The Will

by Harvey Swados

  She withdrew her arms and waited, in a suspension of motion and of thought. She stared down wordlessly at the top of his head and its coarse powerful mat of short-cropped wiry black hair, electric in its springiness.

  “I’ve made you my promise,” he muttered. Then he gathered strength. “Now I want you to make me one. I know why most women marry. I’ve nothing against children. But not yet. You must promise me that there will be none until we’ve gotten what we came for. Later you can have whatever you want, but we mustn’t trap ourselves.”

  Kitty placed her hands on his head and turned his face up to hers. “I promise,” she said. Her heart was still beating fast, but in a different rhythm; it was not the oath Ralph had exacted which unnerved her so much as it was the circumstances, both obvious and implicit, of the exaction.

  Ralph arose rapidly. “Then you must understand too,” he said, “that until we’re married you must stay here and I must stay with Raymond. I don’t dare …” He hesitated, then finished wryly, “And that’s the first of our troubles.”

  He walked to the door with his customary brusque swift stride. “I’ll pick you up first thing in the morning,” he said, and was gone.

  In the sudden silence, Kitty jumped up and flung a cushion at the door which had just closed silently on her lover. But it made no noise either, and she was alone with herself as she had not been since the buoyant hours of packing and leaving her job, preparing to descend the ladder held up to her window by her impetuous fiancé. The insensitive bastard! To bring her here and then to walk out, virtually to sneak out without a kiss or a caress, as if her very eagerness had brought to the surface all his latent stuffiness, reminding him of peeping hotel detectives and of his obsession, here in his home town, with shame.

  But even as she stooped to retrieve the pillow, she knew that she was wrong, she was unfair. If Ralph was too preoccupied with what people would think to be the perfect un-self-conscious lover, he was not a pig or a boor either. Surely the abruptness of his departure had been occasioned by his reluctance to leave—and by embarrassment at revealing that reluctance.

  Just the same, what was she getting into? Maybe Uncle Max and Raymond weren’t the only crazy ones in the Land family; what had Ralph’s mother really been like, or his father, not even cold in his grave? And for that matter, what was Ralph himself? What did he want so desperately, that he couldn’t even put a name to—Did he know? Or was he only dreaming dreams of dreams?

  The full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, to which she turned now, revealed her as slim, blond, sulking. A lie: she was none of these. Her body was fuller than it appeared in sweater and sheath skirt, without help her hair was mud-brown, and her pout was in reality an expression not of petulance but of fear.

  As an only child, Kitty had lived before the mirror since the age of eight or nine. First, as Judy Garland, Judy Holliday, Elizabeth Taylor, Lynn Fontanne, laughing, smoldering, singing, simpering, always with one eye turned, trying to see how she looked. Then as an eyebrow plucker and adolescent blackhead squeezer and tooth examiner, lips drawn back against her gums. And now as a narcissist, presumably full-grown but still unmarried, disappointed in the men to whom she had given herself.

  Teetering on her toes, back to the mirror, head twisted over her shoulder, she considered her buttocks and the two dimples just above them that were said to be so important. If it was not to be Ralph, who then would avail himself wholeheartedly of this ripeness? She rotated nude, her hands covering her heavy breasts until the nipples swelled and she felt the erotic fumes like incense rising to becloud her consciousness.

  In a spasm of self-disgust Kitty threw on her nightgown and kicked the bathroom door closed. Ever since her earliest posturings before the glass, whether as chanteuse or as admirer of her own teeth and nipples, she had imagined a grand passion, a dark powerful man who would drag her away from her parents and her job. Now that he had come, she reverted to pre-adult behavior simply because he would not—and perhaps really could not—honor her every sensual whim. Worse, she had to charge him in her mind with being strange because of the very intensity which had originally drawn her to him.

  Still, it had been odd, the way he had balanced promise against promise. Such talk she might have expected from her college dates, not from a man of thirty. Or did all men, when you had gotten to know enough of them, talk and think in this weirdly romantic, hopelessly impractical way, becoming even worse when they were married and the fathers of families? She thought suddenly of the last man in her life before Ralph, married with three children, who could imagine nothing more splendid than that she run off with him to Puerto Vallarta, where his in-laws (no less) had a beach house. Oh, if only Ralph could have stayed, just for a little while!

  It struck her that she and Ralph had quite neglected—or forgotten—to ring up her parents and inform them of the news. They would be worse than hurt, they would be wretched, if she were to go off and marry without so much as letting them know. Kitty padded barefoot to the phone and sat down on the edge of the bed. But what do you say, that in three days your name will be Mrs. Ralph Land (Mrs. Who?), Kitty Land on the stationery, K.B.L. on the luggage … No, it was still three days too early. This was not exactly going to be a catered affair, with her parents haggling over the guest list. Anyway the time was past for doing things alone, Ralph had recognized it when he had phoned her and asked her to join him; she could only tell her parents with Ralph at her side.

  Stretching herself out at full length on top of the neutral blanket and staring up at the seamless ceiling, Kitty had a bride’s-eye view of the hotel room. But she was more alone than she had ever been since her first night away from home, lying on a narrow cot at Girl Scout camp and feeling the onset of her first period. This was the opposite of what she had expected when she had flown here, like a bird trying its wings in fear and exultation; but then from now on nothing would be what she had expected, of that alone was she certain.

  In the morning she was awakened from a deep dreamless sleep by the ringing of the telephone.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be up,” Ralph said cheerfully. “I hope you got a good night’s sleep—you’re going to need it. I’m downstairs.”

  They took breakfast together in the hotel coffee shop, and then hurried out onto the icy street.

  “It’s sunny.” Kitty clung tight to Ralph’s arm. “That’s a good omen, isn’t it?”

  Without troubling to answer, he led her self-confidently through the business streets. “Nervous about the blood test?”

  “I think I’ll pass it. And if they had to take a quart, I’d still do it to marry you.”

  She was a little taken aback, though, to learn that the doctor was an old friend of the family, Leo Land’s oldest friend, and that Ralph had known him since he could remember. She could not explain why, certainly not to Ralph, but she would have preferred it if he had arranged for this rite to be performed by a complete stranger, a businesslike young professional man. Nevertheless she was pleasantly surprised. The waiting room walls were lined not just with diplomas but with sensitive photographs of men at work—fishermen, glass blowers, cowboys—that the doctor, an enthusiastic amateur, had taken at Pátzcuaro, Murano, Big Bear Lake, Martha’s Vineyard; the magazine table was stacked with the bulletins of half a dozen peace organizations. And Dr. Stark himself turned out to be a most kindly man, gentle as an old hound, with sad dog’s eyes, a drooping, half-inflated bladder of a nose, and large ears whose pendulous lobes were almost concealed by tufts of graying hair. Beneath his white jacket he wore a baggy English tweed.

  He was sizing her up, but politely, almost sweetly, putting her at her ease while he swabbed her finger tip and prepared to withdraw the blood. In his hoarse bullfrog voice he asserted, “You don’t look the fainting kind, Miss Brenner. Usually it’s the big mean ones, like Ralph, who keel over.”

  “I never have fainted,” she assured him. “But then, I’ve never had the occasion.”

  “You do
n’t need the occasion if you’re the type. After forty-four years in practice, I can spot them all, the fainters, the yellers, the whiners. I have a hunch that Ralph has done very well for himself.”

  “You’re very sweet.”

  Because of what the doctor had said Kitty could not turn aside her head while he drew the blood. He had a mother’s touch.

  “This is an occasion. Only two days ago Ralph gave me no indication that marriage was so imminent.”

  “I didn’t know then that Kitty would accept me.” Ralph laughed readily, but Kitty observed, and was afraid that the doctor had too, that the laugh had been preceded by a quick grimace, as if Dr. Stark had done something painful to him.

  “Going back to New York after the wedding?”

  Ralph, scowling at the doctor’s scrubbed and freckled hands, replied deliberately. “It depends. I’ve taken a leave of absence from my job. Ray says he’ll help us hunt up the will, if there is one, and that he’ll try to cope with the idea of moving, if Kitty and I will stay on there with him as long as is necessary.”

  “I see, I see,” the doctor mumbled, and then, just as he jabbed into Ralph’s thumb, he added, “Say, Ralph, since I saw you last, it came to me, I’m almost positive your father did leave a will. Because that was what I witnessed.”

  Ralph’s eyeballs rolled upwards, and he tottered away from the vial of his blood.

  “Whoops!” The doctor cried. “Miss Brenner, reach me that little tube, if you please.”

  But Ralph did not faint, he was only momentarily dazed; he quickly waved away the ammoniated spirits from under his nostrils. “Sorry,” he said. “Too much strain lately, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t apologize, perfectly understandable. Anyway, as I was saying, if you people stick at it, you’ll turn up a will. Because I’m sure the document I signed was headed ‘Last Will,’ even though I have no idea what it said. It was just a matter of doing your father a favor. He was a notary public, he did many such for me.”

  Ralph’s eyes narrowed as he replied, shrugging into his overcoat and barely troubling to smile, “You wouldn’t be stringing me along, would you, Doctor?”

  “Now why would I want to do a thing like that?” The old man gazed at them both innocently. “Well, best of luck in your quest. And of course your marriage.”

  In the corridor outside the office, waiting for the elevator, Kitty demanded, “Why did you make that crack?”

  “Because he asked for it. He knows more than he lets on.”

  “Why shouldn’t he let on to you?”

  “Maybe he wants to play God. Maybe he wants to make sure that I won’t stop hunting, or taking care of Ray. At least now he knows that I know. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I got dizzy.”

  “Maybe that was because you’re afraid of getting married.” Kitty grinned at him in the empty elevator.

  Ralph replied quite seriously, “That could very well be.”

  Somewhat abashed, Kitty kept wordlessly to his side while he led her the two buffeting windy blocks to City Hall. There, in the basement, still breathless, they took their place in line before the clerk’s window at the marriage license bureau. Kitty stared in consternation at the couples who had preceded them; they looked as though they had been carefully selected for their inappropriateness, like bit players from an old Laurel and Hardy movie. A little mustached man dangling from a big dominating woman, two skinny solemn young people, he with baggy pants, she with baggy stockings, a middle-aged pair of rubes, ruminating with the dumb patience of resigned travelers waiting to buy coach tickets from noplace to nowhere.

  “This is romance?” she stage-whispered to Ralph.

  “Don’t knock it.” Ralph repeated the phrase he had used about her hotel. “These people are in love. It’s the squares, not the sophisticates, who believe that only beautiful boys and girls can fall in love.”

  It was only when they were in the taxi, riding out to Max Land’s house, that Ralph again began to seem a little nervous, as he had been in the doctor’s office. Alternating between tension and reassurance, he was overly talkative, pointing out landmarks with bitter comments on the barren scene, as though he were a cashiered tour guide getting back at his former employers.

  “It’s no wonder,” he said, “that the new generation has deserted the center of the city. But before they left they should have blown it up, like a retreating army.”

  Then: “You mustn’t be uneasy about Ray. Well manage him.”

  And then: “In its day Uncle Max’s house must have been something. Even now, surrounded by the new suburbs, it could be fun to live in. Not for three peculiar bachelors, but for people with vision.” He added, with evident self-satisfaction, “You have to know what you want from life.”

  Is that us, Kitty wondered, can he really have such ideas about us? He had her by the arm and was demanding that she duck down so that she could look forward and see the house over the taxi’s hood before being thrust inside of it.

  “You see?” Ralph demanded. “The nut who put it up wanted something facing away from the city. That’s understandable, but nothing else about the house is. You know what all this used to be? Swamp and muck. Who else would have found it appealing, deserted and run down, but another nut like Max Land? Then one night came the biggest joke of all—the suburbs. And the Lands were sitting on something worth ten times what Max had paid for it just before Pearl Harbor.”

  The taxi pulled up to the old mansion’s carriage drive, the only place where the snow was trampled down enough to make the house approachable. Kitty was surprised that it was not surrounded—as she had more or less envisioned it—by a six-foot wall topped with broken bottles set in mortar. There was a stone fence, to be sure, around the entire corner occupied by the house and grounds, but it was no more than waist-high even with the accumulation of snow and, at points, where it must have crumbled away, not even that. The lawn, or whatever ran around the three exposed sides of the house, had been allowed to go to seed, judging by the irregular hillocks of crusted snow (probably concealing clumps of crab grass) that arose here and there like white ant hills. But what was sinister about the place? It was just a big old house. Ralph, she began to suspect, had to construct a set of attitudes toward every situation he confronted; he was in truth much more of a romantic than she had ever realized.

  This impression was reinforced when Ralph let them in to the dark foyer with the key she had not known he possessed. Filthy, yes; jammed with unspeakable junk that was not only dirty but totteringly dangerous, surely; but frightening? No more so than the tattered young man who came bounding down flight after flight of the winding stairs in response to Ralph’s falsely hearty cry: “Ray, oh, Ray! We’re here!”

  She saw a terribly timid boy, heavily bearded, unkempt but not unclean, with great beautiful eyes as light as Ralph’s were dark. What Ralph had not prepared her for was the extraordinary strength of his handclasp, which was not that of a recluse but of an athlete. His fingers were supple and well developed too, cool and pleasant to the touch, but most of all manly. Despite his timidity, he seemed to know instinctively that a woman likes to be taken firmly, even in a handshake.

  “I’m very happy that you’ve come, even into such a terrible mess.” His manner of speech was tentative, very different from Ralph’s. “I don’t know that I can help, but at least I’ll stay out of your way.”

  “You can do better. Even from here I can see obstacles that will require strong backs and stout hearts. Surely you can give Ralph a hand, moving things while I dust?”

  Raymond touched his beard with his finger tips, as if seeking reassurance in its curly fringes. Why should someone so strong be so uncertain?

  “I suppose so.”

  Kitty refused Ralph, who was attempting to help her off with her coat. “No, no,” she said, “I’m on my way out to the shopping center across the street to buy a housedress and an apron. In the meantime you can hunt up a mop, a broom, rags, soap, scouring powder. We’ll clean
one area, then you can bring stuff there to examine it.”

  Ralph had no intention of bringing in an outsider to clean. Even an illiterate might stumble on something, to say nothing of hearing Ray up in the attic. Apparently Ralph had hoped that she would pitch in at once, to riffle through rows of files with her New York office efficiency, but he made no complaint against her choice of priority. So, with a scarf knotted around her head, she attacked cobwebs and heaps of rubbish while the brothers grunted and sweated at her command.

  Perhaps Ralph had dreaded carrying on the hunt without her practical presence to assure him that the search was sensible, and that he was not simply digging to distract himself from the hopeless reality of his situation, like a prisoner dutifully but senselessly chipping away with a sharpened spoon at the bottomless stone floor of his cell.

  What was even more likely, Kitty thought as she watched Ralph poring over mountains of papers, discarding each as reluctantly as if, a true Land, he feared that he might be tossing aside the very object of his quest (who knew, maybe written with invisible ink?), was that he could not bear the prospect of being alone with Ray.

  For herself, when she could pause long enough to think of it, Kitty was astonished only at how quickly one’s daily life could be organized into an established routine around an unforeseen (and more than a little preposterous) set of circumstances.

  After the first day she did not believe that Ralph would ever find the will, and indeed shared his suspicion that the doctor had made up the whole story to get Ralph to stay on and shoulder his responsibilities. After the second day she did not even care. And on the third, whistling “The Wedding March” as she tied cord around bundles of Popular Mechanics to be put out on the porch for the Salvation Army truck, she felt as though she had been intimately involved in the rhythm of this house for years. What was more, she didn’t mind it. One more night and they would be married, yes. But more than that, it was apparent in Ralph’s slightest gesture that she was fulfilling his highest expectations. Will or no will, he would have to demonstrate this gratitude when finally they were alone as married lovers. Because of this she was happy, and the housework—not despite its seeming endlessness, but rather because of it—was a daily task that she took up with more pleasure than she had ever greeted her office work.