The Legacy (6 page)

“You don't have to go back, Sammy. Ever. If you don't want to.”

“I don't want to.”

“All right.”

He was silent after that, and Barbara wondered what one says to a child concerning death. What does one say to oneself? She had never thought of her father as an old man. With his great strength, his bulk, his enormous vitality, she had never even contemplated his death. He was her rock, the one male figure in her life who had not deserted her, who had stood by in good-natured acceptance of all the twistings and turnings of her life. Her first reaction to his death had been sheer terror, the terror of a person unmoored, unstable, teetering at the edge of a precipitous cliff. She had first to grapple with that; the grief came later, and then the arrival in San Francisco and facing her mother. Barbara, and indeed many others who knew Jean Lavette, had the feeling that by some witch's magic, she defied age. In her youth, she had readily been accorded the scepter of being the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, and even in her sixties she retained a serene and unlikely beauty. Her face had the kind of sculptured bone structure that resists time, and her tall, long-limbed frame remained youthful through the years. Now, suddenly, she was a wrinkled, shattered old woman, a transformation that tore at Barbara's heart; she had become a helpless, impotent creature, clinging to Barbara. It was the first time. Never, as long as Barbara had known her mother, had she seen her let go, even for a moment, of the image her friends knew, a coldly beautiful, self-reliant, self-contained woman whose shell could not be pierced — certainly not by a stranger and perhaps never entirely even by Barbara.

It was evening now. Staring out over the dark water of the bay, alongside the road, Sam asked plaintively, “What will become of the
Oregon Queen?
”

Lost in her thoughts, Barbara glanced at him, puzzled.

“The cutter,” he said. “Danny's cutter.”

She had never heard him call his grandfather Danny before, and it took a moment or two for her to sort out her thoughts. “The boat, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well — it's grandma's.”

“She can't sail. That's what Danny always said. No matter how he tried to teach her, she can't sail.”

“I guess not. I'm sure she'll let you use the boat.”

“I can't sail it alone.”

“No, I suppose not,” Barbara said, wondering what was behind this questioning about the boat and wondering at the same time what her son felt about his grandfather's death. He had contrived a mask, and Barbara felt she would never know what went on behind that mask. In a moment of utter panic, she experienced the loss of her son as she had lost the other men in her life; and then common sense returned. The reaction to death was always masked.

“I could teach you,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I mean I could teach you to sail. It's not a real cutter. I mean if it was — well, there's no way the two of us could handle it. It's something gramps invented.”

“You really won't go back to that school?” she said.

“I told you that!” he cried, and then the tears began, and he sat beside her bent and sobbing.

She drove on, relieved that he was crying.

“He didn't have to die,” forcing the words through his sobbing.

“What did you mean when you said it was a boat that pop invented?” she asked softly.

“You wouldn't understand. You don't know anything about sailing.”

“I could try.”

“Well,” he said grudgingly, “two people can't handle a real cutter. A real cutter has a low mast stepped amidships, and then there's a great big topmast with a gaff. It's a long boat, with all kinds of canvas like flying jibs and a forestaysail and a great big bowsprit and it hangs so deep and heavy in the water it wouldn't be any good in the bay. Don't you think Danny knew that? That's why he had to design the whole thing over and invent a new kind of cutter. But it's a real cutter still, like the old Coast Guard boats.”

“I didn't know that,” Barbara said lamely.

“I know, mom.” He moved across the seat and pressed up against her. “I know. It's the kind of thing gramps talked to me about. He wouldn't talk to you about that kind of thing.”

The first time Jean Lavette looked into a mirror after Dan's death, she was repelled and horrified, and the effect was to shake her loose, at least for a moment, from her grief, her self-pity, and her agonizing sense of being totally alone in a meaningless world. She was sixty-eight years old, but the sixty-eight years had passed day by day and hour by hour. She had been young in an age where women were
beauties,
as differentiated from being beautiful or merely pretty. A beauty was of a small, select, and categorized grouping. She was referred to by the term; her genre had been immortalized by Charles Dana Gibson in a hundred paintings; she had been the subject of endless newspaper and magazine articles, and her beauty in itself endowed her with a special and professional social distinction. Just as years later, women began to be referred to as lawyers, physicians, politicians, so in Jean's youth a handful had been referred to as beauties.

She had been one of them, reigning for years in San Francisco as an uncrowned queen and always highly conscious of the distinction bestowed upon her. Now, in her mirror, she saw reflected a haggard, lined countenance, skin gray, eyes bloodshot, hair limp and lifeless. After her initial reaction, she returned to the moment and told herself that she didn't give a damn. Dan was gone. She was beyond vanity and beyond caring. Still, she could not tear herself away from her image. Her eyes filled with tears, and she raised one trembling hand to touch her cheek. Then she stumbled over to a chair, limp and weak. A half hour passed before she was able to make the decision to do her face. It had to be done. She was still in her bedroom. Dan's body had been taken away, and she could hear people entering the house downstairs. Death did away with privacy, and she was still Jean Seldon Lavette, and already too many people had seen her in this condition. Long, long ago, when Dan had pleaded with her for a divorce, she had refused him with the cold statement that Seldons do not divorce; now she specified to herself that they do not make a public display of their grief.

She rose and went into her dressing room, faced the mirror, and began to repair the ravages that Dan's death had imprinted on her face.

Barbara dropped Sam off at her house on Green Street on Russian Hill in San Francisco. He had dozed off in the car on the way in from the airport, and she felt that he had been through enough for one day. She then went on to her mother's house. Her brother Joe was there with his wife, Sally, and Sally's father, Jake Levy, and Jake's wife, Clair. At thirty-two, Sally Lavette was still the long-limbed, flaxen-haired beauty who had once been, albeit briefly, a Hollywood star. She embraced Barbara and wept. She was emotional and she wept without effort. Her father, Jake, a large, heavyset winemaker and farmer, nodded his greeting and sympathy. They were old friends, as close as family. Clair, with the help of her daughter-in-law, Eloise, had been serving food and greeting the people who had been in and out of the house all day. Now she sat on a couch with Sarah Levy, her mother-in-law, trying to persuade the old woman to go home. Sarah Levy was seventy-eight years old, and it was her husband, Mark, dead now a quarter of a century, who had been Dan's partner for many years. As she sat now with Clair, Sarah wept and remembered, her husband dead so many years, her daughter a suicide, her grandson dead in the Pacific during World War Two — and now Danny. She was too old to cope with death anymore, too close to it to regard it as a stranger.

Joe asked Barbara about Sam. “Maybe it was all too sudden, dragging the kid out of school?”

“No, it's all right. I left him at home. He's exhausted. Where's mother?”

“She's at the chapel.”

“Alone?”

“No,” Sally put in. “Steve Cassala is with her. I'm glad you weren't here before. Old Mrs. Cassala — she must be well past eighty — she became hysterical at Dan being buried in an Episcopal cemetery. She wants us to bring the body down to San Mateo to the Catholic church there ——”

“For God's sake, Barbara doesn't have to be bothered with that,” Joe interrupted.

“I thought she should know.”

“Was mother here?” Barbara asked.

“Thank God, no,” Joe said. “Your mother's been at the chapel since four o'clock.”

“Alone?”

“No. Jake and Clair were there and Harvey Baxter and Boyd Kimmelman and Steve Cassala. Steve is still there with her.”

“He's not talking about a Catholic burial?” Barbara asked worriedly.

“No, no. Steve has more sense than that, and anyway, he doesn't give a damn. He's as much of a failed Catholic as pop was.”

“And what happened to Mrs. Cassala?”

“Her grandson, Ralph, took her home.”

“I'll go to the chapel,” Barbara decided.

It was then that Dan's son Thomas and his wife, Lucy, were let into the house by Mrs. Bendler, Jean's housekeeper. They walked silently past her into the living room, where the others were gathered. When they entered, the conversation stopped, and silence hung heavy as lead. It was years since Tom had been here, in his mother's house, his father's house, years since he had spoken to his sister, Barbara. His half brother, Joe, a tall, heavily muscled man, with a face that might have been Eskimo or American Indian, reminded Tom vaguely of his father. He had heard that this man was a physician. As for the tiny, white-haired old lady who sat weeping on the couch, she was as much a stranger to him as the long-limbed, redheaded woman who sat beside her. The others were strangers, too. God's curse on family deaths! What a bitch it was! And what a fool he had been for coming here! It was Lucy's insistence that had brought him here. “As a simple matter of form,” Lucy had said, “Dan Lavette's son cannot be absent. He is now among the honored dead of this somewhat insane city. As with the Romans, we deify our V.I.P. dead and forgive them all their sins.” What a coldblooded bitch his own wife was!

Barbara, on the other hand, was totally unprepared for this sudden appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lavette. It was still less than twenty-four hours since her father's death. She was numbed and confused and nervous about being away from her mother. She had left Los Angeles suddenly, violently; and just as suddenly she had parted with the film industry. The palm trees on the streets of Beverly Hills, the beach at Santa Monica, and Carson Devron with his old Buick convertible were all like a dream. Once or twice during this day, she had thought about her brother Tom, but with no clear notion of whether to approach him or how to approach him. She had never been able to hate, to carry a grudge as some precious inner treasure, and now, confronted suddenly, she let go of all the bitter memories and embraced Tom. For him, her reaction was unexpected. He felt limp, and when she stepped back away from him, he nodded, the funereal expression on his face adequately defining his state of mind.

“Is mother all right?” he asked her.

Lucy simply stood next to him, silent, composing in her mind her condolences.

“As all right as she could be under these circumstances,” Barbara replied.

It Was time for Lucy to express her condolences. Listening to the empty words; Barbara wondered what on earth she could do now. Introduce Joe? “Tom, this is your brother, Joe, whom you have never spoken to before.” How does one say that?

Tom solved the problem. “Is mother here now?”

“She's at the chapel.”

“I see. Should I go there?”

“That's up to you.”

He and Lucy exchanged glances. “It would be better, I think, if we simply came to the funeral. You'll tell mother we were here?”

“I'll tell her,” Barbara whispered.

Then they left. There were no introductions to the other people in the room.

At the chapel, Stephan Cassala and Jean Lavette sat in attendance to the coffin and Dan Lavette's body. They made an odd combination. Cassala was sixty-three years old, a tall, thin, gaunt man. A bad stomach wound, a memento of World War One, had given him a lasting jaundice. His tightly drawn skin, parchment-like, was the color of yellowed ivory, and the discoloration also tinged his eyeballs. He was possessed of an old-world, courtly elegance, and his manner was gentle, almost womanly. Never too close to him, Jean had always trusted him. She was of a time when manners had meaning, and Stephan Cassala's manners were impeccable. He and Dan had been children together, the families close, Stephan the son of a Neapolitan bricklayer who was to become the first important Italian banker in San Francisco, Dan the son of a fisherman. After the death of Mark Levy, Dan's first partner, Dan and Stephan had become business associates, but it was always Dan the mover, Stephan the worshipful follower. This Jean understood, and she was comfortable with him sitting beside her.

Like Dr. Kellman, Cassala was amazed at Jean's apparent lack of emotion. Of course, he told himself, he was Italian; Jean was the other kind; yet he knew better than most the amazing closeness of Dan and Jean Lavette. The white Protestant was not anything he had ever hoped to understand. The meaningful thing was Jean's presence. She had told her son Joe, “I don't want anyone else here. Not tonight. Stephan will stay with me. He wants to, and I have to respect that. But no one else, please.”

They sat in silence for the most part. At one point, Cassala recalled the day after the great earthquake. Young Dan, numb with the death of his father and mother, had spent the day ferrying panic-stricken people from San Francisco across the bay to Oakland. They thrust money at him, a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars — anything to get out of the burning city. The following day, he turned up at the Cassalas', his pockets stuffed with over four thousand dollars.