The Immigrant’s Daughter Read Online Free PDF

heart. Absolutely.”
    â€œI’m so sorry,” Barbara said.
    â€œNo need. Jake caught me on the rebound. He was fourteen.”
    â€œAnd my daddy bought the ship, didn’t he?” Barbara asked. “Of course, that was the Oregon Queen . But what happened to your father?”
    â€œYou wouldn’t remember. You were just in the process of being born. But no one ever told you?”
    â€œNo one, I’m afraid.”
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œWhat on earth are you doing out here in the cold?” Sam asked.
    â€œContemplating the universe, I suppose. Then it became too chilly. Not the air. The universe.”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œFreddie!”
    â€œCan I kiss you now?”
    â€œIf you wish.”
    â€œCome 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.”
    â€œThank you, darling,” Barbara said. “But it’s been a long day, and I’m ready for bed. Anyway, I don’t love rock.”
    â€œWe’re staying with