The Immigrant’s Daughter (2 page)

It was Boyd's death that had changed everything for Barbara. The solid shape of reality had shimmered and collapsed. Life and death suddenly were no longer separated. When she had wept, she had wept for all the love and beauty that had gone away forever.

“Carla!” Sam said sharply.

Barbara realized that Carla had not broken her account.

“I talk too much,” Carla said. “Well, I don't talk too much. But now that I have something to talk about — Did it ever occur to you, Sam, how many hours I sat and listened to you and your smartass doctor friends talk about doing your thing? But that's important. Being an actress is not important. Absolutely not; it only keeps me from getting pregnant and bringing some more Lavettes into the world —”

“Carla, I didn't mean that, I didn't mean that at all. Please, don't make this into another fight.”

“Why not? Because Barbara's here?”

The coiled spring of a fight began to tighten. Barbara had been here before, and now she shrank back in dread. Outbursts of fury on the part of her son bewildered and terrified her, and Carla would rise to his anger with a Latin intensity that matched Sam's rage. Barbara sometimes felt that the marriage should never have been, and she surmised that the only force keeping it together was the transformation of the anger into a sexual passion on the same level as the rage. It was an uneasy surmise on her part; son and mother maintained notions of mutual purity that matched each other in unreality.

It was then, at this moment, that she saw the school bus lose its right rear wheel. They had passed Schellville, driving east toward Napa, when Sam found himself behind the school bus. Driving automatically, his attention concentrated on the developing fight with his wife, he made no attempt to pass the bus, which was moving at about forty miles an hour. Actually, he was almost tailgating. Then Barbara saw the school bus lose its wheel, and she screamed, “Sam — for God's sake, look! The bus!”

She saw the rest as if it were being played on a film screen in slow motion. It was an old yellow school bus, half filled with children, eleven or twelve children, for even in those fractions of a second that spelled out the impending tragedy, Barbara was able to estimate the number of children. The wheel rolled off the road, the school bus lurched to the right, and then, seeking to bring it under control, the driver twisted the bus to the left, where it crossed into the opposite lane and crashed head on into an oncoming gardener's truck. Sam's foot on the brakes of his own car brought them to a screeching halt just short of the two wrecked vehicles.

Sam was out of his car the moment he brought it to a halt, telling Carla, “My bag, in the trunk.” He threw the keys of the car to her as he ran toward the school bus. Carla got the trunk open; Barbara ran after Sam without waiting for Carla to get the bag and a package of dressings that Sam always carried in the trunk of his car. Sam was shouting to Carla, “Dressings — package next to the bag.”

Then he pulled open the back door of the bus and plunged inside. Barbara followed him, a veritable agony of sound greeting her, cries of terror and pain.

Smoke filled the bus, and Sam shouted, “Get them outside, Mom! Never mind the trauma — just get them outside! The bus is burning!”

She pushed two children who could walk past her. “Outside, darlings!” or something of the sort. “And run from the bus!” not knowing whether they understood. Carla squeezed past her with Sam's bag. A child lay crumpled in her seat, bleeding from a head wound. The children were seven or eight years old. Barbara picked up the unconscious child.

“Don't move her if she's hurt,” Carla said.

“Sam wants them out of the bus.”

“Up here!” Sam shouted to Carla. “Get up here! I need help!”

Outside the bus, someone screamed in pain. Barbara ran about fifty feet before she laid the child down off the road and then she herded children away from the accident. Carla climbed out of the bus with another child in her arms, and then Sam handed still another bleeding child to Barbara.

A car stopped and the driver came running to help. A black man. He plunged into the burning bus without a word. He came out with a child in his arms, followed by Sam, who carried another child.

“Two more inside.” He handed the child to Carla. Barbara was back in the bus. One of two hurt little boys could walk. The other screamed in agony as Barbara tried to pull him out from where he was wedged under a seat.

“Let me,” the black man said.

Together they managed to get him loose. Barbara half started toward the driver. Her eyes were burning from the smoke.

“Mother, get out of there!” Sam yelled. “The driver's dead!”

Thick smoke as she felt her way to the exit door. Sam and Carla fairly plucked her out of the bus, both of them shouting, “Run! Run!”

The bus exploded in a burst of flame as they reached the place where the children were huddled together, and bits of glass and burning bus rained on them. The children were screaming. Barbara tried to soothe them. None of the children was badly injured; cuts and bruises. The child Barbara had first carried out of the bus was conscious now. Sam ran to the pickup truck, where the driver, screaming with pain, resisted efforts to free him. Then the driver fainted. Carla and Sam worked together, smoothly and expertly. The black man threw off his jacket, pulled off his shirt, and tore it into strips. Bandages to hold on their dressings. It took her back forty years to that infamous Bloody Thursday, when the longshoremen on the San Francisco waterfront had clashed with the police and when she had helped man a first-aid station all through the hot and bloody morning. Different but the same, somehow, because, as it came to her in a flash, time is an illusion in any case, and here she was on her knees, holding a weeping, bleeding child to her breast while she wept with her own memories.

Then there were ambulances and fire engines and police cars and tow trucks. The injured truck driver and the children were placed in the ambulances. The police took statements, informed Sam that they would be called upon to attend an inquiry and an inquest, and finally left them alone on the roadside.

The wreckage was dragged away, and the four people, bloodstained from head to foot, were left alone with their two cars.

The black man, in his undershirt but maintaining dignity, introduced himself. “Harvey Lemwax.”

“No,” Carla said. “Can't be. You're not Harvey Lemwax. Things like that don't happen.”

“Oh, absolutely. Harvey Lemwax.”

Sam introduced the group. “This is my wife, Carla, my mother, Barbara Lavette. Myself, Dr. Sam Cohen. From Carla's reaction, I realize I should be ashamed not to recognize you. I apologize. Unfortunately, most doctors know little beyond their own medicine.”

“Don't apologize, please.”

“Then tell us.”

“Well — I play trumpet —”

Barbara's knowledge of trumpet players was nonexistent, but on the other hand, Harvey Lemwax gave no indication of ever having heard of Barbara Lavette. Of course, she was by no means the best-known writer in the United States, but neither was she unknown. She had occupied a place in
Who's Who
for the past thirty years, and if her books were not widely enough read, certainly her past had elicited enough nonliterary headlines for her to feel less than apologetic.

“I'm sure you're superb at it,” Barbara said. “If you do it the way you stormed into that smoking bus, I take my hat off to you.”

“Superb is hardly the word,” Carla said.

“About the smoke,” Barbara went on, “I've been coughing my head off. Should I worry about it, Sam?”

“Oh no, no. We need a drink.”

“Superb, indeed,” Carla said. “Only one of the three or four greatest and when I say greatest, I mean greatest, but absolutely. Right there with Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge.”

“Too much, too much!” Lemwax exclaimed. “You are good people. I am glad to have met you, a good meeting, except that we must say God help that poor bus driver and rest his poor soul. Will all them kids be all right, Doc?”

“Cuts, contusions, a broken arm, two or three teeth lost and some blood. Not awful by any means. But don't ride off into the sunset yet, Harvey. Today's Mother's birthday.”

“That is your mother?”

He had been told that, Barbara remembered.

“She is too young and too beautiful.”

“Bless your heart,” Barbara said.

“What I am saying is this,” Sam told them. “In the trunk of my car is a cooler containing six bottles of beautiful French champagne. The celebration of Mother's birthday is to take place at the home of family of sorts in the valley north of Napa where they have a winery, which is what they live, talk, and know. They are bigoted peasants who will not drink French wine or even discuss French champagne. But Mother must be toasted properly, so just sit still while I get to it, provided you will drink Dom Perignon out of paper cups.”

Barbara listened to him with amazement. They had just witnessed a horrible accident. The driver of the school bus was dead. The driver of the pickup truck, a Mexican gardener, had been taken to the hospital in critical condition. The bloodstains and the oil stains were still plain on the road and the stink of burning gasoline was still in the air.

“We did our best,” Sam said, spreading his hands. He saw her expression.

Well, he had. Dried blood marked them all. Carla, dressed in her white silk best, had not hesitated to plunge into the effort, and now the silk was stained with blood and grime.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Lavette,” the black man said, as if compelled to apologize for the others. Barbara realized that he was embarrassed, standing in his undershirt, trying to maintain his original moment of dignity. They didn't know the bus driver. They were under no compulsion to mourn him, or was the whole world under a compulsion to constantly mourn the dead? What do the dead deserve? Barbara clasped her hands and stood stiff and very still for a long moment.

“Are you all right?” Carla asked her.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Just shaken.”

Sam opened a bottle of champagne. Carla opened a package of plastic cups. The cork popped.

Tenderly, Sam said to his mother, “Drink this. It will help.”

She shook her head. She was crying, softly, gently. Even more embarrassed, Harvey Lemwax said that he really had to go.

“One for the road,” Sam said, handing him the cup of champagne. He filled a cup for himself and one for Carla, but then offered his cup to Barbara. “Mother?”

She pushed away the tears with the back of her hand and accepted it. Sam poured another for himself, offering a toast: “Life, not death. There were twelve kids in the bus and they'll all be okay. We got them out.”

Barbara nodded.

“Then bottoms up!”

The wine was cold and good, and it eased Barbara's throat, and it came to her that if they had not been directly behind the school bus and if Sam had not plunged into it, followed by herself and Carla and Harvey Lemwax — if another two or three minutes had gone by — the children would have died.

“And in this crazy, lunatic country,” Carla was telling Lemwax, “my husband could be sued. Can you imagine, for saving lives he could be sued!”

“The hell with that,” Sam said. “Once more around.”

“I feel a bit strange,” Barbara said. “I have to get out of the sun, Sam.”

They made an odd group, standing at the side of the road and drinking champagne. Behind them, a billboard proclaimed the merits of Toyotas. Barbara sank into the back seat of the car gratefully. It was hot in the car, but not so hot as out there in the sun. A motorcycle cop pulled up and they offered him champagne. He grinned and shook his head. Probably, Barbara thought, he'd heard about the accident. Sam was a hero. He was questioning them, and writing down the answers on his pad.

The motorcycle cop took off, and Sam opened another bottle of champagne. Their little group was only twenty paces or so away from the car, but through the closed window it appeared to Barbara that she was in one world and they were in another world. It was chokingly hot in the car, parked as it was on the roadside under the noonday sun, but Barbara made no move to open a window or to turn on the motor and use the air conditioning. She was thinking about the driver, and how death could be so summarily dismissed. This was another aspect of her son: death comes, life goes on; and if death comes to someone whose name is not known, a stranger who dies driving a school bus, well, you take a glass of champagne. Sam was open-minded; no sense of the black man being black. The driver of the school bus had had his chest stove in against the wheel and his skull fractured as it crashed against the windshield. Was he married? Did he have children? Did he have life insurance? Was she, Barbara, weeping for him, for herself or for Boyd?

The black man had gone to his car and brought out his trumpet case, and now he took out his shining instrument, put it to his mouth and blew several fanfares into the California air. More champagne. The three of them embraced and then Harvey Lemwax put his trumpet back in its case, took it to his car, came to say goodbye to Barbara, started, stopped when he saw her tears, shook his head and then walked to his car and drove off.

Sam came to the car and threw open the door. “My God, it's so hot in here, Mother, you could choke. Why on earth are you crying?”

“I don't know.”

“We finished two bottles of that elixir. Carla and I are both sloshed, so you'd better drive. Are you all right? I mean, are you settled enough to drive?”

“Of course,” Barbara snapped at him. “I had one small sip of champagne.”

“I didn't mean —”

“I know what you meant — oh, Sam, I'm sorry. I didn't intend to get so upset and scream at you. That isn't my style, is it? Of course I'll drive.”