Establishment (8 page)

During the next dozen years, Tom established himself as the major force in the combine. Now, at sixty, Whittier was a petulant, overweight hypochondriac who had already suffered one real heart attack and at least a dozen imaginary ones. Nominally the president and the chairman of the board of directors of Great Cal, he was little more than a figurehead. Problems were brought to Tom and decisions were made by Tom. In western financial circles, he was regarded as one of the most powerful and promising of all the young men who had come into industrial control at the end of the war.

Jean had not heard from him for well over a month when he called and asked her to lunch with him at the Fairmont. When Tom did not lunch at his club, he ate at the Fairmont. Jean once asked him why, in a city that boasts more good restaurants than any other city of its size in America, he always ate at the same place. He had replied, “Mother, I do not eat in strange restaurants.”

Jean knew enough about her son to make anyone else, possessed of her knowledge, dislike him intensely. For her part, she would not judge him and she refused to dislike him. He was agreeable and pleasant to her, and he was also quite handsome. She thought of this as he came across the dining room to join her, more slender than Dan, but with Dan's height and breadth of shoulder and with her own blue eyes, light hair, and fair skin. Jean felt that physically, both children had the best of both of their parents.

He greeted her warmly. “Mother, you look absolutely splendid. Still the most beautiful woman in any room you enter.”

“What nonsense! I am fifty-eight years old, and I make no attempt to hide or deny it.”

“No need to.”

“What on earth makes you this amiable?”

“I always am.”

“Except when you're being a beast, which has happened. Anyway, I am glad to see you. Sit down, and we'll have a drink to celebrate. We live in the same city a few streets apart, and we're more or less strangers.”

“I've been busy, mother,” Tom explained. “Very busy.”

“Of course you have. You're a throwback, Thomas. You remind me of your great-grandfather who began as a placer miner in fifty. But he soon discovered that one can't pan gold fast enough to become really rich, and so he became a usurer, lending out his gold at three hundred percent. When I was a child, well, by then he had become a banker and had slipped to twenty or thirty percent, but when I was a child he would give me a ten-dollar gold piece on each birthday. Only it broke his heart to let go of it. You would enjoy seeing the way he fondled it. I think the only time the old goat had an erection was when he was counting his money.”

“Mother,” Tom whispered, “you do say the damnedest things.”

“Yes, I suppose I do. And I do wonder what drives you, Tom. You have enough money to sit back and enjoy life.”

“I enjoy what I do. It's not the money. That's just a way of keeping score.”

“Not very original. I wonder.”

“Then did you ever wonder, mother, who makes this country work, who keeps the wheels turning, who makes it possible for people like yourself to enjoy life, as you put it?”

“Bravo. Now stop snapping at me and order some drinks and lunch, and then you can tell me why I'm here.”

After the food arrived, Tom said flatly, “John has been pestering me to get married again.”

“Oh?”

“Don't just say oh.”

“Is this something we should discuss?” Jean asked kindly. “I'm your mother.”

“Does that make it too sticky for you? Who else do I talk to?”

“A psychoanalyst—please, don't be angry.”

“No!”

Jean pecked at the food for a few moments. She had not expected anything like this, nor did she know quite how to handle it. Finally she said quietly, “All right, we'll talk about it. As much as I can. I don't know—”

“Neither do I,” Tom said. The note of pleading in his voice was something she had not heard in a long, long time, and it melted her and brought up all the guilt she suffered from a long-standing and deep-seated contempt for this man, her son.

“Very well,” Jean said as flatly as she could. “John Whittier wants you to get married. What earthly affair of his it is, I do not know. Do you want to get married?”

“I have plans, mother. That's no surprise to you. I'm running for Congress. I do intend to be elected. Six years from now, in nineteen fifty-four, John and I feel I have a very substantial chance for governor. If I can get the Republican designation, with Earl Warren's record in this state, I am as good as elected.”

“And that's what you want so desperately—to be governor?”

“It's a step.”

“And then? What then?”

“I'm not sure. The Senate, perhaps. John has his own strange ideas about the White House, but that's what every upright American boy wants, isn't it?”

“Yes, every upright American boy,” Jean murmured.

“And why not? I have a decent war record. I have the money and the position, and I'm no fool.”

“You certainly are no fool,” Jean agreed. “I'm just trying to understand it. You cannot grow up in San Francisco, Tom, and respect politics or politicians. It's a nasty game, played mostly by wretched men. Well, you have your dreams. Tell me, is there someone you want to marry or is it just a general notion?”

“There is. Lucy Sommers.”

“Al Sommers' daughter,” Jean said, recalling the retired vice president of the Seldon Bank and his single child, a dark, long-legged girl. She had never cared very much for either of them, and she had not seen Lucy for years. “She's a widow, isn't she, and at least four years older than you, if I remember rightly?”

“Yes, that's so. It doesn't matter—the age, I mean—and a widow doesn't carry the implications of a divorcée. It's bad enough that I have one divorce on my back. When I think of Eloise—”

“We're not discussing Eloise.”

“No, we're not. Well, Lucy and I have talked about marriage. She feels, as I do, that there are concrete benefits for both of us. There are no children, and living alone is no pleasure for any woman. She's a very striking and handsome woman, she's an excellent hostess, and thank God, unlike Eloise, she enjoys the role.”

Concrete benefits for both of us
, Jean thought.
My God, what a way to approach a marriage
!

“What do you think of her?” he asked Jean.

“I hardly know her. Certainly, she's elegant, and I imagine that is what you want. Does she know?” Jean asked uneasily. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean, mother. I made it very plain to her that I am not interested in sex, that we would live in a civilized arrangement. She agrees.”

“And what about her sex life?”

“She has been doing without it. She's apparently content to continue that way.”

“I've heard of such things.” Jean sighed. “It will take some doing on both your parts.”

“It will be a small wedding, just a few people. Will you come?”

“Without Dan?” Jean asked. “I don't think so.”

Tom stared at her.

“If I were you,” Jean said, “I would take a trip. France or England or even the Islands. Get married there. A sudden, romantic decision, and then there's nothing in the papers to worry about.”

That night, Dan asked her about the luncheon, and she told him of Tom's plans.

“Is he in love with the woman?” Dan asked.

“I don't think so.”

“Then what in hell is he walking into this marriage for?”

“Your son,” Jean said calmly, “is a very rich and important man, as such things are measured in our lives. He's also ambitious. You may think he's a bastard, Dan.”

“I never said that.”

“Then you've thought it. Well, he isn't—any more than most men are. He needs the form of marriage, if not the function.”

Dan stared at her for a long moment before he said, “What are you trying to tell me, that he's a faggot?”

“I hate that word!”

“Then he's a homosexual?”

“You've never suspected it?” Gently, she said, “Danny, don't eat yourself up with this. We have enough horrors in our past. Don't add any more to them. I want so desperately to have a little bit of decent happiness before it's over.”

***

Barbara and Sam went to Huntington Park the same day that Jean lunched with Tom at the Fairmont, a stone's throw away.

Barbara went on foot; Sam was pushed in his stroller, facing her and grinning with pleasure at the cool, clean wind that blew in from the Pacific. Barbara never tired of being with her child, and she also never could get truly used to realizing that this fat, alert, and good-natured young man had come out of her very own loins. She had few of the discontents of the average mother and housewife, but then, she had lived a good deal of her life before becoming a mother and a housewife, and to her Sam was an improbable miracle. She knew she would not have another child. She often listened with curiosity to other young mothers in the park, most of them a dozen years younger than she, but she listened without being a part of it. It seemed that she had always watched and listened to a world outside her—it was part of being a writer; and in her new book, the book she was at work on, she was attempting a story about just such people as the young mothers she met in Huntington Park.

She enjoyed listening more than talking, preferring to talk to Sam. He received the profound and the mundane with equal placidity. He was infrequently bored, and when he was, his boredom could be assuaged by either his thumb or a teething ring.

Today, staring at the Fountain of the Turtles, she informed Sam that it was a gift to the city from the Crocker family and a copy of a fountain in Rome. Sam decided that he wanted to sit on the rim and touch the water. “You know you pee when you dabble in water. Well, why not? Sooner or later, anyway.”

They sat on the rim of the fountain. “You know,” Barbara informed him, “the Crockers couldn't bear not to have something in the park here. I wonder if they were jealous of old Collis Huntington. Do you know, he was a friend of my grandfather? Grandpa used to tell me how they would both ride the cable car up California Street and then walk off to their respective mansions. Truth. Both of them had great, magnificent old mansions right up here on top of Nob Hill. Grandpa's was there.” She pointed. “Huntington's was over there. All gone now. I remember when they tore down grandpa's house—twenty-eight, or was it twenty-nine? I was fourteen or fifteen, and it just broke my heart. It was an ugly old place—”

She stopped. A rapt expression had come over Sam's face.

“Ah, yes. And now we go home and change your diaper.” She picked him up and put him back in the stroller. “Someday, God willing, you'll learn to talk, and we'll have perfectly wonderful conversations.”

Walking back to the house on Green Street, Barbara tried to understand why she was neither distressed nor unhappy. Her husband had gone off on a wild, unlikely adventure and she herself had been subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities—in spite of which she was quite content and reasonably happy.

I must be a very strange and unfeeling woman
, she told herself.

I don't like to bargain with Jews,” Mr. Kennedy said. He was a large man whose belly lipped over his belt. He wore a broad-brimmed western hat, and his white duck suit was soaked with sweat. “Too grasping.” He clenched a fist to illustrate his point. “Money, always money. I'm sticking out my neck to sell you these planes, Mr. Cohen. Suppose you take them out of the country. That's against the law. I been reading up on the law. I had a dream and God said, ‘Sell them the planes.' Only I was awake. My wife testifies to that. She says there I was sitting bolt upright in bed with my eyes wide open—bug-eyed. So I say it's the word of God. But God respects a man's right to do business as he sees fit, as long as he don't skin his customers. And I ain't skinning you. Taking a fair profit, but that ain't skinning. Do you know what one of them planes costs new?”

They were sitting under the tin awning in front of Kennedy's building supply store, with the desert in front of them undulating in the heat. Bernie wiped his brow and said softly, “I'm not trying to skin you, sir.” He hefted his briefcase. “Right here, I have one hundred and ten thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds, unmarked bills, Mr. Kennedy. Let's talk plainly. You wouldn't take a check. You wanted cash.”

“Hell, mister, are you accusing me of illegal dealing?”

“No, no, no. Absolutely not. Still and all, you won't find many customers who can pay cash and not put it on their books. This money is not on anyone's books. You might have to look far and wide to find another situation like this, and meanwhile those planes are sitting out there in the desert sun and deteriorating. Deteriorating. You know, we asked Lockheed what it would take to put them into shape. A hundred and fifty thousand each. Mr. Kennedy, those damn things are flying coffins.”

“Appears you're mighty eager to have a funeral,” Kennedy chuckled. “What's your proposition, Cohen?”

“We picked up five more radio operators and two more navigators. They'll be here in Barstow before midnight, but they got to be paid. Two hundred each, that's fourteen hundred dollars. Then we got the hotel bill for the rest of my men, and food, and so help me God, we don't have a nickel. Only what is here in this bag. Now if you're going to stick to your price, I'll just have to cancel out, pay our bills, and look elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere! Where the hell elsewhere you going to find planes like these at this price? There ain't none.”

“There's sixteen C-46 cargo jobs down near San Diego. They don't have this range, but they're a damn sight better for our needs.”

“Cohen, you're bluffing.”

Bernie shrugged and waited.

“Suppose I said one hundred and nine thousand?”

“Wouldn't do us a damn bit of good.”

“Christ, I hate to do business with Jews. How much do you want out of that bag?”

“We need three thousand dollars to cover us. I'll give you a hundred and seven thousand dollars, take it or leave it.”

“Just don't get snotty with me, boy,” Kennedy snapped angrily. “How in hell do I know that money's clean? You're in Barstow, not in L.A. Suppose I call the sheriff and tell him you're sitting here with a bag of hot money? Sheriff's a friend of mine.”

“Call him.” Bernie shrugged. “I know where the money came from. You want the sheriff to hear where it came from and check it out—that's O.K. with me.”

“You are one nasty sonofabitch.”

“It's your deal, Mr. Kennedy.”

“You really going to fly them planes to the Holy Land, Cohen?”

“Now you know that is illegal, Mr. Kennedy,” Bernie said patiently. “You know all about Truman's proclamation number two seven seven six. You told me that yourself. You know that under the law we can't take these planes out of the country.”

“That's what my lawyer tells me.”

“Right. Now suppose you should be under oath, and they say to you, ‘Did you know where those planes were going?' All you have to say is that their flight plans were cleared for Melville, New Jersey. All aboveboard and absolutely legal. Now, do we have a deal for a hundred and seven thousand?”

“Boy, you'd squeeze blood from a stone.” He nodded. “We have a deal, boy. You squeezed me, and I caved in. We do have a deal.”

***

The afternoon of the same day, Dan telephoned Barbara and told her that he and Jean were dining out. Would she join them?

“Daddy, I'd love to. I really would love to. But Bernie will call me this evening, and I can't leave the house. I have to wait for his call. And anyway, I don't know whether I could find a sitter this late.”

“Too bad. I was counting on seeing you.”

He sounded depressed. “Are you all right?” Barbara asked.

“I'm just fine.”

“Then look, daddy, I'm housebound anyway. So after you eat, why don't you and mother stop by, and I'll give you dessert and coffee, and we'll talk for a while. Would you, please?”

“I'd like that,” Dan said.

“Good. Then I'll see you later.”

Filled with a sense of unease, Barbara put down the phone. Something in her father's voice—or was it her imagination? A sudden chill shook her, and she ran up the stairs to look at Sam. He was sleeping peacefully. She went back downstairs and dropped into the chair facing the telephone. Why didn't Bernie call? It was only two days since he had left, and suddenly, at this moment, it turned into an eternity. She had not really missed him until now; in all truth it had been a relief to find herself alone with her child and as the mistress of her own destiny. Now, for some reason she did not entirely understand, her mood had changed. When she married, people had wondered about her alliance with a penniless ex-army sergeant, but as Dan said to her at the time, “You've found a man, Bobby. I can understand that.” Yet it was not the thing of maleness or toughness or ruthlessness; he was none of those things. He was a very open, straightforward person who adored her, and he was unlike almost every other man she had known.
He just is what he is
, she told herself.
Damn you, Bernie, call me!

The telephone rang almost in answer to her request, and she grabbed it before the first ring had finished.

“Bernie?”

“How are you, Bobby? How is Sam?”

“Both of us are fine. Just fine. Sam's asleep, and I'm sitting here watching the telephone and trying to make it ring. Where are you, Bernie?”

“Barstow. Everything is falling into place. We made the deal for the planes, and the boys have been working on them all day.”

“I'm terrified of those damn planes. Will they fly?”

“Like birds. Believe me.”

“And how do you feel?”

“I feel great. Hell, I miss you and the kid. I miss you terribly. But I needed this. My soul was rotting away. That has nothing to do with you, Bobby, or with how much I love you, believe me.”

“I understand.”

“I'm alive again. It's a good feeling.”

“I know the feeling, Bernie.”

“I'm filled with guilts.”

“Oh, damn the guilts. Just get it done and come back in one piece.”

“That's my intention,” he said. “We're in good shape. We have a radio operator on every plane now, and that was the thing that worried me most. We're only short two navigators, and we'll make out with that.”

“When do you take off?”

“Dawn tomorrow. The weather's good right across the country, and we should be in New Jersey no later than four o'clock, Eastern time. Listen, Bobby, I never had a chance to talk to your father about what he did. I was so damn compulsive about this thing that I never even took the time to think about the size of what we asked. God Almighty, the man gave me a hundred and ten thousand dollars without even blinking an eyelash. What a hell of a thing to do!”

“I think so. I think it was pretty magnificent.”

“Bobby, why? Do you know why he did it?”

“Sort of, not entirely. He's a strange man and he's had a strange life. He just does things that other people don't do.”

“You can say that again. Will you thank him? Make him understand that I won't forget this.”

“I'll try, Bernie.”

“I love you very much, Bobby. In my own, stupid, neurotic way.”

“I'll take that from where it comes. There are things about you that I admire, Cohen. Not many, but some.”

“I'll nurse that. God bless you.”

Barbara put down the telephone and leaned back and stretched her legs and closed her eyes. Tonight she would thank Dan. “Daddy, I want to thank you for being as idiotic as my husband.” No, not quite that way. Then why had he done it? To repay a debt to Mark Levy? That was romantic nonsense. There was no way to repay the dead. There must have been reasons, very deep-seated and compelling reasons. Barbara wondered whether she had ever understood her father or his true motives for anything he did. Did she know him at all? She remembered an incident once, long ago, shortly before his divorce from Jean, when he had asked her to have dinner with him, just the two of them, alone. He was reaching out, desperately, like a drowning man; but Barbara was unaware of that, unaware of anything except that this man, her father, had betrayed her mother and was having an affair with a Chinese woman. Barbara remembered very well indeed how that had horrified her. It was years before she actually met May Ling and came to know her and love her. At that time, she had only a sense of adolescent disgust and outrage; and, adding insult to injury—as she saw it then—her father took her to the same restaurant to which he took May Ling so often, to Gino's, where the proprietor praised her beauty so lavishly, chattering to her father in Italian, bringing out all her ethnic fears and resentments. Then Barbara had turned on her father like a wounded cat, clawing, insulting, demolishing him.

The memory of it brought tears to her eyes. The thought of that strong, magnificent figure of a man, still young, Dan Lavette, who with his two hands and his brain had subdued a proud, intolerant city and made it his own domain, cringing under her anger, the scorn and anger of a witless schoolgirl, was almost more than she could bear. How little she had known and how little she had understood!

It was almost eight o'clock.
Enough of this
, Barbara decided. What was done was done. There remained at least another hour before her father and mother would appear, and that could conceivably produce a page of usable if not immortal prose. She went into her study and sat down at the typewriter.

It was almost ten o'clock when Dan and Jean arrived. Barbara had rarely seen her mother so relaxed and ebullient. She wore a new dress that Barbara had not seen before, a high-collared, deep blue and black taffeta, with long sleeves and a tiered skirt. The great high collar framed her neck and shoulders. Barbara stared at her in undisguised admiration and said, sighing, “If I could ever look like that!” To which Jean replied, “Oh, my dear, I'm an old woman, pretending. You have no need to pretend. You will never guess where we dined tonight. We just turned the clock back right to the beginning. At the Palace, in the great dining room under the glass dome. Oh, I will admit that the kitchen has pretty well gone to seed, but there it was, and do you know, Dan and I haven't been back there together since nineteen eleven? Can you imagine? Nineteen eleven—and this is nineteen forty-eight.”

Dan dropped into a chair. Barbara thought he looked tired, very tired. He watched Jean, a slight smile on his lips, the way one might watch a totally adored child, uncritically, as if to say he asked no more than the right to be near her, to look at her; and seeing him that way, Barbara tried again to understand how her father could love two women so completely and so long, thinking again of the strange, bemusing puzzle that Dan Lavette presented.

“He wore his tuxedo that night,” Jean went on. “In nineteen eleven. Dinner jacket to you, my love, but then we called them tuxedos. Why, I wonder? Do you know, Danny?”

“Not a notion. Hell, I'm no authority. That was my first one.”

“And the very first time he wore it on a date, Bobby. Oh, he wore it to the house, to a dinner party. That's why he had it made, to come and dine with the very swell Seldons on Nob Hill, and him just a pushy, tough little kid from the Tenderloin.”

“Not little. Daddy was never little,” Barbara protested. “He was born large.”

“Thank you,” Dan said, taking out a cigar. “You don't mind?”

“I wish you wouldn't,” Jean said. “Well, if you must. Anyway, it was our first formal date, and Danny wore the tuxedo and he took me to dinner at the Palace. Dinner at the Palace, my dear, in nineteen eleven would feed a family of five today for at least a week. Seven courses, and each with some silly French name, and there was young Dan Lavette, all of twenty-two years old—”

“I still can't read a French menu,” Dan muttered.

“—and being so very sophisticated. I'm sure he decided that if I ate myself into a comatose state, he could have his way with me. Do you remember, Danny, brook trout and venison and quail, and on and on. I will never forget the expression on his face as the courses kept coming. Dinner was not nourishment in those days. It was an endurance contest.”

Dan burst out laughing. Then Barbara saw the laughter turn into a grimace of pain. He was trying to light the cigar and he dropped it. He bent to pick it up, stopped, and sat bent over.

“Daddy, what is it?” Barbara cried.

Jean ran to him and put her arms around him. “Danny, are you all right? What is it?”

“I have the most godawful pain,” he managed to say. “It's ripping out my gut—and here in my arm. I think you'd better get a doctor.”

Barbara had never before seen her coldly beautiful mother—whom May Ling used to refer to as the snow lady—react like this. She appeared to go to pieces completely, overcome with terror and clutching Dan, who muttered, “I'm all right, Jeanie, I'm all right.” Barbara called Dr. Kellman and found him at home; after listening to her description of what was happening, he said, “It sounds very much like a heart attack. Don't be too alarmed. Dan is in good shape. I'll order an ambulance, and I'll be there in a few minutes. Where is he?”