The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  Obviously, the poor, the working people and the young professionals in the district outnumbered the rich, yet the district was solidly, unshakably Republican — except that she had shaken it a good deal six years ago. Apparently most of the Chicanos and blacks did not vote, and apparently they were positioned to provide a threat to the rest of the district. There were hardly enough of them to make her win, yet possibly enough to swing the margin if she could do what she had done six years ago. But could she, she wondered? Six years ago, she took on the Republican Party at a most peculiar historical moment. Nixon was in the White House, an affront to any person of decent sensibilities. The country was bleeding from the horror of Vietnam, and her opponent was sleazy, dishonest and on the verge of being indicted. Now, it was a presidential year; Jerry Ford was at least an upstanding and photogenic citizen, and her own opponent was an attorney of distinction, a man of experience, and handsome enough to be a middle-aged star in a soap opera. Barbara felt demeaned by brooding over the question of good looks, but the media had turned that into one of the prime requisites for office. It was hard for her to tell herself that she was as attractive as Alexander Holt — or to believe it.

  Well, be that as it may, she still had a race to run, and if Alexander Holt were Paul Newman himself, he nevertheless could be beaten. She had studied his record carefully, and it asked for such care, since it was an uncommonly careful record. He was one of those Republicans who early on had recognized the awful stupidity and hopelessness of the war with Vietnam, and during his four years in the House, his record on that score was near perfect — according to Barbara’s point of view. He balanced this opposition to the war with a firm stand against abortion — to a point where he was the first representative to ask that foreign aid be withdrawn from nations that permitted legal abortion. It was an untenable and idiotic position, but it put him firmly in the conservative ranks. He was for the strictest of immigration laws, thereby writing off the whole Mexican community, and he was a close old friend of Ronald Reagan and had served in Reagan’s administration when Reagan was governor of California. He had pressed for a larger share for private industry in development of federal lands, and while he did not come out solidly against the entitlement programs, he fudged on any vote that favored such programs.

  Barbara thought about Alexander Holt as she explored the Forty-eighth Congressional District. In California, a congressional district can be as large as or even larger than certain Eastern states, and while the Forty-eighth was not the largest, it was by no means the smallest. It contained four separate independent towns, not to mention stretches of unincorporated area; and moving away from what she had thought of as the Forty-eighth, Barbara was surprised and somewhat chagrined to discover how much of the district she had not set foot in, how much of it she hardly knew existed. In the course of her exploration, she came to an area even more wretched than the barrio on the Bay side. A yellow dirt road ran between a line of ancient shacks constructed out of whatever might be put together to keep out the night and the rain and wind and cold — tin, old plywood, boards, corrugated paper, tar paper. There were about thirty of these shacks, skinny kids playing in the road, women washing clothes in an old horse trough, a few teen-agers lounging around, smoking, and an absence of men — which meant that they were doing something to survive, even if it was for only fifty cents an hour in the fields. A second glance told Barbara that they were not Mexicans, and when she stopped to talk to an old lady who sat smoking a corncob pipe in front of one of the shacks, she discovered that this was a community of people from El Salvador.

  “That’s right,” the old lady said in Spanish, since Barbara had addressed her question in Spanish. “El Salvador. You speak good Spanish for an Anglo. Do you understand me? I have no teeth left, so I garble my words.” She tapped her head. “But the mind is all right.”

  “I understand you perfectly.”

  “Thank you. God bless you. You are very elegant.”

  “But why don’t you have your mouth fitted for false teeth?”

  “Bless your heart! I have no money, no family; all dead. They give me food, my neighbors, my friends. So where would I find the money for teeth?”

  “But the state pays for it.”

  “Lady, lady,” the old woman said, “you are kind. We are illegals.”

  Barbara nodded unhappily, thinking of the long, almost impassable distance, through Guatemala and Mexico. “Still, perhaps something can be done.”

  The old lady puffed on her pipe and looked sidewise at Barbara. By now, others had noticed Barbara, and a small crowd of children and women had gathered around her, listening to the conversation.

  “Who are you?” someone asked.

  “Don’t talk to her, you old fool,” another woman said to the old lady. “She could be from Immigration. Hear the way she speaks.”

  “I’m not from Immigration,” Barbara said. “I’m the Democratic candidate for Congress in the Forty-eighth Congressional District.”

  “What’s the Forty-eighth Congressional District?”

  “Where you live, here.”

  “Oh!”

  “You speak Spanish.”

  “I’ve always spoken Spanish,” Barbara said. “Since I was a kid.” And to the old lady with the pipe, “If you’ll give me your name, I’ll see what I can do about the false teeth.”

  “Never mind her name.”

  “Oh, shut up, you fool. My name is Rosa Hernando,” she said to Barbara. “You write it down, yes? I would like to eat an ear of maize before I die.”

  Walking back to where she had parked her car, Barbara thought about people so desperate that they would come from El Salvador to slip across the Rio Grande River to live in such shacks and in such poverty. Another part of her mind said, Illegals. No votes there.

  “I suppose,” she said to herself, “that’s what Tony Moretti would call thinking politically.”

  That evening, Barbara called her son and told him about the old woman and her teeth.

  “It’s a tricky business,” Sam said. “As an illegal, she could run into trouble, and I don’t think there’s any program that fits her.”

  “There must be.”

  “Is she a voter, Mom? No, that’s a dumb question. If she’s an illegal, she’s not a voter, and I don’t know why you’re knocking yourself out. Anyway, I’m all for you making this race, so don’t feel I’m making snotty remarks about voters. It just crossed my mind, and I love you, and I think you’ll walk all over this Holt character.”

  “Thank you, Sam.” She put down the telephone, thinking that Sam was one of the most sensitive and caring persons she had ever known — yet he could treat his mother as if she were a rather superior idiot and had treated his wife as if she did not exist. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Barbara had become much closer to Carla since the divorce. The day Barbara’s candidacy was announced in the press, Carla had called and begged to be allowed to help. “Barbara, I need this kind of thing. I can talk to Chicanos. I swear I’ll bring you a thousand votes!”

  Barbara had accepted on condition that she pay Carla a salary. Carla had refused alimony or a cash settlement of any kind from Sam, and she had found a job selling cosmetics at Macy’s in San Francisco. That was until: all the jobs Carla had held were until something turned up in the theater. The reviews of her work in Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore were excellent, but after six weeks the play had closed and the reviews faded from everyone’s memory. Now Carla dumped the job at Macy’s without a tear.

  Freddie did almost the same thing. He turned up at the house on Green Street two days after Barbara’s public announcement and informed her that he had worked out with his stepfather, Adam Levy, a leave of absence to extend until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was then the third week in August, which meant that he would be away from the winery for more than two months.

  “But you’re running the winery now,” Barbara protested.

  “No, oh, no. I try
to give that impression, just as Pop tries to give the impression that he runs it, but the truth is that Grandma Clair runs the works. She always did, you know, even though Grandpa Jake established the image of the tough old man in charge. Well, sure he was in charge, but every important decision was made with Grandma. Pop can get along without me for two months, and if he needs me, I can run out there. On the other hand, your campaign needs a manager.”

  “And you’re that?” Barbara asked, smiling.

  “Better than anything you can hire for the money.”

  “And how much is that?”

  “Pay me a dollar a week,” Freddie said.

  “Oh, no. You work for me, you work for pay.”

  Freddie shrugged. “All right, if that’s the way you want it. Thing is, you need me. You need someone who is cold and calculating and not taken in by the bullshit that thickens the blood of politicians.”

  “Freddie, why do you hate them so?”

  “Look around you.”

  “But it can be changed. Believe me, it can be changed. If I didn’t think it could be changed, I couldn’t go on living. You came to your manhood in the sixties and there was some hope then, and I suppose you feel that there’s none left now, none at all.”

  “Only one hope, Aunt Barbara — that we’re not all blown to hell and gone by their bombs. Anyway” — he took out his wallet — “here are the first campaign contributions, the beginning of that quarter million we’re going to raise. Grandma’s check for two hundred dollars and Pop’s for five hundred.”

  Barbara took the two checks, telling herself that she must not refuse because they were family and she must feel no guilt. It was the beginning. Others would give her money; there was no other way. “Thank them,” she told Freddie. “How is your father?”

  “Glum. Miserable. I’ll never really get over Josh’s death, but I’m young and a brother isn’t a son. Pop won’t get over it. Funny thing, Mom is stronger. No matter how she hurts inside, she faces up to the world. Pop is wounded too deeply. Don’t forget, his brother, Joshua, was killed in World War Two. Two Joshuas to their stinking wars, and this Vietnam thing is like a curse that won’t end. You want to know why I hate politicians? You excepted.”

  Telling May Ling about the meeting with Barbara, his son, Danny, on his lap, Freddie made a point of not excluding his wife. “No way are you out of it,” he said. “The damn idiocy of a congressional campaign is that it takes two months of back-breaking, heartbreaking effort, not to mention the money involved — and believe me, May Ling, she needs all the help she can get.”

  “But can she make it?” May Ling wanted to know.

  “She thinks she can.”

  “Do you?”

  “God knows. I’m tempted to say that she’ll get a worse pasting than she got six years ago, but miracles have happened. The point is that Moretti and the others are using her to bring in women voters all over the state. You know, what great guys we are — running this distinguished old woman —”

  “She’s not an old woman.”

  “Not to us — all right. This guy she’s up against, Alexander Holt, is smooth as silk. Looks like John Forsythe — you know, we’ve seen him on the tube maybe fifty times: fine Waspy elegance, gray hair, square face, good features —”

  “You’re describing Barbara’s brother Tom, who just happens to be your father.”

  “Leave that end out of it. Adam’s been my father for as long as I care to remember, but I suppose you’re right. He does resemble Thomas Lavette, except that Holt’s only fifty-nine years old, a widower, and the secret love of every rich broad in the district.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “Studying. Are you serious about working with us?”

  “You’re damn right I am,” May Ling said.

  “Good. I’m used to having you around.”

  “You’re being very generous today.”

  “I have to be. Who else is going to look after that crazy aunt of ours? Sam says she has to get it out of her system. That’s because he doesn’t know one damn thing about her system. Aunt Barbara doesn’t get anything out of her system. It just adds up inside.”

  “Do you know something else?” May Ling said. “The way you and Sam talk about her disgusts me. She’s wonderful. She reminds me of Mrs. Roosevelt. And you talk about her—”

  “No!” Freddie protested. “I’m crazy about her. You know I’m a male chauvinist pig.”

  “You are indeed,” May Ling said. “Why do you cultivate it?”

  “They’re related — I mean also married but related some way, aren’t they?” Tony Moretti asked Barbara the following week. It was his first visit to the campaign headquarters Freddie had set up at Sunnyside Plaza, the largest shopping center in Sunny-side, which was the part of the Forty-eighth C.D. that fronted on the Bay. He had just been introduced to Freddie and May Ling. “Is she Chinese?”

  “Her father’s half Chinese. She’s the daughter of my brother Joe and Sally Levy. Joe is Pop’s son through May Ling, and that beautiful kid was named after Pop’s May Ling.”

  “Half cousins.”

  “Something of the sort.”

  “Doesn’t seem to like me much,” Moretti said, his glance moving around. “He put this place together?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He’s the type who takes charge. You got eleven people here. How many are on payroll?”

  “Three.”

  “That’s good, Barbara. Try to keep it that way. Volunteers are better anyway. They’re dedicated. What about money?”

  “We sent out one mailing. That was only three days ago. Not too much yet.”

  “Don’t depend on mailings. Functions, and the conscience of the rich. I’d like to meet that young fellow who thinks I’m a ward heeler and an old bum.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t think that,” Barbara protested.

  But Freddie regarded Moretti coolly for a long moment before he shook hands, and Moretti said, “I know your generation as little as you know mine, Lavette, but I’ve known a few Lavettes, and when they’re good, they’re good.”

  Freddie smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

  “Not much. You think your aunt’s being set up, don’t you?”

  Moretti waited. Freddie didn’t answer.

  “Nobody sets her up,” Moretti said softly. “She’s too smart.”

  Then Moretti went to her and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be going and I’ll be back. I’ll be back a good deal. We’re going to win this one.”

  She knew that money was the mother’s milk of politics, but six years earlier she’d made out with whatever she had, and if she didn’t talk on television, she talked from a sound truck or on the street at a shopping center. It amazed her now to reflect that in that earlier election, spending less than thirty thousand dollars, she had almost taken the impregnable Forty-eighth. Of course those were other circumstances, other times. She still talked at shopping centers; May Ling, tall, slender, with a face that drew the attention even of women, was her partner at the shopping centers. She would stop women not too overburdened with children and packages, and ask whether they wouldn’t like to meet the candidate, Barbara Lavette. Barbara never used a platform. Standing on their own level, she found she could talk to women very easily and intimately. It didn’t matter if she talked to only a handful; they would remember her and repeat what she said and take it to others. Here, she was a new incarnation, and the younger women she spoke to had little knowledge of her past. Most of them had not read her books, and if they knew her at all, it was as the candidate who had shaken up the district six years earlier.

  But Freddie insisted on television and radio, and that took money. “It’s the new politics and soon it will be the only politics,” Freddie told her. “Believe me, Aunt Barbara, from here on the candidate won’t exist; the only thing that will exist is his image on the glass tit.”

  “The what?”

&nb
sp; “The box, the glass tit that America sucks morning, noon and night, and the candidate will be whatever image they want to put on that box. You don’t make points by talking to a dozen people at a shopping center — whatever May Ling says.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She says you make points,” he admitted.

  Barbara couldn’t be angry at him. Freddie was the physical image of her brother — as he would put it, his natural father — six feet and one inch, large bones but lean, a long head and sandy hair, altogether very handsome, which made him trouble with women. Yet he was bright enough not to confuse his good looks with other parts of himself. He was ingratiating without reaching, a quality Barbara envied.

  “Come with me and see for yourself.”

  Freddie came to a shopping center and watched and listened.

  “Nobody ever asked me what I thought.” A young woman, dragged apart by three children. “How do I know what I think?”

  An older woman, her arms full of packages. “Just let me put these in the car, Miss Lavette. But we don’t think. It’s not in style for ladies.”

  “They say Ford’s wife is a dancer. I’m a dancer who doesn’t dance. In Europe the government supports the dance.”

  “My mother’s fifty-one with cancer. We don’t eat much. Every nickel goes to the doctors and the hospital. I’d like you to look at my kids’ shoes.”

  “She can’t do anything about that.”

  “She can’t do anything about anything!”

  “Who can?”

  “I vote for nobody. My kid died in Vietnam.”

  “But she’s here, isn’t she? How many congressmen have you seen at Sunnyside Plaza?”