Read Online The Legacy by Howard Fast - Free Book Online Page A

one of them for almost half a century. Or should I say laying?”
    â€œYou’re a nasty, dirty old man.”
    â€œYou can say that again. Look, Jean, why don’t you cut out all this crap. I don’t want to be cremated and have my ashes strewn over San Francisco Bay, if that’s what you’re thinking, and if you’re thinking about May Ling, she’s buried in Hawaii. I don’t want my carcass shipped to Hawaii, and I don’t want to go on with this damn-fool discussion. Yeah —” he paused, grinning at her to take the sting out of his words. “One request. No oration, no speeches, no memorial services, no eulogy. I don’t want some horse’s ass telling the world what a great man Dan Lavette was. To go off with a bundle of lies stinks. So that’s it.”
    Jean arranged it that way. The funeral service in the chapel was not open to the public or the press. The three families who had been intertwined through Dan Lavette’s life were there, the Lavettes, the Levys, and the Cassalas, all told about forty people, and with them another forty people who were close to Dan and Jean and Barbara. Dan’s son Thomas was there with his wife, Lucy, but they were alone in representing the vast industrial and financial empire that had its beginnings with Dan Lavette and Mark Levy, his partner. Dan Lavette would be remembered as one of the giants who built the city on the hills, but even in death he was not wholly respectable.
    The Seldon family plot was in San Mateo, and Barbara drove there in a car with her mother and young Sam. It was a long, silent, and sad trip, which Sam would remember for years to come. His grandmother held his hand much of the way. Once, she said to him, “Dan left the boat to you. That’s in his will. Did you know that, Sam?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t.”
    â€œWell, it will be yours now. Perhaps sometimes I could sail with you. Dan taught me — well, I’m not really good. You could teach me more.”
    â€œSure, grandma,” Sam said.
    In the cemetery, during the burial, Sam stood next to May Ling, his cousin, the daughter of Joe and Sally Lavette. Vaguely, Sam was aware of the strange story of his half-Chinese uncle: how Dan and Jean, his grandfather and grandmother, had been divorced in 1929, after which Dan married his mistress, May Ling, and how this same Chinese woman had been killed in Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack. He was hard put to comprehend the circumstances that had brought his grandparents together again, and although he had in the past discussed the whole thing with May Ling, neither of them could ever get it straight or make sense out of it. Now they stood side by side, Sam with his lightbrown hair and very pale blue eyes and May Ling, as tall as Sam, an attenuated Chinese doll, her straight black hair in bangs, her dark eyes filled with tears.
    â€œDo you believe,” Sam whispered to her, “that people go to heaven and hell?”
    She turned her tear-streaked face to Sam. She had always been enchanted with his eyes. They were his father’s eyes, wide-set and so pale as to be almost translucent. “Yes. Don’t you?”
    Sam was just becoming aware of the delightful protuberances that distinguish a woman’s body. His cousin, a year younger, was skinny and flat-chested. He looked at her thoughtfully before replying. “I don’t know. Where would gramps go?”
    â€œHeaven,” May Ling whispered.
    â€œWhat would he do there? He couldn’t sail and he couldn’t fish and he couldn’t smoke cigars and he couldn’t eat spaghetti.”
    â€œYou think you’re real smart, don’t you?”
    â€œA lot smarter than you.”
    Standing behind them, May Ling’s mother, Sally, whispered, “Be quiet, both of you, and listen to the pastor.”
    To herself, Barbara said, “All the men I love die. They all lie in the ground.”