Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  Sam Goldberg sat at the dining room table with her, watching admiringly as she consumed roast chicken and mashed potatoes and string beans. “I’m eating your dinner,” she protested at one point.

  “Enough for both of us, dear. And for me to have company at dinner is a very special treat.” He was less admiring and more dubious as he listened to her story of what had happened that day. She choked up as she told him of Dominick Salone’s death.

  “All right, Barbara. A man died, tragically, wastefully. It’s your first encounter. You’re part of the living. You accept it. Death goes with life. Sooner or later, you face that.”

  “But he was so young, so alive, so cocky. I never met anyone like him before. He had no education to speak of, but he knew so much.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “No. But that only makes it worse, because he was in love with me and I didn’t care about him at all, not that way. And don’t you see, it’s my fault?”

  “No, I don’t see that at all. How could it possibly be your fault? You did what you could. God knows, you did more than anyone else I know.”

  “I sit here stuffing myself with food, and Nick is dead somewhere in some hospital, and Jean’s my mother, and Jean’s married to John Whittier.”

  “And John Whittier’s a monster?”

  “Yes!” she snapped.

  “But suppose Whittier were a shipowner you loved instead of a shipowner you dislike intensely. As I told you, your father was also a shipowner once.”

  “Daddy would never have done this!”

  “I don’t know.” Goldberg sighed. “You know, Barbara, I saw some of it. I was on Rincon Hill at eleven o’clock, watching. That’s when they were fighting on Harrison Street. I wasn’t alone there on Rincon Hill. There were a thousand others, and we just stood there and watched, the way they watched the gladiators in the old days. All over the place, thousands of people watched, and they saw men clubbed and shot, the way I did, and none of us lifted a hand. You did something. You cared for people who were injured and bleeding. Now I am going to be presumptuous and didactic, so forgive me, but I must tell you something about guilt. Guilt is shared, because we belong to the human race. It is convenient to have villains like John Whittier, because it absolves the rest of us, but there’s no absolution from what happens, and until we learn that, we just blunder about in the dark. Now enough of this, and certainly you have been through enough today. The question now is, where do you go from here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The place was swarming with newspaper men. Did any of them get your name? Or photograph?”

  “Not my name. Maybe my picture. I just don’t know.”

  “Will you go home?”

  “To Whittier’s place?”

  “It’s your home.”

  “No,” Barbara said quietly. “I’ll never go back there. I’ll never set foot in that house again.”

  “Well, ‘never’ is an uneasy word. Have you seen Dan yet?”

  “I was in Los Angeles yesterday. I could go back there, but I don’t want to. Not now.”

  “‘Never,’ Barbara, leaves your mother in a very difficult position. Would you like to stay here for a while? I have a comfortable guest room, and you’re welcome to stay.”

  “For a few days? Could I?”

  “Yes. Of course. Will you go back to the soup kitchen?”

  “I don’t know. I feel that I should, but I don’t know whether I can. It’s as if I did something, and now it’s finished.”

  “The strike isn’t finished. It’s only begun.”

  “I know that. But I don’t think I can go back there. It’s not that I’m afraid. I was, but I got over that, and it’s not that I don’t feel for them. It’s as if something inside of me is broken, and I have to put it together again. I know that makes no sense—”

  “Perhaps it does. Now, will you let me call Whittier? Is your mother home yet?”

  “No, she’s still in Boston—I think. I don’t want you to call John.”

  “Barbara, someone has to know where you are. You can’t disappear. They may have already reported you missing—”

  “No. I spoke to the butler. I told him Mother must not be alarmed.”

  “But she will be. And you need clothes. I must call him. Tomorrow, I can send my secretary over to pick up some things for you to wear. Now, you must let me call him.”

  “You will anyway, won’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I must, Barbara. I’m your father’s friend, and I am also an attorney.”

  ***

  The following day, John Whittier telephoned Jean in Boston. The conversation was unsatisfactory to both parties. Since the Boston newspapers—like the newspapers all over the country—carried accounts of what had happened in San Francisco on what was already known nationally as “Bloody Thursday,” she knew more or less what had taken place. She received the news that a picture on page two of the Examiner had depicted her daughter in the midst of a group of injured strikers in the act of rendering first aid to one of them without comment, and when her husband angrily pressed the point, she said, “It appears to me, John, that what she did may have been foolish and romantic, but hardly earthshaking. I’ll talk to her when I return.”

  “When you return? I want you to start back here now, today.”

  “That’s out of the question. I can’t leave Boston today. We have things planned—”

  “Jean, you don’t hear one damn word I’m saying. This city is in a state of civil war. We’re expecting a general strike, and that bastard Bridges and his commie pals are ready to take over. And I’m in the center of it. I’m already late for a meeting with Mayor Rossi and Governor Merriam. Can’t I get through to you what’s happening? There are troops on the Embarcadero, and God only knows when Bridges will decide to move against the ships. I have no time to track down your daughter and discipline her.”

  “What do you mean, track her down? Isn’t she at home?”

  “She is not. She’s apparently decided to stay with a Jew lawyer called Goldberg. I spoke to him this morning, and he sent his secretary over here for her clothes.”

  “You mean Sam Goldberg?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “All right. I suggest you forget about Barbara for the time being. You have sufficient troubles of your own. Tom and I will be back in San Francisco within a week.”

  “And I suggest you leave immediately. I may be able to handle this strike, but your children are more than I can cope with.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “John, this discussion is pointless. We will be home within the week. Meanwhile, try to relax and get some perspective. I don’t think there is civil war in San Francisco. This will all be settled in due time.”

  ***

  On Sunday, two days later, Dan Lavette took the bus from Los Angeles to San Mateo. Long ago, some thirty-six years chronologically but reckoned as an eternity in California, where the land and the people still retain a sense of newness and incompleteness, a man named Anthony Cassala had lent Joseph Lavette, Dan’s father, the money to buy a fishing boat. At that time, Anthony Cassala was a laborer who lent small sums of carefully hoarded money to the Italian workingmen. After the earthquake, during the few days when the city’s banks were entirely inoperative, Cassala’s tiny hoard of money became immensely valuable, and a few years later he obtained a license to establish the Bank of Sonoma. Together with his son, Stephan, he nurtured the bank, moved it onto Montgomery Street, and it might well have become an institution comparable to the Bank of Italy, later the Bank of America. But circumstances intervened, and after the crash of 1929, a run started that left the Cassala enterprise crippled and eventually bankrupt. Anthony Cassala died the following year, and Stephan went to work at Wells Fargo.

 
In their days of prosperity, the Cassalas had built a large, rambling house in San Mateo, on the Peninsula, south of San Francisco. There Cassala’s widow, Maria, his son, his son’s wife, Joanna, and their one child, a boy of seven named Ralph, still lived. After Dan Lavette’s father and mother died in the earthquake of 1906, the Cassalas became a sort of surrogate family to him. Anthony Cassala financed his early ventures into the shipping business, and when the run on Cassala’s bank took place, Dan and his partner, Mark Levy, depleted themselves of every dollar of cash they could lay their hands on in an effort to halt it. Four years had passed since Dan had seen Stephan Cassala, but he did not think that time would change anything that had existed between them. There were too many ties, too many threads that bound their lives together.

  “Still,” May Ling had said to him, “you must be careful what you ask. It lays a burden on them.”

  “I don’t know that I’m going to ask for anything. I just want to see Steve and talk to him.”

  Then he had telephoned Stephan Cassala and asked if he might stop by and spend a few hours with him. Stephan had persuaded him to come on Sunday and stay overnight. The Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times dealt in great detail with the events of “Bloody Thursday,” and on page four of the main section, they reprinted the photograph of Barbara. Riding north on the bus, Dan read the story:

  A curious sidelight to the events of “Bloody Thursday” still remains unexplained. The car in the above picture is registered to one Barbara Lavette, and the owner is listed as residing in a house on Pacific Heights in San Francisco. The address in Pacific Heights is the same as that of John Whittier, a prominent member of San Francisco society and the president of California Shipping, the largest operator of oceangoing vessels on the West Coast. According to a number of people who are friends or acquaintances of Miss Lavette, the woman in the photograph is Miss Lavette.

  Barbara Lavette, twenty years old, is the daughter of Daniel Lavette, one-time partner in the firm of Levy and Lavette, and Jean Seldon Lavette, daughter of Thomas Seldon, and for some years after her father’s death, president of the Seldon Bank. The Lavettes were divorced in 1931, after which Jean Lavette married John Whittier. The car in the photograph was parked on Second Street in San Francisco, and allegedly served as a first aid station and supply depot for the strikers. Miss Lavette could not be reached for comment.

  Stephan met Dan at the bus station in San Mateo and embraced him. The four years had not wrought any great change in Cassala. Thirty-nine years old now, tall, slender, with dark moist eyes, his skin still had the pallid, yellowish tinge it had taken on after his stomach was cut to pieces by shrapnel in World War I. The same overwhelming almost unendurable warmth and emotion greeted Dan when they reached the Cassala home. Maria, Anthony’s widow, fat, shapeless, permanently encased in the black of mourning, wept over Dan and babbled away in Italian. Joanna stared and smiled at him, and then, at the table, Maria ushered in an unending river of food, pressing him to eat and eat, and still eat more.

  It was almost eleven o’clock before Stephan and Dan were able to sit down alone, in Anthony’s old study, and talk about what had brought him there. Stephan poured brandy. A wood fire burned in the grate.

  “Like old times,” Stephen said. “God, it’s good to see you again, Danny. I know you been through a lot, but I swear you look ten years younger than the last time I saw you. Hard, too—no more paunch.”

  “Living right, and a good wife. How about you?”

  “Day to day. I manage one of the branches for Crocker, but you know what banks pay. It’s all right. Pop had insurance, and we keep this big barn of a place going. When I’ll get a chance to pay you back what you dumped into the run—well, I just don’t know—”

  “Forget it.”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Danny. But I just don’t know how. I haven’t the heart for the game anymore. You have to want it.”

  “I know.” He tasted the brandy. “This is good.”

  “Still the old stuff, from during Prohibition. Montavitti used to make it on his place in San Martin. Pop bought twenty gallons.”

  “How’s it going with Joanna?”

  “What should I say, Danny? I live with damn guilts. I’m a lousy husband. You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking that if I could find a way to pay the bills, I’d enter the priesthood.”

  “Hell, no. God damn it, Steve, we’re alive, both of us.”

  “In a world I can’t make head or tail of. You know what happened in San Francisco. How? Why? Are we all going crazy? In Italy, that stupid bastard Mussolini. In Germany, Hitler. In Russia, Stalin. What’s happening to the world?”

  “Like always. Give it a chance, and the shit floats to the top.”

  “And what about Barbara? You read the papers.”

  Dan smiled. “I know what I read, that’s all. She’s quite a lady, Steve. A lot like Jean in some ways, but maybe with a little of me. I thought I’d drive up to San Francisco tomorrow—you do drive, don’t you?”

  “I leave at seven. Sure, come with me. But what about you, Danny? What brings you up here?”

  “Money.”

  “God, I wish I had it to give to you. I got a few thousand. If it will help—”

  “No. I don’t want any money from you, Steve. Some leads, some advice. You know I’ve been fishing—on Pete Lomas’ mackerel boat out of San Pedro. You remember Pete. He used to be my boatmaster before I teamed up with Mark. Well, in a good week, a damn good week, I bring home forty dollars. Mostly less. May Ling works in the library—thirty dollars a week. We make out, but not much more. Now Joe wants college and medical school. He’s a good boy and a smart boy. May Ling’s mother and father live with us, so it’s tight. Well, I’ve been looking around. Christ, I can’t go on fishing forever. There are a couple of things I know, and one of them is boats. With this rotten Depression on, there hasn’t been a boat built down there in years. And they’re going to need them, because the market for fish only grows. Well, there it is. I thought I’d set up a small boatyard. I might just pull it off.”

  “Wooden boats?”

  “To start, yes. Plenty of shipwrights pleading for work, and wood is cheap. I can rent space for peanuts. And one business that isn’t suffering in this Depression is films. The film people have money and they buy boats. The way I calculate, Steve, I can put together a beautiful little yawl for five hundred dollars—and undersell anything good on the market.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “About ten thousand to start. With less than that I’d be scrounging, and it would be pointless. Do you suppose Crocker would let me have it?”

  “With what collateral, Dan?”

  “We have the house—that’s all.”

  Stephan shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t want that. There’s got to be another way. Why don’t you see Sam Goldberg tomorrow. He still pulls a lot of weight around town. And he’s got money.”

  “I’m not going to trade on Sam’s friendship.”

  “Talk to him. Please. As a favor to me. We can always go to the banks.”

  ***

  On the morning of the next day, Barbara awakened early and dressed herself in a plain navy blue skirt, a white blouse, and a black cardigan. Goldberg’s secretary had succeeded in retrieving a suitcase of sweaters, skirts, shirts, and underthings from the house on Pacific Heights. Now Barbara slipped out of the house quietly, without awakening Goldberg. She left her car parked where it had been and set out on foot for the International Longshoreman’s Association’s headquarters on Steuart Street. She had no desire to attract additional newspaper stories with her license plates, and anyway, it was a clear, cool, lovely morning. The blanket of fog on the bay was breaking up into rivers of creamy, golden mist, and as Barbara walked down California Street toward the Embarcadero, she felt so totally alive that she had to fix her mind willfully on the misery of the occa
sion. Yet that did little good, and she thought to herself that there was some deep flaw in her personality. If I had a shred of human sensibility, she reflected, I would be utterly downcast, and instead I am behaving like a perfect pig and feeling like a person going to a picnic. The thought worried her, and she sought in her mind for the source of this streak of what she could only consider as a basic lack of humanity; she finally decided that it was because she had slept well the night before, and because of the weather, which was beautiful indeed.

  By now, the streets were filling up with men and women on their way to work, the clanging cable cars stuffed with more crowded, clinging people than seemed possible, considering how tiny the cars were, the sidewalks bustling with properly dressed men, carrying their briefcases, as much the mark of this place as the umbrella was the mark of London’s City. The stream of commuters pouring out of the Ferry Building was no different than on any other day. It shocked and startled Barbara; she was only beginning to realize how easily life and death go together.

  Once on Steuart Street, it was a different matter. Here, the funeral procession would assemble. A delegation of longshoremen had visited Chief of Police Quinn on Saturday and had stated in no uncertain terms that whether he agreed or not, the funeral of the two men killed on “Bloody Thursday” would proceed along Market Street and not on some quiet side street. He agreed. Now, as she turned the corner into Steuart, Barbara became part of another San Francisco. Men, women, and children, not in their work clothes but dressed in their best, the men in old, ill-fitting suits, wearing black ties, black armbands, black hats, the women in black too, their faces grim and tired, a look that even the children shared—here they were coming by the thousands, all of Steuart Street in a slow movement that converged on the union hall. As she became a part of them, Barbara’s mood changed, as if the anger and grief and hopelessness these people felt was a palpable substance that penetrated to the core of her being.

  The movement slowed and stopped, and the thousands of men and women and children who packed the street stood there motionless. Slowly, the people making way for them, four flatbed trucks moved into the street and lined up in front of the union hall. An odd assortment of musicians, violins as well as horns, and two bass drummers took their place behind the trucks, and now people came out of the union hall, carrying wreaths and baskets of flowers and hundreds of bouquets, all of which they piled onto the trucks. Many of the women and children had brought flowers, most of them home-grown, roses and zinnias and marigolds picked out of gardens, which they put on the trucks, and Barbara wondered with a sudden pang why she had not thought to bring flowers. But she had not imagined that it could be anything like this. The people were still coming along the Embarcadero, and down Mission Street and Harrison Street and Bryant Street, waiting for the crush in Steuart Street to ease so that they might join the procession.