The Legacy (26 page)

He had knocked the props from under her. What do I do now? she wondered. “And what do you expect to do if you don't go to college?” she asked him. “Get a job? What kind of a job would it be? You're only eighteen. You're not trained for anything.”

“You're right. I'm not much good at anything right now. Oh, I guess I know something about raising grapes and making wine. I did work three summers at Higate, but that wouldn't count for much.” He paused and looked at her, and then blurted out, “I want to spend a year in Israel.”

There it was. She had a dreadful, sinking feeling — as if all sensation had stopped and her body had turned into a cold lump. No way, she told herself. You take this calmly and rationally.

“Why?”

“What?”

“I asked you why,” she said, unable to control the chill in her voice. “Why do you want to spend a year in Israel?”

Then they weighed each other in silence, Sam staring at the floor. It was very quiet in the room. A clock ticking sounded explosive. She was determined not to break the silence. Let him speak.

“Because I don't know who I am,” he said at last, looking at her now. “I don't know what I am or who I am. You're Barbara Lavette. I'm Sam Cohen. All my life I fought it inside of me, because I never wanted to be Sam Cohen, and it would have been so easy for me to be Sam Lavette. But I had to be Sam Cohen. I had to be. Do you understand me, mom?”

The question came like a plea for help, for succor. Fighting to remain calm, to keep back the tears, Barbara nodded. “I think I do.”

“I would find myself hating Jews.” The words came pouring out now. “You can't even imagine how I felt. You never felt that way. And then I'd feel sick, and I'd hate myself, and then I'd be with Jews and sometimes I'd pretend I wasn't Jewish and other times I'd say I was, but I never called myself Lavette, I never lied about what my name was — and then you told me that story about how my father took that flight of old army planes from Barstow across the country to Panama and then to the Azores and Czechoslovakia and got the arms and the stuff that helped save the Jews there and how he was killed by the Arabs and buried there, someone I never even saw or if I saw him I was too little to remember, and I'd try to understand what made him do what he did, and maybe I'm not Jewish because my mother isn't, but I have to know. I have to know what I am, and I have to see a place where a Jew isn't a freak ——”

“And isn't this the place?” she cried out, unable to contain herself. “How can you say that? Did I marry a freak? You live in San Francisco. The Jews built this city. They were here in 'forty-nine, when it began. You're named after a man whose father was here two generations before the Lavettes, and he was Jewish. I loved Sam Goldberg, just as I love Jake Levy. How can you think of them as freaks?”

“You don't understand,” he said hopelessly. “You just don't understand.”

“I'm trying to I'm trying to understand why you can't see yourself as an American. Your uncle Joe is half Chinese. Does this make him less American?”

“I don't know what an American is, I don't know what a Jew is, and most of all, I don't know what I am.”

“And you think you'll find the answer in Israel?”

“You found something there, didn't you?”

“I found your father's grave,” Barbara said bitterly. “I found a place where people have to fight and kill just to exist. Is that what you want, to kill or be killed?”

“No. I don't want to kill anyone or be killed.” He went over to Barbara, squeezed onto the edge of her chair, and put his arms around her. “Mom, I love you so much, I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to cause you any pain. Do you remember something you said to me? I was just a kid, but I never forgot it. You said we can love each other, but heaven help us if we cling to each other. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” she whispered.

He got up and stood facing her. “Do you think it's easy for me to leave you alone here? I know you have grandma and lots of friends. Don't you think I thought about it and thought about it and told myself that I belong here with you, taking care of you ——”

“What?” Barbara exclaimed.

“Well, that's what I thought.”

“Then just unthink it,” she said with annoyance. “The last thing in the world I want is a son who thinks he has to take care of me. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, and I intend to go on doing so. Oh, I'm not angry with you, Sammy,” she said more gently. “I'm provoked at myself. I should have raised you as something, either an Episcopalian or a Jew, something definite. Trouble is, I can't stand to set foot in Grace Cathedral. As soon as I smell that musty odor, I want to turn and run, and as for being Jewish, I don't know one blessed thing about it. Your father was willing to die in Israel, but he never set foot in a synagogue, and all the time we were married, he never did or suggested one single thing that I could hang on to and say, that's Jewish. And then when you were thirteen, I knew there was something that Jewish children have ——”

“It's called a bar mitzvah,” Sam said coldly.

“Well, I forgot. But I did speak to Boyd Kimmelman at the time, and he said I should forget about it and that it didn't matter. Oh, Sam, why are we talking like this? You can take off this summer, if you want to, and go to the Continent. You've never been to France or England, and if you want to make a few weeks in Israel a part of it, I'm not averse to that. Freddie might go with you, and you two get along so well together, and I would feel more relaxed about the whole thing. But I won't permit you to give up your education — I simply can't. I can't agree to that.”

Sam sat down again, facing his mother and measuring her. Finally, Barbara said, quietly and deliberately, “I hate war. I hate it with unmitigated loathing. Joe's mother, May Ling, was killed in World War Two. Josh Levy was killed in the Pacific. Two men I loved, one of them your father, died in wars. As long as I have breath and strength, I will fight and oppose war, any war. You will have to register for the draft. I want you to be in college, where you will be exempted — at least for the next four years, and God willing, by then this new slaughter in Vietnam will be over. I am your mother, and as your mother I have some rights. I think you will agree to that.”

Sam nodded.

“You have been accepted at Princeton. I must go to New York and Washington. I'll be gone a little more than a week. Will you agree at least to think about what I've said and make no decision until I return?”

“All right, mom. I can promise that.”

“You are,” Jean said to Barbara the following day, “a most curious child. There are times ——”

“I'm hardly a child. I am fifty years old, mother, and I resent ——”

“Don't. I am aware of your chronological age, but on the other hand you haven't changed very much since you were eighteen.”

“Thank you.”

“You told me what Sam said and asked my opinion. I think he's right, and I think I understand him.”

“You've never been to Israel. I have.”

“True. By the way, I do hope to go next year, and if Sam is there, that will be pleasant. Stephan is going with me. It's always better for a woman to travel with a man than alone. Does that shock you?”

“Nothing you do shocks me anymore, mother.”

“Don't be so damn prissy. Shall I tell you what I think or would you prefer to go away and sulk?”

Barbara burst out laughing.

“Am I that amusing?”

“You're wonderful,” Barbara said.

“I'm an old lady who has seen a great deal. Now listen to me, my dear. You've gone through life playing your own role of being a sort of a cross between Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale ——”

“That's not fair!”

“No, probably not, and I'm not trying to be fair, only to knock some sense into your head. And I must admit, you've taken a very considerable beating in the process. The thought that you could be guilty of anti-Semitism horrifies you. As far as you were concerned, Jews were no different from anyone else, except that they were discriminated against and slandered and abused by people like myself. No, no, don't interrupt me. Just let me finish, and then you can have your say, because, my dear, you are sitting here facing a practicing anti-Semite. Yes, precisely” — smiling at Barbara, who sat rigid —“and if you wish me to specify, when I met your father, something more than half a century ago, I considered Jews to be on a level with Chinese, and as for the general opinion of Chinese then — well, you've grown up in San Francisco. On our first date, he introduced me to Feng Wo, who was then his bookkeeper in the little shack Danny had down on Fisherman's Wharf. And I was sick, literally sick to my stomach at the thought of being introduced to a Chinese — Chinks, we called them, yellow filth — and being invited to take his hand. Yes, Bobby, and I don't exaggerate. Your father's best friend and his partner for years, was Mark Levy, Jake Levy's father, and in all those early years I never had Mark Levy to my home, to this house. It was something that was not done. I was a Seldon. I knew that Jews were wretched and unacceptable creatures. Feng Wo was not only May Ling's father, he was a cultured and brilliant man. He did the first translation of the writings of Lao-tzu ever done in this country, and Mark Levy was a gentle, good man and his wife, Sarah, was lovely. None of that mattered. You see, I am not simply exercising a private confessional here or trying to convince you of what an awful creature your mother was. I am trying to explain something about anti-Semitism, what a deep-seated and disgusting affliction it is. I changed, but I had to be torn to shreds in the process. I had to learn to look at myself, and that is not easy, believe me. Oh, it's still there; it's in all of us; but I have learned to look at it and snarl at it and tell it to keep its ugly head down. But you, my dear, with your penchant for curing the lunacies of this idiotic world we inhabit — you cannot face the thought that there's even a shred of anti-Semitism in your makeup.”

“And you think there is?” Barbara whispered.

“It's in the air we breathe. Do you remember when you kept the horse Danny gave you at the riding place down in Menlo?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that no Jews were allowed there?”

“No. I never thought of it.”

“And when you lunch with Harvey Baxter at his club — do you know they still don't admit Jews to membership?”

“I'll never set foot in there again.”

“And Sam, walking around with that name of Cohen, and wearing it like some kind of yellow star — don't you realize what goes on in his mind? Let go of him, Bobby. Let him go to Israel. Let him find out who he is. That's the only way to have him, to let go of him, the way I had to let go of you when you went to France. That wasn't easy.”

“I know.” She stared at her mother thoughtfully, newly. “There's so much we don't know about each other, isn't there?”

“Too much.”

“Tell me,” Barbara said, “feeling the way you did at that time, how did you ever come to marry daddy?”

Jean smiled, closed her eyes for a moment, the years unrolling. “Yes, that's a good question. He was Italian and at least a Catholic by birth. As far as my mother and father were concerned, Catholics were one rung higher than Jews, but a narrow rung. Danny's father came from a tiny fishing village near France, so I could pretend that he was half French. Not really. No, Bobby, it was the man, this huge, strapping, beautiful curly-haired kid who had the whole world by the tail. He was a man. I was surrounded by boys and I met a man.”

Sally Lavette organized her life and the lives of the people around her, or, as her husband sometimes felt, contrived it. From the age of thirteen she had plotted and contrived to marry Joseph Lavette. A war had intervened, with Joe away in the South Pacific, learning the art of surgery by trying to put back together what Japanese shells and bullets tore apart, but when the war was over, Sally had her way. She published two books of poetry, and through a series of charming letters, contrived to have the critic and poet Louis Untermeyer specify her as one of the most talented young poets of the postwar era. When her husband put his medical experience to use in a clinic in a Los Angeles
barrio,
she contrived a separation from him and clawed her way to stardom in Hollywood. She had brains as well as beauty, a steel trap of a mind, long legs, a narrow waist, and a strange pantherlike face. When stardom palled, when the stupidity and vulgarity of studio and Beverly Hills life became intolerable, she contrived a reunion with Joe, persuaded him to become a small-town doctor in Napa, gave birth to a second child, and published a third book of poetry called
The Family.
Sally was a natural and instinctive actress, in that she was wholly capable of becoming the person she played. She was neither heartless nor unloving; she loved Joe Lavette as much as she had ever loved any man, and her two children were a constant source of wonder and repayment — wonder because of the unlikely fact that she, Sally, had created these two human creatures, and repayment for the injustice of life in making her a woman.

Nevertheless, she was a good mother. It was a role she had created, in the same manner that she created the home, the examining room, the kitchen, the living room, and whatever else was required — to the point where the local paper, interviewing their local celebrity, gushed, “If one were to seek for the ideal American housewife in the ideal American home, Sally Lavette would have to be cast for the part.”

Joe Lavette, a large, shambling overweight and compassionate man of forty-seven years, accepted all this with gratitude. He worshipped his wife, nine years younger, and still beautiful as well as competent. She doubled as his nurse in his house-office; she cooked; she cared for the children and cleaned the house and still found time to write poetry. Whatever nuggets of discontent she nurtured were reasonably well hidden. She was determined to have a family that was a family. Each morning, they had breakfast together; each evening, they sat down to dinner together, unless Joe was away on an emergency call. All these, Sally felt, were very important props for any real family.