The Legacy (36 page)

“You said it was all I needed.”

“It is, no doubt. This is no place for formal attire. We'll get a cab, and then we'll get you into some proper clothes and feed you.”

To Fred, everything was new, strange, and amazing, but nothing so amazing as the sprawling, exuberant city. He had heard of Tel Aviv in terms of a spread of sand dunes upon which some Jewish settlers had put down the beginnings of a village in 1909. Nothing had prepared him for the miles of streets, the thousands of people who thronged the sidewalks, the buses, the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the noise and smell and confusion, the haphazard stucco houses interspersed with towering skyscrapers. It was neither beautiful nor inspiring; but it was marvelously alive. The room Sam had rented in a Mrs. Segal's house, rooms to let, was small, reasonably clean, and cool, something to be valued in the shimmering heat of the city. She had improvised a cot, squeezed in alongside of Sam's bed. Sam told his cousin, in a fit of generosity: “The bed is yours.”

“You're all heart,” Fred told him, “but I'll take it. You're the host, boy.”

Mrs. Segal hovered over them, looking suspiciously at the tall, blond-bearded young man who had been introduced as Sam Cohen's cousin. After Fred had changed into blue jeans and a sport shirt, they walked to Dizengoff Street. At one of the outdoor cafés, Sam ordered pita stuffed with various exotic fillings and beer for both of them.

“Good beer,” he told Fred, “and good food, too, if you stick to this kind of thing and don't look for any haute cuisine, which is usually lousy. Well, what do you think?”

“It's one hell of a jumping place.” He bit into the overstuffed pita. “This is good. What about wine?”

“Forget it. Too sweet for the most part, but if you're that hooked on wine, you can buy French or Italian — at a price. I watch my money, sort of. I haven't taken a nickel from mom since I'm over here. It's my madness, and I figure I should pay for it.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I sold the boat before I left.”

“Oh, no. You sold it. You dumb kid. Why?”

“Makes me feel better — or something. Anyway, it kills me to take money from my mother. This way, I have enough to take me through another year, and then it'll be either medical school here or in the States. The truth is, I'd just as soon go back now, but mom gets crazy at the thought of me being drafted. O.K., I can understand that, after what she's been through, and I suppose that if you grow up as the son of Barbara Lavette, you're a pacifist. I don't quarrel with that. But try being a pacifist in Israel.” He pointed to boys sitting around with their dates, boys in uniform, their guns across their knees. “Just look around you.”

“I wondered about that.”

“Zahel.
That's the army. It's a tiny country, so mobilization has to be instantaneous. They get a day's leave, they have to take their weapons with them. A great place to be a pacifist. Somehow, they got onto the fact that Bernie Cohen was my father, and they ran a big story about him in the Jerusalem
Post
and about me being a student here.”

“Still, as an American citizen, you're exempt, aren't you?”

“I am. And I suppose as premed, I'd stay in school no matter what. But here, no one is exempt. When it happens, it's everywhere. Well, I don't worry about that, and I'm still exempt at home, and if it gives mom peace, O.K.”

“And the rest of it — how's it been?”

“Interesting. The truth is, I like it. I'm all in one piece. Oh, I get homesick, so damn homesick I could cry, and then I'd give anything, anything to be back in San Francisco. I couldn't live here. I don't think I could live anywhere I couldn't see the bay, but I've been able to work out some things. I have a history professor who calls me Shmuel ha Cohen — which roughly translated means Samuel the priest. And damnit, I learned the language. It's a mean language to learn, but beautiful, simple, logical. And talking of language, we have a date tonight. Mine is an Israeli, a Sabra, which means she's native-born. Miriam by name. She works at the museum. Her friend is an archaeological student from Pittsburgh who's one of the volunteers at a dig up north in Megiddo and is down here for a few days to do research at the museum.”

“You've left no stone unturned, have you?”

“Ah, well, Freddie, I do my best. We have three days here before we take off to see the country, and I don't want you bored. Now tell me about yourself.”

“What's to tell? French food and French wine. My French is probably no better than your Hebrew, but I have taken a course in wine. You name it, I've been there — Corbières, Minervois, Languedoc, Gaillac, Bordeaux, Armagnac, Cahors; you might say I'm the world's greatest smart-ass walking encyclopedia on the subject, Médocs, Graves, Champagnes, Sauternes, Chablis, Nuits — I could go on and on, which only means that when I get home, I'll be more intolerable than ever. I've been in love three times. One I almost married, and thank God her father hated me. There are parts of France where they still obey their fathers. A lot of guilt. I enjoyed it too much. My mother is as crazy as yours on this Vietnam business. But enough is enough. Come September, I'm going home.”

“And the draft?”

“The hell with it. I'll take my chances.”

“You heard about Ruby Truaz?”

“I heard. More guilt. It stinks, Sammy, it stinks to high heaven. This is a war being fought by the poor and the dispossessed. Kids who can hide in the universities or abroad — you and me as explicit examples — get out of it. Those who can't, go.”

“Which doesn't make this Vietnam obscenity any less obscene. Anyway, we still haven't been called.”

“And when you are?”

“God knows. In any case, Freddie my lad, we're not going to settle the problems of the world. We have our own. We're going to walk and hitch our way from here to Galilee, and tonight, we have a date with two very cute chicks.”

They had dinner that night in a Yemeni restaurant in old Jaffa, which adjoins Tel Aviv to the south. Miriam was a tiny, dark-haired, pretty young woman of twenty. Her friend was Rita Hogan, a tall, slender, freckled Irish Catholic archaeologist with red hair and unlimited enthusiasm about everything Israeli. Before the evening was over, Fred was in love again.

The women filled Barbara's living room, which was both small and narrow, the complaint lodged most often against the old wooden house that survived on the San Francisco hills. There were Sally, May Ling, Eloise, Clair Levy, Jean Lavette, Carla Truaz, Ruth Adams, and Shela Abramson. Ruth Adams was a professor of economics at Berkeley and Shela Abramson was the wife of a manufacturer of plumbing supplies. Both of these women were old friends of Barbara; years before, they had given her money for the hospital in Toulouse which she had helped support. Now, on this evening late in June of 1966, they drank coffee, sipped brandy, and listened.

“I'm embarrassed,” Barbara told them. “I am not even the victim of a legitimate delusion. The truth is that for more nights than I care to remember, I talked myself to sleep with a fantasy about how a group of determined women could help put a stop to this war. None of my thinking has been very logical lately, which I put down to a change of life or something of that sort. I tell my son to stay on in Israel with some rationale about keeping him out of Vietnam, which is an indication of how logically I've been thinking. Anyway, I began to believe my fantasy, but if most of you think I'm crazy, we can just spend a pleasant evening and go home.”

“I think you're a bit crazy,” Clair said, “but why not give it a try?”

“The thing is,” Sally said, “that when you start working out these fantasies, you don't leave any loose ends hanging. I know. I'm a specialist in the field, and if my daughter wasn't here, I could really spin out one or two. But between a mother and a daughter — oh, the hell with that! Let's hear it, Bobby.”

“It's very simple. Just something about mothers, there are so many of us.”

“I love you,” Ruth Adams said, “but that doesn't make much sense. Motherhood is as old as apple pie. Just as fattening, too.”

“Not clever,” said Shela Abramson. “Give the girl a chance.”

“What I meant before,” Sally told them, “is that if Bobby's been walking around with this fantasy and going to sleep with it instead of some good-looking young buck, she probably has the damn thing worked out. So let's listen.”

“The trouble is, I don't have anything very much worked out. I just had the feeling that no one has ever gone to mothers, there are so many of us. It's your son getting chopped up or blown to bits. How do you feel about it? I have a very strong feeling that it's always someone else's son. I've been reading and talking to people about this new women's movement, and a lot of them don't agree with me, but I have the conviction that the crux of it is war — the absolute definition of a man's world. They make us pregnant and there's the nine months of vomiting and trying to sleep with a belly that doesn't belong to you and screaming your guts out while you try to bring a new bit of life into this sorry world, and then these lunatics work out a solution for the whole thing in a place called Vietnam. Do I make any sense?”

“I have four sons,” Shela Abramson said.

“But how do we make any difference?” Sally asked. “We live in a world where no one matters except the curious swine who run countries. None of us run countries. None of us matters a damn, and that's the plain truth. So we bewail the fact that we're mothers with sons. Who listens? Who cares?”

“Maybe no one cares,” Eloise said. “The girls I know don't even talk about it. They talk about how rotten their marriages are and their shrinks and the new car and the pill. And the men are worse. I thought I knew Adam. He goes to pieces if one of the kids cuts himself or has to have a tonsillectomy or something like that, but when it comes to a war, he just shrugs it off. I care. If Bobby wants to scream, I'll scream with her. Even if no one listens.”

“Can the old lady say something?” Jean asked.

Barbara looked at her mother with interest. When she first proposed that Jean join them, she was met with a stubborn refusal. “Do whatever you have to do, Bobby. But leave me out. I told you that if you needed money, I'd help. That's as far as I go. I am an enlightened reactionary, and I intend to remain so for the rest of my life.” Finally, she gave in to Barbara's plea that she come and listen. No one should buy a pig in a poke, Barbara insisted. Now what? Barbara had ceased to anticipate her mother's actions years ago.

“In the first place,” Jean said, “I have always voted Republican. I shall continue to do so, and my ideological position rests on my total distaste for Mr. Johnson and that dreadful little bald-headed Dean Rusk, who speaks for him. I also have two grandchildren of draft age. Very well. My husband, Dan Lavette, divided the population into two sorts. I must say that he enjoyed simplification more than I do, but nevertheless, in his case it worked. There were the movers and there were those who were moved. Danny used to get very impatient about the dreams everyone in town dreamed about the Golden Gate Bridge, which did not exist at that time. Talk, talk, talk. God damn it, he said once, if I wanted to do it, I'd do it. How would he do it? In his terms, he'd bull it through. Talk a group of engineers into laying it out on spec, and then take the specifications and raise the money. And if he had wanted to, he would have done it. A thing in motion, he always insisted, gathers accretion. Now don't you think that the things you are saying are being said in a million homes around the country? I assure you. But it's talk, talk, talk. This country is full of mothers. If you think it's going to make an iota of difference in this wretched war, then reach out to them.”

“And what do we tell them?” Ruth Adams asked.

Barbara was asking herself, once again, how it was that one has a mother for half a century and more and knows almost nothing about her. Was the reverse also true? Were they all strangers to each other?

“Barbara?”

“Do you know,” she said slowly, “I'm not sure that we have to tell them anything — I mean at this moment. They know it,” thinking that if her mother knew it so clearly, it was hardly a secret. “I think that if we make them aware of each other, that would be a beginning. Afterwards, there will be other things.”

“But what are we? Are we an organization?”

“If we are,” Shela Abramson said, “and if Barbara goes to jail again, we all go. No more fancy quixotic nobility.”

“No one will go to jail,” Barbara said. “I've discussed it thoroughly with my lawyers. We will not go to jail, I assure you.”

“Famous last words.”

“I still want to know what we are.”

“We're women. Isn't that enough?”

“Not quite,” Clair said. “We have to declare ourselves, and that means a place, an address, a telephone number, and of course a name.”

“This can be the place,” Barbara answered, “and the telephone is here. As for a name —” She turned to Carla Truaz. “You and May Ling haven't said a word all evening. Do you like the idea?”

“Yes, I do,” Carla said softly.

“What would you name it?”

Carla hesitated, uneasy in front of the faces turned toward her, staring at her hands. “I couldn't — I can't think of a name.”

“Try,” Barbara said gently. “You've been listening to all of us talking our heads off.”

“Well — I think — well, just Mothers for Peace.”

“That's lovely,” someone said. “Mothers for Peace.”

“And if you had to have a slogan?” Barbara urged her.

“Oh — I couldn't think of a slogan, Miss Lavette.” Suddenly, she was at the point of tears. “I don't really know what a slogan is, I mean what you mean by a slogan.”