Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  Goldberg smiled. “Why? Why, indeed. You’re a nice girl, Barbara. Don’t get into trouble. Down there on the wharf, you are going to change nothing. Remember that.”

  “Not even myself?”

  “Ah. That’s where the trouble begins.” He took three twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and pushed them toward her.

  “What’s this?”

  “Buy more groceries. And remember, the way you’re going, it may be that you’ll need a lawyer. I’m not a bad lawyer.”

  ***

  After Dan Lavette’s partner, Mark Levy, died of a heart attack in 1930, his widow, Sarah, continued to live alone in their big Spanish Colonial house in Sausalito. Sam Goldberg and his wife were frequent visitors there, and when Goldberg became a widower, he fell into a pattern of seeing Sarah Levy on weekends. It was one of the few defenses he had against unbearable loneliness. The weekdays were endurable. He could remain in his office and work until seven or seven-thirty, and then dinner at Gino’s or some other restaurant would kill the best part of the evening; but the weekend stretched out as an interminable period of nothing.

  So more and more frequently after his wife’s death, he would invite himself to the Levy home on a Saturday or a Sunday. He had known the Levys for half a century, which, in the San Francisco of 1934, was an epoch that stretched back almost to the beginning. When Sam Goldberg had come to San Francisco from Sacramento, to read law at the offices of Colby and Jessup at the age of seventeen—as things were done in those days—he lived in a frame boarding house on the Embarcadero, opposite the Levys’ chandler shop. As they were the only Jews in an overwhelmingly Italian neighborhood, he had come to know them well, and Mark’s father had given him his first case, a salvage dispute that involved unpaid accounts at the store. He could remember, as if it were yesterday, the day in 1897 when Sarah arrived from New York, a lovely, slender, flaxen-haired girl, bethrothed to a man she had never seen, through the correspondence of the mutual parents, tagged and addressed like a parcel.

  Now Marcus had been dead these four years past, a quick death from a massive coronary, less to be pitied than his widow, whose daughter had been a suicide just two years before. Her single surviving child, Jacob, had married Clair Harvey, the daughter of Jack Harvey, who had been the first captain in the Lavette and Levy fleet of oceangoing vessels. In the early twenties, when the Volstead Act wrecked the American wine industry, Jake and Clair bought an old winery in the Napa Valley, and they had managed to survive Prohibition through the manufacture of sacramental wine, first for a handful of Orthodox synagogues in San Francisco, and subsequently for most of the synagogues in California and for a good many of the Catholic parishes. This had brought them to a modest prosperity, yet even with the repeal of Prohibition there was no great demand for wine. While Prohibition appeared to increase the national consumption of hard liquor, wine drinking became only a memory—and those who remembered now preferred the imported wines.

  The winery, called Higate, lay in the Napa Valley a few miles north of Oakville, nine hundred acres on the eastern slope of the hills, and now, driving to the Levy home in Sausalito, Sam Goldberg wondered, as he had so often in the past, why Sarah Levy did not accept Jake’s invitation to live there, where there were three children, winery workers, life, and excitement, instead of in the huge Spanish Colonial house where she was utterly alone. As she so often told him, she would not inflict herself on her children. But what else were children for, Goldberg wondered. He had no children of his own. If he only had, how quickly he would accept such an invitation!

  He decided that today he would raise this question with her, pointing out that for a vital woman of fifty-four years to bury herself here was both self-destructive and wasteful; but it was Sarah who brought up the subject of Higate. Clair had telephoned just this morning, asking her mother-in-law to drive up to the Napa Valley—if Goldberg were willing—and for both to spend the afternoon and stay for dinner.

  “In which case, Sam,” Sarah said to him after she had greeted him and kissed him, “you will be my date.”

  “Nonsense. You are too young to be having dates with a man of sixty-six. Visits, that’s one thing. Dates, no. Damn it, Sarah, you’re a healthy, beautiful woman—too beautiful to waste away here doing nothing.”

  She smiled and took his arm. When she smiled, there was a reflection on her drawn face of the woman he had known twenty years before. Her pale yellow hair had turned white, but her eyes were the same bright blue and her figure had not changed. “I would always tell Martha,” she said, “never to contradict a man who said she was beautiful. Of course, Martha was, wasn’t she, Sam?”

  “Very beautiful, yes.”

  “And I don’t do nothing. I read. I knit. I tend my roses. I cook, sometimes.”

  “And you weep for Martha.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is precisely what living alone here does to you. The past is over. You must—”

  “Sam.” She stopped him. “We won’t talk about where I live or why. Will you drive me to Higate?”

  “Of course.”

  In the car, Goldberg said, rather casually, “Would you like to guess who walked into my office day before yesterday?”

  “No. I don’t like to guess things. But I would like to know.”

  “Barbara.”

  “Barbara? Barbara who?”

  “Barbara Lavette. Danny’s daughter.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. Yes, my dear Sarah.”

  “She just walked in? Unannounced?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? If you want to tell me?”

  “I’m not sure I know why. She asked questions about what happened when Jean took over, but I’m not at all sure that’s what brought her. I think she was reaching out.”

  “What is she like?” Sarah asked curiously. “It’s strange, isn’t it, Dan’s daughter, and Danny was like a brother to Mark, and I think I saw her only once, when she was a little child.”

  “Splendid woman—tall, like Jean, looks a little like Jean—not as beautiful, but then, who is?”

  “Indeed. She’s twenty, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. Finished her second year at Sarah Lawrence College in the East. Now she’s working.”

  “Where?”

  “No wages. She’s a volunteer at the Marine Workers’ soup kitchen on Bryant Street.”

  “Barbara Lavette!”

  “I thought that would get you,” Goldberg said, smiling. “The world turns, doesn’t it, Sarah?”

  “It surely does.”

  Long, straight, narrow, a gentle fold between low green hills that only now and then become mountains, the Napa Valley is unique, even in a place like California, where there are a hundred thousand valleys and canyons; for of all the places where grapevines grow in America, only the name of Napa is absolutely synonymous with the word “wine.” It is an old place only in terms of California, where nothing of European vintage is really old, and the first vines were planted there in 1840, by a man named George Yount. Yet, in the European tradition, most of the early wineries, established for the most part by German and Italian immigrants, were built of stone rather than wood, substantial stone buildings that very soon were covered over with broadleaf ivy, and if not actually ancient, they certainly gave the impression of being so. It was such a cluster of stone buildings that Jake Levy and his wife bought when he returned from service in World War I, and when they bought the place, it was little better than an antique and useless ruin.

  Now, fourteen years later, the aspect of the place was quite different. The old buildings had been repaired and refurbished. The hillsides, abandoned during the first years of Prohibition, were now planted in gently curving and contoured rows of vines. Hedges and plantings graced the shapeless stone houses, and half an acre of garden was given over to the growing of table vegetables.

 
Goldberg turned off Highway 29 onto a dirt road that twisted over the hills to the stone-pillared iron gates of the winery. As he got out of the car and helped Sarah out, Jake, Clair, and their three children and two dogs came to meet them. Jake was a tall, heavyset man of thirty-five; his wife, a year younger, long-limbed, freckled, with a great head of orange-colored hair, a sunburned, good-looking woman indifferent to her good looks. The two boys, Adam, twelve, and Joshua, ten, were small, grinning replicas of their mother, carrot-topped and freckled, and Sally, the youngest, eight years old, had the pale eyes and flaxen hair of her grandmother.

  With a touch of sadness and not without envy, Goldberg observed the warmth and excitement of the family as they greeted Sarah. He stood apart from the scramble of embraces, chattering children, and barking dogs. It was mundane and sentimental to see himself in relation to this, but he was a sentimental man. Then Clair noticed how woebegone and forgotten he appeared, and she went to him and took his arm and told him how delighted they all were to see him.

  “It’s been years,” she said. “You and Mother are all that’s left to us of the old times.”

  “I wouldn’t recognize the place. It reeks with prosperity.”

  “An illusion,” Jake said. “Are you tired, either of you?”

  “Not at all,” Sarah replied.

  “Why an illusion?” Goldberg asked.

  “Because Americans have forgotten how to drink wine. If we were making whiskey, we’d be rolling in money. All the decent wine during Prohibition was smuggled in from France, and only the rich could afford it. Now they don’t want our domestic wine.”

  “Which is as good or better than what they make in Europe,” Clair added.

  “Well, sometimes. Look, let me give you a tour of the place, Sam. I’ll practice on you. Clair has a notion that we should open the winery to the public on weekends and let people taste our product and build up demand that way. It might just work if we could convince the big wineries to do it, but we’re too small to make much difference. We’re going to have a valley meeting next week and propose it, but who knows? Anyway, I’ll practice on you and Mother.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Sarah said. “Take Sam. I’ll help Clair inside.”

  Jake led Goldberg off toward the stone winery buildings, the children trailing curiously. He pointed up at the sloping hillsides. “There are our newest plantings. Pinot Noir. Of course you might say that Zinfandel is endemic to this valley and it’s what we’re famous for. But I tasted Pinot Noir in France that was like the wine of the gods, and Clair and I decided that we’d produce a wine as good or better, and by golly, I think we have. You’ll taste it later. We started with five hundred vines, and now we’ve got the best stand of Pinot Noir in the valley. Come back at the end of the summer when the grapes are ripe, and you’ll have a treat, Sam. We don’t irrigate up there. Some of the growers do, but for my money, you get a better grape if you make the vines fight for moisture. If you irrigate, the vines are loaded with grapes, and for your greed there’s a poorer quality.” Jake paused. Goldberg was regarding him in amazement. “What is it, Sam?” he asked.

  “Your passion, sonny. I’m astonished.”

  “Why? Wine is a passionate thing, God Almighty, Sam, do you remember how we scrimped and starved and worked to have this place? It’s my whole life. It’s like I know every vine up there on that hillside by name and number and character.”

  Trudging alongside them, young Adam said, “He does, Mr. Goldberg.”

  “You’ve inoculated them,” Goldberg observed dryly.

  “Higate has. I sometimes try to think of what it means to grow up in a place like this and have Clair for a mother.”

  “You have a pretty damn good mother of your own.”

  “I’m not selling her short, Sam, only making a point. It’s too hot to climb the hill and look at the vines. Come in here,” he said, indicating the entrance to the largest of the stone buildings.

  As he stepped out of the hot sun, the cool darkness blinded Goldberg at first, and he paused to let his eyes adjust and to breathe deeply of the cold, sour-smelling air.

  “That’s the smell,” Jake said. “At first it’s strange. Then it becomes a kind of perfume. What do you drink, Sam?”

  “Scotch whiskey.”

  “Of course. How long is it since you tasted a really fine wine?”

  “I suppose the last time Jill and I were in France. Nineteen twelve. I’m not a wine drinker, Jake.”

  “You will be. Careful here.” Followed by his three children, who were apparently fascinated by the very fat, bespectacled man who ambled after their father, Jake led the way down a set of stone steps into a cavernous cellar. There were rows and rows of wine—in bottles, in small kegs, and in large barrels. The air was cool and damp and heady with the musty smell of wine.

  “The aging room. Over there”—pointing to the big barrels—“the sacramental wine. That’s our bread and butter, Sam, if you can think of it that way. That’s how we started and survived during Prohibition, first with old Rabbi Blum’s synagogues and then with the churches. Now we produce about twenty thousand barrels of sacramental wine a year, port and Malaga, we call it, and not a bad imitation of the real thing. It’s good, decent wine, if you like sweet wine. I don’t. We don’t grow the grapes for this stuff. We buy them down in Fresno. You’d think, with an assured market for twenty thousand gallons, we’d make money.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not a nickel. Oh, we did make money back in twenty-eight and twenty-nine, but this Depression knocked the bottom out of prices. We break even. Come back at the end of the summer, and you’ll find twenty men working here and in the fields. We meet the payroll, and we’re satisfied.”

  He pointed to the racks of bottled wine. “That’s the Pinot Noir, the love of my life. That is wine,” he said slowly, almost reverently, Goldberg thought. “We do about a thousand gallons a year, and we lager it, age it six months to a year in the bottle, laying it that way with the cork down. The cork stays wet and the wine breathes and lives.”

  “Good heavens, it’s become a religion with you.”

  “It tends to. Religion and wine have never been too far apart. That’s how we pay our bills. Let me show you the rest of it—this is only the end product.”

  Jake led Goldberg from room to room, past the crushers, the fermenting vats, the storage tanks, and into the bottling plant.

  “All this to make a glass of wine,” Goldberg said wearily.

  “This and more. Instinct and luck. Without that, you’re doomed. Maybe we don’t have the instinct, but we’ve had a lot of luck. Over here, Sam.”

  He led the way to the end of the bottling room, where half a dozen uncorked, labeled bottles stood. “Our tasting room,” he explained. “We don’t have a real one yet. We will someday. These are all the Pinot Noir. We test them as they age. Open them, and then let them breathe for a few hours.” He poured two glasses of the dark red wine. “Try it.”

  Goldberg drank the wine slowly. The last wine he had tasted was from the bottle Gino had brought to the table in the restaurant as his gift to the diners. He remembered the raw, flat taste of it. This wine was like liquid velvet, dry, slightly nutty, with a gentle, haunting fragrance.

  “I don’t know much about wine,” Goldberg said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “If I knew anything about wine, I’d say it’s pretty damn wonderful.”

  “You bet your sweet patooties. That wine, Sam, is going to conquer the world one day.”

  ***

  Willis Mackenzie, chief trainer at the Menlo Circle Club, at Menlo Park on the Peninsula, was something of an expert in the mores and ordinary habits of the rich and the children of the rich—in particular as they related to horses. Horses, as Mackenzie saw it, could be grouped with liquor, gambling, and desultory sex; they were less an indulgence than an addiction,
less an interest than a demanding status symbol, to the rich of San Francisco and the Peninsula what the automobile was to the upper middle class—and even more specifically so since the onset of the Depression.

  To this, however, there were a few exceptions, people who loved horses passionately. Mackenzie, a tall, hard-faced man of forty-five years, separated such people from the others with a reluctant smile. He was a bitter man, who hated the people he served, who hated and resented the rich, and who desired and resented their well-kept, carefully groomed women. He put Barbara Lavette in the special category of those who loved and understood horses, and on this day, when she informed him that she wished to sell Sandy, her seven-year-old chestnut mare, he looked at her thoughtfully and then suspiciously asked her why.

  “I have my reasons, Mac.”

  “Well, she’s a damn good horse, a good bloodline on both sides. You got the papers?” he asked, wondering meanwhile how much he could pick up on the deal. A local deal was a problem. If he sold her outside the county, he could possibly pick up a few hundred.

  “Right here,” Barbara replied, taking them out of her purse.

  “I didn’t mean right now. You know there’s an auction in August.”

  “I don’t want to wait. I want to sell her now.”

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I got a lady at Flintridge in Pasadena. She’s looking for a good gentle mare.”

  “That would take time, wouldn’t it?”

  “A week or so. She’d want to see the horse.”

  “No. I want to sell her today.”

  “Well—well, now there’s something, Miss Lavette. You don’t just sell a horse like you sell a pair of pants. You got to find a buyer and you got to talk him around to it. You got to give him a run on the beast. No one buys a pig in the poke.”

  “Sandy’s not a pig in the poke. I know you buy horses sometimes, Mac. What will you give me for Sandy?”