Second Generation (5 page)

"I only work at the soup kitchen. I'm not a communist. And they don't know my name. I call myself Bobby Winter. It's easier if I keep the first name the same, and that's what they called me at school, Bobby Winter, because I loved the cold winters there. So they won't find out who I am."

"Maybe not in the next ten minutes," Goldberg snorted. "Why? Because you think John Whittier did your father in? He didn't. I told you that."

"No. No, really."

"What do they pay you?"

"Nothing."

"What do you do there?"

"Mr. Goldberg, you're shouting at me and scolding me as if I were some stupid, senseless little girl. You have no right to. I came to you to talk about my father,' not to sit here and be scolded by you."

"You're absolutely right. I'm sorry."

"I hurt your feelings," she said.

"Absolutely. I hurt your feelings, you hurt mine. Now look, honey, you're the daughter of a man who is like my

son. That gives me certain privileges. I talk to you this way because nobody else is going to. It just happens that John Whittier is the largest ship operator on this coast, and it also happens that he's married to your mother. You got sympathy for the longshoremen; so have I. Now I asked you what you do down there."

"I told you what I do. I work in the kitchen. I help to cook the food and serve it. I have an allowance of forty dollars a week, Mr. Goldberg—"

"Call me Sam, I told you," he interrupted. "If I'm going to yell at you, at least make me comfortable."

"All right. Sam. Do you realize that my allowance is more than twice as much as most longshoremen earn in a week?"

"It's five times as much as the average weekly wage in India, maybe ten times. What does that prove?"

"I'm not trying to prove anything. I don't need the money. I spend most of it on food for the kitchen."

"Do they know that?"

"I'm not a fool. I tell them it's contributions. I help to cook the food. I peel potatoes. I clean vegetables. I help with the serving, and sometimes I wash dishes."

"And you like that? You enjoy that?"

"Yes, I do!"

"Who's shouting now?"

"Well, you keep at me as if I'm doing something wrong. I'm not doing anything wrong. In fact, it's the first time in my life I ever did anything right or useful. It's the first time I ever worked. And if you saw the faces of those men, if you knew how hungry and wretched and miserable they are, you would understand what I feel."

The waiter came, and Goldberg took out his wallet and paid the check. Still holding the wallet, he looked at Barbara and said, "You got a boyfriend, honey?"

"No, not really. There was a nice boy at school who came down from Yale on weekends. His name was Burt Kingman and he lives in Philadelphia. But that seems like a hundred years ago. I know some boys here, but I haven't seen them since I've come back. Why?"

Goldberg smiled. "Why? Why, indeed. You're a nice girl, Barbara. Don't get into trouble. Down there on the wharf, you are going to change nothing. Remember that."

"Not even myself?"

"Ah. That's where the trouble begins." He took three twenty-dollar bills from his Wallet and pushed them toward her.

"What's this?"

"Buy more groceries. And remember, the way you're going, it may be that you'll need a lawyer. I'm not a bad lawyer."

After Dan Lavette's partner, Mark Levy, died of a heart attack in 1930, his widow, Sarah, continued to live alone in their big Spanish Colonial house in Sausalito. Sam Goldberg and his wife were frequent visitors there, and when Goldberg became a widower, he fell into a pattern of seeing Sarah Levy on weekends. It was one of the few defenses he had against unbearable loneliness. The weekdays were endurable. He could remain in his office and work until seven or seven-thirty, and then dinner at Gino's or some other restaurant would kill the best part of the evening; but the weekend stretched out as an interminable period of nothing. So more and more frequently after his wife's death, he would invite himself to the Levy home on a Saturday or a Sunday. He had known the Levys for half a century, which, in the San Francisco of 1934, was an epoch that stretched back almost to the beginning. When Sam Goldberg had come to San Francisco from Sacramento, to read law at the offices of Colby and Jessup at the age of seventeen—as things were done in those days— he lived in a frame boarding house on the Embarcadero, opposite the Levys' chandler shop. As they were the only Jews in an overwhelmingly Italian neighborhood, he had come to know them well, and Mark's father had given him his first case, a salvage dispute that involved unpaid accounts at the store. He could remember, as if it were yesterday, the day in 1897 when Sarah arrived from New York, a lovely, slender, flaxen-haired girl, bethrothed to a man she had never seen through the correspondence of the mutual parents, tagged and addressed like a parcel.

Now Marcus had been dead these four years past, a quick death from a massive coronary, less to be pitied than his widow, whose daughter had been a suicide just two years before. Her single surviving child, Jacob, had married Clair Harvey, the daughter of Jack Harvey, who had been the first captain in the Lavette and Levy fleet of oceangoing vessels. In the early twenties, when the

Volstead Act wrecked the American wine industry, Jake and Clair bought an old winery in the Napa Valley, and they had managed to survive Prohibition through the manufacture of sacramental wine, first for a handful of Orthodox synagogues in San Francisco, and subsequently for most of the synagogues in California and for a good many of the Catholic parishes. This had brought them to a modest prosperity, yet even with the repeal of Prohibition there was no great demand for wine. While Prohibition appeared to increase the national consumption of hard liquor, wine drinking became only a memory—and those who remembered now preferred the imported wines.

The winery, called Higate, lay in the Napa Valley a few miles north of Oakville, nine hundred acres on the eastern slope of the hills, and now, driving to the Levy home in Sausalito, Sam Goldberg wondered, as he had so often in the past, why Sarah Levy did not accept Jake's invitation to live there, where there were three children, winery workers, life, and excitement, instead of in the huge Spanish Colonial house where she was utterly alone. As she so often told him, she would not inflict herself on her children. But what else were children for, Goldberg wondered. He had no children of his own. If he only had, how quickly he would accept such an invitation!

He decided that today he would raise this question with her, pointing out that for a vital woman of fifty-four years to bury herself here was both self-destructive and wasteful; but it was Sarah who brought up the subject of Higate. Clair had telephoned just this morning, asking her mother-in-law to drive up to the Napa Valley—if Goldberg were willing—and for both to spend the afternoon and stay for dinner.

"In which case, Sam," Sarah said to him after she had greeted him and kissed him, "you will be my date."

"Nonsense. You are too young to be having dates with a man of sixty-six. Visits, that's one thing. Dates, no. Damnit, Sarah, you're a healthy, beautiful woman—too beautiful to waste away here doing nothing."

She smiled and took his arm. When she smiled, there was a reflection on her drawn face of the woman he had known twenty years before. Her pale yellow hair had turned white, but her eyes were the same bright blue and her figure had not changed. "I would always tell Martha,"

she said, "never to contradict a man who said she was beautiful. Of course, Martha was, wasn't she, Sam?"

"Very beautiful, yes."

"And I don't do nothing. I read. I knit. I tend my roses. I cook, sometimes."

"And you weep for Martha."

"Yes."

"Which is precisely what living alone here does to you. The past is over. You must—"

"Sam." She stopped him. "We won't talk about where I live or why. Will you drive me to Higate?"

"Of course."

In the car, Goldberg said, rather casually, "Would you like to guess who walked into my office day before yesterday?"

"No. I don't like to guess things. But I would like to know."

"Barbara."

"Barbara? Barbara who?"

"Barbara Lavette. Danny's daughter."

"No!"

"Yes. Yes, my dear Sarah."

"She just walked in? Unannounced?"

"Yes."

"Why? If you want to tell me?"

"I'm not sure I know why. She asked questions about what happened when Jean took over, but I'm not at all sure that's what brought her. I think she was reaching out."

"What is she like?" Sarah asked curiously. "It's strange, isn't it, Dan's daughter, and Danny was like a brother to Mark, and I think I saw her only once, when she was a little child."

"Splendid woman—tall, like Jean, looks a little like Jean—not as beautiful, but then, who is?"

"Indeed. She's twenty, isn't she?"

"Yes. Finished her second year at Sarah Lawrence College in the East. Now she's working."

"Where?"

"No wages. She's a volunteer at the Marine Workers' soup kitchen on Bryant Street."

"Barbara Lavette!"

"I thought that would get you," Goldberg said, smiling. "The world turns, doesn't it, Sarah?"

"It surely does."

Long, straight, narrow, a gentle fold between low green hills that only now and then become mountains, the Napa Valley is unique, even in a place like California, where there are a hundred thousand valleys and canyons; for of all the places where grapevines grow in America, only the name of Napa is absolutely synonymous with the word "wine." It is an old place only in terms of California, where nothing of European vintage is really old, and the first vines were planted there in 1840, by a man named George Yount. Yet, in the European tradition, most of the early wineries, established for the most part by German and Italian immigrants, were built of stone rather than wood, substantial stone buildings that very soon were covered over with broadleaf ivy, and if not actually ancient, they certainly gave the impression of being so. It was such a cluster of stone buildings that Jake Levy and his wife bought when he returned from service in World War I, and when they bought the place, it was little better than an antique and useless ruin.

Now, fourteen years later, the aspect of the place was quite different. The old buildings had been repaired and refurbished. The hillsides, abandoned during the first years of Prohibition, were now planted in gently curving and contoured rows of vines. Hedges and plantings graced the shapeless stone houses, and half an acre of garden was given over to the growing of table vegetables.

Goldberg turned off Highway 29 onto a dirt road that twisted over the hills to the stone-pillared iron gates of the winery. As he got out of the car and helped Sarah out, Jake, Clair, and their three children and two dogs came to meet them. Jake was a tall, heavyset man of thirty-five, his wife, a year younger, long-limbed, freckled, with a great head of orange-colored hair, a sunburned, good-looking woman indifferent to her good looks. The two boys, Adam, twelve, and Joshua, ten, were small, grinning replicas of their mother, carrot-topped and freckled, and Sally, the youngest, eight years old, had the pale eyes and flaxen hair of her grandmother.

With a touch of sadness and not without envy, Goldberg observed the warmth and excitement of the family as they greeted Sarah. He stood apart from the scramble of embraces, chattering children, and barking dogs. It was mundane and sentimental to see himself in relation to this, but he was a sentimental man. Then Clair noticed how woebegone and forgotten he appeared, and she went to him and took his arm and told him how delighted they all were to see him.

"It's been years," she said. "You and mother are all that's left to us of the old times."

"I wouldn't recognize the place. It reeks with prosperity."

"An illusion," Jake said. "Are you tired, either of you?"

"Not at all," Sarah replied.

"Why an illusion?" Goldberg asked.

"Because Americans have forgotten how to drink wine. If we were making whiskey, we'd be rolling in money. All the decent wine during Prohibition was smuggled in from France, and only the rich could afford it. Now they don't want our domestic wine."

"Which is as good or better than what they make in Europe," Clair added.

"Well, sometimes. Look, let me give you a tour of the place, Sam. I'll practice on you. Clair has a notion that we should open the winery to the public on weekends and let people taste our product and build up demand that way. It might just work if we could convince the big wineries to do it, but we're too small to make much difference. We're going to have a valley meeting next week and propose it, but who knows? Anyway, I'll practice on you and mother."

"I've seen it," Sarah said. "Take Sam. I'll help Clair inside."