The Legacy (23 page)

“I lost my head completely.”

“But you saw nothing very wrong in your brother's coldblooded scheme to foist a man like Richard Nixon on the American public ——”

“Of course I did!” Barbara exclaimed. “It stinks!” She leaped to her feet, pacing across the room, turning on Dr. Albright. “What was I supposed to do? Tell Carson that these were bad boys and that he was fine and human to be shocked by their behavior! I have lived in this lousy male world for almost half a century. The shock has worn off. I'm a woman! You fight it up to a point, and then you throw up your arms and you accept it and you admit to yourself that you're no damn different from any other woman and that you've all been stepped on and walked over and defecated on since time began. You know, I could have finished that screenplay. I'm sure you wonder why I keep talking about it, because how important is it in that stupid industry where they ruin everything they touch? But it was important to me. It was my first book and maybe my best and I tore it out of my guts, and that was a time when women didn't write about what they really felt. Yes, my first draft needed work. I knew that. And this man, the director, Jerry Kanter, came to me and told me that if I went to bed with him, he'd see to it that no other writer was put on the job. Oh, he was a doll! Barbara, he said to me, you are absolutely the first writer I ever asked to join me in the sack. Actresses, that's something else, but lady writers look like shit. It comes with the trade. But you, baby, are something to write home about, and all you have to do is bend that WASP backbone of yours a little and I'll see that you stay on the job at four thousand a week, which ain't hay, believe me—”

She stopped and stood facing Dr. Albright, her breast heaving, her fists clenched. Then she dropped back into her chair. Dr. Albright pushed the box of tissues toward her.

“Stop it, damn you! I'm not going to cry.”

“What did you say?”

Barbara shook her head angrily.

“What did you say to Jerry Kanter?”

“I told him to go to hell.”

“Just that?”

“It was enough.”

“What would you have said to him if he weren't Jewish?”

“What? Why, it never even occurred to me that he was Jewish.”

“No? That's strange, Barbara. It occurred to me the moment you mentioned his name. And I never met him.”

“Really, I don't know what you're getting at,” Barbara said, her annoyance increasing.

“And your producer, Mr. Goldberg, he was Jewish, too.”

“Yes, doctor, it's very much a Jewish industry. Jews began it.”

“Can you accept the idea that a Jew can be a bastard? You know, they're not that different from other people.”

“I don't know what you're getting at,” Barbara said stubbornly. “I don't see what this has to do with anything.”

“You're also very provoked with me.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that comes with the territory. I'm no orthodox shrink, as you have discovered by now. Your first husband's name was Cohen, and after his death, you changed your name to Barbara Lavette.”

“Years later. And it just happens that my name was Lavette. I write under that name. Carson's name is Devron. I am still Barbara Lavette.” And when Dr. Albright made no rejoinder, she added, “Yes, Judith, you've touched a nerve. I don't like anti-Semitism, not the taste or sound or smell of it.”

“I didn't think you did. Still and all, it's a complex matter, isn't it?”

“What is?”

“Anti-Semitism,” Dr. Albright said. “It's very complicated in America. My husband was a brilliant surgeon. He died three years ago. His name was Wurtman and he was Jewish. Would I have kept the name of Wurtman if the situation were reversed, or would I have taken his name if his name were Albright? I'm not sure.”

“And you suggest that I changed my name from Cohen because I did not want people to think I was Jewish.”

“Am I suggesting that?”

“It happens that I'm not Jewish. My father's partner was Jewish. He was the best friend my father ever had. My lawyer, Sam Goldberg, was Jewish. I named my son after him. I live in a house I bought from his estate. And I married a Jew. So for you to even suggest that I am an anti-Semite is —”

“Go on. Say it.”

“Obscene.”

“Good. We're at a point now where we can talk to each other, and I don't think we have much further to go. It seems to me, Barbara, that the essence of anti-Semitism is the notion that the Jew is basically different. We've threaded him through our lives, and still when he turns out to be a complete swine, like that director of yours, we're shocked and horrified. And then a nasty little worm of anger and frustration begins to build up.” She glanced at her watch. “I'm afraid our time is up.”

Still angry when she left Dr. Albright's office, Barbara realized that she was stimulated and by no means depressed. She had not been depressed for weeks now.

Love came to May Ling on her sixteenth birthday, sweetly, gently, in the gloaming, as she thought of it. She had her mother's love of words, odd words, different words, and particularly those words that tugged and prodded nostalgically. When twilight, the quick, beneficent California twilight, fell upon the Napa Valley, it was for her the gloaming. She loved the song — in the gloaming, oh, my darling. She was hopelessly romantic, yet gravely wise. If anything, she lacked exuberance, preferring refuge in her vivid fantasies. Only one quarter Chinese, she was totally Oriental in appearance, with her grandmother's skin, straight black hair and tiny uptilted nose. Curiously enough, her young brother, Daniel, eight years old, took after their mother, with Sally's pale skin, straw-colored hair and blue eyes. Nothing could convince May Ling that she was not hopelessly unattractive, certainly not her mother's assertion that she was very beautiful. She was five feet and eight inches tall, quite slender, and in a culture that worshipped oversized breasts, hers were tiny. In the face of fervent pleas, Sally refused to allow her daughter to curl or dye her hair, and in this she was wise, for May Ling was indeed a beautiful young woman, wonderfully graceful and soft-spoken and gentle. She wore her black hair banged and bobbed short and endured it with resentment, but it enhanced her delicate beauty, as Sally well knew. Yet bit by bit, May Ling was becoming aware of herself, resenting her difference less and less. She discovered in her father's library a book of Chinese philosophy called
The Natural Way of Lao-tzu,
translated from the Chinese by her great-grandfather. This led to the further discovery that her father, Joseph Lavette, could actually speak Mandarin Chinese. She read Lao-tzu, delighted with its directness and simplicity, and from this went on to other explorations in old Chinese philosophy, and then bedeviled her father to teach her Chinese. The truth is that Joe Lavette remembered very little of the Mandarin that his grandfather had taught him when he was a child, but he could still read the ideographs, and one day he returned from the hospital in San Francisco, where he did his surgery, with a stack of Chinese books and newspapers. After that, there were evenings when Joe and May Ling sat together, struggling with the Chinese characters, triumphantly unlocking a word here, a sentence there.

And then, for that evening when love came to May Ling, which was November 22, 1963, Sally brought out, from a bed of tissue paper in an old chest of drawers, a gown which had belonged to Joe's mother. Today was May Ling's birthday, and the gown was a gift that Sally had treasured ever since she first married Joe. It was of heavy black silk, decorated with royal dragons worked in gold thread, and when May Ling first saw it, she was speechless, staring at it with dark, delighted eyes. It fitted her perfectly except for its length, but since it came to above her ankles, that was not a problem. From the same bed of tissue paper, Sally revealed a pair of black silk slippers, embroidered in the same gold thread, but alas, May Ling's feet were at least two sizes larger than her grandmother's, and plain Mary Janes were substituted. Nevertheless, May Ling was impressive enough in the gown to make both her parents stare at her in wonder and delight.

The birthday party, to which family and friends were invited, was Jake Levy's gift to his granddaughter, and it was scheduled to take place in Higate in the old bottling plant, now converted into a reception and tasting room. A four-piece band had been hired to provide the music, and aside from May Ling's friends in Napa, Levys and Lavettes and Cassalas swelled out the list of invited guests. Fred had been sent a round-trip ticket from Princeton for the Thanksgiving holidays, and Barbara and Sam drove over for the evening.

Joe, Sally, and May Ling were on their way to Higate, Joe driving with May Ling in the place of honor beside him, and Sally and Daniel in back of the car, when they heard the news over the radio of the assassination of President Kennedy.

They reacted variously. May Ling burst into tears; young Daniel was not certain he knew what it meant; Joe muttered softly about the hopeless barbarism of the human race; and Sally, after the first shock, realized that this would put a damper on what she had hoped would be a delightful and enchanting evening — an evening that May Ling had been looking forward to for months.

“How can we have a party now?” May Ling asked woefully.

“We will have the party,” Sally told her. “This is a dreadful, terrible thing, but we'll help no one by canceling the party. Life goes on. President Johnson has already been sworn in. He didn't throw up his arms and call it quits. So just wipe away those tears. Terrible things happen every day, but we don't stop living.”

“Can we, daddy?” she asked Joe. “Can we still have a party? Wouldn't that be cruel and heartless?”

“No, it wouldn't be cruel and it wouldn't be heartless either. We wouldn't plan a party now, but your grandfather has decorated the room and hired a band, and there's probably enough food to feed an army, not to mention the fact that Freddie has flown in a day early and people are on their way from San Francisco and Oakland and San Mateo. I know how you feel, but we'll try to enjoy the party just as much as we would have if this hadn't happened.”

May Ling tried, as did the others at the party. For Barbara, the lovely child in the incredible Chinese gown was like a re-creation of the woman after whom she had been named, Joe's mother, the Chinese librarian who had been Dan Lavette's mistress and then his wife; and Barbara was relieved that Jean had pleaded a cold, and thereby was absent.

“It's just wonderful,” Barbara said to Joe. “It makes me believe in something — I'm not very sure what — but she is May Ling. She moves the same way, her voice is the same.”

“Yes, genetics works most strangely.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, stop being a damned scientist. How a clod like you ever produced such a child, I'll never know.”

“Thank you, sister.”

“Nevertheless, I'm glad mother isn't here. It's too far along for her to see the other May Ling again.”

“It's only the dress,” Joe said.

“Of course it's only the dress.”

The party took place, but try as they might, dancing, eating, drinking, the guests could not erase the shadow of something grotesque and hideous. The fact that it had happened two thousand miles away did not help to lessen its impact, and May Ling, who was imaginative and very sensitive, could not drive the images of violence from her mind. She was receptive to the attentions being paid her, in particular the interesting new attitudes of her three cousins, Fred and Sam and Joshua; she embraced her great-grandmother, Sarah Levy, now eighty-three years old, who was thoroughly bewildered by the transformation of what she had always considered a proper Jewish girl into this exotic Oriental creature; and she responded with a grave thank you to Fred's declaration: “You, cousin, are one dynamite lady.”

But it was with Rubio Truaz, the son of Cándido Truaz that May Ling found her first love; and that too was due in part to the strange miasma that the news of President Kennedy's assassination had cast over the party.

It began — although there may have been roots going further back — when May Ling cut the cake, handing a piece to each person with a smile and a few words, something that surprised Sally, who had always considered her daughter to be the epitome of shyness. There were three families of Chicanos at the party, and May Ling tried to say something specially nice to each of the group. She managed this until it was the turn of Rubio Truaz, and then her voice dried up. They stood for a long moment, staring at each other, and then he smiled and nodded and took the piece of cake.

Rubio Truaz was eighteen, in his first year at Berkeley. Jake had persuaded his father to send him to Berkeley, where he could take a number of courses in viticulture, rather than to put him to work at the winery. Like his father, he was tall, over six feet in height, heavily muscled in the shoulders, a pleasant, well-formed head, small features, widely set brown eyes and curly black hair. He was bright, read a great deal, came out of high school with a straight A average, and possessed a mind of his own. He had no intention of spending his life at Higate. In his own romantic fantasies, he saw himself as a lawyer, a committed defender of the rights of the sorely oppressed Mexican-Americans who constitute a community of such numbers in California. His father, Cándido, was subject to no such illusions. Cándido had begun life in America as the child of poor Mexican farm workers; he had labored in the lettuce fields from the time he was five years old and had come finally to Higate as a grape picker. Now, thirty-three years later, he had his own home, a washing machine and a television, and children who never went hungry. If the winery was good enough for him, it was good enough for his children; but on the other hand, he did not check Rubio's curriculum at Berkeley, and Rubio had no doubt that when the time came, he would have his own way.