Establishment (22 page)

Tom studied her with interest. “You never fail to astonish me, Lucy. You have qualities I never dreamed of.”

“And how do I take that?”

“I think as a compliment. We get along. We have yet to have our first real quarrel.”

“Could you bear to have me read you something aloud? This is from the
Oakland
Tribune
.” She then read him the background story on the hearing.

“Poor Barbara,” Tom said. “I feel sorry for her.”

“She made her own bed. It's a quality that idealists cherish. I was thinking more of Norman Drake than of Barbara.”

“He's a feisty little bastard, isn't he?”

“Very much on the make, my dear, unless I misjudge him. Also a local boy, right out of our own Bay Area. You know, Thomas, we here on the Coast have been playing second fiddle for years. Even Texas has a larger piece of the action, and that's hardly proper. We're not the frontier any longer, we're the heartland.” She paused and regarded him thoughtfully.

“Go on,” Tom urged her.

“Yes. I think we should get to know Mr. Drake.”

“It is weird, but perhaps it makes sense,” Tom acknowledged.

***

Sally had decided to remain at Higate until Barbara returned from Washington. Her excuse to her mother, if she needed one, held that it was no more difficult to take care of two babies than one, and that Sally plus her one-year-old could therefore be of great help to Eloise. Actually, Clair needed no excuse. She was totally delighted with the company of both her children and her grandchildren. It had been only a few years since her son Joshua had been killed in the Pacific; her recovery from that had been slow and painful, and for a large part of her being, there was neither recovery nor hope of recovery. Time, which is said to heal most sorrows, left her memory undulled; and even after the passage of years, there would be moments of sharp, awful remembering—a vision of the bright, beautiful boy whom she had given birth to and raised and who had bled out his life somewhere in the Pacific, buried at sea, with not even a grave to remind her that he had ever lived. When such moments came, she would lock herself into her room and give way to an emotional burst of tears.

No one in her family knew this. Clair Levy was not given to tears, and her husband, Jake, could not remember her weeping, not even when the news of their son's death arrived. She was a strong woman, both physically and mentally, large-boned, competent, not very stylish after twenty-eight years of living and working on a farm, and given to blue jeans and work shirts, but still lean and shapely at forty-eight and in Jake's eyes as beautiful as ever.

Yet delighted as she was with even a few days of both her children, Clair told Jake that she was worried about Sally and Joe and what was happening between them. “I think it's less a desire to be with Barbara and her baby than a desire to get away from Joe. I think the marriage is sour as hell, Jake, and it worries me.”

“How do you know?”

“I smell it.”

“That's great. That's true perception. Why don't we leave it alone. If the marriage goes sour, it goes sour. How many decent, working marriages do you know about? Our daughter is pretty damn crazy.”

“Wonderful. That's the way you see it. And Joe is a sterling, Christ-like figure.”

“Joe is a decent, solid, hard-working physician.”

“And Sally is a lovely, bright, and sensitive child, whatever you may think.”

“She's not a child. She's a woman with a child of her own.”

“She's twenty-two years old, and to me she's still a child. I'll tell you what's wrong with you, Jake. You're building a damned empire here. You don't see anything else or give a damn for anything else. I can remember when you were ready to cut your father's heart out because he and Dan made money out of the war. We once grew a few grapes and bottled a few thousand gallons. Now you're bottling a hundred thousand gallons and becoming a damn commuter to Montgomery Street!”

“Hey, wait a minute. What have I done? What have I said? I said Joe is a decent, hard-working guy—”

Clair turned away in disgust and strode off, leaving Jake to shake his head in bewilderment.

Clair's assessment was more than a smell. Sally had always been ebullient, given to endless pseudo-literary declarations, high-spirited to the point of explosiveness, and free to say anything she pleased, which she frequently was pleased to do. Now she had turned quiet, had become subdued.

She telephoned Joe the night Barbara left. She found him at the hospital, between operations.

“What is it? I don't have much time, Sally,” he said to her.

“I'm still at Higate.”

“Don't you think you should come home?”

“What difference will it make?”

“That's a peculiar thing to say.”

“You're not there, so what difference does it make?”

“I try to be there as much as I can,” Joe explained impatiently. “I have work to do.”

“I know.”

“What does that mean? You know, I'm not out with some dame. I'm here at the hospital.”

“I know that.”

“When will you be home?”

“I'll wait for Barbara. Then I'll leave. That will be in two or three days. I'll help take care of Sam.”

“They don't need you for that. They have a whole damn institution there at Higate.”

“It's to take care of wine, not babies.”

“That's not funny.”

“I'm not trying to be funny,” Sally said. “I'm trying to stay alive. I'm twenty-two years old, and I'm trying to stay alive.”

“Will you please make sense.”

“All right, Joe. Don't worry. I'll be back as soon as Barbara returns from Washington.”

“O.K.,” he said. “Take care.”

She put down the phone, thinking that he hadn't even asked how his own daughter was.

***

When Barbara returned home after picking up Sam at Higate and then stopping to see her father at the hospital, it was already on to evening, and she was hardly overwhelmed with delight to find a reporter from the
Examiner
camped on her doorstep. He was an aggressive young man who would not accept the excuse that she was tired and that she had a wet baby to diaper and feed. He tried to be ingratiating by admiring the Victorian decor of the outside of her house.

“If that's the case,” Barbara said to him, “you can sit right here and admire it for the next hour. If I've finished everything I have to do, I'll talk to you then.”

“Hey, come on, why can't I sit inside and wait?”

“Because I don't want you there,” Barbara said.

When she opened the door over an hour later, he was still waiting. “I admire your persistence,” she admitted. “Come inside.”

“You're a tough lady, Mrs. Cohen. I'm not out to get you. I want to be helpful.”

“I can do without the
Examiner
's help.”

“Yeah, but I can't do without yours. I'll get clobbered if I don't come back with something. I tried to find your husband at his garage. They tell me he's out of town. Where?”

“I don't think that enters into it. You'll have to ask him when he returns.”

“O.K., I'm not pushing. After your experience, what is your opinion of the House committee?”

“Low, very low.”

“Low opinion.” He made notes. “You know, I agree with you. I read your first book. Overseas—you know, the armed services editions, those little paper books. I liked it. I haven't read the second one yet, but I'm going to. What about the names?”

“What about them?”

“Are they local people?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“I guess it wouldn't do any good to ask you who they are?”

“No.”

“Suppose Congress cites you for contempt. Will you go to jail?”

“I hope not.”

“What is your opinion of the Communist Party? I mean, do you think they're subversive? I mean, do you think they're dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force and violence?”

“I haven't the vaguest notion.”

“Would you describe yourself as an anticommunist?”

“You're cute,” Barbara said. “If I say yes, I'm lumped with those cretins in Washington, and if I say no, you've got a wonderful hook for your story. Do you know what I think? I think you'd better go.”

“Aw, come on. You're an old newspaperman yourself. I've got to try. Just another question or two. What about your brother?”

“What about him?”

“I hear he may get a Republican designation for Congress. What does this do to his plans? Are you friendly?”

“Goodnight, dear boy,” Barbara said. She ushered him to the door, ignoring his fervent pleas.
Well, my love
, she said to herself as she closed the door behind him,
the hayride is over. You are no longer girl guide. You have pink spurs, and the trouble is, you've really done nothing at all to earn them.

Finally she had a chance to go through her mail. There was a letter from her publisher, which was cheerfully supportive, but in the final paragraph he voiced the hope that her new novel would not be “too political.” She went upstairs and gratefully found young Sam sound asleep. Downstairs again, she positioned herself in front of her typewriter, guiltily reviewing the days lost, but the words would not come. She sat for a whole hour staring at the keys, and her thoughts were everywhere but on the page of white paper that confronted her. Only two weeks before, sitting in Huntington Park with Sam in his stroller, she had engaged in a conversation with a French nursemaid. Barbara had been delighted to find someone to speak with in French, and after they had chatted away for fifteen minutes, the nursemaid had asked her what part of France she came from. At first she refused to believe that Barbara was an American, and then, when she had accepted it, she wondered whether Barbara was a nursemaid. “In a manner of speaking,” Barbara told her. “The truth is that I dearly love to come here with my boy. I'm a writer. I write books.”

“And you waste your time with this?” the nursemaid asked unbelievingly.

Barbara did not try to explain the past fifteen years. She had lived three lives, and now she confessed to herself that she desperately wanted the third life to continue. She wanted her world to remain just as it was, no wider than the narrow Victorian house on Green Street. She wanted her large, moody husband to be sitting in the next room, listening to recordings of the
Well-Tempered Clavier
. His lust for Bach was as incongruous as everything else about him. He had over three hundred recordings of Bach's music and could follow most of it in an off-key da-da-da. She no longer had any desire to travel, and she did not want to forage in the past. She loved her tiny study, the walls lined with books. She had paid her dues, as she saw it, and the guilt that had come with an inheritance of fifteen million dollars had been assuaged by her creation of the Lavette Foundation. She was romantic enough to appreciate her action of renouncing the inheritance, and she considered herself to be a very decent, normal human being. There was hardly one of her girlhood friends who had not been psychoanalyzed or divorced, and she was fiercely possessive and protective of her own unshaken castle, the little wooden house that was her home.

All of which only went to make the past two weeks more unbelievable. She was essentially a cheerful person, rarely given to depression; now, unable to write, she set about paying the bills that had accumulated since Bernie's departure. At eleven o'clock, she turned on the radio and listened to the news.

She and Bernie had discussed the purchase of a television set. Most of her friends already possessed one, but Barbara was uncertain about taking the step. She looked upon it as a sort of intrusion, images of people coming into her home uninvited. Bernie had argued otherwise. “Good golly, Barbara,” he had said, “how different is it from radio? I can remember when there was no radio, and so can you. I remember building a crystal set when I was a kid. The whole thing cost seven dollars, and I remember the first time I asked Rabbi Blum to try the earphones. I expected him to be annoyed, but he was as excited as a kid. He said he had always tried to imagine on what level God communicated, and now he finally knew. Of course, he didn't say who the sponsor would be. He didn't think that way.”

Now she hadn't expected her own voice. It was impossible for her to think of herself as a news item, and here she was listening to herself being asked questions and answering them. She was far more interested in the news from Palestine, which had taken on an agonizing sameness. The Mufti's men had ambushed a bus with grenades and machine-gun fire. Twelve Jewish children and four adults had been killed and twenty-two others wounded. War loomed on the horizon. The Arab nations were poised for a four-pronged invasion of the tiny Jewish state. A kibbutz had been wiped out, with the loss of thirty-seven settlers, men, women, and children. There was no emotion in the announcer's voice, and Barbara reflected that the world had become inured to the killing of Jews. It was a matter of course.

“God help me,” she whispered. “I'm taking it that way myself. All I can feel is relief that Bernie is on his way back. Why don't I cry out with their agony? Why don't I weep? My husband is Jewish. How can I just sit here and listen so calmly?”

She turned off the radio, put out the lights, and went upstairs. In the luxury of a hot bath, she found herself relaxed and dozing, but when she crawled between the cold sheets of her bed, she was wide awake again.

For a time she made a conscious effort to find sleep; then she gave up and allowed fancies and images to crawl around in her mind. The thought that something might have happened to Bernie had always lurked there; it surfaced now. In all the years of war, he had never been wounded, never even scratched, and he had told Barbara of how an Indian soldier in North Africa had ascribed it to his karma. Self-consciously and feeling somewhat foolish, Barbara once made a trip to the library to read about karma, but she could make no more of it than that Buddhists considered it to be the record of past existences acting upon the present one; since none of it was within the scope of her belief, she had dismissed it from her mind. She had not thought about it for years, but tonight she clung to it as some of her friends clung to the convolutions of their horoscopes. She was not a person who enjoyed sleeping alone. The male body in bed alongside her was an assurance of wholeness; a single sex was a fragmentation. To awaken at night and reach out and feel a body, the swell of muscles, the pressure of a body against hers—this was night as it should be. The night was lonely and empty, filled with shadows and anxieties.