Establishment (9 page)

“Just sitting here in a chair.”

“Help him lie down on the floor. Don't let him try to move. I'll be right over.”

Barbara put down the phone. “Mother,” she said evenly, “I want you to pull yourself together. Daddy will be all right. Dr. Kellman says we should help him lie down on the floor. Daddy,” she said to Dan, “I'm going to hold you while mother pulls the chair away.”

“I can get up,” Dan said.

“I know. But do it my way.” She bent over her father, holding him under the arms, amazed at her own strength. She eased Dan down onto the floor as Jean pulled the chair away, and then said to her mother, who stood there trembling, her make-up smudged with tears, “Mother, go upstairs and get a blanket from my bed, please. Quickly.”

Barbara put a pillow under Dan's head. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Rotten. What did he say? Am I having a heart attack?”

“Or maybe the Palace Hotel is taking its revenge for your low opinion of their food. Come on, daddy, how does he know?” Again Dan's face contorted in pain. He reached out and clutched Barbara's hand.

Jean came down with the blanket, and they covered Dan. About ten minutes went by before Dr. Kellman arrived; the ambulance came a few minutes later. Jean clung to Barbara as they watched Dan being wheeled out in a stretcher, a mask over his face, breathing from the portable oxygen unit.

“I'll take you with me to the hospital,” Dr. Kellman said to Jean. “We won't know anything for certain until we've run some tests. I'd guess it's a coronary. I hope it's a mild one, but as I said, we won't know for sure until later.”

“I can't leave Sam,” Barbara said woefully. “I'll call Eloise and ask her to come first thing in the morning. But you will call me from the hospital, please?”

“Of course.” She hesitated. “Should I tell Tom? I just don't know—”

“That can wait.”

“And you'd better call Joe.”

“Yes,” Barbara said. “I thought of that.”

Jean and the doctor left, and Barbara closed the door behind them. She experienced a brief moment of panic—first her husband, now her father, as if some force were intent on divesting her of those she loved, of the men who, as the world informed her, were the wall of protection and security behind which a woman must always crouch. “Well,” she reflected, drawing a deep breath, “I have never been one to crouch and my walls have a way of crumbling. As a matter of fact, I have even gotten out of the habit of weeping.” She went to the telephone to call her brother Joe.

Joseph Lavette, now thirty-one, was Dan's son by May Ling.

When Joseph was ten years old, May Ling, finding the situation of being Dan's mistress and living in a shadow of his life intolerable, moved to Los Angeles. Two years later, Jean and Dan were divorced, but another two years went by before Dan and May Ling were married. Dan did what he could do to be a father to his half-Chinese son. Joe Lavette completed college and medical school, was drafted into the army, did his internship and residency in the South Pacific during World War II, and soon after his discharge married Sally Levy, Adam's sister. They had lived in Los Angeles for the past two years, where Joe worked in a free clinic.

Joe answered the telephone, and Barbara told him what had happened.

“It's after eleven,” he said. “If I can still get a plane, I'll be there tonight. What hospital did they take him to?”

“Mount Zion. It's at Post and Scott, not far from here.”

“I know where it is. Can you put me up for the night, Bobby?”

“Of course.”

“And if I can't get out tonight, I'll call the hospital and talk to Kellman. But I'll be there first thing tomorrow.”

Setting down the telephone, Barbara asked herself, “Do I tell Bernie?” But that, she decided, would be pointless, just as she had decided that it was pointless to tell him about the subpoena from the House committee.

Barbara could not face the thought of going to bed; in any case, she was certain that she would not be able to sleep. She sat down with a book, but she was unable to concentrate, and after reading half a dozen pages without the faintest memory of what she had read, she put the book aside and switched on the radio. She twirled the dial until she picked up a news program, wondering whether there might not be something about Bernie and the planes. She listened to a congressman talk about America's need for an uninterrupted flow of atomic weapons and switched it off in disgust. Again and again she reached for the telephone and pulled back her hand. She must have dozed, for it was two-thirty when the telephone rang, its shrill jangle bursting into her sleep.

It was Joe. “I'm at the hospital, Bobby. Pop's not going to die. He'll pull through.”

“Joe, are you sure?”

“Pretty damn sure. As much as one can be at this point. He's still in intensive care and in an oxygen tent, but his vital signs are good. It was a fairly severe coronary infarction, and he'll have to be on his back for quite a while, but he's a hell of a strong man and he'll come out of it. Did I wake you?”

“I'm not in bed, Joe. I'll wait up for you.”

“All right. I'll take Jean home first. She's not in good shape, and I'll give her something to calm her; then I'll come over to your place.”

“Oh, thank you, Joe. And thanks for rushing up here.”

“Not that I could contribute anything. Kellman's a good man, but I feel better now that I'm here.”

She dozed off again. It was well after three when Joe rang her doorbell, and they sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee almost until dawn. Barbara told Joe about Bernie and then about the subpoena.

“It never rains but it pours. You poor kid.”

“I don't look at it that way,” Barbara said. “The marriage wasn't working, and it wasn't getting any better, only worse. It's bad enough to have a marriage go down the drain when you hate the man. But when you love him—and I do love him so much, Joe—well, then it's just awful. And about the subpoena, Harvey Baxter assures me I have absolutely nothing to worry about. Evidently someone on that Un-American Committee is literate enough to read and read my book about what happened to me in Europe, and Harvey says that they go out of their way to pull celebrities down there—not that I'm such a celebrity—and then they make a circus out of it. To tell you the truth, Joe, I'm rather excited about the whole prospect. I feel somewhat the way I felt when I went to Germany in nineteen thirty-nine, a little afraid, yet terribly curious to see the devil in his den.”

“Does pop know about this?”

“He knows about Bernie, of course, but not about the subpoena. I don't want anyone to know, and you're the only one who does besides Harvey Baxter. I suppose that when I go to Washington it'll be spread all over the papers, but until then I just don't want to be bothered, and certainly daddy doesn't need this now.”

***

With ten years of intermittent warfare behind him, Bernie Cohen was neither a pilot nor a navigator nor a radio operator. He rode as a passenger in one of the big C-54s as the ten planes took off, one after another, from the desert airfield. They flew into the morning sun, just lifting above the horizon. Bernie's plane was piloted by Jerry Fox, a small, red-headed, freckled young man who looked eighteen but was actually twenty-six, and who had been with the Tenth Air Force. The navigator, who also doubled as radio operator, was Al Shlemsky, a dark, morose man of thirty who had been born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, who had gone to Palestine at the age of sixteen, and who, like Bernie, had enlisted in the British army. After the war, he had gone back to Palestine and joined the Irgun, the underground terrorist organization led by Menachem Begin. Captured by the British occupation forces, he had been held in the Jerusalem Central Prison for seven months. “I was there when they hanged Dov Gruner,” he told Bernie, his dark eyes turned inward. “They hanged four of us—Gruner, Drezner, Alkochi, and Kashani. We just didn't believe it could happen. They were soldiers fighting for their homeland, and all our lives we had been fed that shit about the British being civilized. Then, when it happened, when they were taken out of their cells to be hanged, we heard them singing the Hatikvah. Someone yelled to us what was happening, and we began to sing, ninety of us singing the Hatikvah in that lousy jail. I remember that I was crying as I sang. A month later they released me, and I came back to the States to see my mother. She was dying. Funny, she was a nice, plain, little orthodox Jewish lady, and she could never understand what I was doing in Palestine. I could never explain it to her, either. Then I heard that the Haganah guys here were looking for pilots and navigators, and here I am.”

Jerry Fox, the pilot, was something else. He was enjoying himself thoroughly. “I never flew one of these cookies before,” he told Bernie, “but they're sweethearts. They handle a damn sight better than the 17-G, and there's nobody shooting at me. I did forty-two missions with the 17-G. I tell you, Cohen, this beats West Covina all to hell. You ever been to West Covina?”

Bernie shook his head.

“You are fortunate. Outside of L.A. My folks live there. Pop runs a hardware store. I get out of the service and I'm back in Pomona College, working weekends in the hardware store, getting laid now and then and going crazy. Absolutely going crazy. There is nothing I want to do except fly an airplane, but go find a job with ten thousand pilots scrambling for the few jobs there are. And then this comes along. I'd pay you to let me fly this crate. Funny thing is, I'm not all that Jewish. My father is, but my mother's Irish and I was raised as a Catholic—parochial school, the whole shtick. And here I am on my way to Palestine. If that doesn't beat the shit out of it, nothing does.”

Sitting in the copilot's chair, the Rocky Mountains beneath him, the other planes spread out to the left and to the right, it occurred to Bernie that if anyone had told him a week ago that he would be here, he would have dismissed the whole notion as an incongruous dream.

***

Sally Lavette, Joe's wife, was, as he would have been the first to admit, a very unusual young woman. For one thing, she had decided at the age of thirteen that Joe would be her husband, come what may. He was then working summers at the Higate Winery. At thirteen, she was a skinny, freckled, tow-headed kid who bewailed her lack of breasts and stuffed a brassiere with absorbent cotton to simulate them. By the age of twenty, when she and Joe were married, Sally had become a tall, slender woman, blue-eyed, blond, with no need to simulate anything. At fourteen, she wooed Joe with sonnets copied word for word from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and blithely signed Sally Levy; at twenty, she published her own first book of poems, which was critically acclaimed and earned her all of eighty-six dollars. She was bright, ebullient, caustic, impetuous, and romantic. She informed her husband, once they were married, that she intended to bear him ten children. After the first was born, she reduced the anticipated number to three.

Sally had many dreams, and one of them was to live in San Francisco in a house like Barbara's and preferably within walking distance of Barbara, whom she idolized. She decided that Joe should set up practice in such a house. It was precisely the place and life for a physician that fitted in with her plans. Joe thought otherwise, and this led to their first fight, wildly emotional on her part, stolid on his, and followed by a tearful reconciliation. Joe had his own plans, which he had worked out during the long, wretched years in the South Pacific. He wanted to operate a clinic in East Los Angeles, an area known as the barrio and inhabited for the most part by poor Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, as they called themselves in Southern California. He would have no part of Russian Hill or a lucrative San Francisco practice. He had no good memories of San Francisco, and he remembered all too vividly the stories Feng Wo, his grandfather, had told him of the virulent anti-Chinese hatred that once infested the city. He had grown up in Los Angeles, and he had an affection for the city that was beyond Sally's understanding.

Joe applied to the Lavette Foundation for a grant, and with it he acquired an old, one-story, brick warehouse on Boyle Avenue in Boyle Heights. He then went into partnership with Frank Gonzales, whom he had known from medical school and who had been with him in the army. They remodeled the old warehouse into a neighborhood clinic, with examining rooms, an X-ray room, a room for minor operations, and a few emergency beds. They charged a very nominal fee, for those who could afford it, and nothing at all for those who couldn't. For Gonzales, a small, dark, serious Chicano, the clinic was the fulfillment of all his dreams, and he looked upon Joe Lavette as one of the Apostles might have looked upon his Master. Sally, who felt that her husband fell somewhat short of sainthood, adapted to the situation and accepted it. Until the baby came, she worked part time at the receiving desk of the clinic. They had purchased a tiny house near Silver Lake, a place in East Los Angeles that was no lake at all but a large, concrete-lined basin filled with water, surrounded by a chain-link fence and rows of dismal, dreary houses. It was the sort of place from which Sally was repelled at first sight and which did not grow on her. Joe felt that they had to live in East Los Angeles, and accepting that decision, Silver Lake was as good a place as any. Sally, having spent most of her life in the Napa Valley, found Silver Lake loathsome, even more so than the barrio where the clinic was.

Sally still covered the receiving desk two days a week; she would take the baby with her and keep her in a carriage beside her desk. She was a casual, unworried mother, and May Ling was a relaxed and easy child. The morning after Joe went to San Francisco to be with his father, Sally put May Ling and her folding carriage into the car and drove down to the clinic. She had written most of her poetry sitting there at the receiving desk. The place fascinated, repelled, and irritated her; but Sally always converted herself into a third person, and the image of herself, still unrecognized as the foremost poet in the country, sitting at the receiving desk in a clinic in Boyle Heights, made a satisfying dramatic entity. She did not know Joe's father too well, but she liked him, and the thought that he might be dying sobered her and depressed her as much as she was ever depressed. She was relieved to hear from Gonzales that Dan would pull through.