The Legacy (7 page)

“That money,” Stephan mused, “was the beginning of everything, our bank, Dan's fortune —”

“He never told me about that,” Jean said. “I wonder why?”

“They were frightened people. Dan felt he shouldn't have taken the money.”

“There is so much I didn't know about him. It wasn't long enough.”

Cassala nodded. So much that he didn't know about her, or himself, so little that people ever knew about each other in the bit of time allowed them.

It was ten o'clock in the evening when Barbara got to the chapel and joined them as they sat quietly alongside the coffin. Cassala rose and watched the two women as they kissed each other.

“They brought Dan here while you were at the airport,” Jean said. “Is Sammy all right?”

“Yes — tired, mother, but just fine.”

“I'm glad he's here.”

“Tom came to the house. With Lucy,” she said.

“Oh? That was dutiful of him.”

“It's no easier for him than for us.”

“No, I suppose not,” Jean said. “Do you want to look at your father? Stephan will open the coffin for you, if you do. I don't enjoy such things. I don't want to remember that stupid travesty undertakers make of a human being.”

Barbara shook her head. “No, it's not necessary. I won't forget daddy.” She went over to Cassala and kissed him. “You've been more than kind, Steve.”

“It's your mother who's been kind enough to let me stay with her. My car's outside, Barbara. Can I drive you home?”

“No, I'll walk with mother to her house, if she feels up to it. Thank you, Steve.”

“I'd like to walk,” Jean agreed.

Outside on Jones Street, Jean took Barbara's arm. Barbara asked her whether she was all right.

“I'm fine, darling. Just let me cling to you a bit, just to reassure myself that you're here and real. Did Tom stay at the house? Will he be there now?”

“No, he and Lucy left. They'll be at the funeral.”

“I've lost my will to hate, or even to resent. Not that I ever hated Tom. You don't hate your son — but what do you feel? He could have stayed at the house, Bobby, he could have waited for me. We're not Kentucky mountaineers to go on with these wretched family feuds.”

“He'll come around, mother.”

Jean stopped walking, breathed deeply of the damp sea air, and pointed down the hill where fog was already gathering. “Do you know, Bobby, we used to run up these hills. Like what? Gazelles? No, two kids. Strong kids. I was mad about him. Nothing else like Danny ever happened to me — that big, hulking fisherman. Oh, damn him! Damn him! All the rotten things he did, this is the worst — to leave me like this.”

“I know, mother,” Barbara said. “I know it all so well.”

About a year before this night, Jean and Dan had talked about death. It was not a matter that obsessed them, but neither was it a subject which they avoided. Talking about it made Jean somewhat uncomfortable, just as talking about religion made her uncomfortable; for Dan, the subject lacked importance.

“Still and all,” Jean said, “you ought to spell out your wishes. I mean write them down.”

“I have a will. What else?”

“You know what I mean. Things one wants done afterward.”

“That's on your shoulders,” Dan said.

“Oh? And what makes you so sure I'll be here?”

“You will.”

“Just don't be so cocksure about it. And if it did happen that way, I might just empty a bottle of sleeping pills and join you.”

“Bullshit.”

“You always were one for a gentle rejoinder. Now let's face it. My grandfather bought a family plot. Plenty of room there. I just don't know whether you want to lie cheek by jowl with the Seldons.”

“I been lying cheek by jowl with one of them for almost half a century. Or should I say laying?”

“You're a nasty, dirty old man.”

“You can say that again. Look, Jean, why don't you cut out all this crap. I don't want to be cremated and have my ashes strewn over San Francisco Bay, if that's what you're thinking, and if you're thinking about May Ling, she's buried in Hawaii. I don't want my carcass shipped to Hawaii, and I don't want to go on with this damn-fool discussion. Yeah —” he paused, grinning at her to take the sting out of his words. “One request. No oration, no speeches, no memorial services, no eulogy. I don't want some horse's ass telling the world what a great man Dan Lavette was. To go off with a bundle of lies stinks. So that's it.”

Jean arranged it that way. The funeral service in the chapel was not open to the public or the press. The three families who had been intertwined through Dan Lavette's life were there, the Lavettes, the Levys, and the Cassalas, all told about forty people, and with them another forty people who were close to Dan and Jean and Barbara. Dan's son Thomas was there with his wife, Lucy, but they were alone in representing the vast industrial and financial empire that had its beginnings with Dan Lavette and Mark Levy, his partner. Dan Lavette would be remembered as one of the giants who built the city on the hills, but even in death he was not wholly respectable.

The Seldon family plot was in San Mateo, and Barbara drove there in a car with her mother and young Sam. It was a long, silent, and sad trip, which Sam would remember for years to come. His grandmother held his hand much of the way. Once, she said to him, “Dan left the boat to you. That's in his will. Did you know that, Sam?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Well, it will be yours now. Perhaps sometimes I could sail with you. Dan taught me — well, I'm not really good. You could teach me more.”

“Sure, grandma,” Sam said.

In the cemetery, during the burial, Sam stood next to May Ling, his cousin, the daughter of Joe and Sally Lavette. Vaguely, Sam was aware of the strange story of his half-Chinese uncle: how Dan and Jean, his grandfather and grandmother, had been divorced in 1929, after which Dan married his mistress, May Ling, and how this same Chinese woman had been killed in Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack. He was hard put to comprehend the circumstances that had brought his grandparents together again, and although he had in the past discussed the whole thing with May Ling, neither of them could ever get it straight or make sense out of it. Now they stood side by side, Sam with his lightbrown hair and very pale blue eyes and May Ling, as tall as Sam, an attenuated Chinese doll, her straight black hair in bangs, her dark eyes filled with tears.

“Do you believe,” Sam whispered to her, “that people go to heaven and hell?”

She turned her tear-streaked face to Sam. She had always been enchanted with his eyes. They were his father's eyes, wide-set and so pale as to be almost translucent. “Yes. Don't you?”

Sam was just becoming aware of the delightful protuberances that distinguish a woman's body. His cousin, a year younger, was skinny and flat-chested. He looked at her thoughtfully before replying. “I don't know. Where would gramps go?”

“Heaven,” May Ling whispered.

“What would he do there? He couldn't sail and he couldn't fish and he couldn't smoke cigars and he couldn't eat spaghetti.”

“You think you're real smart, don't you?”

“A lot smarter than you.”

Standing behind them, May Ling's mother, Sally, whispered, “Be quiet, both of you, and listen to the pastor.”

To herself, Barbara said, “All the men I love die. They all lie in the ground.” But in another part of her mind, the memory of Carson intruded. It was only a few days ago, not years, only a few days past. He had said he loved her, and now she wanted desperately and with all her heart and soul to love and be loved.

Barbara had no stomach for revenge, nor was hatred anything she could deal with. Her brother Tom had betrayed her miserably, giving aid and comfort to one of the men who had sent her to prison. When she told the story to Carson Devron, a month or so ago, her manner was so calm, indeed indifferent, that he looked at her in amazement.

“You mean to tell me,” he said indignantly, “that Tom gave money and support to this detestable sonofabitch congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee — after he voted to send you to jail.”

“Yes.”

“And you don't resent it?”

“Of course I resent it. And the worst of it was that daddy never spoke to him again, and I lost a brother.”

“From what you tell me, you never had a brother.”

“I had a brother, two brothers,” Barbara said softly. “I'm not sorry for myself. I'm sorry for Tom. I suppose he did what he had to do. How would you feel if you had to do something like that?”

“What! What do you mean, had to? Like hell he had to!”

Barbara remembered that conversation with Carson. Back at the house after the funeral, Tom and Lucy stood in lonely silence. The house was filled with people strange to them, people who would not meet their eyes, people who knew all the details of the Lavette family, of the relationships, of the hurts and the tragedies.

What a terrible thing, Barbara thought, to be denied a share in grief. She awarded a silent accolade to her mother, for Jean went to Tom and put her arms around him and kissed him.

Then he and Lucy left; it had not been easy for them. Tom said to Jean, “Mother, if there's anything you need …”

“I need your father,” Jean said gently, “and there's no way around that, is there?”

Barbara didn't hear what they said to each other, but she saw Tom blinking his eyes and she felt he was at the point of tears. More than anything, at that moment, she desired to go to him and say, “It's all right — between you and me, it will be all right.” But that would have been a lie. It would never be all right between them again, and if she couldn't hate, she could not pretend to love. She looked at Eloise, Tom's first wife, who had married Adam Levy after her divorce. Someone had quipped then that the Lavette fruit never fell far from the Levy tree. They were all so close and so bitterly entangled. Eloise and Adam had come to the funeral with their two sons, Joshua, who was ten, and Frederick Thomas, who was sixteen and the child of Tom's marriage to Eloise. But Frederick Thomas hated his father, angrily, totally, with the blind, emotional hatred of an adolescent worshipping a mother wronged. Thankfully, he had hidden himself in the library with his brother and his two cousins. He was a tall, headstrong boy, almost six feet already, and the other boys and May Ling always gave in to his will. He would not face Tom or speak to him, nor had he since he was old enough to have his way.

After Tom and Lucy left, Eloise came over to Barbara and said, unhappily, “Poor Tom. It was his father too. Why must it be like this?”

Barbara shook her head. “I don't know, Eloise. It got this way a long time ago, and it just is.”

By eleven o'clock on the day of the funeral, the evening fog was rolling in and over San Francisco, and the friends and family had left the big Lavette house on Russian Hill. Only Barbara remained, her son upstairs and sleeping here for the night. Eloise had wanted to stay. In a way, she had become Jean's second daughter. Now, at age forty, she was still very much the fragile, vulnerable woman who had fallen in love with Thomas Lavette's good looks and elegant manners, and thereby had fallen into a continuing nightmare. It was Jean who had taken her under her wing and had given her the courage to divorce Tom, after which Jean and Eloise became very close. But tonight Jean wanted to be alone, and she sent Eloise and her family away with the others. Only Barbara refused to leave.

“Honestly,” Jean said to her, “I do want to be alone. I have a great deal to think about.”

“And just as honestly,” Barbara replied, “I don't want you to be alone. So Sam and I will stay here tonight, and tomorrow you can be as independent as you please.”

Mrs. Bendler, who came into the Lavette house each day to clean and prepare dinner, left by eleven-thirty. She had made coffee, and Barbara took it to the library, where Jean sat curled on the couch, facing the fireplace. The library had undergone many transmutations since Dan built the house in 1912, but when Dan and Jean decided to remarry, Jean restored the room as closely as she could to its original appearance, and thus it was very much as Barbara remembered it from her childhood. The overstuffed pieces had an old and comfortable look, and above the mantel there was a primitive oil painting of the
Oregon Queen,
Dan's first cargo ship.

Barbara and Jean sat together on the sofa, Jean watching her daughter thoughtfully. “Things go on,” Jean said at last. “You drink coffee and it tastes good. You know, I envy the old ladies.”

Barbara suppressed a smile. Jean could never connect herself with old ladies, regardless of a chronological age.

“You mean Maria Cassala and Sarah Levy?”

“Yes.”

Barbara recalled the scene at the cemetery. Maria Cassala, who was eighty-one, had flung herself on the earth-filled grave, weeping hysterically. Sarah Levy had collapsed by the grave, moaning with grief.

“You envy them,” Barbara said, and added silently, “I suppose I do too.”

“You know why?”

“I think so.”

“I didn't weep,” Jean said. “I stood there with my heart as cold as ice, but I couldn't weep. What's wrong with us?”

“I don't know.”

“I never talked to you about your father, Bobby. Not really. I suppose there was a reason for that. The good folk of this city discussed our antics over forty years, and I guess that was enough. Neither of us was disposed to add to it. Once, long ago, in a pet of anger, your father said I didn't know the meaning of love. He was wrong. I knew, and I guess I loved him as much as a woman can love a man. Maybe. We tore each other to shreds and then we put it back together, and there aren't many who do that. For the past ten years, we've been inseparable, and oh, God, I was so happy. I think Danny was too. He was the only man in my life who meant one damn thing, and now he's dead, and I don't cry. I'm just cold and numb and without tears, and I'll be this way all the rest of my life, for whatever it's worth.”