Second Generation (6 page)

Jake led Goldberg off toward the stone winery buildings, the children trailing curiously. He pointed up at the sloping hillsides. "There are our newest plantings. Pinot Noir. Of course you might say that Zinfandel is endemic to this valley and it's what we're famous for. But I tasted Pinot Noir in France that was like the wine of the gods, and Clair and I decided that we'd produce a wine as good or better, and by golly, I think we have. You'll taste it later. We started with five hundred vines, and now we've got the best stand of Pinot Noir in the valley. Come back at the end of the summer when the grapes are ripe, and you'll have a treat, Sam. We don't irrigate up there. Some of the growers do, but for my money, you get a better grape if you make the vines fight for moisture. If you irrigate, the vines are loaded with grapes, and for your greed there's a poorer quality." Jake paused. Goldberg was regarding him in amazement. "What is it, Sam?"

he asked.

"Your passion, sonny. I'm astonished."

"Why? Wine is a passionate thing. God Almighty, Sam, do you remember how we scrimped and starved and worked to have this place? It's my whole life. It's like I know every vine up there on that hillside by name and number and character."

Trudging alongside them, young Adam said, "He does, Mr. Goldberg."

"You've inoculated them," Goldberg observed dryly.

"Higate has. I sometimes try to think of what it means to grow up in a place like this and have Clair for a mother."

"You have a pretty damn good mother of your own."

"I'm not selling her short, Sam, only making a point. It's too hot to climb the hill and look at the vines. Come in here," he said, indicating the entrance to the largest of the stone buildings.

As he stepped out of the hot sun, the cool darkness blinded Goldberg at first, and he paused to let his eyes adjust and to breathe deeply of the cold, sour-smelling air.

"That's the smell," Jake said. "At first it's strange. Then it becomes a kind of perfume. What do you drink, Sam?"

"Scotch whiskey."

"Of course. How long is it since you tasted a really fine wine?"

"I suppose the last time Jill and I were in France. Nineteen twelve. I'm not a wine drinker, Jake."

"You will be. Careful here." Followed by his three children, who were apparently fascinated by the very fat, bespectacled man who ambled after their father, Jake led the way down a set of stone steps into a cavernous cellar. There were rows and rows of wine—in bottles, in small kegs, and in large barrels. The air was cool and damp and heady with the musty smell of wine.

"The aging room. Over there"—pointing to the big barrels—"the sacramental wine. That's our bread and butter, Sam, if you can think of it that way. That's how we started and survived during Prohibition, first with old Rabbi Blum's synagogues and then with the churches. Now we produce about twenty thousand barrels of sacramental wine a year, port and Malaga, we call it, and not a bad imitation of the real thing. It's good, decent wine, if you like sweet wine. I don't. We don't grow the grapes for this stuff. We buy them down in Fresno. You'd think, with an assured market for twenty thousand gallons, we'd make money."

"Do you?"

"Not a nickel. Oh, we did make money back in twenty-eight and twenty-nine, but this Depression knocked the bottom out of prices. We break even. Come back at the end of the summer, and you'll find twenty men working here and in the fields. We meet the payroll and we're satisfied."

He pointed to the racks of bottled wine. "That's the Pinot Noir, the love of my life. That is wine," he said slowly, almost reverently, Goldberg thought. "We do about a thousand gallons a year, and we lager it, age it six months to a year in the bottle, laying it that way with the cork down. The cork stays wet and the wine breathes and lives."

"Good heavens, it's become a religion with you."

"It tends to. Religion and wine have never been too far apart. That's how we pay our bills. Let me show you the rest of it—this is only the end product."

Jake led Goldberg from room to room, past the crushers, the fermenting vats, the storage tanks, and into the bottling plant.

"All this to make a glass of wine," Goldberg said wearily.

"This and more. Instinct and luck. Without that, you're doomed. Maybe we don't have the instinct, but we've had a lot of luck. Over here, Sam."

He led the way to the end of the bottling room, where half a dozen uncorked, labeled bottles stood. "Our tasting room," he explained. "We don't have a real one yet. We will someday. These are all the Pinot Noir. We test them as they age. Open them, and then let them breathe for a few hours." He poured two glasses of the dark red wine. "Try it."

Goldberg drank the wine slowly. The last wine he had tasted was from the bottle Gino had brought to the table in the restaurant as his gift to the diners. He remembered the raw, flat taste of it. This wine was like liquid velvet, dry, slightly nutty, with a gentle, haunting fragrance.

"I don't know much about wine," Goldberg said.

"Do you like it?"

"If I knew anything about wine, I'd say it's pretty damn wonderful."

"You bet your sweet patooties. That wine, Sam, is going to conquer the world one day."

Willis Mackenzie, chief trainer at the Menlo Circle Club, at Menlo Park on the Peninsula, was something of an expert in the mores and ordinary habits of the rich and the children of the rich—in particular as they related to horses. Horses, as Mackenzie saw it, could be grouped with liquor, gambling, and desultory sex; they were less an indulgence than an addiction, less an interest than a demanding status symbol, to the rich of San Francisco and the Peninsula what the automobile was to the upper middle class—and even more specifically so since the onset of the Depression.

To this, however, there were a few exceptions, people who loved horses passionately. Mackenzie, a tall, hard-faced man of forty-five years, separated such people from the others with a reluctant smile. He was a bitter man, who hated the people he served, who hated and resented the rich, and who desired and resented their well-kept, carefully groomed women. He put Barbara Lavette in the special category of those who loved and understood horses, and on this day, when she informed him that she wished to sell Sandy, her seven-year-old chestnut mare, he looked at her thoughtfully and then suspiciously asked her why.

"I have my reasons, Mac."

"Well, she's a damn good horse, a good bloodline on both sides. You got the papers?" he asked, wondering meanwhile how much he could pick up on the deal. A local deal was a problem. If he sold her outside the county, he could possibly pick up a few hundred.

"Right here," Barbara replied, taking them out of her purse.

"I didn't mean right now. You know there's an auction in August."

"I don't want to wait. I want to sell her now."

"Well," he said slowly, "I got a lady at Flintridge in Pasadena. She's looking for a good gentle mare."

"That would take time, wouldn't it?"

"A week or so. She'd want to see the horse."

"No. I want to sell her today."

"Well—well, now there's something, Miss Lavette. You don't just sell a horse like you sell a pair of pants. You got to find a buyer and you got to talk him around to it. You got to give him a run on the beast. No one buys a pig in the poke."

"Sandy's not a pig in the poke. I know you buy horses sometimes, Mac. What will you give me for Sandy?"

"You want to sell her to me?"

"I want to sell her today."

Mackenzie stared at her thoughtfully for a long moment. They were standing next to her car, a 1933 Ford station wagon, at the edge of the dirt road that led to the stables. Mackenzie looked at the car, ran a hand over the fender, and asked her, "What happened to your Buick?"

It was none of his damn business, Barbara thought. He was moving in. The careful wall of separation had collapsed. He had decided that she was in trouble, and he was breaking ground.

"Do you want to buy Sandy?" she said. She had no intention of talking about the car; there would be trouble enough with the car thing when her mother returned. The Buick convertible had been a gift from her mother on her eighteenth birthday, but it was nothing she could drive to the soup kitchen on Bryant Street, no way to explain a car like that, and anyway, the luggage compartment was too small for her purposes. She had sold it and bought the Ford station wagon.

"Let's go over to the barn and have a look at her."

"No. I don't want to see Sandy again. Will you buy her?"

"I'm just the trainer here, Miss Lavette. I ain't got the kind of money you find in the club. I suppose I could buy her." He rubbed his chin and thought about it. "I'll give you four hundred for her."

"Oh, no. You must be kidding. The saddle alone cost a hundred and fifty."

"Throwing the saddle in?"

"Sandy's worth a thousand. You know that."

He shook his head. "That's too rich for my blood. Throw in the saddle, and I'll give you five hundred."

"Why, Mac? You know what Sandy's worth."

"I told you, I'm just the trainer. You want to wait a week or two, this lady from Flintridge might give you seven hundred. Wait for the auction, maybe you'll get that much, maybe more."

"Will you pay me cash? Today?"

"I'll pay you cash," he said.

Barbara drove north from Menlo Park, tears running down her cheeks and five hundred dollars in her purse. "I will not weep over a horse," she told herself. "I will not, I will not." Or was she weeping for herself and out of her own fear? After all, she had been nine months without Sandy, and giving very little thought to the animal, if the truth be told. It was the act of selling her, and selling her to that miserable Mackenzie, that chilled her—even more than the act of selling her car, her emerald pin, and her gold bracelet. In time they would all return, her mother, John Whittier, and her brother Tom. Her mother noticed everything. She would come directly to the point. "Why, Barbara, did you sell that beautiful Buick roadster and buy that wretched Ford?" The fact that it was a very special and splendid birthday gift made the surreptitious sale even more heinous. "And where is your bracelet? And what else have you sold? And what kind of trouble are you in?" Barbara was a poor liar and badly versed in the art. She would simply tell the truth, and then whatever might happen would happen.

She told herself that she had done nothing wrong. She had acted out of love and compassion. Or had she? Or was the action taken out of loathing for her own way of life and everything that had surrounded her? If so, it was a very sudden loathing. A few months ago she had been a reasonably content college student. Then she had returned to a home that wasn't hers, yet now she wondered whether even the house on Russian Hill had ever been hers in any real sense. Or is any home of the parents the home of the child? Now she was pitying herself, and that sort of thing simply disgusted her. Her mother's friends pitied themselves; she could remember overhearing their conversations, recalling her own annoyance at the wives of millionaires who pitied themselves in the America of the nineteen thirties.

She hadn't gone to Bryant Street by accident. She loved the waterfront, the Embarcadero, the docks, the fishing boats, the big steamers, the freighters, the great luxury liners. It was all part of the mythology of her strange childhood, of the father she had never really known. This had been his place, where he started as a hand on his own father's fishing boat, out of which he built his empire of wealth and ships. And then he left it, abandoned it; and not comprehending that, Barbara made a quixotic act of nobility out of it. To have and surrender, to find something real, to sacrifice meaningfully—all this raced around inside her tinged with romantic dreams, novels she had read, discussions with her friends at college, and piled childishly into a confusion and despair at odds with her basically cheerful nature.

And then one day she stood outside the soup kitchen on Bryant Street, just stood there and watched as the striking longshoremen lined up to be fed. She had a vivid imagination, and her romantic notion of the working class had been shaped mainly by the novels of Jack London and Upton Sinclair. All of which led to her meeting Domi-nick Salone.

He had paused next to her and said, "Lady, is something wrong?"

He was her own height, skinny, the dark flesh of his face drawn tightly over the bones, deepset, dark intense eyes, a small nose, a head of black, unruly hair, and, curiously in one so young, a nest of wrinkles at either end of his wide mouth. He couldn't have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four. He wore blue jeans and a stained green woolen windbreaker over a T-shirt.

She just stared at him.

"Because you're crying, lady."

"I am not."

"Sure as hell you are. We got sympathizers, lady, but mostly they don't cry."

"I'm not crying."

"O.K., O.K." He shrugged and turned away.