by Howard Fast
She had taken no more than three or four steps before he called after her, “Aunt Barbara!”
She turned and faced him.
“What in hell do you want of me?”
“I want to dance with you.”
“What!”
“Exactly. It’s my birthday. That’s what that big striped tent and all the rest is about over there, and you can hear the music and you can smell the chile beans even down here where you’re hiding, and Freddie, I hear, made a dance card, and I want you on it.”
“I can’t dance!”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t. Look at me.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
He stared at her in astonishment, and then a long silence, the two of them staring at each other, and then Barbara smiled and then he smiled.
“Do you know what I’ll look like, trying to dance?”
“Who cares?”
“I’ll probably fall flat on my face.”
“I’ll pick you up. Now take my arm and escort me back to the party.”
Clair Levy, Jake’s widow, talked Barbara into staying overnight, and now with the party over and the wine drunk and the food eaten, Clair and Barbara sat in the kitchen of the old stone house that had been Clair’s home ever since she and Jake had bought the winery. They were drinking tea and eating ham sandwiches that Clair had put together, neither of them having tasted much food during the course of the party.
“Good party?” Clair asked. Clair was seventy-four years old; her hair, once a marvelous burnished copper color, had turned white, and a lifetime on the farm — this winery being essentially a farm — had turned the skin of her face leathery and wrinkled. Withal, she was a handsome woman, tall, erect when she stood, a woman who worked all day with satisfaction and vigor. Barbara noticed her hands, splotched not with what they called liver spots, but with freckles. Clair ignored the modern warning against women with fair skin exposing themselves to the sun. “I love the warm sun,” she would say. “And I’m old. Nothing will change that.” But the hands were beautiful, strong, long-fingered.
“Oh, splendid,” Barbara assured her. “But such a great, important affair. I am so overwhelmed. It must have cost a fortune.”
“We needed a party. Money — oh, for heaven’s sake, Barbara, I’m past giving two damns for money. With the new bottling plant in Vallejo, the winery’s making more than enough money. But we needed a party. Oh, in any case, I wouldn’t have missed your birthday. It’s seven months since Boyd passed away. You needed something to shake you up.”
“I haven’t started to open the presents. Somehow, you reach an age when presents don’t mean very much.”
“You’re not at that age. Not to me. I’m fourteen years older than you — and old? I suppose so. I began to be old when Jake died.”
“Do you get over being lonely?” Barbara wondered.
“I’m not sure. Of course, I’m lucky. Here at the winery, there are the children and the grandchildren, and I suppose that makes me luckier than ninety percent of the old women in this country. We’re a rotten society on that account. We don’t care for the old; we don’t want them.”
“No, we’re not very civilized about that.”
“Or about much else,” Clair said. “Jake once said an odd thing about that — when he turned seventy. He said that old age is a country you never visit until you come to settle there. Ah, well, I’m not sure I’d want to be younger. I’d go looking for a man like Jake, and I’d never find one. Did I ever tell you how I met him?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Barbara said.
“I was twelve, one of those impossibly homely, skinny kids. I was already five six, bone-skinny, long legs, freckled everywhere the sun touched me, and hopelessly in love with your father, with old Dan Lavette. He was in the process of buying a big old ship from a man called Swenson —”
“The Oregon Queen!”
“Exactly. Pop and I lived on the ship, which was tied up at the old pier; caretakers — Pop, I mean, when he wasn’t drunk, my beautiful, wonderful little-boy father. He captained the last clipper ship to berth in San Francisco. The ship stayed there and rotted until they broke it up, and Pop stayed drunk, on and off, and he had this crummy job of caretaker. Then your daddy brought your mother to see the ship before he bought it, and I saw this glorious, sexy beauty, Jean Lavette, the toast of the town, and it broke my heart. Absolutely.”
“I’m so sorry,” Barbara said.
“No need. Jake caught me on the rebound. He was fourteen.”
“And my daddy bought the ship, didn’t he?” Barbara asked. “Of course, that was the Oregon Queen. But what happened to your father?”
“You wouldn’t remember. You were just in the process of being born. But no one ever told you?”
“No one, I’m afraid.”
“Well, you know, Jake’s father, Mark Levy, and your daddy were partners then. More like brothers. By the time World War One started, they had a whole fleet of ships. Your father got Pop cleaned up and he stayed sober and then your father made Jack Harvey a captain of one of their cargo ships. I guess Captain Jack Harvey was as happy as any man on earth, but it didn’t last. A German U-boat torpedoed him off the British coast, and the ship went down with all hands.” She dried her eyes with her napkin. “Why am I crying? That was almost sixty years ago.”
“No, no, Clair, dear. Time is an illusion. I think of Bernie. Twenty-six years ago, and the tears are there.”
Bernie was her first husband, Sam’s father, who had died in Israel in 1948.
“And then I think of Boyd, and at night I reach out to touch him and he isn’t there.”
Clair said nothing. Barbara rose and said, “I’m a ninny — this kind of talk. I think I’ll go outside and walk a bit. Will you come, Clair?”
Clair shook her head. “Take a sweater. The nights are cold now. There’s a whole rack of them in the hall. Just take anything.”
Outside, wrapped in a heavy sweater, a sweater sweet with the old smell of a man, Barbara stood still and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. It was cold, with just enough wind to bring her the good smell of hot mesquite out of the burned-down barbecue pits. She looked up and remembered the California sky that she had not seen for so long, the great mantle of twinkling points of light, the endless, unlimited universe that terrified her so when she thought about it. But tonight, she watched it without thought or reflection on anything except an acknowledgment of its cold beauty.
She could still make out the big striped pavilion that Clair had put up for a proper birthday party. What a strange, antique habit it was for man to celebrate each milestone on the road that brought him and all his peers closer and closer to the final end! What else in the darkness? She had given up the contemplation of the heavens, shivering at things beyond thought. She had said to herself, after Boyd died, that she would not fear what he had already passed through, but that did not turn out to be the case. She stared into the dark, her eyes dropping from the hills and the dappled sky. Even the scent of the dying barbecue fires did not make the air less sweet.
Voices came out of the dark on the way to the parking place. Four figures and Freddie’s voice, asking, “Is that you, Aunt Barbara?”
Freddie and May Ling, Freddie’s slender, dark-haired wife, and with them Sam and Carla; they paused for her to join them.
“What on earth are you doing out here in the cold?” Sam asked.
“Contemplating the universe, I suppose. Then it became too chilly. Not the air. The universe.”
“You know, I never kissed you today,” Freddie said. “Everyone else did. Hands down, the best-looking woman in the place. I think you were avoiding me.”
“Freddie!”
“Can I kiss you now?”
“If you wish.”
“Come with us,” Carla said impulsively. “We’re driving down to Vince’s Place in Napa. Nothing very important. We’ll have a few beers and listen to some good
rock.”
“Thank you, darling,” Barbara said. “But it’s been a long day, and I’m ready for bed. Anyway, I don’t love rock.”
“We’re staying with Freddie,” Sam said. “We’ll take you back to the city tomorrow, Mother. Unless you want to stay here?”
“No, I’ll go back with you.”
They went off into the night, their figures becoming more and more shadowy and then engulfed by the darkness. There was a system of floodlights all through the winery, but there was no night shift working, and the velvet darkness, punctured by a lit window here and there in the houses, spread over most of the place.
Barbara heard the cough of a car starting, and then yellow headlights swept out of the winery’s big parking place. She followed the progress of the car down the winery’s driveway onto the main road. Then she went back into the house to bed.
In the car, driving south toward Napa, May Ling said suddenly, “I don’t want to go to Vince’s Place. I want to talk. You can’t talk with that rock blaring at you. You don’t even hear yourself think.”
“You can listen,” Freddie said.
“I don’t want to listen. I want to talk. I want to talk about that whole little act you put on with Aunt Barbara.”
“Act! What in hell are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. That great big flirtation scene you just put on with Aunt Barbara. It’s just so charming. Do you really think it makes her feel good or gives you points to tell her she’s the most beautiful woman in the party? She’s old enough to be your grandmother.”
“Oh, come on, come on,” Sam said, pulling the car over onto the shoulder of the road. “This is the damn dumbest subject for a fight that I ever heard of. You’re talking like Freddie was born yesterday, or as if you met him last week. He’s constitutionally unable to avoid coming on to every woman he faces. I’ve seen him do the same thing with his own mother. It’s not his fault. It’s just a lovely aberration.”
“Oh, great!” Freddie yelled. “Just great!”
“I’m not putting you down. I wish I were that way.”
“You don’t fight about the things you fight about,” Carla said.
“The voice of wisdom.”
“She’s right,” May Ling said. “We’re coming apart at the seams, and it gets worse.”
“We’ve been coming apart at the seams since the day we got married,” Carla said. “We need a new marriage ceremony — love and cherish for at least three weeks.”
“That doesn’t help,” Sam said.
“Nothing helps, but don’t make me the bad guy. She wants a divorce,” Freddie said.
“What!” Carla had never thought in terms of divorce. You fought, you screamed, you ripped each other’s flesh, and then you fell into bed and made love and wept and made love again, and it was just about as great as it could be. You didn’t talk about divorce.
“This is insane and unreal,” Sam said. “You’re going to tell me that May Ling wants a divorce?”
“That’s right.”
“Is there a reason?” Sam asked. “Aside from the fact that maybe you hate each other.”
“I don’t hate him, I love him.”
“You hate her?”
“Don’t be a fucken idiot, Sam.”
“Then why?”
“You know why,” May Ling said. “We’re first cousins. You saw my baby, Sam. I’ll never go through that again. He wants children — then let him find someone else. I’ll never have a child again. I won’t bring monsters into this world.”
“Your baby was an encephalitic. Such babies die in a few hours or a few days. It was not a monster. There are no monsters. It was a poor sick child, and it happened because you were a statistic. I told you that. It has nothing to do with genetics — absolutely nothing — and furthermore, you and Freddie are not first cousins. For you to be first cousins, your father would have to be Mother’s whole brother. He’s a half brother. And the likelihood is that there’s nothing wrong with the kids of first cousins, anyway. Thousands of them are born healthy and normal. It’s been going on since the human race started.”
“You don’t have to bear the baby,” May Ling said, stubbornly.
“I’m not divorcing you,” Freddie said. “Just get that through your head. I’m not divorcing you.”
Carla said, “Let’s go to Vince’s Place and get drunk and listen to rock and get real spacey and stop all this stupid talk that gets nowhere; except Sam has to drive, and Freddie, if you don’t know how to get a woman laid back and cool, you ought to go take lessons somewhere. Except that all you dumb Anglos are all tied up in knots.”
“Amen,” Sam said, starting the motor, turning on his lights. “It’s beautiful when you put me in the driver’s seat, and everyone gets potted except Sammy.”
“No one gets potted,” May Ling said. “It’s all talk.”
“Ah, drunk with the sound of my own words,” Freddie said. “Why don’t we stop trying to be clever, hey?” He turned to his wife.
“Yes?”
“Will you dance with me?”
After a long moment, dolefully, “I guess so.”
“Bless your heart. No more fights. We just dance until we drop.”
It would have spoiled their pleasure if she had gone with them. They would have put a good face on it, but everything would have been properly directed and controlled. What an enormous gap between the generations! Yet a time comes — thinking that there was no gap between herself and Clair. Or was there?
The room had been Sally’s, and when she had married Barbara’s brother, Clair had hardly changed the room at all. Some of Sally’s books were still there, and after Barbara had showered and used the hair dryer, she found a copy of Pride and Prejudice and crawled into bed with it. She had always meant to read it and had never found the right moment to begin. The same was true of Crime and Punishment. There, too, she had pledged a reading and put it off through all the years. But between Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen, the gap was very wide, and while she had only a literary interest in Crime and Punishment, she had often thought of herself as Jane Austen. These were her own private, foolish thoughts — fantasies, if you will — to be shared with no living person, not even Boyd, who certainly would not have laughed at her. She possessed a tiny miniature of Jane Austen, and though only a person of imagination could discover a likeness between Barbara Lavette and Jane Austen, Barbara was certainly not lacking in imagination.
Oddly enough, she had read three of Jane Austen’s books and still missed Pride and Prejudice, which was supposedly the best of them. The first acquaintance was made not at her old college, Sarah Lawrence, but in prison, where she had found Northanger Abbey in the prison library. Prison. That was an eternity ago and utterly impossible. It had happened, but it remained impossible that for her refusing to name a group of people who had given her money to buy medicine for a Quaker hospital in the south of France, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had sent her to prison for six months — all impossible, all in a time that had never existed. It was the time that Lillian Hellman had so aptly named “scoundrel time,” a time of national debasement, without honor or decency. She had met Lillian Hellman on one of her trips to New York, and the cold, almost arrogant stare made a wall around a woman whom Barbara admired so. Never had Barbara been able to erect walls, and her total openness had again and again caused her pain and humiliation. Yet, thinking about it now, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, filled with remembrance, she found no regrets for her openness. She could understand the savage scarring that had driven Hellman into herself. Those who survive have courage, and Barbara had come to believe that courage, real courage that exists without killing or violence, is the best part of the human soul.
Not that she was at all certain that a human soul existed. In the immediate hours and days after the death of Boyd, her friend and protector and lover, she had tried desperately to believe that some part of him survived, that she might touch him
again, not with her hands but with some part of her mind or soul, with some vibration, perhaps; but such attempts at a faith she had never dealt with always failed, and her Episcopal instruction at Grace Cathedral, high on the hill in San Francisco, was too long ago, too forgotten and interwoven with the myths of childhood. How she envied religious people who could believe!
Thoughts of prison once more. Pride and Prejudice remained unopened. Memories of trial and imprisonment took over. Yet they had given her Boyd — attorney at law. That was how she had met him. He had fallen in love with her. He was the knight in white armor who would defend her in the court, and no prison gate would ever open for her. She smiled at the thought of Boyd, stocky, solid, his sandy hair out in a brush — he could be so fierce and determined — and that way, relaxed suddenly, she closed her eyes and slept.
So ended the day of her sixtieth birthday.
Two
On a day late in August of 1970, more than four years before Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, Tony Moretti telephoned Boyd Kimmelman and suggested that they meet for lunch at Gino’s Italian restaurant on Jones Street. Boyd Kimmelman, partner in a small but very old and respected San Francisco law firm, knew Tony Moretti, as did a good many citizens of San Francisco; that is, he knew him by reputation and had met him on half a dozen occasions. People will tell you, not only in San Francisco but in most large cities, that the day of the political boss is over and that different forces have taken over the management of American politics; but if that established any kind of a rule, Tony Moretti was an exception.
As chairman of the city’s Democratic organization, he pulled a good many strings, most of them successfully, and while lately, as he approached his seventieth birthday, the younger elements in the party looked upon him as an antique and occasionally an embarrassment as well, older politicians still listened to him and learned from him.