The Immigrant’s Daughter (19 page)

At home in Green Street, tired as she always was after a day at the madhouse called her campaign headquarters, wanting no more than to lie down and watch the news on television after a hot bath and then dress leisurely for the commercial appearance, she nevertheless went about doing something in the way of canapés. She put out olives, nuts and a tray of cheese and crackers, all of it bought on the way home, since after two months of campaigning, her own cupboard was as bare as Mother Hubbard's. She also whispered vows to herself that she would not condemn until she had learned something to condemn, and that she would try her best to view the girl sympathetically — accepting the fact that this meeting might be much more of a trial for Mary Lou Constable than for her.

Mary Lou was beautiful and charming, and after the introduction and a bit of small talk, she said to Barbara, “I love my father and mother, but please try to see me as my own person. I tried very hard to be my own person and I feel that I succeeded in some ways and less well in others.”

Taken somewhat aback, Barbara said, “I'm sure you are your own person.”

“No, not the way you are, Miss Lavette.” She actually blushed as she went on to say, “This dreadful world — and believe me, when you work in Emergency, it can be very dreadful — well, I mean it can also be wonderful. I mean, I grew up reading your books and watching your career and wanting more than anything to be like you, and even if Sam is Jewish, he's a special kind, isn't he?”

Barbara stared in speechless dismay.

“I mean, not like — you know what I mean.”

Somehow, Sam got her out of the house before she could say any more, and when he reached Barbara on the telephone, he pleaded, “Mom, will you give her a chance, please?”

“Yes — yes, of course.”

“She doesn't mean the things she says. Please, believe me.”

“I believe you, Sam,” Barbara said, not knowing what else to say.

The final poll, six days before Election Day, gave Barbara fifty-two percent, Holt forty-three percent, with only six percent undecided. Freddie rented the hall at the Sunnyside Elks for an election night party, and word went out to at least a hundred and fifty people, among them the people at Higate Winery. Even Al Ruddy sent her a telegram of congratulations, and Moretti turned up in his big black limousine to take Barbara to a luncheon at Le Trianon on O'Farrell Street, where they would be joined by half a dozen top party people. “Just our own small celebration prior to the fact,” Moretti said. “I chose Le Trianon for symbolic reasons, if you will forgive me a little sentiment and what you may regard as superstition. The chef, Mr. Verdon, was chef at the White House during the Kennedy years. I find the situation appropriate. Do you agree with me?”

“I am scared,” Barbara said. “I'm frightened. I feel like a kid who's been found out. After the poll appeared yesterday — I didn't sleep last night, Tony. Not a wink.”

“That's only natural. You've poured your heart and your soul into this. Now the reaction begins. That's only to be expected.”

“We still have to face the election, Tony. People are acting as if it's all over.”

“It's not all over, this election,” Tony said as he proposed a toast at the luncheon table. “I've played this game too long to toast the next and first Democratic congressman — or woman, I should say — in the Forty-eighth. Tuesday night, we'll know and drink to it. But meanwhile, to a fine lady. It has been my privilege to know her.”

Barbara was at home alone that Thursday evening. Since the campaign started, she had almost never been alone, and an evening at home by herself with no schedule and no one to address, lecture or contend with was a rare treat. She had time for a leisurely bath and hairwash; and brushing out her hair as she dried it, she speculated on whether it might not have been better to have colored her hair before the campaign began. She had toyed with the idea and had wondered whether she would not be using the election as an excuse for the coloring, but there was so much gray in the honey-colored hair that people would have been certain to note and comment on the change. Her hairdresser had disagreed with this. “You don't look that old,” he had told her. “What I mean is, you're making yourself older than you are, because you walk young and you carry yourself young.”

She had shaken his suggestions aside. She was going gray and she'd go gray, and that was that. Her peers were doing the face lifts and breast lifts and buttock lifts in a desperate race to bring the Beverly Hills syndrome here to the Bay Area, which left her cold and increasingly aware of the ravages of mortality. She was brooding a bit over the fact that Alexander Holt had not called, not for a week, and somehow in her mind the hair coloring connected with Holt. You did such things if you thought of a man, and she thought of men. God knows how many times she filled her mind with thoughts of men. Clair had once said to her that old age is a land never visited; one enters it as a resident, casually and thoughtlessly. No one had ever told her it would be like this, strange, lonely, threatening, but this was America, youth eternal. The truth was, she realized, that no one ever thinks of growing old. Youth looks at a world where the young are young and the old are old, and nothing ever changes.

She tried not to think about Holt. She had found him gracious and charming, yet she knew almost no one who trusted him. What did she know about him — except for the few hours of their two dinner dates, facing each other across restaurant tables? And if she won this contest, as everyone around her was certain she would, what then? How would she deal with it? How would Alexander Holt deal with it?

When Sunday arrived, the Sunday before the Monday before Election Day, Freddie and Barbara decided to close down the storefront for the first time since the campaign started and have a day in the country. Clair was baking a fresh ham whole, and everyone was meeting for Sunday dinner in Glair's kitchen in the old stone house at Higate. The huge kitchen, with Mexican terra cotta tiles on the floor, and on the walls the blue and white tiles from Pueblo, was used as a dining room because it held an oak table fourteen feet long. Sam came with Mary Lou, and therefore Carla had to be left out, which bothered both Barbara and May Ling. Barbara watched Sam and Mary Lou worriedly, relieved finally when she began to realize that today Mary Lou would open her mouth only to eat or say thank you and yes and no. Apparently, Sam had coached her properly.

Freddie was present with May Ling, and Clair's daughter, Sally, wife to Barbara's brother Dr. Joseph Lavette. With them was their son, Daniel, twenty-one, a junior at Princeton. Freddie had invited Mort Gilpin to join them, and Freddie's father, Adam Levy, and Eloise, Adam's wife, completed the group around the table.

The warmth and pleasure Barbara felt whenever she came together with this small group, which was all the family she had, was muted by a sense of empty places. Death had taken its full measure. Why should she think of death, not only the death of others, but death intimately connected with herself? A cold, desolate feeling swept across her like a wave of icy nausea. Fortunately, it did not last. It went and she was smiling with pleasure, sharing their delight at the results of the latest poll. When Sally struck up “For she's a jolly good fellow,” Barbara wanted to cry out for them to stop. But that would have cooled the evening. Freddie took her hand and said, “Nothing can stop the trend. We're going to make it.”

“We're not in,” Barbara said. “No one's in until Tuesday night.”

Driving home that evening, she was detached from all the warmth and excitement of the evening. Something had shattered the passionate desire, the feeling that a whole life of supporting lost causes and tilting at windmills would culminate in the House of Representatives, where she would finally face those who inflicted pain, who lied and looted and made a mockery of justice. All the nasty and envious names that people had attached to her through the years came into her mind,
Girl Scout. Joan of Arc, Goody Two-Shoes, Lady Don Quixote from San Francisco, parlor pink
, threading through her whole life. When she had sorted out the memories and lined them up, they lay on her like a crushing weight. Why had she ever started this thing? Why did she deceive herself with the feeling that she was not old? When did a man last come on to her, and when would a man ever come on to her again? She had toyed with the notion of Alexander Holt. Could it be that he was at least a little bit in love with her?

At home, in bed, Barbara pressed her face into the pillow and wept. Alone in the darkness, she pleaded for her mother and father to come to her. She was sixty-two, but more than that, she was a motherless child and the years made no difference.

Barbara's last salute, as she thought of it, was a luncheon at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where she addressed five hundred members of the Northern California branch of the National Organization of Women. It was well outside the Forty-eighth C.D., nor was it likely that more than a dozen or two of the diners would be from the Forty-eighth, but it would have large coverage from the media, and for this reason Barbara had accepted the invitation two months ago. Her subject was “Women and War,” and she spoke gently, without passion, her voice rising only when she read: “I was the mother of brave sons. They were not ordinary children, but the pride of Phrygia, beautiful children. No Trojan or Greek or Barbarian mother could boast such children. All these I have seen killed by the spears of the Greeks; I wept on their coffins and cut my hair to its roots. Before my eyes, my beloved husband, Priam, was murdered, butchered in his own house. My city was captured. This I saw and watched. My daughters, whom I loved and raised for good marriage, they were taken from me to be whores for strangers. No hope ever to see them again, no hope, and myself — to crown my misery, I shall be taken in bondage to Greece, a slave in my old age, to die a slave.”

Barbara paused. Her voice had turned into a plea of agony and sorrow. She let it drop, and it was again gentle and unemotional. “What has changed?” she asked. “Those words I just read were written by the Greek playwright Euripides, almost two and a half thousand years ago — spoken by the Trojan woman Hecuba after the Greeks sacked Troy. When since then have women not wept over the obscenity men call war, the murder they call glory, and the death of our sons? Now, if it happens, with the terrible weapons we have built, we will have only the awful comfort of dying with our children. It must stop. Perhaps I can help stop it. I can try.”

There was great applause and a standing ovation. Freddie, at the back of the hall with Mort Gilpin, remarked, “This does it.”

“I think so. If I had read the text, I would have said it's political suicide. But that woman gets away with things. How the hell does she do it?”

“She joined the Girl Scouts and never turned in her badge.”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm kidding. The truth is, my Aunt Barbara just doesn't live in this world. Maybe people like the place where she lives.”

“I don't know. If she makes it, the animals in Washington will tear her to pieces.”

“Maybe not. She's a romantic but she's not a fool. She's tough.”

“And by the way,” Gilpin said, “my spy at a certain network tells me that Mr. Holt has sprung for three three-minute spots, day after tomorrow, Monday night, seven-thirty, eight-thirty and nine-thirty. That's how to get a message through. His money doesn't know when to quit. I wonder where it comes from.”

“Does your spy know what he's going to say?”

“No, but he hears it's a bombshell.”

“There's no use worrying Barbara. We'll listen on Monday night. He needs more than a bombshell to turn this thing around.”

Monday evening, Barbara and Freddie and May Ling and Carla and Mort Gilpin and a handful of volunteers were at the storefront in Sunnyside, seated around one of the long tables and eating sandwiches and drinking coffee out of paper containers. They were staying late to finish and nail up a large corrugated Scoreboard, divided into voting districts, so that they could keep track of the incoming vote. It had an additional strip for Jimmy Carter, tracking the national election as well. One of the volunteers was an art student who had spent two full days on the enormous board. Carol Eberhardt had gone out, unasked, to return with two large bags of sandwiches and coffee. While Carla and May Ling were passing out the food, dealing with those who preferred ham and cheese to corned beef or liverwurst and Russian dressing, Carol Eberhardt had taken Freddie aside and whispered to him, “You know, Freddie, my father's head of the Republican organization here in the Bay Area?”

“I know that. Yes.”

“Well, Dad said I could stay home today. It's all over.”

“He knows you're working here?”

“Oh, yes. It's a great joke around his pals. He never took anything I did seriously.”

“Well, you know, it is just about over,” Freddie said. “You've worked hard. You could have slaved home.”

“No, that isn't what he meant.”

“Freddie, come and eat!” May Ling called to him.

“What did he mean?”

“He meant that what Holt says tonight will be devastating.”

Freddie nodded. At the table, Freddie said to Barbara, “Holt's doing his three-minute commercial in about a half hour. Do you know about it?”

“I know he's running something tonight.”

“Three minutes, seven-thirty, and then twice more on the half hour. It's network. Very big money. I hear the organization can't face losing the Forty-eighth.”

“Well, come out with it, Freddie. What are you trying to say to me?”

“I've heard from two or three places that it's very dirty pool.”

Barbara shook her head. “No, he's run a clean fight until now. He's not that kind of a person.”

Freddie shrugged. “We'll see.”