The Immigrants (49 page)

I once said to him that I got my education on fishing boats, and what does he tel me? He got his packing the fish in the Fulton Fish Market in New York. Being a Jew or a Catholic back there in the East, Mark, it’s not like out here. Mark, you know what I want to do tomorrow?”

“Sleep?”

“Hell, no. I’m going to rent me a boat down at the docks here, and we’ll go fishing.”

“Fishing? Are you crazy?”

At seven the following morning, Dan hammered at the door to Mark and Sarah’s bedroom. “Fishing!” he shouted. “Get your ass up out of there, Levy!”

Dan found a catboat to his liking. There was a brisk wind on the

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bay. They sailed for hours, caught nothing, and returned sunburned and relaxed for the first time in months.

“The children will be home for Christmas,” Jean said to Dan.

“We’re not much of a family, but with my fa ther gone, I thought perhaps we might have a civilized family Christmas.”

“And how do we go about that?” Dan asked her. “I bet everyone who knows us asks that question. How do the Lavettes go about it?

Do we pretend affection? Do I spend days buying gifts for two kids who hate my guts?”

“Dan, they don’t hate your guts, as you put it.”

“You should have asked me earlier. I have to leave for New York. We’re rescheduling, we got labor trou ble, we’re oversold and just about everything else that can happen has happened.”

“Conveniently.”

“I suppose so.” He took a deep breath and said, “Jean, how long can this go on?”

“As long as I desire. You have no restrictions and no reason to complain. You are free and I am free, and since we are both reasonably discreet in our affairs, I see no reason for either of us to complain.”

He let it go at that, not bothering to say that he had no affairs that required discretion. When he wanted a woman, he did what a good many of his business asso ciates did. He telephoned a man by the name of Earnie, and for fifty dollars, a good-looking young woman would arrive at an indicated hotel room, disrobe, and give him what sex he required. He did this infrequently and only to prove to himself that he was still alive. It was without joy and without any aftermath of pleasure.

Actually, he had arranged to flee from Christmas. Anthony Cassala begged him to join his family at San Mateo, and Mark begged him

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to come with him and Sarah to spend Christmas at Higate with Jake and Clair and with Martha, who would come up from Los Angeles. It would be the first time in months that the entire Levy family would be together—and it would be Dan’s first visit to the winery. For years, he had listened to Mark’s description of Jake and Clair’s struggle to make the place pay, their contract with Rabbi Blum, their sub sequent conquest of the Reform and Conservative Jewish synagogues, and, most recently, through the intervention of Anthony Cassala, their first penetration into the sac ramental wine purchases of the Catholic Church. But perversely, he had to be alone with his loneliness. There was only one place he desired to be, and May Ling had closed the door there with a firmness he had never be lieved possible.

Dan took the train to Chicago, and from there he went by air to New York. The ear-deafening roar of the lumbering Ford Trimotors gave him a certain deep sense of satisfaction and relaxation, as if this environ ment were entirely his own. He ate his Christmas dinner alone in the Plaza Hotel, looking out on snow-covered Central Park, taking a kind of adolescent and perverse pleasure in his condition, buttressed by the fact that he was three thousand miles from those who felt anything toward him, whether it was hatred or love.

At Higate, Martha felt that she was in a dream, and the winery in the upper reaches of the Napa Valley was to her a scene out of another world. Had she forgotten so soon that people lived this way? Jake and Clair had hired a Mexican couple, Juan and Maria Gonzales, to help with the work. They had orders for three thousand gallons of sacramental wine, and with the coming spring they were planning to put fifty acres into grapes of their own growing. They had an enormous fir tree in the liv ing room, piled underneath with

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presents, and in the big old kitchen, they all sat at a long wooden table of Jake’s own making, carving a turkey that he and Clair had raised and slaughtered. Their children sat at the table, Adam, seven, Joshua, five, and Sally, three, sunburned, freckled, healthy. The boys were both redheaded; Sally was like a miniature version of Sarah, with big, pale blue eyes and straight hair the color of corn-silk. Mark looked at them with wonder; did it happen like this, in only three quarters of a century? For Sarah, who had spent her childhood in old Russia, the gap was even greater. She was uneasy among all the accouterments of a Christian Christmas, even though she and Mark had made certain to come with a car piled high with pres ents. Did they have any religion, she wondered? And what was their life like here in this beautiful and lonely place? Everything on the groaning table was of their own growing or their own making.

Even their bodies were different, Jake in blue jeans and a blue work shirt, hard-muscled, his face burned dark by the sun, Clair so tall and lean and strong, her red hair tied in back, long and indifferent to the style of the day, without make-up, totally unconcerned with all the variety and elements of life in San Francisco or anywhere else, laughing, appar ently as happy as anyone could be. Were these her chil dren and her grandchildren?

Martha was quiet, withdrawn, conscious of her care fully painted nails, her make-up, her precisely bobbed hair. For the rest of them, she was part of that marvelously unreal and fascinating world of Hollywood that lay somewhere far to the south. They asked endless questions that only increased her nervousness and served to make her even more ill at ease. The New York School of Acting had permanently closed its doors. Spizer and Kelly were producing a film at the Great Western Studio. She was to star in it. Uneasily, she told them the plot of the film. The screenplay was being written.

But what did she do with herself? How did she pass her day? She was taking voice lessons with a man called Victor Stransky. There

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was a great deal to do in Hollywood. She had friends. It wasn’t at all as they imagined it; it was a serious place where people worked hard, where people were dedicated to their pro fessions.

Desperately, she wanted a drink, but they served no liquor. She breathed a sigh of relief when at dinner Jake brought out a gallon jug of clear white wine, and the talk turned to wine and its making.

“This,” Jake said with emphasis, “is not sacramental wine. This is wine,” and he underlined the word. “It’s a sort of Chablis, but quite dry and good, we think. We made fifty gallons of it, and since we actually made it for ourselves—and for you, of course—it’s a sort of bootleg. But if we don’t sell it, we don’t get into any trouble over it.”

“Actually,” Clair put in, “we had expert advice. There’s a darling little man called Professor Simon Masseo, who teaches chemistry at Berkeley, and he was wonderfully helpful when we made our first batch of wine. I guess he taught us most of what we know, and we made this white wine to repay him. I mean, that’s one reason. He was so amazed when he tasted it. Jake and I felt that we had passed some kind of awful college exam. We gave the professor twenty gallons, and when he actually accepted it, it was just the highest praise he could offer.”

The glasses were filled and a toast was drunk. Mark and Sarah praised the wine. Martha drained her glass, and Jake refilled it.

“Not that we aren’t grateful to Rabbi Blum,” Clair said. “And I must say that the Catholics insist on the same dreadful sweet wine that he does. But some day if they ever get rid of this insane Prohibition thing, this is the wine we’ll make and sell, I hope. A dry white wine and the wonderful red zinfandel. Poor Fortas. The Feds raided him, and now he’s in jail serving six months.”

Then Jake had to explain who Fortas was and why he was in jail.

Martha filled her glass again. The meal went on. Mark launched into a lecture on air transport. He had finally found the courage

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to make the flight to Los Angeles and back in the Ford Trimotor, and he gave a vivid description of how it went. Adam pleaded for an airplane ride. Sarah praised Clair’s cooking, but then, in Sarah’s eyes, Clair could do no wrong. Martha drank wine, unobtrusively, and apparently only Clair noticed that she had filled her glass half a dozen times.

After dinner, in the early twilight, Clair and Martha, both of them wrapped in sweaters against the chill of evening, walked up the hillside behind the big stone house. Clair stopped at a big eucalyptus tree.

“When it gets to be a madhouse down there, you need to have a place to be alone. This is mine. Let’s sit here a while and pretend we’re still kids back in Sausalito.”

“Only I’m not a kid,” Martha said forlornly. “I’m not grown up either. God, I don’t know what I am.”

“Has it been hard, honey?”

“Not hard—just pointless. The days are fifty hours long. Pop gives me all the money I need. Maybe it would be better if he didn’t, and then I would have to break my back trying to stay alive, like all the other kids down there, and then when everything else fails, they fall into bed with some louse who gives them five dollars or maybe buys them dinner, and then they tell themselves they’re not pros, just kids trying to stay alive. I haven’t had one damned acting job, Clair. I had a screen test—”

“Well, that’s something, isn’t it? I mean, from what I’ve read, to have a screen test.”

“Maybe. Who knows? Maybe they’ll make the film. But, God, I get so lonely and depressed, and then I buy a quart of bootleg gin and sit in my room and drink, and I guess it helps. I don’t think I’m becoming an alco holic, and then I get terrified that I am, like today.

I didn’t have a drink yesterday, and today when Jake brought out the wine, I got goose flesh.”

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“You wouldn’t give it up?” Clair asked gently.

“No. I can’t.”

“Even for a few weeks? Come and stay here. Jake and myself, we won’t bug you. Honey, we love you.”

“I know, but I can’t. I have to see it through. I can’t explain either, Clair. I’ve talked to the other kids about it. No actor can explain what it means. It’s like a drug. You begin, and then the whole world revolves around whether you make it or not, and if you don’t make it, you might as well be dead.”

“No!” Clair exclaimed. “Don’t ever say that.”

Jean had taken over her father’s office in the Seldon Building on Montgomery Street, cleared out the dark oak pieces and the overstuffed leather chairs, and re placed them with pale birch and chintz upholstery. The gloomy Oriental rug on the floor went to an auction house and in its place Jean installed a pale blue, gold, and ivory Aubusson, with drapes to match. Clancy, who had gathered the courage to contest her decision to take over the bank in fairly strong terms, pointing out that the news of a woman bank president might well token disaster, was deeply troubled by these decorative changes, but he bore them in silence. The
Chronicle
, objectively expressing neither approval nor disapproval, did a feature story on the first female bank president in the United States. The bank’s business, however, did not suffer; quite to the contrary, riding on the tide of the times, it increased.

One afternoon, sitting in her office, Jean was in formed by her secretary that a Mrs. Alan Brocker was outside and would like to see her.

“Did you say Mrs.?”

“Yes.”

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“A woman?”

“Very much so.”

“Well—send her in,” Jean said, “by all means, send her in.”

The secretary left and then returned, opening the door for a large, handsome, dark-eyed woman who swept into the room, crying, “Darling, you have not for gotten me? It is Manya.”

Jean rose, staring at Manya Vladavich, whom she had not seen in at least ten years. She came around the desk, and Manya embraced her in a cloud of silk, bosom, and perfume.

“You are more beautiful than ever,” Manya declared when Jean had untangled herself. “You are a witch. Or you have sold your soul to the devil.”

“More likely the latter. You can’t complain, Manya. You look absolutely stunning. What is this Mrs. Alan Brocker thing?”

“What you see, darling. Myself. I have married more money than is in the Bank of England. We have taken fantastic house by the bay, and tomorrow a great party—”

“Manya, stop! Are you telling me that you and Alan Brocker are married?”

“But of course.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jean said, shaking her head and smiling.

“You and Brocker. How did you do it?”

“Darling, it would take days to tell you whole story. I am living in Paris where I meet him. He is very lonely, very unhappy. How old you think he is, Jean?”

“Don’t you know?”

“He tells me forty-four. He looks older.”

“He told you the truth—or close to it.”

“Darling, we are five days in Paris. He is so un happy. I make him go with me to Vienna. You know what is psychoanalysis?”

“Sort of. Dr. Freud’s thing?”

“Exactly. We go to Dr. Freud. He is with Dr. Freud for seven

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weeks, every day. Every day I am like mother to him. Not exactly.

After seven weeks, we go to Ven ice. Three weeks. Then we go to London and we are married. Then we come here. So simple.”

“I don’t believe it. What on earth did this Dr. Freud do to him?”

“Ah. We shall have to talk about that. Alan’s mother, what was she like, darling?”

“A little bit of a thing, as I remember.”

“Yes? What does it matter? You are president of bank. Incredible.

You are still married? Of course—to the fisherman.”