The Will

by Harvey Swados

  He was smiling at me with all his might. His charm was almost radiant, but I was sick with disappointment.

  “I’m sorry, Ralphie,” I said. “I’m really very disappointed. I thought you had something tangible to offer.”

  “Tangible? What do you call ninety thousand—”

  “You’re just using Mr. de Angelis as another crowbar to pry me out of the attic. First we have to understand each other, we have to come to an honest agreement, without trickery or duress. Then the properties will be no problem. The world is full of de Angelises ready to put up professional blocks.”

  “I warned you, Ray …” Ralph was already on his feet.

  “No threats.” I got up too. “It’ll be better if we talk to each other through Kitty. We made a start that way, we should have stuck with it. She can deliver our messages while we work it out between us, can’t you, Kitty?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  We both turned. Until that moment both her husband and I had taken Kitty’s presence for granted. She was sitting motionless at the table between us, her hands folded in her lap, the same secret smile on her lips that had appeared the day before, when I had told her how attractive she looked. This time I was afraid to say anything. I left it to Ralph, who was gazing at her distractedly, a bit puzzled.

  “You chaps might as well know. I’m going to have a baby.”

  It was too silent, too breathless, as though we were in the eye of a storm. Something terrible was going to happen.

  But Kitty was very cool. She smiled at us impartially.

  “And I am very sure. I went to see Dr. Stark.”

  Ralph’s lower jaw had fallen. He looked both stupid and menacing, like a wounded beast. “You mean now he knows too?”

  “He was very happy for us.”

  For an instant I was sure that Ralph was going to attack her. He had forgotten me absolutely, it was as though all the fury he had been building up against me now found its outlet in his wife. He said venomously, “No doubt you’ve also made sure that it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  Kitty nodded gently. “Dr. Stark did say that I may have a difficult time. I’m going to have to live as quietly as possible for the next few months.”

  It is extraordinary—the power of suggestion—how Kitty changed before my eyes. Even while she spoke, I marveled that I hadn’t recognized her pregnancy earlier, her body was taking on the peculiar contours of the mother-to-be. Her chest seemed to have sunken in somewhat, so that her bosom, which before had been large for her frame, now appeared to have melted into the concavity of the upper torso. I thought I could see already, beneath the thickening waistline of her tailored slacks, the pendent globe which women carry before them in their late months like a precious vessel slung over the loins. I have watched many, many of them moving in their stately way through the Lanes and Drives of Happy Valley.

  But now, how special: a new Land at last! And I thought of how many years Papa must have waited, with his hopes diminishing, first in Mel, then in Ralph, at last in me.

  I turned to Ralph, thinking that if I were to say something of the sort, it might hearten him by reminding him of his role as sole continuator of our line. But he was exhaling audibly through his nostrils. Suddenly he reared up, his eyes dilated and his head flung back as if he could not bear to look at either of us, and pivoted on his heel. The crepe of his tennis shoes squealed softly on the linoleum as he ran from us, careening blindly out of the kitchen.

  A moment later the little Triumph fired up in the driveway, then roared away, rubber screaming as it hit the street and swerved about for a wide-open take-off.

  Kitty had still not moved from her placid position at the table. As I stood staring down at the light sparkling on her blond hair, I tried to reconstruct for myself what must have driven her to this action, and her husband to this despair.

  The conception must have taken place very soon after that morning up here with me. It must have terrified her, much more than it did me. Maybe she became frightened at the pleasure she was experiencing from what had probably started as an act of extreme marital devotion. Could be that she felt she had the same potential for becoming a bum as the lowest woman.

  Then the pregnancy would be a shield against such a terrible degeneration. With it, she can be more supremely self-possessed with me than ever. She has wiped the incident from her consciousness for the sake of her unborn child. No wonder she has been wearing that secret smile. She thinks she has won. But Ralph? What of Ralph?

  That was why I couldn’t resist asking her, “Why did you do it?”

  She chose to interpret my question as referring to her having taken this particular moment to announce the pregnancy.

  “If I told him when we were alone, I don’t know what he might have done in a burst of temper. Not to me, but to the baby. You understand, don’t you?”

  Kitty gave me a leisurely smile. I felt as though she were patting me on the head.

  “Ralph will get over it, you’ll see. Men do.”

  Maybe. But things will never be the same.

  7: RALPH

  WHY DID SHE DO it? Why? Why?

  Ralph skirted the perimeter of the city, driving unseeingly past the offal of his fellow citizens. Slag dumps, twisted mountains of rusting auto bodies, bloated oil storage tanks, abandoned lumberyards. Like an ant making its blind and painful way across an endless expanse of kitchen toward its half-divined goal of sugar, he was groping half-consciously for roads that would wind away from the dead level and up into the hills where he and his car could come alive.

  Surrounded by ugliness, he could only repeat the question, without even attempting to answer it. Only after he had found a way out of the junk-laden plain, up into the foothills of the mountains that hid Happy Valley from all the other happy valleys, was he able to formulate for himself some of Kitty’s arguments.

  “I did it because you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “I did it because you proved that you couldn’t master Raymond.”

  “I did it because you broke our contract.”

  But I didn’t break it, I didn’t! If we haven’t yet gotten what we had hoped for, I haven’t broken my word as you have yours.

  Even as he framed the replies in his mind, he knew that he was constructing an imaginary dialogue now because before he had been afraid to engage in a real one.

  I trusted you more than I ever allowed myself to trust anyone else. You betrayed that trust.

  “Your trust wasn’t enough. If you’d given me more, you wouldn’t be in this state.”

  But no amount of trust was ever enough. It hadn’t been for his mother, who had persisted after nearly a dozen dismal years by making yet another Land, only to wind up behind the eight ball.

  And if nothing had done for his mother, what chance had he had to succeed with those two men where she had failed? Nothing had helped—not running errands, getting good grades, delivering parcels, or collecting his uncle’s goddamned string, wax, and tin foil. Uncle Max had only glanced at him shrewdly, cynically, from those tiny but terribly bright eyes, as if to say, I know what you’re up to, kid, and you’ll never get my stamp of approval, not as long as Mel walks the earth in my footsteps. As for Papa, how could he understand if he never looked up from his silly gadgets? And Mel himself, king of the traitors, knowing perfectly well that no one would ever be as devoted as his year-younger blood brother, had turned on him as you would on a pest at a party and casually, heartlessly, cut him out of his life, then had gone off and left him holding the bag.

  “But it’s always the other person who betrays you, isn’t it? And now it’s your wife. Do you really think I came here and took up an unnatural existence, hiding a half-mad boy in the attic as an unmarried girl hides a baby in her belly, just so I could betray you?”

  Just the same, you did. Whatever the reason, whatever the provocation, you did.

  “Self-pity. The most destructive emotion a man can experience.”

 
How pitilessly feminine! You never catch a woman yielding to self-pity. She may fall in love with a man who does, and she’ll feel sorry for him because he’s weak, as if he were a drunkard, or a failure. It gives her an unearned superiority. But to feel sorry for herself—never.

  “A woman has more important things to do with her life than to waste it in self-pity.”

  Such as making babies.

  “Precisely.”

  Was that the logic that had led her to pregnancy? Winding the wheel hard as he wove his way through the sweet little hills which, arising from the filth of his native city, reminded him of an order of nature that he might otherwise have believed to have vanished forever from the world, Ralph fought to remind himself of the classic simplicity of his situation.

  In a way he was behaving exactly as if Kitty had told him that he had been cuckolded. You betrayed me, you betrayed me! That was the howl of the standard mass-produced American jerk, whom Ralph as a soldier had gotten to know and hate, when he discovered that in his absence his wife had been serving him precisely as he had been serving her.

  Yes, it was true that he had not kept his promise any more than Kitty had hers. So far he had given her nothing more than the most dismal complications. Treating Raymond as a stubborn donkey, first with the carrot, then with the stick, he had wasted precious weeks, months even; for Ray was no four-legged beast, but an odd bird, resisting every enticement to leave the building that trapped them all.

  And who had set Kitty the example? Who had fallen into the trap, taking up a wretched “temporary” existence worse than the one he had left behind in New York? Having allowed himself and Kitty to be taken captive by the captive, he had opened before her not the enchanted prospect which had enticed them both into marriage, but instead a routinized, predictable existence of the kind that had always made him shudder, with every little trail blazed for Kitty: Diaper Service, Nursery School, Open House, Den Mother, Car Pool, College Endowment, Disneyland Tour, Retirement Dinner, Monthly Pension, and a quiet death sponsored by Blue Cross and cushioned by Ben Lurie’s Twenty Payment Life.

  There was reason for Kitty to have done what she had. Her deliberate pregnancy was a warning flag run up for him.

  “The baby won’t be born tomorrow. Long before it arrives, matters will have to be arranged between you and Raymond. Your own deadline still stands. I have simply reinforced the necessity of coming to a final decision before Ray’s twenty-first birthday.”

  But you did something irrevocable. And you did it as unilaterally as a woman can.

  “What did you expect, a perpetual honeymoon? Or that if your magic trick with brother Ray wouldn’t work, I would pull a disappearing act, like a woman sawed in half? Did you really think that you could annul me like a bad dream? Nothing can be like it was again. Never.”

  You could have given me a sign.

  “Would you have preferred it if I had turned sullen?”

  It might almost have been better. At least I could have been alerted.

  “That may be your way. It’s not mine. I wasn’t resentful, I was happy. But there came a point, didn’t there, when you stopped talking, when we settled into a routine of sweating it out and praying that something would happen. Well, now I’ve made something happen. Over to you, Ralphie.”

  Maybe she did intend to firm him up, to urge him on toward their goal with more speed. But I won’t quit in any case, so why couldn’t we have talked, why couldn’t we have planned together?

  “You withdrew, you forced my hand. You need me, so I’ve forced yours.”

  It was true, his silent self-pity had preceded the pregnancy, aroused again by the realization that Raymond had the power to force at least a temporary stalemate, and that in consequence he himself had to play the part of the returned rebel, come home to make his peace with the going order of things. At first he had taken it out on Kitty in a violent wordless sensuality, which she had welcomed with such passion that his own had redoubled. But after some weeks (was it after he had gone to work?) his more natural moodiness had reasserted itself even in the bedroom. This too Kitty had accepted as if it were a part of their difficult bargain, if not an inevitable concomitant of married life. When all the time she was planning to break their compact, knowing that Ralph would not dare to scuttle the marriage—not because he was incapable of it in reprisal, but because of how one more desertion by a Land, this time of a pregnant woman, would be taken by those whom he still needed in the contest with Ray.

  Besides, he swore to himself, I still intend to win, I still want to do it with her. And that was what would matter long after the dialogue had worn itself out.

  He turned the car about, backing its tail into a dirt road and aiming the nose at the unseen city below. Confusion, confusion. He drove downhill, going home more slowly than he had left, arguing with himself on the way back as he had argued with her on the way out.

  He knew what would happen when he entered the house. Dinner would be ready and Kitty would be smiling enigmatically. Not acidulously, not demandingly. She would not even pretend surprise that he had returned. And he, feigning weariness, as unable to talk as always, would wind up lying silently at her side in the dark, and wondering whether despite everything he had come back because he still wanted her, or because he still needed her to fulfill his dream. Or did one imply the other? She would go on being pregnant, he would simply have to accept that. But she would also go on doing what he had to have done. And that was essential, that made them truly married.

  The young laurel, seemingly springing from the very hillside stones, glistened in the strengthening sun, and above them the curving whips of forsythia swayed and shook, bursting with yellow-gold blossoms. Sorely troubled and no longer positive that he controlled his world, or that it would change for him in accordance with his plans and predictions, Ralph drove past the laurel, the forsythia, and the reddish holes gouged in the mountainside for more happy valleys, too intent on his own pain and his own altered prospect, as he descended once again to Kitty and Ray, to feel for the disappearance of the natural world into the jaw of the bulldozer.

  The game was not up. Driven forward by Kitty’s boldness, Ralph set himself to tightening the screws on Ray once and for all. First he withdrew library privileges. Then he refused to honor his brother’s requests for small items. Next he took to editing Ray’s shopping list, scratching from it everything but the barest necessities for survival. Already Ray, unable to secure replacement parts for his ham radio, was being cut off from his last links with the outer world, and deprived of the threat that he would transmit anything damaging. Soon he would slip below the subsistence level. After that he would have to decide for himself whether to go hungry or to come down and rejoin the human race.

  This gradual program of withdrawal was for Ray’s good, Ralph was convinced, as if he were withholding drugs in order to break the boy of an addiction. But with Dr. Stark and Martin nudging him, asking what progress was being made, Ralph found it increasingly difficult to keep firmly to his purpose. The Starks would think it cruel if they knew. I do myself, he thought; but it must be done.

  Without Kitty it would have been impossible. Not only was she his agent, supplying or denying in strict accordance with his instructions, so that even when he had to be away from the house the reduction of Raymond went on. Much more important, she supplied the moral sanction.

  Not that he talked with her about Ray, any more than he did about anything else. It was simply that when he told her what he wanted done, she did it without making a face, efficiently and effectively, immediately and unquestioningly. If there remained on her clear blooming features the traces of that enigmatic smile with which she had announced to him her one unalterable violation of their contract, Ralph dared not refer to it or even analyze it. It was hard enough to face the lonely truth that he himself had doubts about what he was doing to Ray, doubts which arose in part from fraternal admiration for the boy’s stubbornness, in part from the suspicion that, but for Kitty,
he would himself be tempted to toss in the towel. But if Kitty were to reveal that she too harbored doubts, everything would be impossible.

  Not only did Kitty say nothing. She revealed nothing. The only indication that she held in her womb a creature formed in the likeness of the Lands was the banal fact that she had become a hearty eater. And Ralph, peering covertly at her apparently contented housewife’s face, could only marvel that there had ever been a time when he and she had accepted each other’s gifts. In a nightly frenzy of possession and repossession, he and this strange complacent woman had kissed, sucked, chewed, and bitten at each other. Was it possible?

  Maybe, though, this was what happened to women when they were bearing their young. How was he to know? Never having slept with a pregnant woman before, Ralph had no basis for judgment, and there was no one whom he would dream of asking about the matter. After all, he himself had lost most of his ardor too. He could only assume that there was nothing any more final about this than there was about his job, or about this house and his hidden brother.

  So the spring weeks slipped by, his own will weakening along with Ray’s, and with them the pretense that he had flown in like a bird of passage, alighting only long enough for a swift conquest before flying off. He had built his own nest, if he had not exactly feathered it, and the fact that the weather had turned mild only infuriated him.

  What good was all this false sweetness? With the top of the Triumph down and the lake breeze ruffling his hair while he made his business rounds with the stupid cans of stupid film, a con man among the yokels, he felt as though he were playing a charade of the happy suburbanite. It’s not so bad, the wind whispered; there are worse existences than cruising with the auto radio playing Cole Porter, a hint of summer in the air, and a few dollars in the bank. Home to a hot supper, an uncomplaining wife, and the six o’clock news, which concluded every day’s smoke screen made by the international dragons breathing their interminable fire with a consoling Panglossian vignette of an absent-minded professor (driving away from the Last Chance gas station at the desert’s edge, he left his forgotten wife in the ladies’ room) or a bouncing baby (tumbling from his sixth-story tenement window, he fell unharmed onto a truckload of mattresses).