The Immigrant’s Daughter (7 page)

There were hours now when no thought of Boyd crossed her mind, and this filled her with guilt; but on the other hand, she realized that she could hardly remember the face and speech of her first love, Marcel Duboise. Almost forty years had passed, and to save the mind from madness, time obliterates. She was invited to a party in one of those gigantic and improbable high-rises that had sprung up on Russian Hill, and she accepted. More than a year had passed since Boyd's death. To her utter amazement, she found herself the center of attention by admiring men, and this embarrassed her and even frightened her a bit. She told herself it was the result of notoriety, yet she knew that her thinking of herself as a notorious woman was rather ridiculous; and she even dared to think that she, Barbara Lavette, was still a very lovely woman. An older man, at least ten years older than herself, used the word
regal
. “Regal,” he said. “I remember your mother very well. She was a regal woman — no other word to describe her — and when she and Dan Lavette entered a room, believe me, the conversation stopped.”

Barbara got rid of her slump. She straightened her back, recalling her dance teacher at Sarah Lawrence. “Your back, ladies, and hold your damn heads as if each of you had a jug of water sitting there.” The younger men there knew that she was someone of consequence. Here was a tall, handsome older woman, whose wide blue-gray eyes suggested both wisdom and sadness. Barbara had never fully understood why an older woman should attract the eager interest of young men half her age. She wondered whether they were homosexuals. She had never been troubled by the accusation that San Francisco, her city, her beloved wonderful city that was like no other city in the world, had become a national center for homosexuals. She argued that it only gave the city more style, which it already had in excess of any other city in America.

“The devil with it,” she said to herself. “I am enjoying myself, and if I'm not happy, I'm not unhappy, and that's a change.”

They had read her books. Boyd once suggested that the work of an interesting good-looking woman sells better than the writing of her opposite; and Barbara smiled now at the recollection, recalling her annoyance with Boyd and her retort that he wore his male chauvinism on his sleeve. Dear, sweet man — yet always he faced her with the attitude that Barbara Lavette could do no wrong, which was perhaps the main reason she had never married him. To be tied to a cruel bastard was a bondage from which escape was at least possible; but to be married to a man who worshiped you — well, that was something else.

“I read your last book,” the young man was saying. “I mean, my friends steer clear of this whole rash of new feminist books — no, I'm not gay, if that's what you're thinking.”

“No, I was simply listening.”

“I read them. I love women, but you're different. When I heard you would — no, might — when I heard you might be here tonight, I was terribly excited. I read what your life has been and I expected an older woman —”

“I am an older woman,” Barbara said cheerfully.

“No way. I'm not coming on — I'd like to — I don't know how—” Then he added, “Have I offended you?”

“Good heavens, no.”

Moments later, a young woman, mid twenties, darkly good-looking and very intense, told her, “I voted for you — the first time I ever voted. I mean, I wanted so much to be like you — oh, from the first time I read something you had written, the book about France, I wanted to do the things you had done, to be just like you. And then when you ran for Congress — you don't remember me, do you?”

“I think I do, yes,” knowing how dismal it was not to be remembered. “Leaflets?” It was a shot in the dark.

“Yes, oh, yes, and one wonderful day when we did the fences with your poster, my boyfriend and myself, and both of us convinced that the cops were one jump behind us. Of course, they weren't. And you will run again, won't you?”

“Perhaps, if you help me.”

The hostess at the apartment, Birdie MacGelsie, whose husband had made many millions out of a uranium discovery, and whose own guilts had made her an eager partner of Barbara's in Mothers for Peace, overheard the young woman's enthusiastic political endorsement of Barbara, and got Barbara aside a while later to ask her if it was indeed true.

“Is what true?”

Small and bright-eyed, like a perky bird, Birdie whispered, “Congress. Will you be a candidate again?”

“I don't know. Until tonight, I wasn't thinking about it very seriously. I suppose I was carried away by her enthusiasm. By the way, what is her name?”

“Carol Eberhardt.”

“Eberhardt?”

“Same one. The child is his daughter.”

“You have to be kidding. The same Jim Eberhardt, the one who heads up the Republican organization here?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why?”

“A perfectly proper rebellion,” Birdie said. “You ought to know about rebellion, Barbara. If I remember—”

“We both remember,” Barbara said shortly.

“You see, Barbara, when you ran the last time, you weren't a bit sure of anything. All of a sudden, there you were. When you do it again, and you must, we're going to be in the act.”

“Oh?”

“Now don't get your ass up, my love. I'm not talking about giving you directions or cutting in on your independence. I am talking about money, pure and simple. I know Tony Moretti staked you to something, but what the party gives you won't get you elected dog catcher. I am talking about real money and real publicity, which means television and more television. How do you think our late but not lamented governor got in there?”

“Yes. Still, I must want it. If you don't want it, then it's not much good even trying.”

“Of course you want it,” Birdie said. “How else can you stand up down there in Washington and tell them what a bunch of hopeless idiots they are?”

But did she want it? It might be an antidote to loneliness and to a purposeless existence, or it might not; and why, she wondered, was she so hooked on the notion that her existence must include purpose? Most people lived without purpose. She had begun a new book, a book about Boyd; not actually about him, but a novel to be based on his life. That was purpose enough, but the book went slowly and painfully, more slowly and more painfully than anything else she had written. Her writing had never come easily, but this writing about a man she had lived with in her years of maturity was most difficult, as if each of the many threads that bound them had to picked apart, investigated, thoroughly studied. Surely this gave her a purpose.

But not enough. She had taken to long walks again, miles each day, along the Embarcadero from Berry Street to Fisherman's Wharf, and in the course of these walks, touching at each block some deep memory, she came to realize that the memories were an illusion. In the same way, the writing of her memories plucked at strings of illusion. That was all very well, and it was the writer's business to try to create reality out of illusions, but for her there had to be more; and one day in July, walking down Jones Street to the Bay, she saw ahead of her, standing large and wide, looking over the water, the heavyset figure of old Tony Moretti. She made her way across the Embarcadero and joined him.

For a while, he said nothing. He glanced at her and offered a nod of recognition, but said nothing, and neither did she. And then, perhaps a few minutes after she had joined him, he pointed across the sparkling waters of the Bay and remembered, “Way over there, Barbara, we picked up the garbage. Oakland garbage. Nineteen twelve, I think. Anyway, I was twelve years old and I got my first job on one of Dan Lavette's garbage ships.”

“Oh, no. Garbage ships?”

“Big scows. Pick up the garbage, dump it in the ocean. We didn't know a damn thing about ecology then. He sold them a few years later. Never knew that, did you?”

“I think I did. I'm not sure.”

He pointed down the street. “Over there — Pat Salvo's crab stand. We're old friends, and his crabs are fresh, believe me. I said to him, When will Miss Lavette be coming along? He tells me, Any time now.”

“No. I can't believe that, Tony. You mean I've become some sort of ridiculous fixture here?”

“I wouldn't say that. People who know you see you and remember you. After all, your father put his mark on Fisherman's Wharf. Everyone knew him. A lot of people know you.”

“Oh!”

“Shouldn't surprise you. Lived here all your life. You write books. You worked for the
Chronicle
on and off.”

“Tony,” she said, “when I ran for Congress back in nineteen seventy, no one brought up the fact that I had spent six months in prison.”

“No, they didn't.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because they knew you couldn't win, so they got themselves some points by treating you with class. But they didn't know how close you came to it, and this time, they'll bring it up all right, and I think we can turn it around and make some points for us.”

“This time!” Barbara exclaimed. “What do you mean, this time?”

“Things have cleared up. It's two years since Boyd died, and I don't like the thought of Barbara Lavette sitting over her knitting and pretending she's an old lady.”

“Which I am.”

“My dear girl, if I were not almost seventy-six years old and seventy-five pounds overweight and carrying four different colored pills which I take three times a day, I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off you.”

“Tony, that's the nicest thing I've heard in months, and I don't believe a word of it.”

“We had a meeting the other night, Barbara, and the question of the forsaken Forty-eighth came up. That's what we call it. You lost by three thousand votes. Murray Henig, who we put in there two years ago, lost by thirty-two thousand votes. This year, no one wants to touch it. Even Al Ruddy's nephew, who's been working in Ruddy's district and who's so eager politically that he begins to sweat if a designation is even mentioned — even he doesn't want the Forty-eighth, because he says the political career he doesn't even have would be ruined. Sort of true. Nobody wants Henig after the beating he took in the Forty-eighth. But I said I got someone.”

“Me,” Barbara said. “Thank you.”

“That's right. You can thank me, because you're going to win and you're going to Congress.”

“And how do you do it?”

“We do it. You and me, we run the campaign together.”

“Only you haven't even asked me whether I want it,” Barbara said.

“Do you want it? Not just a platform to say your piece, but a seat down there in that pesthole they call Washington?”

“I think I do,” Barbara said.

“All right.” He put out his hand, and she took it. “Now we'll have some lunch at Gino's.”

After she left Tony Moretti, Barbara felt that she had to sound off about her decision with someone. Her two closest friends were both sisters-in-law of a sort: Sally, who was Clair's daughter and who had married Barbara's brother Joe, and Eloise, who had married Barbara's other brother, Tom Seldon Lavette, and had then divorced him to marry Adam Levy. Sally was brilliant, but she could not properly listen. Eloise listened and adored, and Barbara felt that at this moment in her life, she needed a lot of listening, not to mention at least a thimbleful of adoration.

It was past six in the evening when Barbara turned her car off Route Twenty-nine onto the winding oiled dirt road that led to Higate. Old Jake had never permitted the road to be modernized, but now that he was dead, Adam was making arrangements for a macadam surface. The evening was stuffily warm, not a trace of a breeze, and the mountains appeared to be undulating gently in the heat.

But only Joshua was at Eloise's house, sitting in the den, his face expressionless as he stared at the television set. Long ago, before he had joined the marines, before he had been sent to Vietnam, Joshua had been a round-faced, sound-limbed boy, chubby if not fat, his straw-colored thatch of hair standing straight up from his head. Eloise's other son, Frederick, had come of her marriage to Tom. Joshua was her son with Adam, and as a small child, he had had the same golden locks and blue eyes as his mother — which led him to be petted and cuddled in a manner he always remembered as distasteful. Barbara had noticed his anger at the showing of pictures of himself as a child. Asked about his resentment, he once told Barbara that they might as well have been pictures of a little girl as of a small boy.

His face remained expressionless as he opened the door for Barbara and explained, tonelessly, “They're all having dinner with Grandma Clair, over at the big house.”

“Oh? I thought I'd find your mother.”

“She's there.” He was no round-faced boy with a thatch of yellow hair. He kept his hair clipped close; his face was tightly drawn over the bones; and there was a nervous tic under one eye. Now twenty-eight years old, there was nothing left of the gentle, chubby boy whom Barbara remembered. His bleak tone dismissed her and said that he wanted to be alone, and he turned back to the room where the television was blaring before Barbara could think of any way to continue the conversation. She left, nervous — and feeling that she should stay and talk to him.

It was still light outside, still before seven o'clock, when Barbara opened the door to Clair's house and went in. The door was never locked. It was a door you passed through without ever thinking too much about it, and everyone passed through it, the Chicano and Mexican workers on the place, their children, the family and their children, delivery men, salesmen. The door led directly into the huge kitchen, twenty by thirty-five feet, equipped with a coal stove, a gas stove, a walk-in refrigerator and a fourteen-foot-long refectory table made of polished oak. The kitchen being the natural core of the house, most of the family meals were taken there; and since this was a farm, dinner was eaten early. They were already at the table when Barbara entered, Clair and Eloise and Adam and Freddie and May Ling, who had acceded to Freddie's desire to have a second child. Freddie's house, while on the Higate property, was about four hundred yards from the main house, and after her first experience at giving birth, May Ling was in no mood to leave her child — seven months old now — with a nurse. The new baby was a boy, plump and perfect, with ten fingers and ten toes, all that May Ling could have desired, and now he slept peacefully in a crib in the corner of the kitchen.