“I think we can get to him. Through Laura. Won’t it have been worth while, then?”
What was the boy talking about? Ralph mumbled wearily, “Nothing has been worth while. The price for everything is too high. If you want to try, go ahead. You need the practice. But I can’t talk to anyone any more, not even you.” He arose. “I have to lie down.”
“Please, go ahead. I’ll see you’re not disturbed.”
Ray had extended his hand as if to touch him on the shoulder in passing. No, Ralph thought, not that, I’m not ready yet for fraternal caresses; and he maneuvered around the kitchen table so as to avoid any touch on his shoulder, even at the cost of embarrassing his brother.
He went on through the hall and up the staircase to the room which he had pre-empted, the room which had been his father’s. He kicked off his shoes, and lay down heavily on his father’s bed. It was strange. With Kitty gone, the bedroom had already reverted to masculinity, lonely and monastic; once again he felt his father’s presence, even more strongly than before.
Although he was exhausted, sleep would not come easily. But it was not his dreamy father, any more than it was his ill-used mother or his driven uncle, who kept him awake; the dead were well dead, and over these last six months he had exorcised their ghosts. Even if he had not, this weekend’s supposedly aimless driving (in actuality he had been startled at the number of times he had passed the Land Pharmacy) had drawn most of the sting from his memories of those three. He had crossed their tracks, and his own too, so often that finally he had felt nothing—no pain, no grief, not even any lingering traces of disgust—at the sight of the house where he had passed what passed for his youth while his mother wept dry-eyed over her darning, and his father the alchemist concocted Land Sea and Air Sick Pills. Even Max’s castle, last way station for the Lands before dissolution into eremitical eccentricity, was now just an old house engulfed by suburbia. Its ghosts were gone, including the defeated widower who had retreated to it with his one remaining son, thereby dooming him to deformation that he just might have escaped had they clung to their own home, the three and a half dark rooms behind the fusty drugstore.
It was not the dead who troubled him now, nor even his own dead youth, which he had buried at New Year’s with his father. No matter whether you bemoaned your own wretched childhood or the twisted lives of your forebears, it was all mere wasteful self-pity. A living trio concerned him more now: his brothers and his wife.
As a result of what he had done, in his blind thrashing way that he had thought of as being rational and calculating, not just their faces but their futures were altered. There was warrant enough, you might argue, for him and Mel, who had once been devoted, to beat each other to death, to battle with fists, feet, spit, and blood, presumably over their inheritance, but actually to destroy the past and to avenge their common separation from it.
As for Ray, he was enough to make anyone itch to starve him slowly, to give him the excuse and the basis for honest-to-God martyrdom. The prize alibi of all time: If I hadn’t done it to him someone else would have, or he would have done it to himself. And who could be held accountable for that? Answer: A brother.
But weren’t there brothers who hated each other with good reason? And brothers who ignored each other’s existence with what you could only describe as perfect propriety? So, although his guts still pained him for what he had done to Mel and to Ray, it was still reasonable to cling to the belief that they owed him redress perhaps as much as he did them.
With Kitty, though, it was another matter. Men made apologetic jokes about a stiff prick having no conscience, but they flinched from recognizing the responsibility that followed their demand for commitment. A roll in the hay was one thing, but when you pleaded, even wordlessly, for a woman’s love, the best thing she had to give, then you had to accept the consequences.
On this bed on which he lay staring, desperate for a few hours of forgetfulness, he and Kitty had writhed night after night, and as he made her twine her limbs about his in absolute abandon, he had drawn from her the orgasmic confession that she was his once and for all, she was his, she was his, he could do with her as he pleased. And he had. If she had filled her belly in violation of their compact, it was because in the end she had come to believe that he would give her nothing else. She hadn’t wanted a god, or a father. Like most grownups, she had already had those. She had wanted a man.
That was the one thing, in his obsession with the future, that he had not reckoned with. Lost in his dream of retribution and of a vaguely roseate life thereafter, he had perhaps succeeded for a time in persuading Kitty of its inevitability. But mostly he had moved through this dream-filled house like one more Land in a dream, draining his wife of her best in the vain hope that the dream not only would become the truth but was in fact the immanent truth.
Perhaps only Kitty knew where his somnambulism had taken him. Had she already recoiled so far from it that she would no longer want to tell him? It could be that, like his mother who had rocked Raymond to sleep while her hopeless husband did his brother’s bidding, she was no longer even interested. She might already have written him off in favor of his unborn offspring.
No one was wholly right. What a discovery! His brothers had been wrong, as wrong as their uncle, as wrong as their parents. Kitty was wrong too, to think that without a husband she could have a baby who would turn out to be anything other than one more variation on an already overplayed theme. And he had been wrongest of all, fixed and frozen in his conviction that to deprive Mel of his portion was to vindicate their mother and thereby to render his own life worth while, regardless of what it did to Kitty. What if Mel had been everything he accused him of? What had he himself achieved in these long months other than poisoning the innocent?
At last he fell asleep. In his sleep the argument continued, for a while, in the form of stale and rancorous discussions with his father in a familiar saloon, Land’s Spot. The two of them were served by a silent drooping waitress. At first he hadn’t recognized her but then he looked up from the reddened hands to the black uniform and the tired homely face, and he cried out gladly, “Mama, I’m so happy to see you, I thought you were dead, they said you were dead!” She looked pleased, but said nothing in reply, only caressed the nape of his neck with her rough hand in the absent way he had been yearning for without realizing it. His father muttered, “She was sick for a long time, she was upset about you boys, that’s what you’re thinking of.” He was filled with an enormous sense of relief, but it did not last long because after that he became involved in a panoramic drama which he knew would be endless but was nevertheless fascinating, like reading a picaresque novel with himself the hero.
Two people kept reappearing, Solomon and Martin Stark, only now they were not father and son but brothers, constantly whispering comments to each other about Ralph which he could not quite catch. They had come down in the world, which pleased him, and were rooming together in a creaky, creepy old house that faced the back of the saloon, Land’s Spot. From his bedroom window he could look across the way directly into theirs, which had no curtain, and in fact had no furniture at all other than two empty chairs. He nudged Kitty, lying comfortably in bed beside him, and said, “Look, see how those two exist, and they make remarks about me sleeping with a girl when I’m only sixteen!” But then a noise roused him further and he arose from his bed, glancing at his watch (it was six-thirty in the morning), and peered down out of his window. He saw in astonishment that an immense funeral cortege was forming in the street before the Starks’ rooming house. That’s why their room is so bare, he said to himself, and motioned to Kitty to join him at the window. Even though it was barely dawn and the street lights were still on, a line of cars filled the street, and pedestrians in their Sunday or mourning best filled the sidewalks. There was a great coming and going, and all the houses on the block were decorated with strung-up Christmas lights, neon tubing, or Chinese lanterns, as though it were some great fiesta. Directly below stoo
d the horse-drawn hearse, the European kind, blacker than the night, with much baroque silver scrollwork. A uniformed employee of the funeral parlor, who was directing the activity, had painted his top hat a luminescent orange. The effect was ludicrous but it was sensible, because he was constantly darting out into the street to direct traffic, and might otherwise have been run down by one of the throng of dark automobiles. Suddenly he did something odd. He clapped his gray-gloved hands together smartly six times in a rhythm of five, then one: clap-clap-clap-clap-clap … Clap! It was embarrassingly like a conga. Besides, as Ralph murmured to Kitty, the uniform, the jerky movements, and even a light rain which had begun to fall, imparted to it a highly stylized quality. They might have been watching a German expressionist movie of the twenties. Six honorary pallbearers, all of them distinguished, and all in formal mourning wear, sprang up from under the very hearse, clapping their hands in unison with their director. What Ralph suddenly realized, very belatedly, and with considerable uneasiness, was that the director was none other than Martin Stark. For a while he had managed to disguise his limp with his rigid jerky movements, but as the pallbearers took their places he moved among them with a brisk authoritative brutality, and was therefore unable to conceal the clubfoot which threw him forward with every step he took. He was particularly brusque when he discovered that one rank of the double line of pallbearers was lame. One man had a short leg and a huge built-up boot, a second wore an aluminum brace over his shriveled leg, a third lacked a leg completely. “It takes a cripple to be really cruel to another cripple,” Ralph said over his shoulder to Kitty, and watched in fascination as a coffin, rather small for a grown man, perhaps large enough for an adolescent, was hoisted from the hearse on the shoulders of the pallbearers and carted into the house with the empty rooms. The coffin tapered sharply at one end and was painted a bright yellow, as if it were meant to decorate a kitchen or a playroom, but more disturbing was the thought that if Martin Stark was running the funeral, he could hardly be the one they had come to bury. Nor could it be his brother, the doctor, for there he was too, standing in the wan artificial light beside the bright yellow coffin, shaking his head pityingly, with agonizing slowness. Invaded by a quick surge of nameless terror, Ralph whirled about and demanded of Kitty, in a trembling voice, “If it isn’t either of the Starks they’re coming to bury, who can it be?” Kitty fixed him with her glittering eyes. “You,” she whispered, and Ralph lurched up and away in terror, his throat cracked and his lungs screaming for air.
Ray was shaking him gently by the shoulder. Ralph blinked and sat upright rapidly.
“What is it? What is it?”
“I hate to disturb you, but you were sleeping restlessly anyway and I thought you’d want to know.”
“Know what?”
“That Laura has a message for us, from Mel.”
Now he was awake. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and demanded impatiently, “Let’s have it.”
“But I don’t know what it is.”
Sometimes Ray invited violence. Ralph slipped his feet into his shoes and said, “When you’re ready you can go ahead and explain it to me. Take your time, we’ve got all our lives.”
“You see, Laura got hold of Martin Stark, I guess through Dr. Stark—she couldn’t get to a phone—and Martin called us. He says it’s most urgent and he’d like us at his house by five o’clock.”
“So what’s your rush?”
“It’s almost that now. Ralphie, you’ve slept the day away.”
12: RAY
LEAVING THE HOUSE, RAY discovered, was simple. Far simpler in fact than leaving the attic, repository of his few clothes, his tools, his books, his barbells, his radio station, and most of all his confidant: the ledger books in which for nearly three years, ever since he had decided to remain in the attic, he had carried on a running battle with himself, setting down what he saw and heard, and trying furiously to make some sense of it. He would be returning to the house, of course, and to the attic, to clear out the little accumulation of objects he would no longer need. But he would never write in the diary again. Of that he was so sure that he bound the books round with twine and stacked them in a corner; still he could not quite bring himself to destroy them.
Ralph, oddly enough, was far more nervous than he. On the front porch he first peered, scowling, every which way. Then, as if it were raining heavily, he scuttled rapidly out to the carriageway, neck hunched forward, and began to tug at the canvas top of his little sports car.
“Come on,” he grunted, “give me a hand.” When they were settled in the closed car and backing out of the drive, Ray was emboldened to protest.
“What’s the point in hiding any more, Ralph? It’s all up, you said so yourself.”
“I still have to play for time. Bad enough to have to explain to everyone about you. What could I say about Mel, when we don’t even know ourselves how things will work out?”
“But from now on everyone will have to see what we’re doing.”
Ralph replied only, “One of these days everyone will have other things to think about,” and then fell silent.
Ray was free to look about him as they cut across Happy Valley on the straightaway leading to the village of Emersonville, where Martin Stark lived with his family. Most exciting was not what Martin would have to say, but what lay on either side of them now, thanks to the low little car, not only within earshot but within arm’s reach too. How wonderful it was not just to see people talk, but to hear them as well, not just to see them walk but to move with them. Watching, he had been unable to hear; listening, he had been unable to see. How beautiful this was!
At the curbside, bordering an empty lot—no man’s land between two warring worlds—an elderly veteran, his gray hair tousled and wind-ruffled, a cigarette butt wet and brownish depending from his lower lip, propelled himself slowly in his motorized wheel chair. Beside him, a kid (his grandson?) in polo shirt and stained dungarees, the front of his face distorted by pink bubble gum, skipped seriously, avoiding the cracks in the cement. For the suspended moment when the auto drew abreast of them, pausing for a light, Raymond was suddenly one of them, he was both of them, resting his powerful old forearms on the tiller, skipping over the asphalt with his springy young legs, lipping a damp cigarette and inflating an elastic morsel of sweet gum.
“Isn’t it a wonderful day?” he called to them.
“No good for the rhubarb,” the old paralytic called back mysteriously.
Before Ray could fathom this, Ralph had shot ahead and away, muttering, “From one extreme to the other. Are you going to talk to everybody now?”
They drew up to a new group, a crowd of loungers, scuffling boys and shuffling girls, all of them with great heaps of hair on their heads, arguing languidly over the cover of a movie fan magazine. He was so close that he could count the studs on the boys’ jackets and see sky through the fragile teased-up birds’ nests teetering above the girls’ foreheads.
At the next red light two women stood waiting at Raymond’s finger tips. Both were crammed into slacks, both smoked cork-tipped cigarettes, both pushed baby carriages. But only one of the carriages contained a sleeping baby, lolling bowlegged, framed by parcels; the other was packed with a week’s load of frozen foods, steaks, vegetables, and beer. The mother was complaining. “He parks himself in front of the TV, he don’t even let me clean around him. I tell him I wisht he’d take his sprained ankle and his Blue Cross to the hospital and he tells me to get lost, he can’t see the ball game through my behind. And who do you think complains about the fluffballs under the end table?”
Her companion’s reply was lost in the roaring blast as Ralph took off with the green, then threw the motor into second as it gained speed. The women were lost to sight and sound forever; but in the one moment he had been beside them Raymond felt, with a quick thrill, that he had learned something essential about them, as one feels that suddenly one has understood the intent of an artist.
He turned to s
ay something of the sort to Ralph, but his brother foreclosed the possibility by asserting, rather curtly, “If we keep straight, we can get to Marty’s by way of downtown Emersonville. If we bear right, we pass the cemetery. Want to pay your respects to the folks? And to Uncle Max, from whom all blessings flow?”
“Oh no,” Raymond replied quickly, he hoped not too quickly. “I’m just getting used to the living. I’m sure the dead are in less of a hurry for me.” He laughed nervously. “They’ll wait, won’t they?”
“Forever, if need be,” answered Ralph grimly, and kept straight on through the shopping section of Emersonville.
It had once been an elite village. The postwar years had erased the family farms which formerly sheltered it from the city, and now it too was a suburb—but still of a serene amplitude which impelled its uneasy inhabitants to take legal precautions against its becoming another Happy Valley. Those in belated flight from the decaying city would have to look elsewhere; Emersonville’s handsome wrought-iron gates were firmly closed.
The business area was not marred by the chipped, rusted, and dangerously dangling signs of declining drugstores. In fact, Raymond was fascinated to observe, there were not only no shabby stores, there were no overhead signs at all. The shops hid their wares modestly behind little greenish bull’s-eye windows, shaded by the overhang of the half-timbered Tudor houses which discreetly sheltered them. Even the gas station made do without flags or flying horses. Its pumps, sunk partway into the ground, might almost have been hitching posts.
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