by Howard Fast
Applause. Shouts of delight. Friends kissing Barbara. Birdie MacGelsie assuring her, “Pure gold, darling. Next fund-raiser, it’s worth a thousand dollars for every percentage point.” And around noontime, a long black limousine containing Tony Moretti, older, heavier, but still with the same deep, comforting voice. He waddled over to Barbara’s desk and allowed his bulk to descend carefully onto the frail folding chair.
“Barbara, you got the whole party talking,” he said. “The bookies were making three to one on Holt. They tell me it’s slipped to two to one. You’ve been going to Mass?”
“Almost as good. We’ve been canvassing. Freddie and Carla have worked out a system, and if we had enough volunteers, we could cover every home in the district. As it is, we hope to reach at least thirty percent. I think it may make the difference, when you add it to the sound trucks, the local advertising and the street meetings. Would you believe that there are three regular weekly newspapers in the Forty-eighth and four more giveaway sheets? We convinced one supermarket to allow us to lay a pile of program broadsides on the bench with the newspapers. I say we, us — but it’s the kids who come in on their own who do it.”
“How many volunteers do you have?” Moretti asked.
“We’ve signed on over a hundred, most of them students, high school and college.”
“No, you’re kidding.”
“The truth, Tony. Well, you know, some of them come in for an hour now and then, some give us a day a week, some come in once and don’t come back. Tony, we’re going to beat Mr. Alexander Holt. We’re going to beat him to a frazzle.”
“I hope so, Barbara, I sure hope so. On the other hand, watch him. He’s smart and he’s ambitious. Have you met him yet?”
“He took me to dinner,” Barbara said, explaining how it had come about. And when Moretti frowned, Barbara put her hand on his and said, “Trust me.”
“He’s a charming man, Barbara.”
“Agreed.”
“All right, enough of that. I like what else you’re doing — it’s the way we used to do it. Know every man, woman and child and what you can do for them, and when the time comes, you have their vote. It’s bigger today, too big, but the principle holds.”
“I wish I could do that, Tony. But we don’t have enough people and the district’s too big. If you could help us —”
“I’m coming to that. It’s no secret that the committee has written off the Forty-eighth. They’re still writing it off, and when it comes to getting money out of the party, it’s squeezing blood from a stone. But after this morning’s World came up, I called a few members, and they’re relenting. I went out on a limb. I told them you’re going to win.”
“You really believe that?”
“Barbara, I’m putting sixty years of being a political animal on the line.”
“You’re also dropping a big burden on me, Tony. I don’t know if I can win. I don’t know if I can keep this pace up until Election Day. It’s worse than anything I had imagined.”
“You’ll keep it up.”
“You said they’re relenting. How much is relenting?”
“Ten thousand dollars to start the ball rolling, and that’s a nice round sum, Barbara. We don’t have money to throw away. I saw your TV commercials. They’re straightforward and good. Try to buy some more time. We’ll have a check for you tomorrow.”
Astonished by Moretti’s gift, Freddie said that they must have seen the light. “It’s nothing to write home about but a fat chunk for the party to hand over. They’re impressed and they should be. Until now, they haven’t come near us.”
“Tony has.”
“You like Tony,” Freddie said, “but don’t get confused. They’ve put him out to pasture. They let him talk and feel that he’s got some influence, but it’s all fading away.”
“We all fade away, Freddie. Time does that.”
Time was creeping up on them. Another Wednesday, and the Los Angeles Morning World published its second poll taken in the Forty-eighth CD. This time, Alexander Holt’s share had shrunk to fifty-two percent. Barbara Lavette’s share had increased from twenty-nine percent to thirty-seven percent, leaving eleven percent undecided. Freddie waved the newspaper from his desktop and spurred them on to greater efforts. He had completely forgotten his cynical attitude toward politics.
Sam showed up at the storefront for a second time, making the point that he had canceled an elective surgery case simply to put an afternoon into the campaign.
“Darling, there was no need to,” Barbara told him.
“I can’t let you think I’m not interested, and I couldn’t tell you that I’m kind of frightened about your being so far away there in Washington, alone.”
“Sam, that’s sweet of you.”
“I can’t see myself stuffing envelopes and I’m no good for canvassing. Let me drive you around this afternoon. We can talk.”
“Carla was going to drive. I suppose I can change that.”
“I changed it. I’m taking her to dinner tonight. Would you like to join us?”
“No. Absolutely not. You want to be alone with her.”
“Do I? I’m not sure.”
“Then why the dinner date?” Barbara asked.
“I’m not sure of that either. When she agreed to have dinner with me, I got so damn excited. We can’t get along married — You know, Mother, it’s confusing. It’s damn confusing.”
“Most things are,” Barbara agreed. “No one ever arranged things in this world to make much sense.” She handed Sam a folded map. “Street map of the district. Today is church day, and fortunately all the churches are marked on the map. Since you don’t know the district and I don’t know it much better, we’ll have to work it out as we go along. I’m off for the day!” she called to Freddie. “Sam’s driving.”
“Heaven help you.”
“We’ll manage. It’s Carla who really knows the district. You’re sure we shouldn’t bring her along?”
“I’d rather be alone with you for a few hours. I’ve been neglecting you.” He steered her to his car, a sleek new Cadillac. “I got it last week,” he explained. “It’s par for the profession.”
Barbara studied him as he drove. People had changed since she was Sam’s age; doctors had changed; Sam had mentioned a single day when four operations brought him seven thousand dollars, hastening to add that it was balanced by his work in the clinic. She said nothing. The leather upholstery in Sam’s car was as smooth as a baby’s cheek.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Sam observed. “What do you mean by church day?”
“It’s an idea Freddie had, He found seven churches and two synagogues and one tiny Buddhist temple to cooperate in hearing the candidates on one day. Holt and I have ten minutes each —”
“Debating, do you mean?”
“Oh, no. Alex won’t debate. We’re scheduled, supposedly to avoid crossing paths. The audience will be mostly women. Some of the pastors and one of the rabbis said they couldn’t count on attendance of more than a dozen or so, but I feel that won’t matter. The point is to meet people who would never come to rallies. We have a very tight schedule, and we begin at eleven o’clock at Holy Trinity. That’s Catholic.”
“Yes, I might have guessed.” He handed the map to Barbara. “You steer me.” After a moment, uneasily, Sam said, “This Alexander Holt, do you know him?”
“Slightly.”
“What’s he like?”
“A very elegant and charming gentleman, about my age.”
“Oh? High praise, coming from you. Freddie’s doing a good job, isn’t he?” A note of envy there.
“Yes, he’s awfully good.”
“Well, I wish I could do more. You understand that a surgeon’s in a different position. Freddie has all kinds of backup at the winery, but I can’t just walk away from my work.”
“Oh, of course not.”
“I left a check for five hundred with Carla.”
“Sammy, that’s not necessary.”
“It is. It certainly is. Guilt money. I have a lot of guilt.”
Guilt for what, Barbara wondered? Guilt for not helping her in the campaign? Guilt for the fees he charged? Why did she always feel such a wide separation between them?
Barbara did not believe in hard-hitting political speeches; it was not her style, and at Holy Trinity she very gently told the story of Rubio Truaz, Carla’s brother, who had died in Vietnam. A fragment from a Vietcong mortar had ignited a phosphorus grenade at his belt, enveloping him in flames. The ultimate horror was that a CBS photographer kept his camera on Truaz, recording every bit of the boy’s agony. “That alone,” Barbara concluded, “would have been enough to make me an enemy of war, but I was a correspondent during World War Two and war was not new to me. If you vote for me and elect me, I will do what I can to keep our country out of war, and I will do it with all my heart and strength.”
As they drove on to the next church, Sam said, “You were wonderful, you know. Not like any political speaker I ever heard.”
“I can’t do it their way. I don’t know whether my way is any good, Sam, but it’s the only way I have.”
Late afternoon, coming out of their last scheduled stop, a tiny Methodist church, built like a miniature Spanish mission, they finally encountered Alexander Holt. He had just gotten out of his parked car, and he grinned with pleasure when he saw Barbara.
“Greetings, lovely enemy. I’ve been chasing along after you all day.”
Barbara took his hand and then introduced Sam: “Dr. Samuel Cohen, my son.”
Holt shook hands warmly. “Of course, you kept your father’s name. Making quite a reputation for yourself, I understand. Would you mind if I had just a word with your mother?”
“Not at all.”
Holt drew Barbara aside and whispered, “Dinner tonight? Please don’t say no.”
“It needn’t be a secret, Alex. I don’t mind if the whole world knows I dine with you — so long as they vote for me.”
“Good. Then I’ll pick you up at your house — say at eight? Will that give you enough time?”
“Certainly. But don’t expect wit and charm. This church circuit has exhausted me. But I would like it.”
Driving back to the campaign headquarters, Sam said to her, “What was that all about? Unless I’m prying —”
“Not at all. He asked me to have dinner with him tonight.”
“And you agreed?”
“Sam, my morality is securely in place. Why shouldn’t I have dinner with him?”
“Well, you are putting him down. He’s the enemy, the competition.”
“Sam, he’s a Republican candidate. He’s not my enemy, and if you listened to my speeches, you’d know that I do not put him down. I do my own thing. He’s nice and he’s charming, and I’m a very lonely widow, and don’t dare offer yourself as an escort. I don’t want an escort. I want a son who lives his own life, because I’m still quite capable of living mine.”
“Now you’re angry with me,” Sam said.
“No, dear. A little angry with myself, perhaps, but that’s all, believe me. And thank you for being a faithful and patient chauffeur.”
At the storefront, waiting for Carla to finish up, Sam said to Freddie, “Do you know who my mother’s having dinner with tonight?”
“Should I know?”
“I think you should. She’s having dinner with Alexander Holt.”
“So?”
“Doesn’t bother you?”
“Sam, if it doesn’t bother her, why should it bother me?”
“I didn’t think that was the way the game was played.”
“Sam, forget it. It doesn’t really matter.”
Freddie watched Sam walk out of the place with Carla, telling himself that he, Freddie, was a worthless louse, going to bed with Sam’s wife, and even though Sam and Carla had been divorced a goodly time now, she was still Sam’s wife, and he, Frederick Lavette, would lie to Sam and lie to May Ling and lie to himself as well, and Sam was the best friend he had in the world, more like a brother than a friend.
Driving back to her house in San Francisco, Barbara brooded over her use of the term lonely widow. It was a new thing. She had never used the term before, never thought of herself as a lonely widow before, and rarely scolded Sam. Was a plea for sympathy encased in the scolding, or was it a cry of terror, or was the outburst or scolding or whatever she might call it simply an excuse to dangle her pain in front of her son? Again and again, she told herself that she was a strong and independent woman, that just about everything had happened to her that could happen, and that come what may, she would never whine or whimper. Even that last day in the hospital with Boyd, when both of them knew that it was the end, when he lay there white and ghastly, tubes in his nostrils, she, who would dissolve in tears watching a third-rate sentimental film, did not cry or whimper, and was able to say “You’ve given me the best love of my life. It won’t die. It will always be there.” She was sitting beside the bed, holding his hand, talking gently about the best of times they had known together.
And tonight she was having dinner with Alexander Holt. That was all right, she assured herself. Life belongs to the living, not to the dead, and endless mourning was a corrosive indulgence. She smiled at the thought of how Sam had reacted, and her spirits perked up as she assured herself that now, as always, she would damn well do as she pleased and as she thought right.
At home on Green Street, Barbara changed her dress three times, and she was still not entirely ready when Holt rang her bell. She ran down the stairs, opened the door, told him to make himself comfortable in her parlor, and then went back upstairs to finish dressing. When she finally came down, wearing a thin woollen lilac-tinted challis and a single strand of pearls that her father had given her on her fifteenth birthday, Alexander Holt stared at her in undisguised admiration.
“You do me honor,” he said.
She burst out laughing. “Bless you! Do you want a drink?”
“We’ll have wine at dinner. That’s about my speed these days.” He kept glancing about the room and then back at Barbara. “I wonder whether there’s another parlor just like this in San Francisco? It looks like nothing has been changed since the house was built.”
“Nineteen hundred and two — before the earthquake, or around then. Sam Goldberg, my father’s lawyer, built it for his bride, and after she died, he lived here alone. But none of this is the original parlor. When the house burned down ten years ago, I tried to put it together the way it had been — or almost the way it had been. Furnishings as well as building.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it was some desperate sentimental need at the time. I wanted something to survive from my schoolgirl days.”
“Yes, I can understand that. It’s lovely — but I forgot myself. Didn’t you want a drink?”
“No. Why don’t we eat? Where?”
“The most obvious place. I’ve reserved a table at the Fairmont. The food is decent, and they’ll treat us like Oriental potentates. I mean, I do want to impress you tonight. You’re laughing at me.”
“Oh, no. Only my son took me there recently. He thought of it as a sort of therapy.”
“The last person in need of therapy, I think. Shall I call a cab, or would you like to walk?”
“Not in these shoes,” Barbara said.
At the Fairmont, Holt’s thoughts were still engaged with her house. “Those old wooden San Francisco houses are probably the most uncomfortable places imaginable. The rooms are too narrow, everything is up and down, and they are firetraps. I should think you would have been happy to be rid of it and have a valid excuse to move into one of those new highrises. I live in that new one on Jones Street, and believe me, it’s a pleasure.”
He had never mentioned where he lived. “No, I don’t think I could live in a highrise,” Barbara said. “I love my house, discomfort and all.”
Champagne appeared, and Holt said, “I know it’s French,
but Higate doesn’t bottle champagne. Just for a toast.” He smiled at Barbara. He could be very charming.
“To victory?” Barbara asked him.
“For one of us, anyway.”
She drank, and then stared at the glass. A long moment of silence followed, and then the head waiter appeared, adroitly self-effacing as he placed two menus on the table.
“Later,” Holt said to him.
“Of course, Mr. Holt.” He disappeared.
Holt looked at her, smiling slightly — with approval, Barbara thought — and waiting for her to speak. Barbara was thinking of how much surface manners come to mean once one passed the middle years.
“Then a single glass of champagne does that to you,” Holt said finally.
“No, not the champagne. After the second poll, I didn’t think we’d see each other again, except in the arena with swords drawn.”
“You feel that it dealt me a mortal blow?”
“Oh, no. Not mortal.” Barbara smiled. “A wound at best, and believe me, Alex, I felt guilty. I think, perhaps, that we should have shunned each other. I like you. I’ll have to comfort you when you lose, and that will be the oddest election aftermath, won’t it?”
“If I were ten years younger, I would be madly in love with you, and I would resign. Now, I’m only normally in love with you, which means that I must win and save you the horror of two years in Washington.”
