The Legacy (27 page)

It was at dinner this evening that Sally's so carefully contrived picture began to disintegrate. It came about because for the second night in a row, May Ling barely touched her food.

“I'm just not hungry,” she protested to her mother.

“At this point,” Sally said, “I am less concerned with your inner needs than with mine. You will eat your dinner. You have had good, tasty food set in front of you, and you will eat it. The world is filled with children who go hungry,” she continued, indulging in the ancient non sequitur, “and I will not see that food wasted.”

The exchange was watched silently and anxiously by Joe. He left all matters of family discipline to Sally.

“I can't eat.”

“She's in love,” Daniel said, pausing in the process of shoveling food into his mouth. He was nine years old and untroubled.

Joe reached across and touched his daughter's brow.

“I'm not sick, daddy.”

“Please eat. You're thin enough.”

May Ling was on the edge of tears, and when Sally snapped at her, “We've discussed this enough. Now eat your dinner!” she began to sob, pushed back her chair, and ran upstairs to her room.

Joe looked at his wife in amazement. “Now what was that all about?”

“She's in love,” Daniel repeated.

“That's all. Enough out of you!”

“Should I go up and talk to her?” Joe wondered.

“I think not. I'll take a tray up to her later.”

“And what's all this about being in love?”

“We'll talk about that later.”

Joe had a small emergency after dinner, a lady who had sliced deep into her hand with a carving knife. He cleaned the wound and took three stitches. He had finished setting the surgery to rights and was washing his hands when Sally entered. The absence of Sally for any length of time, even for an hour, caused Joe to look at her newly. There was always the slight shock of surprise that this woman could remain so unchangingly young and lovely while he, as he felt, turned old and gray and fat.

“Did you get her to eat?” he asked Sally.

“A glass of milk and some cake. It will hold her.”

“I don't think she's ill,” Joe said.

Now, as so often, Sally despaired of him. “She's not ill. She's in love. She's been in love. At that age, love is a very serious business.”

“You mean Ruby Truaz?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she'll work it out.”

“Joe, it's not that simple. Ruby's been drafted. He's been ordered to report for induction.” She was watching how carefully and thoroughly he dried his hands. Why did his small habits irritate her so?

“Oh, come on. That makes no sense. He's a college student. They're not drafting college students.”

“He's also a Chicano.”

“I still don't see it. They're far from the bottom of the barrel.”

“Joe, you never read a newspaper ——”

“I don't have time.”

“The point is, there have been two bad stabbings over in Angwin, and they're accusing what they call a Chicano gang, and there's a lot of bad feeling in the country. Ruby just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It's a rotten break for old Cándido, but it's not the end of the world. Even if this thing of May Ling's is serious, which I doubt ——”

“It's damned serious. Your daughter is very gentle and shy, but she has a mind of her own.”

“A few years in the army won't kill him.”

“It's killed other people, your mother and my brother among them, and May Ling is terrified that they're going to send him to Vietnam, and she's read all sorts of horrible things about what's going on over there.”

“That's nonsense. There isn't a chance in the world that we'll get involved in a war over Vietnam. Why should we? It makes no damned sense.”

“Of course not, because everything this stupid government does makes sense. Is that what you're telling me?”

“Come on, Sally,” he said, “let's not get into one of our dumb political arguments. I'm a small-town doctor, and I don't know beans about politics, and I'm not sure you know much more than I do. May Ling's seventeen years old. This is her first love. There'll probably be a dozen more to follow.”

“She wants to marry him.”

“Sure. Don't tell me you take that seriously?”

“You don't know one damn thing about your daughter, do you? This has been going on for six months. They've been sleeping together —” His face fell, and Sally added quickly, “Don't worry about that. May Ling is no fool. She's not pregnant. Try to remember the way I was when I was a kid, wild and brash, and every thought I had popped right out of my mouth. May Ling is different. It's all inside, and they're the kind that you can't reach. She is absolutely determined to marry this boy.”

“How can she? You mean behind our backs? She's underage. How old is he?”

“Nineteen or twenty.”

“Well, they're both too young. I'll talk to her. I can get through to her. God Almighty, how do you know they're sleeping together?”

“She told me.”

“You mean she'd tell you something like that?”

“The world changes, doesn't it, Joe?”

“I barely know the boy. Have you spoken to him? What is he like?”

“I grew up with the Truazes. They've always been at Higate — as long as I can remember. He's bright and decent and good-looking. I don't know how great it would be for her to marry a Chicano, but you and I are such a pair of mongrels that I don't think we have a leg to stand on in that direction.”

“I don't want her sneaking off,” Joe said. “If those kids can't be reasoned with, let her get married properly.”

When Barbara's plane lifted off the runway at San Francisco Airport, she felt a sense of release and freedom that was both new and exciting. The flight to New York was her first journey outside of California in five years, and it was years before then that she had last experienced this kind of exhilaration. She was a schoolgirl on vacation, an errant adolescent released, a woman free, single, and attractive, without a care in the world. The cares were there, bundled up, tightly packaged, but thrust out of sight for the next two weeks. She was fifty years old, and she weighed only four pounds more than she had weighed at age twenty. She wore a gray flannel suit, thin, lightweight wool, a bright pale-blue kerchief that set off the color of her eyes, and a white silk blouse, and she carried a pearl-colored cashmere topcoat. She had gone on what was for her a wild splurge of spending, being assured of a large advance on her new book, two hundred and fifty dollars for the suit, almost four hundred dollars for the topcoat, a hundred dollars more for two dresses, and sixty dollars for a pair of high-heeled brown shoes that raised her almost to six feet. They were exceedingly uncomfortable for her to walk on — since she rarely wore high heels — but were irresistible. The shoes produced the deepest guilt, but the admiring looks from a variety of men made these and other guilts quite bearable. It was a clear, bracing May day, and the pilot enthusiastically informed his passengers that there was not a cloud in the sky between San Francisco and New York. San Francisco temperature, seventy degrees Fahrenheit; New York temperature, seventy-two degrees.

It was all quite wonderful, the smoothness of the flight, the country unrolling so unbelievably far beneath them, even the tasteless plastic-like food. She ordered a vodka, and after that, two glasses of wine, and when she walked off the plane in New York, she was just the slightest bit, but deliciously, high.

Harris Fielding, her literary agent, was waiting at the incoming gate. He was close to seventy now, but he had aged well in the twenty-five years since she had last seen him. They had been brought together via Jean's introduction, and Barbara had the vague impression that sometime during Jean's divorce from Dan, Jean and Harris Fielding had had an affair of some sort, carnal or otherwise. Now he greeted Barbara as if only days had passed since their last meeting, asking immediately after her mother's health.

“She's well, thank you.”

“And as beautiful as ever?”

“Yes — I suppose so.” Time was an illusion. She understood why he never came to San Francisco. Young, beautiful Jean Seldon would remain in his memory as long as he had a memory.

“I wrote after Mr. Lavette passed away. It must have been an awful blow to both of you.”

The words had to be said. It was more than five years since her father had died. The wind blew memories away. If she clung to them, the memories would devour her. God help people who couldn't let go of the living or the dead, yet Barbara wondered whether mastering a way to let go was not the prop that sustained her. Sometimes, late of a night, when she thought of all the departures that threaded through her life, she would go into a cold sweat and begin a sickening passage of fear. But not this day. On leaving San Francisco, she had made her symbolic separation from her son. His departure for Israel, if he went there, was still in the future, and for these few days away from California she was determined to be free from both the present and the future.

Driving into New York, Fielding remarked on her silence.

“I've been thinking,” Barbara said. “Is there a space shock as well as a culture shock? It's a long time since I've been flung across the continent. Basically, I'm a product of another age, when we traveled by train.”

“No, I just can't think of you as the product of another age, my dear. You're as young and as vital as when we first met. It's like seeing your mother again, unchanged by time.”

“That's sweet of you. I've had my fiftieth birthday.”

“I've had seventy. I don't advertise it in this age of arrogant youth. But enough of this. I find chronology boring. How long will you be in New York?”

“I have five days here, and then I must go to Washington. I loathe the thought. To me it's a hateful city, but I have an appointment there with a President's wife, and there I must go.”

“Well, that is something. The incumbent's spouse?”

“My lips are sealed. My lawyer worked a miracle getting me this meeting with a lady who has agreed to talk to me and answer my questions, but only on the condition that I never reveal her name. I am to have no tapes and take no notes. She laid down a whole set of rules, and I wrote to her, giving her my word of honor that I would respect them. She knows all about me, my past, my sins, and all the rest. You see, she very much wants the book to be written.”

“I don't understand why you can't take notes.”

“I do, and I don't need them.”

“And the pages you have already written?”

“They lead in, as you know. I may have to make some changes, but not too many.”

“Thank goodness, because our publisher loves what he has read. You'll meet him tomorrow. Shall I arrange anything else, parties, TV, radio?”

“Oh, no. No. Absolutely not. I want to be here as a tourist. I've never had that experience in New York. Each time I was here, I have been led around by the nose. Now I want to do it alone.”

It was new, this kind of being alone. She had been alone so often during her life, but never this way, not looking for anything, not searching, not on an assignment, not waiting for something to happen, but simply alone with the city around her, free to go where she wished and do as she wished. She had a room at the Plaza, in the corner on 58th Street. The weather was perfect, the sky clear blue, the air was as sweet and clean as ever in San Francisco. With skirt and sweater and comfortable shoes, she walked for miles, ate hungrily in restaurants chosen at random, and each night fell into bed utterly exhausted. She saw only one play, Peter Weiss's
Marat-Sade,
which thrilled her and troubled her, and one film,
Zorba the Greek,
which she enjoyed immensely. She Wandered everywhere in Central Park, indifferent to newspaper stories about crime and mugging, fascinated by the opening of the foliage, by the smell and color of a spring that has no duplicate anywhere in California. She walked on Fifth Avenue all the way up to Mt. Morris Park, climbing this strange stone hill in the midst of a black world, and then spent the rest of that afternoon wandering through the streets of Harlem, having her dinner of pork ribs, grits, and collard greens in a restaurant where hers was the only white face. When she mentioned it to Harris Fielding the following day, he said, “Barbara, you did a very dangerous thing.”

“Why?”

“Because you could have been mugged or killed.”

“But who would want to kill me? There were thousands of people on the streets there, and no one bothered them.”

The city filled her with delight. People saw her with pleasure. She walked the length of upper Madison Avenue, something she had never done before, as excited as a child by the window displays, the galleries, the antique shops, the parade of the treasures of the world, brought here from every corner of the earth, a price tag on everything. At 96th Street, she walked through the transverse of the park and downtown on Broadway, here in another world entirely, just as she found other worlds on other days in Greenwich Village and on the lower East Side and in the sunless caverns of the financial district. She was unfettered, childlike in her wandering, going out to the Statue of Liberty and climbing inside it, and then eagerly taking the boat ride around Manhattan Island. The five days went all too quickly. Why had she waited half a century to discover this place, to feel it instead of always passing through?

Her mood impelled her to take a Greyhound bus to Washington, something she had never done before, and she was seated next to a white-haired old lady from Tulsa, Oklahoma, a widow seventy-nine years old, who was touring the whole country by bus. They talked all the way to Washington, although most of the talking was done by Mrs. Seever, who was one-eighth Osage Indian and who had eleven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She informed Barbara that while she had met all sorts of interesting people on her trip, which began five weeks ago, she had never met a real, actual writer, which made her certain that her store of biographical and family information would be well received. In all truth, Barbara was quite content to listen, and the hours passed pleasantly.