Little Less Than Kind

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Didn’t they know what Ladd thought?

  Why did this have to be? Ice cream and cake, in candlelight, and talk, talk … Why must Abby have a nice orderly dinner party as if that were the most important thing in the whole world? Why didn’t any of them get up and go out there and find Ladd and try to tell him …

  Tell him it wasn’t true. That Dr. Silver hadn’t been asked here to spy on him, to find out whether Ladd was mentally ill and needed a doctor (just because he couldn’t feel happy about a pretty sudden stepfather)! Or … if it was true and David Crown had done this, then couldn’t someone tell Ladd that it was only because they worried about him? Make him believe it? Oh, comfort him. Surely he was more important than a stupid party.

  Couldn’t any of them tell what had been bothering Ladd all evening? The headshrinker, of course. And it was a little bit funny. Dr. Silver didn’t really fit into this particular party.

  Felicia did not know the truth about that, but she wished she, herself, had the courage to get up and go out there and find him. But she hadn’t. Because of Rafe, who would then certainly come down with his heavy hand. Or because of Justin, who had warned her off, who might follow her and argue. Felicia cringed in herself.

  Or because she had really no status, just her secret devotion and her strong wish to comfort him, somehow. Look at his own mother, who had the status and the right. She wasn’t doing a single thing but being upset and requiring everybody else to comfort her.

  Then Dr. Silver said in Felicia’s ear, softly, “Are you all right?”

  And she cringed. But she answered softly, “You talk to poor Abby.”

  Then she knew he had read her; she knew he saw right through to her feeling about Abby, and everything. These doctors were spooky. Horrible. Felicia didn’t blame Ladd. She didn’t blame him at all. They were intrusive. They didn’t let you alone. You had a right to feel what you did feel and a right not to have to tell, anybody what that was, if you’d rather not.

  You even had a right to be unhappy. It was just phony to try to tell yourself that everything was really rosy. That all you had to do was change your attitude … put on the old rose-colored glasses … that would fix everything. Well, it wouldn’t.

  There are worse things, she thought, than being rude because you feel spied on and betrayed, when maybe you are. There is something basically wrong and unrosy. Because look … she reasoned with herself … probably all these people are, right now, trying to be good and kind, all helping Abby pretend because they think that’s right. They are not doing it to be mean or anything. And yet …

  Felicia herself was being a “good girl,” eating her ice cream daintily and not bothering anybody.

  And yet …

  Maybe it isn’t good enough, just to be “good.” Maybe it’s just not that easy.

  Of course not. Of course not. The secret made her smile.

  The night was cool. The moon was not up. Felicia had hold of Justin’s hard arm, because of her high heels and the dark but the Lorimers knew the Cunningham grounds almost as well as their own. So they crossed the terrace and took the walk to the steps, to the driveway.

  Justin didn’t say a word.

  It had been quite simple for Felicia to get away, after dinner. There had been the milling around in the Cunningham stair-hall, everybody saying “Good-bye,” “Good luck.” Then Abby had taken Gary Fenwick by his arm and on into the living room. Dr. Silver had followed them.

  Rafe had gone into his annual speech to his departing son. It was always the same—on the importance of human values over against materialism, friendships and all that, but of course your friends might as well be high-class well-heeled people. On getting along with others as a sign of maturity, but of course you must always “be yourself.” A speech full of paradox. Justin always listened to it quietly, with his face closed, patient. Then he would go away and do as he would do, which would be very well.

  When Rafe ran down, Felicia was able to say to her father, “Dad, why don’t I walk over with Justin and see him off? You stay at the party.”

  Rafe had been just as pleased to stay. David Crown, waiting politely, had said to her, “But you’ll come back, won’t you, Felicia?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Crown,” she said, “of course.”

  Justin, once they had achieved the level of the driveway, disengaged his arm and crossed to try the pool gate. It was locked.

  “We locked it this afternoon,” Felicia said.

  “I know.” He peered within where the pool glimmered faintly. He turned—she could see him now by starlight or by the city’s sky-reflected glow—and started along the drive toward the gap in the high hedge by which opening the Lorimers came and went. She followed.

  “His car is here,” Justin said, as they passed the Cunningham garage and carport. Her heart jumped. She had not heard Ladd’s car go out, but then she might not have been able. So it was here. “I’m wondering where he got to,” said her brother. “What an idiot!” They went through the gap.

  Justin’s car, which was five years old but well-kept and spry with power—since Justin understood machinery in the way he had of effortlessly knowing what he cared to know—was waiting in the Lorimers’ drive. Justin, being Justin, had already stashed his stuff in trunk and tonneau. He stopped and looked up at their house. The clapboards, that were graying by daylight, rose up whitely now. A light burned in the kitchen. The doors were never locked. (It was Rafe’s philosophy.) This was the house where they had been born. Felicia knew no other place.

  “Well,” said Justin, “so.…” He seemed to try to shrug off house, town, family. He got into his car. He started the engine and listened to it purr.

  Felicia moved closer. “Have fun,” she said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  But there was more to be said; it hung heavy in the air.

  “I suppose,” her brother said, “your heart bleeds for poor Ladd Cunningham. You should try your brain.”

  “Don’t you know it was that doctor?” Felicia almost whispered, as if the night listened. “Don’t you see what Ladd thought? Well, it’s terrible, and somebody should try to talk to him and let him talk. Somebody is going to have to.”

  Her brother turned on his headlights and the dashlight came up to play upon his face. “I suppose you’re going to volunteer and make a damned fool of yourself. Que sera sera, eh? You’re an idiot.”

  “Thanks a lot,” she said, stepping back.

  Justin was peering along the headlight’s beam. The light touched their father’s studio, the big tree, the bench, the hedge, a patch of whiteness, beyond the gap that was the Cunningham’s pavement. All things looked strange, tonight, around this place where they had been born.

  “Next year,” said Justin flatly, “you can get away.”

  “What if I don’t want …?”

  “You don’t know what you want.”

  “But you do?”

  “Oh, I’ll get it,” he said, misunderstanding her. “Just don’t make people up, huh, Felice?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t invent them, I mean. They’re sitting there. Out there.”

  “All those idiots?” Felicia said thinly. “Really?”

  “Okay.” Justin seldom bothered to take offense and did not, now. “I kinda wish I didn’t have to go,” he said, “but … que sera. So long, honey.” Whereupon he put his car in gear and backed, with his usual verve, toward the street and away.

  His sister stood in the tweedy duskiness of the suburban night She felt her heart ache. Her brother never called her “honey.” It was odd. For a moment, she mourned his departure. He was himself. He was himself. A rare bird!

  She had a feeling that it was not so much that he had gone. (He was himself.) He had let her go.

  Now the days would settle to Rafe and Felicia, in the big old house, with Mrs. Wells, the cleaning woman, twice a week.

  And Ladd Cunningham around.

  Felicia shivered and turned her back upon the walls of home so
whitely high.

  Where had he got to?

  She went through the gap. Her heels clicked on the pavement. She did not want to go back to the party. Where would Ladd be? Not at Gary Fenwick’s house. Gary was still trapped in the party. Was he within the pool’s fence, sitting somewhere in shadow? Was he in the garden, that square of shrubs and roses inside the wall? Her heels clicked.

  She passed the carport, just a roof over Ladd’s car, an afterthought, squeezed between garage and hedge. The big three-place garage was open. The Cunninghams … she really ought to get used to saying the Crowns … rarely pulled the doors down. Abby’s car, David Crown’s car. The car nearest the garden end. Hob Cunningham’s car. She looked at it, hard. The parachute cloth was altered from its normal position. Then she knew where he was!

  “Ladd?” But in her mind lingered a thought about her brother. Justin thinks he is so smart! He missed it! Hah! The heart’s a better compass than the brain!

  In the big living room, Abby was busily charming Gary Fenwick—an evasion, a desperate ploy.

  Rafe had undertaken to explain to Dr. Silver some basic insights into human motivations. But Aaron, at the first decently possible moment, arose and said that he must go. So, this having been politely regretted but, as politely, not disputed, be went, and David accompanied him to his car which he had left in the street.

  “Not me,” said Aaron. “Out. Out. Surely, that’s obvious?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Where is he, I wonder?”

  “Beer parlor? Cathouse? Wild drive into the country? Or,” said Aaron reflectively, “possibly he’s got in, secretly, and lies on his bed, which might be unfortunate.”

  “What will happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What am I going to do?” David was not asking for answers, not from Aaron, but from the universe.

  “To protect Abby?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  Aaron said, “It could be … and I suppose I’d better say so …”

  “Yes?”

  “That what he hates is himself, that he is trying to take you for himself, that he might fail. If so—then, you had better take care for Abby.”

  “I don’t …”

  “Ah, well, I don’t either. Nor can I. Out. Out. And much the better part of valor. I’ll have to leave you with it.”

  He got into his car. “I’m sorry, Dave,” he said. And David knew that his friend was sorry.

  He stood alone on the sidewalk in front of Hob Cunningham’s house. Damn the Greeks, he thought, and their word for it. Oh cruel! You could not … could not … (How could you?) … if you loved and proposed to protect a sensitive woman, tell her that her son was sick of incestuous love for her. When she, according to her instincts, according to her best, had only and only loved her son as God gives a woman to do.

  No, said David to himself. No and no!

  My daughters, he thought, loved me and yet now love their husbands and, as far as I can know or tell, they do so safely. And surely not because I was too wise to love them, only and only, as God gives a man to love his daughters.

  Oh cruel doctrine and bitter punishment and mockery! If God is love but love is evil …

  He went up the walk to the house feeling frightened and lost. He went into the stair-hall where the lovely curve of the stairs flew up, where subtly upon the air hung the remembrance of good food, where faintly to be heard came the sound of human voices. He went into a human habitation.

  So David drew himself into himself. Being human, he loved. “Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him. But I will maintain my own ways before Him.”

  Now how had that popped into his head, complete? Job? Yes, he knew it was from Job, and knew not how he knew. He was no Bible student. Ah, thought David, it would be my father or my mother who would remember how I come to know those words. Love sounded down his years, behind him.

  Feeling strong and resettled upon his foundations, he went toward the voices.

  “Don’t touch it!” Ladd said fiercely. Felicia had taken steps toward the garage. He got out of his father’s car where he had been sitting in the driver’s seat, and slammed the door, and pulled the cover over the hood. He hurried out to her. He did not touch her but they walked a step or two together as if he were leading her, by suggestion, away.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” she said. “Let’s … let’s go somewhere.”

  She was wondering where they could go to talk. Not into the garden or anywhere too near the Cunningham house. Not the pool house either, because that involved getting the gate key from its hiding place and unlocking. Too formal and deliberate a course. No, quickly—where? Then she thought of the wooden bench against her father’s workroom, under the camphor tree.

  “I know,” she said. “Please, Ladd … come with me. This way.”

  His feet scuffed the pavement as he walked with her. They went through the gap in the hedge. Felicia was very happy. “No one will know,” she murmured, thinking that they would be lost from all interference in the strangeness of this very familiar place. She reached for his hand to draw him toward the bench. But, he snatched his hand away. He was looking up at the Lorimer house.

  “Justin just left,” she said reassuringly. “There’s nobody home.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just … please, Ladd? I know … I mean … the way you felt. I mean, I think I do.” Felicia was very young. Her speaking vocabulary sometimes failed to match up to her inner musings. She stammered. “I mean, I wish I could … you know? Please, let me?”

  She could not see him very well. The dusk concealed expression. She was yearning to read the blank oval of his face. She would comfort. She would save. She, Felicia. Poised upon a sense of heavenly power, she did not feel her feet upon the earth. She was disembodied.

  So his hard fingers shocked her when he took her by her shoulders and his hard mouth and cruel teeth and his kiss of anger. She was jolted back into her body by pain and surprise.

  “Oh, you lousy bitches!” he said, “Oh, she’s a bird and you’re a bird! Birds of prey! What? What? So we’re supposed to go upstairs? Whose bed? Your bed? No one will know. I’m surprised you give a damn who knows. She doesn’t.”

  “Please …” Her voice was feeble. She felt as if she would faint. “No.”

  “Ah, come on,” he said with loathing. I’ll tell you something, sister. None of that.” So his hands threw her and she fell hard and the ground was cruel but she began to whimper from a worse pain. “Just figure that you didn’t make it, honey,” Ladd said, a tall menace, a terror. She thought for a moment that he would pull back his foot and kick her. But he did not. He turned and went back through the hedge and when he melted in the dark, he laughed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When the phone rang, David answered. He came back into the big room and said, “That was Felicia to say she isn’t feeling awfully well.”

  “Not?” said Rafe, looking startled.

  “Begs to be excused, Abby. Thanks you for a lovely dinner.”

  “Ah, poor child,” said Abby. “What can be the matter?”

  Rafe said, “Perhaps I’d better go along home and see. No one’s there, you know.”

  Gary said, “Yeah, me too. I mean, thanks a lot, Mrs. Crown, Mr. Crown, for everything.”

  So the party was breaking up, at last.

  Gary was younger, more spry, and had fewer phrases of farewell at his command, so he went first. Out upon the terrace, down to the driveway, to turn toward the Lorimers’ gap because it was a shortcut for him to go that way. As he drew even with the pool gate he heard Ladd say from against the garden wall, “Hey, Gare?”

  “Hey, Ladd?”

  “Listen, I think I know how to work what we said. Let’s kick it around.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Listen, let’s go.”

  “Okay. My place?”

  “I got to get out of this God-damned, rotten, stinking place. What took you?” Ladd
snapped irritably.

  “I had to be polite.”

  They were moving fast. They were through the gap.

  “Say, the head-doctor cut out, but quick,” Gary said. “I guess he’d had it.” He stopped because suddenly he had gone ahead. “You coming?”

  Ladd was standing still in the Lorimers’ yard and seemed to be looking at the ground.

  “I’d just as soon cut out of the whole damn stinking world,” Ladd said. “And maybe that’s the best idea of all.”

  “Listen.”

  But Ladd hurried on and Gary followed.

  David and Abby were in their bedroom. They had left a door to the terrace open, not knowing whether the boy had his key. They had left a light in the stair-hall.

  Abby sat down at her dressing table and held her cheeks. “But where is he?” she mourned.

  “I don’t know, darling. After all, he is twenty.” David sawed at his tie.

  “But what was the matter with him? He surely knows better. David, what is it? I’ve done wrong. I must have done wrong.” She was weeping. “Hob was always so busy. I had the job of raising Ladd. I must not have done a very good job. I’ve never been so mortified. What will Aaron Silver think of us?”

  David was not going to tell her all that Aaron Silver thought. “Don’t worry about him,” he counseled.

  Abby held her cheeks and said to the mirror, “Have I done wrong?”

  David came to stand behind her and stroke her shoulders. “I will not leave you,” he said, decisively.

  Her startled eyes met his by way of the mirror.

  “I’ve gone over that a thousand times. Abby darling, consider something. A parent is not supposed to own a child. A child is not a possession.”

  “I know.”

  “Then, neither does a child own a parent. Mustn’t it work both ways?”