The Legacy (14 page)

Carson was gentle and persuasive. “Of course I'd want a small house. I know there are only the two of us and the boy. But the fact remains that I am the publisher of the paper. Hell, I could dump that too, and maybe in time I will, and then we could fall into a beach house at Malibu where we'd both be a damn sight happier. I know that, Bobby. But right now, I am what I am. I am what you married. I have to entertain — no, not the kind of people you find so distasteful. But I am a sort of pivot factor out here, people from Washington, people from Sacramento, from Europe, from Japan and Hong Kong — they flood in and there's no way in the world I can avoid it. You just might enjoy it.”

“Being a hostess?” Barbara said dubiously.

“Have you ever tried it?”

“I seem to have avoided it.”

“You might like it. It's not easy, not if it's done properly. It wants diplomacy and intelligence. I don't mean that it has to interfere with your writing …”

In the end, Barbara gave in. She had made a commitment, and this came with it, the house came with it, and Carson came with it, and she loved him, and perhaps she loved him most when he was like this, like a small boy pleading for a new toy.

And now she had loaded her car, locked up the house on Green Street — she was to keep it and accept the house in Beverly Hills — and was off to Los Angeles with Sam sitting beside her, glum and wishing that he was still at Higate, sorting wine corks.

In the East, at least until the recent generation, families proliferated and extended themselves. Some families had been in America three centuries, some two centuries, far more a century or less. When the first immigrants left Europe or Africa or Asia, the cut in the umbilical cord was savage and final, and in so many cases those left behind never again saw or spoke to those who had departed. In Ireland, where deep poverty made a return trip unthinkable, the going-off was frequently accompanied by what came to be known as “the American wake,” except that there were more tears for the living who departed than there would have been for the dead in a real wake. But once in America, the families reconstituted themselves, and as generations passed in the new land, there were fathers and mothers and grandparents and great-grandparents and multitudes of uncles, aunts, and cousins. But with the transition to California, the process repeated itself. To California came the odds and ends of families, he and she often with no other kin, with a cord clipped from the past, and thus the new family, beginning its slow growth once again on the West Coast, possessed a tight, almost precious sense of itself. It went beyond blood ties. Friends were often treasured, and friend and family frequently merged.

In that manner, in the somewhat more than half a century since the great earthquake, the Lavettes, the Levys, and the Cassalas had taken on certain aspects of a single family, even though they had mixed blood with the Seldons, the Whittiers, the Harveys, and the Clawsons. It took a while in California for the fine lines among Catholic, Protestant, and Jew to be drawn, and when they were drawn, the texture was uneven and easily parted. Thomas Lavette, Barbara's older brother, had originally married Eloise Clawson. Fred was their son. When Tom and Eloise were divorced, Tom married Lucy Sommers, who was the granddaughter of an Irish gold miner and the daughter of a partner in the Seldon Bank. Threads can be severed; in good time they come together. Thomas Lavette, at this time, in 1959, had the reputation of being the third wealthiest and the third most powerful man on the Coast. Perhaps not. Possibly the fourth or fifth. Whatever the case, his wealth and influence were enough for him to be known as one of the kingmakers. The king who was in the process of being made was Norman Drake, the onetime congressman who, as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had been active in citing Barbara for contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal the names of people who had joined her in sending medical aid to survivors of the Spanish Republican army. And because at least a part of Drake's unenviable body belonged to Thomas Lavette, Dan Lavette had not spoken to his son for years before his death.

In the old East, this might have rent the family asunder. In California, responding to different forces, Tom still felt himself part of the family. His wife, Lucy, shared his feeling. They both felt that for Tom to present Norman Drake to Carson Devron not only would be tactless but would come as an action reflecting, from Carson's point of view, upon the whole family. Do what he might, Tom could not live and act as Thomas Lavette in proud isolation; he had to function as Thomas Lavette of the Lavettes. The difference was subtle but important.

“Why they tossed this in your lap,” his wife, Lucy, said to him, “I don't know. I sometimes doubt that they're as clever as you say.”

The “they” whom she referred to were a group of very wealthy and powerful men who controlled most of the industry in California and a substantial part of it in the rest of the country. They had no name for themselves and they were loosely organized, but they knew who they were. It was almost ten years since Tom had become a part of their circle, and somewhat less than ten years since he had introduced Norman Drake to their tutelage and in large measure ownership.

On this day, Tom and Lucy were having breakfast, as they did each morning they were in town, in the solarium of their gray-stone mansion on Pacific Heights. Tom endured the plant-filled room. Lucy loved it. The huge old house had been built by Lucy's father shortly after the earthquake, and Lucy treasured it as she treasured the memory of her father.

“And if they are as clever as you seem to think,” Lucy went on, “then their choice of Norman Drake is, to say the least, incongruous. To think of that wretched, sniveling little man as President of the United States — well, it boggles the mind.”

“The point is that he is ours. He's our wretched, sniveling little man.”

“And how on earth do you propose to get him elected?”

“The same way he got elected to the Congress and the Senate.”

“And what is that? Does your voter recognize his own deplorable self? Is it the lowest common denominator? Or is he everyman? If so, heaven help us.”

In recent years, Tom had come to face the fact that he disliked his wife. She was aggressive, very competent, and brighter than he was. For the first years of their marriage, he had accepted this condition with gratitude; few people knew how many of the most successful moves of GCS were inspired by Lucy; and while this had pleased Tom at first, now it only irritated him and deepened his frustration. There was little love between them in the beginning, but there was dependence and necessity; when the dependence and necessity evidenced itself of late Tom responded with outer irritation and inner rage. He now said coldly, “The point is not his vote-getting ability, but how do I sell him to Carson Devron? And I have to. He's mine. I brought him to the others. I brought him to my tailor. I even got him to stop picking his nose in public. And that miserable damn sister of mine had to marry Devron.”

“You don't bring him to Carson,” Lucy said. “You bring him to Christopher and Lila. Momma and daddy. They understand these things. They will sell him to Carson.”

“Christopher Devron,” Tom said thoughtfully. “The old man still runs things, doesn't he?”

“I would presume so,” Lucy said.

The old man, Christopher Devron, reminded Tom of his father, Dan Lavette. He had the same air of command, the same poise, the same large, erect stature that defied time. He was seventy-four, and his face was as wrinkled as the desert mountains, seen from thirty thousand feet, but his eyes were pale blue and direct and coldly judgmental. The eyes had examined Tom carefully and calculatingly before he nodded and said, “So you're Dan Lavette's boy. I never met your father, but from all I know, he was one uncommon and singular man. And I know a hell of a lot, sonny, so you don't have to explain. We're a newspaper family, and a knowledge of our own peculiar state history goes with the territory. So your little club wants to foist Norman Drake on the American people?”

“That's one way of putting it ——”

“I know your associates,” Devron interrupted. “Dined with them a few times, but I'm not a joiner. I also know Norman Drake.”

“Then I think you might agree with me ——”

“What makes you think so?” Devron interrupted. “Don't presume, boy. There's damn little chance I'd agree with you on anything, particularly on qualities possessed by Norman Drake. Unless you're going to tell me he's a vote-getter.”

“He is,” Tom said gently.

“And what else are you going to tell me about him?”

Tom grinned. “Nothing. Not one damn word more.”

The old man accepted his smile and returned it. He opened a bottle of brandy and poured two glasses, handing one to Tom and setting the decanter down almost with reverence. “Like it?” he asked as Tom drank.

“Wonderful brandy.”

“California brandy. Don't ever forget that, sonny. Our brandy's as good as any in the world and our climate's a damn sight better. Now, about Norman Drake — he ain't without quality, not by any means. He doesn't bite the hand that feeds him, he loves money, and he was born right here in Southern California. Those are qualities. Could he become President? Well, sonny, it's high time we had our own boy in there, and you're not the first one to bring up Norman Drake. As far as my own taste is concerned — well, if you're going to dabble in politics, you'd better turn off taste and smell. If you're going to seek out virtue, you go to a church, not to a cathouse.”

“Would your paper support him?” Tom asked flatly.

“Right to the point, huh? I kind of like you, Thomas. My son publishes the paper, and my son is married to your sister. I don't imagine you and your sister have a great deal in common.”

“We talk to each other.”

“That's something. Not a hell of a lot, but something. I don't expect family to love each other, but they should stay connected. You're not a Catholic, are you?”

“I was raised an Episcopalian.”

“Of course you were. Your grandfather owned a piece of Grace Cathedral, didn't he?”

“He willed them some property — yes.”

“I liked old Tom Seldon. He was a good man, for a banker. Now it looks like the Democrats are going to play with that young snotnose from Boston, the Kennedy kid. Norman Drake. He might do it. I don't think America's ready for the Pope yet, and that kid from Boston might just give Drake the edge he needs.”

“Can you convince your son of that?” Tom asked warily.

“I think so. His daddy still owns the paper, and if I can't convince him, his mother can. How certain are your people that Drake can have the nomination?”

“They appear to be certain.”

“All right, sonny. I'm not saying yes, and I'm not saying no. But I sure as hell will think about it. It's interesting — Norman Drake as President. My God, how low we have sunk.”

The butler picked up the telephone, and then told Barbara the call was for her. Or perhaps he was not a butler. Carson preferred to call him the houseboy. In Beverly Hills, they had things like houseboys. The sprawling stucco-coated mansion on Rexford Drive that Carson had bought for himself and his bride required three persons as full-time help simply to keep it operative: a cook, a housemaid, and a houseboy. The gardener came in twice a week, and for large dinners and parties, caterers joined the cook. The servants were quartered in a cottage behind the pool. The house had an enormous living room, a library, large dining room, kitchen, pantry, and seven bedrooms. Carson bought it furnished, but he assured Barbara that she had a free hand to replace any or all of the furniture. Given that privilege, gift, assurance, promise, Barbara had been overcome by a sort of paralysis, a larger token of the kind of paralysis that overtook her now with the phone ringing, indeed whenever the phone rang. She had answered telephones all her life, yet in this house her ordinary response was constantly frozen. It was not simply that she hated the huge pseudo-Spanish Colonial mansion; it dwarfed her and diminished her. At first, she had confronted it. She had answered the phone; she had made notes; she had studied the oversized chairs and couches and tables — and then, bit by bit, she began to surrender. The surrender began in her search through the house for a room in which to work. She chose a room, but it was dark. In the burning sunlight of Southern California, all the rooms of the house were dark. An electrician came and rigged lights, and she sat under the lights and the words that were the tools of her trade would not come. Carson called it “writer's block.” “Every writer experiences it,” he assured her. Then, when she had sat by a ringing telephone three times without touching it, Carson talked to her, was offered no explanation, and then instructed Robin, the houseboy, to answer the phone. He decided that Barbara was depressed, but when he brought up the question, she refused to discuss it. She remembered the depth and terror of the depression she had suffered in prison. She now told herself that there was a qualitative difference between depression and being depressed.

And now the butler, houseboy, or whatever, a Korean named Robin Park, answered the telephone and then went to Barbara's workroom, where she sat staring at her typewriter, to tell her that the Santa Monica chief of police was on the phone and wished to talk to Mrs. Devron.

“You said the chief of police?”

“Yes, missy, chief of police.”

“Doesn't he want Mr. Devron?”

“He say missy not mister.”

She picked up the telephone, and the voice at the other end asked her whether she was Mrs. Devron.

“Yes. What is this all about?”

“We have your son here, mixed up in malicious mischief. I been talking to him, and seeing who his father and mother are and him being a juvenile, well, I'd rather talk to you before we charge him with anything.”