by Howard Fast
“Take over a moment. I have to speak to Mr. Lavette.” And then to Mort Gilpin, “Sit down. I’ll be back in a few moments.”
It was closer to five minutes, and then the man with the hornrimmed glasses returned and asked Mort Gilpin to follow him. They went through an inner reception room, where a pretty blond young woman sat at a desk and smiled pleasantly, and then down a hallway, to a door Gilpin’s guide opened for him, allowing him to enter, but not following him. No ducal pretensions here; this was a tasteful modern office with an enormous picture window that overlooked San Francisco Bay.
There was no greeting from Thomas Lavette. He sat behind his desk, stared bleakly at Mort Gilpin and then motioned for him to sit down alongside the desk. “You work for my son?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“He’s running the campaign?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“No.”
“Is he any good?” Lavette’s voice was low and rasping. Gilpin could see a resemblance to Barbara, but Thomas Lavette looked older than his sixty-four years. His thin hair was white, and the nest of wrinkles around his pale blue eyes belied the puffy youth-fulness of his cheeks and chin.
“Damn good, sir. Fred’s brilliant.”
“I see. What does he pay you?”
“Two hundred a week, plus five percent of whatever I raise.”
“So if I give you money, you take five percent?”
“No, sir. To come to Miss Lavette’s brother for money — well, that’s not my idea of fund-raising. That’s family. I wouldn’t take a nickel out of that.”
“Then why the hell are you here?”
“Because I want her to win. I’ve been doing this kind of political fund-raising for five years now — I never ran into anyone like her.”
“Can she win?”
“I think so. I think we have a winning edge already.”
“Of course, you have to figure that if you admitted to a very unlikely shot, I’d pull back. Nobody bets on a lost cause.”
“Well, sir, tomorrow the L.A. World prints the results of its latest poll, the Forty-eighth C.D. among others. I think we’ll have an edge tomorrow. I can come back.”
“You’re here now. How much do you need?”
“Whatever I can get. If you ask a figure, I’d like fifty thousand.” It took something for Gilpin to say that. He kept his hands in his pockets. When he took them out, he had to concentrate to keep them from shaking.
Lavette opened a checkbook on his desk, wrote a check, tore it out and handed it to Gilpin. “Fifty thousand. Cash.” He took the check back and endorsed it. “I’ll call my bank. You take this down there and turn it into cashier’s checks or cash or any way you need it. But nobody else knows where this money comes from. I don’t know whether it’s legal or not and I don’t give a damn. If my friends can do it, I can damn well do it. But two things — if I ever find out that you’ve blabbed to anyone, my son, my sister, your wife, if you have one, I’ll break your back, and if you know me, you know I can do it. And secondly, don’t dip into this money. I’ll know about that too.”
“I’m not honest,” Gilpin said, “but I keep my word. I told you I’m not dipping into this. That holds.” He had expected Lavette to offer his hand, but Lavette didn’t move.
“You can go now,” Lavette said.
The fourth poll, with Election Day still thirteen days away, showed Alexander Holt with forty percent of the vote in terms of the people polled, Barbara with forty-six percent, and fourteen percent still undecided. In the midst of the uproar at her headquarters, Freddie answered the telephone and then, after a brief exchange, covered the telephone and shouted, “Will all you characters please shut up for a moment!” He then motioned to Barbara and said softly, “Believe it or not, Alexander Holt. Wants to talk. I think he’s going to concede.”
“Freddie, don’t be a fool.”
“You want to talk?”
“Yes. Freddie, create some quiet and give me a corner by myself.”
She picked up the telephone. “Alex?”
“I heard that,” he said. “It would certainly set a precedent. Holt concedes before the election.”
“Alex, I don’t know what to say. Would it be too awful to say I feel rather sorry for you?”
“Not at all. I treasure a lovely woman’s sympathy. But I still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Dinner tonight — to celebrate your temporary victory?”
“No, not until after the election, Alex.”
“Busy? Or have you been warned off?”
“Some of both. Win or lose, we shouldn’t feel too different Wednesday after next.”
“I’m a rotten loser.”
Later, having lunch in the Mexican restaurant behind the plaza, sitting with Freddie and Mort Gilpin, Barbara said, “No, he didn’t sound disturbed. Very bright and confident.”
“That I find damn disturbing,” Gilpin said. “I hate to say this, Miss Lavette, but he isn’t admired in the circles where I live.”
“I’d rather not push that,” Barbara said, rather primly. “It’s only natural that this election means a great deal to him.”
“On the other hand,” Freddie said, “I want to know where that money came from.”
“No way,” Gilpin told him. “I picked it up from a circle of my own last resort. They live and give anonymously, period.”
“No, sir. I want to know.”
“What the devil gives with you, Freddie? Don’t you want the money?”
“I want to know whether it came from Thomas Lavette.”
“You’re sick on that subject. No. No, it did not come from your father. Furthermore, it’s committed. I made a fantastic deal, and we have four thirty-second local spots on national network prime time.”
“I never agreed to that!” Freddie snapped.
Barbara said gently, “Come on, I did it. I have become greedy and inhuman and I want those spots. You agreed that if Mort raised the money, we could buy them, and if it was Tom —” She shook her head. “No, I wish it were. But it isn’t. It couldn’t be. He’s sworn to Alexander Holt’s camp, he’s Mister Republican, cheek to cheek with Ronald Reagan, and let’s not put any more pressure on Mort. He’s worked miracles.”
Sam brought his new relationship to meet his mother. That’s how he described it. “We have a relationship.” “Well, we didn’t have them,” Barbara said. “We had other things.” Sam was not very long on humor; in that, he was like his father, and since he was beginning to achieve a reputation beyond the Bay Area for his surgical skill and thereby earning very large sums of money, he found himself searching for a life style that would accommodate to it, without leaving all his principles by the wayside. To this end, he spent long hours in the surgical clinic, and it was there that he met Mary Lou Constable, who was also assuaging guilt, and exercising what some called the conscience of the rich, as a volunteer in Emergency, but in all truth as a cleaning woman to keep on top of the blood and debris — a low and unpleasant station. It was this, combined with her very real beauty, that grabbed Sam’s attention, and the attention did not slacken when he learned that she was the daughter of Leonard Constable, who was possibly as wealthy and powerful as Thomas Lavette. The fact that Sam was part Seldon resided in a special section of his mind. He felt that there he had put it to rest, since he had always kept his father’s name. The very first time he bought Mary Lou coffee and apple pie in the hospital cafeteria, he made a point of being Jewish. Mary Lou Constable, a tall, slender girl, dark, black hair and deep-set dark eyes, a narrow nose and full lips — altogether firmly beautiful — was far from being a fool. She knew who Sam was, and if he preferred to be Jewish, that only served to make him a bit more exciting, particularly so since she came from a virulently anti-Semitic family. Not only was Sam tall, and quite handsome, with his long head, his sandy hair and his very pale blue eyes; he was also
financially substantial, as she saw it.
Barbara asked Sam to bring her to the house on Green Street between the daytime chaos at Sunnyside Plaza and the commercial she had to do live at eight o’clock that evening. While San Francisco had great pretensions toward being the New York of the Pacific Coast, it was in all truth a small city with less than a million in population; and in the area of importance that old money brings, everyone knew the money of everyone else — in the world of money. In this case, of course, old money was any fortune put together more than a generation ago. Barbara knew Mary Lou Constable. Originally, the Constables derived from Missouri, enough south for them to cling to Southern affectations, such as the double name for girl children and certain prejudices covering a wide spectrum of dark-skinned people. The fact that Sam, half Jewish, had been married to a Chicana would make him even a more unsuitable object in their eyes, Carla’s people having lived in California for five generations notwithstanding.
Barbara, on the other hand, greeted Sam’s new passion as evidence of a failure on her part. Like his mother, he was fiercely principled, dedicated to his profession, to healing, to the sacred-ness of life, and was possessed of a number of attitudes that, like those listed, could have no existence in a place like the home and environs of Leonard Constable. Yet despite all this, he had selected Mary Lou with a passion he had never revealed toward Carla. Barbara always tried to balance her reactions, remembering her feelings about Carla when Sam had decided to marry her, rooting out her own prejudice and trying to face it. She felt that she had tried, that she had always tried; and here was another woman evoking another side of her prejudice, her dislike of inherited wealth, her distaste for people of wealth, her scorn for the self-styled San Francisco society, and her muted dream that Sam might find and marry someone who could be the daughter she had never had.
At home in Green Street, tired as she always was after a day at the madhouse called her campaign headquarters, wanting no more than to lie down and watch the news on television after a hot bath and then dress leisurely for the commercial appearance, she nevertheless went about doing something in the way of canapés. She put out olives, nuts and a tray of cheese and crackers, all of it bought on the way home, since after two months of campaigning, her own cupboard was as bare as Mother Hubbard’s. She also whispered vows to herself that she would not condemn until she had learned something to condemn, and that she would try her best to view the girl sympathetically — accepting the fact that this meeting might be much more of a trial for Mary Lou Constable than for her.
Mary Lou was beautiful and charming, and after the introduction and a bit of small talk, she said to Barbara, “I love my father and mother, but please try to see me as my own person. I tried very hard to be my own person and I feel that I succeeded in some ways and less well in others.”
Taken somewhat aback, Barbara said, “I’m sure you are your own person.”
“No, not the way you are, Miss Lavette.” She actually blushed as she went on to say, “This dreadful world — and believe me, when you work in Emergency, it can be very dreadful — well, I mean it can also be wonderful. I mean, I grew up reading your books and watching your career and wanting more than anything to be like you, and even if Sam is Jewish, he’s a special kind, isn’t he?”
Barbara stared in speechless dismay.
“I mean, not like — you know what I mean.”
Somehow, Sam got her out of the house before she could say any more, and when he reached Barbara on the telephone, he pleaded, “Mom, will you give her a chance, please?”
“Yes — yes, of course.”
“She doesn’t mean the things she says. Please, believe me.”
“I believe you, Sam,” Barbara said, not knowing what else to say.
The final poll, six days before Election Day, gave Barbara fifty-two percent, Holt forty-three percent, with only six percent undecided. Freddie rented the hall at the Sunnyside Elks for an election night party, and word went out to at least a hundred and fifty people, among them the people at Higate Winery. Even Al Ruddy sent her a telegram of congratulations, and Moretti turned up in his big black limousine to take Barbara to a luncheon at Le Trianon on O’Farrell Street, where they would be joined by half a dozen top party people. “Just our own small celebration prior to the fact,” Moretti said. “I chose Le Trianon for symbolic reasons, if you will forgive me a little sentiment and what you may regard as superstition. The chef, Mr. Verdon, was chef at the White House during the Kennedy years. I find the situation appropriate. Do you agree with me?”
“I am scared,” Barbara said. “I’m frightened. I feel like a kid who’s been found out. After the poll appeared yesterday — I didn’t sleep last night, Tony. Not a wink.”
“That’s only natural. You’ve poured your heart and your soul into this. Now the reaction begins. That’s only to be expected.”
“We still have to face the election, Tony. People are acting as if it’s all over.”
“It’s not all over, this election,” Tony said as he proposed a toast at the luncheon table. “I’ve played this game too long to toast the next and first Democratic congressman — or woman, I should say — in the Forty-eighth. Tuesday night, we’ll know and drink to it. But meanwhile, to a fine lady. It has been my privilege to know her.”
Barbara was at home alone that Thursday evening. Since the campaign started, she had almost never been alone, and an evening at home by herself with no schedule and no one to address, lecture or contend with was a rare treat. She had time for a leisurely bath and hairwash; and brushing out her hair as she dried it, she speculated on whether it might not have been better to have colored her hair before the campaign began. She had toyed with the idea and had wondered whether she would not be using the election as an excuse for the coloring, but there was so much gray in the honey-colored hair that people would have been certain to note and comment on the change. Her hairdresser had disagreed with this. “You don’t look that old,” he had told her. “What I mean is, you’re making yourself older than you are, because you walk young and you carry yourself young.”
She had shaken his suggestions aside. She was going gray and she’d go gray, and that was that. Her peers were doing the face lifts and breast lifts and buttock lifts in a desperate race to bring the Beverly Hills syndrome here to the Bay Area, which left her cold and increasingly aware of the ravages of mortality. She was brooding a bit over the fact that Alexander Holt had not called, not for a week, and somehow in her mind the hair coloring connected with Holt. You did such things if you thought of a man, and she thought of men. God knows how many times she filled her mind with thoughts of men. Clair had once said to her that old age is a land never visited; one enters it as a resident, casually and thoughtlessly. No one had ever told her it would be like this, strange, lonely, threatening, but this was America, youth eternal. The truth was, she realized, that no one ever thinks of growing old. Youth looks at a world where the young are young and the old are old, and nothing ever changes.
She tried not to think about Holt. She had found him gracious and charming, yet she knew almost no one who trusted him. What did she know about him — except for the few hours of their two dinner dates, facing each other across restaurant tables? And if she won this contest, as everyone around her was certain she would, what then? How would she deal with it? How would Alexander Holt deal with it?
When Sunday arrived, the Sunday before the Monday before Election Day, Freddie and Barbara decided to close down the storefront for the first time since the campaign started and have a day in the country. Clair was baking a fresh ham whole, and everyone was meeting for Sunday dinner in Glair’s kitchen in the old stone house at Higate. The huge kitchen, with Mexican terra cotta tiles on the floor, and on the walls the blue and white tiles from Pueblo, was used as a dining room because it held an oak table fourteen feet long. Sam came with Mary Lou, and therefore Carla had to be left out, which bothered both Barbara and May Ling. Barbara watched Sam and Mary Lou
worriedly, relieved finally when she began to realize that today Mary Lou would open her mouth only to eat or say thank you and yes and no. Apparently, Sam had coached her properly.
Freddie was present with May Ling, and Clair’s daughter, Sally, wife to Barbara’s brother Dr. Joseph Lavette. With them was their son, Daniel, twenty-one, a junior at Princeton. Freddie had invited Mort Gilpin to join them, and Freddie’s father, Adam Levy, and Eloise, Adam’s wife, completed the group around the table.
The warmth and pleasure Barbara felt whenever she came together with this small group, which was all the family she had, was muted by a sense of empty places. Death had taken its full measure. Why should she think of death, not only the death of others, but death intimately connected with herself? A cold, desolate feeling swept across her like a wave of icy nausea. Fortunately, it did not last. It went and she was smiling with pleasure, sharing their delight at the results of the latest poll. When Sally struck up “For she’s a jolly good fellow,” Barbara wanted to cry out for them to stop. But that would have cooled the evening. Freddie took her hand and said, “Nothing can stop the trend. We’re going to make it.”
“We’re not in,” Barbara said. “No one’s in until Tuesday night.”
Driving home that evening, she was detached from all the warmth and excitement of the evening. Something had shattered the passionate desire, the feeling that a whole life of supporting lost causes and tilting at windmills would culminate in the House of Representatives, where she would finally face those who inflicted pain, who lied and looted and made a mockery of justice. All the nasty and envious names that people had attached to her through the years came into her mind, Girl Scout. Joan of Arc, Goody Two-Shoes, Lady Don Quixote from San Francisco, parlor pink, threading through her whole life. When she had sorted out the memories and lined them up, they lay on her like a crushing weight. Why had she ever started this thing? Why did she deceive herself with the feeling that she was not old? When did a man last come on to her, and when would a man ever come on to her again? She had toyed with the notion of Alexander Holt. Could it be that he was at least a little bit in love with her?