The Legacy (47 page)

Alexander Hargasey, the film producer who had given Sally her first starring role back in 1948, always spoke of her with a kind of awe. “She's got brains,” he would say, “more in her little finger than all the rest of them on this lot put together.” He had not been exposed to very much intelligence in the people he dealt with, and he had never been exposed to anyone like Sally. Yet her intelligence had been of no help; she always felt moved, used, and frustrated by forces beyond her control, and so often, after she had embarked on some course, she wondered what had pressed her to do what she did. She felt that way today, this afternoon, pulling up in her rented Thunderbird in front of the house she had left almost a year before.

The house in Napa was an old country house that had been built in the nineteen-twenties. It had a wide porch that extended around three sides, roses and honeysuckle climbing over trellises, two stories of clapboard with the paint peeling. Joe always intended to have the exterior painted, but when he had to face the reality of pulling down the vines that clothed so much of it, he backed away. The front door was never locked, indeed they had no key for it, and Sally entered uncertainly, her heart beating rapidly. The front room was empty. Sally paused there, and then May Ling, who had been upstairs, home today and laboring over applications for college, heard the door open and came down the stairs and saw her mother. She ran to Sally and they embraced, and for a few minutes they simply remained that way, hugging each other.

“You're as tall as I am,” Sally said. “You must have grown. Let me look at you.”

“Mom, that's silly. I'm almost twenty years old and I've given up growing.”

“You're beautiful.”

“No, I'm not. Freddie says I look like one of those attenuated Japanese dolls, and he's right. You're the only beauty in this family. You look wonderful.”

“Do I? I don't feel wonderful. Where's Danny?”

“Hanging out somewhere. He'll be in soon. You know, we had a housekeeper, but she left. I've been doing the cooking and cleaning. And I am a very good cook. Don't you think that's wonderful? Of course, I had to stop working with Aunt Barbara, but daddy's going to interview housekeepers as soon as he gets around to it.”

“Where is he?”

“At the hospital. He'll be back for dinner. He has a new nurse, who's old and cranky. She's very disapproving. She's off today, thank heavens. You know how awful disapproving people can be. I was upstairs with catalogues, because daddy says I must go to college and not waste the rest of my life. You know how he is.”

“I know,” Sally agreed. Then she heard the door open, and turned around, and there was her son, Danny, breathing hard. He had seen the car pull up in front of the house and had come running, and now he stood staring at her, a sunburned, freckled boy of twelve years, just staring at her with his mouth open. Then he said, “Is that your car, the yellow T-Bird?”

“I rented it,” she whispered, pleading that he would come to her. But he didn't move, just stood and stared at her.

She felt very tired and walked to a chair and dropped into it. May Ling watched her, silently, woefully. Sally's eyes filled with tears, and she thought, Your whole world turns to shit, and all you can think of is that your makeup will run.

Danny came over to her and touched her cheek and said, “Don't cry, mom, please.”

Sally and her husband, Joe Lavette, differed from each other in many ways. One saw the world symbolically, while the other approached it pragmatically. In Sally's world of symbols, stupidity and injustice lurked everywhere; they were her personal enemies, and in this she was not unlike Barbara, whom she had adored as her heroine since childhood. Joe, on the other hand, regarded Barbara with compassion, and with regret that, in his terms, so much of life had passed her by. Raised by a Chinese mother and Chinese grandparents, Joe had the quality of acceptance. What was could not be changed; it could be sutured, bandaged, helped — but all of that within the framework of what was. Serving as a young army doctor in the South Pacific in World War Two, he healed as best he could; he did not question the war — even as he accepted the war in Vietnam. His role was to heal what could be healed, whereas Sally saw the war as a symbol of man's inhumanity to man. Joe's imperfect world was to Sally a lunatic cage, wherein the stupidity of men brought agony to practically everyone.

This difference between the two of them was strikingly evident today in the manner of Joe's acceptance of her appearance. He had no previous knowledge of her coming; he walked into the house, and there she was, and he smiled with pleasure. Anything else, Sally thought. If he had only been cold and distant at first, or accusing, or deeply troubled — but to smile and accept her presence was simply too much, and she said to herself, “The trouble with the goddamn saints is that they live in the same world we do.”

“You look wonderful,” he said. “You look absolutely beautiful.”

“I don't feel beautiful.”

“I'm glad you came. What a wonderful surprise!”

May Ling was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Danny was upstairs. “I'll tell you why I came,” Sally said. “I came because you and I are going to talk tonight, and I mean talk.”

“Yes, sure, we should.”

“I mean talk. You don't know what I mean, because we've never talked to each other.”

After a moment, Joe shook his head. “No, I don't know what you mean by that.”

“Of course you don't. If you did, we wouldn't be standing here, facing each other like a couple of strangers. Well, I won't go into it now. If you will sit down and try to talk with me tonight, I'll stay. Otherwise, I'll go.”

“I want you to stay. I'll try.”

May Ling had stuffed and roasted a turkey. It was good, and Sally insisted that May Ling was a better cook than she. Danny, more relaxed now, but still bewildered and confused about the situation between his mother and father, pressed Sally with questions about Hollywood, and she told him and May Ling the story of her first encounter with films, going to see Alexander Hargasey — an old friend of Dan Lavette's — with a script she had written and ending up with a major part in his film.

“Was it good?” May Ling asked. “Why didn't we ever see it?”

“It was terrible, and you were much too young to see films. If it ever turns up on TV, we'll watch it. To my shame.”

They went on talking about the film world. Joe was silent for the most part, watching his wife. After dinner, Sally said, “You'll both have to clean up tonight. Daddy and I are going into his office and talk. We have very important things to discuss.”

Her two children looked at each other, and then they nodded silently. In Joe's office, Sally seated herself on his old leather couch. Joe sat behind his desk.

Wondering how they had come by two such offspring, Sally said, “They're such damn good kids, it just breaks my heart.”

“Maybe we did something right,” Joe said.

“Maybe, and maybe I did everything wrong. I don't know. Joe, last week I gave up one of the best parts ever offered to a woman my age. It might have put me up for best supporting actress in the Academy Awards, and I turned it down.”

“Why?” Joe asked her.

“You don't know? You can't imagine why?”

“Well, if you mean you didn't want to stay there ——”

“Oh, Jesus! Joe, why do you think I married you?”

“I used to think you loved me.”

“Why? Why? Why?”

“I never knew. I just never knew. You were the most wonderful girl I ever knew, so beautiful and a lot smarter than I am. I never knew why you married me, Sally. I was just lucky.”

“You think you were lucky? You really think you were lucky?”

“Yes.”

“Your worst enemy should have such luck! Now, Joe, you listen to me. I'll tell you why I married you. I married you because you are everything I'm not. You're honest and decent and honorable, and I don't think you ever hurt anyone in your entire life — except me.”

“You? For God's sake, Sally, that's as wrong as everything else you're saying. I'd die before I'd hurt you.”

“Bullshit! Straight unadulterated bullshit! Nobody dies to keep from hurting someone else. You know what you are, Joe Lavette, you are a fuckin' saint, and God help those of us who are married to saints, it's just so much easier to be married to a sonofabitch. Because with a sonofabitch you have it straight on, so when you step in the shit you can pull your foot out. I know I'm talking dirty. I learned to talk dirty when I was ten years old because I heard what other people said. You never hear what anyone says, but when I talk dirty you're shocked into listening.”

“Sally, you're getting overexcited ——”

“Like hell I am. I said that tonight we're going to talk, and if you don't want to talk, say so, and I'll pick up my lousy three-hundred-dollar Gucci suitcase and head back to that shithole called Hollywood, where I can deal with assholes instead of saints. It's up to you. Either we talk, or else.”

“You mean that, don't you?”

“You're damn right I mean it,” Sally said.

“All right, we'll talk. I'm listening. You don't have to talk dirty. I'm listening.”

“Good. Let me ask you something. When you save a life, whose life are you saving?”

“I don't understand. If it's a patient, I save the patient's life.”

“No, my dear. You're saving your own life. You're making it possible for you to exist on this stinking planet, and when I walked out of here, I was saving my own life, and when some poor driven dame finally picks up a gun and shoots the bastard who has been beating up on her, she's saving her own life too. It's all the same damn thing. You feel sorry for Barbara. Maybe a hundred times you've told me how sorry you feel for Barbara, but Barbara's alive and I'm not alive. Barbara made her choices. All her life she made her choices. That's what it means to be free. That's all it means to be free — to be able to make your own choices, and the essence of what it means to be a woman is that most of us can never make a choice. It doesn't matter that we build our own traps, our own cages; they are still traps and cages.”

She finished and sat trembling with her own emotion. Joe was silent.

“I'd like a drink,” she said after a while.

Joe went to a cabinet and took out a bottle of scotch. “Do you want it straight or shall I get some ice and water?”

“I'll have it straight.”

He poured a shot, and Sally gulped it down, coughing with the strong drink.

“Do you want some water?”

“No. I'm all right.”

Joe returned to his seat behind the desk, chin on his hands, staring at his wife. “Why didn't you ever say this to me before?” he asked her finally.

“Maybe I never put it together before, or maybe I never knew how to get you to listen, or maybe I thought you wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. When I was a little kid, growing up at Higate, everything made sense. My whole world was there, my father and my mother and my two wonderful brothers and the dogs — just put together like a proper storybook — and you came to work there every summer and I could be in love with this big, inscrutable young man; and then it all came apart. Josh was killed out in the Pacific and you were away patching up the wounded out in the Solomons or some other crazy place, and it stopped making sense and it hasn't made much sense since then. Maybe to you, but not to me. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you?”

“I'm trying,” Joe said. “It's not easy for me to put myself in your place. I'm trying, but it's not easy. Think of the way it was for me. My father didn't marry my mother until I was fourteen years old. She was Dan Lavette's mistress. He set her up in that little house on Willow Street, where I was born, Dan Lavette's bastard son. Sure, I worked it out as best I could, and he was always a hero, my hero, your hero. Dan Lavette was everyone's hero. Big Dan Lavette — how could you hate him? You say I don't know what makes you tick, but, Sally, how well do you know what makes me tick? You call me a saint, but if you knew the rage and anger and frustration I've lived with, you'd amend that. Still, I had my mother, May Ling, who was the most beautiful human being I ever knew. Her only child. So in some strange way, everything had to be for her. I had to prove it all for her. I had to be the way she wanted me to be. I had to create what she should have had. She was so damned misused, so heartbreakingly misused that I swore to God that no wife of mine would suffer the way she did — and that's screwed up too. So you see I'm trying to put myself in your place, but it's not easy.”

“God help us both,” Sally whispered.

“Still, I'm not sure I understand why you gave up the part in the picture.”

“Because I love you and I love my kids. It's just not enough.”

“Loving us?”

“That's right. It's not enough.”

“I want you back so much that when I talk to myself, I say I'll get down on my knees and plead — anything, but that doesn't help, does it?”

“No, not much.”

“When you left here, it was like being dead. I did what I had to do, but it was like being dead.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You mean when you were here?”

“No, you damned fool! I mean when I was away.”

“What can I do?” he asked woefully.

“Acknowledge that I'm Sally. I'm a human being. Instead of thinking of me as your wife or the mother of your children, try to see me as a human being. If you have to operate in San Francisco or in San Diego, or go to a medical meeting in Denver or Chicago, I wouldn't dream of standing in your way. I recognize the need of what you are doing because the whole world recognizes it. But who recognizes my need? Suppose I want to go to San Diego because I'm out of my mind staying here? Would you accept that? Would you accept my going to Hollywood for some crummy little supporting role in a TV thing? That's my need. Could I say to you, Joe, take over because I have to be in Hollywood tomorrow, and just accept that and not weigh it against your need — not force me to run away as I did when I was all over the country speaking for the mothers, and so filled with guilt and resentment at my own guilt that I had to fall into bed with some stupid slob, and then hate myself and hate you and everything else. Every damned marriage I know about is splitting up because a woman gets the notion that she could be alive and human, and then doesn't know what to do with the notion except run. I don't want that, Joe, I swear I don't.”