Establishment (39 page)

“What would you think of him as vice president?” Langtrey asked, smiling slightly.

“He's not a fool. It would have to be a steppingstone.”

McGinnis stared at Tom and nodded. Then Fowler changed the subject, questioning Tom about the tankers he had ordered from Germany.

When the evening broke up, Langtrey said to Tom almost indifferently, “We get together about once a month for food and talk, Lavette. We'd like you to join us.”

“I'd be delighted to,” Tom said.

***

When Joe Lavette telephoned Barbara and told her that he would like to fly up to San Francisco and talk to her, she invited him to dinner, suggesting that he stay overnight and catch an early plane back in the morning. Barbara cooked dinner herself. She was a good cook, and she enjoyed it; and while her skill had come in part out of her years of living in Paris, there was also an instinct that separates the natural cook from those who follow recipes and breathe prayers. She prepared a clear, jellied soup, a veal stew with mushrooms and noodles, and for dessert, fruit and cheese. Joe ate hugely of everything, with the apology that he had not tasted food like this in months. He had lost weight; his cheeks were sunken, his facial skin drawn tight, and while it was in a curious way quite attractive, it intensified his Oriental appearance. Looking at the two of them, they would hardly be taken for brother and sister, Barbara with her light skin, her gray-blue eyes, and her honey-colored hair, and Joe with his dark eyes and black hair and brown skin; yet bodily they were much alike, tall and long-limbed, with wide, straight shoulders. Joe was nervous and uneasy, with the manner of one who constantly rehearses his words and as constantly leaves them unsaid. He praised Sam, gave him a wind-up fire engine he had brought, played with him, and then after the child had been put to bed, talked about Barbara's session with the House committee and what she might expect.

As to his reasons for coming, he explained apologetically to Barbara that he intended to approach the Lavette Foundation for another grant. “We just can't hack it anymore, Bobby. I hate to come to you because I know you can't refuse me, but we need our own decently equipped operating room and at least six beds. We've had three people die on us because of red tape and problems with admissions, and it just kills me to see it.”

“Joe, of course.”

“It's not small. It means another wing. We need a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Don't worry. The foundation has plenty of money. Joe, you didn't have to come here for that. You could have filed a formal application.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“And you haven't said one word about Sally.”

“What's to say?”

“What's to say? For God's sake, Joe, what's wrong with you? According to what Eloise tells me, you want to divorce her.”

“Well, that's the way it is.”

“What is? Will you talk sense? Is she in love with someone else? Are you?”

“I've never looked at another woman.”

“Oh, yes, I do love an answer like that. If you never looked at another woman, you ought to have a colleague examine your gonads.”

“You know what I mean. I love Sally. So tell me how to handle it. She's a film star. She earns half a million dollars a year. She bought this huge barn of a house in Beverly Hills, new Thunderbird in the driveway, Chicano maid, nurse for May Ling. Every time I open the newspaper I see her name. I work in a clinic in Boyle Heights. Can you put the two together? Can you? Just tell me that.”

“Are you legally separated?”

“No. I wanted that. She won't have it.”

“I hear you live on a cot in your office. Is that true?”

“It's true.”

“You sold the house at Silver Lake?”

He nodded.

“I don't have to ask what you did with the money. You put it into the clinic.”

He nodded again.

“What would you like me to do, Joe? Give you a silver star for nobility? Do you remember when Sally was a little kid and so crazy about you, she would say, ‘Joe is wonderful, only he's dumb?' She was right. Only I don't think you're so wonderful.”

“That's great. I need this.”

“Maybe you do. Sleeping on a cot in your office! If I read that in a book, I wouldn't believe it. You take a bright, wonderful, exciting young woman and you try to turn her into a brainless drudge.”

“All I asked of her was to be a wife and a mother.”

“That's not what bugs you, my brother. She is a wife and a mother. You can't face up to a wife and mother who is famous and who earns a half a million a year. If the situation were reversed and you were a Beverly Hills doctor earning half a million a year or whatever a Beverly Hills doctor earns, you'd expect Sally to be the happiest woman on earth. What kind of a crazy game are you playing, working eighteen hours a day, sleeping on a cot in your office? My father, who is also your father, happens to be a millionaire.”

“I can't go to him for money.”

“I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about your mind, what there is of it. This Jesus syndrome of yours makes me ill. You can afford a decent apartment, and you can afford to live like a human being, and no patient at the clinic would be an iota the worse for it. Tell me, if you lived with Sally in Beverly Hills, would the clinic suffer? I know your pride would. Would the clinic?”

“I couldn't even pay half the upkeep on that place.”

“Could Sally pay half the upkeep on the Silver Lake place out of what she earned with her poetry? And by the way, she is a hell of a good poet. Did you ever think of that? Did you ever stop to think of what it is to be a woman, Joe? Try it. Just clear your head, clear your mind, and say to yourself,
I, Joe Lavette, am not an oversized male stud, a sort of saint in Boyle Heights whom everybody loves because I'm a doctor and can help them.
I'm none of that but a lonely, helpless girl whose dreams have been shattered, and there isn't one damn thing I can do about it.”

“You've got it so pat, Bobby. It's all my fault, right?”

“I'm not talking about fault. Joe, Joe,” she pleaded, “try to think of one man you ever knew in your life who understood what it is to be a woman. I go upstairs every night to that stinking cold bed alone, because I fell in love with a man who remained what most men are, a kind of bright, idiot child, and when he went off on his own version of the Jesus syndrome, he never gave two thoughts to what it might mean to Sammy and me if he got killed. I'm not accusing you of anything. There's no viciousness in playing the man's game in a man's world. That's just the way it is. But Joey, you're a decent, kind, and gentle human being. Try to see it the way it is.”

***

Time passed. The threat of prison receded to the back of Barbara's mind. It was there, but it was something she no longer lived with from day to day, only remembered from time to time. She worked on her new book, writing and rewriting. It was the story of a man who was very much like her husband, so much so that at times it was as much Bernie as she could make him. She had decided to tell the story in the first person, a way, she realized later, of attempting to make him live again through herself; and to place herself inside a man's body and thoughts was the most difficult thing she had ever attempted. Time had blurred her grief but had not removed it. The two men she had loved, Marcel Duboise and Bernie Cohen, were too much a part of her for her ever to be rid of them. They were woven into her thoughts and her dreams, and sometimes, writing of the one, she would find herself slipping into patterns of the other. She had heard of men and women who had gone through three, four, even five marriages, but it was something beyond her comprehension. There was a drying out, an inner emptiness, that she did not believe could ever be filled.

Dan and Jean plotted and arranged dinner parties, as did other friends. She was introduced to divorced men, to widowers, to single men who had never married. Most of them were utterly enchanted by the tall, lovely, knowledgeable woman—and a good many of those enchanted were also intimidated. A few asked for second dates.

“I'm sorry,” Barbara would explain. “I'm not up to dating.”

“You can't do that,” Jean pleaded. “You can't live the rest of your life alone.”

“I'm not alone. I have friends and I have a family. But I can't sit through an evening and exchange inanities with these men, and most of all I have no desire to be pawed by someone I don't care for and be told that the price of a dinner entitles some boob to go to bed with me. I've been through that route, mother, and I don't want to travel it again.”

“What then?” Dan asked Jean. “Does she go on like this alone?”

“It's not the worst thing in the world. She's a very superior woman, and a superior woman has a rotten time of it in your male world. She's too old and she's been through too much to pretend. Anyway, what's so desperately important about marriage?”

“I find it important,” Dan said.

“Still and all, if it weren't for you, I'd settle for being single.”

But Barbara had not settled for any state, single or married. For the moment, she was content to live from day to day, or in a larger sense from book to book. A new book became a postponement of life.
Until I am finished
, she told herself,
I don't have to make any decisions. Or until I go to jail
, she added.

Sam was growing up with almost terrifying speed.
It was only yesterday
, Barbara thought,
that he had communicated with grunts and tears
. From there he progressed to words, and she had been delighted to discover that among the various genes that she and Bernie had bestowed upon him, there was one that embraced vocabulary. Now the words had become sentences, and he said to her one day, “You have a daddy. Why don't I?”

“You did have a daddy,” Barbara told him, wondering just how to continue, and deciding finally that the only way was to have it straight out.

“In school,” Sam said, “everyone has a daddy.”

“You had a wonderful father,” Barbara said, picking him up and holding him in her arms. “He died. He loved you very much, but he died.”

“I saw a dead cat,” Sam said seriously. “Is he dead the same way?”

“No. Not exactly. He died far away, in another country, fighting for the freedom of his own people.”

“Who are they?” Sam asked.

She was getting in deeper, but she clung to her cause. “The Israelis,” she said, feeling that she had gone wrong there.

“What is dead?” Sam wanted to know.

“It's what happens to people when they get very, very old.”

“Was my daddy very, very old?”

“Quite old.” She nodded.

Sam clutched her and began to cry. “You're old,” he whimpered.

“Not old enough to die. It will be a long, long time before I die.”

“Will I die?”

“When you're terribly old. But that's so far away I can't even imagine it.”

“I don't want to die,” he sobbed.

“Of course not, of course not,” she whispered, rocking him gently. “Nothing bad will ever happen to my beautiful little boy. You will grow up and become a fine handsome man and marry a beautiful princess.”

He stopped crying and looked at her with interest. He had his father's pale blue eyes.

“With yellow hair?” Sam asked her.

“If you wish.”

“I like your hair better.”

“All right, brown hair.”

“Tell me a story about the princess.”

“Very well. Her name was Daisybelle, and she lived in a castle made of five varieties of cookies, but mostly ginger cookies.”

Sam began to chuckle. “Don't make castles of cookies.”

“I admit they're unusual, but so was Daisybelle. She was given to gowns of spun sugar, which made it perfectly natural for her to live in a castle made of cookies…” She went on with the story of Daisybelle, and in a little while, Sam was asleep in her arms. It was an effort to stand up, and she thought wryly that the story of the man who began by lifting a colt, lifting it each day until finally it was a horse, had no validity at all.

***

The guard at the gate to the Paramount Studio found his name on the list and repeated it. “William Clawson? Right?”

Billy nodded.

“O.K. You'll find Mrs. Lavette on Stage Four. Park over there, and then follow the yellow line to the first cross alley, on your left. Or ask someone. They're shooting in there, so if you see the red light outside flashing, you don't go in until it cuts off.”

Billy nodded, parked his car, then walked onto the studio grounds. Outside the huge, hangar-like building that was Soundstage Four, the red light was flashing. Billy waited. He had abandoned the turtleneck and jeans for today. He wore gray flannel slacks, a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a tie, and curiously enough, he was uncomfortable in the clothes, as if he were in costume for a role that ill suited him. It took something like this to make him realize how totally he had fallen into the life of the barrio, how absorbed he had become by the work in the clinic. Yet dressed as he was, tall and slender, with what Sally had once called his “damn upper-class good looks,” he drew admiring glances from girls passing by. Physically, he was compatible with the place.

The red light went out; Billy opened the door and entered. Inside was a dark wilderness of cables, flats, and equipment, and toward the other end of the great building, a concentrated blaze of light. He picked his way toward the light, his eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the darkness, and he came to the edge of a circle of men and cameras. The set looked like a large sewer sliced in half, wet and dripping, an inch of water at the bottom. Sally, barefoot and wearing a shapeless gray sack of a dress, stood in the water.