Second Generation

THE EPIC SAGA OF AN EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN FAMILY—FROM THE BOLD VISION OF ITS IMMIGRANT FOUNDERS TO THE TURBULENT LIVES OF THEIR INHERITORS

njglt

DAN
LAVETTE—Barbara's father. Son of an Italian fisherman, whose life took him from rags to riches and back again. Undaunted, devoted to those he loved, he was ready to rise from the ashes and build a new financial empire.

JEAN SELDON LAVETTE WHITTIER

—Barbara's mother. She had inherited her father's fortune and his genius for banking. She was proud and cold: her marriage to Dan was doomed from the start, but beneath her icy beauty, fiery passion ached for fulfillment.

TOM LAVETTE
—Barbara's brother. Ashamed of Dan's immigrant roots, he turned to his arrogant stepfather. Certain of his desire for wealth and power, he was torn between the love society demanded and the love it would never forgive.

MARCEL DUBOISE—
Barbara's lover. Hi.s relationship to Barbara was deep and intensely moving, but his decision to cover the Spanish Civil War shattered their dream.

* SECOND GENERATION

* THE IMMIGRANTS TIME AND THE RIDDLE A TOUCH OF INFINITY THE HESSIAN THE CROSSING THE GENERAL ZAPPED AN ANGEL * THE JEWS: STORY OF A PEOPLE THE HUNTER AND THE TRAP TORQUEMADA THE HILL AGRIPPA'S DAUGHTER POWER THE EDGE OF TOMORROW APRIL MORNING THE GOLDEN RIVER THE WINSTON AFFAIR MOSES, PRINCE OF EGYPT THE LAST SUPPER SILAS TIMBERMAN THE PASSION OF SACCO AND VANZETTI SPARTACUS THE PROUD AND THE FREE

DEPARTURE MY GLORIOUS BROTHERS CLARKTON THE AMERICAN FREEDOM ROAD CITIZEN TOM PAINE THE UNVANQUISHED THE LAST FRONTIER CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY PLACED IN THE CITY

THE CHILDREN STRANGE YESTERDAY TWO VALLEYS

* In Dell Editions

SECOND GENERATION

Howard Fast

A DELL BOOK

For Jerry and Dotty

Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, New York 10017

Copyright © 1978 by Howard Fast

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means,

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Houghton Mifflin Company. For information address Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, Massachusetts.

Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

ISBN 0-440-17892-4

Reprinted by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

Printed in the United States of America

First Dell printing

CONTENTS

Part One
HOMECOMING
3

Part Two
THE LEAVE-TAKING
101

Part Three
INTO EGYPT
163

Part Four
REUNION 227

Part Five
DEPARTURE
293

Part Six
RETURN
345

Part Seven
HOMELAND
399

Part One HOMECOMING

Pete Lomas' mackerel drifter was an old, converted, coal-fired steam tug of a hundred and twenty-two tons, purchased as war surplus in 1919. It cost him so little then that he was able to sell its oversized engine for scrap and replace it with a modern, oil-burning plant. He named it
Golden Gate,
packed his wife and kids and household goods into it, and sailed from San Francisco Bay down to San Pedro. There he rented a berth for the tug and went into the mackerel business. His wife suffered from asthma, and her doctor determined that the San Francisco area was too damp. Lomas then decided to make the move to Los Angeles County, and he bought a house in Downey.

He laid out his drift nets with a three-man crew, and until the Depression came, in the thirties, he did well; and even after 1929 he managed to make a decent living out of his boat and to pay his crew living wages as well. Years before, he had worked for Dan Lavette as the captain of his fleet of crabbing boats on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco; and when, in 1931, he stumbled on Lavette on the dock at San Pedro, broke and hungry, he offered him a job. Now, in 1934, Dan had been working for Lomas steadily for three years.

Today, the first of June, 1934, Dan Lavette came off the mackerel boat at ten o'clock in the morning and got into his 1930 Ford sedan to drive to his home in West-wood, where he lived with his second wife, an American-born Chinese woman named May Ling, their son, Joseph, and her parents. Their small house was a few blocks from the University of California campus in Los Angeles, where May Ling worked at the library.

Dan was a big man, six feet and one inch in height, heavily built but without fat, broad in the shoulders, his skin tanned and weather-beaten by the sun and the salt water. He had a good head of curly hair, mostly gray,

dark eyes under straight brows, high cheekbones, and a

wide, full mouth.

To the two men who comprised the crew of the mackerel boat along with Dan and Pete Lomas, Lavette was a plain, soft-spoken, easygoing, and competent fisherman. He never lost his temper and he never complained, regardless of how brutal or backbreaking the conditions were, and that in itself was most unusual among fishermen. Of his background, they knew only that years before he had fished with Pete Lomas in San Francisco Bay. One of them was a Chicano, the other an Italian who spoke little English, and they were not inordinately curious. As for Lomas, who knew a great deal more about Dan Lavette, he kept his peace.

The Chicano, whose name was Juan Gonzales, while only twenty-two years old, was alert enough to realize that Dan Lavette was unlike any of the other fishermen on the wharf. He said to him one day, "Danny, how come a man like you, he's satisfied to pull fish?"

Dan shrugged. "I'm a fisherman. Always been one."

"You'll be an old man soon. I'll be goddamned if I spend my life on a fishing boat, take home twenty, thirty dollars a week, and end up a poor bum on the dock."

"I've been a bum on the dock," Dan replied. "I like fishing better."

Driving home today, Dan thought of that. Did he actually like what he did, enjoy what he did? It had been a bad night, cold and wet out on the water, and he had wrenched a muscle in his shoulder. His whole body ached, and he thought longingly of the hot bath that he would climb into the moment he set foot in the house. He supposed he was as happy as a man might be. He had made his peace with himself. Nevertheless, he was still a fisherman who took home between twenty and thirty dollars a week, and he was forty-five years old.

The morning mist and overcast had cleared by the time he reached Westwood. His father-in-law, Feng Wo, was in the garden, tending his beloved rosebushes, and he greeted Dan formally as always.

"You are well, Mr. Lavette?" He had never broken his old habit of addressing Dan as Mr. Lavette.

"Tired."

"You have a letter. From your daughter, Barbara."

Dan nodded. "I'll have a bath first."

He soaked in the tub, and strength and comfort flowed back into his body. In a few hours, May Ling would come home, and he would sprawl in a chair and listen to her recitation of what had happened that day on the campus. She dispelled the common notion that nothing but whispers are heard in a library; everything that May Ling looked at or encountered took on a marvelous and enchanting dramatic shape. Her whole life, every day of it, was an adventure in newness. This past night, out at sea, one of their drift nets had parted. Dan hated the drift nets, which trapped the mackerel by their gills. This time he spent an hour splicing the break, soaked to the waist, the dying fish threshing around his hands; still, he could not put into words what he felt, yet with the most ordinary occurrence May Ling brought a whole world to life.

Out of the tub, he toweled himself dry, relaxed, delightfully weary. The
Golden Gate
would lay over until tomorrow morning while the nets were refurbished, so he had a long, lazy time of daylight ahead of him, and then a night when he could sleep himself out on a clean bed instead of huddling for an hour or two on the damp bunk in the cabin of the boat. He and his son would play a game of checkers. May Ling would be reading a book, looking up every now and then to catch his glance and smile at him. Hell, he thought, it was all and more than anyone wanted out of life.

Dressed in a clean shirt and trousers, he went down to the kitchen where the old woman, So-toy, his mother-in-law, had tea and cake waiting for him. The letter from Barbara lay on the table next to his plate. "You'll excuse me," he said to So-toy.

Still, after so many years in America, she spoke very little English. She simply smiled with approval as he opened the letter, then sat down opposite him at the kitchen table while he read. At first, he had been uncomfortable living with two people who worshipped him as uncritically as Feng Wo and his wife. Now he was almost used to it.

"Daddy," the letter began—always that single word, as if it conveyed a significance beyond what any adjective could, yet a word she had spoken to him only at one meeting, a year before—and then went on: "School's over, but I had to write to you before I leave New York for San Francisco, because you will remember that every letter I ever wrote to you has been from here over the past eight months, and I want this to complete our correspondence for this semester. You always tell me that you are not much of a letter writer, and it's true your letters are short, but I do treasure them. And if anyone ever asked me about my father, and they do, you know, I could have said that so much of what I know of him is from his letters, which is strange, don't you think?

"Anyway, school is over. It was such a good year and I do love Sarah Lawrence, but really, I don't know whether I want to go back. Isn't that a strange thing for me to say? For the past week I have been puzzling over the way I feel and trying to make some sense out of it. Have you ever been very happy, but with a little worm of discontent nibbling away at your insides? I shouldn't ask you that, because I saw you with May Ling and I know how happy you are and that there are no worms of discontent eating at you, and it's worse because I don't for the life of me know why. Can one be happy and so terribly dissatisfied at the same time?

"But now when I look at what I have written here, it occurs to me that happy is not the right word. Jenny Brown, who is one of my roommates, gets very blue, and she can't understand why I am always so cheerful, and I guess that's what I really mean. Cheerful is a better word than happy to describe how I usually feel, because even when I feel that something is deeply wrong about the way I am, I don't get depressed about it. But I am going to take two decisive steps when I get home. I shall tell mother that I want a place of my own, and I also intend to find a job, and the latter may have to take place before the former, since it's up to mother whether my allowance continues. Anyway, I feel a little ashamed writing to you about that, when my allowance is more than anyone deserves without working for it. All of this is just to tell you what to expect when I come down to see you, because it's so very long since my first trip to Los Angeles, and every time I think about that I get all wet-eyed and emotional. But I do promise you that very soon after I get home, I will drive down to Westwood.

"I can't tell you how much I want to see Joe again. It's so strange to have a brother you have only seen once in your entire life, and I liked him so much. How can one have two brothers as different as Tom and Joe? But of course I can answer that myself. I do love Tom, but he's such a stuffed shirt. You know that he's graduating from Princeton this year, and he's just furious at me because I wouldn't hang around with mother's family in Boston until the graduation, and I wouldn't because I don't think it would matter a bit for me to be there at the graduation and I don't intend to make that long train trip twice in one month.

"Anyway, two more weeks away was just too much. I am so eager to get home and to see San Francisco, and to see you and Joe and May Ling, who is just the loveliest person in the world, and her father and mother, who are just darling and much more like two people you read about in a book and don't ever meet in real life."