Free The Immigrant’s Daughter by Howard Fast

he stared at the television set. Long ago, before he had joined the marines, before he had been sent to Vietnam, Joshua had been a round-faced, sound-limbed boy, chubby if not fat, his straw-colored thatch of hair standing straight up from his head. Eloise’s other son, Frederick, had come of her marriage to Tom. Joshua was her son with Adam, and as a small child, he had had the same golden locks and blue eyes as his mother — which led him to be petted and cuddled in a manner he always remembered as distasteful. Barbara had noticed his anger at the showing of pictures of himself as a child. Asked about his resentment, he once told Barbara that they might as well have been pictures of a little girl as of a small boy.
    His face remained expressionless as he opened the door for Barbara and explained, tonelessly, “They’re all having dinner with Grandma Clair, over at the big house.”
    â€œOh? I thought I’d find your mother.”
    â€œShe’s there.” He was no round-faced boy with a thatch of yellow hair. He kept his hair clipped close; his face was tightly drawn over the bones; and there was a nervous tic under one eye. Now twenty-eight years old, there was nothing left of the gentle, chubby boy whom Barbara remembered. His bleak tone dismissed her and said that he wanted to be alone, and he turned back to the room where the television was blaring before Barbara could think of any way to continue the conversation. She left, nervous — and feeling that she should stay and talk to him.
    It was still light outside, still before seven o’clock, when Barbara opened the door to Clair’s house and went in. The door was never locked. It was a door you passed through without ever thinking too much about it, and everyone passed through it, the Chicano and Mexican workers on the place, their children, the family and their children, delivery men, salesmen. The door led directly into the huge kitchen, twenty by thirty-five feet, equipped with a coal stove, a gas stove, a walk-in refrigerator and a fourteen-foot-long refectory table made of polished oak. The kitchen being the natural core of the house, most of the family meals were taken there; and since this was a farm, dinner was eaten early. They were already at the table when Barbara entered, Clair and Eloise and Adam and Freddie and May Ling, who had acceded to Freddie’s desire to have a second child. Freddie’s house, while on the Higate property, was about four hundred yards from the main house, and after her first experience at giving birth, May Ling was in no mood to leave her child — seven months old now — with a nurse. The new baby was a boy, plump and perfect, with ten fingers and ten toes, all that May Ling could have desired, and now he slept peacefully in a crib in the corner of the kitchen.
    At seventy-six, Clair was still strong and energetic, but unhappy in hours of being alone. At least twice a week, she persuaded some or all of her family at the winery to eat at her house, and tonight, when Barbara entered, there were sounds of pleasant greeting around the board. Clair got up to embrace her and beg her to eat with them. Barbara insisted that she was not hungry, and Clair protested that this was not a real dinner, only a pickup of roast lamb, chile beans, and red onion and cucumber. Hard liquor was rarely served at Higate, but there was no meal without half a dozen bottles of wine on the table, and always three of them were the Cabernet Sauvignon, the red wine that Jake had loved so and about which he had boasted — about Higate’s red being the best that California offered. By Jake’s measure, there was no other good wine, only California.
    Even though Jake had been dead a good many years now, to Clair the wine on the table was more than a candle. As far as white wine was concerned, Jake had no strong preference. The market demanded white wine, but to Jake, only red wine was real