Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “I suppose I have no choice,” Jean said. “Where have you been? I’ve enjoyed not seeing you for years—how long is it?”

  “Ah, Jean, dear Jean. How witty you’ve become. France, until this stupid war started. What are you drinking?”

  “It’s sufficient. Whatever it is.”

  He motioned to the waiter and ordered a drink. “And you, Jean, where has life led you?”

  “Would you pay for my drink, Alan?” Jean asked casually.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m grateful. It facilitates things. I’ve spent the afternoon being disgusted, and I think I’ve had my fill of it.” And with that, she rose and walked out, not looking back, not giving a damn what Brocker felt or thought, only saying to herself later, You’re making quite a habit of burning bridges, my dear Jean. Be careful. You’ve lived half a century, and there’s still a long, tired road ahead.

  The next day, Jean went to Sam Goldberg’s office at two-thirty, aware that she was half an hour early, but hoping that Barbara would be there already. She had been waiting ten minutes when Barbara and Goldberg returned from their luncheon date. In every meeting with Barbara, Jean anticipated a rebuff that never actually took place, and even now, wanting so desperately to see her, Jean stiffened and held back. But Barbara came to her and embraced her, and Jean held her tightly, thinking, This is all I have left, and the rest is gone, washed out, destroyed.

  “Tom will be here any moment now,” Jean said. “Did Sam tell you what he wants?”

  Barbara nodded.

  “Do you care? He has John Whittier’s money behind him, and they’ll want to buy a controlling interest in the bank.”

  “Sam and I talked about it,” Barbara said.

  “It’s the way he is,” Jean told her. “He has a desperate need for power and money, the way some people have a need for—well, I don’t know, perhaps to be loved. Maybe it’s his path to love or hope or just living. Please don’t hate him, baby.”

  “Hate him? Why?”

  “I don’t know. He’s so different.”

  “Mother,” Barbara said, “he can have whatever he wants. I don’t care, believe me.”

  And Jean thought, You really don’t, and that’s the pity of it.

  Tom arrived with Clark Seever, who was the senior member of Seever, Lang and Murphy, John Whittier’s attorneys. Seever was a tall, well-groomed, handsome, carefully spoken man in his mid-fifties. He knew Sam Goldberg, as indeed everyone did who was in any way connected with the legal or political functioning of San Francisco, and they shook hands while Tom and Barbara embraced. Five and a half years had gone by since they had last seen each other, and Jean found it strange, almost bizarre, that these, two, brother and sister, were so loosely united, so content to spend a portion of a lifetime away from each other. Jean had been an only child, and like so many only children, she romanticized brother-sister relationships. Yet Tom was not cold or aloof. Too much at stake, and he had obviously structured the warmth and delight with which he greeted his sister.

  Barbara, on the other hand, had been anticipating the self-conscious boy she had last seen so long ago. The fact of Tom Lavette was something else entirely, a stranger whom she had difficulty fitting into place and position. At twenty-seven, he was entirely self-possessed, immaculately groomed, his sandy hair parted on one side and swept loosely across his brow; tall, wide-shouldered, his father’s height grafted onto the spare frame of the Seldons, he was graceful and meticulous in the niceties of meetings and introduction.

  “This is my beautiful sister, Barbara,” he said to Seever, “who garnered most of the brains and all of the talent in the family.” And then he added to her, “Dear Bobby, it’s been too long. Much too long. Well, we’ll change that.”

  The meeting was amiable. Seever brought up the question of control, but almost indifferently. He wondered just how active Miss Lavette desired to be, recalling the role her mother had once played in the affairs of the Seldon Bank.

  “I have no interest at all in banking,” Barbara said.

  “Then you would not be averse to a transfer of sufficient stock to give Thomas the control that the family should necessarily have. Not that I imagine for a moment that you would contest your brother’s voting, but then I understand you’re not living in San Francisco at the present. Of course, a sale of stock is not the only method, although Thomas has ample capital available for that. There could be an assignment of voting rights if you preferred that method.”

  “Miss Lavette has no objection,” Goldberg interposed, “to a sale of sufficient stock to give Thomas the control he desires, and I think those are details you and I can work out at another time—”

  Barbara glanced at her mother. Jean was studying Tom, and then she turned and met Barbara’s gaze and smiled slightly. There was a kind of woeful pathos in the smile that cut to Barbara’s heart. She had never truly thought of her mother as one who wept, bled, suffered. Even now, at fifty, Jean was an incredibly beautiful woman, and through all the years of Barbara’s life, her mother had been the untitled queen of San Francisco society, a sort of magnificent medallion worn by that tight, small circle of wealth and power who regarded themselves as the equal of if not superior to Boston or New York society. She remembered how, in her childhood, she had only to look at the society column in the Chronicle or the Examiner to find that this or that party or ball or dinner was “graced by the presence of the beautiful Jean Lavette.” She had never learned to feel sorry for her, or even to feel for her.

  The meeting had gone so smoothly and successfully that Tom was buoyant, satisfied, and sure of himself. “We ought to have a celebration of sorts. Will you join me for dinner?” he asked both of them, Jean and Barbara. “It’s been an eternity since the three of us were together.”

  Barbara looked at her mother. Jean nodded.

  “Then I’ll pick you up at eight,” Tom said. “Black tie. We’ll make a real evening of it.”

  He left with Seever. Still in Goldberg’s office, the old man seated behind his desk, watching the two of them, Barbara said to her mother, “He’s changed. I’ve never seen Tom like this before.”

  “Yes. You do know what you’ve done, my dear?”

  “You mean the stock?”

  “You’ve just given your brother the Seldon Bank. It’s a very generous gift. He is understandably delighted.”

  Barbara shrugged. “He appears to want it very much.”

  “Oh, very much indeed.” Jean turned to Goldberg. “Did you know about this, Sam? But of course you did.”

  Goldberg nodded.

  “And what do you think?”

  “Your daughter has a mind of her own, Jean. Also, she has no reason to contest Tom’s aims.”

  “It’s Whittier’s money.”

  “I presume so,” Goldberg agreed. “Anyway, I’m glad it was all settled amicably. I don’t like to see a family squabble over money. The bank remains in the family, and that would have pleased your father, rest his soul. He was a damn decent man for a banker, a part of the old times. They’re gone now, Jean. It’s a new ballgame, and I’m afraid the rules are a little rough for me. Anyway, it was nice to see the three of you together.”

  “You’re not troubled, are you, Mother?” Barbara asked her.

  “Not really. Tom is very competent.”

  It was close to twilight; the air was clean and strong with the scent of the sea. Jean had come by cab. She drove back to Russian Hill in Barbara’s car. For Barbara, it was a strange, odd feeling, returning to the house on Russian Hill that Dan had built for Jean after their marriage, where she had been born and spent her childhood. To her, the house had stood there for an eternity, for the beginning years are always an eternity.

  They parked, and Barbara took her suitcase out of the trunk of her car.

  “No servants, dear,” Jean said. “I have a cleaning woma
n in three times a week.”

  “Mother, I’ve been without servants since I left here.”

  “Tom finds it shocking.” She opened the door and held it aside for Barbara to enter.

  Barbara’s first reaction was of shock and amazement. She had expected nothing to be changed, nothing different. Now all the rooms on the first floor were empty, the walls painted stark whiter the polished wooden floors devoid of carpet or rugs. She put down her suitcase and stared, then walked through room after room—all white, all bare, bare walls and no furniture. She turned in bewilderment to look at her mother.

  “Darling, I didn’t tell you. This is my dream—San Francisco’s first valid museum of modern art, or at least the gallery. The art will come.”

  “But how do you live here?”

  “Upstairs I have a very comfortable apartment—living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, office. These rooms down here will be the galleries.”

  “All your beautiful paintings?”

  “Oh, I still have some upstairs. Some I gave to the museum, some I sold. I’m starting fresh, clean. Art is the only passion that still remains to me, Bobby, and thank God for it. If it weren’t for that, I should be a very wretched and lonely old woman. But come upstairs now, and we’ll change and we’ll have a drink and talk. There’s so much to talk about.”

  “Mother, Tom’s dressing tonight, and I have nothing but skirts and sweaters and blouses in this suitcase.”

  “I have enough. We’re still about the same size.”

  Jean opened a bottle of champagne, and they sat in the living room, which had once been the master bedroom, and here at least Barbara found some of her memories—pieces of furniture, a Renoir nude, a Picasso, and a George Luks, all of them old favorites Jean would not part with. Barbara told her of meeting Picasso in France. He had kissed her. He had sought her out after reading what she had written about Marcel’s death. “What was he like?” Jean wanted to know.

  “How can I say it?” Barbara laughed. “The only word is horny, Mother. He was absolutely the horniest little man I ever met in my life. Not in anything he did or said. It was just the total effect of him. He reeked of masculine sex. I loved him.”

  “God, what an opportunity—and I mean for paintings, not for sex. Trouble is, you don’t care about paintings.”

  “I do, but not the way you do, Mother. Mother—” She had held off until now. “Well, I must tell you something. I’ve been putting it off.”

  “You’re very serious. You’re not going back to Europe, not now, for heaven’s sake?”

  “No, nothing like that. This is about the stock, my inheritance.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m giving it away, all of it. I told Sam to set up a charitable foundation.” Having said it at last, Barbara expected all and any reactions—anger, disbelief, opposition, even hysteria—so she was totally astonished when Jean did not react at all, but simply looked at her wineglass and took a sip of her drink.

  Finally, she said, “When did you decide to do this, Bobby?”

  “A few weeks ago, when Sam told me about the meeting.”

  “Then you’ve had time to think about it?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Did Sam tell you about your account at the bank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you giving that away too?”

  “No, not at the moment.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. There are times when one needs money—not perhaps fourteen million, but it helps.”

  “You’re not angry?” Barbara asked.

  “Should I be?”

  “I thought you would be.”

  “My dear, beautiful Barbara.” She shook her head. “My eyes are wet, and if I rub them, I’ll smear my mascara.” She refilled the glasses. “I only knew one other person who made a gesture like that. Let’s drink to him. His name is Dan Lavette. I loved him very much, but it was a while after he left before I knew how much. The hell with the lousy stock! Do you know what your father would say? He would say that his daughter is one damn fine sonofabitch of a woman—or some such words. Enough of that. Let’s talk about other things.”

  ***

  San Francisco had already been a city for many decades when Los Angeles was still a collection of villages connected by interurban streetcars, dozing in the beneficent Southern California sunshine and waiting lazily for something to happen. That was a time that existed as a blurred, golden memory in the minds of a very few, for demographically speaking, there were only a few around to fix it in their memories.

  Then two things happened that changed the history of Southern California and fixed the golden memories forever in the past. Film was discovered, and oil was discovered. Film, in those days, required maximum exposure to light, and since Southern California had more days of sunshine and more varied scenery than any other part of America that was not out and out desert, the film companies moved to Los Angeles. The industry was young, and the companies were fairly small, but both were mushrooming; and while a good deal of Los Angeles County was semidesert, a good deal more of it was lush and beautiful: salt marshes in Santa Monica, broad, fertile fields in Wilshire, snow-covered mountains in the eastern part of the county, green, rolling hills stretching out to the coast, and in the San Fernando Valley, a veritable paradise of orange groves, pecan groves, almond groves, lemon groves, and acres and acres of garden produce—all the elements of which paradise is said to consist, lying in the sun and waiting for man to wreak havoc and concrete and stucco desolation.

  The second happening was oil. With the twentieth century came the automobile, and with the automobile an ever-increasing thirst for oil. And beneath the soil of Los Angeles lay one of the largest oilfields in California, with its nexus in an area bounded today by La Brea and Fairfax avenues running north and south and by Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Boulevard running east and west. In this square mile of land, hundreds of oil derricks arose, but that was only the beginning; and from that center the oil derricks spread out across the county to the sea, to Signal Hill in Long Beach, to Torrence, Baldwin Hills, Wilmington, Venice, and El Segundo. The oil gushed, the speculators went mad, thousands of investors became rich, and thousands more were swindled and became poor; and then the oil, stupidly, greedily poached, ran out, lost its pressure, locked itself away in the ground, and with 1929 and the Depression, the oil bubble collapsed completely.

  By 1940, Dan Lavette had been in Los Angeles almost ten years. He had seen the end of the interurban red electric cars, the growth of the freeways, the interlocking of the villages into a sprawling city. He had witnessed the arrival of the poverty-stricken dust bowl farmers from Texas and Oklahoma, partaken of the misery of the unemployed on the San Pedro waterfront, broke and in jail and out of jail and hungry, and then spent years as a mackerel fisherman; and now unreasonably—it appeared to him—he was operating a shipyard where the keels of two merchant ships had already been laid down, with ways being constructed for two more, thanks to loans from the Maritime Commission, and sitting in the water off Terminal Island was the last yacht that he would build being finally fitted.

  Along the waterfront, in Long Beach and San Pedro and Wilmington, unemployment was becoming a thing of the past. Dan had convinced Pete Lomas, turning sixty now, to sell his mackerel boat and come to work at the shipyard as a foreman. Between them, they scoured the docks for shipworkers, welders, cranemen, electricians, posting bulletins, putting ads in the local papers. The Maritime Commission sent him half a dozen young naval architects and a couple of engineers. There was no housing. Piles had to be driven into the mud flats of Terminal Island to extend the base for additional ways, and there were no pile drivers available. Dan’s was not the only shipyard lying dormant on the Los Angeles portside. There were five others that Admiral Land had catapulted into life, and the competition among them for workers was reminiscent of the eighteenth-century
press gangs of the London waterfront. And not only for workers. The shipyards fought and pleaded and competed and bribed and stole in their desperate hunger for materials, for lumber for the ways and frames, for housing. Dan had platforms built on the mud and rigged surplus World War I tents for the workers to sleep in. He sent the young naval architects out to search for mattresses and blankets, and he threatened to kill the alcoholics he had picked up for laborers, who brought their rotgut with them onto the island. It was a miracle that out of the chaos, out of shipbuilders who did not know how to build, out of welders who did not know how to weld, out of carpenters who could not drive a nail properly, out of electricians who lied and bluffed their way into their jobs, out of steamfitters who had never worked on a ship before, out of auto mechanics turned ship mechanics—out of all this somehow two merchant ships were arising and two more were on their way to beginning.

  The price Dan paid for this left no room for pleasure or any sense of achievement. There were nights when he never left the shipyard, sleeping on a cot in his office, eating coffee and sandwiches, working until midnight and up again at dawn. He took neither pleasure nor pride in what he was doing. He loathed war, and he felt a sick disgust at the gigantic fact of the profits of war. He had lived through it once, and he had little desire to live through it again. Coming home one night, driven by a desperate need to be clean, to soak in a hot tub, to sleep in his own bed with the body of his wife next to him, he poured out his anger and confusion to May Ling.