She was thinking that it was exactly what she needed, a birthday party. Oh, yes indeed, it was just what she needed to remind herself that she was sixty years old. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I am sixty. That is something to write home about, isn’t it? Here’s my celebratory verse: It’s nifty to be sixty and heavenly to be seventy. Stupid doggerel. Does one still weep at sixty? Or does the brine connote rheumy presenility? All thoughts of irresolute protest, and she was actually saying, “Please, let me be. Not that I don’t want you to remind me, because I can’t forget for a moment, and I can even face the fact that I am an old woman — yes, in spite of your indignant protests. Old? Since when is sixty old? You’re still young and vital and beautiful and all the other assorted bullshit. I am old, and the truth is that I really don’t give a damn about parties or any other kind of celebration.”

The telephone rang.

Barbara Lavette picked up the telephone and spoke to her son, Sam, more formally Dr. Samuel Thomas Cohen, who kept the name of his father and who put together smashed hands and feet with great skill. In that crisp, knowledgeable tone that doctors assume, he informed his mother that he and Carla would stop by for her at about eleven. Something in Barbara always reacted to Carla and even to the mention of her name. She did not like Carla; howsoever much she tried, howsoever much she looked into herself, she could not bring herself to feel affection for her son’s wife. This filled her with guilt. Carla was a Chicana, a Mexican but California born, out of five generations in California, more generations than Barbara could look back at, and, with good reason, proud, defensive and full of walls, safeguards and anticipatory hurts, an unfulfilled actress, who bridled when Barbara referred to her as an actor. “Don’t give me that women’s lib crap. I’m a Chicana and an actress.”

She was a thorny woman, full-figured beautiful, a round face, round breasts, round limbs, yet tall enough to carry it with poise and dignity. But like a porcupine, there were quills of anger and resentment that bristled at a word, a suggestion, an intonation. Barbara prided herself that her relationship with Carla was easy, and that if no affection actually existed, at least a decent pretense of affection was maintained. Perhaps so. She was never entirely certain and never entirely free of the guilt she felt at not caring for her son’s wife.

“Sam?” Barbara said.

He knew the tone of voice. “Mother, we want to stop by for you. I know you can drive out there by yourself.”

“I wasn’t thinking of driving out there by myself. I was thinking of not going. I just can’t face it. Don’t you understand, Sam, I simply can’t face it?”

“Mother, it’s seven months since Boyd died,” he said, almost harshly. “You can’t go on flagellating yourself. These are people who love you and want very much to see you.”

She could imagine him looking at his watch while he spoke to her. Sam was always looking at his watch or listening to the tinkle that called him to the telephone. His day was precisely and carefully subdivided. Barbara’s brother Joe was also a doctor, but one who lived easily. He might even forget his watch, leave it by his bedside; not Sam.

“I don’t whip myself,” Barbara said with annoyance. “And I don’t enjoy it when you talk to me like that, Sam.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. But please, please don’t reject everyone. We love you. We’ve made so many preparations. May I pick you up?”

She sighed and said, “Yes. Very well.”

She was aware that she was being childish and petulant. In all truth, she had no intention of avoiding her birthday party. She had never been cruel, and that would have been very cruel indeed, to fail to appear after the entire family had come together. It was a whimper; she admitted that to herself, underlining the fact that she had always despised whimperers, but in this case, a plea to Sam to see her, remember her, beg her. But he would look at her in astonishment if she told him that he had forgotten her. The whole world had forgotten her — or she had forgotten the whole world. That would simply evoke more astonishment. How could she explain what had happened inside herself?

Carla was being sweet. She could be endearing when she put herself to it. She embraced Barbara — unusual — and told Sam, “You drive, Doc. Barbara and I share the back, and I have things to tell her. And you look absolutely beautiful,” she told Barbara, who was wearing a jacket of pale gray linen over a white silk blouse — a suit that would have fitted her just as neatly thirty years before. She had kept her figure; she had kept her firmness of body. “You’re not going to let your hair go white,” Carla added. Barbara wondered whether she was aware of her habit of taking with one hand as she gave with the other. There were pale streaks in Barbara’s honey-colored hair, but it was far from white.

In the car, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to the Napa Valley, Carla said to Barbara, “I’ve been holding this because I’m just about ready to explode with it, and I’m not going to pretend to be cool. They’ve given me the part of Annabella — finally, finally, and it’s a special showcase thing, six weeks at the center. Can you imagine, Barbara? Annabella!”

“Back a bit. It’s wonderful, of course, but Annabella what?”

“John Ford’s play,” Sam said from the driver’s seat. “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Annabella’s the lead part — you know, Mother, falls in love with her brother —”

“I know the play,” Barbara said. “In fact, we did it a hundred years ago at Sarah Lawrence. Oh, no fear,” she assured Carla, “I did not do the role of Annabella. No, I played a nurse or something of the sort. There is a nurse in it, isn’t there?”

“There is.”

“Carla, I think it’s wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. It’s what you’ve been working for, isn’t it? And at the center. When? When is the opening?”

Mollified, Carla informed her that there would be six weeks of rehearsal, with an opening just after New Year’s. “Of course, nobody does ’Tis Pity the way it was written. Ford was no Shakespeare, you know, and parts of the original script are sheer confusion. Our director, Stan Lewis, is rewriting and restructuring —” and thus she went, on and on. Barbara listened, trying to nod appropriately and listen and then look past her to the green hills of Marin County. It was about two years since she had been out to the Higate Winery in the Napa Valley, a place bound up and threaded through with the lives and memories of the two families that had their beginnings in the partnership of her father, Dan Lavette, and Mark Levy; and it was disturbing to be without any feeling of anticipation. For most of her adult life, the Napa Valley, and the old winery that Jake Levy had purchased following his discharge from the army after World War I, had been a sort of a glowing garden in Barbara’s mind. Not that she spent much time there; its existence was enough, a place she could reach for when she was weary or when she had looked too much at the rest of the world. But this had changed. Boyd had died, and everything had changed.

The world turned gray. For three weeks, she left her home only to buy the few things she needed to survive. She had been subject to depression in the past, and, knowing this, her brother Joe had warned her in very careful medical terms that, in a manner, she was committing suicide. “Do you actually want to die?” he had asked her, exercising, as Barbara thought, the physician’s right to ask any question, no matter how intimate or demeaning. She was more provoked than such a question demanded.

“Don’t be a fool!”

“I think I can guess,” Joe said, in that very gentle manner that he took with his patients, “where the guilt comes from. You’re so ridden with guilt, Barbara.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe.”

“Guess! I don’t give a damn!” She would forget that he was half Chinese, her brother Joseph, her half brother, actually, born out of their father’s second marriage, to a Chinese woman named May Ling, and then he would suddenly look so very Chinese, in spite of his great bulk, two hundred and twenty pounds and six feet two inches tall. It made her smile; anger at Joe Lavette. No one was angry with Joe. How could you be angry with a large, intelligent Saint Bernard dog?

“You’ve been reading statistics: married men less subject to heart attack. Statistics are a marvelous substitute for mind, but the fact of the matter is that Boyd had been walking around with a bad heart, a very bad heart, for years. If you had married him, nothing would have been different. I didn’t recommend the bypass surgery. I didn’t think he could take it in his condition, but he insisted. He knew that he was at the end of his rope, and the thought that the surgery might give him five more years with you was worth a tilt with death. He was a good man, and he adored you.”

She was crying. “If I had married him,” she began, her voice breaking through the tears. “He wanted that so much.”

“You were better together than any married people I know. All right, it’s good to be sad and tears are a kind of therapy, but not guilty. Guilt kills the appetite. How much weight have you lost?”

“I don’t know. I don’t weigh myself.”

“I’d say too much. You’re not the anorexic type. Let me take you home to Napa. Baked ham for dinner.”

She had refused the invitation, thinking to herself that her brother could be a very weird, spooky kind of Chinese, but the talk with him helped to shake her loose from the shroud of self-pity she was constructing. Her dear friend Eloise, coming by to see her a day or two later, put it wistfully: “I knew you wouldn’t get bogged down with self-pity, Barbara. It’s the kind of thing I used to do with these dreadful headaches that no doctor could do anything about, and then when Josh was wounded in Vietnam and came home without a leg, I wept and wallowed in self-pity and guilt until no one could tolerate me except you and poor dear Adam, but then it goes away. The pain goes away.”

Barbara had often been tempted to say that nothing very much changed with Eloise, and then a second look would quell the temptation. A great deal changed with Eloise. She had gone through life with a round, lovely face, blue eyes and naturally blond hair and a small, soft voice that deceived people. No one who looked like Eloise and sounded like her could have a brain in her head, except that Eloise was wise and quick-witted and had lived for years with a very painful incurable disease that she had never allowed to dominate or defeat her. She had been married to Barbara’s brother Thomas, unhappily, and then had divorced him to marry Adam Levy, who was the grandson of Mark Levy, Barbara’s father’s partner. So her thoughts went, loose, disordered, reaching out here and there, while Carla babbled along, spelling out the plot of Ford’s play, her own role, and what she planned to do with it. Barbara nodded appropriately, but no longer heard; she was in the well of her own thoughts, unraveling the connections and memories stirred up by the visit to the winery.

It was Boyd’s death that had changed everything for Barbara. The solid shape of reality had shimmered and collapsed. Life and death suddenly were no longer separated. When she had wept, she had wept for all the love and beauty that had gone away forever.

“Carla!” Sam said sharply.

Barbara realized that Carla had not broken her account.

“I talk too much,” Carla said. “Well, I don’t talk too much. But now that I have something to talk about — Did it ever occur to you, Sam, how many hours I sat and listened to you and your smartass doctor friends talk about doing your thing? But that’s important. Being an actress is not important. Absolutely not; it only keeps me from getting pregnant and bringing some more Lavettes into the world —”

“Carla, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean that at all. Please, don’t make this into another fight.”

“Why not? Because Barbara’s here?”

The coiled spring of a fight began to tighten. Barbara had been here before, and now she shrank back in dread. Outbursts of fury on the part of her son bewildered and terrified her, and Carla would rise to his anger with a Latin intensity that matched Sam’s rage. Barbara sometimes felt that the marriage should never have been, and she surmised that the only force keeping it together was the transformation of the anger into a sexual passion on the same level as the rage. It was an uneasy surmise on her part; son and mother maintained notions of mutual purity that matched each other in unreality.

It was then, at this moment, that she saw the school bus lose its right rear wheel. They had passed Schellville, driving east toward Napa, when Sam found himself behind the school bus. Driving automatically, his attention concentrated on the developing fight with his wife, he made no attempt to pass the bus, which was moving at about forty miles an hour. Actually, he was almost tailgating. Then Barbara saw the school bus lose its wheel, and she screamed, “Sam — for God’s sake, look! The bus!”

She saw the rest as if it were being played on a film screen in slow motion. It was an old yellow school bus, half filled with children, eleven or twelve children, for even in those fractions of a second that spelled out the impending tragedy, Barbara was able to estimate the number of children. The wheel rolled off the road, the school bus lurched to the right, and then, seeking to bring it under control, the driver twisted the bus to the left, where it crossed into the opposite lane and crashed head on into an oncoming gardener’s truck. Sam’s foot on the brakes of his own car brought them to a screeching halt just short of the two wrecked vehicles.

Sam was out of his car the moment he brought it to a halt, telling Carla, “My bag, in the trunk.” He threw the keys of the car to her as he ran toward the school bus. Carla got the trunk open; Barbara ran after Sam without waiting for Carla to get the bag and a package of dressings that Sam always carried in the trunk of his car. Sam was shouting to Carla, “Dressings — package next to the bag.”

Then he pulled open the back door of the bus and plunged inside. Barbara followed him, a veritable agony of sound greeting her, cries of terror and pain.

Smoke filled the bus, and Sam shouted, “Get them outside, Mom! Never mind the trauma — just get them outside! The bus is burning!”

She pushed two children who could walk past her. “Outside, darlings!” or something of the sort. “And run from the bus!” not knowing whether they understood. Carla squeezed past her with Sam’s bag. A child lay crumpled in her seat, bleeding from a head wound. The children were seven or eight years old. Barbara picked up the unconscious child.

“Don’t move her if she’s hurt,” Carla said.

“Sam wants them out of the bus.”

“Up here!” Sam shouted to Carla. “Get up here! I need help!”

Outside the bus, someone screamed in pain. Barbara ran about fifty feet before she laid the child down off the road and then she herded children away from the accident. Carla climbed out of the bus with another child in her arms, and then Sam handed still another bleeding child to Barbara.

A car stopped and the driver came running to help. A black man. He plunged into the burning bus without a word. He came out with a child in his arms, followed by Sam, who carried another child.

“Two more inside.” He handed the child to Carla. Barbara was back in the bus. One of two hurt little boys could walk. The other screamed in agony as Barbara tried to pull him out from where he was wedged under a seat.

“Let me,” the black man said.

Together they managed to get him loose. Barbara half started toward the driver. Her eyes were burning from the smoke.

“Mother, get out of there!” Sam yelled. “The driver’s dead!”

Thick smoke as she felt her way to the exit door. Sam and Carla fairly plucked her out of the bus, both of them shouting, “Run! Run!”

The bus exploded in a burst of flame as they reached the place where the children were huddled together, and bits of glass and burning bus rained on them. The children were screaming. Barbara tried to soothe them. None of the children was badly injured; cuts and bruises. The child Barbara had first carried out of the bus was conscious now. Sam ran to the pickup truck, where the driver, screaming with pain, resisted efforts to free him. Then the driver fainted. Carla and Sam worked together, smoothly and expertly. The black man threw off his jacket, pulled off his shirt, and tore it into strips. Bandages to hold on their dressings. It took her back forty years to that infamous Bloody Thursday, when the longshoremen on the San Francisco waterfront had clashed with the police and when she had helped man a first-aid station all through the hot and bloody morning. Different but the same, somehow, because, as it came to her in a flash, time is an illusion in any case, and here she was on her knees, holding a weeping, bleeding child to her breast while she wept with her own memories.

Then there were ambulances and fire engines and police cars and tow trucks. The injured truck driver and the children were placed in the ambulances. The police took statements, informed Sam that they would be called upon to attend an inquiry and an inquest, and finally left them alone on the roadside.

The wreckage was dragged away, and the four people, bloodstained from head to foot, were left alone with their two cars.

The black man, in his undershirt but maintaining dignity, introduced himself. “Harvey Lemwax.”

“No,” Carla said. “Can’t be. You’re not Harvey Lemwax. Things like that don’t happen.”

“Oh, absolutely. Harvey Lemwax.”

Sam introduced the group. “This is my wife, Carla, my mother, Barbara Lavette. Myself, Dr. Sam Cohen. From Carla’s reaction, I realize I should be ashamed not to recognize you. I apologize. Unfortunately, most doctors know little beyond their own medicine.”

“Don’t apologize, please.”

“Then tell us.”

“Well — I play trumpet —”

Barbara’s knowledge of trumpet players was nonexistent, but on the other hand, Harvey Lemwax gave no indication of ever having heard of Barbara Lavette. Of course, she was by no means the best-known writer in the United States, but neither was she unknown. She had occupied a place in Who’s Who for the past thirty years, and if her books were not widely enough read, certainly her past had elicited enough nonliterary headlines for her to feel less than apologetic.

“I’m sure you’re superb at it,” Barbara said. “If you do it the way you stormed into that smoking bus, I take my hat off to you.”

“Superb is hardly the word,” Carla said.

“About the smoke,” Barbara went on, “I’ve been coughing my head off. Should I worry about it, Sam?”

“Oh no, no. We need a drink.”

“Superb, indeed,” Carla said. “Only one of the three or four greatest and when I say greatest, I mean greatest, but absolutely. Right there with Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge.”

“Too much, too much!” Lemwax exclaimed. “You are good people. I am glad to have met you, a good meeting, except that we must say God help that poor bus driver and rest his poor soul. Will all them kids be all right, Doc?”

“Cuts, contusions, a broken arm, two or three teeth lost and some blood. Not awful by any means. But don’t ride off into the sunset yet, Harvey. Today’s Mother’s birthday.”

“That is your mother?”

He had been told that, Barbara remembered.

“She is too young and too beautiful.”

“Bless your heart,” Barbara said.

“What I am saying is this,” Sam told them. “In the trunk of my car is a cooler containing six bottles of beautiful French champagne. The celebration of Mother’s birthday is to take place at the home of family of sorts in the valley north of Napa where they have a winery, which is what they live, talk, and know. They are bigoted peasants who will not drink French wine or even discuss French champagne. But Mother must be toasted properly, so just sit still while I get to it, provided you will drink Dom Perignon out of paper cups.”

Barbara listened to him with amazement. They had just witnessed a horrible accident. The driver of the school bus was dead. The driver of the pickup truck, a Mexican gardener, had been taken to the hospital in critical condition. The bloodstains and the oil stains were still plain on the road and the stink of burning gasoline was still in the air.

“We did our best,” Sam said, spreading his hands. He saw her expression.

Well, he had. Dried blood marked them all. Carla, dressed in her white silk best, had not hesitated to plunge into the effort, and now the silk was stained with blood and grime.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lavette,” the black man said, as if compelled to apologize for the others. Barbara realized that he was embarrassed, standing in his undershirt, trying to maintain his original moment of dignity. They didn’t know the bus driver. They were under no compulsion to mourn him, or was the whole world under a compulsion to constantly mourn the dead? What do the dead deserve? Barbara clasped her hands and stood stiff and very still for a long moment.

“Are you all right?” Carla asked her.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Just shaken.”

Sam opened a bottle of champagne. Carla opened a package of plastic cups. The cork popped.

Tenderly, Sam said to his mother, “Drink this. It will help.”

She shook her head. She was crying, softly, gently. Even more embarrassed, Harvey Lemwax said that he really had to go.

“One for the road,” Sam said, handing him the cup of champagne. He filled a cup for himself and one for Carla, but then offered his cup to Barbara. “Mother?”

She pushed away the tears with the back of her hand and accepted it. Sam poured another for himself, offering a toast: “Life, not death. There were twelve kids in the bus and they’ll all be okay. We got them out.”

Barbara nodded.

“Then bottoms up!”

The wine was cold and good, and it eased Barbara’s throat, and it came to her that if they had not been directly behind the school bus and if Sam had not plunged into it, followed by herself and Carla and Harvey Lemwax — if another two or three minutes had gone by — the children would have died.

“And in this crazy, lunatic country,” Carla was telling Lemwax, “my husband could be sued. Can you imagine, for saving lives he could be sued!”

“The hell with that,” Sam said. “Once more around.”

“I feel a bit strange,” Barbara said. “I have to get out of the sun, Sam.”

They made an odd group, standing at the side of the road and drinking champagne. Behind them, a billboard proclaimed the merits of Toyotas. Barbara sank into the back seat of the car gratefully. It was hot in the car, but not so hot as out there in the sun. A motorcycle cop pulled up and they offered him champagne. He grinned and shook his head. Probably, Barbara thought, he’d heard about the accident. Sam was a hero. He was questioning them, and writing down the answers on his pad.

The motorcycle cop took off, and Sam opened another bottle of champagne. Their little group was only twenty paces or so away from the car, but through the closed window it appeared to Barbara that she was in one world and they were in another world. It was chokingly hot in the car, parked as it was on the roadside under the noonday sun, but Barbara made no move to open a window or to turn on the motor and use the air conditioning. She was thinking about the driver, and how death could be so summarily dismissed. This was another aspect of her son: death comes, life goes on; and if death comes to someone whose name is not known, a stranger who dies driving a school bus, well, you take a glass of champagne. Sam was open-minded; no sense of the black man being black. The driver of the school bus had had his chest stove in against the wheel and his skull fractured as it crashed against the windshield. Was he married? Did he have children? Did he have life insurance? Was she, Barbara, weeping for him, for herself or for Boyd?

The black man had gone to his car and brought out his trumpet case, and now he took out his shining instrument, put it to his mouth and blew several fanfares into the California air. More champagne. The three of them embraced and then Harvey Lemwax put his trumpet back in its case, took it to his car, came to say goodbye to Barbara, started, stopped when he saw her tears, shook his head and then walked to his car and drove off.

Sam came to the car and threw open the door. “My God, it’s so hot in here, Mother, you could choke. Why on earth are you crying?”

“I don’t know.”

“We finished two bottles of that elixir. Carla and I are both sloshed, so you’d better drive. Are you all right? I mean, are you settled enough to drive?”

“Of course,” Barbara snapped at him. “I had one small sip of champagne.”

“I didn’t mean —”

“I know what you meant — oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to get so upset and scream at you. That isn’t my style, is it? Of course I’ll drive.”

“About that silly little act we put on? We’re not heartless, Mother, but if you bleed for everything — well, how much blood does one have?”

“I know.”

Carla was silent. Barbara stepped out of the car and into the driver’s seat. Sam held open the back seat door for Carla, but Carla said, “No, I’d like to sit in front with Barbara.”

“Sure.”

Barbara just glanced at Carla. A few moments after the car began to move, Carla reached out tentatively and touched Barbara’s arm. Then Carla burst into tears. Barbara slowed the car and took it off the road onto the shoulder.

“What in hell is this all about?” Sam wanted to know.

“Sam, please shut up,” Barbara said. She got out of the car, walked around and opened the door on Carla’s side. Carla came out of the car into Barbara’s arms, and embracing her, holding her soft, warm body against her own breast, Barbara understood that this was something women could do, a kind of human contact that men had lost long, long ago.

“I only wanted you to love me,” Carla whimpered.

“I know. I do, truly.”

Back in the car, Barbara drove on again, thinking that this short trip to the Napa Valley could turn into some kind of Voltairean adventure, going on and on, encounters with the hurt, the wise, and the foolish. And what was wrong with her, herself, Barbara Lavette, that here she was at sixty years and supposedly a woman of experience and insight, yet she had never really tried to comprehend this dark, tumultuous woman her son had married? The rich and the poor, always the rich and the poor, something she had wrestled with all her life, the difference being so basic and so deep, like all the apparently unalterable differences this world presented, black and white, Chicano and Anglo.

Sometime around nineteen twenty or nineteen twenty-one, Carla’s father, Cándido Truaz, had come to work at Higate Winery, to become foreman, to have Jake Levy build him a house on the property. Carla had been born there on the grounds of Higate, had grown to womanhood there, had played as a child with the children of the Levys and Lavettes in a kind of tangled relationship that she as a child never really understood, except that she did come to realize that the brown-skinned were the disinherited and the white-skinned were the inheritors.

God, help me; Barbara pleaded the thought. Nothing was worse than to face one’s own inadequacy and insensitivity. It was too much of being Barbara Lavette. If age did nothing else, it sometimes brought along with the wrinkles a kind of insight.

She sighed and said, “We’re almost there, so I imagine we’ll have no more adventures. But what shall we tell them about the clothes? We look like we’ve been through a battle.”

“So we shall tell them about the battle,” Sam said.

“I wore my best dress,” Carla said, mournfully.

“Clothes don’t matter. The dress can be cleaned and they have plenty of clothes there.” Then she said to Carla, softly, “Forgive me, please.”

“For what?”

“Just forgive me.”

Sam listened in dubious silence. Emotional outflowing disturbed him. It gave him a feeling of being naked in a bad dream.

They had done this up brown, and peach and white, which were the colors of the enormous tent they had raised. This was to be only the family to celebrate Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, but it was the family in the Western, not in the Eastern sense. A California family, settled there in the last hundred years, was limited; and with this knowledge of limitation and the sense of awayness and loneliness that prevailed before the coming of easy air transport and cheap long-distance telephoning, a family tended to cling to the most fragile relationships. A new family emerged because the Pacific Ocean, only a few miles away, made a barrier to Westward wandering, and in this case, the big old winery was a magnet of sorts. It was ruled over by Clair Harvey Levy, Jake’s widow, and operationally it was guided by Adam Levy, Jake’s son. Eloise was his wife. Freddie Lavette was Eloise’s son from her first marriage, to Thomas Lavette, and Freddie and his half brother, Joshua, were totally dedicated to the growing of grapes and the making of wine. Adam’s brother, also Joshua, had been killed in the Pacific during World War II, and the third child of Jake and Clair, Sally Levy, had married Barbara’s half brother, Joseph Lavette. It went on from there, and Barbara could remember trying to explain the family quilt to Boyd. He never quite got it all straight and sorted out. When Sally’s daughter, May Ling, one-quarter Chinese, married Freddie Lavette, no one could comprehend what their previous blood relationship had been. Along the way, other families had interacted and interconnected: the Cassalas, who were a kind of royal Italian clan such as existed only in San Francisco during the first half of the century, and the Devrons, who owned the better part of downtown Los Angeles.

Along with these, there was the Truaz family, Carla’s family, who lived on the place, big, barrel-chested Cándido, his wife, two kids besides Carla; and there were also various and sundry grandchildren and half a dozen other kids whom Barbara could not properly place, and, in the brash, bright pavilion, a five-piece mariachi band. The cooking was Mexican, under the supervision of Cándido’s wife, Martha: huge pots of chile beans, stacks of tortillas, wide bowls of mole, succulent chicken immersed in a wonderful bitter chocolate sauce, saffron rice mixed with shrimp, red snapper Vera Cruz, and wine, red wine, which was in tribute to old Jake Levy, who had never considered white wine to be a drink fit for a grown man.

And Barbara, seeing all this, said to herself, ruefully, And I would have missed this and sulked. How awful that would have been.

They loved her, and such expressions of love filled her with guilt, something she had puzzled over all her life.

In Eloise’s bedroom, dressed in a clean skirt and blouse that Eloise had provided, Barbara confessed the small agony of being kissed and embraced by so many people.

“Yes, I always feel that way — filled with guilt,” Eloise said.

“Do you know why?”

“No, not really. Do you, Barbara?”

“Sort of. You possess deep down the notion of being undeserving of love — or undeserving of anything good, one might say, and then you receive it and it’s a mistake, like a package being delivered to the wrong person. I told you about that dreadful accident. The children weren’t hurt badly, but the driver of the school bus was killed, and less than a half hour later, Sam was passing around a champagne bottle, and all I could think of was the poor broken body of the man as the firemen dragged him out of the bus, and I was sick with guilt. But why? One moment I say it’s the sense of being undeserving of love, and then that doesn’t explain it—”

“My parents loved me too much,” Eloise said. “I was a pretty little doll — a precious thing, I suppose they felt, but not a person. But today, you and Carla and Sam saved those children’s lives. I’ve never seen Carla like that. It did something to her.”

“Yes — to all of us.”

“The skirt is perfect on you,” Eloise said, and then she sat down and began to cry. Her husband, Adam, knocked, opened the door and waited, his hand on the knob. He was a tall, slender man, with a pleasant freckled face, sunburned arms and orange hair turning white. He stood in the doorway watching his wife for a long moment, and then said, more harshly than Barbara had ever heard him speak to Eloise before, “It’s got to stop! The boy is alive and well, and I will not live out my life with a self-pitying bundle of tears.”

Surprisingly, at least to Barbara, Eloise snapped, “I am not self-pitying, Adam! I won’t have you talk to me like that!”

Adam started to speak — and swallowed his words. He was nervous, distraught.

“In front of Barbara,” Eloise said, unhappily.

“I’m sorry.” He went to Eloise, but she retreated into herself, her head bent. He looked at Barbara helplessly.

“She’ll be all right,” Barbara said. “Just leave us together, Adam. Please.”

“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not myself either. God Almighty,” he said to Eloise, “you know how much I love you! We have more damn blessings than ninety-nine percent of the people on this earth!” And with this, he walked out, slamming the door behind him.

Barbara handed Eloise a box of tissues. “We have this in common,” Barbara said. “We’re both of us the easiest cry on the Coast. Tears frighten men. It’s our old, old weapon, and some men go into an absolute panic with it. Boyd did — just went to pieces — and it appears that your Adam disintegrates just as easily.”

“And I don’t cry that much. I was so strong all through this agony of Joshua’s. Even when I learned that they’d amputated his leg, I managed. I did manage. But two weeks ago, he got his permanent prosthesis, and somehow that — I don’t know. It did something to me —”

“I can understand that,” Barbara said.

“He became so angry, Joshua did. He was never really against that filthy war. You know, he wouldn’t even discuss Vietnam. Oh, he had one awful fight with Freddie, but then when Freddie went to jail for nine months as a conscientious objector, Joshua didn’t have a word to say against him. He was in boot camp with the marines then. He just said, His way and my way — they don’t mix. But since he came back, his hatred of the war and the government and Johnson — he becomes livid if anyone mentions Johnson. To him, it was Johnson’s war. I’ve never seen anyone change like that —”

“But people do.”

“I know. He had to spend those months in the hospital, and that was torment time, but I thought it was easing up. He said to Freddie that he’d never sleep with a girl again,” woefully. “Can you imagine, Barbara, that no woman should ever look at his wound? But I thought that would change. I still do, but when this prosthesis was fitted, he just withdrew into himself, and it’s been awful. And then Freddie gets the notion of making this huge dance card — you know Freddie adores you — and everyone who wants to dance with you signs it. Josh wouldn’t. I know I cry too much.”

Barbara found Joshua sitting on a bench outside the old stone aging building, one leg bent, the leg with the prosthesis stretched out in front of him. She had seen him in the hospital, but this was the first time she had seen him since his release and return to Higate. He had changed a great deal from the chubby, cheerful boy she remembered in years past. He was bone-lean, and his face was full of sharp edges and angry knots. He had the same pale blue eyes as her son, Sam; cold eyes. As Barbara approached him, he began to work his way to his feet. She accepted this, feeling that if she told him not to rise, it would have been taken as a direct insult.

“Aunt Barbara.”

She was actually Freddie’s aunt, but since Freddie was his half brother, he had always called her that. He kissed her cheek, almost absently. Barbara remained silent, and finally Joshua said, “I’m glad to see you.”

“Yes, we have something in common,” Barbara said flatly. “We lost part of ourselves. You lost a leg. I lost the man I loved better than I ever loved another. He was a part of me, and I lost him. I lost the right to live without endless loneliness. I lost the hope of a warm and decent old age in whatever time I have left. I lost the joy of sleeping with him, yes, of having intercourse with him, which I still need and want; of feeling his good protective warmth. All that — not with fake glory, but with the failure of his poor sick heart.” With that, she turned and began to walk away.

She had taken no more than three or four steps before he called after her, “Aunt Barbara!”

She turned and faced him.

“What in hell do you want of me?”

“I want to dance with you.”

“What!”

“Exactly. It’s my birthday. That’s what that big striped tent and all the rest is about over there, and you can hear the music and you can smell the chile beans even down here where you’re hiding, and Freddie, I hear, made a dance card, and I want you on it.”

“I can’t dance!”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. Look at me.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

He stared at her in astonishment, and then a long silence, the two of them staring at each other, and then Barbara smiled and then he smiled.

“Do you know what I’ll look like, trying to dance?”

“Who cares?”

“I’ll probably fall flat on my face.”

“I’ll pick you up. Now take my arm and escort me back to the party.”

Clair Levy, Jake’s widow, talked Barbara into staying overnight, and now with the party over and the wine drunk and the food eaten, Clair and Barbara sat in the kitchen of the old stone house that had been Clair’s home ever since she and Jake had bought the winery. They were drinking tea and eating ham sandwiches that Clair had put together, neither of them having tasted much food during the course of the party.

“Good party?” Clair asked. Clair was seventy-four years old; her hair, once a marvelous burnished copper color, had turned white, and a lifetime on the farm — this winery being essentially a farm — had turned the skin of her face leathery and wrinkled. Withal, she was a handsome woman, tall, erect when she stood, a woman who worked all day with satisfaction and vigor. Barbara noticed her hands, splotched not with what they called liver spots, but with freckles. Clair ignored the modern warning against women with fair skin exposing themselves to the sun. “I love the warm sun,” she would say. “And I’m old. Nothing will change that.” But the hands were beautiful, strong, long-fingered.

“Oh, splendid,” Barbara assured her. “But such a great, important affair. I am so overwhelmed. It must have cost a fortune.”

“We needed a party. Money — oh, for heaven’s sake, Barbara, I’m past giving two damns for money. With the new bottling plant in Vallejo, the winery’s making more than enough money. But we needed a party. Oh, in any case, I wouldn’t have missed your birthday. It’s seven months since Boyd passed away. You needed something to shake you up.”

“I haven’t started to open the presents. Somehow, you reach an age when presents don’t mean very much.”

“You’re not at that age. Not to me. I’m fourteen years older than you — and old? I suppose so. I began to be old when Jake died.”

“Do you get over being lonely?” Barbara wondered.

“I’m not sure. Of course, I’m lucky. Here at the winery, there are the children and the grandchildren, and I suppose that makes me luckier than ninety percent of the old women in this country. We’re a rotten society on that account. We don’t care for the old; we don’t want them.”

“No, we’re not very civilized about that.”

“Or about much else,” Clair said. “Jake once said an odd thing about that — when he turned seventy. He said that old age is a country you never visit until you come to settle there. Ah, well, I’m not sure I’d want to be younger. I’d go looking for a man like Jake, and I’d never find one. Did I ever tell you how I met him?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Barbara said.

“I was twelve, one of those impossibly homely, skinny kids. I was already five six, bone-skinny, long legs, freckled everywhere the sun touched me, and hopelessly in love with your father, with old Dan Lavette. He was in the process of buying a big old ship from a man called Swenson —”

“The Oregon Queen!”

“Exactly. Pop and I lived on the ship, which was tied up at the old pier; caretakers — Pop, I mean, when he wasn’t drunk, my beautiful, wonderful little-boy father. He captained the last clipper ship to berth in San Francisco. The ship stayed there and rotted until they broke it up, and Pop stayed drunk, on and off, and he had this crummy job of caretaker. Then your daddy brought your mother to see the ship before he bought it, and I saw this glorious, sexy beauty, Jean Lavette, the toast of the town, and it broke my heart. Absolutely.”

“I’m so sorry,” Barbara said.

“No need. Jake caught me on the rebound. He was fourteen.”

“And my daddy bought the ship, didn’t he?” Barbara asked. “Of course, that was the Oregon Queen. But what happened to your father?”

“You wouldn’t remember. You were just in the process of being born. But no one ever told you?”

“No one, I’m afraid.”

“Well, you know, Jake’s father, Mark Levy, and your daddy were partners then. More like brothers. By the time World War One started, they had a whole fleet of ships. Your father got Pop cleaned up and he stayed sober and then your father made Jack Harvey a captain of one of their cargo ships. I guess Captain Jack Harvey was as happy as any man on earth, but it didn’t last. A German U-boat torpedoed him off the British coast, and the ship went down with all hands.” She dried her eyes with her napkin. “Why am I crying? That was almost sixty years ago.”

“No, no, Clair, dear. Time is an illusion. I think of Bernie. Twenty-six years ago, and the tears are there.”

Bernie was her first husband, Sam’s father, who had died in Israel in 1948.

“And then I think of Boyd, and at night I reach out to touch him and he isn’t there.”

Clair said nothing. Barbara rose and said, “I’m a ninny — this kind of talk. I think I’ll go outside and walk a bit. Will you come, Clair?”

Clair shook her head. “Take a sweater. The nights are cold now. There’s a whole rack of them in the hall. Just take anything.”

Outside, wrapped in a heavy sweater, a sweater sweet with the old smell of a man, Barbara stood still and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. It was cold, with just enough wind to bring her the good smell of hot mesquite out of the burned-down barbecue pits. She looked up and remembered the California sky that she had not seen for so long, the great mantle of twinkling points of light, the endless, unlimited universe that terrified her so when she thought about it. But tonight, she watched it without thought or reflection on anything except an acknowledgment of its cold beauty.

She could still make out the big striped pavilion that Clair had put up for a proper birthday party. What a strange, antique habit it was for man to celebrate each milestone on the road that brought him and all his peers closer and closer to the final end! What else in the darkness? She had given up the contemplation of the heavens, shivering at things beyond thought. She had said to herself, after Boyd died, that she would not fear what he had already passed through, but that did not turn out to be the case. She stared into the dark, her eyes dropping from the hills and the dappled sky. Even the scent of the dying barbecue fires did not make the air less sweet.

Voices came out of the dark on the way to the parking place. Four figures and Freddie’s voice, asking, “Is that you, Aunt Barbara?”

Freddie and May Ling, Freddie’s slender, dark-haired wife, and with them Sam and Carla; they paused for her to join them.

“What on earth are you doing out here in the cold?” Sam asked.

“Contemplating the universe, I suppose. Then it became too chilly. Not the air. The universe.”

“You know, I never kissed you today,” Freddie said. “Everyone else did. Hands down, the best-looking woman in the place. I think you were avoiding me.”

“Freddie!”

“Can I kiss you now?”

“If you wish.”

“Come with us,” Carla said impulsively. “We’re driving down to Vince’s Place in Napa. Nothing very important. We’ll have a few beers and listen to some good rock.”

“Thank you, darling,” Barbara said. “But it’s been a long day, and I’m ready for bed. Anyway, I don’t love rock.”

“We’re staying with Freddie,” Sam said. “We’ll take you back to the city tomorrow, Mother. Unless you want to stay here?”

“No, I’ll go back with you.”

They went off into the night, their figures becoming more and more shadowy and then engulfed by the darkness. There was a system of floodlights all through the winery, but there was no night shift working, and the velvet darkness, punctured by a lit window here and there in the houses, spread over most of the place.

Barbara heard the cough of a car starting, and then yellow headlights swept out of the winery’s big parking place. She followed the progress of the car down the winery’s driveway onto the main road. Then she went back into the house to bed.

In the car, driving south toward Napa, May Ling said suddenly, “I don’t want to go to Vince’s Place. I want to talk. You can’t talk with that rock blaring at you. You don’t even hear yourself think.”

“You can listen,” Freddie said.

“I don’t want to listen. I want to talk. I want to talk about that whole little act you put on with Aunt Barbara.”

“Act! What in hell are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. That great big flirtation scene you just put on with Aunt Barbara. It’s just so charming. Do you really think it makes her feel good or gives you points to tell her she’s the most beautiful woman in the party? She’s old enough to be your grandmother.”

“Oh, come on, come on,” Sam said, pulling the car over onto the shoulder of the road. “This is the damn dumbest subject for a fight that I ever heard of. You’re talking like Freddie was born yesterday, or as if you met him last week. He’s constitutionally unable to avoid coming on to every woman he faces. I’ve seen him do the same thing with his own mother. It’s not his fault. It’s just a lovely aberration.”

“Oh, great!” Freddie yelled. “Just great!”

“I’m not putting you down. I wish I were that way.”

“You don’t fight about the things you fight about,” Carla said.

“The voice of wisdom.”

“She’s right,” May Ling said. “We’re coming apart at the seams, and it gets worse.”

“We’ve been coming apart at the seams since the day we got married,” Carla said. “We need a new marriage ceremony — love and cherish for at least three weeks.”

“That doesn’t help,” Sam said.

“Nothing helps, but don’t make me the bad guy. She wants a divorce,” Freddie said.

“What!” Carla had never thought in terms of divorce. You fought, you screamed, you ripped each other’s flesh, and then you fell into bed and made love and wept and made love again, and it was just about as great as it could be. You didn’t talk about divorce.

“This is insane and unreal,” Sam said. “You’re going to tell me that May Ling wants a divorce?”

“That’s right.”

“Is there a reason?” Sam asked. “Aside from the fact that maybe you hate each other.”

“I don’t hate him, I love him.”

“You hate her?”

“Don’t be a fucken idiot, Sam.”

“Then why?”

“You know why,” May Ling said. “We’re first cousins. You saw my baby, Sam. I’ll never go through that again. He wants children — then let him find someone else. I’ll never have a child again. I won’t bring monsters into this world.”

“Your baby was an encephalitic. Such babies die in a few hours or a few days. It was not a monster. There are no monsters. It was a poor sick child, and it happened because you were a statistic. I told you that. It has nothing to do with genetics — absolutely nothing — and furthermore, you and Freddie are not first cousins. For you to be first cousins, your father would have to be Mother’s whole brother. He’s a half brother. And the likelihood is that there’s nothing wrong with the kids of first cousins, anyway. Thousands of them are born healthy and normal. It’s been going on since the human race started.”

“You don’t have to bear the baby,” May Ling said, stubbornly.

“I’m not divorcing you,” Freddie said. “Just get that through your head. I’m not divorcing you.”

Carla said, “Let’s go to Vince’s Place and get drunk and listen to rock and get real spacey and stop all this stupid talk that gets nowhere; except Sam has to drive, and Freddie, if you don’t know how to get a woman laid back and cool, you ought to go take lessons somewhere. Except that all you dumb Anglos are all tied up in knots.”

“Amen,” Sam said, starting the motor, turning on his lights. “It’s beautiful when you put me in the driver’s seat, and everyone gets potted except Sammy.”

“No one gets potted,” May Ling said. “It’s all talk.”

“Ah, drunk with the sound of my own words,” Freddie said. “Why don’t we stop trying to be clever, hey?” He turned to his wife.

“Yes?”

“Will you dance with me?”

After a long moment, dolefully, “I guess so.”

“Bless your heart. No more fights. We just dance until we drop.”

It would have spoiled their pleasure if she had gone with them. They would have put a good face on it, but everything would have been properly directed and controlled. What an enormous gap between the generations! Yet a time comes — thinking that there was no gap between herself and Clair. Or was there?

The room had been Sally’s, and when she had married Barbara’s brother, Clair had hardly changed the room at all. Some of Sally’s books were still there, and after Barbara had showered and used the hair dryer, she found a copy of Pride and Prejudice and crawled into bed with it. She had always meant to read it and had never found the right moment to begin. The same was true of Crime and Punishment. There, too, she had pledged a reading and put it off through all the years. But between Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen, the gap was very wide, and while she had only a literary interest in Crime and Punishment, she had often thought of herself as Jane Austen. These were her own private, foolish thoughts — fantasies, if you will — to be shared with no living person, not even Boyd, who certainly would not have laughed at her. She possessed a tiny miniature of Jane Austen, and though only a person of imagination could discover a likeness between Barbara Lavette and Jane Austen, Barbara was certainly not lacking in imagination.

Oddly enough, she had read three of Jane Austen’s books and still missed Pride and Prejudice, which was supposedly the best of them. The first acquaintance was made not at her old college, Sarah Lawrence, but in prison, where she had found Northanger Abbey in the prison library. Prison. That was an eternity ago and utterly impossible. It had happened, but it remained impossible that for her refusing to name a group of people who had given her money to buy medicine for a Quaker hospital in the south of France, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had sent her to prison for six months — all impossible, all in a time that had never existed. It was the time that Lillian Hellman had so aptly named “scoundrel time,” a time of national debasement, without honor or decency. She had met Lillian Hellman on one of her trips to New York, and the cold, almost arrogant stare made a wall around a woman whom Barbara admired so. Never had Barbara been able to erect walls, and her total openness had again and again caused her pain and humiliation. Yet, thinking about it now, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, filled with remembrance, she found no regrets for her openness. She could understand the savage scarring that had driven Hellman into herself. Those who survive have courage, and Barbara had come to believe that courage, real courage that exists without killing or violence, is the best part of the human soul.

Not that she was at all certain that a human soul existed. In the immediate hours and days after the death of Boyd, her friend and protector and lover, she had tried desperately to believe that some part of him survived, that she might touch him again, not with her hands but with some part of her mind or soul, with some vibration, perhaps; but such attempts at a faith she had never dealt with always failed, and her Episcopal instruction at Grace Cathedral, high on the hill in San Francisco, was too long ago, too forgotten and interwoven with the myths of childhood. How she envied religious people who could believe!

Thoughts of prison once more. Pride and Prejudice remained unopened. Memories of trial and imprisonment took over. Yet they had given her Boyd — attorney at law. That was how she had met him. He had fallen in love with her. He was the knight in white armor who would defend her in the court, and no prison gate would ever open for her. She smiled at the thought of Boyd, stocky, solid, his sandy hair out in a brush — he could be so fierce and determined — and that way, relaxed suddenly, she closed her eyes and slept.

So ended the day of her sixtieth birthday.