The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  “How little we know about people! Last night, Eloise couldn’t sleep. After the first two days, Dr. Milton Kellman, who has taken care of Seldons and Lavettes and Levys for a lifetime and who is practically the last family practitioner left in San Francisco, gave her pills, but last night she threw them away, telling me that the dreams were worse than the reality. Eloise and I sat up for most of the night, and we talked. I put down the conversation here mostly because I want to remember what she said. Eloise is an extraordinary woman, but I have come to the conclusion that to be a woman in this world is an extraordinary thing. Eloise said to me:”

  “‘Do you know, Barbara, that in certain Arab countries, they sew up the vagina of a woman who has committed adultery?’”

  “Apropos of what? I wondered. I simply stared at her.”

  “‘I mentioned that,’ Eloise went on, ‘because the cruelty that men display toward women is beyond my understanding. You may think I am being very cold and restrained about the death of my son. I loved Josh more than anything on earth —’”

  “‘I know that,’ I said.”

  “‘And in return, Josh did to me — and to Adam too — the most terrible thing that a son can do. My wonderful Joshua is dead, but I’ll live with this pain all the rest of my life.’”

  “‘He didn’t do it to cause you pain!’ I cried.”

  “‘Oh, but he did, he did. He knew what he was doing. I know that life had become unbearable for him, but life is unbearable for many people and they go on living. He did it because he blames me and he blames Adam — because we brought him into a world where Vietnam happened. We can never understand that. We weren’t there, and only those who were there understand it!’”

  Barbara stared at the paper and at what she had written. Since she was a writer, it was entirely proper to put words on paper, and she had often found that when something was confused in her own mind, it clarified matters to spell it out on paper. Now it was on paper. Barbara recalled the time when Eloise had married her brother Tom — thirty-six years ago — and she remembered Eloise as she was then, a slender, baby-faced upper-middle-class girl, with blue eyes and golden locks. She was Eloise Clawson then, and the Clawsons were very rich, almost as rich as the Lavettes, and Barbara had characterized her at that moment as a brainless bit of fluff.

  Barbara wept more easily than Eloise, and after she dried her eyes now, she telephoned Tony Moretti.

  “I would like to see you,” she said.

  “Of course. I know what a terrible time you had. Your nephew, wasn’t it?”

  “No, but very close to me.”

  “We still bleed for that stupid war, don’t we?”

  “I suppose you could put it that way.”

  “All right, Barbara. Tomorrow we have lunch at Gino’s, and we talk.”

  “Not tomorrow. Tonight,” Barbara said evenly.

  “It can wait. I’m an old man, Barbara, but what do I tell my wife — almost ten o’clock and I’m going out to meet a beautiful lady? She’ll believe that?”

  “Tony,” Barbara said coldly, “don’t ever patronize me again and don’t ever tell me that I’m a beautiful lady. I am sixty-two years old; you said what you said because I’m a woman. There’s no man of sixty-two years in the world to whom you would talk like that.”

  “Barbara, Barbara,” he said mollifyingly. “I talk to you like you’re my daughter.”

  “I know. I’m not angry with you, Tony. But if I wait until tomorrow, I’ll forget everything I mean to say, and it’s important.”

  “Important?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I know what you been through.”

  His car drew up in front of her house about twenty minutes later. He had a long, sleek stretch Cadillac and a chauffeur, and that eased her sense of guilt at dragging him over to her place at night. She had been very angry before, but anger was not an easy emotion for Barbara to cling to. She tried to maintain it now — anger and objectivity.

  She took his coat and sat him down on the single large, comfortable leather chair that invaded the black horsehair delicacy of her Victorian parlor. Moretti nodded his gratitude, looking suspiciously at the frail sofa and side chairs. “It’s the kind of chair Bernie, my first husband, liked so much, a chair for men of substance.” She couldn’t help smiling.

  “He was a man of courage and distinction. You suffer a lot, Barbara. I know you’re not a Catholic, but you’re half Italian. Try to accept God’s will.”

  “Oh? Can I give you a drink, Tony?”

  “My drinking days are over. A little red wine with my meals.”

  “I have tea?”

  “Good.”

  Barbara poured the tea, and said, “If I didn’t love you, Tony, I might get very bitter about this communication with God. Was it God’s will that Kennedy should take time off from screwing his dozen women for the day and start that horror in Vietnam? Don’t be shocked by my language, Tony. I was a correspondent in World War Two and lived with the army. Was it God’s will that a son of a bitch named Johnson should continue that crazy war until seventy-five thousand American boys were dead and another half a million wounded and crazy? Was it God’s will that this pissant, Nixon, should be voted in to go on with that horror? Don’t ever mention God’s will to me. We blaspheme every time the words pass our lips.”

  “You got no right to talk to me like that, Barbara,” the old man said tiredly. “You brought me over here to tell me that you don’t want the designation. All right. I understand.”

  “No. You don’t. I didn’t ask you over here for that. Not at all. I want the designation.”

  “Then why in God’s earth are you cutting me up? I know what happened. I make allowances. The world is the world. You want to call the Kennedys a pack of Irish bums — your opinion. Johnson, you want language — an iron rod up his asshole, but he tried to be a President. You think anyone can govern this country? The people decide. Nixon was what they wanted.”

  “All right, Tony. You see it your way. I told you I want the designation. But the conditions have changed, and if you want to give it to me, these are the new conditions. You people walk away from the war. I won’t. I’ll live the rest of my life with that image of a beautiful young man dead in a bathtub of bloody water, with a stump where his leg once was and with his wrists slit. I’m going to talk about that war, because the past is also the future. I learned that. There is a big Democratic contingent out of California in the House of Representatives, and if I join them, they won’t love me. I want you to know that too. There are enough atomic weapons to kill the human race ten times over. I intend to raise all hell about that — and about the treatment of the illegals and offshore drilling and our brotherhood with every filthy dictatorship on earth — all of it, Tony.”

  He sipped at his tea and nodded. “That’s a lot, Barbara.”

  “You’re damn right.”

  “I got a feeling you’re practicing on me,” he complained.

  “Oh, Tony — no. Tonight is one of my crazier moments, but I had to say it to you.”

  “All right. Now listen to me for a little while. These young men in the party, thirty, thirty-five, they live in a world of computers and polls and multinational corporations, and they say, How long before that old dumb Italian gives up? Soon, but when I go a lot of things go that they never knew or understood. They don’t know their history, and that’s a sad thing. We learned about it. We learned ward politics but we also learned history, because we were the children of the immigrants, and we loved this land. A different way than they talk now about loving it. So we learned. We read, we studied. We learned that there was once a President of these United States whose name was John Quincy Adams, a farmer from Massachusetts. He lived before the Civil War, so the Southern states were slave states. Adams was elected President in eighteen twenty-four. He served four years and fought the slave-owners every inch of the way. Then Andrew Jackson was elected, and John Quincy Adams went home to his farm in Massachusetts.
Well, his neighbors came to him and they said to him, Adams, we want you to run for Congress. He did. Never happened before and it never happened again, but John Quincy Adams went back to Washington as a congressman after he’d been President. But before he took the designation, he said to his neighbors, You want me, you can vote for me. But I’m my own man, and I vote my conscience.”

  “Did he?”

  “Oh, he did, Barbara, he did. And he died there, in the halls of Congress, fighting the slave-owners.”

  A long silence as Barbara stared at the old man. He sipped his tea. Then he said, “You want the designation, you can have it. Only because we can’t find anybody else to go through the motions. But you can have it. You mind now if I go home, Barbara?”

  He stood up, and Barbara threw her arms around him. She was crying, not unusual for her. After Moretti had left, Barbara went up to her bedroom and observed herself in a full-length mirror. A tall woman, five feet eight inches. Her features had always been just a bit too prominent for people to call her beautiful; she was better described as a handsome woman. And while there were wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth, she could still on occasion notice heads turning. Her hair was streaked with gray. She would not interfere with it. Her belly was flat, her breasts still round and shapely. Lucky, she thought. I’ve been lucky, all things considered. No more tears — not for the moment.

  The telephone rang. Sam’s voice, asking her how she was.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I was worried. I know how you feel about Aunt Eloise.”

  “More to the point, you know how I feel about Josh.”

  “Josh is dead. Eloise is alive. It makes a difference.”

  “You could have been more attentive, Sam. They wanted you there. They needed whatever there is of the family.”

  “Mom, please stop scolding me!”

  Scolding him? Was she scolding him? He was thirty years old.

  “Then don’t shout at me,” she said with annoyance.

  “Mother, Mother,” he said, gently now. “Don’t you understand this? I stayed as long as I could after the funeral. It wasn’t easy. I had a knockdown, drag-out fight with Josh when he decided to enlist in the marines. So did Freddie. We were rotten to him. I understood later, the beautiful fat little boy with the big blue eyes and that same strawberry blond hair that Eloise had, with Freddie and me lording it over him and pushing him around, and the only thing he could do that was more than we had done. As he saw it, the only thing that would give him that damn macho that has killed kids since time began — well, the only thing was Vietnam, and he did it. I tried to stay there after the funeral —”

  “Sammy, I’m hot blaming you.”

  “The divorce came through today,” his voice flat and miserable.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Poor Sam.”

  “Poor Carla, poor both of us.”

  “How is she?”

  “She feels free, kicking up her heels. You can have your friendly divorce.”

  “Sam, have you eaten tonight?”

  “Mom, don’t worry about me.”

  “I haven’t eaten all day, and now I’m very hungry. Will you take me to dinner? Late, late dinner at some silly place — the Fairmont? Yes?”

  “You’re on.”

  She dressed carefully for the evening. There is death and there is life, and if the one takes over the other, then there is nothing left, absolutely nothing. She was not ready for nothing. For the first time since Boyd’s death, she felt intensely alive.

  It was not until the end of the summer that Barbara’s campaign for Congress actually began. During the weeks following the end of July, she did her homework, studied the newspapers, read books on the recent history of her country, and watched the Carter-Mondale team with the greatest of interest. This was not, as far as she was concerned, a reprise of 1970. The Vietnam War was over. Watergate had happened, and the mean, snarling visage of Richard Nixon had passed from the scene. She was a candidate, and she intended to win. When she appeared before the party’s subcommittee on new candidates, they asked her a few cursory questions, generalized questions about her response to the principles that the party stood for, and then they were ready to congratulate her and dismiss her.

  “I’m sorry,” Barbara said. “I can’t leave it this way.”

  “What way, Miss Lavette?” the committee chairman asked. “Have we missed anything of importance?”

  “Everything,” Barbara answered flatly. “Either you’re ready to accept me on this flimsy basis because I’m a woman or because you’re convinced that I don’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of carrying the Forty-eighth C.D. One reason is as distasteful as the other. Don’t you think you ought to know how I feel about specific issues? Suppose you felt I could win in the Forty-eighth?”

  The chairman was a patient man. “It is true, Miss Lavette, that six years ago you rolled up the highest number we ever had in the Forty-eighth, but then you were running against a nonentity who was already on the carpet for a matter of unreported income. He finished out his term, made a deal, paid off Internal Revenue, and bowed out. In ’seventy-two, our candidate scored thirty-two hundred votes. That was not the difference between his vote and his opponent’s. That was his total vote. In ’seventy-four, we ran a name. He barely set foot in the district. We had other fish to fry, and the man the Republicans put up in ’seventy-two was still on the ticket. Let me tell you about him.”

  “You don’t have to,” Barbara said coldly. “I know Alexander Holt. He was part of the law firm that represents my brother Thomas Lavette.” She noticed how they quickened when she mentioned Tom. He was one of the half-dozen wealthiest men in San Francisco. “Mr. Holt is very good-looking and very bright. A widower. You see, I do my homework. From your attitude, I gather you’d be perfectly satisfied if I telephoned my campaign to the Forty-eighth.”

  That brought a laugh where Barbara had intended no humor. Al Ruddy, whom she had met through Moretti and who was one of the old man’s protégés and whom, she remembered, Boyd had disliked intensely, spread his hands and said, soothingly, “I don’t think Miss Lavette is trying to be humorous. Tony has only the highest respect for her, and if anyone in the Bay Area could make a reasonable showing in the Forty-eighth, she could.”

  More meaningless words followed. When Moretti asked her how it had gone, she answered, “Very well indeed. From what I heard there, if I lived in the Forty-eighth, I’d make sure not to vote Democrat. And by the way, they regard me as a silly old lady whom you’re encouraging to exercise her vanity.”

  Moretti shook his head and sighed. Barbara realized that there was nothing very much that he could say.

  She was a good walker; thank God for that and for the fact that a tall woman is forgiven for wearing sensible shoes. In Maine Trotters, a plaid skirt and a white blouse, Barbara decided that she transcended the various social layers of the Forty-eighth C.D. There was a lot to do, an office headquarters to be rented and furnished, a plan of action to be worked out, fund-raising — a successful fund-raising committee could make all the difference — media time, leaflets, posters. She had been through a sort of trial run six years before; now she had to rethink it and do it better, and, as she was determined, differently.

  It was still August, mostly a cool and pleasant month in the Bay Area, and Barbara decided to do parts of the district on foot. Six years ago, she had driven through most of it, but then six years was a long time, and there is much you miss in a car that you can see clearly when walking.

  The area called the Palisades she knew very well indeed, and she could point to at least a dozen fine houses where she had once dined or danced. That was a long time ago, so long ago that two of the houses lay in her memories as places where she had attended sweet-sixteen parties. The houses, layered on terraces gouged out of the hillside, offered a splendid view of the Bay, and in the present market would command prices up to a million dollars. Back from there, pleasant streets, shaded with live oak and mass
ive pines, were lined with houses less grand than those which faced the Bay, but still expensive, with close-cropped lawns, beautiful and expensive plantings, and back yards — to call them by so mundane a title — sporting tennis courts or swimming pools and very often both. Here, reality was pressed back and away from this California land-island that reminded her of Beverly Hills.

  Two of those improbable California shopping centers marked this part of the district. They were done in California-Spanish Colonial and whatever-money-will-buy style, red tile roofs, great redwood timbers, a supermarket like something dreamed up by imaginative and underfed children as a centerpiece, and then a selection of somewhat less magnificent stores to provide whatever the heart might desire, the best of men’s and women’s clothes, furniture, drugs, household appliances and whatever else was needed to save the residents of the area any need to cross the path of the less rich. But beyond this inner island, there were rows and rows of tract houses, most of them bare and naked of fancy shrubbery or shade trees, young people fighting desperately to meet monthly payments, lots of kids and a good many unsmiling mothers. One still needed sixty or seventy thousand dollars to buy such a tract house, and as upwardly mobile as the owners might be, they still had huge mortgage payments and children to feed and clothe and wives who either worked to meet the bills or chewed an eternal cud of discontent.

  And then, beyond the tract houses but still in the district, a barrio to house the servants, the cooks and gardeners, the brown-skinned men and women who worked the fields, driving out of the district in trucks that took them to the orchards and vineyards and then brought them back, and their children and the mini-gangs, imitative of the larger urban areas. And on the edge of the barrio, the houses of the black community, small cottages, some of them neat and well cared for, others with paint peeling, surrounded by dead shrubbery, kids playing in the unpaved streets, the men gone to jobs in Oakland or Berkeley or some other Bay area or to the fields. It was not simple; it was very puzzling and complex indeed, and this was only one of a number of small communities in the district. As day after day passed, Barbara parking her car in one part or another of the district, trudging on by foot, a tall lady with a leather pouch slung over her shoulder, the problem of the Forty-eighth Congressional District became even more puzzling and troubling.