The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  The Family Circle

  That day – it happened to be the very same day President Truman scored his upset victory at the polls over Thomas E. Dewey – Howard, then in his senior year at college, walked into his dormitory room, and his roommate said, ‘Oh, there, Wicks, there’s something you ought to know.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Howard, a little surprised to find his roommate in such a loquacious mood. From first acquaintance the two of them had got along nicely by almost never addressing each other. This was not out of animosity. The roommate was a cadaverous, unkempt genius at science, sweating it out on a full scholarship, forever deep in his books, who had made it plain from the outset that he had no time whatsoever for idle conversation. Howard, plump, neat as a pin, and not a genius at anything, had been tongue-tied from childhood in the presence of any member of the human race, including his immediate family. For as long as he could remember, he had suffered from the deep-rooted conviction that as soon as he opened his mouth and let a word out he was being weighed and found wanting.

  Now, on being addressed at this unusual length by his roommate, he said a little warily, ‘What ought I to know?’ and the roommate said, ‘Your father just died. Some kind of car crash. Your sister phoned and wants you to get home right away.’

  So Howard took the plane home to Midlandsville, Minnesota, that night and never came back to college again. He intended to – or, more precisely, he didn’t intend not to – but, as it turned out, he never did. Not even to pack and ship home his belongings. At the close of term when he was planning to go east and attend to this chore, his mother firmly pointed out that the college authorities could very well attend to it for him, and that was how it was attended to.

  As it turned out, it never did matter that Howard failed to earn a diploma. He had reluctantly entered college only because it was the thing to do and because money was certainly no problem. And it happened to be a faraway and very Ivy League college because his mother’s father had been a distinguished alumnus of it – captain of the football team in his time, president of the senior class – and his mother had maintained a sentimental regard for the place.

  What Howard himself had found there were three years of unalloyed loneliness. Lonely even in the bosom of the family, he was at least identifiable to those around him. At college he sometimes had the feeling that he had simply become invisible. A competent if not shining student, he was the one least likely to be called on in class, and on those rare occasions when he was called on, it was noticeable that the instructor, whichever it was, had to do some awkward brow-wrinkling and finger-snapping before he could attach the name to the body. It was also noticeable, at least to Howard, that at any social gathering on or off campus, no matter how crowded it might be, he always had plenty of elbow room. Not rejected, really. Simply, so to speak, not present.

  His only pleasure during school terms was, inevitably, a solitary pleasure. One can play golf solo, and so Howard did. A neat, consistent game of straight short drives, careful iron play, and sound putting. Very sound putting. Watching the ball find its way over a rolling green into the cup ten feet away, Howard felt he was as close to being blissfully happy as he ever could be.

  Back home in Midlandsville, however, the college life now only a vaguely unpleasant memory, it seemed there wasn’t much opportunity for the playing of games. The late Mr Wicks had been his wife’s zealously devoted attendant from the day he first laid eyes on her until his untimely death. It was Howard’s obligation, his widowed mother soon let him know, to fill the gap made by his father’s departure. No hypocrite, she didn’t whine or wheedle or play forlorn in passing along this information. Mrs Wicks was a strikingly handsome woman, strong-willed, sharp-tongued, and with a penchant for stating the facts as she saw them.

  She was also a woman who had suffered two gross betrayals, a condition which did nothing to sweeten her prevailing mood. Howard’s older sisters, Regina and Ada, as handsome and imperious as their mother, had each made what Mrs Wicks regarded as an impossible marriage. The Wickses were by far the richest family in the area, their home on the ridge overlooking town a well-kept monument to the most extravagant late Victorian architecture and landscaping. Inevitably, as the sisters blossomed into maidenhood, the Wicks’ place became a magnet for a number of highly eligible suitors. Then, abruptly, all were rejected for a pair of ruggedly virile and good-looking ineligibles who, catching the girls during the brief romantic phase of their lives, swept them off to the most commonplace of commonplace existences.

  For Regina it was Vernon Birkenshaw, physical training instructor at Midlandsville High School. For Ada, only three months later, it was Thomas Dove, well-regarded by the townsfolk as the best mechanic in the Midlandsville Garage. Mr Wicks, who had worked his way up from the bottom to make a cool million and wed into the town’s most aristocratic family, rather liked his new sons-in-law. But for Mrs Wicks one disaster following hard on another made the ultimate nightmare, the one you know you’ll never wake up from.

  Consequently, the wedding portion in each case was the bare minimum needed to keep face in the community: a trim little house right there in the newly developed tract at the foot of the ridge. Certainly this was not what the brides had anticipated, not from their adoring and wealthy father, but it was their mother who had the last word, and so Regina and Ada had to settle for what they loudly and clearly regarded as an outright insult.

  Mr Wicks had borne up under this a little while, and then, an uneasy eye on his wife, had started to weaken. Perhaps, he suggested, a partnership for Vernon in distinguished Midlandsville Boys Academy might be in order. And considering that the Midlandsville Garage would be a sound investment, there was no good reason why Thomas should be a grease-monkey there when full ownership could be obtained for a fair price. As it happened, Mrs Wicks could come up with several good reasons, all having to do with heedless and ungrateful children, and that was the way things stood when a drunken driver plowed into Mr Wicks’ car at 80 miles an hour.

  It was no great surprise for Regina and Ada to learn at the reading of the will that their father’s entire estate was the inheritance of their unsympathetic mother. And it was small comfort to them to learn soon afterward that Mrs Wicks, in drafting her own will, was not carrying her resentment of her daughters’ unfortunate marriages to the limit and depriving them forever of what they felt was due them. Not forever, because the will divided her estate, when the time came, equally among her three children. When the time came. Meanwhile, as she put it, her daughters, having made their beds to their willful satisfaction, had better learn to lie in them. If they were so anxious to find out what life was like on a schoolteacher’s salary and a garage mechanic’s pay, they’d have plenty of time to do it.

  Howard, retired from college life, soon came to see that if only the contending parties would keep their distance, things would not be too bad. Unfortunately, the contending parties had good reason not to keep their distance. Every Friday evening without fail there was a family dinner at the Wicks’ place where Mother would serve in a style best calculated to make her guests realize their own insufficient means. There was small point to a triumph, her attitude seemed to be, if the victims couldn’t be on hand to share it.

  As for Regina and Ada, they were simply not taking any chances. They were allied in the same cause, but like all allies they had their suspicions of each other. Mrs Wicks never made any secret of it that her three children were going to share alike in the loot someday. But what if one of them stepped on Mother’s toes too hard before that day? What was there to prevent Mother from calling in the family lawyer and having him draft a new will cutting out the offender entirely? Not a thing. In fact, there were moments during those Friday night dinners when it seemed that Mother was looking for just such an excuse.

  So there it was. And there was Howard in the middle of it. He didn’t fully appreciate just how deep the middle of it was and how hot the water there until one day when his sisters chose to offer him e
nlightenment.

  ‘Waiting on Mother hand and foot,’ Regina said to him scornfully that day. ‘Jumping whenever she snaps her fingers. Taking all her abuse with that sweet smile.’

  ‘For good reason,’ said Ada, looking wise.

  ‘Oh, for very good reason,’ said Regina. ‘But mark my words, Howard, it won’t work. It will absolutely not work.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Ada. ‘If you think for one moment, Howard, that you are going to have us cut out of that will—’

  Nor did Howard’s stammering denial of any such intentions move his sisters in the least. As far as they were concerned, the endless little services he rendered his mother couldn’t possibly be motivated by anything but greedy calculation. And as he could see with dejection, the logic was all on their side. Even outsiders getting a glimpse of his home life might well agree with them.

  The sad irony of it – and although he had no bent for irony he could appreciate it in this case – was that he was more than content with the role he played in his mother’s household. Finally, he had, if not a friend, a close companion. With his father and the girls at home in bygone years he had been almost invisible. The same at school, whatever school it was. But here, alone in the inescapable and overwhelming presence of his mother, he had an identity and a function. It struck him with wonder one day to realize that the aching loneliness was gone for good. No drifting along, trying to win a pleased look of recognition from some bypasser. No more solitary hours. In fact, very few solitary minutes.

  To be absolutely accurate, he was not all alone with his mother. From the time Mr and Mrs Wicks had returned from their honeymoon there had been a housekeeping couple to tend the premises, Lorenzo for the chauffeuring, gardening, and heavy work, Mattie for the cooking and other domestic service. A morose team inclined to much sotto voce grumbling as they went about their duties, they had a pleasant apartment on the attic floor and seemed to find each other’s company sufficient for their needs.

  As time passed it came to Howard that with the exception of the cooking and housecleaning, he was absorbing their duties, one by one. He was now making all those trips to market that Mattie once made. He was now in charge of the building’s maintenance, overseeing the hired hands who came in to make repairs and improvements. He was doing all his mother’s chauffeuring, although, unlike Lorenzo, he had the doubtful privilege of joining the company she visited. And under her instruction, although up to now he had never demonstrated any interest in gardening or any talent for it, he even became something of a gardener, down on his knees among the flora while Mrs Wicks, her broad-brimmed straw hat shielding her fine complexion from the sun, stood at his shoulder and tartly supervised.

  Going far beyond Lorenzo and Mattie, he also came to serve as social partner every evening. Then Mrs Wicks, who had a preferred list of television entertainments marking each day of the week, would have him tune in her favored programs – usually the most lachrymose of dramas – and join with her in witnessing them to the bitter end.

  In the broad area of economics Howard attended to the household accounts, making out the checks for his mother to sign; supervised the supervisors of the brokerage house in town who handled Mrs Wicks’ investments; put together the tax materials for the family accountant; and served as liaison to the family lawyer. What with one thing and another, starting in the late morning when Howard carted up the breakfast tray to his mother in bed and ending after the nightly late newscast on television when, with Mrs Wicks again settled in bed, Howard provided her with the gentle massage that helped relieve those aching back and shoulder muscles, it made for quite a full day, seven days a week.

  Yet, serving faithfully and well for small thanks, he had no complaints to make. It was Regina and Ada who, starting with that confrontation where they first opened fire on him, gave vent to the complaints. At every opportunity they let him know how they viewed the services he rendered their mother, playing the same tune over and over with only small variations.

  ‘I don’t see why she keeps on Lorenzo and Mattie,’ Regina told him. ‘Not with your waiting on her hand and foot every live-long minute of the day.’

  ‘And night,’ Ada put in. ‘Bedtime massages indeed. Anything to let poor dear Mother know how devoted her son is. Not at all like her neglectful daughters. Really, it’s almost obscene, Howard, the efforts you’re making to get her under your influence.’

  The most painful part of it for Howard was that neither of his sisters seemed to have the least idea how desperately he yearned for their affection. He had a hazy recollection of a golden period in his early childhood: little Howard being convoyed by his big sisters, each with one of his hands in a tight grip, as they merrily made their way down the main street of town on a shopping trip. And their comic, if sometimes painful, teasing of him when they were at their games in the playroom or in the tree house their father had built for them. A very hazy and faraway recollection, and a heartwarming one. And the way things were going, more and more a hopeless one.

  Hopeless. Because while he would have been glad to prove his feelings for the sisters he cherished by handing over to them whatever they wanted of his mother’s fortune he had no control over that fortune. He made out the checks, but it was Mrs Wicks who signed them, keeping a sharp eye on every digit. Actually, in terms of cash flow, he was the poorest one of them all, wholly dependent on the few dollars his mother grudgingly allotted him now and then. He couldn’t find it in himself to honestly resent this – after all, he was only a boarder in her home – but it was a nagging misery to know that he had no means of ever proving his regard for his sisters and thus winning theirs in return.

  So, in this fashion, time went on as time will, 30 years of it no less, the last few of them more and more seeming to confirm Regina and Ada’s grim foreboding – they openly expressed it to Howard – that their mother obviously intended to outlive them all. Approaching 75, Mrs Wicks had withered a little, had suffered a couple of minor heart episodes which Dr Gottschalk, leading practitioner of Midlandsville, had smilingly shrugged off as meaningless, and had developed some sharper pains in neck and shoulders which the doctor, a rough-hewn and blunt-spoken fellow, had dismissed, much to her annoyance, as the natural consequences of old age. Howard’s fine hand at massage, he said, was all the prescription required.

  Beyond this Mrs Wicks certainly did appear to be in excellent condition for her years, and, without question, as active, demanding, and testy as ever. Lorenzo and Mattie who were about her age, Howard took note, now looked considerably older and more fragile than she did. They still remained on, however, wispy inefficient shades of their old selves, and Howard once found himself wondering if his mother refused to pension them off only because they provided her with a cheering contrast to her own condition.

  As for Regina and Ada, things had slightly improved for them in their middle age, but only slightly. Regina’s Vernon had become head of his department at the high school, but the economic advantages of this were canceled out by the twins who had come along – a pair of strikingly handsome, sturdy boys – and so, as Regina put it, it was still uphill all the way. Still uphill for Ada too, even though her Thomas was now manager of the Midlandsville Garage, because, as she took pains to inform her sister in Howard’s presence, one properly brought-up, extremely sensitive and talented girl – her sole issue – could mean at least the expense of two crude boys.

  It had very soon become clear after the arrival of her grandchildren that Mrs Wicks was not one of your doting grandmothers. She took occasional notice of these little people but not much more. Her gifts to them – and there was no change in this policy with the passing years – were always moderately priced and, from Howard’s point of view, depressingly practical. Much worse, as he saw it, was the reception the children received in his mother’s home during their formative years. Mrs Wicks objected to noise, active play, and dirtied clothing, thus making it a painful experience, it was plain, for any of the children to enter her presenc
e. Their parents, making sure that an errant offspring didn’t cost them an inheritance, firmly reinforced this code, so that Howard, who would have been the willing slave of his nephews and niece, was steadfastly denied the opportunity for it. Like it or not, he could see that he was regarded by these small stony-faced creatures as an adjunct of their formidable grandmother. When on rare occasion he worked up enough courage to offer them some token of friendship, they backed away in open alarm as if he were setting a trap for them.

  This cut so deep that Howard at last presented his case to his mother. He did it during one of her pre-slumber massages when she was, if not in an amiable mood, at least in a neutral one.

  ‘I think you’re much too strict with the children, Mother, that’s the trouble. They just don’t enjoy being with us here.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Wicks, stretched out prone in her terry-cloth robe, her eyes closed, luxuriating in the gentle kneading of neck and shoulders. ‘If their own parents don’t know how to bring up those children, someone had better instruct them in their manners right now.’

  ‘Mother, there’s a difference between—’

  ‘You’re digging your thumbs into me, Howard. And the matter is closed. I don’t want to hear any more about it.’

  But the matter wasn’t quite closed, although the children had sprouted into their early teens before it did come up again and this time led to an unpredictable and astonishing explosion in the Wicks’ household.

  That day – a fine springtime Friday – Howard had carted up the winter blankets to the cedar chest in the attic storeroom across the hallway from Lorenzo and Mattie’s apartment. There in the storeroom he had come upon his set of long-forgotten golf clubs, the complete set, along with one stained and battered ball. Wistfully he had slid the putter out of the bag and tapped the ball back and forth across the floor a few times. Then, in the very act of replacing the clubs in the bag, he had been filled by a sudden excitement.