The Immigrants (35 page)

“You goddamn crazy woman,” he whispered. “I love you.”

She fought to hold back her tears. “As much as you can love anyone, Dan.”

“You’re my whole life.”

“No. Not even ten percent of it, Dan.”

“I won’t let you do this.” He leaped to his feet and began to pace back and forth. “To hell with this house. You’re right. I wanted you to get out of here for years. There’s a piece of property in Marin County, not far from Mark’s place. It’s big enough for Joe and your folks, if you want them to live with you. I don’t see why, but if that’s what you want, fine. Two acres of land—that’s what the kid needs, to live in the country.”

“Dan, you haven’t heard a word I’ve said. It’s done. It’s over.”

He stopped pacing and faced her. Very quietly, he asked, “What’s over?”

“You and me.”

“No.”

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Her face crinkled in pain and she closed her eyes. “Don’t fight me, Danny. Don’t make it any harder. I love you so much.”

He went to her and knelt in front of the chair where she sat, taking her hands and pressing them to his lips. “I know how it’s been for you. I swear to God I know. I get involved in things. It’s not the money. I don’t give a damn about money, you know that.

But all my life I’ve been climbing Nob Hill and pushing at those bastards up there. I go to bed and dream I’m still the kid in the fishing boat with the whole damn city in flames. My father? He wanted to buy my mother a gold ring. He put aside the pennies for months, and then the boat was stove in by some crazy bastard, and for months there was nothing, barely enough food to live. I don’t know, I don’t know anything except that you’re the only thing in my life that ever really mattered, and I know how it’s been, but it won’t be that way anymore.”

“How will it be, Danny?”

“Different.”

“Will you marry me?”

He stared at her, his mouth open.

“Will you marry me, Danny?”

He rose and went to the couch where he had dropped the gifts.

He took a slender box, ripped the paper off it, opened it, and revealed a string of matched pearls. “They’re for you,” he said. “I bought them at Tiffany’s. That’s the best jewelry store in New York. They’re on Fifth Avenue.”

“I know where Tiffany’s is, Danny,” she said coldly. “Oh, damn you and your stinking pearls!”

The word reached him. It was the first time in all their years together he had ever heard her swear.

“I asked you whether you would marry me,” she said. “I will not go on this way. I would lay down my life for you, Dan, and you know that. But not because I’m weak. Because I love you. But this

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kind of love is like a sickness, and I will not spend my life and my son’s life being sick.”

“He’s my son too.”

“Is he? What have you given him?”

“I’ve given both of you everything you need.”

“What? This?” She took the pearls from his hand. “This?” She picked up the baseball glove, and then she flung both the glove and the pearls across the room. “Give him your name,” she whispered.

“Now listen to me, Daniel Lavette. Today is Tuesday. We leave here Friday. That gives you three days. Any time during those three days, come to me and tell me that you have initiated divorce proceedings against your wife, or made up your mind to do so, or discussed it with your law yers, and I will go with you anywhere on earth or stay with you here in town or live in a shack in the desert if we must, or do anything you decide we should do. Oth erwise, it’s done, and I won’t see you again.”

“For Christ’s sake, May Ling, you are my wife and that kid upstairs is my son!”

“That’s all, Dan. That’s all I can say.”

During the long eight-hour train ride between San Fran cisco and Los Angeles, May Ling lived with her own thoughts. Her father, her mother, and her son all re spected her silence; they had their own preoccupations. San Francisco had been their world; through the years, they had seen it change from a city filled with fear and hatred and suspicion of Chinese to a place where slowly but certainly Orientals were being accepted as a valid and constructive part of the population. Now they were going into the unknown, to a place they did not know and could not visualize. Dan Lavette had been Feng Wo’s rock and salvation. At the end of his rope, his

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wife and child literally without food and wasting from hun ger, Dan Lavette had rescued him, given him food and sustenance, and raised him to a position equaled by few if any Chinese in the city. He did not consider what he had given to Levy and Lavette in return, the wisdom with which he had managed their finances, the battles he had fought when they were on the edge of destruc tion, the integrity he had maintained through the wild scheming and flights of fancy that were a part of Dan Lavette’s empire building. This was only what was ex pected of him. Eighteen years ago, he had gone to work for Dan Lavette at the wage of twelve dollars a week. When he told Mark Levy that he intended to resign, his pay was twenty thousand dollars a year, probably the highest wage earned by any Oriental in the City of San Francisco.

Now, fifty-two years old, he sat in the railway coach next to his wife and facing his daughter and his grand child, his face calm and impassive, his heart broken, his soul filled with agony. He had done what he had to do; he knew that. Physically, they would survive; he had lived simply and saved his money, and in Los Angeles he would find work of some sort; but he was leaving behind him a structure he as much as anyone else had created and a man he loved and honored more than any other man he had ever known. Through all that had happened, he would neither say nor hear said a word against Dan. Not from his wife or his daughter or any one else.

May Ling knew some of what went on in her father’s mind.

She had made her own decision to leave San Francisco; it was her father’s decision that he would go with her, and that meant that at least she would have her father and mother to take care of her son while she was at work.

The three days after Dan had come to the house were the three most awful days she had ever lived through. She had known with absolutely certainty that her ulti matum was meaningless, that to marry her was no part of his life and had never been a part of his

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life; she knew him that well; but she also knew that there had been moments between them as precious and as won derful as ever existed between a man and a woman, and for that reason, whenever the phone rang during those three days, whenever the doorbell sounded, her heart stopped and there was a crazy moment of hope and belief.

On the second day, a messenger brought a letter from him:
My Dear, Beloved May Ling:

I am writing to beg you to change your mind. There is nothing more
that I can say that I haven’t said. Even if you won’t change your
mind and re main in San Francisco, this is not the end of us. Just don’t
believe that. This money is to help out. Please take it. I love you.

Dan

Enclosed with the letter was a check for ten thousand dollars. She mailed the check back to him with a very brief note:
Danny:

I don’t want to close any doors. I will write from Los Angeles. Only
think about what I said. I have enough money from the sale of the
house. Thank you.

May Ling

Now it was done, as she had known it would be, and she called upon all her reserves of inner strength to blot out what had been.

She knew that she had to counter her grief with anticipation. She was the pivot of these four people on the train, this quiet Chinese family that the others in the car kept glancing at so curiously. Her

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father was no longer a young man. He had saved a sub stantial sum of money, but it would not last forever. Nor did she know what kind of prejudice existed in Los Angeles. They would have to live frugally and carefully. She had her son to raise, and she was sufficiently Chinese to tell herself that he must do honor to all of them.

When applying for a position at the library, she had pretended to know Japanese, but her knowledge was cursory at best. She could read Japanese fairly well, but she would have to master the spoken language to some degree before they discovered her deception.

And as for Dan? She closed her eyes, and there she was with him, the two of them sprawled on the deck of the boat, he with one hand on the rudder, the other hand touching her, the wind in the sails and the taste of salt spray on her lips.

“Mommy, don’t cry anymore,” Joseph said, touching her. “It will be all right.”

“I know it will.” She managed to smile. “Of course it will.” She pointed through the car window to the rocky, spectacular California coast. “Look there, how lovely it is.”

The thing was not to think of Dan—not at all.

For the tenth time since the beginning of the journey he had embarked on, Rabbi Samuel Blum regretted the fact that he had allowed Bernie Cohen to be his driver. Rabbi Blum was eighty; Bernie Cohen was nineteen; and while the distance from San Francisco to the Napa Valley was little more than thirty miles, the journey for Rabbi Blum appeared to extend itself indefinitely. Part of this lay in the profession of Bernie Cohen; he was a self-styled “pioneer,” which meant that with nine other young men, he was preparing to go to Palestine and be come a part of the tiny community that a handful of Jews had founded there. In the course

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of this prepara tion, he and his fellow pioneers were learning how to use the necessary machines, and having very little money, they put things together with what they could find or scavenge. When Rabbi Blum ventured to ask what kind of a car they were riding in, Bernie Cohen replied that most of it was once a Chevrolet. The rest of it had been drawn from a number of places.

Bernie Cohen was a large-muscled, good-natured young man who had been within earshot when Rabbi Blum let drop that he had to go to a place in the Napa Valley. “I will take you there,”

Bernie Cohen declared. “It will give me an opportunity to observe the irrigation systems.”

“As long as you take me to a place called Higate. It used to be a winery.”

“I am even more interested in wineries.”

They were halfway there when young Cohen, in trigued by the soft drone of sound from the old man, asked him what he was saying.

“I am not saying. I am praying. It may surprise you since I am eighty years old, but I have a peculiar desire to live.”

“Oh, we’ll make it all right, Rabbi. This is a good car when it runs. Anyway, what can happen with a rabbi in the car?”

“That’s what I wonder.”

The rabbi was amiably surprised when they reached Higate untroubled by calamity, and he briskly de scended from what he would always think of as an in fernal machine. It was his first visit to the Levy place or to the Napa Valley, and he was impressed by the beauty of the scene, the green hills, the old stone buildings, the cattle grazing in the upland meadows—and also im pressed by the lovely redheaded woman who came out of the house to greet him.

He remembered Clair from the last time he had seen her at the Levy home in Sausalito, but that had been years ago. Life worked won ders. This tall, long-limbed lady, a child in her arms and two little boys hanging onto her apron, her face red and freckled by the

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sun, was a delicious surprise, and the old man beamed with pleasure as he regarded her. The older he got, the more it seemed to him that each new generation vindicated his life and his belief.

“How marvelous!” he exclaimed. “I turn my back, and you have three children.”

“You turned slowly, Rabbi. It’s been years. Oh, it’s so good to see you. But what brings you here?”

“This one,” he replied, indicating Bernie Cohen, “in his infernal machine that he calls a car. He’s a nice boy. His name is Bernie Cohen.”

“Can I look around, Mrs. Levy?” he asked eagerly.

“Wherever you wish. You may run into my husband. Just introduce yourself and tell him that Rabbi Blum is here. And, Rabbi,”

she said to the old man, “come out of the sun. It’s cool inside.”

“First I must be introduced to what God has given you. This one?”

“My oldest. He’s five. His name is Adam.” Adam clutched his mother’s leg and buried his red hair and his freckled face in her apron. “This is Joshua—three.”

Joshua stared at the old man with unabashed curiosity and demanded, “What’s on his eyes?”

“Glasses. I’m not as young as you.”

“And this is Sally,” Clair said. “She’s new. Well, not so new.

A year old. She can walk if she tries. But what brings you here, Rabbi? Of course I’m delighted.”

“A small business proposition for your husband.”

Clair led the way inside to the kitchen, where she put Sally down in a playpen. The kitchen was cool and comfortable, and Rabbi Blum seated himself gratefully at the kitchen table. Clair poured him a glass of lemon ade.

“It’s good. Our own lemons. It’ll cool you, Rabbi.”

“If it’s not too much trouble, I’d prefer hot tea.”

“In this weather?”

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“Absolutely. You know, this is a fine place you have here.”

“It’s been a struggle, Rabbi. We do everything our selves. Jake made these cabinets, and the table too. We both found we can do anything—or almost anything. We have four acres in table grapes, and we sell them. We have forty-one steers and six milk cows, and we’ve made a cash crop out of plums. And a garden. Last year we broke even for the first time, and this year we expect to make some money. We have to. At this point, we don’t have a dime.”

“And Jacob’s father?”

“Oh, we’re friendly, and they come up here and we go down there with the kids, but Jake won’t take a penny from him.”