The Immigrant’s Daughter (10 page)

“You don't have to,” Barbara said coldly. “I know Alexander Holt. He was part of the law firm that represents my brother Thomas Lavette.” She noticed how they quickened when she mentioned Tom. He was one of the half-dozen wealthiest men in San Francisco. “Mr. Holt is very good-looking and very bright. A widower. You see, I do my homework. From your attitude, I gather you'd be perfectly satisfied if I telephoned my campaign to the Forty-eighth.”

That brought a laugh where Barbara had intended no humor. Al Ruddy, whom she had met through Moretti and who was one of the old man's protégés and whom, she remembered, Boyd had disliked intensely, spread his hands and said, soothingly, “I don't think Miss Lavette is trying to be humorous. Tony has only the highest respect for her, and if anyone in the Bay Area could make a reasonable showing in the Forty-eighth, she could.”

More meaningless words followed. When Moretti asked her how it had gone, she answered, “Very well indeed. From what I heard there, if I lived in the Forty-eighth, I'd make sure not to vote Democrat. And by the way, they regard me as a silly old lady whom you're encouraging to exercise her vanity.”

Moretti shook his head and sighed. Barbara realized that there was nothing very much that he could say.

She was a good walker; thank God for that and for the fact that a tall woman is forgiven for wearing sensible shoes. In Maine Trotters, a plaid skirt and a white blouse, Barbara decided that she transcended the various social layers of the Forty-eighth C.D. There was a lot to do, an office headquarters to be rented and furnished, a plan of action to be worked out, fund-raising — a successful fund-raising committee could make all the difference — media time, leaflets, posters. She had been through a sort of trial run six years before; now she had to rethink it and do it better, and, as she was determined, differently.

It was still August, mostly a cool and pleasant month in the Bay Area, and Barbara decided to do parts of the district on foot. Six years ago, she had driven through most of it, but then six years was a long time, and there is much you miss in a car that you can see clearly when walking.

The area called the Palisades she knew very well indeed, and she could point to at least a dozen fine houses where she had once dined or danced. That was a long time ago, so long ago that two of the houses lay in her memories as places where she had attended sweet-sixteen parties. The houses, layered on terraces gouged out of the hillside, offered a splendid view of the Bay, and in the present market would command prices up to a million dollars. Back from there, pleasant streets, shaded with live oak and massive pines, were lined with houses less grand than those which faced the Bay, but still expensive, with close-cropped lawns, beautiful and expensive plantings, and back yards — to call them by so mundane a title — sporting tennis courts or swimming pools and very often both. Here, reality was pressed back and away from this California land-island that reminded her of Beverly Hills.

Two of those improbable California shopping centers marked this part of the district. They were done in California-Spanish Colonial and whatever-money-will-buy style, red tile roofs, great redwood timbers, a supermarket like something dreamed up by imaginative and underfed children as a centerpiece, and then a selection of somewhat less magnificent stores to provide whatever the heart might desire, the best of men's and women's clothes, furniture, drugs, household appliances and whatever else was needed to save the residents of the area any need to cross the path of the less rich. But beyond this inner island, there were rows and rows of tract houses, most of them bare and naked of fancy shrubbery or shade trees, young people fighting desperately to meet monthly payments, lots of kids and a good many unsmiling mothers. One still needed sixty or seventy thousand dollars to buy such a tract house, and as upwardly mobile as the owners might be, they still had huge mortgage payments and children to feed and clothe and wives who either worked to meet the bills or chewed an eternal cud of discontent.

And then, beyond the tract houses but still in the district, a barrio to house the servants, the cooks and gardeners, the brown-skinned men and women who worked the fields, driving out of the district in trucks that took them to the orchards and vineyards and then brought them back, and their children and the mini-gangs, imitative of the larger urban areas. And on the edge of the barrio, the houses of the black community, small cottages, some of them neat and well cared for, others with paint peeling, surrounded by dead shrubbery, kids playing in the unpaved streets, the men gone to jobs in Oakland or Berkeley or some other Bay area or to the fields. It was not simple; it was very puzzling and complex indeed, and this was only one of a number of small communities in the district. As day after day passed, Barbara parking her car in one part or another of the district, trudging on by foot, a tall lady with a leather pouch slung over her shoulder, the problem of the Forty-eighth Congressional District became even more puzzling and troubling.

Obviously, the poor, the working people and the young professionals in the district outnumbered the rich, yet the district was solidly, unshakably Republican — except that she had shaken it a good deal six years ago. Apparently most of the Chicanos and blacks did not vote, and apparently they were positioned to provide a threat to the rest of the district. There were hardly enough of them to make her win, yet possibly enough to swing the margin if she could do what she had done six years ago. But could she, she wondered? Six years ago, she took on the Republican Party at a most peculiar historical moment. Nixon was in the White House, an affront to any person of decent sensibilities. The country was bleeding from the horror of Vietnam, and her opponent was sleazy, dishonest and on the verge of being indicted. Now, it was a presidential year; Jerry Ford was at least an upstanding and photogenic citizen, and her own opponent was an attorney of distinction, a man of experience, and handsome enough to be a middle-aged star in a soap opera. Barbara felt demeaned by brooding over the question of good looks, but the media had turned that into one of the prime requisites for office. It was hard for her to tell herself that she was as attractive as Alexander Holt — or to believe it.

Well, be that as it may, she still had a race to run, and if Alexander Holt were Paul Newman himself, he nevertheless could be beaten. She had studied his record carefully, and it asked for such care, since it was an uncommonly careful record. He was one of those Republicans who early on had recognized the awful stupidity and hopelessness of the war with Vietnam, and during his four years in the House, his record on that score was near perfect — according to Barbara's point of view. He balanced this opposition to the war with a firm stand against abortion — to a point where he was the first representative to ask that foreign aid be withdrawn from nations that permitted legal abortion. It was an untenable and idiotic position, but it put him firmly in the conservative ranks. He was for the strictest of immigration laws, thereby writing off the whole Mexican community, and he was a close old friend of Ronald Reagan and had served in Reagan's administration when Reagan was governor of California. He had pressed for a larger share for private industry in development of federal lands, and while he did not come out solidly against the entitlement programs, he fudged on any vote that favored such programs.

Barbara thought about Alexander Holt as she explored the Forty-eighth Congressional District. In California, a congressional district can be as large as or even larger than certain Eastern states, and while the Forty-eighth was not the largest, it was by no means the smallest. It contained four separate independent towns, not to mention stretches of unincorporated area; and moving away from what she had thought of as the Forty-eighth, Barbara was surprised and somewhat chagrined to discover how much of the district she had not set foot in, how much of it she hardly knew existed. In the course of her exploration, she came to an area even more wretched than the barrio on the Bay side. A yellow dirt road ran between a line of ancient shacks constructed out of whatever might be put together to keep out the night and the rain and wind and cold — tin, old plywood, boards, corrugated paper, tar paper. There were about thirty of these shacks, skinny kids playing in the road, women washing clothes in an old horse trough, a few teen-agers lounging around, smoking, and an absence of men — which meant that they were doing something to survive, even if it was for only fifty cents an hour in the fields. A second glance told Barbara that they were not Mexicans, and when she stopped to talk to an old lady who sat smoking a corncob pipe in front of one of the shacks, she discovered that this was a community of people from El Salvador.

“That's right,” the old lady said in Spanish, since Barbara had addressed her question in Spanish. “El Salvador. You speak good Spanish for an Anglo. Do you understand me? I have no teeth left, so I garble my words.” She tapped her head. “But the mind is all right.”

“I understand you perfectly.”

“Thank you. God bless you. You are very elegant.”

“But why don't you have your mouth fitted for false teeth?”

“Bless your heart! I have no money, no family; all dead. They give me food, my neighbors, my friends. So where would I find the money for teeth?”

“But the state pays for it.”

“Lady, lady,” the old woman said, “you are kind. We are illegals.”

Barbara nodded unhappily, thinking of the long, almost impassable distance, through Guatemala and Mexico. “Still, perhaps something can be done.”

The old lady puffed on her pipe and looked sidewise at Barbara. By now, others had noticed Barbara, and a small crowd of children and women had gathered around her, listening to the conversation.

“Who are you?” someone asked.

“Don't talk to her, you old fool,” another woman said to the old lady. “She could be from Immigration. Hear the way she speaks.”

“I'm not from Immigration,” Barbara said. “I'm the Democratic candidate for Congress in the Forty-eighth Congressional District.”

“What's the Forty-eighth Congressional District?”

“Where you live, here.”

“Oh!”

“You speak Spanish.”

“I've always spoken Spanish,” Barbara said. “Since I was a kid.” And to the old lady with the pipe, “If you'll give me your name, I'll see what I can do about the false teeth.”

“Never mind her name.”

“Oh, shut up, you fool. My name is Rosa Hernando,” she said to Barbara. “You write it down, yes? I would like to eat an ear of maize before I die.”

Walking back to where she had parked her car, Barbara thought about people so desperate that they would come from El Salvador to slip across the Rio Grande River to live in such shacks and in such poverty. Another part of her mind said, Illegals. No votes there.

“I suppose,” she said to herself, “that's what Tony Moretti would call thinking politically.”

That evening, Barbara called her son and told him about the old woman and her teeth.

“It's a tricky business,” Sam said. “As an illegal, she could run into trouble, and I don't think there's any program that fits her.”

“There must be.”

“Is she a voter, Mom? No, that's a dumb question. If she's an illegal, she's not a voter, and I don't know why you're knocking yourself out. Anyway, I'm all for you making this race, so don't feel I'm making snotty remarks about voters. It just crossed my mind, and I love you, and I think you'll walk all over this Holt character.”

“Thank you, Sam.” She put down the telephone, thinking that Sam was one of the most sensitive and caring persons she had ever known — yet he could treat his mother as if she were a rather superior idiot and had treated his wife as if she did not exist. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Barbara had become much closer to Carla since the divorce. The day Barbara's candidacy was announced in the press, Carla had called and begged to be allowed to help. “Barbara, I need this kind of thing. I can talk to Chicanos. I swear I'll bring you a thousand votes!”

Barbara had accepted on condition that she pay Carla a salary. Carla had refused alimony or a cash settlement of any kind from Sam, and she had found a job selling cosmetics at Macy's in San Francisco. That was
until:
all the jobs Carla had held were until something turned up in the theater. The reviews of her work in Ford's ‘
Tis Pity She's a Whore
were excellent, but after six weeks the play had closed and the reviews faded from everyone's memory. Now Carla dumped the job at Macy's without a tear.

Freddie did almost the same thing. He turned up at the house on Green Street two days after Barbara's public announcement and informed her that he had worked out with his stepfather, Adam Levy, a leave of absence to extend until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was then the third week in August, which meant that he would be away from the winery for more than two months.

“But you're running the winery now,” Barbara protested.

“No, oh, no. I try to give that impression, just as Pop tries to give the impression that he runs it, but the truth is that Grandma Clair runs the works. She always did, you know, even though Grandpa Jake established the image of the tough old man in charge. Well, sure he was in charge, but every important decision was made with Grandma. Pop can get along without me for two months, and if he needs me, I can run out there. On the other hand, your campaign needs a manager.”

“And you're that?” Barbara asked, smiling.

“Better than anything you can hire for the money.”

“And how much is that?”

“Pay me a dollar a week,” Freddie said.

“Oh, no. You work for me, you work for pay.”

Freddie shrugged. “All right, if that's the way you want it. Thing is, you need me. You need someone who is cold and calculating and not taken in by the bullshit that thickens the blood of politicians.”