Establishment (17 page)

“It wouldn't delight me,” Jake said. “It's a damned outrage!”

“But I know exactly what Bobby means,” Sally told them. “If Oscar Wilde had not gone to prison, how could he have written
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, and if Bunyan had not gone to prison, then no
Pilgrim's Progress
, and Cervantes and
Don Quixote
—and do you know, Thoreau was put in prison because he refused to pay taxes to support the Mexican war, and when Emerson saw him there, he said, ‘Henry, what are you doing in there?' and Thoreau said, ‘Waldo, what are you doing out there?' So I know exactly what Bobby means, but I still think it's a stinking shame.”

“I am not going to prison, and I do think there are more pleasant matters to discuss, and this wine is so good! What do you call it?”

“Pop calls it a Chablis,” Adam replied, “which it is not. There is really no such thing as a Chablis in California.”

“Damn nonsense!” Jake snorted. “It's as fine a Chablis as ever came out of France.”

“Which is just the point. Chablis is the generic name for the white Burgundies that come out of the Chablis region in France. This is better than any Chablis I ever tasted. It's more delicate, and it has a better bouquet. Just hold it in your mouth a moment before you swallow, Bobby. No tartness, or almost none. It's a California wine, pure California. In fact, outside of the Napa and Sonoma valleys, no one grows a grape that can do this. We can make the best damn wine in the world, but we have such an inferiority complex about it that we give them French names and pretend we're making French wines. We're not.”

“It's hard enough to sell it as it is,” Jake said. “Without calling it Chablis, we wouldn't sell a hundred gallons.”

“What would you call it, Adam?” Barbara wanted to know.

“I don't know. Any local name. I'd call this Eloise.”

“Oh, thank you,” Eloise said. “I prefer not to become a wine, if you don't mind. One glass of it gives me a splitting migraine. If you named it after me, heaven knows what would happen.”

“You mean you never drink wine?” Barbara asked.

“Never. I don't dare. And I do love it. Isn't that an awful irony, to be married to a winemaker and not be able to drink it?”

Sally grabbed her hand as they left the table. “Bobby, I must talk to you. Are you going home now?”

“I'm afraid I must. I'm leaving for Washington in the morning.”

“Just a few minutes, please?”

They went up to Sally's old room, and Sally sat with May Ling in her arms. “Isn't she absolutely darling, Bobby?” Sally said. “And for a one-year-old, she's brilliant—I mean for twelve months, you can't expect too much, can you? I think she looks very Chinese, but Joe insists that Chinese children do not have sandy hair. But with seven or eight hundred million people, such a generalization is ridiculous—”

“Sally,” Barbara interrupted, “that's not what you want to talk to me about.”

“No. My marriage. My marriage stinks. And I want to weep, because how can I be married to your brother and have it turn into such a rotten mess?”

“It has nothing to do with being married to my brother. You're married to Joe. Now what has happened?”

“I've disappeared. I don't exist. We've been married two lousy years, and I don't exist.”

“Oh, Sally, come on. What do you mean, you don't exist?”

“I'll tell you exactly what I mean. He's up at six-thirty and off to the clinic at seven. At ten he goes to the hospital to operate. Then back to the clinic. Then back to the hospital. Then back to the clinic. If I'm lucky, he's home at eight. Otherwise, nine, ten—just early enough to stuff some food into himself and fall into bed. Oh, I don't mean he's cruel to me or nasty or mean. You know Joe. He couldn't even be mean to Adolf Hitler. He'd just examine him and prescribe pills for his craziness.”

“Have you tried to talk to him?”

“Of course I have. He doesn't hear me. I have my poetry and I have May Ling. He considers that a full life. The only thing he leaves out of his thinking is marriage. I do love him, Bobby, and this thing is driving me right up the creek.”

“Sally, darling,” Barbara said, “I don't have any quick answers. Perhaps there aren't any, but I don't think your marriage is breaking up. It won't unless you want it to. Let me get through this stupid committee business, and I'll be able to sit down and talk with both of you. Perhaps that will help.”

“Will you? Will you, Bobby?”

“I promise.”

Sam was asleep in his crib. Barbara kissed him lightly, thanked Eloise and Adam profusely, and then drove back to San Francisco alone. The cable was pushed under her front door. She tore it open, and saw from the date that it had been delayed five days. It read, “No way to get through on the phone. Flight successful, goods bought, and all planes safe in Tel Aviv. Flight out of here impossible. Booked passage from Haifa to Naples. Then to London, and hopefully flight home. Ten days at most. I love you. Promise never to leave you again.” It was signed “Bernie.”

***

Jean was standing in the corridor outside Dan's hospital room when Tom appeared. Her surprise was more than she could cope with; she simply stared and said nothing.

“Well, I'm not a ghost, mother. I'm real,” Tom informed her.

“Yes, I know you're real,” Jean said slowly.

“How is he?”

“Much better.”

“Can I see him?”

“I don't want him upset,” Jean said. “I don't want him hurt. He's been hurt enough. What made you come here?”

“That's a hell of a note,” Tom complained. “Instead of admitting that I might be doing a decent thing, you're being hostile.”

“I'm not hostile. I'm just worried. You haven't spoken to your father for twenty years.”

“And he hasn't spoken to me.”

“All right, Tommy. This is no time to rehash anything. If you go in there, I don't want any of that. Are you concerned for him?”

“I think so,” Tom replied uncertainly. The truth was, he didn't know.

“Then if you go inside, you must forget the past. I don't want you to talk about anything but your concern for him.”

“I'll try.”

“That's not good enough. I want you to promise me.”

Tom nodded.

“I'll go in first and tell him. He doesn't need a shock.” She turned to the door. “Wait here. Don't lose your nerve and run.”

“I'll be here,” he answered, thinking that she still treated him like a small, willful boy.

Dan, propped up in bed, was reading an old, battered copy of Masefield's
Salt Water Ballads
. May Ling had bought it for him thirty years before, and it had her inscription inside the cover: “For a loving and gentle saltwater man.” Jean had found it among his things and had brought it to him, not mentioning the inscription. That puzzled him, but there were any number of things about Jean that puzzled him. Now he put down the book and said, “I wish you liked small boats.”

“That depends on how small they are. I could learn.”

“I've been thinking of something about thirty feet, sloop-rigged, something that the two of us could handle. I'd build it myself—well, not with my own hands, but I'd design it and watch it every step of the way. Build it of teak—none of this rotten plastic they're using now. I'm not thinking of anything ambitious. There's enough water and shoreline in the bay to keep a man occupied for years. I'd teach you to sail. You know, that was something I planned to do from the first day we were married, and believe me, you'd learn at the hand of a master.”

“It's a thought.”

“Come on, Jeanie, would you?”

“Get well first. I'm not saying no. Meanwhile, there's a visitor outside. I thought I'd tell you before he comes in.”

“Who?”

“Tom.”

“Tom?”

“Our Tom. Your son.”

Softly, Dan said, “No. Well, I'll be damned. He wants to see me.”

“That's right. Do you want to see him?”

“I want to see him. Yes.”

“All right, Danny. But the past is over. Otherwise, there's no use seeing him at all.”

“I'll buy that.”

“I'll send him in and stay outside,” Jean said. “I think it's best if you see him alone.”

Dan waited apprehensively. His heart was beating more rapidly, and he wondered whether that was good or bad after what had happened to him. It would not be literally true to say that he had not seen his son for twenty years. San Francisco is not a large city, and three times during the years he had caught sight of Tom, most recently in the distance, and before that twice in the same room at public functions. His feelings about Tom were a complex maze of contradictions. On one level, Tom was an unmitigated bastard; on another level, Dan blamed himself and softened the characterization; on still another level, he tried to grapple with the fact that his son was very possibly a homosexual, but since his notions of what constituted homosexuality were rather primitive, he dealt with the possibility by negating it and putting it down to an incorrect conclusion of others or as a temporary aberration from the normal. With all his faults, Dan Lavette was not intolerant; he was not given to hatred or grudges. After all, two generations ago, when the Chinese were an anathema to almost all of the white population of San Francisco, he had hired May Ling's father as his bookkeeper and had subsequently made him the manager of all his enterprises. His judgment of himself was so unsparing that he hesitated to condemn others. And as far as Tom was concerned, he had lived with an aching desire, a dream that one day the boy would lay aside his hurt and bitterness and return to him, for Dan had never denied Tom's right to despise him. By the measure of his own coin, he had failed his children, and if Barbara and Joe chose to forgive him that failure and to love him in spite of it, the virtue was theirs, not his. When he had given the hundred and ten thousand dollars to Bernie Cohen, his excuse that he was paying a debt to Mark Levy was an empty apology and no more; the truth was that a child of his, through her husband, had come with a plea. At that point he was allowed to give, and that was all that mattered to him. His was the peculiar anguish of a once poverty-stricken child whose family now was of the establishment. He still measured giving by the thing that was given.

So when Jean asked him to put aside the past, she was controlling her own ghosts. There was no thought of the past in Dan's mind as Tom entered the room. He was unaware of his slight smile, thinking only that his son was a fine-looking man, tall, well built—his father's frame and his mother's color and good looks. He was thirty-six years old, one of a half dozen of the wealthiest and most powerful men in California. Dan made no obeisance to wealth and power, but they were the measure of the game he had played for most of his life.

“Hello, dad,” Tom said tentatively. He, too, was apprehensive. Dan held out his hand, and Tom took it. His grip was firm. “How do you feel?”

“Not bad,” Dan replied. “You know, this is a Jewish hospital. They have a funny expression about a coronary. They say, ‘Now you're bar-mitzvahed.' The words came out, and Dan didn't know why he had said them.
What a stupid thing to say
, he thought.
What a stupid way to begin! Why couldn't I keep my mouth shut?
“I guess you don't know what that means,” he said lamely.

“Sure I do. Only it doesn't apply. You were a man when you were still a kid. It's people like me who have to do the growing up.”

Dan stared at him, wondering whether he meant it. He remembered a boy's voice. This voice was strong, well modulated, the voice of a man who was listened to.

“I'm glad you came,” Dan said. “It's been too long.”

“I know it has.”

“Pull over a chair. Sit down.”

“I should have brought flowers,” Tom said.

“Who the hell wants flowers! I'm not dead. The flowers keep coming and I send them down to the ward. You know what you should have brought me? A cigar.”

“I wish I had thought of that. But mother would have killed me.”

“I suppose so. She prowls around here like a cop. You look good. Taking care of yourself?”

“I try.”

“How's business?” Dan asked, unable to think of anything else to say, or unable to say any of the hundred things he thought of, unable to ask whether he had been missed, loved, cherished, hated, unable to ask whether his son was happy, lonely, fulfilled, resentful.

“Well, the chaps in Washington say we're going to own the world, that it's our century. I used to think that business was a matter of making money. But then money becomes meaningless, and the whole game becomes something else.”

“I know the feeling,” Dan agreed.

“I suppose we own a very substantial part of the world already. The question is, where do I go from here?”

Dan waited. He mistrusted the words on the tip of his tongue.

“I'm going to run for Congress,” Tom said.

Dan nodded. “I heard.”

“What do you think of the idea?”

Dan nodded again. “I think you'll make it. Does that mean you'll leave Whittier in control?”

“Not on your life,” Tom said. “I know you don't like John. I guess you have your reasons. He's no one to like or dislike. He's an old fool and a hypochondriac. I've been pressing him to retire, and I imagine he will. You know, I'm getting married.”

“Yes, Jean told me.”

“Lucy Sommers.”

“I knew her father, but I never met her. I'm sure she's a fine girl.”

“She's a fine woman, dad. A year or two older than I. But that makes no difference.”

“Of course not.”

At that point Jean entered. Tom rose, explaining that he did not want to tire Dan. He shook hands with his father and kissed Jean, then left.