Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “If you ask me,” Sarah said hopelessly, “you’ll talk Joe to death. Please stand still.”

  “Are you going to marry him? Barbara, how did he ever find you?”

  “In the telephone book.”

  “Of course. No one ever thinks of telephone books. Don’t you think he’s marvelously romantic, Bobby? You know, he looks like Spencer Tracy, except that he’s a foot taller and his nose. Well, I like a man with a good nose. It shows character. Poor Joe. Mom’s right. Mom, you’re right,” she told her mother.

  “Thank you. Now hold still.”

  “I mean,” she explained to Barbara, “that poor Joe never had a chance. I threw myself at him. I confess it.”

  “I think Joe loves you very much. I wouldn’t feel sorry for him. He’s lucky.”

  “Do you think so, Bobby? Bless you. I’m so happy, but quite nervous. Do you know, we’ve never had intercourse.”

  “Sally!” her grandmother said sharply.

  “Granny, don’t be shocked. If I said we had, then you’d have good reason. He’s hopelessly old-fashioned. Can you imagine, here it’s nineteen forty-six, and I’m twenty years old and I’m a virgin.”

  “Sally,” Clair said, “if you wish to discuss your virginity, you can take it up with Barbara later. Right now we’re trying to fit this dress. I suggest you hold still and be quiet for five minutes.”

  “Anyway,” Sarah said, looking out of the window, “Dan is here with your mother, Barbara.”

  Barbara ran downstairs to greet them. A slow stream of cars, bumper to bumper, was coming up the road to the winery. On the lawn, facing the main house, a green-and-white-striped pavilion had been erected, with chairs set upon a dance floor. Another huge tent housed the tables, and beyond that, Chicano winery workers were preparing the barbecue under the careful eye of Rudy Gomez, Jake’s foreman. Jake himself, already resplendent in a white dinner jacket, was greeting the guests, and when Barbara appeared, Dan was introducing Jean. Joe stood at the other end of the garden, talking to Judge Henderson of San Francisco, who was to perform the ceremony. Barbara looked around for Bernie, and not finding him, walked quickly over to where Joe stood. Joe introduced her to Judge Henderson.

  “Well, young lady, your mother’s daughter, true enough. She was the belle of the city at your age, and you do her proud.”

  Barbara begged Joe’s presence, “for just a few minutes, please, sir.” She took Joe aside and said to him, “Joe, my mother’s here. Whatever you feel deep inside, it was a great act of courage for her to come here.”

  “I know.”

  “I want you to meet her now.”

  She led Joe over to where Dan stood with Jean. “She’s a beauty,’’ Joe whispered to her. Jean, in a simple beige chiffon dress, her face shadowed by a wide straw brim, was indeed an imposing and handsome woman.

  “Mother,” Barbara said, “this is my brother Joe. I want you to meet him and know him and love him—as I do.”

  They stood looking at each other for a long moment. Joe appeared at a loss. Then Jean walked to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him. He stepped back, looking at Jean and then at Dan. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Finally he said, “I’m glad you came. I’m very glad.” Then he turned and walked off.

  Barbara took her mother’s arm. “It’s all right, Mother. Give it time. Everything’s piled together today. Joe’s scared. Sally’s scared. These are all good people, but I think the only time they see each other is at weddings and funerals.”

  “I shouldn’t have come,” Jean whispered.

  “You damn well should have,” Dan said.

  “I shouldn’t have kissed him.”

  “Thank heavens you did,” Barbara told her. “Nothing today is going to be easy. This place is dripping with emotion, and I don’t know whether I can stand it myself. I’ve been so long without family, and now they’re everywhere I look.”

  “Where’s your soldier?” Dan asked her.

  “Don’t call him that, please. He’s around somewhere. Now listen to me, both of you. He’s Jewish. He has no job, and he has no real prospects, and he’s been living with me in my house these past three weeks, and I’m going to marry him. That’s it, flat and straight, and I’m glad I got it out before you meet him. So both of you digest that, and you’ll meet him as soon as I can find him.”

  With that, she ran off, and Jean said to Dan, “Well, this is certainly going to be a day.”

  “I think you can say that again.”

  ***

  Adam Levy, with Eloise and her small son, had climbed up the hillside to a point where the wedding party, the houses, and the guests were below them. They had gone up steps, so it had not been a hard climb, and now, a hundred feet higher than the gardens, they could look out over the whole vista of Higate, the stone buildings, the gently rolling vineyards, the pastures where cattle grazed, the line of cars crawling up to the main house, and the swirl of guests eddying into the gardens and the pavilions.

  “I can see the whole world,” Freddie said.

  “My whole world when you and Freddie are in it,” Adam said to Eloise. “There’s a real mixing of the Levys and the Lavettes. It began forty years ago.”

  “Adam, I’m frightened,” she whispered to him.

  “That’s normal. I mean that one gets used to it and lives with it, and then it goes away. This is a strange place to you, filled with strange people. Like most people, we’ll have our ups and downs. We’ll work it out.”

  “Can I go down there?” Freddie asked her.

  She looked at Adam, who nodded. The little boy ran down the steps.

  “It was good growing up here,” Adam said, “making wine, growing grapes. It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it’s a good way to live. You’ll unwind here, and then you’ll never be afraid again. We’ll have more children, if you want to.”

  “He won’t get lost?” she asked nervously, pointing after her son.

  “No, he won’t get lost, Ellie.”

  “I think I’m very happy, but I’m not sure,” Eloise said. “I keep waiting to be scolded. I keep waiting for Tom to find me and be very angry. Then I begin to die inside.”

  Adam drew her to him and kissed her. “Do you know,” he said, “all the time overseas I waited for it to be over, day after day, waiting for it to be over, and I always told myself that when it was over, something good would happen. I can remember sitting in cold wet mud and eating cold, miserable C rations and telling myself, another meal, another day, and one day it’s going to be over, and then everything will be fine. But I never dreamed it would be you. I never dreamed that anyone like you existed. No, I think I did, but it was only a dream.”

  “You won’t get tired of me and angry at me? I’m not smart, and I can’t do things. When I see women like Barbara and Sally and your mother, I just want to crawl away and hide.”

  “Then I’ll crawl away and hide with you. And now we’d better go back. They’re beginning to go into the pavilion, and I’m the best man, for the moment. You talk about being afraid; poor Joe is paralyzed.”

  ***

  Looking everywhere for Bernie Cohen, who had disappeared, Barbara finally went into the old stone aging-building. Here, out of the warmth of the noonday sun, it was cool and damp and suddenly silent, the big metal tanks looming strangely. Bernie stood inside, in the dim light, motionless. As she entered, he turned slowly to face her. After he had stared at her for a moment or two, he said wonderingly, “I’ve never seen you look like this before. God, you’re beautiful.”

  “If you like pink.”

  “Don’t laugh at me now.”

  “I never laugh at you, Bernie. I only giggle a little.” She walked over to him, went up on her toes, and kissed him lightly. “You’re full of regrets and doubts, aren’t you, Bernie? You’ve sold your birthright for a mess of Barbara.
What a strain it must be to be Jewish, to spend two thousand years trying to teach the world to be civilized, and then to give it all up and discover that even a Jew can become a practiced professional killer.”

  He pulled back. “That’s a hell of a thing to say!”

  “Good. I’m glad you can get angry with me. I want a husband, not a willing slave. You know, I was in Germany. You were too, but you came there with a gun in your hands. So we saw it differently. I’m not laughing at you, Bernie. And I’m not trying to hurt you.”

  “You do a damn good job without trying.”

  “Then perhaps I have to. I’m trying to say something very important, and I want to get it said before we go out there into the sunlight, where Joe and Sally will pledge to live happily ever after. No one lives happily ever after. Happiness is the pie in the sky we’re fed from the moment we come out of the womb, and the little bit of decent human understanding we could hope for falls by the wayside. Well, what I’m trying to say is this: There’s a moment in life when something hits you over the head. It’s like waking up after you’ve been asleep for a long time, and what happens then is that black and white are no longer black and white. It happened to me in Germany when a German Junker saved my life. Possibly that’s not very much in the large scheme of things, but it’s my life and the only one I have, and it’s nicer to be here talking to a man you love than to be beaten to death by the Gestapo. Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “Go on,” he said coldly. “Finish your lecture.”

  “Oh, I will, you can be sure of that. When we walk out of this building, we will either know something about each other or we won’t. You see yourself as a dedicated fighter who trained for years to liberate Palestine as a Jewish homeland. I see you as a frightened little boy, motherless and fatherless, who was rescued from an orphanage by a kind man and given a burden of debt you’ve spent your life trying to repay.”

  “Spare me the psychoanalysis.”

  “Why? Because it’s true? Didn’t it ever occur to you that you’ve paid your debt, that you fought those wretched fascists for nine years? What else must you prove to yourself? That all the slanders thrown at the Jews for a thousand years are lies? That the only virtue is to kill or be killed? That’s the male curse, the male abomination that has filthied this beautiful world for centuries. I’m a woman, and I don’t buy it, and I will not buy it. A bullet has no conscience or judgment. You’ve been lucky. Josh Levy was not lucky. May Ling was not lucky. Fifty million others were not lucky. I want you to live. It’s as simple as that.”

  He sat down on a wine barrel and put his face in his hands. Barbara waited. Minutes passed, and still she waited. Finally, he looked up at her and said, “I give up the fight. Is that it?”

  “No. We never give up the fight. We give up the guns.”

  He stared at her thoughtfully. Then he said, “You’re quite a woman, Barbara Lavette.”

  “And you’re quite a man.”

  “Then maybe we’ll work things out. Like I said, I’ll give it a try.”

  “A woman could ask no more. Now, like I said, gird your loins. You’re going to meet my father and mother.”

  ***

  They shook hands, Bernie Cohen and Dan Lavette. They were the same size, Barbara noted, the same bulk. Jean regarded him judiciously, thinking that she and Barbara were not too unlike, their taste in men not too dissimilar.

  “Dan Lavette, my father,” Barbara said, “and this is Jean Whittier, my mother. They’re not married, but they do live together occasionally, and they get along, and they’re legitimately my father and mother. They’re nice when you get to know them.”

  There was no time for much more than that. The place was full of the past, a crowd as mixed as the lives of the two families—Chicanos and Chinese and Italians and Jews, lawyers, politicians, trade union leaders, Mexican music, and the smell of roasting lamb and beef, men in uniform, an admiral, a mayor, women in pink and yellow and white, great jugs of wine waiting to be drunk, tears waiting to be wept, laughter waiting, and Joe Lavette standing uneasily in front of the stone house with Adam beside him as the seats under the pavilion filled up.

  “What do you think of him?” Jean asked Dan.

  “I think he’ll do.”

  “He reminds me of you.”

  “That’s no accolade.”

  “It all depends on how you look at it,” Jean said.

  Judge Henderson said to him, “Do you, Joseph Lavette, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

  “I do.”

  “And do you, Sally Levy, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  “I do.”

  “Then, by the authority vested in me under the laws of the State of California, I declare you wed as man and wife.”

  ***

  Clair Levy, finally, at long last breaking out of the shadow of her son Joshua’s death, was able to laugh through her tears and tell her husband exuberantly, “Just see what we have put together, Jake. Sally is Jewish and Irish and Scotch and English, and Joe is Chinese and French and Italian. What damn wonderful kids they’re going to have!”

  ***

  Sarah Levy, Sally’s grandmother, had used up her tears, and now she sat with Dan and fondled her memories. They went back forty years together, to the time of the great earthquake. She was only nine years older than Dan, but after her grandson’s death, she had become an old woman. Dan could remember when she was as like Sally as a sister, the same yellow hair, the same slender figure. But death had touched her too mercilessly—her daughter, her husband, and then her grandson.

  “Still,” she said, “I’m glad to be alive. I guess we’re both of us lucky, Danny. I tell myself that God runs the world stupidly, but today I refuse to think about that.”

  “I suppose He does His best. That’s what we all do.”

  ***

  Barbara watched Bernie Cohen dance with her mother, and afterward she said to him, “I didn’t know you could dance. We’ve never danced.”

  “Would you like to try?”

  “Why not? My belly’s still flat.”

  “It’s an old trick, to tell a man you’re pregnant.”

  “I’m full of old tricks, as you will discover.”

  Dancing with Barbara, Bernie said, “There’s one thing you can be sure of. I worship the ground you walk on.”

  “That’s too extravagant. I don’t want to be worshipped, not myself or the ground I walk on.”

  “O.K. It’s one of those phrases you pick up reading. You’d be surprised how much reading you do during a war. What I mean is that after I met you, I never thought of myself in terms of any other woman. Only I was never very sure how to pull it off.”

  “You worked it out.”

  “Funny thing is, I didn’t. I still don’t know exactly how it happened. I only know that I love you, I think, as much as any man can love a woman. I don’t know why you want to marry me, but I’m not going to dispute it.”

  “I have my reasons,” Barbara said.

  “This is a hell of a good wedding,” he said a few minutes later.

  “It has its points,” Barbara agreed.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Why does Barbara disguise herself and try to hide her wealth when helping out at the wharfs? Do you agree with her reasoning?

  2. May Ling frequently advises Dan on how to interact with Joseph, offering support and constructive criticism as he tries to be a good father, though we rarely see what May Ling is like as a mother. How would you think May Ling behaves as a mother to Joseph? Do you agree with the advice she gives Dan regarding parenting? Are her expectations for Dan fair?

  3. Is Dan or Tom more at fault for their broken relationship? Who else shares responsibility?

  4. After Feng Wo dies, May Ling tells Dan, “You gave him his manhood. Without tha
t, life is wasted, the way thousands of Chinese here live wasted lives. His life wasn’t wasted.” What does May Ling mean by this? Do you agree with her assertion that without manhood, a man’s life is wasted?

  5. Dan is faithful to May Ling throughout their entire marriage, but May Ling always remains suspicious and critical of Jean. Do you think May Ling’s grudge is fair? Is this sort of jealousy inevitable when a spouse remains friends with a former lover?

  6. Jean notices that Tom’s ambitions for power are eerily reminiscent of Dan’s youthful aspirations. Do you think Tom might someday lose interest in the power “game” like his father and pursue a different lifestyle? Why or why not?

  7. May Ling tells Barbara, “One of the tragedies of the rich is that they mostly cannot comprehend what it is to be poor.” Do you agree with May Ling? Can a person raised in one background ever fully understand another way of life?

  8. Jean tries to encourage Barbara to interact with single men and consider dating, but Barbara explains, “I can’t, mother. I’ve shifted worlds. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but it’s the only way I can explain it.” How do you interpret Barbara’s explanation? Do you think her attitude toward romance is temporary or permanent?

  9. Barbara has strong, positive relationships with both May Ling and Jean, while Tom’s relationship with Jean is strained, and he makes no effort to even meet May Ling. Why do the siblings have such different relationships with these two mother figures? Is it simply a gender issue, or are there other factors involved?

  10. Barbara labors over her novel for several months, but she is able to write columns for the San Francisco Chronicle relatively quickly and frequently. What is different about these two forms of writing for Barbara? Do you think one or the other more appropriately defines her as a “writer”?

  11. Barbara shows no interest in the glowing reviews her novel receives from important newspapers. Instead, she is only interested in Jean’s and May Ling’s reactions to her work. Do you find certain individuals’ praise or criticism more important than others’ reactions? Whose comments and suggestions do you value most? Why?