Second Generation by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

Mackenzie looked at the car, ran a hand over the fender, and asked her, "What happened to your Buick?"
It was none of his damn business, Barbara thought. He was moving in. The careful wall of separation had collapsed. He had decided that she was in trouble, and he was breaking ground.
"Do you want to buy Sandy?" she said. She had no intention of talking about the car; there would be trouble enough with the car thing when her mother returned. The Buick convertible had been a gift from her mother on her eighteenth birthday, but it was nothing she could drive to the soup kitchen on Bryant Street, no way to explain a car like that, and anyway, the luggage compartment was too small for her purposes. She had sold it and bought the Ford station wagon.
"Let's go over to the barn and have a look at her."
"No. I don't want to see Sandy again. Will you buy her?"
"I'm just the trainer here, Miss Lavette. I ain't got the kind of money you find in the club. I suppose I could buy her." He rubbed his chin and thought about it. "I'll give you four hundred for her."
"Oh, no. You must be kidding. The saddle alone cost a hundred and fifty."
"Throwing the saddle in?"
"Sandy's worth a thousand. You know that."
He shook his head. "That's too rich for my blood. Throw in the saddle, and I'll give you five hundred."
"Why, Mac? You know what Sandy's worth."
"I told you, I'm just the trainer. You want to wait a week or two, this lady from Flintridge might give you seven hundred. Wait for the auction, maybe you'll get that much, maybe more."
"Will you pay me cash? Today?"
"I'll pay you cash," he said.
Barbara drove north from Menlo Park, tears running down her cheeks and five hundred dollars in her purse. "I will not weep over a horse," she told herself. "I will not, I will not." Or was she weeping for herself and out of her own fear? After all, she had been nine months without Sandy, and giving very little thought to the animal, if the truth be told. It was the act of selling her, and selling her to that miserable Mackenzie, that chilled her—even more than the act of selling her car, her emerald pin, and her gold bracelet. In time they would all return, her mother, John Whittier, and her brother Tom. Her mother noticed everything. She would come directly to the point. "Why, Barbara, did you sell that beautiful Buick roadster and buy that wretched Ford?" The fact that it was a very special and splendid birthday gift made the surreptitious sale even more heinous. "And where is your bracelet? And what else have you sold? And what kind of trouble are you in?" Barbara was a poor liar and badly versed in the art. She would simply tell the truth, and then whatever might happen would happen.
She told herself that she had done nothing wrong. She had acted out of love and compassion. Or had she? Or was the action taken out of loathing for her own way of life and everything that had surrounded her? If so, it was a very sudden loathing. A few months ago she had been a reasonably content college student. Then she had returned to a home that wasn't hers, yet now she wondered whether even the house on Russian Hill had ever been hers in any real sense. Or is any home of the parents the home of the child? Now she was pitying herself, and that sort of thing simply disgusted her. Her mother's friends pitied themselves; she could remember overhearing their conversations, recalling her own annoyance at the wives of millionaires who pitied themselves in the America of the nineteen thirties.
She hadn't gone to Bryant Street by accident. She loved the waterfront, the Embarcadero, the docks, the fishing boats, the big steamers, the freighters, the great luxury liners. It was all part of the mythology of her strange childhood, of the father she had never really known. This had been his place, where he started as a hand on his own father's fishing boat, out of which he built his empire of wealth and ships. And then he left it, abandoned it; and not comprehending that, Barbara