The Immigrants (27 page)

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jean, cool down. What did you expect? You haven’t been sleeping with the man. He’s evidently not a eunuch.”

“Can’t you be quiet?”

“As you wish. Shall I order lunch for both of us?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’ll order anyway.” He called the waiter and gave the order for both of them. “Chops and salad,” he told her. “Very simple.”

She folded the report and stuffed it into her purse. “About the child,” she said slowly. “Do you suppose it’s his?”

“Possibly. There are ways to find out if you desper ately have to know. Do you know who this Chinese lady might be?”

“I can guess.”

“You’re furious, aren’t you?”

“I’m not exactly delighted.”

“On the other hand, you are in possession of what might be called an invaluable weapon.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Do you intend to face him with this?”

“That is none of your business.”

“Still, as a friend of the family, I am curious.”

She observed him shrewdly. “My dear Alan,” she said. “I will satisfy your curiosity. At some time, which I alone will decide, I shall discuss these matters with my husband. That time is in the future. Do you understand? The future. Meanwhile, you are not to imagine for one moment that you too have a weapon. If one

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word of this gets out—one word, mind you—I shall tell Dan that you are the originating source. And do you know what he might well do?”

“Latins are quite temperamental.”

“Yes, he might kill you. And not pleasantly either.”

“I should think you could trust me.”

“I like you, dear man,” she said, smiling. “I like the way you look and the way you make love. So we’ll re main friends and not discuss trust. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” The waiter brought the food now. “Do eat your lunch,” Alan said. “One always feels better after wards.”

She began to eat with excellent appetite. Brocker watched her in silence for a while; then he said, “Dear lady, only one thing. Why won’t you divorce him?”

“Do you know any divorced ladies you don’t feel sorry for, Alan?

I don’t. And no one is to feel sorry for me. May I tell you something else? One day, Dan Lavette will be the richest and the most powerful man in this state. He’ll own California. But, dear man, I shall own Dan Lavette. Think about that.”

The opening of the new L&L Department Store, the largest, the most splendid, and the most stylish store west of Chicago, was, in Mark Levy’s words, “a historic occasion for this queen of all American cities.” It is true that the planned principal beneficiary of Mark’s labors was still with the American Expeditionary Forces in oc cupied Germany, but since he was alive and well, his absence did not in any way interfere with the gaiety of the occasion. The two enormous and malignant forces of death, the World War and the influenza epidemic, were both in the past, and while an unpredict-able thing called Prohibition was settling down on the nation, this

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was still the beginning of a new era of light and hope, a time when the reborn nations of the earth would em brace in a mighty league to end war forever and to insti tute the community of man. Of course, there were cer tain disturbing factors, such as the emergence of a man called Lenin leading a Bolshevik Revolution in Rus sia—but that was only a temporary phenomenon. The Hun had been driven into his lair, and the war to end all wars was over.

As the main speaker at the reception, held in the street floor of L&L, Mayor Sunny Jim Rolph empha sized all of the above points, and then he joined in the singing of “Smiles,” not only his own theme song but in a sense one of the theme songs of the AEF.

“There are smiles that make you happy, there are smiles that make you gay,” his fine baritone boomed out above all others.

Mark Levy, gray at the temples and almost bald now in his fortieth year, had labored long and carefully over his own small speech. “A store such as this,” he said, “is not simply an emporium where things are sold to the public; it is a hallmark, a symbol of the civilization which we have built here on the shores of the mighty Pacific Ocean. Our fathers and our grandfathers came here with only their bare hands and the clothes on their backs. All of us were immigrants together. We worked and saved and built. And on the counters of this great store will be the products of this great and industrious nation. No store like this one ever existed in the great state of California, and every inhabitant of the Bay Area should take pride in its present existence.”

Dan was careful and patient in his approach to his father-in-law.

He was not in a hurry. By the war’s end, the price per ton for the building of first-class passenger tonnage had gone above five hundred dollars, raising the cost of a ship such as he envisaged to over fifteen

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million dollars. But no one was building passenger ships. Every dockyard in the nation was frantically crem ating cargo vessels—and then the war ended. Mean while, Dan waited. He no longer had one ship in mind, but two—the beginnings of a mighty fleet. He hired Alton Jones, the best naval architect on the coast, to begin work on the plans. With the sale of the cargo ships, he had plenty of time on his hands but no desire to be in volved or to interfere with the operation of the new de partment store. He left that entirely to Mark and Feng Wo. He invested in some tracts of land in Daly City and purchased some property near Lincoln Park. He pored over each new set of drawings for the ships, and he studied the plans of such great liners as the old White Star
Oceanic
, the Cunard
Mauretania
, and the North German Lloyd’s
Crownprince Cecilie
.

Much of this he did at May Ling’s house, and those days there were the happiest he had ever known. He would sometimes arrive there in the morning, spread out his blueprints on the floor, and then pore over them while his son, Joseph, did his best to crumple and tear them; and then the two of them would roll over on the floor, Dan growling and woofing like a huge bear and Joseph shrinking away in mock terror.

“Do you ever play like that with Tom and Barbara?” May Ling asked him one day.

“No—no, I can’t say that I do.”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t dare. Wendy Jones would hand me my head.”

“But they’re still your children, Dan.”

“Jean’s children.”

“Danny, what kind of a life are you living? You’re the father of two children, and you don’t even dare play with them. You live with a woman you haven’t had sex with in years, without love and without companionship. I don’t want to nag you, Danny, and you know that I haven’t mentioned this for months—yet you’re so

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filled with guilt and fears that you don’t even share my bed for the night. And what kind of a woman is she that she doesn’t care?”

“Baby, just give me a little time.”

“For what, Danny?”

“I am going to leave her. I told you that, May Ling.”

He bought an enormous doll, with eyes that opened and closed and a head of silky yellow imitation hair, and he brought it into the nursery with the determination to conquer the small, gray-eyed child who always greeted him with an air of bewilderment. Barbara was in bed already, and her face lit up at the sight of the doll; but Wendy Jones interposed herself.

“Well, not now, Mr. Lavette, really. Not at bedtime.”

“Why not? I brought a doll for her.”

“And the excitement will keep her awake for hours.”

“Why?” His voice became hard and cold without his realization.

This bitch
, he thought to himself.
Christ, how I hate her!

“Because she’s a child.”

He pushed Miss Jones aside roughly, and the smile vanished from the child’s face. He held out the doll. It had gone wrong, it always went wrong. “Don’t you like it?” he asked Barbara. Miss Jones stood there, her face tight with anger, and Barbara began to cry.

He laid the doll down beside her, stood there irresolutely, turned to look at Miss Jones, and then stalked out of the room. Downstairs in his study, he dropped into a chair and sat there, asking himself why—why were there walls be tween these two children and himself? He had thought about the doll and the way he would present it; he had worked the whole thing out in his mind; and then that Jones bitch had destroyed it. Or had she?

“God Almighty,” he whispered, “what am I doing here? I’m in Seldon’s house. I’ve always been in Seldon’s house.”

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About the same time that the Congress of the United States was overriding President Wilson’s veto of the Volstead Act and making Prohibition the law of the land, Lieutenant Jacob Levy disembarked from a ship in Hoboken. Two days later, he was mustered out of the United States Army, and on the first day of November in 1919, he stood on the deck of a ferry, crossing from New Jersey to New York. People who noticed him would hardly have believed that he was still weeks short of his twenty-first birthday. His face was lined and drawn, the bright blue eyes—so like his mother’s—sunken, his whole frame lean and spare. The ferry was crowded with service-men, but he stood alone, silent and unsmiling, turned in to his own thoughts and memories. Yet he was intrigued with the great river, the shipping, the mighty bulk of the city, the sound and sight and energy of this place that was the near edge of his native land, the smell of the salt spray, the screaming of ships’ horns, and the great skyscrapers reaching up to the sky.

A few hours later, he boarded a train in Grand Cen tral Station and began his journey westward. He had writ ten briefly to Clair when his orders first came through in Europe, but not since then.

There had been too many letters; he had no more to write or say in letters. In Chicago, there was a five-hour layover, but he felt too dulled and depressed to go out into the city and spent the time in the railroad station with his luggage, reading newspapers and magazines. But westward from Chi cago, he began to experience the land and a sense of homecoming, especially when the plains gave way to the mesquite-covered hills. The emotion welled up in him, and now his apathy turned into a consuming eagerness. He counted the miles and the hours. He found himself smiling and talking politely to people who desired to show their respect and admiration for his uniform—instead of ignoring them and turning away. His sense of separation from and annoyance with these men and women who talked so glibly of war and who had not the faintest notion of what

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war was ebbed away; and he be gan to accept the fact that to chatter nonsense with nei ther knowledge nor perception was the ordinary manner of mankind. He listened to platitudes without disgust, and he began to create conversations with Clair in his mind.

Strangely, it was hard to form a picture of her. He could define her, her long legs, her freckled skin, her red hair, but the woman eluded him. His desire for her grew like a sickness, and in the last stage of his journey, motion reduced itself to a frustrating snail’s pace. It seemed to Jake that he had been traveling forever, through Germany into France, through France to Cher bourg, from there to Southampton, and then eleven endless days across the ocean to Hoboken, and then time without end across the country, and now in a ferry that was taking an eternity to cross over from San Fran cisco to Sausalito. He had no eyes for the wild beauty of that morning, the fog licking through the Golden Gate, a splendid wand of sunshine striking down onto the bay, the blue water choppy and dancing with whitecaps, and ahead of him, Marin County, which he and Clair had specified so often as the most beautiful place on God’s earth, its dark hills thrusting up above the fog—all of this was meaningless because inside him was a whim pering, forlorn plea to be home.

A rattling, creaking taxicab drove him from the ferry landing to the Spanish Colonial house, high on the hill side, and again the few miles seemed to take forever. He paid off the cab, and it drove away. He stood there, his luggage on the ground next to him.

Where were they?

Then he heard her cry, and Clair burst out of the house, ran to him, and clutched him in her arms. It was all as he had dreamed and prayed it would be.

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Thomas Seldon asked his daughter to come to dinner at his home.

He was very specific about Dan accompany ing her. Whatever rumors of their relationship reached him, it was not anything that he discussed with either of them; yet he made the point that he wanted them both present and that he had matters of importance to dis cuss with Dan. After his wife’s death, his sister, Virginia Carter, a widowed lady in her middle fifties, had moved into the house on Nob Hill, taking over the duties of housekeeper and hostess, and when they sat down to dinner, there were only the four of them, Dan and Jean and Seldon and his sister.

Mrs. Carter was properly shocked at Jean’s appear ance, and she minced no words in stating that in her opinion Jean’s costume passed the boundaries of pro priety. Jean smiled with delight and accepted it as a compliment. She wore a Directoire, high-collar suit jacket of burgundy velvet, a transparent georgette blouse, a black cravat, and a braided skirt that fell to just below her knees. With velvet pumps and black stockings, the effect was such that her father shook his head and muttered that she was just too damn beautiful.

“How can you permit it, Daniel?” Mrs. Carter asked him.

“My dear Virginia,” Jean said, “Dan neither allows nor disallows.

And if a woman’s leg is shocking, then San Francisco will simply have to be shocked. This is a Pierre Lazai creation, and in Paris they’re all wearing skirts this length.”

“I think it’s horrible,” Mrs. Carter said.

Dan voiced no opinion. A part of him was totally ser vile to her beauty, and he agreed with Seldon that she had never appeared more lovely than this evening. He never escaped the enormous badge of permission; what ever she thought of him, whatever distaste she had for his body and his manners and his self, she permitted his position as her husband, and that permission was in part ownership. A man was judged by his ownership; his property was more than he was.