Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “It doesn’t help hers. She can’t go back there. She’s John Whittier’s daughter—at least in their eyes.”

  “I don’t see why she should want to.”

  “For the same reason she went there in the first place.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Guilt. Compassion. A desperate need to find out something about herself and the world she lives in.”

  “Not John?”

  “I don’t think she gives a damn about John Whittier. She doesn’t like him. Does Tom like him?”

  “I think so. What’s more important is how Tom feels about you.”

  “He hates my guts.”

  “No, Danny, no. He doesn’t know you.”

  “I lost him somewhere on the way. Like you said, Jean, it’s always too late.”

  “You could try.”

  “Could I explain to him why I work as a boathand for thirty dollars a week?”

  “I don’t think you could explain that to me, Danny. How did you explain it to Barbara?”

  “I never had to.”

  “You know, Dan, she adores you. She’ll listen to you. She won’t listen to me. She doesn’t want to go back to college. I spoke to her this morning.”

  “I know.”

  “I think she should. I think she should heal the breach with John. This is a terrible time for John; whether you like him or not, he’s facing his own moment of truth. Everyone says there’ll be a general strike tomorrow.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “I can’t imagine it. Everything stops—the whole world. John hasn’t slept in three days; there have been endless meetings with the mayor, the governor, and heaven knows who else. If Barbara could be made to understand—”

  “I think she does understand, from her point of view.”

  “Dan, she’s not a communist. Or is she?”

  “No.” He grinned. “I hardly think so.”

  “What does she want?”

  “I think she wants to get away from all of us for a while. She wants to go to Europe, to Paris. Study and work.”

  “And you encourage that?”

  “Jean,” he said gently, “I encourage nothing. I want her here as much as you do. But I won’t impose anything on her. I won’t even try to persuade her. You and me, my dear, we have one hell of a kid. She survived being born in a golden crib, and if she survives that, she’ll survive anything. On the other hand, you’re the trustee of her estate. If you cut off her money, she’ll have a hard time of it.”

  “That’s what John wants me to do.”

  “Will you?”

  “That’s a hell of a comment, Dan. I love her as much as you do. It’s her money.”

  Dan looked at her and nodded. They ordered lunch, but hardly touched the food. They talked around things, awkwardly—Barbara’s sale of her car, her horse—but the matter of their daughter was decided already. When Dan said that she would be coming to Los Angeles to stay with him until she left for Europe, Jean said almost hopelessly, “I suppose that’s best. She won’t come back to John’s house. I’ll spend the next few days with her. Don’t worry about the money.” Then she talked about Tom, and her tone became almost plaintive. “I never turned him against you, Danny.”

  “I know.”

  “So strange, Danny, to sit here like this, the two of us. You feel that, don’t you?”

  “I feel it.”

  “Danny, if I said to you, take a room and go upstairs and wait for me—?”

  “Are you saying it?”

  “Danny, I could endure anything except to have you reject me again. So I’m not saying it, really.”

  He reached over and took her hand. “Jeany—” He had not called her that in years. “Jeany, I have twenty-two dollars in my pocket and a return ticket on the bus, and that won’t buy us a bed at the Fairmont. But thank you. I’ll remember that.”

  “John is sure you hate me. He begged me not to see you. He actually was afraid you’d commit mayhem.”

  “I guess John knows as little about men as he does about women.”

  She made no effort to take the check, and inwardly he thanked her for that.

  ***

  A few days later, the day Dan left San Francisco to return to Los Angeles, one hundred and fifteen San Francisco trade unions met in delegation and voted to call a general strike. The next day, the most feared, the almost mythical weapon of the working people came into being as the San Francisco trade unionists walked off their jobs and left the city paralyzed. Among the various devices that the employers and the so-called nabobs resorted to was the resurrection of the vigilantes, so notorious in San Francisco’s past. Rumors were circulated that a communist army was already marching on San Francisco, although its point of origin was never revealed. There were other carefully circulated rumors of bomb plots and planned attacks on police headquarters and the general post office. None of the rumors was founded in any basis of reality; nevertheless, the vigilante gangs went into action, carrying out raids against the headquarters of the Marine Workers International Union, the Communist Party headquarters, the headquarters of Upton Sinclair’s Epic Plan movement, and a number of other places, among them the soup kitchen on Bryant Street.

  Barbara went there the day after she read the account of the raids in the Chronicle. She walked through a city that teemed with police, National Guardsmen, and unofficially deputized American Legionnaires. She came to Bryant Street and stood there looking at the wreckage of what had been the storefront soup kitchen. The windows had been smashed, the tables and chairs inside broken, the dishes shattered and scattered about. The destruction was maniacal, childish, and thorough.

  The following day, she left for Los Angeles.

  ***

  Dan did not make up his mind about Sam Goldberg’s offer until after he had spoken to May Ling. He had an almost mystical regard for her good sense and wisdom. He told her all that had been discussed in Goldberg’s office and then let the question hang.

  “What do you really want, Danny?” she asked him.

  “The money to put Joe through medical school.”

  “We can manage that. It’s four years away. He’ll go to UCLA, where the tuition’s free. I have some money saved, and Pop has his savings.”

  “I won’t touch that.”

  “Joe will be working this summer. He’ll save that money.”

  “Where?”

  “While you were gone, I phoned Jake Levy at Higate. He offered Joe a job at the winery. Joe wants to go. So we’d manage the money.”

  “All right. I’ve had it with fishing. I’m not young anymore.” He was sitting opposite her in the living room of their little house in Westwood. It was on toward eleven o’clock, the hour that was theirs alone. She sat with her hands in her lap, a small, slender ivory-skinned woman whose hair was turning gray, and he thought to himself, She’s all of it—everything. Love was something he could never adequately put into words.

  “You don’t enjoy being poor, do you, Danny?”

  “I don’t give a damn about that. Only, the good years—Christ, we couldn’t even walk into a decent restaurant together.”

  “They weren’t such good years, Danny. These are the good years.”

  “I can’t go on in that damn mackerel boat.”

  “Then tell Sam you accept.”

  “You won’t mind?”

  “Come to bed, Danny. You’ll call Sam tomorrow.”

  Lying in bed with May Ling’s head cradled in his arm, her naked body pressed close to him, both of them easy in the afterglow of their lovemaking, he said, “There is one thing more I should tell you about the trip.”

  “Oh?”

  “I had lunch with Jean at the Fairmont.”

  “The snow lady. Yes?”

  “Eleven dollars with the tip. That�
��s half a week’s wages when the fish aren’t running.”

  “She didn’t offer to take the check?”

  “Come on, baby. We talked about Barbara. That’s all.”

  “She didn’t ask you to go to bed with her?”

  “You know, my darling May Ling, under that satiny Oriental skin of yours lurks traces of a bitch.”

  “Then you’ve found me out. What did you say?”

  “What do you mean, what did I say?”

  “When she asked you to go to bed with her?”

  “I said that with twenty-two dollars in my pocket, there was no way I could afford a room at the Fairmont.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I’ve suspected that.”

  She pressed closer to him, running her hand over the hair on his body. “I like it when two bodies become one. That’s the way it should be. Only, Occidental men are so hairy, apelike.”

  “How the hell would you know? You’ve never been to bed with anyone else. Or so you tell me.”

  “So I tell you. Would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “Would you have gone to bed with the snow lady if you had had the price of a room at the Fairmont?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You’re not very nice, Danny. But I love you.”

  PART TWO

  The Leave-Taking

  Barbara met Marcel Duboise on the Champs-Élysées. It was on an afternoon in April of 1937, a cool, lovely, sun-drenched day, the kind of a day that people who love Paris will insist occurs only in Paris and only in April, although Barbara remembered many days like it in San Francisco, when the wind blew gently from the Pacific and when the sunlight danced on the water of the bay. Indeed, this kind of a day filled her with nostalgia and homesickness, and led her to think that she had lived enough away, and that it was time to go home.

  She had lunched out of a bag in the garden of the Tuileries, and that was when Marcel Duboise saw her. She was unaware of this until he followed her across the Place de la Concorde and up the Champs-Élysées.

  He quickened his pace until he was alongside her, and then he said, speaking very quickly, “My name is Marcel Duboise. I am honest, decent, fairly intelligent, of good character, and not a criminal or a depraved type, and I do not make a habit of speaking to strange women on the street. But what else can I do? If I don’t speak to you now, you will disappear and I will never see you again. I never saw you before, so it is quite logical that I will never see you again, and then my life will be desolate and meaningless until the end of time.”

  The words poured out of him with such speed that Barbara retained only a vague impression of what he had said. By now her French was adequate, but she still had some difficulty following when it was spoken very quickly, and her instinct was to ignore the man and quicken her pace. She glanced sideways at him. He was slender, tall, brown tweed jacket, gray flannel trousers, white shirt, striped tie, wide mouth bent in a pleading smile, wide jaw, brown, humorous eyes, a large, narrow nose, and a mop of unruly brown hair.

  “Please, please do not ignore me.”

  “What on earth do you want?” she asked him, shocked into English without thinking. “What do you want?” she repeated in French.

  “Ah, you are English.”

  “I’m an American, if it’s any affair of yours.”

  “So much better. Please, may I talk to you?”

  She stopped, turned to face him, and stared. “Monsieur what-ever-your-name-is, you are talking to me. I don’t know why, but you are. A mile a minute,” she added in English.

  “Of course. My name is Marcel Duboise. What did you say, ‘A mile a meeneete’?”

  “Too fast. My French is not that good.”

  “Yes. Of course. Forgive me.” More slowly, he asked, “Is this better?”

  “Much better. Now I am sure you have mistaken me for someone else.”

  “Oh, no. No. Impossible. I could not.”

  She sighed and began to turn away.

  “Please, one moment. I could not mistake you for anyone else because I have never seen you before.”

  “Then what on earth—?”

  “I am trying to make your acquaintance,” he said desperately. “Believe me, I do not make a habit of this kind of thing. I have never done it before. For ten minutes I stood there watching you eat your lunch. Then I took the plunge.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barbara said.

  “If I try to explain, I will only sound more insane, and I’m not insane. I mean, no more than the next man. One dreams for years about a woman, and then one sees her? Well, what is one to do?”

  In spite of herself, Barbara began to laugh. He appeared to be so absolutely ingenuous that for the life of her she could not be rude or coldly unapproachable.

  “Only one terrible thing occurs to me,” he added.

  “Oh? Yes, what terrible thing?”

  “That you are happily married.”

  She hesitated and then replied, “Neither happily nor unhappily. I’m not married.”

  “God be praised. Now, please, please, I introduced myself before. But now more formally. My name is Marcel Duboise. I am unmarried, twenty-nine years old. I was born in Toulouse, which accounts for my accent. I work for the newspaper Le Monde in a most shameful way. You see, I hold nothing back. I write a daily column about food and restaurants, and the only redemption in my work is that I am the substitute play critic. Once, twice a week, if I am lucky, I am allowed to review a play. Also films, but again as a substitute. One time, the film critic was sick for a month. That was glorious.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Barbara said, for want of anything else to say.

  “Then you find me interesting. Good. Please tell me your name.”

  She thought about it for a while. He stood there, hopeful, earnest, not a very good-looking man, but with an undeniable charm and with a boyish openness and vulnerability that she simply did not believe could be assumed.

  “My name is Barbara Lavette,” she said at last.

  “But that is a French name. You are not French?”

  “My grandfather came from Marseille. He was part French and part Italian.”

  “Of course. The wonderful thing about Americans—they are always from somewhere else.”

  She was laughing again. Common sense said to her, You do not let yourself get picked up on the street in Paris by a strange man. On the other hand, strange men do not bother to pick up a woman who wears no make-up, a brown woolen suit over a beige cashmere sweater, not to mention scuffed ghillies with heels only three-quarters of an inch high. She was also lonely and homesick, and fancied the smell of the April air to be like the salty scent of the sea on a breezy day on Russian Hill.

  Sensing her mood and hesitation, Marcel Duboise said, “Mademoiselle, what harm will it do if I walk with you and we talk? If you tire of me, I will go. Surely, on the Champs-Élysées, on an April afternoon, nothing unpleasant can happen?”

  “But you don’t even know where I am going.”

  “That’s where I am going. There is nothing in the world more important.” A half-hour later, he was telling her the story of his grandmother, who had written her first novel—and had it published—at the age of seventy-two. “Very risqué, very risqué indeed.”

  Barbara realized how little she had laughed in the past three years.

  “But of course, you are serious,” he said. “There is your charm. Myself, I am a fool. So my family regards me. So the world regards me.”

  “You are certainly not a fool, and as for myself, you know nothing about me. Oh, I wish my French were not so wretched.”

  “Your French is very correct, and your accent is absolutely delightful.”

 
“Thank you. But I really must go.”

  “Where? You see, you are in flight because we were not properly introduced. If an aunt of yours said, ‘This is Marcel Duboise, a proper gentlemen,’ then the whole thing would be so simple.”

  “But my aunt is three thousand miles away, so it is impossible.”

  “Miles, yes. What is that in kilometers? Oh, devil take it!” They were at the corner of the Avenue Victor-Hugo now, and Duboise pointed to a sidewalk cafe. “We sit down there for one moment. I buy you a small drink. Vichy water, tea. I accept the fact that I must be neutral and harmless.”

  The proprietor greeted him by name. “You see, I am not a nameless thug,” he reassured her.

  “All right.” She dropped into a chair. “You are Marcel Duboise. I am Barbara Lavette. We have met. It is absolutely formal now. For a half-hour, you have been introducing yourself to me.”

  “And you have not driven me off.”

  “True. Could I have a beer?”

  He ordered two beers and stared at her in delight.

  “Monsieur, you must not stare at me like that.”

  “But certainly. Forgive me. I have told you who I am, what I do, what my father did, what my grandfather did. You have told me nothing.”

  “How could I? Do you always talk nonstop?”

  “Oh, no. Certainly not. I was fighting time and tradition. I was talking for my life—really, truly. Now tell me about yourself, Barbara Lavette.”

  “You are rather nice—”

  “Thank you. Bless you.”

  “And I am entirely able to take care of myself. But when a stranger tries to pick you up in Paris—”

  “Not to pick you up. Only to keep you from walking out of his life.”

  “That’s just it. Would I select a man and accost him on the street because I was attracted by his face? It stinks a bit, doesn’t it? That’s an American expression,” she explained. “It doesn’t work when I put it in French.”

  “I get it. My face? Never. But it wasn’t only your face, but yourself, all of you.”

  “And still you know nothing about me.”

  “Not so. It’s true, you have told me nothing. But just wait. The suit is Molyneux? Am I right?”