The Legacy by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

sins.
    Barbara’s son, Sam, however, was among the living; and at Roxten Academy, he had been allowed neither forgiveness nor forgetfulness. Since the teachers at Roxten knew all about him, his parents, and their curious past, the knowledge trickled down. Samuel Cohen was a young man whose mother had been in prison, whose father did not exist, whose grandfather had married a Chinese woman after divorcing his wife, only to remarry the woman he had divorced after his Chinese wife’s death, and who had a Chinese uncle and a Jewish name. It was understandably irresistible. Sam added to his execrable origins with an essay written for his class in English composition; but in all truth it was less that he betrayed himself than that California had betrayed him.
    Mr. Pinchel, the English tutor, taking a lead from the Reader’s Digest, assigned the class the following topic: “The most interesting character I have known.”
    â€œThe most interesting character I ever knew,” Sam wrote, “is my grandfather, whose name is Mr. Daniel Lavette but everyone calls him Dan except if they love him and then they call him Danny. I call him gramps because he’s my grandfather. He taught me to sail a boat. The boat is the Oregon Queen, which is named after gramps’ first ship except that this Oregon Queen is a cutter, not a ship. The cutter is a single mast boat with a heavy keel and maybe three jibs except that we only have two, which my grandfather thinks is better. The happiest times are when the two of us sail in San Francisco Bay, where my grandfather learned to sail with his father who was an Italian fisherman.”
    Actually, Dan Lavette’s father, Joseph Lavette, coming from that part of the Mediterranean coastline where Italy approaches France, was part French; but having been raised in San Francisco, it had never occurred to Sam that the one was ethnically superior to the other, and he went on to describe how, after sailing, they would tie up at Fisherman’s Wharf and then walk to Gino’s Italian restaurant, where both of them would consume enormous quantities of spaghetti, Sam under a solemn promise not to inform his grandmother of his grandfather’s lapse from his diet. And since during the hours Sam and his grandfather spent on the cutter, Dan gave his grandson lessons in bad Italian, Sam was able to engage old Gino in the restaurateur’s native tongue. This evidence of an Italian bar sinister in his checkered pattern of national origin was set down by Sam with innocent pride. It was the final brick in the wall of contempt and isolation that the Roxten boys built around him.
    From his window seat, Sam watched the landing at San Francisco Airport with the passive indifference of a generation inured to air travel almost from birth. The age of twelve years is still unable to grapple with death; a mystery at every age, to a child it is unthinkable and untenable. It would not remain in his mind, even when his guilt demanded that he retain it, and his mind simply substituted departure for finality. His grandfather had gone away; forever was nothing that he could deal with, and the rebuff he had inflicted upon his fellow passenger, Mrs. Bernstein, had dislocated his concentration on grief. Now he was involved with the tactics he would use to convince his mother that he should not return to Roxten. His planning triggered his guilt once again, reminded him that the person he loved most in the whole world, perhaps even more than he loved his mother, was gone, and as the plane landed and taxied along the runway, he began to cry. Mrs. Bernstein watched him with sympathy and was moved to murmur, “It will be all right.”
    He replied to himself that it would never be all right again, and then he was pushing along the aisle and off the plane. Barbara was waiting for him, and she folded him into her arms, clinging to him as the ultimate reassurance in the idiocy of life and death. Walking