Authors: Howard Fast
you don't mind?"
"I don't mind."
"I guess," he said, "I'm the only one here."
"I guess you are."
"Well, that's obvious, I guess. I don't always say silly things. What I meant is, do many people come here to
look at the paintings?"
"On weekends we get a fair attendance. And in th
e
afternoons we do get a few people, mostly art students, You see, it's very avant-garde, not the kind of thing that San Francisco is used to. People must be educated to mod. em art."
"Oh? Yes, I'm sure. Do you understand it?"
"A little. I've learned a great deal from Mrs. Whittier."
"Now that one," he said. "That one looks like two dead fish on a straw mat, only I'm not sure they're fish. Are they?" He was very funny without being disrespectful and so earnestly serious that Eloise burst out laughing.
"I know," he nodded. "That's a really dumb thing to say."
"No it isn't. That's what it looks like to you, so why shouldn't you say so? As a matter of fact, that painting is by Paul Klee, one of the great modern masters. He was a German Expressionist, except that he was Swiss. I mean he was born in Switzerland, but in his painting he was of the German Expressionist school. He was nonrepresenta-tional. I mean he didn't try to paint things as they appear to most people. He changed them into designs that he considered amusing and delightful."
The young man regarded her with awe, nodding, and at that moment Jean appeared and walked over to join them-
"This is Mrs. Whittier," Eloise said. "I don't know your name."
"No, of course. I never told you. I'm sorry."
"I didn't ask you," Eloise said.
"No, you didn't, did you? My name is Adam Levy."
"Mine is Eloise Lavette."
"Oh. Yes. How do you do."
The name jogged Jean's memory. Then she remembered and said, "Of course. You're Mark Levy's grandson-I'm so glad to see you."
He took the hand she held
out
and nodded.
"That's
right. Yes. Thank you."
"You see, I did know your grandfather. I don't know your mother and father."
"I understand."
"When did you get home, Adam?" Jean asked him.
"Two weeks ago, luckily, believe me. I could have been trapped there for another year."
"I'm glad you're back, safe and healthy—at least you
look very healthy."
"Oh, I am, yes, ma'am."
"And is there something I can do for you? Or did you just wander in?"
"Oh, no. No. Barbara—your daughter—suggested that I come and see you. She said you know every artist in the city."
"Almost every one, yes."
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a sheaf of snapshots. "These are photographs of my brother, Joshua," he said, handing them to Jean. "He was killed in the Pacific a year ago."
Jean nodded. "I know." She didn't know what else to say.
"Well, I thought it would be nice to have a painting of him that I could give to my mother and father. We don't have anything like that. And Barbara said you might know a painter who could do it for me. I don't know what these things cost, but I can afford it, I think. You know, back pay—"
"Adam," Jean said, "you don't mind if I call you Adam?"
"Oh, no, not at all."
"We're going out to lunch, Adam. Would you like to join us, and we can talk about this?"
"Yes, if you will let me take both of you to lunch?"
"If you wish, certainly."
At the lunch table, Jean watched him with interest. It was not that he was charming; she had known sufficient charming men not to be overimpressed with charm. But this man had a naivete, a kind of open, boyish simplicity, that was absolutely delightful. Certainly to Eloise. Jean had never seen her like this before, relaxed and chatting away, actually talking. How old was he? Jean wondered. Twenty-three, twenty-four at the most, she thought, trying to recall what Dan had told her. A captain or a major? In the first wave of the Normandy landing, and then leading his company across the breadth of France into Germany. And now he sat at the table with them, apparently enchanted with Eloise, hanging on to every word she spoke. It was all inconceivable. Children went to war. Children witnessed hideous, indescribable things, children killed and burned and destroyed, and then children came back
and
they were children again.
"But we haven't talked about the painting," he said.
"No, we haven't, have we? Let's get at it," Jean said. "Now, as far as copying these photographs in oils, there are any number of people here in the city who could do that, and quite professionally too. It's merely a question of copying, and such copies are usually flat and lifeless, and I don't think it would bring very much joy to your folks."
"You think it's a bad idea?"
"No, Adam, not at all. The thing is to find someone who can look at these pictures and perhaps go beyond them, someone who can breathe life and joy into the painting, who will create something that is not simply a lifeless copy. I must warn you that such a painting will not be photographic. If it is to succeed, it must capture the essence of this lovely boy. It will not be exactly like him at all, but it may find him more than any exact copy could. Or it may not. You see, you will have to pay the artist even if you don't like what he paints."
"I understand."
"I'll try to find someone if you wish me to."
"Yes, please. How much will it cost?"
"I don't know. I'll try to keep it under a thousand dollars—perhaps a good deal under, perhaps not. Can you afford that?"
"Oh, yes. Yes."
"All right. Suppose you drop by next week—next Wednesday. About eleven. I'll try to have someone there for you to speak to, and perhaps you can see some of his work."
"Sure. That's great." He turned to Eloise. "Will you be there?"
Eloise turned to Jean mutely, and Jean said,
"There
are days when Eloise helps me, but she has no regular hours at the gallery. Perhaps she'll be there, perhaps not."
"I hope so. I sure hope so," Adam said.
During the fifteen years from 1922 to 1937, the shipbuilding industry of America perished. During that time, in the greatest industrial country in the world, only two dry cargo ships were built. The ways rotted. The companies that made the parts—the compasses, the wheels, the turbines, the speaking tubes, the winches, and the
isand other items that go into the construction of a "bant ship—either went bankrupt or closed down, or Tn" to life with a skeleton force of a handful of workers. The "thousands of shipyard workers who had found em
ployment
during the years of World War I found other jobs or went into the lines of the unemployed. They became old, and their skills were only memories. The shipyards were abandoned, and half a hundred unfinished ships rotted away, rusted, disintegrated.
The first break in this situation occurred in June 1936, when the Seventy-fourth Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act and created the United States Maritime Commission "to develop and maintain a merchant marine sufficient to carry a substantial portion of the water-borne export and import foreign commerce of the United States on the best-equipped, safest, and most suitable type of vessels owned, operated and constructed by citizens of the United States, manned with a trained personnel and capable of serving as a naval and military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency."
Having created this commission and having given it a mandate, Congress rested. For Admiral Land and his fellow commissioners, it was another matter entirely. There were almost no functioning shipyards, no shipbuilders to call upon, no trained workmen—in fact, very h'ttle of anything; and soon thereafter, war in Europe threatened to engulf the United States. Within this broad Problem, there were two specific situations that called for solution. On the one hand, there was Dan Lavette as a Prototype. Dan had taken over a bankrupt shipyard that Jne bank, which held the mortgage, had been only too happy to dispose of; and this he had clung to, scraping °gether enough money to meet each payroll. He had no money even to contemplate the building of one steel cargo vessel, mush less a fleet. On the other hand, the men who ad access to great amounts of capital—the bankers and he big industrialists—well, they were much too careful
and
wise to invest in shipbuilding. The aftermath of the Previous war was still too close. Out of this necessity, the Maritime Commission was forced into the position of financing the construction of the yards and guaranteeing he price and sale of the ships—and paying the ship-elders a bonus for each ship built.
By the end of 1945, with the war over, the construction at the Lavette Shipyard on Terminal Island was winding down to a close. Five ships were still in construction, two of them tankers, the other three Victory-type cargo cat-riers; but to all effects and purposes the operation was over, and the bonuses had made Dan Lavette a millionaire for the second time in his life. More and more, during the fifteen months since he had met Jean in San Francisco, he was away from the yard. He had trained a group of managers to do everything that had to be done. Joe had not yet returned from the Pacific, but his letters made it plain that he intended to marry Sally and live in Northern California as soon as he came back.
Aside from the bedroom adjoining his office on Terminal Island, Dan had no residence. When he was in San Francisco, he stayed with Jean in the house on Russian Hill. They had fallen into an easy and undemanding companionship. They saw a good deal of Barbara, but they made no plans for the future.
The first meeting of the two of them with Barbara was hardly the way either would have planned it. Barbara had returned to San Francisco and had gone directly to the house on Russian Hill. It was early in the morning, and Jean, still in a robe, let her into the gallery. After their greeting and embraces, Barbara said that she ought to call her father in Los Angeles.
"He's not on Terminal Island," Jean told her. "He's here."
"Here? You mean here in this house?"
"Yes. Upstairs. Probably still asleep."
"You mean he lives here?"
"At times, yes."
Barbara stared at her mother in silence. Then, after a few moments, she asked, "When? I mean—"
"About ten days ago."
"Oh."
"No other comment?" Jean asked her.
"I don't know what to say."
"That's reasonable," Jean agreed. "Why don't we g° upstairs and have breakfast. We'll talk about it."
But upstairs, having breakfast with her mother and father together for the first time in more than fifteen years, Barbara could only say, "I'm so very happy to be back—with both of you."
Finally, Dan was forced to admit that he was a reasonably wealthy man, that his life had not ended with the death of May Ling, and that he enjoyed the possession and use of money. Long ago, he had said to May Ling that he would never play the game again—the game that he often thought of as the gunfight on Nob Hill—that he was out of the struggle for boodle that was called American success, and that he was out of it forever. Now he was back in it because it was the only game he knew. He was fifty-six years old, healthy, and vigorous. At that time, the term "establishment" was not in use in America, but if it had been and if Dan had been faced with it, he would have rejected membership with contempt. The word "maverick" was in use, and it fitted him better.
One day, early in December of 1945, having had word that Joe was on his way back and would be arriving in San Francisco in a few days, Dan telephoned Jean and asked her whether she could put him up for a few days. It was a euphemism, an avoidance of the flat statement of a situation, and Jean accepted it, assuring him that she would be delighted.
Driving north, Dan stopped off at Stephan Cassala's home in San Mateo and allowed himself to be persuaded to stay for dinner. It was his first visit to the Cassalas' since May Ling's death, and they welcomed him with a veritable outpouring of love and emotion. Maria Cassala, sixty-eight years old now, had not changed. Her English was almost as bad as when she arrived in America half a century before. She was still stout, her round face un-wrinkled, and she still wore her ankle-length black dress of mourning for her husband, who had passed away fifteen years ago. She enveloped Dan in her embrace and exclaimed in Italian, "How can you do this to us? Who loved May Ling more than we did? What is a family for if not for grief? You break my heart. Always, you break my heart. Stephan tells me you are the richest, biggest shipbuilder in America. You think I care about that? You think it impresses me? Make your peace with God.
That
impresses me. Come to people who love you. That impresses me. You know how many candles I light for you? You know how many prayers I say for you?"