The Legacy (53 page)

Sam reached out and touched his shoulder. “It's all right, kid. We'll ride our luck.”

“We're not really frauds,” Fred said. He had been thinking about Carla's sudden outburst. “We never made this world. We got born into it, and we do the best we can. All of a sudden, we're people instead of being kids, and if we have any sense, we look around us and we realize that it stinks. From Vietnam to those cretins in Washington, it's all one fucked-up beautiful mess, but I wonder whether it's ever been any different. The other day, I was speaking to some real estate developers before Old Jake chased them off. They've been buying up vineyard land up and down the valley for tract houses, and of course Jake says he'll see them in hell or go broke before he sells an acre of Higate land. Well, there's no danger of us going broke, but there's the handwriting on the wall. Jake and pop and mom want everything to remain just the way it is, but that's real kid thinking, isn't it?”

“That's why they used to get so crazy upset about us smoking pot,” May Ling said. “Not wine. We could always have wine. But pot was something new.”

“No more. Funny, I haven't even thought about pot in years.” Sam shook his head. “On the other hand, this is the valley. You say one word against wine, and you're lynched.”

“And rightly so,” Fred agreed.

“Back in Prohibition days, when Grandpa Jake bought the place, that was it. No wine, no booze in the whole country,” Joshua said. “It's unreal, absolutely unreal.”

“You can have the past,” Fred said. “Right now is pretty damn good.” He squirmed around, so that he could look up at May Ling. In the firelight, her face was like a chiseled ivory cameo. She touched his face and then ran her finger across his lips.

“Dear boy,” she said softly, “you talk too much. If you do find a wife, you'll talk her to death.”

“I've found one.”

“We'll see.”

“Idea,” Fred said. “Let's the four of us have dinner in town next week.”

“What about me?” Joshua asked.

“Next week, brother, you'll be back in Stanford studying viticulture. However, if you can find a lady acceptable to your elders and you don't mind driving up, we'll be happy to have you join us.”

Dan, lying on his stomach, chin propped on his hands, respectfully silent, listened to the two young women and the three young men with awe and admiration. He was grateful that they permitted his presence. Someday — yes, someday. All things were possible someday.

The world turned, and spring came to the year 1968. In San Francisco, Lynda Johnson Robb, the President's daughter, was ordered off a cable car for eating an ice cream cone. It attracted more attention than an earthquake some months later in Iran that killed twelve thousand people. In Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King said, “I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” The next day he was assassinated by James Earl Ray. It was a time for assassinations. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy, candidate for President of the United States, was assassinated in Los Angeles by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a Jordanian Arab. Peace talks began in Vietnam, as they had so often before, and on April 27, there was another peace march and rally in San Francisco. In Oakland, a man beat up his wife because she had joined a women's peace organization.

In San Francisco, in Barbara's house on Green Street, Boyd Kimmelman loosened his belt, leaned back, and voiced his satisfaction. “You are one hell of a good cook,” he told Barbara. “Where did you learn? Or does it come naturally?”

“Nothing comes naturally. I learned in Paris, painfully for a kid who didn't know how to boil an egg.”

“You've found the way to a man's heart. Have you ever been to Malibu?”

“That's almost a non sequitur. Why do you ask?”

“Jim Bernhard, who's an old friend and a client and lately a successful film producer, has a house in the Malibu Colony, which is a very posh part of Malibu Beach. He has to go away for a couple of weeks, and he asked me whether I'd like to come down and use the house for the time he's gone. He has a housekeeper, so there's nothing we'd have to do but eat and sleep and walk on the beach.”

“It sounds enticing.”

“You're only lukewarm.”

“I've been there. I'm not overfond of the people who live there.”

“I presume that's when you were working in Hollywood. Ten years ago. The way they roll over the houses down there, there probably won't be a face you recognize.”

“It's Sam's spring break, but I imagine he's planning to spend it at Higate in any case. The organization can get on without me for a few weeks. Let's drive down.”

“Wonderful. How about we take old Route 1 and stay overnight at Big Sur?”

It was a quiet two weeks that they spent at Malibu. They went to no parties, entertained no one, and had only a nodding acquaintance with other people in the colony. The house was large enough for two people to be comfortable. Bernhard had left a few days before they arrived, and his housekeeper, an elderly Mexican woman, accepted them entirely, due to Boyd's excellent command of Spanish. She took it for granted that they were married, and they did not disabuse her of the notion. They wore jeans, walked on the beach barefoot, and occasionally dared the cold ocean water. Nights, they sat in front of the fireplace, talking sometimes, silent sometimes, occasionally reading or playing backgammon. They made a point of not turning on the television or reading a newspaper.

One evening, sitting in front of the fire, Boyd observed that they got along nicely. “We both have better than half a century behind us, and still we're a pretty well set-up pair. We don't seem to get on each other's nerves, and for a couple in their middle fifties, we have a damn good sex life. We respect each other's independence, and on top of that, I'm totally in love with you and can't think of anyone I would rather have around.”

“What's all this leading up to?”

“I don't know. I was just thinking that we could get married and probably make a go of it.”

“Probably.”

“I never told you, but your mother asked me to come and see her after Kellman told her the illness was terminal.”

“Did she? Why?”

“Some changes in her will. Nothing important. But I spent the afternoon with her, and we talked a good deal. It was the first time I had ever actually talked to her, I mean more than to pass the time of day.”

“But why you and not Harvey Baxter?”

“She said that Harvey was an old woman, and she didn't want him crying on her bedspread.”

“Yes, that's mother. Did she also pledge you to care for her poor orphaned daughter?”

“Jean Lavette? Come off it, Barbara.”

“I wondered, this sudden offer of marriage. It's been months now.”

“I thought I'd wait an appropriate length of time after your mother's death. Here and now, it appears to make some sense.”

“I suppose so. On the other hand, what difference would it really make? I'm not much good at marriage. One lasted two years, and the other less than a year, but you and I, we've kept our thing going for how long? It must be eight years.”

“That's true. I just hate to keep asking, What are you doing tonight?”

“On the other hand, there's an element of uncertainty that conceivably we both need.”

“Oh?”

“Ask.”

“What do you mean, ask?”

“You're nice and very clever, Boyd, but not very quick-witted. Ask me what I'm doing tonight.”

“All right. What are you doing tonight?”

“Nothing much, but I'm tired of sitting here in front of the fire like an old lady. Let's take a walk on the beach.”

They pulled on their sweaters, and hand in hand they walked along the beach, watching the surf break. The moon was high and full, lighting the night, and out in the surf, a single fisherman was casting.

“Not that the institution won't continue,” Barbara said. “It seems that Freddie is going to marry May Ling one of these days, and Sam is hanging out, as they say, with Carla Truaz, a pretty little Chicano girl you may have seen around the loft.”

“Very pretty, dark hair, dark eyes, looks like Natalie Wood?”

“You haven't lost your eye.”

“Does he want to marry her?”

“I don't think Sam's ready to marry anyone yet. He's just about got his head on straight, and he has to finish medical school, and then the army may grab him if this insane war isn't over. You do worry your head on the subject of marriage.”

“That's something you don't understand about me,” Boyd said. “Twenty years ago, when I first went down to Washington to defend you in that rotten contempt of Congress case, I fell in love. From that time until now, all I ever wanted was Barbara Lavette. Now I have you, I live from day to day in fear of losing you.”

She stopped walking, turned to him and kissed him. “Poor, dear Boyd. We never have anyone. That's the great illusion, isn't it? We don't even have ourselves. We reach out so desperately because we're afraid, and in this lunatic world, how could any sane person live without fear? I don't know about love anymore. It's the most overused, corrupted word in the human lexicon. But to trust someone, to know that he'll be there when you need him, well, that's pretty damn good. I feel that way about you, Boyd, and somehow I don't think the feeling will change.”

Boyd thought about it for a while. Then he said, “I think I can live with that.”

They walked on, each of them thinking that all had been said that had to be said, and then, since it was getting quite cold, they turned around and walked back to the house.

A Biography of Howard Fast

Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933). His next novels, including
Conceived in Liberty
(1939) and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in
The American
(1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write
Spartacus
(1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release
Spartacus
. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including
Silas Timberman
(1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.