Second Generation (18 page)

"Danny, they got nothing but money. There's no Depression in the movies. Anyway, he wants to meet you, and I said I'd arrange it. One deal like this could turn this white elephant of yours into a paying proposition. You phone him at Paramount Pictures and arrange to meet him. And bring some stuff with you—plans; blueprints, photographs."

"I can do that," Dan agreed. "I got a beautiful set of Sparkman and Stephens blueprints and drawings that I inherited with the place. But, god damn it, how much does a movie director earn?"

"The hell with that! Go out there and sell him the job. Let him worry about paying for it."

Three days later, Dan drove his 1930 Ford from West-wood to Hollywood, turned off Melrose Avenue into Marathon Street, and faced the imposing gates of the Paramount studio. The guard at the gate regarded his car dubiously, checked his name, then passed him through and directed him where to park and how to find Alex Hargasey. It was the first time he had ever been inside a film studio, and after he had parked his car, he walked past the huge sound stages and the bungalow-like office buildings and dressing rooms with the gawking curiosity of any tourist, thinking that this was certainly an intriguing, childlike world, the great factories of make-believe drenched in the morning sun, men and women hurrying past in the colorful costumes of cowboys and Indians and maidens and knights of the Middle Ages. He found the half-timbered building that housed Hargasey's office, fake English between fake modern and fake Spanish, and was directed upstairs to a suite of offices. There he sat for fifteen minutes, leafing through a copy of the Hollywood
Reporter,
an object of interest to the peroxide-blond receptionist who sat behind her desk and studied him unabashedly.

Finally Hargasey emerged, an enormous, fat, bald man with a bulletlike head, his stomach pressed tightly behind a broad leather belt that encircled whipcord riding breeches. "Ah, boatbuilder!" he boomed. "You are this Lavette. I am Hargasey. Come on in." He studied Dan as they entered his office: a white rug that Dan felt was enveloping him like quicksand, white overstuffed chairs, a great black desk. "Son of bitch!" Hargasey exclaimed. "You are damn sight more photogenic than stupid star I got to work with. Maybe I forget about boat and I make you star? What do you say, Lavette? No. Joke. I got idiot sense of humor. Sit down. I got half-hour to tell you what I want. Then you make it for me."

That night at dinner in the cottage in Westwood, May Ling, her son, her mother and father, listened fascinated as Dan described his experience at the studio. "It makes no sense," he said. "The country's going down the drain, starving, dying, and this man tells me to spare no expense. Mahogany woodwork, silver-plated fixtures, teak decks. I told him it might run to three hundred thousand. He just grinned at me and said, 'Good, good.' "

"Then you'll build it," May Ling said calmly, "if you can."

"I can build it. I can build anything he wants."

Watching his father thoughtfully, Joe finally said, "You don't want to build it, do you, pop?"

"I guess I don't."

"I know," May Ling agreed. "But what difference does it make, Danny? It means work for a lot of men. If you don't build it, someone else will."

"If I don't build it," Dan said, "then I close down. It's the end of the road. So I guess I'll build it."

When Marcel Duboise came into Barbara's apartment on the Quai de Passy for the first time, he looked slowly around him and then shook his head and sighed hopelessly. "You lied to me," he told her. "You said you were a journalist. No journalist lives like this. No journalist lives on the Quai de Passy."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

He prowled through the place. "Bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, shower, tub, bidet—you're an heiress."

"All right. Then you've found me out. I am. You thought I was a plain
fieur de 1'asphalt,
since you did pick me up, and here I am an heiress."

"Don't be silly." Still, he kept turning and staring. "A place like this—at least a thousand francs a month."

"Eight hundred." She smiled at him. "Do you like it? I adore it myself. It's my first real home, can you imagine? And you never have to meet the man who pays the rent. He comes only one evening a week—"

"Don't talk like that!" he snapped at her. "I've known you for two weeks and you've never talked like that before. I don't like it."

"There you are, my dear Marcel. Every Frenchman is a moralist. They pretend otherwise. Oh, stop being so pompous and sit down." He sank into the chair, fingering the upholstery. In her mind, Barbara could see him calculating the price. It irritated her. So much that was French irritated her, and yet so much enchanted her. "I'm an heiress," she said deliberately. "I should have told you that at the beginning, but at the beginning I was sure I'd never see you again, and anyway, it's a cliche for an American girl in Paris to be an heiress. I'm very rich— oh, not at this moment. Don't be alarmed. I don't come into the money for another three years, and anyway, how do you think I feel about it with my country in the middle of this rotten Depression?"

He just sat there and stared at her. Then he asked, "Why did you never let me take you home before?"

"Oh, you ass!" she exclaimed. "You think I'm a
putain.
You do, don't you? A classy whore. You don't believe a word I said."

"Should I? After all the lies?"

"What lies? I told you I'm a correspondent. I am!" She walked over to a pile of magazines, picked up a handful, and flung them at him. "Read it, if you can read English. That's the work I do, and I'm damn proud of it." She stared at him, shaking her head. "Oh, what's the use! You'd better go."

"No!"

"Then stay there and let your thoughts rot in that stupid bourgeois mind of yours."

"So I'm bourgeois? Me?" he cried indignantly.

"Yes. And now, excuse me." She went into the bathroom, washed her face with cold water, stared at the angry face in the mirror, and then began to laugh. Her lips were still twitching with a smile she fought to control as she returned to the sitting room. Marcel stood facing her.

"I love you," he said desperately.

She burst out laughing.

"And you laugh at me, you heartless bitch!"

"Who do you love, Marcel, the
putain
or the heiress?"

"Stop that!" He grabbed her, started to shake her, and then embraced her. She stopped laughing. She met his lips and closed her eyes and felt the tears start. Then she pulled back and stared into his dark eyes.

"Why are you crying?" he whispered. "Did I hurt you?"

"You're such a strange Frenchman. I've seen you eight times and you never made a pass. I could have been your sister. Oh, I know you were being careful. And now, when you decide that I am a kept woman—"

"No!"

"That's not why I'm crying. Don't you see? I love you so much."

In a way, she told herself, she had never been made love to before—remembering the clumsy pawing on college dates, remembering the argumentation and pleading of those who did it vocally, remembering what was almost a knock-down, drag-out fight on a Princeton football weekend, remembering and then remembering nothing, only lying naked and alive with a man whose hands and lips worshipped her body, and who told her over and over again, in a language so well made for it, how very beautiful she was.

"Marcel," she said.

"Yes, my love?"

"When it happens, don't be alarmed."

"Alarmed? My God, alarmed?"

"Oh, I hate to have to tell you this, but I'm a virgin."

He raised himself from where he lay beside her, stared at her, reached out, and touched her cheek. "Oh, no."

"God's truth," she said in English.

"You're twenty-three years old. You've been in Paris almost three years."

"I know. I don't know what else to say. I'm so ashamed." She was giggling.

"Darling, lovely Barbara," he begged her. "Don't laugh. You cannot make love and laugh at the same time."

Later, hours later, lying side by side, smoking, watching the tendrils of smoke drift and twist, too languorously surfeited even to dress, Marcel said, "Being an heiress makes it difficult. It would have been easier the other way."

"What other way?"

"A kept woman. We could have worked that out. But an heiress—I don't have two francs. What I earn, I spend."

"Then we'll both be poor." "And what about the fortune?"

"I'll probably give it away," Barbara said indifferently.

Late at night, on the twenty-seventh of May, 1937, Thomas Lavette knocked at the door of his mother's room. There was no response, and he opened the door gently. Jean sat at her dressing table, and as he opened the door, she turned to face him.

"It's me, mother. Is it all right?"

She picked up a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

"You've been crying?" He had never seen his mother in tears before.

"Not really. Tears, but not really crying, Tom. Just a long day and too much emotion."

"May I come in?"

"Please."

"It's past midnight."

"Come in, come in."

"John's asleep?"

Jean nodded. She pointed to a chair and then dropped into a chaise longue. "Sit there, Tommy. Let me look at you. I haven't seen you for dayc."

"Not my fault, mother. You've been so wrapped up in the bridge. How did it go today?"

"You don't want to know about the tears?"

It embarrassed him. "I don't want to pry."

"I wish you would pry. I wish we both could pry at each other enough to break through. Well, I was crying. Today, just before the ceremonies began, Mr. Strauss came to me—"

"Mr. Strauss?"

"You don't know, do you, Tom. The name doesn't even ring a bell."

"That's not fair, mother. He had something to do with the bridge."

"A little. He and Clifford Paine built the bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge that we dedicated today. I first met him six years ago—"

Tom half-rose. "Mother," he said, "it's very late."

"No. I'm in a very singular mood, Thomas. I wish you would just sit there and listen to me. I intend to talk to my son, perhaps because I have no one else to talk to. So if you will—please."

"If you wish."

"I do. It's very late, but I am not a bit tired. I want to talk about Joe Strauss, a small, not terribly impressive, Jewish man. A least I think he's Jewish. Perhaps not. When I was your age, I had all the normal—no, not entirely normal—prejudices against Jews. Your father's partner, Mark Levy, was Jewish, and I could barely tolerate him. So you see, I have a very clear understanding of what growing up rich on Nob Hill does to one. It happens quickly. My grandfather panned gold. My father was Thomas Seldon—"

"You're going to lecture me again," Tom said.

"Again? No. I think this is the first time."

"Have it your way."

"I intend to, this once. You see, there never would have been a bridge without Joe Strauss. It was his demonic compulsion. Everyone said that it was impossible—oh, mostly the geologists. They knew it was impossible. But Joe decided to build the bridge or die in the attempt, and I think he did both."

"He died?"

"No, my dear. Please don't ask me to explain. But, you see, once he had fought it all through—the legalities, the politics, the plans, the concepts—once he did all of that, he still required the money, and there all the wise and practical people decided that they had him stopped cold. He needed twenty-seven million dollars. Six years ago, he walked into my office at the bank and introduced himself. Oh, I knew who he was, but we had never met. He told me that he was putting out a bond issue. The banks had laughed him out of their offices until he went to Giannini. Giannini didn't laugh. He told Joe that his bank, the Bank of America, would take the bonds. But there was still an overage, some six million. So Joe Strauss came to me. I asked him why, and he said, 'You're a woman, Mrs. Lavette. You know about men, the kind of men who remain children and dream the dreams the kids dream.' Or something like that. I don't remember exactly."

"That was a damn strange thing for him to say."

"Not really. He knew about your father, and I did something to your father once that he never hated me for, so perhaps I knew less about men than Mr. Strauss thought. Anyway, I took the bonds, and I bullied my board of directors into accepting my position. That was how I came to know Joe, and today the bridge was finished and opened and dedicated, all nine thousand feet of it, all twenty-seven thousand strands of wire—and that's why I was crying. Now, please go to bed."

Tom started to say something, to tell her that he had come into her room to talk about his job and money. Then he shook his head and sighed. "All right. Good-night, mother." He walked over to her and kissed her dutifully, then he left the room, and Jean sat there, staring at the door, disliking herself for being obtuse and unreasonable with him.