The Immigrant’s Daughter (18 page)

“O.K. I just thought it worth mentioning.”

“What do we need for the commercials she wants?”

“We can get thirty seconds for fifteen thousand — maybe. It doesn't make sense.”

“What time?”

“Eight-thirty. That's almost prime time. They consider it prime time.”

“That's a damn stiff price for thirty seconds.”

“I'm not sure of prices. We don't want network exposure. We want it on the network channel but as a local segment. Miss Lavette's right. Today, TV is the absolute determining factor. And I've plucked my chickens.”

“Then find more chickens.”

“Freddie,” Gilpin said softly, “suppose I go to your father — you don't even know about it.”

“I'd kick your ass across the bridge. I told you he's not my father.”

“What burns your ass if I talk to the man? Maybe he's not your father; he's her brother.”

“No!”

“What do I do — print the money?”

“You tell her she can't have it. She's my aunt, and she is like no one I've ever known. But right now, she's a little crazy.”

“Because she has to win? Can't you understand that? She has to win.”

“Suddenly, you're a damn psychologist.”

“I'm a fund-raiser, Freddie. I'm a political fund-raiser, and I'm a damn good one. I went into this because I read her books when I was twelve years old. I learned about war from her, and I learned something about living and dying, and I learned something about women.”

“That's enough.”

“What's enough?”

“The hell with it. Do anything you want to do.”

Gilpin decided to do it. There were all sorts of families, and the condition was more or less generic in the human race. A family this ridden with money, guilt, love and hatred was not entirely unfamiliar to him, but having been San Francisco born and bred, he had come to regard the Seldons and the Lavettes as a New Yorker might regard the Harrimans and the Rockefellers, except that here big money was more recent than in the East, and here there was an ethnic jigsaw puzzle and a tangled history that was difficult if not impossible to follow. Nevertheless, he went to the seat of the mighty, which in this case was a thirty-six-story tower of glass and steel and concrete, a piece of arrogant insanity in a city that had once before half perished in an earthquake and that was now and forever perched on top of that same uneasy continental flaw. The elevator marked
EXECUTIVE OFFICES
took him to the thirty-fifth floor, where he emerged into a severely formal foyer, decorated in a style that was a cross between a British ducal establishment and a proper millionaire's den. The walls were oak, the floors pegged walnut, the carpets expensive Persian, the furniture English-club style, soft leather, and on the paneled walls, oversized nonobjective modern paintings.

At the reception desk, a young man in his thirties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a properly stolid look on his handsome face, asked what he could do for the gentleman who faced him.

“I'd like to see Mr. Lavette.”

“And you are?”

“Mort Gilpin.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Then I'm afraid you can't see Mr. Lavette. No one does without an appointment.”

“I understand that. I'm a fund-raiser, engaged by Mr. Lavette's son to raise money for Mr. Lavette's sister's congressional campaign. His sister's name is Barbara Lavette.” Gilpin took out his card. “Here's my card. The telephone number on there is a storefront at Sunnyside, which Miss Lavette uses as her campaign headquarters. If you wish to verify my identity, you can call this number and talk to Miss Lavette or her nephew Frederick. No tricks. Everything aboveboard. Suppose you send some kind of word to Mr. Lavette, and if he won't see me, I leave. O.K.?”

The good-looking young man picked up his desk phone and said, “Willie, step out here for a moment.” The raised arm revealed a bulge. When Willie came through the door, thirtyish and also good-looking, his jacket bulged slightly, too. Gilpin had not realized how nervous the seats of the mighty were.

“Take over a moment. I have to speak to Mr. Lavette.” And then to Mort Gilpin, “Sit down. I'll be back in a few moments.”

It was closer to five minutes, and then the man with the hornrimmed glasses returned and asked Mort Gilpin to follow him. They went through an inner reception room, where a pretty blond young woman sat at a desk and smiled pleasantly, and then down a hallway, to a door Gilpin's guide opened for him, allowing him to enter, but not following him. No ducal pretensions here; this was a tasteful modern office with an enormous picture window that overlooked San Francisco Bay.

There was no greeting from Thomas Lavette. He sat behind his desk, stared bleakly at Mort Gilpin and then motioned for him to sit down alongside the desk. “You work for my son?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“He's running the campaign?”

“Yes, he is.”

“Does he know you're here?”

“No.”

“Is he any good?” Lavette's voice was low and rasping. Gilpin could see a resemblance to Barbara, but Thomas Lavette looked older than his sixty-four years. His thin hair was white, and the nest of wrinkles around his pale blue eyes belied the puffy youth-fulness of his cheeks and chin.

“Damn good, sir. Fred's brilliant.”

“I see. What does he pay you?”

“Two hundred a week, plus five percent of whatever I raise.”

“So if I give you money, you take five percent?”

“No, sir. To come to Miss Lavette's brother for money — well, that's not my idea of fund-raising. That's family. I wouldn't take a nickel out of that.”

“Then why the hell are you here?”

“Because I want her to win. I've been doing this kind of political fund-raising for five years now — I never ran into anyone like her.”

“Can she win?”

“I think so. I think we have a winning edge already.”

“Of course, you have to figure that if you admitted to a very unlikely shot, I'd pull back. Nobody bets on a lost cause.”

“Well, sir, tomorrow the
L.A. World
prints the results of its latest poll, the Forty-eighth C.D. among others. I think we'll have an edge tomorrow. I can come back.”

“You're here now. How much do you need?”

“Whatever I can get. If you ask a figure, I'd like fifty thousand.” It took something for Gilpin to say that. He kept his hands in his pockets. When he took them out, he had to concentrate to keep them from shaking.

Lavette opened a checkbook on his desk, wrote a check, tore it out and handed it to Gilpin. “Fifty thousand. Cash.” He took the check back and endorsed it. “I'll call my bank. You take this down there and turn it into cashier's checks or cash or any way you need it. But nobody else knows where this money comes from. I don't know whether it's legal or not and I don't give a damn. If my friends can do it, I can damn well do it. But two things — if I ever find out that you've blabbed to anyone, my son, my sister, your wife, if you have one, I'll break your back, and if you know me, you know I can do it. And secondly, don't dip into this money. I'll know about that too.”

“I'm not honest,” Gilpin said, “but I keep my word. I told you I'm not dipping into this. That holds.” He had expected Lavette to offer his hand, but Lavette didn't move.

“You can go now,” Lavette said.

The fourth poll, with Election Day still thirteen days away, showed Alexander Holt with forty percent of the vote in terms of the people polled, Barbara with forty-six percent, and fourteen percent still undecided. In the midst of the uproar at her headquarters, Freddie answered the telephone and then, after a brief exchange, covered the telephone and shouted, “Will all you characters please shut up for a moment!” He then motioned to Barbara and said softly, “Believe it or not, Alexander Holt. Wants to talk. I think he's going to concede.”

“Freddie, don't be a fool.”

“You want to talk?”

“Yes. Freddie, create some quiet and give me a corner by myself.”

She picked up the telephone. “Alex?”

“I heard that,” he said. “It would certainly set a precedent. Holt concedes before the election.”

“Alex, I don't know what to say. Would it be too awful to say I feel rather sorry for you?”

“Not at all. I treasure a lovely woman's sympathy. But I still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”

“I'm sure you have.”

“Dinner tonight — to celebrate your temporary victory?”

“No, not until after the election, Alex.”

“Busy? Or have you been warned off?”

“Some of both. Win or lose, we shouldn't feel too different Wednesday after next.”

“I'm a rotten loser.”

Later, having lunch in the Mexican restaurant behind the plaza, sitting with Freddie and Mort Gilpin, Barbara said, “No, he didn't sound disturbed. Very bright and confident.”

“That I find damn disturbing,” Gilpin said. “I hate to say this, Miss Lavette, but he isn't admired in the circles where I live.”

“I'd rather not push that,” Barbara said, rather primly. “It's only natural that this election means a great deal to him.”

“On the other hand,” Freddie said, “I want to know where that money came from.”

“No way,” Gilpin told him. “I picked it up from a circle of my own last resort. They live and give anonymously, period.”

“No, sir. I want to know.”

“What the devil gives with you, Freddie? Don't you want the money?”

“I want to know whether it came from Thomas Lavette.”

“You're sick on that subject. No. No, it did not come from your father. Furthermore, it's committed. I made a fantastic deal, and we have four thirty-second local spots on national network prime time.”

“I never agreed to that!” Freddie snapped.

Barbara said gently, “Come on, I did it. I have become greedy and inhuman and I want those spots. You agreed that if Mort raised the money, we could buy them, and if it was Tom —” She shook her head. “No, I wish it were. But it isn't. It couldn't be. He's sworn to Alexander Holt's camp, he's Mister Republican, cheek to cheek with Ronald Reagan, and let's not put any more pressure on Mort. He's worked miracles.”

Sam brought his new
relationship
to meet his mother. That's how he described it. “We have a relationship.” “Well, we didn't have them,” Barbara said. “We had other things.” Sam was not very long on humor; in that, he was like his father, and since he was beginning to achieve a reputation beyond the Bay Area for his surgical skill and thereby earning very large sums of money, he found himself searching for a life style that would accommodate to it, without leaving all his principles by the wayside. To this end, he spent long hours in the surgical clinic, and it was there that he met Mary Lou Constable, who was also assuaging guilt, and exercising what some called the conscience of the rich, as a volunteer in Emergency, but in all truth as a cleaning woman to keep on top of the blood and debris — a low and unpleasant station. It was this, combined with her very real beauty, that grabbed Sam's attention, and the attention did not slacken when he learned that she was the daughter of Leonard Constable, who was possibly as wealthy and powerful as Thomas Lavette. The fact that Sam was part Seldon resided in a special section of his mind. He felt that there he had put it to rest, since he had always kept his father's name. The very first time he bought Mary Lou coffee and apple pie in the hospital cafeteria, he made a point of being Jewish. Mary Lou Constable, a tall, slender girl, dark, black hair and deep-set dark eyes, a narrow nose and full lips — altogether firmly beautiful — was far from being a fool. She knew who Sam was, and if he preferred to be Jewish, that only served to make him a bit more exciting, particularly so since she came from a virulently anti-Semitic family. Not only was Sam tall, and quite handsome, with his long head, his sandy hair and his very pale blue eyes; he was also financially substantial, as she saw it.

Barbara asked Sam to bring her to the house on Green Street between the daytime chaos at Sunnyside Plaza and the commercial she had to do live at eight o'clock that evening. While San Francisco had great pretensions toward being the New York of the Pacific Coast, it was in all truth a small city with less than a million in population; and in the area of importance that old money brings, everyone knew the money of everyone else — in the world of money. In this case, of course, old money was any fortune put together more than a generation ago. Barbara knew Mary Lou Constable. Originally, the Constables derived from Missouri, enough south for them to cling to Southern affectations, such as the double name for girl children and certain prejudices covering a wide spectrum of dark-skinned people. The fact that Sam, half Jewish, had been married to a Chicana would make him even a more unsuitable object in their eyes, Carla's people having lived in California for five generations notwithstanding.

Barbara, on the other hand, greeted Sam's new passion as evidence of a failure on her part. Like his mother, he was fiercely principled, dedicated to his profession, to healing, to the sacred-ness of life, and was possessed of a number of attitudes that, like those listed, could have no existence in a place like the home and environs of Leonard Constable. Yet despite all this, he had selected Mary Lou with a passion he had never revealed toward Carla. Barbara always tried to balance her reactions, remembering her feelings about Carla when Sam had decided to marry her, rooting out her own prejudice and trying to face it. She felt that she had tried, that she had always tried; and here was another woman evoking another side of her prejudice, her dislike of inherited wealth, her distaste for people of wealth, her scorn for the self-styled San Francisco
society
, and her muted dream that Sam might find and marry someone who could be the daughter she had never had.