by Howard Fast
“Don’t apologize, please.”
“Then tell us.”
“Well — I play trumpet —”
Barbara’s knowledge of trumpet players was nonexistent, but on the other hand, Harvey Lemwax gave no indication of ever having heard of Barbara Lavette. Of course, she was by no means the best-known writer in the United States, but neither was she unknown. She had occupied a place in Who’s Who for the past thirty years, and if her books were not widely enough read, certainly her past had elicited enough nonliterary headlines for her to feel less than apologetic.
“I’m sure you’re superb at it,” Barbara said. “If you do it the way you stormed into that smoking bus, I take my hat off to you.”
“Superb is hardly the word,” Carla said.
“About the smoke,” Barbara went on, “I’ve been coughing my head off. Should I worry about it, Sam?”
“Oh no, no. We need a drink.”
“Superb, indeed,” Carla said. “Only one of the three or four greatest and when I say greatest, I mean greatest, but absolutely. Right there with Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge.”
“Too much, too much!” Lemwax exclaimed. “You are good people. I am glad to have met you, a good meeting, except that we must say God help that poor bus driver and rest his poor soul. Will all them kids be all right, Doc?”
“Cuts, contusions, a broken arm, two or three teeth lost and some blood. Not awful by any means. But don’t ride off into the sunset yet, Harvey. Today’s Mother’s birthday.”
“That is your mother?”
He had been told that, Barbara remembered.
“She is too young and too beautiful.”
“Bless your heart,” Barbara said.
“What I am saying is this,” Sam told them. “In the trunk of my car is a cooler containing six bottles of beautiful French champagne. The celebration of Mother’s birthday is to take place at the home of family of sorts in the valley north of Napa where they have a winery, which is what they live, talk, and know. They are bigoted peasants who will not drink French wine or even discuss French champagne. But Mother must be toasted properly, so just sit still while I get to it, provided you will drink Dom Perignon out of paper cups.”
Barbara listened to him with amazement. They had just witnessed a horrible accident. The driver of the school bus was dead. The driver of the pickup truck, a Mexican gardener, had been taken to the hospital in critical condition. The bloodstains and the oil stains were still plain on the road and the stink of burning gasoline was still in the air.
“We did our best,” Sam said, spreading his hands. He saw her expression.
Well, he had. Dried blood marked them all. Carla, dressed in her white silk best, had not hesitated to plunge into the effort, and now the silk was stained with blood and grime.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lavette,” the black man said, as if compelled to apologize for the others. Barbara realized that he was embarrassed, standing in his undershirt, trying to maintain his original moment of dignity. They didn’t know the bus driver. They were under no compulsion to mourn him, or was the whole world under a compulsion to constantly mourn the dead? What do the dead deserve? Barbara clasped her hands and stood stiff and very still for a long moment.
“Are you all right?” Carla asked her.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Just shaken.”
Sam opened a bottle of champagne. Carla opened a package of plastic cups. The cork popped.
Tenderly, Sam said to his mother, “Drink this. It will help.”
She shook her head. She was crying, softly, gently. Even more embarrassed, Harvey Lemwax said that he really had to go.
“One for the road,” Sam said, handing him the cup of champagne. He filled a cup for himself and one for Carla, but then offered his cup to Barbara. “Mother?”
She pushed away the tears with the back of her hand and accepted it. Sam poured another for himself, offering a toast: “Life, not death. There were twelve kids in the bus and they’ll all be okay. We got them out.”
Barbara nodded.
“Then bottoms up!”
The wine was cold and good, and it eased Barbara’s throat, and it came to her that if they had not been directly behind the school bus and if Sam had not plunged into it, followed by herself and Carla and Harvey Lemwax — if another two or three minutes had gone by — the children would have died.
“And in this crazy, lunatic country,” Carla was telling Lemwax, “my husband could be sued. Can you imagine, for saving lives he could be sued!”
“The hell with that,” Sam said. “Once more around.”
“I feel a bit strange,” Barbara said. “I have to get out of the sun, Sam.”
They made an odd group, standing at the side of the road and drinking champagne. Behind them, a billboard proclaimed the merits of Toyotas. Barbara sank into the back seat of the car gratefully. It was hot in the car, but not so hot as out there in the sun. A motorcycle cop pulled up and they offered him champagne. He grinned and shook his head. Probably, Barbara thought, he’d heard about the accident. Sam was a hero. He was questioning them, and writing down the answers on his pad.
The motorcycle cop took off, and Sam opened another bottle of champagne. Their little group was only twenty paces or so away from the car, but through the closed window it appeared to Barbara that she was in one world and they were in another world. It was chokingly hot in the car, parked as it was on the roadside under the noonday sun, but Barbara made no move to open a window or to turn on the motor and use the air conditioning. She was thinking about the driver, and how death could be so summarily dismissed. This was another aspect of her son: death comes, life goes on; and if death comes to someone whose name is not known, a stranger who dies driving a school bus, well, you take a glass of champagne. Sam was open-minded; no sense of the black man being black. The driver of the school bus had had his chest stove in against the wheel and his skull fractured as it crashed against the windshield. Was he married? Did he have children? Did he have life insurance? Was she, Barbara, weeping for him, for herself or for Boyd?
The black man had gone to his car and brought out his trumpet case, and now he took out his shining instrument, put it to his mouth and blew several fanfares into the California air. More champagne. The three of them embraced and then Harvey Lemwax put his trumpet back in its case, took it to his car, came to say goodbye to Barbara, started, stopped when he saw her tears, shook his head and then walked to his car and drove off.
Sam came to the car and threw open the door. “My God, it’s so hot in here, Mother, you could choke. Why on earth are you crying?”
“I don’t know.”
“We finished two bottles of that elixir. Carla and I are both sloshed, so you’d better drive. Are you all right? I mean, are you settled enough to drive?”
“Of course,” Barbara snapped at him. “I had one small sip of champagne.”
“I didn’t mean —”
“I know what you meant — oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to get so upset and scream at you. That isn’t my style, is it? Of course I’ll drive.”
“About that silly little act we put on? We’re not heartless, Mother, but if you bleed for everything — well, how much blood does one have?”
“I know.”
Carla was silent. Barbara stepped out of the car and into the driver’s seat. Sam held open the back seat door for Carla, but Carla said, “No, I’d like to sit in front with Barbara.”
“Sure.”
Barbara just glanced at Carla. A few moments after the car began to move, Carla reached out tentatively and touched Barbara’s arm. Then Carla burst into tears. Barbara slowed the car and took it off the road onto the shoulder.
“What in hell is this all about?” Sam wanted to know.
“Sam, please shut up,” Barbara said. She got out of the car, walked around and opened the door on Carla’s side. Carla came out of the car into Barbara’s arms, and embracing her, holding her soft,
warm body against her own breast, Barbara understood that this was something women could do, a kind of human contact that men had lost long, long ago.
“I only wanted you to love me,” Carla whimpered.
“I know. I do, truly.”
Back in the car, Barbara drove on again, thinking that this short trip to the Napa Valley could turn into some kind of Voltairean adventure, going on and on, encounters with the hurt, the wise, and the foolish. And what was wrong with her, herself, Barbara Lavette, that here she was at sixty years and supposedly a woman of experience and insight, yet she had never really tried to comprehend this dark, tumultuous woman her son had married? The rich and the poor, always the rich and the poor, something she had wrestled with all her life, the difference being so basic and so deep, like all the apparently unalterable differences this world presented, black and white, Chicano and Anglo.
Sometime around nineteen twenty or nineteen twenty-one, Carla’s father, Cándido Truaz, had come to work at Higate Winery, to become foreman, to have Jake Levy build him a house on the property. Carla had been born there on the grounds of Higate, had grown to womanhood there, had played as a child with the children of the Levys and Lavettes in a kind of tangled relationship that she as a child never really understood, except that she did come to realize that the brown-skinned were the disinherited and the white-skinned were the inheritors.
God, help me; Barbara pleaded the thought. Nothing was worse than to face one’s own inadequacy and insensitivity. It was too much of being Barbara Lavette. If age did nothing else, it sometimes brought along with the wrinkles a kind of insight.
She sighed and said, “We’re almost there, so I imagine we’ll have no more adventures. But what shall we tell them about the clothes? We look like we’ve been through a battle.”
“So we shall tell them about the battle,” Sam said.
“I wore my best dress,” Carla said, mournfully.
“Clothes don’t matter. The dress can be cleaned and they have plenty of clothes there.” Then she said to Carla, softly, “Forgive me, please.”
“For what?”
“Just forgive me.”
Sam listened in dubious silence. Emotional outflowing disturbed him. It gave him a feeling of being naked in a bad dream.
They had done this up brown, and peach and white, which were the colors of the enormous tent they had raised. This was to be only the family to celebrate Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, but it was the family in the Western, not in the Eastern sense. A California family, settled there in the last hundred years, was limited; and with this knowledge of limitation and the sense of awayness and loneliness that prevailed before the coming of easy air transport and cheap long-distance telephoning, a family tended to cling to the most fragile relationships. A new family emerged because the Pacific Ocean, only a few miles away, made a barrier to Westward wandering, and in this case, the big old winery was a magnet of sorts. It was ruled over by Clair Harvey Levy, Jake’s widow, and operationally it was guided by Adam Levy, Jake’s son. Eloise was his wife. Freddie Lavette was Eloise’s son from her first marriage, to Thomas Lavette, and Freddie and his half brother, Joshua, were totally dedicated to the growing of grapes and the making of wine. Adam’s brother, also Joshua, had been killed in the Pacific during World War II, and the third child of Jake and Clair, Sally Levy, had married Barbara’s half brother, Joseph Lavette. It went on from there, and Barbara could remember trying to explain the family quilt to Boyd. He never quite got it all straight and sorted out. When Sally’s daughter, May Ling, one-quarter Chinese, married Freddie Lavette, no one could comprehend what their previous blood relationship had been. Along the way, other families had interacted and interconnected: the Cassalas, who were a kind of royal Italian clan such as existed only in San Francisco during the first half of the century, and the Devrons, who owned the better part of downtown Los Angeles.
Along with these, there was the Truaz family, Carla’s family, who lived on the place, big, barrel-chested Cándido, his wife, two kids besides Carla; and there were also various and sundry grandchildren and half a dozen other kids whom Barbara could not properly place, and, in the brash, bright pavilion, a five-piece mariachi band. The cooking was Mexican, under the supervision of Cándido’s wife, Martha: huge pots of chile beans, stacks of tortillas, wide bowls of mole, succulent chicken immersed in a wonderful bitter chocolate sauce, saffron rice mixed with shrimp, red snapper Vera Cruz, and wine, red wine, which was in tribute to old Jake Levy, who had never considered white wine to be a drink fit for a grown man.
And Barbara, seeing all this, said to herself, ruefully, And I would have missed this and sulked. How awful that would have been.
They loved her, and such expressions of love filled her with guilt, something she had puzzled over all her life.
In Eloise’s bedroom, dressed in a clean skirt and blouse that Eloise had provided, Barbara confessed the small agony of being kissed and embraced by so many people.
“Yes, I always feel that way — filled with guilt,” Eloise said.
“Do you know why?”
“No, not really. Do you, Barbara?”
“Sort of. You possess deep down the notion of being undeserving of love — or undeserving of anything good, one might say, and then you receive it and it’s a mistake, like a package being delivered to the wrong person. I told you about that dreadful accident. The children weren’t hurt badly, but the driver of the school bus was killed, and less than a half hour later, Sam was passing around a champagne bottle, and all I could think of was the poor broken body of the man as the firemen dragged him out of the bus, and I was sick with guilt. But why? One moment I say it’s the sense of being undeserving of love, and then that doesn’t explain it—”
“My parents loved me too much,” Eloise said. “I was a pretty little doll — a precious thing, I suppose they felt, but not a person. But today, you and Carla and Sam saved those children’s lives. I’ve never seen Carla like that. It did something to her.”
“Yes — to all of us.”
“The skirt is perfect on you,” Eloise said, and then she sat down and began to cry. Her husband, Adam, knocked, opened the door and waited, his hand on the knob. He was a tall, slender man, with a pleasant freckled face, sunburned arms and orange hair turning white. He stood in the doorway watching his wife for a long moment, and then said, more harshly than Barbara had ever heard him speak to Eloise before, “It’s got to stop! The boy is alive and well, and I will not live out my life with a self-pitying bundle of tears.”
Surprisingly, at least to Barbara, Eloise snapped, “I am not self-pitying, Adam! I won’t have you talk to me like that!”
Adam started to speak — and swallowed his words. He was nervous, distraught.
“In front of Barbara,” Eloise said, unhappily.
“I’m sorry.” He went to Eloise, but she retreated into herself, her head bent. He looked at Barbara helplessly.
“She’ll be all right,” Barbara said. “Just leave us together, Adam. Please.”
“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not myself either. God Almighty,” he said to Eloise, “you know how much I love you! We have more damn blessings than ninety-nine percent of the people on this earth!” And with this, he walked out, slamming the door behind him.
Barbara handed Eloise a box of tissues. “We have this in common,” Barbara said. “We’re both of us the easiest cry on the Coast. Tears frighten men. It’s our old, old weapon, and some men go into an absolute panic with it. Boyd did — just went to pieces — and it appears that your Adam disintegrates just as easily.”
“And I don’t cry that much. I was so strong all through this agony of Joshua’s. Even when I learned that they’d amputated his leg, I managed. I did manage. But two weeks ago, he got his permanent prosthesis, and somehow that — I don’t know. It did something to me —”
“I can understand that,” Barbara said.
“He became so angry, Joshua
did. He was never really against that filthy war. You know, he wouldn’t even discuss Vietnam. Oh, he had one awful fight with Freddie, but then when Freddie went to jail for nine months as a conscientious objector, Joshua didn’t have a word to say against him. He was in boot camp with the marines then. He just said, His way and my way — they don’t mix. But since he came back, his hatred of the war and the government and Johnson — he becomes livid if anyone mentions Johnson. To him, it was Johnson’s war. I’ve never seen anyone change like that —”
“But people do.”
“I know. He had to spend those months in the hospital, and that was torment time, but I thought it was easing up. He said to Freddie that he’d never sleep with a girl again,” woefully. “Can you imagine, Barbara, that no woman should ever look at his wound? But I thought that would change. I still do, but when this prosthesis was fitted, he just withdrew into himself, and it’s been awful. And then Freddie gets the notion of making this huge dance card — you know Freddie adores you — and everyone who wants to dance with you signs it. Josh wouldn’t. I know I cry too much.”
Barbara found Joshua sitting on a bench outside the old stone aging building, one leg bent, the leg with the prosthesis stretched out in front of him. She had seen him in the hospital, but this was the first time she had seen him since his release and return to Higate. He had changed a great deal from the chubby, cheerful boy she remembered in years past. He was bone-lean, and his face was full of sharp edges and angry knots. He had the same pale blue eyes as her son, Sam; cold eyes. As Barbara approached him, he began to work his way to his feet. She accepted this, feeling that if she told him not to rise, it would have been taken as a direct insult.
“Aunt Barbara.”
She was actually Freddie’s aunt, but since Freddie was his half brother, he had always called her that. He kissed her cheek, almost absently. Barbara remained silent, and finally Joshua said, “I’m glad to see you.”
“Yes, we have something in common,” Barbara said flatly. “We lost part of ourselves. You lost a leg. I lost the man I loved better than I ever loved another. He was a part of me, and I lost him. I lost the right to live without endless loneliness. I lost the hope of a warm and decent old age in whatever time I have left. I lost the joy of sleeping with him, yes, of having intercourse with him, which I still need and want; of feeling his good protective warmth. All that — not with fake glory, but with the failure of his poor sick heart.” With that, she turned and began to walk away.
