The Immigrant’s Daughter (27 page)

“Absolutely fantastic!” Bernhard exclaimed. “They should have grabbed it.”

“They did. CBS grabbed it, just as you say. And do you know what they did?”

“I can guess,” Joan said.

“You'd never guess. They began by saying, No Jewish mother. That was twenty years ago. So they changed the mother to a Wasp, which let Norma out. They thought Jane Wyman would be fine for the role, if they could get her. Then they washed out Appalachia, the mob, the bridge club and the election. They decided that the Wasp lady's husband should die and she takes over his seat in Congress. They insisted that her secretary should be a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound football player. Funny. Comic relief. And they felt that obviously such a lady should be a Republican.”

“You're kidding.”

“And what happened?” Bernhard asked.

“What would have to happen. They trashed it and then they junked it and it was never done.”

“At least they paid for it.”

“Oh, yes. They're very good about that. But the point I was making is that essentially this reflects their opinion of a woman. A decent woman who can't bear to see suffering. This they couldn't go with. And yet we dream of a Congress that's half women.”

“It's a local disease, the Hollywood concept of women.”

“They've infected the whole nation,” Barbara said. “Here I am, sound of limb and reasonably clear mentally, and most of the time I feel that I'm looking at a world that has ushered me out. Damn it, I'm not ready to be ushered out. They laughed and trashed that idea of mine out of existence because it challenged their notion of a woman. Tell me,” she said to Bernhard, “would you think seriously about making a film where a woman in her sixties or even in her seventies was the protagonist? I'm not talking about those cutesy numbers that Helen Hayes and Ruth Gordon have been doing, and I'm not talking about the specter of youth that comes from a couple of face lifts and the art of the makeup man. I'm talking about a serious film about an old woman.”

“Right now?” Bernhard shook his head. “I don't know. I'm tempted to say that if the screenplay is good enough, we can get anything on the screen, but that's not the bottom line either. Some day, sure. Perhaps not yet.”

“Some day. You see, Jim, Joan put her finger on it, didn't she? We're half of the human race, and properly we should be half of the Congress of the United States.”

“And,” Joan added, “we could hardly mess things up worse than the men have.”

The talk went on. They had all the missing years to fill in. Barbara, hardly able to keep her eyes open, was ready for bed at ten o'clock.

“Make no apology,” Jim Bernhard said. “Off to bed.”

“And tomorrow, what kind of a program?” Joan asked.

“Bare feet and wet sand. I want to walk on the beach and lie in the sun. That will be as close to paradise as I have any right to expect.”

When a week had gone by and Sam had had no word from his mother, other than the note telling him she'd gone away, he said to Mary Lou, “What do I do now? I don't know where she is. No one has heard a word from her. What do I do? Do I call the cops and tell them that my mother wandered off seven days ago?”

“That would be real smart, wouldn't it? Your mother would love that.”

“I don't suppose she would. What's your suggestion?”

“That you leave her alone. She's perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”

“I can't just forget about her. She's my mother.”

“You forget about her very nicely when she's here on Green Street,” Mary Lou pointed out.

“That's different. Then I know where she is.”

“Well, right now she knows where she is.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Mary Lou sighed and shook her head. “Nothing much.”

“I'm worried about her. Do you know, I have a tennis date at the club. I'm late and I will be lousy. I'm always lousy when I have something like this on my mind.”

“And you know,” Mary Lou said, “you can be a sweet and compassionate and wonderful person.”

“All right,” Sam said with annoyance. “But I've turned into a louse because I don't want to be late or rotten for a tennis game and because I'm worried about my mother.”

But Mary Lou, understanding Sam a good deal better than Carla ever had, made no reply to this but kissed him and told him that she loved him.

Eight

D
ivorce, as Barbara told Boyd, somewhat defensively, was not a matter of ceasing to love a man, but of being unable to continue to live with him and share his life. At least, such was her perception, and when Boyd had pointed out to her that a great many divorces end in hatred far more intense than the original love, Barbara argued that there had been no real love to begin with, which simply stated that Barbara Lavette was as incapable of defining love as anyone else in America. Barbara had married twice and loved twice without marriage, and death had made short shrift of one marriage and both loves; but the marriage that had ended in divorce had never truly finished. If she had hated Carson Devron, it would have been over, but her love for him had never turned into hatred, and his love for her was not a part of the divorce.

Probably he had never understood the divorce. “We can't hack it anymore.” That's no excuse and meaningless. “It's just not working.” “We tried.” “We gave it our best shot, didn't we?”

None of that meant anything. Tag words, code words. Carson, divorced, stayed with her — remote but nevertheless with her. There were other things besides his giving the campaign a polling mechanism, other gifts through the years, but always gifts at arm's length. If someone had ever asked her, Barbara would have replied, “Did we ever make love again? The answer is no.” Boyd had never asked her.

Joan Bernhard sort of asked her. “We do want to have at least one celebration of sorts while you're here. Nothing very large or splendid. Jim and I gave up the large and splendid years ago. I was thinking of a small dinner party. Perhaps eight or ten people.”

“Joan, it's not necessary,” Barbara said. “I came to be with you.”

“Most things aren't absolutely necessary. But if you don't mind?”

“Of course not.”

“Some of our friends, and some of yours.”

“You're my friends down here. You know that.”

“What about Carson Devron? Still friends?”

“I haven't seen him in years, but the cords are still there. He's a good man.”

“Then why don't we have him?”

“Marriage and kids, for one thing. I hardly think it's a good idea. No — no, I don't think so.”

“It's not the best of marriages. She's in Palm Springs. He's here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Any cocktail party here at the Colony, and you know everything. But this time, it comes from Jim. Carson's been his partner in a film now and then, and they lunch together every few weeks or so.”

“I didn't know you even knew Carson.”

“No,” Joan said, “it's not anything we'd have talked about in front of Boyd. He was fiercely jealous of you.”

“I know, poor dear. But Joan, just stop thinking whatever you may be thinking.”

“What? Tell me what I'm thinking,” Joan said, smiling. “Dear Barbara, no. I'm thinking that if you and Carson are good friends, it would be nice for you to see each other after all these years.”

“Yes, I want to see Carson,” Barbara admitted. “I want to touch something that used to be, something that was a part of my life that isn't dead or broken or soured or lost. But I don't want to hurt anyone, not Carson, not his wife.”

“I think we're all past the age of hurting people that way.”

So it was to be just a casual meeting of old friends, yet Barbara tried on every piece of clothing she had brought with her, not once but twice, and finally sighed hopelessly and settled for a white blouse, a pink cashmere sweater and a full gray skirt. It was not fashionable, but all she had with her were a few skirts and sweaters and blouses.

She was coming downstairs after dressing when the doorbell rang. It was too early for Carson. Jim Bernhard opened the door, still in his apron as self-appointed cook, and a policeman on the doorstep inquired whether the Bernhards had a guest, name of Barbara Lavette.

Her heart stopped when she heard this, and all her guilts and fears, so easily set aside, now swarmed over her. “What is it?” she asked, her voice high-pitched and anxious.

“You're Barbara Lavette?”

“Yes. For God's sake, tell me what happened!”

“Nothing to get upset about,” the policeman said. “The way I understand it, your son, Dr. Cohen — your son?”

“Yes, my son.”

“All right, lady. He put out a missing person on you with the San Francisco cops —”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Barbara demanded. “Who's missing? Is my son missing?”

“You are, Miss Lavette,” the officer said stolidly. “If your son is a Dr. Samuel Cohen, then he decided that you are missing and his information sheet suggested that you might be at the Colony here, but he didn't have any name or address, so the San Francisco cops called here and asked us to do a house check —”

Relieved, laughing now, Barbara tried to assure the policeman that it was some kind of stupid joke.

“Well, if it is, ma'am, your son put us to a lot of trouble. If you'll give me the telephone here, I'll report it back to San Francisco.”

When the policeman had left, both Bernhards — Joan having joined them at the door — turned to stare at Barbara.

“No, I did not tell him where I was going,” Barbara said. The Bernhards still made no comment. “I ran away,” Barbara said hopelessly. “I wanted to do it all my life. I finally did it.”

Once Jim Bernhard had invited Carson, who said that he would be delighted to come but that he would be coming alone, both Bernhards felt that they would do best to have no other guests. “In fact,” Jim had said to Barbara, “when Carson asked me who else would be here, aside from you, I told him just Joan and myself. I had a feeling that as much as he might want to see you, he would have bowed out if others were here.”

Barbara decided that Bernhard had been quite right. As casually as she might take an evening with Carson, he on the other hand might look forward to it with great anticipation. The years that had passed did not matter, time did not matter — that well she knew him and understood. For men like Carson, the unfulfilled is always laced with golden webs of wonder. He would come tonight as he had come almost twenty-five years ago to a party given for Barbara by William Goldberg, her producer; and he had come then not because he liked parties — he hated them — but because he was already in love with the author of
Driftwood
, whom he had never met. And tonight, as his herald, a delivery boy appeared with two dozen long-stemmed roses.

It prompted Jim Bernhard to say to his wife, softly, in the confines of their bedroom, “I don't know which of them is more the idiot child or more the wonderful person. Why couldn't they stay married?”

“If we knew that, we could sell marriage prognoses and make us a bundle.”

“Of course, it's pretty damn easy to love Carson.”

“At his age?”

“I happen to be older than he is,” Bernhard informed her.

“And how old would that make him?”

“I'm not sure. He's younger than Barbara.”

At first, at the dinner table, the conversation was constrained. The Bernhards, doing their own cooking and serving, took turns in the kitchen. A maid came in the morning and left at noon, and for a large dinner party, they would have had help. But tonight there were only the four of them, and Jim Bernhard had poached salmon fillets for the main course and had wrapped Brie cheese in phylo to go with the salad, which in California precedes the main course. With an icy cold Sicilian wine, it made a meal that nobody could fault and a conversation piece as well.

But after exhausting the virtues of the food and the beauty of the Pacific, iridescent in the moonlight, and the pleasure of eating in sight of a boundless ocean, Carson Devron became strangely silent. He was a large, handsome man, his once blond hair turned white, his manner, for all of his very real diffidence, the manner of a man who has ordered other men and indeed ruled a substantial empire all of his adult life, the Devron holdings in Southern California being very much of an empire. Some years younger than Barbara, he lacked her ebullience. Barbara approached each day as if she had never actually experienced a day before. What was always new to her was old to Carson Devron, who appeared to exist in a rigid frame of depression.

On first entering the Bernhard house, he had smiled with pleasure and embraced Barbara as if she had conferred an ultimate favor upon him. He fussed over her appearance, repeated his observation that time had dealt so well with her, and treated her for all the world like an attractive young woman.