The Legacy (42 page)

“In the fall, if I can meet the entrance requirements, I would like to go to Stanford Medical School, which would be convenient since it functions in Lane Hospital right there in San Francisco. I think it will be a long time before I have any desire to leave San Francisco. As for the entrance requirements, my three years here, I am told, would be the equivalent of four years of college in the States, maybe more, since for the past year I've been doing hospital work. My grades have been good, which ain't easy with the competition one has in this place. Also, Ralph Cassala is a pretty big wheel at Stanford, and I am shameless about pulling any strings which would allow me to study in town.

“I just can't imagine what you thought about me when we were together last summer in Paris. I behaved like a little swine, and it has taken me all this time to realize how rotten I was. Well, I have done a lot of growing in the past year, and look, mom, the house doesn't have to be finished for my return. There are plenty of rooms in the house on Russian Hill, and Granny Jean won't mind having me around for a week or two. If you see Freddie, tell him to come into town for a few days, so we can bum around in the old places.

“In your last few letters, I could read an underlying fear that I might fall in love with a local girl and decide to stay here. You see, it didn't happen. Maybe I was sort of in love with Rachel, and you can see from the picture I sent you that she is one hell of a girl, but she is a kibbutznik, with all the qualities of a kibbutznik. The kibbutz sent her here to study medicine, and then she goes back to the kibbutz. It was impossible. I admit that I have met all kinds of wonderful kids from the kibbutzim, but after a few weekends at Rachel's kibbutz, which is not too far from Jerusalem, I realized that if I had to spend my life in such a place, I'd go stark raving mad. For one thing, it's pretty much a closed society. Unless you were born in the place and grew up there, you're never really in. It's a great experiment in communal living, but it's still a farm. The thing that Rachel and I could never work out is the way I feel about war and killing. When I think about it, it's my feeling about life and my abhorrence of pain that turned me to medicine, but I could never make Rachel understand what it means to me to be a philosophical pacifist. She would tell me that they are all pacifists here. Jews are pacifists. But if we don't defend ourselves, we will die. We argued for hours about that but never worked it out. Anyway, I am not a farmer. It's a pity, because she's a wonderful girl, but when I suggested to her that she might return with me to San Francisco, she looked at me as if I had totally taken leave of my senses. The question is not even to be discussed. Anyway, our decision to end our relationship was mutual but it was a bad scene while it lasted because we really care for each other.

“You can see now that your fears about war over here were unfounded. You know, mom, you can't go on trying to protect me, no matter how deeply you feel about the war in Vietnam. Anyway, if someday I have to be involved, it will be as a doctor, and the only positive thing I see about war is the physician, who tries to put some of it back together again. Now, if this letter should reach you before I do, I'm taking the early plane out of New York on June 14th, and we'll be landing at San Francisco International just about noon. I'm not standing on ceremony. I want you to be there, just you, with open arms for the returning prodigal. And will I ever be glad to see you!”

He was sealing the letter in its envelope when he heard his name called. “Shmuel!”

Sam looked up and saw Dr. Reznik walking toward him, between the tables of the deserted library. The old man walked slowly, wiping his glasses, and then replacing them carefully as he sat down across the table from Sam. “So here you are,” he said. “I looked everywhere, even in your room. It's a lot of walking for an old man.” He glanced around him. “Sitting here in this deserted place.”

“It
is
empty, isn't it,” Sam said. “I've never seen it this way before, but I guess I didn't think about it.”

“You don't know why?”

“I've been here for hours, writing a long letter to my mother.”

“You don't know why the library is empty?” Dr. Reznik asked him again, a note of sadness in his voice.

“No. What has happened?”

“We're at war again.”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Yes, we're at war.”

“With whom?”

“Everyone,” he said, shaking his head, “everyone, Shmuel, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan — already you can hear the sounds of war. Not in here.” He glanced around the empty library again. “A few kilometers away, and here it's quiet. Here the wisdom of all the ages rests quietly, while men kill each other again.”

“I just wrote my mother that I was coming home next week. I have the tickets,” Sam said dully.

The old man nodded. “Well, we'll see. Meanwhile, I need you.”

“Why?”

“The Jordanians are attacking already. Our forces are going up against them in East Jerusalem, and the war will be on the other side of Samuel Street.”

“It's insane. When did this happen?”

“Today, while you were sitting in here.” He took off his glasses and wiped them again. “Now listen to me, Shmuel!” the old man said sharply. “The university is empty. Everyone's been called up. We gathered together a handful of the premedical students, along with those of us on staff who are too old, and we're setting up emergency first aid stations in the Guela section, on Yoel Street and Guela Street. One of them will be mine. Rachel is there already and Ari, who is exempted for his club-foot. We have an older woman, a nurse from the hospital. That's all they could spare. I want you with me.”

“I'm not a doctor,” Sam protested.

“Am I a doctor? It's twenty years since I practiced medicine. You're the best student I have. You've learned something. You can put on a dressing. You can tie up an artery. You can bandage a wound. You can set a broken bone. It's keeping the boys alive until the ambulances can take them to the hospital. I say boys, but they've started shelling. It will be everyone, women, children.”

“I didn't want to see Rachel again. We said goodby.”

“What is it?” Dr. Reznik asked harshly. “Isn't half of you Jewish? You will say goodby again.”

“Let's go,” Sam answered angrily. “You don't have to bait me.”

“All right, all right. Now come along, my boy. We'll stop at Hubber's pharmacy on Ben Yehuda Street and pick up some supplies.”

“You mean there are no supplies there?”

“Not yet. The war has just begun.” Then he added, “Because we are an afterthought. They have the hospitals and the ambulances and the teams of medics, everything waiting and ready except the afterthought. But you will be surprised, Shmuel, at how important the afterthought will be.”

It was not until noon of that day that Barbara heard about the war. She was awakened early in the morning by a phone call from Sally, who had just won a major supporting role in a film. After informing Barbara that she had not slept all night because she was more miserable than delighted, she explained that if this job had washed out, as so many others had, she would have gone back to Napa. She had been speaking to Joe on the telephone almost every day for a month now. “And now I don't know what to do,” she told Barbara. “I don't even know if I want the job, and it's a wonderful part, but if I take it I have the feeling that I'll never be able to go back to Joe, and he's been such an angel about this, and this is the second time we've separated, and do you think I'm actually pathological, Barbara? Please don't spare me.”

“Yes, I think you're crazy,” Barbara answered sleepily.

“I know, I know. In this world, who isn't? Bobby, I know I talk my head off and that makes me sound glib, but I'm just about the most miserable woman in the world. Well, not the most, but up there with the top ten, and one day I hate myself for doing anything so stupid as to walk out on Joe, and then the next day I get the shakes at the thought of going back to Napa. You have to help me.”

“I can't help you,” Barbara said angrily. “For once in your life, you're going to have to decide whether to be married or not to be married. Joe is my brother. You can't keep putting me in the middle of this.”

“I know. I'm so thoughtless. Basically, I'm rotten, but I can't turn down the part. It's the first decent thing in months, and now you hate me too, along with May Ling and Danny.”

“They don't hate you.” It was impossible for her to be angry with Sally. “If you take the part, why don't you ask Joe to come down for a while?”

“He wouldn't.”

“Did you ever ask him? Did you ever try? This whole damn women's thing makes no sense if a man and a woman can't live their lives as they feel they must and still be married.”

“Would you talk to him?” she pleaded.

“I damn well will not. He's your husband.”

The conversation left her more provoked with herself than with Sally, her patience worn thin. Why, she asked herself, was she in the middle of this, in the middle of so many things? Where was Barbara Lavette or Barbara Devron or Barbara Cohen? Why couldn't she pull herself together? It had been a hard, confusing eight months since her house had burned, finding a loft where the organization could continue to work, finding enough money to pay their debts, to start all over again, persuading the women involved that it could still work, still make a difference in the scheme of things. She had not dreamed that they would be so eager to accept defeat, but then they had spent most of their lives accepting defeat, which she understood only too well. There was a strong urge inside of her to acquiesce; they had done something, they had tried and it was over. But once again, she was in the middle. No one of some twenty other women who were active in the organization could have made the decision or wanted to or felt pressed to; it had to be herself. Find things, do things, make something that is dead viable. She never got back to the book she had started, the manuscript of which had been destroyed in the fire. Why, she asked herself over and over, does one person and not another find the state of things untenable? No one saved the world and no one changed the world; it was only an inner pleading that had to be answered, and one's own soul that had to be saved.

At the same time, she had been living for the past eight months in her mother's house, a house she had left as a schoolgirl. She got along with her mother. Jean was amiable enough, but the thought occurred to her after the fire that Jean could have said, “Here is this big, ridiculous mansion on Russian Hill. Bring your Mothers for Peace in here. If they could work in your home, they can work in mine.” But Jean never said that, and Barbara would never suggest it. When she mentioned it to Boyd, he suggested that the house on Russian Hill was all that remained for Jean. With so little future, she could only reach back in time to moments half a century ago. Barbara tried to understand; wasn't she herself the same way? Otherwise, why was she driving a contractor out of his mind, rebuilding the house on Green Street to be precisely the way it was before it had burned? Jean had said to her, “This has always been your home, Barbara, and heaven knows, there is plenty of room.” And yet Jean had protested only halfheartedly when Barbara explained that she must rebuild. Mr. Kurtz, the contractor, had protested more violently. “You are asking me for something impossible,” Mr. Kurtz had said. “You had a wooden Victorian house, Miss Lavette. Who can build such a house today? You think because you show me pictures of your house, I can build it? Never. Curved dentils. Who can make such a thing today? And the lintels over the windows? Hand-carved they have to be, and nobody does such hand-carving, not for any price. You have engaged pilasters all over the front, Corinthian crowns, broken pediments — am I a magician?”

“You'll find them in the junkyards,” Barbara had told him soothingly. “They're always tearing down one of these houses somewhere in town. On Jones Street, they're tearing down four of them, and they're tearing down others over in North Beach. You'll find the carvings you need, I'm sure you will, someone as skilled and inventive as you are.”

Yet the project would have been impossible, had not Tom telephoned with offers of assistance, her brother strangely sympathetic, assuring her that the bank, the Seldon Bank, her grandfather's bank which was now Tom's bank, would extend any mortgage loan she required without interest for any term of years she desired. His thoughtfulness and concern moved her, as did the sympathy and concern of so many others. A feature story about the burning of her home appeared in the Chicago
Tribune,
hardly known as a liberal newspaper, yet it brought in a flood of contributions to the cause of Mothers for Peace.

So it might well be, Barbara reasoned, that she was not so different from her mother, treasuring the old house which was the only focus of stability and continuity in her life, driving Mr. Kurtz out of his mind in her effort to reproduce it, haunting antique shops to find furniture like the old pieces Sam Goldberg's wife had bought for the house three quarters of a century before.

These and other thoughts filled Barbara's mind as she showered and dressed after receiving Sally's telephone call. She had driven Mr. Kurtz into a race against time, hoping to complete the rebuilding of the house before Sam's return, and now all that remained was the painting of the exterior and some finishing of the rooms inside. Not that she expected Sam to live with her for any length of time, but even as it was the focus of her security, she felt that it must have some of the same meaning for him.

Jean was already at the breakfast table, complaining to Mrs. Bendler that the coffee was too weak. Barbara joined her. The housekeeper reminded Jean that Dr. Kellman had forbidden coffee entirely, which led Jean to remark that Kellman was an old fool.