The Legacy by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

to the car, she asked about the trip. It was the question one asks. She had already wept her tears, and her drawn, pale face was somehow strange to Sam. “O.K.,” he said. “It was O.K.” And then he began to cry again, but it happened as a dutiful performance.
    â€œDon’t cry,” Barbara said gently. “Your grandfather had a good life, and there was very little pain in his going away. That’s something you’ll have to understand now, Sam. We live and we die. It happens to everyone.”
    They were in Jean’s car, the luxurious Cadillac that had been her notion of a modest step downward from a Rolls-Royce, driving along the bay shore, when Sam said bluntly, “I’m not going back.”
    Barbara’s thoughts were elsewhere. “Back?”
    â€œBack to Roxten. I hate the place. Rotten. That’s what the kids call it. They’re right.”
    â€œYou don’t have to go back, Sammy. Ever. If you don’t want to.”
    â€œI don’t want to.”
    â€œAll right.”
    He was silent after that, and Barbara wondered what one says to a child concerning death. What does one say to oneself? She had never thought of her father as an old man. With his great strength, his bulk, his enormous vitality, she had never even contemplated his death. He was her rock, the one male figure in her life who had not deserted her, who had stood by in good-natured acceptance of all the twistings and turnings of her life. Her first reaction to his death had been sheer terror, the terror of a person unmoored, unstable, teetering at the edge of a precipitous cliff. She had first to grapple with that; the grief came later, and then the arrival in San Francisco and facing her mother. Barbara, and indeed many others who knew Jean Lavette, had the feeling that by some witch’s magic, she defied age. In her youth, she had readily been accorded the scepter of being the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, and even in her sixties she retained a serene and unlikely beauty. Her face had the kind of sculptured bone structure that resists time, and her tall, long-limbed frame remained youthful through the years. Now, suddenly, she was a wrinkled, shattered old woman, a transformation that tore at Barbara’s heart; she had become a helpless, impotent creature, clinging to Barbara. It was the first time. Never, as long as Barbara had known her mother, had she seen her let go, even for a moment, of the image her friends knew, a coldly beautiful, self-reliant, self-contained woman whose shell could not be pierced — certainly not by a stranger and perhaps never entirely even by Barbara.
    It was evening now. Staring out over the dark water of the bay, alongside the road, Sam asked plaintively, “What will become of the Oregon Queen? ”
    Lost in her thoughts, Barbara glanced at him, puzzled.
    â€œThe cutter,” he said. “Danny’s cutter.”
    She had never heard him call his grandfather Danny before, and it took a moment or two for her to sort out her thoughts. “The boat, you mean?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell — it’s grandma’s.”
    â€œShe can’t sail. That’s what Danny always said. No matter how he tried to teach her, she can’t sail.”
    â€œI guess not. I’m sure she’ll let you use the boat.”
    â€œI can’t sail it alone.”
    â€œNo, I suppose not,” Barbara said, wondering what was behind this questioning about the boat and wondering at the same time what her son felt about his grandfather’s death. He had contrived a mask, and Barbara felt she would never know what went on behind that mask. In a moment of utter panic, she experienced the loss of her son as she had lost the other men in her life; and then common sense returned. The reaction to death was always masked.
    â€œI could teach you,” he said.
    â€œOh?”
    â€œI mean I could teach you to sail.