The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  Joan Bernhard sort of asked her. “We do want to have at least one celebration of sorts while you’re here. Nothing very large or splendid. Jim and I gave up the large and splendid years ago. I was thinking of a small dinner party. Perhaps eight or ten people.”

  “Joan, it’s not necessary,” Barbara said. “I came to be with you.”

  “Most things aren’t absolutely necessary. But if you don’t mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Some of our friends, and some of yours.”

  “You’re my friends down here. You know that.”

  “What about Carson Devron? Still friends?”

  “I haven’t seen him in years, but the cords are still there. He’s a good man.”

  “Then why don’t we have him?”

  “Marriage and kids, for one thing. I hardly think it’s a good idea. No — no, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not the best of marriages. She’s in Palm Springs. He’s here.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Any cocktail party here at the Colony, and you know everything. But this time, it comes from Jim. Carson’s been his partner in a film now and then, and they lunch together every few weeks or so.”

  “I didn’t know you even knew Carson.”

  “No,” Joan said, “it’s not anything we’d have talked about in front of Boyd. He was fiercely jealous of you.”

  “I know, poor dear. But Joan, just stop thinking whatever you may be thinking.”

  “What? Tell me what I’m thinking,” Joan said, smiling. “Dear Barbara, no. I’m thinking that if you and Carson are good friends, it would be nice for you to see each other after all these years.”

  “Yes, I want to see Carson,” Barbara admitted. “I want to touch something that used to be, something that was a part of my life that isn’t dead or broken or soured or lost. But I don’t want to hurt anyone, not Carson, not his wife.”

  “I think we’re all past the age of hurting people that way.”

  So it was to be just a casual meeting of old friends, yet Barbara tried on every piece of clothing she had brought with her, not once but twice, and finally sighed hopelessly and settled for a white blouse, a pink cashmere sweater and a full gray skirt. It was not fashionable, but all she had with her were a few skirts and sweaters and blouses.

  She was coming downstairs after dressing when the doorbell rang. It was too early for Carson. Jim Bernhard opened the door, still in his apron as self-appointed cook, and a policeman on the doorstep inquired whether the Bernhards had a guest, name of Barbara Lavette.

  Her heart stopped when she heard this, and all her guilts and fears, so easily set aside, now swarmed over her. “What is it?” she asked, her voice high-pitched and anxious.

  “You’re Barbara Lavette?”

  “Yes. For God’s sake, tell me what happened!”

  “Nothing to get upset about,” the policeman said. “The way I understand it, your son, Dr. Cohen — your son?”

  “Yes, my son.”

  “All right, lady. He put out a missing person on you with the San Francisco cops —”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Barbara demanded. “Who’s missing? Is my son missing?”

  “You are, Miss Lavette,” the officer said stolidly. “If your son is a Dr. Samuel Cohen, then he decided that you are missing and his information sheet suggested that you might be at the Colony here, but he didn’t have any name or address, so the San Francisco cops called here and asked us to do a house check —”

  Relieved, laughing now, Barbara tried to assure the policeman that it was some kind of stupid joke.

  “Well, if it is, ma’am, your son put us to a lot of trouble. If you’ll give me the telephone here, I’ll report it back to San Francisco.”

  When the policeman had left, both Bernhards — Joan having joined them at the door — turned to stare at Barbara.

  “No, I did not tell him where I was going,” Barbara said. The Bernhards still made no comment. “I ran away,” Barbara said hopelessly. “I wanted to do it all my life. I finally did it.”

  Once Jim Bernhard had invited Carson, who said that he would be delighted to come but that he would be coming alone, both Bernhards felt that they would do best to have no other guests. “In fact,” Jim had said to Barbara, “when Carson asked me who else would be here, aside from you, I told him just Joan and myself. I had a feeling that as much as he might want to see you, he would have bowed out if others were here.”

  Barbara decided that Bernhard had been quite right. As casually as she might take an evening with Carson, he on the other hand might look forward to it with great anticipation. The years that had passed did not matter, time did not matter — that well she knew him and understood. For men like Carson, the unfulfilled is always laced with golden webs of wonder. He would come tonight as he had come almost twenty-five years ago to a party given for Barbara by William Goldberg, her producer; and he had come then not because he liked parties — he hated them — but because he was already in love with the author of Driftwood, whom he had never met. And tonight, as his herald, a delivery boy appeared with two dozen long-stemmed roses.

  It prompted Jim Bernhard to say to his wife, softly, in the confines of their bedroom, “I don’t know which of them is more the idiot child or more the wonderful person. Why couldn’t they stay married?”

  “If we knew that, we could sell marriage prognoses and make us a bundle.”

  “Of course, it’s pretty damn easy to love Carson.”

  “At his age?”

  “I happen to be older than he is,” Bernhard informed her.

  “And how old would that make him?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s younger than Barbara.”

  At first, at the dinner table, the conversation was constrained. The Bernhards, doing their own cooking and serving, took turns in the kitchen. A maid came in the morning and left at noon, and for a large dinner party, they would have had help. But tonight there were only the four of them, and Jim Bernhard had poached salmon fillets for the main course and had wrapped Brie cheese in phylo to go with the salad, which in California precedes the main course. With an icy cold Sicilian wine, it made a meal that nobody could fault and a conversation piece as well.

  But after exhausting the virtues of the food and the beauty of the Pacific, iridescent in the moonlight, and the pleasure of eating in sight of a boundless ocean, Carson Devron became strangely silent. He was a large, handsome man, his once blond hair turned white, his manner, for all of his very real diffidence, the manner of a man who has ordered other men and indeed ruled a substantial empire all of his adult life, the Devron holdings in Southern California being very much of an empire. Some years younger than Barbara, he lacked her ebullience. Barbara approached each day as if she had never actually experienced a day before. What was always new to her was old to Carson Devron, who appeared to exist in a rigid frame of depression.

  On first entering the Bernhard house, he had smiled with pleasure and embraced Barbara as if she had conferred an ultimate favor upon him. He fussed over her appearance, repeated his observation that time had dealt so well with her, and treated her for all the world like an attractive young woman.

  But now that brief spell of excitement had worn off, and he sat, mute and worried, at the dinner table. Barbara took up the slack with observations about the role of food in the current world of the middle class, recalling that in her youth there was no ideology of food.

  “And is that what you’d call it, really — an ideology of food?” Joan wondered.

  “Pick up any newspaper — pages devoted to food, cooking, spices, quick cooking, gourmet cooking —”

  “Like mine,” Bernhard said.

  “Oh, absolutely. Or try a bookstore. Almost half is cookbooks. And this dinner — wonderful dinner. But thirty years ago, who would ever dream of serving this marvelous poached salmon, cooked by a man, no less.” She went on chattering, a woman who rarely chattered, and a
t the same time reflecting on the fact that she was clinging to this nonsense because Devron sat opposite her like some damn Indian sachem, never saying a word.

  Whatever the constraints within the Bernhard house, the weather outside was delightful, rather warm for a seaside evening, but nevertheless with a clean edge in the air that called for a heavy sweater. So when Barbara suggested a walk on the beach after dinner, Joan was quick to second the motion and provide sweaters — and at the same time to be greatly relieved that the grim attitude Devron had fallen into would not be encased for dreary hours by the walls of her living room. “You and Carson go ahead,” Joan said. “We’ll be with you as soon as we straighten up a bit.”

  “Shoes full of sand,” Carson muttered, once they were out and walking on the beach. “I never did like the damn beach.”

  “You loved the beach,” Barbara told him. “What happened, Carson? What awful thing happened to you?”

  “No awful thing at all.”

  “Carson, I’m no stranger. We were married.”

  “Yes, we were.”

  “Could you smile once? Once. Just once, so that I’ll know that somewhere inside that damn perfect decathlon body of yours a human being survives.”

  “Damn perfect decathlon body—” He began to laugh.

  “There you are. Funny. You are still Carson.”

  “Hardly. I’m trying to diet my way out of a triple bypass, which is why Jim served salmon. I passed on that marvelous cheese dish. I just spent a month at the Pritikin Institute. Your perfect decathlon body leaves a hell of a lot to be desired.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. I live with it, and if I’ve been a pain in the ass tonight, it has nothing to do with my health. At least not with my physical health. My life stinks, Barbara. That’s the long and short of it. Aside from my work, it’s not worth a plugged nickel.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Barbara said. “I don’t believe it for one moment.”

  “No,” he said with annoyance, “no, you wouldn’t believe that. You never did understand me. You never could figure out why I didn’t dance through life the way you do, without one damn care in the world. Oh, no. No —”

  Barbara stopped short, grasped his arm and pulled him around. “Just cut that out, because it’s pure bullshit, and you know it is. If you want to talk, we’ll talk and try to make some sense. Otherwise, let’s go back.”

  “You’re really mad,” Carson said in astonishment. “You’re really angry. I’ve never seen you so angry before.”

  “Sure I’m angry. I’ve been a widow for almost seven years. Try being a widow some time. Try looking at a telephone that stops ringing, that doesn’t ring for a week at a time. Try being invited to a dinner party where you know damn well that it’s poor Barbara, and it’s just too long since we invited her, and try shopping around in a world that doesn’t want you or need you! But I don’t whine and whimper about it. I’m older than you. Damn you, Carson, I was so excited and delighted about seeing you again that I didn’t sleep last night — not a wink — and what do I find —”

  “You were? So excited you didn’t sleep? Come on.”

  “Damn right I was. And there are the Bernhards coming out of their house, so do we walk or go back and tell them the evening’s over?”

  “Let’s walk.”

  They walked on, the Bernhards making no effort to overtake them, and after a minute or so, Carson asked, “Is it true what you said before — you were that pleased to see me?”

  “True. Good heavens, Carson, we were married, we slept with each other. We made love. We shared our dreams and our fears.” She took his hand. “You don’t forget that.”

  “No, you don’t. I was whining?”

  “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “I was whining. You’re right. Absolutely right. I’m trapped. You may be suffering all the miseries of being a widow — which I don’t believe for a minute, because you would beat the shit out of being a widow or anything else — but still you’re not trapped. Not the way I am. There’s something you can’t really understand, which is a very beautiful woman who is stupid. But you meet such a woman, and her beauty spells out everything else, because that’s the American doctrine, fed everywhere by Hollywood, and she has to be wonderful and understanding and kind and clever, and that’s what I married, and so help me God she’s as stupid as our Irish setter, who’s also very beautiful and very stupid. Only the Irish setter can’t talk, thank heavens. This one can talk. Would you believe it, she calls me Kit Carson in front of others? But she doesn’t understand anything I say and never will. Do you know why she’s in Palm Springs, which is, forgive me, the utter asshole of creation? Damn it, you’re laughing at me!”

  “Carson!” She threw her arms around him and kissed him. “Carson, Carson, I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at our ridiculous world. Don’t be offended. Why is she in Palm Springs?”

  “Because she thinks people like Sinatra and Hope and Jerry Ford and the Reagans and the Annenbergs are wonderful and bright and diverting and admirable, and she believes that to be in that hot desert pisshole is the summit of human achievement.”

  “You could divorce her.”

  “My dear lady, divorce is not something you make a profession of, not if you’re a damn Devron, and we have three kids, and she’s as decent as one can be with an IQ, of about ninety, and she knows by now that I’m delighted for her to be in Palm Springs while I’m here in L.A. running the paper, and we haven’t had sex in the three years since my heart attack, because if I’m going to pass out while screwing someone, it won’t be my miserable wife. It’ll be someone I care about.” He stopped suddenly, and then, “Are you listening to me? Have you ever heard me talk like this before? What has gotten into me? Let’s join the Bernhards before I say anything else.”

  Devron called the following day, just before noon, and asked Barbara to have dinner with him that evening, to which Barbara replied that she would love to, except that she was leaving today, having already overstayed and abused the hospitality of the Bernhards.

  “Stay another day,” Carson begged her.

  “I simply can’t.”

  “Well, where will you go from here?” Carson wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. I had thought of driving down to Tijuana, but I’ve lost the taste for it, and now I don’t know where I want to go, except that I have no great desire to go home.”

  “Then listen to me, please,” Carson pleaded. “I have an important meeting tonight, but I put it off until ten o’clock, thinking I could take you to dinner. Let me do that. If you feel that you must leave the Bernhards, then why not drive into town and spend a night at the Beverly Wilshire or some such place and then take off tomorrow?”

  “Carson,” she said, “is it so important to see me again?”

  “Important for me — yes. Believe me. Seeing you after all these years is not something I can leave with an argument on Malibu Beach, which I concluded with the ravings of a lunatic. My God, we do enough clowning in the normal course of things. Don’t leave me with this kind of memory of being with the one woman I have been able to love.”

  Poor Carson, she was thinking. What a mouthful of words! He’d never tolerate that in one of his editorials.

  She couldn’t refuse, and she said, “All right, Carson. The Beverly Wilshire.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six-thirty. That’s not too early, is it?”

  “Six-thirty,” Barbara agreed.

  But when she told the Bernhards what she intended, their response was to be hurt and to spell that out. “You’ve been here ten days,” Joan said, “and it’s been a perfectly wonderful visit, and why you should feel for a moment that you’ve overstayed your welcome, I don’t know. At least stay another night. Let Carson come here.”

  “No. I think he wants to stay in the city. He said something about an important meeting at ten o’clock. You’ve been wonderful, but no guest ever l
eft too soon.”

  After Barbara had driven away, Joan Bernhard admitted to herself that she was somewhat relieved. “Even with someone you love,” she said to her husband, “ten days is long enough. And Barbara — I love her, I do love her — but she makes me feel that nothing in the world is right. She won’t leave it alone — the government, the bomb. Can’t she just relax and live with it?”

  “No. That’s Barbara.”

  Barbara had her own sharp twinges of guilt. Her mother had long ago impressed upon her that in polite circles — which were the only circles a lady should ever seek — one did not discuss three subjects, namely, religion, money and politics, which as far as Barbara was concerned left very little of interest. She had learned long ago that dinner table discussion of art and letters was limited to very few, and while the partial liberation of women had made talk of sex possible, it was often less than enlightening. However, why annoy people who liked you? Why indeed?

  After Barbara had greeted Carson in the hotel lobby and then seated herself in his car for the drive downtown to a restaurant of his choice, she said to him, “Do you find me boring when I dwell on things not very nice?”

  “Most things are not very nice,” Carson decided. “And boring? No indeed; I have never found you boring. But it’s an odd question.”

  “I feel guilty. I like the Bernhards enormously, but I think I troubled them. You know, when I was a little girl and left food on my plate, our nanny would remind me that there was enough food left on my plate to save the life of some small child dying of hunger in China, after which I stuffed the food into my gullet, never inquiring how one could get what was left on my plate to China and save the life of the poor child.”

  “The curse of those rich enough to have a nanny.”

  “You’re missing the point completely, and I’ve paid the price in guilt for being a rich kid.”

  “I don’t think I’ve missed the point,” Carson said. “I’m only needling your guilt. The fact is that the Bernhards live out there in one of the loveliest spots on earth, and they want to live pleasantly and quietly and forget about all the small starving kids, because they feel they can’t do much about it and they’ve never really felt that they had to do much about it. You and I, Barbara love, are different. We are cursed with what Veblen called the conscience of the rich, and all our lives we’ve brooded over what a cesspool most of society is.”