The Legacy (33 page)

“
Cactus Flower
.”

“No, it's not original — a translation of some sort.”

“That is Jacqueline Susann,” Sylvia said to her. “I did just introduce you to Jacqueline Susann. Or didn't I? I don't make those mistakes.”

The tall blonde facing Barbara said, “Don't look at me as if I'm a stranger. I'm your damned alter ego. I played you in the film.”

And Barbara thought, panic-stricken, She is the one, and I never saw the wretched thing.

And from his corner, Greenway plowed to her rescue, wheeling the blonde away, booming, “Come on, gorgeous, when you're drunk and horny as I am, a print will serve as well as the original.”

A bearded man who had written a book about the Kennedy assassination breathed on her, close and hotly, “Because, Miss Lavette, it's the theme of today, assassination, murder, the new government, the new path to power.”

Barbara was rescued by a full-breasted, hawk-nosed woman who wore a long, loose shift of India cotton. She steered Barbara out of the crowd into a reasonably unpopulated corner of the room, explaining, “Rescue is the key element in these local tribal rites, otherwise known as the literary cocktail party. If your publisher weren't sodden drunk, he might remember that.”

“He did. He rescued me once. I was about to be shafted by the Hollywood star who played me in the film of my book — which I never saw —” Barbara began to laugh. “I've never really been to one of these before — oh, once perhaps, but that was so long ago and not like this. It's wonderful.”

“Awful wonderful.”

“Exactly.”

“Let me introduce myself. We met half an hour ago, but you don't remember. How could you? My name is Netty Leedan, and I'm the author of
The Feminine Enigma,
and you're one person I've wanted to meet for years, and here we are, and I'm not going to let the opportunity slip away.”

“Of course,” Barbara exclaimed. “Oh, this is good, truly. I've read your book and parts of it over again. It's quite wonderful.”

“And you agree with me?”

“You don't want me to agree, do you? I mean, it's made me think and probe and examine myself, but do you know, you're setting out to turn the world over on its head. I've tried that. It doesn't work.”

“It will, believe me, Barbara. May I call you that? Call me Netty. I've been reading you and about you for years. It's an old saw to say that when the time of an idea has come, it's irresistible, but it's true, and this is the time of the women's revolution. It's here. It's in the air. The feminist movement is going to be the great movement of our century.”

“Do you really believe that? But why?”

“Perhaps because everything else has failed, because we've reached rock bottom — no, that's not the reason. But some of it. Perhaps it's this filthy, unspeakable war we've gotten ourselves into. There's a world of women watching it. It's in their living rooms, on their TV screens — a living testimony to how the men have failed. We may fail too, but we've never had a chance to try.”

“No,” Barbara said, “we've never had a chance to try. We couldn't do worse, could we?”

“Hardly.”

“This is no place to talk. Why don't we have lunch?”

“How long will you be in New York?”

“A few days.”

“Tomorrow, then. You're free? Good.” She scribbled an address on a bit of paper. “Here, at twelve-thirty.”

Afterwards, Greenway said to Barbara, “I see that Netty Lee-dan cornered you. Being drunk, I can characterize her as a nut. Hell, you don't need that, Barbara — a gaggle of sex-starved biddies.”

“Perhaps I do,” Barbara said. She doubted that he was as drunk as he made out to be. “Yes, I think I do.” She was reasonably tight herself, taller than Greenway by three inches, deliberately looking down at a man who held a good part of her creative life in his power, wondering whether her feeling, her reaction, was of contempt or simply indifference.

The address Netty Leedan had given her was on Fifty-fourth Street at Madison Avenue, a place called The Women's Exchange. It was a large, pleasant restaurant, quite full, mostly women, although here and there a man shared a table with a woman. Netty waved to her, and Barbara joined her.

“The food's not bad,” Netty said, after they had ordered. “As a matter of fact, it's quite good. But it's not the food. I think I'd come here no matter what they served. The organization that runs the place came into being years ago, a time when a woman with a child and no man, married or unmarried, had absolutely nowhere to turn. No welfare, no relief, and damn little charity. This place taught such women to do work at home — sewing, embroidery — and it sold the stuff they made. Oh, it didn't mean much except that sometimes it meant the difference between life and death. Not much place for it in our world of today, but I like to eat here and be reminded.”

“It never occurred to me,” Barbara said slowly, “that at home there was nothing like this. It's very interesting how many things never occurred to me.”

“But a lot of things did occur to you, and you wrote about them. I'm a Johnny-come-lately compared to you. You've done it; you're a woman, but you fought it out in their world.”

“You don't fight it out in their world, Netty. You scrabble at the edges. It's always in spite of and never because of. Whatever you do, it's considering that you're a woman. And don't think for a moment that the ass and the tits don't help. I don't make a practice of talking dirty; I hate that kind of talk and it always makes my skin crawl; but how do you put it? Lady, I'd like to fuck you — oh, that adds up to points, and it takes you in and out of places you'd never squeeze through if you were a size forty with acne. I am fifty-two years old, and one small advantage of my age is that from here on, I'll make it with other virtues, or not make it at all.”

“You're still damned attractive. Do you mean to tell me that Greenway hasn't made a pass?”

“No. I don't like him, and I think he knows it. And the book is selling.”

“It is. You're a celebrity. Hell, you have been for years. Look, I want you to stay in town a few extra days. We're having a meeting in Carnegie Hall, the first big thing we've ever attempted. If it works, it will be the real beginning and we'll finally have a women's movement that matters. I just feel in my bones that this is the moment, the time, and we need you. I want to be able to spread the word that Barbara Lavette will be our keynote speaker ——”

“Oh, no! I'm a rotten speaker. You don't want me. I've done it only once in my whole life, years ago at Sarah Lawrence, and my vocal cords froze ——”

“You can do it.”

“Please.”

“No. Believe me, you can do it.”

In the end, Barbara allowed herself to be persuaded, and for the next two days, she wrote and rewrote her ten-minute address, spoke it into her mirror, reread it with disgust, lay awake dreading the situation that faced her, and then called Netty Leedan and pleaded for escape, only to be told that it was too late, that the announcement had been made on radio and television and in the press. Then, in late afternoon on the day of the meeting, Sally telephoned from Napa and told Barbara about the death in Vietnam of Rubio Truaz.

After that, for the next hour, Barbara sat in her hotel room, alone and doing nothing, not reading, almost without thought, just sitting. Then she changed her clothes for the evening and walked the few blocks from her hotel to Carnegie Hall. She left her speech at the hotel.

“How strange,” she thought, “how very strange indeed to be doing this.” She was not at all sure how she came to be there, sitting on the platform, one of a row of women, facing a packed hall, mostly women but with a good sprinkling of men, nor did she know why she was so deeply moved. The pressure of emotion welled up inside her, and she felt that she was at the point of tears. That would not do; it would not do at all, and she fought to step away from herself, to see the time and the place and the moment and to see it all apart from herself. She had never been in Carnegie Hall before. What an immense place it was! And how, she wondered, did one go about filling it with all these women? Or was there indeed some new and mysterious current at this moment of human history? She tried to marshal her thoughts, to sort out what she intended to say, to arrange a proper sequence of events in her mind; but it was no use. Some witch's spell had cast her into memories of her youth, the sundrenched streets of pre-World War Two Paris, the trees in blossom, the broad stretches of the boulevards. Her own name tore her out of the reverie. Netty Leedan was introducing her. Barbara stood up, and there was a storm of applause as she walked to the podium and stood facing the microphone and beyond it the audience.

“I did have a speech written out,” she said to them, once the applause had died down. “I spent two days writing it and rewriting it, and I tell you this because I don't want you to feel that I am totally irresponsible, standing here without a scrap of paper. I also don't want to give the impression that I am so practiced a speaker that I can do this. I'm not. This is the second public address I've made in my entire life and the other was more than twenty-five years ago. But something happened a few hours ago, and it made me realize that I couldn't come here and read what I had written about the inequities women suffer. I can only talk about what has happened, so I beg you to bear with me.”

She paused. The audience was watching her. Her eyes moved from face to face. Strangers — or sisters? Netty Leedan had called them sisters. The thought occurred to Barbara that the only women she had felt were sisters, bound to her by ties stronger than blood, were the women she had known in prison. She cast that away. Just talk to them and tell them how it happened.

“My father,” she said, “Dan Lavette, was the son of Italian immigrants. He was a fisherman. In San Francisco, where I live, there is a place called Nob Hill, a place but also a symbol of success and power. My father fell in love with a beautiful woman who lived on Nob Hill. Her name was Jean Seldon, the daughter of a very wealthy and powerful banking family. Jean Seldon, my mother, is a remarkable woman, but then, so many years ago, she was a product of her time and a victim of her time — as my father was. My father clawed his way to wealth and power, and in the process, my mother lost him. The gulf between them was wide to begin with, and time widened it. My father took a mistress — a Chinese woman whose name was May Ling. I say Chinese, but actually she was the second generation born in America. But you would have to know San Francisco at that time to realize how little that mattered. May Ling was a lovely, intelligent woman, well educated, and she gave my father a great deal. My father divorced my mother in 1929, and a few years later, he and May Ling were married.

“I tell you all this not because of any compulsion to reveal the tangled family history of the Lavettes, but because it must be a preface to what happened to me today. My father and May Ling were in the Hawaiian Islands when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place, and May Ling was killed there. Her death was as senseless, as meaningless, and as tragic as any death in any war. No, perhaps not as meaningless, for when war kills a woman or a child, the particular murder is robbed of all the euphemistic rationalization and patriotic hyperbole with which men justify the mass slaughter they periodically inflict upon the human race.

“My father and May Ling had one child, my half brother, Joseph Lavette, who is a physician practicing in the town of Napa, in Northern California. Joe married the daughter of the family who own the Higate Winery in the Napa Valley, and their first child, a daughter, was named May Ling after Joe's mother. Again, I ask you to bear with me if I appear to wander, but I must tell this in the only way I can. In Higate, as in most of the California wineries, many of the workers are Mexicans. I call them Mexicans only to identify them, for many of these families have lived in California for generations, some before any Yankees came there. The foreman at Higate is a man called Cándido Truaz, a Chicano, as these American-born Mexicans call themselves, and his son was a young man whose name was Rubio Truaz. Rubio and May Ling fell in love. May Ling is nineteen, a slender, beautiful young woman. Rubio was a few years older, a student at Berkeley. In the normal course of things, college students have been exempted from the draft, but nothing is normal when rules are applied to Chicanos, and two years ago, Rubio Truaz was drafted. Three months ago, his unit was shipped to Vietnam, and after that, each evening, May Ling watched her television set, hoping for some sight of Rubio Truaz. A few nights ago, her watch was rewarded. She saw him. He was in the cameraman's lens when a bullet struck a grenade attached to his belt. The grenade exploded, and he was enveloped in fire, and he died this awful, terrible death while the young girl who loved him watched.

“Today, my brother's wife, Sally, May Ling's mother, telephoned me and told me what had happened. Whether the damage done to this child is as permanent as the damage done to the man she loved, I don't know. But after I spoke to my sister-in-law, I realized that whatever I had written to say here tonight was without importance. All the importance in the world was with that child, my niece, and all the symbols which adhere to the state of being a woman were bound up in her suffering and condition. I don't know what will come of this meeting here tonight, and I truly do not know whether there can ever be a women's movement powerful enough to undo what the men in this world have done. Yet they are the victims — more the victims than we have ever been. When they put us in bondage, they encased themselves in their own madness, and there, in Vietnam, we are witnessing the ultimate maniacal result of male chauvinism.

“So I am thankful, deeply thankful for this opportunity to talk to you. I said that I don't know whether we can have a great women's movement. Now I say that we must have it, because everything else has failed. We inherit that failure. We inherit all the agony and all the madness, and somehow we must put it right. There is no mankind without us. It comes out of our loins. We must free ourselves from this age-old bondage, and in so doing there is at least the slim hope that we can free all humankind. Women have always prayed that the war would be the last war. It is time we stopped praying and made certain that it
is
the last war!”