The Legacy Read Online Free PDF

incredible that a woman as devoted to her husband as Jean Lavette had been to Dan Lavette should show no emotion, or perhaps — as he preferred to think — be capable of concealing what emotion she felt. On the other hand, he knew that in some cases, a death like this was so traumatic that the mind rejected it, which meant that in due time he would have to deal with violent hysteria.
    However, neither supposition was correct. Jean Lavette had spent a lifetime in perfecting a mask to conceal her emotions and fears, and for the past ten years, ever since her husband had his first heart attack, she had envisioned the possibility of his death. Being a highly emotional and imaginative woman, she had experienced his death not once but a thousand times. He was the only man she had ever loved, the only man she had opened herself to, the only man who had brought her great happiness and great misery. For almost half a century they had loved, fought, clawed at each other, torn each other’s flesh and soul, divorced, married again to others, and then had finally come together because what had been for them at the very beginning still remained. Now Dan was dead and what she had imagined again and again had come to pass. She had known it would come.
    After Dr. Kellman had left the room. Jean stood silently and motionless at the foot of the bed, looking at the sheeted object that had been her husband. Then she walked around the bed and uncovered Dan’s face. “I’ll be long enough without seeing you, Danny,” she said aloud, “ever again.” His face was burned brown from their long hours on the boat in the bay, the white, curly hair a stark contrast. There was no memory of pain in his face.
    â€œPoor Danny,” she whispered, “poor Jean. What a stinking mess life is!”
    She caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing-table mirror, and she realized what she had been unconscious of until this moment, that she was weeping. The tears must have begun the moment Kellman left the room. Until then, she had not cried. She was not a woman given to tears, and in her whole life she could count the times when she had wept, and now she could not stop. She dropped down onto the bed, running her hand down the dead man’s leg, grasping his calf. Sobbing, “Oh, Danny, Danny, you bastard. What will I do now? What will I do? I can’t stick it alone. I simply can’t. I don’t know how anymore.”
    Before her marriage to Bernie Cohen, Barbara had written her books and articles under her maiden name, Barbara Lavette. After her husband died, as well as during his lifetime with her, she continued to write under her maiden name, and frequently, simply to avoid confusion, not because the name Cohen bothered her in any way, she used the name of Lavette. Or so she told herself, for it was in the nature of Barbara not to place any great faith in her subjective verities, and in all truth she was never wholly comfortable with the name Cohen, no matter how assiduously she sought for and rejected any trace of anti-Semitism in her character. Her son, Samuel, was reasonably comfortable with the name of Cohen until, almost twelve, he was sent to Roxten Academy in Connecticut.
    Until a month before he left, Barbara had never heard of Roxten Academy, nor had she entertained any notion of sending Sam away to an Eastern school. For one thing, a great deal of her life revolved around her son — too much, as Jean frequently pointed out to her. Barbara had raised him herself, indifferent to all urging from her mother and others that she marry again, and, according to Jean, had spoiled him thoroughly. Barbara felt otherwise; to love was not to spoil; and she felt no unhappiness over the sensitivity and gentleness of her son. He was tall and slender, a head of curly sandy hair, a prominent nose, thin and hawklike, pale blue eyes, and a good mouth and a firm chin. If he had no father — dead in the second