The Will

by Harvey Swados

  Except for two people, he would surely have walked out, renouncing any hope of sharing in the estate, even though he yearned for it.

  Kitty. His marriage to her a losing gamble. I mean losing only in the sense that Ralph had been counting on a quick killing, not on having his nose rubbed in 500 Happy Valley examples of what happens to losers. And regardless of how he claims to despise their rabbitlike conservatism, in at least one respect I’m convinced he’d behave exactly like them: if worst came to worst he would never desert Kitty. He would make the best of a miserable bargain.

  Me. I see it more every day, how he vacillates between contempt for me and a funny kind of admiration (the remains of childhood affection?). Here too he is trapped. He can’t even make the grand gesture of renouncing the estate, because he knows I’ll just turn around and split it up between him and Mel. On the one hand he fears what I will do if he doesn’t come to terms with me, on the other he honestly fears for what would happen to me if he walked out and left me alone.

  So we coil in upon ourselves, one upon the other, as we recommence our lives together.

  January 30

  Ralph has bought a car! Was watching a dishwasher being delivered, truck surrounded by preschool kids, when Ralph came skidding up the slushy carriage drive in a little white Triumph. It has a knock, I heard it clearly up here while it was idling, but it is stylishly battered and has more class than the VWs and Chevys in the Happy Valley driveways.

  He didn’t seem excited. Didn’t even call Kitty out to see it, simply clumped up the steps and on into the house.

  It must have taken the last of his money. Worse than that, it is a confession that Ralph is stuck here.

  He brought me up a couple of books that I had asked him for from the library. When I congratuated him on the car, he gave me a sour look.

  January 31

  This morning R. was all turned around. Came up with some canned vegetables. Instead of hurrying back down the ladder, he said, very friendly, “I’m ready to take you for a spin, kid.”

  Was taken by surprise, could only stammer. He told me he counted on my tuning it up and fixing the timing. I could hardly talk him out of it. I can see, his new campaign to get me out of here has begun.

  So far, I think he’s been improvising, more or less like me, trying first one approach and then another, just as I try everything I can to soften him up on Mel (I don’t think I’ve even written down anything about that, and I won’t, not until something works). His hard line hasn’t worked. I’ve got news for him. A soft one won’t either.

  But he’s not basically an improviser. He’s been meeting with Dr. S., and Martin, and consulting lawbooks on his own. And I hear him and Kitty talking, arguing, talking until all hours of the night. I think he’s decided to quit playing it by ear. I think he’s working out a plan.

  My best countereffort will be to play for time. This morning I said to him, “Ralphie, the newspapermen don’t bother you any more, do they? They’ve forgotten all about us, we can take our time and work things out. They won’t come back until we’re ready with a final decision about the will.”

  An odd expression came over his face. It was almost as though he was in pain, and was trying to conceal it from me.

  “Take our time?” He repeated the phrase I had used. “But I’m ten years older than you. I know you’d like me to wait forever, but I just can’t.”

  February 1

  If Ralph only knew it, what weakens me most in my resolve is not fear of him. Not even fear of myself. It’s pity for him in his present situation and guilt at my part in it.

  Here he is, caught up in the most banal of American dilemmas. He’s broke, so he has to have a car to hunt work, and he has to go to work to support the car.

  I hear him phoning up, answering ads, making appointments for interviews, hunting for a job which will carry him and Kitty (and me too, I might as well admit it) through the uncertain winter. There’s nobody here for him to turn to, no “contacts,” the way people in New York City move from one job to another. And he is not going to let Kitty go to work. That wasn’t part of the bargain. He has his pride.

  February 3

  Ralph has a job. Area representative for distributor of short subject movies. He’ll be busy, out of the house. I should be building my own plan. Maybe somehow the job, which will involve traveling around his home town, will soften his feelings about Mel? If he would only be reasonable, what wonderful possibilities there would be for us!

  I know he must be saying the same thing to Kitty …

  And Kitty, what will she do now, all alone, all day long?

  February 12

  Every morning, on my knees, I peer through the window and watch Ralph going off to work. Sometimes I can hardly keep from crying out, “Stop I I didn’t mean that, come back!”

  The movies he peddles show audiences, mainly kids, how lead pipes and chocolate bars are manufactured, and demonstrate the incomparable working conditions in the factories and the kindliness with which the owners operate their enterprises.

  Same kind of films that Ralph was associated with in New York. He never cared for the work, he made no bones about that. It was always a makeshift occupation, a temporary substitute for real life.

  But now he really hates it. Not so much for what is in the cans of film. That he ignores. No, it’s for what they symbolize, and he practically spits when he says it. A cheap hack routine job in a provincial town, a facsimile of all the jobs of all the mortgaged husbands of Happy Valley.

  The misery is his, but if he only knew it the guilt is mine. I watch my brother grimly backing his little car into the sluggish stream made by the car pools of Happy Valley. No bus for him, no fraternizing with the commuters. (He is a great democrat, he is all for the people who did the dirty work of building the development, but he’d rather die than mix with them.) In the dark end of the day he comes home, his face older each evening, his new hat drawn down over his dark furrowed brows. Who would know, encountering him on his rounds, that he is any different from the husbands across the street?

  This galls him as much as the job itself. And because it galls him it hurts me.

  I have the temporary security of the two below me, the comforting sounds of their comings and goings, and the hope that maybe the entire ambience—this funny old house that Kitty is struggling with, the emerging sense of a common past not totally shameful and worthy of more than scorn or concealment, the recognition that I, me, up here in the attic, am not just a nut but someone with a claim on my brothers’ consciences—all these—may be exerting an emollient influence on my jagged and abrasive brother. Maybe instead of destroying each other we’ll come to understand each other?

  What I don’t have is Ralph’s freely accorded respect and confidence. Much less his love.

  As I stare down, condemned to watch, at my older brother angrily leaving the house and tiredly returning to it, I begin to feel like an old man I once read about, who desperately desired a young girl. The old man managed to get her to marry him by threatening her parents with disaster. He had won the girl, her constant presence, her prettiness, her soft warmth beside him in the sheets, but none of what he had dreamed of beforehand—whistling in the sunny kitchen, willing eagerness in the darkened bedroom—and in consequence the very sight of his prize became more and more bitter to him until at length it became utterly intolerable, and he committed a terrible deed …

  5: KITTY

  KITTY HAD TRIED TO imagine, as everyone does, what love in marriage would be like. She found it far different from anything she might have guessed, for there was very little tenderness. She wondered, though, whether this might not be a hangover from girlish daydreams of masculine gallantry on the part of a faceless someone both fierce and kind, demanding and gentle—or whether she had wishfully believed that a husband would be absolutely different from the four or five actual lovers with whom she had grappled and groped her disappointing way toward self-realization. If one had not been tende
r, it was all too obviously because he was in terror lest tenderness be interpreted as readiness for marriage. If another had been enervatingly soft, it was because he was pathetically grateful, horribly grateful, for the small favors accorded an unhappily married man with no intention of divorcing his wife.

  Ralph was neither soft nor gentle. Even when he said nothing, but simply bore down on her, bore her down onto the bed that had been his father’s, against her ear she could hear his jaws working, clamping and clenching; and later, when he slept, his teeth grinding, relaxing only when she wormed her way under the wing of his arm.

  It was terrible, the hard metallic sound, but it came to be associated in her mind uniquely with Ralph, with their act of sex, and after a while she began to accept the grim collision of his opposing jaws as one of their shared private sounds.

  She began too to realize that she did not know or understand her husband at all. If she could not recall that Ralph had ever ground his teeth in his sleep before their marriage (hadn’t he had as much frustration and provocation then?), Kitty had also to remind herself that in those days of presumably “getting to know each other” they had seldom spent an entire night together. But it wasn’t only the comparative brevity and abruptness of their premarital experiments that rendered them unmemorable. What she had done, she realized now, was to range Ralph—even while she was admitting him to her bed—with the other men who had come and gone, his predecessors (whom she had neither gotten to know nor allowed to get to know her), and so with some success to push him and his love-making out of her mind, simply because he had been quiet and cagy and had never, any more than the others, permitted her to hope that one day he would plead for permanence.

  Far from disturbing her, this feeling that she was in certain substantial ways still a virgin, wedded not to someone with whom for months she had been working by day and making love by night, but to an exotic man who had swept her off her feet, gave to their nightly physical encounters an added spice—the thrill of violation by a stranger who took her not because he cherished her or wished to make her love him, but because she smelled tempting and felt hot. Gradually she would learn (in fact was learning) about him, and what sort of person he was; right now, however, she could only be astonished at her temerity in running off with a man about whom she had known little more than that he was reticent about his background, surly with strangers, aristocratic in his tastes, and brutally attractive, from the thick brows that grew together over his piercing prow of a nose down to his quick decisive tread.

  She did not mind that he was not tender like the gallants of her high-school daydreams; she had enough tenderness, she discovered, for them both. Nor did she mind that he had reneged on his assurance that they would never lead an ordinary life, and thrust her without warning into a housewifely existence in the same kind of community from which she had fled to New York in hopes of finding someone different, someone like him. It would have made no difference to Kitty if Ralph had installed her in a Rivington Street tenement or a call girl’s kittenish cubicle on Central Park West; and she barely gave thought to her long solitary days of housework in the Lands’ mausoleum, with only an occasional creaking board to remind her that Ralph’s odd brother was crouched up above, watching over her. She would have been as content—or as mindless—if Ralph had insisted that she go to work every day to support him, scrubbing endless corridors or mountains of pots and pans.

  All that mattered was that his brooding physical promise had been fulfilled. How did I live without this, she marveled, as she wandered about the house, dust mop or garbage pail in hand, in a feverish erotic haze. Before, her evenings and her nights had been spent in a fashion so blandly inane, so depthless, that she could think only that it must have been another person, the Kitty Brenner who had sat dumbly before the television with a towel around her drying hair and a box of Loft’s butter crunch at her finger tips; who had sat in the art movies with whichever uneasy date, dreaming of what it would be like to be undressed and loved like Jeanne Moreau, Sophia Loren, or Brigitte Bardot; who had sat with her roommates doing each other’s nails and hair and talking fretfully about men. Men! Ralph was a man such as she had dared to imagine—without really being able to visualize—he might be.

  There was no quenching the fire that burned in his loins. He had no need for, no interest in, amusements, distractions, television, radio, magazines. In the evening he ate rapidly and then proceeded to take her at once, sometimes not even waiting for supper, absolutely ignoring her protests that dinner was cooking and would be spoiled if it were not eaten before love, shoving her up the stairs into the bedroom, rapping her on the flanks to make her move faster, forcing her to disrobe hurriedly while he yanked at his belt buckle and kicked off his shoes.

  Ralph did not even attempt to be gentle. He tore at her underwear, he ripped the straps on her nightclothes, he left his saliva on her shoulders and her breasts as well as in her mouth, and his hot seminal fluid on her thighs, while she cried with pleasure. Once she was sure that he would not be disconcerted, she responded in kind, worming her hand inside his waistband to dig her nails into the black mat that covered his belly, nipping him while he undressed her, biting him until she could taste his dark red blood. She loved to wait until he had fallen asleep on his back, sweating and momentarily exhausted, his mouth a trifle ajar, his lax arm lying upturned across her, but his teeth grinding, faintly at first and then louder; then she would begin to caress him, to tickle him, at the very source and fountain of her straining delight. Until, in his sleep, without knowing who or what, there would come that resurrection more thrilling and more awesome than anything she had ever known, giving her such a trembling exquisite sense of her own power that she bent unbidden, her hair falling about her face, to touch her lips to the soft but surging source of her ecstasy. It was then that Ralph would rouse to consciousness, his lips drawn back over his teeth, the muscles working behind his gangster’s jaw that was already turning blue-black, and, unable to bear any more, would push her off him, fling her face down into the mattress, and mount her, muttering, groaning between his teeth, “You, you, you!” The while she pressed her mouth into the tumbled pillow, to suppress her own cries, morsels of words (half fainting, she no longer knew), “Ralph!” or “Husb—” or “Lover, lover, lover!”

  It was the memory of these moments that would overcome her when least she expected to be reminded of them—when, a kerchief bound round her head, she shook out a carpet, or wiped moldings, or rubbed furniture polish into neglected wood. Suddenly she would be lost in an erotic confusion, lost in the woods like Goldilocks, with no one to help her but herself. Swooning at the recollection of what Ralph had done the night before, at what she had dared to do, at what she would do that she had not yet done, she would have to subside into a chair, the backs of her thighs trembling, the sweat suddenly beginning to pearl her neck and her bosom.

  This had to be brought under control. Not just because it interrupted a businesslike house-cleaning schedule, but because it struck her as perverse to be at the mercy of such desires, as if she were a deserted divorcée or a love-starved castaway on an uninhabited isle, rather than someone who only awaited her husband’s return that very evening.

  Kitty tried, with increasing success, she felt, as time passed, to understand not just the lover in the bedroom but the human being who was revealing himself to her almost in spite of himself. Not that he did it quietly, reasonably, seated beside her on the sofa, or driving about in the little white auto on one of their rare evenings out. No, at those times he was as impersonally businesslike as he had ever been in the days of their courtship, or still was for that matter during the daylight hours. It was only between their acts of love that there spurted from his lips, like the jets of his fierce sex, the ferocious phrases that began to expose to her the depths of his involvement with the family from which he had fruitlessly attempted to flee.

  Ralph had to explain why it was that he hated his older brother so much. In the process he
disclosed to her, although still refusing to admit that there had been a time when he and Mel had dearly loved each other (and that fascinated her most of all—what lay behind his refusal?), something of the sort of person he himself had become in the stifling atmosphere of the Land household.

  “How would you feel,” he had asked bitterly in the dark, not really asking, even rhetorically, simply justifying himself to himself for speaking aloud at all, “if your brother was in and out of juvenile court, half the time for things that probably your own uncle had egged him on to do? And your mother sat home and cried?”

  And (was it the same night or another?): “I was almost relieved when he ran off. He never came back, not once, to see what he had done to his mother. Not even to her funeral.”

  Kitty began to see, dimly, uneasily, that one of her attractions for Ralph had been not her legs or her liveliness, not her bust or her brusque firmness, none of the things he praised, so much as the fact that she was an only child. If she had been an orphan to boot, unencumbered by a father who tapped out gratuitous philosophical advice on a gummy Smith-Corona, and by a mother who glanced up from Ayn Rand only long enough to sign, Love Mother, Ralph would undoubtedly have been tempted to carry her off at once, unconstrained by his own poverty and lack of prospects.

  For he was nourished by hatred of family, which fed his self-pity as much as it explained to his own satisfaction the unhappy turns his life had taken from childhood to marriage.

  “When you graduated from high school—how long ago, only seven years?—you must have been one of the most popular girls in your class. Tell me.”

  Laughing in the dark, innocent of what he was up to, she had said, Yes, she had been popular, not sexy or even unusually attractive, a clown in fact, but popular with girls as well as boys.