An Independent Woman
Page 34
He got out of bed and turned on the bedside light. Barbara lay on her back, eyes open, her white hair spread behind her over the pillow. He bent over the bed and kissed her lips. Then, without thinking, he made the sign of the cross. He was unaware that he was crying. There was a small mirror on her bedside table. He took it and held it above her slightly parted lips. There was no sign of breath on the mirror.
Philip closed her eyes, pulled up the blanket, and then folded the sheet below Barbara’s chin. He could not cover her face. His first thought then was to call Joe, but he stopped himself before he picked up the telephone. What good would it do to wake him at three in the morning? What good would it do to awaken anyone? He had been a priest once, and he had seen enough death to recognize it. He got dressed, and then he kissed Barbara again, and then he sat beside the bed until dawn came.
AT A HALF HOUR PAST SIX, Philip called Joe and told him that Barbara had died.
“When?”
“Last night—at about three in the morning. She passed away in her sleep.”
“Phil, you should have called me.”
“Why? What good would it have done?”
“How are you taking it?” Joe asked.
“All right, I suppose.” What else do you say, Philip wondered—that the best thing in your life is gone?
“I’ll be there as soon as I’m dressed.”
“Thank you.”
The sun was rising over the hills as Philip walked to the kitchen, the air clean and sweet, a sting in the cold morning air that bit through his sweater. In the kitchen a fire was already, going in the big fireplace. Eloise and Adam sat at the table, drinking coffee. Cathrena stirred a pot of oatmeal.
Eloise glanced up as Philip entered, read his face, and whispered, “Oh no—no.”
Philip nodded. “Yes, Barbara’s gone. She passed away last night, quietly, no pain; she was in my arms.”
Adam’s face wrinkled with pain. He was very old, Philip thought; an old, old patriarch who rose and walked unsteadily around the table and put his arms about Eloise.
“I want to see her,” Eloise said, forcing the words through her sobs.
Adam helped her out of her chair, his arm around her, and they followed Philip back to the bedroom. “The morning’s so beautiful,” Eloise said, almost in a whimper.
Eloise bent over Barbara’s body, stroked her cheeks lovingly, straightened her hair, and then bent to kiss her. “Go, dear one, and wait for me.”
Adam said nothing; tears rolled down his cheeks.
“I couldn’t cover her face,” Philip said. “She looks beautiful. She just went away.”
Adam managed to ask Philip whether he had called Joe. He spoke with difficulty, biting his lips.
“I called him. He’ll be here soon,” Philip said.
“I’ll stay with her until he comes,” Eloise told them. “I don’t want to leave her alone.”
“Yes, of course,” Philip said. “She fell asleep in my arms, Ellie. She didn’t cry out. I woke up, and she was gone.”
Eloise sat down, next to the bed. Philip took Adam’s arm and led him outside. “There are a few things,” he explained. “Her wish was to be cremated, and she wanted her ashes scattered among the vines. I must honor that.”
“Yes, I understand.” Philip had never seen Adam like this, so deeply affected, his face tangled with pain.“I understand,” he repeated.
“We’ll leave her in bed until Joe and Sally come. Sally will want to see her. Are Freddie and Judith here?”
“Yes.”
“I must call Sam. I’ll call him from the kitchen.”
Adam nodded.
“Do you want to stay with Eloise?”
Adam nodded again.
In the kitchen Cathrena sat huddled over, weeping copiously. She spoke pleadingly to Philip. Philip’s Spanish was indifferent, and he could only make out something about God taking the good. He stood a moment, looking at her uneasily. What could he say?
“You shrived her?” she asked in English.
He nodded, thinking how Barbara would have looked at him if he had ever suggested confession—that expression of loving disagreement. Or was it loving pity?
“That’s good,” Cathrena said.
“I must use the telephone,” Philip said.
Cathrena nodded.
He called Sam at home, and when he answered the phone, shortly, Philip said, “Your mother passed away last night. Peacefully. There was no pain. She died in her sleep.”
Sam’s reaction was unexpected. “No, no!” he protested. “Not so soon! Why didn’t I do something? I could have done something—why didn’t you call me?”
“It was three o’clock in the morning. There was nothing you could have done, Sam. She went as she wished to go.”
Sam went on pleading that they should have tried chemotherapy, and that she could have still been alive. Philip throttled his rising anger and said gently, “Come down here, Sam. You’ll want to be here.”
Then Philip slumped into a chair at the table. “Please, Cathrena, could you give me some coffee?” he asked wanly. “I’m very tired.”
It was then that a sobbing Sally entered the kitchen, Joe behind her, and Philip stood up and embraced her. “She’s in our room,” he told Joe, “with Eloise and Adam. Take Sally there.” When they left, he put his head down on the table and wept. There was a bottle of fifty morphine pills in their room. If he washed them down with a glass of water, all the pain would be gone; and then he felt defiled at the very thought. Cathrena brought him the coffee. Freddie and Judith were still asleep. He would have to awaken them, and he would have to call Harry and May Ling. “Everyone will be here,” he told Cathrena sadly. “You’ll have food for them?”
She nodded.
Then he went to awaken Freddie and Judith.
BARBARA DIED ON THE I8TH OF FEBRUARY. Later, in the spring, Judith’s child was born, and they named her Barbara Lavette. She was nine pounds at birth, a plump, beautiful baby and an easy birthing. She had blue eyes and a skin of pale brown, and as Judith put her to her breast, she told Freddie, “I will never model again. I will have three more, just like her. I shall be a mother.”
On the 15th of February, a Sunday, a memorial service was held for Barbara at the Unitarian Church. Freddie and Eloise both spoke, and when Philip asked whether anyone else desired to speak, a black man came forward and said simply, “I went to rob her, but you can’t rob a person who will give you all that she has. She gave me my life.” There were others who spoke, but these few words moved Philip most. When these memorials were done, Philip spoke and said, “For seven months, I was married to a gracious and beautiful woman who, above all things, knew who she was. I think that is the most I can say about her here and now. My church has given me a month for retreat, and perhaps at the end of that time I will know who I am, and my union with Barbara will be complete. I thank you for all the words of grace.”
A few months after Barbara passed away, Eloise and Adam had a granite plinth put in the small clearing on the hillside, opposite the bench where she and Eloise would sit and talk and open their hearts to each other. On it, they had engraved a verse from Barbara’s book of poems, a verse selected by Philip:
DO NOT LOOK FOR ME HERE,
FOR I AM NOT HERE.
BUT YOU CAN FEEL ME WHEN THE WIND BLOWS
AND YOU CAN SEE ME WHEN THE VINES LEAF OUT
AND YOU CAN SENSE ME WHEN THE GRAPES ARE CRUSHED
AND YOU CAN SEE ME SMILING WHEN THE SUN RISES
AND YOU CAN HEAR MY LAUGHTER WHEN THE BIRDS SING.
SO DO NOT WEEP FOR ME. I AM EVERYWHERE.
Barbara Lavette Carter
Nov. 10, 1914–February 18, 1985
A Biography of Howard Fast
Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in
his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.
Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.
Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.
Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast’s appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin’s purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.
Fast’s career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast’s books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).
Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.
Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother’s death in 1923 and their father’s absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”
A copy of Fast’s military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.
Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. “Everyone worked at the prison,” said Fast during a 1998 interview, “and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America.” Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: “I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison.”
Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette’s father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)
Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. “I got a disease, which is called ‘candidateitis,’” he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. “And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you’re ready to kill to win that election.” He concluded: “I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience.”
In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson’s work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. “Paul,” he said, “was an extraordinary man.” Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.)
Howard and Bette Fast in California in 1976. The couple relocated to the West Coast after Fast grew disgruntled over the poor reception of his novel The Hessian. While in California, Fast temporarily gave up writing novels to work as a screenwriter, but, like many novelists before him, found the business disheartening. “In L.A. you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you are cheating on your wife,” he told Pe
ople after he had moved back East in the 1980s. Of course, Fast, an ardent nature-lover, did enjoy California’s scenic beauty and eventually set many of his novels—including The Immigrant’s Daughter and the bestselling Masao Masuto detective series—in the state.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1997 Doubleday & Company, Inc.
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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