by Howard Fast
“Not my fault, mother. You’ve been so wrapped up in the bridge. How did it go today?”
“You don’t want to know about the tears?”
It embarrassed him. “I don’t want to pry.”
“I wish you would pry. I wish we both could pry at each other enough to break through. Well, I was crying. Today, just before the ceremonies began, Mr. Strauss came to me—”
“Mr. Strauss?”
“You don’t know, do you, Tom? The name doesn’t even ring a bell.”
“That’s not fair, mother. He had something to do with the bridge.”
“A little. He and Clifford Paine built the bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge that we dedicated today. I first met him six years ago—”
Tom half-rose. “Mother,” he said, “it’s very late.”
“No. I’m in a very singular mood, Thomas. I wish you would just sit there and listen to me. I intend to talk to my son, perhaps because I have no one else to talk to. So if you will—please.”
“If you wish.”
“I do. It’s very late, but I am not a bit tired. I want to talk about Joe Strauss, a small, not terribly impressive, Jewish man. A least I think he’s Jewish. Perhaps not. When I was your age, I had all the normal—no, not entirely normal—prejudices against Jews. Your father’s partner, Mark Levy, was Jewish, and I could barely tolerate him. So you see, I have a very clear understanding of what growing up rich on Nob Hill does to one. It happens quickly. My grandfather panned gold. My father was Thomas Seldon—”
“You’re going to lecture me again,” Tom said.
“Again? No. I think this is the first time.”
“Have it your way.”
“I intend to, this once. You see, there never would have been a bridge without Joe Strauss. It was his demonic compulsion. Everyone said that it was impossible—oh, mostly the geologists. They knew it was impossible. But Joe decided to build the bridge or die in the attempt, and I think he did both.”
“He died?”
“No, my dear. Please don’t ask me to explain. But, you see, once he had fought it all through—the legalities, the politics, the plans, the concepts—once he did all of that, he still required the money, and there all the wise and practical people decided that they had him stopped cold. He needed twenty-seven million dollars. Six years ago, he walked into my office at the bank and introduced himself. Oh, I knew who he was, but we had never met. He told me that he was putting out a bond issue. The banks had laughed him out of their offices until he went to Giannini. Giannini didn’t laugh. He told Joe that his bank, the Bank of America, would take the bonds. But there was still an overage, some six million. So Joe Strauss came to me. I asked him why, and he said, ‘You’re a woman, Mrs. Lavette. You know about men, the kind of men who remain children and dream the dreams the kids dream.’ Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly.”
“That was a damn strange thing for him to say.”
“Not really. He knew about your father, and I did something to your father once that he never hated me for, so perhaps I knew less about men than Mr. Strauss thought. Anyway, I took the bonds, and I bullied my board of directors into accepting my position. That was how I came to know Joe, and today the bridge was finished and opened and dedicated, all nine thousand feet of it, all twenty-seven thousand strands of wire—and that’s why I was crying. Now, please go to bed.”
Tom started to say something, to tell her that he had come into her room to talk about his job and money. Then he shook his head and sighed. “All right. Good night, Mother.” He walked over to her and kissed her dutifully, then he left the room, and Jean sat there, staring at the door, disliking herself for being obtuse and unreasonable with him.
Lately, it was getting to be a habit for her to dislike herself. Tom was no worse, perhaps a little better, than most of the young men in his set. He tended to his work at the bank as an assistant vice president in charge of loans, and in view of her own obsession with the building of the bridge, it was quite natural that he should block out Strauss’s name, natural even if it were simply a pretense to irritate her. She irritated him, and she certainly irritated her husband, John Whittier. Why on earth she should have started out, a few minutes before, to tell Tom of all people what Joe Strauss had said to her before the ceremony, she simply did not know. Of course, Strauss was in an unusual condition, keyed up, filled with the wonder of the miracle that they had wrought there in San Francisco, yet depressed too. He took her hand in both of his and said, “Dear Jean, I will tell you what it’s like today, the way it must feel to a man who knows you and loves you—when the love is returned. So the bridge is built and done. There’s no other way I can say it.”
Her husband overheard this, and Whittier said to her afterward, “Now what the devil did he mean by that? Is the silly ass in love with you? Or have you—”
He stopped short. She was staring at the bridge, at the great, incredible red-orange monster of steel and wire, as delicate and graceful as a glowing spider’s web in the sunshine, so proper and immediate a signature for this strange people who had settled the Pacific edge and, oblivious to desert and earthquake, build there the one American city that was like a dream. She was staring at it, a part of it until Whittier spoke, and then she turned and glanced at him as if she had never seen him before.
And now she wept. Her tears were her own. She had never shared them before, and it provoked her to have to share them with her son. She felt very strongly that if you are alone in the world, utterly, totally alone, you use that loneliness as your comfort and your strength.
***
Barbara gave a party for Marcel’s friends. She felt that since neither of them had any family available, friends were the next best thing, and the occasion, though unannounced, would be to celebrate the fact that someday, in the distant or not too distant future, they would be married. Two of her own friends, the only close friends she had in Paris, were included: Susan Clark, a Philadelphia girl who was a student at the Sorbonne, and Betty Greenberg, a junior correspondent for the New York Times. Marcel invited his three best friends, Jean Brissard and Maurice Jouvelle, both of them staff writers on Le Monde, and Claude Limoget and his wife, Camille. Limoget, Marcel explained, was a reporter for Humanité, the Communist Party daily, which meant that sooner or later the evening would explode into a wild argument, but then, as he said, “What else makes a good evening?”
“Food, for one thing, and I’m a rotten cook. But this Claude Limoget, he’s a real, live communist, in the flesh?”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve never met one.”
“After all you told me about the strike in San Francisco? What about that man who was killed, Dominick Salone?”
“I never asked him. You don’t ask anyone in the States.”
“Why? It’s not Germany.”
“We’ll go into that another time. Meanwhile, what ever am I to cook? I can’t cook for Frenchmen. It would be grotesque.”
“We’ll do it together.”
“Marcel,” she exclaimed in delight, “can you cook?”
“This and that. Not really. But I do know how to prepare a cassoulet, a huge pot of beans and sausage and pork. That’s all we need—and good bread and good wine.”
The cassoulet turned out to be delicious. The fresh, golden spears of bread were like no other bread in the world, and the inexpensive table wine was as good as any Barbara had ever tasted. Marcel’s friends were charming, full of praise for everything—the apartment, the food, and the three “absolutely delightful” American girls. They were all in their late twenties: Brissard stout, jolly, a sort of French G. K. Chesterton in appearance, at least to Barbara; Marcel had described him as Balzacian. Jouvelle and Limoget were small and slender and filled with energy, and Camille Limoget was petite and pretty, causing Barbara to feel oversized and gross. Thank heavens, she told herself
, that Marcel was taller than she. The two American girls were both in the five-foot-two or -three range, attractive and unconcerned over their execrable French. Barbara rarely gave much thought to her height—she had grown up in a city where tall women were not uncommon—but now she whispered to Marcel that she felt utterly grotesque. He in turn assured her that she was the loveliest and most desirable grotesque in the city of Paris.
They ate the food and drank the wine and talked at first about America, San Francisco, Roosevelt, the New Deal, the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, the CIO, and the ravings of Father Coughlin. Barbara answered questions when they were put to her, but otherwise she listened in silence. She was amazed at their knowledge of what went on in her own country. They were all newspapermen, but still and all, they were far better informed than she was. Also, it was the first time in her life that she had ever been at a dinner party where the discussion was totally political. Not even at college had anything like this ever taken place, and she found herself concentrating fiercely to follow their rapid French.
Then the conversation turned to Spain and the Spanish Civil War, which had been going on for almost a year now. Camille Limoget had a brother in the French Battalion of the Internationals, fighting on the Republican side and against Franco, and she spoke bitterly of the embargo of munitions.
“I put Roosevelt with Hitler,” she said. “One is no worse than the other.”
“Why not with Hitler and Stalin?” Brissard said lightly.
“Of course, of course,” Claude Limoget said sarcastically. “What is the difference? Only that Hitler fights on the side of Franco and Stalin for the Republic. But how can that make any difference?”
“They are both practicing, testing arms, testing airplanes. You are going to tell me that Stalin gives two damns for the Republic? Each has theories. They work them out in Spain.”
Until now, Barbara had sat in silence. She started to say something, but Limoget broke in with, “Ah, that is splendid! How I love a cynic. He is absolved from responsibility. A plague on both your houses. Isn’t that Mr. Roosevelt’s phrase?”
“If you mean—” Barbara began.
“What I love,” said Jouvelle, “is the way you cannot be wrong. You cannot be open to argument. No discussion. When Zinoviev and Kamenev were beaten and tortured into submission and forced to confess and then executed like dogs, you knew. Oh, yes, you knew they were guilty. Of what? But you knew they were guilty, even before they knew it themselves.”
“Who were Zinoviev and Kamenev?” Barbara whispered to Marcel.
“Two loyal old Bolsheviks. Stalin accused them of treason and executed them.”
“Tell her the whole story,” Camille snapped.
“That would take all evening. How many were there—sixteen in the first trial, seventeen this past January, Marshal Tukhachevski and his whole general staff—it is simply too dismal.”
“Absolutely,” Limoget agreed. “Dismal. You see,” he said to Barbara, “this never angers me. I don’t hear Marcel. I hear Le Monde. Who speaks? The whore or the pimp? The driver or the horse?”
Barbara expected Marcel and his two friends to react in rage, but instead they exploded with laughter. Evidently they had been through all this before.
“You were trying to say something before,” Marcel said to her. “Talk quickly, or you’ll never get a word in here.”
“I can’t in French, truly,” she told them. “Only you were blaming Roosevelt for the embargo. It was an act of Congress, you know.”
To her amazement, all four of them turned on her. Only Marcel forbore to attack.
“Your Congress!”
“Running dogs of the bourgeoisie!”
“Running dogs of Roosevelt!”
“Who is the lead dog of the bourgeoisie!”
“You abuse the child. The child is innocent.”
Through all this, Betty Greenburg and Susan Clark had sat as silent as Barbara. Now, Betty came to her defense, saying, “You really don’t know all that much about the States. It was a joint resolution of Congress on January sixth. I am sure that if Mr. Roosevelt had made the decision—”
“He did!” Limoget snapped. “You Americans are children when it comes to politics. He leads your Congress by the nose.”
“It hurts me to agree with Claude,” Jouvelle said placatingly. “But, mademoiselle, it is a fact. Roosevelt could have blocked that resolution. He did not. Thereby, he practically condemns the Spanish Republic to death. Where will they find arms? Franco gets all he needs from Hitler and Mussolini.”
“Then why not from Russia?” Susan Clark demanded.
“Because Stalin is very careful about offending Hitler,” Marcel said.
“Nonsense! Everything the Republic gets is from Russia.”
“But your own Leon Blum is a socialist,” Barbara protested. “It’s easy to blame Roosevelt three thousand miles away, but why does Blum do nothing?”
“Why indeed?”
“Because a French socialist,” snapped Camille Limoget, “is a French pig. No difference. Frauds, cheats, liars—”
“Oh, come on, come on,” Jouvelle said.
It continued. It went on and on until midnight. They consumed every drop of wine, and never paused from talking, shouting, waving their arms, and insulting each other. After the first exchange, Barbara and the two other American women retreated into silence; at last, when everyone had left, Barbara sighed in relief and said, “Thank heavens. No blood spilled.”
“But they are dear friends,” Marcel protested.
“And they always do that?”
“When you have communists, a socialist government, a war in Spain, Hitler, Mussolini—oh, yes, they argue. I suppose it might be thought of as a sort of intellectual exercise.”
“I’ve never heard anything like it before.”
“Then, my darling Barbara, you’ve been in the company of dullards.”
“Perhaps. But the things you say to each other—”
“Better said than unsaid. You know, you Yankees pretend to be so different from the British, but you share their fear of passion. It is the same word in English as in French.”
Barbara nodded.
“Only I think it goes further in our language. Did it ever occur to you, my dear Barbara, that our whole world is coming to an end?”
“You are being very serious, and I have to think about that. Mostly, you are only serious when you make love to me.”
“And you refuse to be serious.”
“It’s so late. And do you know, Marcel, in spite of all the sound and fury of your friends, I had a wonderful evening, and since Jouvelle and Brissard took the girls home—well, who knows, I may have done my good deed for the day. And it’s impossible for me to consider that the world is coming to an end. I’m much too pleased with you.”
“Not the world. That goes on. Our world. I cannot understand communists, I cannot agree with them, but damn it, they see what is happening in Spain, and if the lights go out in Spain, as in Germany and Italy—”
“But not tonight. Tonight, only the lights in this apartment. After which—”
“For a good, innocent American heiress, you have the strangest single-track mind.”
“One of these days,” Barbara decided, “we will examine that entire question. Probably we will discover that the white Protestant American schoolgirl has the most explosively repressed sexual urge of anyone on earth. And in French, that is a mouthful for me. But not tonight. Tonight, let’s just curl up in bed and let the world take care of itself.”
***
Alex Hargasey was fascinated with Dan Lavette and with the yacht that Dan was building for him. On Dan’s part, he had never before come in contact with this particular type of man-child-idiot-artist, all of which described Hargasey and none of which described him adequately. He appeared to kn
ow his business of making films, but emotionally he was infantile. At the age of fifty years, he was alternately enraged, gentle, wild, or demonic. He was paid enormous fees, tolerated, kowtowed to, and he in turn abased himself before the stars in his film. He would not be crossed. When he demanded Dan’s presence, Dan had to appear or endure his threats to break his contract for the yacht, and he in turn spent hours at the shipyard, watching the work in progress, asking endless questions.
At first indignant, angry, ready to tell him to go to the devil and take his damn contract with him, Dan came to realize that Hargasey and the people around him lived in a world totally separated from reality. Their work was the substance of dreams. They admitted no other responsibility than that to the film they were making, and like overindulged children of overindulgent parents, they simply accepted the fact that rules contrived for others did not apply to them.
When Hargasey informed Dan that he was giving a party at his home to celebrate the completion of his sea film—a wrap party, he called it—the information included a royal summons. Dan was to appear, with his wife, if he had a wife and desired to bring her, without her if he so desired—there would be single girls in plenty—or with anyone else he cared to bring. Informed of this, May Ling’s immediate reaction was, “No, I can’t go, Danny. You go without me.”
“Why, can’t you go? My word, honey, I would think that just out of curiosity you’d want to. He tells me that Garbo will be there, and Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich and a lot of other names that I can’t even remember—and it’s the kind of thing we’d never get to see if not for that crazy yacht of his. Come on, come with me.”
“Danny, darling, how can I go? I’m a middle-aged librarian, a very plain Chinese lady.”
“Like hell you are!”
“I have nothing to wear. Danny, we haven’t been to a party in years.”
“Then it’s high time, isn’t it? Whatever you say about Hargasey, he’s ended our condition of being broke. He’s spending money on that yacht like it’s going out of style. So just you go out and buy any dress you think is right for it.”
