The Will

by Harvey Swados

  It would be embarrassing to be recognized by those who would remember her as she used to be, sacrificial and glumly determined. What would they think of her now, in this new incarnation, self-conscious and more conspicuous than before? For she had not taken the time to change out of her uniform, she had simply unpinned her student nurse’s cap and tossed a cardigan over her shoulders, not even slipping her arms into it, merely buttoning the top so that the breeze would not blow it off her back.

  It wasn’t as if she was doing anything even ethically reprehensible. She was just stopping off for a minute. She might have been bringing a patient one last glass of ice water, before continuing on home to her parents. At first she had been a little excited at the idea of attending a patient written up in all the papers, but that was hardly why she had agreed to run his errand. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that he was no more an inherently criminal type than was anyone else. He was a man, a human being, vulnerable, variable, desperately hoping to prosper.

  Laura knew now that this was what had drawn her to nursing. People who understood nothing about it, or about the practice of medicine, usually had the thing completely inside out. They had the notion that caring for the ill must turn you into a cynic. They thought that when you became involved with bodily dysfunctions, patients had to shrink to ciphers, or at best to file numbers, case histories, charts, graphs. They conceived of the shaving of vulvas, the extraction of urine, the removal of feces, the laving of bedsores, and the rubbing of reddened rectums as degrading to the attendant and dehumanizing to the attended. How foolish! Every day Laura understood a little better how the confronting of pain, nakedness, birth, death, tightened the bonds of your human connection.

  Never before had people been so sharply distinguishable, so appealingly unique, as when she moved among them doing all the little drudgeries demanded of her. Not only was this true of the ill-smelling old women whose pustules she anointed and the incontinent old men whom she shaved and cajoled, each become a part of her life, her being, her own singularity, as they smiled, shuddered, wept silently, or touched their finger tips to her finger tips in gratitude; but her comrades too, and her superiors, the head nurses, and even the Olympian doctors, bloomed for her like flowers that she could not only see but smell and touch too.

  She was happy. She was happy even when she cried in her room from weariness, from looking hopelessly at death, and from the humiliation of being bawled out before the others by a heartless older woman, as though she were a child who had wet her pants or stolen penny candy. She had tried to explain to her father and mother—no luck, they didn’t get it—how it was more than worth all the misery and pettiness just for the opportunity to be in the same sickroom with someone like Dr. Stark. To see him approach a fevered child, calming frightened eyes with his gentle assurance, radiating sympathy for the suffering that he probed with his infinitely experienced, immaculate fingers, was for Laura a revelation of the religious experience that had never been vouchsafed to her through works or through dogma, despite her adolescent years of straining and her mother’s endless assurances. So this errand was simply an extension of what she defined as duty.

  To deliver the message was no more than to hold Dr. Stark’s hat and coat. (Maybe a little more. She hadn’t said so to the patient, but there had been a maddening poise about Mrs. Land. The idea of conveying word to Mr. Land unbeknownst to his wife had given her a shameful thrill.)

  And yet … Was it because of the house, then, and not because of Mrs. Land or the banged-up patient, that she was so nervous?

  How many times had she stood here in baking sun and pelting rain on the shopping center blacktop, her eyes fixed on the looming anachronism that resisted the grunt and push of the bulldozers only through some strange internal stubbornness? Seeing its windows dusty and uncurtained, the broken panes covered with the wrenched-off ends of packing boxes, its clapboard siding, curling shakes and weather-beaten dadoes too bleached and furrowed for any more paint, its porch billowing here and sagging there like a blowzy, un-corseted old lady, its lawn become a nesting place for moles and a bed for dandelions, the track of its carriage drive as cracked and crumbling as a weathered face across which a razor has been scraped, she had never dreamed that one day she would cross the street and see it from the inside. The spook house, the kids of Happy Valley had called it, and along with them she had wondered, not when it would be pulled down, but who it was that could go on living there (living? better, rotting) while another world was growing up around it.

  Now as she approached it from the same vantage, the colonial A & P where the bus dropped her off, she saw that the spook house (in all the earlier days she had never known the names of the men living there, and she still had little interest in current news) had changed. Certain signs bespoke a new determination, like those on an aging woman who has determined to take herself in hand. Paint had been applied to the casements, the lawn had been trimmed, the privets cut back, the weeds burned out of the carriageway by oil and exhaust, if by nothing else, the downstairs windows washed and decently covered. It still loomed, but no longer as a temptation to housebreakers, or wild high-school kids. It was perfectly plain that if her patient had indeed broken in, he hadn’t been motivated by common vandalism.

  Laura went steadily up the walk to the creaking porch, found the iron thumb screw in the middle of the front door, set in a round protuberance like the corroded breast of a copper statue, and twirled it firmly, undismayed by the high dull whanggg of the clapping bell within.

  She waited for what seemed like a long time. Then, hearing nothing, she reached forward and gave it one more turn. Rummaging in her purse for pencil and pad, she wondered whether she could entrust the message to paper and slip it under the door. It was annoying not to have foreseen that there might be no one at home. She began to arrange in her mind an order of priority for the other stops—dime store, drugstore—before going home to her parents for dinner.

  The door opened suddenly. Laura sucked in her breath involuntarily.

  Before her stood a thickly bearded young man in purple boxer’s trunks with an elasticized waist and a white stripe on either side. His bare legs ended in frazzled plaid carpet slippers through which his little toes protruded like snails peering from their shells. The upper part of his body was somehow jammed into an outmoded sport shirt several sizes too small; at least his biceps and triceps burst from it rebelliously, and lengthwise it was considerably short of meeting his trunks. In between there was only skin, ridged with muscle, but pale. Through the buttonholes of the undersized sport shirt he had crisscrossed a white tennis shoelace, the ends of which lay open on his chest.

  The shoelace fascinated her in a horribly embarrassing way. It was as if their sexes were reversed and she were unable despite herself to give up staring at the taut expanse of breast before her, on which the shoelaces rose and fell in an unusually rapid rhythm. This astonishing-looking person (could he really be Mrs. Land’s husband? or anyone’s husband?) might have been catching his breath after a race. Indeed, his nostrils were dilated, and his pale cheeks were flushed above the curly prophet’s beard. His lake-blue eyes, bright with intelligence, were staring with what seemed to her to be amazement and admiration.

  “Hello,” she said, pleased.

  He did not reply.

  Taken aback and suddenly sweating with uneasiness, she felt her self-confidence melting at her feet. What if he were a mute? Then what?

  “I am looking for Mr. Land. I have a message for him.”

  The young man continued to stare at her in silence, but her words were knuckles rapping him to recognition of his situation. His lips began to tremble and for a moment he looked ready to flee.

  What did I do, what did I say? Caught by the contagion of his fear, Laura dabbed at her damp face and took a step backward, recoiling from the implicit rebuff as if she had been a peddler who had inadvertently insulted the man of the house.

  But before she could pivot on the rubber sole of
her white shoe, he held out his hand beseechingly and opened his mouth.

  In that instant she was forcibly reminded of the swollen-faced, bandaged philosopher who had sent her on this errand. Didn’t his eyes too give off this haunted gleam, or was there some closer resemblance, the attempt to define which confounded her … Or was it simply maleness and a need for her that they both shared? Anxiously she leaned forward to assure the young man that she was waiting.

  “Yes,” he said. His Adam’s apple moved first up, then down, as he swallowed saliva. He gestured clumsily, boyishly, for her to enter the house. Then he spoke with startling decisiveness.

  “Yes, yes, I am Mr. Land. I’ve been watching for you.”

  Laura followed him unhesitatingly into the gloom.

  “Please sit here, it’s comfortable.” He indicated a velour couch, and stood beside it until she had settled herself. “Can I bring you a cold drink?”

  When she shook her head no, he said in a rush, “This is truly remarkable. I never really thought you’d come back.”

  For the first time, Laura felt that she had made a mistake in coming. “But I’ve never been here before. You must be confusing me with someone else.”

  “Oh no. I wasn’t referring to this house. I meant, you know, across the street.”

  I had to come all the way back, she thought resignedly, to be recognized. “You saw me there?”

  “Many times. You’re the Witness, aren’t you?”

  Laura nodded slowly. Then she qualified the nod: “That is, I was.”

  “You’ve been away so long! I’ve turned it over and over in my mind, trying to guess what happened to you.”

  “I lost my faith, is all. One day I couldn’t face handing out any more literature, and I knew it was finished, my belief was gone. My mother was always the religious one. She still is. My father was brought up Catholic, like her, but he says in the old country it was a woman’s religion. He says his religion is poker. Seven card stud.”

  But why am I saying all this, she wondered, why should he care? To her further astonishment, she heard herself asking the question aloud while she stared into his eager innocent eyes.

  “I don’t know why you should care.”

  “But I do. I do! You can’t imagine, I used to wait every day for you to show up.” He must have read the confusion in her face, for he hurried on. “I work in the attic, that was why it took so long to let you in just now. And that’s where I used to watch you from. Believe me, I waited for you like a drenched man waiting for the sun to come out. I can explain why, but first you have to tell me some more.”

  Seated on a small stool at her feet, he looked up at her beseechingly, and yet with an innocent confidence in his persuasive powers. Like a child he pleaded, “Go ahead, you first.”

  “No one has ever asked me about myself quite like that. I don’t know where to start. How much is there to say? My mother brought me up as a Witness; she kept telling me that I was going to be saved and the rest of the world wasn’t. For a while, when I was in my teens, I was sure the light had entered my soul. All of a sudden I was ready to go anywhere, do anything, to prove it, even if I had to ring doorbells or stand on street corners. Snubs or insults meant nothing to me, less than nothing. I wasn’t ashamed. After all, at that age it’s a privilege to suffer.”

  “I know, I know! And it doesn’t make any difference why, or what for, does it, as long as you’re one of the privileged.”

  “Finally, though, it did make a difference. Instead of bothering strangers for something I stopped believing myself, I thought it would be more honest to go where people really needed my help. That’s why I’m studying nursing. My mother hasn’t changed. She really believes. I’m sure she always will. I wouldn’t have said this a while ago, but maybe it’s best that she does. She’s happy, she’s harming no one.”

  “And that was all? That was why you stopped coming with the Watchtowers?”

  There was an unidentifiable note, almost of disappointment—or was it jealousy?—in his question.

  “My mother almost died when she learned that I was going into a Catholic hospital, the devil’s lair. She can’t understand, she can only think of her own childhood, and those immoral priests. It’s no use explaining that before, I did nobody any good, not even myself, but now everything I do, even the dirtiest little job, helps somebody. Including me—especially me. You know something? It’s only lately I’ve discovered how selfish I am. Who knows, maybe I’m kidding myself now as much as before—when I used to stand out in the rain with the Watchtowers!”

  “Probably not. But it meant a lot to me, your being there.”

  “I don’t understand. How much could you have seen me …” she hesitated, “… unless you were watching me all the time?”

  “That’s just it. I was. I’ve been a witness myself. Let me try to explain it to you. When I’ve tried to straighten it out in my own mind, or to write it down in my diary, I’ve been encouraged by the feeling that you were reading over my shoulder, or actually listening. Sometimes you can say things to a stranger that you can’t to your own family. I felt we wanted the same from life, you and I. That it should be more pure, more disinterested. We called what we did bearing witness. We protected ourselves, or thought we did, by hiding, or, what amounted to the same thing, by warning others that the world was coming to an end.”

  Hiding? Who had done that? Laura was not so much offended as confused. No one had ever spoken to her with such penetration. With her hands folded in her lap, she waited quietly and expectantly for him to go on.

  “How did it start? For myself, when I think about it, it brings me always to my family. Just as it brings you to yours. In my case, the family is bound together by hate. That can’t be right, not even when we protest that it’s love which makes us do what we do.

  “I’m the biggest hypocrite of all. You know about women who seal their wombs because they’re afraid of an imaginary hereditary taint? Or men who refuse to become fathers because they say they don’t want to bring more childern into a terrible world? What I did was even worse.

  “Out of fear that I would do things like those already done by my family, I refused to do anything. And I called the refusal by such fancy names that I wouldn’t even have the nerve to repeat them to you. Look at me!”

  Tears had sprung to his eyes as he talked. With his hands he gestured helplessly at his figure.

  “A clown! Don’t think I don’t know how funny I look. But I didn’t dare stop to change. It would have taken too long, I’d have missed you.”

  “I don’t care. Believe me. I didn’t change out of my uniform to come here.”

  “That’s different. You’ve earned it. Just like you earned that funny sack when you were peddling your magazines. But with me it’s a fraud. I took a vow of simplicity like monks take a vow of silence—and what do you think I’ve been living off? The same money that’s been willed to me. The same money I pretended not to care about, just like my brothers pretended not to care about each other.”

  “Willed to you?” Laura was stunned. My God, she thought, it’s the other one, my God, what have I gotten into? She cried again, “Willed to you? Then you’re the brother everyone has been looking for. You’re—”

  “I’m Ray Land, you mean you didn’t know? Mister Land, you called me. You’re the first person who ever called me that. I assumed—”

  “Is that how you watched me so much? You’ve been in this house all along, just sitting here?”

  “More than just sitting. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. I’ve been in the attic, it’s true, but I’ve followed a stiff schedule to keep me from rusting physically or mentally. At least, if I didn’t accomplish anything else, I was preparing for the sign that would tell me when to come down.”

  Laura held her head in her hand. For the second time in one remarkable day, she was being drained of her energy, almost hypnotized; first it had been one strange man, now another. But if the first had radiated, eve
n from beneath his bandages, a potent durability that was almost overpowering, this one emanated a sweetness as innocently exhilarating as a wild flower. Why do I want to stroke his cheek, she thought in panic, when I hear him talking such foolishness?

  As coolly as she could, she demanded, “And you’ve never had the sign? What makes you think you will?”

  “Because I have already.” His smile was dazzling. His teeth, so much whiter and straighter than hers, gleamed in the thicket of his beard. “I had it this afternoon. A bell rang.”

  Get up, run away, she still knew enough to say it to herself. Go home where you are merely expected as a daughter bringing ordinary news and an ordinary appetite, not desperately wanted, not awaited as a sign. But she could not move.

  She said faintly, “I think you’re very arrogant. Even more so than most men.”

  “What’s your name?”

  He was the second to ask in one day, but this time she did not willfully answer the question backward, like an army nurse reporting for duty. She said her name as she wanted to hear him say it. “Laura. Laura Leone.”

  “Laura. It’s true. You’re right. I am arrogant. I would have been ashamed to admit it a while ago—now I’m not. But I am ashamed of the cowardice that drove me up to the attic in the first place. I kidded myself that it was a virtuous refusal to become involved in evil.”

  “I don’t think it’s cowardly to resist evil.”

  “It is when you let other people do the dirty work for you. Too easy, too easy. I only wonder now how I could have believed that any good would come of it. I should have known that my brothers would use violence to try to win an impossible victory. And that I would stay perched like a parakeet, not knowing the right words to keep them from destroying each other. I guess we’re all ashamed now, but wasn’t I the worst, secretly hoping that my brothers would bleed each other to death?”

  “Did you say, your brothers?”

  “Of course. I knew perfectly well that the man who broke in was my brother Mel.”