The Immigrant’s Daughter Read Free

help!”
    Outside the bus, someone screamed in pain. Barbara ran about fifty feet before she laid the child down off the road and then she herded children away from the accident. Carla climbed out of the bus with another child in her arms, and then Sam handed still another bleeding child to Barbara.
    A car stopped and the driver came running to help. A black man. He plunged into the burning bus without a word. He came out with a child in his arms, followed by Sam, who carried another child.
    â€œTwo more inside.” He handed the child to Carla. Barbara was back in the bus. One of two hurt little boys could walk. The other screamed in agony as Barbara tried to pull him out from where he was wedged under a seat.
    â€œLet me,” the black man said.
    Together they managed to get him loose. Barbara half started toward the driver. Her eyes were burning from the smoke.
    â€œMother, get out of there!” Sam yelled. “The driver’s dead!”
    Thick smoke as she felt her way to the exit door. Sam and Carla fairly plucked her out of the bus, both of them shouting, “Run! Run!”
    The bus exploded in a burst of flame as they reached the place where the children were huddled together, and bits of glass and burning bus rained on them. The children were screaming. Barbara tried to soothe them. None of the children was badly injured; cuts and bruises. The child Barbara had first carried out of the bus was conscious now. Sam ran to the pickup truck, where the driver, screaming with pain, resisted efforts to free him. Then the driver fainted. Carla and Sam worked together, smoothly and expertly. The black man threw off his jacket, pulled off his shirt, and tore it into strips. Bandages to hold on their dressings. It took her back forty years to that infamous Bloody Thursday, when the longshoremen on the San Francisco waterfront had clashed with the police and when she had helped man a first-aid station all through the hot and bloody morning. Different but the same, somehow, because, as it came to her in a flash, time is an illusion in any case, and here she was on her knees, holding a weeping, bleeding child to her breast while she wept with her own memories.
    Then there were ambulances and fire engines and police cars and tow trucks. The injured truck driver and the children were placed in the ambulances. The police took statements, informed Sam that they would be called upon to attend an inquiry and an inquest, and finally left them alone on the roadside.
    The wreckage was dragged away, and the four people, bloodstained from head to foot, were left alone with their two cars.
    The black man, in his undershirt but maintaining dignity, introduced himself. “Harvey Lemwax.”
    â€œNo,” Carla said. “Can’t be. You’re not Harvey Lemwax. Things like that don’t happen.”
    â€œOh, absolutely. Harvey Lemwax.”
    Sam introduced the group. “This is my wife, Carla, my mother, Barbara Lavette. Myself, Dr. Sam Cohen. From Carla’s reaction, I realize I should be ashamed not to recognize you. I apologize. Unfortunately, most doctors know little beyond their own medicine.”
    â€œDon’t apologize, please.”
    â€œThen tell us.”
    â€œWell — I play trumpet —”
    Barbara’s knowledge of trumpet players was nonexistent, but on the other hand, Harvey Lemwax gave no indication of ever having heard of Barbara Lavette. Of course, she was by no means the best-known writer in the United States, but neither was she unknown. She had occupied a place in Who’s Who for the past thirty years, and if her books were not widely enough read, certainly her past had elicited enough nonliterary headlines for her to feel less than apologetic.
    â€œI’m sure you’re superb at it,” Barbara said. “If you do it the way you stormed into that smoking bus, I take my hat off to you.”
    â€œSuperb is hardly the word,” Carla