The Legacy (32 page)

“A sort of toad-into-prince thing,” Fred said, and then added hastily, “No, I'm not being snide. Please believe me, I'm not unaware of the immensity of this offer, or the importance. But you must admit it has the elements of bad drama, the poor country boy discovering his Daddy Warbucks and being offered an empire.”

“I spoke in all good faith,” Tom said, a kernel of anger beginning to form. “I offer something real. We're not dealing with cheap drama.”

“I know. Please forgive me. But try to see it from my point of view. I'm not capable of running a small business, much less a giant like this. The only thing in the world I know anything about, in a practical sense, is wine. The only thing I want to do is make wine. Higate is a very small enterprise compared to GCS, but it's ample for my needs. As I said before, the gulf is too wide. I think we can both be decently polite to each other and decently civilized, but if I said I could go any further than that, I would only be lying.”

Tom controlled himself. Inside, anger had begun to burn. He was asking himself, “Who the hell does this snotty kid think he is? I offer him the world, and he's sitting there, laughing at me. Fucking me — plainly and simply fucking me.” His wife, Lucy, had warned him. “Offer him nothing,” she had advised. “If he wants it, he'll ask for it. But if you offer and he rejects you, it will hurt too much. He's hurt you enough.” Still, he managed to control himself and say to Fred, “All right, that's your decision. But the door isn't closed. If we can meet occasionally, perhaps we'll get to know each other a little better, perhaps we'll get to like each other.”

“Perhaps,” Fred said.

On a Saturday afternoon, late in August of 1964, the wolf pack gathered on the hillside overlooking Higate. They were all of an age where the very suggestion of the name “wolf pack” would have embarrassed them; nevertheless, it lingered in their minds, even as childhood lingered. They were all present, Sam and May Ling and Fred and his brother, Joshua, and Rubio and Carla Truaz. It was three days before Sam was scheduled to leave for Israel and the last day of Rubio's leave. Rubio was in uniform, and each time May Ling looked at him, her eyes became moist. Since there was a chill in the air, the boys had built a fire, and Joshua was roasting marshmallows, his contribution to the leave-taking. He had squeezed four marshmallows onto the end of a pointed stick, allowed them to become a flaming torch, and had then blown out the flame and offered the blackened candy to his mates.

“That,” Fred said, “is absolutely disgusting. How can you eat anything like that?”

“Mostly by mouth,” Sam replied, pulling off a sticky marsh-mallow. “I like them.”

“Me too,” Carla said.

“A difference of opinion,” Joshua said calmly, “is always intriguing. To your generation, marshmallows are disgusting. To mine they are funky.”

“Listen to him.” May Ling laughed, the melted candy all over her fingers. “Your generation indeed!”

Rubio stared at her with what Sam thought of as the longing expression of a lovesick calf. Carla, more opulently lush and beautiful than ever, had switched her affection from Fred to Sam. His impending departure made the situation quite wonderful and romantic.

“It just doesn't seem possible,” she said, “that in three days you'll be leaving for Israel. Will I ever see you again?”

“Now isn't that silly? Of course you will.”

“For a year — a whole year. It's not even a real place. It's something you learn about in Sunday school.”

“It's a real place, all right, and it's nothing compared to Fred's fancy travels.”

“Freddie, you're going away?” May Ling cried. “Oh, no. When did you cook this up?”

“We've been talking about it,” Fred said, “and last night mom and pop gave it their final O.K. We had talked about my taking some PG courses in viticulture at Berkeley, but pop doesn't think much of them, and he feels they don't compare with what you can get at the Viticultural Institute in Paris and in Colmar. He's also making arrangements for me to travel in the Gironde area and study the Médocs. We're really working to develop a superb Cabernet Sauvignon, something that will identify the Higate label with real class everywhere in America, and that means I'll be spending a good deal of time in Bordeaux. I'll be gone about a year, and I'm not sure I'll learn much, but I will drink some very beautiful wine.”

“Lucky stiff! You get all the breaks.”

“Like Mississippi,” Rubio said. “You can live without that kind of luck.”

“I would have died — right there,” May Ling whispered.

“I did, sort of,” Fred said uncertainly. “I think a part of me died there. I mean that part of me is gone forever. Maybe that's what happens to someone in a war. I still dream about it. I see poor Jones hanging from the beam over the barn door, and I see Katz lying there with his back all torn to shreds. It's not real. If it were real, it wouldn't be as bad, but it's like one of those ghastly nightmares you have as a kid, and it stays with you all your life.”

After that, they fell silent for a while. As the sun moved toward the west, the shadow of the hillside above enveloped them. They were in their own dimmed world, looking down at the sun-kissed, vine-covered fields and the sprawling buildings of the winery. All of them shared in the sad, sweet sense of childhood's end.

Four

T
he death of Sergeant Rubio Truaz, born in the Napa Valley of Northern California, twenty-one years old, a Chicano — which term indicates a Mexican of California birth — was witnessed by millions of people. Such is the miraculous nature of our time and the wonder of television. Sergeant Truaz was on patrol. Or perhaps not yet on patrol, because the TV cameras don't move out on patrol. Or possibly the patrol was starting, or finishing. That point was never really clarified, but what was very clear was that the camera, loaded with color film, was on Sergeant Truaz when the bullet struck him. The bullet struck a grenade that was attached to Sergeant Truaz's belt, and the grenade exploded, sheathing Sergeant Truaz from head to foot in burning chemicals. The incendiary grenade covered him with green fire, and the microphone of the TV crew picked up his wild screams of pain as he leaped around in his agony and then rolled over and over on the ground until at least two of his comrades managed to fling a body bag over him and thus put out the flames. Afterwards it was said that his screaming was a wild track, put into the film by the TV people to heighten the effect, but this was not the case. The screams belonged to Sergeant Truaz; they were his very own, and they went on for seven minutes before a medic reached him and gave him a shot of morphine, which probably did little to alleviate the pain. A few minutes later he lapsed into unconsciousness, and about an hour after that he died.

They ran the film on network television without identifying the soldier in question, and that was followed by anger from many quarters, accusations and counteraccusations, but it was not the first and would not be the last time this was done in the course of the Vietnam war. Cameramen risked their lives to get shots of men in action, and thereby bring the war directly into every American living room, and what better perception of front-line action than to see a man take a bullet or a shell fragment.

And since such photography was done under nerve-racking conditions, it was impossible to pause to get the name and rank and whatever of every miserable, filthy grunt the camera rested on — not to mention the red tape one would be enmeshed in if one tried to clear each name with the army or the marines.

So it happened that the death of Sergeant Truaz, an extraordinary glimpse of what war can be like, an incredible piece of photography, was witnessed by millions. Among these millions was May Ling.

Barbara was at a cocktail party that evening, so she was spared the tiny, unimportant incident in a very large war that titillated or shocked or horrified or stunned or sickened or entertained so many millions of others. She had come to New York during this spring of 1966 for the publication of her new book,
The President's Wife.
The book was published on the eleventh of May, the day that the government of the United States made known its formal reply to the mainland government of China, concerning the use of atomic weapons. The government of China had proposed to the government of the United States that each country pledge never to use atomic weapons against the other. Very easy for the Chinese to propose such a thing; the statisticians had worked out a schematic, using the latest calculators, which proved that such was the numbers of the Chinese that if one were to fight them with nonatomic weapons, one could not kill them fast enough to counteract the birthrate. Give up the use of atomic weapons indeed! The government of the United States indignantly refused, and this refusal was condemned by a good many people, including Senator Robert F. Kennedy. One reviewer of Barbara's book wondered if Miss Lavette was not “leaping onto the anti-government bandwagon, which has become a hallmark of the 'sixties. Ostensibly,” the reviewer went on, “Miss Lavette is writing a book about a woman; but in fact, her novel is a crushing indictment of the Presidency and of the method whereby Americans choose their Chief Executive. If the Presidency is, as Miss Lavette claims, encased in a procedural process that demands such characteristics as a malignant lust for power, an indifference to the needs of others, and the inability to manifest normal qualities of affection, then we are indeed in a most unhappy situation. But Miss Lavette comes with dubious credentials. Who is this President's wife she writes of?”

Who indeed? The critics received her book with restrained annoyance. Was the President Lyndon Baines Johnson? Was she not echoing, with the privileges of fiction, the shrill scream of a million voices crying out, “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids have you killed today?”

Her publisher, Holden Greenway, a round, overweight Balzacian man of explosive and colorful emotions, was not disturbed. “The book is selling like fried catfish in a Carolina picnic. Oh, I love you, Barbara Lavette, and I'll tell you something about critics. The critic is the eunuch in the harem. He watches the trick being done day in and day out, and the poor, miserable bastard knows he'll never do it himself. Still and all,” he said, “you want to meet them. They're a mixed lot, and there are some damned good ones mixed in with the whiners. Also, they don't actually believe in anything west of the Hudson River. So we'll have us one large bash of an old-fashioned literary cocktail party, and when they see this beautiful woman I've snagged for my list, they'll sing a different tune. Ours is a cosmetic society.”

“In which case, you'd better look twice,” Barbara replied. “A middle-aged housewife, and not very cosmetic.”

The party was held in Greenway's apartment on Sutton Place, Barbara's first literary cocktail party in more than twenty years. It was called for five o'clock, but by six o'clock, the only people present aside from Barbara were Greenway and his two sisters, Kate, who was fifty, and Sylvia, who was fifty-three. They were both overweight, and they wore long brown satin skirts and hair piled high on their respective heads.

“They are good girls and very literary,” Greenway whispered to Barbara. “Very romantic, full of tragedy. They were betrothed to two young fellows who joined the Canadian air force, flew in the same bomber, and were shot down in flames over Germany. Tragedy is as idiotic as love and honor, and frequently just as ridiculous. They cherish their loss. It's much more rewarding than being married to some brainless stockbroker.” He whispered all this with a cheerful smile. “Of course, I'm lying. They
are
married to brainless stockbrokers, who will come later. They always come first, because they remember everyone's name. Don't be nervous, my dear Barbara, because in a half hour, there will be a hundred people here. No one would be gauche enough to be less than an hour late.”

He was right. The room filled up, and one after another, the string of celebrities was introduced to Barbara. The two Green-way sisters remembered every name. Greenway himself retreated to a corner and got systematically drunk.

“Those who know him avoid him,” Kate told Barbara. “He becomes insulting, rude, and unbearable. But he is a great publisher. He will do wonders for your book, my dear.”

“My own impression,” said the symphony conductor, using Barbara's other ear, “is that you're writing about Mrs. Johnson.”

Trying to deny that, Barbara's words were muffled by a comparison between President Johnson and the Emperor Tiberius. A small writer with a high-pitched voice complained that they were maligning the best man ever to sit in the White House. Barbara relinquished any attempt at an opinion. The enormous living room had filled with people.

“He wrote
In Cold Blood,
” someone said to her. “Of course you've read it.”