Little Less Than Kind

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Abby sighed. “I don’t know why people think that’s a comforting remark. It does not comfort me. I wish he were happier right now, Rafe. I don’t like feeling that even I can’t reach my son any more.”

  “Growing pains. Growing pains, dear Abby. Children grow away. You wouldn’t believe the contempt in which my son holds me at the moment. It’s a phase.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, no, no.” Rafe slurped coffee. “They all go through that. Of course, my Felicia …” He cocked his head. Abby had shifted her narrow feet. She never had taken to Felicia for some reason, as everyone knew. “Do you know,” said Rafe, blinking rapidly, “I have had an idea. Now, it isn’t spring,” he continued in his somewhat coy manner,” but just the same a young man’s fancy …”

  “You don’t think what’s bothering Ladd is a girl!”

  “Well … now … it could be.”

  “But what girl?”

  “Well … now … who can say?”

  “Oh dear, if that were all,” said Abby.

  Rafe said, “Not to worry.” His breast was swelling with wise and well-intended plots. “We’ll see. We’ll see.”

  “Of course,” said Abby, “I suppose that’s possible. I hadn’t thought. We are all so vain, aren’t we? We always think it must be something we have done.”

  “My dear, my dear,” said Rafe beaming, “you’ve done no wrong.”

  “I’ve never meant to.”

  “Nor ever have,” Rafe comforted. Tears fell out of Abby’s eyes. He touched her hand. “It’s not easy to be young, remember?”

  “It’s not easy to be middle-aged, either,” said Abby, and then her fine eyes, full of tears, began to laugh at herself, which was one of Abby’s charms.

  Ladd’s room in the rearward arm of the L was now the half that faced away from the garden and the pool. He had changed rooms, this summer. He used to be in the other half, with the southern sun upon his windows, facing inward upon the establishment, getting an angular line of sight upon the other arm of the L, and the windows of his parents’ bedroom. Now, he could look over the neighbor’s roof, north to the hills. Although he didn’t often look out of the window.

  His mother had let him fix this room as he pleased: he’d got rid of a lot of kid stuff. Every piece of furniture was very low—the divan-bed close to the floor, the couch low-slung. Ladd was lying on the carpet, itself. Gary, sprawled, face down, on the couch, was beating time as the hi-fi blasted.

  When the player stopped, Gary said idly, “Hey, Ladd, what’s in that box?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you look?”

  “Because I don’t care. Listen, Gare. You know what he had laid on for a trap?”

  “What?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  “Huh!”

  “Oh, you bet.”

  “Listen …”

  “Don’t believe it, then. A Jew-boy, he had there. Doctor Silver.” Ladd’s thin mouth had a bitter line.

  “Maybe you better cut out,” Gary said mildly.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Cunningham Company, eh?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Going to State with me? Hey, neat!”

  Ladd rolled his head. “The hard way, he says. The hard way. He made it the hard way, oh, did he not? He got married!”

  Gary said, “How about some Dixieland?” He heaved himself over to the hi-fi.

  “I want long-hair.”

  Gary said, with a blank look, “Sure.”

  Ladd rolled on the carpet, in restless misery. There was nothing on earth—nothing—that he wanted. Except vague everything. His fingers touched the black box and he flipped the lid off.

  As Gary started the music and retreated to listen, Ladd sat up slowly. He pulled the box within his reach and under his eyes. On top, there was a photograph, framed in gold. It was Abigail, young and beautiful. With all my love was written across her bosom in Abby’s spiky hand. Her son took the photograph out of the box and put it on the carpet, face down. All, he thought bitterly, a drumming in his ears that wasn’t the music.

  Another photograph. Ladd himself. His high school senior picture. Young, callow, oblivious, fatuously happy and callow. He turned his own face to the floor with a pang of disgust. A pen. Fancy desk pen, with its anchoring gadget. Black and gold. A paper weight, heavy square of onyx. Then a … what?

  A stone. A gray stone, pink-veined. Of a certain shape. A shape that fit and comforted the hand.

  The boy sat cross-legged on the floor and the stone fit into his hand and he remembered.

  One time … one time … father and son at the beach. Hob had never been the pal-type Dad, but one time he and Ladd had made an expedition. Ladd had been eleven or twelve—something like that. They had gone to the beach, a beach of stones, a place where rumor had it that sometimes, after certain tides, moonstones were to be found, having washed to shore.

  Why had they gone? Oh yes, Abigail had been down with the flu and had Cleona to take care of her. On that Saturday …

  Hob Cunningham took very little interest in nature, but they had gone, that one time, to this beach in wind and sun. Kidded about finding moonstones to a profit, although neither of them had any idea what a moonstone would look like.

  Hob, his big calf muscles tight against the cloth when the breeze hit the trousers of his business suit, laughing. Not indulging anybody. Just Hob Cunningham, amused at himself for being where he was.

  Ladd could remember his own sense of strain. Wanting to play his proper part, boy-on-expedition-with-father. But not able. Because Hob was just Hob Cunningham and Ladd just happened to be his son and you couldn’t—

  Ladd bashed his memories back to the point. The stone. Oh yes, he had collected a whole heap of stones and pebbles to take home. He had brought them home, and thrown them out after a year or two. Hob had taken one stone. This one.

  So there had been something significant? After all? After all? Between his hero-father and himself? Or why keep …? The stone felt alive. Ladd opened his hand and let it fall. But no one must ever touch it! No one else!

  He poked deeper into the box. Inside, he was screaming and-dying of a terrible something. A leather-bound book lay at the bottom of the box.

  Ladd pried it out and opened it. Music streamed into his ears. The book was a kind of daily appointment pad. Something Hob had kept in his desk. It had squiggles and symbols, initials, cryptic self-directed reminders. Ladd turned the pages at random, frightened before the mysterious marks that he could never decipher. Never. Never. Then he found plain writing. His fingers pinched paper. He shut the book with a snap and pinched it in both hands and held it to his forehead.

  Startled, Gary said, “What’s the matter?”

  The leather was cool on the skin of his forehead; the music was rising to triumph in brass. The moment had content too heavy to bear. Had to move, break it. Ladd leaped up. He stood taller than he really was.

  Gary heaved and put his feet to the floor. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, the fool!” said Ladd with bright eyes.

  “Who?”

  “David! David! Dear old David! The fool! The fool! Gave this to me!”

  “What is it? What’s up?”

  “But I knew it. That’s what I knew. All the time.” Ladd began to move around the room, almost prancing. “I knew but I didn’t know and I don’t know how I knew. But I’ve got it. He gave it to me. Simple as a, b, c, and d.…” Ladd let out a strange crowing sound. “So now I know.”

  Gary sat on the edge of the couch with his jaws moving as if he were chewing gum. It was a mannerism he employed when he was bewildered, which was often.

  Ladd stood still, becoming tall and taut. “You’re my buddy, buddy?” He was not really thinking of the other boy as a “buddy” or even as an entity. “You won’t talk.” Ladd made this a statement holding a faint flavor of threat. It was mechanical.

  Gary’s jaws moved. His he
ad moved in a negative sign.

  Ladd burst: he could contain these words no longer. He would have said them to the wall. “He killed my father. His name is Death.” Ladd sank down into his cross-legged position and bent over as if he had a cramp in his middle. He rocked.

  “How do you figure?” said Gary, looking more stupid than astonished.

  “Because it’s right in here. Because he gave it to me. My father’s writing. I’ve got the message. Oh yes, I read it, loud and clear.”

  “What do you mean, killed him? Who did?”

  “I mean killed him.” Ladd’s monotone went on, “I mean caused him to become dead. I mean David Crown did it.”

  “But … Hey, Ladd, that’s kinda … you know … serious. Where does it say …?”

  “Not going to get away … oh, no … he’s not going to get away … thinks he has … he hasn’t … he won’t …” It was a chant. It was childish.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Kill him,” said Ladd. He looked up with brilliant eyes.

  Now, something of the existence of this other came through to him. He felt no sense of caution but simply of power. Gary would behave exactly as Ladd wanted. “I’m not going to shoot him,” he said impatiently. “Shooting’s too good for him. I mean, I’ll get rid of him. And I will. I will.”

  Gary said, “Let me see what it says.”

  “No. You don’t want to see it. Gare.” Ladd was yellow. The ruddiness had vanished from under his tan. (No one must ever touch this book! No one else!) “And you’re not going to say one word about it. You swear that?”

  “What can I say, if you won’t …?”

  “Swear?”

  “Okay, I swear.”

  “But whatever I do,” said Ladd strangely, “you’ll know the reason. Don’t forget that.”

  Gary rubbed his crew cut. “How could he kill your Dad?” he said in an awestruck fashion.

  “So he’d get what he wanted. Which was everything. And he did get everything. And he got it the hard way. Oh, you bet!” Ladd held the book to his breast and toppled. He curled around it on the floor. “Oh, I’ll kill him,” he said almost lightly. He had long lashes. The lashes lifted from his cheeks. Gary stared at his friend. Ladd lay on the floor and stared at nothing. The music stopped.

  Gary said, “How come your father would know about it? I mean, write it down in there?”

  “You couldn’t read it,” Ladd said. “I am the only one. Nobody else could read it.” He let go the book with one hand and groped for the stone. It fit into his palm. He closed his eyes. “My father wanted me to know and now I know, that’s all.” A look of satisfaction and relief came down upon his face.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On Saturday, at a quarter of six, Felicia, who was all ready except for her dress and her shoes, who had been working for an hour with her coiffure, slipped on slippers and a muu-muu, went downstairs and out through the deserted kitchen across the grass to the studio.

  Rafe, in his old clothes, was hacking away at an odd-looking piece of wood, a reddish and fibrous log.

  “Dad, it’s time to dress for dinner.”

  “Ah, is it?” He looked at her and after a while his eyes focused. “This is Saturday? Dress, eh?”

  “It isn’t just the Cunninghams and us,” Felicia said patiently. “They’ve got another guest coming, a Doctor somebody. And anyway, if it’s Justin’s farewell dinner, you know Cousin Abigail is going to make it fancy.”

  “Yes, I’d better dress.” Rafe hacked with the little hatchet-like device he had in his hand.

  “What’s that?” It was not enough to have warned him. Felicia knew he was capable of being drawn on into shaping the thing until he forgot the warning and the time. She must get him physically started into the house.

  “This?” said Rafe, pleased to have been asked. “Ah, this is a Tiki-god.”

  “A … god?” Felicia shivered a little.

  “Ah yes. People put them in among the plantings for a garden ornament. But you know, they are so crude … easiest thing in the world … Do you see?”

  Felicia said nothing. She did not move. Rafe looked up, called by her immobility. “I’m coming,” he said.

  Then he smiled, which pushed his face top to bottom like an accordion. Rafe constantly wore an expression of amiable but unsmiling absorption. When he put on the smile, Felicia thought, it was as if he plugged himself in to the currents of society. He lit up. Yet it was put on. It took his will.

  She leaned on the doorjamb pensively. A golden light lay on the green behind her. But her father was not a lonely man. Or, if he was, he did not riot know it. He lived in a kind of ivory … well … at least an ivy tower, she thought fondly, in a world he had invented for himself. And did not know that, either. Rafe was fond of groups, fond of distributing his store of philosophies, not because he was vain but because he was benign. He received a good deal of local respect for his unconventional way of life. For being an artist? No, probably because people could tell that he didn’t really need them, after all.

  Felicia felt herself to be a truly lonely person—that is, one who needed more attention than she got. Justin was different. If he walked alone it was on other people’s attention that he placed his sure and spurning feet.

  “Justin,” said Rafe, as if he caught his son’s name out of her mind and suddenly remembered that he had a son and the son was going away. “Packed, I suppose?”

  “I guess so.”

  “That long drive, alone at night,” Rafe sighed.

  “He’d rather,” she said carelessly. None of this was important. They both knew that Justin would do what he would do and do it well. Rafe was not really concerned. He was just in the process of pulling himself away from his puttering.

  Or so she thought, until Rafe said, “Ladd’s not going. Why is that? Do you know, dear?”

  Felicia did not move, but all her senses were alerted. “I don’t know,”– she said in the same careless tone exactly. “I guess he’d rather not.”

  Rafe was putting tools away. But she knew him very well, indeed, and she was alarmed.

  “You’ve spent so much time together, this last while,” her father said, “I thought perhaps you would have been told.”

  She shrugged and slouched against the wood. Oh, no, she thought, no, please, no! Don’t let Rafe begin to matchmake or unmatchmake or meddle, at all! Oh no … so delicate were the tendrils, so unsubstantial, so easily wiped away by one swipe of a heavy hand. If indeed there existed any tendrils of connection, except those she held suspended in her own creative hope.

  “What do you and Ladd talk about?” her father was asking. So kind. So cruel.

  “Books, music—nothing,” she murmured. She gazed across his cluttered workroom and out the big window at the far end, through which she caught glimpses of blue water in the Cunninghams’ swimming pool. She kept her expression dreamy. She pretended not to be interested in this exchange. What am I going to do? she was thinking, frantically.

  “Abby’s a little worried. As for me, I never worry, of course. But I do wonder …”

  “Hm?” said Felicia as if she hadn’t been listening.

  “I thought perhaps you would know—better than anyone,” Rafe said slyly. “Look at me, pet.”

  Felicia blinked. She saw the log with the crude face half hacked out upon it. Her lids went down. “Dad,” she said on a low plaintive note, “could I ask you something?”

  “Anything, darling.”

  “I don’t want to upset you,” Felicia said. She looked up—wide-eyed, troubled. Oh, she had his attention and it was mean to manipulate … to turn his attention … but it was so easy and she knew how to do it. She had to do it to save herself.

  “I just wonder if it’s right,” she said, “to imitate some people’s religious symbol for an ornament.” She straightened and launched into exposition. “I mean, what if a symbol of yours … I won’t say the Cross because you don’t go to church … but what if on som
e island, some place, people were using the American flags—well—for tea towels? They’d be very pretty.”

  Her father’s face was brick-red. He pulled his chin in. His hair seemed to stand up even more than usual. Perhaps it was the redness of his scalp. “No, darling, it is not right,” Rafe said with great dignity.

  She had known where to strike. She loved him very much and she had known just what to do, but now she flew to him and into his arms. Rafe, for all his informal garb, was a clean and a sweet-smelling man. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I know other people do it. Maybe I’m silly. I had to say.” She was tearful for her own duplicity.

  Rafe stroked her hair, ruining the hard-wrought coiffure. Felicia let it go without protest.… “You must always say what you think to me,” he comforted. “My happiness,” he added tenderly, playing on her name.

  In his daughter’s ear was the slow sound of his heart. Oh God, she thought, why do things have to be the way they are? What is the matter with people?

  Ladd Cunningham stood in the open door and said, “Excuse me. Did Gary come by your driveway?”

  The sun was a little lower. He was a gray shape against the light. He had barked the question.

  Rafe let Felicia go. “Why … I haven’t seen him. Have you, dear?”

  “No,” said Felicia.

  Ladd began to withdraw.

  “About to dress and appear,” called Rafe genially. “We’ll see you at dinner.”

  “Yes, I’m looking forward,” said Ladd on a strange ringing note. Then he vanished.

  “What does he want with Gary?” said Rafe, blinking.

  “Oh, Gary’s coming to dinner, too,” said Felicia. “Cleona told me. Abby was practically weeping over her table. So she asked Gary to make eight. As if it matters.”

  Rafe patted her shoulder. “Poor Abby.” He knew Felicia wasn’t crazy about Cousin Abby.

  They walked together toward the house. Poor Abby, thought Felicia with scorn. She knew very well that three years ago, when her own mother, Sylvia, had died, Abby had wanted to take a little girl under her wing. Teach her to dress, to have manners, bring her up the way Abby thought she should go. But Felicia had quietly wiggled out of that relationship. Eluded it. Abby was a lady. Felicia admitted and even admired that. But Felicia had been an ugly duckling and an ugly duckling has its own destiny. Felicia didn’t want to be a lady. She didn’t … at least not any more … even want to be a “cute” girl. Felicia was going to have to be Felicia, whatever that was. She tried to be sorry that Abby was miffed, but Abby must let her alone.