The Will

by Harvey Swados

  “You don’t sound like a hermit,” Ralph said rather lamely. “Not when you talk like that.”

  “But I never think of myself as being one. I was never thwarted in love, I never did anything to make me hide from the police, or even from the draft. And I haven’t lost interest in the world.”

  “Then I don’t get it.”

  “It’s more that I’ve got too much interest in the world. It frightens me. What can I do about all the horrible things that are happening? People making terror weapons and holes to hide in? I’m frightened for myself, as I am for everybody. Because here I am, strong as an ox, and what can I do?”

  “You make a good cup of coffee.”

  “No, Ralph, I don’t understand myself, I don’t deny it. I try to study science, but it seems to me as though the more scientists learn, the less they can tell us about ourselves. And where else can I find out about myself? To say nothing of the world, which may not even be here one of these days.”

  “You could find out more about yourself by living your own life, instead of hiding from it.”

  “I hear that on the radio all the time.” Ray glanced at him shrewdly. “Has it helped you? If it hasn’t done anything for other people, why should it for me?”

  But then an alien noise intruded from outside, and in an instant Ray’s face crumpled with fear. The sound, at first like an old pig rooting and squealing, was in reality the heavy squeak and crunch of rubber packing into snow, releasing it, flinging it away. Ralph was almost pleased to see his younger brother’s eyes go wide, humbled and supplicant.

  “Don’t worry, Ray,” he said. “It’s just a car.”

  Ray put down his coffee quickly. “Of course. It must be Dr. Stark again. It’s nearly time.” He tagged after Ralph to the front hall, where Ralph put down his coffee cup and picked up his coat from the tied bundles of newspapers on which Ray had draped it. “I’m sorry about your having to be the only one to represent us. At least if Mel were here …”

  “I’ll make out somehow. I just worry about one thing. If no one knows you’re still here but the Starks and Mama’s cousins, then people must think this house is empty, now that Uncle Max and Papa are gone. With you up in the attic, what’s to prevent prowlers or neighborhood kids from trying to break in?”

  “We’ve never once had a burglar, in all the years that the junk has been piling up here. Who wants it? Anyway, you’ve forgotten Sasha.”

  The name penetrated Ralph’s being as if borne by some strange arrow released many years earlier, from a sprung bow that no longer even existed, but had once served to send this cisely to pierce him with its wounding reminder of the vivid humanity, the coarse and comic vitality of Sasha’s owner, Max Land. If before he had thought that he could wipe his uncle from his mind as though the man had never existed, he now knew that effort to be vain.

  Sasha! It was as if Ray had suddenly, gratuitously, uttered the forgotten name of the girl whom Ralph had kissed, trembling, under a damp lilac bush, at the age of fourteen, and from whom he had learned the dazzling possibilities of adult pleasure; she too would remain with him and in him until he drew his last breath; only by suicide could he deny her.

  And then, more shocking still, the sounding of the two soft syllables had caused Sasha to materialize from that dark nameless realm where he had lain concealed these ten years and more. As Ralph stared, his uncle’s ancient police dog, gone gray about the muzzle, his once glittering coat turned stiff and patchy, tottered silently from the gloomiest fastnesses of the dining room (now crammed with dental equipment and porch furniture, spiders’ webs sparkling delicately between rusting dental drills and cracked, motionless gliders) to come to rest, a string of drool dangling from his chops, at the satin pants leg of the final resident.

  Ralph fell to his knees before the dog. “Sasha,” he whispered, and met the mucid gaze of the old hound. One eye was thickly filmed with the silver-gray cataract that was already forming over the other. His breath had gone bad. But it was the same beast, Uncle Max’s pet and companion of a thousand rent-collecting expeditions through the slums, his protector against those who would make an attempt on the solitary fortress and its priceless collection of refuse. The old dog muttered, and bent its silvered head humbly to receive Ralph’s brief caress.

  “You see,” Ray murmured. “I wasn’t the only one to recognize you. Believe me, he still barks at strangers. And they fear him. They don’t know that he spends all day sleeping on a porch rocker in the dining room.”

  Ralph arose and dusted off his knees. Fighting to regain his composure, he calculated aloud, “Sasha must be almost fifteen.”

  “Do you remember how Uncle Max trained him to heel, when he was just a pup? And how Mel used to tease him and say that he was raising an obedient Nazi hound?” Then, reversing his field, Ray said soberly, “But I won’t keep you any longer. If you don’t go out now, the doctor will come in, and it’s hard for an old man like him to get through the snow.”

  Quickly, Ray closed the door behind him. Thus evicted by the brother he had thought only moments earlier would cling to him, weeping, refusing to permit him to leave, Ralph stumbled in confusion through his own reversed footsteps back to the old doctor and the waiting automobile.

  If the funeral services were not unceremoniously swift, they were certainly businesslike. The man of God, a young intellectual obviously hired for the occasion, had not known Leo Land. He made that plain, protesting, though, that the pharmacist had been—if “a man of retiring ways”—of good repute and of refined intelligence, beloved by those few who had been privileged to know him. Thirteen people (Ralph counted carefully), including the hired hands and two strangers whose attendance had surely not been motivated by grief, listened politely as the hard-working young man concluded by calling attention to the sad coincidence of the two brothers’ proximate deaths, “a coincidence that may have been, like many events so labeled, inspired by divine kindness.”

  When the youthful orator had retired to enwrap himself in scarf, burberry, and galoshes for the cortege to the cemetery, everyone was invited tacitly to queue up for a final lingering farewell to the dummy who lay rigidly wrapped in satin and plastic, waiting only for the lid to be screwed into place.

  Ralph declined the invitation to view him proffered by a whispering usher, unctuous in gloves and striped trousers not unlike those of his brother. There were murmurs, but he turned firmly from them to Dr. Stark, who had been kindly trying to distract him in his own peculiar way with a meandering account of exotic burial rites, from the burning Ghats to Southern California.

  “Now what?” he asked of the old man. “Does everyone go out to the cemetery?”

  “Not me.” The doctor shook his head and blew his long nose, which was quite red at the wings, either from the weather or from a grief which he attempted to master with jocularity. “Duty calls elsewhere. I had planned on going on to say good-by to Leo, but there’s a primipara with a breech delivery, tricky business, which calls me to the hospital. That was one of the few matters on which your father and I were agreed: birth must have priority over death. I’m sure you agree too.”

  Startled by the unexpected desertion, Ralph could only nod. “I knew you when you were a little boy,” a withered woman with a trembling head and a terrible strawberry mark suddenly said to Ralph, with no provocation. She had him by the arm and was tugging at it gently, as if testing it to find out whether it was real. “I haven’t seen you in a long time, you’re working downtown or what?”

  “I don’t live here any more,” Ralph said, freeing his arm from her grip. “Thank you for coming.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” she replied at once, and was about to say more when the doctor interposed himself. With the conversation ruptured, she turned her attention to the casket.

  “I’ve often said to Marty,” Dr. Stark went on imperturbably, as if the branded old lady had done no more than to ask Ralph for the time, “that if he doesn’t have me cremated I’ll never forgive hi
m. Marty finds that corny, coming from an old atheist, but he gets the point. Now as for your own arrangements, I should like you to take my car to the cemetery.”

  Ralph started to protest, but the doctor persisted. “It will be more simple for me to take a cab to the hospital from here. There are several out front. And I’ve already spoken to Marty on the phone. His home isn’t too far from the cemetery, so he’ll meet you there, he simply couldn’t come in for the services. Then he’ll drive you back in my car.”

  “I couldn’t think of it.”

  “But you must. You see, you forgot your bags. They’re still in the back seat of my car.”

  Ralph felt himself growing red. Chattily, still attempting to distract him, the doctor launched into an explanation of the psychological mechanism involved in the forgetting of the luggage. While they prepared to leave the funeral parlor, he moved on from subconscious motivation to the pros and cons of Freudian translation of trunks, valises, and their delivery chutes into wombs, vaginas, and other female appurtenances. “Surely it seems obvious, at minimum,” the doctor croaked in his frog’s voice, “that you didn’t want to stay, that you wanted to be put back on the plane with your suitcases.”

  “I don’t think much of that kind of theorizing,” Ralph objected, even though he was pleased that the doctor should go to so much trouble to shield him from the other mourners. “My feelings would be obvious even if I hadn’t forgotten my bags in your car.” He could not refrain from adding, “In fact you forgot them too. Did you want me to leave town?”

  Dr. Stark replied foxily, “You fail to consider the possibility that my behavior was deliberately calculated. This way you can decide your future course of action for yourself. You can get on a plane after the interment, you know, and wash your hands of a very messy business. Marty and I will do our best to settle things up, and see if we can’t get Raymond into a nice quiet rest home.” Without giving Ralph a chance to reply to this, he tacked back to an earlier course. “I don’t mean to insist that you drive my car. If you prefer you can drive in one with the Kadin cousins.”

  Ralph glanced over the shoulder of the doctor, whom he was helping into his overcoat, to his mother’s two cousins, last remaining links to a common ancestry which meant less than nothing to anyone. The women, both safely past the change of life, both squat, heavy-cheeked and earringed, both heavily powdered and corseted into their black dresses and Persian lamb coats, both moving painfully and awkwardly, like barnyard fowl, bore no resemblance to his mother, who had been tall and rawboned and extremely shy. Why have they come, he wondered, they who never once came to the house after Mama’s death, they who had no regard for any of the Lands? Was this the same kind of “respect” for the insentient corpse (for whom they had had no use during his lifetime) that was so repugnant to Ray? Or was it that they sniffed an odor stronger than the discreet incense masking the mortuary stench of corruption: the smell of money, of that considerable fortune that the doctor had spoken of earlier in the day? In any case Ralph could not bear the thought of being cooped up with them in the velour depths of a rented limousine for the long ride to the burial ground.

  “No,” he said to Dr. Stark, “I’ll take you up on your kind offer.”

  The doctor unclipped his car keys from a large ring and handed them to Ralph, who observed before slipping them into his pocket that they were attached to a silver fob, which bore a caduceus on one side and a small reproduction of the Hippocratic Oath on the other.

  “A present from my son, a little reminder.” The doctor grinned. “I’ll just let the man in charge know that you’ll be driving my car. And Ralph …”

  “Yes?”

  “Good luck.” The doctor pressed his hand and was gone.

  Ralph had wanted to ask him about the Kadin cousins, but there had been no opportunity. Now they bore down upon him. But Ralph kept moving toward the door, forcing them to trot on their black suede platform shoes, like hobbled Chinese women.

  Cousin Lillian said, “What an occasion for a family reunion! Just the same, Ralph, you’re looking well, after so many years.”

  Cousin Henrietta said, “We should be grateful. Your father didn’t suffer like poor Max, that’s a blessing.”

  “How true,” Ralph replied. “I must go now. I’m sure I’ll see you later.”

  “We’ll be there!” they both cried ambiguously, waving their crumpled little handkerchiefs as Ralph shouldered a path to the doctor’s car.

  “You are first, sir, as the nearest of kin,” whispered a hired servitor whose glossy black shoes shone astonishingly against the slush of the entranceway. With caressing obsequiousness he delivered his daily commercial as though he were stroking Ralph’s back: “Stay quite close to the hearse and keep your dims on. Then you can go right through all the traffic lights.” What a treat!

  He had not reckoned that one day he would be jouncing along these raw snow-packed streets behind the body of his father. Nor that he would be leading the way to the family plot for the prosy interchangeable Kadin sisters, paid-up no doubt in their sites but far from ready to bury each other. They were, each of them, plump and overstuffed like tearoom luncheon tomatoes packed with creamed goodies, still running with the juices of life. It was more than familial piety that drew them out on a holiday along this dismal trail; it was more even than a grim satisfaction that they had outlasted both of the Land brothers and so earned that secret pride which culminates, after the deceased has been laid away, in heavy eating and semi-hysterical merriment. Ralph was convinced, cruising cautiously behind the hearse as though he had been commissioned to pick up the body if an unexpected jolt were to bounce it stiffly out of the hearse, that the Kadin women—and whatever other connections by marriage or common assumption were rolling along behind them—had sniffed the intoxicating scent of an inheritance, and were announcing by their presence that they stood ready to cut themselves in—particularly since the sons were alienated, dispersed, and undeserving. We’ll see about that, Ralph said to himself grimly; through Dr. Stark’s tinted rear-view mirror he could see not only the weak yellow head beams of his second cousins’ limousine, but also, right in the car, his own valises, resting on the cushioned upholstery and ready to be opened.

  The air was bitter, bitter at the graveside. In the declining sun the final obsequies were pronounced with as much haste as was seemly, to an accompaniment of feet discreetly stamping and hands wrung together. Ralph was quite numb, in body and in spirit. There was a moment when, staring with his eyes only half focused on the velvet cord pulls that were to lower the casket into the yawning hole and that glistened stiffly, half frozen, with speckled crystals of ice, Ralph felt that he was still high in the sky, on the morning airplane, staring down through the little window at this little hole as though it were an excavation for another monument to progress, an eighteen-lane bowling alley or a drive-in movie.

  But then someone pressed a handful of crumbled earth on him, he sprinkled it on the coffin that the Mackinawed grave-diggers had lowered into the hole, and the sudden reality, the actuality, beat against his bare temples so fiercely that he stumbled away to prevent himself from crying out.

  To the left of his father’s grave lay the heaped-up clumps of earth, still coarse and lumpy, but fortunately blanketed with recent snow, that marked out the six or seven feet of Max Land’s reluctant return to the dust. And to its right was the spot which he knew so well, the stone that marked his mother’s grave, together with a small urn in which he had once planted a pot of salmon-colored geraniums, her favorite flower, IN LOVING MEMORY OF JENNY KADIN LAND, 1906–1950, it read, SORELY MISSED BY … but the rest, the bottom line of engraving, was covered with snow.

  Ralph dropped to his knee and wiped away the snow that clung to the stone: HER LOVING HUSBAND AND SONS. What a laugh. But he was not laughing as he knelt in the drifted snow, any more than he had laughed when he knelt before Sasha, the half-blind servitor and guardian of husband and sons as well as cracked brother-in-law. These were
his connections now, an incontinent, cataracted hound whom no one could bear to put away, a bearded half-mad brother who had put himself away, and another who … He glanced up through a blur of icy tears (whether caused by the raw twilight wind off the lake or by the memory of the poor woman, neglected in life and forgotten in death, who lay beneath his hand, he did not know) at a pair of stout black galoshes, clipped about heavy tweed trousers, that had suddenly appeared beside him. What gave him pause was that one leg was shorter than the other, so that the left overshoe seemed to be standing on tiptoe, straining, aiding its owner to grasp for something just beyond his reach. Ralph raised his head and smiled.

  Yes, it was Martin Stark. Still with the clubfoot, which he would drag to his own grave one day, doctor father or no doctor father. But in all other respects he had changed, and much more than his father, who was simply the same cynical old man he had always been. Ralph remembered Martin best, not from the last few times they had met, perhaps ten years ago, but from long before that, maybe twenty years back, when he himself had been a wretched boy, ashamed of himself and his family, and Martin a college student, limping down to the Settlement House two blocks from Land Bros. Pharmacy on Saturday mornings to give violin lessons as his civic duty to children who were not only without money but also without talent. In those days Martin had seemed always tentative, always groping (perhaps because of the short left foot which, even after two operations, threw him always a bit forward and upward), his dark intent eyes absorbing everything from musical notations to the stingy faces of small boys, the fleshy bag of a nose which he had inherited from his father saving his otherwise delicate features from prettiness. Now his hair was quite gray above the ears, there were two grooves carved above the nose, and he looked every bit of forty; but more than that, his youthful air of wonder and uncertainty had completely disappeared, replaced by a mature self-assurance that sat strangely on him to one who remembered him as a youth.