An Independent Woman (17 page)

“Yes.”

“Excuse me, I don't want to pry, but are you any relation to the Barbara Lavette I read about—oh, maybe five or six weeks back—the woman who said she wasn't robbed of a hundred grand in jewelry?” .

Freddie hesitated, then nodded. “She's my aunt.”

“I'll be damned! How did Judy find you?”

“Judy,” someone called out, “come over here!”

Freddie shrugged uneasily. Another man joined them, and then a couple, and in a few minutes Freddie was the center of a circle of people.

“Come on, she really gave him the jewelry?”

“Did they know each other?” a woman wanted to know.

“No,” he replied, and tried to explain. “The way she put it, she was buying the fifteen years he would have served. She knows what prison is. She was in prison once.”

“Come on!”

Judith Hope had never made the connection, and as she joined the circle around Freddie she stared at him as if she had never seen him before.

Taken wholly aback by the look on Judith's face, he had a sudden rush of panic. “Here I am babbling away—I shouldn't be speaking about this. If a cop took down what I'm saying—”

“Freddie,” Judith said, “there are no cops here.” Larry Cutler, their host, was an attorney and knew Harry Lefkowitz, and he filled in pieces of the story. Freddie had another gin and tonic, and the talk turned to the first case of Robert Jones and the term he had served for punching the armed guard. Bit by bit, Freddie forgot his white skin, and when dinner was served, he ate hungrily of the fresh roast and fixings. He was just a little drunk, relaxed, and he accepted the plate of food that Judith chose for him with a whisper of gratitude.

When he dropped Judith off at her house, well past midnight, after she opened the door, she leaned toward him and kissed him—and then swirled away and closed the door behind her. He drove back to Highgate, lost in a maze of interesting thought. Fortunately, there was almost no traffic at that hour.

H
ARRY LEFKOWITZ WAS INVOLVED
in the closing of an important case, and May Ling had agreed to meet him in San Francisco for lunch at his office so that they could talk to Philip Carter. Harry was perfectly willing to leave all wedding arrangements to Sally and May Ling, but Philip felt that he should at least have a talk with Harry before the ceremony. May Ling planned to do some shopping while in town, and she arrived early, with her four-year-old son, Danny. She had hoped to leave him with Sally, but Sally complained that she could not cover for May Ling in the surgery and take care of Danny at the same time.

At Harry's office, his secretary, Alice Goldman, a fat, good-natured woman of fifty or so, said that she would gladly look after Danny for the next hour, but Danny refused vociferously, and May Ling decided that the best choice was to take him with her. After an hour of shopping, May Ling returned to the office with a tired and irritated little boy, explaining to Harry and Philip, who were already there, that this was not his usual behavior and that Market Street and Macy's had gotten the best of him.

He was a handsome little boy, part Chinese, part Jewish, and part Anglo, straight brown hair and large brown eyes. Harry had put out a sumptuous spread—chicken salad, a pâté, a green salad, small rolls, and ice cream—but Danny would have none of it until finally, with his mother's urging, he settled for the ice cream.

Harry shared the boy's uneasiness. He had pondered the question of adoption, and while he felt that Freddie would not stand in the way of such a course, his feeling—not unusual in a Jew—was that with his natural father being a Lavette, the child would have more opportunities with that name than with the name of Lefkowitz. Harry had raised this question once with May Ling, and it evoked the only anger he had ever seen her display. “You are Lefkowitz and I shall be Lefkowitz, and. if Freddie agrees that you adopt Danny, he will be Lefkowitz and proud of it. My father was Jewish, Harry, and so am I. I don't want you to forget that.” Harry realized that this was not strictly true, since under Jewish practice the descent is through the mother, and Sally's mother was not Jewish; but Harry had been in no mood to argue the matter.

Harry had intended to look up
Unitarian
in the encyclopedia, but time and the closing of his case prevented this, and very uneasily he broached the question of cults to Philip, who took it with good nature. “No, Mr. Lefkowitz—we are older than the United States and we exist all over the world. We are a very simple and straightforward religion. I brought some material that we publish, which you may read when you find time.” He put the material on the table and selected a single pamphlet. “This is our marriage booklet. It has dozens of suggestions, and you may choose any of them or any combination of them—or May Ling and you may decide to write your own ceremony. We have no liturgy that we press on anyone.”

“That's hard to believe,” Harry said. “If you're trained as a lawyer, you live on liturgy. It becomes our religion.”

“From what I hear, that's hardly the case with you.”

“Thank you,” Harry said, looking at his watch. “I only wish it were so. I'm defending a man who may or may not have stolen five million dollars from his stockholders, and I'm ashamed to admit that I don't actually know whether he's guilty or not. Our liturgy is very complicated, Dr. Carter.”

“Well, there is one rule in our church. No one is permitted, without correction, to call me Dr. Carter.”

“I'll remember that, Philip.”

T
HAT EVENING BARBARA DINED
with Philip at her home. More and more often she had been inviting him to partake of her own cooking, since he insisted on getting the check when they dined out. She was a good cook. Her time in France had been at least in part an investigation into French cooking, and she had an assortment of French cookbooks on her kitchen shelf. He ate what she cooked with delight and gusto, and complained gently that for the first time in his adult life he was gaining weight, which she dismissed as nonsense. “You're thin as a rail. It's just that for the first time in years you're enjoying what you eat, instead of what they serve you in those dreadful restaurants you patronize.”

“They're not all dreadful.”

“Most are. Chinese food is very salty, and the doctor said you should cut down on salt. Oh, what's the use? You don't listen to anything I say.”

“I certainly do,” he protested. “And I'm healthy as an ox.”

“However healthy that may be… Tell me about today. What happened?”

“It went nicely. May Ling is a lovely, gentle woman.”

“And Harry Lefkowitz?”

“He puzzles me. I mentioned him to Bob Doyle, who's a member of our church and a U.S. Attorney. He says Lefkowitz is one of the sharpest lawyers in town, and the others hate to go up against him because he ties them into knots and wins most of his cases. On the other hand, Doyle says that Lefkowitz's office does more pro bono work than any large firm in town. I don't like to judge people—especially when I know so little about them.”

“Saint
and
sinner?” Barbara asked.

“Perhaps.”

“I thought you didn't have sin in your discipline?”

“Do you mean we don't admit to sin, acknowledge sin?”

“I suppose.”

“Of course there's sin—just look around the world we live in. The difference is that we don't deal with sin against God or the rules they make up concerning sin against God. We deal with sin against men and women, and that's an entirely different matter.”

She nodded, rose, and went into the kitchen for dessert and coffee. She returned with the coffeepot in one hand and a big platter in the other, which Philip took from her as its weight began to tell.

“What on earth is this?” he asked her.

“It's a superb Australian dessert called a pavlova. She was dancing in Sydney, I believe, and they were so delighted with her that they named this dessert after her. It's all egg white, sugar, and flavor—not a drop of cholesterol, and it rips the fat off you.”

He had two helpings of the pavlova and praised it, and when she started to clear the table, he said, “No—please, Barbara. Sit down. I'll help you clear later. There's something I have to say now.”

“Now? How about in the living room, and I'll pour some brandy?”

“No. Here, right now, before the telephone rings. Your friends always call when they think you've finished dinner.”

“What an odd thought! All right, my dear Philip, here, now.” She leaned over the table and put her chin on her palms.

“I want to marry you,” Philip said flatly.

“Do you? That's very flattering. But why?”

“Because I love you.”

“Thank you, dear Philip. But you don't have to marry me to love me. Is that the result of seeing Harry and May Ling? May Ling is thirty-seven, and Harry is somewhere around fifty, and it's quite intelligent for them to marry. You and I—”

“I know how old we are. That makes no difference. I want very much to marry you, for us to be man and wife.”

“But why marriage, Philip? This isn't the largest house in the world, but I have three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, and a good many closets, and you could move in—and believe me, I have thought about it—and you could be perfectly comfortable here. You have stayed over here, let me see, four times at least. We could turn the extra bedroom into a study; one of the bedrooms, as you have seen, has a large window with a view of the Bay… I've been married twice, Philip. Don't you think that's enough?”

“What has that to do with this?”

“Oh, a great deal. I'm not much good at marriage.”

“Barbara,” he said, “we can't live together.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm a minister of a church.”

“What!” Barbara exclaimed. “After all you've told me, after all your sermons about equality and the rights of women and the freedom of choice, you tell me that we can't live together! They would fire you because you're living with me? Then it's all a lie, isn't it? How can you say that you love me?”

“I do love you.” He had never seen this part of her. “And they wouldn't fire me. They wouldn't care—but I would. Do you know, I never kissed a woman after my wife died; never been with a woman. Do you think I'd be in bed with you if I didn't adore you? I was a priest. You can take a man out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the man.”

“So you keep telling me. Thank God I never had a church inside of me.”

“Why are we doing this? For heaven's sake, Barbara, marry me. We have no obligations to anyone.”

She burst into laughter, rose, and went around the table; stood behind him and put her hands on his cheeks. “Poor Philip, poor Philip. And I'm to blame. I seduced you, deliberately and wantonly.”

“No, you didn't. I was praying to God that you would come into my room. I didn't have enough courage to go into yours. Like President Carter, I lusted in my heart.”

“Poor, dear Philip,” she said. “My darling Eloise will have a nervous breakdown before May Ling's marriage is over, and you want to wish another one on her.”

“No, we'll be married in the church—with no fuss and no toll on Eloise.”

“And who will marry us?”

“I'm not the only Unitarian minister. Are you saying you'll do it, you'll marry me?”

“I suppose so. That's not very romantic, is it, Philip? But I hate sleeping alone, and when I wake up in the middle of the night and reach out and touch you, I feel safe and I can sleep again. We'll wait until the big wedding is over—but don't tell anyone, especially Eloise. Then we'll do it quietly and slip away somewhere for our honeymoon.”

“Thank you,” he whispered. “God bless you, Barbara.”

“And do you suppose that church you carry around inside of you will allow us to sleep together tonight?”

“I think it could be arranged.”

E
ARLY IN THE MORNING
five days after Barbara's discussion with Philip, Eloise telephoned, a note of panic in her voice. “Barbara,” she said, “what are you doing today?”