The Legacy by Howard Fast Page A

one day. She then went on to her mother’s house. Her brother Joe was there with his wife, Sally, and Sally’s father, Jake Levy, and Jake’s wife, Clair. At thirty-two, Sally Lavette was still the long-limbed, flaxen-haired beauty who had once been, albeit briefly, a Hollywood star. She embraced Barbara and wept. She was emotional and she wept without effort. Her father, Jake, a large, heavyset winemaker and farmer, nodded his greeting and sympathy. They were old friends, as close as family. Clair, with the help of her daughter-in-law, Eloise, had been serving food and greeting the people who had been in and out of the house all day. Now she sat on a couch with Sarah Levy, her mother-in-law, trying to persuade the old woman to go home. Sarah Levy was seventy-eight years old, and it was her husband, Mark, dead now a quarter of a century, who had been Dan’s partner for many years. As she sat now with Clair, Sarah wept and remembered, her husband dead so many years, her daughter a suicide, her grandson dead in the Pacific during World War Two — and now Danny. She was too old to cope with death anymore, too close to it to regard it as a stranger.
    Joe asked Barbara about Sam. “Maybe it was all too sudden, dragging the kid out of school?”
    â€œNo, it’s all right. I left him at home. He’s exhausted. Where’s mother?”
    â€œShe’s at the chapel.”
    â€œAlone?”
    â€œNo,” Sally put in. “Steve Cassala is with her. I’m glad you weren’t here before. Old Mrs. Cassala — she must be well past eighty — she became hysterical at Dan being buried in an Episcopal cemetery. She wants us to bring the body down to San Mateo to the Catholic church there ——”
    â€œFor God’s sake, Barbara doesn’t have to be bothered with that,” Joe interrupted.
    â€œI thought she should know.”
    â€œWas mother here?” Barbara asked.
    â€œThank God, no,” Joe said. “Your mother’s been at the chapel since four o’clock.”
    â€œAlone?”
    â€œNo. Jake and Clair were there and Harvey Baxter and Boyd Kimmelman and Steve Cassala. Steve is still there with her.”
    â€œHe’s not talking about a Catholic burial?” Barbara asked worriedly.
    â€œNo, no. Steve has more sense than that, and anyway, he doesn’t give a damn. He’s as much of a failed Catholic as pop was.”
    â€œAnd what happened to Mrs. Cassala?”
    â€œHer grandson, Ralph, took her home.”
    â€œI’ll go to the chapel,” Barbara decided.
    It was then that Dan’s son Thomas and his wife, Lucy, were let into the house by Mrs. Bendler, Jean’s housekeeper. They walked silently past her into the living room, where the others were gathered. When they entered, the conversation stopped, and silence hung heavy as lead. It was years since Tom had been here, in his mother’s house, his father’s house, years since he had spoken to his sister, Barbara. His half brother, Joe, a tall, heavily muscled man, with a face that might have been Eskimo or American Indian, reminded Tom vaguely of his father. He had heard that this man was a physician. As for the tiny, white-haired old lady who sat weeping on the couch, she was as much a stranger to him as the long-limbed, redheaded woman who sat beside her. The others were strangers, too. God’s curse on family deaths! What a bitch it was! And what a fool he had been for coming here! It was Lucy’s insistence that had brought him here. “As a simple matter of form,” Lucy had said, “Dan Lavette’s son cannot be absent. He is now among the honored dead of this somewhat insane city. As with the Romans, we deify our V.I.P. dead and forgive them all their sins.” What a coldblooded bitch his own wife was!
    Barbara, on the other hand, was totally unprepared for this sudden appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lavette. It was still