The Legacy (24 page)

May Ling had known him since they were children and his sister, Carla, and he had been accepted as members of the wolf pack — ill-at-ease members, perhaps, for even at a place like Higate the barrier between the Chicanos and the Anglos, as the Mexicans called them, was never completely broken.

It was about ten o'clock that evening, the food and the cake eaten, the four-piece band playing slow, old-fashioned music, that May Ling told Sally that she was going outside for just a while.

“Alone?” Sally asked her. “Why don't you take Sam or Freddie?”

“I'd rather be alone. I want to walk and think.”

“All right. But don't be too long. We'll be leaving in an hour or so, and I think you ought to open your presents.”

“Must I? It embarrasses me.”

“I think you should.”

May Ling slipped outside at a moment when no one appeared to be watching her. She wanted very much to be alone, to taste the bittersweet of the evening, to contrast her own saddened happiness with a world where a President could be shot down in cold blood. The evening was cool, but not cold, and a bright moon cast a silvery radiance over the fields and vine-shrouded buildings. She walked up the hillside to the old fireplace where they had spent so many hours as children, and there, sitting with his hands clasped around his knees, she found Rubio Truaz. The meeting was unexpected. He scrambled to his feet.

“I didn't think anyone would be here,” he said lamely.

“Neither did I.”

“When I saw you —”

“When I saw you —”

“I mean,” he said, “that when I saw you, I thought for a moment that I was dreaming, because I was sitting here thinking about you, and then I looked up and there you were.”

“I only wanted to be alone and breathe some fresh air.”

“I'll go down if you want to be alone.”

“No. Oh, no. You were here first.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“No. We can both stay here for a little while. I have to be back in a few minutes. They want me to open the presents. I hate to do that.”

“Why?”

“Because someone whose present isn't as nice or expensive as someone else's feels bad. I don't want anyone to feel bad at my birthday.”

“I know. If I had the money, I would have given you a diamond necklace.”

“Why? And what on earth would I do with a diamond necklace?”

“Wear it. Not that it would make you any more beautiful than you are.”

May Ling thought about it for a moment before she answered. “No one ever said anything like that to me before.”

“I said it a hundred times, but very quietly.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Can you sit on the ground in that dress, or will it spoil it?”

“I'll be careful,” May Ling said, dropping down to the ground. Rubio sat beside her. They sat silently for several minutes, looking at the buildings below them and listening to the faint sound of the music. At last, May Ling said, “I feel so guilty because I'm so happy tonight, and such a terrible thing happened.”

“It is terrible, and terrible, cruel things happen all the time. That doesn't mean we can't be happy.”

“Are you?” she asked him.

“I guess I've never been really happy before, because I never felt this way before.”

“What way?”

“Like I want this to go on forever, just the two of us sitting here. But I guess you don't feel that way?”

“But I do. Sort of. Yes.”

Then she heard Sally's voice calling her. The moment was over, but in May Ling's mind the moment would remain forever.

*

There is no doubt that in the earlier periods of man, the sense of time was very different. People lived in a world that was not obsessed with schedules and surrounded with clocks and watches. Time was an easier thing; its flow was gentler; and there was less necessity to mark the beginning and the end. Barbara sometimes brooded about this, remembering the day of Kennedy's assassination as the beginning of a period, a new phase of her existence. On the other hand, an inner clock was also working. Menopause had overtaken her, and although she had known what would happen and had expected it to happen, she was nevertheless deeply shaken. She had discussed it at great length with Dr. Albright, wondering how much it contributed to the long months of depression.

“Of course it's a factor,” Dr. Albright said, “a very important factor. A source of life inside of you dries up, and that's a gigantic psychological blow. Flushes, weariness, fear, and it's the lot of all women, and in your case, you cope with the quality of being a romantic. So many woman have that beaten out of them and crushed before they ever reach your age.”

Was being a romantic a blessing or a curse, Barbara wondered. It was her only kinship to Kennedy, whom she had never seen or met, but he too was a romantic, the last romantic, and now he had died in a hospital in Texas, his head blown open.

Barbara drove home alone from May Ling's party, leaving Sam to spend the night at Higate, and driving through the darkness, she could not pull her mind out of the drama and tragedy that had happened in Dallas. She had been to Dallas once, years ago, autographing copies of her book at the big Cokesbury bookstore, and she remembered the people she had met that day, mostly women, their timid smiles and soft, slurred speech. In her memory, they were self-effacing, gently apologetic for putting her to the trouble of autographing a book. A truck came by, swerving toward her and almost driving her off the road. It broke the chain of her thoughts. She turned on her car radio, listened to the flow of mechanical chatter about what had happened that day, and then switched it off. A hot flush was beginning, taking over her body, her face tight and uncomfortable, her arms wet with sweat.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, “now. Why now?”

It was almost one in the morning when she got home. She took a bath, and after that, she couldn't sleep. She prowled through the empty house, tried to read and discovered that the words made no sense, and then decided to pay neglected bills. Once her father's estate had been settled, a trust fund provided her with enough money to live comfortably if not opulently. She smiled at the thought now; Dan Lavette had been much too wise to leave his daughter a sum of money outright; again the romantic whose guilt would drive her to dispense with it, to give it away.

She wrote out a few checks and then paused. “The devil with this,” she said aloud. “I've written nothing in three years. It's time I put an end to that.” She closed the checkbook, took the cover off her typewriter, inserted a sheet of paper, and typed out a title: “The President's Wife.” Dawn came, and she was still at the typewriter, pounding away.

When she finally stopped working, it was well past seven o'clock. She was exhilarated and excited, not sleepy, not tired, but alive and filled with a sense of herself. She went into the kitchen and made a pot of strong coffee, and drinking it, she leafed through the pages she had written, lingering over one part:

“So it had come finally, at long last, that thing she had dreaded so, that thing that would surely happen to every other woman on earth, but not to her, that thing which they called the menopause, the change of life. She tried to remember all she knew about it, the stuff of her biology class in college. The ovaries stop producing eggs, but there was another part, something to do with the female hormones. She searched through the bookshelves for her old textbook. Had she kept it? Then she found it. Estrogen and progesterone — the two hormones produced in smaller and smaller quantities. She read on in increasing panic: changes in the skin tone, wrinkles, a different distribution of the body fat, fat deposits at the back of the neck, that curse called the ‘dowager hump'; and as she read, she felt a cold sweat break through the hot flush that had overtaken her.”

“Not bad,” Barbara said as she put down the page. “Not bad at all. You've got a hook into something, old girl, and let's see where it takes you.”

She felt a personal sense of triumph. She was able to put it down in sharp, clear typewritten words and look at it coldly and objectively. That was the beginning of something, not simply a book, something else that she would have to think about very deeply. She had a second cup of coffee, layered two slices of toast thickly with peanut butter and jam, a dispensation to herself since Sam was not present, and then went upstairs and showered and dressed — after which she called Boyd Kimmelman and asked him to take her to lunch. They made a date for one o'clock. She then called Eloise in Higate, and was told that Sam had been invited to stay for Thanksgiving, which meant missing only a couple of days of school, which he had assured Eloise he could comfortably miss. Could he stay? Barbara agreed reluctantly, convinced that Sam had invited himself. She then went back to the typewriter, felt suddenly sleepy, and decided to stretch out on the couch for just a minute or two. She awakened in panic, discovered that it was five minutes to one, dashed some cold water on her face, ran a comb through her hair, and arrived at Gino's Italian restaurant twenty minutes later.

She kissed Boyd and apologized breathlessly. “You should be raging at me,” she said, “but you're a dear man and you sit there smiling. I'll try to make up for it. I'll never be late for lunch with you again.”

“What happened?”

“I fell asleep. I was up all night writing. I wrote for six hours straight — six hours. Can you believe that, Boyd? God, I'm so excited! I've started a book. Where have I been these past few years? I suppose I'm heartless, because the whole notion leaped into my mind after I heard the terrible news about Kennedy. I'm calling it
The President's Wife,
and I want to tell
the
woman's point of view, the story of a woman married to this power-compelled man who has finally made it to the ultimate top, all the power and all the glory, and what happens to the woman? That's what I want to write. What happens to the woman? Oh, I know, I'll have to go back to that hateful city of Washington and prowl around, and I swore I never would, but this is something, believe me ——”

“I do believe you, but do you suppose you could pause for just a minute or two while we order lunch. I'm starved.”

“Of course. I'm thoughtless, and you've been such an angel.”

“You're right.” They ordered lunch, and when that had been done, he said to Barbara, “It sounds great, and I'm damn pleased that you've pulled out of that slump, but where do I come into it?”

“Two ways. But first, the legalities.”

“What legalities? If you're writing fiction, there aren't any legalities. I presume your President's wife will be a fictional person?”

“Absolutely.”

“And your supporting characters, will they all be fictional?”

“No, they can't be. I have to anchor it in history, and there will have to be at least some real people.”

“All right,” Boyd told her, “we'll take them as they come. Let me pour you some wine. The point is, it's almost impossible to libel a public figure the way our laws are set up. In England, it's another matter, but our laws are very liberal on that point.” He poured the wine. “Now what else?”

“I want you to find me a President's wife I can talk to.”

“Just like that?”

“I have faith in you, Boyd.”

“Bobby, darling, faith has no place here. The field is too limited. Mrs. Roosevelt might have succumbed to your charm and beauty, but she died last year. What kind of questions do you want to ask this lady?”

“Very intimate questions.”

“Honey, you are a notorious woman, an ex-jailbird, a divorcée. You are absolutely asking the impossible.”

“As I said, I have faith in you. You have all sorts of connections. I have faith in you.”

“You said that twice. You really think I could set this up.”

“Absolutely.”

“Then if you have all this admiration for my qualities, why won't you marry me?”

“You never asked me.”

“Suppose I asked you now.”

“That's not asking,” Barbara said. “You were hungry. Why don't you eat?”

“I'm asking you.”

“You're not serious?”

“Completely so.”

“Boyd darling, I've married enough. It doesn't work.”

“You always married the wrong man.”

“True. That's why I must stop.”

“I'm too short — right?”

“How tall are you?”

“Five eight.”

“So am I. You're tall enough.”

“If you go barefoot.”

“Boyd, I'm trying to be sensible. That's new for me.”

“You don't love me.”

“Sure I do. You're darling. I go to bed with you, don't I? I wouldn't do that if I didn't love you.”

“Tell me something,” Boyd said. “If Marcel had lived, would that have worked?”

“You do have a way of asking questions. I don't know, Boyd. I sometimes think that sort of love comes only once, only when you're very young. That was twenty-five years ago.” She shook her head. “No more of this. We'll talk about Presidents' wives.”

Since the death of his wife, Joanna, in 1959, Stephan Cassala had become an increasingly frequent visitor to the house on Russian Hill. His mother, Maria Cassala, had died a year after his wife, at the age of eighty-three, a gentle death, passing away in her sleep. His son, Ralph, a professor at Stanford working experimentally in the field of subatomic particles, had married and lived in a small house on the edge of the campus. This left Stephan Cassala alone in the great house at San Mateo that his father had built half a century before, a monumental pile of stone and wood, created as the realization of the dream of a semiliterate Sicilian immigrant. At sixty-eight, Stephan was retired. A ten percent interest in the Lavette shipping company, sold by Dan more than ten years ago, had given Stephan all the money he would ever require, more than sufficient to keep the house at San Mateo functioning. But after his mother's death, the house became a hollow, echoing morgue, and he put it up for sale and took an apartment in San Francisco.