Authors: Howard Fast
There were no tears after her initial outburst. She had gone with Marcel to the Gare de Lyon, and while waiting for his train, they lunched at one of the stands in the station, agreeing that the ham, sandwiched in small loaves of fresh bread, and the mugs of cold beer were as good as anything they had ever tasted. They laughed a good deal, and she expunged the scene that had taken place in her apartment by assuring him that she would steal from his pieces in
Le Monde
without conscience, incorporating what she stole into her own "Letter from Paris." They were self-consciously gay and young and delighted with themselves until it was train time, and then she clung to him, whispering, "You bastard, I'll never forgive you for going away." But then, when the train began to move and he had poked his head out of his compartment, she ran alongside and shouted, "I've forgiven you, but only for six weeks. One day more and I'll cut your heart out."
Two days later, getting out of a cab at the Hotel de la Tremoille, where the Levys were staying, she felt that she had worked out her period of being alone and that six weeks was by no means the eternity she had imagined. Jake and Clair Levy were waiting for her in the lobby. Barbara recognized them; she knew that Clair Levy was a redhead, but she was unprepared for the striking, unusual look of the woman, almost as tall as her husband, who was well over six feet, long-limbed, almost raw-boned, a high, full bust, and a strong-featured freckled face under a mop of flaming red hair. She was quite beautiful, yet Barbara felt that to think of her simply as a beautiful woman diminished her. Jake Levy was a burly heavyset man, with dark hair turning gray, a prominent nose, pale blue eyes, his heavy shoulders tight in his clothes, like a farmer in city dress.
Barbara walked over to them and said, "I know you because daddy told me so much. I'm Barbara Lavette."
Their greeting waited on a moment of amazement and delight; then Clair Levy folded Barbara in her arms, kissed her, and then stepped back to look at her. "Oh, great! You're just what you should be!"
Barbara kissed Jake. He stood there grinning at her. "We're such old friends," Barbara said. "We mustn't pretend that we've just met. I knew you both the moment I came into the hotel. Daddy always spoke of the green eyes and the red hair."
"You see," Clair told her husband, "being a bit freakish has its advantages."
"Oh, no!" Barbara cried. "I think you're the most stunning woman I've ever seen."
"So do I," Jake said comfortably. "We're so glad to finally meet you, Barbara. I saw you once, when you were two or three years old. Danny sneaked you out to Sausa-lito. You remember, Clair?"
"I certainly do. You've changed, darling."
"I'm sure I have."
"We didn't make any dinner arrangements," Jake explained. "This is my first time back since the war, and the first for Clair, and I've forgotten what little French I picked up then. I thought you'd know where the food is good, since you're practically a native."
"One of the delicious things about Paris is that the food is good practically everywhere. There's a little restaurant on the Left Bank called Laperouse where I know the proprietor. We're sure to get a table, and the food is good. We can take a cab."
They listened with the awe that Americans hold toward anyone fluent in a foreign language as she gave directions to the cab driver and then to her conversation with the owner of the restaurant, to whom she introduced them as members of her family.
"Your French is amazing," Jake said as they were seated.
"It should be. My goodness, I had four years of it in private school and then two more years at college, and I've been living here almost four years. I even think in French now, and do you know, I dream in French."
"Don't go on." Clair sighed. "I don't have two words."
"She speaks Spanish like a native," Jake said.
"Oh, come on, Jake. Don't be defensive. We have Chi-canos working at the winery, and I can tell them what to do. That's about it."
At Jake's urging, Barbara ordered dinner while he pored over the wine list. He selected three chateau Burgundies, each a different label and a different year.
"Are you sure?" Barbara asked him. "We'll never finish three bottles."
"We don't have to. We've been tasting Burgundies at every meal on the ship coming over."
"It's a practically demonic compulsion with Jake," Clair explained. "They talk of carrying coals to Newcastle. We come carrying wine to France. Every grower we know says we are totally out of our minds—even for dreaming that America could sell wine to France. But I guess Jake and I have been out of our minds ever since we got into wine, and do you know, Barbara, I do think that all wine makers are a little crazy. It comes from breathing the fumes day and night."
"That's nonsense," Jake said. "If we're crazy, we're
crazy like foxes. I'm the kind of jingoistic American who
thinks we can do anything better than anyoile else, and
that includes wine. Are we boring you with all this talk of
wine?"
"No, no, please. I'm fascinated," Barbara assured him.
"All right. I'll try to explain. Up in the Napa Valley and the Sonoma Valley, where wine is like a religion, the growers with very few exceptions have decided that our Cabernet Sauvignon is the great red wine of California and thereby of America. Oh, it's good all right, and when it's well made, really well made, it can compare with some of the fine French Medocs. Essentially, it's a claret. Also, it's a wine that can stand aging, and if you can afford to lay it away and let it sit for ten years, you have a wine as good as anything in the world. But we can't put away our wine for ten years; we just don't have the money or the reserves, and as for a young Cabernet—well, it has a little too much tannin for my taste."
"That's the stuff in wine that makes the cheeks pucker," Clair said. "It's also rather sharp."
"So we broke with the crowd," Jake said, "and decided to experiment with Pinot Noir. That's a Burgundy. The first of our vines came from France, but California soil and California sunshine change it—improve the grape to my taste. Pinot Noir is a beautiful wine, soft and smooth as velvet when it's well made, and with much less of the tannic taste. But the decisive fact is that while it is also a red that needs aging, two years of laying it away will produce as fine an aged wine as eight or ten years with the claret. Now ours is a varietal, which means wine made out of a single type of grape. The French tend to blend their Burgundies. By now, Clair and I have tasted at least forty Pinots and Burgundies, and we still think we're sitting on top of the lot."
"That's to
our
taste," Clair said. "We're by no means great wine tasters. We know a little, much less than Jake likes to think we know, and the wine is as much an excuse for this trip as a business venture. We shipped ten cases over here, not so much for France as for Holland and Denmark, where we think there might be a market. Just for tasting. Not for selling. Germany would be ideal, but we wouldn't set foot in that hateful place. Anyway, American wine might just be a novelty. What do you think of the notion?"
"I think it's great," Barbara said. "Just great. And I think I could be of some help. I know people on
Le Monde,
which is one of the most prestigious papers in Paris, and I think I could arrange for an interview. They're Marcel's dear friends, and I do think it's newsworthy. I'll write about your visit myself, but I'm afraid publicity in New York won't help you much."
"Marcel?" Clair asked.
Barbara smiled. "There goes the cat out of the bag. You're the first to know. I haven't told mother or daddy, but I simply must tell someone. Marcel Duboise is a French journalist whom I love very much. Someday, I suppose, we'll be married. He's thirty years old, dark, skinny, kind of funny-looking, and very kind and very smart."
"I'm so glad. He sounds wonderful," Clair said. "Will we meet him?"
"Only if you can stay six weeks. He left two days ago for Spain." Then she went on to tell them about Marcel —who he was, what he did, and how they had met. She found herself talking to Jake and Clair as if she had known them all her life, in part because she was so hungry for some part of home, of California, and in part because they were warm and open and easy to talk to.
The food came and the wine came. The wine was tasted, judged, discussed. Barbara knew very little about wine. She and Marcel were quite content with
vin ordinaire,
a liter of which could be bought for a franc, and she was quite in awe of the manner in which Clair and Jake discussed the virtues of the three Burgundies. Then they told her how they had gotten into making wine, with old Rabbi Blum coming to them with the proposal that they make the sacramental wine for the Orthodox synagogues of San Francisco. "He's been dead these past five years, rest his soul," Clair said. "But would you believe it, we just about built Higate on sacramental wine. We sold to the Jews, the Catholics, the Episcopalians—sweet, horrible stuff. Yes, we still make a good deal of it."
A whole past came alive for Barbara that evening. They told her the story of how Dan Lavette and Mark Levy bought their first iron ship, the
Oregon Queen,
from an old Swede called Swenson. Clair's father, Jack Harvey, was the captain of the
Oregon Queen,
and Clair, then ten years old, had her first mad crush on Dan.
"He was always my hero," Clair said. "That never changed. Martha—poor child, she's dead. She was Jake's sister—Martha and I both worshipped the ground Dan walked on—"
Jake, uncomfortable, changed the subject. They had scheduled ten days in Paris and then would be off to Amsterdam. Would it be possible for Barbara to spend some time with them, perhaps show them some of the sights? She said she would love it, and with Marcel away, it was the best thing that could have happened to her. They talked on and on, and suddenly they discovered that it was midnight, and that they were the last ones in the restaurant.
Before she left them, Barbara said, "By the way, Joe wrote to me that there was a man named Cohen who had once worked at Higate and who's now with the Lincoln Battalion."
"Bernie. Of course," Clair said.
"He's quite a guy," Jake added. "A little mad, but then, who isn't?"
"A little mad?"
"He has this obsession about a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He learned farming, and now it's fighting. That's a hell of a reason to enlist in a war, but it takes all kinds."
Barbara waited—for a by-line dispatch in
Le Monde
or for a letter. With the Levys, she wore an air of relaxed gaiety. Her anxieties were none of theirs; they had planned this trip and looked forward to it for years, and she felt a proprietary responsibility for their time in a city she knew so well and loved so much. Jake and Clair were almost childlike in their delight with what they saw. They put themselves wholly in her hands, and when she told them that they must have an entire day for the lie de la Cite, they accepted the assignment willingly. Barbara's first hour in Westminster in London had left her in tears; her first hour in Notre-Dame had left her in a state of exultation, and when she came there now with Jake and Clair, she tried to recapture the feeling, to feel that in the Europe of 1938, God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. It was not there, and she slipped away to be by herself and let her tears wash out her eyes. When she joined them again, Clair said, "You've been crying. Why? What's wrong?" And Barbara assured her that she was simply an overemotional person. "I cry at the drop of a hat. This place is haunted, you know. Let's go to the flower market. This little island has the most marvelous flower market in the world." But then she changed her mind, as if she had betrayed her new friends, and insisted that they climb to the top and see the breathtaking view. They stood there entranced, all the hazy, misty beauty of Paris spread out beneath them.
It was almost midnight when they dropped Barbara at her apartment, and in spite of her vow to be both patient and calm, she telephoned Marcel's friend Jean Brissard, awakened him, and then begged him to forgive her. "But there's been nothing," she said, "nothing in the paper and no letter."
"Barbara, he's only been gone five days."
"But the paper must be in touch with him."
"Barbara, don't you understand about Spain? He had to go over the Pyrenees. The lines are very fluid. He might have to hole up for days. Also, he's not there as a regular correspondent. He's not required to file a dispatch every day. He's doing a background piece on the Americans. He might not file it for two weeks. As for the mail, it goes by sea. It could take a week for a letter to reach Paris. So just be patient and don't worry."
It was reassuring, and Barbara, exhausted after her day as a tour guide, slept well. The Levys had a wine-tasting appointment the following afternoon at the offices of Lebouche & Dume, one of the largest wine wholesalers in Paris, and Barbara had agreed to go along as interpreter. The Levys had been assured that English would be spoken, but Barbara explained to them that such assurance meant very little in France. She assigned the morning to the regular American tourist routine, up the funicular to the heights of Montmartre, or the Butte, as she called it, apologizing for the cheap, touristy gimmicks that had invaded it, but also repeating Marcel's story of the bloody battle that had raged there during the time of the Paris Commune. They lunched at a little restaurant in the shadow of the Sacre-Coeur, where they were plagued by the vendors of so-called Paris postcards.