The Legacy (39 page)

“But what do I do? That fat, oily bastard put his finger where it hurts most. But what do I do?”

“Let me think about it. I'll find a way.”

“To influence Barbara? I doubt it.”

“Don't doubt me, Thomas,” she said gently, smiling at what was as close to humor as she ever came. “Things can be made difficult for her.”

“She is my sister.”

“We don't kill people. We're not the Mafia. There are more civilized ways.”

“I hope so. I do hope so.”

It was not until late in October that Carson called Barbara from Los Angeles and informed her that he was sending a feature writer to San Francisco to do the story on Mothers for Peace. Barbara had just returned to San Francisco. She had been scheduled to meet Sam in Israel in September, but then he changed his plans and decided to spend the last week in August in Paris with Fred. Barbara flew to Paris with Eloise, her first visit to the city since the years she had spent there prior to World War Two. It was a very different place, and Barbara found that instead of the emotional turbulence she had half anticipated, she was strangely unmoved, as if she were visiting a place she had never been to before. Except for her pleasure at seeing her son, she reacted with the detachment of a tourist; or perhaps Sam's reaction to her obscured everything else. It was a year since she had last seen him. He had broadened, filled out; and with his face burned deep brown by the sun, his blue eyes appeared lighter than ever, the blue of winter ice. The eyes more than anything else brought back the image of his father, and as with his father, they appeared to be clouded with doubt, with some deep inner uncertainty. She could detect no happiness in his decision to finish his premedical training in Israel, nor could she get him to explain what unanswered questions still haunted him. Afterwards, she felt that the time with him could have been better but modified that feeling with an acknowledgment that it could have been worse. She could remember quite clearly her own emotions when she was his age.

Eloise, on the other hand, found her world shaking violently. First, she was introduced by Fred to a long-limbed, redheaded archaeologist named Rita Hogan who, as he informed her, had consented to be his wife. On top of that, Fred announced that war or no war, they were both returning to the States. Eloise, who had experienced a few weeks of grateful respite from her merciless headaches, now fell prey to them again. Barbara was relieved when the two of them were on the plane and homeward bound. Fred and Rita were to follow a week or so later.

“It's not simply that she's a Catholic and her father's a steel-worker,” Eloise complained. “I could live with that. But she's dragging him back to the States, and he could be drafted.”

“Eloise, my dear, he could be drafted in Europe, if it comes to that, and it may well be that she's pregnant, which means that as a father, he won't be drafted.”

“He only met her two months ago,” Eloise wailed.

“That's time enough, if I know Freddie,” wondering why it couldn't have been that simple with Sam. Her son was haunted by ghosts, and her heart ached with her inability to reach him, to touch him, to convince him that it was all right, that he was what he was.

They parted in New York, Eloise to go on to San Francisco, while Barbara began a round of lecture dates, New York, Boston, and then a long seminar in Chicago. Wherever she went, there were women reaching out to her and to each other. And then, finally back in San Francisco, she found the center of it, the volunteers in her house on Green Street, totally out of funds, broke and in a near panic. That was when Carson called to tell her that their best lady feature writer, Gertrude Simpson, would be in San Francisco the following day. “Barbara,” he assured her, “it can be one hell of a story. We'll run it page one, column one, in the Sunday edition. And Gert's a doll. She's all with you.”

“Carson,” Barbara said, determined to be shameless, “you're a sweet dear man. We need the story. But more than that, we need money. We are absolutely broke and absolutely desperate. You have so many friends down there who are richer than God, and I've learned how to beg, believe me. If you could get a few of them together in a room and let me talk to them, women if possible, but men if there's nothing else? Could you?”

“Give me a week. I'll see what's possible.”

Her next move was to Boyd Kimmelman's office. His face lit up when he saw her. “Bobby! My God, I've missed you!” It was good to be held in a man's arms, to be crushed in an embrace, to be kissed, to feel at least for a moment like a woman treasured, coveted and protected, to have a fleeting fantasy of being a wife with no more obligations than the life of a middle-aged housewife entailed. “When did you get back?”

“Last night. Do you know, I almost went to your apartment. I went home and opened the door and pushed my way in through the cartons, the desks and tables and smell of stale cigarette smoke — and would you believe it, they were collating papers all over my bed, and I was almost ready to turn around and march over to your place.”

“Why didn't you?”

“How did I know you'd be alone?”

“I don't believe you. You couldn't think of anything that rotten.”

“Don't you believe it. I've been neck-deep in the women's movement for three weeks.”

“And what about Paris?”

“Would you believe it, Boyd — it left me cold. Even the ghosts die in thirty years. I thought the memory of Marcel would tear my heart to shreds, but the memory was no different there than here. Oh, it was good to hear French again, to speak French, and to see Sammy. But the wall was there between us. I couldn't climb over it.”

“Give it time.”

“How long? I feel so old and tired.”

“You don't look old and you don't look tired. Let's have dinner tonight with the tourists at the Top of the Mark, and we'll look at the city and remember the old things and pretend that we're exactly as young as we feel — if you can bear to part with the stale cigarette smoke?”

“I can bear it. But right now, old friend, I need help desperately. We are broke. We owe the printers and we owe our paper people and we even owe the people we rent the typewriters and copying machines from. Can we get a loan? Do you know some friendly, openhearted banker?”

Boyd began to laugh.

“Don't laugh at me. I want help.”

“Dear Barbara, you're an impossible risk. You spend money but you don't earn any. An outfit like yours is always in the red. The kindest, most incompetent banker in the world would not lend you twenty cents.”

“Thank you.”

Boyd went to his desk, opened his checkbook, scribbled in it, and then handed Barbara a check.

“What's this?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Absolutely not!” she exclaimed. “I didn't come to you for money. I came for advice, for guidance, and like all men in this wretched society, you buy out.” She threw the check down on his desk. “And you don't even agree with me. I've argued myself hoarse on this question — with you.”

“That's not so,” he said quietly. “Give me credit for having enough intelligence to learn. I've learned more from you than from anyone I know. You have no right to say what you did.”

After a long moment or two, Barbara nodded.

He picked up the check. “Will you take it?”

She reached out and took it.

“Dinner tonight?”

“Yes.” She came around the desk, bent, kissed his cheek, and then left.

Back at the house on Green Street, Gertrude Simpson was waiting for Barbara. She was a small, thin woman, with bright eyes and a tangle of gray hair. She was a chain-smoker, her fingers yellow with nicotine stain, and she took her notes in shorthand, never asking the speaker to pause. She greeted Barbara enthusiastically. “I know you. I mean, I've read your books. That's the way to know someone. Still, I'll bug you to death with questions. Can we find somewhere quiet in this madhouse?”

Barbara led her upstairs to Sam's bedroom, the only room that remained sacrosanct. “My son's room,” she explained. “He's in Israel at Hebrew University, trying to find himself or his soul or just being his twenty years. His father was Jewish,” she added.

“I have the background. We have a file of clips and I studied them. Call me Gert — everyone else does. I'll call you Barbara — you don't mind? This is one lovely operation you got going. On the plane up here, I was trying to remember what Abe Lincoln said when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe — ‘So you're the little lady who split a nation and started this war' or something like that. I was going to reverse it for a lead, but it wouldn't work.”

“It certainly wouldn't,” Barbara agreed.
“Uncle Tom's Cabin
may have started the Civil War, but we'd be fools to imagine that our little pinpricks could end this one.”

“It's helping, it's certainly helping. Now, for a couple of hours before you came in, I was talking to your volunteers. Nice ladies. But what surprised me is that most of them said more or less the same thing. Sure, they're interested in your project. They hate the war and they hate the thought of their kids being maimed or killed. But more than that, they expressed a real sense of release. They talked about their frustration at being housewives, at being turned into college-educated zombies, at being locked out of life, because they don't see waxing floors and doing the kids' laundry and cooking their husbands' dinner as any valid expression of existence. Not all of them, but a good many. This way, even if they're only stuffing envelopes, they have a feeling that they are part of something broader. Four of them feel that their husbands are total idiots who don't have the vaguest notion of what goes on, in Vietnam or anywhere else. A lot of anger. A lot of it directed against their husbands. Even when they didn't come right out with it, I could sense it. One of them has two sons, sixteen and eighteen. She talked about her life, bringing them up.” She referred to her notes. “‘I'd wake them up, dress them, feed them breakfast, wash the dishes, clean the house, start dinner. When they got older, they were off to school. Nothing changed. I never talked to them about real life or war or this lousy mess all around us because I never knew anything. And my husband didn't talk, not to them, not to me. I became a glazed, functioning moron, informed by TV commercials that I was the most fortunate woman on earth.' Now that's damned interesting, isn't it?”

“You haven't wasted any time,” Barbara acknowledged.

“You're not upset about this line I'm taking?”

“Good God, no! It's all the same thing.”

“I was hoping you'd say that. Now, your own case is different. You're a very important, successful, well-known, and occasionally notorious woman. From what I've researched, you've never been a part of this burgeoning feminist movement — until you addressed that meeting in New York last spring. Is that what converted you?”

“I haven't been converted, by which I mean that I've never had an opportunity to accept my role as housewife. I did for a while, in the two years between my marriage to my husband and his death — that is, my first husband. I'm not sure that was a very happy time, and I suppose you know enough about my marriage to your boss to know that was not a very happy time either. That's one part of it. The war is something else. I was born in nineteen fourteen, the year the First World War began. I've lived my whole life with war. I was in Paris during the Spanish war, and the man I loved died as a result of that war. I saw Nazi Germany from the inside, and I was a war correspondent in World War Two. My husband died in the Israeli war in nineteen forty-eight. So you might say that my loathing of this practice of mutual mass murder that men have developed has become something of an obsession with me. I say men advisedly, because as I see it, the practice of warfare has been an integral part of the crazy macho ideology that men live by.”

“And you tie this into the oppression of women?”

“Of course I do. The woman bears the child, nurses it, feeds it, raises it, and then the man feeds the child into his death machine and kills it.”

“Isn't that somewhat simplistic?”

“It is. If you try to take the complexity of human history and squeeze it into a sentence or two, it becomes very simplistic.”

“All right. That makes you a feminist. How do you feel about men?”

“Compared to what? It's all we have, isn't it? I couldn't live without loving a man or being loved by a man.”

“And you see no contradiction there?”

“No. The feminist movement is not anti-male. It's a struggle against a very ancient oppression.”

“With no necessity to hate the oppressor?”

“No, because the oppression destroys more men than it does women. One can't be free without the other. In any case, we can never do it alone, only with the help of the men.”

“O.K., Barbara,” she said. “Let's switch tracks. Enough of feminism. Let's talk about Mothers for Peace. How did it begin?”

At the Top of the Mark that evening, with the lights of the city below them like a gargantuan jewel in a setting of limitless, inky darkness, Barbara confessed to Boyd that she was indecently content. “Which has been my curse all along, low-priced contentment. Gert Simpson, who is much brighter than I ever could hope to be, sees me as angry and discontented. She's wrong, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You agree with her.”

“No,” Boyd said, “I don't agree with her, but I also don't see you as any angel of contentment. At this moment, you're full of clam chowder and scallops and white wine — all of which help toward contentment. From where I sit, you're a very complex lady who mostly baffles me. You tell this Gertrude Simpson that you can't get along without loving a man or being loved by a man. When it comes to being loved by a man — well I can work that out. But loving a man? Are you sleeping with anyone else?”