The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

“It was a damn lie.”

  “Somewhat, but not entirely. I never told you about my time in France — except that I met your father there.”

  “No, but I think there’s a great deal you never told me.”

  The food came, the wine was poured. She wasn’t hungry. She felt that she was on the edge of something important to both of them. “I was in my middle twenties,” she said. “I went to France without finishing college, to Paris, the old Paris before World War Two, and there I fell in love with a French journalist whose name was Marcel Duboise. We lived together. And then he was given an assignment in Spain, to cover the Spanish Civil War for his newspaper. He was badly wounded in Spain, and later he died in a hospital in Toulouse. Yes, of his wounds. They amputated his leg, but it was too late. There were no antibiotics then.’’

  “You don’t have to tell me this,” Sam said. “It’s disturbing you.”

  “I’m all right. You see, when Marcel was wounded, your father carried him back to the aid station. Your father was with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But I’ve told you that.”

  “Yes, you told me, Mother.”

  “What I didn’t tell you, or anyone, for that matter, was how I felt in my time of grief. The first love is a sort of sacred thing. I think you know that.”

  “I know it, yes.”

  “I was depressed and lonely — very lonely. Marcel had introduced me to a number of his friends. Some of them were Communists, which in France did not make outcasts of people. They were trying desperately to find out whether any organization or resistance still existed in Germany. They had sent in several couriers, all of whom had disappeared and were presumed dead. Well, they came to me and asked me to go. I was not a Communist, so I would not be arrested as one in Germany. I was an American. I came from a wealthy background and I was a journalist, which gave me a legitimate reason for a trip to Berlin. I got in touch with my editor in New York — I was doing a Paris Letter for Manhattan magazine — and he was so absolutely delighted that I might get an interview with Hitler or Goering that I had to go through with it, no matter how I regretted it. It would take too long to tell you all that happened, but at the end I was arrested by the Gestapo.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “No. It wasn’t something I wanted to remember. But now I want to tell you exactly how it happened. I was walking on a street in Berlin — Berlin before the war — and I saw a group of elderly people cleaning a street. Well — elderly — I would guess in their fifties and sixties, decently dressed, you would look at the men and say, A doctor, a college professor; that specific European intellectual look. They were sweeping offal into piles. A sewer must have overflowed. The street was unbelievably filthy. Then, as I watched, one of the SS men or Gestapo or whatever they were — he ordered this elderly man, a man with pince-nez and a beard, to pick up the filth with his bare hands and put it in a can. The old man was confused by this. I could see him spreading his hands, as to ask for some kind of tool. In response, the Gestapo man struck him, knocked him down, and then he and another Gestapo man began to kick this poor man lying on the street, and I lost my head and began to strike at them with my purse — and, well, that’s how I ended up in a German police station. But that’s not the point. The point is that these elderly people were Jews, degraded and dehumanized, used as slaves by those dreadful creatures of Hitler.

  “You see, Sam, up until then I knew very little of Jews. Daddy’s partner and best friend, Mark Levy, was Jewish, but I hardly knew the Levys when I was a young girl. Mother didn’t like them, my poor, dear mother, who was full of the most wonderful set of prejudices, all of which she recognized and fought; and as for the people at Higate, I never actually thought of Jake Levy as being Jewish. The first person who came into my consciousness as a Jew was Sam Goldberg, Daddy’s lawyer and a dear, dependable friend — and then, of course, I met your father in Paris, after Marcel died. But then again, one would not see Jews in any true historic sense simply by knowing your father. He was a splendid figure of a man, well over six feet, eyes like yours, that same pale blue —” Barbara’s voice broke off; she closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “Mom — Mom, you don’t have to tell me all this.”

  “I’m all right. Just give me a moment.”

  “Mom, I think I know what you’re trying to say.”

  “Do you? You were in Israel, Sam, but the Israelis are different. In my mind’s eye, I always have the picture of those elderly people sweeping the filth from the street. I know about the camps and the rest of it, but this I saw with my own eyes — the final chapter of two thousand years of torture and humiliation. It made me at least try to understand something. It’s not easy. I’m still trying.”

  “Mother,” Sam said evenly, “I know what you’ve been through, and I think that all my life I’ve been trying to be something that you and a father I never knew would want me to be. I married a Mexican Catholic girl who grew up on a plantation — Yes, whatever you may think of Higate, it’s a damn plantation, like every other big winery in the Valley. I know Jake paid his people the best wages in the Valley, but it’s still a hacienda. Well, it couldn’t work with Carla. I tried to make myself into a Jew. You know my Hebrew is almost as good as my English, and I suppose I became a sort of Israeli at medical school in Jerusalem, but that isn’t being a Jew either. I wanted to find my father and maybe in the process find myself. It didn’t work, not being in Israel, not keeping the name Cohen — none of it worked. Now I’ve found myself a woman whom I relate to. I don’t think Mary Lou is an anti-Semite, and if she is, she can change. Grandma Jean changed. Your mother was something wonderful — you know that.”

  “Yes,” Barbara admitted. “I know that.”

  She baked an apple pie and a pound cake. Barbara would win no medals as a cook. She was too indifferent to food, and she regarded with bewilderment the growing obsession with food and cooking that had overtaken America. Her editor had called from New York, full of an idea: Barbara should do a San Francisco cookbook. He was reluctant to accept her argument that she was the last person in the world to do a San Francisco cookbook. His idea had been born out of the notion that in some way she was connected with the Higate Winery, and that a profound knowledge of wine was somehow evidence of a profound knowledge of cookery. She managed to convince him otherwise, and perhaps it was in reaction to this that she was impelled to bake an apple pie and a pound cake, a project she managed by a meticulous following of the recipes. Since she was not too fond of sweets and since she couldn’t bear for these two proofs of new creativity to be wasted, she invited Eloise to lunch at the Green Street house. Lunch would be simple: scrambled eggs with cheese, toasted English muffins, and coffee and pound cake and apple pie. Aside from Boyd, Eloise was the only one who approved of her cooking.

  Through the years, Barbara had become very close to Eloise, and rarely did a week go by without Eloise coming into town to lunch. When Eloise first married Adam Levy, in 1946, her journey to Higate made her feel like someone taking residence in paradise. But much had happened since then, much pain and bitterness — to a point where escape to San Francisco was a necessary buffer against madness.

  Eloise always dressed for town. A pink skirt of fine thin wool was topped with a white silk shirt and a pink silk scarf at her throat. She loved pink. Her hair was white, and she made no effort to color it, and her face, once the beautiful, round cherub face of the girl who wins small-town beauty contests, had become drawn and tight. She used almost no makeup, made no effort to conceal what time and pain had accomplished. Once, she heard another woman advising Barbara on the virtues of a face lift as a means of doing away with wrinkles, to which Barbara had replied that she earned each and every one of those wrinkles and they were not to be lightly discarded. So Eloise felt. But when it came to selecting clothes, she refused to accept any strictures of age. Barbara was always delighted with Eloise’s clothes. “If I only dared to wear a pink skirt in February!”

  “Why not?” />
  “Thirty years ago was a proper time. I didn’t have the courage then.”

  “Courage? Courage to wear clothes? Barbara, I will never understand you.”

  Barbara poured two glasses of Lillet on ice. “Instead of sherry. Try it. We’re both far enough from Napa to drink a French aperitif. Oh, I made such a fuss with Sam when he took me to Fleur de Lys for lunch and ordered a French wine.”

  “It’s good,” Eloise said approvingly, tasting the Lillet. “Freddie is the other side of the coin. He would walk out of the restaurant if I ordered French wine.”

  “No!”

  “But he would.”

  “Freddie is my notion of the civilized man. Let me keep my illusions.”

  “Let’s not get on to Freddie — but we are, aren’t we? Well, I wasn’t sworn to silence. He hasn’t spoken to you at all?”

  “About what?”

  “The Forty-eighth C.D.”

  “I think he knows what my reaction would be. I will never again put myself through that — which may be selfish or may be proof that I’m finally growing up, a bit late, I will admit. No, I’ve had enough of politics. Tony Moretti telephoned last week, and he wanted to know whether I’d do it again next time. I told him no, never, very emphatically.”

  “Do you know why he called you?”

  “I told you why.”

  “Not so, Barbara. He called because Freddie went to him and told him that if you didn’t want the district, he’d like to have a try at it in nineteen seventy-eight.”

  After a long moment of digestive astonishment, Barbara burst into laughter. “Oh, no,” she finally managed to say. “Poor Freddie! He caught it.”

  “Poor Adam, poor Eloise. Barbara, if he should win, it leaves that whole wretched winery on our backs. Clair is seventy-seven and not well. Oh, I hate to be selfish, but since Joshua’s death I’ve wanted to get away for a time. We planned to take a year in the wine country of France and Hungary. It’s been an old dream of Adam’s to make a reasonable facsimile of the Imperial Tokay — and now —”

  “Freddie won’t make it. Holt is no pushover. No, I don’t think Freddie could make it.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “Pretty sure. So let’s have lunch and talk about other things.”

  Both the apple pie and the pound cake were delicious, but neither offered Barbara an inducement to delve deeper into the art of cooking. A visit from Eloise made her feel abandoned and lonely when she left. A new feeling for Barbara. Self-pity had never been a state she enjoyed. After Boyd’s death, friends had been considerate and had tried to include her in dinner parties, and even to find her dinner partners. But Barbara soon enough discovered that in the world of people past sixty, single men possessed of a modicum of wit and wisdom were not abundant; single women were, and soon the dinner parties became fewer in number. On occasion, she would have a small party at her house, but she found no great satisfaction in the role of hostess. At best, writing is a lonely profession, and only the knowledge that there was someone close by who deeply cared for her and for what she wrote made writing tolerable.

  She was a compassionate person, yet she had no desire to become a Gray Lady at Sam’s hospital, as he had once suggested, or to fulfill some romantic notion of working in a soup kitchen for the poor. That wasn’t what she had been trained for through all her years of living. She was a feminist; she could say that to herself proudly and without equivocating. She had loved men and married and borne a child, and she had never stepped back from what she thought of as the good fight. It meant, as it always had since the end of her sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence College, standing face to face and without whimpering against whatever forces of cruelty and oppression confronted her. It was a fight she had never avoided and that had become the fulcrum of existence, yet it was a fight that always ended in defeat; and in that, she knew, she was like all other women on earth.

  When she thought about it in such terms, her eyes would brim with tears of frustration, and she would have to remind herself that she was healthy and strong. That was something time had not taken from her, nor would she surrender whatever years still remained to silence and defeat.

  Sam’s romance with Mary Lou Constable came to a curious pause, the details transmitted to Barbara by Freddie, who, while not sworn to silence, was certainly told the story in confidence. But Freddie’s dislike for the Constable family was such that he could not forbear passing said details on to Barbara.

  “The point is,” Freddie told Barbara, “that I know a great deal about the Constables. They tried to buy Higate, and we told them to shove it. They offered eighty-five million, which is not hay, and when we turned them down, they moved up the Valley and made an offer to Templeton. I don’t know why they wanted so desperately to get into the wine business, but I guess it’s the in thing these days. Well, Jack Templeton hired an investigative service to work up a total background on the Constables. They came out here from New Orleans after the earthquake; from New Orleans, not from Saint Louis, and they’d like to forget all about the New Orleans connection, because Mary Lou’s great-grandma ran the biggest whorehouse in the city. That’s where their stake came from.”

  “And you had to rush off and give that to Sam.”

  “Absolutely not,” Freddie protested. “I’m giving it to you as background material. Sam proposed to her and she accepted, and the family figured that the nephew of Thomas Lavette could hardly be all bad —”

  “He never told me,” Barbara said.

  “He would have told you. He wanted the proper moment, and then he was going to take both you and Mary Lou to a festive dinner somewhere and make the announcement. But Mary Lou comes back with the news that her family is arranging for the wedding to be held in the chapel at Grace Cathedral, a special dispensation from the bishop, and Sam says to her, Come on, honey, I’m Jewish, and if you want a church wedding, it will have to be in a synagogue.”

  “You’re inventing, Freddie. I don’t think Sam ever set foot in a synagogue.”

  “Well, so it went, and one thing led to another, and Mary Lou, who is no shrinking flower, told Sam that he was as Jewish as the Pope, and that was all Sam had to hear.”

  Barbara kept her peace for the following few weeks, and then, at last, when Sam stopped by for a drink, she could not refrain from asking about Mary Lou.

  “We had an amicable parting of the ways,” Sam said.

  “Is it over?”

  “Maybe all over. Maybe not.”

  “By the way,” Barbara asked, “did Freddie ever mention anything about Mary Lou’s great-grandmother or something of the sort?”

  “You mean about her being a hooker, Mom? First thing Mary Lou told me. She was proud as a peacock about it. You see, Annabelle Fitzroy was not just a hooker; she ran the biggest whorehouse in New Orleans.”

  “And Mary Lou?”

  “She’s a first-rate tennis player. That’s high on the list for a doctor’s wife.”

  There were times when Barbara was not fond of her son.

  About a month after this, Birdie MacGelsie decided to give a small dinner party for Sam and Mary Lou. When Birdie telephoned Barbara to invite her, Barbara was reasonably surprised. “The marriage is off,” Barbara said. “At least, that was my understanding. I’m only his mother.”

  “Darling, these days you don’t get too many points for being anyone’s mother. My spies tell me that the wedding is probably on again. Anyway, I felt an obligation to meet the young lady. Don’t you like her?”

  “I’m not sure I know her well enough to like or dislike. She appears to have had a childhood resembling mine, and that’s reason enough to be wary.”

  “But you will come?”

  Barbara assured Birdie that she would come, but she did not look forward to it. Her distaste for social engagements that she had to fulfill without an escort was increasing; she felt uncomfortable as the widow lady, the odd woman out. It made her angry to surmise that people might be sorry for her; she w
ould not be an object of pity. Yet she knew well enough that people spoke about poor Barbara, and of course we must do something, but find us a man over sixty who isn’t simply deplorable —

  Still, she could not become a hermit in the little wooden house on Green Street. Once it had been cute and delightful, a valid old Victorian San Francisco hill house. Now even Eloise, who had always admired the house, said, “No, Barbara, it’s too dark. At our age we need light.”

  Once she had allowed Eloise to steer her into one of the new highrises being built on the hills. They looked at an apartment on the sixteenth floor that had a splendid view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, but it brought a flood of memories and a stab of apprehension to Barbara, who reminded Eloise that two of her grandparents had perished in the earthquake of 1906. “I would never draw an easy breath here,” Barbara said.

  In Birdie MacGelsie’s thinking, eleven people constituted a small dinner party. Nor did her apartment high above the city arouse her apprehensions. Aside from Sam, Mary Lou and Barbara, there were three other couples, one of them Al Ruddy and his wife, Susan. Barbara had never met Susan Ruddy before. She was small, dark, with a sort of apologetic prettiness. A large, redheaded man of fifty or so was introduced as Bart Limber. His wife was very tall, very thin, blond hair and bony shoulders. She wore two strings of pearls and a heavy necklace of carved quartz beads. Limber subcontracted airplane parts, and he had been a classmate of MacGelsie’s at Stanford. The third couple, Barbara met with some relief. They were old friends, Dr. Milton Kellman and his wife, Nell. Birdie was sensitive enough to feel that Barbara needed additional buttressing. Both Susan Ruddy and Alison Limber were, as they put it, absolutely thrilled to meet Barbara Lavette, whom Susan Ruddy specified as “the” Barbara Lavette. “I heard so much about you, so many things, and of course it was years ago — when you were young.”

  Her husband looked daggers at her, and her voice dried up. It was the last thing Susan Ruddy said that evening — that is, the last thing that might have had either an opinion or a question tied into it. But on the plus side it produced a deep, suppressed giggle in Barbara, who was certain that, if left alone, Susan would have plunged into a host of questions about how it felt to be in jail or a Communist courier. Well, why not? Certainly the evening promised nothing much more interesting.