The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  “You know who you are,” Moretti said.

  “Yes,” Boyd said sourly, “you make your party’s points with a woman candidate, but we both know there’s no way in the world Barbara can get elected in that district.”

  “Come on, Boyd, let her talk for herself.”

  “I don’t think I want to be a politician,” Barbara said. “I live in a demented world hanging on the brink of destruction in an atomic holocaust, fighting absurd and hideous wars, killing without end while a parcel of strange people put heart and soul into calling for an end to abortion, to the killing of the unborn. But these same pious folk pour their money and their sons into an unending killing of those born eighteen or twenty years before. One small push, Tony? No way. I am going to shout my head off. Your Congress would bore me to distraction.”

  “Suppose we talk about it in two years,” Moretti said.

  But two years later, in the fall of 1972, Barbara and Boyd were in Scotland, attending an international lawyers’ meeting in Edinburgh. Barbara sent Tony Moretti a postcard, on which she wrote, “Scotland is the most beautiful country on earth, except for Northern California, and please forgive me and raise the subject in 1974.” But in April of 1974, Boyd Kimmelman died.

  Tony Moretti came to the funeral. He came to Barbara and kissed her cheek. He held her hand, a huge, fat mountain of a man, topped by a thatch of thick white hair. Sam, standing with his arm around his mother, looked strangely at Tony Moretti. Barbara, listening to the keening chant of the rabbi, watched the plain pine coffin, raw unfinished wood, being lowered into the earth. Boyd, who in all the years they were together had hardly mentioned the fact that he was Jewish and had never entered a synagogue, had left specific instructions as to his burial. A plain pine coffin — as Jewish custom had it — and a rabbi officiating.

  Later, at Barbara’s house on Green Street, Moretti talked to Sam about Sam’s father, dead these twenty-six years. As Moretti left, he said to Barbara, “It would be good at this bitter time, Barbara. To involve yourself in an election campaign would take your mind off your grief.”

  Barbara shook her head. “It’s meaningless without Boyd.”

  “Think about it,” Moretti said.

  Barbara thought about it, but it remained meaningless without Boyd. A week or so later, Sam asked her about Moretti.

  “He’s the head of the party here.”

  “You mean the Democrats?”

  “Yes.”

  “He said he knew Pop. How did he know him?”

  Barbara always felt awkward when her son brought up the subject of his father. He had been less than two years old when his father was killed; he had no memory of the man, but an insatiable curiosity, and through the years, he had questioned Barbara persistently.

  “A man like Moretti — well, people are his thing, Sam; knowing people, remembering them, influencing them. Your father was a man other men valued.”

  “What does that mean? Brains, skill?”

  “I think you know what I mean. Men have said that in a tight or dangerous situation, there’s no one they’d rather have had with them than your father.”

  Switching abruptly, Sam asked, “Why didn’t you marry Boyd?”

  Taken totally aback, Barbara stared at her son. She realized that he was exercising with her, his mother, that curious prerogative of physicians, the right to ask any question of anyone, no matter how intimate the question: Have you moved your bowels? Was the stool soft or hard? How many times a week do you have intercourse? Even of the Queen of England, any question was permissible.

  She always answered his questions. “I’m not much good at marriage.”

  “Not even with my father?”

  “I loved him. He was an extraordinary man. But the marriage wasn’t much good. He walked out on the marriage. And you’re old enough to remember how it was with Carson.”

  “What does Moretti want of us?” Sam asked, after a long moment.

  “Us?”

  “You’re my mother.”

  When it pleases you to remember, Barbara thought, and said aloud, “He wants me to run for Congress again.”

  “Just like that? He wants you to? Does he appoint candidates? I thought there were supposed to be primaries and that kind of thing.”

  So angry, she thought. At me? At Boyd for dying? Or because his mother is becoming an old woman and there’s no one to take care of her? No. That’s not Sam. At least he knows me that well. No one will ever have to take care of me. The anger belongs somewhere else, and he uses me because I’m here and I’m his mother.

  “Mr. Moretti does not appoint candidates. The Democrats have never won an election in the Forty-eighth C.D. There are no primaries, because no one wants the headache of running a hopeless campaign.”

  “Except you?”

  “That’s nasty, Sam, and I won’t have it. There are things you don’t know. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Not when you’re like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” he burst out. “I’m so damn sorry. My own world stinks, and I bring it here to you.”

  Barbara put her arms around him and held him close. It was her first hint that Sam’s marriage was going to pieces.

  In the weeks after that incident, the weeks after Boyd’s death, she brooded over the election invitation, but finally she wrote a note to Moretti that it was impossible.

  Moretti came to see her soon after the birthday party at Hi-gate, and he said to her, “In two years, we will discuss it again.” And Barbara realized that they would, that in 1976 the sharp edge of the pain would be gone. Long, long ago, in France, in Paris of the nineteen thirties, she had fallen in love with a journalist whose name was Marcel Duboise, and who died of a wound during the Spanish Civil War. Then she believed that time would never erase the agony, but time took away the pain, just as time took away the pain of her husband’s death. All things give way to time — ideas, causes, nations. Her life had been passionate, filled with belief and trust and love, but that was long ago.

  She had always thought that Sam might understand.

  “No,” he said. “No, I can’t understand why you do what you do, why you went to prison, why you couldn’t just give the committee the names they wanted. Nothing would have happened to the people you were protecting. The McCarthy era wasn’t Hitler Germany.”

  “What might have happened to the people who gave us the money to buy medicine and send it to the Spanish Republicans, I don’t know. Perhaps they would have suffered, perhaps not. For me, it was a matter of honor.”

  But honor, too, had gone on down the road. What conceivable meaning could honor have during the administration of Richard Nixon? He had not seized power at the point of a gun; he had been elected and re-elected by the people of the United States, people who knew his values and accepted them, and here was her own son handling the word honor and trying to relate it to reality. Nor was Sam one of those doctors who rooted in every grubby hole for a buck, who robbed the government through Medicare, who handed their patients a warning never to be sick on Wednesday, our golf day. He gave hundreds of hours to a charity clinic, and he cared very little about becoming a millionaire, a condition with which many of his colleagues replaced the caduceus. But why his mother went to prison as a matter of honor, that was hard to grasp.

  Slowly, the pain went away and the loss receded into the background. It was a very slow process, like the emptying, grain by grain, of some enormous hourglass. Through her years, she had slept alone too many times for it to be something that had to be learned, and if, in the dark hours of the night, she reached out for warm flesh, that too had happened before. The two men who had been the true and deep loves of her life died violent deaths. Death was a stranger then; now as Barbara passed her sixtieth year, death was no longer the dark stranger who came from a place unknowable. Days passed and days became weeks, and the weeks stretched into months. She sat in the park on a warm, sunny day and she noticed other women who sat in the park. The men died and the women were alo
ne. That was the way it was in America. There were few families where the old were cherished. Sam tried to call every few days and to take her to lunch at least once a week. That was pleasant. He didn’t take her to dinner because of his own disintegrating marriage. He was still trying to save it.

  There were hours now when no thought of Boyd crossed her mind, and this filled her with guilt; but on the other hand, she realized that she could hardly remember the face and speech of her first love, Marcel Duboise. Almost forty years had passed, and to save the mind from madness, time obliterates. She was invited to a party in one of those gigantic and improbable high-rises that had sprung up on Russian Hill, and she accepted. More than a year had passed since Boyd’s death. To her utter amazement, she found herself the center of attention by admiring men, and this embarrassed her and even frightened her a bit. She told herself it was the result of notoriety, yet she knew that her thinking of herself as a notorious woman was rather ridiculous; and she even dared to think that she, Barbara Lavette, was still a very lovely woman. An older man, at least ten years older than herself, used the word regal. “Regal,” he said. “I remember your mother very well. She was a regal woman — no other word to describe her — and when she and Dan Lavette entered a room, believe me, the conversation stopped.”

  Barbara got rid of her slump. She straightened her back, recalling her dance teacher at Sarah Lawrence. “Your back, ladies, and hold your damn heads as if each of you had a jug of water sitting there.” The younger men there knew that she was someone of consequence. Here was a tall, handsome older woman, whose wide blue-gray eyes suggested both wisdom and sadness. Barbara had never fully understood why an older woman should attract the eager interest of young men half her age. She wondered whether they were homosexuals. She had never been troubled by the accusation that San Francisco, her city, her beloved wonderful city that was like no other city in the world, had become a national center for homosexuals. She argued that it only gave the city more style, which it already had in excess of any other city in America.

  “The devil with it,” she said to herself. “I am enjoying myself, and if I’m not happy, I’m not unhappy, and that’s a change.”

  They had read her books. Boyd once suggested that the work of an interesting good-looking woman sells better than the writing of her opposite; and Barbara smiled now at the recollection, recalling her annoyance with Boyd and her retort that he wore his male chauvinism on his sleeve. Dear, sweet man — yet always he faced her with the attitude that Barbara Lavette could do no wrong, which was perhaps the main reason she had never married him. To be tied to a cruel bastard was a bondage from which escape was at least possible; but to be married to a man who worshiped you — well, that was something else.

  “I read your last book,” the young man was saying. “I mean, my friends steer clear of this whole rash of new feminist books — no, I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No, I was simply listening.”

  “I read them. I love women, but you’re different. When I heard you would — no, might — when I heard you might be here tonight, I was terribly excited. I read what your life has been and I expected an older woman —”

  “I am an older woman,” Barbara said cheerfully.

  “No way. I’m not coming on — I’d like to — I don’t know how—” Then he added, “Have I offended you?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  Moments later, a young woman, mid twenties, darkly good-looking and very intense, told her, “I voted for you — the first time I ever voted. I mean, I wanted so much to be like you — oh, from the first time I read something you had written, the book about France, I wanted to do the things you had done, to be just like you. And then when you ran for Congress — you don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I think I do, yes,” knowing how dismal it was not to be remembered. “Leaflets?” It was a shot in the dark.

  “Yes, oh, yes, and one wonderful day when we did the fences with your poster, my boyfriend and myself, and both of us convinced that the cops were one jump behind us. Of course, they weren’t. And you will run again, won’t you?”

  “Perhaps, if you help me.”

  The hostess at the apartment, Birdie MacGelsie, whose husband had made many millions out of a uranium discovery, and whose own guilts had made her an eager partner of Barbara’s in Mothers for Peace, overheard the young woman’s enthusiastic political endorsement of Barbara, and got Barbara aside a while later to ask her if it was indeed true.

  “Is what true?”

  Small and bright-eyed, like a perky bird, Birdie whispered, “Congress. Will you be a candidate again?”

  “I don’t know. Until tonight, I wasn’t thinking about it very seriously. I suppose I was carried away by her enthusiasm. By the way, what is her name?”

  “Carol Eberhardt.”

  “Eberhardt?”

  “Same one. The child is his daughter.”

  “You have to be kidding. The same Jim Eberhardt, the one who heads up the Republican organization here?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why?”

  “A perfectly proper rebellion,” Birdie said. “You ought to know about rebellion, Barbara. If I remember—”

  “We both remember,” Barbara said shortly.

  “You see, Barbara, when you ran the last time, you weren’t a bit sure of anything. All of a sudden, there you were. When you do it again, and you must, we’re going to be in the act.”

  “Oh?”

  “Now don’t get your ass up, my love. I’m not talking about giving you directions or cutting in on your independence. I am talking about money, pure and simple. I know Tony Moretti staked you to something, but what the party gives you won’t get you elected dog catcher. I am talking about real money and real publicity, which means television and more television. How do you think our late but not lamented governor got in there?”

  “Yes. Still, I must want it. If you don’t want it, then it’s not much good even trying.”

  “Of course you want it,” Birdie said. “How else can you stand up down there in Washington and tell them what a bunch of hopeless idiots they are?”

  But did she want it? It might be an antidote to loneliness and to a purposeless existence, or it might not; and why, she wondered, was she so hooked on the notion that her existence must include purpose? Most people lived without purpose. She had begun a new book, a book about Boyd; not actually about him, but a novel to be based on his life. That was purpose enough, but the book went slowly and painfully, more slowly and more painfully than anything else she had written. Her writing had never come easily, but this writing about a man she had lived with in her years of maturity was most difficult, as if each of the many threads that bound them had to picked apart, investigated, thoroughly studied. Surely this gave her a purpose.

  But not enough. She had taken to long walks again, miles each day, along the Embarcadero from Berry Street to Fisherman’s Wharf, and in the course of these walks, touching at each block some deep memory, she came to realize that the memories were an illusion. In the same way, the writing of her memories plucked at strings of illusion. That was all very well, and it was the writer’s business to try to create reality out of illusions, but for her there had to be more; and one day in July, walking down Jones Street to the Bay, she saw ahead of her, standing large and wide, looking over the water, the heavyset figure of old Tony Moretti. She made her way across the Embarcadero and joined him.

  For a while, he said nothing. He glanced at her and offered a nod of recognition, but said nothing, and neither did she. And then, perhaps a few minutes after she had joined him, he pointed across the sparkling waters of the Bay and remembered, “Way over there, Barbara, we picked up the garbage. Oakland garbage. Nineteen twelve, I think. Anyway, I was twelve years old and I got my first job on one of Dan Lavette’s garbage ships.”

  “Oh, no. Garbage ships?”

  “Big scows. Pick up the garbage, dump it in the oce
an. We didn’t know a damn thing about ecology then. He sold them a few years later. Never knew that, did you?”

  “I think I did. I’m not sure.”

  He pointed down the street. “Over there — Pat Salvo’s crab stand. We’re old friends, and his crabs are fresh, believe me. I said to him, When will Miss Lavette be coming along? He tells me, Any time now.”

  “No. I can’t believe that, Tony. You mean I’ve become some sort of ridiculous fixture here?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. People who know you see you and remember you. After all, your father put his mark on Fisherman’s Wharf. Everyone knew him. A lot of people know you.”

  “Oh!”

  “Shouldn’t surprise you. Lived here all your life. You write books. You worked for the Chronicle on and off.”

  “Tony,” she said, “when I ran for Congress back in nineteen seventy, no one brought up the fact that I had spent six months in prison.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because they knew you couldn’t win, so they got themselves some points by treating you with class. But they didn’t know how close you came to it, and this time, they’ll bring it up all right, and I think we can turn it around and make some points for us.”

  “This time!” Barbara exclaimed. “What do you mean, this time?”

  “Things have cleared up. It’s two years since Boyd died, and I don’t like the thought of Barbara Lavette sitting over her knitting and pretending she’s an old lady.”

  “Which I am.”

  “My dear girl, if I were not almost seventy-six years old and seventy-five pounds overweight and carrying four different colored pills which I take three times a day, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you.”

  “Tony, that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in months, and I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “We had a meeting the other night, Barbara, and the question of the forsaken Forty-eighth came up. That’s what we call it. You lost by three thousand votes. Murray Henig, who we put in there two years ago, lost by thirty-two thousand votes. This year, no one wants to touch it. Even Al Ruddy’s nephew, who’s been working in Ruddy’s district and who’s so eager politically that he begins to sweat if a designation is even mentioned — even he doesn’t want the Forty-eighth, because he says the political career he doesn’t even have would be ruined. Sort of true. Nobody wants Henig after the beating he took in the Forty-eighth. But I said I got someone.”