The Legacy (40 page)

“That's a very personal question.”

“I'll rephrase it, as the gentlemen in the profession say. Do you love me?”

“At times.”

“I'll settle for that. Why won't you marry me?”

“You haven't asked me in months now. Are you asking me now because I've been away?”

“Partly. I get lonely as hell when you're away. And partly to underline certain complexities of your character.”

“It's not that complex, Boyd. I'm a year older than you. I've experienced my change of life, and in a few more years I'll be entirely gray. You'd want me to dye my hair.”

“Never.”

“Anyway,” Barbara said, “I hope to pay you back that five thousand dollars next week.”

“I don't want it.”

“Let's say you'll take it and keep it until the next time I ask for money.”

“And where is all this money coming from?”

“I'm going down to Los Angeles to talk to some people.”

“Just like that?”

“No. Carson is setting it up for me.”

“Carson?”

“Yes, we're still very good friends.” And then, after a few minutes of silence, Barbara said, “Boyd, you're sulking. You're jealous.”

“You're damn right I am!”

“He's comfortably married.”

“Ha! Why not happily married?”

“Very few are.”

“And just like that, the publisher of that rotten, warmongering, jingoistic rag becomes a supporter of a women's peace movement.”

“Perhaps he doesn't sleep well. He's doing a story on us.”

“I'll suspend judgment until I see it.”

Later that evening, in Boyd's apartment, lying in bed in his arms, Barbara said dreamily, “You know, it's not very complimentary to suggest that just because I happen to be in Los Angeles, I'd leap into bed with my ex-husband.”

“I don't know. It's sort of complimentary to suggest that an old girl who'll be gray in a few years is so desirable that a handsome sonofabitch like Carson can't keep his hands off her.”

“Go to hell,” Barbara told him lazily.

In the morning, making breakfast in Boyd's kitchen, Barbara heard the telephone. “I'll get it,” Boyd yelled, and then he called out to her that it was her mother. Barbara cut the flame under the pan, picked up the telephone, and wondered how on earth her mother had found her here at eight o'clock in the morning.

“Sin in San Francisco is a public secret. But I am not afflicted with voyeurism, only in need of help. Sally is here. She's been here all night. She has left your brother. It appears to be a family failing.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“Perhaps it is.”

“Why did she come to you?”

“It's a safe, snug harbor. I suppose she had nowhere else to go.”

“I'll be there in an hour. Tell her to wait for me.”

“The trouble is that I understand it only too well,” she told Boyd over a hurried breakfast. “She did it once before, when they had been married only a few years. My brother Joe is a good, kind, gentle person, but as dull as dishwater.”

“Most men are,” Boyd said, his mouth full of food.

“Don't be so damned complacent and superior, and don't talk with your mouth full. My sister-in-law is a bit insane.”

“That's not uncommon.”

“Thank you. She's been his nurse — he practices at home — and housekeeper, mother, and cook. When we started this Mothers for Peace thing, she told Joe that he could hire a nurse, that he was making enough money, which was true, and that he treated every Chicano in the valley for nothing, which was about half true, and she took off up and down the West Coast, talking at every little meeting we could pull together. She was quite a film star in her day, and that helped. I feel rotten, and I feel responsible.”

“That's nonsense. You're not responsible. And if she wanted to do something she felt mattered ——”

“Oh no, hold on. Do you remember what William Blake said? ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.' I don't hold with those who love mankind and despise people.”

“Now you're being judge and jury. Why don't you hear her side?”

“I know, I know.” She pushed back her chair. “Be a dear and finish alone. I must run.”

Barbara arrived at her mother's house with no set plan or position. Divorce frightened her. It had begun when her mother and father divorced, tearing the world of her girlhood into fragments, and her own divorce from Carson Devron had left her depressed, unable to work. Her brother Joe had always called forth a sense of guilt and protectiveness. Joe was totally vulnerable. He was one of those rare men who could not kill a mosquito without hesitation and remorse. He had no defenses. He was a compassionate and skilled physician, in a world where medicine was practiced only too often with little compassion and less skill. Barbara had watched Sally execute her decision to marry Joe — a decision that had depended very little on Joe's desire. The Sally of twenty years ago had been a wild, lovely, and exciting young woman. She was still beautiful, still exciting, still endowed with the same explosive quality as she paced back and forth in the living room of the Lavette house on Russian Hill. Jean, who could not bear scenes of any kind, had disappeared upstairs.

“No,” she said emphatically. “No, Bobby, you don't understand, because you're the way he is, a goddamn saint! And the only thing worse than being a bloody saint is being married to one.” And then she was pleading with Barbara that she didn't mean it at all. “You know I love you, Bobby. I admire you. I always have. You were my Joan of Arc.”

“Will you stop talking nonsense!” Barbara snapped. “Will you for once in your life look at people the way they are! I am no saint, and neither is Joe. I'm a troubled, confused divorced woman, no different from ten million others. I spent months with a kind shrink, trying to get my head screwed on right, and my son is seven thousand miles away trying to find out who he is because I failed him as much as I failed both my husbands. So just stop this silly fantasy and then perhaps we can talk to each other like two civilized people. Now, what happened between you and Joe?”

“Nothing happened. That's it, Bobby.”

“You'll have to make it clearer than that,” Barbara told her. “And for heaven's sake, stop moving. Sit down!”

She dropped onto the couch. “O.K., O.K., I'm sitting.”

Barbara took a chair facing her. “Now make sense.”

“All right. I'm bored.”

“Just that? It's not new, Sally. They say most men live lives of quiet desperation. Most women live lives of quiet boredom.”

“I am not most women. Do you know what happened when I went out on that tour, talking to groups of women? I became alive. I'm not pretending it's the cause I spoke for. I do hate this crazy war. My Danny's only eleven, but this bastard Johnson can keep his war going forever. But it wasn't that. It was getting away from Napa, from that awful small-town life, from Joe — yes, from Joe — and feeling that I had been dead and some miracle had revived me. And then in Hollywood, I went onto the Paramount lot. Believe it or not, Mike, the guard at the gate, recognized me, and then in a little restaurant right outside the gate, I got together with a whole bunch of the kids, young actors who weren't stars and some old-timers I had known, and we held a meeting right there in the restaurant, and they put up almost eight hundred dollars — I have almost four thousand dollars in cashier's checks in my purse to give you — and it was just — I don't know how to put it, but it was wonderful. And then I was invited to a party that night and I went to bed with someone I had known in the old days, and it didn't mean one goddamn thing except that I felt alive and young — and do you know how long it is since I felt that way?”

Then they sat silently, facing each other, minute after minute, until Sally burst out, “Aren't you going to say anything?”

“Did you tell Joe — about the man at the party?”

“I told him. I told him I had to leave him.”

“What did he say?”

“What do you think he said, Bobby?” Her voice was woeful, pleading. “He said he understood what had happened to me. Jesus God, he understood it! Only he didn't. He said he loved me.”

“He does.”

“It's not enough.”

“What do you feel for him? Do you love him?”

“Is love feeling dead? I don't know what love is. I don't want the damn thing! I want to be alive. I'm forty years old. My life has escaped me. I want to find it. I was a star. I wrote poetry and published it. And then I stopped existing.”

The trouble was that Barbara understood her and had no argument. None. She could only think what a rotten mess things were.

“And you hate me for it,” Sally said.

“Oh, stop that. You'll do what you must do. I'm no judge. What about May Ling and Danny?”

“May Ling spends her days at your house. It's become her whole life. She'll help Joe with Danny. He's old enough to understand.”

“No one is,” Barbara thought. “You don't want Danny with you?” she asked.

“I can't. I'm doing enough to Joe. I can't do that. I'm going back to films. Oh, I'll never be a star again. I don't have any such dreams. But I'll find work. It's no life for Danny, and May Ling wouldn't leave Joe.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Yes — both of them.” She began to cry. “Oh, Bobby, I feel so rotten, so guilty.”

Not quite as guilty as I do, Barbara thought, and then she went to Sally and drew her to her feet. “Come on, baby, we'll find my mother and have some coffee and talk about your future.”

“You don't hate me?”

“Not this morning. We'll see how I feel next month.”

A week later Barbara took the eleven o'clock plane out of Los Angeles to return to San Francisco. The previous evening had been successful, and she had over nine thousand dollars in cash and checks stuffed into her purse — most of it from an old lady of eighty-two years, who was some sort of second cousin to Carson's grandmother, lived in Pasadena, and possessed, as Carson put it, more millions than she could count. She had given Barbara a check for six thousand dollars, explaining, “This is not for your organization child. I lost all taste for organizations when they found our pastor in bed with my niece, Agnes — who was certainly not his wife. This is because you had enough grit to go to jail when everyone else turned chicken and ran. And why Carson ever let go of you, I'll never know.” The rest of the money came from a director, a producer, and three actresses who had joined her and Carson for dinner. Late that evening, back at her hotel room, she felt the need to talk to someone about her triumph, and she called Boyd, waking him. He listened sleepily, congratulated her, and told her he would be waiting for her at the airport.

“You don't have to.”

“I want to. You need a bodyguard.”

“All right. You're a dear. Now go back to sleep.”

Still high and excited as she strode through the gate to where Boyd stood waiting, Barbara demanded, “Well, now what do you think of my talents as a fund-raiser? A whole new profession, and enough to pay off almost all our debts.” It was only then that she noticed his face. “What happened, Boyd?”

“No one hurt, no one dead, but still very bad.”

“Will you please tell me!”

“Your house burned down last night.”

“Oh, no.” She stared at him, shock, disbelief — her eyes filling with tears, her face pleading with him to tell her it was some grotesque joke. “All of it?” she asked hoarsely. “Is anything left?”

He shook his head. “Those old wooden houses, Bobby. It went up like tinder.”

“When?” she managed to ask. “When did it happen?”

“About four o'clock this morning.”

Everything, she was thinking, a whole life, my books, my pictures, my memories, all of it gone. I'm naked. What do I do now?

“I spoke to Harvey,” Boyd was saying. “He says your insurance was in order. So that's some consolation.”

“It can't be, it just can't be,” she whispered, crying now.

“Don't cry, darling, please.”

“No. I'm all grown up. Why should I cry? I had almost a hundred pages of my new book written and sitting in my study. Why should I cry? I can't do it again. I can't live my life over again. I can't write those hundred pages again.”

Boyd steered her to his car .She dried her eyes, trying to think, to remember everything that had been there, Bernie's record collection, the photo albums, a seascape that Dan had loved and that her mother had given to her after her father's death, the black-horsehair-covered Victorian furniture that had belonged to Sam Goldberg, all her books, current and back to her early childhood, her collection of the
O
z books of L. Frank Baum, which she had loved so and passed on to Sam, the dishes she had collected, the articles she had written for
Manhattan Magazine
when she. was a correspondent in Paris, foreign translations of her own books. She had never been capable of throwing away a book. And there was one ancient doll she had preserved, and she had not thought about it or looked at it in years. And of course the manuscript she had been working on. Conceivably, other things could be replaced, but not the manuscript. That was gone. How could she reclaim it or rewrite it? And then, suddenly projected into her thinking, heart-chilling and agonizing, the material of Mothers for Peace, thousands of leaflets, bumper stickers, stationery, envelopes, a Xerox machine that they had just rented, typewriters, lapel buttons, voice tapes, banners, thousands of address plates that linked their organization together, and rolls of motion picture film for a documentary they had been planning — all of it gone.