Second Generation by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2014-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Reunion

Sitting in his office on Terminal Island, staring out of the window at the almost-completed hull of the third yacht he had built for film moguls who were searching for new ways to spend their money, Dan Lavette contemplated his fiftieth year. He had lived half a century, he had been rich and he had been poor, and once or twice he had experienced a sense of comprehending why he was alive. The moments of self-revelation, however, had been ephemeral; discontent was deeper and more lasting. His health was good; he had not put on weight since he had given up mackerel fishing to sit at the desk of an enterprise that was at best modestly profitable and at worst utterly senseless. His wife was the one woman who had ever managed to give him a sense of his own worth or importance, yet he had reached the point where he took her for granted, and lately he found himself thinking more and more often of Jean, who had divorced him ten years before.

He had fathered three children. There was his son Thomas, lost to him. Ten years had gone by since he had seen Thomas. The boy—well, not really a boy anymore, a man now—would be twenty-seven, or was it twenty-eight? Even the birthday had gone out of his mind. Who was he and what was he like, this stranger who was his first child by Jean? What a stupid, hopeless thing that was! The two of them building a wall that became thicker and more impenetrable year by year. May Ling had lectured him on that, on the difference between the hurt pride of a man and a boy, but his own pride or sensitivity or fear was something that eluded him and was beyond his own understanding. He had once tried to explain to May Ling how the mind of a hoodlum, a roughneck, a brawler—as he saw himself—worked, but he had bogged down in the contradictions of his attempt at self-analysis and had given up the effort to make her or himself understand.

By what miracle Barbara had come to love him, he did not know, but she did love him, and she was comfortable with him and May Ling. Since her return from Europe, she had spent most of her time in Los Angeles. They had put a bed in Feng Wo’s tiny study, and there, for the past three months, Barbara had been working on her book, spending most of the hours of each day toiling over the typewriter. She had been to San Francisco twice to see her mother, and from all Dan had been able to get from her, the visits were pleasant, although she refused to set foot in John Whittier’s house. She too was something of a stranger to Dan, for the girl who had gone away five years before was in many respects very different from the woman who returned. She was still direct and warm and open, and

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