The Immigrant’s Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

each other, and then Barbara smiled and then he smiled.
    â€œDo you know what I’ll look like, trying to dance?”
    â€œWho cares?”
    â€œI’ll probably fall flat on my face.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œGood 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.
    â€œOh, splendid,” Barbara assured her. “But such a great, important affair. I am so overwhelmed. It must have cost a fortune.”
    â€œWe 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.”
    â€œI haven’t started to open the presents. Somehow, you reach an age when presents don’t mean very much.”
    â€œYou’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.”
    â€œDo you get over being lonely?” Barbara wondered.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œNo, we’re not very civilized about that.”
    â€œOr 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?”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so,” Barbara said.
    â€œI 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 —”
    â€œ The Oregon Queen! ”
    â€œExactly. 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