Second Generation (14 page)

"Still," May Ling had said to him, "you must be careful what you ask. It lays a burden on them."

"I don't know that I'm going to ask for anything. I just want to see Steve and talk to him."

Then he had telephoned Stephan Cassala and asked if he might stop by and spend a few hours with him. Stephan had persuaded him to come on Sunday and stay overnight. The Sunday edition of the Los Angeles
Times
dealt in great detail with the events of "Bloody Thursday," and on page four of the main section, they reprinted the photograph of Barbara. Riding north on the bus, Dan read the story:

A curious sidelight to the events of "Bloody Thursday" still remains unexplained. The car in the above picture is registered to one Barbara Lavette, and the owner is listed as residing in a house on Pacific Heights in San Francisco. The address in Pacific Heights is the same as that of John Whittier, a prominent member of San Francisco society and the president of California Shipping, the largest operator of oceangoing vessels on the West Coast. According to a number of people who are friends or acquaintances of Miss Lavette, the woman in the photograph is Miss Lavette.

Barbara Lavette, twenty years old, is the daughter of Daniel Lavette, one-time partner in the firm of

Levy and Lavette, and Jean Seldon Lavette, daughter of Thomas Seldon, and for some years after her father's death president of the Seldon Bank. The La-vettes were divorced in 1931, after which Jean Lavette married John Whittier. The car in the photograph was parked on 2nd Street in San Francisco and allegedly served as a first aid station and supply depot for the strikers. Miss Lavette could not be reached for comment.

Stephan met Dan at the bus station in San Mateo and embraced him. The four years had not wrought any great change in Cassala. Thirty-nine years old now, tall, slender, with dark moist eyes, his skin still had the pallid, yellowish tinge it had taken on after his stomach was cut to pieces by shrapnel in World War I. The same overwhelming almost unendurable warmth and emotion greeted Dan when they reached the Cassala home. Maria, Anthony's widow, fat, shapeless, permanently pncased in the black of mourning, wept over Dan and babbled away in Italian. Joanna stared and smiled at him, and then, at the table, Maria ushered in an unending river of food, pressing him to eat and eat, and still eat more.

It was almost eleven o'clock before Stephan and Dan were able to sit down alone, in Anthony's old study, and talk about what had brought him there. Stephan poured brandy. A wood fire burned in the grate.

"Like old times," Stephen said. "God, it's good to see you again, Danny. I know you been through a lot, but I swear you look ten years younger than the last time I saw you. Hard, too—no more paunch."

"Living right, and a good wife. How about you?" "Day to day. I manage one of the branches for Crocker, but you know what banks pay. It's all right. Pop had insurance, and we keep this big barn of a place going. When I'll get a chance to pay you back what you dumped into the run—well, I just don't know—" "Forget it."

"I haven't forgotten, Danny. But I just don't know how. I haven't the heart for the game anymore. You have to
want it."

"I know." He tasted the brandy. "This is good." "Still the old stuff, from during Prohibition. Montavitti

used to make it on his place in San Martin. Pop bought

twenty gallons."

"How's it going with Joanna?"

"What should I say, Danny? I live with damn guilts. I'm a lousy husband. You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking that if I could find a way to pay the bills, I'd enter the priesthood."

"Hell, no. God damn it, Steve, we're alive, both of us."

"In a world I can't make head or tail of. You know what happened in San Francisco. How? Why? Are we all going crazy? In Italy, that stupid bastard Mussolini. In Germany, Hitler. In Russia, Stalin. What's happening to the world?"

"Like always. Give it a chance, and the shit floats to the top."

"And what about Barbara? You read the papers."

Dan smiled. "I know what I read, that's all. She's quite a lady, Steve. A lot like Jean in some ways, but maybe with a little of me. I thought I'd drive up to San Francisco tomorrow—you do drive, .don't you?"

"I leave at seven. Sure, come with me. But what about you, Danny? What brings you up here?"

"Money."

"God, I wish I had it to give to you. I got a few thousand. If it will help—"

"No. I don't want any money from you, Steve. Some leads, some advice. You know I've been fishing—on Pete Lomas' mackerel boat out of San Pedro. You remember Pete. He used to be my boatmaster before I teamed up with Mark. Well, in a good week, a damn good week, I bring home forty dollars. Mostly less. May Ling works in the library—thirty dollars a week. We make out, but not much more. Now Joe wants college and medical school. He's a good boy and a smart boy. May Ling's mother and father live with us, so it's tight. Well, I've been looking around. Christ, I can't go on fishing forever. There are a couple of things I know, and one of them is boats. With this rotten Depression on, there hasn't been a boat built down there in years. And they're going to need them, because the market for fish only grows. Well, there it is. I thought I'd set up a small boatyard. I might just pull it off."

"Wooden boats?"

"To start, yes. Plenty of shipwrights pleading for work, and wood is cheap. I can rent space for peanuts. And one business that isn't suffering in this Depression is films. The film people have money and they buy boats. The way I calculate, Steve, I can put together a beautiful little yawl for five hundred dollars—and undersell anything good on the market."

"How much do you need?"

"About ten thousand to start. With less than that I'd be scrounging, and it would be pointless. Do you suppose Crocker would let me have it?"

"With what collateral, Dan?"

"We have the house—that's all."

Stephan shook his head. "No, I wouldn't want that. There's got to be another way. Why don't you see Sam Goldberg tomorrow. He still pulls a lot of weight around town. And he's got money."

"I'm not going to trade on Sam's friendship."

"Talk to him. Please. As a favor to me. We can always go to the banks."

On the morning of the next day, Barbara awakened early and dressed herself in a plain navy blue skirt, a white blouse, and a black cardigan. Goldberg's secretary had succeeded in retrieving a suitcase of sweaters, skirts, shirts, and underthings from the house on Pacific Heights. Now Barbara slipped out of the house quietly, without awakening Goldberg. She left her car parked where it had been and set out on foot for the International Longshoreman's Association's headquarters on Steuart Street. She had no desire to attract additional newspaper stories with her license plates, and anyway, it was a clear, cool, lovely morning. The blanket of fog on the bay was breaking up into rivers of creamy, golden mist, and as Barbara walked down California Street toward the Embarcadero, she felt so totally alive that she had to fix her mind willfully on the misery of the occasion. Yet that did little good, and she thought to herself that there was some deep flaw in her personality. If I had a shred of human sensibility, she reflected, I would be utterly downcast, and instead I am behaving like a perfect pig and feeling like a person going to a picnic. The thought worried her, and she sought in her mind for the source of this streak of what she could only consider as a basic lack of humanity; she finally decided that it was because she had slept well the night

before and because of the weather, which was beautiful

indeed.

By now, the streets were filling up with men and women on their way to work, the clanging cable cars stuffed with more crowded, clinging people than seemed possible, considering how tiny the cars were, the sidewalks bustling with properly dressed men, carrying their briefcases, as much the mark of this place as the umbrella was the mark of London's City. The stream of commuters pouring out of the Ferry Building was no different than on any other day. It shocked and startled Barbara; she was only beginning to realize how easily life and death go together.

Once on Steuart Street, it was a different matter. Here, the funeral procession would assemble. A delegation of longshoremen had visited Chief of Police Quinn on Saturday and had stated in no uncertain terms that whether he agreed or not, the funeral of the two men killed on "Bloody Thursday" would proceed along Market Street and not on some quiet side street. He agreed. Now, as she turned the corner into Steuart, Barbara became part of another San Francisco. Men, women, and children, not in their work clothes but dressed in their best, the men in old, ill-fitting suits, wearing black ties, black armbands, black hats, the women in black too, their faces grim and tired, a look that even the children shared—here they were coming by the thousands, all of Steuart Street in a slow movement that converged on the union hall. As she became a part of them, Barbara's mood changed, as if the anger and grief and hopelessness these people felt was a palpable substance that penetrated to the core of her being.

The movement slowed and stopped, and the thousands of men and women and children who packed the street stood there motionless. Slowly, the people making way for them, four flatbed trucks moved into the street and lined up in front of the union hall. An odd assortment of musicians, violins as well as horns, and two bass drummers took their place behind the trucks, and now people came out of the union hall, carrying wreaths and baskets of flowers and hundreds of bouquets, all of which they piled onto the trucks. Many of the women and children had brought flowers, most of them home-grown, roses and zinnias and marigolds picked out of gardens, which they put on the trucks; and Barbara wondered with a sudden pang why she had not thought to bring flowers. But she had not imagined that it could be anything like this. The people were still coming along the Embarcadero, and down Mission Street and Harrison Street and Bryant Street, waiting for the crush in Steuart Street to ease so that they might join the procession.

Then the pallbearers came out of the union hall, carrying the two coffins, many of them, as with so many of the crowd, still wearing head bandages and patches of gauze. Barbara recognized some of them. There was Guzie and Fargo and some others whom she had come to know at the soup kitchen. She saw Bridges among them. As they came out of the hall, the musicians began to play Beethoven's funeral dirge. The pallbearers slid the two coffins onto the flatbed truck, and then the crowd gave way for them to take their place in front of the trucks. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the procession began to move. No one gave orders; no voice was raised other than whispered requests by a group of longshoremen ,that the march be ten abreast—and so the grim river of silent people turned into Market Street and began to march southwest across the city. The same group of strikers who had whispered the marching orders now spread ahead of the funeral procession, shunting the traffic off Market Street into the side streets.

Barbara fell into one of the lines and walked slowly with the procession out into Market Street. Looking back at the apparently endless stream of people coming out of Steuart Street, she realized that the procession could not consist of longshoremen and seamen alone, not even with their families. Thousands more had joined the march, and thousands of others lined Market Street to watch in silence as the procession passed. Indeed, the silence was uncanny and incredible. The little group of musicians had stopped playing. No traffic moved on Market Street, and nowhere was there a policeman to be seen. There was no other sound than the tread of thousands of slow-moving feet

Dan Lavette, standing at California and Market, was one of the thousands who watched the procession, watched it come out of Steuart Street. He suspected that Barbara would be somewhere in that great throng, but though he looked for her, he was unable to spot her. He tried as best he could to understand what forces motivated her and what this experience meant to her, but for all their closeness now, his daughter was very much a stranger to him. He himself had never been very political. Most of his adult life had been spent climbing the path to Nob Hill, to success and wealth and power. Even as a fishing hand, he could not think of himself as a workingman. A workingman was a victim by his lights, and to his own way of thinking he had never been a victim but always the manipulator, always the man who controlled his own destiny. The only time he had ever thought and acted in political terms was when he had supported A1 Smith for the presidency. If Smith had won, Dan Lavette's life might have been very different, but Smith had not won.

Now, watching the mass of people passing slowly by, he could only think of the strike and of "Bloody Thursday" in terms of stupidity, stupidity on both sides, but specifically the stupidity of men like John Whittier. He didn't hate John Whittier; he simply despised him, as he had once despised Grant Whittier, the man's father. For perhaps half an hour, Dan stood and watched the funeral procession; then he turned away and walked to Sam Goldberg's office on Montgomery Street.

Goldberg received him warmly and immediately put to rest his fears about Barbara. "She's staying with me," he said, "and I hope you will too, Danny. There's plenty of room in the old house."

"Have you talked to Whittier?"

"I have. It was not pleasant. He regards her as some kind of crazed kid out to destroy him. I agree with Barbara. She can't go back there."