Second Generation (13 page)

Barbara swallowed the gin, choking on it. Guzie stood in front of her, watching anxiously.

"I'm all right," she managed to say. "I don't have a handkerchief."

Guzie took a dirty, bloodstained rag out of his pocket. She wiped her face with it and handed it back to him. "I'm all right, Franco. What happened?"

"A bullet in the head. Two guys killed, and one of them has to be Nicky."

"Has he any family? Do they know?"

"Not here. He got a mother up in Seattle."

"What happens to him? Who takes care of him?"

"The union takes care of that."

"Where is his body?" She had to ask. She had never encountered death before. She had no knowledge of the way of death.

"At the hospital. Look, kid, when the time comes, we'll tell you. You don't want to stay here. There's nothing but grief in this lousy place. You got a place to go?"

She nodded.

"Can you drive? Are you O.K.?"

"I can drive."

"All right. Just rest up a little, and then I'll clear the way and you can back out of the alley. You don't have to talk to none of them lousy reporters. We'll take care of that."

She sat there for another ten or fifteen minutes. The longshoremen who came in and out of the kitchen looked at her curiously, but no one spoke to her. They were filled with the horror of the day, and distantly, as if she were in another world, she listened to their talk of the pitched battles fought with the police and the company goons on the Embarcadero, of what had happened on Pier 20 and Pier 22 and Pier 38, of who had been clubbed and who had been gassed. Irma was cooking stew. Most of them had not eaten at all during the day, and vaguely Barbara felt she should remain and help. But she couldn't; she had to get out of there. Finally, she got up and went to the door. Guzie helped her to back out of the still-crowded alley, and then she began to drive. She just drove, with no destination in mind.

It was still early evening, a beautiful, golden California evening, the city sitting over the bay like a shining jewel, the rust-colored tower of the unfinished Bay Bridge glowing in the slanting light of the sun. Beauty and misery always go together, Barbara thought. It was all a part of the chaotic senselessness that had replaced the well-ordered serenity of her life.

She was on Franklin Street when she realized that she had no place to go, and she pulled over to the curb and sat behind the wheel, staring glumly at the shining waters of the bay. She couldn't face another night alone at the St. Francis Hotel, not the way she felt now, and to go to the Whittier house was simply out of the question. As for another trip to Los Angeles, the very thought of the long drive turned her weariness into a nightmare. For a few minutes, she just sat there, and then, noticing a drugstore down the street, she locked the ignition and got out.

She found Sam Goldberg's number in the directory, but when she called the office, there was no answer. She should have known that; it was past six o'clock already. There were three residence numbers for three Samuel Goldbergs. The man at the counter changed a dollar for her, and she said a silent prayer. She had already ruled out her friends and her mother's friends. To face any one of them now and try to explain was patently impossible. The first number did not answer. The second number brought a familiar voice.

"Is this Sam Goldberg the attorney?" she asked.

"Yes?"

"This is Barbara Lavette. You do remember me?"

"Of course. Are you in trouble, Barbara?"

"Yes—no. Oh, I don't know. Could I see you, now?"

"Certainly. Where are you?"

"I'm at Franklin, near Clay Street. I have my car."

"I'm not far away, Barbara, at Green on the corner of Polk. A white house with yellow trim. You can park right in front."

A middle-aged black woman opened the door for her. "You're Miss Lavette? Mr. Goldberg's expecting you— right inside, dear."

It was an old Victorian house, the outside scalloped and bracketed, the inside full of framed plush pieces upholstered in olive-tinted velour. Barbara walked into a library: three walls of books and on the fourth wall an oil portrait of a pretty, delicate-featured woman. Goldberg got up out of a leather armchair and greeted her warmly.

"This is a wonderful surprise, Barbara—" He broke off, staring at her. "Is that blood on your blouse? On your neck too. Are you hurt?"

"No, I'm not hurt. I'm all right. I'm just so tired, and I had no other place to go. And please forgive me, Mr. Goldberg, but I'm so hungry. I haven't eaten all day. Could I have something, anything? A sandwich?"

Sam Goldberg sat at the dining room table with her, watching admiringly as she consumed roast chicken and mashed potatoes and string beans. "I'm eating your dinner," she protested at one point.

"Enough for both of us, dear. And for me to have company at dinner is a very special treat." He was less admiring and more dubious as he listened to her story of what had happened that day. She choked up as she told him of Dominick Salone's death.

"All right, Barbara. A man died, tragically, wastefully. It's your first encounter. You're part of the living. You accept it. Death goes with life. Sooner or later, you face that."

"But he was so young, so alive, so cocky. I never met anyone like him before. He had no education to speak of, but he knew so much."

"Were you in love with him?"

"No. But that only makes it worse, because he was in love with me and I didn't care about him at all, not that way. And don't you see, it's my fault?"

"No, I don't see that at all. How could it possibly be your fault? You did what you could. God knows, you did more than anyone else I know."

"I sit here stuffing myself with food, and Nick is dead somewhere in some hospital, and Jean's my mother, and Jean's married to John Whittier."

"And John Whittier's a monster?"

"Yes!" she snapped.

"But suppose Whittier were a shipowner you loved instead of a shipowner you dislike intensely. As I told you, your father was also a shipowner once."

"Daddy would never have done this!"

"I don't know." Goldberg sighed. "You know, Barbara, I saw some of it. I was on Rincon Hill at eleven o'clock, watching. That's when they were fighting on Harrison Street. I wasn't alone there on Rincon Hill. There were a thousand others, and we just stood there and watched, the way they watched the gladiators in the old days. All over the place, thousands of people watched, and they saw men clubbed and shot, the way I did, and none of us lifted a hand. You did something. You cared for people who were injured and bleeding. Now I am going to be presumptuous and didactic, so forgive me, but I must tell you something about guilt. Guilt is shared, because we belong to the human race. It is convenient to have villains like John Whittier, because it absolves the rest of us; but there's no absolution from what happens, and until we learn that, we just blunder about in the dark. Now enough of this, and certainly you have been through enough today. The question now is, where do you go from here?"

"I don't know."

"The place was swarming with newspaper men. Did any of them get your name? Or photograph?"

"Not my name. Maybe my picture. I just don't know."

"Will you go home?"

"To Whittier's place?"

"It's your home."

"No," Barbara said quietly. "I'll never go back there. I'll never set foot in that house again."

"Well, 'never' is an uneasy word. Have you seen Dan yet?"

"I was in Los Angeles yesterday. I could go back there, but I don't want to. Not now."

" 'Never,' Barbara, leaves your mother in a very difficult position. Would you like to stay here for a while? I have a comfortable guest room, and you're welcome to stay."

"For a few days? Could I?"

"Yes. Of course. Will you go back to the soup kitchen?"

"I don't know. I feel that I should, but I don't know whether I can. It's as if I did something, and now it's finished."

"The strike isn't finished. It's only begun."

"I know that. But I don't think I can go back there. It's not that I'm afraid. I was, but I got over that, and it's not that I don't feel for them. It's as if something inside of me is broken, and I have to put it together again. I know that makes no sense—"

"Perhaps it does. Now, will you let me call Whittier? Is your mother home yet?"

"No, she's still in Boston—I think. I don't want you to call John."

"Barbara, someone has to know where you are. You can't disappear. They may have already reported you missing—"

"No. I spoke to the butler. I told him mother must not be alarmed."

"But she will be. And you need clothes. I must call him. Tomorrow, I can send my secretary over to pick up some things for you to wear. Now, you must let me call him."

"You will anyway, won't you?"

"I'm afraid I must, Barbara. I'm your father's friend, and I am also an attorney."

The following day, John Whittier telephoned Jean in Boston. The conversation was unsatisfactory to both parties. Since the Boston newspapers—like the newspapers all over the country—carried accounts of what had happened in San Francisco on what was already known nationally as "Bloody Thursday," she knew more or less what had taken place. She received the news that a picture on page two of the
Examiner
had depicted her daughter in the midst of a group of injured strikers in the act of rendering first aid to one of them without comment, and when her husband angrily pressed the point, she said,

"It appears to me, John, that what she did may have been foolish and romantic, but hardly earthshaking. I'll talk to her when I return."

"When you return? I want you to start back here now, today."

"That's out of the question. I can't leave Boston today. We have things planned—"

"Jean, you don't hear one damn word I'm saying. This city is in a state of civil war. We're expecting a general strike, and that bastard Bridges and his commie pals are ready to take over. And I'm in the center of it. I'm already late for a meeting with Mayor Rossi and Governor Mer-riam. Can't I get through to you what's happening? There are troops on the Embarcadero, and God only knows when Bridges will decide to move against the ships. I have no time to track down your daughter and discipline her."

"What do you mean, track her down? Isn't she at home?"

"She is not. She's apparently decided to stay with a Jew lawyer called Goldberg. I spoke to him this morning, and he sent his secretary over here for her clothes."

"You mean Sam Goldberg?"

"I suppose so."

"All right. I suggest you forget about Barbara for the time being. You have sufficient troubles of your own. Tom and I will be back in San Francisco within a week."

"And I suggest you leave immediately. I may be able to handle this strike, but your children are more than I can cope with."

"Thank you."

"What does that mean?"

"John, this discussion is pointless. We will be home within the week. Meanwhile, try to relax and get some perspective. I don't think there is civil war in San Francisco. This will all be settled in due time."

On Sunday, two days later, Dan Lavette took the bus from Los Angeles to San Mateo. Long ago, some thirty-six years chronologically but reckoned as an eternity in California, where the land and the people still retain a sense of newness and incompleteness, a man named Anthony Cassala had lent Joseph Lavette, Dan's father, the money to buy a fishing boat. At that time, Anthony Cassala was a laborer who lent small sums of carefully hoarded money to the Italian workingmen. After the earthquake, during the few days when the city's banks were entirely inoperative, Cassala's tiny hoard of money became immensely valuable, and a few years later he obtained a license to establish the Bank of Sonoma. Together with his son, Stephan, he nurtured the bank, moved it onto'Montgomery Street, and it might well have become an institution comparable to the Bank of Italy, later the Bank of America. But circumstances intervened, and after the crash of 1929, a run started that left the Cassala enterprise crippled and

eventually bankrupt. Anthony Cassala died the following

year, and Stephan went to work at Wells Fargo.

In their days of prosperity, the Cassalas had built a large, rambling house in San Mateo, on the Peninsula, south of San Francisco. There Cassala's widow, Maria, his son, his son's wife, Joanna, and their one child, a boy of seven named Ralph, still lived. After Dan Lavette's father and mother died in the earthquake of 1906, the Cassalas became a sort of surrogate family to him. Anthony Cassala financed his early ventures into the shipping business, and when the run on Cassala's bank took place, Dan and his partner, Mark Levy, depleted themselves of every dollar of cash they could lay their hands on in an effort to halt it. Four years had passed since Dan had seen Stephan Cassala, but he did not think that time would change anything that had existed between them. There were too many ties, too many threads that bound their lives together.