The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  “Me,” Barbara said. “Thank you.”

  “That’s right. You can thank me, because you’re going to win and you’re going to Congress.”

  “And how do you do it?”

  “We do it. You and me, we run the campaign together.”

  “Only you haven’t even asked me whether I want it,” Barbara said.

  “Do you want it? Not just a platform to say your piece, but a seat down there in that pesthole they call Washington?”

  “I think I do,” Barbara said.

  “All right.” He put out his hand, and she took it. “Now we’ll have some lunch at Gino’s.”

  After she left Tony Moretti, Barbara felt that she had to sound off about her decision with someone. Her two closest friends were both sisters-in-law of a sort: Sally, who was Clair’s daughter and who had married Barbara’s brother Joe, and Eloise, who had married Barbara’s other brother, Tom Seldon Lavette, and had then divorced him to marry Adam Levy. Sally was brilliant, but she could not properly listen. Eloise listened and adored, and Barbara felt that at this moment in her life, she needed a lot of listening, not to mention at least a thimbleful of adoration.

  It was past six in the evening when Barbara turned her car off Route Twenty-nine onto the winding oiled dirt road that led to Higate. Old Jake had never permitted the road to be modernized, but now that he was dead, Adam was making arrangements for a macadam surface. The evening was stuffily warm, not a trace of a breeze, and the mountains appeared to be undulating gently in the heat.

  But only Joshua was at Eloise’s house, sitting in the den, his face expressionless as he stared at the television set. Long ago, before he had joined the marines, before he had been sent to Vietnam, Joshua had been a round-faced, sound-limbed boy, chubby if not fat, his straw-colored thatch of hair standing straight up from his head. Eloise’s other son, Frederick, had come of her marriage to Tom. Joshua was her son with Adam, and as a small child, he had had the same golden locks and blue eyes as his mother — which led him to be petted and cuddled in a manner he always remembered as distasteful. Barbara had noticed his anger at the showing of pictures of himself as a child. Asked about his resentment, he once told Barbara that they might as well have been pictures of a little girl as of a small boy.

  His face remained expressionless as he opened the door for Barbara and explained, tonelessly, “They’re all having dinner with Grandma Clair, over at the big house.”

  “Oh? I thought I’d find your mother.”

  “She’s there.” He was no round-faced boy with a thatch of yellow hair. He kept his hair clipped close; his face was tightly drawn over the bones; and there was a nervous tic under one eye. Now twenty-eight years old, there was nothing left of the gentle, chubby boy whom Barbara remembered. His bleak tone dismissed her and said that he wanted to be alone, and he turned back to the room where the television was blaring before Barbara could think of any way to continue the conversation. She left, nervous — and feeling that she should stay and talk to him.

  It was still light outside, still before seven o’clock, when Barbara opened the door to Clair’s house and went in. The door was never locked. It was a door you passed through without ever thinking too much about it, and everyone passed through it, the Chicano and Mexican workers on the place, their children, the family and their children, delivery men, salesmen. The door led directly into the huge kitchen, twenty by thirty-five feet, equipped with a coal stove, a gas stove, a walk-in refrigerator and a fourteen-foot-long refectory table made of polished oak. The kitchen being the natural core of the house, most of the family meals were taken there; and since this was a farm, dinner was eaten early. They were already at the table when Barbara entered, Clair and Eloise and Adam and Freddie and May Ling, who had acceded to Freddie’s desire to have a second child. Freddie’s house, while on the Higate property, was about four hundred yards from the main house, and after her first experience at giving birth, May Ling was in no mood to leave her child — seven months old now — with a nurse. The new baby was a boy, plump and perfect, with ten fingers and ten toes, all that May Ling could have desired, and now he slept peacefully in a crib in the corner of the kitchen.

  At seventy-six, Clair was still strong and energetic, but unhappy in hours of being alone. At least twice a week, she persuaded some or all of her family at the winery to eat at her house, and tonight, when Barbara entered, there were sounds of pleasant greeting around the board. Clair got up to embrace her and beg her to eat with them. Barbara insisted that she was not hungry, and Clair protested that this was not a real dinner, only a pickup of roast lamb, chile beans, and red onion and cucumber. Hard liquor was rarely served at Higate, but there was no meal without half a dozen bottles of wine on the table, and always three of them were the Cabernet Sauvignon, the red wine that Jake had loved so and about which he had boasted — about Higate’s red being the best that California offered. By Jake’s measure, there was no other good wine, only California.

  Even though Jake had been dead a good many years now, to Clair the wine on the table was more than a candle. As far as white wine was concerned, Jake had no strong preference. The market demanded white wine, but to Jake, only red wine was real wine.

  Barbara joined the table and indicated the Cabernet, which Freddie poured for her. A small ceremony, but old enough for her to have developed a true preference. The two Mexican women, both of them illegals, passed around the table with platters of sliced leg of lamb and bowls of chile beans, and Barbara, who had given no thought to dinner, found her appetite in the delicious aroma of the food, helped herself and considered how much of the food served here had the flavor of Mexico in it. There was much of Mexico at Higate, and old Jake, from the time he and Clair bought the place, well over half a century ago, had made a point of hiring a certain number of illegals. Barbara could remember his argument that the land was theirs and we had taken it from them. To give back a little had eased his conscience.

  “I’m so glad you decided to come,” Eloise told her. “I mean, just on the spur of the moment. You hardly ever do, you know — it takes such pleading to get you here.”

  “I treasure my welcome — and guard it. I don’t want to waste it.”

  “What nonsense!” Clair snorted.

  “Aunt Barbara comes when the sky is falling down — she props it up. Right?” Freddie said.

  “Wrong,” his wife informed him.

  “Oh, I wish I were propping it up,” Barbara said. “But — well, sort of.”

  “We want a toast,” Adam said, raising his glass. “Barbara?”

  “Just peace — and a few grains of happiness, wherever we may find them.”

  “Good enough,” Clair said.

  Barbara realized that there was no way she could lure Eloise away and say to her, “Darling, I have lost my mind, but I must tell you all about it.” Instead, she paused in her dinner, chewed a mouthful of lamb, and said, “Dear ones, I’m running for Congress again. I had to tell someone.”

  All the eating stopped, and they stared at her. May Ling said it was great and she was sure Barbara would make it. Clair thought she had lost her mind. “Oh, I have. I certainly have,” Barbara agreed. “But I think every candidate is a little bit insane, don’t you?”

  “A little bit?” Freddie asked.

  Adam said, “Stop being a damn smartass, and let Barbara talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk,” Barbara protested. “I’ve said my piece. I was walking down at the Embarcadero, and it occurred to me that walking along the Embarcadero each day is hardly the most interesting way to spend the rest of my life. I am bored to death with looking at crabs, watching sea gulls and watching the tourists watch sea gulls and watching the film companies film the tourists watching the sea gulls — good Lord, listen to me — and then I saw Tony Moretti standing there on the street. I walked over to him, and he said, How about this time? And I said yes.”

  “Just like that?” Eloise asked softly.

  “Just like hat.�
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  “Does Sam know?” Adam wondered.

  “No, I’m afraid to tell him.”

  “What nonsense!” Clair exclaimed, forgetting that she had already disposed of Barbara’s mind and judgment. “What does he expect you to do? Sit by the fire and knit?”

  “Something of the sort. You know, being a doctor doesn’t mean you’re wise or bright. Well, Sam’s bright enough, but not overequipped with common sense. He constantly asks me to rest. Rest, take it easy, Mother, haven’t you done enough?”

  “The first time,” Eloise said, “you were after something else. You wanted a platform. Oh, I’ve felt like that so many times — just to stand up and shout that we must do something about our agony — about their stupidity and our tears, their cruelty and idiocy —”

  It’s Joshua’s absence from this table. That’s what she’s saying, Barbara thought. No simple absence, either.

  “But I’m not Barbara.” Eloise sighed. “You do know, Barbara,” tentatively speaking yet apologizing for having the temerity to speak, “you will be elected this time. Do you really want that?”

  “Why do you say I’ll win this time? No Democrat has ever won in the Forty-eighth.”

  “Because it’s not six years ago,” Eloise said. “We’ve been so deep in the women’s movement that we never really got outside to look at it. We’ve ended that horror in Vietnam and Nixon’s gone and no woman in this country will ever be quite the same again, and even if the Forty-eighth is slightly to the right of Pasadena, you’ll still win, Barbara.”

  “It’s different,” Clair said. “A few months ago, Gerald L. K. Smith died down in Glendale, and it hardly made the papers.”

  “Who was he?” May Ling asked.

  “There you are — only the most notorious anti-Semite and public native fascist of our time, my time, darling, not yours. I can’t applaud what you’re doing, Barbara — Washington is an unhappy place — and I know you a little. But — oh, hell, why not?”

  After dinner, May Ling’s baby had to be taken home, and Adam had to go over things with Clair. Freddie said to Eloise, “Mom, I want a half hour with Barbara.”

  Eloise looked at him curiously, and then nodded. “I’ll wait here with your father.”

  “We’ll be in the living room,” Freddie said.

  All very odd, Barbara thought. At this point, she hardly knew whether to be depressed or pleased by her decision. There had been a time when the decision would have been hers, entirely hers — perhaps tested on Boyd, but still entirely hers, regardless of Boyd’s agreement or protest — but now, after the conversation at the dinner table, she felt neither enthusiasm nor any real approval from the only family she had. Of course, Eloise’s calm certainty that she would win the contest surprised her, but Eloise always surprised her when it came to a matter of importance. The same might be said of Freddie. At age thirty-four, Freddie was knowledgeable, sometimes brilliant, and usually iconoclastic. He had always adored Barbara, and he underlined that now.

  “You know,” he said, sitting opposite her, his long, good-looking face, the Seldon face, set seriously, “I do feel like a horse’s ass, Aunt Barbara, and I have no damn right to say what I’m saying —”

  “For heaven’s sake, Freddie, stop apologizing and get to it.”

  “All right, and you can put me down and walk out of here, but I’m saying it anyway. You’re being used by a pack of bums, and that includes that benign old gentleman Tony Moretti. Where was he when they tossed you in jail? Same party, same head — do you want me to stop?”

  “No, Freddie. I want you to say exactly what you want to say, and I won’t take offense. You are very dear to me.”

  “All right, I’ll go on. There’s a notion around that because Nixon behaved like a complete turd, the Democrats have come up smelling like roses. Not to me. The crazy time of terror that sent you and a lot of others to jail was called McCarthyism, and the Democrats loved that. It made people forget that Truman started the whole thing with his Executive Order on the Loyalty Oath, and let me add something else. When we drove down to Mississippi to help in the registration drive, back in the sixties, and they whipped us and tortured us and they murdered Bert Jones and Herbie Katz — you remember that, I think?”

  “Yes, I do,” Barbara said softly, recalling how she found him after the incident in the hospital at Jackson, Mississippi.

  “Well, who was in the White House then? Brave Jack Kennedy and brave brother Bobby, and they knew what was happening down south, they knew—”

  “Freddie,” Barbara said gently, “what are you trying to tell me?”

  “That they’ll break your heart, and it will hurt. Of course, you’ll win. Aunt Barbara, I know you. You’re the last real romantic, and you’ve always been your own person — and down there in Washington —”

  “Still,” Barbara said, “I may be able to change something — just a little. Wouldn’t that be worth it?”

  “I don’t know. I just haven’t said anything the way I wanted to — I mean, what I was trying to say — and it’s none of my business, is it?”

  He had been trying to say, Barbara realized, what Boyd would have said, that Congress was no place for a lady Don Quixote to go tilting at windmills — or was it the best place in the world?

  Adam was still huddled with his mother, papers and ledgers spread on the kitchen table. This was the material of thirty years ago, reminders of a time before computers — only a sample of the boxes of material that Adam wanted to be rid of and that Clair could not bring herself to destroy.

  “We’ll work something out tonight,” Adam said. “Another hour or so.”

  “Oh, go on home,” Clair said to Eloise.

  “A half hour more, Mom.” He turned to Eloise. “Go ahead with Barbara.”

  Eloise didn’t protest. She knew that Barbara had come to talk to her, and she wanted some time for the two of them to be alone.

  “I’m going your way,” Freddie said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll pop in and say a good word to Josh.”

  “How is he?” Barbara asked, as they walked toward Eloise’s house.

  Eloise shook her head hopelessly, and Freddie said, “Too much depression, too many memories. He’ll come out of it, but it takes time. If I could only get him interested in something. Trouble is, he’s so full of hate — he hates everything, the Pentagon, the government, the army. Well, a lot of the vets are that way. He feels that they turned him into a murderer. He killed two little kids, Aunt Barbara —”

  “No!” Eloise exclaimed. “I don’t want to hear that!”

  “You have to face it, because it’s eating his guts out. Oh, not anything he did purposely. They were hiding in the high grass, and he saw the grass move and let go with his rapid fire —”

  “Freddie!”

  “No. He has to talk about it, Mom. You have to. Aunt Barbara has to.”

  “Freddie,” Barbara said, “for heaven’s sake, stop it. We’ll talk about it, but not now. Josh needs help. I know someone who can help him.”

  “I’ve pleaded with him,” Eloise said. “He won’t — no, it’s not much use. I’ve almost given up.”

  Freddie opened the door and held it while they entered. No doors were locked on the winery grounds. Lights were on in the living room and the den, but both rooms were empty.

  . “I’ll have a look in his room,” Freddie said, going up the stairs and down the hall to the big room they had shared when they were kids. The room was lit but empty, the floor was wet, and there was a sound of running water from the connecting bathroom. Freddie went into the bathroom. Naked, Josh lay in a tub filled with blood-red water. He had cut the veins in both wrists. His face was icy cold under Freddie’s touch, his blue eyes wide open and fixed.

  It took a minute or two for Freddie to get control of himself and to feel in his brother’s neck for a pulse beat, knowing all the while that Josh was dead and had been dead for at least an hour. He turned off the water, and then he dried his hands. He was crying with
out knowing that he was crying. He was trying to think of a way to go downstairs and tell his mother and Barbara what had happened.

  Three

  She put down the date first: “July 23, 1976.”

  She was at home in her house on Green Street, sitting in her tiny study.

  “This is the first time in seven days, except to change clothes for the funeral of Joshua Levy, that I have been back to my house in Green Street. I note with some surprise that nothing here has changed, but why I should be surprised, I don’t know. Nothing here changes. I suppose that I expected change because I saw a vibrant and wonderful young man change into a corpse. No one will ever say that. We surround death with euphemisms. They will say he passed away. No one will mention or even think of the fact that he cut his wrists in a bathtub, where he lay naked in the running water — naked, I think, so that he could stare with grief and anger at the stump of his left leg — and the water running to wash away his sin and the blood. If, indeed, any of this is true, because what he thought we will never know.”

  “I revise that. I think that his mother knew. Freddie tried to keep both of us out, but Eloise said something to the effect of, Freddie, damn you, get out of my way — and she said it in a way that he could not face down. When he put out an arm to stop her, he seemed to know that he could not stop her; and then she walked into the bathroom and I came after her. She didn’t faint and she didn’t become hysterical. She looked at her son for a long, terrible moment, and then she said to me, almost wistfully, ‘Is he dead, Barbara?’ I told her that he was. Then she bent over, slid down on her knees, and kissed his face. She didn’t weep — not until later, not until the funeral. Joshua’s father, Adam, wept. He pretty well went to pieces that first night. He clung to Eloise, not she to him.