The Legacy (51 page)

“Then you believe that the cancer has spread to my liver?”

“What I believe is not the point. I don't know. That is why we must get you to the hospital immediately, to discover whether the malignancy has metastasized.”

“You're lying to me, Milton,” Jean said calmly. “You damn well do know.”

“There is no way for me to know. I can only guess.”

“And if it has spread to my liver, what then?”

“Why don't we wait until we get to the hospital. We'll know in a few hours.”

“Oh no, Milton. We made a deal. You spell it out.”

“I have spelled it out.”

“No, doctor. I want to know what happens if it has already reached my liver.”

“Please don't push me, Jean.”

“I am pushing you. I insist.”

“Very well, my dear. I'm so damn sorry. If it has reached your liver and taken hold, then it's fatal.”

Now Jean sat silent for at least a minute, staring at Kellman. Then she asked him, softly, “No chance, no way, no hope?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“What does fatal mean? How long will I have?”

“You're presuming on what we don't know.”

“Milton, Milton, once you have pronounced the death sentence, you have no right to play games. You're too good a doctor not to know exactly what my condition is. I have said I will go to the hospital. Now please tell me how long I have.”

“If it is the liver,” his voice dropped, “it could be a month, two months, possibly a year.”

“Will I be an invalid until the end?”

“You will gradually lose your vigor.”

“And pain?”

“Very little pain.”

Jean sat with her eyes closed for a minute or so; then she said, “We'll go to the hospital now.” On her way to the hospital, she said to him, “This is between you and me, Milton. No one else is to know, not Barbara, not anyone. The last thing in the world I want is for my friends and family to come around and bite their tongues and mutter platitudes to a dying woman. I have witnessed that scene, and I will have no part of it. I suppose Barbara will discover that I've been to the hospital and she'll be calling you and trying to ferret the truth out of you. We will both tell her that we undertook some tests and the results were negative.”

Kellman had never encountered anyone quite like her. He tried to argue, but she cut him short. “No. It has to be this way, Milton.”

“You may be bedridden. What then?”

“Let me handle that.”

“You don't want Barbara to know you're at the hospital?”

“Not until I've come home.”

“Well, I'll try. Barbara's no fool, but perhaps we can work something out that will explain it.”

Dressing to leave the hospital the following day, Jean wondered why she had permitted herself to be taken there. She did not require the tests to confirm her condition. From the moment Kellman had finished his examination, she had known what the verdict would be; and from that very moment, she had felt an intense need to be her own woman, to command whatever moments were left and to suffer no needless indignity. Probing her body, poking needles into it, gouging out bits of her flesh, these were indignities. She should have put her foot down firmly and had no part of it. Surprisingly, she found that she felt no real fear, a certain nervousness, one or two moments of intense anxiety, but fear had not taken hold of her, and she wondered whether this was due to her annoyance at Kellman and whether a terrible and morbid fear of death would set in later.

Kellman insisted on taking her home himself, and by then her annoyance with the doctor had dissipated. Kellman, on the other hand, was full of a peculiar guilt, that he should have been the one to tell her, and that he shared a fault of ignorance and helplessness, being one of a profession that had found no alleviation for her illness.

“You've done whatever you could do,” Jean said, patting his hand. “Our problem now is to keep this secret, and on that score I'm not so certain of you, Milton.”

“Usually, it's the other way round, and the patient's the one who doesn't know. In this case — well, it's hard to be just a physician, Jean. I am very fond of you. I hate myself and I hate what I do, we're so useless, we know so little.”

“Milton, don't weep for me. I've had a long and a rich life, and there are worse ways to die. You've been a dear friend and a wonderful mother hen, and shall I tell you something I never told anyone else? Ever since Danny died, almost ten years, I've been fighting my way through a day at a time. I learned to love a man, and it wasn't easy, because in the beginning I couldn't love anything, not myself and not anyone else. But I learned, and in the good years with Danny — there were fifteen of them — I had something that few women have. After he died, I simply stayed on because there was no other place to go. I truly don't care anymore.”

“I wish I had your courage,” Kellman muttered.

“It's not courage, Milton, it's indifference.”

“Well —” There was nothing he could say to that. “Barbara telephoned me. Mrs. Bendler told her you were in the hospital.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her it was no use to come and see you, since you'd be home this evening. I guess she'll be over to see you.”

“And the rest? What else did you tell her?”

“Malnutrition, a general rundown condition. I hate to lie to someone like Barbara.”

“Of course you do. You're caught between two strong-minded women, and that's a painful place to be. But thank you.”

But Barbara, coming to the house on Russian Hill that evening, was suspicious. “What does malnutrition mean? I'm surprised at Milton.”

“It means I've been eating too little and the wrong food. It happens when you get to be my age, my dear. Milton has given me all sorts of pills and tonics, and you are not to worry about me.”

“When have you ever allowed anyone to worry about you?” Barbara demanded. “You're the most headstrong and arrogant woman I've ever known. And I do love you,” she added.

“That's very nice,” Jean said. “Children today are so preoccupied with hating mothers and fathers that to hear you say you love me is like a breath of fresh air.”

“I should think you would have known, even if I hadn't said it.”

“I think I would have. Now for the next few weeks I'll be housebound and spending a good deal of time in bed. Milton prescribes rest. So if you can get those two grandchildren of mine to come by and spend a few minutes with an old lady, I would appreciate it.”

“They'll come by,” Barbara said.

Over the next weeks, Jean's strength decreased rapidly. She did not enjoy entertaining in her bedroom, and each day she dressed carefully and made her way downstairs. If the weather was good, she would sit on the balcony, which was a sort of cantilevered terrace, with a wonderful view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and the hills of Marin County. A thousand times she and Dan had sat there, breakfasted in the morning, dined at night, watched the sun set in its endlessly varied vortex of color, watched the stars blink on in the velvet-black sky. If the weather was cold and damp, as is so often the case in San Francisco, she would sit in the library, which was the room in the house Dan had most preferred, with its overstuffed furniture and the painting of Dan's first ship, the
Oregon Queen,
hanging over the mantel. Mrs. Bendler would start a fire in the grate, and there Jean could sit for hours, watching the flames. She lived a good deal in the past, both in her waking hours and in her nighttime dreams.

Jean had never attempted to work out a philosophy of life. She had learned and grown out of her own suffering and her own inner agony, and like many sensitive people, she had feelings and insights which she could not articulate. Her dissatisfaction with the condition of the world was not ideological; she had no theories or Utopian dreams, and unlike her daughter, she had neither the desire to change things nor the confidence to think that she could. She had no explanations to go along with her sense of the disintegration of the society around her, only an awareness of disintegration and change. The cruel war in Vietnam was beyond her comprehension, yet its horror reached her and touched her, and out of her own background and breeding came her contempt for the men who ruled the nation. The city, her beloved San Francisco, where she had lived all her life, was no longer the city of her childhood or youth; now it was bound over with six-lane concrete highways, overburdened with high-rise office buildings and apartment houses, swarming with new people and new trends, sects, and movements which she read about without understanding. The past was better, easier, more comprehensible. In the past she could remember Dan, waiting to pick her up in front of her father's house, sitting in a one-horse chaise, all decked out in white flannels and a blue jacket, twenty years old and ready to conquer the world — and conquer the world they did, the world that had gone away with time.

But her strength waned, and very soon the time came when she couldn't leave her bed. When Dr. Kellman came to see her, she said to him flatly, “Is this it, Milton? Am I dying? How long?”

He would not or could not answer her question as she wished it to be answered.

“How can I keep up this charade of malnutrition? Barbara knows there is something very wrong.”

“Perhaps we should tell her.”

“I'd rather you didn't.”

When the doctor had left, Jean called Boyd Kimmelman and asked him to come to see her, to bring with him her will and all else that pertained to her estate, and to say nothing about it to Barbara. They made an appointment for the following day.

Boyd had not seen Jean for some months. He had been told by Barbara what she knew and what her suspicions were; still, he was taken aback by Jean's appearance. Her face was lean, her cheeks sunken, her arms and hands fleshless. He had never thought of Jean as an old woman before. She was very much a frail old woman now.

“Sit down, Boyd,” Jean said, studying him with interest. “Pull a chair up to the bed. My voice is not what it was and neither is my hearing. Don't mind my staring. I look at everything and everyone now as if I am seeing things and people for the first time.”

“I should have come by to see you,” Boyd said. “Barbara told me you were rundown ——”

“Don't apologize, and I'm sure Barbara's suspicions go further than that.”

“Yes, I guess so.” He drew up a chair and sat down.

“The truth is, Boyd, that I am dying. I have cancer. It's incurable, inoperable, and it's spread through my body. I hate to shock you, but it has to be said.”

“But surely ——”

“No!” She interrupted. “We'll waste no time with platitudes or sympathetic gestures. What I said is a fact. You are the only one in the family who knows. I say in the family, because while marriage is somewhat out of style these days, you've been going with Barbara and sleeping with her for years now. And today, we have a good deal of work to do, as much as my strength will sustain. So let's get down to it. The will first.”

“Yes, I brought the copies of your will.”

“Whatever we decide to change, Boyd, I want done here and now, so that I can sign it or initial it or whatever you do about such things. Is that understood?”

“Yes, certainly, Mrs. Lavette. If anything is very extensive, I'm sure you have a typewriter somewhere in the house.”

“Nothing so fancy. You do have a fountain pen?”

Boyd was attempting to maintain his equilibrium, but was losing it more quickly than he could reenforce it. He had walked into a room to be told flatly, by the mother of the woman he loved, as she might refer to the weather, that she was dying. He had also been instructed, in the manner in which a schoolboy is instructed, to display no sympathy and to express no regret. On top of that, he had been asked, in a critical manner, whether he had a fountain pen.

“It's all too much, isn't it?” Jean said to him, smiling at last. “Dear boy, there is no way to treat a dying person. We live in a country that never faces the fact of death, even though we have become so competent in inflicting it. Don't be troubled.”

“I am troubled. Good heavens, as you yourself pointed out, you're practically my mother-in-law.”

“Which should make it easier. Now let's get down to the facts of the will. I understand that my estate, apart from this house and its contents, amounts to about two million dollars.”

“That's about correct,” Boyd agreed. “Stocks, bonds, and cash in your bank account. But the house, considering your collection of paintings, comes to a good deal more than that.”

“All right, we'll discuss the house first. It doesn't belong to our time. I've lived here because it's filled with memories, but it's a relic of another age, and here, on Nob Hill and Russian Hill, such relics are no longer tolerated. Barbara will never use it, and my will already provides for its sale. There is no mortgage, and Harvey Baxter assured me it will bring enough to pay the estate tax.”

“Most likely. But I'm surprised you didn't ask Harvey to come here instead of me. He's better acquainted with your affairs.”

“Harvey is an old woman, and I couldn't bear to have him weeping over my bedspread. Now about my paintings. Please read me what is specified in my will.”

“‘The Piet Mondrian and the Picasso
Blue Woman
I leave to my dear friend Eloise Levy, who has been like a daughter to me —'” He broke off and asked, “Does that identify the Picasso sufficiently? I presume there is only one Mondrian?”

“Oh, yes. I have two Picassos, and each is titled.”

“‘To my daughter, Barbara, I leave the painting of the
Oregon Queen,
the Winslow Homer
Fisherman,
and the two paintings by Thomas Eakins.' Are there only two?” he asked.