The Legacy (43 page)

“He also forbids me to drink or keep late hours. I was up until two o'clock reading Massie's
Nicholas and Alexandra
and I had three sherries, and I feel perfectly fine. Have you read it, Barbara?”

“No, mother.”

“You should. Liberals never read anything that might upset them. Take the coffee back, please, it's undrinkable.”

“Leave a cup for me, please,” Barbara said. “I can't spend the morning over breakfast.”

“Who called at such an unearthly hour?” Jean asked her.

“Sally. She has been talking things out with Joe and half decided to go back to him, and now she's got herself a part in some new film, and she's filled with guilts and all kinds of ambivalence.”

“She's quite mad,” Jean observed, buttering a slice of toast.

“Yes, I suppose so. But we all are, more or less. Mr. Kurtz is convinced that I am totally insane.”

“With reason. To rebuild that strange Victorian house to a facsimile of what it was is just beyond me. I suppose you're on your way there now.”

“We have an appointment at ten. And then I'm meeting Boyd at his office and he's taking me to lunch, and after that I'm joining the ladies at the loft. We have a new bumper sticker that's coming in from the printer. I've decided that in our car culture, the bumper sticker is number one in getting your message across.”

“You're very fond of Boyd, aren't you?”

“Quite fond, yes.”

“Has he asked to marry you?”

“On various occasions.”

“Why not?”

“I'm fifty-three, for one thing. For another, marriage doesn't seem to suit me very well. I've known Boyd for twenty years, and he's very dear and thoughtful. But he goes his way and I go mine. When we need each other, we find each other.”

“Yes, that's very much the order of the day, and I can't say I approve. I do hope it hasn't affected my grandchildren. It would be very nice to see a great-grandchild before I die. And speaking of that, when is our Sam returning?”

“On the fourteenth, which is hardly more than a week away.”

“I'm very excited about it, truly, Barbara. I'm very fond of our Samuel. And it's been so long. I do love that child, which is something I must handle very carefully. He's not a child anymore, is he?”

“I'm afraid not, mother.”

“I do love Freddie, but Freddie's such a flibbertigibbet and that beard of his. I'll never be reconciled to men with beards. Well, thank heavens he didn't marry that girl.”

“Why? She's a lovely girl.”

“She's Catholic and Irish.”

“Good God, mother, you married a Catholic who was Italian.”

“Danny,” Jean said calmly, “as I've told you before, had ceased to be a Catholic before we were married, and as for his being Italian, well, San Francisco Italians are different. I mean, you can't think of Stephan Cassala as an Italian, can you?”

“Why not?” Barbara demanded, wondering why, after a lifetime of knowing her mother, she was still unable to anticipate her train of thought.

“He was a distinguished and courtly gentleman,” Jean replied.

“Mother, I don't know what to say. You leave me speechless. Your prejudices baffle me.”

“Prejudices?” Jean smiled comfortably. “I think I've overcome all my prejudices.”

“Of course you have,” Barbara agreed. She kissed her mother and left the house. Afterwards, she would recall how very good she had felt on this morning. The house was almost completed; Sam was due home in a few days; the sky was blue and the wind from the Pacific was as sweet as honey. She walked briskly, covering the few blocks between her mother's home and her own house on Green Street in a matter of minutes. Mr. Kurtz was waiting for her, his crew of painters sitting on the steps of the rebuilt house.

“Every minute you're late,” he informed her, “costs me money. You think when painters sit and wait for you, they don't get paid?”

“I thought they'd be at it all morning.”

“Before you seen the color? God forbid. I got too much experience with you, Miss Lavette.”

“But I said white. You know that.”

“There is white and white, plaster-white, oyster-white, antique white, gray-white, blue-white, yellow-white.”

“Just white.”

“There is no such thing as just white. Come and look.”

When Barbara had agreed that the white paint he had mixed would be satisfactory, Mr. Kurtz breathed a sigh of relief, instructed his painters to begin, and told Barbara that if she planned any future reconstruction, he would rather not be involved.

“But, Mr. Kurtz, the
Chronicle
ran a long piece about my house, and the writer praised you to the skies and pointed out that your work was superb.”

“That's the trouble,” Mr. Kurtz agreed.

Barbara left him, her mood still untroubled, and since it was still early, she decided to walk down the hill to Market Street, observing to herself, as she had so often in the past, that here was a place where many walked downhill but only a few walked uphill, and wondering how it had been before there were cable cars, buses, and automobiles. What had Sam written about that — something about horses dragging wagons up the hills, a school composition or was it in one of his letters? She loved the letters in which he took off and let his fancy or memory run freely. There was one letter in which he had described a whole day, in minute detail, of his experiences at that silly school in Connecticut to which she had sent him — and now she couldn't even recall the name of the place. She was trying to remember it when she walked into Boyd's office, and then Boyd told her that Israel was at war.

Barbara stared at him in silence for a moment or two, and then she dropped into a chair. Boyd would have been reassured if she had cried out or broken into tears, but she said nothing, and the moments went by.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. He poured a glass of water from a jug on his desk and handed it to her, and she drank it, and then asked quietly, “What kind of a war?”

She would know sooner or later. “The worst kind,” Boyd said. “Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, all at once.”

“Which means they're fighting in Jerusalem.”

“Yes, I'm afraid so. I've been on the telephone the past two hours. I had the crazy notion that if I could get through to Hebrew University, I might reach Sam. Out of the question. There is no way to get through to Jerusalem or even to Israel. The international operator said I could be put on a hold list, which might be three hours or tomorrow or never. Then I called an old schoolmate of mine in the State Department, which was not easy because there too it's murder to get through, and he told me that the news out of Jerusalem is very sparse and for the most part contradictory.” He hesitated.

“Please tell me whatever you heard,” Barbara said.

“You know how the city is divided. The line runs north and south, along the west wall of the old city. Well, according to what they've been able to find out, there's fighting all along the line of the division, and they think the Israelis are more than holding their own, but they're not sure at this time. In any case, the fighting is at least a mile from Hebrew University.”

“At least a mile. My God.”

“Barbara,” Boyd said, “I know how you feel, and it's not going to get any better for at least a day. I mean there's no way Sam can get through to you or you to him for at least a day — and possibly for much longer. He has no telephone of his own, and my friend says they have no communication at all with the university. You just have to believe that he's self-reliant enough to survive. After all, he's not in the army.”

“If Jordan takes Jerusalem,” Barbara said dully, “they will slaughter every living soul in the city.”

“No! Absolutely not. What makes you think that?”

“The Israelis believe it.”

“Barbara, they couldn't take it in nineteen forty-eight. What makes you think they can now, almost twenty years later?”

“Boyd, it's too terrible,” she whispered, the tears beginning now. “He would have come home if I had insisted. It's my fault. I can't bear it. First his father, and now my son. It's too much.”

Hubber's pharmacy on Ben Yehuda Street was one of the first casualties of the war. “I've been picked clean already,” he told Dr. Reznik. “Why didn't you come earlier?”

“Because I was trying to find my young assistant here, who is a philosophical pacifist and was sitting in the library writing a letter to his mother.”

“At least he's a good son,” Mr. Hubber said. “My son is in the Sinai, and the world would come to an end if he should think of writing a letter to his mother. I'll tell you what, I put aside some stuff, and I'll let you have part of it.” He reached under the counter and came up with a liter of iodine, two liters of peroxide, and four liters of alcohol.

“That's not very much.”

“No, but it's the bottom of the barrel.” He paused to listen to distant explosions. “Larger guns, and closer. I have some American Mercurochrome that nobody wanted.”

“We'll take it.”

He brought out a case of a dozen small bottles.

“Bandages, dressings?” Dr. Reznik asked.

“I'll give you what I have left, not much but it will help.” He piled rolls of bandages, boxes of dressings, and spools of adhesive tape on the counter. “A moment,” he said, and then went to the back of the store and returned with a small carton. “More American ingenuity. They're called Band-Aids, small dressings with tape.”

“I know,” Reznik said. “I've used them. But for our need —” He shrugged. “We'll take them.”

Hubber produced two corrugated cartons. “Pack it,” he instructed Sam. “I'll make out the bill. You'll sign it, doctor, and I'll argue later with the War Ministry.”

Each of them carrying a box of supplies, Sam and Dr. Reznik set out again. The streets they passed through were crowded with soldiers, civilians, men, women, children, all of them strangely calm, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, no one running, no one screaming except the driver of a huge half-track who was cursing a cab driver who blocked his way.

“Don't mumble,” Dr. Reznik said to Sam. “If you speak to me, speak up.”

“I was talking to myself. I was asking myself what kind of a crazy war this is where you go to a drugstore for medical supplies.”

“Where else should we go? I told Rachel to bring all my instruments from the laboratory.”

“Dissecting tools?”

“We'll make do. I have a few other things. Why do you worry so much?”

“Because I have nothing to worry about,” Sam said sourly. “I have my tickets home for next week, and by now my mother knows about this and she's going out of her mind and remembering how my father died here in 'forty-eight — could I reach her? Is there any way?”

“Impossible. I'm sorry,” Reznik said sadly. “Your father died here? I didn't know that. In the war?”

“In the war.” He didn't want to talk about it. At this moment, he didn't want to talk about anything, telling himself that tomorrow, if it was humanly possible, he'd get to Tel Aviv, even if he had to walk; get to the airport; and sleep in the airport waiting room, if he had to, until the day came to leave. It was not his war. No war was his war, and no war contained one shred of sanity or decency. Several times, as they walked to Bezalel Street, Dr. Reznik glanced at him, but his set face and his tight, thinly compressed lips did not invite conversation.

Dr. Reznik's first aid station, one of many hurriedly improvised, had been set up in the ground-floor apartment of a family by the name of Lieberman. They were Polish in origin, and they had left Poland for Palestine shortly before the Nazi invasion. Rose and Aaron Lieberman were in their fifties; they had one son who was away in the army, leaving his wife and baby with his parents. It was a small two-bedroom apartment, the living room of which had been turned into an emergency first aid station. The fact that their apartment was less than half a mile from the front line did not appear to trouble the Liebermans inordinately. They were both stout, good-natured people. When Reznik and Sam arrived, Rose Lieberman was in the kitchen, cooking. War or no war, nobody in her house would go hungry. Her daughter-in-law, Shela, was nursing her baby in the bedroom, and Aaron Lieberman was sitting in the other bedroom, cleaning his rifle. Too old for the army, he was in the reserve, and now that the apartment had been turned into a first aid station, he felt free to leave his family and walk over to the front and see if he could help.

It served to increase Sam's impression of a world gone mad. Sarah, the nurse the hospital had sent, was spreading a sheet over the couch, so that it might be used as a bed. Ari, Dr. Reznik's assistant, was reading a newspaper. Rachel had opened the door for them, and now she took the heavy box from Dr. Reznik, just glancing at Sam, asking Ari to help her. Ari limped over and took the box from her arms. Sam set his box down on the floor, and now he and Rachel stood facing each other.

“I thought you had gone,” she said. She was a tall, well-built, dark girl, small, regular features, dark eyes, and black hair tied tightly in a ponytail.

Sam shrugged and shook his head.

“Since the war is still a few blocks away,” Dr. Reznik said, “why don't you two go outside and talk while we arrange things here.”

“Do we have anything to talk about?” Sam wondered.

“I think so.”

“All right. We'll talk.”

She led the way through the front door and they sat down on the outside steps of the house. It was on toward twilight now, and from the direction of East Jerusalem came the constant snapping crackle of small-arms fire, punctuated now and again by the crash of an artillery shell. A woman came out on the street and shouted for her children. Three of them appeared, and she ordered them into the house. A bus packed with soldiers rolled by, and then incongruously a young girl on a bicycle. A company of paratroopers came along the street, marching two by two, their Uzi guns slung over their shoulders, their gait cocky and easy. One of them whistled at Rachel, and she waved at him.