The Immigrant’s Daughter (22 page)

“By the way,” Barbara asked, “did Freddie ever mention anything about Mary Lou's great-grandmother or something of the sort?”

“You mean about her being a hooker, Mom? First thing Mary Lou told me. She was proud as a peacock about it. You see, Annabelle Fitzroy was not just a hooker; she ran the biggest whorehouse in New Orleans.”

“And Mary Lou?”

“She's a first-rate tennis player. That's high on the list for a doctor's wife.”

There were times when Barbara was not fond of her son.

About a month after this, Birdie MacGelsie decided to give a small dinner party for Sam and Mary Lou. When Birdie telephoned Barbara to invite her, Barbara was reasonably surprised. “The marriage is off,” Barbara said. “At least, that was my understanding. I'm only his mother.”

“Darling, these days you don't get too many points for being anyone's mother. My spies tell me that the wedding is probably on again. Anyway, I felt an obligation to meet the young lady. Don't you like her?”

“I'm not sure I know her well enough to like or dislike. She appears to have had a childhood resembling mine, and that's reason enough to be wary.”

“But you will come?”

Barbara assured Birdie that she would come, but she did not look forward to it. Her distaste for social engagements that she had to fulfill without an escort was increasing; she felt uncomfortable as the widow lady, the odd woman out. It made her angry to surmise that people might be sorry for her; she would not be an object of pity. Yet she knew well enough that people spoke about poor Barbara, and of course we must do something, but find us a man over sixty who isn't simply deplorable —

Still, she could not become a hermit in the little wooden house on Green Street. Once it had been cute and delightful, a valid old Victorian San Francisco hill house. Now even Eloise, who had always admired the house, said, “No, Barbara, it's too dark. At our age we need light.”

Once she had allowed Eloise to steer her into one of the new highrises being built on the hills. They looked at an apartment on the sixteenth floor that had a splendid view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, but it brought a flood of memories and a stab of apprehension to Barbara, who reminded Eloise that two of her grandparents had perished in the earthquake of 1906. “I would never draw an easy breath here,” Barbara said.

In Birdie MacGelsie's thinking, eleven people constituted a small dinner party. Nor did her apartment high above the city arouse her apprehensions. Aside from Sam, Mary Lou and Barbara, there were three other couples, one of them Al Ruddy and his wife, Susan. Barbara had never met Susan Ruddy before. She was small, dark, with a sort of apologetic prettiness. A large, redheaded man of fifty or so was introduced as Bart Limber. His wife was very tall, very thin, blond hair and bony shoulders. She wore two strings of pearls and a heavy necklace of carved quartz beads. Limber subcontracted airplane parts, and he had been a classmate of MacGelsie's at Stanford. The third couple, Barbara met with some relief. They were old friends, Dr. Milton Kellman and his wife, Nell. Birdie was sensitive enough to feel that Barbara needed additional buttressing. Both Susan Ruddy and Alison Limber were, as they put it, absolutely thrilled to meet Barbara Lavette, whom Susan Ruddy specified as “the” Barbara Lavette. “I heard so much about you, so many things, and of course it was years ago — when you were young.”

Her husband looked daggers at her, and her voice dried up. It was the last thing Susan Ruddy said that evening — that is, the last thing that might have had either an opinion or a question tied into it. But on the plus side it produced a deep, suppressed giggle in Barbara, who was certain that, if left alone, Susan would have plunged into a host of questions about how it felt to be in jail or a Communist courier. Well, why not? Certainly the evening promised nothing much more interesting.

“Of course I read your last book, loved it,” Alison Limber said in a deep throaty voice. Barbara realized that the tall, thin and stylish lady said things for the sound of them, not for the content. Barbara counted the years since her last book. Too long to be remembered.

“Oh! Writer, are you?” Limber said. “Never actually understood about writers. Suppose you just sit down at a desk and write. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?”

“Oh, yes, indeed — sometimes,” Barbara agreed. Drawing her aside, Birdie whispered into her ear, “Horse's ass, but Mac loves him.”

Milton Kellman kissed her and Nell Kellman embraced her and began to apologize for the time elapsed since the last time. “But that's Milt, and I'm a doctor's wife, and unless I have the bad luck to get sick, I never see him either.”

Mary Lou grinned at Barbara and said, “I'm not going to say anything but hello. I open my mouth any wider, and in goes my foot.”

It was an improvement, Barbara felt, and at least the lady had a sense of humor. Sam whispered, “Give her a chance, please, Mom. Her parents are Neanderthals. She has to work her way through several thousand years of history. Not easy.”

Birdie seated Barbara between Milton Kellman and Sam; she faced Al Ruddy and Bart Limber, with Mary Lou sandwiched across the table from her, but taking it well and being charming to the men who flanked her. MacGelsie proposed a simple toast to the younger generation present. The big, heavyset man was more sensitive than Barbara had supposed. Alison Limber talked about the election. “If I had only lived in the Forty-eighth,” she said, in her husky voice, “I would have voted for you at least twice.”

“If we lived in the Forty-eighth,” her husband countered, “we would have moved after two days, so you wouldn't have voted for Miss Lavette at all.”

“Not if you lived in one of those million-dollar waterfront shacks,” Birdie said. “You might just endure it.”

“Outside the city? Never, never, never.”

The asparagus vinaigrette appeared. The wine was poured.

“A time will come,” Sam said, “when we'll dine at your house, Birdie, or at the home of some equally lovely and generous person, and our hostess will not feel the necessity of serving Higate wine.”

“Oh, no, Sam. It's simply the best. I'm not tipping my hat to you and your mother. I'm simply defying the myth that no California wine is as good as the French.”

“Some people don't regard it as a myth.”

“In our house, it's a myth.”

The soup came.

“Does all this mean that you own Higate Winery?” Alison Limber asked Barbara.

“Oh, no — no. It's just a tangled family thing, but we have no financial interest in Higate.”

With the roast, Al Ruddy said, “I saw your brother the other day, Miss Lavette. Remarkable man.”

“Oh, yes, Tom is remarkable.”

“I came as an improbable petitioner, but he was quite pleasant. Oh, I had met him before, but only casually.”

Certainly they all knew that she had not spoken to her brother in years. Why did they persist? Or was it that money was an icon that must be worshiped?

“It's one of the perks of the profession,” Bart Limber said. “Everyone's nice to a congressman.”

“It could have been my charm.”

“I'm sure it was,” Mary Lou said.

“More perks. Beautiful women tell you you're charming.”

“Are you going to tell us about it?”

“Only if you pledge not to put your hands in your pockets. I abhor people who raise funds at a social gathering.”

“The easiest pledge I ever had pushed at me,” Limber said.

“Well, no great secret. We're trying to build a new library as a sort of monument to the memory of Harry Truman. A repository for books about the Korean War; you know, maps, news reports. They want it down at City College. I think it's an appropriate place for a Truman memorial.”

“I could think of a more appropriate place,” Barbara said.

“Oh? And where might that be?”

“A military cemetery.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then Al Ruddy, as if he had missed Barbara's remark entirely or thought it unworthy of comment, went on to talk about her brother. “I do mean, to ask a rock-ribbed Republican like Thomas Lavette to support a memorial to Truman — well, that's pushing it. But he didn't throw me out. Not at all. Simply said he'd like to have some time to think about it.”

Limber would not drop it. “I was wondering what Miss Lavette meant. This isn't a gravestone. You don't put a library in a cemetery?”

“Why not, if it's dedicated to death. Appropriate? Well, when one considers it, no man in all of human history, except Adolf Hitler, ordained so much death at one stroke as Mr. Truman when he gave the order to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And since the library is to be devoted to his war, what better place than a cemetery?”

Was she serious? She could see that Ruddy was uncertain. Limber was not uncertain. Alison Limber had the slightest smirk of satisfaction on her face. She had known all along, it said. When the sky fell on Barbara, Alison would watch with pleasure. MacGelsie was fighting a grin, and Kellman's face was impassive. His wife nodded gently.

“You don't mean that,” Ruddy said at last.

“Oh, I do.”

“Then you're way off base, Miss Lavette,” Limber said sharply. “It was not Truman's decision. The military decided it.”

“I'm afraid not, Bart,” MacGelsie said. “That's one little bit of history I was very close to. I was a colonel, stationed in Hawaii, and I was in on some private talk. The Joint Chiefs did not want to drop it on cities. They voted to hit the fleet or a concentration of Japanese troops. It was Truman who backed dropping the damn thing on the cities.”

“And saved a hundred thousand American lives,” Ruddy said.

“They were not far from surrender,” Barbara said. “But I only made a suggestion. You needn't take it to heart. The military cemetery will survive without it.”

“I suggest a more cheerful topic,” Birdie MacGelsie said, “as for instance the disintegration of our beloved city. We have become a Disneyland of the North, tied up in ribbons of concrete, with monstrous highrises, like the one we're sitting in right now, up all over the place like mushrooms or like candles in the whipped cream top of a rich kid's birthday cake.”

Barbara would have preferred to walk home alone. It was not a happy evening, and it had dragged on and on; and then it was late and Sam held the car door open for her, and she had absolutely no desire to get into an argument with him. Sam had barely started the car when he could contain himself no longer and lashed out at her. “Mother, for Christ's sake, why must you always do it? Will you never grow up? That was a perfectly decent, pleasant dinner party until you brought up that old saw about Truman and the bombs. Why? It's done! It's over! Can't you stop —”

Possibly he had forgotten that Mary Lou was in the car in the back seat. He was sitting at the wheel, with Barbara beside him, her heart feeling like ice breaking into small shards.

Mary Lou's voice came hard and sharp. “Sam, will you shut up!”

“What?”

“You said enough, and you said it more stupidly than anything I ever heard you say. Your mother is right. She said what had to be said about that dreadful little man.”

“This doesn't concern you!”

He had stopped the car now in front of Barbara's house, having covered the few blocks from Jones Street, and Mary Lou opened the door and said, “It concerns me! It damn well does.” And then she got out and walked off without looking back.

Barbara, still held in a sick spell, turned to look at Sam.

“Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry. I have to go after her.”

Sam leaped out of the car on the gutter side, leaving Barbara sitting alone. After a moment, Barbara left the car and went into her house. She went to her bedroom and dropped onto her bed, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling.

About ten minutes later, the front doorbell rang — again and again. Barbara could not bring herself to get up and answer it; she felt a weight like a large stone across her chest. Then the doorbell stopped ringing. No more than a minute or two went by, and then the telephone next to Barbara's bed rang. It rang five times before she forced herself to pick it up. She knew before he spoke that it was Sam. He had a radio phone in his car.

“Please, Mom, please. I don't know what got into me.”

“We'll talk about it tomorrow,” Barbara said. “I'm very tired now and not thinking clearly at all.”

“Just a few minutes. We're right outside.”

“Tomorrow, Sam.”

Mary Lou's voice came over the phone. “Please forgive him.”

“I'm not angry, dear. Just tired,” Barbara said.

“My dear Barbara,” Alexander Holt wrote. “Over a year has gone by since we spoke, and believe me I am still blistered by what you said. You can also believe that I have thought about it constantly, by which I mean that it was hardly ever out of my mind. Nobody likes to look at himself and say, ‘You're a bum'; and I'm not so sure that it would explain what I did. The thing is that nobody in my circle feels that my TV appearance the night before the election was foul or dishonorable. But also, I do not deceive myself by believing that there is much left in my circle that can be called a sense of honor. I don't know how I can make you understand what being defeated in the last election would have done to me. I am not whining, or maybe I am, but the truth is that the only reason I have for existence would have been taken away. I tried to say something like this the last time we spoke. But that didn't explain and I don't know of anything I can say to explain an empty man. That's the only description that fits: an empty man, a hollow man. It is not that I don't know what is right and what is wrong. The truth is that I don't care. Being in the House means more than questions of right and wrong. I try to make a decent record when it doesn't mean bucking the tide. So having said this, why should I care where I stand in your book of dunces? I'll try to answer that as straightforwardly as I can. Meeting you made me alive for a little while, and I remember what it felt like to be alive.