Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  She couldn’t answer it. A lump was forming in her throat, her heart, her mind.

  “What were your impressions of Germany?”

  “Were you expelled, Miss Lavette?”

  “Did you undergo torture?”

  “What can you tell us of the methods of the Gestapo—from personal experience?”

  She pushed through them and left the room. The action was so unexpected that no one tried to stop her, and then she was out in the corridor with Bradley running after her.

  “You can’t do this, Barbara! For Christ’s sake, you can’t just walk out of a press conference like that!”

  “I did it.”

  “Don’t you have one lousy shred of consideration for me?”

  She stopped suddenly and turned to face him. “Frank, I can’t even answer the questions I ask myself, much less those others ask me. Do you know what Germany is? Germany is the final demented horror of what men have created. Do you know what death is, Frank? Do you know what agony is? Have you ever been closer to death than a funeral parlor?”

  The reporters had flowed into the hallway, and they stood in a cluster, staring at her. Then the elevator door opened. Barbara bolted into the elevator, and the door closed behind her. A week later, back in Los Angeles at long last, Bradley wrote to her: “What a performance! Did you plan it? And a day later, Germany and Russia sign the pact. I am enclosing the clippings. How do you like that: ‘The final demented horror of what men have created—Barbara Lavette.’ On the front page of the New York Times. My dear Barbara, even when you leap blindly off the curb, you manage to step squarely into a bed of roses. I offer my most humble apologies for unwarrented anger, and in return I offer you any assignment you desire. Robinson has increased his offer to an advance of fifteen thousand and a guarantee of as much in advertising. Let him publish the book, I beg you.”

  Barbara tore the letter into shreds. She never communicated with Frank Bradley after that and returned his letters unopened. She had gone to San Francisco, spent a day with her mother—Tom and John were in Washington—and then to Los Angeles. On her second day in Dan’s house, awakening from a dream of horror, she sat in bed, sobbing uncontrollably until dawn brushed the darkness away.

  May Ling came into her room. “Barbara?”

  “I’m all right.”

  May Ling went over to her and took her in her arms. “Of course you are. Of course.”

  “Just a bad dream and a miserable night. I couldn’t fall asleep again.”

  “I know such nights,” May Ling said gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I can’t.”

  “I understand. Barbara dear, I’ve never interfered or advised you. If I do so now, will you consider it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not just to be rid of me at this moment. Do you promise?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “Very well,” said May Ling, almost primly. “Take a cold shower, get out your typewriter, and begin to put it all down on paper. Your own way.”

  “Oh, May Ling,” Barbara said woefully, “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Only begin, and things will fall into place.”

  That morning she began the book. The little house in Westwood was a haven of peace. She was fussed over, coddled, and adored in a way that she had never truly experienced before. So-toy, barred from other communication, expressed her affection in the only way she could—in an endless stream of exotic Chinese dishes. During the day Barbara wrote, rewrote, corrected, and then destroyed what she had written in hopeless exasperation. But, bit by bit, the past five years came into focus. In the evenings, she sat in the living room with her father and May Ling and So-toy, reading for the most part, sometimes listening to the radio or to records. She had no dates, nor any desire for them; she was totally fixated on the manuscript she was writing.

  The weekends when Joe was home were the best part of it. He and Barbara became very close during that time. He was patient, kind, gentle; he never pried and never invaded her privacy, and perhaps because of that she talked to him as she had not talked to anyone else. They had found a bit of beach at Malibu that seemed to be theirs entirely, cupped between two jutting piles of rock, and always deserted. In Southern California, September is the best month for swimming; the water is at its warmest, the days hot and still long in the aftermath of the summer. They would pack a picnic lunch, swim, eat, and then lie in the sun, sometimes in silence, sometimes talking. For the first time, Barbara was able to talk about Marcel, freely, openly. Strangely, this half-Chinese half brother, three years younger, but older in so many ways, had become dearer to her than any other person in the world.

  One day, when the two of them were together on the beach, she asked him, “Were you ever in love, Joe?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s the part of me that’s missing, and I feel such guilt.”

  “Guilt? But why guilt?”

  “Because I long to be in love even more than I long for Marcel.”

  “Marcel’s dead, Bobby. You can be in love again.”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I doubt it. I was so alive with him. Everything had a golden glow. I remember the sunsets in Paris, as if the whole city were painted in gold. And then when I went back there, after Germany, the city was dead and colorless. I was alive for a little while, and it was the most wonderful thing.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?” she asked, smiling suddenly, prodding him. “Who is she? Tell me, Joe.”

  “It’s dumb.”

  “Being in love?”

  “Being in love with a fourteen-year-old kid. Being so much in love with her that I don’t think of anything else.”

  “I don’t believe you. A fourteen-year-old kid? Where did you find her?”

  “At Higate. She’s Jake Levy’s daughter, Sally. Why do you think I go there?”

  “I couldn’t imagine. But then, this whole thing is crazy, Joe. That place has a hold on our lives. You know how Bernie Cohen saved Marcel’s life. Years ago, when he was just a kid, there was some kind of rabbi in San Francisco who got the Levys into the business of sacramental wine, and Bernie Cohen used to drive him to Higate. Then he got a job with the Levys and worked there for a while. And now you tell me that you’re in love with Clair’s daughter.”

  “That’s pretty dumb, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, no, no. I think it’s absolutely wonderful. I told you that I was with the Levys in France. They’re great. I like them. But what is she like? Sally, I mean.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know how to describe her. In some ways she’s terribly bright and wise and knowing, and in other ways she’s like a crazy kid. She’s tall and skinny and freckled, and she thinks she’s ugly but she’s not. She looks something like her mother, but she’s not redheaded. Her hair’s more the color of dirty straw.”

  Barbara burst into laughter. “Dirty straw! Joe, that’s the worst description of a woman’s hair I ever heard.”

  “Well, she’s not exactly a woman. I don’t know what she is, and I don’t even know why I’ve got this crush on her, because she’s absolutely crazy. She wants to go to bed with me. Thank God I’m here and she’s up there in Napa Valley. Can you imagine if I went to bed with her and got her pregnant, and she just turned fourteen?”

  “It’s done.” Barbara couldn’t stop laughing. It was years since she had laughed like this. “Oh, Joey, darling, I’m not laughing at you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m sure.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was that funny if you had her around you for a whole summer.”

  “But you said you’re in love with her.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. It was her idea. It started with her a year ago, the first time I was
there. She kept tagging around after me. There’s something about her.”

  “There must be.”

  “Anyway, she says that if I marry anyone else, she’ll kill me and whomever I marry. How would you like to have something like that on your back?”

  “If you stay in love with her—do you think she means it? She can’t.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “No, I don’t.” Barbara began to laugh again.

  “You don’t take it very seriously.”

  “I do. I do. But it’s very funny. And of course that’s why you go up there.”

  “Not entirely. I love the place.”

  Barbara had been watching a gull taking dainty steps along the lacy edge of the water. She turned to look at Joe now, his dark eyes following a design he was tracing on the sand.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You were never there?”

  “I used to ride near Sonoma. I once had a date with a boy called Clark Addison. Ugh!” She began to laugh again. “He was about five foot two. Came up to my shoulder. He had his father’s Cadillac, and we drove up into the Napa Valley. He tried to rape me, and I grabbed him very tightly by both wrists, and do you know, I fractured one of his wrists. He had fragile bones. Oh, heavens, the things one remembers! That poor boy. His wrist was in a cast for weeks.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eighteen, I think. But I was frightfully oversized. I still am. No, I never saw this Higate place. What is it like?”

  “You know the way the valley is, the way the land slopes down and almost makes a V in the middle. Higate’s on the left as you drive north on Highway Twenty-nine. Near Spring Mountain. I sometimes think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.”

  Anyplace is when you’re in love, Barbara thought.

  “There are two big old stone buildings. They’re built of the native fieldstone, with high, pointed, raftered roofs, and they’re covered with ivy, and they look like they’ve been there forever. One is the house, and the other is the original winery, and I guess they were both built in the eighteen nineties. Then there’s another stone house, farther up the hill, built into the hillside. There are three wooden buildings that Jake added to the place. The vineyards roll up from the house over the hills, and from where the house is, you can look down the whole length of the valley. There’s something about it that gets into you, like making wine is the key to some great secret of life. It’s not like being a wino or something, not drinking the wine. It’s making it that’s the thing, and Clair says that all wine makers are a little crazy—but I guess it’s the way they all are, I mean Clair and Jake and the kids, Sally and her brothers. Josh is fifteen, and Adam is seventeen, and I don’t know, but I have a good feeling when I’m there, and I suppose that if I had my own way, I’d rather be a wine maker than anything else in the world.”

  “Why don’t you?” Barbara asked him.

  “Come on. If I ever gave up medicine, it would break Pop’s heart.”

  “Hearts don’t break that easily.”

  “No. It’s impossible.”

  ***

  When dawn broke, on the first day of September in 1939, the sound Spain heard the year before changed the world. It was the roaring, grinding noise of Adolf Hitler’s panzer divisions driving across the Polish border, the sound of the Stuka dive bombers, of the exploding bombs, the sound of a bullet as it penetrates human flesh, the sound of walls collapsing, of roofs falling in, the sound of a child screaming in terror and pain.

  “But I am wrongly judged,” Hitler pleaded to the world, “if my love of peace and my patience are mistaken for weakness.”

  Two days later, Great Britain and France were at war with Germany, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, was reading a letter from Albert Einstein that said, “In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”

  On September 17, Soviet armies marched into Poland. On September 28, Germany and Russia divided the once-sovereign nation of Poland between them, and on the fifth of October 1939, the last regular armed resistance in Poland ceased.

  On the eighth of October, Admiral Land dictated a memorandum on West Coast shipbuilding potential, and in the course of it he commented on the Lavette Shipyard on Terminal Island. “It would appear,” he said, “that here we have one of the largest and most impressive potentials on the West Coast. It requires expansion and expertise, and much will depend on the will toward cooperation of its owner and manager, Daniel Lavette. Properly organized and managed and creatively expanded, the Lavette Shipyard should be capable of turning out between twenty and thirty merchant vessels a year.”

  ***

  Lunching at the California Club in San Francisco, in the early part of November, Tom Lavette felt more than ever the strength of the ties binding him and John Whittier to each other. However, his assessment of Whittier was slowly changing; almost without an articulated interior decision on his part, Tom had come to think of Whittier, not as a person who was using him, but as someone he would use to his own purposes, purposes still rather amorphous. The more time he spent with Whittier, the more conscious he became of the man’s various weaknesses, his pettiness, and his self-indulgence. The very fact that, at age fifty-one he had transferred so many of his ambitions to Tom proclaimed that he had to a large extent surrendered. He was without subtlety. Tom knew that he was being used because Whittier was clumsy in his usage of the younger man, and Tom was quite content with the relationship. He felt an increasing advantage over Whittier, but he was in no hurry to express it.

  On this day Whittier bluntly, almost petulantly, informed Tom that his mother had asked for a divorce. Tom made no comment. He watched Whittier thoughtfully and waited.

  “I’ve been married to your mother almost seven years. I often feel that I am very much your own father, Thomas. I feel that we have a strong relationship.”

  “How do you feel about a divorce?” Tom asked.

  “It should make no difference to our own relationship.”

  “Then you won’t contest it?”

  “To what end? Your mother is a headstrong woman. Certainly you know that.”

  “I like you, John. I think we are good for each other.” He had never taken that tone with Whittier before, and now the older man studied him curiously.

  “It’s nothing I enjoy. It’s scandal, and I despise scandal.”

  “Not today, I think. I mean, it’s not considered scandalous today, John. I don’t want to pry, but did you try to talk her out of it?”

  “I have you to consider, Thomas.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You should. She influences Barbara. And without Barbara’s stock to vote, our whole plan falls through. By the way, have you seen Barbara?”

  “No.”

  Whittier made no attempt to disguise his annoyance. “She’s been away five years and you make no attempt to see her.”

  “We were in Washington when she returned.”

  “And that was three months ago.”

  “She’s in Los Angeles with my father,” Tom said. “Are you suggesting I go to see her there?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It’s ten years since I’ve seen my father. I thought you’d understand that, John. I can’t just walk in there, and I don’t want to.”

  “I never particularly liked
Dan Lavette,” Whittier said, “but I saw no reason to hate him.”

  “You’re not his son.”

  “That’s so. Anyway, I spoke to Sam Goldberg. You know he’s Barbara’s lawyer. We agreed to a meeting in December, for the transfer of the stock from the trusteeship to both of you. I hope you don’t feel I talked out of turn?”

  “No, not at all.”

  They went on with their lunch. Tom realized that Whittier was nervous, uneasy. He only toyed with his food. He started the meal with an old fashioned, and now he ordered a second one. It had never occurred to Tom to speculate on whether or not Whittier had any deep feelings for Jean. His involvement was with himself, not with others; but now he wondered whether Whittier was not taking the whole matter of the divorce more to heart than he would have guessed. After all, Jean was rejecting him. That was not easy for a man to accept, especially a man like Whittier.

  “Tom,” Whittier said, finally breaking the silence, ‘‘you know there’s no way for us to stay out of this war.”

  It was apropos of what, Tom wondered. His own thoughts were far away.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I was talking to Senator Lancor the other day. He’s on the armed services committee and very close to the navy. We can get you a commission, nothing very fancy, lieutenant junior grade, and then an assignment to my shipping line. They’ll want a man of their own with us, and going in now, so early in the game, will look damn good on your record.”

  “What about training?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know all the details, but I think the understanding would be that you’re a civilian in uniform. That doesn’t change your status or anything for the record. It just places you in a damned good position.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Tom said, aware that a very real if subtle change in their relationship had already taken place.

  ***

  Clair Levy frequently reflected on the fact that life had been extraordinarily good to her. Her husband, Jake, less given to abstractions, reversed her conclusion and pointed out that she was good to life. She was a life giver, not a taker. Life flowed from her strong, competent, life-giving hands. If a grapevine, a dog, or a child were sick, she could cure it. She had three children. The two boys, Adam, aged seventeen, and Joshua, aged fifteen, were like their father in every way except for their flaming red hair. They were large, rather stolid and serious young men, Adam away at Berkeley for his first year of college, Joshua a junior at the local high school. They had grown up in the Napa Valley in a free, easygoing sort of way, barefoot through the summer months, working at the winery when they were old enough, immersed in the half-mystical process of the vine, the grape, and the vats, never questioning the strange fact that to wine makers, the process, more than the making of a drink, was a way of life that approached a religion. They went to a school where at least half of their fellow students lived in wineries. The valley was a world unto itself, a world they accepted without undue resentment or questioning.