by Howard Fast
“Of course I read your last book, loved it,” Alison Limber said in a deep throaty voice. Barbara realized that the tall, thin and stylish lady said things for the sound of them, not for the content. Barbara counted the years since her last book. Too long to be remembered.
“Oh! Writer, are you?” Limber said. “Never actually understood about writers. Suppose you just sit down at a desk and write. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, indeed — sometimes,” Barbara agreed. Drawing her aside, Birdie whispered into her ear, “Horse’s ass, but Mac loves him.”
Milton Kellman kissed her and Nell Kellman embraced her and began to apologize for the time elapsed since the last time. “But that’s Milt, and I’m a doctor’s wife, and unless I have the bad luck to get sick, I never see him either.”
Mary Lou grinned at Barbara and said, “I’m not going to say anything but hello. I open my mouth any wider, and in goes my foot.”
It was an improvement, Barbara felt, and at least the lady had a sense of humor. Sam whispered, “Give her a chance, please, Mom. Her parents are Neanderthals. She has to work her way through several thousand years of history. Not easy.”
Birdie seated Barbara between Milton Kellman and Sam; she faced Al Ruddy and Bart Limber, with Mary Lou sandwiched across the table from her, but taking it well and being charming to the men who flanked her. MacGelsie proposed a simple toast to the younger generation present. The big, heavyset man was more sensitive than Barbara had supposed. Alison Limber talked about the election. “If I had only lived in the Forty-eighth,” she said, in her husky voice, “I would have voted for you at least twice.”
“If we lived in the Forty-eighth,” her husband countered, “we would have moved after two days, so you wouldn’t have voted for Miss Lavette at all.”
“Not if you lived in one of those million-dollar waterfront shacks,” Birdie said. “You might just endure it.”
“Outside the city? Never, never, never.”
The asparagus vinaigrette appeared. The wine was poured.
“A time will come,” Sam said, “when we’ll dine at your house, Birdie, or at the home of some equally lovely and generous person, and our hostess will not feel the necessity of serving Higate wine.”
“Oh, no, Sam. It’s simply the best. I’m not tipping my hat to you and your mother. I’m simply defying the myth that no California wine is as good as the French.”
“Some people don’t regard it as a myth.”
“In our house, it’s a myth.”
The soup came.
“Does all this mean that you own Higate Winery?” Alison Limber asked Barbara.
“Oh, no — no. It’s just a tangled family thing, but we have no financial interest in Higate.”
With the roast, Al Ruddy said, “I saw your brother the other day, Miss Lavette. Remarkable man.”
“Oh, yes, Tom is remarkable.”
“I came as an improbable petitioner, but he was quite pleasant. Oh, I had met him before, but only casually.”
Certainly they all knew that she had not spoken to her brother in years. Why did they persist? Or was it that money was an icon that must be worshiped?
“It’s one of the perks of the profession,” Bart Limber said. “Everyone’s nice to a congressman.”
“It could have been my charm.”
“I’m sure it was,” Mary Lou said.
“More perks. Beautiful women tell you you’re charming.”
“Are you going to tell us about it?”
“Only if you pledge not to put your hands in your pockets. I abhor people who raise funds at a social gathering.”
“The easiest pledge I ever had pushed at me,” Limber said.
“Well, no great secret. We’re trying to build a new library as a sort of monument to the memory of Harry Truman. A repository for books about the Korean War; you know, maps, news reports. They want it down at City College. I think it’s an appropriate place for a Truman memorial.”
“I could think of a more appropriate place,” Barbara said.
“Oh? And where might that be?”
“A military cemetery.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then Al Ruddy, as if he had missed Barbara’s remark entirely or thought it unworthy of comment, went on to talk about her brother. “I do mean, to ask a rock-ribbed Republican like Thomas Lavette to support a memorial to Truman — well, that’s pushing it. But he didn’t throw me out. Not at all. Simply said he’d like to have some time to think about it.”
Limber would not drop it. “I was wondering what Miss Lavette meant. This isn’t a gravestone. You don’t put a library in a cemetery?”
“Why not, if it’s dedicated to death. Appropriate? Well, when one considers it, no man in all of human history, except Adolf Hitler, ordained so much death at one stroke as Mr. Truman when he gave the order to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And since the library is to be devoted to his war, what better place than a cemetery?”
Was she serious? She could see that Ruddy was uncertain. Limber was not uncertain. Alison Limber had the slightest smirk of satisfaction on her face. She had known all along, it said. When the sky fell on Barbara, Alison would watch with pleasure. MacGelsie was fighting a grin, and Kellman’s face was impassive. His wife nodded gently.
“You don’t mean that,” Ruddy said at last.
“Oh, I do.”
“Then you’re way off base, Miss Lavette,” Limber said sharply. “It was not Truman’s decision. The military decided it.”
“I’m afraid not, Bart,” MacGelsie said. “That’s one little bit of history I was very close to. I was a colonel, stationed in Hawaii, and I was in on some private talk. The Joint Chiefs did not want to drop it on cities. They voted to hit the fleet or a concentration of Japanese troops. It was Truman who backed dropping the damn thing on the cities.”
“And saved a hundred thousand American lives,” Ruddy said.
“They were not far from surrender,” Barbara said. “But I only made a suggestion. You needn’t take it to heart. The military cemetery will survive without it.”
“I suggest a more cheerful topic,” Birdie MacGelsie said, “as for instance the disintegration of our beloved city. We have become a Disneyland of the North, tied up in ribbons of concrete, with monstrous highrises, like the one we’re sitting in right now, up all over the place like mushrooms or like candles in the whipped cream top of a rich kid’s birthday cake.”
Barbara would have preferred to walk home alone. It was not a happy evening, and it had dragged on and on; and then it was late and Sam held the car door open for her, and she had absolutely no desire to get into an argument with him. Sam had barely started the car when he could contain himself no longer and lashed out at her. “Mother, for Christ’s sake, why must you always do it? Will you never grow up? That was a perfectly decent, pleasant dinner party until you brought up that old saw about Truman and the bombs. Why? It’s done! It’s over! Can’t you stop —”
Possibly he had forgotten that Mary Lou was in the car in the back seat. He was sitting at the wheel, with Barbara beside him, her heart feeling like ice breaking into small shards.
Mary Lou’s voice came hard and sharp. “Sam, will you shut up!”
“What?”
“You said enough, and you said it more stupidly than anything I ever heard you say. Your mother is right. She said what had to be said about that dreadful little man.”
“This doesn’t concern you!”
He had stopped the car now in front of Barbara’s house, having covered the few blocks from Jones Street, and Mary Lou opened the door and said, “It concerns me! It damn well does.” And then she got out and walked off without looking back.
Barbara, still held in a sick spell, turned to look at Sam.
“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. I have to go after her.”
Sam leaped out of the car on the gutter side, leaving Barbara sitting alone. After a moment, Barbara left the car and went into her hous
e. She went to her bedroom and dropped onto her bed, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling.
About ten minutes later, the front doorbell rang — again and again. Barbara could not bring herself to get up and answer it; she felt a weight like a large stone across her chest. Then the doorbell stopped ringing. No more than a minute or two went by, and then the telephone next to Barbara’s bed rang. It rang five times before she forced herself to pick it up. She knew before he spoke that it was Sam. He had a radio phone in his car.
“Please, Mom, please. I don’t know what got into me.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Barbara said. “I’m very tired now and not thinking clearly at all.”
“Just a few minutes. We’re right outside.”
“Tomorrow, Sam.”
Mary Lou’s voice came over the phone. “Please forgive him.”
“I’m not angry, dear. Just tired,” Barbara said.
“My dear Barbara,” Alexander Holt wrote. “Over a year has gone by since we spoke, and believe me I am still blistered by what you said. You can also believe that I have thought about it constantly, by which I mean that it was hardly ever out of my mind. Nobody likes to look at himself and say, ‘You’re a bum’; and I’m not so sure that it would explain what I did. The thing is that nobody in my circle feels that my TV appearance the night before the election was foul or dishonorable. But also, I do not deceive myself by believing that there is much left in my circle that can be called a sense of honor. I don’t know how I can make you understand what being defeated in the last election would have done to me. I am not whining, or maybe I am, but the truth is that the only reason I have for existence would have been taken away. I tried to say something like this the last time we spoke. But that didn’t explain and I don’t know of anything I can say to explain an empty man. That’s the only description that fits: an empty man, a hollow man. It is not that I don’t know what is right and what is wrong. The truth is that I don’t care. Being in the House means more than questions of right and wrong. I try to make a decent record when it doesn’t mean bucking the tide. So having said this, why should I care where I stand in your book of dunces? I’ll try to answer that as straightforwardly as I can. Meeting you made me alive for a little while, and I remember what it felt like to be alive.
“Now all of this can be dismissed by you as some fancy footwork on my part, except that I’ve underwritten it, and that at least is one honest thing and maybe the only honest thing I ever did. But I’m doing it. I’m writing this letter, and if my gut is not strained too much, I’ll send it to you. You will then have in your hand the same kind of instrument, more or less, that I used to win the election, and it will be up to you to decide whether or not to use it. You may think that, as little as I know you, I know that you would not do to me what I did to you. Well, I know it and I don’t know it, but sending you this letter is something I have to do. I hear that your nephew Frederick Lavette may get the designation. I wish it could be you. If I have to be kicked out on my keester, I would prefer you do it.” And he signed the letter simply ALEXANDER HOLT.
“I have received your letter,” Barbara wrote to him. “I thought you might wish to be certain that it was received.” Just that and no more, and then after she had sent off her letter, she reflected on the fact that she could be as calculating a bitch as anyone else. All her life, she had fulminated against such distortions of the human spirit as revenge. She tore Holt’s letter into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. “I will not tell him,” she said aloud. “For once in your life, you, Barbara Lavette, will not act like a sentimental Girl Scout. You suffered. Let him suffer — let that bastard have second and third thoughts. You know enough about men to know that macho is a fleeting illusion. The nobler nature can survive a few hours, but then it crumbles, and by now, he would walk through the fires of hell to retrieve that letter.”
But a few days later, her resolve crumbled. She asked herself how she could play such an idiot child’s game. She had never done that, never in her life. She had never practiced revenge, and she had only pity for those who indulged it.
She put through a call to Washington. When Holt identified himself, she said stiffly, “This is Barbara Lavette.”
“I thought it was you when they said it was a woman who would not give her name. I got your letter.”
“Your letter,” Barbara said coldly, “has been torn into small pieces and flushed down the toilet. I thought it was mawkish.” Then she put down the phone and broke the connection. And then she burst into laughter. It was good to laugh this way. “Thank you, Alexander Holt!”
“I have it,” Freddie told her. “Not that it’s any kind of great achievement, because nobody’s contesting it. As far as the party’s concerned, it’s still the impossible Forty-eighth, but they figure that I’ve endless sources of money, and nobody else wants to come up with twenty cents. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“Not a chance, darling. Oh, no. It’s an illness I never want to contract again.”
“Ah, well. You know, they didn’t just give it to me. It was the word of Tony. He put in for me. You know, I think he likes me.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“It’s mutual. You know, Aunt Barbara, I didn’t like him at first. I’m not exactly Freddie Lavette, friend of the establishment. If you had told me a year ago that I’d put myself on the chopping block and make a run for what they euphemistically call the House of Representatives, I would have said you were crazy. I despise politicians, but Tony Moretti’s something else. I don’t know exactly what he is, but he’s a breed that’s gone.”
“Don’t romanticize him, Freddie. He’s a politician and a very good one. How is he?”
“In a wheelchair, dying slowly.”
Barbara shook her head, fighting against the tears that were welling into her eyes. Why did he have to come here and talk about Tony Moretti?
“You’ve never been to his house?”
She rose and went to the window, her back to Freddie. “No.”
“A small old frame house in North Beach — a lot like this, only less grand.”
“Less grand than this?” Barbara asked. They were sitting in her tiny parlor. “Hard to believe.”
“His limo’s a lot more magnificent, believe me. He sits there in a wheelchair and he seems to have a lot of pain —”
“Freddie,” she interrupted, “what does May Ling think about all this?”
“Well, she’ll come around.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“I guess she’s frightened.”
“Of course she’s frightened. She grew up in Napa. She’s a small-town girl. Have you thought it through? If you win, do you leave her here and become a weekend husband? Or do you take her with you and make a life in that place they call Washington?”
Freddie shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ll work it out somehow.”
“I hope so.”
Rising to leave, Freddie paused to stare at a magnificent bouquet of long-stemmed red roses. “Two dozen. Whoever it is, Aunt Barbara, he loves you truly.”
“I hope so. They’re a peace offering from Sam.”
“Are you angry with him?”
“No, Freddie, and don’t pry any further.”
“Are you angry with me?”
“I could never be angry with you.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
“Yes, I’ll help you.”
And pray that he loses, she told herself after he had gone. If he won, the marriage would not stand up. In no way could it stand up. Freddie was too charming, too good-looking, and completely enchanted with women. There were so few men like him, men who loved women simply because they were women, men who understood women without ever truly understanding a woman.
Mary Lou telephoned and asked Barbara whether she might come by at four o’clock to talk and to have a cup of tea if that didn’t put Barbara out too much.
“Tea? My de
ar, that’s lovely but unusual these days. Of course, if you can tolerate a two-year-old. May Ling is in town and has parked young Daniel Lavette with me. He’s in that area of life the young folk call the terrible twos. Actually, he’s not terrible at all, but a great strain on the shoulder muscles.”
“It can wait —”
“No, it shouldn’t wait. If you want to come today, there must be a good reason.”
She was stronger than Barbara would have suspected, one of those women whose large frames hide behind soft, round faces. She lifted the little boy and hugged him while he tugged at her hair.
“He should be ready for a nap. He’s been up since dawn. I’ve had him for two hours, and believe me, I’m ready to drop.”
“I read somewhere of an athlete who tried to keep pace with the motions of a two-year-old for a day of the kid’s life.”
“Poor athlete,” Barbara agreed, putting Daniel down on the couch. He stared at the two women for a moment or two, then curled up and closed his eyes.
“As easy as that?”
“Once in a blue moon, I would guess. What happened to the athlete?”
“They took him to the hospital.”
“Well, we won’t try to pace Danny. You know, my brother has a boy named Daniel. Senior at Princeton. I wonder what Pop would have thought of his two namesakes.”
“What was he like, Barbara? May I call you Barbara?”
“Of course.”
“Dan Lavette. Not the boy at Princeton. Your father.”
“Big, easygoing man. Very gentle, very sweet.”
“Gentle?”
“I know what you’re thinking. That was only once, and I suppose it was the worst moment in his life. He got into a fight in a saloon in the Tenderloin and broke up the place and the men who jumped him. That wasn’t Daddy.”
“How do you tell when it is or it isn’t? Who is my father? All my life, he treated me like some damn incredible princess until he found out that I was working in an emergency room, pushing around a bloody mop and holding the edges of a slit gut together until the doctor gets to it. That made him crazy, and he got even crazier when he found out that I was sleeping with a divorced Jew-doctor, as he put it. Just tell me there’s no anti-Semitism in America — no way, not a trace of it. At first he was going to go along with a wedding at Grace Cathedral, where a bronze plaque was loaded with the names of Lavettes and Sel dons, but that was before I told him that Sam’s name was Cohen and not either Lavette or Seldon. He really hadn’t done his homework —” She was becoming very emotional, and Barbara disliked hysteria, in herself and in others.
