The Legacy (11 page)

She told Carson about it afterward. “There's nothing as closed, as unreachable as a boy his age. So it's your decision. I won't send him away to school again. I can't. It was just too awful for him.”

“We'll give it time. I'm not an ogre.”

“Hardly. You're right. We'll give it time.”

“And the honeymoon?”

“He'll stay at Higate. It's the place he loves best, and we'll only be gone for a month.”

Adam Levy was president of Higate Winery. His father, Jake Levy, sixty years old now, still ran the sprawling farm in the Napa Valley and supervised the work at the winery; but in the years since Prohibition, when Jake and Clair Levy had bought a ruined winery and nine hundred acres of good land for a few thousand dollars, the Higate Winery had become the fourth largest in the state of California. They had offices on Sacramento Street in San Francisco and a warehouse in Los Angeles, and while every tillable acre at Higate was in vines, their production was such that they rented almost a thousand acres in the Sonoma Valley and had begun buying additional grapes in the San Joaquin Valley.

This meant that Adam Levy was away from the Napa Valley place a good deal, a condition that his wife, Eloise, accepted without complaint. Barbara envied her the ability to live what appeared to be a totally contented life within so circumscribed a world. In her forty-first year, Eloise was almost unchanged from the very pretty and vulnerable young girl Barbara's brother Tom had married and then divorced. But her prettiness, almost a cliché, a round face, blue eyes and blond hair, masked a woman whose life was filled with pain, anxiety, and fear. The pain came from a vicious form of migraine which she suffered from chronically, and the anxiety was equally constant.

She lived with named fears and nameless fears. The onset of her migraine attacks — known to medicine as cluster headache — was usually without warning, and the pain was utterly devastating, and no hour of her life was without the anticipation of pain. The nameless fears were many and had their origin years ago in the belief that her divorced husband, Thomas Lavette, would take away her son. As this fear faded, after the birth of Joshua, her second son, it was replaced by an amorphous anxiety that had no hold on reality and increased her vulnerability; and since she had few defenses, she tended to fall into an attitude of doll-like imperturbability that was frequently taken for stupidity. Mrs. Johnson, who was Frederick's grade adviser at the local high school, made this mistake. She had felt it worthwhile to visit Frederick's mother at home, and now she wondered whether all she had said did not fall on deaf ears or, more likely, totally uncomprehending ears. Eloise simply sat and listened, her face betraying no emotion at all.

“But it's not that he's bad. He's not rowdy or disruptive?”

“Disruptive?” Mrs. Johnson asked. “Yes, of course disruptive. He makes fools of his teachers. That is disruptive.”

“But how? I don't understand how.”

“I have been trying to explain how. Miss Catell is his English teacher. She had given the class an assignment, and the following day, she asked for their input concerning the assignment. Your son proceeded to inform Miss Catell that input means something that is put in, not something given out, and then he went on to advise her that her knowledge of the English language was primitive at best. You can imagine the effect on the class. You can imagine the effect on Miss Catell.”

“But was he right?” Eloise asked desperately.

“It is not a question of right or wrong, nor is it the first time he has done this, and not only in Miss Catell's class, but in the class of Mr. Pikwick, our science teacher, whom he corrects constantly, and in his social studies class — and need I go on? If I can't make you understand what his effect is on the school, then really —”

“I think I do understand,” Eloise whispered. “I will talk to him —”

“That won't be enough. I think I must ask you to take him out of school.”

“It's only a few weeks until the term ends,” Eloise pleaded.

“I would like to talk to his father.”

“My husband's in San Francisco. But tomorrow, I promise you.”

The following day, Adam went to the school and spoke to Mrs. Johnson, and that evening he spoke to his son. He had never thought of Fred as anyone but his son. Like Eloise, he was soft-spoken, a very gentle human being, and with both his mother and father, Fred reversed the roles, as if they were his children, never indulging his bitter, caustic wit where they were concerned. He listened to his father now, and shook his head hopelessly.

“I'm not an idiot. I can't sit there day after day and supposedly be enlightened by idiots.”

“They're not idiots, Fred. They're qualified teachers.”

“Who qualifies them?”

“I'm not denying your intelligence,” Adam said patiently. “You're a lot brighter than most people your age. That ought to give you enough forbearance to work this thing out. You have to finish the semester, and then another year and you'll be in college.”

Fred nodded. “I'll try.”

Grimly silent, Fred sat through the next two weeks, and then the summer vacation began. He was waiting eagerly when Barbara arrived with Sam, and then with scarcely more than a nod to Barbara, he led Sam in a race up the hillside, not pausing until both boys collapsed breathless at the old stone fireplace.

“Oh, God, this place is real!” Sam said. “Everything else stinks. This is real, and for a month I don't have to look at that phony creep my mother married.”

“From which I gather you don't care for Kit Carson.”

“You can say that again. Suppose I ask old Jake for a job? Do you think he'd give me one? I could stay the whole summer maybe, if I had a job here.”

“How old are you now?” Fred asked him.

“Almost thirteen.”

“Well, you could try. You're almost as tall as I am. No more wolf pack this summer, because I'm working in the bottling plant. Except on weekends. I loused up at school, and they almost dumped me. I wish they had. I was just too smart-ass with the idiots they call teachers, but I did have them going ape.”

“Oh, Jesus, I wish you were at Roxten with me. I needed you, Freddie. They ran my ass ragged.” He turned to his cousin and asked curiously, “But why would they want to dump you? Mom says you walked off with all the honors, and you're on the basketball team.”

“It's my nasty nature. Example. This guy Burns, he teaches social studies. Talks about pedestal people. He means people you put on a pedestal. I hate that
Time
magazine talk, and anyway, he's not saying pedestal but pederast. So I stand up and say, ‘Mr. Burns, you don't mean pederast, surely.' So he snaps at me, ‘What the devil
is
pederast?' So help me, he doesn't know what the word means. I feel called upon to explain. Could I do otherwise, Sammy?”

“Absolutely not,” Sam agreed, as ignorant as Mr. Burns of the meaning of the word.

Carrying Sam's suitcase, Barbara followed Eloise up the staircase into the room which Sam would share with Joshua, Fred's eleven-year-old brother. It was a pleasant, sunny room, and Barbara expressed her delight in it. “I don't know how to thank you,” Barbara said.

“Barbara, I love you, and we love Sam, and the boys are crazy about him, and anyway we're family, and whatever I did, I could never repay you and your mother for all your kindness.”

There's no payment or repayment, Barbara thought. This place in the Napa Valley, with its sprawling stone buildings, its children and dogs and endless rows of vines, like a gigantic knitted carpet, had given her a family. Without the people who lived here — Jake Levy and his wife, Clair; the old lady, his mother; and Adam and Eloise; and Barbara's brother Joe and his wife, Sally — without them, there was only herself and her mother and Sam. In other places, a family might be taken for granted, but California was still a land of exile.

Eloise was asking about Jean.

“I don't know,” Barbara said. “There are days when she appears to be her old self, and then the depression begins again.”

“I've begged her to come and stay with me.”

“No. Even Oakland is an uncivilized hinterland as far as mother is concerned. She won't leave San Francisco, and mostly she doesn't set foot out of the house. I hate to ask it with all the kids here, but if you could only spend a day or two with her. She does love you, Eloise.”

“I'll manage. I will. I have enough help to keep the house going, and Adam will understand. When do you and Carson leave?”

“Tomorrow. We fly to New York, and then we take the
Cristoforo Colombo
to Genoa. We'll spend a week in Florence and Rome, and then two weeks at a hotel on Ischia in the Bay of Naples.”

“How wonderful! How I envy you!”

“I don't know — well, I hope it works. We'll be away five weeks.”

“Of course it will. I never had a real honeymoon. The first time, with Tom, was just miserable, and then when I married Adam, I couldn't bring myself to leave Freddie.”

“I know,” Barbara agreed. “I have my own guilts, but Carson needs a break from the paper. Only, it's odd. It sounds so damn romantic, and I feel so old. You know, I'm forty-five.”

“You never looked better. You don't look a bit different from the first time we met.”

Barbara burst out laughing. “What nonsense!”

“Truth. Only if I could plan a honeymoon, it would have to begin in Paris.”

“Yes. That's what Carson said.”

It was as close as they had come to their first real quarrel. Carson proposed that they begin their honeymoon with a week in Paris. “I told you I was with the 2nd Armored when we entered Paris, and I've never been back there. I always planned to, and somehow I never got around to it. And now to go there with you, the way you handle French, well, that would be something, wouldn't it?”

Barbara shook her head. “No, I don't think so, Carson.”

“Why?”

“I can't go there on a honeymoon. Try to understand.”

“What am I to understand? Is it Marcel? He's been dead twenty years. Or Bernie? He's been dead over ten years. Do you never let go of anything?”

“They're both dead. I don't want to talk about them.”

“But that's it, isn't it? And if it is that, then there's all the more reason to go to Paris and rid both of us of the ghosts.”

“There are no ghosts,” Barbara said gently. “I want this trip to be something good and wonderful. I've never in all my life been on a vacation trip where I was relaxed and happy. I can't be relaxed and happy in France.”

“Which means that we never set foot in France.”

“No, no, Carson. It doesn't mean that. We'll go to France — anywhere you want to go. But please, not on our honeymoon.”

His reaction revealed a part of his character she had not seen before. He sulked. He pulled away from her. He became a small boy thwarted. The saving grace was that it lasted only an hour or so, and then he said to her, “I'm being an idiot about the whole thing. Of course I understand.”

She was not sure she herself understood, and by no means sure that Carson understood, and she said it to Eloise now, “I don't know why I'm telling you all this, only I'm so damned frightened.”

“Of what?” Their roles were reversed. It had always been Eloise, terrified of everything, who came to Barbara for sustenance.

“Of what I've done,” she confessed. “Of this marriage. It was just that the whole world went to pieces with pop's death — and there I was.”

“But, Bobby, he loves you and you love him.” The expression on Eloise's face was so woebegone that Barbara burst out laughing.

“Absolutely. And we shall both live happily ever after.”

When Dr. Kellman informed Jean that he would be willing to give her sleeping pills, but only four at a time, she stared at him in astonishment and then burst out laughing. It was the first time Kellman had seen her laugh since Dan's death. “Milton, you are a dear,” she said to him. “You're a sweet, worried darling. But I am not going to take my own life.” “It never crossed my mind.”

“Oh? Then why four at a time — and do you know how silly that is, dear Milton? I could simply put them aside for a few weeks, and then
finis.
Have no fears. I sleep poorly, but I am told that is one of the afflictions of age. I am sixty-nine, you know, and that makes for an old woman. By the way, is this a professional call?”

He had dropped in unexpectedly, and now, standing awkwardly in her living room, he assured her it was not. He was a slender, bald man in his fifties, who peered through heavy glasses at the tall, white-haired woman who faced him. “By no means an old woman,” he said to her. “You're in good health. What you need is fresh air and exercise.”

“Ah, a message Barbara left with you. And if this is not a professional call, let's sit down and have something — a drink? No, I think it's early for both of us, and I am not becoming a sorrowing lush, if that has occurred to you.”

“Never.”

“Then tea?”

“Tea will be fine. I have twenty minutes. Stole ten from my patients and ten from the hospital.”

“I envy you. I have nothing — day's end to day's end. And I don't pity myself. I simply state a fact.”

“Then the fact must be changed.”

They sat in the tiny breakfast room at the back of the house, where the window overlooked the bay and the bridge, where she and Dan had faced each other so often, and Kellman admired the view. “I always dreamed of a view of the bay and the bridge. Never managed it.”

“The bay was here when Dan and I built the place,” Jean reflected. “Not the bridge. But you know, Milton, you reach a point where you don't see things out of one pair of eyes. There has to be another, otherwise it's meaningless. You don't care. Times when Danny and I used to watch television, not too often, but now and then. I can't watch it alone. It's just a bore.”