The Legacy (48 page)

“But what do you want?”

“I'm trying to tell you. I want to be a person.”

“You're asking me to turn everything I ever thought about this upside down,” he said slowly, seeking words that would spell out his confusion without driving her away. “I'm trying to understand you, believe me, I am, but I'm so bewildered. I tried to explain to May Ling what had come between us, and God help me, I couldn't make any sense of it.”

“And now? Do you make some sense of it now?”

“I'll try. That's all I can say — if it will only keep us together. You asked me to talk. I did talk, and I listened ——”

“I think we've talked enough,” Sally said, getting up and going to him. “Come on, put your arms around me. I want to cry. Make me feel that you love me.”

Jean Lavette was one of those fortunate women who go through life with no illness more serious than a bad cold or an occasional touch of the flu. In addition to that, at the age of seventy-seven, she had all of her teeth, something she attributed to the excellent Boston Puritan stock she had come from. Like so many of Jean's attributions, Barbara simply accepted it without argument or probing into genetic verities. Thus she was disturbed, coming to Jean's house, to find her mother in bed. “And the second day,” Mrs. Bendler informed Barbara. “She refuses to have the doctor.”

Jean, propped up on three pillows, wearing a mauve, lace-trimmed bed jacket, was reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel
The Manor.
“Have you read it?” she asked Barbara, and when Barbara shook her head, “Well, you should. You have all sorts of Jewish friends. All my Jewish friends are dead.”

“Mother, what on earth are you talking about? What Jewish friends are dead?”

“Mark Levy is dead and Sam Goldberg is dead.”

“Mother, Sam has been dead for almost twenty years, and as for Mark Levy, he died in nineteen thirty, if I'm not mistaken, and you barely knew him and I heard you were never even polite to him.”

“Are you trying to be nasty? I'm lying here ill. You might have a little consideration.”

“And Milton Kellman is far from dead. Why won't you call him? Why won't you see a doctor?”

“I can't bear Milton. He drives me mad, telling me what I must eat and what I must drink and how much rest I must have.”

“Then call another doctor.”

“And hurt Milton? He'd never forgive me. He'd never talk to me again.”

“I give up. I do give up. Are you really ill?”

“Oh, darling, I don't know. I feel rotten. I don't have a fever, but I do feel wretched and weak and old. And the other day I was down on Market Street and they're tearing it up to build a subway. What is happening to this city with a subway and all those horrible high-rise buildings?”

“It's called progress, mother. And I shall ask Milton to drop by to see you.”

“He bores me. Who told you I was never polite to Mark Levy?”

“I think you did.”

“Did I? Yes, I suppose it's true. I have changed, haven't I, Bobby?”

“I always thought you were a very remarkable woman.”

“I don't know what that means. Will we ever be rid of that wretched Mr. Johnson? I read somewhere that he has a habit of picking his nose. No breeding, none.”

“He has worse habits, mother.”

“I'm sure. I'm letting my hair remain completely white. I think to tint it mauve or blue is utterly ridiculous.”

“It wouldn't suit you, mother.”

“Of course not. However, there's no reason why you shouldn't get rid of those gray streaks. You're a young woman.”

“I'll think about it.”

“I can't stand it when you agree with every silly remark I make,” Jean said testily. “You not only have a mind of your own; you have a most unsettling one. Don't treat me as an old woman.”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

“There it is again. How are you getting on with your antiwar agitation? Do you need money?”

“We always need money.”

“This town is filled with people who have more money than they know what to do with. My accountant says that if you could get a tax-exempt status, you could raise much more. If you're truly desperate, you'll find my checkbook in my dressing-table drawer.”

“You've given us enough. And if I may say so, you're giving Sam too much.”

“Only what he needs. It's quite amusing. He very seriously signs a note for everything he's borrowed. He insists on it. I do have a codicil in my will wiping out his debts. Has he found a girl yet?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, there's no hurry about that. He's young enough. I have two very fine grandsons, and I think Danny would be pleased at the way they've grown up. I never expected very much from Freddie, but he's all right. He's beginning to get his head together, as the kids say, and I suppose Eloise and Adam should be given kudos for that. And I don't want either of them in Vietnam. I wouldn't trade one hair of their heads for all the rice in that place.”

“We've been lucky so far, mother.”

“Well, don't depend on luck. You're the only one in the family who does anything. The rest of them just sit by and let things happen. And now I'm beginning to tire, so just go about your business and you can drop in tomorrow if you have nothing better to do.”

Later, Barbara called Dr. Kellman. “Milton, I'm worried,” she said to him. “There's something very wrong.”

He promised to stop by and see Jean.

Thomas Lavette's lawyers were Richardson, Merrill and Coleman, a very prestigious firm with which he had done business ever since his break with John Whittier almost twenty years ago. Originally Whittier, now dead, had been Tom's partner; when they broke, Tom transferred his business from Seever, Lang and Murphy, who had been Whittier's attorneys, to Richardson's firm, and in the years since then, he and Seth Richardson had become close friends. On the day Barbara visited her mother, Tom and Richardson lunched together in the private dining room in the towering GCS Building on Montgomery Street. Richardson, fifty-seven, two years Tom's senior, a stout, affable man, well versed in the intricacies of corporate law, had reached a point where most of his time was devoted to the affairs of GCS. Tom had taken him into his confidence at the time Barbara's home had burned, and he chided Tom for not coming to him first. “I had intended to,” Tom explained. “But when Lucy goes off on one of her direct action forays, she doesn't give advance notice.”

“You should have spoken to me. We do have strings that reach to Washington, even with that oversized Texas dunderhead in the White House.”

Now Tom spoke to him, and Richardson listened and then sighed and shook his head hopelessly.

“What are you telling me?” Tom demanded.

“That it won't work. Don't you think I know what you've been living with? But, Thomas, the rich are unique and the very rich are very unique. There are two categories in the United States for whom divorce is most difficult and frequently impossible, the very poor and the very rich. I suspected it might come to this, and I've looked into it. I'm afraid you have to live with it.”

“What the devil are you telling me — that the condemned man should eat a hearty meal? I don't need a lecture on social inequalities. The only damned virtue in money is that it will buy anything, and while you're smart as hell, Seth, I refuse to abandon the only faith I have. If Nelson Rockefeller could divorce his wife and marry his light of love, then I can divorce mine.”

“The circumstances are different. Oh, it's not a matter of wealth. I admit we're not as big as the Rockefellers, but being in the top twenty-five of the list of Fortune's Five Hundred entitles you to parity. It's just that the circumstances are entirely different. Sure, Tom, you could quote me examples like Tommy Manville and others of his ilk who tossed wives around as if they were poker chips, but these were for the most part legatees who squandered inherited wealth. To put it bluntly, they were in the market for women, and they bought them and sold them. Your own case is very different indeed.”

“Suppose you spell it out for me,” Tom said.

“All right. When you and John Whittier merged his Great Cal Shipping with the Seldon Bank, you arrived at a financial balance. When you split with Whittier, it was the twelve thousand shares of Seldon stock, originally owned by Alvin Sommers and willed to your wife, that enabled you to force Whittier out of the picture. Lucy voted her stock, but she retained ownership. Today, GCS is a holding company, publicly owned, with three million shares of stock. Lucy owns twenty-five percent of that stock. But that's only the nub of the iceberg. We're a community property state, and that entitles Lucy to half of your acquisitions subsequent to your marriage — which embraces your period of greatest growth. And still we're only at the beginning of the entanglement. It would take the rest of the afternoon to spell it all out. The point is that if you were to undertake divorce proceedings — providing she consented to such proceedings and you did not have to fight and connive for it — she could destroy you. Well, you know your wife better than I do. What would she do?”

A few long moments passed before Tom answered. “Just what you suggest. She'd destroy me.”

“There's nothing left between you?”

“Oh, yes. Mistrust and hate.”

“That doesn't make it very comfortable.”

“To put it mildly. What do you suggest?”

“Somehow, Tom, you have to live with it. Unless she sues for divorce, which might put another face on the matter. It would still be as destructive as hell, but we might have a fighting chance.”

“She won't. Why should she?”

“Then you have to live with it. See her as little as you can, put as much distance between you as possible, and live with it. I wish to God I could offer you something better, but I can't.”

After the fire, Barbara had found a second-floor loft on Larkin Street which she could rent for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. The place lacked all the conveniences that would make it comfortable, no running water and only primitive toilet facilities on the floor below, but it did have five hundred square feet of floor space in one large room. The women bought sawhorses and planks from Mr. Kurtz, Barbara's contractor. They rented typewriters and pooled their money for stamps, and a boxed editorial, written by Carson Devron and appearing on page two of the Los Angeles
Morning World,
brought in a flood of contributions, over nine thousand dollars, including a three-thousand-dollar check from Carson himself. By the beginning of that year, 1967, Mothers for Peace was back in business, and by the late summer of 1967, the San Francisco
Chronicle
pointed out, with noteworthy objectivity, that “Mothers for Peace, perhaps the least strident of all the national peace movements, has nevertheless become one of the most influential.”

Today was Frederick Lavette's first visit to the place. He had been in San Francisco early that day as an invited speaker at a luncheon given by the Wine Makers Association, where he had made a number of friends and a number of enemies.

Tact was not one of Fred's conspicuous qualities. He had taken the opportunity to denounce the California practice of giving their wines French names. “For how long,” he had demanded, “must we engage in this deceitful and misleading practice? How long must we crawl to Europe's envy and New York's arrogant claim to taste? Their so-called taste is compounded out of ignorance and insularity. I had the misfortune to be present at a New York dinner party, where certain gourmets — one of whom writes for the New York
Times
— turned up their noses at a bottle of Higate Mountain Red 1964, which I had presented to my hostess, a wine as good as any table wine in the world. They refused to taste it. Not that they could have commented properly had they tasted it, for the gourmets above all others are the victims of the ignorance they berate. But who is to blame? We are. Cabernet Sauvignon is not a California wine. It never can be. It is a wine of Bordeaux, just as Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are wines of Burgundy. The grapes of Médoc and Graves cannot be grown in the Napa Valley without changing their character, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot produce French wine. Why should we? Our wine is superb. I spent two years working and studying in the wine country of France and Italy and Spain. There are great French wines, and there are unworthy French wines. There are great California wines and there are unworthy California wines. We have Napa, Sonoma,' the North Coast, Santa Rosa, Shenandoah, Chiles, to name only a few of the places here that produce splendid wine. Isn't it time we stopped lying to the public, catering to this gourmet-inspired worship of everything French, and named our wines for what they are?”

He went on for another ten minutes, and finished to the applause of some of the fifty or so people present and to the angry silence of others who wanted to know who this arrogant young man was and where he had come from. His stepfather, Adam, and Adam's father, Jake Levy, were both present, and Jake stared at Freddie moodily when the meeting was over and wondered whether he had considered the fact that Higate produced both a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay that they were justly proud of.

“You're absolutely right, gramps. We produce the best red and white wine in California. What we name it is something else.”

There were others who confronted him and argued with him, but finally Fred pulled away, and by three o'clock he was at the loft on Larkin Street, where he had promised to meet May Ling and join her in a Peace March down Market Street to the Federal Building. He was still euphoric from what he regarded as a well-deserved attack upon the California winegrowers' feeling of inferiority, and coming into the crowded, bustling loft, with its two dozen women, its noise and confusion and sense of urgency, did nothing to lessen his mood.