Authors: Howard Fast
"Does he still live with John?"
"No, he's taken an apartment on Jones Street. As a matter of fact, I think he and John bought the building. They've formed some kind of interlocking corporation or something of the sort, and they're expanding or whatever. Suddenly, my dear, the whole thing bores me. You're not envious of him, are you?"
"Good heavens, no."
"And no regrets about all that money?"
"Absolutely none."
"You are a strange girl. I don't mind. I love you very much just as you are. Now for this afternoon. Krumbach —he's one of the art dealers here, if you can call them dealers—well, he's gotten his hands on a Kandinsky, and he has all sorts of visions of wealth because he knows I want it. I think I do. Will you come with me?"
"Of course. But what on earth is a Kandinsky?"
"Vasili Kandinsky, a very wonderful Russian painter, but not very good at getting along with them. He went to Weimar in Germany, where he worked at the Bauhaus, and I suppose he's in Paris right now. I've tried to get in touch with him, but never received an answer. He worked with another artist called Paul Klee, who just died. I'm starting with two of Klee's paintings, which are on their way here from New York. One of your film stars in Los Angeles had a picture he painted. I tried to get hold of it, but Krumbach got there first, and now he will try to take it out of my hide. We'll see. I suspect there are not many more than twenty people in San Francisco who have ever heard of Kandinsky, and nineteen of them have no money."
"Mother, you amaze me."
"Do I? Why?"
"The way you care about paintings."
"I do. They're very wonderful and full of passion, and they ask nothing but to be looked at and understood. Which is more than I can say of most people."
Krumbach's gallery was on the second floor of an old house on Grant Avenue, two rooms, painted white and hung with paintings of redwood trees, stony beaches laced with waves only a little less stony, and cowboys roping cattle in eager but untalented imitation of Frederic Remington. Krumbach himself was a small, stout man, with a pince-nez and an indeterminate foreign accent. He welcomed the two women as if they were visiting royalty, bowed and scraped, and begged them to examine his dis-play of the most talented new western painters.
"Krumbach,"
Jean
said,
"don
't waste your breath
on
me °r my daughter.
There
are talented western painters, but you wouldn't dare
show one of
them.
Now,
where is the Kandinsky?"
"Your daughter—as beautiful as the mother.
But
who could believe you are not sisters?"
"That's enough," Jean said with annoyance.
Barbara had never seen her in quite that mood, all busi
ness, cold, and intimidating. Rrumbach sighed, opened the closet door, and brought out a canvas that was about twenty inches square, covered by what appeared to Barbara to be a random arrangement of bright lines and explosions of color reminiscent of fireworks. He put it on an easel and stood back to admire it. Jean barely glanced at it.
"So that's it," she said, looking at her watch.
"It's magnificent," Krumbach said.
"Do you like it?" Jean asked Barbara casually.
Not knowing what was expected of her, Barbara decided to say what she thought. "No, I can't say that I do. I haven't the vaguest notion of what it means."
"What should it mean?" Krumbach cried in pain. "A Kandinsky does not have to mean something."
"I think we must go," Jean said.
"You don't want it, Mrs. Whittier?"
"Not really. You heard what my daughter said."
"But mother," Barbara protested, "I don't know the first thing about modern painting."
"You see, you see!" Krumbach exclaimed. "From her own lips. Modern painting she don't understand."
"I'm afraid I don't either." Jean sighed and put her hand on the doorknob. Then she said, over her shoulder, "What are you asking?"
"Nothing. I'm giving it away. For three thousand dollars, I'm giving it away."
"Come on, Barbara," Jean said.
"Mrs. Whittier, make me an offer!" he cried desperately.
Jean turned and glanced at the painting again. "I really don't know. Oh, well, I don't know what else you'll do with it. Five hundred dollars."
"Five hundred dollars," Krumbach repeated. "And also a pint of blood."
"I don't need the blood. Really."
"Twenty-five hundred, rock bottom."
A half-hour later, they had settled on eight hundred dollars, and Jean wrote out a check while Krumbach looked at her as if his best friend had died.
"Shall I deliver it?" he asked woefully.
"No. I'll take it with me."
Once outside and in a cab, Jean was ecstatic. "I have it!" she cried. "Bobby, I have it. Two Klees and now a Kandinsky, and I have a line on a Nolde. What a beginning! What a grand, exciting beginning'"
"Mother, how could you?" Barbara asked unhappily.
"How could I what?"
"How could you do that to that poor little man?"
"My dear Bobby, that poor little man paid three hundred dollars for the painting."
"How do you know?"
"Because I telephoned the owner. Well, he went down there and got it. Counting his expenses and time, we'll say four hundred. Which means he got a hundred percent profit instead of the thousand percent he began with. I don't think I was too hard on him."
A while later, Barbara said thoughtfully, "I have an interesting mother."
"And I have an interesting daughter," Jean said. "And do you know, my dear, this is the first time in I don't know how long that we've had a chance to be together and do things together, and I intend to make the most of it."
For the next two weeks, Barbara went to parties, dined in the best restaurants, went to a horse show at Menlo Park, read the books she had meant to read, slept late, joined her mother in planning the Russian Hill museum, went to the opera, saw five plays and three films, and spent two evenings with her brother Tom and Eloise Clawson, who was twenty-two years old, very petite, very blond, very pretty, and very well trained. The Clawsons owned a steel-fabricating plant in Oakland and about twelve acres of the residential section of Oakland as well. Miss Clawson said very little, looked at Tom adoringly, and prompted people to observe what a splendid couple they were.
At the end of the two weeks, Jean said to Barbara, "I know you've brought your manuscript with you, Bobby, and I've waited patiently for you to say something about it. But it appears that you won't, and I want desperately to read it. Could I?"
Barbara hesitated. "It's a novel, but it's also me. I'm very naked in it."
"I've seen you naked."
"You're sure you want to?"
"Of course I'm sure," Jean said. "Has anyone else seen it?"
"Not this version. You'd be the first."
Jean spent a whole day with the book, and when she finished, she said to Barbara, "I think it's splendid. Look, my dear, I know a literary agent in New York. His name is Harris Fielding. I met him in London ages ago, but I get Christmas cards from him, and I hear he's quite important. Why don't you send it to him?"
"I'll think about it, mother."
"You don't believe me, do you?"
"You know," Barbara said, "I considered tearing it up and forgetting about it. I've always loved you, mother, but now I've come to like you a great deal. You take it, and send it to him if you wish."
"I don't cry," Jean said. "More's the pity. I'd love to have a good cry now. You're the best thing that ever happened to me. Maybe the only good thing."
A month later, back in Los Angeles, Barbara received a letter from Harris Fielding. "My dear Miss Lavette," he wrote. "Once in a long while, a literary agent receives the manuscript of a first novel that is absolutely fine. Moments like that make the profession worthwhile. I love your novel. It is sincere, uninhibited, and totally gripping. Of course, I know your work, having read your 'Letters from Paris,' so the professional quality of your writing did not surprise me. The maturity of your outlook did, if you will forgive me, in one so very young. I don't think I'll have any difficulty placing this with a publisher."
Moody, at odds with herself since her return to Los Angeles, the letter sent Barbara's spirits soaring. She read it aloud to Dan and May Ling. "I can't believe it," she said, when their delight and excitement had spent itself. "I can't believe that I did it."
Three weeks later, a second letter from Fielding informed her that the novel had been accepted for publication by Halliday, one of the best New York publishers, and that they were paying an advance of three thousand dollars. The check accompanied the letter.
Part Five
V
DEPARTURE
Barbara was in San Francisco in June of 1941, when Sam Goldberg died. She was there for two reasons: her brother Tom's marriage was to take place on the twenty-first of June, and she had to attend to the final details that would establish the Lavette Foundation. As to the first matter, Tom was marrying Eloise Clawson, which everyone who knew them felt was an excellent match. The Clawsons were an old family, which in California meant that they had arrived there before the turn of the century: they had money, not as much as Tom but very considerable wealth; they were Episcopalian, which was the proper thing to be in their circle, and Miss Clawson was attractive enough for even the newspapers to refer to them as a "handsome couple." In addition to all these evident virtues, John Whittier approved of the match, explaining to Tom that while divorce was becoming increasingly commonplace, a person wise enough to structure a career for the future would do best to make a correct decision at the very beginning. Tom was not in love in the romantic sense, but he was fond enough of Eloise, who said very little and who always agreed with him. But then he had never been romantically in love with any other woman, and he agreed with Whittier that Eloise would make an excellent and advantageous wife. As for Barbara, the comparison between Eloise and Sally Levy could not escape her.
The Lavette Foundation was more demanding than the circumstances of Tom's marriage. Giving away a fortune of fourteen million dollars, Barbara discovered, was a complicated and long-drawn-out process. There was in Goldberg's office a man of thirty-six years who name was Harvey Baxter, who was one of Goldberg's two associates. Goldberg suggested him as one of the board of directors, and potentially as the manager of the fund. He also coopted Jean for the board, a function which she first resisted and then finally allowed herself to accept. With Barbara and Goldberg, the board would consist, at least for the moment, of four members. Baxter found a small house on Leavenworth Street, not far from Jean's house on Russian Hill, and the first financial action of the fund was to purchase the building as its headquarters. At first, Barbara, who was with Jean in the gallery house, felt that the small, narrow, old Victorian house would reduce problems. Then she discovered that there was renovating to be done, new wiring, repainting—a host of problems she had never faced before. She had sketched out plans for a new book, hoping to get started on it before her first novel appeared—certain now that the reviews would be devastating—yet weeks went by and still she was in San Francisco, first with the house, then finding an office manager, then a bookkeeper; and then, having extended her stay to June, she decided to remain for Tom's wedding.
It was on the ninth of June that she had a breakfast appointment with Sam Goldberg at his home. Mrs. Jones, the black woman who had been Goldberg's housekeeper for the past twenty years, looked somewhat puzzled as she admitted Barbara. "Was he expecting you, Miss Lavette?" she inquired. "He's still asleep. He been tired lately, and I don't want to wake him early, because if he don't want to sleep, he sets his alarm."
"He was expecting me," Barbara said.
"Then I go and wake him." She went upstairs and returned a few minutes later, shaken and frightened. "I can't wake him. Oh, God."
Barbara called the doctor, and a half-hour later, he told her that Goldberg had died in his sleep. "Not unexpected," he told her. "Man of his age, seventy-three, bad heart, bad habits, overweight. I warned him, but it does no good to talk to a man like Goldberg—"
"Oh, wiU you shut up and get out of here!" Barbara cried out through her tears. "Just do what you have to do and get out of here!"
Dan and May Ling came to San Francisco for the funeral, and in the group that gathered around Sam Goldberg's grave were people Barbara knew and loved and others who were only names to her: Stephan Cassala and his mother, Maria, who was Anthony Cassala's widow, and Sarah Levy, who had been married to her father's partner, Mark Levy, dead these many years and Jake and