Authors: Howard Fast
"I know, I know, Maria," he said humbly.
"Even your Italian is no good anymore. Everything you forget. In this country, the children become barbarians. What shall I cook for you? Tell me."
After dinner, stuffed with good food and red wine, Dan and Stephan settled in front of the fire in Tony Cassala's old study, and Dan, looking around the room approvingly, said, "I'm glad you kept it the way it was."
"It's a nice room," Stephan said. "A lot of memories."
"The whole house. It's good you held on to it."
"It isn't easy, Dan. It's a big house, and the taxes have gone sky-high. I'm fifty years old and the manager of a branch bank. Do you know what they pay me?"
Dan shook his head.
"Ten thousand a year. And now the boy's in college. I'm mortgaged to the hilt. There are times—hell, no reason to lay my problems on you."
"Why not?" Dan was regarding Stephan thoughtfully. "Steve, is there anything about finance you don't know?"
"A little."
"How would you like to work for me? I'll pay you thirty thousand a year to start?"
"Doing what? Dan, that's a bonanza, but I don't know one damn thing about shipbuilding."
"That's over, Steve. A year, two years, maybe three, and the only ships they'll be building in this country are tankers. But I won't be building them. I'm going to sell the shipyard. The government owns most of it already, but my equity ought to be worth a million and I think I've got a buyer. No, I've had my fill of building ships. I want to get back to operating them. Hell, there's where the game is, the excitement and the money. Not that I give a damn about the money, but it measures the game, doesn't it?"
"It sure as hell does."
"I've got a million and a half put away out of this shipyard operation, and I'll pick up a million more for the yard. I've already put down an option on a tanker, and I know where there are two more to be gotten at a very decent price. This country is so hungry for oil, now that the war's over, that every tanker's going to be a damn gold mine. I've been talking to Chris Noel in Hawaii, and he's ready to come in with me. I believed in the Islands twenty years ago, and now that this country's lousy with its bloody prosperity, I can't help thinking that Hawaii will become another Florida. And that means oil and more oil. I've been looking at dock facilities in Oakland, and I think I'll open offices there in a few weeks. I want someone to do for me what Mark Levy did in the old days—to run the company, be the comptroller, ride herd over the whole thing—and I think you're the man. Thirty thousand, that's just to start, and I'll cut you in for ten percent of my share of the company. What do you say?"
Stephan didn't answer for a minute or so, sitting and staring at the flames. Then he turned to Dan and nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak.
"Then we'll shake hands on it."
"Thanks, Danny," Stephan finally said.
"Why don't you marry him?" Barbara asked her mother.
"I don't think you quite understand," Jean said.
"You could try me. I'm a big girl now." And when Jean remained silent, she .said, "I think I have a right to know."
"Why?"
"My God, mother, does it make any sense to you? For months now, my mother and father have been having an affair. He lives with you—"
"Not really. He does have an apartment in Oakland."
"I truly don't believe this. I don't believe either of you. I love you both so much. You apparently love each other. Or is it just a casual affair?"
"Barbara!"
"All right, forgive me. I certainly shouldn't have said that. I think you love each other. I think he's always loved you. That doesn't mean he didn't love May Ling. The relations between men and women are never very simple—"
"Thank heavens you admit that."
"Still, I never heard him speak a word against you. I know how the past can live in people. But with you two, the past is a long time ago. When I hear people call you Mrs. Whittier, I wince. It's ridiculous. At least change your name back to Lavette."
"And do what, my dear? Send cards to everyone I know, announcing that Jean Whittier is now Jean Lavette? Can you see that? Dan and I are already in the gossip columns—"
"Mother, who cares?"
"I do, for one. You don't discard the habits of a life-time like an old hat."
"But you do go on with the charade."
"Bobby, darling, try to understand. Your father and I were never happy when we were married. It went wrong from the beginning, in every possible way. Now it is good, just the way it is. We make no demands on each other. When we're together, we're really together. There are men and women for whom marriage is a good thing. I'm not sure Dan and I are in that group."
They were sitting in the little Victorian living room of Barbara's house on Green Street, where Barbara had very properly served her mother tea. Barbara had found the Spode tea service in a little secondhand furniture shop in Oakland and had purchased it with great enthusiasm. She had then spent an afternoon in the library reading up on Josiah Spode (1754-1827) and bone china, and when she informed Jean that she was going to do a piece on bone china for the
Woman's Home Companion
magazine, her mother regarded her with some misgiving.
"Barbara," she said, "what on earth has happened to you? You don't go out. You don't date. You fuss over this little house without end, and now you've plunged headlong into bone china—of all things."
"I've crawled into a cave," Barbara said complacently. "When I've been in it long enough, I'll crawl out again."
"You're thirty-one years old and still unmarried. You live here alone. Why did you ever let Mrs. Jones go?"
"I didn't let her go, mother. She was quite old, and she wanted to live with her sister. Sam left her enough so that she doesn't have to work, and I certainly don't need a servant in this house. An hour a day does it. Besides, I like to live alone. I work better alone."
"Please, find a good man and get married," Jean said wistfully; and it was that muted plea that led to Barbara's suggestion that her mother and father might be married first.
"You see," Barbara said, "we have spun a very tangled web, we Lavettes. Next month, Joseph Lavette is to be married to Sally Levy. Joseph is my half brother
and
Dan's son. Are you coming "to the wedding?"
"I was invited. I've already sent a gift."
"I think you should come."
"I don't know. He's May Ling's son."
"Joe would like you to come. We talked about it."
Jean laughed and shook her head. "More tangled than you imagine. You know Adam Levy."
"Sally's brother, yes."
"He's in love with Eloise. He wants her to leave Tom and marry him."
"Good heavens! When did this happen?"
"It's been going on for quite a while now. It began when he came to the gallery to ask me to find a painter to do a portrait of his dead brother. That's when he met her. You know, Eloise has been helping me two or three days a week. It gave her some diversion and purpose, which heaven knows she needed. She's very bright and quick to learn, and now she's taking a course in art history at the university. Well, he came back, and again, and again. By the way, how old is he?"
"Almost twenty-four, I think."
"He ended up in the war as a major. Do they have majors as young as that?"
"I don't think they do it by age, mother. How does Eloise feel about him?"
"Eloise is older, probably four years older."
"Mother, I don't care whether she's older or younger. How does she feel about him?"
"How would you feel? Apparently the only person who ever gave her a shred of sympathy or understanding is myself, and I'm Tom's mother. I don't delude myself about my son, but he is my son. The poor child is torn to pieces, and just to make it nicer, she's a migraine sufferer. And this Adam Levy is like an attenuated Jewish leprechaun, if you can imagine such a thing. He's absolutely charming and gentle and he worships the ground she walks on."
"Mother, he's only half Jewish, which doesn't matter, and I don't see him as a leprechaun, and he has been through the worst war in human history. He was awarded the Silver Star for extraordinary courage and decision in action, and he was very severely wounded."
"Bobby, don't lecture me," Jean begged her. "I've really become quite civilized."
"You still haven't told me how Eloise feels."
"How can she feel? She has a kind, charming man who desires no more than to be her faithful slave and servant, and she's married to a man who hasn't had intercourse with her in seven months. They have separate rooms,
Bobby. And believe me, if your brother hasn't slept with his wife in seven months, then sure as God, he's sleeping with someone else."
"Then why doesn't she leave him?"
"My dear Bobby, you . are a liberated woman. Eloise is a frightened little rabbit. She lives in terror of Tom, in terror of his fits of temper, in terror of having her child taken away from her, and in terror of her migraine headaches."
"He can't take the child away from her. Mother, Tom isn't a monster. He's no Sir Galahad, but he's always been reasonably decent."
"To you and me. We don't see him too often and we're not married to him, and we never ask him for money. Those are three good conditions for decency. Also, this Adam Levy hasn't a bean."
"The Levys aren't rich, but they're not poor. It's one of the best wineries in the Napa Valley, and making wine is all that the boy wants to do. It's not the money that holds Eloise there, is it?"
"Oh, no. It's the whole complex of circumstances."
"I think you ought to help her," Barbara decided.
"I try."
"I mean, you should help her leave Tom."
"I don't think anyone can help her do that."
With some feelings of guilt, Barbara realized that she had more or less ignored her sister-in-law, and later that same afternoon, she telephoned and invited her to have lunch at her house. The house, her home and refuge, had become very much a passion with Barbara. She knew that it was a reaction to the years she had spent abroad, and she also knew that it was in a sense a retreat from reality. It was, as she had said, a cave, a shelter, but the actual cave was herself. She had drawn into herself. Writing required only her own participation. She met no one whom she cared for particularly. TTie girls of her own age whom she had known were all of them married now and with children. She would soon be thirty-two years old, and for a thirty-two-year-old woman there were only divorced men and that singular species called bachelors, a word that fitted a variety of neuroses. She had overheard a very attractive single woman, only a few years older than herself, referred to as a "fag-hag," and the term had chilled her blood. At least she had some constructive work in her jif
e
_aside from her writing—and the more attention she
paid to the Lavette Foundation, the more she realized that in her moment of petulance and rebellion she had created something very important indeed. A home for unwed mothers had been funded. A clinic had been opened in San Diego, which catered to the needs of Chicanos, and seventeen scholarships for postgraduate work, medical and otherwise, had been awarded. A grant had been made for research into the history of the Plains Indians, and six additional grants were devoted to research in antibiotics, pneumonia, sickle-cell anemia, and cancer. It had been slow in starting, but to Barbara the results were marvel-ously satisfying.
Meanwhile, she was successfully operating as an independent person, earning more than enough from her writing to support herself and maintain the house. She loved housekeeping. She had purchased a dozen cookbooks, regretting the fact that during her years in Paris she had never taken advantage of the Cordon Bleu, and she found that it was both pleasant and exciting to have guests to a lunch or dinner that she had cooked and served herself. Today, for Eloise, she had prepared eggs Benedict and fresh spinach and had baked biscuits, and the two of them ate in the tiny breakfast room, with its bay window from which one could just glimpse the harbor.
Eloise was delighted with the house. "It's so small and warm and wonderful," she said. "We live in such a huge barn of a place. Oh, I would be so happy with a house like this! And the food is so geod. To me, it's absolutely a miracle when people cook things and have them taste good. I mean, the cooking is one thing, but to have them taste so delicious. And of course, making bread—well, I can't even fry an egg properly."
"It's not real bread. One buys a biscuit mix. It's almost cheating."
"You couldn't cheat," Eloise said earnestly. "You can't imagine how much I've always admired you, Barbara. I read both your books, and they were simply wonderful, especially the one about the war. How many woman could go through all that and experience all those awful things, and then just remain as simple and nice as you are, I don't know."
Barbara was overcome with guilt. To be so admired and praised by someone she had considered to be an empty-headed doll was mortifying, and for a moment she disliked herself intensely. However, she could not let the opportunity pass, for she had invited Eloise for a very specific purpose. "Your friend, Adam Levy," she said, "has been through a great deal more than I, and he's quite nice, I think, and very gentle."