The Legacy (25 page)

He fell into the habit of dropping in at Jean's house at cocktail time two or three days a week. They would have a drink, and then they would go to dinner and occasionally to the theater or a film. Other times they would meet for lunch and then stroll together along the Embarcadero or in Lincoln Park. Even at seventy-three, Jean cut a handsome figure, erect and slender, her blue eyes still clear, her hair white and thick. All of his adult life, Jean had occupied a place in Stephan's fantasies, but in his mind, she was unapproachable and properly so, the wife not only of his best friend but of a man he literally worshipped. Now the fires had quieted, and he was grateful for the fact that she regarded him as a dear friend, someone to be with and to lean on.

Jean, on the other hand, was even more grateful. Stephan never approached her as an old woman; in his eyes, she was still the queenly woman, the
beauty
of a time long past, when that in itself was a title and an accolade, and his manner toward her was of an old-world courtliness. Tall, darkly handsome, his skin sallow, his white mustache rather grand, he was as unlike Dan as anyone could be; yet they made a handsome couple, and Stephan never presumed beyond a rigidly established formal relationship.

Still, Jean had guilts about the whole thing. “I don't know what I would do without him,” she told Barbara. “We live in a society that has no place for the old.”

“You're not old, mother.”

“Am I not? Don't speak nonsense, my dear. I'll soon be seventy-four, and that is old. Every man I ever knew is either dead or has become one of those doddering old fools in the clubhouse on California Street. As for the women, they've surrendered their minds, those that are still alive.”

“Which means nothing. You're very much alive.”

“I like to think so, but what will I do, Bobby? The poor man's in love with me.”

“That's wonderful. He's had a rotten life.”

“I am not in love with him. I'm an old lady, and I am not in love with anyone except my grandsons. I'm one of those unfortunate creatures who was only able to love one man, your father.”

“I don't know too much about sex at your age,” Barbara said, “but has he ever made a pass? I mean ——”

“What on earth are you talking about!” Jean exclaimed.

“Then the whole thing's academic, isn't it? He's a dear friend. He interests you. He escorts you ——”

“You will never grow up, will you?”

“Perhaps not. But I'm working at it. I've started a new book, and I've sent off a hundred pages to Harris Fielding. You do remember him?”

“Is he still alive?”

“Mother, all sorts of people are still alive, and he's still a literary agent, and in his letter he wanted to know whether the remarkable Jean Lavette is still as beautiful as ever.”

“No, I don't believe that.”

“It's the truth. I'll show you the letter. I told him absolutely, even more so.”

They were sitting in Barbara's living room, and Jean could not resist glancing at a mirror, across the room and obliquely reflecting her.

Telling Dr. Albright about it a few days later, Barbara said, “Sure as God, my mother is going to seduce him. Stephan Cassala will be making love to Jean, and he'll be guilt-ridden and absolutely certain it was his idea.”

“And the notion of a seventy-three-year-old woman going to bed with a man doesn't bother you?”

“Should it?”

“I asked you.”

“I think it's rather great,” Barbara said.

“When are you going to New York?”

“When school ends. I'll ship Sam off to Higate. I'm still a bit wary of the weather in the East, and anyway I hate to leave Sam alone in the house. It's years since I've been East. My agent loves what I've done, and Boyd has come up with a President's wife who will talk to me.”

“Good.” Dr. Albright consulted her appointment book. “Suppose I see you once more, Barbara, a week from now. After that, we'll call it quits.”

“You mean I'm finished?”

“For the time being. If you want to talk, I'm always here.”

Barbara was silent for a while. Then she said, “May I ask you a rather foolish question?”

“There aren't any. Go on.”

“What we've been doing — that's certainly not psychoanalysis, Freudian or otherwise?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then what have we been doing all these months?”

“Just talking to each other. You felt rotten then and you couldn't work. You feel better now, and you're working. It's a kind of therapy, and it helps some people, not all by any means. Are you upset because it's not something more complex and mysterious?”

“Oh, no. No. I'm delighted to know that I'm only moderately crazy.”

“As we all are, Barbara. It's the human affliction.”

Sitting in the lounge at the Woodrow Wilson Society at Princeton, reading and trying to understand a book that had been circulating as a sort of cult object among his associates, Fred Lavette looked up and became aware that he was being confronted. He marked the page and closed Hermann Hesse's
Siddhartha,
and then nodded at the four young men who stood facing him. One of them, Herb Katz, a senior, said, “What do you think?”

“Of this?” tapping the book.

“Read it twice.”

“I'm not looking for salvation. I only want to be able to discuss Hesse with the bright chicks. I'm addicted to bright chicks.”

“I'm addicted to large tits,” Phil Strong said, pulling up a chair. He was an anomaly, an intellectual jock who lived at Ivy and hung out in Woodrow Wilson. He was six foot two, a lineman, whose big body hung easily and loosely under a pleasant, good-looking face and a crop of stiff, sandy hair. Katz was smaller, wiry, intense. The third in the group, Alan Greenberg, was pudgy, middle height, with a remarkable resemblance to Bob Hope; wherefore he was called Hopeful. The fourth young man was black, tall, long-limbed, an excellent basketball player whose color relegated him to Woodrow Wilson, a fact that did not disturb him. Bert Jones had made friends at Woodrow Wilson, and it was a good deal less likely that he would have made them anywhere else on the Princeton campus.

The other three pulled up chairs to face Fred, who inquired with some impatience, “What is it? Do we discuss Hermann Hesse or tits — or is this a deputation?”

“A deputation,” Hopeful told him. “The Siddhartha speaks of repose. The quiet mind attains clarity. We approach you at a moment of Lavette clarity.”

“Knock that off,” Strong said. “Just feed it to him straight.”

“A little delicacy is called for,” Katz said.

“How do you feel about civil rights?” Bert Jones asked Fred.

“That's a dumb question. In fact, that's a provocative question. I've signed every petition you've shoved in front of me. How should I feel about civil rights? I'm no bloody fascist.”

“That's a positive reaction,” Katz said. “Very good.”

“Look, Freddie,” Jones explained, “we're very serious about this. There's a big drive coming up to register black voters in Mississippi — a national thing. Every college is sending people down to work on it, and we want to see Princeton in on it.”

“Just to show the colors,” Strong put in. “So they won't point a finger at the old alma mater and say we head up the shit list.”

“Nothing very big. You wouldn't expect any kind of mass movement out of Princeton, but the four of us are committed, and we need you.”

“We really need you, Freddie.”

“Now wait a minute, just hold on,” Fred told them. “You have the wrong place, the wrong time, and the wrong guy. As they say, my mind to me a treasure is. I'll sign your petitions and I'll put my ten or twenty bucks into the kitty. Intellectually, I'm all for you, but I am not made for the barricades.”

“In other words, when the chips are down you point to the next guy.”

“Exactly.”

“Take it easy,” Bert Jones said. “Just take it easy. All of you laying it on Freddie at once. That's too heavy, and let's not feed him the crap about guts. That's stupid. The point is that we need Freddie, and we got to convince him.”

“Very true,” Strong agreed. “Just look at it another way, Freddie, the camaraderie, the five of us together, free, like one long picnic ——”

“Why do you need me?” Fred asked suspiciously.

“Let's cut out the crap,” Katz said. “You're the only one of us that has a car, a big, proper five-passenger car.”

“Will you hold it down!” Fred hissed. “That's all I need, for one of those lousy proctors to hear that I've got a car. This place crawls with them. Man, do you want to destroy me?”

“Freddie, we don't want to destroy you. We cherish you. We only want to enlighten you.”

“The way I hear it,” Strong said, “there are at least two profs who've had their asses burned by one Freddie Lavette, who insists upon correcting their speech and impugning their thinking. Oh, they would love to know that he keeps a car, that sin of sins, that violation of violations ——”

“You wouldn't!”

“Of course we wouldn't. We'd die before we'd leak it.”

“You bastards,” Fred said. “You miserable bastards.”

“You'll enjoy it,” Katz said.

After dinner one evening, a few weeks before Barbara was scheduled to leave for New York, Sam said to her, “Mom, let's talk.”

“Oh? Don't we?”

“I mean seriously. I've been a long time getting up the courage to say what I want to say, so I think we ought to sit down and be very serious about it.”

“That sounds alarming.”

“I don't know — maybe.”

She wanted to take it lightly, the manner of his approach so grave and quiet, but her heart fell. He was too much like his father, six feet and one inch now, his slender form filled out, his eyes pale blue, very pale blue. Barbara remembered an evening in Karachi in 1944, when she had been a war correspondent, and that evening she had gone to a British officers' dance and had met an old friend, Mike Kendell, an American correspondent. He said he had been in North Africa during the fighting there, and she asked him, as she had asked so many people, about the man she would one day marry and who would become Sam's father. Not so strangely — for war is filled with strange coincidences — he had met him, and in describing him, Kendell mentioned the eyes several times, very pale, icy blue. Her son had those same eyes, and now, turning eighteen, the same hawklike face. A sudden feeling of panic washed over her. She had raised him alone, fed him, cared for him, shared his griefs and frustrations, invented stories to amuse him, washed his dirty clothes, sat terrified in his grandfather's boat while he guided it through a stormy bay, given him books to read, books she loved which he would love, talked to him for hours about every subject under the sun — all of this, and now he was like a stranger, a mysterious shell. How could this be? How was it possible?

She led the way into the living room and poured herself a glass of sherry. It was a rich, heavy sherry, a new product at Higate.

“Will you have a glass?” she asked Sam.

“No, thank you.” Very formal, very precise.

She grimaced. “I don't care for it. Too sweet.”

He seated himself in the old leather chair that had been his father's favorite, and Barbara couldn't help thinking how alike they were, in their movements, in their slow, easy manner of speech. She sat facing him.

“All right, Sammy,” she said. “We're here, and we've filled our bellies. Let's talk.”

He sat in silence for a few long moments, and Barbara waited. Then he said abruptly, “I love you. I think you're one of the finest persons I ever knew — not just because you're my mother.”

“Thank you, darling,” thinking, God help me, what occasioned that?

“I had to say that, because we're going to argue.”

“It's nice, even if you had to say it.”

“I meant it.”

“I know you did.”

“Mom, I'm not going to Princeton.”

“Oh?” Not so terrible after all. What had she been afraid of? “It's a little late in the game, isn't it? I mean, you've been admitted, and that's a pretty decent achievement, even with the family background. Well, it's not the end of the world. I've never been a great Princeton buff. I think Stanford is every bit as good a school, and even though it's late, we could pull a few strings. Stephan Cassala is on the board down there, and it would be wonderful to have you so close.”

“Mom,” he said slowly, uneasily, “I don't mean Stanford.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean —” He shook his head. “I don't want to go to college right now.”

She was silent for a while, and Sam waited. She was asking herself, “What do I say now? How do I handle this? How do I get inside him and guess what goes on there?”

“Sam,” she finally said, very quietly, “there has to be a time when a young man decides what he's going to do with his life. If the world were different, we could just live our lives. In this world, we can't. We're a part of a very wealthy family, but we're not rich. My father left a trust fund that provides enough to cover our needs, and it will continue for the rest of my life and then the money will go to you. As you know, I took nothing from Carson. I'm writing again, and I think I have a piece of what may be a good book. I'll earn some money that way, possibly a good deal. I would see you through college, of course, but if you were to throw away the opportunity for a college education, I would not support you. As much as I love you — and you're the most important thing in my existence — I would insist that you stand on your own two feet.”

“I know that,” he said unexpectedly. “I respect you for saying that. I wouldn't have it any other way.”