Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “Dodo Beach?”

  “Right. A mile of white beach, tucked into paradise.”

  “That’s nice, Danny, ‘tucked into paradise.’”

  “Well, I may just stay there and never leave it. Live on seafood. Spear fish. Let my beard grow. Barefoot. Naked, God damn it.”

  “You don’t like fish, Danny. And I’m not sure I’d like you with a beard.”

  “You’d get used to it.”

  “And all the lovely dresses I bought to wear at the Noels’?”

  “Wear them. What the hell!”

  The ship, the Angeles, had just finished loading when they arrived in Wilmington, and the deckhands were battening down the five big hatches and making fast the booms. Matt Tubman, the first officer, greeted them on the dock and got a seaman to carry their luggage on board. Tubman was a slender, redheaded man in his thirties. “You’re on the boat deck, Mr. Lavette, cabin five. If you just trail along after Brady there, you’ll find it. None of the amenities right now because we got hung up on late cargo, and we got to go out on the tide. But we’ll all get together at dinner. Just make yourself at home on board.”

  “Do you like her?” Dan asked May Ling.

  “Danny, I’d love her if she were a rowboat.”

  “We’re up there,” he said, pointing. “This is the main deck. Boat deck next, and we’ll have that pretty much to ourselves. Over that, the quarterdeck, and then bridge, topside, and flag-deck. She carries four lifeboats and a couple of rafts, and those big things sticking up are called kingposts.”

  “Yes, Danny.”

  “You might as well know. She’s home for the next six days.”

  “Yes, Danny, of course.”

  The cabin was large and comfortable, opening onto the boat deck. They were unpacking when the door opened and a short, dark man with an enormous beak of a nose poked his head in and announced that he was Minelli, the purser. “Anything you want, just yell for me, Mr. Lavette. We only carry two passengers, but we treat them better than any ocean liner. You know, I worked one of your ships in the last war, the Fremont. I was just a deckhand then.” They shook hands.

  “By golly,” Dan said, after the purser had left, “why didn’t we do this years ago. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Danny, we haven’t unpacked. The ship is still tied up on the dock.”

  “Hell, we got two hours before she sails, and I haven’t touched you in two weeks.”

  “Lock the doors,” May Ling said.

  Naked, she stood in front of him and said, “Do you really still want this withered old Chinese lady? Do you, Danny?”

  “Do you know, baby, it’s like the first time,” he replied, looking at her slight, supple body, the ivory skin, the tiny breasts, as small and firm as when she had first stood before him like that, naked in the hotel room on the Peninsula. “You haven’t changed.”

  “Danny, flattery will get you everything and everywhere.”

  They were both like kids. They made love as if it had never happened before, and then he sprawled in bed with her body curled up against his stomach, her head in the cradle of his arm, telling him, “How I always loved you the way you are, hard and hairy, a whole, huge, nasty barbarian of a man just the way you are, Danny Lavette, and I guess I am the luckiest woman in the whole world.”

  “Very true.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get a cigar.”

  “Oh, no, you wouldn’t.”

  “I have two boxes of the best Havana, and sex and a good cigar, my love, are all that any man should dream of.”

  Later, dressed again, they stood on deck and watched the Angeles being warped out of the harbor by tugs. “Do you feel any pangs, Danny, at leaving it—that great, wonderful shipyard you created?”

  “Not a pang, not a twitch. I’d give it to the low bidder in a minute.”

  There were five of them at dinner in the captain’s mess—Anson Ulman, the captain, Jack Gordon, the engineer, and Matt Tubman, the first officer. And Dan and May Ling. May Ling wore a white suit and a cotton print blouse. She had used makeup carefully and delicately for the first time in months, and her black hair, cut in bangs across her brow, fell in a rich, helmetlike pageboy cut to her shoulders. The effect on the three seamen delighted Dan, and afterward he told May Ling how Gordon had whispered to him, “That’s a young and bonnie wife you got, Lavette.” The ship’s officers outdid themselves in gallantry, Ulman, a white-haired Swede, telling her that she must make free use of the bridge and that he would be honored to show her the working of the ship. Gordon invited her to the engine room, “When it is your pleasure, ma’am. It’s a hot but interesting place down there.” The food was plain but good, and while the conversation was not brilliant, it was sparked, as Dan noticed, by May Ling’s charm and curiosity.

  After dinner, the sun already hull down, as the seamen said, they walked on the boat deck, their own private deck to all effects and purposes, and watched the crimson horizon blend into night.

  They fell into an easy, unhurried routine for the six days of the passage. May Ling had chosen a few books very carefully—the collected poems of Robert Frost, Saroyan’s latest book, My Name Is Aram, The Ox-Bow Incident, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. She also brought an old copy of “The Ancient Mariner,” a poem that Dan had never heard before. He had no taste for reading poetry himself, but he loved to hear May Ling read, and he was content to lie in a deck chair for hours while she read poetry to him. She had a soft, musical voice, and for Dan, lying in the sun, listening to her voice, feeling the wash of the sea air across his face, was as close to complete happiness as he had ever come.

  Other times they played jack-o’-diamonds, but more often than not they passed hours walking about the ship, chatting sometimes with the seamen or again just sitting in their deck chairs, side by side, in a comfortable silence.

  Just as Captain Ulman had insisted that they be his guests on the bridge, so that he might instruct May Ling on the wonders of the chronometer case, explaining that the nine fine clocks it held were necessary “because there is no clock that is perfect, not to a fraction of a second. But with those nine beauties, we’re never off a moment,” so did Gordon lure them down into the noisy hell of the engine room, where oil-fired boilers of seven hundred and fifty degrees of superheated steam drove steam turbines, which in turn drove two thick propeller shafts. She was led through the inferno of heat and noise, watching the engine crew checking the gauges, studying the dials, opening valves, adjusting the fires, oiling, constantly oiling, the long, smooth propeller shafts. “But it’s so clean,” May Ling said—or rather shouted—in amazement, her mouth against Gordon’s ear.

  “Ay, and so it must be. Like your kitchen, dear lady, like your kitchen.”

  So tight with pressure and tension and the roar of sound was the place that May Ling could not wait to be out of there. “Oh, not for all the money in the world would I work there,” she said to Dan when they were on deck again.

  “I know, but the oilers and wipers and engineers—they’d work nowhere else.”

  “And in a war, Danny, what happens when the ship is hit?”

  “The boilers burst. And then God help them. To die in seven hundred and fifty degrees of superheated steam, roasted alive—well, it’s not something you want to think about. The bastards who make wars don’t think about it. You can be sure of that.”

  “I don’t think I can ever be on a ship again without thinking about it. I don’t want to go down to the boiler room again.”

  The days passed. Bit by bit, the knots in Dan’s soul and mind unraveled and untangled. People love each other, but no one remains in love, for whatever “in love” is, but bit by bit, day by day, the large, lumbering, gray-haired shipbuilder rediscovered the tiny Chinese woman he had married, and fell in love again in a way that he had never imagined possible.

  *** />
  More and more frequently, Jean found that she was altering her first impressions of people. Her first impression of Eloise Clawson, who was now Eloise Lavette, was of an empty-headed fluff of a girl with nothing except her good looks and her people’s money to recommend her. At the wedding, Jean had detected a note of fear, a tremulousness, a sense of something sensitive and full of pain that Eloise herself was perhaps only half aware of.

  The day after Tom and Eloise returned from their honeymoon, Jean telephoned them at the apartment on Jones Street. Eloise answered the phone. “I thought I might drop by,” Jean said. “We could lunch together, if you’re free.”

  “Oh, please, please. Yes, Mrs. Lavette—I mean, Mrs. Whittier. I don’t know why I said that, but Tom—”

  “Don’t give it a moment’s thought,” Jean said. “People do it all the time. You must learn to call me Jean, and then, you see, it won’t matter.”

  Eloise was dressed and ready when Jean arrived, nervously precise and pretty in a pale blue shantung suit and a blue chiffon blouse with a bow at the throat. With her white gloves and her tiny straw hat, she appeared almost unreal, as if she had been dressed by someone else and set to pose. But when Jean kissed her, Eloise clung to her and said desperately, “But you will be my friend, won’t you?”

  “What is it, my dear?”

  Eloise shook her head.

  “Tell me about it. You can talk to me.”

  “I’m so miserable.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I get these dreadful migraine headaches. I did get them once in a while before I married Tom, but then they began to come all through the honeymoon, one after another. I don’t blame Tom. Who wants to be with a person in such awful pain?”

  “Have you seen a doctor about this?” Jean asked gently.

  “Oh, yes. Mother used to take me to doctor after doctor, and they all said the same thing.”

  “And what was that?”

  “That no one knows anything about migraine headaches. Some of them said it was psychosomatic, that I did it to myself because I have what is called a migraine personality, but that doesn’t do any good even if it’s true, because I can’t stop doing it to myself. And then Tom just gave up and stopped talking to me, and then another attack would come, and I could see that he was furious with me. I don’t blame him, but I’m so absolutely miserable—”

  “Eloise darling, listen to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “We shall go out now and have an excellent lunch, and we will not talk anymore about headaches. I know Tom very well indeed, and I think we can work out some devious plan, just between us. Then I want you to come to my house with me and look at the gallery I am putting together.”

  “I don’t know anything about pictures. I’ve come to feel so stupid, so worthless.”

  “Exactly the way I felt for a very long time. The sensation should be called the woman’s disease, and the microbe that transmits it is of the other gender. You are not worthless and you are not stupid. You are a very pretty and bright and good-hearted young woman.”

  “You’re not saying that just to make me feel better?” she asked plaintively.

  “Of course I am. I want you to feel better. I’m also saying it because it happens to be true. So let’s start to get to know each other. I think we’re going to be good friends.”

  ***

  William Halliday, Barbara’s publisher, was in his mid-forties, recently divorced, and quite attractive, with a long, narrow head, dark eyes under a shock of black hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a tall, lanky figure. He wore a gray flannel suit, a button-down shirt that was slightly frayed, and a striped tie with the Harvard colors. He was charming, cultured, and protectively possessive of Barbara. He had arranged for her to stay at the Algonquin Hotel, purchased her plane tickets to New York, met her at the airport himself, and saw her settled in her hotel. Halliday’s was a small, distinguished, and very successful publishing house; it had weathered the Depression by carefully presenting a small list of talented writers and developing a reputation for literary quality. Several national bestsellers had put the firm on a sound financial basis, and now Halliday was convinced that in Barbara Lavette he had found what he had been searching for, a young writer with a clean, lucid style, a sense of the fitness of things, a feeling for drama, and an underlying and intense passion. He had never seen her until he met her at the airport, and having spent most of his adult life in the company of writers, he was hardly prepared for the tall, clear-eyed, beautiful woman who took his hand firmly and greeted him without formality or coyness. He noted with satisfaction that she rejected the silly pompadours that had become all the rage, instead gathering her honey-colored hair in a bun at the back of her head, and he also approved of the blue serge tailored suit and the blue kid shoes. In common with most sophisticated New Yorkers, Halliday regarded the western part of the United States dubiously, and he was excited at the prospect of a potentially best-selling writer who looked like this.

  The following day, he took Barbara to lunch at Sardi’s Restaurant on West 44th Street. It was the first time she had ever been there, and the place delighted her with its feeling of the theater, its walls covered with framed caricatures of theater people, and its resemblance to European restaurants. Men came to their table to be introduced to her, and Barbara was astonished at how many of them had read a book not to be published for three more days. The praise they offered made her uneasy and self-conscious, and one of them, a playwright whose name she recognized, made his plea for the right to dramatize the book as a stage play.

  “Time enough for that,” Halliday told him. “Anyway, I’m only the publisher, not the agent.”

  “You see,” he said to Barbara, “this is only the beginning. Have a stout heart, a ready smile and believe nothing. It’s rather unusual for a first novel to be successful, but our advance sales appear to indicate a very substantial success. That might very well mean a theatrical dramatization and then a movie sale, but that’s in the future. Right now we want to sell books, a great many of them. I hope you won’t mind being lionized?”

  “Is there any way out of it?”

  “Oh, yes. You can flee back to San Francisco, if you wish.”

  “I don’t wish,” Barbara said firmly. “I’ve been to New York before, but somehow this is different. I feel that it’s so good to be here. I’ve never really taken the time to see the city, to walk, to look at it the way I would look at Paris.”

  “Then nothing would please me more than to be your guide. If you need one. Well, even if you don’t need one.”

  “I couldn’t impose on you.”

  “Ah, let me decide that. Meanwhile, here are some of the tasks we’ve laid out for you. Day after tomorrow, the day before publication, a cocktail party at the Algonquin. Alexander Woollcott is dying to meet you. He’ll be there, reporters, celebrities, writers—it will be an ordeal, make no mistake. Tomorrow, interview on WJZ in the morning, WEAF in the afternoon. Have you ever done a radio interview?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “Well, the question that will be thrown at you most often is, ‘How much of the book is true?’ I suspect a great deal of it. Am I right?”

  “It’s hard to say. I mixed fact and fiction. I suspect that even if one attempts to write very truthfully of oneself, it’s so subjective that it is a fiction of sorts.”

  Halliday nodded. “That’s a good approach. By the way, you’ll have Hildy Lang with you. She’s our PR woman, very good, very competent. She’ll smooth over some of the rough spots. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune both want pictures and interviews for their book sections, and I think they want you to give a talk at Sarah Lawrence College, as a rather famous alumna.”

  “Good heavens, I’m not famous, and I haven’t the vaguest notion of what I would talk about, and I never even graduated.”

&n
bsp; “No matter. You’ll think of something. Barbara—you don’t mind if I call you that?” She shook her head. “Barbara, just say no to anything that feels like a burden. I am a greedy, avaricious publisher, so don’t hesitate to reject our notions.”

  Again and again during the time that followed, Barbara had opportunities to reflect on what the course of things would have been had she been plain, homely, old, or fat, and she felt a growing irritation with a world that dwelt on the fact that she was, according to how they put it, fascinating, lovely, beautiful, sensational—her face and figure rather than what she had written. The first radio interviewer said, “I wish my audience could be here with me in the studio, facing this very beautiful young woman who has written a novel that will surely be one of the most talked about books of 1941. I want you to meet Miss Barbara Lavette.”

  “What does one say to that?” Barbara wondered.

  One says, “How do you do, Al?” She had met him an hour before. “We begin with introductions. You call me Al. I’ll call you Barbara.”

  “How much of your book, Barbara, is based on fact? This man who died in Spain, was he actually your lover?”

  “How do you feel about the Nazis? Can we live with them? Or must we fight them?”

  “Do you feel that there are good Germans?”

  “Why does a girl with everything in the world leave home and go to a foreign country? Now that’s a part of your experience.”

  “Do you feel that explicit sex is the wave of the future in novels?”

  Hildy Lang, small, dark, efficient, and easily familiar with this strange world Barbara had entered, complimented her. “Great! Simply great! You handled that beautifully.”

  “I didn’t handle it at all.”

  “Oh, yes, absolutely. Now, Barbara, the Prince Carelli people want to use you.”

  “Who? What on earth is Prince Carelli?”

  “My dear, you have been a recluse. Only the most popular perfume around. They do movie stars and that sort of thing, and now they’ve decided that a gorgeous author is exactly what they need. They’ll photograph you with the book in your hands, and there’ll be some little statement about how you love the slop they sell. It’s terribly good for the book, and they’ll pay five hundred dollars, which isn’t exactly peanuts.”