her husband, and Barbara realized that her mother heard nothing Whittier was saying, nothing she was saying. The ice cream continued to melt.
"As for Harry Bridges," Whittier was saying, "if there were law and order in this city, he'd be behind bars. Oh, yes, behind bars."
Barbara was in bed, reading Gertrude Stein's
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
intrigued, fascinated by a world so distant and different, when the door opened and Jean entered the room. She wore a dressing gown of pale pink velvet and she had removed her make-up, and as far as Barbara was concerned, it only enhanced her face. If she were as beautiful as her mother, she would never touch make-up. She put down the book, and Jean came to the bed and sat down beside her. Jean picked up the book and glanced at it.
"Like it?"
"I like to pretend I'm in Paris."
"The question is, darling, are you glad to be back in San Francisco?"
"I think so. Yes."
"You mustn't mind John. He's terribly upset. People in his position develop a tremendous feeling of power. I know the feeling, and now, with the waterfront closed down as it is, he's utterly frustrated. This is hardly the best side of him."
"Mother—"
"It used to be 'mummy.' "
"I know. I'm twenty years old."
Jean was smiling.
"So you mustn't laugh at me."
"I wouldn't dream of laughing at you. But you're so very serious."
"Yes," Barbara agreed. "I guess I'm forcing myself to be serious because I have been trying to get up the courage to talk about this—"
"Baby, we can talk about anything. You know that."
"We can't," Barbara protested almost plaintively. "You're my mother. It's just not true that we can talk about anything."
Jean stopped smiling. "Try."
"All right. I want a place of my own."
"What do you mean by a place of your own?"
"My own apartment. I can't live here."
Jean sighed. "The truth is, you don't live here—I mean in reality, my dear. Think about it. You're away at school. It's only the few summer months. And your horse is down in Menlo Park, and you can stay at the club there whenever you wish—and if I know you, you'll be practically living there. You do have your car, so I just don't understand what you mean."
"You don't want to understand what I mean."
"No, that's not fair. Put yourself in my position, Barbara. You tell me that you want an apartment of your own—but why? You're comfortable here. You have everything you could possibly want. You come and go as you please, and whatever you may feel about John, he certainly doesn't restrict your movements or impose any discipline on you."
"That's not it."
"Then tell me what it is."
"This isn't my home. It never has been my home."
"Why? Because you don't like John?"
"Please, please don't get angry with me, mother," Barbara begged her. "You said we could talk. It's not easy for me to explain what I feel. There's a teacher at school, Professor Carl Franklin, who conducts a seminar in sociology, and he said the Embarcadero was a slave market, different, but no better and no worse than the old Negro slave markets in the East, and I was so indignant I almost walked out of the class, because really, they don't think we're quite civilized out here."
"I don't see what that has to do with it," Jean said. "The Embarcadero is not a slave market. The longshoremen are well paid and their demands are utterly preposterous. And what on earth has this to do with your wanting an apartment of your own?"
"Like the ice cream at dinner," Barbara said hopelessly.
"What on earth! The ice cream at dinner?"
"Don't you see? There was that enormous brick of ice cream, and we just sat there and let it melt down while John lectured me about the strike. You can't do anything with ice cream once it melts. You throw it away, and it didn't mean a thing to any of us. It just doesn't. We can't think that way—I mean, we don't even understand what food is in a country where thousands of people are starving."
"But you do understand this," Jean said.
"Now you are angry with me."
"Barbara," Jean said calmly, "I am not angry. Not really. You're a very romantic child, you always have been. I'm well aware of the inequities of society, but we did not create them."
"I'm not a child, mother."
"I think you are. In many ways. You dislike John, and you compare him to your father. I don't -think seeing your father has helped, and the romantic image of him that you have is far from the reality."
"Then I dislike John Whittier," Barbara said flatly. "I can't control who I like and who I dislike. Do you think it's pleasant for me to live under his roof?"
"It's my roof too. I happen to be married to John Whittier, and you are a part of a very wealthy family, like it or not. I have no intention of shedding crocodile tears or wallowing in guilt over what my father and his father created by their own sweat and wit. As for the apartment —well, we'll talk about that another time."
It had not been the best of days for Jean Whittier, and now, looking at her daughter, the strong, lovely face, the pale gray eyes, the honey-colored hair, so like her own— and thinking that this was probably the only person in the world she truly loved—it promised to end even more wretchedly than it had begun.
It had been Jean's last day as president of the Seldon Bank, a great, unshakable financial institution, which her grandfather had founded in a wagon at the placer mines just eighty-two years before, and which her father had continued and cherished and nourished. At his death, six years ago, Jean—then Jean Lavette and not yet divorced —had become trustee for three hundred and eighty-two thousand shares of stock in the Seldon Bank, to be divided equally between her two children, Thomas and Barbara, twelve years later. With over seventy percent of the voting stock of the Seldon Bank in her trust, with the right to vote it, Jean had taken over the presidency of the bank, becoming the first woman in California, if not in the entire country, to sit as president of a major bank.
Now she was surrendering. No, as she saw it, not a surrender but an abdication. Willing or unwilling? She could not be certain. Until today, she had felt that she was certain, that she was taking a step out of her own free will, doing what was best for her and for the bank. Walking into the bank that morning, passing through the great marble-clad street section that fronted on Montgomery Street, she had been shaken by a sudden and desperate sense of loss. Which, she told herself immediately, was an understandable and emotional reaction. Essentially, nothing had changed. She still, as trustee for her children, voted the controlling interest in the stock; she would still sit on the board of directors; and at long last she would be able to return to the central interest of her life, her collection of paintings and sculptures, which she had so long neglected. It would be said, as it was perhaps already being said, that her husband, John Whittier, had persuaded her to take this step; and she admitted to herself that it was true in part—but only in part. It was her own decision.
Alvin Sommers, vice president of the Seldon Bank, had been waiting and watching for her that morning, and as he saw her enter, he hurried to meet her. He noticed that she was wearing what to his way of thinking was civilian dress, a bright flowered taffeta with pink velvet trimming, both cheerful and youthful, he assured himself. Even at the age of forty-four, Jean Lavette—he still thought of her as Jean Lavette—was, as the news stories so often observed, perhaps the most fashionable and attractive woman in San Francisco social circles. He himself, a small, dry man in his middle sixties with a small, pudgy wife, had long entertained his own fantasies about Jean Whittier; it was a totally frustrated, totally concealed love, lust, hate fixation, nourished on the one hand by her cold, distant beauty, and on the other by his resentment at the manner in which, after her father's death, she had taken over control of the bank. The fact that the bank had flourished during the first five bitter years of the Depression, when so many banks were in crisis or closing their doors, only increased his resentment. Now that time had come to an end, but he was still not certain that his own temporary ascendancy to the presidency would be made permanent, and he was thus more deferential than ever, more effusive in his greeting.
"My dear Jean," he said to her, "I've never seen you look so radiant. But what will we do now? We'll become a drab and colorless place."
"You will manage, Alvin. In fact, you will manage very well indeed. By the way, I told Martin"—Martin Clancy was the second vice president—"that I shall empty my office. You'll be moving in, I presume, and I hardly think you'll be comfortable with an Aubusson carpet of pale blue, or with the Picassos and Monet's
Water Lilies,
which you and Martin have always regarded as being a slur on the entire tradition of banking."