The Immigrant’s Daughter (32 page)

“Hey! You're really trashing the world!”

“And don't laugh at me!” Carla shouted. “I'll kill you if you laugh at me and try to show me how goddamn clever you are. I'm not clever! I'm a stupid Chicana.”

Freddie got out of bed, spreading his arms to mollify her. Like Carla, he was naked. She shouted at him, “Put something on! I don't want to look at you naked!”

“You're naked,” he protested weakly.

“That's different.” Then she strode into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Freddie stared after her for a minute or so, still not entirely awake, trying to analyze and understand the explosion that had greeted him. He dressed without shaving, since Carla still held the bathroom, and then he ordered breakfast sent up. He had no idea whether Carla's anger had run its course, and he had no desire to share it with the guests in the dining room. However, and very much as usual, he had been unable to anticipate Carla's mood, and when he had finished ordering breakfast, she came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a charmeuse dressing gown of lemon yellow, her face shining. She needed no makeup. She had scrubbed her face with soap and water, and her skin glowed. Her mass of black hair fell to her shoulders, and Freddie, always astonished by her beauty, could picture her as the mistress of some great California hacienda in an era gone by. The sight of her melted him.

“Ah, my poor baby,” she said, going to him and embracing him. “I make you so miserable. I am so rotten to you. I don't know why. I swear I don't know why. I pray to the Mother of God, she should make me like herself, sweet and loving and forgiving. I think I'm not one damn bit forgiving. Maybe I think of how you took my cherry when I was just a kid. Oh, that's a miserable thought, but sometimes nice. Don't look at me like that, sweetheart. I'm so crazy, but I love you so, and I don't want any kids in France. Fuck France. I want to go back to California.”

“Why? You were delighted at the thought of living in France.”

“That was when I was in California. Everything comes up roses when you're someplace where you're unhappy, and you think that anywhere else you could be happy. No way, darling. You speak French. I don't know one damn word of French. You know that in school when a Chicana picks a second language, if she's a dumbbell like me, she picks Spanish. Sure, I was speaking Spanish since the day I began to speak anything.”

“All right. Maybe my own dream of France is crazy. When you go back to a place where you've been happy as a kid, it never works. Does it?”

“Maybe not, Freddie. Oh, the hell with all this talk. Take off your clothes and get back into bed with me.”

She stepped away from him, grinning and opening her dressing gown. Freddie began to unbutton his shirt. “We'll have to make a lot of adjustments, but we'll get married in California, if that's what you want.”

“No.”

“No?” He stared at her for a long moment. “No? Not in California? Where, then? Here?” But he knew the answer.

“Freddie — oh, Jesus, what kind of a game are we playing? I keep telling you this, and you keep forgetting. What kind of marriage would we have? Freddie, I don't want kids and I will not have kids. There are enough poor cursed Chicanos in this world. And I don't want any children, period. Some women are mothers. They got to be knocked up every year to be happy. No, no. Not me. You know, you confuse everything, you don't think straight, and I go along with you. My papa is Cándido Truaz, foreman in the growing fields. In your winery — hold on, don't stop me — so it's Adam's winery and what did you just inherit, ten, twelve million dollars. You want to make a lady out of me —”

“Damn it, you're a lady! A great lady!”

“Take off your clothes, Freddie. I'm sick of talking.” She dropped the robe and threw herself on the bed. “Come on. This is the only language we don't talk different.”

Carla took an afternoon plane back to California, leaving Freddie too stunned to assess properly what was happening. He tried to force money on her, which she rejected, and managed to stuff only a few hundred dollars into her purse. She insisted that she would have no trouble finding a job in San Francisco, and Freddie went through the phases of her decision like a man in a trance. He embraced her and kissed her, and then watched hopelessly as she passed through the metal detector and down the passageway to the plane.

“Poor Freddie,” she had said. “I love you so much, I don't want to louse up your life beyond any repair. As soon as I find a place, I'll call Barbara and tell her so you can find me.”

Freddie went back to his hotel suite and tried to get drunk. It had never worked for him and it didn't work now. If you grow up in a winery, you build unshakable defenses against drunkenness or else become a hopeless alcoholic, and he was not an alcoholic. Freddie sat and brooded until four o'clock in the morning, and then he fell asleep.

The following morning, at nine o'clock, he telephoned Sam. Nine o'clock in New York is six
A.M.
in San Francisco, and Sam underlined that angrily. “Damn it, Freddie, do you know what time it is?”

“Nine o'clock,” Freddie said miserably.

“No! No, you horse's ass, it's six o'clock in the morning out here.”

Freddie could hear Mary Lou in the background, telling Sam to have a little compassion. “For heaven's sake, he's in trouble,” Mary Lou was saying.

“Are you in trouble?” Sam asked him.

“My God, Sam, I'm on the short end of the worst mess of my life. No one ever fucked up the way I did, and I deserve it — goddamn it, I do deserve it for taking off with your wife —”

“Freddie, will you stop being a horse's ass and talk straight for one minute. You did not take off with my wife. I was divorced, and believe me I was thankful that Carla had someone like you to turn to, and you did me the favor of taking on my guilt. Now will you please tell me what happened.”

“She took off. No marriage. She went back to the Coast. Tried not to take a dollar from me; just took off and left me here — and so help me God, I look at the window and think about what a pleasure it would be to jump out.”

“Freddie, I never thought you were particularly bright, but that's stupid — high-class stupid! Did Carla tell you that I now pay her four hundred a week in alimony?”

“No, she didn't.”

“It's no fortune, but it keeps the wolf away from the door. Freddie, where are you staying?”

“At the Saint Regis.”

“O.K. Now today's Wednesday, when the medical profession hibernates. I was going to take Mary Lou to the beach, but that can wait. I'll get an early plane and we'll have dinner together. Unless you can change your plans about France and come back here?”

“No. Oh, no — no. I can never go back there, never!” Then he added, “It's cold and wet here, and it's beginning to snow. Oh, God, Sam, I feel so rotten. I broke May Ling's heart. I left my kid. Do you know I was going to France for two years? I wouldn't have seen him. I wouldn't even remember what he looked like. Sammy, I don't know what's happened to me — Jesus God, I feel so rotten I want to die.”

“Can you get on a plane?”

“I can't go back. Sammy, I can never go back. I've just fucked up beyond repair.”

“Stay right there at the hotel. Get some sleep. Watch TV. But stay there, and I'll be there about four o'clock your time. Please, Freddie, just don't do anything until I get there.”

When Sam finished speaking, Mary Lou said to him, “Do you have to?”

“He's the closest thing I ever had to a brother. It's not that Freddie's my cousin — he's my friend. How many friends do you have in a lifetime?”

But more than that, Sam sensed the illness of a man close to the breaking point, and when he greeted Freddie in the hotel room in New York, he felt that his apprehensions had been fully justified. Unshaven, always very thin and even thinner now, his eyes bloodshot, his hand shaking as a result of two ashtrays filled with half-smoked butts of cigarettes, Freddie was a man distraught.

“Did you eat at all today?” Sam asked him.

“I don't know. I'm not sure.”

“Suppose you shave and comb your hair, and then we'll go down to the dining room and have dinner and talk about this.”

“I don't know how to thank you,” Freddie said woefully.

“Don't. I'm starved. Wait a minute — give me your hand.”

Freddie's pulse was seventy-six. Sam touched his brow, which was not too warm, and then pushed him into the bathroom. When Freddie emerged, shaven, hair combed, he looked less like a man at the edge of death. Sam, somewhat heavier in build than Freddie, two inches taller, a face dominated by a strong, high-bridged nose, had always looked upon Freddie, with his flaxen hair and his long, narrow head, as the quintessential Anglo. As a kid, he had envied him both his appearance and his easy flirtation with girls; as a man, he continued to admire and envy Freddie's wit, his bright intelligence, and the fact that most women were totally enchanted by him. Now, rejected, disposed of like an unwanted pet puppy, a new and vulnerable Freddie appeared. Sitting at the dinner table in the hotel dining room, he said hopelessly, “I don't know what to do with my life, Sam. I don't know what to do with it anymore.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I've been thinking, brooding over that for hours, waiting for you — I swear, if I didn't know you were coming, I don't know what I would have done. I've finally painted myself into a corner, Sammy. The thought of going to France now, alone — it's senseless. It chills me, like locking myself into a cell for two years. What's the use of kidding myself? The only life I ever had that made sense is in Napa, and I can't go back there. And if I can't go back —” He shrugged.

“Why can't you go back?”

“Why? Face my father again? Face Carla's father every day?”

“Your father and mother would be two of the happiest people on earth. Your grandmother Clair is dying. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Freddie, you've been running that winery for the past ten years. I know Adam's the boss, but you've put it on the map. It's five times the size now. That's your doing. You could walk away from it — but to where? People like us, we're a part of that place, and there isn't any satisfaction for us anywhere else. Sure it's going to be a son-of-a-bitch thing to face up to Cándido, but we didn't do him in. His daughter shafted both of us, so to speak.”

“Come on. We're big boys. If we were shafted, we asked for it.”

“Freddie, we'll both defend Carla right down to the finish line, but the plain truth of the matter is that she used us. Maybe it was reciprocal — maybe we used each other. We're all too close, too damn incestuous, but maybe that's because there were so few of us to begin with, and death has chopped away at us so savagely.”

“I love Carla.”

“Oh, hell, Freddie. We go back a long time together. You've loved a lot of women. You loved May Ling. You were absolutely crazy about her.”

“I still am.”

“So you divorce her and take off with Carla.”

“Sam,” Freddie pleaded, “try to understand. For three years now, I couldn't get it up with her. I'm only thirty-eight. Do you know what it feels like to go to bed with a woman night after night and not be able to have an erection? I was impotent, plain, stinking impotent. I never believed it could happen to me.”

“Why didn't you come to me? I'm a physician.”

“Carla turned out to be all the medicine I needed. Oh, Christ, I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. May Ling moved in with Sally and Joe, but before I left, my mom persuaded her to come back. How do I face up to that? She's right there. Do I go back to work right under her nose?”

“Maybe it's the first real thing you've ever had to face up to, Freddie. We're the kids of the rich. We slide through life without ever facing up to anything. The money's a fucken waterbed, and it rocks us like a cradle wherever we turn. I'm beginning not to like us. I don't like the people we see at the club, and most of my colleagues are milking the Feds and depending on Reagan to pour the money into their laps. I'm losing all my fondness for them too. Look at us. Did we ever fall down without a hand waiting to pick us up? We're so snotty sure of ourselves that it's beginning to turn my stomach. Do you know what I deal in? Two-thousand-dollar appendectomies, five-thousand-dollar hysterectomies — I'm a lousy highwayman. We all are. God bless us all and Medicare too. We make the Mafia look like a bunch of inept idiots, and none of us goes to jail. So suppose you cut out all the shit, and I'll try to match you at shedding crap and we'll both go back together.”

“Sam, I just haven't got the guts.”

“Make the guts, and if you talk to Cándido, tell him that you love and respect his daughter, but that it wouldn't work. I talked to him.”

“No. You did?”

“I did. I went to him with Martí Pérez — Father Martí from Napa. You know him.”

Freddie nodded.

“According to Cándido, his daughter had sinned beyond forgiveness. Father Martí convinced him that she could be forgiven and that she could find a place in the hereafter. Don't look at me like that. I don't edit what others believe. All I know is that I was able to shake hands with Cándido without feeling that he wanted to put a knife into me. If I could do it, you could do it.”

“I deflowered her when she was just a kid,” Freddie moaned. “He knew about it then. He wanted to kill me. Instead, he let Adam take over. It was the only time I ever saw Adam blow his top. This time, I swear to God Cándido will kill me.”

“You'll die honorably,” Sam said. “We still have time for the late plane.”

The second day after she had returned to San Francisco, Barbara drove out to Higate. On her way to the winery, she stopped off at her brother Joe's house in Napa. Sally was at home. Joe was at the hospital, and young Daniel, out of college barely two years, was down in Silicon Valley, being a sort of genius and putting together, with two other sort-of-geniuses, a new computer company that would make them millionaires before Christmas. Or so Sally spelled it out after she had embraced Barbara.