Establishment Read Online Free PDF

playing with Sammy and you say to yourself, what a happy, darling man—and content. No, he’s not content. He’s eating out his heart.”
    â€œFor what? To be in Palestine?”
    â€œThat could be what he tells himself. But it’s not that. It’s to be free, to run after that macho image of a big, heroic man. Oh, maybe not. I don’t really know what tortures his soul. He once asked me why I kept publishing my books under the name of Barbara Lavette. Was I ashamed of the name of Cohen? Can you imagine? I tried to make him understand that a writer’s name is like a trademark, a record of the work she has done. But the plain fact is that we live on the money I earn. He’s so aware of that. Every cent the garage makes goes to paying off his loans and paying the mortgage fees, and he is damn well aware that I clean the house and cook the meals and take care of Sammy and do my own writing as well.”
    â€œAnd how you do it, I can’t for the life of me imagine.”
    â€œIt’s no great problem. I have enough time. But I know what it does to him. I’ve watched the marriage going to pieces for months, and it breaks my heart. He’s not cruel or nasty or vicious. He’s just dying inside himself, and it’s my fault because if I had had an ounce of common sense, I wouldn’t have married him. The funny part of it is that I love him so much, almost the way I love Sammy, the way you love a child. You don’t know a man until you’re in bed with him, and then you know him the way no one else does. And you know, if I plead with him enough I can stop him, I can keep him from going.”
    â€œWill you?”
    Tears welling into her eyes, Barbara shook her head. “No. That would do no good. That would only destroy both of us.”
    â€œWill he come back?”
    â€œIf he lives—yes. He’ll come back. He thinks he’s indestructible. In all those years of war, he was never wounded, never scratched. But that—”
    Sammy saw the tears and reacted to the tone of voice, and he began to cry. Jean took him in her arms, and Barbara went to the bathroom and washed her face. When she returned, Jean said, “There’s still the money. That must be one of the reasons they came to him. Where could he find a hundred and ten thousand dollars?”
    â€œI think,” Barbara said, “I think he’ll go to daddy. Would daddy give it to him?”
    Jean thought about it for a while. “He might. He just might. I’ve long ago given up trying to anticipate what Dan Lavette might do.”
    ***
    Newspapermen who interviewed Dan Lavette frequently described him as leonine. The term amused him. A man is inside himself, and unless he is an actor or a politician, he rarely knows the image he presents to the outside world. It might be said that he generally knows even less concerning his inner self. Long ago, before Dan Lavette’s Chinese wife, May Ling, died, he had moments when he felt himself and knew himself at least to some degree, and in those moments he had never seen himself as or considered himself a lionlike character. If anything, he had been as bewildered and confused as the next man. Yet it was quite true that now, in his sixtieth year, he might be described as leonine. He was a large man, six feet two inches in height, and over the past few years he had put on weight. His thick, curly hair had turned white, his face and neck had become heavier, and when he tightened his belt it creased the beginnings of a paunch.
    He had become a legend in the Bay Area. When columnists were at a loss for a subject, there was always gold to be mined out of Dan Lavette. They could go back to his boyhood, when he ran his crabbing boats out of Fisherman’s Wharf and fought the fish pirates with a double-barreled shotgun, or to the financial empire he had built with his partner, Mark Levy, before the Great Depression, or to his marriage to