An Independent Woman (12 page)

“Thomas Lavette—the Seldon Bank—you certainly don't come of poor people, Frederick Lavette.”

He poured the last of the white wine into her glass, then the last of the Cabernet into his, impressed as before with the extent of her knowledge. And she did not appear to be the slightest bit drunk. “You know,” Freddie said, “they know me here at the hotel from way back. I can get a room for the night without any trouble.”

She smiled, a very thin smile. “You must be a very important person in San Francisco, Freddie. Lean toward me. I want to say something very serious to you.”

He leaned over and she leaned toward him until her lips were only inches from his. Then in a low whisper, she said, “Fuck you, too.” Then she rose, picking up her purse and her ruana, and strode out of the dining room.

A
T ELEVEN O'CLOCK
, Freddie called Barbara, and said, “I'm here at the Fairmont, Aunt Barbara, and I'm too crocked to drive home, but I can get the car over to your place, and I have to talk to you. I know it's late, but I'm desperate.”

“Freddie, I'm on my way to bed. Can't it wait until tomorrow?”

“I suppose so. I can get a room here.”

There was something in his voice so sad and forlorn that Barbara said, “All right, Freddie. And for God's sake, drive carefully.”

Ten minutes later Barbara, wrapped in a bathrobe, opened the door for him, told him that she had a pot of coffee brewing, and led him in to the kitchen. He dropped lightly into a chair.

“What happened, Freddie?”

“Aunt Barbara,” he said, “what on God's earth is wrong with me?”

“Freddie!”

She poured a cup of coffee for him. “Sugar and cream?”

“No, thank you. What is it? Am I backward, brain damaged, or just stupid?”

“Well, you did graduate with honors from Princeton.”

“Don't tease me, Aunt Barbara. You're the only one I can talk to.”

“Freddie,” she said patiently, “I don't know what's wrong with you or if
anything
is wrong with you. You're a little drunk, and my suggestion is that you go upstairs to the guest room and get a good night's sleep.”

“I have to talk.”

“Then talk, Freddie. It's late. What did you drink?”

“A whole bottle of Cabernet.”

“Don't you have more sense than that?”

“Apparently not. Do you remember when I went down South in the sixties with some of the boys from college and I was beaten half to death? Doesn't that give me points?”

“I'm not likely to forget it,” Barbara said.

“I'm not a white chauvinist pig—or am I?”

“Whatever that means. Suppose you tell me what happened tonight?”

He narrated the sequence of events, leaving nothing out. Barbara listened without interrupting and then sat in silence for a minute or so while Freddie sipped the coffee, his eyes cast down, for all the world like a small boy caught with a cigarette.

“Freddie,” she finally said, “would you expect a white woman to fall into bed with you on the first date?”

“It happens.”

“What is a woman, anyway? Have you ever asked yourself that?… Why do you come to me, Freddie?” There was an angry edge to her voice now. “I'm not your confessor and I'm not a psychiatrist. You do a nasty, degrading thing to a woman and she spits in your face. And she's a black woman. Has it ever occurred to you to think of what it means to be a black woman, or a white woman—or any kind of woman? We've known each other since you were a child. I watched you being baptized at Grace Church. Yes, yes, you went down to Mississippi to register black voters, and you were very brave and it broke my heart to see you in the hospital down there, but what did you learn? I spent my whole life trying to be something that any woman has the right to be, and you were always like a son to me and I always loved you, but you treat women like dirt, not like people.”

“I don't treat you like dirt.”

“Freddie, would you say what you just told me to a man? Probably, whoever the man, he'd laugh it off and say something like, ‘Sonny, it comes with the territory.' At least you have the decency to know that you did something disgusting. That's not much of a plus, but it's something. You're forty-two years old. You almost destroyed May Ling, and you haven't been able to make it with any woman. Yes, they love you. You're tall and handsome and you carry the Lavette name. Freddie, get some help, please. That's all. Now go upstairs and sleep it off. I'll see you in the morning.”

He had no retort to what she said, but he took himself upstairs like a whipped dog, and when Barbara came downstairs in the morning, Freddie was gone. He'd left a note on the kitchen table:

Dear Aunt Barbara:

Thank you for your good advice. What I remember of what you said should have been said to me a long time ago. I helped myself to last night's coffee and three of your aspirin. I'll see you soon.

With love,

Freddie

E
LOISE WAS KINDER THAN BARBARA
. She walked over to the aging room at the other end of the winery. Freddie's office was in the old building, which was joined to the new, larger building. He had refitted it into a suitable office for himself and for Ms. Gomez, his secretary. Eloise entered his office, came up behind him where he sat at his desk, and kissed the top of his head.

“Mother,” he said. “No one else kisses me on the top of my head.” He stood up to face her, wincing.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I have a frightful headache.”

“I suppose so. You know, Adam was going to talk to you. I said I would.”

Sensing what was coming, Freddie said, “Adam is a Puritan. All the world can't behave like Adam.”

“Adam is a good, loving man. He considers you to be his son. Fran Johnson—well, I called her about the wedding flowers, and—”

“Go on, Mother.”

“And she told me”—it was very hard for Eloise—”she told me that you were at the Fairmont the other night with a black prostitute and that you made a scene.” Eloise shook her head and blinked away tears.

“She's a foul-mouthed bitch!” Freddie exclaimed. “Yes, I was at the Fairmont—with a wonderful woman. Yes, a black woman—who is as far from a prostitute as you can get. She has a master's in business administration, and she works as an advertising model in commercials and in stills. She is one of the most successful and sought-after models in California. I did not make a scene. She left the table and walked out because I said something stupid to her and hurt her feelings. That's all it was. I was a bit under—too much wine. It was not a scene.”

“I'm sorry, Freddie.” She dropped into a chair. “Give me a tissue, Freddie.” She wiped her eyes, and he bent over to kiss her. “I'll explain to Adam, and there'll be no more said about this.” Then she paused and said very tentatively, “Do you like this woman, Freddie?”

“Precious lot of good if I do. She won't forgive me.”

“Women do forgive, Freddie. Otherwise our lives would be impossible.”

B
ARBARA TELEPHONED
B
IRDIE
M
AC
G
ELSIE
. Barbara had never asked Birdie, or for that matter anyone else, what his or her religion was, but Birdie had organized at least half of the protests, marches, and sit-ins in San Francisco over the past twenty years, and Barbara recalled her once saying something about the Unitarians. They had been organizing a delegation to the United Nations—one that Barbara missed, being at that time in El Salvador—and now she decided that it was worth a call.

Birdie, a large, good-natured woman, congratulated Barbara on the way she handled the theft. “What a gesture!” she exclaimed. “I meant to call you.”

“Birdie, let me ask you a curious and personal question…”

“Wow! I'm as old as you are, so I'm not pregnant. Angus has taken to sleeping in the guest room, thank God. What else is there?”

“Are you a Unitarian?”

“Well, that does it. I would never have thought of that.”

“Are you?”

“Sometimes. Maybe one Sunday in three or four or five. Angus is a totally fallen Catholic. I'm sort of—well, it's hard to describe. Why this curious and personal question?”

“Phil Carter is taking me to dinner tonight. I need some background.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, God's truth.”

“Thank goodness. Do you know how long we've been trying to find you someone? How did this happen?”

“I came in out of the rain one Sunday,” Barbara said. “How old is he?”

“What an expression of faith! You came in out of the rain. He's somewhere in his seventies—seventy-three or seventy-four. Madly in love with a wife who died—I think five years ago.”

“Well, don't jump to any conclusions.”

“I'm way ahead of you. You need someone, Barbara. You can't go on living alone in that house.”

“Stop right there,” Barbara said. “Thank you for the information, Birdie.”

“Stay in touch, Barbara,”

“One more thing,” Barbara insisted. “You intimated that I am the first in his long vigil of mourning?”

“As far as I know.”

Barbara said good-bye and felt abashed that she had derided his letter. Birdie was right in her declaration that Barbara needed someone. She had never before lived any length of time without a man in her life, but her instincts shied away from a minister. As far as she was concerned, a person's life should be involved with facts, and facts were of material substance and not of dreams; when one set about to dream, the facts had to be rejected or destroyed. She remembered only too well the first time she came face-to-face with what she regarded as the plain facts of life. That was in 1934, during the great longshoremen's strike on the docks of San Francisco, when she had become emotionally involved with the strikers' need for food. She had worked in a food kitchen then, and her experience there had been the pivotal turning point of her life. Yet she had to admit to herself that when she and Birdie MacGelsie and a few other women had organized Mothers for Peace during the Vietnam War, the first man to join them was Father Matthew Gibbon, a Jesuit priest, and after him a dozen other clerics. Who else had there been to turn to then? The thought hammered at her mind. She was too easily given to cynicism, which she was well aware of, and when she fell into that trap she disliked herself. She had not lived a cynical life; every step she had taken was out of simple belief in the rightness of a cause.
But, Barbara
, she thought,
how many men have asked you to dinner since Carson died?
She had not fallen into a morass of mourning; she had gone on with her life—but it was a lonely life. At first, every one of her friends had been eager to invite her to dinner, but she had tired of being the lone woman out. Single men of her age were hard to find, and the dinner invitations became fewer. There were days that stretched on endlessly. She walked alone on the Embarcadero; she once took to needlework, and after a day of earnestly trying, she cast it aside in disgust. There was once an entire week when she could not approach her typewriter. Why was she writing a book? There were enough books in the world, and how many women of seventy wrote books? The more she tried to re-create the beginnings of her family, the more she became overwhelmed by the toll that time had taken on them.

Finally she put all thought of the past aside and dressed herself for the evening date. She chose loose brown slacks, a pullover, and a beige cardigan. It was one of those cool summer days, and by nightfall there would be a cold wind from the Pacific. She tied up her hair and then shook her head with annoyance, untied her hair, combed it out again, and let it fall into a cowlick, shoulder length.

I always used to wear it that way—explaining to herself. And then, at precisely seven o'clock, the doorbell sounded. It occurred to her that if he had come five minutes early, he would probably have waited outside until seven.

She opened the door for him, and he greeted her with a shy, self-effacing smile, someone quite different from the confident man who had spoken with her at the church. “I'm very happy to see you,” he said. “I felt my letter was a bit foolish. Old-fashioned.”

“I like old-fashioned things,” Barbara replied. “When one gets to my age, one
is
old-fashioned.” Small lies, and why not? “Come in.”

He wore gray flannels, a white shirt, a bow tie, and a blue blazer. His shoes were old and comfortable. “You're not ready?” he asked.

“I'm ready enough. I thought we might have a glass of wine and talk a bit—get to know each other a little as people, rather than as a confused parishioner and her adviser.” She was trying desperately to put him at his ease.

“Well—” He paused. “I try not to think of myself as an adviser. I mean—well, I'm as confused as the next person.”

“Will you have some wine? I don't have any hard liquor.”

“Sure, that will be fine.”

“I have white in the fridge. I can open a bottle of red if you prefer.”

“Oh no. White will be fine.”

While she went for the wine, he looked around the modest living room: a grospoint rug on the floor, two armchairs and a couch upholstered in bright printed cloth, a very small upright piano, a Victorian chair tufted in black horsehair, and an old leather chair in the last stage of survival. On the wall, an oil painting of a handsome woman who he guessed was her mother, some prints, and a watercolor of a freighter.

Barbara returned and handed him his glass. “What shall we drink to, Mr. Carter?”

“Philip, please.”

“Very well, Philip.”

“Our meeting, perhaps?”

“Why not?” Barbara said. “May it be a good meeting.”

“I feel that I should tell you about myself.” He looked at her inquiringly, as if he expected approval or rejection. “I mean—well, people do know a lot about you—I mean, I've read a couple of your books. The one about prison and what it means—that moved me a great deal—and of course your book about El Salvador. I think it was the best book about the horror that we inflicted on that poor, suffering country.”