by Howard Fast
Barbara realized that Freddie’s small world was coming to an end. All worlds come to an end, all lives, all dreams, and then all the bits of paper that remain are pasted together into different dreams. Everywhere — and she remembered the barrios of the Forty-eighth Congressional District, where there were neither toilets nor running water and often enough no electricity either; yet even there dreams were shaped and reshaped.
He was talking about Carla. “You don’t like her?” he had just said.
“When she was married to Sam,” Barbara said, “things lost their shape. I liked her before that and after that. She has quality.”
“I want you to like her.”
“Want Eloise to like her. That’s what really faces her. It faces both of them.”
In the end, Freddie thanked her. “For being willing to listen to me. I had no one to listen to me, no one.”
“It’s easy for me, Freddie. It’s going to be very tough for you. It’s not hard to listen. To do it right — whatever it is — that’s hard.”
As the months passed, it was not easy for Barbara. When you are young and things become dislocated, there is time ahead to patch things up and put them together again. Now that endless river of time seemed to be drying up. Barbara began to fall prey to the belief that things were different from the way they had been when she was young, heartlessly different. She was beginning to forget youth’s necessity to be heartless. Otherwise they would be trapped — as she felt trapped!
Self-pity disgusted Barbara, yet it was no more controllable than some tuberous growth on the skin, and she was vain enough to choose an inner pain, if such a choice had come to her. But the inner pain was there without choice. When Sam neither visited nor called for two weeks, her misery grew inside her like a tumor. It was only slightly helped by Mary Lou’s explanation. “You mustn’t feel neglected, Barbara dear, because Sam hasn’t had time to breathe, and I’m afraid I see him almost as rarely as you. He’s observing a series of eye operations — you know, cataracts and such. Not that he’ll ever be an eye surgeon, but Sam’s curiosity just can’t be satisfied.”
Barbara had accepted Mary Lou as a woman with a mind and a will to look at the world with open eyes, but now she found herself irritated and provoked. Why did they have to be conde scending? Why did the confrontation of an older person turn an otherwise intelligent and attractive woman into a duty-directed machine fueled by guilt? And how much of it was her own fault? Why did she fall into Sam’s trap? All her life, she had been her own responsibility. She told herself angrily that now this must not change.
She went to the telephone and dialed a number. This is the way she would have proceeded thirty years ago, and being alone in the world with no one depending upon her and no one to account to, she could turn the boredom into a sort of laughter. She could act out the fact that loneliness and aloneness were two very different things. The number she dialed belonged to Jim Bernhard, a film producer and an old friend of Boyd’s and hers. Years ago, she and Boyd would travel south whenever their spirits needed refurbishing, and after Boyd’s death Bernhard had called several times, trying to persuade her to come and stay with him and his wife.
Barbara had always rejected the notion of going alone to experience what she had experienced only with Boyd. But Boyd had been dead full six years and more by now, and time has a way of dealing with the past. It was almost seven o’clock when Barbara put through the call, certainly the best time to find Jim Bernhard at home; and indeed he answered the phone himself, delighted to hear from her after so long a time.
“Nothing bad, I hope,” he said, after the salutations.
“Just enough to make me desperate to get out of this place, and I thought I’d drive down the coast road, nice and easy, and perhaps you and Joan could put me up for a night.”
“All the nights you can spare. We’d love it.”
“Bless you.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night too soon?”
“Perfect.”
She was free. She owned a 1974 Volvo, an old, reliable workhorse, and it held two small suitcases, a bottle of cold beer, and two sandwiches of creamy chèvre and parsley. She drove off like a kid running away from home at six o’clock in the morning, when it was barely light. She had her coffee and toast in a little roadside place, where she sat at the counter and giggled to herself and savored the knowledge that at this moment no one in the world knew where she was and, except for the Bernhards, where she was going. She had invested in a telephone answering machine, a wonderful little gadget that told the world that Miss Lavette was not at home, but if you waited for the electronic beep, you could talk for two minutes and Miss Lavette would return your call as soon as she returned home. Since Sam might properly be worried, she mailed a note to him which informed him that she was off for a few days.
She drank her beer and ate her sandwiches at a place where the Pacific Coast Highway dropped to a level only twenty feet or so above the beach. She parked her car by the road and climbed down to the beach, and then up onto one of those amazing rocks that dot the Pacific shore. Then, sitting up high, dressed in her blue jeans and blue work shirt, she drank beer and munched away at her chévre sandwiches. A young couple came walking along on the sand, and they stopped and the boy said, “You want some help off there, lady?”
“Why?” Barbara asked him.
He couldn’t bring himself to reply, but the girl asked in some amazement how she’d got up there.
“Climbed,” Barbara said.
“Well, you could hurt yourself,” the girl scolded.
“Oh, bug off,” Barbara said.
They departed, rejected and miffed. There was no one else on the beach, only the gulls swooping and screaming, so Barbara sat happily on the rock for at least a half hour, savoring her place and position, remembering how at the age of seven she had climbed to the top of a set of monkey bars for the first time and rejoiced. Small victories can be very important ones.
She was in no hurry, and it was early evening when she reached Santa Barbara. She parked her car at Pueblo Gardens, a Mexican place right off the Pacific Coast Highway, ordered Mexican beer and an enormous taco and tortillas on the side, and stuffed herself properly, meanwhile chattering away in Spanish with the waiter. She had a good ear for the accent, and the waiter was impressed. A tall, heavyset young Chicano, he said to her, “Lady, you are no Anglo, are you?”
“Sure I am.”
“Your Spanish is pretty good for an Anglo.”
“Thank you.”
“You live around here?” Speaking in Spanish gave him a lead toward intimacy he would not otherwise have dared exercise, and that, together with Barbara’s jeans and blue work shirt, allowed him to study her with a warm grin.
“Just passing through.”
“You got time, I’m off at nine. If you’re still here, suppose we have a drink — if you feel like it, I mean.”
“Sonny,” she said in English, “I’m not only old enough to be your mother, I’m old enough to be your grandmother.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Bless you, no.”
Driving south from Santa Barbara, she giggled again with delight.
At the Malibu Colony, the Bernhards were waiting for her, and they were out to greet her as she parked her car. It made her feel welcome. They both embraced her, obviously delighted to see her. Jim Bernhard was a large, heavy man in his middle sixties, white-haired and possessed of abundant energy. Joan was fifteen years younger, a slender, handsome woman who had been an actress and had given it up to raise four children. Two were in college and two were out in the world. The Bernhards’ marriage of twenty-eight years had overcome all hurdles, healed all the wounds inflicted upon each other, each by the other, and settled down into an easy and comfortable partnership. Jim was just about ready to give up film production. Like many old-timers in the film industry, he was not thrilled by either the industry’s taste or the public’s taste, and he was perfectly conten
t to swim, walk on the beach, read books and play gin rummy and sometimes chess with his wife. Since she enjoyed the same things, it made for an easy and uncomplicated household. They shared the cooking, and tonight it was grilled lamb chops and pilaf and sliced tomatoes. Barbara had not the heart to confess to them that she had stuffed herself with Mexican food only a few hours before. She joined them at the dinner table, amazed at how her appetite adjusted to the situation.
It was over six years since she had seen them; the last time was when they came to Boyd’s funeral. In the beginning, they had been Boyd’s friends, not hers, and she had taken to them slowly, suspicious as she was of anyone connected with the film business. But in every such situation, there are those who reverse the role, who make of the cliché a pattern of what not to do or be. The Bernhards did not sniff coke, they drank moderately, they did not possess a hot tub or a Jacuzzi, they didn’t engage in switching and they did not go in for wild parties. They lived at Malibu because they loved the ocean; and after Barbara got to know them, Bernhard had asked her to write a screenplay — but asked her tentatively, as if it were certainly too much to ask of someone who was a good writer in another medium. Barbara based the screenplay on an incident she had witnessed during World War Two, when she had been a correspondent and had come across the case of a young soldier, stationed in Arabia, who had sex with a willing Arab woman. He was accused, tried and found guilty of a rape he did not commit, and was sentenced unjustly as a sop to the Saudis. The film was a moderate success, and the fact that Bernhard had it filmed without asking Barbara to change a word, or degrade it in any manner, endeared him to her. Seeing them with Boyd had been very pleasant, and though it had taken her years to will herself to see them without him, she discovered that it could continue to be good.
At the dinner table she talked about her drive down the coast and the delight she had taken in the few commonplace incidents she had encountered. She had no desire to talk about serious matters, feeling that her present mood of guilty pleasure in her truancy might be as fragile as a spider’s web. The Bernhards, on the other hand, were intrigued by an election campaign already four years in the past, and they insisted on discussing it.
“It was a brief aberration,” Barbara said. “It was a fit of ego. The little child who can’t have her own way kicks and screams, hoping that it will put her small world in order.”
“Not a good comparison,” Bernhard said.
“Just reading about it, I became terribly excited,” Joan told her. “I mean, I’ve never been the great feminist, but I began to tell myself that if Barbara could do it, then we could all do it.”
“There are women in Congress,” Barbara pointed out.
“Oh? How many in the House — a dozen? No, not even that. And how many in the Senate? I began to think, Just suppose half of Congress were women —”
“There she goes,” Bernhard said.
“Really? And why not? We happen to be half of the human race.”
“I got a notion for a TV show once,” Barbara said. “It happened when I was working here on my first screenplay. Twenty years ago. That is a long time, isn’t it? Well, you know that wonderful little lady Norma Felson, who plays the quintessential Jewish mother? What would happen, I asked myself, if she were elected to Congress?”
“Great idea,” Joan said.
“So I decided. I set up a situation where my little lady is watching TV and discovers that here in America, in Appalachia, children are starving. Outraged, she decides to run for Congress and change all this. Her son is a lawyer, her daughter a smooth professional woman. Son and daughter think she’s crazy. However, she puts her bridge club onto it and they get her on the ballot as an Independent. The Republican candidate is indicted for fraud. The Democratic candidate is mixed up with the mob. So the Democrats go all out for our little lady, figuring they can control her after she’s elected, and, of course, she makes it. I have two standing sets. One is her West Side apartment in New York. The other is a section of Congress where we see Norma Felson with a Southern racist on one side of her, a born-again Christian on the other, a tough old politician behind her and a young me-generation know-it-all in front of her.”
“Absolutely fantastic!” Bernhard exclaimed. “They should have grabbed it.”
“They did. CBS grabbed it, just as you say. And do you know what they did?”
“I can guess,” Joan said.
“You’d never guess. They began by saying, No Jewish mother. That was twenty years ago. So they changed the mother to a Wasp, which let Norma out. They thought Jane Wyman would be fine for the role, if they could get her. Then they washed out Appalachia, the mob, the bridge club and the election. They decided that the Wasp lady’s husband should die and she takes over his seat in Congress. They insisted that her secretary should be a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound football player. Funny. Comic relief. And they felt that obviously such a lady should be a Republican.”
“You’re kidding.”
“And what happened?” Bernhard asked.
“What would have to happen. They trashed it and then they junked it and it was never done.”
“At least they paid for it.”
“Oh, yes. They’re very good about that. But the point I was making is that essentially this reflects their opinion of a woman. A decent woman who can’t bear to see suffering. This they couldn’t go with. And yet we dream of a Congress that’s half women.”
“It’s a local disease, the Hollywood concept of women.”
“They’ve infected the whole nation,” Barbara said. “Here I am, sound of limb and reasonably clear mentally, and most of the time I feel that I’m looking at a world that has ushered me out. Damn it, I’m not ready to be ushered out. They laughed and trashed that idea of mine out of existence because it challenged their notion of a woman. Tell me,” she said to Bernhard, “would you think seriously about making a film where a woman in her sixties or even in her seventies was the protagonist? I’m not talking about those cutesy numbers that Helen Hayes and Ruth Gordon have been doing, and I’m not talking about the specter of youth that comes from a couple of face lifts and the art of the makeup man. I’m talking about a serious film about an old woman.”
“Right now?” Bernhard shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m tempted to say that if the screenplay is good enough, we can get anything on the screen, but that’s not the bottom line either. Some day, sure. Perhaps not yet.”
“Some day. You see, Jim, Joan put her finger on it, didn’t she? We’re half of the human race, and properly we should be half of the Congress of the United States.”
“And,” Joan added, “we could hardly mess things up worse than the men have.”
The talk went on. They had all the missing years to fill in. Barbara, hardly able to keep her eyes open, was ready for bed at ten o’clock.
“Make no apology,” Jim Bernhard said. “Off to bed.”
“And tomorrow, what kind of a program?” Joan asked.
“Bare feet and wet sand. I want to walk on the beach and lie in the sun. That will be as close to paradise as I have any right to expect.”
When a week had gone by and Sam had had no word from his mother, other than the note telling him she’d gone away, he said to Mary Lou, “What do I do now? I don’t know where she is. No one has heard a word from her. What do I do? Do I call the cops and tell them that my mother wandered off seven days ago?”
“That would be real smart, wouldn’t it? Your mother would love that.”
“I don’t suppose she would. What’s your suggestion?”
“That you leave her alone. She’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”
“I can’t just forget about her. She’s my mother.”
“You forget about her very nicely when she’s here on Green Street,” Mary Lou pointed out.
“That’s different. Then I know where she is.”
“Well, right now she knows where she is.”
“What’s that supposed
to mean?”
Mary Lou sighed and shook her head. “Nothing much.”
“I’m worried about her. Do you know, I have a tennis date at the club. I’m late and I will be lousy. I’m always lousy when I have something like this on my mind.”
“And you know,” Mary Lou said, “you can be a sweet and compassionate and wonderful person.”
“All right,” Sam said with annoyance. “But I’ve turned into a louse because I don’t want to be late or rotten for a tennis game and because I’m worried about my mother.”
But Mary Lou, understanding Sam a good deal better than Carla ever had, made no reply to this but kissed him and told him that she loved him.
Eight
Divorce, as Barbara told Boyd, somewhat defensively, was not a matter of ceasing to love a man, but of being unable to continue to live with him and share his life. At least, such was her perception, and when Boyd had pointed out to her that a great many divorces end in hatred far more intense than the original love, Barbara argued that there had been no real love to begin with, which simply stated that Barbara Lavette was as incapable of defining love as anyone else in America. Barbara had married twice and loved twice without marriage, and death had made short shrift of one marriage and both loves; but the marriage that had ended in divorce had never truly finished. If she had hated Carson Devron, it would have been over, but her love for him had never turned into hatred, and his love for her was not a part of the divorce.
Probably he had never understood the divorce. “We can’t hack it anymore.” That’s no excuse and meaningless. “It’s just not working.” “We tried.” “We gave it our best shot, didn’t we?”
None of that meant anything. Tag words, code words. Carson, divorced, stayed with her — remote but nevertheless with her. There were other things besides his giving the campaign a polling mechanism, other gifts through the years, but always gifts at arm’s length. If someone had ever asked her, Barbara would have replied, “Did we ever make love again? The answer is no.” Boyd had never asked her.