by Howard Fast
He came to the point immediately. “Before we eat,” he said to her. “Before we talk. Before we do anything, you and I have a small matter of business to transact.”
“Steve dear, what business?”
He took an envelope out of his pocket, unfolded some documents, and handed her a check for twenty thousand dollars. It was made out to Martin Spizer Productions. She stared at it, then shook her head and burst out in protests. “No, no, this is crazy, Steve. This is absolutely crazy, and I won’t have it. Do you know, I haven’t even asked my father for this money. Marty keeps after me to ask him, and I can’t. And now you hand me this. You’re out of your mind.”
“Will you calm down,” he said to her. “Will you please calm down and listen to me. This is not a gift. Not that I wouldn’t make you a gift of the money if I could. I’m a banker and this is a regular bank loan. I have all the papers here.”
She began to protest again, and again he interrupted her. “Why don’t you try to think of it as something apart from you. I’m approached for a loan and I decide to grant it.”
“Because it isn’t apart from me.”
“My darling Martha, listen to me. This is all perfectly legal. We make loans every day. This loan will help you. If the loan is a bad loan, we will write it off, as we do with other bad loans.”
“Does your father know about this, Steve?”
“My father doesn’t question my decisions. Martha, there are all kinds of people. You are someone who will never be happy until you make it in this business. I love you very much. I don’t ask much in return, but I do ask that you let me go ahead with this loan. Now I want you to call this man Spizer and have him meet us later. He can sign the documents, and then the film is on its way.”
“I don’t understand you, Steve, I swear I don’t.”
“Let’s say that I don’t understand myself very much. I just seem to be here on earth in a very strange place that doesn’t make much sense to me surrounded by strangers. You’re one of the few people who is not a stranger.”
“I’m not in love with you, Steve. You know that.”
“I know. So we won’t talk about being in love or not in love. There are plenty of other things to talk about. I’m staying at the Ambassador for the night, so why don’t we eat there and have a nice, leisurely dinner, and you call Spizer and have him meet us later, and he can sign these documents and then we’re on the way.”
“Steve, you’re an angel, a complete angel.”
Martha reached Spizer in his hotel room, where he was sitting with Timothy Kelly, the two of them finishing off a bottle of cellar muscatel, which they had purchased with what was practically their last ninety cents. Spizer listened to what Martha had to say and enthusiastically promised to meet them at the Ambassador at ten o’clock that evening. He turned back to an inquiring Kelly, grinning from ear to ear.
“Timmy, my lad, the eagle has crapped. Not just crapped, a veritable storm of shit. The brilliance and charm and patience and persistence of Mrs. Spizer’s boy has finally paid off. At ten o’clock tonight, we shall be in possession of the incredible, impossible, unthinkable sum of twenty thousand dollars.”
Sarah Levy still kept the big Spanish Colonial house in Sausalito without a servant or household help of any kind. On occasion Mark would lose his temper and shout about this. “At present market prices,” he once stormed at her, “my stock in the company is worth over eleven million dollars. And I haven’t done anything criminal to become a millionaire. I gave forty thousand dollars to charity last year, and I built the synagogue in this town almost single-handed. I got nothing to be ashamed of, and the least I could have is a servant to help my wife.”
“And then what would I do?” Sarah asked mildly.
“Enjoy life.”
“You mean spend the eleven million? You know, Mark, you’ve devoted your life to making it. You haven’t given much thought to spending it.”
“Stop being foolish. We went to Europe last year. I don’t deny you anything.”
“Then don’t deny me the right to clean the house. That’s my work,” she said bitterly.
Dan spent more and more time at the house in Sausalito. For one thing, Sarah lit up when Dan was there. She cooked special foods for him, fussed over him, coddled him, and lectured him. She was only nine years older than Dan, and as it was with her daughter, Martha, Dan had always been the swashbuckling, romantic concomitant of her life. She approached him as a mother, but also, somewhere deep in her mind, neither admitted nor fostered, as an adoring mistress. Still a year short of fifty, Mark had aged. He had lost his hair, taken on weight, developed a paunch. Dan at forty was erect and youthful. Time had bound the three of them close together, and circumstances cemented that bonding. When Dan came to Sausalito, Sarah appeared to shed her years. She still possessed her trim, youthful figure, and when she laughed, Dan saw the same slender blue eyed girl Mark had married so long ago.
The one thing Sarah could never comprehend was the relationship between Dan and Jean. With the coming of fall, Barbara had been sent to school in Boston and Wendy Jones, with a bonus and the money she had saved, returned to England. Yet Dan and Jean continued to live their separate lives in separate bedrooms in the house on Russian Hill. They functioned on separate schedules, and Dan was no longer expected to be present when Jean came to a dinner party. When one or another was gone through the night, there were neither questions nor recriminations; and one night, when Dan sat with Mark and Sarah in the big Spanish tile kitchen at Sausalito, Sarah said to him, “Why? Why, Danny? How can you live like that?”
“Because it doesn’t happen all at once. It goes slowly, through the years. The truth is, I suppose, that I don’t really give a damn. She has her life, I have mine.”
“The truth is that you have no life,” Sarah said.
“Sarah, don’t let’s start that again. It’s Dan’s life.”
“Hell, Mark,” Dan said, “Sarah can ask me anything she wants to ask me. It’s the answers that don’t make sense. There are things I can’t explain, even to myself, so what’s the use of trying to talk about them? Jean and I live what she calls a civilized life. I’m civilized, she’s civilized, my children are civilized. That goes a long way. She doesn’t bother me. Our mutual dislike has become very tolerable. Anyway, she’s plunged head over heels into being a banker. Funny thing is, she is actually running that bank.”
“Which also puzzles me,” Sarah said. “It would seem to me that now she really owns you. You and Mark owe the bank sixteen million dollars–”
“Not really,” Mark said. “The company has the bank loan, and if the Seldon Bank calls it, we could lay it off in a dozen places. It’s nothing to worry about We’re in good shape. We’ll be in even better shape if Dan’s pipe dream about Al Smith comes off.”
But it didn’t come off. On election night, on the evening of November 6, in 1928, sitting in the Levy living room, Mark and Sarah and Dan listened to the radio and heard the results pile up as Herbert Hoover won the election in a massive landslide vote. America’s repudiation of Al Smith, streetwise Catholic from New York, was overwhelming and complete. There were over twenty-one million votes for Herbert Hoover, as against fifteen million for Al Smith. Hoover garnered four hundred and forty-four electoral votes, as compared to eighty-seven for Smith–forty out of forty-eight states for Herbert Hoover.
By midnight, the results were beyond dispute, and Dan made his own small political epitaph: “ ‘You win some and you lose some.’ Not very original, but it fits.”
“What did it cost us?” Mark asked.
Glancing at where Sarah slept, curled up in a chair, Dan said softly, “Maybe a hundred grand.”
“Dumb.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. But I like that little sonofabitch. He’s got guts. I once said to him that I got my education on fishing boats, and what does he tell me? He got his packing the fish in the Fulton Fish Market in New York Being a Jew or a Catholic back there in the East, Mark, it�
��s not like out here. Mark, you know what I want to do tomorrow?”
“Sleep?”
“Hell, no. I’m going to rent me a boat down at the docks here, and we’ll go fishing.”
“Fishing? Are you crazy?”
At seven the following morning, Dan hammered at the door to Mark and Sarah’s bedroom. “Fishing!” he shouted. “Get your ass up out of there, Levy!”
Dan found a catboat to his liking. There was a brisk wind on the day. They sailed for hours, caught nothing, and returned sunburned and relaxed for the first time in months.
“The children will be home for Christmas,” Jean said to Dam. “We’re not much of a family, but with my father gone, I thought perhaps we might have a civilized family Christmas.”
“And how do we go about that?” Dan asked her. “I bet everyone who knows us asks that question. How do the Lavettes go about it? Do we pretend affection? Do I spend days buying gifts for two kids who hate my guts?”
“Dan, they don’t hate your guts, as you put it”
“You should have asked me earlier. I have to leave for New York. We’re rescheduling, we got labor trouble, we’re oversold and just about everything else that can happen has happened.”
“Conveniently.”
“I suppose so.” He took a deep breath and said, “Jean, how long can this go on?”
“As long as I desire. You have no restrictions and no reason to complain. You are free and I am free, and since we are both reasonably discreet in our affairs, I see no reason for either of us to complain.”
He let it go at that, not bothering to say that he had no affairs that required discretion. When he wanted a woman, he did what a good many of his business associates did. He telephoned a man by the name of Earnie, and for fifty dollars, a good-looking young woman would arrive at an indicated hotel room, disrobe, and give him what sex he required. He did this infrequently and only to prove to himself that he was still alive. It was without joy and without any aftermath of pleasure.
Actually, he had arranged to flee from Christmas. Anthony Cassala begged him to join his family at San Mateo, and Mark begged him to come with him and Sarah to spend Christmas at Higate with Jake and Clair and with Martha, who would come up from Los Angeles. It would be the first time in months that the entire Levy family would be together–and it would be Dan’s first visit to the winery. For years, he had listened to Mark’s description of Jake and Clair’s struggle to make the place pay, their contract with Rabbi Blum, their subsequent conquest of the Reform and Conservative Jewish synagogues, and, most recently, through the intervention of Anthony Cassala, their first penetration into the sacramental wine purchases of the Catholic Church. But perversely, he had to be alone with his loneliness. There was only one place he desired to be, and May Ling had closed the door there with a firmness he had never believed possible.
Dan took the train to Chicago, and from there he went by air to New York. The ear-deafening roar of the lumbering Ford Trimotors gave him a certain deep sense of satisfaction and relaxation, as if this environment were entirely his own. He ate his Christmas dinner alone in the Plaza Hotel, looking out on snow-covered Central Park, taking a kind of adolescent and perverse pleasure in his condition, buttressed by the fact that he was three thousand miles from those who felt anything toward him, whether it was hatred or love.
At Higate, Martha felt that she was in a dream, and the winery in the upper reaches of the Napa Valley was to her a scene out of another world. Had she forgotten so soon that people lived this way? Jake and Clair had hired a Mexican couple, Juan and Maria Gonzales, to help with the work They had orders for three thousand gallons of sacramental wine, and with the coming spring they were planning to put fifty acres into grapes of their own growing. They had an enormous fir tree in the living room, piled underneath with presents, and in the big old kitchen, they all sat at a long wooden table of Jake’s own making, carving a turkey that he and Clair had raised and slaughtered. Their children sat at the table, Adam, seven, Joshua, five, and Sally, three, sunburned, freckled, healthy. The boys were both redheaded; Sally was like a miniature version of Sarah, with big, pale blue eyes and straight hair the color of cornsilk. Mark looked at them with wonder; did it happen like this, in only three quarters of a century? For Sarah, who had spent her childhood in old Russia, the gap was even greater. She was uneasy among all the accouterments of a Christian Christmas, even though she and Mark had made certain to come with a car piled high with presents. Did they have any religion, she wondered? And what was their life like here in this beautiful and lonely place? Everything on the groaning table was of their own growing or their own making. Even their bodies were different, Jake in blue jeans and blue work shirt, hard-muscled, his face burned dark by the sun, Clair so tall and lean and strong, her red hair tied in back, long and indifferent to the style of the day, without make-up, totally unconcerned with all the variety and elements of life in San Francisco or anywhere else, laughing, apparently as happy as anyone could be. Were these her children and her grandchildren?
Martha was quiet, withdrawn, conscious of her carefully painted nails, her make-up, her precisely bobbed hair. For the rest of them, she was part of that marvelously unreal and fascinating world of Hollywood that lay somewhere far to the south. They asked endless questions that only increased her nervousness and served to make her even more ill at ease. The New York School of Acting had permanently closed its doors. Spizer and Kelly were producing a film at the Great Western Studio. She was to star in it. Uneasily, she told them the plot of the film. The screenplay was being written. But what did she do with herself? How did she pass her day? She was taking voice lessons with a man called Victor Stransky. There was a great deal to do in Hollywood. She had friends. It wasn’t at all as they imagined; it was a serious place where people worked hard, where people were dedicated to their profession.
Desperately, she wanted a drink, but they served no liquor. She breathed a sigh of relief when at dinner Jake brought out a gallon jug of clear white wine, and the talk turned to wine and its making.
“This,” Jake said with emphasis, “is not sacramental wine. This is wine,” and he underlined the word. “It’s a sort of Chablis, but quite dry and good, we think We made fifty gallons of it, and since we actually made it for ourselves–and for you, of course–it’s a sort of bootleg. But if we don’t sell it, we don’t get into any trouble over it.”
“Actually,” Clair put in, “we had expert advice. There’s a darling little man called Professor Simon Masseo, who teaches chemistry at Berkeley, and he was wonderfully helpful when we made our first batch of wine. I guess he taught us most of what we know, and we made this white wine to repay him. I mean, that’s one reason. He was so amazed when he tasted it. Jake and I felt that we had passed some kind of awful college exam. We gave the professor twenty gallons, and when he actually accepted it, it was just the highest praise he could offer.”
The glasses were filled and a toast was drunk. Mark and Sarah praised the wine. Martha drained her glass, and Jake refilled it.
“Not that we aren’t grateful to Rabbi Blum,” Clair said. “And I must say that the Catholics insist on the same dreadful sweet wine that he does. But someday if they ever get rid of this insane Prohibition thing, this is the wine we’ll make and sell, I hope. A dry white wine and the wonderful red zinfandel. Poor Fortas. The Feds raided him, and now he’s in jail serving six months.”
Then Jake had to explain who Fortas was and why he was in jail. Martha filled her glass again. The meal went on. Mark launched into a lecture on air transport. He had finally found the courage to make the flight to Los Angeles and back in the Ford Trimotor, and he gave a vivid description of how it went Adam pleaded for an airplane ride. Sarah praised Clair’s cooking, but then, in Sarah’s eyes, Clair could do no wrong. Martha drank wine, unobtrusively, and apparently only Clair noticed that she had filled her glass half a dozen times.
After dinner, in the early twilight, Clair and Martha, both of the
m wrapped in sweaters against the chill of evening, walked up the hillside behind the big stone house. Clair stopped at a big eucalyptus tree.
“When it gets to be a madhouse down there, you need to have a place to be alone. This is mine. Let’s sit here awhile and pretend we’re still kids back in Sausalito.”
“Only I’m not a kid,” Martha said forlornly. “I’m not grown up either. God, I don’t know what I am.”
“Has it been hard, honey?”
“Not hard–just pointless. The days are fifty hours long. Pop gives me all the money I need. Maybe it would be better if he didn’t, and then I would have to break my back trying to stay alive, like all the other kids down there, and then when everything else fails, they fall into bed with some louse who gives them five dollars or maybe buys them dinner and then they tell themselves they’re not pros, just kids trying to stay alive. I haven’t had one damned acting job, Clair. I had a screen test–”
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it? I mean, from what I’ve read, to have a screen test.”
“Maybe. Who knows? Maybe they’ll make the film. But, God, I get so lonely and depressed, and then I buy a quart of bootleg gin and sit in my room and drink, and I guess it helps. I don’t think I’m becoming an alcoholic, and then I get terrified that I am, like today. I didn’t have a drink yesterday, and today when Jake brought out the wine, I got goose flesh.”
“You wouldn’t give it up?” Clair asked gently.
“No. I can’t.”
“Even for a few weeks? Come and stay here. Jake and myself, we won’t bug you. Honey, we love you.”
“I know, but I can’t. I have to see it through. I can’t explain either, Clair. I’ve talked to the other kids about it. No actor can explain what it means. It’s like a drug. You begin, and then the whole world revolves around whether you make it or not, and if you don’t make it, you might as well be dead.”
