The Legacy (9 page)

“I remember,” the old man agreed. “Set up some kind of charitable trust. Damn foolish act.”

“On the other hand,” Jamie Coster reminded his brother-in-law, “the Lavette interests are enormous. Perhaps the second or third largest in Northern California.”

“I can offer you no comfort in that.” Carson smiled. “She hasn't spoken to her brother in years. As far as he is concerned, she is beyond the pale.”

“I'm happy you're not a lawyer, Carson,” Jamie Coster said. “You plead a damn poor case.”

“How old is she?” Lila asked thinly. “If I remember —”

“Yes, mother.”

“If I remember correctly, she must be older than you.”

“She's forty-four.”

It was entirely the bombshell Carson had been expecting, and it produced a long blast of silence. They looked at each other and then at Carson, and then at Lila and Christopher, who were studying their son as if they had never seen him before. Drew Anthony stifled a giggle when Lila glanced at him coldly.

Willa broke the silence. “Well,” she said, leaving that to convey what it would. She was two years older than Carson, a dark, intense woman, not unlike a younger version of her mother.

“Eight years' difference,” the old man said at last. “That's a hell of a lot of difference, Carson. She won't be bearing children at that age.”

“I think not,” Carson agreed.

His mother noticed how gentle and offhand he was, and knowing her son, she concluded that neither arguments nor a show of steel would at this moment swerve him from his decision. She had a few cards to play, but she did not feel that they were worth a great deal. There was no question of cutting him off. Carson's grandfather, Angus Devron, the founder of the dynasty, had provided his grandchildren with trust funds that had prospered mightily, and both Carson and Willa were wealthy in their own right. His father could remove him from the position of publisher of the newspaper, but what then? He had been groomed for the job ever since leaving college; it had to be a family job; and Carson did it well. With this in mind, Lila ended the discussion by saying, unemotionally, “I think, Carson, that we should meet the woman you have chosen before we say anything more on this subject.” She had carefully avoided saying “young woman,” and now she continued, “I presume you brought this to our attention for what, in a more civilized time, would have been called our blessing. This is appreciated.” She rose. “I suggest that we go into the living room and leave the gentlemen to their cigars and their brandy.” That was ritual, preserved here if nowhere else in Los Angeles. Asked once by an interviewer how she saw herself and her family, Lila Devron replied without hesitating, “As a civilizing force — which is perhaps the direst need of Southern California.”

When the ladies had left the room, Christopher Devron lit his cigar, looked thoughtfully at his son as he puffed on it, and then said, “Carson, you are one curious, stubborn sonofabitch. I want to see this gal. She must have something.”

“She has,” Carson agreed.

Frederick Thomas Lavette, Tom Lavette's son by his first wife, Eloise, had grown to his sixteen years at a place called Higate, in the Napa Valley of California. Higate consisted of nine hundred acres of rolling foothills, much of the land planted in grapevines, and a thriving winery.

Along with his father, Jake, Adam Levy ran the winery. Not only was it expected of him, he had never desired any other life. He was fortunate in that he could focus his life on two passions, his wife, Eloise, and the making of wine. After eleven years of married life, he remained romantically and totally in love with her. Eloise was possessed of that curious personality that combines innocence and intelligence, a combination found rarely in men and perhaps somewhat more often in women. Eloise was without ambition; her life suited her. She adored her husband, her home, and her children. Big Jake Levy, Adam's father, cherished her. A large, gruff, intermittently angry man, he was reduced by Eloise's smile to the subservience of a lapdog. Jake's wife, Clair, had taken her to her heart at the moment of their meeting, and Adam, long-legged, skinny, long of face and pleasantly ugly, could never quite accept the fact that he of all men should be the husband of Eloise, whose blond ringlets and round face and vulnerable blue eyes matched all his dreams of what a woman should be. Others disagreed with him. Adam's sister, Sally, often thought of Eloise as a doll-like dunce, and Barbara would find herself doubting that good nature as perpetual as Eloise's could be combined with any sort of real intelligence.

It was Barbara's mother, Jean, who was closest to Eloise. She had long ago taken Eloise under her wing, employed her in her art gallery — a brief and abortive venture — and had given her the courage to divorce her first husband, Jean's own son, and the courage to face her family, who thereupon turned their faces from her permanently. Jean knew her best, better perhaps than her own husband. In each crisis Eloise faced, Jean stood firmly behind her — as when Frederick Thomas first refused the visitation rights of his father.

Eloise had two children. Frederick Thomas was born of her marriage to Tom Lavette. At the time of Dan's funeral, he was sixteen. Joshua, her son by Adam Levy, was born in 1948, six years after Fred. For the first five years of Fred's life, his father more or less ignored him. It was only after the divorce from Eloise that he realized that a son was part of the process of becoming a corporate giant. Since it was hardly likely that his second wife, Lucy, already in her forties when he married her, would bear children, Frederick remained his only heir. However, it was too late. Tom's rages at Eloise were a part of Fred's earliest memories; twice he had seen his father strike his mother, and since he knew nothing of Tom's frustration and unhappiness, he conceived a bitter and unyielding hatred of his natural father. The legal visitation periods became a time of horror for Tom and Lucy. A maniacal, destructive child was loosed upon them, and every attempt to discipline or restrain Fred only increased his capacity for overt and concealed destructiveness. He broke crockery, slashed upholstery, scratched precious paintings, lied, stole, and once, aged nine, attempted to burn down the great graystone mansion on Pacific Heights that was Thomas Lavette's home.

Throughout this period, five years of Fred's life, Tom exhibited enormous patience. In all truth, he wanted a son desperately, wanted to love and be loved, wanted to dream of a day when his son would join in the management of his growing financial and industrial empire. He had fantasies of doing things together with his son, a kind of comradeship that his own father had never granted him. He endured Fred; he never struck the child; and he even went so far as to plead with Eloise to use her influence. Eloise, in turn, pleaded with Fred, but it was hopeless, and after five years Tom surrendered his visitation rights.

At Higate, Frederick Thomas Lavette was a reasonably happy, imaginative, and headstrong boy. He managed good grades in school without ever trying very hard, became his high school's most valued basketball player, read a good deal — for the most part Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs — and became the acknowledged leader of what he named “the wolf pack.” The wolf pack consisted of Fred's younger brother Joshua, his cousin Sam, and his other cousin, May Ling. She was included by sufferance. In addition to these four, there were the two children of Cándido Truaz, the Mexican foreman at Higate, Rubio, who was thirteen, and his sister, Carla, two years older, a lovely, round-faced quiet child. Like May Ling, she was there both by sufferance and by Sam's argument that there were female as well as male wolves.

Sam, who worshipped Fred, spent his summers at Higate, and it was during the summer months that the wolf pack ranged through the hills of the Napa Valley.

The Christmas recess had just begun, and Barbara, still staying with Jean, had given in to Sam's pleading that he spend the next two weeks at Higate. It was a cold December day, and high up on the ridge above the winery, the boys had built a fire. The flame was well protected by a stone fireplace that Adam Levy had built when he was a boy, and the four boys and two girls huddled around it, roasting and devouring the unlikely combination of frankfurters and marshmallows. Sam and May Ling picked up on their conversation which had begun at the cemetery, and once again May Ling was comforting herself with the thought that her grandfather had arrived safely in heaven.

“How?” Sam challenged her. “You saw what they did with gramps. They put him in a coffin and buried him. How would he get out?”

“Not his body. His soul,” May Ling countered.

“Ha!” Sam snorted. “You think his soul is up there with wings, playing on a harp? I bet I know gramps better than any of you. He couldn't even play a kazoo. And you know something — he was supposed to stop smoking cigars. Dr. Kellman said that if he kept on smoking cigars it would kill him. Grandma would throw away his cigars when she found them in the house. But you know what, he kept them hidden in the boat. Then when we'd be out on the bay, he'd hand me the tiller and stretch out and open a can of beer and smoke a cigar. Then he'd say to me, “Sammy, a woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke ——”

“What?” Fred interrupted.

“That's what he'd say.”

“Well, it doesn't make any sense.”

“Anyway,” Sam said to May Ling, “where is he going to get cigars in heaven?”

“From God,” May Ling answered.

“You're crazy.”

“You kids are both crazy,” Fred said with authority. “You're dumb enough to believe that stuff they feed you in Sunday school,” he told May Ling, “and Sammy's dumb enough to argue with you. Anyway, nobody believes that anymore. Didn't you ever hear of evolution?”

“I heard about it,” his brother, Joshua, said.

“We were not created, we evolved — from monkeys, to make it simple. All a natural process.”

“What an awful thing to say!” Carla whispered.

At that moment, May Ling's dog, a big German shepherd called Casper, joined the group.

“And we no more have souls than Casper there,” Fred stated.

“Casper has a soul!” May Ling cried out.

“And he goes to dog heaven when he dies?” Sam grinned.

“He does, he does!” May Ling leaped to her feet. “I hate all of you!” And then she raced off down the hill, followed by Casper. Carla ran after her.

The boys looked at each other and then were silent for a little while; and then Sam said, “I wish there
was
a place you go to after you die. It's scary. Aren't you ever scared when you think about it?” he asked Fred.

“Father Garvey says you go to heaven if you don't sin,” Rubio said uncertainly.

Fred shrugged. “Hand me another frank,” he said lightly. But inside him, a cold knot of fear began to build, growing like a lump of ice next to his heart. He had never really faced it before, the fact that he too would one day die.

The day after the funeral, Maria Cassala went to the Catholic church in San Mateo and spoke to Father Michaelson. Tentatively, pleadingly, she asked for a mass to be said for Dan Lavette's soul. It was difficult for her to convey the exact circumstances to Father Michaelson. She was a timid woman, and although she had lived in America for well over half a century, her English was not good. Most of her life had been confined to her home, and there for the most part she spoke to the members of her family in Italian. At first, the priest thought that she meant her son, which puzzled him, since he knew the family and had never heard of a son called Daniel. But then, gradually, he was able to unravel the facts of the Cassala family's relationship to Dan.

“Yes, of course. Why not?” the priest asked the old woman.

She wept as she explained that he had married out of the faith, that he had divorced, had been married again to a Chinese woman who was not even a Christian, and had died in a state of sin, without remorse or the presence of a priest. Father Michaelson, who was in his mid-thirties and had few Italians in his parish, was both intrigued and touched by the depths of the old woman's belief. She was pleading with him to ease the suffering of someone beloved to her who was condemned, by the fervency of her own faith, to burn in hell for all eternity. The situation unsettled him, and he could only think to ask, “Was he a good man?”

“Believe me, I tell you the truth. Would I lie? Would I lie to a priest?”

“Of course not,” Father Michaelson assured her.

“Would I lie to God?”

The priest shook his head.

“He was a good man —” She sought for words and lapsed into Italian:
“Compassionevole, generoso, gentile
—
molto gentile.
”

“Then God will forgive him,” the priest said.

“You pray for him — please?”

“I'll pray for him,” the priest agreed, strangely touched.

Maria's son, Stephan Cassala, had remained in San Francisco, and for three days following the funeral, he came each day to the Lavette house on Russian Hill. Whenever he appeared, his arms were filled with food, cake, candy, delicacies, once a smoked turkey, another time a baked ham. He was gentle, soft-spoken and unobtrusive, and Jean had the feeling that he could not let go of the dead man. How was it, she asked herself during those days, that Dan had made a connection with so many people who remembered him and valued him? How was it she knew so few of them, and who would reach out to her family after her death? To a degree she resented Cassala's presence; he was connected to a part of her husband that was still strange to her; but in another way, she welcomed him. He was content to remain downstairs while she took refuge in her bedroom, and he spared her and Barbara the necessity of formal and uneasy words spoken to people they did not know.

Thus he was there, leaving to return to San Mateo, on the evening of the third day after the funeral, and on his way out opening the door for Carson Devron. Stephan smiled and nodded. He didn't recognize the face, and he asked whether Carson was a friend of the family.