The Legacy (17 page)

“I wish I could.”

“Meanwhile, where will you be staying? At your house?”

“I'm having lunch with mother, but I'll stay at the house.”

“All right. I'll talk this over with Harvey, and unless there's some change in plans, I'll meet you at the airport. I'll call you at about nine in the morning, and we'll make arrangements.”

She had been away from the house on Green Street for months, and she approached it tentatively, but the moment she entered the small, shadowed vestibule, her heart lightened and she felt a sense of great relief and tranquillity. She prowled through the house, thinking what a pleasant, nice little house it was. Indeed, it was very neat and clean, and if Eloise and Sally had used it, no trace of their presence remained. It was only twelve o'clock, and only a ten-minute walk to her mother's house on Russian Hill, and she felt that she could savor this place awhile longer. She dropped into the old leather chair in the living room, where her husband, Sam's father, would sit and doze as he listened to his Bach recordings. So long ago, eleven years since he had died, slain somewhere in Israel. Poor Bernie. But the thought was without tears, without grief. Time erases things, yet time also deceives, and right now she could feel that it was not eleven years but only yesterday. What a strange, beguiling place the old house was! It was almost as old as the city itself, built by Sam Goldberg for his bride, and then a place where he lived alone after her death and then bought by Barbara, and now standing unlived in but ready for her and waiting. She didn't want to think, to analyze herself and her marriage. Sitting here, she felt good. For all the grief and agony that had befallen her during her life in this house, the memories were comforting. Here she had brought her son from the hospital, and here together they had faced the first twelve years of his life. Barbara sat with her eyes half closed, remembering many things and trying not to remember that the following day she would go back to Beverly Hills.

“You have told me everything, and you have told me absolutely nothing,” Jean said to Barbara, after she had poured the coffee and set out a plate of bakery cookies. She apologized for the cookies, just as she had apologized for the failed soufflé. It was Mrs. Bendler's day off, and since Barbara had suggested that they eat in her mother's home, Jean had prepared lunch herself. “I'm a rotten cook, and baking remains a mystery.” “You look wonderful,” Barbara said. “I'm glad.”

“I look and feel like an old woman. Of course you shall have the fifty thousand dollars. I'll write a check before you leave, and don't argue with me and don't tell me you'll use your own money. I'm as rich as God, indecently rich, and I will not talk about money; and as far as Sam is concerned, I can understand why he did what he did, and if you don't understand it, that, my dear, is a problem to work out yourself. I say again, you've told me nothing.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You, my darling, are absolutely impossible. Do you intend to live your entire life as some ridiculous Girl Scout?”

“I never joined the Girl Scouts, mother.”

“Oh, clever! I would have expected better from you.”

“You're really provoked with me, aren't you?” Barbara said, puzzled.

“Of course I am. Why didn't you go to Carson? The Devrons stink with wealth.”

“I couldn't.”

“You couldn't. Oh, great! You couldn't. What does that mean?”

“It means that Sam is my son, not Carson's.”

“That's a pity, isn't it? Not that it means anything. If Carson is your husband, he's Sam's father. Does he want to adopt him?”

“We never discussed it.”

“Does Sam like him?” Jean asked.

“Mother, it's my life and my son.” Barbara was silent for a moment, staring at her coffee cup. “No, Sam doesn't like him, and Carson is very much aware of it. Mother, I'm a big girl. Marriages are not made in heaven when you're twenty. I don't know where they're made at my age.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“No, it's not something you discuss with your mother, is it? Still, I think you should talk about it — to someone.”

“Perhaps. How about you?”

“Well, I'm a widow. America's filled with them. I was reading the other day that widows own seventy-five percent of the wealth of the country. I try not to feel sorry for myself.”

“You look wonderful. You're still the best-dressed woman in town — it's rotten lonely, isn't it?”

“Lonely?” Jean shrugged. “I have seven charities at the last count. I have the Civic Art Committee. I'm on the museum board, and the governor has just appointed me to the new state advisory council on the arts. I'd give it all for ten minutes with Danny. I pass someone on the street smoking one of those wretched cigars, and my heart stops and I'm ready to dissolve. Sammy would say that I'm dumping on you, and I suppose I am, but I have no desire for pity. There are good days and bad days. Steve Cassala's in town tonight. He's taking me to dinner. Poor, dear man. I think he's been quietly infatuated with me for the past thirty years or so, and never a word passed his honorable lips, and his own marriage has been a loveless, hopeless disaster, pious Catholics, so no divorce ever. It's a lovely world, Bobby dear, and now his wife's here in the hospital, dying of cancer, and Steve is being as gentle and dutiful as a man could be. So we'll have dinner after he visits her. Why don't you join us?”

“Oh, no. Better with you alone. But I didn't know that about Joanna. Poor woman.”

“Yes, and Steve tearing his heart out with guilt. Do you know Joanna well?”

“Not really, weddings and funerals. I've seen her two or three times — last at daddy's funeral.”

“You can stay here, you know. I won't be late.”

“I'll stay at Green Street — unless you feel strongly about my staying here.”

Jean shook her head and smiled. “I think you need a night alone.”

But back in her house on Green Street, Barbara came to the conclusion that the last thing in the world she needed this day was a night alone. She dialed a call to Carson at his office at the paper, and then put down the telephone before the call went through. Then she called the house in Beverly Hills and spoke to Sam. It was four o'clock now, and he was home from school. She asked him what he was doing.

In a strangely mature manner, he said, “Mom, are you checking up on me?”

“Absolutely not. I just wanted to talk to someone I love,” and then wondering why she had said that, thinking that it was a very odd thing for her to say.

A long pause before Sam answered, and then he said, “Where are you — at grandma's?”

“No, in the old house. At Green Street.”

“I wish I was there with you. If you stay there, can I come up for the weekend?”

“I'm coming back tomorrow.”

Again a long pause. “Sure. Don't worry about me. I'm just hanging out here. I'm reading
The Three Musketeers.
It's great.”

“Is it? I never read it.”

“You should. It's great.”

Barbara put down the telephone, stared at it for a moment or two, then dialed her lawyers' number and asked for Boyd Kimmelman. “I was wondering,” she said to him, “whether you're free for dinner tonight?”

“Tonight, tomorrow night, the next night.”

“Would you mind taking me to dinner?”

“I'd love it.”

“About eight? Here at my house.”

“I'll be there.”

Then Barbara called a cab, and took it to St. Mary's hospital. Walking with the sister who led her to Joanna Cassala's room, she had a strange, almost unbearable sensation
déjà vu.
It was the first time she had been in a Catholic hospital since Marcel's death. That was in 1938, twenty-one years ago. Was it possible — twenty-one years? She was twenty-four then, living in Paris, writing for a New York magazine. He was a journalist. The memory of him, of her first love that was like no other love, of his leaving her to go to Spain to write about the civil war there, his being wounded, and then his death of gangrene in the Hospital of the Sacred Heart in Toulouse — all of it flooded over her mind and body; and the nun walking with her asked, “Are you all right, miss?”

“Yes, I'm all right.”

“I know. These things are so sad.”

“Is there no hope for Mrs. Cassala?”

“I'm afraid not.”

Stephan was in the room, sitting by the bed. Joanna, dark-eyed, emaciated, smiled tremulously when she saw Barbara. “How good of you, how thoughtful, to come all the way from Los Angeles.”

Barbara kissed her. Stephan, blinking his eyes, rose to give Barbara his seat. “Raise the bed a little, please,” Joanna said to her husband, “so I can look at Barbara. Don't look at me,” she said to Barbara. “I'm a sight, no makeup, nothing.” Then she began to chatter about Beverly Hills, the film people, the Devrons. In her mind, Barbara had always been a wonderful, glamorous figure. Now Barbara answered her questions, attempted to be amusing and entertaining; but after a few minutes Joanna closed her eyes and became silent.

“She tires easily,” Stephan said. A while later, he stepped out into the corridor with Barbara, who wiped away her tears, hardly knowing whether she was crying for Joanna, herself, or her memories.

“It was so good of you to come,” Stephan said.

“I was here. Mother told me. I didn't know.”

Stephan shook his head hopelessly.

*

Sitting in the restaurant that evening with Boyd Kimmelman, sipping her second martini, Barbara said, “When we were kids, we used to argue that God was a woman. What nonsense! Only a man could screw up things so remorselessly. That poor woman! What a rotten mess this whole thing is!”

“It has its moments, as for example right now. You're talking to a man who is very much at peace with the world.”

“Good. You're talking to a woman who is suffused with guilts. It's a common notion among Jews that you have a corner on the practice of guilt. Believe me, a good, standard white Protestant woman, especially one from what they used to call a good family, could show you depths of guilt you never dreamed of.”

“That's very interesting,” Boyd said. “Go on.”

“I shall. Two martinis make me slightly drunk and very articulate. There's a theory that writers are articulate. Nothing to it. They talk silently to a sheet of paper. Lawyers are something else entirely. Why did you get divorced, Boyd?”

“That's out of left field, isn't it?”

“Out of John Barleycorn.”

“It was during the war. I was in Germany. I got a Dear John letter, and when I got home, I never saw her again. Harvey Baxter took care of it, bless his soul. She was living in Hollywood with a film editor.”

“Weren't you terribly angry?”

“No. To tell you the truth, I was relieved.”

“But that was almost fifteen years ago. Why didn't you marry again?”

“Ah.” He was grinning now.

“You're laughing at me.”

“No, dear Barbara. I couldn't laugh at you. I think I'll have another drink. The first thing a good attorney learns is not to say too much. That's why all lawyers are bores.”

“You're not a bore.”

“Give me time. Now in answer to your forthright question, I lived with a lady for five years or so, and then it just washed out. I don't know how better to explain. I don't find the institution of marriage so enticing. When I think of poor Steve Cassala, of two miserable wasted lives — do you know any happy marriages?”

“Some. My father and mother, for instance. Well,” Barbara said, “that one had some blood, sweat, and tears, but they worked it out. I know of a few others ——”

“Yours?”

“Well, I had lunch with mother, and she said I should talk to someone. I think she regards me as a prim, virginal oversized Girl Scout. Do I give you that impression?”

“Not quite.”

“I think she meant a shrink, not a lawyer. Most of my friends are in what they call therapy, a middle-class word for seeing a priest. I don't think I could stick it. You were asking me about my marriage. It stinks.”

“Oh? I think we should order some food.”

“If you wish. Boyd, what's wrong with me? I loved two men, and one of them died in the Spanish war and the other in Israel. And now I've married a good, decent man I'm not in love with and who wants children I can't give him, and who hasn't slept with me since a week after our honeymoon ended. Oh, he's tried, poor soul — what in God's name am I doing? I think I'm quite drunk, and please order me a large plate of spaghetti and another martini.”

It was a little after seven o'clock in the morning when Barbara awakened. Boyd still slept, lying on his stomach, one arm flung out over the side of the bed. Barbara turned on her side to look at him, and then she ran her hand gently over his thatch of sandy hair. He stirred without waking. Curiously, she felt no regrets, no guilts, only a strange, comfortable calm and satisfaction, as if she had been away for a long time and had finally returned to herself. It had been good, easy lovemaking between two people who were not in love with each other but who nevertheless cared for each other a great deal. They had known each other a long time. Boyd had defended her when she was on trial for contempt of Congress; he had fought for her and pleaded for her. He had said to her last night, “I never permitted myself to fall in love with you, Barbara. A man who doesn't set some limits on himself is either a maniac or a fool or both. I'm neither.” It was nicely said, as she thought of it now, but there were all too many men in the past who had decided they were in love with her. The word was wearing thin. She was pleased that Boyd hadn't used it, and it was enough that he made love with tenderness and sincerity and gave her something she had longed for so desperately. She knew that there were women who appeared to manage a life of completeness without men. She was not one of them, and the thought of existence without love in the physical sense was bleak indeed. Whatever hangups, blocks, and various neuroses might have possessed her, any inhibition against the joy of a body of the opposite sex was not one of them. She had argued it out with Eloise, who was shocked to find Fred and Sam immersed in a copy of
Playboy.
“But why not?” Barbara asked. “Why shouldn't they see how lovely a body can be?” She stretched lazily now, letting the covers slide away; her own body was still tight and supple.