“No, no,” Bob said. “We are not going to freeze Mainwaring, at least not yet. Hans thinks he might be able to save him.”
Reinhart shook his fist. “You would never try that on a white man.”
Streckfuss was furiously busy at another table, chopping some organic-looking substance in a glass dish. Making lunch again, no doubt. This was a place in which Hieronymous Bosch would have felt quite at home.
“I tell you, Bob,” Reinhart stated gravely, “if you persist, I will personally call the police.”
Sweet flexed his arms as one does to suggest a hale condition. “God knows I am myself Exhibit A.” He bounced on his toes. He was still wearing the androgynous gown, and there was something osbcene about the demonstration of vigor.
“Did you hear me, Bob?”
Sweet went so far as lustily to gnash his artificial teeth in a grin of braggadocio virility. Then he said more soberly: “Of course Mainwaring’s degeneration is well advanced. Too bad Hans couldn’t have got to him earlier. But once this biliary malfunction is straightened up, he should be back on his feet, a better man than before—in fact, rejuvenated.”
Reinhart gave up on the warnings: one, because Bob paid no attention to them, and for another, he had heard the magic word, and furthermore pronounced without the smirk which had been its natural accompaniment since Ponce de León explored Florida, finding only alligators and sawgrass. To go back and start all over again, with the faculties of twenty and the memories of forty-four. Of course he was thinking of himself and not Splendor. Could it be serious?
“Do you have to be dying to get this treatment?” he asked.
And now Bob heard him, and answered: “I have tried to tell you a number of times, Carl, that I myself have received Hans’s cell therapy, and here I stand as proof: Old age is a disease, and can be arrested right now, cured altogether perhaps still in our lifetimes. In this light nothing else is serious—can’t you see that? The treasuries of all nations should be put at the disposal of the researchers in this field. Men like Hans, who is alone here and practicing illegally, in fact. But there are several in Europe, some accepted and even honored by their countries, if the countries are small enough. In America especially, which should be foremost in this sacred mission, medical theory and practice persist, ignorantly, cowardly, in the same old negative approach.”
Sweet laughed savagely, his ordinarily dispassionate mask extruding at appropriate points to produce, with the white cassock, the look of a celebrant of a proscribed religion, all the more righteous as well as merciless therefor. “The President,” he cried, “will probably die at no more than eighty years of age. The most powerful man on earth. He can put people on the moon, while his own cells waste away.”
“Chemicals,” said Reinhart, “I know, are the big things now. The emphasis has shifted from the emotional, psychosomatic approach to drugs—”
“No,” Sweet interrupted firmly. “Not chemicals but the basic unit of life, the cell, capable of infinite regeneration. We are not solid, Carl. We are assemblages of cells adhering together.”
“True,” Reinhart agreed. “You take any solid, even inanimate. It is no more than a cluster of molecules. They say that if you were deft enough you could slip your hand through a wall, between the atoms. Anyway, I saw once during the war, in England, Exeter Cathedral, I believe it was, a piece of wood that had been driven into a stone pillar by a bomb blast.”
“Bopp,” Streckfuss called. He held aloft an enormous syringe, of the kind used by veterinarians on people in movie comedies.
Sweet strode to the table. He opened his surgical gown at the back-parting and got his hands inside.
Reinhart saw that the tube of the hypodermic was filled with a suspension of pink globules, a slippery, gooey mess that reminded him in texture and form of that cocktail-party horror, orange caviar.
Bob’s pants collapsed around his ankles, followed by his under-shorts. He lifted one side of the gown, revealing a hairy haunch, and Streckfuss drove the needle into the ham so presented and began slowly to depress the plunger.
Reinhart believed it was more polite to go around to the other side of the table, facing Bob, whose neck, however, was twisted and head inclined so that he could watch his buttock ingesting the weird nourishment.
“Which organ,” asked Reinhart, “are you getting?”
“Testicles.” Sweet was very matter-of-fact. He did not bother to look around and check out this statement on Reinhart’s countenance, for obviously there was no irony in it. He was having minced goat balls injected into his rump—doesn’t everybody? was the implication.
After that was done, over to Splendor’s house Streckfuss would go and shoot the poor devil full of chopped goat’s liver. Reinhart was not the one to stand in his way. Splendor was dying anyhow.
11
There were various possibilities: that Blaine had lied to Maw, in whole or part; that the girl had lied to Blaine; that each was lying to the other; that Maw was lying deliberately or suffering from senile delusions or merely making a malicious joke in stopping the check.
Blaine of course was quite capable of the bad feeling behind this bit of character-assassination, and he certainly would be in the market for revenge. He was a pretty ugly kid without his long golden locks. To Reinhart’s taste he had not been much with them. Up to puberty he had resembled his father. Then for no good reason he had begun to get this ratty look along with the change of voice and a skin condition. At fourteen or fifteen, when acne was still in vogue, he had a faceful of purple welts. Sympathetically Reinhart supplied him with a new type of lotion—advertised on late-afternoon teen dance shows which, during idle periods, Reinhart tuned in on to watch the jouncing thoraxes and sturdy thighs of adolescent girls—the kind that masked the lesions with a beige cosmetic while “hidden medication did its work.” But Blaine was by then already well embarked on his career of defiance—though not as yet openly vile.
Reinhart knew his own trouble as a father resulted from a preoccupation with the ideal which actuality delighted in continually proving impractical. Hence he was ever insecure. To Blaine he could not speak straight without considering the ironies. He had not been able to order him to do his homework, say, without reflecting on a number of considerations which, evident in his voice, vitiated the command to a mere wheedle devoid of sufficient reason. For one, Blaine had always got good grades without apparent study. For another, Reinhart abhorred the idea of enforced learning as illiberal, un-American, antidemocratic, and contrary to the best psychosocial theory. The life of the mind must be pursued by love alone. He had heard often enough that Shakespeare will be hated if read under compulsion. At the same time he was secretly pleased to have had As You Like It rammed down his own throat as a high-school freshman, else he would have preserved nothing from those days but memories of Reader’s Digest accounts of now-outmoded scientific breakthroughs.
Reinhart had always lacked the essential of the commander: the conviction not that his orders were sensible or just, but that they would be carried out.
A brassard labeled DAD and a steel helmet, that was what Reinhart needed, nightstick, handcuffs. As one grows older he becomes more of a policeman. Yet his own father had been anything but a cop, and Reinhart could not remember having defied him. They had this instinctive, tacit agreement by which each observed the decencies towards the other. When their needs conflicted, something was always worked out. If Reinhart was supposed to cut the grass, on the one hand, and play ball with his pals, on the other, his custom was to put the situation to Dad, who would always find a civilized exit from the dilemma.
“Why don’t you mow the front lawn, Carlo, which shows? That shouldn’t take so long, whereas the back, which is larger, you can leave for when it is convenient, on account of nobody sees it as much.”
For his part, Reinhart then would accept only pro rata payment, twenty cents out of the fifty which he got for the whole job, taking the remainder when he completed the back yard, whic
h indeed he would do promptly after the ball game.
It had been so simple, sensible, and just, and both parties habitually acted with honor. Common decency, Reinhart was wont glibly to think as a very young man, is all that’s necessary for a world without conflict. He saw a ghost of this theory in the contemporary vogue among youth for “love,” though, typically, exaggerated by the passing of the years. Just as you could not get a lawn mowed any more for fifty cents, so inflation had affected ethics. Decency was not enough, and the English, who seemed to have invented it, no longer had their empire, were in fact virtually bankrupt. Why should you have to love a man to give him justice? Though Reinhart did, of course, love Dad, but he might have done as much for a stranger.
Blaine however, in his day, neither played ball nor cut the grass, though the fee for the latter was now three dollars and the tool, provided by the employer, a gasoline-powered device for which no effort was needed beyond a gentle guidance. A young girl could have run it, and in fact, Winona sometimes did, or came outside, anyway, while Reinhart was making it roar, and “helped.” What had she been then, eight or nine? Always large for her years.
What had Blaine done, if not sports and not work? He had a puppet show of his own making, quite cunning, cardboard theater, finger-puppets suggested by that glove-style hot-dish handler Gen had, the palm of which was decorated as a comic rabbit face in fragments of colored felt. Blaine himself stitched up a cast of characters on his mother’s Singer, then manipulated them and spoke in several voices to a script of his own composition. Genevieve naturally believed this a confirmation of the boy’s genius, predicted by her father when Blaine had been christened with his own name. Never having been herself a boy, she was not equipped, as was Reinhart, with the experience from which to assess the accomplishment as rather routine. At ten or eleven Reinhart had made his own comic strip, using a set of rubber stamps which, inked on resilient pad and carefully positioned on the paper and pressed, left the representation of circus animals, clowns, bareback riders, and aerialists. It was far from easy to make neat impressions, properly aligned, but the real creativity came in on the writing of the accompanying narration, painstakingly lettered in a box at the bottom of each frame.
Genevieve said: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Jealous of a young boy? Who is furthermore your own son? You make me sick.”
But the moral question was: Why should Blaine get everything? He already had early youth, perfect health, and an allowance of five dollars a week for which he performed no chores. For the weekly four bits Reinhart had also, when the grass was out of season, raked leaves, shoveled snow, and organized the basement. Having begun these jobs as a son, he continued them as a father, getting help from his father when a son, but when a father himself he worked alone, except of course for sporadic aid from Winona, whose will was good but whose effectuality was impaired by daydreaming, the practical use of only her left hand, her right ever occupied with wedge of cake or jelly doughnut, and a flow of tears whenever she flushed an insect from “his little house.”
While Blainey was indoors running up puppet dresses on the sewing machine. At that time he reminded Reinhart of Genevieve’s brother Kenworthy, who after a career of harassing them in their courtship, had gone off to the Navy and thence to New York, where he allegedly had enjoyed success as an interior decorator, though he never visited back or wrote. Gen once displayed a page from one of those snotty fashion magazines, showing a serpentine model lounging amidst a total environment of jaguarskin, to carpet, wall, and ceiling which an entire jungle must have been emptied. Among the credits one read: “Mise en scène—Kenworthy Raven.”
“What I wonder,” Reinhart had noted, “is who shot those wild animals. You can’t drop a jaguar with a slap from a limp wrist.”
“I think you are a dirty shit,” said Gen, who had developed quite a foul mouth over the years though she was careful to use it only when they were home alone.
At parties she was most demure of speech, even when, as the punchbowl got down to the discolored orange rounds, the rest of the crowd waxed raunchy. From the sort of smut related by a Harry Healy, whose conceit it was to use physician’s jargon (“He palpated her clitoris with his glans …”), Genevieve would indeed retreat to the lavatory or, finding it occupied, to the bedchamber-checkroom and sit sulkily upon the piled coats. Reinhart became privy to this practice once when, leading Harriet Birdsall, who loosened up to the point of harlotry after two drinks, to a private place so they could join tongues and he cup her rather juvenile buttock-globes in his large paws, they staggered into a bedroom and saw Gen; fortunately her head was turned away and he could pretend he came to fetch her for leaving.
But what did Gen want? Reinhart had had less of a clue each succeeding twelvemonth of an era lasting twenty-two years. Pregnant with what turned out to be Blaine, which was to say for a period of ten months immediately following their marriage—the nine bearing Blaine added to the one for the pretense of pregnancy, by means of which she had induced Reinhart to marry her—Gen lay about in a wrapper and read mystery novels, the sort set in country estates and peopled with tea-pouring dowagers who disposed of parvenus with devastating adjectives, trust-fund lawyers, lapdogs, and rose gardens, the lot pussyfooting around in New or Old England.
Yet Genevieve had never shown a penetrating interest in Reinhart’s schemes to make money—if the grand life was what she wanted, with upstairs maids and porte cocheres and snowy napery. It was not. That happened to be Reinhart’s own dream. He understood that people did not necessarily lust for that which they read about. Reinhart liked private-eye yarns, but he neither wished to be a shamus nor live in California. On the other hand, though he could not endure ten pages of the sissy type of thriller he would have liked to be an intimate of the houses depicted therein or, better, own one of sufficient magnitude to require a “staff.”
Money. So simple was his need. The strange thing was that in the early days, when Gen and he both worked for Humbold the realtor, she had been quite ambitious for him. On the strength of her urging and her expertise in office matters, he had even squeezed a raise out of Claude. Pregnancy had changed her, and Reinhart as well. He insisted she quit her job: he would not have a child of his carried to employment for another man. (So early did he begin to give Blaine special treatment!) Neither would he let her turn a hand at home. He did the meals and cleaning himself, and of course when the baby came, with all its requirements, it would have been shameful to dump all the old duties on Gen in addition. In fact Reinhart also took on several of the feedings and most of the diaper-changings—it was not unpleasant to deal with the intake and outgo of one’s own flesh, and in the cradle Blaine was a dead ringer for Reinhart, in miniature and surely much finer-made, but with ears set at the same angle and the characteristic depression of the cranium just below the summit in back.
Genevieve’s descent was allegedly echt English, at least on her father’s side. Her mother was a dim figure, apparently some kind of spiritualist crank, though in twenty years Reinhart had not talked with her more than an aggregate of twenty minutes, and that mainly on the phone if he called the Raven house and she answered. In nonelectronic encounters he had seldom seen her except in the company of his father-in-law, to characterize whom as an arrogant, tyrannical, narcissistic, and thoroughly nasty king of pricks was to circumlocute to the point of mealy-mouthed inarticulation.
And yet Reinhart had had to name his own son after this individual, had been forced to watch another Blaine grow to majority. The two Blaines of course got on famously, demonstrating what’s in a name after all, for Reinhart’s father-in-law was a blatant fascist in marvelous physical trim though a drunkard.
He claimed to be a former Marine officer and had the uniform and Jap combat souvenirs to back him up, though no doubt these could have been acquired by purchase or theft from the genuine article, and such an item as the gold incisor tooth—reputedly knocked by him personally, with the horizontal butt-stroke of an M-I carbine, f
rom a Nipponese monkey-mouth on the Canal or Iwo—could have been swiped from a local dentist. (He had been trained at “Tico” and shipped out of “Dago.” His jargon had an authentic sound.) Stolen from the dentist, because the elder Blaine was never known to pay for services rendered or goods received, and being a lawyer by training and an indeterminate period of practice before he was disbarred, he could not effectively be bluffed by his creditors.
Reinhart for example usually owed certain debts, like the one at Gino’s restaurant, but he would pay them when he could and at no time did he challenge the basic principle of obligation. But his father-in-law, who frequented the haute cuisine establishments downtown—L’Etable à Cochon and the Epicure’s Nook in the Shade-Milton Hotel—might eat three-quarters of a dish before returning it to the kitchen as ill-prepared, spray a mouthful of wine through his perfect teeth and send back the bottle, abuse the waiters and the maître d’, then sign the check including tip, and not only never pay it but if he were subjected to the proprietor’s importunities, threaten to boycott the place forever. He was of course only dunned by mail. On personal appearances he received a red carpet the nap of which grew deeper and the obsequiousness with which it was unrolled more slavish in the degree of his indebtedness.
Reinhart finally worked out an explanation: for one, his father-in-law persistently put on their mettle these persons whose business it was to cater to what began as a basic human need for nourishment and became a highly stylized self-indulgence. Obviously you did not require caneton aux cerises for life. Existentially speaking, such a menu was most arbitrary, even irrelevant. Therefore it would be difficult to establish that payment for it was necessary in the absolute moral sense in which a hungry man was obliged to return money for the hamburger filling his but lately hollow maw.
Vital Parts Page 25
