Establishment

by Howard Fast

  “I don’t know what I could do at this point about your sister,” he said helplessly.

  “Nothing, I’m sure. It’s unfortunate that my sister stepped into the middle of this. Now suppose we talk about your own plans, Mr. Drake.”

  For the next hour, Tom and Lucy listened to the pompous self-importance of Norman Drake. They fed him food and Scotch and praised his acumen and patriotism, and he in turn became wet-eyed in his apologies for his ignorance.

  Finally, Tom and Lucy drove him home—he was too drunk to drive himself—to his place in San Pablo; then, too exhausted to face the drive back to Pacific Heights, they registered for the night at a local hotel, registered separately, and took adjoining rooms.

  Excited, stimulated by his and Lucy’s manipulation of Drake, nervous as a college boy with an illicit date, his exhaustion gone now, bathed and in shirt and trousers—since they had no luggage—Tom nerved himself to go to Lucy’s room. She solved his curious struggle by knocking at the door to his room. She carried a handful of magazines.

  “Just something to read if you can’t sleep.” She stood facing him, regarding him with fond interest.

  “You look very beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you—not for the truth but for saying it. I was very impressed with the way you handled that little swine.”

  “Come on, Lucy, not so harsh. I think he’s our little swine from here on in.”

  “And you really don’t give a damn about what happens to Barbara?”

  “Does that shock you?”

  “No. I’m not fond of your sister. To be truthful, I think she’s a sentimental ass. But I must say that my opinion of Drake doesn’t bear repeating. What an unctuous, dreadful little man he is! Do you really imagine that he’s destined for great things?”

  “If we help to destine him. That’s not really a word, is it, but it fits.”

  “Perfectly good word.”

  “He’ll be very obedient, and I don’t think he’ll bite the hand that feeds him. He’s very guilt-stricken about Barbara at this point, and I can’t convince him that I don’t actually give a damn. I’m not sure that I want to convince him.”

  Lucy sprawled on the bed. “Come over here, Thomas,” she said.

  “Oh?” He walked to the bed and stood looking down at her.

  “Has a woman ever made love to you?” she asked.

  “Lucy, I’m thirty-six years old.”

  “Ah, and you’ve made love to women. That, dear boy, is not what I am talking about. Has a woman ever made love to you?” She reached out and took his hand. “Don’t answer that. Take off those ridiculous trousers and lie down here beside me.”

  Suddenly, as he tried to undo his pants, his hands were shaking like those of an adolescent confronted with his first sexual opportunity. Lucy was smiling at him, her long, angular face almost pretty. She kicked off her shoes and slipped out of her dress and underthings. It was the first time Tom had ever seen her naked. She had a strong, muscular body, narrow hips, flat breasts. He was shivering with excitement. No woman had ever acted upon him like this before, excited him this way. He finished fumbling with his clothes, and now he was naked.

  “Lie here,” she said, moving over and making room for him. “Just lie down here and forget that anything in the world ever troubled you.” He stretched out next to her, and she began to caress him, touch him, stroke him, his body shivering under her hands. When he tried to respond on his own part, she whispered, “No, no, this is mine.”

  “Don’t you want the lights out?”

  “No. Better this way.”

  When he touched her, she pushed his hands back down on the bed. In his mind, he was her prisoner, her plaything, her pet, and the thought gave him a wild, erotic pleasure; and when finally she straddled him, her dark hair falling on his face, her small breasts hanging loose from her body, her lips parted in a kind of triumphant grin, he climaxed with a violence that shook his body and left him limp and mindless.

  Afterward, Lucy said to him, “I think we will be good for each other, Thomas, but I shall not play the jealous wife and you will not play the jealous husband. I think we make an interesting match.”

  Three days later, they were married in San Francisco at her father’s house. Since it was a second marriage for each of them, the wedding party was very small, restricted to members of both families—Alvin Sommers, the bride’s father, very old and withered, an aunt and uncle of the bride, Dan and Jean Lavette, and Barbara. It was understood that Joe, Tom’s half brother, would be left out of the festivities. In actual fact, he and Tom had never met each other. Alvin Sommers, who had taken over the presidency of the Seldon Bank after Jean’s resignation, was smugly delighted at the match, chuckling with geriatric glee that his family would once again control the swelling Seldon fortune. But aside from the old man’s financial joy, the little wedding party was curiously cold and subdued, kisses confined to small, polite pecks. It broke up early, Dan and Jean taking Barbara home with them for a drink and a few minutes of relaxation.

  Just the week before, Barbara had hired Anna Gomez, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Francis Gomez, the mechanic who had taken over Bernie’s garage. Anna would live in at the house on Green Street, do the housekeeping, and take care of Sam when Barbara had to be away. She was a pleasant, honest young woman, and Barbara liked and trusted her; now, as her recognition of Bernie’s death passed from grief into an accepted and permanent reality, Barbara realized that she must have more time, not only for her work but for the necessary business of living as a single woman.

  “We are a strange family indeed,” Barbara said to Jean. “What a loveless, cheerless occasion! I don’t think I could love Tom, but I do pity him, and mostly during his moments of exultation.”

  Dan brought them brandy, and they sat in front of the fire in the living room of the house on Russian Hill.

  “I would hardly call it a moment of exultation,” Jean said. “But I suppose it’s no worse than most marriages.”

  “The woman’s a barracuda,” Dan said. “Not that Tom doesn’t have piranha qualities of his own—”

  Barbara burst out laughing. “What a beautiful piscatorial equation! You will always be my own very dear fisherman, daddy.”

  “I’m afraid I agree with Bobby,” Jean said. “I feel sorry for Tom.”

  “He’ll hold his own. You haven’t heard about John Whittier?”

  “No. What about John?”

  “Tom dumped him. Came in with the voting rights to Al Sommers’ stock and threw John out on his ear. Old Grant Whittier must be turning over in his grave.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Jean asked.

  “Just what I said. John Whittier has been tossed out of Great Cal Shipping, which is now the GCS Corporation. Tom’s the new president.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Word gets around.”

  “But Tom was his protégé. John adored him.”

  “I don’t think John Whittier ever adored anyone but John Whittier,” Barbara said.

  “I know you disliked him, Bobby, but he was fond of Tom. It was his notion to combine the bank with his own company. Why on earth would Tom do it? John is old and sick.”

  “And Tom is impatient,” Dan said. “I wouldn’t weep for John Whittier. He still has his minority holdings and enough millions to live in luxury.”

  “Do you think it was Lucy’s idea?”

  “Possibly. She got him the voting rights. But don’t sell our boy short, Jeanie. He’s quite an operator on his own.”

  ***

  Playing with her son one day in Huntington Park, trying to get him to realize the potential in tossing a large, soft ball, catching it, and tossing it back, Barbara found herself giggling with delight in the simple joy of the game.

  It had happened. The wave of guilt that followed
soon passed. There is no sin in laughing, she told herself, feeling nevertheless that there was a deeper sin in being so joyously and completely alive. But it had happened, and she was not the type who could consciously plunge back into depression. What might have been her condition without the presence of Sam, she did not know, but just the thought of something happening to him filled her with terror. Sam represented the only sanity, the only reason, the only validity that remained in her world. She knew now that she would never have another child. She was approaching her thirty-fifth birthday, and even if her childbearing years could be extended, even if she could bring herself to face a second Caesarean section, she could not cope with the thought of a second marriage. Jean had tried, very gently, to open the subject, but Barbara refused to discuss it.

  In any case, come what might, she had her son, a year and a half and a month, weighing thirty pounds, walking with a tight hold on her finger as she pushed the stroller, which already he disdained. Life resumed itself, renewed itself. The sun rose each day; the cool wind blew from the Pacific; it was a cliché to say that life belonged to the living, but it was also an unadorned truth. The cable cars lumbered past, and Sam watched them with joy. When she took him out with no stroller, just the two of them on foot, and then, with him in one arm, swung onto a cable car, he was transported into the seventh heaven of delight. She thanked God that she was a large, strong woman; thirty pounds is no small weight. They would ride the cars from one end of the line to the other, Sam gurgling with pleasure as the car slid over the lip of a hill with the precipitous slope down to the bay in front of them; and then she would return home, content to turn him over to Anna while she went to her typewriter.

  She was writing again, and she felt a new depth, a new strength in what she wrote. Barbara was not unimaginative, but as a writer she felt incapable of dealing with things she had never experienced, and when she engaged in sheer invention, she felt that her writing became listless and meaningless. Though she found it difficult to believe that one day, sooner or later, she might be arrested and forced to stand trial for what still struck her as a bit of impossible lunacy, the thought was never entirely out of her mind, and she felt a tremendous need to finish her book before it happened—if indeed it was to happen.

  This book was a departure from what she had previously written. Her first two books dealt with her own experiences in Paris and Berlin before the war and then in North Africa and India and Burma during the war years. Her new novel was a deceptively simple love story about a returned soldier who married and settled down in San Francisco—certainly nothing to trouble her nervous publisher, who had begged her not to make it too political. It was a much harder writing task than either of her previous books, the more so since Bernie’s death had happened when she was halfway into it. For weeks afterward, she could not face the thought of writing; now she could work on it each day, and she had a feeling that it was good.

  Early in July, Barbara received a letter from Herb Goodman in Israel. He enclosed a snapshot of a grave, one of many graves that Barbara could see in the background, spaced in the neat, geometrical rows that define a military cemetery. Her eyes misted and her throat choked up as she looked at it, and for a long while she sat holding the photo, unable to read the letter.

  It was not long: “Dear Mrs. Cohen: I thought you would like to have this picture of Bernie’s grave. He is buried in a military cemetery on a hillside outside of Jerusalem. He lies with other men who fell in the struggle for a Jewish homeland, good, brave men. Next week, I am being married to a Sabra, which means that my wife-to-be was born here in Israel. We have decided that we will name our first child, no matter whether it’s a girl or a boy, Bernie, not only because I liked him but because he was one of the best. The second child will be named Irv after Irv Brodsky, who died with Bernie. I don’t know how much this will mean to you, but I thought you would like to know. I am enclosing, with the snapshot, a sort of map with exact directions on how to find the grave if you should ever come here and want to see it. Now that the war is over, care will be taken of the military cemeteries, and the grave will be kept in good condition. I don’t know what else to say except to wish you all the best. I can imagine your sorrow, because my girl’s brother was killed in the war, and almost everyone you meet lost someone. We just hope this will be the end of war.”

  Anna came into the room and saw Barbara holding the letter and crying. “Is it bad news, Señora?”

  Barbara shook her head. “Just a letter from a friend of my husband.”

  A few days later, Sally came to San Francisco to visit Barbara. She had left her baby with Lola Gonzales, the wife of Joe’s associate at the clinic. “I had to get away,” she said to Barbara. “I felt I was choking, drying up and dying. I’m a terrible person, Bobby. I have no patience and I’m a rotten housewife and I make poor Joe miserable, and he’s the most wonderful, decent kind of human being, and he deserved better than me. I’m miserable too. Can I stay here overnight? Then I’ll drive back in the morning.”

  “Aren’t you going to Higate to see your folks?”

  “No. I can’t bear to go there. They’re happy and content, and all they care about is that precious wine of theirs, and I can’t bear to be with Eloise because all she wants out of life is to be a service organization for my dumb brother, Adam—oh, Bobby, I’m miserable.”

  “All right,” Barbara said. “Of course you can stay overnight. Go up to the guest room and put your things away and then take a hot bath, which is the best medicine I know for most varieties of misery. Then we’ll have dinner together and we’ll talk, just the two of us.”

  At the dinner table, Barbara said, “Sally, why don’t you stop trying to explain that Joe is some kind of tin-horn saint and tell me what’s wrong. Joe is my brother, but I love you very much, believe me.”

  “Do you, Bobby, truly?”

  What a strange girl, Barbara thought. She has the most astonishing face of anyone I have ever known. One moment it’s a mask of utter tragedy, and the next moment it’s like the face of some divine clown, with that wide mouth and those incredible pale blue eyes and that long yellow hair. I do wish she wouldn’t wear her hair like that. But to cut it, she’d have to grow up. “Yes, I do,” she answered.

  “You know how madly, divinely in love with Joe I used to be—”

  “I don’t think you were.”

  “Bobby!”

  “You were in love, oh, yes. But with Joe, Sally? Or just in love?”

  “Bobby, I don’t know. I am bored, bored to tears. I do love my baby—most of the time. She’s darling. But who am I? What am I? That house we live in depresses me so. Joe comes home, and he’s too tired even to talk, and when we do talk, there’s nothing for us to talk about. When I read him my poetry, he pretends to listen but he doesn’t. He fell asleep once right in the middle. And he never does anything mean or cruel, and I know he’s giving his whole life to the clinic, because if he were in private practice he could make all the money in the world. They say he’s one of the best surgeons in Los Angeles, and there are surgeons who don’t have half his skill, and they make a hundred thousand a year and live in those big, posh homes in Beverly Hills—”

  “Is that what you want, Sally, the money and a big house in Beverly Hills?”

  “Oh, you know I don’t, Bobby. Yes, enough money to hire someone to take care of May Ling and to have a decent car instead of the old wreck I’m driving. That’s why I wrote the screenplay.”

  “Did you, a screenplay?”

  “Being a poet is like a public service. I was so excited when they published my book of poems. My royalties amounted to exactly eighty-six dollars, and when I sell a poem to a newspaper or magazine, it’s ten or fifteen dollars, so that’s no way to get rich, is it? And I see all those dreadful movies and I’m sure I can do better. So I wrote this and I brought it with me. Would you read it, Bobby? It will only take you an hour or so.”


  “I’ll read it, yes, I’d love to,” Barbara agreed.

  “And then, you know, I remember years ago Joe telling me how your father built a yacht for a director who was very important in Hollywood?”

  “Yes, his name was Alex Hargasey. As a matter of fact, I saw a picture of his about four months ago. It was called Fretful Desire, or was it?”

  “That’s the man. Now if Dan could call him up and make an appointment for me to see him with my screenplay…?”

  “I’m sure daddy would,” Barbara said. “I’ll read it later.”

  Barbara was not impressed with the screenplay. She felt that it was mawkish and sentimental, with very little dramatic impact. But as she said to Sally, “I simply don’t know about such things. Truthfully, it’s the first screenplay I’ve ever read, and I have no idea what the limitations and the standards are.”

  “But did you like it? You, just as a reader?”

  Barbara could remember how once, long ago, when she had been living with Dan and May Ling in Westwood and attempting to write her first book, she had given some pages to May Ling to read, and how May Ling had been truthful and merciless. The pages were torn up, and after a brief spell of fury at May Ling, Barbara had begun the book again and more rewardingly. Yet she could not do that with Sally. It was not only that she was unable to judge a screenplay in any professional sense, it was also quite evident that Sally was disturbed.

  “I liked it,” Barbara lied unhappily.

  “Oh, did you? I’m so glad, Bobby. And you will ask Dan to speak to Mr. Hargasey?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  Sally leaped up, ran over to Barbara, and kissed her. “Oh, I do love you. Bobby, what about Billy Clawson?”

  The question was totally unexpected. “What about him?”

  “I think he’s in love with me.”

  This time Barbara was capable of no response. She sat and stared until Sally said uneasily, “You did hear me. I said I think Billy Clawson’s in love with me.”