An Independent Woman

by Howard Fast

  “That’s great,” Barbara said. “Bless you”—and added woefully, “They killed my story.”

  “I know. It’s her paper now. We won’t talk about that. But please come and see me as soon as you get yourself together. There has to be something very good for you here at City Hall.”

  “Thank you, but my political life is over. But thank you for the thought, and good luck.”

  BARBARA LAVETTE AWAKENED. It is said that dreams are a part of awakening; that a dream will come in the few seconds of awakening; or perhaps, as she herself had heard someone say, the awakening makes the dream. She clutched at the dream, trying to hold on to it as it faded; and then she heard a ship’s foghorn from the Bay, lonely and haunting, and the dream was gone.

  She reached for her bedside light and looked at her clock. Two o’clock in the morning, an odd hour. Usually she awakened at four and then lay in bed, struggling for more sleep but rarely achieving it. For a few moments she lay quiet, eyes closed, listening to the foghorn. Then it was joined by another, and then a third—was it a third, or perhaps the first horn answering? The Bay must be thick with fog, soaked in fog, and she could imagine a ship trying to slide through the Golden Gate. It could drop anchor and wait until the fog lifted, or at least until daylight; but recalling her father’s years as a shipowner, she knew the price of a ship’s day lost in passage.

  She dropped into memories. It was not hard to remember her father, his commanding voice, low and resonant, and still at times amazingly gentle.

  Then true awakening came, hard and sharp, and her body responded to the sound of a footstep outside her bedroom door. Barbara stiffened, fear quickening her heartbeat, fear that she tried desperately to control, clenching her fists and easing herself. The old house was full of sounds, boards creaking, boards tightening in the cold air of night, and possibly she had heard no more than that.

  She was not easily given to fear; her life had been too violent, too shredded. She had resisted the parade of salesmen who had tried to sell her this or that security system. “I have nothing worth stealing,” was her response. She was sixty-nine years old, and she had consistently rejected the notion, offered by her friends, that she should keep a gun in the house.

  The sound again, and this time she was certain. It was a footstep, no doubt about that. She leaped out of bed, threw on her robe, and reached for the telephone.

  The bedroom door opened, and a voice said, “Lady, don’t pick up that phone!” He had a gun in his hand, not pointed at her, but simply held as an exhibit. He was a tall, slender man, blue jeans and a black sweatshirt, a mask with eyeholes, and tightly curled hair cropped close. Dark skin showed beneath the mask. He wore sneakers.

  Barbara was herself now. She heard his words against the lonely hooting of the foghorns. Her hands had stopped shaking. She pushed her white hair away from her face and tried to speak calmly.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m a thief. What do you think I want? Open your robe.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see what you look like.”

  “I’m seventy years old.”

  “Shit, lady. Do what I tell you.”

  She opened her robe. Staring appraisingly at her body, visible through the thin nightgown, he nodded. “You’re stacked,” he said approvingly.

  “I have AIDS,” she said. She had thought of that invention recently, anticipating the possibility that she might someday face rape. But so had all her friends. The man grinned.

  “What the hell, it’s San Francisco,” he said. “I’m not a rapist, I’m a thief.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “Keep what?”

  “Jewels, gold, any damn thing I can sell.”

  “What’s your name?” Barbara asked. She was in control of herself now, wrapping her robe around her and tying the sash.

  “Oh, Jesus—lady, you’re weird. Fuck my name. Let me get what I came for and get the hell out of here. I don’t want to get mean with you. I don’t want to shoot you, so don’t push me.”

  “There’s a television downstairs.”

  “I’m not breaking my back with any lousy television. You got any cash?”

  Barbara sat down on the bed. She felt that it gave her an advantage, that it was a bit more difficult to shoot or beat someone sitting down—at the same time wondering where she got the notion.

  “Suppose my husband came in. Would you shoot him? Would you shoot both of us?”

  “You got no husband, lady. Don’t fuck with me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “There’s a hundred and twenty dollars or so in my bag.”

  “Where’s the bag?”

  She pointed to a chair. He found the bag, a large brown leather purse with a shoulder strap. Not taking his eyes off her, he picked up the bag and tossed it at her. “Empty it on the bed.”

  The contents spilled out on the comforter, a change purse, a wallet, an address book, keys, cards, lip gloss, handkerchief, gold pen, small mirror, comb, nail clipper, and a glassine folder of children’s pictures.

  “Empty the wallet and the purse.” He walked to the other side of the bed and flicked on the other bedside lamp as Barbara took the bills out of the wallet and opened her change purse. There were five dollar bills and some change in the purse. He stuffed it into his pocket and counted the money from the wallet, one hundred and twenty-six dollars. Barbara started to rise.

  “Don’t move, lady. Just sit there.”

  “What else do you want?”

  “Jewelry. Do I have to dump all the drawers, or are you going to tell me?”

  “What I have is here in my bedside drawer.” She sighed now.

  “Pull it out and dump it on the bed.”

  “All right.” Barbara reached over and pulled out the second drawer of her bedside table, and turned it over onto the comforter.

  “Don’t get euphoric,” he said sharply. She looked at him curiously. He was separating the jewelry, four rings, one of them a small diamond set in gold, two plain gold bands, and the third, a large man’s ring, heavy gold and carved to look like a leopard. He held it in front of him so that he could watch Barbara as he read the inscription on the inside. There was also a heavy gold linked bracelet, a neckband to match, and a brooch set with small diamonds and rubies.

  “That ring was my father’s,” Barbara said. “I wish you would leave it. The other stuff is worth much more.” She had never cared for jewelry, wore it only occasionally, and ignored the advice of her friends that she keep the pieces in a vault.

  He weighed the ring in his hand.

  “My mother gave it to him. It means something to me.”

  “It’s worth a thousand, lady.”

  “I’ll give you the thousand. You can have the jewelry. I won’t call the cops, and I won’t ever bear witness against you. Take it as a gift but leave me the ring.”

  “You are something, lady. Where’s the thousand?”

  “I don’t keep cash in the house. I’ll write you a check.”

  “Oh, lady, lady,” he said, smiling. “You’ll give me a check—written out to me, of course. And when I go to cash it, the cops will be waiting to pick me up. I wasn’t born yesterday. This is the largest crock of shit I ever heard.”

  “If I give you my word, I’ll keep it. You’re no ordinary thief. You’re an educated man. I don’t give a damn about the other stuff, but I care about the ring.”

  “Lady, I’m a plain street nigger.”

  “But you use words like euphoria. You don’t talk like a plain street thug. You try to, but it doesn’t come off. If you were a professional, you’d grab the stuff and be out of here in minutes. You wouldn’t be sitting here and talking to me. You’d beat me up and rape me and get out of here… You don’t have to keep pointing that gun at me. I’m not going to resist you. But I want the ring. There’s a small leather box on my dressing table, and there’s a string
of pearls in it that’s worth more than five thousand dollars—a lot more than the ring.”

  The black man stared at her for a long moment. Then he went to the dressing table, opened the leather box, and took out the pearls. The necklace was twenty-four inches long, matched natural pearls, a gift from Carson Devron. In the two years since he died, she had never touched the pearls, never worn them. Two years was not long enough for her to accept the fact that Carson was dead, and she shunned anything that brought it home to her. She had intended to give the pearls to Sam’s wife, Mary Lou, or perhaps to Mary Lou’s daughter when she was a few years older.

  The black man was looking at the pearls, holding the necklace up to the light. “What else did you forget to show me?”

  “Nothing else. As a matter of fact, I haven’t thought about the pearls for months.”

  “I don’t know shit about pearls.”

  “Suppose you stop trying to talk like a thug,” Barbara said softly. “Why don’t you take the pearls and the other stuff and go—and leave me the ring, please. Suppose there’s an alarm somewhere in the house?”

  “There isn’t. I looked around downstairs. And the fog’s as thick as glue. Nobody’s coming.”

  “The pearls are valuable, believe me. What college did you go to?”

  He was taken aback, off guard; she could see his eyes narrowing through the holes in his mask. “You don’t want to know.”

  “But I do.”

  “Why? So you can call the cops the moment I leave and tell them to look up every nigger that graduated from—oh, shit, lady, keep the goddamn ring!” He stuffed the jewelry into his pockets and said, “Stand up and turn around.”

  “Are you going to tie me up? It’s not necessary. I’m not going to call the police.”

  “Sure.” He walked around the bed and tore the telephone cord out of the wall and crushed the connecting tab under his foot.

  As he turned to the door, Barbara said, “One question, please. Why?”

  “Why I’m a thief? All right, lady. I’m a civil engineer. For a year after I graduated, I washed dishes and cleaned toilets. This is easier. Four years of engineering training, and I can pick locks and neutralize alarm systems. Most crooks have the brains of a maggot, so the competition’s not heavy. I knew you were alone because I know the story of you and your father. Who doesn’t in this town?… Don’t go outside and start screaming. The fog’s as thick as shit, and maybe you’ll meet up with one of the bad guys.”

  “I don’t scream,” Barbara said. “How did you get in?”

  “I told you, I picked the lock. You don’t impress me, lady. You liberal do-gooders give me a pain in the ass. It’s burning out there, and you sit here with your fuckin’ jewels. So thank you for nothing.”

  Then he left, and a few moments later she heard the downstairs door slam. She was dog-weary and a little sick inside, her pulse hammering. Thank God he had not tied her up! She thought of going downstairs and seeing whether he had disabled all of her telephones, but then she decided that it didn’t matter and she truly didn’t care. All she desired right now was to get into bed, turn off the lights, and pull the covers up to her chin. Anything else could wait until tomorrow.

  SHE WAS TOO TIRED TO SLEEP, too tired to let go of her churning thoughts. Was she sane, or was she acting out the last thing he had said—“It’s burning, out there and you sit here with your fuckin’ jewels”? He had walked off with the money and at least a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. Did she care or didn’t she care? Long ago, half a century ago, she had taken an inheritance of fourteen million dollars and turned it into a trust, coddling herself with the virtue of what is right and what is wrong. Her grandfather had died, and the fourteen million was stuck in her grandfather’s bank, left to her in his will.

  Why am I thinking of that? I am an old woman of seventy, and I have just been robbed by a black civil engineer, and I am hiding under a comforter. Who was it that said, “Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue”? Was it Seneca? Who was Seneca? I’ve forgotten that, too … I want to sleep and forget that this ever happened.

  “But I have the ring,” she said, almost in a whimper.

  She would not think about the robbery anymore. But she did think about it; she lived it through again and again. She had experienced a great deal, but she had never been robbed before. She had a feeling of violation, of penetration to the uttermost soul of her being, of having been raped in a way that was worse and more devastating than any physical rape. She had been a liberal all her life; for almost half a century, there had been no good cause in San Francisco that Barbara Lavette had not been a part of—frequently as the leader. It began with the great waterfront strike of the thirties, and it went on from there, one thing after another until it became a commonplace to turn to Barbara Lavette— So why the guilt? she asked herself. It was not the jewels; she had been entirely truthful with herself and with the thief when she said she did not give a damn for the jewels. It was what he said and how he said it; and his leaving the ring. She recalled his gesture of contempt as he tossed the ring on the comforter. Any hockshop would have gladly paid a hundred dollars for the ring. What was gold selling for now—four hundred, five hundred dollars an ounce? She tried to recall the sum; she didn’t read the financial pages, but the enormous rise in the price of gold was talked about all over the City.

  On the other hand, her father’s name, Dan Lavette, was inscribed on the inside of the ring, and when she recalled that and realized that it would be worthless to the thief unless melted down, and a conclusive piece of evidence if he were to be caught with the ring in his possession, she was at last able to relax. “Let virtue be what it is,” she said to herself, smiling forlornly for the first time since the night began.

  She must have dozed after that, and she awakened to the vague morning light. She left the bed and looked out of the window. Green Street tilted down Russian Hill to the Embarcadero, and from her window Barbara could see the last wisps of fog curling before the wind and drifting across the Bay. It was a beautiful sunny day, and for all that she had had so little sleep, she felt renewed and refreshed.

  She showered, pulled on a pair of gray slacks and a cashmere sweater, and went downstairs. Nothing appeared to be disturbed, except that the drawers in her desk were partially drawn and the clay jars in which she kept sugar and flour were upended and dumped on the kitchen table. He must have been careful, since she had heard no sound until his footsteps on the creaking stairs awakened her. The phone plugs had been pulled out of the wall and broken, so she was still without a telephone. Somewhere she had an extra phone wire, but that could wait until she had cleaned up the kitchen table and had breakfast.

  She had regained her composure, and that pleased her, but the cleaning of the kitchen table and the precise, orderly way she went about boiling two eggs and preparing a bowl of dry cereal made her acknowledge to herself that she was putting off the telephone call. In many ways Barbara was a precise and orderly person, but this time she was purposely slow and deliberate, giving her additional time to consider the question. She had heard that little that was stolen was recovered, and she had also heard that many people preferred to simply let it go and claim the insurance; but to claim the insurance, the theft must be reported to the police, and there was the rub. Do I or do I not want to report this to the police? She had told the thief and she had told herself that she didn’t give a damn about the jewelry, but the diamond and ruby brooch had been a gift from Carson. Was it callous—or could a lifeless thing have meaning? Why did she plead with the thief to let her keep her father’s ring? Why was she so hungry, buttering a third slice of toast and chewing it slowly and savoring each bite of it? Was this indifference? Carson had been her husband, and after she had divorced him, he had been her lover and protector, and this very morning, providing she could get her head together, she would begin to work on the final chapter of her new book, the story of her time with Carson and his death. It was to be published a
s fiction, and originally she had planned that when the manuscript was finished, she would change the names; but for the last eight months she had evoked Carson daily, reexamining her relationship with him, and had come to the conclusion that she would publish it as she wrote it, and let come what might. And yet the most precious gift of jewelry that he had given her was gone. When she had offered to buy the ring from the thief, he had derided her—and still she could tell herself that she would keep her word, although by now she realized how ridiculous her proposal was.

  “It’s burning outside, and you sit here with your fuckin’ jewels!”

  No, no, no! exploded inside of her. I am not a racist! I did not make slavery! I paid my dues. Who are you to judge me? What do you know of me?

  Angrily she rummaged through her tool drawer, found a spare telephone cord, and managed to plug it in. She looked at her watch; it was seven-thirty. She sat staring at the telephone and brooding, and then she looked at her watch again and it was seven forty-five. She went into the bathroom, glanced at the mirror, and then brushed her thick white hair. Her dearest friend, Eloise, had pleaded with her to dye it the rich honey color it had once been, but after Carson died she had become indifferent to her looks. Then she went back to the chair by the telephone, an ancient green velvet upholstered Victorian chair that she had inherited from old Sam Goldberg, her father’s lawyer and, after Dan’s death, her surrogate father. Evidently the chair finally brought her to a decision, and she picked up the telephone and called her own lawyer, Abner Berman.

  “Do you know what time it is?” he demanded sleepily.

  “It’s a time when honest men are on their way to work.”