Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “Heavens, no. I bought it in San Francisco.”

  “Well, so much for clothes. I know this: you are kind, gentle, sure of yourself, intelligent and—all right, I say it. I think you are one of the most attractive women I have ever seen. So I have sinned. And your French is excellent, so you have lived here for some time.”

  “I wish that were true.” Barbara sighed. “I had four years of French at secondary school, two years at college. Six years. So I would be a perfect donkey if I couldn’t get along with it. I’ve been here for almost three years.”

  “With your family?”

  “No, alone. I came first to study at the Sorbonne, which is the rationalization of so many Americans who come here, but I just don’t have the character of a student. I stuck it out for a year and a half. I was almost ready to give up and go home when I ran into a piece of luck. I met Frank Bradley, who is editor of Manhattan Magazine. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, of course. My English isn’t good enough for me to enjoy reading it, but I love the cartoons.”

  “So do I. Well, you know it’s a weekly, and every other week they publish a ‘Letter from Paris,’ a sort of grab bag—some politics, fashion, the arts and letters, and whatever gossip might strike a chord back in the states. Well, Bradley and I got to talking, and then I showed him some pieces I had written. He liked them, and he let me try the ‘Letter from Paris.’ They liked what I did, and I got the job—I guess for want of anyone else at the moment—and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

  “Then we’re both writers. Do you see how sound my instinct is?”

  She nodded, smiling, and he ordered another round of beer.

  ***

  Ten years after the turn of the century, the leading citizens of Los Angeles, already suffering from a sense of inferiority imposed by San Francisco, which was arising like a phoenix out of its ashes, realized that they needed a harbor. History had bequeathed them a city twenty miles from the sea, and they felt that as an inland city in a semidesert, their future was far from bright. Long, long ago, ancient Athens had faced the same problem, and the Athenians, a vigorous and intelligent people, decided to build a pair of walls, each four miles long, to connect their city with Piraeus, their seaport. On the Pacific coast, in the vicinity of Los Angeles, there was unfortunately no harbor worthy of the name, but there was an ocean, and, never daunted, Los Angeles incorporated into itself a strip of land a mile wide and sixteen miles long, stretching from the westernmost edge of the city to two coastal fishing villages, San Pedro and Wilmington, two sleepy villages that fronted on a great mud flat called Terminal Island. The citizens of San Pedro and Wilmington, facing sudden absorption, were of mixed feelings, but the city of Los Angeles undertook a public relations campaign calculated to convince these people that their destiny and future were much brighter within Los Angeles than outside of it. In August of 1909, elections were held in San Pedro and in Wilmington, and when the results had been counted, Los Angeles was at long last a seaport. Eventually a stone breakwater, miles long, threw a great circle around San Pedro, Wilmington, and the neighboring port of Long Beach, providing Los Angeles not only with a seaport but with a large, safe harbor.

  Within this enormous breakwater were enclosed the mud flats of Terminal Island, which was transformed into a busy hive of shipbuilding during the years of World War I and in the early 1920s, employing literally thousands of men. With the onset of the Depression, the shipyards of Terminal Island closed down, succumbing one by one to the economic malaise that gripped America, until only a hardy handful were left to try to survive and dream of better times.

  One of the companies that failed to survive and ended up in the hands of the local banks was Occidental Marine, a medium-size shipbuilder that had specialized in the construction of wooden minesweepers during the war. It had twenty acres of land, shops, cradles, groundways—even a small drydock that had fallen into disuse and disrepair. The whole enterprise was offered to Dan Lavette for a hundred thousand dollars, but, hoarding his tiny store of capital, he delayed, bargained, and finally took over the place for a total price of sixty-five thousand dollars, the bank taking back a mortgage of sixty thousand dollars at four percent interest, and considering itself fortunate in the deal. Dan was less fortunate in his plan to make enough money to send Joe through medical school. During the next three years, he built seven boats, only managing to keep his head above water, to pay his bills, and to meet the payroll for the five men he had hired—and to make them understand the situation when he had to lay them off. The first boat was ordered by Pete Lomas, whose converted minesweeper-turned-mackerel boat was beginning to come apart at the seams. There were two other fishing boats, one of which saw its owner go out of business. The remaining four vessels were small sailing craft, pleasure boats. The bank, which dreaded the possibility of another bankruptcy and the possession of worthless property, forgave him a year of interest payment, and somehow or other Dan forced his enterprise to survive.

  One day in the early spring of 1937, Pete Lomas walked into Dan’s office on Terminal Island and offered him a pure Havana cigar. The office, where Dan was the only occupant—the little bookkeeping he required was done by Feng Wo at home—consisted of six rooms in the main shop building, all but one deserted. The room that Dan occupied had a desk, a swivel chair, a row of empty filing cabinets, and a splendid walnut architect’s chest, whose many shallow drawers were filled with old Occidental blueprints of boats Dan would never build. There was also a table and five captain’s chairs, obviously for meetings to discuss the plans.

  Pete Lomas dropped into one of the chairs while Dan examined the cigar and admired it.

  “Courtesy of Alex Hargasey.”

  “Thank him. Who the hell is he?”

  “Oh, nobody. Nobody. Only the most important director in Hollywood.”

  “Yeah. And that’s why you’re sitting here in white ducks and a white shirt and that silly captain’s hat of yours instead of being out fishing.”

  “Exactly.”

  Dan bit off the end of the cigar, and Lomas leaned over to light it for him.

  “Go on,” Dan said.

  “You be nice to me, Danny,” Lomas said. “You be very goddamn nice to me because I am going to blow your ass sky high. You want to know why I’m not out fishing? Because Paramount Pictures—you heard me, Paramount Pictures—is paying me fifty dollars a day, seven days a week, and all expenses and the crew’s wages for the use of my boat. They’re making a film about a fisherman, and they’re using my boat. Only today they’re not shooting on location, which is my boat, so I’m a gentleman of leisure. You got anything to say about that?”

  “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. But it doesn’t blow my ass sky high.”

  “Be patient.” He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and extracted a folded check. “Five hundred.” He handed it to Dan. “Last payment on my boat. Took two years, but it’s done.”

  “It helps. Believe me, it helps.”

  “Now, listen to me, Danny. This Hargasey, he’s a Hungarian, very emotional, blows up, yells, screams, but he’s a nice guy. Since they start this film, he becomes absolutely crazy over the sea. He says it’s because there’s no ocean anywhere near Hungary. Well, he wants a yacht. He’s got this girl, Lorna Belle—you heard of her?”

  “I heard of her.”

  “She’s the star in the film, and I guess they’re shacked up, not married or anything, but that ain’t too important with them, it seems. Well, she’s just as nuts as he is on this business of a yacht. Hargasey is in love with my boat, and when I tell him that you built it, nothing else but you got to build him a yacht.”

  “What?”

  “Hold on, Danny. Not just a yacht. He wants a hundred-foot Diesel with eight bedroom suites.”

  “Is he crazy?”

  “Have I blown your ass sky high or not?”

  “Pe
te,” Dan said, “You can pick up yachts all up and down this coast—and for a damn sight less than it costs to build one. You know that. He must know it. And who has enough money for a hundred-foot Diesel? It could run to a quarter of a million—more.”

  “Danny, they got nothing but money. There’s no Depression in the movies. Anyway, he wants to meet you, and I said I’d arrange it. One deal like this could turn this white elephant of yours into a paying proposition. You phone him at Paramount Pictures and arrange to meet him. And bring some stuff with you—plans, blueprints, photographs.”

  “I can do that,” Dan agreed. “I got a beautiful set of Sparkman and Stephens blueprints and drawings that I inherited with the place. But, God damn it, how much does a movie director earn?”

  “The hell with that! Go out there and sell him the job. Let him worry about paying for it.”

  Three days later, Dan drove his 1930 Ford from Westwood to Hollywood, turned off Melrose Avenue into Marathon Street, and faced the imposing gates of the Paramount studio. The guard at the gate regarded his car dubiously, checked his name, then passed him through and directed him where to park and how to find Alex Hargasey. It was the first time he had ever been inside a film studio, and after he had parked his car, he walked past the huge sound stages and the bungalow-like office buildings and dressing rooms with the gawking curiosity of any tourist, thinking that this was certainly an intriguing, childlike world, the great factories of make-believe drenched in the morning sun, men and women hurrying past in the colorful costumes of cowboys and Indians, and maidens and knights of the Middle Ages. He found the half-timbered building that housed Hargasey’s office, fake English between fake modern and fake Spanish, and was directed upstairs to a suite of offices. There he sat for fifteen minutes, leafing through a copy of the Hollywood Reporter, an object of interest to the peroxide-blond receptionist who sat behind her desk and studied him unabashedly.

  Finally Hargasey emerged, an enormous, fat, bald man with a bulletlike head, his stomach pressed tightly behind a broad leather belt that encircled whipcord riding breeches. “Ah, boatbuilder!” he boomed. “You are this Lavette. I am Hargasey. Come on in.” He studied Dan as they entered his office: a white rug that Dan felt was enveloping him like quicksand, white overstuffed chairs, a great black desk. “Son of bitch!” Hargasey exclaimed. “You are damn sight more photogenic than stupid star I got to work with. Maybe I forget about boat and I make you star? What do you say, Lavette? No. Joke. I got idiot sense of humor. Sit down. I got half-hour to tell you what I want. Then you make it for me.”

  That night at dinner in the cottage in Westwood, May Ling, her son, her mother and father, listened fascinated as Dan described his experience at the studio. “It makes no sense,” he said. “The country’s going down the drain, starving, dying, and this man tells me to spare no expense. Mahogany woodwork, silver-plated fixtures, teak decks. I told him it might run to three hundred thousand. He just grinned at me and said, ‘Good, good.’”

  “Then you’ll build it,” May Ling said calmly, “if you can.”

  “I can build it. I can build anything he wants.”

  Watching his father thoughtfully, Joe finally said, “You don’t want to build it, do you, Pop?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “I know,” May Ling agreed. “But what difference does it make, Danny? It means work for a lot of men. If you don’t build it, someone else will.”

  “If I don’t build it,” Dan said, “then I close down. It’s the end of the road. So I guess I’ll build it.”

  ***

  When Marcel Duboise came into Barbara’s apartment on the Quai de Passy for the first time, he looked slowly around him and then shook his head and sighed hopelessly. “You lied to me,” he told her. “You said you were a journalist. No journalist lives like this. No journalist lives on the Quai de Passy.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He prowled through the place. “Bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, shower, tub, bidet—you’re an heiress.”

  “All right. Then you’ve found me out. I am. You thought I was a plain fleur de Vasphalt, since you did pick me up, and here I am an heiress.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Still, he kept turning and staring. “A place like this—at least a thousand francs a month.”

  “Eight hundred.” She smiled at him. “Do you like it? I adore it myself. It’s my first real home, can you imagine? And you never have to meet the man who pays the rent. He comes only one evening a week—”

  “Don’t talk like that!” he snapped at her. “I’ve known you for two weeks and you’ve never talked like that before. I don’t like it.”

  “There you are, my dear Marcel. Every Frenchman is a moralist. They pretend otherwise. Oh, stop being so pompous and sit down.” He sank into the chair, fingering the upholstery. In her mind, Barbara could see him calculating the price. It irritated her. So much that was French irritated her, and yet so much enchanted her. “I’m an heiress,” she said deliberately. “I should have told you that at the beginning, but at the beginning I was sure I’d never see you again, and anyway, it’s a cliche for an American girl in Paris to be an heiress. I’m very rich—oh, not at this moment. Don’t be alarmed. I don’t come into the money for another three years, and anyway, how do you think I feel about it with my country in the middle of this rotten Depression?”

  He just sat there and stared at her. Then he asked, “Why did you never let me take you home before?”

  “Oh, you ass!” she exclaimed. “You think I’m a putain. You do, don’t you? A classy whore. You don’t believe a word I said.”

  “Should I? After all the lies?”

  “What lies? I told you I’m a correspondent. I am!” She walked over to a pile of magazines, picked up a handful, and flung them at him. “Read it, if you can read English. That’s the work I do, and I’m damn proud of it.” She stared at him, shaking her head. “Oh, what’s the use! You’d better go.”

  “No!”

  “Then stay there and let your thoughts rot in that stupid bourgeois mind of yours.”

  “So I’m bourgeois? Me?” he cried indignantly.

  “Yes. And now, excuse me.” She went into the bathroom, washed her face with cold water, stared at the angry face in the mirror, and then began to laugh. Her lips were still twitching with a smile she fought to control as she returned to the sitting room. Marcel stood facing her.

  “I love you,” he said desperately.

  She burst out laughing.

  “And you laugh at me, you heartless bitch!”

  “Who do you love, Marcel, the putain or the heiress?”

  “Stop that!” He grabbed her, started to shake her, and then embraced her. She stopped laughing. She met his lips and closed her eyes and felt the tears start. Then she pulled back and stared into his dark eyes.

  “Why are you crying?” he whispered. “Did I hurt you?”

  “You’re such a strange Frenchman. I’ve seen you eight times and you never made a pass. I could have been your sister. Oh, I know you were being careful. And now, when you decide that I am a kept woman—”

  “No!”

  “That’s not why I’m crying. Don’t you see? I love you so much.”

  In a way, she told herself, she had never been made love to before—remembering the clumsy pawing on college dates, remembering the argumentation and pleading of those who did it vocally, remembering what was almost a knock-down, drag-out fight on a Princeton football weekend, remembering and then remembering nothing, only lying naked and alive with a man whose hands and lips worshipped her body, and who told her over and over again, in a language so well made for it, how very beautiful she was.

  “Marcel,” she said.

  “Yes, my love?”

  “When it happens, don’t be alarmed.”

  “Alarmed? My God, alarmed
?”

  “Oh, I hate to have to tell you this, but I’m a virgin.”

  He raised himself from where he lay beside her, stared at her, reached out, and touched her cheek. “Oh, no.”

  “God’s truth,” she said in English.

  “You’re twenty-three years old. You’ve been in Paris almost three years.”

  “I know. I don’t know what else to say. I’m so ashamed.” She was giggling.

  “Darling, lovely Barbara,” he begged her. “Don’t laugh. You cannot make love and laugh at the same time.”

  Later, hours later, lying side by side, smoking, watching the tendrils of smoke drift and twist, too languorously surfeited even to dress, Marcel said, “Being an heiress makes it difficult. It would have been easier the other way.”

  “What other way?”

  “A kept woman. We could have worked that out. But an heiress—I don’t have two francs. What I earn, I spend.”

  “Then we’ll both be poor.”

  “And what about the fortune?”

  “I’ll probably give it away,” Barbara said indifferently.

  ***

  Late at night, on the twenty-seventh of May, 1937, Thomas Lavette knocked at the door of his mother’s room. There was no response, and he opened the door gently. Jean sat at her dressing table, and as he opened the door, she turned to face him.

  “It’s me, Mother. Is it all right?”

  She picked up a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

  “You’ve been crying?” He had never seen his mother in tears before.

  “Not really. Tears, but not really crying, Tom. Just a long day and too much emotion.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Please.”

  “It’s past midnight.”

  “Come in, come in.”

  “John’s asleep?”

  Jean nodded. She pointed to a chair and then dropped into a chaise longue. “Sit there, Tommy. Let me look at you. I haven’t seen you for days.”