Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “I do indeed. I remember running with you.”

  They walked on in silence for a while. Downhill still had its pitfalls, and when she stumbled once, Dan grasped her arm and steadied her. She took courage from that and grasped his arm; the swell of his biceps under her fingers was good and comforting, and it was good to be close to him, to feel him against her. They could see the bay beneath them, with the fog rolling in, and they could hear the mournful hooting of the ships. The wonderful, woeful old sound brought a lump into Dan’s throat. He had been bereft of emotion for a long time; now it filled him and choked him. His voice was thick as he told Jean that he was due back at Terminal Island this same night.

  “But can you make it, Dan?”

  “The hell with it.”

  Gino embraced him. Gino had become an old man. “Hey, Danny, Danny, mio caro figlio, so long, so long.”

  “This is Jean,” Dan said.

  Gino bowed, said something to Dan in Italian, and then took them to their table.

  “What did he say?” Jean asked.

  “He said you’re a lovely woman.”

  “He doesn’t know who I am?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Dan ordered linguini, with olive oil and garlic, and after that a veal cutlet and salad. Jean said she’d have the same thing. A bottle of red wine. Gino brought the wine and poured it. Jean raised her glass. “To the war’s end, Danny. Soon.”

  “Yes. Soon.”

  They drank the toast and sat quietly, watching each other. Finally, Jean said, “You miss her terribly. You never got over it, did you, Danny?”

  “I miss her.”

  “You live alone?” Jean asked.

  Dan nodded.

  “In the house in Westwood?”

  “No. I sold the house.”

  “Then where?”

  “On Terminal Island. I have a room next to my office. A bed and a bathroom. That’s all I need.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Danny, what do you do with yourself?”

  “I build the damn ships.”

  “But you can’t live that way. That’s not enough.”

  “I make it enough. I’m up at five in the morning. The first shift comes on at six. We have our own commissary, so that takes care of my meals. By eight o’clock, I can barely keep my eyes open. I put on the radio. There’s a station that plays classical music. I’ve become damn fond of baroque music. I can listen for about a half-hour or so, and then I’m asleep.”

  “And you live that way, day in and day out?”

  “Just about. If you call it living.”

  “But why? Why, Danny? Is it because you hate them so much?”

  “Who?”

  “The Japs.”

  “Why should I hate them?”

  “They killed your wife.”

  “No. No, I don’t look at it that way, Jean. This rotten, sick world we live in killed May Ling, the same way it killed Josh Levy, Jake’s kid, the same way it’s killing millions and millions of others.”

  “You mean Mark’s grandchild?”

  “Yes, he died in the Pacific. You didn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “How terrible! How absolutely terrible!”

  “It’s a beautiful world we made, isn’t it?”

  The food came. Dan tasted the linguini and smiled. “I’ve forgotten good food.”

  “It’s nice to see you smile.”

  “Oh?” He stared at her thoughtfully. “Jean,” he said, “back in the old days, did you ever sit down and try to figure out exactly how I felt about you?”

  “I tried, Danny. Yes, I tried.”

  He nodded and went on eating.

  After a moment, Jean said to him, “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you don’t hate them, why do you do it? Why do you give your life to building the ships?”

  “Because I want it to end. The way I see it, there’s only one way to end it—with the ships. Without the ships, it will go on forever. With enough ships, it will end. I have no love for any of these bastards who run governments. If I despise Hitler more than Stalin, it’s because Stalin is helping to end it, but to me they’re both the scum of the earth, and I put Roosevelt and Churchill only a few rungs higher. They all play the same bloody game, and they all share the same filthy disregard for human life. I make no secret of how I feel. Admiral Land knows. I like Jerry Land. He’s tough and he’s honest and he put this whole thing together, and when this war ends, he gets as much credit as any of their damned generals—and, well, there it is. I haven’t talked so much in years.”

  “We never talked before, Danny. You know that. In all the years, we never really talked. Barbara asked me that once. ‘Did you ever try talking to Daddy?’ she asked me.”

  “I spoke to her day before yesterday,” Dan said. “Thank God she’s all right.”

  “Did you tell her about the award?”

  “No. She would have come. She still has things to do in New York.’’

  “She would have been very proud of you. She’s quite a woman.”

  “Then we must have done something right, Jean.”

  “A few things,” Jean admitted ruefully. “Where is your son?”

  “You mean Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the Pacific. On Guam.”

  “He’s a doctor, isn’t he?”

  “Yes—” Dan’s face was bleak.

  “We’re old friends, Danny. Let’s not slip back into the past. Let’s try to keep it here and now.”

  “All right. Tell me about Tom.”

  “He’s a commander, you know. He’s John Whittier’s partner, and the war has made them both very rich and very important. Not that they weren’t both rich enough before, but if you want the whole world, what is rich enough?”

  “And that’s what Tom wants—the whole world?”

  “More or less. When the war is over, he plans to run for the House. After that the Senate. Then the presidency. Presidents are made, I’ve learned, they don’t just happen. Tom is very ambitious. I wish he were a little nicer. There’s something we didn’t do right.”

  “And the girl he married?”

  “I like her,” Jean said. “There’s something in her that’s very good and honest.”

  “Is it a good marriage?”

  “No, it’s a rotten marriage. But Tom won’t let go of her, and she isn’t strong enough to break out of it.”

  “I know. Seldons don’t divorce.”

  “That’s wasn’t called for, Dan.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  “Candidates don’t divorce,” Jean said. “Do you have any desire to see him?”

  “Of course I do. He’s my son. But damn it, Jean, what do I do? Go to him, and have him spit in my face?”

  “I don’t think he’d do that.”

  “I can’t go to him.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “And we’re neither of us eating, are we?” Dan said.

  It wasn’t until they were in the cab that he asked her where she was living.

  “Don’t you know? I’m back in the old house on Russian Hill.”

  “Yes, of course. I remember Barbara telling me you had turned it into a gallery.”

  “I had my dreams, Danny. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was to start up there on Russian Hill, and in no time at all we’d rival New York. Then the war came. I’m just hanging in. It’s sort of fun, and it gives me something positive to do. I’ve had an architect draw up a set of plans, and for two million dollars we could have a perfectly beautiful building. Well, someday, perhaps. Meanwhile, we get a reasonable amount of visitors, and it gives the house a tax-exempt status. That h
elps. I’m not poor, but neither am I very rich, and I’ve spent a fortune on paintings. By the way, where are you staying?”

  “I wasn’t. I was returning tonight.”

  They were at the house now. Dan paid off the cab. It was strange, very strange indeed, to stand in front of the house he had built for Jean more than thirty years ago, and stranger still to return there with her. He stood looking at the entranceway without moving, and Jean watched him.

  “Will you come inside?” she asked softly.

  He didn’t answer. She took out her key and opened the door and switched on the lights, a blaze of light that lit up the white-walled galleries. Then he followed her into the house and stood there, looking around curiously.

  “Well?” She was smiling at him.

  “I still can’t make head or tail of the paintings you like, but it’s damned impressive.”

  “Shall I boast a little?”

  “Why not?”

  “I have Braque and Picasso and Kandinsky,” she said, pointing to the pictures, “Paul Klee, John Marin, Miró, Delauney, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley—”

  Dan laughed. “You’ve lost me.”

  She turned to face him, her face suddenly filled with sadness. “I have, haven’t I, Danny. I lost the only man in my life who was any damn good.” She went over to him. “Danny, stay here with me tonight. Come to bed with me. Make love to me. I’m pleading with you, Danny. Don’t say no.”

  He hesitated, then took her in his arms and kissed her. She clung to him. “I don’t even know if I could,” he said. “I haven’t been near a woman since May Ling died.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just hold me in your arms. But don’t go away.” Her voice was filled with fear.

  “I won’t go away.”

  They went upstairs. Her bedroom was unchanged, except that the full-length nude that Gregory Pastore had painted was gone. She went to the closet, took out a robe, and handed it to him.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s yours. It’s been hanging there ever since.”

  When he lay beside her, naked, it was very much as if time had reversed itself, and bit by bit the hunger returned, the strange obsessive hunger for Jean that had never left him, that May Ling had always sensed, the arbitary possessor that was first love, that might be crushed and shattered and mutilated but that could never be entirely destroyed. He abandoned reason and surrendered the loyalty to a dead woman that had depressed him and owned him for so long. He was alive. In over three years he had not been alive like this. This wonderful, long-limbed body next to him was his first true love. It did not diminish May Ling. May Ling was dead. He let go of her. He had worshipped May Ling, adored her, honored her. She was his refuge, his teacher, his mother, his consolation, but this woman next to him was his first true love, and she was inside of him, and she had never left him. She was part of his blood and his bones, and there were times when she had been like a cancer, but the cancer had also been a part of him; and there had been times when he had hated her with animallike ferocity, and he knew that there had also been times when she had hated him; and they had fought each other, cut each other, scarred each other, and while the scars would never go away, the love, the passion, would also remain.

  When they finished, shaken by a climactic violence that they had never known in the time of their youth, they lay together, clutching each other, in the dark silence. They sensed in each other the fear that this would dissolve, that it was a rediscovery that could not survive the moment, that all the walls they had broken through would suddenly reassert themselves and separate them in a future that neither of them could conceive. Time passed. They fell asleep, still entangled in their embrace, and then Dan awakened convulsively, dreaming, not knowing where he was. Jean flicked on the light, and he looked at her, sitting there in bed naked, her breasts still firm and lovely, her long, thick hair falling around her shoulders.

  “Are you all right, Danny?” she asked him.

  “Sure. What time is it?”

  She looked at the clock on her night table. “Two forty-five a.m. Middle of the night.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “We tried twice—and left it uneaten both times. You want to try again?”

  “What can you offer?”

  “Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee?”

  They sat at the table in the upstairs kitchen, and they both finished everything Jean cooked. The food was good, and Dan realized that in all the years he had known her, in all the years they had been married, this was the first time she had ever cooked for him. Then they drank coffee and talked. They talked as if they both sensed that the only way to keep down the walls that had separated them was to know each other at long last. Dan talked about May Ling, and Jean talked about John Whittier. They talked about their children, about their lives together, and about their lives apart from each other, and they were still drinking coffee and talking when dawn came.

  “Do you know,” Dan said, “all I have with me is that damn rented tuxedo that I wore at the dinner.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  “A day or two. Then I have to go back.”

  “But you’ll come back, Danny?”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “All right. We’ll go out and buy some clothes. We’ll get one of those big, fat, cardigan sweaters that I love. You’ll let me pick it out for you. Then you’ll change. Then you can take me to lunch somewhere. Then we’ll ride the cable cars down to the Embarcadero and walk. Then you can bring me back here, and if you don’t feel too old and tired, we can make love again.”

  “I’ll manage. But what about the gallery?”

  “The hell with it. I’ll lock it up. Let’s crawl into bed until the stores open.”

  In bed, their bodies touching, they fell asleep again.

  PART SEVEN

  Homeland

  One day in November of 1945, Eloise Lavette was in the gallery on Russian Hill, waiting for Jean to complete some paperwork in her office upstairs and join her for lunch, when a young man entered and paused just inside the doorway, looking about him uncertainly. He stared at the paintings first with a respectful but bemused expression, which Eloise had noticed frequently on the faces of those who viewed Jean’s collection for the first time. Then he saw Eloise, and he smiled. She returned the smile. He then walked over to her and asked whether Mrs. Whittier was in the gallery.

  “Yes, she is. She’s upstairs. She’ll be down in a few minutes, if you care to wait.”

  “Do you work here?” he wanted to know.

  “No, not really. I’m a friend. I help out sometimes.”

  He was an odd-looking young man. He had a thatch of the brightest orange hair she had ever seen, and under it was a freckled face that was marred by a scar that stretched from his chin to the hairline. The scar, she thought, made his face strange but not truly ugly; it rather blended with the freckled skin, and his blue eyes were alert and alive and widely admiring. He was tall and skinny, with large hands, the backs of which were covered with the same freckles that were splashed on his face. And he was staring at Eloise with such apparent pleasure that she felt herself blushing like a schoolgirl.

  “Can I help you?” she asked him.

  “Well, I don’t think so. No. I’ll wait for Mrs. Whittier, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I guess,” he said, “I’m the only one here.”

  “I guess you are.”

  “Well, that’s obvious, I guess. I don’t always say silly things. What I meant is, do many people come here to look at the paintings?”

  “On weekends we get a fair attendance. And in the afternoons we do get a few people, mostly art students. You see, it’s very avant-garde, not the kind of thing that San Francisco is used to. People must be educated to modern art.”

 
“Oh? Yes, I’m sure. Do you understand it?”

  “A little. I’ve learned a great deal from Mrs. Whittier.”

  “Now that one,” he said. “That one looks like two dead fish on a straw mat, only I’m not sure they’re fish. Are they?” He was very funny without being disrespectful and so earnestly serious that Eloise burst out laughing.

  “I know,” he nodded. “That’s a really dumb thing to say.”

  “No it isn’t. That’s what it looks like to you, so why shouldn’t you say so? As a matter of fact, that painting is by Paul Klee, one of the great modern masters. He was a German Expressionist, except that he was Swiss. I mean, he was born in Switzerland, but in his painting he was of the German Expressionist school. He was nonrepresentational. I mean, he didn’t try to paint things as they appear to most people. He changed them into designs that he considered amusing and delightful.”

  The young man regarded her with awe, nodding, and at that moment Jean appeared and walked over to join them.

  “This is Mrs. Whittier,” Eloise said. “I don’t know your name.”

  “No, of course. I never told you. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” Eloise said.

  “No, you didn’t, did you? My name is Adam Levy.”

  “Mine is Eloise Lavette.”

  “Oh. Yes. How do you do?”

  The name jogged Jean’s memory. Then she remembered and said, “Of course. You’re Mark Levy’s grandson. I’m so glad to see you.”

  He took the hand she held out and nodded. “That’s right. Yes. Thank you.”

  “You see, I did know your grandfather. I don’t know your mother and father.”

  “I understand.”

  “When did you get home, Adam?” Jean asked him.

  “Two weeks ago, luckily, believe me. I could have been trapped there for another year.”

  “I’m glad you’re back, safe and healthy—at least you look very healthy.”

  “Oh, I am, yes, ma’am.”

  “And is there something I can do for you? Or did you just wander in?”

  “Oh, no. No. Barbara—your daughter—suggested that I come and see you. She said you know every artist in the city.”