The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  As for Barbara, she didn’t know what her own response was; the death seemed so distant and meaningless, as if time beyond measure had drifted by since a word of affection had passed between her and her brother. At Grace Cathedral, over five hundred men and women turned out for the funeral service, no surprise to Barbara. As she sat there, with Sam and Freddie at one side of her and her brother Joe and his wife, Sally, on the other, listening to words spoken without meaning or truth, breathing in the musty smell of the church air, a smell she had come to associate more with death than with marriage or baptism, she felt an icy chill of hopelessness. It was all pointless and meaningless — all the funerary trappings — except for one incident that happened after they had left the cathederal.

  Mort Gilpin fell into step alongside her. Barbara was surprised to see him. Why would he come to Tom Lavette’s funeral service?

  “Miss Lavette, I know this is the worst time, but can we have a word?”

  Her mind did its own research. Thinking of how odd it was to see Mort Gilpin here in Grace Cathedral, she also thought of the strange business of a woman’s name. A man had his identity. Even in death, he was still Thomas Seldon Lavette, but what would she be when she died? Who would she be? Barbara Lavette? Barbara Cohen? Barbara Devron? Ms. Lavette, Mrs. Lavette, Miss Lavette? You don’t solve such things at a funeral. She struggled to fix her attention on Mort Gilpin.

  “Please, Miss Lavette.”

  They were outside. “Wait for me at the car,” she said to the others.

  Freddie was studying Gilpin curiously. The rest of the family made their way through the crowd, and meanwhile a stream of people, most of whom she hardly knew, some of whom she did not know at all, stopped to offer their sympathy to Barbara. It was an ancient rite; you had to cast your sympathy, like bread, on the water, whether it lay there soggy wet or not.

  Freddie received sympathy coldly. If he had at least the decency to refrain from stating that he couldn’t care less whether his father was dead or not, he did not, on the other hand, pretend to even a polite indication of grief. Barbara’s grief was a slow thing, building to pain; now, at last, grief for what might have been and for all the petty annoyances and angers.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Freddie whispered to Gilpin.

  “Paying my respects,” he said coldly.

  May Ling was waiting for Freddie, who grabbed her hand and walked off with her. Mort Gilpin blocked Barbara’s way.

  “Can’t it wait?” Barbara asked.

  “No. Let’s cross the street.” They had a few moments alone on the other side of the street, and Mort Gilpin said, “I should have told you this yesterday, but I couldn’t reach you. You remember the fifty thousand dollars for the TV spots?”

  A stab of pain went through Barbara. Of course she remembered, and she not only remembered but knew what Gilpin was going to say.

  “It’s none of my damn business what went on between you Lavettes in the past. All I know about the rich is squeezing money out of them, but you can bet your sweet life that the process tells me something. The fifty grand came from your brother, the same Thomas Lavette who is being buried today, and I didn’t have to get down on my knees and brown-nose him. He asked me how much you needed, and then he wrote out the check. I thought you should know. He swore me to silence, but the hell with that. You can tell Freddie if you want to. The hell with him too.” And with that, he turned and walked off.

  It made Tom Lavette no easier to understand, no more alive, no more real. Barbara tried to recall a time when they were children; Tom had been there. He was a part of her life that resided in her earliest memories, always a part of her life, Tom in his first pair of long pants at a time when long pants had some meaning, Tom defending her from a couple of tough kids down on North Point, Tom with his first pair of white flannels, Tom with his tennis racquet and white sweater, Tom at Princeton. Where did it stop? Where did it all begin to crumble? When did Tom stop being Tom? Was it when he married Eloise? But Freddie was only four or five when Tom divorced Eloise, and Freddie’s store of hatred was all at second hand. Was it Tom against their father, Dan Lavette? But that was business. How does hatred begin? How is it nurtured? Boyd had told her many times that the secret of the successful practice of the law was communication. “You can talk to anyone,” he had said, “and you can be pretty damn sure that anyone wants to talk to you.” And she had always told herself that one day she would talk to her brother, a long, sincere talk that would move all the resentment and hatred out into the open.

  Now he was dead. They would never talk to each other.

  The reading of Tom’s will was painful, uncomfortable. The interested parties, called to the offices of Tom’s attorneys, consisted of Lucy, Eloise, Freddie, Tom’s only child, Barbara, and Joe Lavette, physician, half brother to Tom and Barbara. Neither Sam nor any of Joe’s children had been mentioned by the attorney, Seth Richardson, the member of the firm permanently assigned to the enormous Lavette interests. A younger member of the firm, Digby by name, was also present. His presence gave Richardson, a tall, sallow and unsmiling man, the opportunity to say Digby, give me this, Digby, give me that. Richardson opened the proceedings by ordering, “Digby, give me the codicil.”

  Digby handed it to him, and Richardson continued, “This is a codicil to the will which I am preparing to read. For reasons that will be obvious in a few minutes, I am going to tell you the contents of the codicil before the will is read. The codicil provides for a separate fund of two million dollars, to be held in escrow. This fund is earmarked to pay the legal expenses of my firm, retaining us to fight any contest of any part of Mr. Lavette’s will by any legatee. If no part of the will is contested, the two million will go to Mercy Hospital to establish a free clinic. Of course, you will all receive copies of the codicil as well as of the will itself. I will now read the will. Digby, hand me the will.”

  As Richardson opened the folder containing the will, he looked unsmilingly from face to face, and Barbara couldn’t help thinking that in such dismal neutrality, the State Department must have lost a great entry.

  “This is my last will and testament,” Richardson read, his voice a toneless drone. “To my wife,” Richardson read, “I leave absolutely nothing, not even good will or a shred of love. I have lived in fear and hatred of this woman, but now I am beyond her reach. She is rich enough in her own right, but she is still a minority stockholder in the Lavette enterprises. I am placing the controlling stock in a trust, to be used for the endowment of the following —” But before he could read the list of charities, Lucy Lavette stood up and drove a skinny finger at Richardson.

  “We shall see,” she said. “We are not without legal defenders, Mr. Richardson.” And with that, she stalked out of the room.

  Now the room was very silent until Richardson said, “There are no more comments on the part of the deceased Mr. Lavette. I will simply read the list of bequests, yet taking the liberty to make my own observation about the bequest to Mr. Lavette’s son. As Mr. Lavette felt that his son, Frederick, had betrayed no interest in the various Lavette enterprises, his bequest is entirely in cash. Now the will: To my son, Frederick, twelve million dollars; to my sister, Barbara, two million dollars in United States Government bearer bonds; to my half brother, Joseph Lavette, one million dollars in United States Government bearer bonds. Whatever funds remain in my estate shall go to San Francisco Medical Center to take whatever steps they may feel necessary for the study of heart disease, which has taken the life of my father and, presumably, myself.”

  The newspapers made a large front-page story out of the contents of the will. Barbara felt an immense surge of sadness. Sally telephoned Barbara to tell her how happy Joe was — he was not the kind of a person who could have expressed it himself — with the bequest. “We’ll have a real clinic now, a real, functioning clinic, which is something he’s dreamed about for years.”

  Freddie, however, received the news in grim silence. He made no comment whatsoe
ver at the reading of the will. A month then passed, during which Barbara had no word from either Freddie or Eloise. Then Freddie telephoned and said he was going to be in town, and could he drop in for a drink?

  “You’re always welcome,” Barbara replied.

  “At four o’clock, Aunt Barbara. I hope we can be alone.”

  “No one else will be here, Freddie.”

  “That’s good. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  His voice was without spirit or energy, and when he appeared at Barbara’s house, he looked pale and tired. Barbara had not seen him since the reading of the will, and she wondered that a month could produce so profound a change. When Freddie’s father married Eloise, he had chosen someone very much like himself in coloring and general appearance, as much as a very pretty young woman can resemble a man without the woman being less feminine and the man less masculine. The result, in Freddie, was a man who frequently made Barbara feel that she was seeing her brother as she remembered him many years ago, a tall, slender man, pale eyes and hair that was still the color of cornsilk. As a younger man, Freddie had been as lighthearted and easygoing as her own son, Sam, had been grimly serious. The change had come slowly.

  “What will you have?” Barbara asked him. “I have a pot of coffee warming, or you can have a drink.”

  “Coffee, please.”

  When she returned with a tray that held a plate of cookies as well as the coffee, Freddie was very seriously studying his fingernails. He glanced up at her as she set down the tray and asked, “Did my father ever meet Uncle Joe? I mean, did he know him at all? Did he know that Uncle Joe was a physician?”

  Barbara thought about his question before answering, and Freddie, before she could answer, went on to say “I mean, a million dollars is a million dollars. You don’t give away a million to a total stranger, do you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I mean, did they ever meet?”

  “Why is that so important to you, Freddie?” Barbara wondered.

  “Because it’s important. Because it’s damn important!”

  “All right,” Barbara said soothingly. “As far as I can remember, they never met. Joe was an illegitimate child, conceived while my father was still married to my mother. Of course, later, when he married May Ling, he took out formal adoption papers for Joe. I don’t think Tom ever got over his anger at my mother and father for their divorce. I think that’s understandable if not too sensible. You might think about your own feelings toward your father, and perhaps you’ll understand why Tom felt the way he did.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought about it. Why do you suppose he left Uncle Joe a million dollars? Guilt?”

  “If there’s one thing I learned as a writer, it is that there are no simple answers to human action or motivation.”

  “You must have thought about his motivations.”

  “Yes —”

  “Why in hell’s name did he do it? I’ve learned something about Jewish guilt, but he wasn’t Jewish.”

  “Neither are you. Freddie, forgive me, and you know that I love you as much as if you were my own son, but you talk more damn nonsense than anyone I know. The Jews have no monopoly on guilt, but I don’t think Tom did anything out of guilt. Time passed and he changed; things changed him, things that brought him great unhappiness, and I would guess that he was one of the most tragically unhappy men I’ve ever known. Maybe dead he could do things he couldn’t do when he was alive. I don’t know.”

  “When I was a kid,” Freddie said, “I felt that putting aside that huge lump of money that your grandfather left you and turning it into a foundation and not taking a nickel out of it for yourself — well, I thought that was maybe the classiest quixotic act I had ever come across. I felt so damn proud that you were my aunt. I used to wonder whether, if I were in that position, I’d do the same thing.”

  “What difference does it make? Why should you brood over it?”

  “Because I’m not and because I’m nothing I ever dreamed of being. I gave half of the money to May Ling. I’m keeping the rest.”

  He had been eating cookies furiously, stuffing his mouth as he spoke. Barbara had never seen him so rapacious for sweets before, nor had she ever seen him this tense. She picked up the plate and started toward the kitchen to replenish it.

  “It’s your money. But why divide it? May Ling’s your wife.”

  “I’m leaving May Ling,” he said dully.

  Barbara turned around, plate in hand, and stared at her nephew. Then she put down the plate, her hand shaking, and stared at him again. “When did this happen?”

  “It’s been happening for years. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “I’ve noticed. You fight, you squabble. Every couple does. But you don’t break up.”

  “It happens. Divorce happens. It happened to you, it happened to my mother.”

  Barbara took a deep breath and then said, “Yes, it happens. It certainly does happen.” She picked up the plate. “I was going to get more cookies. Do you want more cookies?” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Jesus Christ, no! To hell with the goddamn cookies! I tell you I’m leaving my wife, and you ask me if I want cookies!” He was scolding her, snapping at her as a kid does at his mother.

  Barbara controlled her mounting anger and tried to see him as she would have seen Sam; indeed, as she had seen Sam — to be flattered by his coming to her instead of going to another. She realized that in search of some relief for his agonies, there had been no one else for him to turn to. So she said nothing at all, and he apologized, begging her to forgive indefensible behavior.

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  They both waited now, measuring each other, Barbara trying to remember what she, Barbara, was in his eyes. At sixteen, he had been madly in love with her; at twenty-one, in his last year in college, he had gone south in the big civil rights registration drive and had been taken and whipped by a gang of rednecks, and she had come to him in a hospital in Mississippi, and that was when he had said to himself that he would never marry or be content until he found a woman like her. His idol remembered. She reached out and took his hand.

  His defense and explanation were commonplace. How many tortured and frustrated men had pleaded that their wives did not understand them! He defended May Ling and called her an angel. What did he mean when he said that his wife was an angel? What, in human terms, is an angel? What is a bitch? We are demented because the world is demented. We use code words and names because we understand nothing.

  “Yes, I could stay with her and live with her — sure I could. She’s sweet and kind, and she’s beautiful, and she makes me absolutely crazy. What on God’s earth do I do, Aunt Barbara? Do I piss my whole life away satisfying a woman who can’t understand one damn idea I have in my head?”

  “Come on, Freddie,” Barbara said softly, “people don’t divorce for a mismatch of intellect. May Ling is bright. Do you understand everything that’s in her head?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t be fair to her. Well, there it is — my father, whom I hated all my life, leaves me the money to make me free.”

  “That’s an odd way to look at it. You were making enough money at Higate to divorce if you had to.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “I didn’t think it was. The bitter truth, as O’Casey once put it, is that a man doesn’t tire of one woman unless he’s in the process of becoming untired of another.”

  “I suppose O’Casey was right. I don’t know — I can’t go on at Higate.”

  “Why?”

  For a long moment, Freddie stared at Barbara without answering. Then he shook his head hopelessly and said, “I may as well tell you, because if I don’t tell someone I’ll go out of my mind. I’m going to marry Carla. I was the one who deflowered Carla when we were both kids, and her father and Adam came close to killing me then because Carla thought she was pregnant, which she was not, and Cándido Truaz has never forgiven me, and on top of everything, S
am is not only my cousin, but he’s my best friend, and how much more tangled do you want it?”

  “It’s tangled enough,” Barbara said sadly. “Have you spoken to May Ling?”

  Freddie nodded.

  “Is she taking it very hard?”

  “She’s been taking it very hard for a long time, Aunt Barbara. It breaks my heart, and I know that’s a kind of rotten, dishonest thing to say, because I’m breaking her heart and still it’s true. Do you believe me?”

  Barbara nodded.

  “So by now —”

  “Come on, Freddie, the world hasn’t come to an end. Marriages do. There are people who know how to be married, and there are those who don’t, and someone would have to be blind not to see that nothing’s working out between you and May Ling. What will you do?”

  “There’s enough money for May Ling. She’ll have custody of Danny. Carla and I, after we’re married — well, I thought we’d go to France. I know the wine country there, but I’ve never been to Alsace or to the Rheingau district in Germany. I’d like to study the Moselles and the Rhine wines, and then I’ve been thinking of the north of France and learning more about champagne. Maybe a year, possibly two years. There’s two hundred acres for sale in the Valley, a few miles to the north of Higate. I’ve put a binder on it. The price is very high, but I can afford it, and I couldn’t live anywhere else in the world except in the Valley.” He went on talking, almost compulsively.