The Immigrants (22 page)

It was the beginning of summer and early on a Satur day morning when Jacob Levy received his induction notice. The family was at breakfast in the kitchen, and Martha ran out when she heard the mail wagon. Jacob opened his letter and read it to them. Then there was silence, his mother and father and Clair and Martha staring at him, Sarah’s face twitching as she fought to control herself.

Then Clair said firmly and quietly, “Jake, I don’t want you to go.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“You don’t have to do a damn thing,” she said bit terly. “You can hide. You can take off. You can be come a seaman on one of Mark’s ships and stay on the run from here to Hawaii. I don’t want you to go.”

No word from the others. Sarah, Mark, and Martha simply sat in silence and listened.

“No, my darling,” Jacob said, just as quietly and firmly. “I have to go.”

“This war stinks. It stinks. It’s a lousy, rotten blood bath, and

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there are no good guys and no bad guys, only a stinking lot of lice who feed kids into the slaughter.”

“I know that. I know it only too well. The bread I eat was fertilized with the slaughter.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say!” Mark exclaimed.

“It’s true.”

“It is not true,” Mark said. “Can’t you see that Clair is right? We can put you on a ship, and that will get you an exemption. You’ll still be serving.”

“Serving what? Levy and Lavette? The hell with that!” He leaped to his feet and stormed out of the house.

“Oh, my God,” Sarah said, choking over the words. “Is this what we ran away from Russia for? First her father, and now Jake.”

“Go out and talk to him,” Mark said to Clair. “He’ll listen to you. You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”

“He’s ready to start college,” Sarah whimpered. “He’s just a boy.

Why are they doing this?”

“Talk to him,” Mark said.

“All right,” Clair agreed, “I’ll talk to him. But I know him.”

She found him sprawled under the eucalyptus tree, and she stretched out next to him, her head cradled in his arm. He loosened her hair, laying the thick red folds over her face.

“You know how long it takes me to comb it out,” she complained.

“I know. You just got to suffer.”

“Same as you, you’re such a stinking martyr. You think you’re going to atone for Levy and Lavette. Well, thank God I can talk freely out here. That’s bullshit. Dan and Mark didn’t make this war and they’re no dif ferent from anyone else. There are maybe ten million people in this country who bring home money every week that’s decorated with blood, and maybe it would be worse if the ships weren’t getting through. Who are you to say?”

“I’m what I am.”

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“Oh, Jesus, why did I have to fall in love with a crazy Jew?

You’re all so convoluted and twisted you don’t know your ass from your elbow.”

“That’s some sentence.”

“Your guilts are so goddamn precious. Sarah runs the place with guilt and you run your life with guilt—and what about me?”

“What about you?”

“Jake, I love you so much that I swear, I swear to God that if anything happens to you, I’ll slit my wrists. So if you want guilt, just wear that around your neck, and if you have to put on that lousy soldier suit to live with yourself, then for Christ’s sake become a medic or a clerk or something like that, because if anything hap pens to you, I’ll never forgive you, never. I’ll just remember you as the worst unfeeling sonofabitch that ever lived.”

“You got a remarkable vocabulary for a sweet young lady.”

“I’m not a sweet young lady, Jake. I’ve been depos ited for safe-keeping in more saloons than you could shake a stick at, and I had baby sitters who were hook ers when I was still teething. So don’t think I don’t mean what I say.”

“Then shut up for a while and just let me hold you.”

Stephan Cassala received his induction notice early in August, after his father had left the house for the city. When Anthony returned that evening and heard the news, Maria was gone.

“Well, where is she?”

“At church,” Stephan said.

“Since when?”

“Since this morning.”

“And you didn’t go for her? What were you doing? You didn’t come to work.”

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“I was thinking,” Stephan said. “I had a good deal to think about and a good deal to do. Can’t you under stand? I have to report tomorrow.”

“Where’s Mama?”

“At church, I told you. Rosa went there. I tele phoned Clair at Sausalito. Jake’s at Fort Dix in New Jersey.”

“Both of them go away all day, and you sit here!” Anthony shouted. Then his face broke and he clasped Stephan in his arms.

“Papa, don’t cry,” Stephan begged him. “It’s all right.”

Then they drove to the church. Maria and Rosa were at the altar rail, Maria a tragic lump of black-clad suf fering. Anthony went to her and lifted her up, whisper ing in Italian, “The Blessed Mother will watch over him, my darling. Come home now. Together, we’ll cook a nice dinner for everyone, like in the old days.”

She had been kneeling so long she could hardly walk. Stephan and Anthony put their arms around her, and, followed by Rosa, they led her out of the church.

One day, in August of l918, over the protests of Wendy Jones, the childrens’ nurse, Dan awakened his six-year-old son, Tommy, while Jean was still asleep. By seven o’clock, they were in Dan’s new Pierce-Arrow, heading south toward San Mateo, and by ten o’clock, they were in Dan’s cutter working to windward out in the bay, and Dan was explaining to the excited child the virtues of the cutter design over the sloop, the great weight of lead in the keel, and how in the old days they were used by revenue agents to overtake smugglers. Tommy listened in delight, understanding very little of what his father said, but totally delighted with the fact that he had this enormous, exciting father of his entirely to himself, and thrilling to the rush of wind and spray. At two o’clock, they were back at the berth, and then Dan drove to the Cassala house, where Maria served them with spaghetti and sausage, two delicious treats that had never been permitted on the Lavette table. Maria and Rosa fussed over the child, and the Cassala dogs, a pair of amiable collies, played with him and rolled him around on the lawn. Dan, meanwhile, tele phoned his home with news that all was well, and since Jean was out, he had only Miss Jones to contend with. By eight o’clock that night, he walked into his home carrying a sleeping, dirty, and completely contented child.

He had expected a storm of anger from Jean, and was relieved when her only complaint was to the effect of his having a yacht that was berthed so far away.

“It’s more Tony’s than mine, and it’s just a small boat,” he said.

“We can have one up here if you wish.”

She had come to dislike boats increasingly. “No thank you,” she said. “I have no desire for a San Fran cisco Bay complexion. But you

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ought to awaken me and tell me when the desire to kidnap your own child over takes you.”

Still and all, she was in rare good humor, telling him that she had kept dinner, and that if he would clean up and change, they could eat together. He stopped in at the nursery to look at his son, wondering as he so often did how this small, blue-eyed, golden-haired child could be his. Both children were asleep, both of them blue-eyed and fair-skinned, as if denying the heritage of a swarthy, black-haired father. “You mustn’t disturb them,” Miss Jones whispered to him, and he patted her behind amiably.

“Please, Mr. Lavette,” she complained, the prisoner of her whispers.

“You’re a fine figure of a woman,” he whispered back.

He was always amazed, surprised, flattered when Jean unbent. It did not happen often. She had become one of the leading figures in the New Art Society, an organization which proclaimed its intent to make San Francisco the leading art center of the United States, which had grown out of the Panama-Pacific Interna tional Exposition of 1915, and which had coalesced around the drive to save the Palace of Fine Arts and to preserve it for the future.

She had made her place among the new elite of art and literature, and since Dan never denied her money and since she had ample funds of her own, she was constantly sought after as a patron and a sponsor of project after project, whether it was a piece of sculpture for the new city hall or a reception for Hamlin Garland, who might or might not be lured to San Francisco. These and other activities gave her a full life which apparently satisfied her. It was several years since she had taken to sleeping in her own bed room, apart from him; and Dan accepted this not only as a rejection of any sexual advances on his part but also as a normal action in the habits of the rich, whose set of mores were still strange to him. He had fallen into an acceptance of a double life on his part, yet he was unable to cope with the thought that Jean might have a lover.

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Somewhere in his mind, hardly recognized, hardly dealt with, but there nevertheless, was the notion that Jean’s passion for him might reawaken. How he would react under those circumstances he did not know; if he was totally unaware of the woman called Jean Lavette, he was very much aware of the image, cool, tall, beautiful, and totally admired in the circles that knew her; and on those occasions that he was with her, he basked in the admiration, still unable to comprehend that this creature was the wife of a dago fisherman, a kid from the wharf.

Strangely, his feeling lived with his relationship to May Ling.

Jean was the illusion. May Ling was the reality and the validity, and to a degree he understood this completely. May Ling nourished him, educated him, adored him, and gave him a sense of himself.

If anything happened to Jean—well, life would go on. If anything happened to May Ling—that was a thought he could not deal with. Yet a simple matter of interest and kindness on the part of Jean—perhaps better called a suspension of coldness and hostility— drove the thought of May Ling from his mind. Only Jean could truly ac cept him as a nabob, sitting opposite him at the dining room table, wearing the jewels he had given her, a pale blue gorget draped from her regal shoulders, her skin so pink and white, her eyes the icy blue that the dark-skinned, dark-eyed races of the earth had regarded for so long as the symbol of beauty and authority. When he sat that way with her, accepted by her, it did not matter a damn that she had closed her thighs to him; she was still his wife, and deep inside of him this was the core of desire.

He was still full of the contentment of the good day with the little boy. “I want him to know how to sail,” he explained to Jean.

“I sometimes think that’s all I can give him. All the rest he gets from you.”

“Oh, not at all, Dan. But you spend so little time with him.”

“I know.”

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“I do try to find time for the children,” she said, “and I always manage a few hours a day. One must. And now we’re putting together a Keith memorial, and you can’t imagine how demanding that is.”

“Keith?”

“William Keith—lovely, dreamy landscapes, you know, very much in the style of George Inness. For heaven’s sake, Dan, we have one of his paintings in the living room.”

“
Live Oaks
,” he remembered. He had never made a connection between the painting and reality, and had looked at it only long enough to know what it was called.

“But what great new mountain are you climbing?” she asked him. “I’ve lost touch completely with the realms of high finance.

All I know is that we seem to become richer and richer until it’s almost gross.”

“We’re still very poor compared to the Seldons,” he assured her.

“Still can’t accept the Seldons. Daddy’s very fond of you, truly.”

“No, that’s not it. It’s a question of what we want to do and how to do it.”

“Do what?”

“You know, we’re selling out to Whittier.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I thought you detested him.”

“I mentioned it to you.”

“I couldn’t take it seriously.”

“Well, I’m not in love with Grant Whittier,” Dan said, “but he wants our ships and he’s willing to give us three million dollars for our fleet.”

“But why sell them?”

“It’s kind of complicated. Mark’s kid, Jake, is over there, and he’s been through Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood, and it’s been a pretty rotten bloody thing, and Mark can’t live with making any more money out of this war, and Stevie Cassala got a gut full of

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shrapnel and they shipped him home—six months in the hospital—and well, Whittier made us this offer—”

“Oh, really splendid,” Jean said. “We all think this way, and we just bow to the Huns and explain to them that we just can’t bear to make any profits, and there fore they can go ahead and take France and England and come over here too—”

“Come on, Jean, we’re not interfering with the ship ping. We’re just transferring ownership. We’ve made enough money out of this war.”

“It’s just so typically a Jew thing. First he makes a fortune out of the war, and then the moment his son is in there, he begins to whine—”

“God damn it, how the hell can you say that!” Dan exclaimed.

“There are no Seldons or Lavettes over there in France. I’m thirty—I could be over there. But I’m not.”

“You have two children, and your role is vital to the war interests.”

“Bullshit! I’m a millionaire, and I don’t sail the ships; I own them!”

“If you’re going to swear at me and talk Tenderloin, that finishes it.”

“Jeany, Jeany,” he said, “Why do we have to get into a scrap every time we talk to each other? I’m sorry, believe me, I’m sorry.

And what I said isn’t the full story, not by a long shot. There’s a very basic difference of opinion between Whittier and me.”

She stared at him coldly.