Free Second Generation by Howard Fast

seems to like him. She married him."
"He's a parody of what he appears to think Boston society is all about. Of course, he hasn't the faintest notion of what Boston is. Your great-great-grandfather, my grandfather, was in the rum trade with Jamaica. It was better than the slave trade, and it permitted his brother to be both wealthy and Abolitionist, and grandfather was a pillar of the Congregational church. Nevertheless, he had a black mistress in Jamaica, and according to the family mythology, he birthed five black children there—aside from his proper family here in Boston. By the way, do you ever see your father?"
Confused, taken aback, Tom replied that he had not seen Dan Lavette since the divorce.
"Why?" his aunt asked pointedly.
"I don't know," Tom said uncertainly. "He was never very close to me."
"Do you like him?"
"I don't know. Barbara does. She saw him last year. He's living in Los Angeles—"
"Yes, with his Chinese mistress, whom he married. Good heavens, you talk as if you were John Whittier's son. I met Dan Lavette once. Don't mumble."
At the Copley Plaza, in the dining room, the headwaiter greeted Leona Asquith by name and kissed her hand. At the table, she said to Tom, "Do the ordering, Thomas. I think it ought to be broiled lobster for both of us. Whatever elements of civilization have crept into that West Coast of yours, lobster is something they do not have. We'll have a Chardonnay to go with it." She was slightly deaf, and like so many slightly deaf people, tended to make her already high-pitched voice even more strident. It embarrassed Tom to -have her conversation overheard by the tables around them.
"A substitute for sex, did I say that? Yes. She does it with those wretched pictures she collects, and being president of a bank. Thank heavens that's over. And now she wants my collection, and you are to be very charming to
„„ H
me.
"Oh, no, no. Not at all," Tom protested, dropping his voice as if pleading with her to drop hers.
"Don't mumble, Thomas. It's quite transparent, but then, people are transparent, all of us, although we all pretend to ourselves that we are well hidden. So you're trapped here and bored to tears."
"No. I'm not bored, Aunt Leona." Which was very much the truth. At the moment, he was nervous and bewildered, but not bored.
"You need a girl," she said flatly.
He stared at her.
"Well, you do like women, don't you?"
"Yes. Certainly."
"How long will you be here now?"
"Another week or so, I think."
"That's not time enough for anything. Do you want a drink?"
"I think so."
"You do mumble so. Order a martini for each of us. A week, you said. Well, I know a very respectable lady who runs a bawdy house. I think I'll send you there."
"Oh no," he said to himself. "I am not hearing this. It's not happening."
"Yes," she said. "That's decided. It's what you need, and you'll stop looking so wretchedly sour. Now I want you to tell me about this John Whittier your mother married. Tell me all about him."
Barbara carefully backed her Ford station wagon into the alley on Bryant Street, then went into the kitchen and asked for help to unload. It was eleven o'clock in the morning on the third day of July in 1934, and already the makeshift stove was smoking hot, piled with pots of stew to feed anywhere from two hundred to five hundred men. The kitchen was dirty, steaming, the garbage cans overflowing and spilling onto the floor, with two longshoremen washing tin cups and bowls and arguing about a third man who was, according to their definition, either a fink or a pimp. Dominick and another longshoreman by the name of Franco Guzie were slicing stale, three-day-old bread. Volunteers from the bakery workers' union bought the unsold bread, paying for it out of union funds, and delivered it twice a week to the various soup kitchens the maritime strikers had set up. Sometimes it amounted to several hundred loaves, sometimes only a few dozen.
Salone looked up as Barbara came into the kitchen. Guzie shouted for