Authors: Howard Fast
"No, indeed. You have a beautiful office."
He had to quicken his pace to keep up with her as she swept through the bank into the main lobby of the Seldon Building.
"Alvin, how old are you?"
"Sixty-five," he answered, thinking, What an outrageous question, and the way she asked it, like making a remark about the weather. But no comment followed it, and his inner debate on whether to follow her into the elevator like an obedient puppy dog was decided by her own motion. They were alone with the operator in the elevator reserved for the top three floors, where the bank's offices were.
"We set the board meeting for three o'clock," he told her. "Tentatively, that is. If you are free then?"
"No, I'm not. I'm meeting Barbara at the station, and that's at two-thirty, I think. But you don't need me, Alvin. I've drawn up the agenda. Martin will propose you and the board will vote it that way. You do know that, don't you?"
"I had hoped so. Thank you, Jean."
Since she didn't invite him out, he remained in the elevator. Jean admitted to herself that she couldn't tolerate him. That was a plus for her decision; she would not have to face Alvin Sommers every time she came to the bank. Yes, there was a whole list of positive things. Six years was enough. She had taken the step originally because it was a challenge. Or was it because her life was coming apart at the seams? Or was it because she loathed everything about the bank and everyone connected with it? That, indeed, was an odd thought, and a new one, and it might very well be so.
Miss Pritchard, her secretary, regarded her sadly. "I was not sure of your-time today—everything is so upset. Will you see anyone?"
"I don't think so. I have a luncheon engagement, and it's ten o'clock already. I won't be in at all this afternoon."
"And tomorrow?"
"No tomorrow, Lorna. You know that. Finis." She patted Miss Pritchard's thin shoulder. "It's all right, and you must not worry about your job. Just take your two weeks' vacation and enjoy yourself," she said, wondering just how skinny, spinsterish, fortyish Miss Pritchard would go about enjoying herself. "Did I have any appointments? I didn't think so."
"No. But Mr. Liu called again. The man from the Oriental Improvement Society. He said he would call back."
"Then you talk to him. What does he want, a contribution?"
"I don't imagine so. I think it's part of their campaign to place Chinese and Japanese in jobs in banks."
"We're not taking on anyone, you know that," Jean said with some irritation. "If he wants to see anyone, he can see Mr. Sommers next week."
Provoked, and annoyed with herself for allowing it to show, Jean went into her office, closed the door, and stood there, looking around. It was a large office, twenty by thirty feet. The walls, once covered by walnut panels, were now painted in soft tones of ivory. The pastel blue Au-busson measured eighteen by twenty-four, and Jean thought wistfully of how splendid it would have been on the floor of her bedroom in the house she had lived in on Russian Hill, when she had been Jean Lavette. In the Whittier mansion—well, a pastel blue rug in the Whittier house was as yet unthinkable. All in due time. She had already invaded her husband's house—which had once belonged to his father—with thirty-seven paintings, still only part of her collection, and now somehow she would have to find a place for the Picassos and the enormous Monet. It would mean a struggle, but she was determined that the
Monet would hang on a wall in the Whittier house, and there were few decisions of Jean's that did not come into being.
She sat down behind her desk, a graceful eighteenth-century French piece that she had picked up in Paris, and surveyed the room. Actually, there was nothing more for her to do here; she was simply going through motions, but she could recall with satisfaction that she had never been a figurehead. She had run the bank and not only the bank; there were huge land holdings that her former husband had acquired, the largest department store in San Francisco, and other odds and ends of a small empire that had become a very large empire since her marriage to John Whittier. She had nurtured it. She had been wealthy before; now, in this dismal year of 1934, she was a great deal wealthier.
"And totally miserable," she said aloud.
The telephone rang. It was her husband, John, explaining that something had come up and that he could not make lunch with her. "Can you go to tiie station alone?" he asked her. "The afternoon's just no good for me."
"I think I'm capable of getting to the station. Yes."
"You sound unhappy."
"Do I? I'm happy as a lark."
"Well, you'll be pleased to see Barbara again."
"Yes, of course." There was a long moment of silence, and then Jean said, "By the way, I've decided not to sell the house on Russian Hill. I shall keep it and turn it into a gallery."
"Oh. And when did you decide that?"
"Just this moment."
When she put down the telephone, she felt better. John hated the house on Russian Hill, just as he hated everything that related to Daniel Lavette.
As a matter of fact, John Whittier shared a sentiment held by his wife's former husband, Dan Lavette. It was less the house on Russian Hill that he disliked than the hill itself, the place, the ambience, the cluster of artists and writers who had given the hill a reputation almost as widely recognized then, in the 1930's, as that of Greenwich Village in New York. Those who knew John Whittier said that the only thing in the world that he loved, cherished, or respected was money—which was not entirely fair, for he respected Jean, his second wife, and certainly he respected the vast wealth that she represented. Whether or not he loved her, or had ever been in love with her, is a question which, if put to him, would have required for an answer a degree of introspection of which he was by no means capable. In his terms, she was a rewarding wife. She was tall, beautiful, dressed elegantly and in the best of taste, still youthful at forty-four, and in San Francisco terms at the very apex of society, the only daughter of Thomas and Mary Seldon; and Mary Seldon's mother had been an Asquith from the Boston family that still resided on Beacon Hill. All to the good. The various factors held together like an analysis of an impeccable blue chip stock. There were still other characteristics of his wife that John Whittier regarded as assets, but her involvement with the artists and writers of Russian Hill was not one of them.
He himself was a rather good-looking, tall, and somewhat overweight man of forty-six, with thinning blond hair and pale blue eyes. His father, Grant Whittier, now deceased, had been the largest shipowner on the West Coast, and the combining of the Whittier and Lavette interests had produced the largest single conglomeration of wealth in California; still, it nettled him that he should have to continue to pay taxes on a boarded-up mansion that was certainly the best piece of property on Russian Hill. Long ago, Robert Louis Stevenson had sailed out of San Francisco on one of the Whittier ships, and had afterward written a scathing little essay on how the ship was run; and while Stevenson had never lived on Russian Hill, his wife had, and Mrs. Stevenson's presence there contributed to making the place an anathema to the Whittiers. Even so small a matter as a piece in the
Chronicle
mentioning how much Peter B. Kyne, another resident of Russian Hill, was paid by the
Saturday Evening Post
for his stories, elicited an angry denunciation by Whittier against the large sums paid to writers in these depressed times.
His own home was in Pacific Heights, a twenty-two-room limestone mansion. It had been built by his father, and when John Whittier and Jean Lavette were married, they agreed that it would be their residence and that she would rid herself of the house on Russian Hill as soon as it was convenient for her to do so. Now it was to be a gallery—whatever that meant
Whittier's musing was interrupted by his secretary, who told him that there was a collect call for him from Thomas Lavette, from Lambertville, New Jersey.
"From where?"
"Lambertville. Will you accept it, Mr. Whittier?"
"Of course." He picked up his phone. The high-pitched voice on the other end was uneven, uncertain.
"John?"
"Tommy? Where the devil are you?"
"I'm in a frightful mess, John. Don't be angry with me, please. I didn't dare call mother. I don't want her to know—"
"To know what? Will you please tell me what happened."
"I'm in jail here."
"You are what?"
"Please," Tom begged him, "don't blow up at me. I'm miserable enough. I was drunk, and I smashed up the car."
"Are you all right?"
"I'm all right, but there was a girl with me, and they had to take her to the hospital. I don't think she's badly hurt. But they're holding me here for drunk driving, and I need five hundred for bail to get out—"
Whittier stared at the phone without replying. He had no children of his own from his first marriage—which had come late in life and lasted for only three years— and he had no attitudes at all toward children. They were not of his world. It grated when he heard Jean refer to the children. As far as he was concerned, they were adults, a woman of twenty and a man of twenty-two. Between him and Barbara, there was a fence of thorns. Her kisses were cold pecks on the cheek, and communication was almost nonexistent. His attitude toward Tom was more neutral; it consisted of tolerance without affection, but the tolerance was not too elastic.
"John, are you still there?" the voice pleaded.
"How the devil did you get into a scrape like that?"
"God, I don't know. I just don't know. I wish it had never happened, but it did. I hate to come begging to you, but I need the bail money, otherwise I'll just sit here. I'll pay you back."
"All right. I'll wire the money. What did you say that place is? Lambertville, New Jersey?" He scribbled the name on a pad. "You'll need a lawyer. I'll have my people in New York find you someone in Princeton. I trust you'll
be in Princeton and stay there?" he finished sourly.
"I will, believe me. I don't know how to thank you, John. It's very decent of you."
"Stupid young fool," he said as he put down the phone. Then he called his secretary and instructed her to wire the bail money and to call his New York attorneys and have them find a lawyer in Princeton and have the lawyer get in touch with Thomas Lavette at the college. "We'll pay the costs," he added.
All of which he repeated to Jean, angrily and bitterly, before they sat down to dinner with Barbara. It definitely had not been one of Jean's good days.
Dressed in a woolen skirt, an old sweater, and the worn loafers she had used at school, Barbara took the streetcar down Market Street to the Embarcadero. On foot, she drifted slowly south from the Ferry Building, studying the striking longshoremen with curiosity and interest. Essentially, her mother was quite right about her romantic nature, and her mind gave every incident in which she participated a dramatic form and structure. She realized that she had never actually looked at the faces of men like those on the picket lines; the faces were worn, pinched, lined without reference to age. "Longshoreman" had a connotation in her mind of size, bulk, brute strength; but most of these men were no taller than she was, many of them shorter than she was, Mexicans and Orientals many of them, hunched over, pulling their jackets tight against the cold wind, holding their picket sings unaggressively, signs that called for a dollar an hour and for a hiring hall instead of the shapeup on the docks. Barbara had only a fuzzy notion of what a shapeup was, thinking of an auction system of some kind, which Dr. Franklin had referred to when he called the Embarcadero a slave market. Barbara went closer to read a sign covered with rough lettering, and the man carrying it stepped out of line, facing the sign to her and grinning a toothless, good-natured grin.
"Read it, sister," he said. "I'm in no hurry. I got all the time in the world."
The sign read: "I want a dollar an hour. I got three kids and a wife, and I average 15 hours a week. Can you make it on that? When we struck, my pay was 75 cents an hour when I worked."
He grinned again, stepped back into the picket line, and walked off. Barbara stared after him. She had thirty-five dollars in her purse, and her first impulse was to run after the toothless longshoreman and press all the money she had into his hands. No, that would be awful, perfectly awful, she decided. She walked along the Embarcadero, carrying the whole weight of poverty and suffering upon her shoulders. It made no difference to Barbara that every port on the West Coast was tied up, from Seattle down to San Diego; the entire guilt, in her mind, belonged to John Whittier and her mother, since they were the largest ship operator on the Coast—and thereby to her.
She came to a place where a truck was parked. The tail of the truck was down, and inside a sort of soup kitchen had been improvised; two men and a stout woman were serving coffee and doughnuts to the strikers. The lettering on the side of the truck read
SCHOFIELD'S BAKERY
, and under that a hand-painted card read
BAKERY WORKERS, LOCAL
12. Barbara watched for a few'minutes. Then she went to the woman and whispered uncertainly, "Do you take contributions?"