An Independent Woman

by Howard Fast

  “And what makes you think Sally objects?”

  “Just the few words between you and Adam.”

  “You know Sally as well as I do. Mostly the fact that he’s a lawyer. Not sensitive enough, not charming enough, and May Ling’s two inches taller than he.”

  “Yes, of course. Sally never got over being a film star.” Barbara shook her head. “I’ll have a word with her.”

  They sat and talked until the sun touched the top of the hill. There was a tracery of long, slender clouds that turned the sunset into a mass of shimmering color, pink and azure, with streaks of scarlet that fought the pale pastels.

  HARRY LEFKOWITZ COULD NEVER QUITE get over his awe at the Levy—Lavette family. He had never before encountered anything like it, a group of people of so many diverse ethnic origins, and a family history, wealthy without doing as the wealthy do, and all connected by long or short strings to a winery that was more like an antique Mexican—Californian hacienda than the American style of big business. Not that Highgate was big business or comparable to such giants as Gallo or Mondavi, but it did gross more than five million in a good year and it hewed to a good quality of red wine that by now was recognized and valued in every wine-drinking country.

  Harry had been born in 1934, at the nethermost point of the Great Depression, one of five children of an unemployed garment worker who struggled to feed his children and pay the rent on a miserable flat on Orchard Street, in New York City’s Lower East Side ghetto. Harry and his two brothers had worked at every conceivable way to earn money since they were children, gathering and selling old papers, delivering whatever there was to deliver, making pennies for hours of work while his mother and his two sisters took in washing and sewed piecework whenever they could get it. He had graduated high school with honors, had been admitted to City College, which was then free, graduated with top honors, and had gone on to Harvard Law on scholarship. Offered a job in California, he took the California bar and passed easily.

  During the years since then, he had married, suffered the death of his wife, opened his own firm, and bit by bit, as so many immigrants to California do, he lost touch with his family. His mother and father died; one sister died of pneumonia; the other sister married and moved to Alpine, New York, and one brother taught philosophy at Tulane in New Orleans, while the other became an auto salesman in Utica, New York. The family was shredded beyond repair.

  Sitting this evening at the big table in the kitchen at Highgate, with a lovely woman who was one-quarter Chinese and the rest portioned out of Jewish, Italian, and white Protestant, and all of it combined into very considerable beauty, he felt that this was the most pleasant moment of his life. Adam sat at the head of the table, Freddie at the other end, Barbara and Eloise on either side of Adam, and Lefkowitz facing May Ling and Barbara.

  “You never said a word about May Ling,” Barbara was complaining to Lefkowitz. “You could have told me. It would have made it so much easier.”

  “I was being a lawyer. I knew who you were. May Ling gave me your books to read, and I think she told me most of your life story, but I never met you. I like Abner Berman. I didn’t want to put him in the middle.”

  As always, Cathrena had cooked for twelve, the table piled with mounds of the ever-present tortillas, a huge poached salmon, bowls of rice, beans, and broccoli—the continually blooming broccoli that renewed itself day after day—hot bread, and salad greens picked that afternoon from the kitchen garden.

  Eloise, heaping the plates, demanded to know what was going on.

  “We haven’t seen Harry since the theft of the century.”

  “Not a theft,” Harry said shortly.

  “I still can’t believe you’d defend him against my aunt,” May Ling said, “and you knew she was my aunt.”

  “I was defending him against the state. Barbara—if I may call you Barbara—was not a complainant. It was the cops who wanted to get their grubby hands on Jones.”

  “The papers said he was a murderer,” Adam said. “That’s hard to wash away.”

  “Will you all please listen to me?” Barbara demanded. “Harry took on the man’s case pro bono. That means—”

  “We know what it means,” Freddie interrupted.

  “Let me explain what it means. Everyone is not as wise as you, dear Freddie. It means he took the case without payment. And this man, Robert Jones, is not a murderer. He’s a college graduate with a degree in civil engineering. A white guard at the university insulted him and then slapped him, and they got into a fight and Jones hit him, and the man went down and cracked his head on a concrete path, and Jones would have sat for fifteen years of his life in prison then if Harry had not taken his case, and that was also pro bono. Am I right, Harry? Since he had no money, how could he have paid you?”

  “Harry, why didn’t you tell me that?” May Ling said.

  Harry, who was an excellent litigator, appeared tongue-tied. He swallowed uneasily, started to speak, and then stopped.

  “You should have told me,” May Ling said gently. “You tell me about these dreadful corporate swindlers, but you never said a word about Barbara’s case.”

  “And one thing more,” Barbara added. “In the true sense of the word, I gave him the jewelry. You know that I never wear jewelry. I didn’t even keep the pieces in a vault, for all they meant to me. I had them in a drawer next to my bed. But there was one thing that I did want, Daddy’s ring. Perhaps you remember it, Adam. My mother gave it to him when your dad and he formed the shipping company and bought the Ocean Queen. It’s a heavy ring, and with gold selling for five or six hundred dollars an ounce these days, it must be worth a great deal. I said that if I could keep the ring, he could have the rest.”

  “Oh, come on,” Freddie said. “You were robbed. How can you say you gave him the stuff? That’s putting the cart before the horse, Aunt Barbara.”

  “Not quite,” Lefkowitz said. “Abner Berman was willing to go along with Barbara’s story, and we had a talk about that. Abner said that if he returned the jewels, there would be no charges. I must say that I sort of agreed, if silence could be taken as acquiescence, but then when Abner and I finished our meeting, I double-crossed Abner and asked Barbara to let him keep the loot. She agreed.”

  “Not quite that way,” Barbara protested. “I had intended to let him keep it.”

  “This grows stranger and stranger,” Adam said. “What did Sam say?”

  “He thinks I’m crazy.” Barbara shrugged. “His exact words were, ‘Mother, if I didn’t love you, I’d file papers to commit you.’ It was nice to hear him say he loved me. But to expect children to understand one’s quirks—well, that’s a bit much.”

  “Hardly a quirk,” Eloise declared. “It’s simply Barbara.”

  “And a hundred thousand dollars is a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Is it?” Barbara wondered. “According to Abner, Harry has defended more minority defendants pro bono than any other lawyer who isn’t a public defender. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars does that add up to?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Getty,” Harry said, in an obvious attempt to shift the conversation. “Nobody reads Veblen anymore and his theories about the conscience of the rich, but did you know that Getty left his whole stake, a billion-point-one, to that museum of his? Based on that sum the law requires that to keep its status as a foundation, the directors must spend at least fifty-one million a year on works of art. Every auction house here and in Europe is dancing with delight. But somehow, in this year of 1984, it doesn’t wash. Not with me. Can you imagine how many turkey dinners this billion-point-one would buy for poor kids? He could have wiped out that rotten L.A. ghetto and rebuilt it from scratch.”

  “I don’t see where there’s any conscience in that,” Eloise said. “The paintings would survive, no matter who owns them.”

  “Veblen didn’t care for the rich,” May Ling put in. “He questioned whether they had a conscience. And some of us do read him, Harry.”


  “I like to think that all people have a conscience,” Eloise said gently.

  “They keep it in a small pocket, Mom,” Freddie said. “Let’s go back to this Jones character. He had a gun.”

  “A toy gun.”

  “Still, the cops could have gone to the grand jury and indicted him for intent.”

  “It wouldn’t wash, Freddie,” Lefkowitz said. “If they did anything that foolish—and I don’t know that they could—I’d have six blacks on the jury and laugh them out of court. They were content to call it quits.”

  “Yet we eat and we drink,” Eloise said, “and we’re rich.”

  “If the crop is good,” Freddie admitted. “If we don’t have a drought. If the price of bottles doesn’t go up. If the grape pickers don’t go on strike, and if the vintage doesn’t turn on us, and if we don’t get sued because some crazed kid gets picked up with a bottle of Highgate after he’s killed someone—because essentially, Mom, we’re farmers, and few farmers get really rich. I know a guy in L.A. who has eight thousand acres in one-crop barley, and with that one crop he has a house that would put the White House to shame, and he owns a dozen high-rises in L.A. But Adam wouldn’t go that way, and he’s absolutely right. There was a time when I thought of battling Gallo, but Pop sat on me because you don’t make good wine that way. We grow our own grapes and the wholesalers plead for our stuff. And what did the old poet say? You were always quoting him, May Ling—”

  May Ling smiled. How could she ever dislike Freddie? “‘I wonder often what the Vintners buy/One-half so precious as the stuff they sell’?”

  THE SUNDAY DINNER WAS OVER. The sound of the piano came from the living room, Eloise playing Gershwin. Adam would be sprawled in his armchair, listening to the music and counting his many blessings. May Ling and Harry were either there or off somewhere to be alone; Barbara was still at the table, taking a seat next to Freddie, both of them with mugs of strong Mexican coffee. Cathrena had cleared the table, stowed away the uneaten food in the huge refrigerator, and gone off.

  “She has Saturday off,” Freddie said defensively.

  “I know. Tell me, Freddie, how is it with my favorite nephew?”

  “Your other nephew, young Danny, is very successful.”

  “All the glories of the Lavettes. He’s dull. Scientists, God bless them, are dull. My brother Joe is utterly dependable but dull.”

  “And myself?”

  “Never dull, Freddie. But you’re forty-two years old.”

  “Meaning, Why don’t I get married?”

  “More or less.”

  “And why don’t you get married, my dear aunt?”

  “I’m sixty-nine years old, and I’ve been married.”

  He looked at her with interest. “You’re still beautiful.”

  “I’m not beautiful, Freddie, though flattery will get you everywhere. I never was.”

  “That’s not a majority opinion. And I love you with white hair. It’s simply great, and it goes with your eyes. Let me try to answer your very personal question.”

  “It’s my right to ask, by seniority.”

  “Good enough. It’s not that I don’t like women, Aunt Barbara. It’s just that I love women too much. For me, the greatest thing on God’s earth is women. I look at women with joy—almost any woman; you, for example. I find myself walking behind a strange woman on the Embarcadero, for instance—any woman—and I find myself enthralled with the movement of her legs, the way her hips move, the slope of her back—it doesn’t matter that I don’t see her face, the vibrations are the same. And unfortunately I have no particular preference—it’s all-embracing. I watch the Mexican women working in the bottling plant. Mexican women are beautiful. They’re passionate, they’re joyous—”

  “I know all about that, Freddie. You never learn.”

  “What is there to learn? I think Chinese women are beautiful. I love blond women and brunette women, and the other night I had a drink at the Fairmont with a black woman who stepped right out of H. Rider Haggard. Do you remember the Zulu queen? What was her name?”

  “Freddie, that’s enough. I don’t know any Zulu queens, and I don’t have the foggiest notion of who H. Rider Haggard is.”

  “He was. He isn’t anymore. Good God, what did they teach you there at Sarah Lawrence?”

  “Not much, except that you don’t ask personal questions. I should have learned that simple bit of manners, but since I stepped over the boundaries, I will say one thing more. I want you to find a nice girl and marry her and try to be decently faithful to her. And now I think we should go into the living room.”

  “That’s not Barbara Lavette speaking.”

  “Rest assured, it is.”

  IN A PART OF THE NAPA VALLEY where the darkness of night was not diffused with any electric light, Harry Lefkowitz pulled off the road and cut the ignition. May Ling turned to him inquiringly, and he explained that he wanted them to step out of the car and to look at the sky.

  “I’ve seen the sky, Harry.”

  “I want to look at it with you.”

  “Then why not roll back the top, and we can sit right here?”

  “That never occurred to me. Certainly. I haven’t put down the top since I bought it. Let’s see if it works.” He pressed a button, and the top lifted and came down.

  “The toys of the rich,” May Ling murmured.

  “Not at all. I don’t have a Rolls-Royce. My friends tell me that you have to have two, one that you drive when the other is in the shop being fixed.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry. I say awful things.”

  “Look at the sky,” he whispered.

  It was a moonless night, and the stars were as bright as if they had exploded with delight at not having to compete with the moon.

  They sat for a while in silence. The air was clean and cold, and May Ling shivered. “Do you ever think, Harry, of how many billions and billions of stars there are? We are so small, so insignificant, tiny bits of matter on a little planet.”

  “I try not to. My ego is small enough. Every time I go into court to litigate, I shrink with horror, and I ask myself, Who the hell am I, Harry Lefkowitz from Orchard Street, to stand up in court as if I owned the place and spurt stuff that actually means something to anyone?”

  “No, Harry—you don’t!”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Harry,” she interrupted, “I think you’re one of the best men I’ve ever known. I think what you did with Jones was noble and good. Why don’t you ever speak of those things? I don’t understand you. And why don’t you ask me to marry you?”

  “Because if you say no, that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Stop looking at the sky and ask me. Or must I ask you to marry me? I’m thirty-seven years old. Don’t you want to marry me? You’ve never even made a pass at me,” she said plaintively.

  “Oh, Jesus!” he exclaimed. “Do you really mean that?”

  “Try me.”

  “Yes—tonight.”

  “Harry, we can’t get married tonight. You’re a lawyer—you should know that. And it would break Mom’s heart if she didn’t have a month to prepare a wedding and send out a thousand invitations to Highgate. But it’s only ten o’clock, and you can turn the car around and we can drive back to Highgate and whisper to Eloise that we want to stay overnight, and she’ll call Mom, and there is a guest house, and you can crawl into bed with me and put your arms around me and tell me that you love me.”

  Harry couldn’t think of anything to say appropriate to the moment. She leaned over and kissed him, and then he turned on the ignition, swung the car around, and drove back to Highgate.

  BEFORE OPENING THE LETTER from Philip Carter, Barbara studied the address on the envelope. The even, controlled handwriting brought back the Palmer Method of her childhood, when the children of seven and eight years were taught to sit upright, move their whole right arm, and form their cursive letters so that each word was a flowing example of literacy, the proper way for a young lady
to present her thoughts. The problem, in Barbara’s case, was that she was left-handed. Her teacher, Miss Hatcher, whom she remembered to this day as Miss Hatchet, was gently and comfortingly cruel, declaring, “There is no such thing, Barbara, as left-handedness. It is all a question of one’s mind and one’s will, so you will write with your right hand, as all normal children do, and in time you will overcome this handicap.”

  Barbara, not quite certain at the age of eight that she was left-handed—her mother being of the same mind as Miss Hatcher—obediently performed the task with her right hand, and because her words were practically unreadable, she was always at the bottom of the writing class. She still wrote cursively with her right hand, and her handwriting was still difficult to read, even back to herself. She also sent silent blessings to the spirit of Christopher Sholes, who had invented the first typewriter in 1867, and she was determined someday to write about him and enshrine him as one of the great men of the nineteenth century.

  When she opened Philip Carter’s letter, handwritten, she experienced the same admiration that the address had awakened. Women still wrote letters by hand; few men did.

  “Dear Ms. Lavette,” he wrote;

  During the two weeks since I spoke to you here at the church, I have called you several times. I should have left my name on your answering machine, but I was afraid you might be disappointed with our talk and would not call me back. If so, I must apologize, and I hope you will take this letter in good spirit. I would like to have dinner with you some evening, when you are free of other engagements.

  I live alone. I am a widower. My wife passed away five years ago, and I must confess to being a very lonely person. I know this letter is rather presumptuous, and if you do not choose to reply to it, I will understand.

  It was signed, “Sincerely, Philip Carter.” His telephone number was at the bottom of the page.

  Barbara read the letter again, certainly the most stilted, old-fashioned letter she had received in years. What on earth have I gotten myself into? she wondered. The man wants to date me. If I read this curious letter right, he’s scared to death. Afraid to leave a message because he feels I wouldn’t return his call. Yet when we spoke, he appeared to be a perfectly normal person. What do I do, throw it away, ignore it? A Unitarian minister. I still have no real idea of what a Unitarian is. Does he hope to convert me? I’m not convertible to anything. She thought of the old saw about Unitarians—irritate them too much, and they’ll burn a question mark on your front lawn. This is all ridiculous, she told herself. I’m an old, white-haired lady of sixty-nine years, and the last thing in the world I desire is another man in my life. I want to live quietly, write my book—no, no, that’s an absolute lie. The last thing in the world I want is to live quietly. Next to the last thing in the world I want to do is to get involved with a minister. And I am not lonely. I am baby-sitting for Sam and Mary Lou tonight… They have a perfectly competent maid who gets two nights off a week, but they can’t stay home two nights a week. This city teems with high school girls who would be delighted to sit with their brat. No, she isn’t a brat. What’s happened to me? I never used that word before. But it has to be me, Grandma Barbara. How I hate that! Grandma Barbara. They bury you as soon as you turn sixty.