by Howard Fast
He made no judgment of the ugly, cream-colored Art Nouveau buildings, of the small campus with the city blocks of wood and stucco bungalows licking at the edge of it; it was ennobled because May Ling was in some way a part of it. He walked slowly across to the largest building, inquiring of some boys and girls who stood in front of the place where the library might be. They gave him directions, and he walked there in a sort of dream, transported back through the years to his first visit to the San Francisco library, where May Ling ruled the little cubbyhole of Oriental languages. Then he entered the building, and there she was, not different, not changed, sitting at the outgoing desk and stamping some books for a student. He stood there silently until she looked up, stared at him, and then smiled.
“Danny,” she said. No reproach. She turned to the librarian sitting beside her and said, rather tremulously, “An old friend. I’ll be back in a moment.” Then she came around the desk and steered him out to the front of the building.
“May I kiss you here?” he asked.
“Danny, Danny, take me in your arms and kiss me. Yes. Yes.”
He took her in his arms, the smell, the feel of her, the touch of her lips–all of it unchanged as if there were no passage of time for them.
“Can we go somewhere, talk?”
“Yes, of course. It’s almost ten. I’ll take an early lunch at eleven-thirty, and then we’ll have a whole hour. Can you wait, Danny?”
“I’m here. Where would I go?”
“That’s nice. Yes.”
“I’ll be on that bench, over there,” he said, pointing. “You’ll see me when you come out.”
“Of course.”
“One thing–how’s Joey?”
“Big, strong, beautiful.”
“And your folks?”
“All right. Good. You wait for me, Danny.”
He sat down on the bench, stretching out his long legs, watching the students passing by, basking in his own euphoria, delighting in the sensation of a man of forty in love with all the excitement and fervor of a teenage boy. Would he wait for her? Just to sit there, facing a building which contained her presence, made his life richer than it had been in months. He was quite content. If she had said wait for me five hours, six hours, he would have been equally content.
At eleven-thirty she appeared, and he took her in his arms and kissed her again, and she said, “You know, we’re doing this in public, and if anyone asks me or sees me, I shall simply say that this is my husband. It’s time someone here saw the father of my child.”
“I want to hear that.”
“What?”
“This is Mr. Lavette, my husband.”
“You know, you’re like a kid, Danny. You pretend like a little boy.”
“You’re angry?”
“No, no, no. I’m so happy. Now listen, I brought a sandwich, but I left it inside, because I am sure you want a proper lunch, because I remember how you eat.”
“How I eat!”
“And we can go to the faculty dining room. It’s just a little cafeteria sort of place, but it’s all right. We’ll find a quiet corner.”
Sitting across from each other, ignoring their trays of food, they just stared at each other.
“You don’t change,” Dan said. “You don’t grow older, only more beautiful.”
“I’m thirty-four. That’s considered quite old in China.”
“I’m sure.”
“And you, Danny–you’re turning gray, and that’s distinguished. But I think you’re putting on weight.”
“Nine, ten pounds. It’s nothing. I can carry it. Trouble is, nothing costs money anymore. We have charge accounts in every good restaurant in San Francisco and in New York. So you just eat what you please and sign the check, and that’s what I can’t get used to. Funny, we got this damned empire, and it’s all like a game I’m playing.”
“Hopscotch to the top of Nob Hill?”
“But it’s the bottom, not the top, and you got to play the game again.”
“And the airline is part of the game. I read all about it in the paper. They had your picture there. Joe saw it.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. I’m never worried about what he says, only about what he doesn’t say.”
“God, how I miss him. Can I see him, baby–please!”
“What will you say to him if you see him, Dan? You’ll come with your arms filled with presents, but what will you say to him?”
“I could tell him I love him.”
“I don’t think he’d believe you, Dan.”
“Do you believe me when I say that I love you–more than anything on earth?”
“I believe you love me. Not more than anything on earth. I think you love the game you’re playing more. And that’s the strange part of it. You’re not like the others, the Seldons, the Mellons, the Crockers, the Hearsts–all those uncrowned kings of this country.”
“How do you know I’m not? You don’t know them. You only know me.”
“There’s a way to know things. And sometimes I think I know you better than you know yourself.”
“I sent you money four times. Why did you always send the checks back?”
“How did you get the scar on your cheek?”
“I got drunk and smashed up a speakeasy.”
“Oh, no–”
“Why did you send the money back?”
“Because I don’t need money, Danny. That’s the truth. I received nine thousand dollars for the house on Willow Street–which was a gift from you. And during those years we were together, I saved almost four thousand dollars. You always gave me too much money. And my father has his savings. I don’t need money, Danny. I need you. I need you because I’m only half alive without you. I’ve never been with another man, and I don’t want to be with another man. There’s only you, and it’s been that way since the first time we met. And if this hurts you, I’m selfish enough to want it to hurt, and I’m not going to salve your guilt by taking more money from you. Anyway, money is meaningless to you. It always has been. You don’t give anything of yourself when you give me money.”
“Don’t be so damned logical!” he burst out.
“Then what should I do, dear love? I can’t be angry at you. I adore you.”
“Now look,” he began, “my airline is functioning now–”
“Danny, stop! Don’t you think I know what you’re going to say? Don’t you think I know what you had in mind with this airline of yours? You’re going to tell me that you’ll come to Los Angeles in four hours now and that we can see each other–”
“Yes, yes. Twice a week, three times a week. And in another year or two, the new planes will be in production, and then it will be two and a half hours–”
“Danny!”
He stopped and stared at her. “What did I say?”
“Oh, Danny, Danny, this is a land where men don’t grow up. Don’t you understand me? You’re not a little boy, working out a way to play hooky and not get caught. I love you. I call myself Mrs. Lavette. My son is registered in school as Joseph Lavette. And I am not playing a game. You live with a woman you hate and who hates you. If there’s a shred of sanity on this earth, you are my husband. You are the father of my child. That’s the whole of it. Come to me whenever you want to, but come to stay. I don’t care whether you divorce Jean or not, and I don’t even care whether you can marry me or not, or whether you’re the richest man on earth or penniless. But when you come, you have to say to me, May Ling, I will not leave you again. Because I’m strong enough for everything else, but not for the leaving, Danny, not for the leaving.”
PART FIVE
The Wind
Sam Goldberg was a sentimental man. After all the years, he still kept a photograph of the Oregon Queen hanging in his office. His father, then aged fifteen, had come to California in ’52 to dig for gold. He never found gold and settled for a fruit stand in Sacramento, and somehow set aside enough money to send his son to law school. Goldb
erg had deep loyalties. He was ferociously loyal to and proud of San Francisco, which he never tired of defining as the one and only great city in the United States wherein Jews and Italians and Irish played commanding roles from the very beginning. He also hotly defended it as the only truly civilized city on the face of the earth, and he specified California as the only place on earth fit for human beings to live.
He had the same loyalty to and love for Dan Lavette and Mark Levy–his oldest continuing clients and now his biggest and most important clients. His partner, Adam Benchly, was four years older than Sam, who was now sixty-two. Benchly, whose father had jumped ship in San Francisco in 1850, had run for mayor once, but was defeated, and had served as district attorney some twenty years before. Unlike Goldberg, he was coldly cynical and sourly suspicious. They made an excellent combination. They had worked out in detail the public offering of stock for Levy & Lavette, and now, a pleasant afternoon in April of 1928, they were both of them, Goldberg and Benchly, sitting in Goldberg’s office with Dan and Mark.
“The trouble is,” Benchly began, “that you two young fellows have been running this operation like a grocery store. No board of directors, no vice presidents, just Dan here running off like some besotted steer, with Mark trying to hang on to him. Well, god damn it, this is no grocery store. You two got yourselves one hell of a big and sprawling operation.”
“We’ve got managers,” Dan said defensively. “We’ve got Anderson in New York and Burroughs at the store, and we’ve got Sidney Cohen in Hawaii.”
“You don’t know what you got,” Benchly snorted. “When you had that Chinaman running things, you could make some sense out of it. Now–good Lord, Sam and I have been trying to make sense out of your books for two months now. Well, we got them in some kind of order. Do you realize that you’ve got an operation with maybe twenty million dollars of capital worth and you don’t make a nickel?”
“What about our balance sheets? What about our statements?” Mark demanded. “We showed half a million clear profit last year.”
“Where is it?”
“In the business. Do you know what this airline is costing us? And we bought that building on Eleventh Avenue in New York. We had a floor of offices that cost us more than the taxes, and we have seven floors rented.”
“What Adam is saying,” Goldberg put in, “is that you’ve been very lucky. When you two kids decided to buy the Oregon Queen, Adam and I set up a corporation for you and we issued a hundred shares of capital stock, fifty in your name and fifty in Dan’s. That stock is still lying in our office safe. Since then, you been flying and lady luck rode with you. But the bitter truth is that you don’t own the business. The Seldon Bank is into you for sixteen million.”
“We’re into them.” Dan grinned.
“No, sir,” said Benchly. “They are into you. That’s something you have to understand.”
“Now wait a minute,” Mark said. “We’re issuing a million shares of stock–which represents twenty million dollars. That takes us off the hook, doesn’t it?”
“Yes and no. Like I said, you’re not running a grocery store. Sam and I have drawn up a new charter for the corporation. You’re in the big time and you’ve got to play it like the big time. You have to put together a board of directors. You have a responsibility to your stockholders as management and you’ve got to exercise it like grown men, not like a couple of kids gone hog wild.”
“Adam, that’s not fair,” Mark protested.
“It’s fair enough.”
“It’s not that we don’t respect you,” Sam Goldberg said. “Our job is to protect you. Right now, if Seldon called his loans, you’d probably be able to cover. Tony Cassala would protect you, and between him and Giannini and maybe with Crocker and Wells Fargo in the picture you’d get out from under. That’s because we’re sailing on milk and homey these days. But suppose the situation changes? All right, we got Cohen, Brady and Wilkinson to take the underwriting and they’re very confident. At this time next week, you’ll have ten million dollars, less the underwriter’s commission, and you’ll be a publicly owned corporation. But if you insist on retaining fifty-one percent of the stock, you will still be in hock to the bank.”
“We can carry six million easily,” Mark said.
“Not six million. Mark, your idea of paying off ten million of the loan is impossible. We’re in an inflationary situation, with prices skyrocketing. There’s going to be a longshore strike as sure as hell. You’re going to have trouble with your crews. You can’t go on operating without money, and you can’t keep going to Seldon. Now I hear that Dan is ordering six new planes from the Douglas Company. Where does the money come from?”
“When the time comes–”
“No, sir,” said Benchly. “Either you listen to Sam and me, or we’re out of this.”
“Come on, come on,” Goldberg said. “No ultimatums. Boys, please–we’ve got to play it differently. You’re paying Seldon a million and a quarter a year. We want you to put away three million in government paper to cover that, and above all, the debt stays. You don’t go into Seldon or any other bank–not until you can show a realistic profit. Otherwise, you’re playing roulette.”
“That’s all right with me,” Dan agreed. “God Almighty, we can use that money.”
Mark began to protest and Dan said, “Mark, we can’t stay still. This whole country is snowballing. It’s a new era, a new time, a whole damn new civilization.”
“Then we don’t retire any of the loan?” Mark asked.
“Sam and I think three million might go to that. Let the rest of it lay.”
“I bought a stock ticker,” Dan said. “Can you imagine–never bought a share of stock in my life, and now I got a brand-new classy ticker, all my own.”
Jean had left for England again, this time to attend an auction at Sotheby’s. She had conceived a sudden passion for water colors, and Sotheby’s was selling a wide range, from David Cox to John Marin. Thomas was at school in the East, and Barbara was totally devoted to horses. The year before, Dan had made his daughter a gift of a five-year membership in the Menlo Circle Club, a very exclusive riding club in Menlo Park, just outside of Atherton and about thirty miles down the Peninsula, and ever since then she had pleaded with Jean to give her consent to the purchase of a country house at Menlo Park. But Jean was not only averse to a second home; she also expressed the opinion that Menlo Park had become the haven of the newly rich. There had been a time when Jean rode, if infrequently; of late she had taken a dislike to horses and the company they kept–as she put it. Still too young to drive, Barbara had become a part of a clique of boys and girls, between sixteen and twenty–she was the youngest one of the group–who raced down to Menlo Park at every opportunity that presented itself.
School had been reduced to a chore that kept her from the stables. She was a poor student–not because she lacked intelligence, but out of resentment for anything that kept her from riding. She was a tall, long-limbed girl, five-foot-eight already, very much like her mother in appearance and very much of a stranger to Dan. Not only was he unaware of who she was, but with Jean away, he had no notion of the rules by which she should live. The two of them shared the house with Wendy Jones and the servants. Miss Jones ran the place, planned the meals, and took care of the household accounts with money Dan gave her. With the stock offering that turned Levy and Lavette into a publicly held corporation, Dan’s trips to Hawaii, New York, and Detroit became more frequent, and when he was in San Francisco, he would frequently eat dinner downtown and then return to the offices. He saw his daughter only intermittently and salved his conscience with gifts. He took a day off to attend a horse auction in Sonoma County, where he purchased a splendid chestnut mare, which he immediately shipped to Menlo Park. Barbara encountered it the following day at the clubhouse stables but curiously enough did not mention it to Dan or even thank him for it until the two of them met in the house one day a week later.
He had to prod, finally asking h
er whether she liked the horse.
“Oh, yes. It’s a beauty.”
“Did you name her?”
“Her name is Sandy,” Barbara said. “Didn’t you know? You bought her.”
“Funny, I never asked her name of anyone. If I did, I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
In his mind’s eye, he saw her throwing her arms around him, kissing him and thanking him effusively; but the reality was a tall, slender, distant person, properly polite. When had they last kissed or embraced? He could not remember. He said, suddenly, “How about the two of us going out to dinner?”
“Wendy has dinner here.”
“The hell with Wendy. She can eat alone.”
“I have a party later.”
“All right, I’ll drop you off at your party.”
She agreed without enthusiasm, and when they were in his car, he asked her whether she liked Italian food–aware of how strange the question was, but no stranger than the fact that she spoke not a single word of Italian and probably had never thought of herself as Italian.
“If you wish, sure.”
“There’s a little place on Jones Street where I eat. It’s not very posh, but the pasta is as good as any in the city and better than most–”
“Pasta?”
“Spaghetti, linguini, tortellini.” He wondered whether she had asked the question deliberately. Could she conceivably not know what the word meant?
Gino welcomed him with delight, wringing his hand. “Danny, two month I don’t see you. Too long.”
“I been away, here and there. This is my daughter, Barbara.”
“So beautiful,” Gino exclaimed. “So tall, so beautiful. I welcome you here. Come, here is your papa’s favorite table.”
She was stiff and cold, looking around the little restaurant with its checked gingham tablecloths with distaste. Already, Dan realized that it had been a mistake to bring her here. Why had he ever imagined that she would like the place?
Gino led them to the table, pulled out the chair for Barbara with as sweeping and courtly a gesture as he could manage. Oblivious to her reaction, he was beaming with delight. “What do you think, Danny,” he said, “Al Smith, he gonna make it?”
