The Will

by Harvey Swados

  “To put it bluntly, so as to save your time,” continued Mr. Treadwater, looking at no one, “Max Land very seldom filed income tax returns in the last seventeen years. And when he did, he usually declared a net loss. If you went by his returns alone, there would be nothing for his heirs but some bad debts.”

  What was really confusing about this timid man, Mel thought, was his badly broken nose, which bespoke at least one moment of violence, of struggle, and at most … He turned, surprised that it should be Raymond who would interrupt with a question.

  “How about all his properties? When they’re sold—”

  “Ah, yes, exactly. That’s when my office became interested. If you liquidate the real estate as inheritor, you must understand that the charge would be on the estate, and that the federal government’s claims for back taxes would have to be satisfied prior to those of any other creditors.”

  “Hold it.” Ralph’s command was cool and authoritative; how many people besides me, Mel wondered, can possibly realize how close he is to hysteria? “Tell us how much is owing in back taxes.”

  “That’s just it.” Mr. Treadwater raised his head for the first time. “It’s a difficult case to estimate, partly because of the Lands’ highly unorthodox bookkeeping. In addition to the capital gains taxes on the sale of the unreported real estate, there will naturally be penalties, plus accumulated interest, for false returns and blank years. But one reason I am here this morning is to assure you that the Bureau is not a heartless mechanism as it is sometimes depicted. In this case we do understand that the offenses weren’t deliberately committed by anyone now alive and in this room. Therefore we are prepared to be compassionate, to try to consider everyone’s best interests, to come to an amicable arrangement with the Land estate. We want to be fair both to the public and to the estate.”

  “Mr. Treadwater, let me interrupt you.” Ben Lurie was whiney and frightened, but he was on his feet and determined to be a man, or at least to do what he thought a man would do in this situation. “I want to put a question to Mr. Stark.”

  Jesse Treadwater was so gratified to be relieved of the floor that he almost toppled in his haste to sit down.

  “Mr. Stark,” Lurie went on doggedly, “maybe I can presume and just call you Martin.”

  The brother-in-law, the husband, the insurance agent, who could supposedly compute survival percentages, likelihoods, possibilities, chances, had found his voice. You had to admire his struggle to put the best face on this compound humiliation, like a swimmer just rescued from drowning who, overcome by shame at the sea water belching from his mouth and nostrils, attempts to pass off as nothing but momentary discomfiture his public terror, his futile thrashing and floundering against the annihilating sea.

  Martin did not directly refuse this plea for familiarity, he merely waited politely—which was eloquent enough in itself.

  “My wife and my sister-in-law came here at Mel’s request. We were in hopes that we could do something to patch up a bad situation before it got even worse.”

  “I think that’s what we’ve all been after.”

  “Well, whether Raymond really wanted to is an open question. The fact remains that he didn’t do anything. And we offered to be helpful to Ralph and his wife when they got here after Leo’s death, but it looks like the only reason he stayed on was to squeeze out his own flesh and blood so he could get everything for himself. In those circumstances, we felt we shouldn’t turn our backs on Mel, like everybody else.”

  “That’s laudable.”

  “Now I’m speaking not as an insurance man, but as one human being to another. The only person besides Mr. Treadwater who could have any idea about the value of the estate is you. So I think we’re entitled to a frank statement, even if it’s just a guess. What do you think the net worth of the estate will be after the government’s been satisfied?”

  “Nobody can say. The Bureau’s preliminary investigation, in which I’ve been co-operating, to the extent I can without compromising the Lands’ interests, indicates that delinquent taxes and penalties will be—Jesse, you’ll bear me out on this, I think?—”

  But the civil servant, steadfastly engaged in studying his shoe tips, only nodded slightly.

  “—will be on the order of several hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I still want—”

  “Say for the sake of argument that Ray decides, after liquidating the real estate, to divide what’s left after taxes among everyone in this room. I very much doubt that there’d be more than a couple of thousand for each of you.” He glanced about coldly and added, “If that.”

  The two cousins, come back to this house they despised and would gladly have wished out of existence if only it were possible, stared at each other wildly for an instant before they dropped their eyes in fright and confusion. It was as if in that moment each saw in the other’s eyes the naked reflection of what was usually decently clothed in praiseworthy disguises, homely truisms: blood is thicker than water, God helps him who helps himself, nothing ventured nothing gained, you can’t kill a man for trying.

  Mel was overwhelmed by a guilty horror, as though he had been spying on a sixty-year-old woman who suddenly, almost by chance, had caught sight of herself in her brightly lit mirror. Not while she was busily and methodically adjusting her face to the vicissitudes of time with the aid of emollients, powders, and coloring agents, but before that, while she struggled clumsily into her undergarments, and beheld in all its collapsing horror, before she could drop her eyes in shame and misery, the ruined flesh, puckered and folded upon itself, discolored here, pendulous there, a corrupted betrayal of what seemed once—and remained, in the falsifying mirror of the mind—firm and incorruptible, without fault or fissure.

  These two women had been betrayed not simply by cupidity, but also by its corollary, a wildly unrealistic assessment of their chances, which had entrapped them now in public contumely. Not only could they not have confessed to the collapse, which in a sense confessed itself in their faltering eyes and hands; they sat paralyzed, unable to scream, to cry, even to squeak. Martin Stark might just as well have wrapped his capable hands around their fat throats and squeezed the hope and the life out of them.

  And I was thinking about Treadwater’s nose, Mel said to himself. Noses! Martin Stark had brought them all to heel with such ease that it was laughable. But if no one was laughing, Mel asked himself, what do I hear? A terrible involuntary giggle was welling up within him and spurting out with the unbearable slow metronomic regularity of spasmodic hiccoughs.

  Martin said swiftly, but quite smoothly, “Given what we now know, doesn’t it make sense that everyone close ranks? Shake hands all around? Do what we can to work things out with Mr. Treadwater? And put the best front we can on it when we leave here to face public curiosity?”

  “You don’t give us much of an alternative, do you, Counselor?” Pushing back his chair, Mel groped in his hip pocket for a handkerchief and spat into it, choking and coughing. “You ring in your Mr. D. X. Machina, he makes his little announcement, we all collapse, and you wrap things up and move on to the next case.”

  “Mel, Mel,” Dr. Stark cried in a strangely agonized voice, “what better answer have you got? What the hell is the difference how the torment stops, as long as it stops? And what more could any of us do?”

  “Ask Ray. Look, he has tears in his eyes. Would you have believed it, Doc? All this time he’s been saying he didn’t care for worldly goods, but now he’s crying because he hasn’t got any to give away. Without the power to hand out money, what is he? And Kitty, she’s shaking like a leaf, aren’t you, Kitty? She went and made a baby on the strength of Ralph’s promises, and now they’re both stuck. Do you think it makes no difference to her?”

  “Calm, calm,” Dr. Stark implored him. “I warn you, the concussion … When wars have no object, you have to have peace.”

  “But aren’t you shocked?” Mel swung on him.

  The room spun, the white faces, tense an
d twisted, blurred into a swaying circle. Even Sasha, alarmed, had tottered into the room; as he lurched he collided with Mel’s wrenching foot; although the impact was not severe, the dog lost his balance and fell sideways.

  Mel shouted, “Look at us, still sitting up and begging for favors at Max’s table. Arf! Arf! And there’s Max, still laughing at us all, screwing us from beyond the grave like he screwed us in life. He couldn’t trust you, neither could Leo, so they passed on the dirty work to your son. It’s all been visited on the next generation. Are you listening, Doctor?”

  Dr. Stark was on one knee before him. For a wild instant, it occurred to Mel that the doctor was kneeling to be knighted.

  But he had not been concerned with himself or with Mel. Raising his head from Sasha’s rickety carcass and glancing about him, he murmured, “I’m sorry. The dog is dead.”

  “Long live the rest of us!” Mel called to the staring distant faces, and, bowing to them all, he fainted.

  15: DR. STARK

  SOLOMON STARK KNEW WHY he enjoyed being recognized and greeted in public places. You do exist, we respect your title, you are important to us. Passing through the glass portals of his bank, he returned the stately declension of the uniformed doorman who, since the doors opened of their own accord, was really an armed guard in splendid disguise. He returned too the smile of the receptionist-inquiry clerk, who called out to him by name, and he proceeded to the counter behind which stood the cheerful young woman in charge of foreign accounts and traveler’s checks.

  “Where are you off to this time, Doctor?”

  “Guatemala, just a brief winter holiday.”

  Starched and fresh in white shirtwaist, the newish wedding band glinting on her busy hand, she dimpled enviously.

  “Imagine! I think it’s wonderful to go to all those places the way you do.”

  He had his checkbook out now, to indicate that he was ready to get down to business, but he said, prolonging the human encounter for just another moment, “The most wonderful part is coming back. Sometimes I think that’s why I go.”

  He was rewarded with an unbelieving laugh.

  He endorsed the check and passed it on to her. She became businesslike: “What denominations would you prefer?” and he was free to withdraw into his own reflections once again, as he proceeded with the mechanical task of signing his name over and over until it became first comical, then meaningless. Solomon Stark, M.D. (Many Dollars, More Dough, Meaningless Digits).

  As he signed, he considered the antiseptic nature of the transaction. Not merely the cool chatter; more important, the fact that you simply signed one crisp piece of paper in exchange for other crisp pieces of paper which, when countersigned, you conveyed to clerks in return for accommodations and presents for the grandchildren. All as bloodless and dispassionate as his son’s little credit cards. It was a feeble climax, simply not commensurate with the sweat and striving that went into the getting of the money. A good thirty years had passed since the pit of the Depression, but he had not been a young man even then; he remembered, with considerable emotion, how his patients had paid him for a delivery or for setting a fracture with fifty-pound sacks of potatoes and crates of lettuce, and in one case even with some books of meal tickets for an all but bankrupt luncheonette. The direct sense of that exchange, service for service, value for value, had stirred him deeply, even though it had not helped him to pay his own bills.

  This business was convenient, no doubt about it, but maybe there was such a thing as too much civilization. Packaged honeymoon trips, His ’n’ Hers Steaks, quick-frozen semen—his countrymen were playing it mighty cool. Where was the passion, or even the plain pleasure, in flashing a credit card when you yearned to possess a pre-Colombian pot, or to reward an Indian kid for leading you through back alleys to the market place? Supposing it would have been the same money that the Land boys had tried to press on him to pay for repairs for the assorted damage they had done one another? What value would it have had in such a transmutation?

  When you thought of what Max and Leo Land had done for money! Still, he reflected as he watched the pretty clerk clip his bundle of signed traveler’s checks into leatherette containers, Mel and Ralph and Ray had made their own passionate response to the money-hunger bequeathed them. And in truth it hadn’t started simply as money-hunger even with old Max, any more than it had with Leo. The mania had begun, as many severe ailments do, with a series of seemingly benign semeiological developments. But by slow degrees successive ends—like running off with Ann Sheridan—had become so farfetched that they had been replaced by the crass means themselves.

  What was funny, or maybe not funny at all when you thought about it, was how the displacement of the money-emotion had been carried to even wilder extremes by the next generation.

  It was painfully evident that what Mel had really wanted was not his cut or his vengeance, but to be invited to take his name back. Raymond, on the other hand, had asserted all along that he hadn’t wanted any part of the money, and no doubt he hadn’t, at first, but how could you ever forget his face at the moment of his discovery that the Land fortune was really a misfortune, and that he was going to be gypped out of the opportunity to be generous?

  Ralph was the only one whose libido had been at all in phase with objective reality, and yet look at the catatonic rigidity with which he had opposed even the most minimal sharing with his older brother, or the most logical compromise with his younger brother.

  The doctor took one last gulp of the overheated air of the bank, nodding a second time on his way out to those who had greeted him on the way in. A strong wintry wind had come up. Despite his greatcoat and muffler, he felt himself taken by a sudden chill. He leaned for a moment against a parking meter, a concession he would have been ashamed of a few years earlier, until he should grow accustomed to the raw blast blowing up the street off the lake. Snow was overdue. What a morning that had been! Even for himself, maybe most of all for himself, what an experience, what a revelation, when Marty had pulled off his little coup with the tax agent. Mel’s wild brilliant outburst, half Homeric, half concussed, had been the most perceptive as well as the most immediate reaction, but even it had fallen short of understanding all the implications of the heritage—to say nothing of Marty’s sleight of hand. And the others had been so stunned by the personal impact of the news that their responses had been more revealing of their own expectations than of any understanding of what had hit them.

  Never mind the fat sisters and their spluttering consort, so far beyond their depth that the doctor had wished he could throw them a life preserver. But Raymond, sensitive as a bug feeling its way delicately across uncharted territory—the tears had started to his eyes as if someone had cruelly pinched the soft flesh of his upper arm, and he had spoken wonderingly not of his father or his uncle or of Marty, but simply of himself. “I’d just made up my mind, just now, to be a doctor, I know I could do it.”

  With Ralph, a twisted ashamed grin of relief, yes, relief, had spread across his face like a blush, even while his eyes darted sidewise in search of the wife to whom he must have made such grandiose promises.

  And not one of them, after Mel’s brief outburst, had challenged Marty, or really questioned his cool conclusion that, since their Pandora’s box supposedly contained nothing more than a ghostly horselaugh, they had better make peace as quickly as possible.

  The doctor shrugged himself down into his overcoat and walked on, pausing near the corner to drop another dime into the parking meter. (The cops never tagged M.D. plates, but he believed in being punctilious about small matters on the ground that it made the big ones more manageable.) Actually, he thought—it was something that he had not cared to probe from that day to this, now that he was making plans to go far away—there was nothing remarkable about the fact that no one had tried to carry on the fight against Marty’s suspiciously convenient arrangement.

  Quite the contrary. There were a number of excellent reasons (which a person like himself,
pretending to an analytical bent, should have been able to foresee) for the Lands collectively to accept unquestioningly what any of them singly would earlier have considered catastrophic.

  Had it not been for Mel’s half-hysterical rendering of his autobiography, and Ralph’s tortured self-defense, none of them would have been able to understand, much less to conceive, how their mother and their father and their uncle could have so arranged—or disarranged—their fortunes.

  Take Max: It took a lot of doing to see the old boy. Not just to visualize him (striding along jerkily with his cocky little walk, dangerously digging wax from his ear with the end of a match, Sasha plodding along beside him to protect his rents), but to understand how he could dominate them all. Once they did understand this, though, it must have seemed all too appallingly logical that he should have tricked them one final time by slipping into the grave just one step ahead of the tax collector; by making sure, in short, that none of them would get any better use than he himself had out of the real-estate parcels that he had amassed like a kid playing Monopoly.

  Besides, they were only hearing what in the bottom of their hearts they dearly wanted to hear. Marty had grasped, and boldly acted upon, what he himself had earlier hardly surmised: that the three brothers had mutually excited each other into a state of preparation for renunciation, and that they needed only the excuse of a supra-fraternal force to compel them to do collectively what they were incapable of doing separately.

  Mel had raged, Raymond had cried, Ralph had besought the wife whom he had, after all, married for her strength, but none of them had balked, had said, Wait, there must be another way out.

  But then, not one of them was in any position to defy authority. Especially not when their model was that very authority, flanked by Karpinski and Treadwater, one with a badge, the other with a brief case.

  Even Mel, the defiant scorner of the bourgeois, whether it went by the name of Stark or Land, had been running so hard all these years from the Karpinskis and their kid sisters that he had breath left only for the wild bitter howl of the man who has known all along that he couldn’t do it alone.