The Legacy (8 page)

“No.” Barbara shook her head. “Time heals it, mostly.”

“I'm too old for time to do any healing. I don't know why I'm drinking coffee. Do you want a drink?”

“Yes.”

“Scotch and water and ice?”

“I'll make them,” Barbara said, rising.

“All right. I'm tired. Make mine a double. Perhaps I'll sleep.”

“Didn't Dr. Kellman give you something?”

“Sleeping pills?” Jean snorted. “Not your precious Kellman. Afraid I'd do myself in or something. Told me to take hot milk. I'll tell you, if I thought it would lead me to Danny, I wouldn't hesitate. Only I don't.”

Barbara handed Jean the drink. “Here's to daddy. One last toast.”

“You had this kind of grief twice, didn't you?” Jean asked, looking at her daughter strangely.

“Yes, twice.”

“Poor kid. Poor Barbara. Poor Jean.” She drank, a long gulp that drained half the glass. “You're still young and beautiful. Would you do it again?”

“I've thought of it.”

“Oh? Anyone in particular? You're so closemouthed. You never did tell me about Los Angeles.”

“There's not much to tell. Someone once said L.A.'s a great place if you like to eat. Not that the food's good, but there's not much else to do.”

“They also say it's a great place if you're an orange. What about the man?”

“His name's Carson Devron. Well — Kit Carson Devron.”

“Devron?” Jean looked at her and then looked back into her glass. Then she finished her drink. “Not
the
Devrons?”

Barbara nodded.

“No. Good heavens, no. They're cowboys. They live on beans and jerky and grow oranges.”

Barbara leaned over and kissed her. “Mother, you're wonderful. I adore you.”

“Kit Carson Devron,” Jean whispered. “Does he wear a coon-skin cap? I'm a little drunk, darling. Shall I have another?”

“If you wish.”

“A short one. I'll get maudlin.”

“Your privilege.” Barbara mixed the drink and handed it to Jean.

“Tell me about Kit Carson,” Jean said.

“Call him Carson — only for my sake. You know, they're quite civilized, mother, and very rich. They own half of downtown Los Angeles —”

“It has a downtown?”

“—not to mention the
Morning World.
I'm not impressed by the wealth, which you might suspect. I met him at one of those dreadful Beverly Hills parties, which my producer gave to welcome me into the fold of what they euphemistically call the Industry. He talked me into leaving, and do you know, nobody actually realized that the guest of honor was missing. Well, one thing led to another, and I think he's very much in love with me.

“Are you in love with him?”

Barbara shrugged. “It gets less easy. I'm forty-four. He's thirty-six.”

“Well, I suppose you've thought about that?”

“You can be sure.”

“I remember reading about him,” Jean said. “When they made him publisher of the paper. It's a rotten paper. The
Chronicle's
nothing to write home about, but compared to the Los Angeles
Morning World,
it's the New York
Times.
”

“All Los Angeles papers are awful,” Barbara agreed, unruffled. “He's only just become publisher.”

“The golden lad, Olympic athlete, Rhodes scholar, very much the young Greek god. For heaven's sake, Bobby, he's not even real.”

“He's very real. I'll admit he's good-looking, but it's not his fault. I'll also admit that he's some sort of throwback, very honorable, which doesn't hurt, and certainly not the kind of man I've ever been interested in.” She was thinking of Marcel Duboise, who died in a hospital in Toulouse after being wounded in the Spanish Civil War, her first love, a tall, skinny, wonderfully ugly man, and she was thinking of Bernie Cohen, whom she had married and who had died fighting in Israel, a great bear of a man, Sam's father. “No, not the kind of a man I've taken to.”

“But you do take to him?”

“I think I do, mother.”

“And the age difference?”

“It worries me,” Barbara admitted. “I told him it made things impossible.”

“Does it?”

“I don't know. I want you to meet him. He wanted to come with me, but I thought he should meet the Lavettes under happier conditions.”

“You know,” Jean said, “from all I hear, the Devrons are a tight little clan. Primitives. They'll have something to say about it.”

“I'm sure they will.”

“Well, what will be, will be. I'm a little drunk, my darling, and I find myself sitting here and thinking that Danny will be upstairs, sound asleep in a room that stinks of cigar smoke. I don't want to cry in front of you, so let's go to bed.”

The bed was cold as ice. Jean lay there, looking into the darkness and finding nothing.

Barbara lay awake and brooding. This was her old room, the first sleeping place that she remembered in her life. Whatever her father and mother had done to tear up their life, to dismember it before they patched it together again, the house on Russian Hill had remained. Tom's room, where Sam was sleeping tonight, was next to hers. The furniture upstairs had never been replaced. At least four times, Jean had swept the lower floor clean of its contents, going from period to period, from mood to mood, from Queen Anne to Art Nouveau to Chinese Chippendale, reacting in this manner to loneliness, to dissatisfaction, and to anger, yet her rage against the decor of her living space had always stopped short at the staircase to the bedrooms. For this, Barbara was grateful, yet it made the realization of her father's death only more difficult.

Long ago, while still in college, she had been involved with the great San Francisco longshore strike and the incident remembered as Bloody Thursday. In the course of this, a young longshoreman named Dominick Salone had fallen in love with her, an affection Barbara had been unaware of and indifferent to. In the course of the strike, he had been killed, and after his death Barbara had been full of guilt for her indifference to his feelings. Yet the feeling came and departed, just as the death of Marcel Duboise, the French newspaperman who had been her lover, was a blow she accepted. She survived the grief because she accepted the parting, and that too was the case when her husband had been killed in Israel. She was a strong woman; she had never emptied or destroyed herself by screaming out endlessly against a fate that appeared to militate against any lasting happiness in her life. Her very serenity often made her uneasy and guilt-ridden and caused her to wonder whether she was capable of any truly deep feeling or emotion. As a young woman, she had been easily given to tears; now, like her mother, she lay in the darkness, dry-eyed, trying to grasp the fact that the one man who had never deserted her, who was her strong rock of support and had been for forty-four years of her life, was now gone forever.
Forever
was somehow different than it had been with her lover and her husband. Forever was unfathomable.

It was almost dawn when Barbara finally fell asleep, and then she dreamed that she and Sam were out in the boat Dan had designed, not in the bay but out far in the ocean, cloaked with fog and lost beyond rescue.

The Devron mansion, in Hancock Park, was half-timbered in imitation of an English manor house and contained twenty-two rooms. Hancock Park, still an elegant area in 1958, had been even more elegant when Christopher Devron, Carson's father, built his home there. He chose Hancock Park deliberately. For one thing, it was square in the center of Los Angeles, as opposed to the great ranch-estates of his financial contemporaries in Orange County and up the coast toward Malibu. If Los Angeles was his city, he had no intentions of being an absentee landlord. For another, it was on the front wave — forty years before, when it was built — of a city moving westward toward the Pacific shore. It was a Devron instinct to move westward. Now, however, by this year of 1958, Beverly Hills had sprawled out to the west of Hancock Park, and indeed the area was beginning to show wear around the edges — which did not perturb the Devrons at all. The fact that they had chosen Hancock Park made it the place; as simply as that.

Jean Lavette's assessment of the Devrons would have been less scornful had she been less miserable; yet even less scornful, it would have stemmed from two conditions. For one, from the San Francisco consciousness, the knowledge that this tiny city, this jewel of the Pacific, this city of hills and high-rises and cable cars, which claimed to be a miniature New York, a miniature Paris, was in reality a town of less than a million people with very much of a small-town mentality — and out of this troubled knowledge a fierce sense of superiority over Los Angeles, that huge, sprawling, shapeless entity to the south; and for another, the fact that Jean's mother had been an Asquith of Boston. Given those two conditions, her view of the Devrons was understandable, if inaccurate; indeed, as inaccurate and intolerant as the Devrons' assessment of the Lavettes.

In one aspect, however, it was valid. The Devrons were a tight clan, and now, in the Devron dining room, the clan was gathered at dinner. Seven Devrons were seated around the long dining table, Devrons all because whether of male or female gender, whether by blood or marriage, they were nevertheless considered Devrons. At one end of the table, Christopher Devron, seventy-three, a large, rugged man, his face wrinkled like old leather, his thick head of hair snow-white. Facing him, at the other end of the table, Lila Devron, slender to the point of emaciation, dark eyes set in an olive-skinned, aristocratic face. Five years younger than her husband, she permitted no strand of gray to reveal itself in her black hair, and her tightly drawn skin made her appear much younger than her sixty-eight years. Her daughter, Willa — Willa Cather Devron — favored her, even as Carson favored his father. Willa and her husband, Drew Anthony, whose Arlington Ranch took up a goodly part of Orange County, were seated on Lila's right, with Carson between Willa and his father. On Lila's left, Christopher Devron's sister, Sophie, and her husband, Jamie Coster, whose legal firm of Coster and Haley had represented, fought for, and sinned for the Devron interests since there had been Devron interests in Southern California. Coster and his wife, the child of grandfather Devron's older years, were both in their early sixties.

In all, it was a family company that dined together at least one night out of every week, and those who knew the Devrons also knew that most decisions regarding their vast interests were decided not at the formal board of directors meetings of their various companies, but at these family affairs. Tonight, they had just finished discussing the acquisition of a thousand-acre tract of land in San Luis Obispo County, debating the pros and cons of its possibilities for development, when Carson decided to make his own announcement, to take the plunge, to mount the barricades.

“I'm thinking of getting married,” he said bluntly. “I thought this might be a good occasion to inform you all, after which” — smiling — “we can join battle.”

Christopher Devron knew his son. He waited, silent. Lila said, “Join battle? Really, my dear.”

“In a general sense?” his sister, Willa, asked. “Or do you have someone in mind?”

“I have someone in mind. I met her three months ago.”

“And never saw fit to bring her here?” his mother said.

“I had my reasons, mother.”

“I'm sure you did,” Christopher Devron acknowledged. “What's her name? Who is she?”

“Her name is Barbara Lavette.”

Carson glanced at the assembled faces. They were dealing with the name, running it through their memories. They placed it and waited for Lila to comment.

“Not
the
Barbara Lavette.”

“Yes,
the
Barbara Lavette.”

“Didn't her father die a few days ago — Dan Lavette?” Christopher asked. “Page three,” he added, smiling slightly. “I would have given the old pirate page one.” He had founded the
Morning World.

“Carson, you're not serious,” sister Willa said.

The others watched Lila. Their comments had already formed. It was simply a question of what tack Lila Devron chose to take. Few outside this circle knew the power and strength of this slender woman.

She chose an ethnic point of departure. “Dan Lavette was an Italian. His father was a fisherman, if indeed anything is to be known about his parents. It's true he married a Seldon, and I understand that his son, Thomas, is very rich and very powerful. Nevertheless, his life has been threaded through with the most disgusting scandal. If I remember correctly, he had a Chinese mistress who bore him a son out of wedlock.”

“Out of wedlock,” Carson thought. “How wonderful.” And then added aloud, “Since we're talking about wedlock, mother, he also lived with his wife out of wedlock. After which he married her a second time. I think that's quite remarkable.”

“I'll be damned,” Drew Anthony muttered.

“I don't appreciate flippancy,” Lila told her son. “It's not an original thought, but I must remark that the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. The father was in jail and so was the daughter. Carson, you can't be serious. The woman's a communist.”

“She's no more a communist than you are, mother.”

“He has a point there, Lila,” Jamie Coster said. “I followed the case rather carefully. She was foolish and arrogant and pigheaded, and perhaps she had her fingers in some sticky stuff. But there's no grounds for thinking that she's a communist.”

“There are no grounds for thinking she isn't,” Willa put in.

“Thank you, sister dear. She isn't. Not that it's to the point; it's just a matter of fact.”

“What connection has she with the Seldon Bank?” Christopher asked.

“None. She sold out to her brother.”