The Legacy by Howard Fast

It’s not a real cutter. I mean if it was — well, there’s no way the two of us could handle it. It’s something gramps invented.”
    â€œYou really won’t go back to that school?” she said.
    â€œI told you that!” he cried, and then the tears began, and he sat beside her bent and sobbing.
    She drove on, relieved that he was crying.
    â€œHe didn’t have to die,” forcing the words through his sobbing.
    â€œWhat did you mean when you said it was a boat that pop invented?” she asked softly.
    â€œYou wouldn’t understand. You don’t know anything about sailing.”
    â€œI could try.”
    â€œWell,” he said grudgingly, “two people can’t handle a real cutter. A real cutter has a low mast stepped amidships, and then there’s a great big topmast with a gaff. It’s a long boat, with all kinds of canvas like flying jibs and a forestaysail and a great big bowsprit and it hangs so deep and heavy in the water it wouldn’t be any good in the bay. Don’t you think Danny knew that? That’s why he had to design the whole thing over and invent a new kind of cutter. But it’s a real cutter still, like the old Coast Guard boats.”
    â€œI didn’t know that,” Barbara said lamely.
    â€œI know, mom.” He moved across the seat and pressed up against her. “I know. It’s the kind of thing gramps talked to me about. He wouldn’t talk to you about that kind of thing.”
    The first time Jean Lavette looked into a mirror after Dan’s death, she was repelled and horrified, and the effect was to shake her loose, at least for a moment, from her grief, her self-pity, and her agonizing sense of being totally alone in a meaningless world. She was sixty-eight years old, but the sixty-eight years had passed day by day and hour by hour. She had been young in an age where women were beauties, as differentiated from being beautiful or merely pretty. A beauty was of a small, select, and categorized grouping. She was referred to by the term; her genre had been immortalized by Charles Dana Gibson in a hundred paintings; she had been the subject of endless newspaper and magazine articles, and her beauty in itself endowed her with a special and professional social distinction. Just as years later, women began to be referred to as lawyers, physicians, politicians, so in Jean’s youth a handful had been referred to as beauties.
    She had been one of them, reigning for years in San Francisco as an uncrowned queen and always highly conscious of the distinction bestowed upon her. Now, in her mirror, she saw reflected a haggard, lined countenance, skin gray, eyes bloodshot, hair limp and lifeless. After her initial reaction, she returned to the moment and told herself that she didn’t give a damn. Dan was gone. She was beyond vanity and beyond caring. Still, she could not tear herself away from her image. Her eyes filled with tears, and she raised one trembling hand to touch her cheek. Then she stumbled over to a chair, limp and weak. A half hour passed before she was able to make the decision to do her face. It had to be done. She was still in her bedroom. Dan’s body had been taken away, and she could hear people entering the house downstairs. Death did away with privacy, and she was still Jean Seldon Lavette, and already too many people had seen her in this condition. Long, long ago, when Dan had pleaded with her for a divorce, she had refused him with the cold statement that Seldons do not divorce; now she specified to herself that they do not make a public display of their grief.
    She rose and went into her dressing room, faced the mirror, and began to repair the ravages that Dan’s death had imprinted on her face.
    Barbara dropped Sam off at her house on Green Street on Russian Hill in San Francisco. He had dozed off in the car on the way in from the airport, and she felt that he had been through enough for