The Immigrant’s Daughter (23 page)

“Now all of this can be dismissed by you as some fancy footwork on my part, except that I've underwritten it, and that at least is one honest thing and maybe the only honest thing I ever did. But I'm doing it. I'm writing this letter, and if my gut is not strained too much, I'll send it to you. You will then have in your hand the same kind of instrument, more or less, that I used to win the election, and it will be up to you to decide whether or not to use it. You may think that, as little as I know you, I know that you would not do to me what I did to you. Well, I know it and I don't know it, but sending you this letter is something I have to do. I hear that your nephew Frederick Lavette may get the designation. I wish it could be you. If I have to be kicked out on my keester, I would prefer you do it.” And he signed the letter simply
ALEXANDER HOLT.

“I have received your letter,” Barbara wrote to him. “I thought you might wish to be certain that it was received.” Just that and no more, and then after she had sent off her letter, she reflected on the fact that she could be as calculating a bitch as anyone else. All her life, she had fulminated against such distortions of the human spirit as revenge. She tore Holt's letter into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. “I will not tell him,” she said aloud. “For once in your life, you, Barbara Lavette, will not act like a sentimental Girl Scout. You suffered. Let him suffer — let that bastard have second and third thoughts. You know enough about men to know that macho is a fleeting illusion. The nobler nature can survive a few hours, but then it crumbles, and by now, he would walk through the fires of hell to retrieve that letter.”

But a few days later, her resolve crumbled. She asked herself how she could play such an idiot child's game. She had never done that, never in her life. She had never practiced revenge, and she had only pity for those who indulged it.

She put through a call to Washington. When Holt identified himself, she said stiffly, “This is Barbara Lavette.”

“I thought it was you when they said it was a woman who would not give her name. I got your letter.”

“Your letter,” Barbara said coldly, “has been torn into small pieces and flushed down the toilet. I thought it was mawkish.” Then she put down the phone and broke the connection. And then she burst into laughter. It was good to laugh this way. “Thank you, Alexander Holt!”

“I have it,” Freddie told her. “Not that it's any kind of great achievement, because nobody's contesting it. As far as the party's concerned, it's still the impossible Forty-eighth, but they figure that I've endless sources of money, and nobody else wants to come up with twenty cents. Unless you've changed your mind?”

“Not a chance, darling. Oh, no. It's an illness I never want to contract again.”

“Ah, well. You know, they didn't just give it to me. It was the word of Tony. He put in for me. You know, I think he likes me.”

“I can't imagine why.”

“It's mutual. You know, Aunt Barbara, I didn't like him at first. I'm not exactly Freddie Lavette, friend of the establishment. If you had told me a year ago that I'd put myself on the chopping block and make a run for what they euphemistically call the House of Representatives, I would have said you were crazy. I despise politicians, but Tony Moretti's something else. I don't know exactly what he is, but he's a breed that's gone.”

“Don't romanticize him, Freddie. He's a politician and a very good one. How is he?”

“In a wheelchair, dying slowly.”

Barbara shook her head, fighting against the tears that were welling into her eyes. Why did he have to come here and talk about Tony Moretti?

“You've never been to his house?”

She rose and went to the window, her back to Freddie. “No.”

“A small old frame house in North Beach — a lot like this, only less grand.”

“Less grand than this?” Barbara asked. They were sitting in her tiny parlor. “Hard to believe.”

“His limo's a lot more magnificent, believe me. He sits there in a wheelchair and he seems to have a lot of pain —”

“Freddie,” she interrupted, “what does May Ling think about all this?”

“Well, she'll come around.”

“What on earth does that mean?”

“I guess she's frightened.”

“Of course she's frightened. She grew up in Napa. She's a small-town girl. Have you thought it through? If you win, do you leave her here and become a weekend husband? Or do you take her with you and make a life in that place they call Washington?”

Freddie shook his head. “I don't know. We'll work it out somehow.”

“I hope so.”

Rising to leave, Freddie paused to stare at a magnificent bouquet of long-stemmed red roses. “Two dozen. Whoever it is, Aunt Barbara, he loves you truly.”

“I hope so. They're a peace offering from Sam.”

“Are you angry with him?”

“No, Freddie, and don't pry any further.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“I could never be angry with you.”

“Then you'll help me?”

“Yes, I'll help you.”

And pray that he loses, she told herself after he had gone. If he won, the marriage would not stand up. In no way could it stand up. Freddie was too charming, too good-looking, and completely enchanted with women. There were so few men like him, men who loved women simply because they were women, men who understood women without ever truly understanding a woman.

Mary Lou telephoned and asked Barbara whether she might come by at four o'clock to talk and to have a cup of tea if that didn't put Barbara out too much.

“Tea? My dear, that's lovely but unusual these days. Of course, if you can tolerate a two-year-old. May Ling is in town and has parked young Daniel Lavette with me. He's in that area of life the young folk call the terrible twos. Actually, he's not terrible at all, but a great strain on the shoulder muscles.”

“It can wait —”

“No, it shouldn't wait. If you want to come today, there must be a good reason.”

She was stronger than Barbara would have suspected, one of those women whose large frames hide behind soft, round faces. She lifted the little boy and hugged him while he tugged at her hair.

“He should be ready for a nap. He's been up since dawn. I've had him for two hours, and believe me, I'm ready to drop.”

“I read somewhere of an athlete who tried to keep pace with the motions of a two-year-old for a day of the kid's life.”

“Poor athlete,” Barbara agreed, putting Daniel down on the couch. He stared at the two women for a moment or two, then curled up and closed his eyes.

“As easy as that?”

“Once in a blue moon, I would guess. What happened to the athlete?”

“They took him to the hospital.”

“Well, we won't try to pace Danny. You know, my brother has a boy named Daniel. Senior at Princeton. I wonder what Pop would have thought of his two namesakes.”

“What was he like, Barbara? May I call you Barbara?”

“Of course.”

“Dan Lavette. Not the boy at Princeton. Your father.”

“Big, easygoing man. Very gentle, very sweet.”

“Gentle?”

“I know what you're thinking. That was only once, and I suppose it was the worst moment in his life. He got into a fight in a saloon in the Tenderloin and broke up the place and the men who jumped him. That wasn't Daddy.”

“How do you tell when it is or it isn't? Who is my father? All my life, he treated me like some damn incredible princess until he found out that I was working in an emergency room, pushing around a bloody mop and holding the edges of a slit gut together until the doctor gets to it. That made him crazy, and he got even crazier when he found out that I was sleeping with a divorced Jew-doctor, as he put it. Just tell me there's no anti-Semitism in America — no way, not a trace of it. At first he was going to go along with a wedding at Grace Cathedral, where a bronze plaque was loaded with the names of Lavettes and Sel dons, but that was before I told him that Sam's name was Cohen and not either Lavette or Seldon. He really hadn't done his homework —” She was becoming very emotional, and Barbara disliked hysteria, in herself and in others.

“We're going to have that tea,” Barbara said firmly. “I think it's the first time in years anyone invited herself to this house for tea. And if you don't think I'm flattered, I took myself down to Bonier's for their special cookies.”

They left the child sleeping on the couch and had their tea in the kitchen, no great distance in the tiny house. Meanwhile, Mary Lou had caught hold of herself, and she was able to say, very quietly, “I have been cast out, like in those silly old stories I used to read.”

“No, those things don't last,” Barbara assured her. “Your father will come around.”

“They won't come to a wedding. They won't even admit it can be. Well, I am just as strong and hardheaded as they are, and I think Sam loves me, and I love him more than I can say.”

“They will come,” Barbara assured her.

“Oh, no. You don't know Daddy. But Barbara, please, I want to be married right here. Right here in this house. And I want your permission and I want your blessing, and I want you to love me.” Now the tears came, and Mary Lou stood up and they embraced each other.

“You thought I was horrible,” Mary Lou said.

“Oh, no. No.”

“I was horrible.”

“Mary Lou,” Barbara said, “you need no one's permission to marry my son. If you love each other, that should be enough. My son was married to a fine person and he divorced her. I think he has a penchant for fine people; I pray he has the same penchant for staying married. As for having a wedding in this house, it is impossible.”

“Why?”

“Have you spoken to Sam about it?”

“Not yet.”

“Mary Lou, my dear, even a very small wedding would bring too many people for this house to hold.”

“Only people who love Sam.”

“I don't see how it's possible.”

“Will you try, will you think about it? Please?”

Barbara had always written about things she had seen with her own eyes. She had not stopped seeing, but the writing would no longer come. After Boyd's death, she had planned to write a book about him but had written nothing. At first, she had gone to the typewriter each day, as a religious primitive might go to his wooden god, always convinced that a time would come when the god would awaken and perform wonders. But the god did not awaken, and no wonders were performed. Time after time, she formed a sentence, a paragraph, now and then a page, and once almost forty pages; but it all ended up the same way, shredded and dropped into the wastepaper basket. When she sought for some answers inside herself, she found that she didn't care. There were deeper reaches that she visited in the darkness of her sleepless nights, tearing at herself to discover why she should be cursed with the inability to write unless she cared.

She roamed among the bookstores, buying books, loads of books, books by all the eager, bright, liberated young women, confessions of love life and loveless life. Orgasms detailed and counted, marriages installed and shattered, love and hate to a point where men and women harried each other like a pack of demented dogs. She had no scorn for this, none of the contempt she felt for the endless stream of books about spies, secret agents, supermen who saved the world, the killers and the killed; no, for the work of the young women she had only admiration, a certain degree of envy, and the frustration that came from trying to be one with a world so distant from the world she had known as her own young woman. But reading the books of others did not help.

She brooded over these things as she tried to solve the wedding problems of Mary Lou, wondering whether this was her destiny, a housewife aged, helpful and cheerful. She was being helpful — or was she? She paced through the little clapboard house. A wedding here? Did she really care? She couldn't write because she no longer cared. Did she care enough about a wedding to crowd all her family and friends into this place? The whole notion was ridiculous, and she felt a marvelous sense of relief because, ridiculous or not, it was obviously a delicious idea.

“I think maybe I'll make it,” she said to no one in particular, and not referring to the wedding at all.

Tony Moretti died, and he was taken to his grave and buried on a cold, wet spring day. Freddie picked Barbara up, and they went to the funeral together. The church was packed.

“They're making sure he's dead,” Freddie said bitterly. “There isn't a California Democrat left in Washington. They're all here to tell each other how great the old man was.”

“Why so bitter?” Barbara asked him.

“Because I bowed out. Because he wasn't dead more than a few hours when good Al Ruddy informed me that a certain Nancy Kraft was having petitions signed in the Forty-eighth and that I'd have to go through a primary. It's a joke — go up against a woman in the Forty-eighth. I wouldn't get a hundred votes in a primary. So I told the little bastard to shove it and I bowed out.”

“And how do you feel?”

“Lousy.”

“Poor Freddie — I'm so sorry.”

But they both knew it was her doing. She had established the legitimacy of a woman in the Forty-eighth C.D. And she had given Ruddy good reason to hate people who were named Lavette.

Seven