The Immigrant’s Daughter (41 page)

Sam and Mary Lou had been at the airport in San Francisco to meet Barbara when she came up from Los Angeles. Anticipating that the newspaper story about the death of Clifford Abrahams might mention her, she had called Sam immediately after hearing the facts from Carson Devron. She was right in her supposition that the stories would mention her, but it was only a passing reference to the effect that a writer from the
Los Angeles Morning World
had been with Abrahams earlier on the day of his death. Apparently, no one filing the story had picked up the business of the trip to meet Constanza, the interception by the National Guard and the incident of the Spanish ambassador's wife. The murder of Abrahams and Felshun remained, for the time being, a mystery.

During the short flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Barbara brooded over her relationship with her son. It was too easy an out to decide that he had disappointed her in some indefinable manner, and the truth of the matter was that it was her expectations much more than his failings that had created the gulf between them. In her deepest essence, Barbara Lavette was a product of the nineteen thirties. The thirties had shaped her thinking and turned her toward her father, Dan Lavette, a product of Fisherman's Wharf and the Tenderloin, rather than toward her mother, Jean, a product of one of the wealthiest families on Nob Hill. The great longshore strike of the thirties had put a stamp on her that would remain a part of her as long as she lived, just as her foray into Nazi Germany had given her a personal knowledge of fascism.

Yet the thirties was a time gone away and barely remembered, and why should Sam honor it any more than another would? The past was filled with things that made no sense to this generation. It was quite incredible to them that a person still alive and vigorous could have been a part of that past, the agony of the Great Depression, the rise of a man called Hitler, the postwar period of fear and intimidation that was called McCarthyism, and the slow growth of a mushroomlike cloud that had changed the world forever. Why must her son be more than he was, a decent, reasonable man, a good and honest physician, a man politically if vaguely on the side of the angels?

It's not too late to learn, she told herself. Listen to him. Don't make him listen to you.

She was ready to listen to him, but he offered no advice, simply embracing her in a bear hug. As tall as she was, he loomed over her, and then held her at arm's length, just as Carson had, studying her.

“My word,” he said, “you look wonderful. You look absolutely wonderful,” and in the manner of his saying it, there was an acknowledgment of his mother as a woman.

Mary Lou kissed her and said, “I'm glad you're back. I'm so glad you're back.”

Barbara said nothing about Clifford Abrahams. It was of another world, and she needed no one to share her grief or offer sympathy. When they questioned her, she put off answers with the excuse that it was all very complex, and when she had finished writing they would be able to read thousands of words on the subject.

This was also her response to Freddie, who came the following day to pour out his problems. She told herself not to be upset by Freddie's being so totally immersed in his own frustrations; she must take it as a compliment, for Freddie, unlike Sam, looked upon her quite simply and childishly as a figure unconquerable and thoroughly unflappable. Freddie had his own difficulties with the world. He still lived apart, but he was now engaged in an exciting and rewarding affair with May Ling, his divorced wife.

“Then why don't you marry the poor child again, before she becomes pregnant out of wedlock?”

“She isn't a poor child. She's thirty-four years old, and she won't marry me. Our sex was rotten when we were married, and it's great now, but she says she'd have to have her head examined to marry someone like me twice. Everyone says, Oh, May Ling, the poor child. No one gives a damn about my situation. You haven't even the patience to listen to me, and right now you're thinking, Why doesn't this poor nut get out of here and leave me alone?”

If the truth be told, Barbara was thinking something of the kind, and she was upset at being caught with it, and it made her not a whit superior to lay Freddie's words against a recollection of hunger and fear in El Salvador — something that she had been engaged in, a kind of thinking that, in her youth, made her sneer, at least mentally, at the pastors who served the very rich congregants of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. But years later, when she talked to Billy Clawson, Eloise's brother and an Episcopal minister, he made the point to her that the well-to-do were not without anguish, and that if there was a God, it was unlikely that he judged people purely by their economic status.

Barbara had never given too much thought to God, except to note that if he existed, he ran things poorly, and she had never accepted the validity of judgments; but Billy Clawson was so gentle and decent that his few words on the subject stayed with her, engraved even more deeply after his death in Korea, where he was serving as an army chaplain. All of this surfaced in her mind and memory, nudged by Freddie's statement, which she immediately denied.

“No, Freddie. I don't want you to leave and I don't think you're a nut. Do you love May Ling?”

“I've always loved her. She's wonderful and bright and witty. It all works, as long as I'm not married to her.”

“Then don't worry about marrying her. Let it untangle itself. It will, you know.”

“I hope so.”

The following day, three cases of wine arrived from the Higate Winery, delivered directly to her front door and proclaiming Freddie's gratitude and love. There were twelve bottles of Mountain White, which Freddie always claimed was the best dry white wine made in California, twelve bottles of Higate Pinot Noir, that marvelous red that Higate, of all California wineries, had been exporting to France since 1938, and twelve bottles of Higate's Cabernet Sauvignon, which they so often drank on family occasions. Barbara sat and stared at the wine, remembering and remembering while her eyes filled with tears.

“The endless tears,” she said aloud. “Tears and laughter. Thank God for the mix.”

Thank God for Eloise. She could talk to Eloise. Without Eloise, there would be no one she could really talk to. Not Carson. How could she make Carson understand about Clifford Abrahams? “Could I tell Carson that I loved him?” she asked Eloise.

Eloise understood the bereavement of love.

She felt that Eloise had knowledge of something she, Barbara, had missed. They had shared pain, deep, awful pain; but Eloise had Adam, and Barbara was alone. Adam had been her husband for more than thirty years, and they had had the chance to grow old together and to learn in the process. Barbara grew old alone.

Yet Barbara felt that for herself, too, the men wrenched away from her time after time were like a single man. A curse had been placed upon her. But she fought the curse and overcame it, and found another man. He was a man gentle and soft under all the strength a man believes he must have, a man who could hear the lyric sweetness hidden in ordinary speech, somewhat like herself in man's flesh. All of her men were matched to that specific: Marcel, slender, gracious and very brave; Bernie, gentle and without violence, for all that he had lived half his life as a solider, and very brave too. They were always brave men: Boyd, and then Carson Devron, whom she had left and come back to and who was the single man alive among all her ghosts.

“I sometimes wonder,” she said to Eloise, “would I have lived better without all the sorrow that came from my loving?”

“Not you, Barbara. No. Not you.”

“I suppose not. So many men I loved, and they loved me, and then I meet Clifford Abrahams.”

“I read in the paper that you knew him.”

“I knew him a little, yes. For a few weeks we were together, morning, evening, noon and night. It was a new experience for me, Eloise, being with a man day after day, with no flesh ever touching more than a handshake, and sex blown out the window, and he a handsome and delightful young man. It was such an odd relationship. I never even asked him whether he was married, and I didn't know until I read in the paper that he had been divorced and that he had two kids in England. My heart goes out to them. But, you see, he existed for me outside of those things, and as I grew so damn fond of him, I put away all those feelings that we are not supposed to have at our age, and which we damn well do have, like fires inside us that burn and mock at us and won't be doused. You know, this thing about Jews, which we all have whether we will admit it or not, and especially in our family, where it has been like a thread running through both our lives, ever since my father and Adam's grandfather became partners after the earthquake. Well, when I first met Cliff, I just took it for granted that he was Jewish, partly because of his name, which certainly sounds like a Jewish name, but also because of the way he was, which I don't understand at all, and certainly not because of his appearance. He was about six feet three inches tall, rather long, wavy hair — you know the way the British wear it — light brown hair, pale eyes, and he sort of shambled in that funny way some of the British have of walking. Well, it turned out that he wasn't Jewish at all. He explained that his people were Church of England and had been for the three hundred years or so that he knew about. No idea whatsoever where the name Abrahams had come from.”

“He fell in love with you?” Eloise wondered.

“A very strange thing happened —” Barbara began. Her voice drifted away. How do you tell what makes no sense?

They took the long downhill walk from Green Street to the Bay, and once there they leaned against the sea rail, watching the gulls scream and swoop as they fought the gold-tinted wavelets for the fish. There, alone, yet with people all around them, in a place where no one carried submachine guns and where no murder squads roamed, Barbara poured out the story of that last few days in El Salvador. “And now it's like a dream,” she said to Eloise, “but it wasn't a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night, and he was in bed with me, asleep, and Eloise, I think that never in all my life did I have a better moment than when I reached out and touched him and felt the warmth of his body — and that was all. I fell asleep, and in the morning I was alone in the bed, a foolish old lady.”

“I think you're a remarkable lady, and I'm happy that I know you and that we have always been such dear friends. As for old, I don't know what old is, I don't know what time is. We've talked about that. We change, but when I think back to the first time I saw Adam, in that wonderful gallery your mother owned, it seems like only a moment ago. That was in ‘forty-six, wasn't it? Why must we behave by the rules they make for us — at such and such a time, we must become old women and give up?”

“But that's what we become, old women, and we give up because we can't change what has happened. When we were young, we could sort of change it, choose another road, another style, but not anymore.” After a moment, Barbara added, “I'm not down. I had my bad moments after I heard about Clifford's death, but I'm all right about that now. Not really all right — that never happens, as you know — but all right enough to keep things going.”

They both thought about that, and then Barbara added, “We have to, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

Clair was very close to the end. Dr. Kellman felt that she might have at least some additional weeks, perhaps months, if they put her in the hospital; yet after little persuasion, he agreed with Barbara's brother Joe that it would be less than an act of mercy. In any case, Sally would have fought against it.

“They do these awful things to people who are dying, and they go on breathing in a sort of semi-death. The fact that most things have become hideous doesn't mean that we should inflict a hideous end on those we love, and Mother would be the first one to fight it. She's had a long and good life, and most of it has been at Higate. Let her die there.”

It was easier for Sally to talk about death than to face her mother's absence. There would be a yawning void. Of the three children that Clair had carried, she was the youngest. She was beautiful, brilliant, driven to taste everything — yet in the end drawn back to the Napa Valley. It was her cradle. The poems she had written and published were all of the Valley: memories, departure, return.

She was sentimental. She told Joe that she wanted to die when the time came to die. “When I'm dying, let me die here. Don't you dare put me into one of those crazy machines in the hospital.”

Eloise begged Barbara not to put off coming to Higate. She recognized Barbara's need not to be pulled away from the story she was writing. At the same time, Joe had told her that Clair's death was near. Barbara put other things aside and drove out to the Napa Valley. It was hot, the Valley shimmering in the heat, the vines green and changed from rows of naked sticks to verdant necklaces that ringed the hillsides.

Joe was at the house when Barbara arrived. He was downstairs in the big kitchen, using the telephone, which he put down to hug Barbara desperately. It was the first time he had seen his sister since she returned from El Salvador. Joe looked haggard. He had lost weight. For years, Joe had been called the last country doctor. He sat and talked to his patients without counting the minutes. He doubled as internist and obstetrician and very often became the family's pediatrician. Sally was born in the Napa Valley, which made Joe very much of an insider with the odd assortment of folk who inhabited the valley. He still made house calls, but he had passed his sixty-fifth year, and day by day his routine became more difficult. Today, he appeared very tired, new lines on his face and heavy circles under his eyes. When Barbara remarked on his appearance, he explained that during the past week he had lost three patients. “It beats you down,” he said to Barbara. “We grow old. It seems to happen so suddenly. Your patients are old and they go. Well, that's the way it is. I'm glad you're here. Clair is dying. She slips in and out of consciousness. I gave her an injection, so there's no pain now. But very soon she'll close her eyes and slip away.”