Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  After the funeral, they gathered at Goldberg’s house. Barbara had arranged with Mrs. Jones for food to be cooked and ready for guests, so they all crowded into the old Victorian parlor, with its green plush furniture and its lonely mementos of Goldberg’s life. It was a strange afternoon and evening for Barbara, meeting the Levys again for the first time since they had been together so long ago in Paris, being clutched in the arms of Sarah Levy, weeping for herself and her dead husband, and seeing in the flesh the Stephan Cassala she had heard about for so many years. Before he died, Sam Goldberg had suggested to Barbara that Stephan Cassala would be an excellent choice for the Lavette Foundation’s board of directors. “You don’t know the Cassalas, Barbara,” he said to her, “but take my word for it, they are as close as your own flesh and blood.”

  She had to struggle with herself to comprehend it, to equate her own upbringing with the old Italian woman, a shapeless lump in a black, floor-length dress, whom her father had kissed so tenderly and to whom he was now talking in his very poor Italian. Stephan Cassala was a tall, very thin, and rather good-looking man in his mid-forties. He had a long, thin nose, a mustache, and sad, dark eyes. May Ling had told Barbara the story of his tragic romance, if it could be called that, with Martha Levy, who had died in an auto crash years ago. It was so very strange to meet people in the flesh whom one had known out of stories, and when finally she could take him aside and talk to him, she found Cassala gentle and charming.

  “I know this isn’t the time or the place, Mr. Cassala, but without Sam to hold my hand, the world is a very complex thing. Did he speak to you about the fund we set up, the Lavette Foundation, a very pompous name?”

  Cassala nodded. “And call me Steve, Barbara. I can’t very well call you Miss Lavette.”

  “Steve, yes. Then you know about it. If you can possibly find the time, I’d like to have you on our board.”

  “I’m very touched by that. Of course I’ll find the time.”

  They were like shadows, more memories of memories than actual living people. The Cassalas had once been very wealthy, as had the Levys, as had her father. Now she had asked Stephan Cassala to help supervise a fund of some fourteen million dollars. Was he poor or rich? He was a manager of a bank, but that in itself made no one very rich.

  Dan came over and put his arm around her. He wasn’t good with words. She would think of him saying, “Poor kid—just too much death.” But that was not the kind of a thing he would say.

  “Poor old Sam,” he said. “Funny thing, Bobby, I had two Jews for partners. Nice people; neither one of them ever did a lousy thing. Back then, there were four of us, me and Tony Cassala and Mark and Sam. I was the wild, crazy kid—and there was always one of the others to bail me out. Well, they’re gone. Mark’s father was a peddler. Drove a wagon clear across the country, selling gewgaws to the Indians and the sodbusters, then he came here and stopped. Sam’s father had a grocery or something in Sacramento. Tony was a stonemason. It was all so damn new, and now it’s old and gone away forever.” It was half non sequitur and half sense, and Barbara felt how much he was hurting inside. She took his arm from around her, squeezed it, and then led him into a corner.

  “Daddy,” she said gently, “we have to talk.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tom’s getting married. In two weeks.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Will you never see him or speak to him again? What sense does it make? Our lives are so short.”

  “Bobby, you’re young. You have all the time in the world.”

  “No one has, Daddy. I don’t find much sense or reason in life. The God they told me about in Grace Cathedral up there on Nob Hill is either a lunatic or a comedian, and I don’t have much rapport with either. The only thing I’ve found that makes any sense is love.”

  “That’s a good deal, isn’t it? Well, Tom is my son, but that’s purely genetic. I haven’t seen him in twelve years. I haven’t been invited to the wedding. My goodness, Bobby, can you see those egg-sucking, ass-licking Clawsons inviting May Ling to their daughter’s wedding? And what would Tom say to her? I know what you’re thinking. You’ll talk to Tom and arrange the whole thing. Well, it wouldn’t work. Tom’s a twenty-nine-year-old stranger, and I don’t know him very well. It’s not pride. Hell, I have nothing to be proud of. If he comes to me and says, ‘Lavette, I’d like to get to know you’—well, I’d like that. But I can’t go to him.”

  The following day, Dan and May Ling returned to Los Angeles. Sam Goldberg’s will had turned over his share of the shipyard to Dan. Everything else, except a cash bequest to his housekeeper, went to the Jewish Home for Orphaned Children, the only exception being a string of pearls that had belonged to his wife, which he left to Barbara.

  Tom’s wedding to Eloise Clawson took place on the twenty-first of June. They were married by Father Templeton, who had officiated at Seldon weddings and funerals for the past thirty-five years, and the ceremony took place at Grace Cathedral. The reception afterward was held at the Clawson home in Berkeley, where two great striped pavilions had been erected on the lawn. Jean wore a gown of patterned blue-green chiffon with a matching garden hat, and Barbara decided, with a sense of childish satisfaction, that her mother was the most attractive woman there, including the bride. “I couldn’t come to the funeral,” Jean said to Barbara. “I know that I should have. Do you know, I had come to like the old man a great deal, and he was utterly devoted to you, but I couldn’t come, not with your father and May Ling there.”

  “I can understand that, but why didn’t they at least invite Daddy to the wedding?”

  “The Clawsons!” Jean exclaimed, looking around at the assembled multitude under the striped pavilions. “My dear, they are the ultimate Philistines. Your father would have proper words for them. My own vocabulary is limited.”

  “He did.” Barbara laughed. “You are absolutely wonderful. The Clawsons are the most proper people in the world. And very rich.”

  “And the rich marry the richer. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. By the way, have you spoken to your brother?”

  “I kissed him.”

  “He found out that you had given away your birthright. He is absolutely furious.”

  “Then I shall avoid him,” Barbara decided.

  “It would seem to me,” Jean said, “that you are also avoiding the young single men present. Bobby, love, you have the pick of the Bay Area here, and they are swooning over you. You are twenty-seven years old, you know.”

  “Only too well. Mother, have you ever tried to talk to one of the pick of the Bay Area?”

  By the time the reception was over, Barbara had talked to a dozen of them. They crowded around her, first identifying the tall beautiful woman in beige crêpe de Chine, then, excited at the thought that this was the groom’s famous sister who had been arrested by the Gestapo and who had just inherited many millions of dollars, pleading their cases as best they could.

  “But, you see, I live in Los Angeles,” Barbara explained repeatedly.

  “But no one lives in Los Angeles. That’s impossible.”

  They were not original in their rejoinders, but Barbara felt fortified by their admiration. She said to Jean afterward, “It’s my fault, and I don’t like myself for it. They were very sweet and nice, but I don’t want anything close with them. I can’t, Mother. I’ve shifted worlds. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but it’s the only way I can explain it.”

  ***

  The date for the publication of Barbara’s novel, the final title being A Long Way from Home, was September 30, 1941. The news came in a letter from Fielding, her literary agent, who also informed her that the publishers would like to have a party on that date if she could come to New York. The final proofs of the book were waiting for her, along with the letter, when she returned to Los Angeles. She wrote to Fielding that she saw no reason why she should not come to New Y
ork in September; then she went over the proofs, beset with a growing feeling of lassitude and indifference. She felt choked in the tiny study in the house in Westwood. The wonderful sense of elation that had resulted from the acceptance of her manuscript was gone now. After the weeks in San Francisco, she felt isolated and bored. The notes she had put down as an outline for a second novel were suddenly inane and pointless, and she destroyed them one day in a fit of petulance. Why am I here and what is happening to me? she asked herself. Joe was gone, drafted, serving an internship in a naval hospital in San Diego. Dan was spending more and more nights at the shipyard, sleeping there. Barbara and May Ling faced each other alone in the evening, night after night, sharing a kind of lonely despair.

  It was May Ling who said to her one evening, “You can’t go on like this, Barbara. You’ve stopped your life. Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?”

  “I only know that I’m utterly miserable,” Barbara said. “It seems that I want no one and nothing, and I miss everyone and everything. My life is absolutely empty and pointless. I don’t like the men I meet; I can’t comprehend them. I can’t write. I can’t even want anything very much. And I have the sense of sitting alone in a world that has gone completely mad.”

  “I’m afraid the madness has only begun,” May Ling agreed. “Why don’t you go back to San Francisco? Stay with your mother until you go to New York.”

  “And leave you alone?”

  “Oh, Bobby, I’ll be all right. And you can do things there. The foundation is a wonderful thing. Make yourself take an interest in it. You can help people, and for the moment, that’s the best way to help yourself.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Barbara said.

  One day she drove out to Malibu and parked by a beach where the surfers were rolling in on the waves, standing, she told herself, like brown, mindless demigods on their boards. The world was so easy for some. She kicked off her shoes and sprawled on the sand to watch, and presently one of them, tall, handsome, marvelously muscled, blue eyes under a thatch of sunburned, straw-colored hair, walked over to where she sat and said, “Try it, sis. You might like it.”

  “No suit,” Barbara answered.

  “Out here, who cares?”

  “Force of habit,” Barbara said.

  “You’re a good-looking dame,” he said, sitting down beside her. “What’s your name?”

  “Barbara. What’s yours?”

  “Mike.”

  “What do you do, Mike?”

  “In the summer I surf.”

  “Just that?”

  “Sometimes I get laid. How about it? You and me, we could make sweet music.”

  Barbara laughed.

  “Hey, I figured you’d get mad, spit in my eye or something.”

  “Is that why you said it?”

  “Sort of.”

  “No, I’m not mad. How old are you, Mike?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Go on and surf. I’ll watch.”

  “You’re watching the best,” he said.

  She watched for a while, then she went back to her car and drove off. The next day, she said to May Ling, “I’m going to drive up to Higate, to the winery. And then I’ll stop by and visit with Jean in San Francisco. I hate to leave you like this, but I can’t sit still, and I can’t write. Tell Daddy not to worry. I’ll call from San Francisco.”

  ***

  With Europe at war, Eloise had agreed to a honeymoon on Cape Cod, and since she was afraid of air travel, they crossed the continent by rail. After the first few hours on the train, in spite of the luxury of a double-bedroom suite, Eloise developed a migraine headache, and when Tom tried to initiate his first lovemaking, she whimpered in agony, the pain being too great to suffer a scream. Tom, who had surrendered his virginity at the age of seventeen, and who had engaged in sex, either found or purchased, since then, had satisfied himself—insomuch as a man may—that his wife-to-be was a virgin, and he had zealously restrained himself from tampering with that virginity. He had his own concept of who Eloise really was, and he had not tried to test or reinforce that concept with any actual knowledge of his wife. Prior to their marriage, they had danced a great deal, gone riding a number of times, attended several dozen dinner parties, a number of beach parties, several picnics, and three Sunday mornings of worship at Grace Cathedral, but they had never actually had a conversation with each other. That is, they had never carried their dialogue to the point where each discovered something deep or genuine about the other.

  There were many hidden facets to Eloise’s personality more complex and interesting than her migraine headaches—some of which resulted in the migraines—but Tom had no idea of these things, just as he had no idea that to Eloise he was the totally fitting, proper, perfect knight in white armor that she had dreamed about ever since reading, as a child, Howard Pyle’s tales of the Knights of the Round Table. She had never been able to tell him that she considered him the handsomest man she had ever known, and that ever since their first date she had lived and created an imaginary inner life that he and she shared. He never knew that she kept a diary, which she called “Poictesme” after the mythical land of James Branch Cabell, whose novels she had read over and over ever since her teens, and that in this diary were put down her expectations ever since meeting Tom Lavette.

  On the other hand, Tom had never revealed any part of his own sexual fantasies. He had a deep-seated suspicion that he had never deflowered a virgin, although several girls he had known had insisted that such was the case, and Eloise’s virginity scored highly in his imaginings. He was determined to have intercourse with her their first night on the train. Eloise, her eyes tightly closed against the light, could manage no more than a whisper, and in those muted tones she attempted to convey to Tom what a severe migraine headache was like. “Every jolt of the train is agony,” she said to him. “Even the sound of my own voice hurts me.”

  “Well, God damn it, isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “I’ve taken aspirin and codeine, and I’m so sick, Tommy. I wish I could die.”

  Tom left her, went into the lounge car, ordered an old fashioned, and got into a conversation with a well-dressed, rather good-looking woman in her thirties who was sitting in the next chair. He bought her a drink and learned that she was a buyer for Krempel’s Department Store in Oakland. They each had two more drinks, and Tom went back to his compartment. Eloise was as he had left her, desiring neither food nor drink. Tom went to the dining car, and since there was an empty seat opposite the buyer from Krempel’s, they resumed their acquaintance. She was divorced. He said little about his own situation, except to explain his naval uniform with the information that he was an officer on leave. Since she was to leave the train at Omaha, he felt fairly secure. After dinner, they went to her compartment, had some more drinks, and then went to bed. There was no need on Tom’s part to seduce her; the buyer from Krempel’s had made the decision much earlier, utterly enthralled by this handsome, slender young man in uniform. Tom, driven by his feelings of frustration and rejection, performed dutifully and without joy, then he made his way back to his own compartment.

  Eloise’s headache persisted all the way to Chicago, and there, during the few hours of stopover between trains, it finally disappeared. Tom took her to lunch at the Pump Room, and sitting across the table from him, Eloise, with shining eyes, told him how much his patience and consideration meant to her.

  “I’ve been such a disappointment to you,” she said. “But I will make up for it, Tommy. I promise you.”

  “Not at all.” He was almost abject in his guilt, which Eloise translated into compassion.

  “When we came here,” Eloise said eagerly, “I saw how every woman in the room turned to look at you. I’m not a bit jealous, Tommy. I’m so proud. I took an oath last night that I would never again have a migraine—”

  “But you can
’t help it,” he said gallantly.

  “But I shall help it. It will be mind over matter—only trains are so dreadful. Anyway, I know how lucky I am. I had a chat with Mr. Whittier, and he assured me that I was marrying the man who would one day be governor of California.”

  “Did John say that?”

  “He did.”

  “Well, that’s a long way off. If ever,” he said modestly. “Anyway, you look very pretty.”

  “I suppose that the one good thing you can say about migraine is that when it stops, you just float away with good feeling. Do you like the dress? I feel silly in pink, but everyone says it’s becoming.”

  “It’s great.”

  But on the Twentieth Century Limited, going from Chicago to New York, Eloise’s migraine returned; and Tom brooded in the lounge car, smoking too many cigarettes and asking himself, How in hell did I ever get into this? and remembering Whittier’s warning to him, “For you, Tom, no divorce ever. Make up your mind about that at the very beginning.”

  ***

  Somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Barbara realized what she was going to do. It was like an idea planted long ago that had grown slowly, as if looking down for the first time in years, she had come to the notion of origin and what it meant, and instead of driving on to the Napa Valley, she stopped in San Francisco and went to her mother’s house on Russian Hill. Jean was delighted to see her. The gallery was growing, and Jean bubbled with enthusiasm. The Nolde had arrived, and a quick trip to New Mexico had enabled her to acquire a painting of a buffalo skull by O’Keeffe. “Which ordinarily I would not have, but this one—isn’t it splendid, Barbara?”