Establishment (36 page)

“Barbara,” Kimmelman said, “I feel rotten. I let you down. I feel stupid and useless, but most of all I feel that I let you down.”

“Boyd, I am being very serious now. I think you're one hell of a lawyer. When you summed up, I wanted to crawl into a hole, I was so embarrassed by your description of me. I hope you realize that not one word of it is true. Nevertheless, I appreciated its rhetorical quality. You know, daddy used to tell a story about a lodge meeting, a memorial to one of the members who had died. The speaker went into an emotional description of the suffering and misery of the deceased member to the point that everyone in the audience was in tears except for one man, who sat unmoved and stony-faced. A lodge member sitting next to him asked whether the speaker's account was not moving enough to wring tears from a stone. ‘Oh, yes indeed,' said the stony-faced man, ‘but I'm not a member of the lodge.' You see, Boyd, none of them is a member of the lodge—not the judge, not the jury, not Mr. Crombie. We've had our day in court, and a part of me is rather satisfied. I'll join an interesting group of writers whose books have led them into a prison cell.”

“For heaven's sake, Barbara, you are not in a prison cell yet. And you won't be if I have anything to say about it.”

“You're a dear.” He was just short enough for her to lean forward and kiss him on the forehead. “Now I want my bath.”

Before she got into the tub, she called home. It was three o'clock in the afternoon in San Francisco, and Jean had just returned from the park with Sam.

“How are you, Bobby?” Jean wanted to know.

“Just fine. What about you and my son?”

“Your son is in fine fettle. I am exhausted. Child raising is for the young. But we had fun. How is that stupid trial going?”

“It's over. I'm guilty.”

“Oh, no, Bobby.”

“Now don't get upset. For the moment, nothing is going to happen. I haven't even been sentenced yet, and even if they do sentence me to jail, Harvey says that the appeals can take anywhere from a year to three years. So I won't be going to the pokey for a while.”

“How can you joke about it?”

“Mother, how can I be serious about it? I felt like Alice being tried by the king and queen of hearts. Harvey was provoked with me because I kept giggling. He and Boyd were great. They really are good lawyers, and they are so miserable now.”

“Darling, when will you be home?”

“Tomorrow, I hope. But then I have to find out when the judge decides to sentence me. I'll keep in touch with you. And please don't worry about me.”

Jean's notion of Washington inclined toward the social side, and she had persuaded Barbara to include a short black chiffon evening dress. Barbara put it on now, with black high-heeled evening shoes and sheer black stockings. Her lack of despondency pleased her; she applied make-up carefully and lightly and piled her hair on top of her head. When she appeared in the dining room, only twenty minutes late, both Baxter and Kimmelman rose and stared at her.

“It's no occasion for mourning,” she assured them. “We are bloody but unbowed, and very hungry.”

“You're beautiful,” Kimmelman said.

“How very nice of you, Boyd. I don't know about you two, but I want a large, cold martini.” Then she added, “There'll be no talk of law and order and courtrooms until we've finished our drinks.”

It was after the drinks and after they had ordered dinner that Baxter told her of his talk with Judge Meadows. “I pointed out that California was a long distance away and that it made no sense for the government to shuttle us back and forth. He agreed to sentence you tomorrow morning.”

“How thoughtful of him!”

“What was his attitude?” Kimmelman asked. “I mean, how did he appear? Friendly?”

“Very cold, I'm afraid. He doesn't like us—either because we're from California or because he thinks we are all redder than a rose.”

“Oh, Harvey, not you,” Barbara said. “Anyone who'd think you were a radical is dense.”

“I don't know whether that's a compliment or not.”

“Did you talk to him?” Kimmelman insisted. “Did you at least build Barbara's character?”

“I tried. He annoys easily. He told me that it was improper for me even to suggest that I might influence him.”

“If you cut him, he'd bleed ice water.”

“Or vinegar,” Barbara said. “Please don't worry. Whatever will be will be.”

“The thing to remember tomorrow,” Baxter said, “is that it's only the beginning. We'll take this to the Appellate Division, and if they don't reverse him there, we go to the Supreme Court. I think his whole charge was in error.”

“What is the best I can hope for?” Barbara asked.

“A suspended sentence and a stiff fine.”

“And the worst?”

“God only knows,” Baxter said. “A week ago I would have said that no sane judge would give you a prison term.”

“The Hollywood people got prison terms.”

“Yes, I know.”

At ten o'clock the following morning, Baxter, Kimmelman, and Barbara sat in the court, alone except for two attendants. They waited for fifteen minutes before Judge Meadows entered.

“All rise!” the bailiff called.

Meadows seated himself and stared at Barbara. Then he glanced at the black man, who lifted this morning's iceberg while the judge wet his mouth with ice water. “At a moment like this,” Meadows said, “one thinks of contrition. I don't regard you as an ordinary criminal, Mrs. Cohen, but as a product of these difficult times. I have taken into consideration that you are a mother and a widow, and therefore, before I pronounce sentence, I am going to ask you whether you will express a willingness to purge the contempt. You can do this by appearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and answering whatever questions they feel necessary to ask. Will you agree to do this?”

“No, I'm afraid not,” Barbara said.

“Then you leave me no choice. I sentence you to pay a fine of five hundred dollars and to serve six months in a prison to be designated by the federal Department of Correction. Your attorneys have already filed for an appeal, so the court will allow your present status of bail to continue until the results of such appeal are determined.”

Sitting in the park with her father, Barbara watched Sam circle around and back and forth on his tricycle. Tall for his age, well knit and competent, he handled his small machine with ease and grace.

“How old is he now?” Dan asked. “I lose track.”

“Two years, nine months. He'll be three in December.” She looked at her father curiously. “Daddy, do you mind this? I mean just sitting here in the park?”

“Mind it? What's to mind?”

“Oh, I don't know. It just seems peculiar, Dan Lavette sitting in the park with nothing to do.”

“You're not telling me to take off?”

“Daddy!” She took his hand. “I love having you here. I love having you with me. Have you ever tried a conversation with sparrows? Or sea gulls? The sea gulls are better. And I'm bored to tears with reading. I've just finished
The Seven Story Mountain
, Merton's book, and it would be so nice to be religious if I could only work up some enthusiasm for it. Now I'm into the Kinsey report, and it's just dull, dull.”

“The Kinsey report? What on earth for?”

“I suppose it's a substitute for sex.”

“What in hell good is a substitute? Why don't you go out, Bobby, meet people? Jesus, you're young and beautiful, and no Lavette was ever cut out to be a monk or a nun. We're a horny tribe.”

“I love you.”

“It's a year and a half since Bernie died. How long can you mourn?”

“I'm not mourning, daddy. Mourning is guilt, and I have no guilt about Bernie. I have sorrow when I think of what could have been if he had only been willing to accept his life and live it.”

“That kind of a man can't accept life and live it. You wouldn't have looked at him twice if he had.”

“Perhaps. I don't know. But we were talking about you—Dan Lavette sitting in the park with his grandchild.”

“He's a damn fine kid.”

“You're through with the empire syndrome? No more shipping lines, no more airlines?”

“Bobby,” Dan said, “I built three damned empires. That's enough. It's a fool's game. Either you're crazed by a hunger for money or you're sick for power. That's your brother's disease. I'm very content. I draw plans for a yawl I'll probably never build, and I've finally accepted the fact that the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, who happens to be my wife, actually loves me. That's not bad for a kid from the Tenderloin. As for their lousy rat race, they can have it.”

“Talking of the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, where is mother?”

“Making the rounds with a real estate agent. She claims there isn't one decent art gallery in San Francisco.”

“She's probably right. But don't tell me she's going to open another gallery?”

“As a business this time. She's still hell-bent on converting the city to modern art. It's a good idea. It'll fill in her days, and she always has been devoted to painting. Maybe I'll learn something if she lets me be her assistant—I mean for the heavy work. She's taking in Eloise as a partner, but I doubt that Adam will relish Eloise spending her days in San Francisco.”

“You two,” Barbara said, “you and mother, you're like a couple of kids. You're absolutely wonderful. You really adore each other.”

Dan smiled ruefully. “It wasn't easy. It took forty years of tearing our guts out. We have more scars than a pair of professional fighters. The only thing we had going for us is that we were crazy about each other. Crazy is a better word than love. But if anything happened to her—” He shook his head. “Well, that's hardly to the point. We were talking about you.”

“You're forgetting, daddy. I have a date with a federal penitentiary. The last thing I want to do is to get involved with anyone now.”

“Well, what in hell are they doing? I called Harvey last week. The case hasn't even been argued at the Appellate Division yet.”

“I'm in no hurry, daddy, although sometimes I wish it were over.” She leaped up and ran to head Sam away from the street, and Dan, watching the grace and ease with which she moved, wondered, as he had so often before, how he had produced her out of his loins. When he looked at Barbara this way, thoughtfully, really looking at her instead of simply accepting her, it always brought May Ling to mind. There was more of that slender, incredible Chinese woman in Barbara than there was of Jean; and it gratified him that he could think of both of them, May Ling and Jean, without guilt or sorrow. He was not inclined to live in the past, but there was so much of his past that he could never wholly escape. He felt a strange kind of perverse gratitude for the heart attack. He had looked at himself during that passage with death, and he had done so with the realization that he had never truly been able to look at himself before; and looking at himself, the whole structure of desire and power had collapsed. It had almost happened this way once before, when he had been a jobless derelict on the docks at San Pedro in 1930, but then it had been at a moment of misery and defeat and hopeless despair. This time, in the hospital, realizing that he might die, there was no defeat and no despair. He had turned to himself and discovered he was not afraid. He had escaped from desire. It was not that he didn't want to live—he wanted very much to live—but if he had to die, that would be all right. In a sense, it was the answer to the question Barbara had asked him, but he had no words at his command in which he could frame that answer and explain to her why he had lost any taste for wealth or power.

She returned and sat down beside him again and said, “Daddy, what is prison like?”

He looked at her and smiled. “I don't think you're going to prison.”

“Nobody thinks so, except me.”

***

The next day, Barbara received a royalty report from her publisher. Her new novel had been published six months before, and the sales had not been exciting. The royalty statement informed her that half of the advance she had been paid was still unearned, and the accompanying letter from her publisher was part apology and part explanation. “It's a damn good book,” Bill Halliday wrote. “Nothing has happened to change my opinion on that score. But it's a very quiet book, a very gentle book, and you've made your reputation with two books that were anything but quiet and gentle. You only have to look at the best-seller list to see what the public is eating up today. On the one hand,
The Naked and the Dead
, and on the other hand, a piece of tripe by Lloyd C. Douglas called
The Big Fisherman
. We have a problem trying to figure out where your little book fits in and how to sell it. The story of a returned soldier in San Francisco falling in love and marrying a perfectly ordinary girl and making a decent life out of it is probably one of the most difficult things to bring off; and how you've done it so well, considering the hellish experiences you've undergone while writing it, I don't know.

“But I do not want you to think that we've caved in under the pressure and that we're not trying to sell the book. And there is pressure. I am not denying that. Some of it is very subtle, some isn't. Two FBI men paid me a visit. Very polite. They simply said it was their practice to interview the employer of anyone convicted of a federal crime. I said that I couldn't think of any crime you had ever committed, and they said that the record showed otherwise. Then they wanted to know whether I intended to continue publishing your books, and I told them I had every intention of doing just that.

“The more subtle pressure comes in the shape of returns. The cartons in which some early orders were shipped have been returned unopened. I am only itemizing these things because I don't want you to feel that we have just dropped your book by the wayside. I think I can say with a touch of pride that there is still no blacklist in publishing, as there unquestionably is in network television and in films. We have every intention of continuing to publish your work.”

Barbara put the letter down with a wry smile. There was no blacklist in publishing, but there was no mention in the letter of an advance for her next book or even a note of curiosity as to what she might be working on. It was a full year since any magazine had asked her to do a piece, and an unsolicited article she had written about her experience in Washington had been turned down by every magazine she had sent it to. When she followed it with a story about Saudi Arabia and places where no other American woman had ever been, that too was rejected.

Well, she would manage. She had her salary from the foundation, and she still had a substantial amount of money in the bank, money that her mother had banked for her as trustee of Barbara's inheritance from her grandfather. She would not starve or have to turn to her father for money. At the same time, to feel a sort of invisible net tightening around her was not pleasant.

Yet she would not indulge her anxieties. To create her own company of ghosts in a self-manipulated nightmare was the way of madness. She remained cheerful not because she consciously created a mask of cheerfulness and not because she was indifferent to her own fate, but simply because she was alive and in good health and because the sun rose in the morning and set at night. If it was not the best of all possible worlds, it was one that provided no alternative.

***

Speaking in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy said, “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful, potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department…In my opinion the State Department is thoroughly infested with communists. I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.”

***

It is held by many that November is the best month of the year in Southern California. The summer heat is gone. The hot Santa Ana desert winds have ceased to blow. The air takes on a delicious crackling quality, the sky is as blue as anywhere in the world, and very often the cool Pacific wind liberates the Los Angeles basin from its coat of smog.

All this was in the mind of Alexander Hargasey as he drove west on Sunset Boulevard from Hollywood to Beverly Hills. He opened the windows of his Rolls-Royce, breathed deeply, and reflected on the best of all possible worlds.

It must be said in Hargasey's favor that he never forgot his origins, which is more than could be said of most of his colleagues. He was born in the slums of Budapest, apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a primitive filmmaker, drafted into the Hungarian army, captured by the British in 1917, and at last he found himself in Hollywood in 1922 with no capital except his wits. Now, in 1949, he was regarded as one of the bastions of the film industry in its defense against the increasing encroachment of television.

In Beverly Hills, Hargasey turned left onto Rexford Drive and then into the driveway of a handsome home, built after the manner of a French château. A Chicano maid opened the door, and a voice from upstairs called out, “Is that you, Alex? I'm up here. Come on up.”

He climbed the stairs and entered a bedroom that was thirty feet square and decorated in blues and pinks and pale greens. Flowered chintz and expensive brocade—Sally Lavette's taste was nothing if not Catholic. She was sprawled on a chaise longue reading a script. She wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt, and her long yellow hair was tied with a ribbon behind her neck. She wore no make-up, a plus in Hargasey's opinion and an indication of the complexity that confronted him.

Once in an interview, in reply to a question about what he considered his greatest achievement, Hargasey had replied, “An understanding of the psychology of the movie star.” His reply was taken as facetious, but it was not so intended. For twenty-five years, Hargasey had witnessed and frequently manipulated the elevation of boys and girls from Nebraska, New York, Kentucky, Utah, Texas, and a dozen other places into stardom. He had seen shy, small-town, high school graduates turned into rapacious monsters; he had seen simple, hard-working, ranch hands become egomaniacal tyrants; he had seen soft, apparently gentle and pliant men and women become hard and vicious; and he had seen people who once never drank become alcoholics in the space of months. He had seen virgins turn into promiscuous women, and he had seen seemingly decent men turn into brutal wife-beaters. It was not a nice process. There were exceptions, but these he could count on the fingers of one hand and still have a finger or two to spare, and his only consolation was that each case was sufficiently different for him always to hope for an exception to the rule.

Certainly, Sally Lavette was different, but in what way Hargasey was as yet unable to say. At least she was not stupid or insensitive. Stupidity and insensitivity were the two aspects of a human being that Hargasey dreaded most. They worked to set up an impenetrable wall, against which neither reason nor emotion could prevail. Quite to the contrary, Sally was bright and sensitive. Unfortunately—as a part of Hargasey saw it—she had starred in two films that were both brilliant successes; the other part of him found her success both fortunate and rewarding. There are people who cannot act. Years of dramatic school, the best of coaches, the best of teachers, leave them untouched. There are others who fall into acting as if some mysterious gene had transmitted the talent at birth, and it was in this latter category that Sally belonged. A suggestion was sufficient; Hargasey had only to indicate what he desired of her, and she could do it and even carry it a step further. She had that very necessary thing for a great actor, an instinct for what was right, and she gave Hargasey that rare feeling of creation and triumph that comes to a director who discovers a natural in the art.