Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “You’re a little tight, Bernie. So am I. Let’s go out and eat.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “If you have a dinner date?”

  “Date?” He began to laugh. “Funny thing is, I was going to tell you that. Hell, look at me. I haven’t had a bath in two weeks. I just can’t imagine what I smell like. I came out of Spain without a dime. When I got to Ceret in France, I sold my rifle and a German Lüger to a Rumanian who had an arrangement with the border guards, a small-time munitions dealer. He gave me two hundred francs. I have four francs left. That won’t buy us dinner.”

  “Then let me buy you dinner.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, great! I just love men who are proud. The whole world is bleeding and ready to die from the pride and stupidity of men, and now you’re too proud to let me buy us dinner.”

  “Hey, don’t get angry at me!”

  “Why not?” Barbara demanded. “You won’t accept repayment. You’re too proud for that. You saved the life of a man I loved more than anything on earth, but I can’t buy you dinner.”

  “All right. O.K. I’m half-starved. If you’re not ashamed to be seen with me, buy me dinner. But I warn you—I eat a lot.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” she said.

  They went to Allard’s; it was the first time she had been there since Marcel died, her first evening out with a man. It seemed incredible to her that she could have been alone so long. Her mourning had been like a death of her own. Her American friends had left Paris. There had been days and weeks when she had sat in her apartment, did nothing and saw no one. Then one day she left her apartment and walked for hours in the rain, “As if the rain had never stopped after that day in Toulouse,” she told Bernie Cohen. “And then the rain stopped and the sun came out. Suddenly, it was all right for me to be alive. As if I had paid a debt. Do you understand?”

  “I know the feeling, after they die,” he agreed. “I felt that way. Like I’m the murderer, not the fascists.”

  “I’m all right now. I’ll never let go of Marcel, but I’m all right now.”

  “I know.”

  “Good. Dessert?”

  “Sure. Why not. I’ve eaten like a pig. I might as well finish like a pig.”

  “You’re a big man. You need food. You remind me of my father.”

  “I don’t want to remind you of your father.”

  “O.K. You remind me of Jake Levy. How does that sit with you?”

  “Better. I like him. It’s a damn small world, isn’t it? Here we are, you and me, and we got a link that goes way back. I used to hear a lot about your father. Everyone in San Francisco knew about him. There was a kid in the Battalion from Palo Alto, and it turns out that his father worked on one of Dan Lavette’s ships during the World War, he was a mate or something. So who knows, maybe there are only a hundred people in the world and they’re all connected.”

  “And what about you?” Barbara asked. “Where are you connected? Where are your mother and father and sisters and brothers?”

  “I draw a blank. I grew up in the Hebrew orphanage—no mother, no father, nothing. Old Rabbi Blum sort of adopted me, and I did odd jobs for him, and then after I got out of high school, I worked for the Levys for two years, and then I got into school at Berkeley, where I majored in agriculture. I worked all over the place—Sonoma, Napa, Fresno—a strong back and not too much brains to bother me. I’m a kind of crackpot Jew, and ever since I was a kid I had one goal, to settle in Palestine.

  “There were two things I had to learn about, agriculture and guns. I got the first in California, and I joined the Lincoln Brigade for the second. At first, they wouldn’t have me. They claimed I had no ideological commitment. I had none to communism, but I hated the Nazis with the best of them. I got on a ship to France as a deck hand, and then I got to Spain and joined up with the 58th Battalion there. Their casualties were heavy, so they didn’t bother about commitment. Well, I lived through it, and I learned what I had to learn.”

  Barbara shook her head. “I don’t understand that. You’re warm and kind and gentle, and you join an army to learn the trade of killing. If you believed fervently in the Spanish cause, if you felt that the Republic had to survive, that might make some sense, but just to learn how to kill—”

  “I killed fascists and Nazis. You know what’s happening in Germany.”

  “I do know, and still I don’t understand it. A bullet makes no judgment. Marcel died because men play a lunatic game, but it was meaningless and senseless.”

  “You don’t hate, do you?”

  “No, I find it too hard,” Barbara said.

  “You’re a strange, sweet woman. Can I ask how old you are?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “I guess Marcel was the luckiest man on earth.”

  “To die the way he did?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant to have your love, to be loved by you.”

  She shook her head, tears welling into her eyes. “No, Marcel was not lucky.”

  “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “It’s all right. Only, it reminds me of myself. At least you have a goal and a drive. I don’t. I’ll go home, but not because it makes any great sense. What will you do, Bernie?”

  “I was thinking I’d head south tomorrow. Hitch my way down to Marseille. Get a job as a deck hand there on something heading east. That’s not hard, I’m told. Then I’ll jump ship at Suez or Beirut, and then to Palestine. That’s all the plans I have.”

  “And it doesn’t worry you—being broke? Eating? Sleeping?”

  “I’ve always been broke. It’s normal for me.”

  “What about tonight? Where will you stay?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll make out, kid. Believe me.”

  “Come home with me. Sleep on the couch. No, you won’t fit. We’ll pile some cushions on the floor.”

  “You’re sure you want me to?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’m rank. The place will smell like a barracks.”

  “I have a real shower, a real, North American shower. Oh, come on, don’t be silly about it.”

  She didn’t want him to leave, to walk off into the night. The taste of home was on her lips, the salty smell of the fog as it rolled into the bay, the remembrance of the treeless, rolling hills, the singing hum of the cable cars. Suddenly, she was alone and dreadfully lonely in this strange place. Her time of mourning had been virgin and aseptic; she had clutched death in a dying place, and by now she had had enough of the taste of death. There had been no men in her life since Marcel died, and now here she was, mellow with wine and food and with the open ingenuousness of the man who sat with her, a huge, heavy, round-faced man—she could understand how he had lifted Marcel to his back and carried him for miles—with a boyish, diffident smile and pale, baby blue eyes that worshipped her unequivocally. He was right about his smell, a strong male body odor that Barbara did not find particularly unpleasant; but where does one bathe in France when one is penniless? His attitude was full of respect and diffidence and admiration, but he had not even reached out to touch her hand. He had crossed the Ebro River, bearing with him the broken body of the man she loved, and again her eyes filled with tears, remembering a childhood picture of Saint Christopher wading through a rushing stream with the Christ child on his back.

  “Don’t cry, please,” he said to her.

  They walked back to her apartment. It was a calm, lovely evening, just two years from the time Marcel had intercepted her on the Champs-Élysées, pouring out his plea that she not disappear from his life. Was that always to be her fate, to step in and out of the lives of others?

  At the apartment, she gave Bernie Cohen a robe that Marcel had kept there, and while he showered, she scrubbed his shirt and underthings, wrung them out, and hung them to dry. He came out of the bathroom grinning, the r
obe, so small on him, pulled tightly around him. He looked at the couch and shook his head. “The floor’s better. I can sleep anywhere.”

  “Come to bed with me,” Barbara said simply. Her whole body ached with desire. She could not face the thought of seducing or of being seduced.

  His smile went away and he stared at her thoughtfully. “You’re sure you want that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “You’re not in love with me?”

  “No.”

  “I think I love you. Not that it can mean anything to you. I know who I am. I know who you are. So maybe it would be better if—”

  “I asked you to come to bed with me. Don’t you want to?”

  “My god, Barbara, what do you think?”

  “Then come to bed and don’t talk about it anymore.”

  After they had made love, she fell asleep in his arms, easily and trustingly. For hours he lay awake, afraid to move for fear he would disturb her. Then he slept. It was just dawn when he opened his eyes. She was asleep next to him, and for a while he lay there quietly, wondering whether he should wake her. He knew he had to go, and he knew she would not let him go without pressing money on him, and because he was quite sure of that, he slipped out of bed silently, moving with ease and grace for so large a man. He found his clothes in the kitchen, not quite dry but clean. He dressed, found pen and paper on her desk, wrote a note, and then left, closing the door gently behind him.

  An hour later, Barbara saw the note and read it: “My darling, lovely woman: I am leaving like this because there is no way I can say goodbye. If things were otherwise, if I had anything to offer you, I might stay and fight it through. I don’t think I fell in love with you yesterday; I think I fell in love with you just listening to Marcel talk about you. Well, there it is. I don’t know what else to say. Half of being a proper guest is knowing when to leave. This is the time.”

  ***

  Jean telephoned Dan at his home in Los Angeles. May Ling answered the phone, turned to her husband, and said uncertainly, “It’s Jean. She wants to talk to you.” She handed him the phone gingerly, as if it were something unsavory, and then walked out of the room.

  “Dan,” Jean said, “I want to talk to you about Barbara.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Not on the telephone. I want to see you. I want you to come up here.”

  “That’s impossible. Not for the next ten days, I couldn’t. Why can’t we talk about it now?”

  “Because I won’t discuss this on the phone. If you can’t come to San Francisco, I’ll fly down to Los Angeles.”

  “If you wish.”

  “Can you lunch with me tomorrow at the Biltmore?”

  “All right. I’ll see you at twelve-thirty.”

  He walked into the kitchen, where May Ling sat with her mother, the old woman silent, obscure, still living with her grief. “I behave so badly,” May Ling said. “I was never that way. I’m getting old and ugly.”

  “I think you’re very young and very beautiful, and the hell with it! Do I stop loving you because we pass forty?”

  “I’m forty-three, Danny.”

  “She wants to talk to me about Barbara.”

  “Oh, no. Nothing happened?”

  “No. She wants the kid back. So do I.”

  “Are you going to San Francisco?”

  “No, she’s coming here. I’m having lunch with her at the Biltmore tomorrow.”

  “Why at the Biltmore?” May Ling asked. “Why doesn’t she come here?”

  “Do you really want her to come here?”

  “No! But she’s so damn beautiful—”

  “You never used to swear.”

  “Damn isn’t swearing. The way you talk, that’s swearing.”

  “How do you know she’s still beautiful?”

  “Because you told me so.”

  So-toy said something to May Ling in Chinese.

  “What’s that?” Dan asked.

  “She said I must not challenge the opinion of a man so good and wise as my husband.”

  “She’s right.”

  “Danny?”

  “Yes?”

  She rose, took him by the arm, and led him into the living room. “My mother understands more than she admits to. I want to talk very seriously.”

  He pulled her down on the couch next to him, curled an arm around her, and drew her to him. “Go on. Talk seriously.”

  “I used to be very strong, Danny. No, I can’t talk when you do this to me.” She pulled away and faced him. “I knew how to be alone. Now I’ve had you for eight years. I don’t know how to be alone anymore. What if you fall in love with her all over again?”

  “What if I do?”

  “I couldn’t stand that, Danny.”

  “Well, I’d have to stop loving you first, wouldn’t I?”

  “That’s just talk, Danny. You never got Jean out of your blood.”

  “I was never in love with Jean, not the way I love you. You know that.”

  “You wanted her and you never really had her, and that’s worse.”

  “Chinese thinking.”

  “What?”

  “That’s Chinese thinking. Jean’s married.”

  “Oh, sometimes, Danny—Chinese thinking! What a dumb thing to say. You told me who Jean married. You despise him.”

  “But she doesn’t.”

  “How do you know she doesn’t?”

  He didn’t know, and he didn’t want want to talk about it. They went to bed, May Ling pleading softly, “Make love to me, Danny, make love to me. Make me feel that I am not drying up, withering away. Make me alive.” But he was asleep almost immediately, and she lay there with her eyes open, looking into the darkness and remembering the single time she had seen Jean Lavette. How strange it was, knowing Dan Lavette, knowing about him at least since she had been fourteen, falling in love with him when she was eighteen, and never really being apart from him, at least in her heart, in all the twenty-five years since then, yet seeing his first wife only once. It was before she actually met Dan. She was seventeen at the time, applying for a job in the Oriental section of the San Francisco Public Library, and there were some papers her father had to sign. She met him on the Embarcadero, in front of the Levy and Lavette warehouse, and as she stood there, the “snow lady” swept by, in a white silk dress under a white woolen coat, a piled mass of honey-colored hair, and the bright blue eyes that were for May Ling so much a symbol of the Caucasian. She had caught just that single glimpse of her, yet the image was printed on her mind and remained there, clear, beautiful, untouched by time, of a translucent, enviable creature that had haunted her all through the years. If she herself, May Ling, had aged and changed through the years, the illusion persisted that Jean had remained untouched by time.

  The following day, in the dining room of the Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles, the same notion occurred to Dan. Five years had passed since he had met Jean in San Francisco. Time was kind to her. A little more make-up, more careful grooming, perhaps a few tiny wrinkles around the eyes, but the totality of her beauty remained untouched. Perhaps she dyed her hair. He himself was almost entirely gray, but not a gray hair showed on Jean’s head. He tried to remember how old she was. He had just passed fifty; she would be forty-nine then. More than she had been five years ago, she was now a stranger, a woman he had known once and only in fragments—or had he ever known her at all?

  Yet there was a difference, and he sensed it almost immediately. The certainty was lacking, the almost unconscious arrogance, the built-in, magnificent confidence of the very rich and the very beautiful, as a gift of birth and never requiring cultivation. There was both fear and uncertainty—in the way she greeted him, in her petulant criticism of the place, the unlikely pretentiousness of the Biltmore.

  “It’s ridiculous in this
wretched city. How can you live here, Dan?”

  “You get used to it. Los Angeles has its points.”

  “I haven’t noticed. I heard you’re doing very well.”

  “Well enough. I build yachts for millionaire movie moguls.”

  “And what happened to all your vows of poverty?”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “That’s a damn funny thing for you to say. Anyway, how did you know that I was doing well?”

  “I had lunch with Sam Goldberg. You know, he’s Barbara’s lawyer, so we talk occasionally.”

  “You don’t approve of him.”

  “He’s old, Dan. He’s past seventy.”

  “And he’s also Jewish.”

  “That’s not fair. You never forget, do you? You never forgive, either.”

  “I told you once that there was nothing to forgive.” He grinned at her. “No fights, Jean. I’m glad to see you, I swear I am.”

  “When you smile like that—well, it’s like long, long ago. All right, Danny. I’m worried about Barbara. I want her to come home. Europe is boiling, and it’s going to explode.”

  “Have you asked her to come back?”

  “Pleaded with her in my letters.”

  “Well, she’s coming back. We had a letter from her yesterday.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. She said she had one more thing to do, and then she comes back.”

  “What thing?”

  “She didn’t say. You know, she’s had a bad time of it. She was in love with a French boy. They were going to be married. He was wounded in the Spanish war, and he died. That was about a year ago.”

  “Oh, no. I never knew a thing about that. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to upset you. Barbara’s not the kind who likes to share grief. She locks it inside herself.”

  “Danny, I’ve lost her,” Jean said, her voice full of anguish. “I love her so much, and I’ve lost her.”

  “We’ve neither of us lost her, Jean. Give it time. She’ll be back.”

  “I’ve run out of time, Danny. How much time does anyone have? I lost you—and now my daughter.”