Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  He seated himself and sighed.

  “I want this to be a quiet, civilized discussion, Tom. I came here to ask you to give Eloise a divorce.”

  He was taken completely aback. He stood up, walked to his desk, and lit a cigarette. Then he turned back to her and said, “I don’t think this is your province, Mother. I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “Please sit down, Tom.”

  “I prefer to stand.”

  “Very well. It is my province. You are my son. Eloise is my daughter-in-law and a dear friend.”

  “That’s just the trouble.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean that if she spent less time around that damn silly museum of yours and more time at home—”

  “Tom, why don’t we talk sense? You know the situation as well as I do.”

  “I’m not going to talk about it at all.”

  “Then I shall have to insist that you do.”

  “There is nothing to talk about. There will be no divorce.”

  “I had hoped you would be more sensible,” Jean said quietly. “You are my son, and believe it or not, I care for you—as much as you let me. I don’t want to pressure you, and believe me, I can. I am asking you as earnestly as I can to let that child go. Live your life, but let her live her own life and find whatever happiness she can.”

  “I told you, I will not discuss it.”

  “Then you force me to. Alan Brocker was a friend of mine in the days when I had such friends. He subsequently married Manya Vladavich, who was Calvin Braderman’s model—”

  “Damn it, Mother, what has this got to do with anything? My work is piled neck deep. I happen to be the chief of one of the largest corporations in California. I will not have you interfere with my personal life, and I will not waste an afternoon standing here and listening to you babble nonsense!”

  “But, Tom, what can you do? Have me bodily removed?” Jean asked.

  “I can damn well leave. If you wish to spend the afternoon here talking to yourself, you have my blessing!” He started toward the door.

  “Tom, just hold on! I mentioned Manya because Manya loves to whimper on my shoulder. A year ago, Lionel Smith, your decorator, was having an affair with Alan Brocker.”

  Tom paused and turned to face her.

  “Alan had just turned sixty, and I suppose he required stimulation. He is also very wealthy, and he has always bought what he fancied. Manya came to me with this delicious gossip, but the romance was short-lived. Manya also has a loose and spiteful tongue.”

  “That bitch,” Tom said.

  “Please sit down,” Jean said gently, telling herself, What a rotten way. She was filled with pity. His arrogance was crumbling. As much as she knew about such things, it was her doing as well as his. “I didn’t want to say this, Tommy. Believe me, it makes no difference to me.”

  He dropped into a chair. “No, not at all.”

  “Not at all. I don’t understand such things. I don’t condemn them, either. I’ve lived too long and hurt too many people to sit in judgment. If you have a relationship with Lionel Smith, that’s your affair—only yours—not mine, not anyone else’s. I told Manya that if she ever spoke of this to anyone else, I’d slit her throat.”

  “Thank you for nothing.”

  “Perhaps,” Jean agreed. “But I do think I bullied her into silence. As I said, I don’t judge. With all our power and money, people like ourselves have messed up almost everything in this land, sex included. I have no opinions on that score, and I don’t know what is right and what is wrong. I do know this—Eloise is being destroyed. Do whatever you have to do, but let her go.”

  He stared at her in silence.

  “She doesn’t know about this, and as far as I am concerned, she never will.”

  “Your concern overwhelms me,” he said bitterly. “Does my father know? Did you inform him of your brilliant discovery?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Yes, God damn it, I care!” he shouted. “Oh, you’re both of you two gorgeous characters! First he dumps you and runs off with this Chinese floozy, and now the two of you live together in that so-called museum of yours with the whole city snickering at the spectacle, and then you come here and sit in judgment on me!”

  “Dan doesn’t know,” she said evenly. “I will see to it that he never knows, if you are reasonably circumspect. But if you carry on this charade with Eloise, then sooner or later she will know and so will others. I can appreciate the fact that a divorce does not fit in with your plans, but if you believe that your marriage is a mask you can wear, you’re mistaken. Quite the reverse.”

  “What about Freddie? He’s my son.”

  “He’ll remain your son. There’s no malice in Eloise, not a shred. She would never do anything to hurt you. Eloise is expecting me this afternoon. I want to take her and the boy to my place, and they will remain with me until arrangements are made.”

  “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

  “Tom, I wish to God there had been an easier way to do this. I wish everything I said could be unsaid.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” he asked, his voice quivering. “You haven’t enjoyed this at all, not one bit, have you, Mother?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Like hell you haven’t!” He covered his face with his hands.

  “Tom.” Now she was pleading. “I’m your mother.”

  “Are you? The way he’s my father—oh, yes, you’re my mother. Always by my side, always helping me, always loving—what kind of crap is that?”

  “Tom, please.”

  “Are you finished? You’ve done it all. There’s nothing more you can do to me. Nothing.”

  “Tom, I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.” He was in control of himself again. “I am also very busy. I have work to do.” He turned away and sat down behind his desk.

  Jean rose and looked at her son for a long moment, then she left. He remained seated, staring at the papers on his desk.

  She drove to the house on Pacific Heights, seeing it as if for the first time, the enormous pile of stone and wood that her son had bought as a fortress against his fears and agonies, and who else but she and Dan were responsible for the fears and agonies? She remembered a stand-up comic who once chortled, “I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.” She no longer knew. Like a housewife picking up pieces of broken glass and clumsily stepping on the pieces and crushing them in the process, she was trying to gather together and reconstruct the bits and pieces of her life. She was fifty-six years old, and almost nothing made a shred of sense. She had lost all of them, husband, son, and daughter. And now she was frantically trying to repair the rents and tears she had caused in the lives of others, telling herself that she made amends by helping Eloise.

  Well, she thought, one does what one does. It was not much of a philosophy, but she admitted to herself that she was not very much of a person. It was, perhaps, the first time she had examined herself without obstruction and made such an admission, and she felt better as she went on into the house.

  ***

  On the morning of the day of Joe Lavette’s wedding to Sally Levy, Barbara and Bernie Cohen drove up to Higate. Barbara drove her 1946 Ford, the first of the postwar vintage, and Bernie contrasted it with the ancient Chevrolet in which he had driven Rabbi Blum on their first trip to Higate, when the rabbi had rescued Jake and Clair Levy from impending bankruptcy with a contract for them to manufacture sacramental wine.

  “Over twenty years ago,” Bernie said. “That Chevy was a miracle. I had put it together out of seven different junkyards, and the miracle was that it worked. Well, cars were simpler then. The old man was terrified. Did you ever meet the rabbi?”

  Barbara shook her head. “No, but I wish I had.”

  “He was an amazing c
haracter—long white beard, beautiful blue eyes, skin as pink as a baby’s, he looked as if he had stepped right out of the Old Testament. You know, he took me out of the orphanage when I was twelve—closest thing to a father I ever had. That was after his wife died. There’s a strange story about him, and I wonder how many people know it. You know, his father wasn’t even Jewish.”

  “Then how on earth could he be a rabbi?”

  “Listen and learn, dear woman. His father was a Dutch seaman named Blum who jumped ship in eighteen fifty and went into the diggings. He never found any gold, but in the course of looking for it, he met and married a dance hall girl who was Jewish, whose name was Rosie Katz. Then, a few years later, Blum the father jumped back on a ship and was never seen or heard from again. Now, in Jewish law, the descent is through the mother, so the child was technically Jewish, just as the Levy kids are technically not Jewish because Clair isn’t Jewish. Well, believe it or not, Rosie became a very successful madam in the old Tenderloin, retired reasonably wealthy in eighteen sixty, married again, this time a Jew, and the rabbi was raised as a Jew, sent east to the seminary, and then he came back here as a full-fledged rabbi. How about that?”

  “It’s incredible,” Barbara said, “when I think of how new we are here. Mother had a bit of doggerel that she used to impart to me as a great secret. It went like this: ‘Granddad worked in the placer mines; Daddy’s on Nob Hill. If it weren’t for Sutter and Sutter’s gold, I’d still be sucking swill.’ Mother said that Grandma once heard her saying it and became perfectly furious. How Granny ever permitted Mother to marry an Italian fisherman, I’ll never know.”

  “From what you tell me of your mother, it was not a question of permission.”

  “She’s quite a lady. You’ll meet her today, and Daddy and everyone else. It’s going to be a rough day for you, Bernie, so gird your loins.”

  “And how will you introduce me?”

  “Ah, we come to that. Well, I suppose I could introduce you as a bloody mercenary who seduced me one night in Paris long ago.”

  “Come on, Bobby.”

  “Or I could explain that this is an old friend who was staying at the Mark Hopkins until three weeks ago, when he moved into my house.”

  “Why did you take him in?”

  “Pity, I suppose.”

  “I evoke pity?”

  “I think you do. When you look at me in that beseeching, plaintive way”—she took her eyes off the road to glance at him—“like now. Sort of like a camel.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, no! Not like a camel.”

  “Camels are dear beasts.”

  “Camels are the ugliest, stupidest, foulest, smelliest animals God ever contrived. You know, you never say anything nice to me.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not fond of you.”

  “Since we sleep together and eat together and spend most of our days together, that’s a reasonable assumption. Why won’t you marry me?”

  “Did I say I wouldn’t?”

  “You never said you would.”

  “I’m not sure I would. I’m not sure I wouldn’t.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “It takes time.”

  “Seven years?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Barbara agreed. “On the other hand, you have no visible means of support. You’re footloose and fancy free. You remind me of my father, which may be why I’m taken with you, but that’s a minus as well as a plus. You’ve spent much of your adult life at war, which is nothing I am enamored of, and you also confuse me. Jews are supposed to be intellectual, introverted, and abashed.”

  “Who said so?”

  “Well, I’ve sort of accepted that. Maybe I’m wrong. But as far as Palestine is concerned, it’s the last place in the world I desire to go. I love San Francisco. It’s my home; it’s the place where I’m most comfortable. I don’t ever want to travel again, and I don’t ever want to live anywhere else.”

  “Bobby, what would I do here?”

  “What would you do in Palestine? You’re forty years old. From what you tell me, it’s a bleak, inhospitable desert, a ruined land that has to be made over foot by foot. I’m a writer, and I’m a woman. I want to have children, and I want them to grow up here. With all its faults, with all the lying and the cheating and the dirt and the misery, it’s the best place in the world that I have ever seen. I am sick to death of this Jew and gentile, black and white, Chicano and Anglo—God Almighty, won’t we ever grow up and become people?”

  “The six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, the children among them, they won’t ever grow up, Bobby.”

  “And six million Bengalis died in the famine in India, and I saw a street where the dead were laid out like a carpet. Bernie, I love you. I’m trying to drive a car and think and talk, and it’s not easy. But I love you. You and Marcel. Two men in my life, like the two sides of a coin, because you’re as different from him as day from night, but you’re the only two men I ever wanted. Bernie, what do we do? Do we spend our lives trying to atone for the dead? I know something about Palestine and the Jewish settlements there. But I will not put a gun in my hands and kill—not if my own life depended on it, not for anything, not for any dream or ideal. I’ve lived through the worst bloodbath this world ever saw, fifty million dead, and that’s not the way, and I won’t go that way.”

  “What would I do?” he asked miserably.

  “It doesn’t matter to me. What does any man do? You studied agriculture. Look around you.” They were in the Napa Valley now, driving north on Highway 29, the vineyards rolling away and up the hillsides on either side. “We’ll buy a piece of land if you want to. Farm it. Make wine. Anything. Bernie, I wasn’t going to tell you, but damn it, I will. I think I’m pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “I’m one week late. Usually, that doesn’t mean anything, but I’m as regular as clockwork. Anyway, I’ve got a feeling about it.”

  “That’s wonderful!” he burst out. “Bobby, that’s great, just absolutely great. We’ll get married.”

  “Just hold on. Not so quick.”

  “You wouldn’t get rid of it?”

  “Oh, no, my lad. I’m going to have this kid, come hell or high water. I’m thirty-two years old, and I’m going to have this kid and others while I still can, even if I have to resort to artificial insemination. And I don’t want one. I want three or four. But you and me, Bernie, we’re two people. Maybe we’re not so different. I think we both spent our lives expiating some kind of guilt. I grew up rich, and you grew up lonely and poor, and I think that’s some kind of cement that binds us together now. I’m not looking for bliss. I think you’re a little crazy and kind of intractable, and we’re going to have a lot of misery, but maybe we can work it out so that we have a lot of happiness as well. I’m willing to give it a try, but you’ve got to see me as a whole person, not just as a woman and not just as a mother, but as a whole human being who is half of your life. I’m not saying I wouldn’t go to Palestine someday or even live there for a while, but my roots are here, and I think yours are too. Whatever we were in the beginning, it’s this war that’s made us what we are today. So I’ll reverse the question. Will you marry me and live here with me?”

  He didn’t answer until they had turned into the dirt road, with the old stone buildings of Higate before them. Then he said, “O.K. I’ll give it a try.”

  ***

  When Barbara came into the room where Sally was being dressed by her mother and by Sarah Levy, her grandmother, Sally broke free of them to throw her arms around Barbara. “Oh, Bobby, how perfectly wonderful to see you! And you’re so beautiful! Why can’t I look like you?”

  Barbara felt quite foolish in the flowing, shell pink organdy dress that had been decided upon for the maid of honor. Pink was decidedly not her color, but pink was what Sally would have, and Barbara’s sa
tin slippers were pink, and the broad-brimmed straw hat she carried and now tried to protect from Sally’s embrace had a dripping garnish of tiny pink roses.

  “Sally,” Clair said, “if you don’t get back here and let me finish the hem, you won’t look like Barbara. You’ll look plain silly.”

  “Do you like it?” Sally asked, turning, stepping back, swirling the folds of white organdy, to her mother’s annoyance. “I think I look like Granny did when she was my age. Don’t I, Granny? I saw a picture—only my hair’s like straw. I don’t know what to do with my hair. I wish I could cut it off, only Joe would kill me. That’s because he’s Chinese. He has a fixation on yellow hair.”

  “Sally,” Clair said sharply, “no more of that. Joe is Barbara’s brother. He is not Chinese. Heaven help me, what do I do with her?” Clair asked Barbara.

  Barbara laughed. “In one hour, she’ll be off your hands.”

  “Poor Joe.”

  “Poor Joe indeed,” Sally said.

  “You look very beautiful,” Barbara told her, thinking that the years had changed very little of Sally. She still had the tiny breasts she had bemoaned; she was taller, but still very slender, and with her yellow hair falling over her shoulders, in the white organdy wedding gown, with a veil of tulle and a white Juliet cap, she looked like something out of a Mucha print, an illustration for an unlikely tale of a time long ago.

  “Bobby,” she exclaimed, “we are truly going to be sisters. Isn’t that wonderful? And Adam is Joe’s best man, so it’s brother, sister, brother, sister, and if only Adam would marry you. No. I forgot. You have that marvelous, romantic soldier. I remember the letter so well, and he’s here. I caught a glimpse of him through the window. Bobby, why don’t you marry him? We’ll have a double wedding. I mean, Adam is impractical. He’s totally gaga over his Eloise. Peaches and cream. Well, if that’s his taste, it’s his taste. She’s all fluff, if you ask me.”