Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  The other thing was that the elder Blaine actually cowed these persons with his connoisseurship, which was authentic at least in passion. Though the servitors were a mixed bag of nationalities, some from no farther than Kentucky, the chefs were approximate Frenchmen, and more than once a baggy white toque drooped in contrition as the haricots flageolets were identified as rather American Great Northern or the eggs Benedict were smothered in hollandaise and not sauce Mornay or if the latter, the constituent cheese was domestic and not imported Swiss. Perhaps his father-in-law was a genuine gastronome, or merely a shrewd psychologist. It was not likely that Reinhart, who bought California wine by the gallon, could fault him on technical matters.

  What interested Reinhart in all this was Raven’s assurance. The man was a monster of certainty. He could survey a room in a single glance and identify its inhabitants as base swine or sum up a historical situation, for others fraught with agonizing complexity, with the stark statement, “The coons are taking over everywhere.” But organized right-wing groups were beyond his pale, with their flabby faces and loutish clothes, and anybody Southern because of the accent, and Hitler and his associates had all been grotesquely deformed in body. Raven could not endure people who deviated from the physical norm in any direction, fat or bone, wore facial hair, walked with an irregular stride, or whose nostrils, ears, eyebrows, etc., were either exceptionally tiny or gross.

  He was particularly a nut on posture, and might strike Reinhart painfully in the small of back if he passed behind him—probably a holdover from his officer-days, but after the breaking-in period of the marriage, Reinhart felt within his rights to protest. Raven however was a master in rising above what he considered meanness. He would not argue. For that matter he would not fight though he kept himself in beautiful trim in the gymnasium of his club (on the upstairs bulletin board of which his name was permanently posted as being in arrears on dues), hefting barbells and making the cable weights scream.

  Raven’s style was not everywhere triumphant. The lower on the social scale his involvements, the more likely the resistance, and the attendant of a parking lot, say, being virtually immune to any kind of approach, in fact sharing with Raven a sense of disjunction from the rest of humankind, would fetch his car with no more grace than a sane man would expect, abusing the transmission and brakes, ripping the ticket from the hand, spitting on the ground, the usual series of natural uglinesses. Raven’s practice was to get back of the wheel, close and lock the door, and, lowering the window two inches, call out in a penetrating but not loud voice: “You are a filthy hyena.” Oftentimes the attendant was too far sunk in the mire of his spirit to hear the statement or at any rate to apprehend and/ or apply it to himself. But on at least one occasion, Reinhart being present, a short, underweight fellow, with a ripe boil on his cheek, correctly divined he was the target of an insult and ran to the window uttering obscene imprecations. At which Raven smiled victoriously through the glass, turning once to show Reinhart, and accelerated into the street.

  The truth was, Reinhart envied his father-in-law. He too loathed persons who were paid to render service and did it badly, but found himself paralyzed when it came to entering a complaint: his conscience would invariably begin to snivel about how little the flunky must earn in wages, how dreary the job, how limited the opportunity. In the old days Reinhart would swallow his bile and congratulate himself on his compassion. He now had the courage anyway to admit his failure to protest was due exclusively to cowardice.

  Raven’s solution was perfect, but you had to be a scoundrel to execute it. What Reinhart envied in his father-in-law was not finally the arrogance in itself, but rather the solipsism of which it was a product, and he hated him the more, without sympathizing with any of Raven’s victims. On his side Raven had always been more or less oblivious to Reinhart. Yet, in the early days Reinhart had often found himself, willy-nilly, in his father-in-law’s company. More than once he had come upon a drunken Raven and helped him home. Reinhart himself was wont to soak his depression in strong drink, which made his spirit despair even more strenuously and his body swell with fat, but though twenty-odd years older, Raven seemed immune to the deleterious effects of liquor. His belly was flat and his wind inexhaustible, at least by Reinhart, who had many occasions on which to gauge it, for Raven in his cups could become quite bestial when pursued, leaping onto bartops and car roofs and swinging on overhead projections with a simian’s insouciance.

  As a lawyer he had seemed rarely to have a client. The only one Reinhart could remember was the streetwalker who had hired Raven to beat a bum rap brought by a vice-squad dick who had been getting freebies from her for six months in exchange for immunity and then treacherously, to fill an arrest-quota in response to a mayoral cleanup push, put the collar on her. While planning her defense, Raven went into one of his crazy drunks and gave his client a savage pummeling. The hooker took him to court and won. Another issue of this incident was his disbarment.

  But Raven not only survived the experience but through it became favorably known to the fellowship of local pimpery, who recognized a kindred soul when it came to handling women and retained his services for a decent annual stipend. He could not practice, but dispensed advice equipping the clients to represent themselves quite effectively.

  Gen did not know the whole story, and overrode with screams and howls Reinhart’s attempts to put her in the picture. To her Raven was still “the greatest Daddy who ever lived,” her literal inscription on the cards accompanying Xmas and birthday gifts. Reviewing this state of affairs in a mirror, Reinhart could watch himself turn blue.

  But as his own daughter grew into a usable consciousness, Reinhart recognized that he might well be the Raven to Winona’s Genevieve. The girl worshiped him. It had not been little Blaine who smeared aerosol-canned whipped-cream substitute on his cheeks and scraped it off with a pencil, in imitation of his shaving Dad, but Winona, who subsequently licked off the froth and swallowed it. When hardly out of the staggering stage she had already begun to pick up Reinhart’s peculiar stride. It was amusing to see that little blob loping along a block away, and of course touching as well.

  Or when, still too young to read—which was in fact somewhat later than normal, for though not in any sense “retarded,” Winona was very patient about acquiring new skills—she would sit next him on the sofa and pore over a book chosen to resemble his in size and color, with her eyes cornered so as to see his expression and simulate it upon her own visage. As Reinhart did not usually reflect on his face the emotions derived from the written word, Winona grew ever more strenuous in her surveillance until, leaning over, she lost her balance and fell across his lap. It was of course impossible to read under this well-motivated harassment, and if Reinhart was eager for the book he took it into the toilet, where he seldom got settled before Gen or Blaine wanted to flush him from cover.

  But if, as was more likely with every year of life, he found the narrative or exposition indifferent to his needs—the quenching of a thirst for fantasy-adventure and the confirmation of favorite prejudices—he would help Winona back onto her seat and pretend to resume reading but actually daydream while making grimaces, smirks, scowls, and even the occasional belly-laugh for her benefit. Each of which she would simulate in turn.

  Sometimes they both held their volumes upside down. She was not that stupid or young. She knew that he knew. A charming little game of affection. There was no getting away from the fact that he was loved and in the only right way: uncritically. But it was also unfortunately true that one, or to be candid, he, tended to undervalue that which came so naturally without condition. That was to say, he got less joy from Winona’s total approval than despair from Blaine’s rejection.

  Part of this was sheer snobbery, Blaine being older and considerably more clever than his sister. This might be a rotten consideration, but Reinhart had come to manhood in a day when psychoanalysis and other forms of secular rationalism demanded that the truth be told, to oneself at least,
however hideous.

  Then there was the sexual distinction. Growing up to womanhood equipped with the expressions of a male face would be impractical for Winona. Whereas, those were precisely what Blaine could use as an adult, as well as a virile moral code comprising such basics as an initial respect for everybody, its reluctant withdrawal individually from the unworthy and, if necessary, replacement by the just use of strength—the obvious points, simple enough to make theoretically though in practice complex. Seldom had Reinhart been satisfied with his own performance on these principles, but that they were manly he had no doubt.

  But from the first Blaine had taken his own cue from Genevieve as to ethics. What he wanted was always right. Why? Because it was what he wanted. A continuous circle, self-perpetuating, and above all neat, whereas Reinhart’s soul-searching, weighing of alternatives, and identification of motives were a disordered procedure, and after all of that the issue might well be self-destructive.

  Reinhart was never pompous, to be which you must have power, and he always wore the familiar soft button-down collar of oxford cloth. Receptivity to all points of view was his natural habit. Reinhart should have been Blaine’s best friend, that was the pity. As a drab bourgeois father Reinhart was actually in disguise, wearing the same makeup, which aged like skin, that had served him as middle-class son. Underneath it throbbed the questing mind of a philosopher-king, vitalized by the blood of a poet’s expansive heart. His own parents had never had a clue to his true character. Why cannot they see me as a prince? he had asked in vain for the last time, and joined the Army at eighteen. He was careful not to have the same failing with Blaine. Had read him King Arthur when the boy was six or seven. Reinhart was wont to exaggerate when estimating the term of years during which Blaine had loathed him. Actually the boy had been friendly enough as a tot. He would often apply to his father to be read to on retiring—Reinhart of course never forced this.

  Blainey’s favorite was Sir Galahad, the pure, the dedicated, whose strength was that of ten because his heart was squeaky clean—a sexless, priggish, obsessive compulsive by Reinhart’s own measurement even as a child. Reinhart naturally preferred Launcelot, who carried about him an aura of stain even in the bowdlerized versions for children. Both were water over the dam now, of course, except that Blaine wore his hair like the Perfect Knight, which may have been one of the leavings, and there was also the possibility, now that Reinhart thought about it, that Blaine believed his own morality to be Galahadic.

  He had already begun in high school to find the existing social structure as a matrix of fraud, sheathed in lies. Reinhart had made something of the same discovery in his own day; it was scarcely an original apprehension. Later Reinhart decided that whether or not it would stand up as a universal truth, it was immediately attractive in the degree to which one had no responsibility, which was to say, did no work.

  In his first job, the selling of real estate, it had soon become apparent that one could not at the same time survive in commerce and adhere to the letter of certain moral maxims. As a result tradition had worked out a kind of gentleman’s agreement, never vocally articulated but more or less understood by all parties, to the effect that each side would screw as good a deal as he could from the other, and the state of the market, an objective gauge and no respecter of personalities, would determine who came out the better. In a seller’s market the vendor had the upper hand, but a recession would eventually come along. And anyway, once the buyer made a purchase, he was himself a potential seller: think of that, ad infinitum.

  But Blaine was only a high-school sophomore, wise fool, when he arrived at an opinion adverse to the whole idea of private property. “The land should belong to the people.” Generous and noble sentiment, but redundant: every single property-owner in the world was a human being or an institution comprising many. Blaine of course meant commonality, pure communism in fact, and who had not dabbled in that vision as a beardless stripling? And then grew up, at least in America, to see the mess made by the Post Office, the Army, and other public agencies. Reinhart would rather buy a house from a crooked finagler like his old boss Claude Humbold than be issued one by some prick of a bureaucrat.

  “But if there were no private enterprise all the good men would have to work for the government,” said Blaine, with his already well-developed air of Q.E.D., already offensive in its implication that at fifteen he could recognize a truth that idiot Dad had missed for thirty-eight years.

  “But that’s just it, Blainey,” Reinhart cried vehemently. “There are no good men in that sense!”

  He had him there, and Blaine winced, his blue eyes pale as skim milk. He seemed ready to weep. Disillusionment hit him hard.

  “You see,” Reinhart pressed on while he had the advantage, “in certain situations all men act the same, or most—there are always eccentrics—which does not refer to good or evil, really. They will try to make a profit. If the monetary type of gain is outlawed, as in Russia, then in power. People are a competitive race as well as gregarious—there may be some connection. Other herd-type beasts have instinctive hierarchies of power. They follow a leader who has whipped the other aspirants. So do we, but in human life the leaders are usually not big, strapping physical warriors but rather men with cunning, often quite small in body, as was Adolf Hitler, who was actually a flop at every other form of endeavor than handling people.”

  Blaine’s tears turned out to be not a whimpering reaction to the force of Reinhart’s analysis but the symptom of a suppressed rage which he now proceeded to liberate.

  “You,” he said, making a highly particular form of recognition, “you”—he actually pointed at Reinhart—“you are a defender of the status quo of substandard housing, underdeveloped countries, the poor and the wretched all over the face of the earth.”

  Reinhart moved quickly to say: “I think I get your point of argument, but there’s no call to get personal, Blaine. Of course I am not offended, but—”

  “That’s what’s wrong with you. That’s why you tolerate social evils like racism—it’s not personal. But it should be. It should be the personal agony of every human being. You should not be able to sleep at night.”

  In fact Reinhart was suffering from insomnia at this very period, which was that of his gas-station venture, in which all his resources and then some were tied up, and They had already begun to construct the superhighway which would bypass him. They, the people with power and money. Blaine should see Them as the common enemy.

  “Look, son,” he said. “I can hardly keep ahead of the bill collectors. We might lose our home unless I use every bit of my mind and spirit in my own business. I wish the poor well and deplore the way Negroes are treated in some areas of this country. Look, I always vote for liberals. What else can I do and at the same time look after my own interests, which are also yours and your mother’s and sister’s? A man’s first obligation is to his own family.”

  “Human beings are dying of neglect,” said Blaine. “And all you think of is your bankbook.”

  With its balance of $27.24. If Reinhart thought of that, he thought of trash indeed. A far-right fringe group had lately circulated an open letter to all taxpayers, branding several local social-science teachers as Commies. Reinhart had grinned and discarded the missive, but it now occurred to him that Blaine might be under such tutelage.

  “Do you get this stuff in school?”

  Blaine loftily replied: “I get it from the President of the United States.”

  “Oh, a millionaire by inheritance,” was Reinhart’s riposte. “They always grieve for the poor.” It was mean, but he was somewhat cynical about Blaine’s adoration of the Kennedys, as he would not have been were they penniless, homely, and dull—but then Blaine would not have worshiped them. “Anyway,” he went on, “I voted for him. You can’t fault me on that.”

  “Then why aren’t you thinking of what you can do for your country instead of what it can do for you?” Blainey asked indignantly. A few years later he would
savagely reject such political rhetoric—except that spewed forth by the white bums and colored criminals who called themselves revolutionary—but at this time his hair was still short and he wore much the same kind of buttondown collar as Reinhart, and a V-necked sweater in maroon.

  All at once Reinhart understood he was being admonished by an adolescent boy for utterly arbitrary, imaginary failures. Were he to tolerate this he might next be accused of allowing cancer to spread unchecked and hurricanes to devastate the Caribbean.

  “How dare you speak to me in that tone! I won’t answer to a fifteen-year-old boy for whatever I do or don’t. And I don’t admire Communists. I saw plenty of Russian soldiers in Berlin and they were nobody to emulate, dirty apelike bums who went around raping German girls.” Actually Reinhart had never seen this in practice, and the Russkies he encountered seemed like pretty nice guys, smiling at and saluting everybody, but he wanted to end the colloquy on an aggressive note of his own.

  Blaine gave him a long stare. Reinhart was never good at eye-to-eye combat. He looked instead at his son’s chin, already elongating from the roundness of boyhood. The thin mouth could be an implication of cruelty, the lower lip almost flat and thus not so much a lip as the inferior margin of a gash. He was still too young and fair to shave. He smoked on the sly, but not much. Probably grabbed a beer now and again, but in general he was not a rebel in his personal habits. Dad had never spied on Reinhart, and Reinhart returned the favor to his own son. There had never been a curfew on Blaine, but he rarely stayed out late and whether he had shiftless cronies was not apparent. Occasionally when Reinhart rose from bed to take a post-midnight pee, he could hear the dim murmur of Blaine’s radio, never music, probably one of those all-night talk shows out of New York. The boy always got good grades, yet one seldom caught him with an open schoolbook. But he read much, and not in clothbound volumes borrowed from the public library, as had been Reinhart’s adolescent practice, but rather from paperbacks purchased on his own and usually those of quality both in matter and format, costing a dollar ninety-five and up. This impressed Reinhart, who would casually buy the dearest whiskey, but thought much wine and most books snobbishly overpriced, and if you got a lemon you were stuck with an item whose resale value was nil.