Second Generation (9 page)

"Oh no," he said to himself. "I am not hearing this. It's not happening."

"Yes," she said. "That's decided. It's what you need, and you'll stop looking so wretchedly sour. Now I want you to tell me about this John Whittier your mother married. Tell me all about him."

Barbara carefully backed her Ford station wagon into the alley on Bryant Street, then went into the kitchen and asked for help to unload. It was eleven o'clock in the morning on the third day of July in 1934, and already the makeshift stove was smoking hot, piled with pots of stew to feed anywhere from two hundred to five hundred men. The kitchen was dirty, steaming, the garbage cans overflowing and spilling onto the floor, with two longshoremen washing tin cups and bowls and arguing about a third man who was, according to their definition, either a fink or a pimp. Dominick and another longshoreman by the name of Franco Guzie were slicing stale, three-day-old bread. Volunteers from the bakery workers' union bought the unsold bread, paying for it out of union funds, and delivered it twice a week to the various soup kitchens the maritime strikers had set up. Sometimes it amounted to several hundred loaves, sometimes only a few dozen.

Salone looked up as Barbara came into the kitchen. Guzie shouted for a little quiet. "What have you got, Bobby?" Dominick asked her.

She was looking at the garbage. "Don't you ever clean this place?" ""

"It gets done," he said. "Is that what you come for—to tell us the place stinks?"

"No. I have a load outside."

"Come on, Franco," Dominick said.

She led the two of them out to the station wagon. "Jesus Christ," Guzie whispered. "What the hell have you got there?"

"I was down on the Peninsula, so I picked it up off the roadside stands," Barbara said proudly. "A lot cheaper there than here. Two hundred pounds of potatoes, two hundred pounds of onions, two bushels of cabbage, two crates of carrots, a hundred pounds of squash, and five hams. I got the hams at Tulip Farm in Belmont. They wanted twenty-five cents a pound, and I got them down to twenty. What do you think of that?" She was pleased with herself, as eager for praise as she had been as a child doing something noteworthy and deserving.

"What do we do with smoked ham?" Dominick said sourly. "You can't put it in stew."

"Who says you can't?" Guzie demanded. "Gives the stew a flavor. God damn it, Bobby, this is a bonanza. You're some lady, kid, you're some lady. I wish we had ten like you, ten like you. Don't pay no attention to this punk."

After they had carried the food inside, Barbara parked her car. Then she came back to the kitchen, put on an apron, and began to clean up. She hated this kind of work, yet she took a perverse satisfaction in forcing herself to do it. Dominick had finished slicing the bread. He stood watching her as she swept the garbage together and stuffed it into the cans. The smell made her gag.

"Take the cans out of here," she said to him. "This shouldn't be here with the cooking. You know that."

"Now you're running the joint."

"What? Oh, don't be an ass, Nick."

" 'Don't be an ass.' That's real classy talk. I'm sorry, duchess. I beg your pardon."

"Knock it off," Guzie said, and he picked up the can and carried it out.

Fat Irma Montessa, the acknowledged boss of the kitchen, shouted at Barbara, "Bobby, you forget about the cleaning, because with these pigs here, you can't keep nothing clean. The feeders are here, and we got to start serving. You want to help me?"

At the front of the store, standing behind the table next to Irma who was ladling the stew into tin bowls, passing out the bowls to the line of strikers and adding bread and chili pepper for those who wanted it, Barbara said to her,

"What's come over Dominick?"

"Men turn lousy, sweetie. Up and down. It's in their nature. Too much strike."

"It's not like him."

"Sure it is. What do you expect from a guinea longshoreman?" .

Barbara had never heard the expression before. She finished serving the meal. She had been up at six that morning to drive down to Belmont for the food, and by now the sour smell of the stew filled her with nausea, so she went out into the alley for a breath of fresh air. Dominick was there, puffing on a cigarette.

"You're in a lovely mood today," she said to him.

"Yeah."

"I didn't mean to call you an ass. I lost my temper."

"Who the hell are you?" he asked angrily.

"Who are you?"

"I
'm a guinea longshoreman, name of Dominick
Salone." "That's the second time today I heard that word," Barbara said. "What does it mean?"

"What word?"

"Guinea."

"Oh, Jesus Christ! You don't know what a guinea is, you don't know what a fink is, you don't know what a goon is. You give me a load of horseshit about working at L and L and collecting money, and you drive a car that nobody makes eighteen a week could afiord, and you talk the way some pisspot society dame talks. You spend the day here and you tell me then you go out and put in an eight-hour shift at the store. That's bullshit, and you know it."

"What if it is?" Barbara said tiredly.

"I just don't like to be conned."

"What do you think I am? Some kind of labor spy?"

He threw away the cigarette and grinned. "If you are, they're scraping the bottom of the barrel."

"Thank you."

"I didn't mean it that way."

"I know you didn't. Look, Nick, nobody else here worries about who I am. Nobody else objects to my buying food, and nobody else cares where the money comes from. Nobody even objects to the way I speak."

"Yeah."

"So?"

"So I'm crazy. Since the first time I seen you, I can't think of nothing else. Ah, shit!"

"That's expressive."

"I'm sorry. God damn it, you're not like any dame I ever knew. I didn't need this. You come in here with your heart bleeding, and you do your lady bountiful act, and then back to wherever the hell you come from—"

"Come on, Nick."

"Don't patronize me!" He turned on his heel and stalked back into the kitchen.

She started to follow him, then stopped herself and shook her head, and she stood there staring at the cracked asphalt of the alleyway. He was not playing a game. No one there was playing a game. "And I'm not," she pleaded to herself; but then, had she nothing to do with the fact that he was in love with her? A skinny, undernourished, uneducated Italian longshoreman had fallen in love with her. A brief, romantic flow of imagery flashed into her mind—her father's conquest of her mother, the fishing boat captain from the wharf making his way up Nob Hill —and then she shivered and threw it off. The thought— which she had never actually entertained before—of being trapped down here in this bleak, dreary hopeless abyss of workingmen was not pleasant. She felt no more for Dominick Salone than she felt for Franco Guzie or any of the other longshoremen. He interested and intrigued her, and she had been direct and open with him. At first, the longshoremen had frightened her; they were different, they spoke another language, they wore old clothes, and very often they were rank with body odor. But then, after only a few days of working around the kitchen, she discovered that they were amazingly correct in their behavior toward her. They always apologized for strong language used in her presence, they forbore any of the sexual innuendoes that were commonplace among the set of her own class, and all in all, they treated her with respect. It had simply not occurred to her that Dominick or any of the others might become emotionally involved with her.

She stood there in the alley for a few more minutes, trying to decide whether to go back into the kitchen and talk to Dominick again. Then she decided that it was best to leave it alone at this point, and she walked to where she had parked her car, got into it, and drove back to the Whittier house on Pacific Heights. She was tired; she would spend the afternoon curled up in a chair reading a book.

Knox, the butler, opening the door for her, said, "Mr. Whittier would like to see you, Miss Lavette."

"Oh? When did he get back?"

"Just about an hour ago."

Barbara went into the breakfast room. John Whittier was sitting at the table, dining on bacon and eggs and reading a newspaper. He rose as she entered and kissed her perfunctorily on the cheek.

"Sit down, Barbara. Will you have some lunch?"

"I'll have coffee," she said.

"Help yourself. There's a pot on the teacart there. I thought we'd have a chat, just the two of us. I never subscribed to the myth that servants don't have ears. They damn well do, and big mouths also."

"Did
you have a
good
trip?" Barbara asked, bringing her coffee back to the table.

"Good enough. The wretched train takes forever."

"And Tom and mother—are they well?"

"Well enough when I left them. Your mother is determined to work your Aunt Leona for those dreary pictures that adorn her house. Did you know about her scheme to turn Russian Hill into a museum?"

"She mentioned something about it in a letter."

Her conversation was listless. Whittier looked at her thoughtfully. "Are you well, Barbara?"

"Perfectly well. Just a little tired. I thought I'd spend the afternoon with a book."

"Well, that will be a change."

She looked at him, wondering what was coming now.

"Apparently it's the first afternoon you decided to spend at home."

"What does that mean?"

"According to Knox, you've been out each morning and back each night since we've been gone."

"Really. Is it part of Knox's job to spy on me?"

"He's the butler. It's his job to know what goes on in this house."

"Then you have a faithful servant. That should please you, John."

"I don't think that tone is called for, Barbara."

"And I don't think I have to account for my time," she said coldly. "Thank you for the coffee." She rose and started to leave.

"One moment, Barbara." She turned to him, trying to control herself, trying to repress the loathing she felt for him. "What happened to your car?" he asked.

"Why don't you ask Knox?"

"I did. He says that your Buick disappeared, and that now you're driving an old Ford station wagon."

"Then you have your answer. Now I'm driving an old Ford station wagon." With that, she grabbed her purse and rushed out of the room, through the house, and out the front door. The station wagon was still parked in the driveway, where she had left it. She got into the car and suddenly burst into tears. She cried for a while. Then she felt better, relieved of what had been pent up inside her. She dried her eyes, turned the ignition key, and started the car. As she left the driveway, she saw in her rearview mirror that Knox was standing at the door, watching her.

She had no destination in mind, no thought except a compelling desire never to return to John Whittier's home. She drove through the park, and she found herself on 19th Avenue, heading south.

Joe Lavette was curled up on his bed, reading, when Dan came into his room and sat down at the foot of the bed. He had rehearsed what he was going to say several times, and now he came directly to the point. "That day," he began, "when you came home and told us that you had been made valedictorian of your class—that day something happened inside me. I can't explain it, and I can't explain to you why I couldn't say anything. I can only say to you that I was so damn proud that if I had stayed there or tried to talk about it, I would have just gone to pieces, and that's nothing that I waned you or your mother to see. I couldn't explain that to you, and I couldn't explain it to your mother, either. I've led a strange life, Joe. You know about that. Did you ever wonder why I work as a hand on a fishing boat?"

Joe stared at him uncertainly. "Yes," he said at last.

"Why didn't you ever ask me?"

"I couldn't ask you something like that."

"You know," Dan said miserably, "I have to get up my courage to talk to you. Not just to talk to you. But to talk to you like this."

"Why? Why, pop?"

"I don't know. Jesus—" He stared at the bedspread and then looked up and met his son's eyes. "I love you so much. How many times I wanted to say that, and I couldn't say it. I loused up fourteen years of your life. All the time when you needed me, I wasn't there. And now I feel so damned empty, hopeless."

Joe reached out and put his hand on his father's. "Pop," he said softly, "all that stuff about college and medical school—it's not important"

"It's important."

"No. No, it really isn't. I see you come in after eighteen hours on that boat, so tired you can hardly stand up—it breaks my heart."