The Immigrant’s Daughter (6 page)

“All right. And who knows, miracles happen.”

The miracle did not happen, but Barbara lost the election by only three thousand votes, whereas the general pattern was for a Democrat to come in at least twenty thousand votes behind his Republican opponent. She spoke, pleaded, unrolled facts and figures, and drew applause from those who would not vote for her as well as from those who would. It was a catharsis she needed desperately, and in the course of lashing out against a war she hated, as she hated all war, she came to know Tony Moretti. A half-dozen times during the course of the campaign, Moretti turned up to sit and watch her and listen to her speak. He never had a comment. He never spoke of approving or disapproving of anything she said, but he always chatted with Barbara for a few minutes, mostly about the old times and the people he had known in the twenties and the thirties.

The day after the election, Wednesday evening, Moretti asked Barbara and Boyd to join him for dinner at Gino's place. Gino was dead these many years, but the place had not changed, defying the freeways that laced the city and the hordes of tourists that had invaded the city during the sixties. It was still an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, with straw-bottomed bent-wood chairs and checked tablecloths, maintained by one family for over seventy-five years — a long, long time in San Francisco. Barbara wondered whether it was as filled with memories for Moretti as it was for her.

After they had been greeted effusively by Gino's son, Alfred, escorted to the best table, and there ordered their dinner, Moretti nodded at Barbara and said, “Now we'll talk about it.”

“While I was banging my head against the wall,” Barbara said, “I thought you might tell me to stop, or shift my position and let the bloody side dry up.”

“No, you had to do it your own way. You made the best race of anyone in the party. I didn't think there was any way you could win, and neither did Boyd here, but maybe you could have won. I've been thinking about that.”

“Oh?”

“Did you think you might win?”

“Yes, I guess I did.”

“Ah—”

The spaghetti came. Moretti had ordered, and without emphasis he had included a Higate Cabernet Sauvignon 1968, their very best year. Barbara took note of this. It was as if the man knew everyone in San Francisco who was worth knowing, and perhaps he did, and their ways as well.

They finished the spaghetti, and Barbara asked him what she had done wrong.

“I don't like the question,” Boyd said. “You knew who she was. I told her she was being set up.”

“I wasn't set up!” Barbara exclaimed. “And if you don't mind, this is between Mr. Moretti and myself. I want to know.”

“I don't like the question so much either,” Moretti said, “because it wasn't what you did wrong. You're a political person, Barbara, but you're not a politician. What do I mean by that? First, let me say something about a political person. I remember you when you were a young woman. I can remember once, right here at Gino's place, must have been just before the end of the war and you had been writing for the
Chronicle
in the Far East and you were having dinner here with your father, and I came over to wish him the best, and he introduced us.”

Barbara knitted her brows and closed her eyes, and then, “Oh, yes. Of course. But your hair was black—”

“And I weighed sixty pounds less. Well, thirty years is a long time. But I recalled that, Barbara, because there was a beautiful young woman, richly endowed, and like fifty million other young women, you could have settled for a family, for kids, or for a job or a career — the way this new women's movement puts it.”

“I had a family and a son,” Barbara reminded him.

“Yes, but you know what I mean. You started way back with the longshore strike, when you went into the soup kitchen, and then you ran your car right into Bloody Thursday and set up a first-aid station. Guilt, I suppose. You know, three men from my family were on strike there, and Limey — Harry Bridges — well, we still see each other about once a year. A lot of threads in my life. But it wasn't only guilt. You were a political animal — and I mean that in the best way. One of our Stanford sociologists would say you had developed a social conscience, and when the oppressed bled, you bled. Maybe so, but to me, you became political — in the best way again. You were connected. That's one part of politics, the best part. You follow me?”

Barbara nodded, smiling slightly. “I think so, Tony, and now you're going to tell me why I'm a rotten politician.”

“No. Leave out the rotten part. You're not a politician, good or bad, and the fact that you and your friends organized Mothers for Peace, maybe the biggest headache Nixon has with this lousy, stupid war of his, doesn't change it. You're a damn good organizer.”

“But not a politician.”

“No. Now listen to me carefully, Barbara. I'm pretty long in the tooth. Now maybe you're thinking that I don't call you a politician because a politician has to be elected, and that's the only way he can work at his job. No. That's not the crux of it. I'll admit that maybe ninety percent of politicians will jump to sell their souls just to be elected, but we still got the other ten percent. The core of the matter is that the politician, if he's a good man and not an asshole like Nixon, studies where his constituency stands, and then he tries to give them one small push. He accepts the world the way it is because he knows he can't change it. All he can do is push in the right direction without losing his people. And sometimes that little push pays off.”

Barbara nodded. “I see what you mean.”

“Now if you want it, this district is yours. Go in there two years from now, and the party will put everything it has behind you. What do you say?”

“A political animal,” Barbara reflected. “Perhaps so, perhaps not. I've tried to understand why I do what I do, but that's just as hard as trying to find out who I am. I'm fifty-six years old, Tony, and you want me to become a politician.”

“You know who you are,” Moretti said.

“Yes,” Boyd said sourly, “you make your party's points with a woman candidate, but we both know there's no way in the world Barbara can get elected in that district.”

“Come on, Boyd, let her talk for herself.”

“I don't think I want to be a politician,” Barbara said. “I live in a demented world hanging on the brink of destruction in an atomic holocaust, fighting absurd and hideous wars, killing without end while a parcel of strange people put heart and soul into calling for an end to abortion, to the killing of the unborn. But these same pious folk pour their money and their sons into an unending killing of those born eighteen or twenty years before. One small push, Tony? No way. I am going to shout my head off. Your Congress would bore me to distraction.”

“Suppose we talk about it in two years,” Moretti said.

But two years later, in the fall of 1972, Barbara and Boyd were in Scotland, attending an international lawyers' meeting in Edinburgh. Barbara sent Tony Moretti a postcard, on which she wrote, “Scotland is the most beautiful country on earth, except for Northern California, and please forgive me and raise the subject in 1974.” But in April of 1974, Boyd Kimmelman died.

Tony Moretti came to the funeral. He came to Barbara and kissed her cheek. He held her hand, a huge, fat mountain of a man, topped by a thatch of thick white hair. Sam, standing with his arm around his mother, looked strangely at Tony Moretti. Barbara, listening to the keening chant of the rabbi, watched the plain pine coffin, raw unfinished wood, being lowered into the earth. Boyd, who in all the years they were together had hardly mentioned the fact that he was Jewish and had never entered a synagogue, had left specific instructions as to his burial. A plain pine coffin — as Jewish custom had it — and a rabbi officiating.

Later, at Barbara's house on Green Street, Moretti talked to Sam about Sam's father, dead these twenty-six years. As Moretti left, he said to Barbara, “It would be good at this bitter time, Barbara. To involve yourself in an election campaign would take your mind off your grief.”

Barbara shook her head. “It's meaningless without Boyd.”

“Think about it,” Moretti said.

Barbara thought about it, but it remained meaningless without Boyd. A week or so later, Sam asked her about Moretti.

“He's the head of the party here.”

“You mean the Democrats?”

“Yes.”

“He said he knew Pop. How did he know him?”

Barbara always felt awkward when her son brought up the subject of his father. He had been less than two years old when his father was killed; he had no memory of the man, but an insatiable curiosity, and through the years, he had questioned Barbara persistently.

“A man like Moretti — well, people are his thing, Sam; knowing people, remembering them, influencing them. Your father was a man other men valued.”

“What does that mean? Brains, skill?”

“I think you know what I mean. Men have said that in a tight or dangerous situation, there's no one they'd rather have had with them than your father.”

Switching abruptly, Sam asked, “Why didn't you marry Boyd?”

Taken totally aback, Barbara stared at her son. She realized that he was exercising with her, his mother, that curious prerogative of physicians, the right to ask any question of anyone, no matter how intimate the question: Have you moved your bowels? Was the stool soft or hard? How many times a week do you have intercourse? Even of the Queen of England, any question was permissible.

She always answered his questions. “I'm not much good at marriage.”

“Not even with my father?”

“I loved him. He was an extraordinary man. But the marriage wasn't much good. He walked out on the marriage. And you're old enough to remember how it was with Carson.”

“What does Moretti want of us?” Sam asked, after a long moment.

“Us?”

“You're my mother.”

When it pleases you to remember, Barbara thought, and said aloud, “He wants me to run for Congress again.”

“Just like that? He wants you to? Does he appoint candidates? I thought there were supposed to be primaries and that kind of thing.”

So angry, she thought. At me? At Boyd for dying? Or because his mother is becoming an old woman and there's no one to take care of her? No. That's not Sam. At least he knows me that well. No one will ever have to take care of me. The anger belongs somewhere else, and he uses me because I'm here and I'm his mother.

“Mr. Moretti does not appoint candidates. The Democrats have never won an election in the Forty-eighth C.D. There are no primaries, because no one wants the headache of running a hopeless campaign.”

“Except you?”

“That's nasty, Sam, and I won't have it. There are things you don't know. I don't want to talk to you anymore. Not when you're like this.”

“I'm sorry,” he burst out. “I'm so damn sorry. My own world stinks, and I bring it here to you.”

Barbara put her arms around him and held him close. It was her first hint that Sam's marriage was going to pieces.

In the weeks after that incident, the weeks after Boyd's death, she brooded over the election invitation, but finally she wrote a note to Moretti that it was impossible.

Moretti came to see her soon after the birthday party at Hi-gate, and he said to her, “In two years, we will discuss it again.” And Barbara realized that they would, that in 1976 the sharp edge of the pain would be gone. Long, long ago, in France, in Paris of the nineteen thirties, she had fallen in love with a journalist whose name was Marcel Duboise, and who died of a wound during the Spanish Civil War. Then she believed that time would never erase the agony, but time took away the pain, just as time took away the pain of her husband's death. All things give way to time — ideas, causes, nations. Her life had been passionate, filled with belief and trust and love, but that was long ago.

She had always thought that Sam might understand.

“No,” he said. “No, I can't understand why you do what you do, why you went to prison, why you couldn't just give the committee the names they wanted. Nothing would have happened to the people you were protecting. The McCarthy era wasn't Hitler Germany.”

“What might have happened to the people who gave us the money to buy medicine and send it to the Spanish Republicans, I don't know. Perhaps they would have suffered, perhaps not. For me, it was a matter of honor.”

But honor, too, had gone on down the road. What conceivable meaning could honor have during the administration of Richard Nixon? He had not seized power at the point of a gun; he had been elected and re-elected by the people of the United States, people who knew his values and accepted them, and here was her own son handling the word
honor
and trying to relate it to reality. Nor was Sam one of those doctors who rooted in every grubby hole for a buck, who robbed the government through Medicare, who handed their patients a warning never to be sick on Wednesday, our golf day. He gave hundreds of hours to a charity clinic, and he cared very little about becoming a millionaire, a condition with which many of his colleagues replaced the caduceus. But why his mother went to prison as a matter of honor, that was hard to grasp.

Slowly, the pain went away and the loss receded into the background. It was a very slow process, like the emptying, grain by grain, of some enormous hourglass. Through her years, she had slept alone too many times for it to be something that had to be learned, and if, in the dark hours of the night, she reached out for warm flesh, that too had happened before. The two men who had been the true and deep loves of her life died violent deaths. Death was a stranger then; now as Barbara passed her sixtieth year, death was no longer the dark stranger who came from a place unknowable. Days passed and days became weeks, and the weeks stretched into months. She sat in the park on a warm, sunny day and she noticed other women who sat in the park. The men died and the women were alone. That was the way it was in America. There were few families where the old were cherished. Sam tried to call every few days and to take her to lunch at least once a week. That was pleasant. He didn't take her to dinner because of his own disintegrating marriage. He was still trying to save it.