The Immigrants (48 page)

“By all means,” Clancy agreed.

“And what will that relationship be?” Jean asked quietly.

“Very close, very close indeed,” Clancy said.

“Let me be more specific,” Sommers said. “Not only will you receive quarterly reports of the bank’s condi tion, but we shall see to it that the minutes of each and every meeting of the board of directors are conveyed to you. Of course, this does not mean that you must read every report or trouble yourself over the statements. We have a very well-managed bank, Mrs. Lavette, and I don’t think you need lose a minute of sleep over its con dition and progress.”

“That is to say,” said Clancy, “that we are well aware of your interest in the arts and in civic affairs. We ap plaud them, Mrs. Lavette, and we have no intentions of burdening you with the complexities of this institution.”

“You all appear to have missed the point,” Jean said.

“The point?”

“The point being that for the next twelve years, I am the trustee for the majority of the stock in this bank. I have discussed the matter very carefully with Mr. Thorndyke, gentlemen, and I am under no illusions. I vote that stock, gentlemen. In so many words, for the next twelve years, I own the Seldon Bank.”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking,” Sommers agreed. “We are well aware of that.”

“Not in a manner of speaking,” Jean said, quietly but firmly. “In a legal sense. There are no qualifications. For the next twelve years, I have control of the Seldon Bank.”

“But no one denies that,” Whittier said. “My dear Jean, you can’t for a moment imagine that we do not respect your position?”

“Well, there does appear to be a contradiction.”

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“How is that?”

“As I understand it—and you may correct me if I am wrong—it is the board of directors that constitutes the highest authority of this bank and has the decision-making responsibility.”

“Quite right.”

“And the board members are elected by the voting stock, which in this case is merely a euphemism. My father appointed this board of directors.”

“Are you saying that you are dissatisfied with us?” Clancy asked worriedly.

“No indeed,” Jean replied. “I have no reason to be dissatisfied.”

“I think,” Sommers said slowly, “that Mrs. Lavette is making a point. I think she would like formally to ap prove our position. I see no reason why she should not.”

“No,” Jean said. “No, gentlemen. When I came here today, I expected you to take it for granted that I would take my place on this board.”

There was a long silence. Then Clancy said, “But, Mrs. Lavette, we have never had a woman on our board. Indeed, unless I am greatly mistaken, there has never been a woman on the board of any major bank in this country.”

“I’m sure you are correct.”

“It would seem,” Clancy said uncertainly, “to be a matter of some impropriety.”

“Oh, don’t be an ass, Mr. Clancy,” Jean said, losing patience. “I don’t give a tinker’s damn what has been or what is propriety or impropriety. This is nineteen twenty-eight. Women exist. They vote. They are in most respects admitted members of the human race. Now I not only intend to sit on the board of directors, I intend to chair it. I am not denigrating your wisdom or management. I have a great deal of respect for the ways the affairs of this bank have been conducted. But the plain fact of the matter is that

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for the next twelve years, I vote the majority stock of this bank, and I intend to exercise my affairs with knowledge and involvement. And you needn’t worry about the time or energy that will be required. I have both. Now there is my position, stated as plainly as I can. If any of you gentlemen have any serious objections to the role I have chosen for my self, I would like to hear them right now.”

She had lost her patience only for a moment; then her voice was quite calm and matter-of-fact, and when she finished speaking, she looked from face to face.

Again, there was a long moment of silence. They waited for Clancy, who said finally, “You are quite within your rights, Mrs. Lavette. I think I can speak for all the members of the board when I say that we will render you whatever good advice and aid that is within our power. And simply to formalize it for the record, I will move that the chairmanship of this board be offered to Mrs. Jean Seldon Lavette.”

“I will second the motion,” Grant Whittier said weakly.

Two weeks after he had seen her in Los Angeles, Stephan Cassala telephoned Martha and told her that he would be in Los Angeles the following day. Could she see him and have dinner with him?

She tried to dissuade him at first, but when he pressed her, she agreed. He was so easily hurt, and he always gave her the feeling that to reject him would hurt him beyond his tolerance for the pain.

She wondered why he appeared so de fenseless to her. Surely, he was not defenseless. She knew, from what she had heard at home, that he was the moving force in the Sonoma Bank, that it was he who had built it from a tiny bank that served Italian fishermen and laborers for the most part into a substan tial institution; yet she always felt that he approached her with the assurance that she could destroy him, pleading with her not to. She wondered why he could

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not realize that all the men she was attracted to were almost his opposite in their character.

He was a serious man. Martha’s depression lurked under a gaiety that she wore like a favorite dress. The New York School of Acting, for what it was, had closed, and Martha had fallen upon long, endless days of boredom and inactivity. Her mother and father begged her to come to Sausalito for the summer, but she felt that to leave the scene she had chosen would be an admission of defeat.

Having enough money to survive without a job, she looked for a role instead, always cushioning her defeats with Martin Spizer’s promises. When Stephan arrived at her apartment, he noticed the change in her. Odd corners of her despair had begun to show.

He came to the point immediately. “Before we eat,” he said to her. “Before we talk. Before we do anything, you and I have a small matter of business to transact.”

“Steve dear, what business?”

He took an envelope out of his pockets, unfolded some documents, and handed her a check for twenty thousand dollars. It was made out to Martin Spizer Pro ductions. She stared at it, then shook her head and burst out in protests. “No, no, this is crazy, Steve. This is ab solutely crazy, and I won’t have it. Do you know, I haven’t even asked my father for this money? Marty keeps after me to ask him, and I can’t. And now you hand me this. You’re out of your mind.”

“Will you calm down,” he said to her. “Will you please calm down and listen to me. This is not a gift. Not that I wouldn’t make you a gift of the money if I could. I’m a banker and this is a regular bank loan. I have all the papers here.”

She began to protest again, and again he interrupted her. “Why don’t you try to think of it as something apart from you. I’m approached for a loan and I decide to grant it.”

“Because it isn’t apart from me.”

“My darling Martha, listen to me. This is all per fectly legal. We

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make loans every day. This loan will help you. If the loan is a bad loan, we will write it off, as we do with other bad loans.”

“Does your father know about this, Steve?”

“My father doesn’t question my decisions. Martha, there are all kinds of people. You are someone who will never be happy until you make it in this business. I love you very much. I don’t ask much in return, but I do ask that you let me go ahead with this loan. Now I want you to call this man Spizer and have him meet us later. He can sign the documents, and then the film is on its way.”

“I don’t understand you, Steve. I swear I don’t.”

“Let’s say that I don’t understand myself very much. I just seem to be here on earth in a very strange place that doesn’t make much sense to me surrounded by strangers. You’re one of the few people who is not a stranger.”

“I’m not in love with you, Steve. You know that.”

“I know. So we won’t talk about being in love or not in love.

There are plenty of other things to talk about. I’m staying at the Ambassador for the night, so why don’t we eat there and have a nice, leisurely dinner, and you call Spizer and have him meet us later, and he can sign these documents and then we’re on the way.”

“Steve, you’re an angel, a complete angel.” Martha reached Spizer in his hotel room, where he was sitting with Timothy Kelly, the two of them finishing off a bottle of cellar muscatel, which they had pur chased with what was practically their last ninety cents. Spizer listened to what Martha had to say and enthusi astically promised to meet them at the Ambassador at ten o’clock that evening. He turned back to an inquiring Kelly, grinning from ear to ear.

“Timmy, my lad, the eagle has crapped. Not just crapped, a veritable storm of shit. The brilliance and charm and patience and persistence of Mrs. Spizer’s boy has finally paid off. At ten o’clock tonight, we shall be in possession of the incredible, impossible, unthinkable sum of twenty thousand dollars.”

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Sarah Levy still kept the big Spanish Colonial house in Sausalito without a servant or household help of any kind. On occasion Mark would lose his temper and shout about this. “At present market prices,” he once stormed at her, “my stock in the company is worth over eleven million dollars. And I haven’t done anything criminal to become a millionaire. I gave forty thousand dollars to charity last year, and I built the synagogue in this town almost single-handed. I got nothing to be ashamed of, and the least I could have is a servant to help my wife.”

“And then what would I do?” Sarah asked mildly.

“Enjoy life.”

“You mean spend the eleven million? You know, Mark, you’ve devoted your life to making it. You haven’t given much thought to spending it.”

“Stop being foolish. We went to Europe last year. I don’t deny you anything.”

“Then don’t deny me the right to clean the house. That’s my work,” she said bitterly.

Dan spent more and more time at the house in Sau salito. For one thing, Sarah lit up when Dan was there. She cooked special foods for him, fussed over him, coddled him, and lectured him. She was only nine years older than Dan, and as it was with her daughter, Mar tha, Dan had always been the swashbuckling, romantic con-comitant of her life. She approached him as a mother, but also, somewhere deep in her mind, neither admitted nor fostered, as an adoring mistress. Still a year short of fifty, Mark had aged. He had lost his hair, taken on weight, developed a paunch. Dan at forty was erect and youthful. Time had bound the three of them close together, and circumstances cemented that bond ing. When Dan came to Sausalito, Sarah appeared to shed her years. She still

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possessed her trim, youthful fig ure, and when she laughed, Dan saw the same slender, blue-eyed girl Mark had married so long ago.

The one thing Sarah could never comprehend was the relationship between Dan and Jean. With the com ing of fall, Barbara had been sent to school in Boston and Wendy Jones, with a bonus and the money she had saved, returned to England. Yet Dan and Jean contin ued to live their separate lives in separate bedrooms in the house on Russian Hill. They functioned on separate schedules, and Dan was no longer expected to be pres ent when Jean came to a dinner party. When one or another was gone through the night, there were neither questions nor recriminations; and one night, when Dan sat with Mark and Sarah in the big Spanish tile kitchen at Sausalito, Sarah said to him, “Why? Why, Danny? How can you live like that?”

“Because it doesn’t happen all at once. It goes slowly, through the years. The truth is, I suppose, that I don’t really give a damn.

She has her life, I have mine.”

“The truth is that you have no life,” Sarah said.

“Sarah, don’t let’s start that again. It’s Dan’s life.”

“Hell, Mark,” Dan said. “Sarah can ask me anything she wants to ask me. It’s the answers that don’t make sense. There are things I can’t explain, even to myself, so what’ s the use of trying to talk about them? Jean and I live what she calls a civilized life. I’m civilized, she’s civilized, my children are civilized. That goes a long way. She doesn’t bother me. Our mutual dislike has become very tolerable.

Anyway, she’s plunged head over heels into being a banker. Funny thing is, she is actually run ning that bank.”

“Which also puzzles me,” Sarah said. “It would seem to me that now she really owns you. You and Mark owe the bank sixteen million dollars—”

“Not really,” Mark said. “The company has the bank loan, and if the Seldon Bank calls it, we could lay it off in a dozen places. It’s

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nothing to worry about. We’re in good shape. We’ll be in even better shape if Dan’s pipe dream about Al Smith comes off.”

But it didn’t come off. On election night, on the eve ning of November 6, in 1928, sitting in the Levy living room, Mark and Sarah and Dan listened to the radio and heard the results pile up as Herbert Hoover won the election in a massive landslide vote.

America’s repu diation of Al Smith, streetwise Catholic from New York, was overwhelming and complete. There were over twenty-one million votes for Herbert Hoover, against fifteen million for Al Smith. Hoover garnered four hundred and forty-four electoral votes, as com pared to eighty-seven for Smith—forty out of forty-eight states for Herbert Hoover.

By midnight, the results were beyond dispute, and Dan made his own small political epitaph: “‘You win some and you lose some.’

Not very original, but it fits.”

“What did it cost us?” Mark asked.

Glancing at where Sarah slept, curled up in a chair, Dan said softly, “Maybe a hundred grand.”

“Dumb.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. But I like that little sonofabitch. He’s got guts.