An Independent Woman (4 page)

They heard Adam's deep
halloo:
“Where the devil are you two hiding?” He came stomping through the vines up the hillside, his long white beard bent in the breeze. In his jeans and a blue cotton workman's shirt, he looked for all the world like some patriarch out of the long past. Eloise, thinking of what Barbara had said, remembered the first time she had met him, in Jean Lavette's gallery. He was a tall, lean, gentle boy, whose face had been scarred and torn in World War II (the scars were now covered by his beard), and she had loved him from the moment she met him. She had been married to Tom Lavette then, Barbara's brother, and he had verbally beaten her to an emotional pulp; and then, under the love and shelter of Jean and Barbara, she had grown and matured. Adam was her world, her lover, her rock—how else could she have survived the suicide of Joshua and become whole again?

Adam stood in front of them now. “Not my idea to break in on you,” Adam said apologetically, “but Dianne Feinstein called, and she wants to talk to Barbara, and she wants you to call her right back, and since she's one of my favorite women, I set out to find you. What is it, Barbara? Are you back in politics?”

“Never. It's probably the gun thing.”

It was the gun thing. When Barbara called City Hall, they put her right through to Dianne Feinstein. “Dear Barbara,” the mayor said, “my heart goes out to you. Carson was a fine, wonderful man. God only knows what will be the future of the
World
, and I shouldn't be delighted with anything. But we took an early vote, and the bill passed six to four in the Board of Supervisors, and we're the first big city in America to ban guns within city limits. We've done it!”

“That's great,” Barbara said. “Bless you”—and added woefully, “They killed my story.”

“I know. It's her paper now. We won't talk about that. But please come and see me as soon as you get yourself together. There has to be something very good for you here at City Hall.”

“Thank you, but my political life is over. But thank you for the thought, and good luck.”

B
ARBARA LAVETTE AWAKENED
. It is said that dreams are a part of awakening; that a dream will come in the few seconds of awakening; or perhaps, as she herself had heard someone say, the awakening makes the dream. She clutched at the dream, trying to hold on to it as it faded; and then she heard a ship's foghorn from the Bay, lonely and haunting, and the dream was gone.

She reached for her bedside light and looked at her clock. Two o'clock in the morning, an odd hour. Usually she awakened at four and then lay in bed, struggling for more sleep but rarely achieving it. For a few moments she lay quiet, eyes closed, listening to the foghorn. Then it was joined by another, and then a third—was it a third, or perhaps the first horn answering? The Bay must be thick with fog, soaked in fog, and she could imagine a ship trying to slide through the Golden Gate. It could drop anchor and wait until the fog lifted, or at least until daylight; but recalling her father's years as a shipowner, she knew the price of a ship's day lost in passage.

She dropped into memories. It was not hard to remember her father, his commanding voice, low and resonant, and still at times amazingly gentle.

Then true awakening came, hard and sharp, and her body responded to the sound of a footstep outside her bedroom door. Barbara stiffened, fear quickening her heartbeat, fear that she tried desperately to control, clenching her fists and easing herself. The old house was full of sounds, boards creaking, boards tightening in the cold air of night, and possibly she had heard no more than that.

She was not easily given to fear; her life had been too violent, too shredded. She had resisted the parade of salesmen who had tried to sell her this or that security system. “I have nothing worth stealing,” was her response. She was sixty-nine years old, and she had consistently rejected the notion, offered by her friends, that she should keep a gun in the house.

The sound again, and this time she was certain. It was a footstep, no doubt about that. She leaped out of bed, threw on her robe, and reached for the telephone.

The bedroom door opened, and a voice said, “Lady, don't pick up that phone!” He had a gun in his hand, not pointed at her, but simply held as an exhibit. He was a tall, slender man, blue jeans and a black sweatshirt, a mask with eyeholes, and tightly curled hair cropped close. Dark skin showed beneath the mask. He wore sneakers.

Barbara was herself now. She heard his words against the lonely hooting of the foghorns. Her hands had stopped shaking. She pushed her white hair away from her face and tried to speak calmly.

“What do you want?”

“I'm a thief. What do you think I want? Open your robe.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what you look like.”

“I'm seventy years old.”

“Shit, lady. Do what I tell you.”

She opened her robe. Staring appraisingly at her body, visible through the thin nightgown, he nodded. “You're stacked,” he said approvingly.

“I have AIDS,” she said. She had thought of that invention recently, anticipating the possibility that she might someday face rape. But so had all her friends. The man grinned.

“What the hell, it's San Francisco,” he said. “I'm not a rapist, I'm a thief.”

“Thank God.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“Keep what?”

“Jewels, gold, any damn thing I can sell.”

“What's your name?” Barbara asked. She was in control of herself now, wrapping her robe around her and tying the sash.

“Oh, Jesus—lady, you're weird. Fuck my name. Let me get what I came for and get the hell out of here. I don't want to get mean with you. I don't want to shoot you, so don't push me.”

“There's a television downstairs.”

“I'm not breaking my back with any lousy television. You got any cash?”

Barbara sat down on the bed. She felt that it gave her an advantage, that it was a bit more difficult to shoot or beat someone sitting down—at the same time wondering where she got the notion.

“Suppose my husband came in. Would you shoot him? Would you shoot both of us?”

“You got no husband, lady. Don't fuck with me.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“There's a hundred and twenty dollars or so in my bag.”

“Where's the bag?”

She pointed to a chair. He found the bag, a large brown leather purse with a shoulder strap. Not taking his eyes off her, he picked up the bag and tossed it at her. “Empty it on the bed.”

The contents spilled out on the comforter, a change purse, a wallet, an address book, keys, cards, lip gloss, handkerchief, gold pen, small mirror, comb, nail clipper, and a glassine folder of children's pictures.

“Empty the wallet and the purse.” He walked to the other side of the bed and flicked on the other bedside lamp as Barbara took the bills out of the wallet and opened her change purse. There were five dollar bills and some change in the purse. He stuffed it into his pocket and counted the money from the wallet, one hundred and twenty-six dollars. Barbara started to rise.

“Don't move, lady. Just sit there.”

“What else do you want?”

“Jewelry. Do I have to dump all the drawers, or are you going to tell me?”

“What I have is here in my bedside drawer.” She sighed now.

“Pull it out and dump it on the bed.”

“All right.” Barbara reached over and pulled out the second drawer of her bedside table, and turned it over onto the comforter.

“Don't get euphoric,” he said sharply. She looked at him curiously. He was separating the jewelry, four rings, one of them a small diamond set in gold, two plain gold bands, and the third, a large man's ring, heavy gold and carved to look like a leopard. He held it in front of him so that he could watch Barbara as he read the inscription on the inside. There was also a heavy gold linked bracelet, a neckband to match, and a brooch set with small diamonds and rubies.

“That ring was my father's,” Barbara said. “I wish you would leave it. The other stuff is worth much more.” She had never cared for jewelry, wore it only occasionally, and ignored the advice of her friends that she keep the pieces in a vault.

He weighed the ring in his hand.

“My mother gave it to him. It means something to me.”

“It's worth a thousand, lady.”

“I'll give you the thousand. You can have the jewelry. I won't call the cops, and I won't ever bear witness against you. Take it as a gift but leave me the ring.”

“You are something, lady. Where's the thousand?”

“I don't keep cash in the house. I'll write you a check.”

“Oh, lady, lady,” he said, smiling. “You'll give me a check—written out to me, of course. And when I go to cash it, the cops will be waiting to pick me up. I wasn't born yesterday. This is the largest crock of shit I ever heard.”

“If I give you my word, I'll keep it. You're no ordinary thief. You're an educated man. I don't give a damn about the other stuff, but I care about the ring.”

“Lady, I'm a plain street nigger.”

“But you use words like
euphoria.
You don't talk like a plain street thug. You try to, but it doesn't come off. If you were a professional, you'd grab the stuff and be out of here in minutes. You wouldn't be sitting here and talking to me. You'd beat me up and rape me and get out of here… You don't have to keep pointing that gun at me. I'm not going to resist you. But I want the ring. There's a small leather box on my dressing table, and there's a string of pearls in it that's worth more than five thousand dollars—a lot more than the ring.”

The black man stared at her for a long moment. Then he went to the dressing table, opened the leather box, and took out the pearls. The necklace was twenty-four inches long, matched natural pearls, a gift from Carson Devron. In the two years since he died, she had never touched the pearls, never worn them. Two years was not long enough for her to accept the fact that Carson was dead, and she shunned anything that brought it home to her. She had intended to give the pearls to Sam's wife, Mary Lou, or perhaps to Mary Lou's daughter when she was a few years older.

The black man was looking at the pearls, holding the necklace up to the light. “What else did you forget to show me?”

“Nothing else. As a matter of fact, I haven't thought about the pearls for months.”

“I don't know shit about pearls.”

“Suppose you stop trying to talk like a thug,” Barbara said softly. “Why don't you take the pearls and the other stuff and go—and leave me the ring, please. Suppose there's an alarm somewhere in the house?”

“There isn't. I looked around downstairs. And the fog's as thick as glue. Nobody's coming.”

“The pearls are valuable, believe me. What college did you go to?”

He was taken aback, off guard; she could see his eyes narrowing through the holes in his mask. “You don't want to know.”

“But I do.”

“Why? So you can call the cops the moment I leave and tell them to look up every nigger that graduated from—oh, shit, lady, keep the goddamn ring!” He stuffed the jewelry into his pockets and said, “Stand up and turn around.”

“Are you going to tie me up? It's not necessary. I'm not going to call the police.”

“Sure.” He walked around the bed and tore the telephone cord out of the wall and crushed the connecting tab under his foot.

As he turned to the door, Barbara said, “One question, please. Why?”

“Why I'm a thief? All right, lady. I'm a civil engineer. For a year after I graduated, I washed dishes and cleaned toilets. This is easier. Four years of engineering training, and I can pick locks and neutralize alarm systems. Most crooks have the brains of a maggot, so the competition's not heavy. I knew you were alone because I know the story of you and your father. Who doesn't in this town?… Don't go outside and start screaming. The fog's as thick as shit, and maybe you'll meet up with one of the bad guys.”