The Legacy (5 page)

“Who knows? Anyway, it fits. That would make him sixty-nine or seventy. What does his family say?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“His daughter, Barbara, worked for the paper once. That was during the war. Correspondent in Burma or India — you should have it in the file. I remember her, good-looking kid. Go easy on the contempt of Congress thing that she got herself mixed up in. The red menace is going out of style, and anyway, we don't want to kick any shins. Tom Lavette, Dan's son, owns half the city. Keep that in mind. Did you talk to his wife?”

“She won't talk to any press.”

“She's a Seldon. Pull the file on old Tom Seldon, the banker. That'll give you some background. Now get to it. I want it by six.”

The stout, middle-aged lady, sitting next to Sam on the plane that was taking him from Idlewild Airport in New York to San Francisco, waited until an hour into the trip before asking him his name.

“Sam.”

“Twelve years old,” she decided. “You're big for your age,” she informed him, smiling slightly. “All alone, this is a very large trip for you from New York to San Francisco.”

He stared at her, puzzled, and she smiled wisely and knowingly. “It's not mysterious. I got a grandson almost your age. Well, almost. He's nine.”

Sam remained silent. He was not good at small talk, and practically incapable of it with total strangers. In his mind, the woman next to him was very fat and very old, although she could not have been much past fifty. Her intonation bothered him. Six months ago, he would have been insensitive to it; now it embarrassed him and made him wish that she would not talk to him, that she would leave him alone.

“You got another name?”

“Sam.”

“Sam what?”

“Sam Cohen,” he muttered.

She cocked her head and looked at him with new interest, and Sam had the feeling that she was taking him apart, probing and judging and examining.

“I'm Mrs. Bernstein,” she said. “My daughter lives in Broad-moor. You know where Broadmoor is?”

Sam nodded.

“You don't live there — maybe?”

“No, I live in San Francisco.”

“Where?”

“It's no business of yours where I live,” he said to himself, thinking, Why can't you leave me alone?

“I mean, I'm not totally a stranger,” she explained. “I come twice a year. I stay with my daughter a week. You wouldn't understand, you're young, I mean. But a week is enough, as much as I love her. Then I move to the Palace Hotel for another week. I see her, of course, but I'm not in her house underfoot. You know where the Palace Hotel is?”

Sam nodded.

“It's an old place, but I like it because I'm too old for the hills. For the hills, you got to be as young as you are. Do you live on the hills?”

“I live on Russian Hill.”

“Oh? Tell me something, young man, why do they call it Russian Hill?”

“I don't know,” Sam said after a moment.

“You lived there long?”

“I was born there.”

“And you never asked anybody why it is called Russian Hill?”

“I never thought of it,” he replied defensively. “It's just there. Nobody thinks of asking why it's Russian Hill or Nob Hill or Telegraph Hill.”

“Forgive me,” Mrs. Bernstein said gently. “I'm too curious. My husband always told me that. He said one day my curiosity would kill me, like it killed the cat. Well, not yet. So don't be annoyed with me.”

“I'm not annoyed,” Sam said. He was less uneasy now. He was thinking that she was nice, strange but nice. She was Jewish, he knew, and he squirmed with the thought that her being Jewish was what he disliked most. It made him miserable and even more dejected.

“You're going home?”

He nodded.

“From school, yes? How do I know? A young man like you wears a blue broadcloth jacket with a patch on the breast pocket, it's got to be a nice private school. I'll tell you something, Sam, my daughter hears me talking like this, it would embarrass her to death. So she's not listening, you'll forgive me. But to go to a school in the East all the way from San Francisco. It must be wonderful to go to such a place. And now you go home for the holidays?”

“No, I'm going home because my grandfather died.”

“Oh? I'm sorry,” Mrs. Bernstein said. “I'm so sorry. I didn't know and I sit here talking my head off.”

“Why should you be sorry?” Sam muttered. “You didn't even know him.”

She stared at him, rebuffed, hurt, and Sam's eyes filled with tears, less for grief at his grandfather's death than for sorrow for himself. He had a sense of being worthless, utterly worthless, and he would have given anything he possessed to be able to say to Mrs. Bernstein, “Please forgive me. I didn't want to hurt your feelings. I really think I like you.” But he was unable to say anything, and for the rest of the flight, they sat in silence.

The death of Dan Lavette was front-page news in most newspapers in the Bay Area, even downstate where the story was featured in the Los Angeles
Times
and the Los Angeles
World.
Carson Devron went over the copy for the
World
story himself, partly because of a feeling of obligation toward Barbara and partly because he was intrigued by the personality of Dan Lavette. On the morning when Barbara received the news of her father's death, Carson had begged her to allow him to go with her to San Francisco. Distraught as she was, she nevertheless realized that Carson's presence would be in the nature of a commitment which she was still unwilling to make; and for that reason, she had refused.

Left to himself, Carson went over the
Morning World's
story with a fiercely remorseless blue pencil. In 1948, when Barbara had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and had refused to supply the names of a group of people who had joined with her to send medical supplies to aid Spanish Republican refugees in the south of France, the editorial writers of the
Morning World
had attacked her unmercifully. They had denounced her as a tool of communism, as a dupe of communism, as a traitor to her class and to the country. Los Angeles journalism of that period was described by some as primitive and by others as right-wing and irresponsible, and indeed all of these descriptions had a firm basis in fact — a situation which Carson Devron was determined to change.

In the midst of the obituary, following a paragraph which described Dan Lavette's achievements as a shipbuilder during the war and his award of merit from President Truman, the writer bemoaned the fact that his daughter had betrayed him: “Unhappily, his life was marred by the trial and imprisonment of his daughter, Barbara, for contempt of Congress when she refused to give the names of her coconspirators in a front organization.”

Raging, Carson called the rewrite man into his office. The man's name was Hank Dudly. He was fifty-two years old, twenty-five of them with the
Morning World,
gray, slack-bellied, bent and defeated. He cringed helplessly before Devron's anger.

“What in hell do you mean by this?” Carson demanded coldly. “‘Unhappily' — did you ever ask Dan Lavette whether he was happy or unhappy with what his daughter did? It just happens that he supported her, right down the line. Who said his life was marred? And what the devil is this about coconspirators? She was not accused of conspiracy. And how do you know it was a front, as you put it? Three errors of fact as well as interpretation in one lousy paragraph — and you've been with us how long?”

“Since 'thirty-three.” He felt hurt, put upon. He could remember when Carson had been led through the newsroom as a small boy. “Now wait a minute, Carson, I was just following policy and presenting the facts —”

“Like hell you were! You wouldn't know a fact if you saw it.” Carson ripped the copy. “Tell Joe to put another man on this.”

“What?”

“You heard me! If you don't like it, hand in your resignation. I'll shed no tears. Now get out of here!”

The San Francisco papers, on the other hand, carefully omitted all mention of Barbara's prison sentence, merely observing in passing that Dan Lavette was survived by his wife, Jean, his daughter, Barbara, and two sons, Joseph, a physician in the town of Napa, and of course, Thomas Lavette, chairman of the board of GCS, which was possibly the most potent financial empire in Northern California.

All observations that the press made on Dan Lavette's death were tempered by the fact that his son Thomas ruled GCS. It was common knowledge around town that Dan and his son had not spoken to each other for years, but since the bitterness between them was a family matter, made public only by rumor, the newspaper writers trod a fine line, avoiding the unpleasant gossip that had swirled around the Lavettes for so many years. Indeed, the
Chronicle
ran an editorial headed “The Last Giant Passes,” in the course of which the writer observed that “with the passing of Dan Lavette, the last of a mighty breed steps into the pages of history. He was one of the giants who made this city unique and splendid, setting a ladder against the sky and daring to climb it…” The prose was effusive. Dan Lavette might have read it with more annoyance than appreciation, but on the other hand it was a bestowal of honor and respectability. America forgives its dead, whatever their sins.

Barbara's son, Sam, however, was among the living; and at Roxten Academy, he had been allowed neither forgiveness nor forgetfulness. Since the teachers at Roxten knew all about him, his parents, and their curious past, the knowledge trickled down. Samuel Cohen was a young man whose mother had been in prison, whose father did not exist, whose grandfather had married a Chinese woman after divorcing his wife, only to remarry the woman he had divorced after his Chinese wife's death, and who had a Chinese uncle and a Jewish name. It was understandably irresistible. Sam added to his execrable origins with an essay written for his class in English composition; but in all truth it was less that he betrayed himself than that California had betrayed him.

Mr. Pinchel, the English tutor, taking a lead from the
Reader's Digest,
assigned the class the following topic: “The most interesting character I have known.”

“The most interesting character I ever knew,” Sam wrote, “is my grandfather, whose name is Mr. Daniel Lavette but everyone calls him Dan except if they love him and then they call him Danny. I call him gramps because he's my grandfather. He taught me to sail a boat. The boat is the Oregon Queen, which is named after gramps' first ship except that this Oregon Queen is a cutter, not a ship. The cutter is a single mast boat with a heavy keel and maybe three jibs except that we only have two, which my grandfather thinks is better. The happiest times are when the two of us sail in San Francisco Bay, where my grandfather learned to sail with his father who was an Italian fisherman.”

Actually, Dan Lavette's father, Joseph Lavette, coming from that part of the Mediterranean coastline where Italy approaches France, was part French; but having been raised in San Francisco, it had never occurred to Sam that the one was ethnically superior to the other, and he went on to describe how, after sailing, they would tie up at Fisherman's Wharf and then walk to Gino's Italian restaurant, where both of them would consume enormous quantities of spaghetti, Sam under a solemn promise not to inform his grandmother of his grandfather's lapse from his diet. And since during the hours Sam and his grandfather spent on the cutter, Dan gave his grandson lessons in bad Italian, Sam was able to engage old Gino in the restaurateur's native tongue. This evidence of an Italian bar sinister in his checkered pattern of national origin was set down by Sam with innocent pride. It was the final brick in the wall of contempt and isolation that the Roxten boys built around him.

From his window seat, Sam watched the landing at San Francisco Airport with the passive indifference of a generation inured to air travel almost from birth. The age of twelve years is still unable to grapple with death; a mystery at every age, to a child it is unthinkable and untenable. It would not remain in his mind, even when his guilt demanded that he retain it, and his mind simply substituted departure for finality. His grandfather had gone away; forever was nothing that he could deal with, and the rebuff he had inflicted upon his fellow passenger, Mrs. Bernstein, had dislocated his concentration on grief. Now he was involved with the tactics he would use to convince his mother that he should not return to Roxten. His planning triggered his guilt once again, reminded him that the person he loved most in the whole world, perhaps even more than he loved his mother, was gone, and as the plane landed and taxied along the runway, he began to cry. Mrs. Bernstein watched him with sympathy and was moved to murmur, “It will be all right.”

He replied to himself that it would never be all right again, and then he was pushing along the aisle and off the plane. Barbara was waiting for him, and she folded him into her arms, clinging to him as the ultimate reassurance in the idiocy of life and death. Walking to the car, she asked about the trip. It was the question one asks. She had already wept her tears, and her drawn, pale face was somehow strange to Sam. “O.K.,” he said. “It was O.K.” And then he began to cry again, but it happened as a dutiful performance.

“Don't cry,” Barbara said gently. “Your grandfather had a good life, and there was very little pain in his going away. That's something you'll have to understand now, Sam. We live and we die. It happens to everyone.”

They were in Jean's car, the luxurious Cadillac that had been her notion of a modest step downward from a Rolls-Royce, driving along the bay shore, when Sam said bluntly, “I'm not going back.”

Barbara's thoughts were elsewhere. “Back?”

“Back to Roxten. I hate the place. Rotten. That's what the kids call it. They're right.”