The Legacy (41 page)

Until they were in Boyd's car and driving into San Francisco, Barbara was silent, nor did Boyd interrupt her thoughts. When at last she spoke, it was with a kind of hopeless despair. “Boyd, what will I do? How can I ever replace it?”

“I know there are things you can never replace. But you're well insured, and the house can be rebuilt.”

“We're not insured for the organization's things. There must have been fifty or sixty thousand dollars' worth of material in the house. You saw it. You know. And the basement was packed with cartons. What I have in my purse won't even pay for the machines we rented. How can we ever work our way out of this?”

“Not all at once, Barbara. You have to get over the shock, and then we'll sit down and talk and do some planning. After all, the organization exists in the people who were working with you, and they're still here, and you'll be surprised at how helpful they'll be.”

“I don't know. I just don't know. You're sure no one was in the house, no one was hurt?”

“Absolutely.”

“I want to go there now.”

“Now? You're sure?”

“Yes, please.” Then a while later, she said to him, “How did the fire start? Do they know?”

“Not for certain.”

“What does that mean?”

“It might have been arson, but the police and the firemen are not sure. It's very hard to tell with the old wooden houses. The heat is very intense. You mustn't expect to recover anything.”

“But they suspect arson?”

“They're not sure, Barbara. Someone could have dropped a cigarette into a wastebasket and it might have smoldered for hours. Ruth Adams was the last one to leave last night. She locked up. Also, she doesn't smoke, and she swears that everything was in order when she left.”

“It would be. Ruth wouldn't leave it any other way. It's strange, Boyd, I always told myself that material things meant nothing to me. Mother was always in despair with the way I dressed. I hate to buy clothes — and now — now I have a dress and a sweater in my bag and I'm wailing over everything the old house contained. But I did love that house so. Did you talk to mother?”

“This morning. She wants me to bring you there.”

“All right. But I want to see the house first.”

She stood on the sidewalk on Green Street, looking at the pile of charred wood that had been her home. Ruth Adams, Shela Abramson, Eloise, and several others of the volunteers were there, waiting for her, along with a crowd of onlookers and a policeman. Her house was totally destroyed. There was nothing to be salvaged.

Lucy Lavette sat opposite her husband at breakfast the following morning, observing him carefully as he read the account of the fire that had destroyed Barbara's house. They were breakfasting, as always, in the solarium of the house on Pacific Heights. Lucy enjoyed the environment of flowers and palms. The house had been built by her father, and she had always been very close to her father; after her father's death, she had insisted that Tom take over the house and make it his home. On his part, Tom admired the antique magnificence of the old mansion, a quality that simply could not be built into a modern house, regardless of the money one spent, and he was not at all reluctant to make her childhood home his own. On this morning, he was far from happy; however cool his relations with Barbara, he had always maintained, somewhere deep in his mind, a flicker of pride in the fact that she was his sister.

“You read this?” he asked Lucy.

“Oh, yes.”

“Poor Barbara. She loved that ridiculous house. To my way of thinking, it's absolutely insane the way we cling to those old wooden houses on the hills. One day, we'll have a fire as bad as nineteen six.”

Lucy reached across the table and took the paper. “You saw this?” And she read from the story, “In addition to being Miss Lavette's residence, the building was used as the working headquarters of the antiwar organization which calls itself Mothers for Peace. According to Ruth Adams, one of the founders of the organization, the loss to Mothers for Peace in material and equipment amounts to seventy-five thousand dollars. While unable to confirm this figure, Barbara Lavette, reached later at her mother's house, where she is staying, said that it sounded like a reasonable estimate of their losses. When asked whether the organization could continue its work, Miss Lavette said that she hoped it could, but that the financial blow was shattering.”

Tom listened in silence, watching his wife. She smiled slightly. “You see, my dear,” she said to him, “there are more ways than one to skin a cat.”

He continued to stare at her.

“I'll send this clipping to Austin Campbell. I think he'll appreciate its significance.”

“You consider this a fortunate accident,” Tom said coldly.

“There are no fortunate accidents. Only fools depend on accidents. I am not a fool.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Only that Campbell will respond to this.”

“Lucy, did you have her house torched?”

“And if I did, would you blame me? Or pretend to? Come off it, Tom. You were in deeper trouble than you knew. Mr. Johnson is a vindictive man, and while your sister may have been only a gadfly, he doesn't tolerate such things easily. Now you're off the hook, and how has Barbara been hurt? The house was insured. I made certain of that, and we made certain that no one was in it. What must be done must be done.”

“How could you?” Tom said hoarsely. “She's my sister. And without asking me. What am I? This puts me on a level with the Mafia.”

“Don't take that tone with me, Thomas. Things far worse than this are done every day — yes, by respectable business organizations.”

“Not by me! We could have survived anything that loathsome Texas baboon threw at us. If he wanted a fight, I would have given him one. Where the hell would he get tankers if he put mine out of the picture? And I'm not one damn bit sure that he could. But to engage in anything so low as this — to burn down a woman's home ——”

“Thomas! Just cool down and think about it. We knew she was in Los Angeles and we knew the house was empty. She may be very happy to be rid of that miserable shack!”

“It stinks to hell!” Tom shouted, rising and stalking out of the room. Lucy sat at the table and finished her breakfast. She had witnessed these bouts of anger on her husband's part in the past. Left alone for a few hours, he would come to his senses. He always did.

Five

I
t hadn't been until Sam was on his way to Israel, actually in the plane between London and Tel Aviv, late in the summer of 1964, that he had made up his mind about his future. He had with him almost seven thousand dollars in travelers' checks, the proceeds of the sale of his treasured boat, his inheritance from his grandfather. When he told his mother what he intended, the sale of the boat, her first reaction was disbelief and resistance. Finally, Barbara gave in to his decision, recognizing in her son a stubborn will and independence that would not be thwarted. At that time, almost three years ago, Sam had only the vaguest notion of what he intended to do in Israel, or indeed what Israel was like. He projected himself into many roles, a tourist wandering through the land and seeing every corner of it, a member of a kibbutz, toiling uncomplainingly in the soil of the ancient land, a sophisticate spending his days in cafés — although he had no idea whether there were cafés — and his evenings in romantic encounters, a lonely researcher trying to discover his own past and origins; and having projected and imagined each of these various styles of living, he had enough common sense to reject all of them and to consider realistically only two alternatives, either to find a job or to continue his schooling. And since he was not equipped for any job he could regard with any sense of satisfaction, he decided to go to school, and once he reached Israel, he went on to Jerusalem and set about the process of enrolling in Hebrew University.

It was not easy; indeed, it was the most difficult thing he had ever attempted, and his decision to enroll as a premedical student made his life even more difficult. For the three weeks before the school term began, he hired a tutor and embarked on an intensive study of Hebrew. He found a room in a house on Bezalel Street, within walking distance of the university, and for three weeks he lived there, emerged only for food, worked fourteen hours a day, and achieved at least a primitive mastery of a language he had never before encountered. Now, somewhat less than three years later, early in June of 1967, he was only days away from his departure. His money had run out, and still unwilling to ask his mother for support, he had received a loan from Jean, his grandmother, enough to purchase his ticket home, nonstop from Tel Aviv to New York via El Al, and from there to San Francisco. There remained some forty dollars, which would see him through the next week and pay for a bus ticket from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Today, in the quiet of the afternoon, he sat in the almost deserted library, composing a letter to his mother, which he began with a sort of apology:

“It may well be,” he wrote, “that I will return before this letter, the mail here being a bit uncertain at times, but I decided to write this letter in any case. I remember you telling me about your last night in prison and your unreasonable fear that you would die before you were released. It's not a very apt comparison, yet I am so desperately eager to return home that I've been sleeping poorly, afraid that something will intervene to prevent it. Of course nothing will, and even if the mails provide an unexpected agility in this case, I'll be only a day or two behind. Yet strangely, I have come to love this place, and I am torn between that love and my desperate need to go home. When I try to analyze that need and ask myself what it is specifically, I can put aside the place and the landscape, as dear as they are to me. It's a question of family, and I think that I couldn't face life apart from the people I knew and loved from when I was a child. That's the important thing. I can't tell you how much I miss you and Granny Jean and the people at Higate, and Freddie, more or less underlined. I don't think that if we were brothers we could be any closer, and I wasn't a bit surprised that the marriage between him and Rita Hogan never came off. The trouble with Freddie is not that he falls in love with every beautiful girl he meets, but that he falls out of love so quickly. He lacks staying power, but since he's only twenty-five, that may change. Myself, having yet to reach my twenty-first birthday, well, I can afford to be superior.

“Yesterday, Dr. Reznik called me into his office and talked to me about living here in Israel. ‘Shmuel,' he said to me, ‘now that we have given you of our blood and substance and elevated you from a
naar
(fool) into a being of some common sense, you propose to leave. You have robbed us, and you run away with your loot.' Of course, this is a rough translation of the Hebrew. Dr. Reznik, who is head of the biology department here, is a wonderful old man. I think I mentioned him in some of my previous letters. He was one of the original founders of the university, which has a very strange history indeed. You know, when I came here, mom, the only thing I knew about Hebrew University was the name, and I expected to find something like Berkeley or Stanford. Well, it ain't. The university was started long before there ever was a Jewish state, sometime around 1924 or so, and Dr. Reznik, who is about seventy-five, was here at the beginning. He was born in Vienna, where he got his M.D., and one day he told me the whole story of the founding of the University, when they had no buildings or books or equipment, just the faculty and about a hundred students, and some of the first buildings were built by the students and faculty. That was on Mt. Scopus, which has been cut off by the Arabs since 1948. The place where I've been studying, as you know, is at Givat Ram.

“Anyway, that's what Dr. Reznik said to me yesterday, and I was kind of snotty and told him that he didn't want me there because I wasn't Jewish. ‘Ah ha,' he said, ‘so you have been deceiving us and lying to us. And where, tell me, did you get the name Shmuel ha Cohen, which is not only a Jewish name but the most distinguished?' He was not really angry, and he knew well enough where I got my name, which in Hebrew means Samuel the priest. And then we talked for a long time about who I am and what I am, and what it has meant to me not to be Jewish by Jewish law and by the laws of Israel and to go through life with a Jewish name. He's a very wise man, and his position, as I understood it, is that being Jewish is a state of mind. I don't have that state of mind, which is strange, because I love this place and I've had more happiness here than unhappiness, and here is where I came to manhood, whatever that is. But if I am not Jewish, then I am not Christian either, and I must exist like something hanging between two worlds, trapped in a Jewish name which I will never change.

“On the other hand, Dr. Reznik does not consider this to be any kind of a tragedy. On the contrary, he feels that I am lucky and that I can understand things I never would have understood under other circumstances. I am going into all this because when I came here and left you for so long, I insisted that I had to and that I had to find out who I am. I'm not sure that I know, but I am closer to it.