Ralph held up his finger confidently, warningly, like a schoolteacher. Even before he spoke I felt the menace in his gesture. “That’s not quite true. You want us.”
That was a brutal thing to say. Next thing I knew Kitty had her hand on my arm and was telling me how Ralph wanted the best for me.
“If I can live on here quietly,” I said, “I’ll divide up everything that comes in from the estate. Share and share alike. Half for you two, half for Mel.”
“The fact is, brother, you can’t live on here indefinitely. No more than you could on a desert island, if the island happened to be where they wanted to test bombs.”
I started to protest, and Ralph held up his hand to stop me.
“So I chose a bad example. But you know what I mean. I’ve had a long discussion with Kitty about Mel, and she agrees that he’s not entitled to participate in the inheritance.”
I turned to her.
She colored a little, but she stuck by Ralph. “I can’t see rewarding him for the suffering he’s inflicted on the family. Besides, he wouldn’t have any conception of what to do with the money.”
“That’s not for us to say. I don’t say what Ralph and you ought to do with your share.”
Ralph smiled patiently, and remarked that I wasn’t being very practical.
But when I explained that I wasn’t trying to be practical, simply principled, like Ralph himself with his protests that Mel should get nothing at all, his face contracted, so I tried another way. “If you’ll agree that it’s nobody’s business what we do with our shares, then I’ll agree to forget about Mel. Well divide the whole works, fifty-fifty.”
Ralph burst out laughing. “You’re so transparent! You’d just turn around and give your share to Mel. Sorry, pal. That’s out. You’ll have to give me a written promise not to sign anything over to Mel.”
“I could just as well demand the same thing from you. How do I know you wouldn’t turn around and make a deal with Mel against me?”
I wanted to find out just how much Ralph had told Kitty, so it was her I watched while I said, “Mel was the one you were close to when you were a kid, not me. I found the secret oath you both took when you became blood brothers, when you were eight and he was nine, and I wasn’t even born. No wonder you can’t stand each other now.”
Kitty sucked in air through her teeth, but she didn’t say anything. I could see the muscles going in Ralph’s jaw when he answered me.
“I’m trying very hard to be reasonable. If you want Martin Stark to give Mel a nominal sum in return for a quitclaim, that might do it.”
“A nominal sum isn’t what Papa specifies.”
“He doesn’t specify anything.”
“Papa specifies in the second sentence—”
“The will, the will!”
I knew the will by heart, and I recited it aloud, fast: “I hereby bequeath all of my possessions and worldly goods to my faithful son Raymond, to be held in trust for him until he becomes of age by my brother Max; in the event of Max’s death by my friend Solomon Stark, M.D.; in the event of Solomon’s death by his son Martin. I bequeath also to Raymond as the executor the task of apportioning to my sons Melvin and Ralph a share of this bequest, as he sees fit, depending on the relationship existing among the three at the time of my death.”
“If you keep whining about that bastard who shortened your own mother’s life, I’ll flush the will down the toilet.”
Ralph’s features had grown even darker, and his cheeks were startlingly red between the bluish planes of his heavy beard and his grown-together eyebrows. He was pressing down hard on the table, near the remains of my wedding cake. When he stopped speaking I could hear his chair squeaking horribly behind him on the worn-out linoleum.
“You’re not the only one that’s been thinking, Ralphie,” I said. “If there’s no will, they’ll split up everything between you, me, and Mel.”
Kitty jerked her head nervously.
“Don’t bet on that,” Ralph replied harshly. “They won’t be in a hurry to hand money out to one nut sitting in the can and another sitting in an attic.”
I hadn’t been intending to say what I did next, but he forced my hand, didn’t he?
“If that’s how you want it, I’ll be glad to oblige you with lots of publicity for the reporters. So will Mel in his cell, I’m sure.”
“What’s your price, Ray? What do you want?”
“A détente.”
Ralph looked a little baffled, so I explained, “Stay on here with Kitty. We can argue it out—I’m not twenty-one yet—and maybe one of us can convince the other.”
I extended my hand. Ralph’s rose slowly to meet it.
But then the phone rang. Ralph shook his head rapidly, like Sasha leaping from the washtub after a bath, and reached for the extension phone before Kitty or I could move.
It was Dr. Stark. After that, of course, everything happened. He and Martin came, and the Kadin cousins, but I’m just too tired to go on with it. Tomorrow.
January 9
Can’t. Too busy getting back on schedule.
January 10
Here we go. The rest of what happened 2 days ago, on the 8th. Was quite calm while Ralph talked to Dr. S. and Kitty asked me to be patient with Ralph and his ferocious temper. She sounded proud of it.
When I learned that not only Dr. S. and his son, but also our cousins, were coming, I had all I could do to keep from turning and running up to the attic. Told Ralph and Kitty that they’d have to get along without me, I was going upstairs.
“No you don’t,” Ralph said. “Those people are the only ones who know you’re here, and if you want to keep it that way for a while you’d better stay put.” Kitty tried to soften it, but it still sounded like a threat.
The cousins knew about me, but they had only come once since Mama’s death, and then they had practically held their noses as they fled. Once, too, they had gone to the hospital—to make sure that Uncle Max was dying, was the way Papa put it, and he was not a spiteful man. They had gone to Uncle Max’s funeral too, to make sure that the lid was screwed down tight. I am as hungry for family as a cat for fish-heads, but I felt about them coming into this house as Ralph did about the reporters. No good could come of it.
Ralph urged us to stick together against the cousins. He and Kitty had me lifting and hauling while they cleaned up the parlor for the company. Then, when Kitty went back to the kitchen to prepare some food, Ralph went to work on me some more.
“You look awful,” he said.
I ran my filthy hands up and down my trouser legs. “I’ll get washed up,” I said.
“It’s not that. It’s the pants. And those slippers. Shuffling around like an old man. Haven’t you got any pride?”
I felt my throat filling. I could hardly talk. I whispered, “I’m in mourning.”
“So am I. Out of respect for Papa you ought to get out of that sweater and pants.”
“I’ll try to find something,” I said. “It’s been years.”
“And shave while you’re at it.”
Ralph wanted to march me out like a clotheshorse. For what? Suddenly I was certain that this was to be the first push in his big drive to dislodge me from the attic. I had to resist.
“No, I can’t shave, Ralph,” I said. “I don’t think you ought to ask that of me.”
And I didn’t. But once I was upstairs I dug up the clothes I had worn three years ago for my high-school graduation. Blue suit with wide lapels, white on white shirt, black shoes. I didn’t mind trying to look neat, like the husbands and fathers of Happy Valley whom Ralph despised, or even like Ralph himself; but Ralph wanted more, he wanted to cut me down and destroy my potential for bringing him shame, by making me indistinguishable from all the rest.
It was only when I tried everything on that I saw how ludicrous I looked. White shirt couldn’t button, neck three sizes too small. That meant no tie. Couldn’t even get my arms through suit-coat sleeves. Feet had spread from wearing sl
ippers. Had to remove laces so I could squeeze my feet into the graduation shoes, which had green mold on the welts that I couldn’t wipe off.
When I came down to lunch Ralph considered me carefully and decided that I would pass. We were still eating when Dr. Stark and his son arrived.
Dr. S. is one person I am always glad to see. At least he tries to understand me. Besides, he really loved Papa, and he knows the history of our family from before I was born, in fact from before Papa and Mama were married.
He came marching right into the kitchen with Martin. They insisted that we finish our bananas and cream, and congratulated the newlyweds.
“Tell Kitty some of your stories about Uncle Max and Papa, Doctor,” I urged him.
Ralph was uneasy. “Let’s go into the living room.”
I was supposed to be the uncomfortable one, but Ralph was more anxious than me. Afraid that the doctor or the lawyer would start asking questions about the will, what Ralph was going to do with me, etc., etc. As simple as that.
“I’d like to hear about Ralph’s father’s inventions, Doctor,” Kitty said, “but I really want to know the truth about him and his brother.”
“The truth? That’s one hell of an order. Even to start, I’d have to go back well before your time, even before Martin’s. The two Land boys arrived here early in 1911, I believe it was, from the old country. It was Max who made the decision for them to come out here. They were young, they weren’t afraid of hard work. They shoveled snow, they worked on junk wagons, they ate beans and rice.
“Besides the dream of pharmacy school, which was more practical than medical or dental school, they were saving up to pluck their parents out of that benighted corner of southeastern Rumania, I think it was, where they still clung to their little grain and feed store.
“But in 1914, after the years of struggle, they learned that their mother had died in an epidemic. A tough blow, but it made them work twice as hard for their father. When they’d succeeded finally in sending him the passage money, their old man wrote back that he had already remarried and was raising a new family.”
By now the doctor had us.
“Six years of overwork and deliberate semistarvation had had their effect. Even though the supposed motivation had been removed, the same life rhythm continued, like a watch that keeps running on a man’s wrist after he has stopped breathing. They graduated, they rented the drugstore—in which they had originally hoped to install their parents. The flu epidemic got them over the financial hump and enabled them to buy the building. By the time I met them, which was 1920, they were already confirmed in their neuroses. At any rate, isn’t it clear why Max Land should never have married? Why he should have preferred the shadowy consolations of Ann Sheridan? Need I labor the point?”
“You’d labor the point, Dad,” Martin remarked dryly, “if we’d let you.”
“Fortunately for me,” Kitty said, “Leo Land married. But why did he, if his brother didn’t?”
“He wasn’t hooked until he was pushing forty. And at that it was my doing. The brothers were very different, and reacted differently to the same stimuli. About all they had in common, in truth, besides upbringing and education, was their pyknic bodily structure. Both men were small but long-armed, they did look a bit simian, but that was the end of the resemblance. All I’m suggesting is that their diverse neuroses had a common origin.”
“What happens to your Freudianism,” Martin demanded, “if you admit that their peculiarities came not from their infancy but from events when they were already grown?”
“You’re being simplistic,” the doctor retorted. “Those events in Rumania circa 1916 must surely have aroused dormant memories of what the old man had been like when Max and Leo were tots, of how he had behaved with their mother, and all the rest. Isn’t that obvious? Boy,” he addressed himself to Ralph and me with youthful enthusiasm, “I’d give a cooky to have known your grandfather. That old bastard must have been something.”
“Does that bring us to the inventions?” Kitty asked.
“Well, I always felt that Leo was ashamed of himself, because he didn’t dare be ashamed of his father. What’s more, I told him so, just as I’m telling you.”
Ralph stared curiously at the doctor. “What did he say to that?”
“He laughed! Because in his own gentle way he had to work at being good to others, whether to his brother or to humanity in general, in order to expiate his own feelings, of shame and inadequacy. So came the inventions, do you see?”
“I don’t know that I do,” Kitty replied.
“All of his inventions, even his feeble attempts to patent and market them, were grounded not in a desire to make money—in which he wasn’t really interested—but in an irrational desire to make other people happy. The obverse, in short, of his brother’s anal propensities. In a parallel way he went through all that suffering as a young fellow not to liberate himself from his father, which I think we can say of Max, but rather to put himself under his old man’s domination again, under the guise of getting the folks out of Europe.”
“But the inventions?”
“Anybody tell you about his pillow for the weary traveler? A self-inflating and deflating rubber spheroid with a bulb that you squeezed to force gas into the bladder, and unscrewed to release the gas, like a blood-pressure apparatus. He spent considerable dough on it, and time too, back in the twenties, and then someone beat him out with a simpler gadget.” The doctor sighed. “Then there were a series of anti-nail-biting devices inspired, I regret to say, by my son’s bad habit.”
Martin was sitting negligently on his spine, but it pleased me to see a forty-year-old lawyer blushing.
“Martin, Leo used to say, it’s not nice for a violinist to chew his nails, his hands are on display. So, because he felt sorry for my boy, he made up a pocket kit, including scissors, file, orange stick, buffer, and a little bottle of some odious mixture that you were supposed to smear on, to make your gorge rise every time you brought your hand near your face. Do you think I could convince Leo that you can’t cure nailbiting with toys, any more than you can thumb-sucking or enuresis? I gave him books to read, I argued. No use. How he used to plead with me to let him paint Martin’s nails with that rat poison!
“But Martin gave up the habit. Or rather he substituted a pipe. Leo’s other preoccupations grew out of his own childhood, his mother’s desire for a daughter, his father’s deafness. I’ll tell you this much, a shady character on the west side fleeced him out of fifteen hundred bucks on a promise to market Leo’s litmus paper test for determining the sex of unborn babies. He got clipped good on his cure for deafness too, based not on amplification but on some kookie fenestrating chemical, like a universal solvent. This one he claimed to derive from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Beethoven’s letters, and I think Goldoni. Or was it Manzoni? I can never tell them apart.”
“I hate to break in on your reminiscences,” Martin said pleasantly, “but don’t you think we ought to take up more current matters?”
Ralph glanced across at me warily. Kitty was smiling fixedly, like a young lady at a dull tea party. I had a feeling all hell would break loose.
Just at that moment the doorbell went off, like a rusty alarm clock. I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only one who jumped.
Can’t write any more, my arm feels like it’s falling off. Will try to put down the rest of it tomorrow.
January 11
January 8th, cont: Ralph brought in Lillian Kadin and her sister Henrietta, and Henrietta’s husband, Ben Lurie. My intestines were tied up in knots. Was dying to run to toilet if not to attic. Visitors tense too. And funny-looking. The sisters are small, roly-poly, overdecorated, like loud souvenir pillows. Too much hair, even under their little veiled hats, and too many clothes. Sweaters over dresses, scarfs over sweaters, etc.
Mr. Lurie has a smile that is artificial even when he means it—when his face opens it looks painted on, like a circus clown’s. When he stands nex
t to his little wife they look like Mutt and Jeff.
Ralph suddenly became like them. They brought out in him the same gestures, the same gentilities.
“Ralph, you were wise to marry right away.” That was Henrietta.
Ralph put his arm proudly around Kitty. “Don’t I know it?”
“Life is too short.” Lillian this time. “Your father would have wanted it this way. It doesn’t pay to wait. Nothing lasts forever.”
Even Mr. Lurie got into the act. He shook hands all around, showing two rows of teeth and a row of ball point pens. “Life has to go on, doesn’t it, Doctor? These young people should take advantage of it. You and I have learned that from our professions.”
The doctor grinned like a fox. I was hoping they’d ignore me in favor of the newlyweds. Did my best to be inconspicuous, sat on edge of piano bench at the fringe of the semicircle we’d arranged. But Mr. Lurie sat down next to me, gripped my thigh, addressed me in his disagreeably penetrating voice.
“Young fellow, you’re looking good, all things considered.”
I didn’t know what things he had considered, but right away I knew what he had been put up to by his wife and his sister-in-law.
“Don’t you think it’s about time you started making plans for getting out of here?”
I looked to Ralph for help, but he was pleased that the heat was being turned on me, and looked on unblinkingly with a mocking smile. I told Mr. Lurie that Ralph and I had a lot of things to talk about first, but he wouldn’t let it alone.
“You can talk, who’s stopping you? But you can’t keep on hiding. “You can’t expect us to cover up for you indefinitely. People get suspicious, it’s not normal.”
“Then why not tell them?” I was getting tenser every second. “For my part, I don’t care. Just tell people that I’m here and that for the time being I want to stay here.”
“Once word gets out that you’ve been here all along, they’ll besiege you and your brother. They’ll bombard all of us.”
“But that’s going to happen whenever—”
“Not if you leave discreetly.” Mr. Lurie looked very wise, as well as buddy-buddy. “Then you can turn up here just like Ralph did, and it’s nobody’s business where you’ve been.”
The Will Page 11
