The Immigrant’s Daughter (11 page)

“Freddie, why do you hate them so?”

“Look around you.”

“But it can be changed. Believe me, it can be changed. If I didn't think it could be changed, I couldn't go on living. You came to your manhood in the sixties and there was some hope then, and I suppose you feel that there's none left now, none at all.”

“Only one hope, Aunt Barbara — that we're not all blown to hell and gone by their bombs. Anyway” — he took out his wallet — “here are the first campaign contributions, the beginning of that quarter million we're going to raise. Grandma's check for two hundred dollars and Pop's for five hundred.”

Barbara took the two checks, telling herself that she must not refuse because they were family and she must feel no guilt. It was the beginning. Others would give her money; there was no other way. “Thank them,” she told Freddie. “How is your father?”

“Glum. Miserable. I'll never really get over Josh's death, but I'm young and a brother isn't a son. Pop won't get over it. Funny thing, Mom is stronger. No matter how she hurts inside, she faces up to the world. Pop is wounded too deeply. Don't forget, his brother, Joshua, was killed in World War Two. Two Joshuas to their stinking wars, and this Vietnam thing is like a curse that won't end. You want to know why I hate politicians? You excepted.”

Telling May Ling about the meeting with Barbara, his son, Danny, on his lap, Freddie made a point of not excluding his wife. “No way are you out of it,” he said. “The damn idiocy of a congressional campaign is that it takes two months of back-breaking, heartbreaking effort, not to mention the money involved — and believe me, May Ling, she needs all the help she can get.”

“But can she make it?” May Ling wanted to know.

“She thinks she can.”

“Do you?”

“God knows. I'm tempted to say that she'll get a worse pasting than she got six years ago, but miracles have happened. The point is that Moretti and the others are using her to bring in women voters all over the state. You know, what great guys we are — running this distinguished old woman —”

“She's not an old woman.”

“Not to us — all right. This guy she's up against, Alexander Holt, is smooth as silk. Looks like John Forsythe — you know, we've seen him on the tube maybe fifty times: fine Waspy elegance, gray hair, square face, good features —”

“You're describing Barbara's brother Tom, who just happens to be your father.”

“Leave that end out of it. Adam's been my father for as long as I care to remember, but I suppose you're right. He does resemble Thomas Lavette, except that Holt's only fifty-nine years old, a widower, and the secret love of every rich broad in the district.”

“How do you know so much?”

“Studying. Are you serious about working with us?”

“You're damn right I am,” May Ling said.

“Good. I'm used to having you around.”

“You're being very generous today.”

“I have to be. Who else is going to look after that crazy aunt of ours? Sam says she has to get it out of her system. That's because he doesn't know one damn thing about her system. Aunt Barbara doesn't get anything out of her system. It just adds up inside.”

“Do you know something else?” May Ling said. “The way you and Sam talk about her disgusts me. She's wonderful. She reminds me of Mrs. Roosevelt. And you talk about her—”

“No!” Freddie protested. “I'm crazy about her. You know I'm a male chauvinist pig.”

“You are indeed,” May Ling said. “Why do you cultivate it?”

“They're related — I mean also married but related some way, aren't they?” Tony Moretti asked Barbara the following week. It was his first visit to the campaign headquarters Freddie had set up at Sunnyside Plaza, the largest shopping center in Sunny-side, which was the part of the Forty-eighth C.D. that fronted on the Bay. He had just been introduced to Freddie and May Ling. “Is she Chinese?”

“Her father's half Chinese. She's the daughter of my brother Joe and Sally Levy. Joe is Pop's son through May Ling, and that beautiful kid was named after Pop's May Ling.”

“Half cousins.”

“Something of the sort.”

“Doesn't seem to like me much,” Moretti said, his glance moving around. “He put this place together?”

“What makes you say that?”

“He's the type who takes charge. You got eleven people here. How many are on payroll?”

“Three.”

“That's good, Barbara. Try to keep it that way. Volunteers are better anyway. They're dedicated. What about money?”

“We sent out one mailing. That was only three days ago. Not too much yet.”

“Don't depend on mailings. Functions, and the conscience of the rich. I'd like to meet that young fellow who thinks I'm a ward heeler and an old bum.”

“Oh, he doesn't think that,” Barbara protested.

But Freddie regarded Moretti coolly for a long moment before he shook hands, and Moretti said, “I know your generation as little as you know mine, Lavette, but I've known a few Lavettes, and when they're good, they're good.”

Freddie smiled and shook his head. “I don't know what that's supposed to mean.”

“Not much. You think your aunt's being set up, don't you?”

Moretti waited. Freddie didn't answer.

“Nobody sets her up,” Moretti said softly. “She's too smart.”

Then Moretti went to her and kissed her cheek. “I'll be going and I'll be back. I'll be back a good deal. We're going to win this one.”

She knew that money was the mother's milk of politics, but six years earlier she'd made out with whatever she had, and if she didn't talk on television, she talked from a sound truck or on the street at a shopping center. It amazed her now to reflect that in that earlier election, spending less than thirty thousand dollars, she had almost taken the impregnable Forty-eighth. Of course those were other circumstances, other times. She still talked at shopping centers; May Ling, tall, slender, with a face that drew the attention even of women, was her partner at the shopping centers. She would stop women not too overburdened with children and packages, and ask whether they wouldn't like to meet the candidate, Barbara Lavette. Barbara never used a platform. Standing on their own level, she found she could talk to women very easily and intimately. It didn't matter if she talked to only a handful; they would remember her and repeat what she said and take it to others. Here, she was a new incarnation, and the younger women she spoke to had little knowledge of her past. Most of them had not read her books, and if they knew her at all, it was as the candidate who had shaken up the district six years earlier.

But Freddie insisted on television and radio, and that took money. “It's the new politics and soon it will be the only politics,” Freddie told her. “Believe me, Aunt Barbara, from here on the candidate won't exist; the only thing that will exist is his image on the glass tit.”

“The what?”

“The box, the glass tit that America sucks morning, noon and night, and the candidate will be whatever image they want to put on that box. You don't make points by talking to a dozen people at a shopping center — whatever May Ling says.”

“What does she say?”

“She says you make points,” he admitted.

Barbara couldn't be angry at him. Freddie was the physical image of her brother — as he would put it, his natural father — six feet and one inch, large bones but lean, a long head and sandy hair, altogether very handsome, which made him trouble with women. Yet he was bright enough not to confuse his good looks with other parts of himself. He was ingratiating without reaching, a quality Barbara envied.

“Come with me and see for yourself.”

Freddie came to a shopping center and watched and listened.

“Nobody ever asked me what I thought.” A young woman, dragged apart by three children. “How do I know what I think?”

An older woman, her arms full of packages. “Just let me put these in the car, Miss Lavette. But we don't think. It's not in style for ladies.”

“They say Ford's wife is a dancer. I'm a dancer who doesn't dance. In Europe the government supports the dance.”

“My mother's fifty-one with cancer. We don't eat much. Every nickel goes to the doctors and the hospital. I'd like you to look at my kids' shoes.”

“She can't do anything about that.”

“She can't do anything about anything!”

“Who can?”

“I vote for nobody. My kid died in Vietnam.”

“But she's here, isn't she? How many congressmen have you seen at Sunnyside Plaza?”

“The thing nobody ever told me is exactly what can a congressman do.”

“What does he do?”

“It beats me.”

“There's a spot behind our house that oozes. The smell is sickening. A friend of ours from the university at Berkeley says it's an old chemical dump. He tested the stuff. He says sell our house and move. With that smell, who'll buy it?”

“I'm on the same block.”

“You know what happens when you write your congressman?”

“Who is our congressman?”

“Alexander something.”

“He's beautiful.”

“You vote for him because he's beautiful?”

“Why not? What other reason is there to vote for him?”

“The plain truth is that it's wonderful to have a woman running for Congress, but what can you do about things? We're not cynical. We're just hopeless.”

“I see what you mean,” Freddie said to Barbara. “But we still have to buy television, and that costs money.”

Everything cost money. The pretty girl who was hired to sing the song from
Cabaret
, “Money Makes the World Go Round,” was paid three hundred dollars. She sang the song four times, and Barbara thought it was more than enough, but Birdie MacGel sie, at whose home the party was being given, said to Barbara, “You can't raise money and be a lady too. No way. Money makes the world go round, and you've got to beat it into people with a stick.”

Birdie's husband, Mac, climbed onto a chair and called for silence. Greeted with hoots, he said, “The next one who hoots gets his ass broken by me, personally.” Since he was over six feet and weighed three hundred pounds, it was not an empty threat. He went on to point out to them that he had not asked them here tonight, drinking his booze and gobbling his sandwiches, for the pleasure of their company.

“This is not one of those hotshot Republican thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners. We don't deal with such people. This is a poor little party to honor a great lady, Barbara Lavette, old Dan Lavette's daughter, who has taken upon herself the task of reclaiming the Bay Area from the political sewage that has been flooding it.” He took out a roll of bills and began to peel off hundred-dollar notes. Birdie came out of the kitchen with an enormous aluminum pot. “So here's my five hundred in the pot, and I want every one of you freeloaders to match it. There are no welfare cases here, and none of you was invited for his talent. And couples to me are two people, not one. So keep the pot boiling.”

Voices called for Barbara, and she had to stand up and thank them and tell them that she would try to do an honest and decent job.

After the party, Freddie, who was driving her home, said to her, “Don't feel the way you do — please, Aunt Barbara — or we'll have to wash it up right here.”

“And how do I feel?”

“Sick and disgusted, and there's no reason to feel that way. We picked up seventeen thousand, five hundred dollars tonight, and we got a pledge of ten thousand from a guy called Lars Swenson, who said his father sold Grandpa the
Ocean Queen
or something of the sort.”

“The
Oregon Queen
,” Barbara said. “Good heavens! Which one was he?”

“I think it must have been his grandfather. Tall feller, about forty, blond hair going white. He had that beautiful red-headed gal with him. I heard about him. Swenson Explorers — three big cruise ships that sail out of Long Beach. Who's this Carol Eber-hardt? Skinny, good-looking kid about twenty-eight or thirty?”

“Why?”

“She wants to come in as a volunteer. Very earnest.”

“Yes, we met at Birdie's place before. She helped out the first time. Her father's Jim Eberhardt, top of the local Republicans. I think he's the Republican whip at the State House. A lot of inherited money. None of the Eberhardts have to work for a living.”

They were at Green Street now, and after Barbara had climbed out of the car, Freddie said, “Just a moment. Look at this. I thought of tearing it up, but now I'll deposit it — if you think it's real.” He handed Barbara a check, and peering at it in the light of a street lamp, she saw that it was a check for a thousand dollars, drawn on the Crocker Bank and signed by Carol Eberhardt. On the line given to
Memo
, she had written: “Republican — one grand.”

“It's real.”

“I can understand that,” Freddie said.

“Yes, I thought you might.”

But at home with May Ling, who would have no part of fundraisers, it was not that easily explained.

“Why?” May Ling insisted.

“Isn't it obvious? She probably feels about her father the way I feel about mine.”

“Adam!”

“Not Adam. Thomas Lavette.”

“You mean you'd toss off a thousand dollars just to let the world know how much you hate your real father?”

“Twice a day, if I had the money to spare. I don't think of him as my real father. There's a genetic connection, but since I can remember, I've thought of Adam as my father. In fact, I have no memory of Thomas Lavette as my father. I was a very small kid when Mom married Adam.”

“Why do you hate him so?” May Ling wondered. “How can you go on with that kind of hate?”