The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  “The thing nobody ever told me is exactly what can a congressman do.”

  “What does he do?”

  “It beats me.”

  “There’s a spot behind our house that oozes. The smell is sickening. A friend of ours from the university at Berkeley says it’s an old chemical dump. He tested the stuff. He says sell our house and move. With that smell, who’ll buy it?”

  “I’m on the same block.”

  “You know what happens when you write your congressman?”

  “Who is our congressman?”

  “Alexander something.”

  “He’s beautiful.”

  “You vote for him because he’s beautiful?”

  “Why not? What other reason is there to vote for him?”

  “The plain truth is that it’s wonderful to have a woman running for Congress, but what can you do about things? We’re not cynical. We’re just hopeless.”

  “I see what you mean,” Freddie said to Barbara. “But we still have to buy television, and that costs money.”

  Everything cost money. The pretty girl who was hired to sing the song from Cabaret, “Money Makes the World Go Round,” was paid three hundred dollars. She sang the song four times, and Barbara thought it was more than enough, but Birdie MacGel sie, at whose home the party was being given, said to Barbara, “You can’t raise money and be a lady too. No way. Money makes the world go round, and you’ve got to beat it into people with a stick.”

  Birdie’s husband, Mac, climbed onto a chair and called for silence. Greeted with hoots, he said, “The next one who hoots gets his ass broken by me, personally.” Since he was over six feet and weighed three hundred pounds, it was not an empty threat. He went on to point out to them that he had not asked them here tonight, drinking his booze and gobbling his sandwiches, for the pleasure of their company.

  “This is not one of those hotshot Republican thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners. We don’t deal with such people. This is a poor little party to honor a great lady, Barbara Lavette, old Dan Lavette’s daughter, who has taken upon herself the task of reclaiming the Bay Area from the political sewage that has been flooding it.” He took out a roll of bills and began to peel off hundred-dollar notes. Birdie came out of the kitchen with an enormous aluminum pot. “So here’s my five hundred in the pot, and I want every one of you freeloaders to match it. There are no welfare cases here, and none of you was invited for his talent. And couples to me are two people, not one. So keep the pot boiling.”

  Voices called for Barbara, and she had to stand up and thank them and tell them that she would try to do an honest and decent job.

  After the party, Freddie, who was driving her home, said to her, “Don’t feel the way you do — please, Aunt Barbara — or we’ll have to wash it up right here.”

  “And how do I feel?”

  “Sick and disgusted, and there’s no reason to feel that way. We picked up seventeen thousand, five hundred dollars tonight, and we got a pledge of ten thousand from a guy called Lars Swenson, who said his father sold Grandpa the Ocean Queen or something of the sort.”

  “The Oregon Queen,” Barbara said. “Good heavens! Which one was he?”

  “I think it must have been his grandfather. Tall feller, about forty, blond hair going white. He had that beautiful red-headed gal with him. I heard about him. Swenson Explorers — three big cruise ships that sail out of Long Beach. Who’s this Carol Eber-hardt? Skinny, good-looking kid about twenty-eight or thirty?”

  “Why?”

  “She wants to come in as a volunteer. Very earnest.”

  “Yes, we met at Birdie’s place before. She helped out the first time. Her father’s Jim Eberhardt, top of the local Republicans. I think he’s the Republican whip at the State House. A lot of inherited money. None of the Eberhardts have to work for a living.”

  They were at Green Street now, and after Barbara had climbed out of the car, Freddie said, “Just a moment. Look at this. I thought of tearing it up, but now I’ll deposit it — if you think it’s real.” He handed Barbara a check, and peering at it in the light of a street lamp, she saw that it was a check for a thousand dollars, drawn on the Crocker Bank and signed by Carol Eberhardt. On the line given to Memo, she had written: “Republican — one grand.”

  “It’s real.”

  “I can understand that,” Freddie said.

  “Yes, I thought you might.”

  But at home with May Ling, who would have no part of fundraisers, it was not that easily explained.

  “Why?” May Ling insisted.

  “Isn’t it obvious? She probably feels about her father the way I feel about mine.”

  “Adam!”

  “Not Adam. Thomas Lavette.”

  “You mean you’d toss off a thousand dollars just to let the world know how much you hate your real father?”

  “Twice a day, if I had the money to spare. I don’t think of him as my real father. There’s a genetic connection, but since I can remember, I’ve thought of Adam as my father. In fact, I have no memory of Thomas Lavette as my father. I was a very small kid when Mom married Adam.”

  “Why do you hate him so?” May Ling wondered. “How can you go on with that kind of hate?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure I hate him or how I feel about him. I just don’t care.”

  “And do you think this Eberhardt woman feels the same way about her father? I remember seeing pictures of the family — she’s very pretty. They all are; no half-breed Chinese-Italian-Jews like me.”

  “Of all the damn nonsense! Why do you keep putting yourself down?”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  “I’m not shouting at you — only God help me if I should dare to say that another woman is pretty.”

  “Because I’m ugly, and every woman who looks at you—”

  “You’re one of the loveliest women I’ve ever laid eyes or hands on, and you keep on and on with this ‘ugly’ crap.”

  May Ling was crying. She had no more defenses. Freddie took her in his arms and said, “Let’s go to bed and make love all night.”

  The baby began to howl.

  “Still, it’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me in a long time,” May Ling told him through her tears as she went to pick up their baby.

  The next day, Freddie said to Barbara, “We need a pollster.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way it goes these days. Alex Holt will have his pollster. We have to check it and we must know how we’re doing, where we’re weak and where we’re strong. Just as we have to have radio and TV. That’s the way it is.”

  “How much will it cost?”

  “Too much. Look, Aunt Barbara, I’ve been thinking about this. I used to think I’d die before I’d do it, but I think I’d do it for you.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Thomas Lavette, my father, your brother. He has more money than God.”

  “And you’d ask him?”

  “Yes. But he’s your brother, so it’s up to you.”

  “Over my dead body. It’s very sweet of you and very gallant, but leave the tilting at windmills to me. Yours is the practical end of this business.”

  “All right. Then let me suggest something else — with great temerity.”

  “Great temerity. I shudder to think of what’s coming.”

  “Carson Devron,” Freddie said quickly, talking very fast and not permitting Barbara to get a word in until he had finished. “He runs the L.A. Morning World and they have their own pollster and if they took on your campaign as a matter of statewide interest, I mean intensively, they would run their own polls and save us a bundle —” He stopped suddenly and waited.

  There was no explosion. Barbara stared at him thoughtfully for a long moment, and then she asked him, “Why statewide interest? This is the Bay Area. Southern California’s another world.” She had been thinking of Carson lately. It seemed impossible that fifteen years had passed since their divorce
.

  Freddie handed her two clippings. “Op ed page, one of them. What you keep forgetting is that you’re Barbara Lavette, and that you put together one of the most successful peace movements this country ever saw, and that you stuck in Lyndon Johnson’s craw like an oversized fish bone.”

  “A beautiful image,” Barbara murmured, reading a clipping, which said, “The decision by Barbara Lavette to challenge the incumbent in California’s 48th C.D. is one of the most interesting developments of the current campaign. Credit must go to the local Democratic organization for this choice, the choice of a brilliant and principled woman, an advocate of peace and women’s rights, but one who has lived her life apart from the body politic —” Barbara paused, confused. “This is an editorial, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely. Which means that Devron either wrote it or approved it. You’re still on good terms, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. We’re friends.”

  “You don’t seem very certain.”

  “Freddie, I haven’t seen him in years, and I have no intention of seeing him now. I suppose it would be helpful to have his polling machine as a gift, but why would he do it?”

  “Because he respects you.”

  Barbara shrugged.

  “Would you mind if I went down there and talked to him?”

  She didn’t know. Would she mind or wouldn’t she mind? Six years ago, her campaign had been so easy. Boyd had taken care of everything, and it was all very simple, direct and successful, because she didn’t care whether she won or lost. However, two years later, Alexander Holt gave his Democratic opponent a few thousand votes, and two years after that, the Democrats polled a total of four thousand, six hundred votes.

  “Another ball game entirely,” everyone said to her. “There’s a new pitcher in the game.”

  How she resented people turning everything into games. Games were the mindless passion of America, games and money. Freddie and Moretti kept talking about money — always money. Everything depended on money. If Freddie spoke to Carson Devron, it would save money. If she would talk personally to twelve people whose names they had given her, she might raise as much as fifty thousand dollars.

  “Aunt Barbara?”

  “Do you know,” she said to Freddie, “we’re going to drop the aunt. You’re thirty-four and running this campaign. When we’re alone, Barbara. Other situations, Miss Lavette. Now, about Mr. Devron, I suppose I must be practical, as practical as I could ever hope to be because, believe me, Freddie, I would not hesitate to nominate myself as the most innocent or witless character in this politics business. Do you know that in nineteen seventy I never gave a thought to money? Oh, Boyd raised a few thousand dollars — Now what on earth are you shaking your head about?”

  “I hate to say this to you, but in ‘seventy, they were voting against that silly little ass who opposed you. That’s the way it is. Half the voters in this country never voted for a candidate; they vote against a candidate. Think about it.”

  She thought about it and nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “And Devron?”

  “No reason why you shouldn’t talk to him.” She didn’t hide from herself the fact that she wanted a connection, and that Freddie would make the connection. You lived your life and you loved men, and of all the men she had loved, only Carson Devron was still alive. When she was a schoolgirl, it had seemed impossible, if not somewhat unnatural, that love and passion and sex could continue into one’s old age; and now, almost sixty-two, she felt reluctant to admit, even to herself, that she so desperately wanted a man’s arms around her, the warmth of his body in bed and the surging, incredible climax of sex. Carson was younger. He would still be in the full vigor of manhood. Her bed was icy cold. It was August, and San Francisco was the coldest place on the face of the earth. She lay curled under the covers, shivering, trying to warm herself after standing naked in the cold room, like some sentimental child of thirteen, and trying to remember the name of the Arctic explorer — was it Stefansson, or something like that? — who had remarked that he’d never felt so cold in the Arctic as he had in San Francisco.

  She couldn’t manage indifference when Freddie returned from his errand to Carson Devron in Los Angeles. When Barbara saw the small store at Sunnyside Shopping Plaza that Freddie had rented for their headquarters, she realized that the campaign was beginning in earnest and that it should have been twice or even three times as large. The furniture consisted of two long sawhorse tables for the mailing operation, two old desks for Barbara and Freddie, an ancient kitchen table and two dozen folding chairs. With a stream of eager volunteers, mostly under twenty, who were going to remake the world in the Forty-eighth with Barbara Lavette as their Joan of Arc, and now five others on staff, with and without pay, and crates of material arriving daily from the printer, and Carla sitting at the kitchen table, sign overhead specifying Talk Spanish to Me, the place was a bedlam of chaotic energy. When Freddie showed up, Barbara grabbed him and steered him outside to Daisy’s Delicious Lunch, on the other side of Gelson’s Supermarket. At the same time, telling herself, You, Barbara Lavette, are acting like some idiot teenager, about to make contact with a lost love who is a running back on the varsity team. A proper level of comparison, she decided.

  “I’m starving,” Freddie said.

  “Then order before you say another word,” Barbara told him. “I’ve been talking to Tony Moretti about polling, and, you know, the party has their own pollster, but believe me, they are not going to waste him on the accursed Forty-eighth. They may give us a smidgen, whatever that is in polling terms. Tony thinks it would be wonderful if the L.A. World took us on.”

  Freddie ordered ham and eggs and fried potatoes.

  “We got it,” he then announced.

  “Oh? Come on. How? You’re charming, nephew, but that charming?”

  “You’re looking at it. He thinks that your contest in the Forty-eighth is symbolic of the post-Watergate era. You know, his paper supports Carter, but with no great enthusiasm, and I think he’s trying to shift the emphasis to statewide events.”

  “We’re not statewide.”

  “Well, Brown’s not up for re-election — you know, he likes Brown enormously, but some of that must be reaction to Reagan. He froths at the mouth when he speaks about Reagan.”

  Barbara smiled. “Oh, yes, he detested Reagan. You know, he grew up in Los Angeles, side by side with that whole film crowd.”

  “Anyway, he’ll have one of his political reporters up here — of course covering the whole Bay Area, but with specific emphasis on the Forty-eighth, and he’s going to poll the district week by week. You know he’s still in love with you, don’t you?”

  “Freddie, middle-aged men don’t remain in love for fifteen years. I admire Carson and I think he admires me. That’s it. Tell me, how does he look?”

  “He looks great. In fact, he looks like Alexander Holt, in a way. Total Wasp elegance and good breeding. I thought I was smooth, but he could walk circles around me. Didn’t he win the decathlon or something at some long-forgotten Olympics?”

  “Or something. He remembered you?”

  “Says he did. Kept asking about you and about the campaign and what you were doing otherwise and how you’d taken Boyd’s death.”

  “He has a lovely wife, three children, and the best newspaper in California. So turn your sneaky thoughts elsewhere.”

  “Sneaky — oh, no. No, indeed. I’m realistic, dear aunt. I’m working up to calling you Barbara.”

  She did a record for a sound truck, and she found that she disliked more and more of what a candidate had to do. Upstairs in her own house, preparing for a television interview at home, she heard Freddie, sotto voce, telling May Ling, “I warned her about it. Knee-deep in crap, and it gets worse and worse. It’s not for people. In England maybe, but not the way we do politics in this country, and you take someone like Aunt Barbara, with her beauty and dignity, and throw her into this lousy rat race where everything is P.R. and media bea
uty contest — everything that isn’t pure bullshit.”

  Aunt Barbara decided that she would put up signs to let people know that in this house, sound carried through the heating system. It was the sound of a Watergate generation that believed in nothing, and she was not going to let this get under her skin when she had just completed a listing of issues that she intended to refer to in the upcoming television interview. Regardless of what else was cosmetic, the issues were real.

  “Thank God she’s beautiful,” Freddie was saying.

  “Freddie, will you shut up,” she shouted. “This house lets me hear everything you say. Suppose you do your thing and let me do mine.”

  The issues were not cosmetic. Immigration — Mexicans moving across the border by the thousand, facing starvation at home. Welfare, constructive, not destructive; foreign policy, get rid of the bombs before they get rid of us; energy, we must learn how to harness the power of the sun, the tides. That was the one Freddie was afraid of. “Puts us in the camp of the nuts.” Gays; ah, there was one for a candidate in the Bay Area.

  She closed her notebook and said, “The hell with it,” and went downstairs to be interviewed for the first time on television.

  Sam tracked her down to her headquarters in the Forty-eighth. “I’ve canceled three operations,” he said, and seeing the look of alarm on her face, added, “Elective surgery. Which still doesn’t change the fact that I feel like a motherless child.”

  “Yes, that will be the day. Go over and be decent to Carla.”

  “I did and I was decent. While you were taken over by three nuns.”

  “Nuns vote,” Barbara said. “Anyway, they’re good people. They’ve just come back from El Salvador. Some of the things they’ve seen —”

  “I want to take you to lunch. Do you hear me? I want to take my mother, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in three months, to lunch. You’re losing weight again. I can imagine the junk food you’re living on. What’s in there?” pointing to a brown bag on her desk.

  “Corned beef on rye, mustard, pickle and coffee. I’m not losing weight. I am gaining weight, and Sammy, darling, I love you, but don’t practice medicine every time we meet. I can’t have lunch with you, because in thirty minutes I have to tell the senior class at Fremont High School why I’m running for Congress.”