Second Generation Read online

  “That’s not it.”

  “Then tell me what it is.”

  “This isn’t my home. It never has been my home.”

  “Why? Because you don’t like John?”

  “Please, please don’t get angry with me, mother,” Barbara begged her. “You said we could talk. It’s not easy for me to explain what I feel. There’s a teacher at school, Professor Carl Franklin, who conducts a seminar in sociology, and he said the Embarcadero was a slave market, different, but no better and no worse than the old Negro slave markets in the East, and I was so indignant I almost walked out of the class, because really, they don’t think we’re quite civilized out here.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Jean said. “The Embarcadero is not a slave market. The longshoremen are well paid and their demands are utterly preposterous. And what on earth has this to do with your wanting an apartment of your own?”

  “Like the ice cream at dinner,” Barbara said hopelessly.

  “What on earth! The ice cream at dinner?”

  “Don’t you see? There was that enormous brick of ice cream, and we just sat there and let it melt down while John lectured me about the strike. You can’t do anything with ice cream once it melts. You throw it away, and it didn’t mean a thing to any of us. It just doesn’t. We can’t think that way—I mean, we don’t even understand what food is in a country where thousands of people are starving.”

  “But you do understand this,” Jean said.

  “Now you are angry with me.”

  “Barbara,” Jean said calmly, “I am not angry. Not really. You’re a very romantic child, you always have been. I’m well aware of the inequities of society, but we did not create them.”

  “I’m not a child, Mother.”

  “I think you are. In many ways. You dislike John, and you compare him to your father. I don’t think seeing your father has helped, and the romantic image of him that you have is far from the reality.”

  “Then I dislike John Whittier,” Barbara said flatly. “I can’t control who I like and who I dislike. Do you think it’s pleasant for me to live under his roof?”

  “It’s my roof too. I happen to be married to John Whittier, and you are a part of a very wealthy family, like it or not. I have no intention of shedding crocodile tears or wallowing in guilt over what my father and his father created by their own sweat and wit. As for the apartment—well, we’ll talk about that another time.”

  ***

  It had not been the best of days for Jean Whittier, and now, looking at her daughter, the strong, lovely face, the pale gray eyes, the honey-colored hair, so like her own—and thinking that this was probably the only person in the world she truly loved—it promised to end even more wretchedly than it had begun.

  It had been Jean’s last day as president of the Seldon Bank, a great, unshakable financial institution, which her grandfather had founded in a wagon at the placer mines just eighty-two years before, and which her father had continued and cherished and nourished. At his death, six years ago, Jean—then Jean Lavette and not yet divorced—had become trustee for three hundred and eighty-two thousand shares of stock in the Seldon Bank, to be divided equally between her two children, Thomas and Barbara, twelve years later. With over seventy percent of the voting stock of the Seldon Bank in her trust, with the right to vote it, Jean had taken over the presidency of the bank, becoming the first woman in California, if not in the entire country, to sit as president of a major bank.

  Now she was surrendering. No, as she saw it, not a surrender but an abdication. Willing or unwilling? She could not be certain. Until today, she had felt that she was certain, that she was taking a step out of her own free will, doing what was best for her and for the bank. Walking into the bank that morning, passing through the great marble-clad street section that fronted on Montgomery Street, she had been shaken by a sudden and desperate sense of loss. Which, she told herself immediately, was an understandable and emotional reaction. Essentially, nothing had changed. She still, as trustee for her children, voted the controlling interest in the stock; she would still sit on the board of directors; and at long last she would be able to return to the central interest of her life, her collection of paintings and sculptures, which she had so long neglected. It would be said, as it was perhaps already being said, that her husband, John Whittier, had persuaded her to take this step, and she admitted to herself that it was true in part—but only in part. It was her own decision.

  Alvin Sommers, vice president of the Seldon Bank, had been waiting and watching for her that morning, and as he saw her enter, he hurried to meet her. He noticed that she was wearing what to his way of thinking was civilian dress, a bright flowered taffeta with pink velvet trimming, both cheerful and youthful, he assured himself. Even at the age of forty-four, Jean Lavette—he still thought of her as Jean Lavette—was, as the news stories so often observed, perhaps the most fashionable and attractive woman in San Francisco social circles. He himself, a small, dry man in his middle sixties with a small, pudgy wife, had long entertained his own fantasies about Jean Whittier; it was a totally frustrated, totally concealed love, lust, hate, fixation, nourished on the one hand by her cold, distant beauty, and on the other by his resentment at the manner in which, after her father’s death, she had taken over control of the bank. The fact that the bank had flourished during the first five bitter years of the Depression, when so many banks were in crisis or closing their doors, only increased his resentment. Now that time had come to an end, but he was still not certain that his own temporary ascendancy to the presidency would be made permanent, and he was thus more deferential than ever, more effusive in his greeting.

  “My dear Jean,” he said to her, “I’ve never seen you look so radiant. But what will we do now? We’ll become a drab and colorless place.”

  “You will manage, Alvin. In fact, you will manage very well indeed. By the way, I told Martin”—Martin Clancy was the second vice president—“that I shall empty my office. You’ll be moving in, I presume, and I hardly think you’ll be comfortable with an Aubusson carpet of pale blue, or with the Picassos and Monet’s Water Lilies, which you and Martin have always regarded as being a slur on the entire tradition of banking.”

  “No, indeed. You have a beautiful office.”

  He had to quicken his pace to keep up with her as she swept through the bank into the main lobby of the Seldon Building.

  “Alvin, how old are you?”

  “Sixty-five,” he answered, thinking, What an outrageous question, and the way she asked it, like making a remark about the weather. But no comment followed it, and his inner debate on whether to follow her into the elevator like an obedient puppy dog was decided by her own motion. They were alone with the operator in the elevator reserved for the top three floors, where the bank’s offices were.

  “We set the board meeting for three o’clock,” he told her. “Tentatively, that is. If you are free then?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m meeting Barbara at the station, and that’s at two-thirty, I think. But you don’t need me, Alvin. I’ve drawn up the agenda. Martin will propose you and the board will vote it that way. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “I had hoped so. Thank you, Jean.”

  Since she didn’t invite him out, he remained in the elevator. Jean admitted to herself that she couldn’t tolerate him. That was a plus for her decision; she would not have to face Alvin Sommers every time she came to the bank. Yes, there was a whole list of positive things. Six years was enough. She had taken the step originally because it was a challenge. Or was it because her life was coming apart at the seams? Or was it because she loathed everything about the bank and everyone connected with it? That, indeed, was an odd thought, and a new one, and it might very well be so.

  Miss Pritchard, her secretary, regarded her sadly. “I was not sure of your time today—everything is so upset. Will you
see anyone?”

  “I don’t think so. I have a luncheon engagement, and it’s ten o’clock already. I won’t be in at all this afternoon.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “No tomorrow, Lorna. You know that. Finis.” She patted Miss Pritchard’s thin shoulder. “It’s all right, and you must not worry about your job. Just take your two weeks’ vacation and enjoy yourself,” she said, wondering just how skinny, spinsterish, fortyish Miss Pritchard would go about enjoying herself. “Did I have any appointments? I didn’t think so.”

  “No. But Mr. Liu called again. The man from the Oriental Improvement Society. He said he would call back.”

  “Then you talk to him. What does he want, a contribution?”

  “I don’t imagine so. I think it’s part of their campaign to place Chinese and Japanese in jobs in banks.”

  “We’re not taking on anyone, you know that,” Jean said with some irritation. “If he wants to see anyone, he can see Mr. Sommers next week.”

  Provoked, and annoyed with herself for allowing it to show, Jean went into her office, closed the door, and stood there, looking around. It was a large office, twenty by thirty feet. The walls, once covered by walnut panels, were now painted in soft tones of ivory. The pastel blue Aubusson measured eighteen by twenty-four, and Jean thought wistfully of how splendid it would have been on the floor of her bedroom in the house she had lived in on Russian Hill, when she had been Jean Lavette. In the Whittier mansion—well, a pastel blue rug in the Whittier house was as yet unthinkable. All in due time. She had already invaded her husband’s house—which had once belonged to his father—with thirty-seven paintings, still only part of her collection, and now somehow she would have to find a place for the Picassos and the enormous Monet. It would mean a struggle, but she was determined that the Monet would hang on a wall in the Whittier house, and there were few decisions of Jean’s that did not come into being.

  She sat down behind her desk, a graceful eighteenth-century French piece that she had picked up in Paris, and surveyed the room. Actually, there was nothing more for her to do here; she was simply going through motions, but she could recall with satisfaction that she had never been a figurehead. She had run the bank and not only the bank; there were huge land holdings that her former husband had acquired, the largest department store in San Francisco, and other odds and ends of a small empire that had become a very large empire since her marriage to John Whittier. She had nurtured it. She had been wealthy before; now, in this dismal year of 1934, she was a great deal wealthier.

  “And totally miserable,” she said aloud.

  The telephone rang. It was her husband, John, explaining that something had come up and that he could not make lunch with her. “Can you go to the station alone?” he asked her. ‘The afternoon’s just no good for me.”

  “I think I’m capable of getting to the station. Yes.”

  “You sound unhappy.”

  “Do I? I’m happy as a lark.”

  “Well, you’ll be pleased to see Barbara again.”

  “Yes, of course.” There was a long moment of silence, and then Jean said, “By the way, I’ve decided not to sell the house on Russian Hill. I shall keep it and turn it into a gallery.”

  “Oh. And when did you decide that?”

  “Just this moment.”

  When she put down the telephone, she felt better. John hated the house on Russian Hill, just as he hated everything that related to Daniel Lavette.

  ***

  As a matter of fact, John Whittier shared a sentiment held by his wife’s former husband, Dan Lavette. It was less the house on Russian Hill that he disliked than the hill itself, the place, the ambience, the cluster of artists and writers who had given the hill a reputation almost as widely recognized then, in the 1930s, as that of Greenwich Village in New York. Those who knew John Whittier said that the only thing in the world that he loved, cherished, or respected was money—which was not entirely fair, for he respected Jean, his second wife, and certainly he respected the vast wealth that she represented. Whether or not he loved her, or had ever been in love with her, was a question which, if put to him, would have required for an answer a degree of introspection of which he was by no means capable. In his terms, she was a rewarding wife. She was tall, beautiful, dressed elegantly and in the best of taste, still youthful at forty-four, and in San Francisco terms at the very apex of society, the only daughter of Thomas and Mary Seldon; and Mary Seldon’s mother had been an Asquith from the Boston family that still resided on Beacon Hill. All to the good. The various factors held together like an analysis of an impeccable blue chip stock. There were still other characteristics of his wife that John Whittier regarded as assets, but her involvement with the artists and writers of Russian Hill was not one of them.

  He himself was a rather good-looking, tall, and somewhat overweight man of forty-six, with thinning blond hair and pale blue eyes. His father, Grant Whittier, now deceased, had been the largest shipowner on the West Coast, and the combining of the Whittier and Lavette interests had produced the largest single conglomeration of wealth in California; still, it nettled him that he should have to continue to pay taxes on a boarded-up mansion that was certainly the best piece of property on Russian Hill. Long ago, Robert Louis Stevenson had sailed out of San Francisco on one of the Whittier ships, and had afterward written a scathing little essay on how the ship was run; and while Stevenson had never lived on Russian Hill, his wife had, and Mrs. Stevenson’s presence there contributed to making the place an anathema to the Whittiers. Even so small a matter as a piece in the Chronicle mentioning how much Peter B. Kyne, another resident of Russian Hill, was paid by the Saturday Evening Post for his stories, elicited an angry denunciation by Whittier against the large sums paid to writers in these depressed times.

  His own home was in Pacific Heights, a twenty-two-room limestone mansion. It had been built by his father, and when John Whittier and Jean Lavette were married, they agreed that it would be their residence and that she would rid herself of the house on Russian Hill as soon as it was convenient for her to do so. Now it was to be a gallery—whatever that meant.

  Whittier’s musing was interrupted by his secretary, who told him that there was a collect call for him from Thomas Lavette, from Lambertville, New Jersey.

  “From where?”

  “Lambertville. Will you accept it, Mr. Whittier?”

  “Of course.” He picked up his phone.

  The high-pitched voice on the other end was uneven, uncertain. “John?”

  “Tommy? Where the devil are you?”

  “I’m in a frightful mess, John. Don’t be angry with me, please. I didn’t dare call mother. I don’t want her to know—”

  “To know what? Will you please tell me what happened?”

  “I’m in jail here.”

  “You are what?”

  “Please,” Tom begged him, “don’t blow up at me. I’m miserable enough. I was drunk, and I smashed up the car.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right, but there was a girl with me, and they had to take her to the hospital. I don’t think she’s badly hurt. But they’re holding me here for drunk driving, and I need five hundred for bail to get out—”

  Whittier stared at the phone without replying. He had no children of his own from his first marriage—which had come late in life and lasted for only three years—and he had no attitudes at all toward children. They were not of his world. It grated when he heard Jean refer to the children. As far as he was concerned, they were adults, a woman of twenty and a man of twenty-two. Between him and Barbara, there was a fence of thorns. Her kisses were cold pecks on the cheek, and communication was almost nonexistent. His attitude toward Tom was more neutral; it consisted of tolerance without affection, but the tolerance was not too elastic.

  “John, are you still there?” the voice pleaded.


  “How the devil did you get into a scrape like that?”

  “God, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I wish it had never happened, but it did. I hate to come begging to you, but I need the bail money, otherwise I’ll just sit here. I’ll pay you back.”

  “All right. I’ll wire the money. What did you say that place is? Lambertville, New Jersey?” He scribbled the name on a pad. “You’ll need a lawyer. I’ll have my people in New York find you someone in Princeton. I trust you’ll be in Princeton and stay there?” he finished sourly.

  “I will, believe me. I don’t know how to thank you, John. It’s very decent of you.”

  “Stupid young fool,” he said as he put down the phone. Then he called his secretary and instructed her to wire the bail money, and to call his New York attorneys and have them find a lawyer in Princeton and have the lawyer get in touch with Thomas Lavette at the college. “We’ll pay the costs,” he added.

  All of which he repeated to Jean, angrily and bitterly, before they sat down to dinner with Barbara. It definitely had not been one of Jean’s good days.

  ***

  Dressed in a woolen skirt, an old sweater, and the worn loafers she had used at school, Barbara took the streetcar down Market Street to the Embarcadero. On foot, she drifted slowly south from the Ferry Building, studying the striking longshoremen with curiosity and interest. Essentially, her mother was quite right about her romantic nature, and her mind gave every incident in which she participated a dramatic form and structure. She realized that she had never actually looked at the faces of men like those on the picket lines; the faces were worn, pinched, lined without reference to age. “Longshoreman” had a connotation in her mind of size, bulk, brute strength, but most of these men were no taller than she was, many of them shorter than she was, Mexicans and Orientals, many of them, hunched over, pulling their jackets tight against the cold wind, holding their picket sings unaggressively, signs that called for a dollar an hour and for a hiring hall instead of the shapeup on the docks. Barbara had only a fuzzy notion of what a shapeup was, thinking of an auction system of some kind, which Dr. Franklin had referred to when he called the Embarcadero a slave market. Barbara went closer to read a sign covered with rough lettering, and the man carrying it stepped out of line, facing the sign to her and grinning a toothless, good-natured grin.