Authors: Howard Fast
"But this is a part of it," Barbara explained. "How could you go home and tell them you were not at Montmartre?"
"I love it," Jake said. "Don't apologize."
"Tomorrow we will begin with the Medicis fountain in
the Luxembourg Gardens, and that will take the taste of
this away."
With Clair carefully cradling two bottles of Pinot Noir in a canvas bag, they made their way to the Faubourg-St.-Honore, where Lebouche & Dume had their offices in an old town house that rented space to an antique dealer on the main floor. They passed through an archway and went up a lift and then into a splendidly furnished set of rooms. An ancient, gilded wine press was the only indication of the business conducted there. The waiting room contained an assortment of lovely pieces from the time of Louis XIV and XV that caused Barbara to exclaim in delight. A door opening momentarily revealed another room where half a dozen clerks labored at desks, but ho sign or sound of commerce was permitted in the waiting room or in the office of Monsieur Lebouche, into which a stout, middle-aged receptionist conducted them and where they were received by Lebouche himself, a bearded gentleman in his seventies, dressed in striped trousers and a morning coat, pink-cheeked and white-haired. He greeted them graciously, obviously amused at the notion of American wine being sold in France.
"Monsieur Dume is indisposed," he explained. "Otherwise, we would both be here, no? He is only sixty-two, a young man, but he abuses his body. You are Mr. and Mrs. Levy, of California. But this enchanting young lady?"
Barbara explained her position and the Levys' lack of ease with the French language.
"They do not speak French?" Monsieur Lebouche asked in amazement. "They make wine and they do not speak French?"
Barbara apologized profusely. California was very far away. It occurred to her to mention that they both spoke Spanish.
"Excellent. We will converse in Spanish."
Jake sighed and resigned himself to silence. Clair unpacked the two bottles of wine, explaining that it was a varietal out of an ancestry of Burgundian vines. Lebouche could not keep his eyes off Clair. She was at least four inches taller than the wine merchant, and the interesting combination of green eyes and red hair obviously fascinated him. "Ah, what a splendid woman!" he said to Barbara in French. "If Monsieur Dume were here, he would be quite out of his mind. An extraordinary woman."
Clair was holding forth in Spanish about California soil and sunshine. Barbara whispered to Jake in English that Monsieur Lebouche considered Clair to be an extraordinary woman.
"So do I," Jake said. "This is a damn peculiar way they do business here."
Lebouche found a corkscrew and opened the bottles. Then he took two beautiful crystal decanters out of a cabinet. "We decant it now," he explained to Clair. The others no longer mattered. "We let it breathe a little. Then we taste." He selected two wine goblets. Obviously, he and Clair were to be the tasters. "Madame," he said to her, "you ennoble the art of wine-making."
"You haven't tasted it yet," Clair replied, smiling.
"I refer to you, not to the wine. Now we taste."
He poured two glasses of wine. "You must drink with me," he said to Clair. The others watched and waited, Barbara utterly entranced by the old man, his manner and ritual, Jake trying to maintain a calm fade and repress a desire to burst out laughing. Clair accepted the ritual gravely and calmly. No toast. She followed the old man's motion as he raised the glass to his lips and tasted. He rolled his head, rolling the wine around in his mouth, and she did likewise. Then he swallowed. Then he held the glass to his nostrils, sniffing the aroma.
"Pinot Noir?"
Clair nodded.
"How long is it aged?"
"Two years."
"In what wood?"
"Our cooperage is German oak."
"How long in the bottle?"
"Four months."
"We'll taste again." He lifted the glass to his lips. Again the ritual. "You've tasted our Burgundies?"
"A good many of them," Clair replied.
"This is quite different. Is it warm in your Napa Valley?"
"The summers are hot, yes."
"Very strange. Hot weather spoils the Pinot Noir, but this—very excellent. And different. A most unusual wine, befitting a most unusual woman. If I were ten years younger, I'd challenge that great ox of a husband of yours,
I would, the woman and the wine. He doesn't know what I'm saying, does he?"
"I'm afraid his Spanish is not up to it," Clair said sweetly. "I am sure that if you were ten years younger, Monsieur Lebouche, we would welcome the challenge. Will you take the wine?"
"Can I refuse you so small a thing? But only as a novelty. France is France. What will you charge me for two hundred cases?"
"What the devil's going on?" Jake demanded.
"But you speak Spanish, dear."
"Plain Spanish, not this."
"He says he'll take two hundred cases to start. He feels it will be simply a novelty, but he's interested. He wants to know the price. Oh, yes, he approves of the wine."
Outside again, Clair asked Barbara whether she had followed the conversation inside.
"No, I don't have two words of Spanish. But you were wonderful, I could see that."
"Enlighten me," Jake said.
"He liked the wine. He said that if he were ten years younger, he would have both, myself and the wine. Isn't that perfectly wonderful, Jake? I'm almost forty years old. France is one hell of a place, don't you think?"
"That old goat. I'll be damned."
Six days later, the Levys departed for Holland, and on the same day, Barbara received a letter from Marcel, the first letter. He told her how much he loved her, assured her that all was going well, explained that since he did not care to have the letter censored he would go into no details, and promised to write again very soon. It was not, to Barbara's way of thinking, a very satisfactory letter, but it relieved her anxiety. He also mentioned that he had met her fellow Californian, Bernie Cohen, and that he liked him immensely.
Dr. Kaplan had never treated a Chinese before—there were few Chinese families in Westwood—and now he appeared troubled and uncertain as the frail Chinese gentleman dressed himself. Feng Wo sensed this, and directed the conversation very matter-of-factly. "It is cancer, isn't it?"
Kaplan was a young man, in his early thirties, and he had come to Los Angeles from New York and set himself up in practice only a short time before. Feng Wo had chosen him almost at random, looking for a physician who would have no possible connection with his family. He suspected that it might well be Dr. Kaplan's first terminal case.
"It's not operable, is it?"
"Both lungs," Dr. Kaplan said miserably.
"You're quite sure?"
Strange, a small Oriental gentleman who spoke perfect English, who appeared to be undisturbed by a sentence of death. Dr. Kaplan nodded. "I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't have another opinion, but it's not something that is easily mistaken. If you'd like me to recommend an internist?"
"No, that won't be necessary. How long do I have?"
"A few months, perhaps a little more."
"I understand."
"I'd like you to see me again, perhaps in a week or two."
"Yes, most likely."
It was almost noon when Feng Wo arrived at the boatyard in San Pedro, and during the trip down there, he examined himself, his being, and the fact of his impending death. He was only sixty-three years old; he had not yet begun to think of himself as an old man; and once again he was managing the affairs of Dan Lavette. From the moment his son-in-law had asked him to come in and take charge of the books and finances of the new enterprise, he had felt youthful and renewed. Years before, when Dan Lavette's great empire had washed out in the debris of the Depression, his daughter, May Ling, had arranged for him to make a translation of the writings of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. At that time, he had paid tribute to her skill in putting together a situation where he was commissioned to do the work for the University of California Press. His scholarship left something to be desired, yet somehow he had managed the translation, plodding through the work more as an effort to please his daughter than himself. It was only a temporary stopgap in the process of dying from lack of purpose and a feeling of utter uselessness. Now he was dying in fact, from a malignant disease for which there was no cure.
He went into the office that he now occupied at the shipyard and sat down at his desk, just sitting there and staring through the window at the mud flats and the still water of the bay. Then the door swung open and Dan Lavette entered, his voice booming with energy and excitement.
"Feng Wo, where the hell have you been? It's starting again, and I don't know whether to start climbing that lousy shitpile of success or to kick the whole thing into the mud."
Feng Wo turned to face him, his wrinkled face as impassive as ever. "What happened, Mr. Lavette?" he asked calmly.
"You won't believe this. Hargasey comes down this morning to look at his yacht. He's like a kid. He can't stay away from it, and this time he brings Samuel Carl-win with him. Carlwin's the owner of the studio where Hargasey's slated to make his next picture, and I suppose he has more money than God. I lead them around the boat and explain things, and Carlwin never says a word. Then, when we climb down from the cribbing, Carlwin takes me aside. Lavette, he says to me, I want you to build me a yacht. Just like that. I say, sure, I'll be happy to build him a yacht. Then he says to me, I want it to be twice as big as the one you're building for that sonofabitch Hungarian gypsy.
"Can you imagine? I try to calm him down. I try to explain to him that a ship that size would be damn near an ocean liner, that it would cost him over a million dollars. But he doesn't want to listen. All he wants to know is what I need to get the job started. I tell him I need fifty thousand dollars to draw up the plans and start ordering the material, and so help me God if he doesn't take out his checkbook and write out a check on the spot. Here it is." He took the check out of his pocket and handed it to Feng Wo, who looked at it, smiling slightly.
"Well, what about it, old man? What do we do?"
"We build the ship," Feng Wo said calmly. "In this strange and unreasonable world, nothing should surprise you, Mr. Lavette."
"I'll draw up a letter agreement, and I'll telephone Sam Goldberg to put together a contract. Meanwhile, get the check to the bank before he changes his mind, and then we'll get to work on costs. I don't know any more about what he wants than he does, but we'll figure something out. Twice the size of the one out there. Can you imagine?"
A week later, on his way home from San Pedro, Dan
stopped to pick up May Ling at the library. She was waiting for him at the entrance. She took his arm and said, "Leave your car parked for a while, Danny, and we'll walk on the campus. I want to talk—here, not at home."
"You sound damn serious."
"I am, Danny. Very damn serious."
They began to walk. He didn't press the point. May Ling would tell him what she had to tell him in her own good time. Anyway, it was a good walk, the sun dropping into a lacework of clouds, the air sharp and cool.
"It's about my father, Danny," she said at last.
"He's not feeling too well, is he?"
"Then you noticed."
"Do you know what's wrong with him?"
"He's dying, Danny."
"No! Good God, what are you saying?"
She nodded miserably.
"How do you know? That's crazy. He was down at the shop today. All right, he's tired. He doesn't have to work that hard. I don't push him."
"Danny, Danny, listen to me. Joe noticed that something was wrong, and he asked me if I could get papa to go down to USC with him, where they could do some tests. Papa got very annoyed at me. Joe insisted that I try to find out something, so I called five local doctors. The fifth was a Dr. Kaplan, and when I told him who I was, he admitted that papa had seen him twice. I went to see Dr. Kaplan. Papa has cancer of the lung. It's inoperable. He hasn't very long to live."
"My God," Dan whispered. "Are you sure? Who is this Kaplan? We don't have to let it rest there. We'll get the best doctors in California. There must be something we can do."
"Danny, dear, there's nothing we can do. Joe spoke to Dr. Kaplan. He took the X rays down to the medical school at USC. It's too late. Nothing can be done."
"Oh, Christ, what a lousy, rotten deal." They walked on. After a few minutes of silence, he asked her, "Does your mother know?"
"I'm sure she doesn't. I can't tell her. It has to come from papa. Danny, I want you to do this for me. Don't treat him differently, please, and don't let on that you know. Just let him work on as before. Dr. Kaplan said