Free The Legacy by Howard Fast Page B

They’ll have something to say about it.”
    â€œI’m sure they will.”
    â€œWell, what will be, will be. I’m a little drunk, my darling, and I find myself sitting here and thinking that Danny will be upstairs, sound asleep in a room that stinks of cigar smoke. I don’t want to cry in front of you, so let’s go to bed.”
    The bed was cold as ice. Jean lay there, looking into the darkness and finding nothing.
    Barbara lay awake and brooding. This was her old room, the first sleeping place that she remembered in her life. Whatever her father and mother had done to tear up their life, to dismember it before they patched it together again, the house on Russian Hill had remained. Tom’s room, where Sam was sleeping tonight, was next to hers. The furniture upstairs had never been replaced. At least four times, Jean had swept the lower floor clean of its contents, going from period to period, from mood to mood, from Queen Anne to Art Nouveau to Chinese Chippendale, reacting in this manner to loneliness, to dissatisfaction, and to anger, yet her rage against the decor of her living space had always stopped short at the staircase to the bedrooms. For this, Barbara was grateful, yet it made the realization of her father’s death only more difficult.
    Long ago, while still in college, she had been involved with the great San Francisco longshore strike and the incident remembered as Bloody Thursday. In the course of this, a young longshoreman named Dominick Salone had fallen in love with her, an affection Barbara had been unaware of and indifferent to. In the course of the strike, he had been killed, and after his death Barbara had been full of guilt for her indifference to his feelings. Yet the feeling came and departed, just as the death of Marcel Duboise, the French newspaperman who had been her lover, was a blow she accepted. She survived the grief because she accepted the parting, and that too was the case when her husband had been killed in Israel. She was a strong woman; she had never emptied or destroyed herself by screaming out endlessly against a fate that appeared to militate against any lasting happiness in her life. Her very serenity often made her uneasy and guilt-ridden and caused her to wonder whether she was capable of any truly deep feeling or emotion. As a young woman, she had been easily given to tears; now, like her mother, she lay in the darkness, dry-eyed, trying to grasp the fact that the one man who had never deserted her, who was her strong rock of support and had been for forty-four years of her life, was now gone forever. Forever was somehow different than it had been with her lover and her husband. Forever was unfathomable.
    It was almost dawn when Barbara finally fell asleep, and then she dreamed that she and Sam were out in the boat Dan had designed, not in the bay but out far in the ocean, cloaked with fog and lost beyond rescue.
    The Devron mansion, in Hancock Park, was half-timbered in imitation of an English manor house and contained twenty-two rooms. Hancock Park, still an elegant area in 1958, had been even more elegant when Christopher Devron, Carson’s father, built his home there. He chose Hancock Park deliberately. For one thing, it was square in the center of Los Angeles, as opposed to the great ranch-estates of his financial contemporaries in Orange County and up the coast toward Malibu. If Los Angeles was his city, he had no intentions of being an absentee landlord. For another, it was on the front wave — forty years before, when it was built — of a city moving westward toward the Pacific shore. It was a Devron instinct to move westward. Now, however, by this year of 1958, Beverly Hills had sprawled out to the west of Hancock Park, and indeed the area was beginning to show wear around the edges — which did not perturb the Devrons at all. The fact that they had chosen Hancock Park made it the place; as simply as that.
    Jean