Tender Victory

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Mr. Summerfield lifted his stricken head from his wife’s breast and turned his anguished eyes to his daughter. He began to speak in a faraway, laboring voice. “So—much—talk—about forgiving. So many lies. There was never anything else but lies. It’s very hard to explain—if you’ve killed somebody—I don’t really think I did, now. I should have told. But it was all a lie. That’s when it began, when I was told lies.” His voice suddenly failed, and he slumped in his wife’s arms, and she could no longer hold him. She screamed as he slipped to the floor and lay face down, without a sound.

  “You’ve killed him, Lorry! You’ve killed your father! No, don’t touch him! Don’t dare to touch him!” And Esther, in her despair and grief, struck her daughter’s shoulder with her clenched fist as Lorry bent over her father.

  “I’ll get help,” said Lorry, distraught, rising. “Someone will help. I didn’t know. I must get help!”

  36

  Dr. McManus came wearily down the long curve of the marble stairs and went into the Hindustani room where Lorry, Barry, and Esther were waiting for him. He looked at them from under his cliff-like brows and said, “Well, he’s all right now. The nurse knows what to do, and the parson’s with him. Lorry, Lorry,” he said sadly, “it could have been done with more mercy. Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”

  Lorry said through a tight throat, “I wanted to tell him from the very first, but you made me promise not to.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” said the doctor, carefully avoiding Barry’s coldly condemning eyes. He turned to Esther compassionately; she sat in her chair, white and immobilized, her braids in disorder, her hands limp. “I don’t know how you’ll do it, but I guess you’ll have to forgive us, Esther. Especially me. Lorry was all for telling Mac about it in the beginning.”

  “I know,” said Esther. “You’re not terribly smart, Al, about some things. MacDonald’s been ill for a long time. I could see it. You have to love someone to see the changes. I tried to get him to go to a doctor, but he laughed at me, and there he was, changing every day, sickening. I knew there was something on his mind, something that was growing too heavy for him to bear any longer, but he refused to acknowledge it to me, or let me help him. Al, if you’d been at all intelligent you’d have known that something was wrong with MacDonald all these past years, and you’d have tried to help.”

  “Never claimed to be intelligent,” said the doctor. “And I get more stupid every day.”

  Esther tried to smile. Her hand was clasped in Lorry’s, and she pressed the girl’s chilly fingers encouragingly. But Barry said, “I wish there were some law I could use against you and Lorry for your stupidity. Look what happened to Johnny and my father because of you both. I’m not going to get over this.”

  “And I’m not going to argue with you,” said the doctor, “for there isn’t any argument. You should see the parson with Mac! By the way, the parson’s not speaking to me, either. I think I’ll go home. What am I, a criminal?”

  “Yes,” said Barry. The young man was extremely shaken; he lit one cigarette after another, and prowled miserably up and down the room, which was saffron now, with all its brazen lamps. Esther gazed at him anxiously. “Barry, don’t take it so hard. I don’t care, as long as it isn’t a heart attack, or apoplexy. You see, dear, I love your father. I’m so glad it’s nothing worse than a nervous breakdown.”

  Hum, thought Dr. McManus. It’d be better if he’d broken both his legs. Nervous breakdown! They think it’s nothing. All it is is that a man’s soul gets sick to death and he can’t stand living any more! Just a nervous breakdown! He coughed. “The parson and I listened to Mac before I gave him the shot of sedative. Enough to make your hair rise and go off your head forever. God damn it,” said the doctor, simply. “There’s devils in the world, real devils. Never believed it before, but I do now. Barry, I got to talk about this to you, so sit down. You make me jittery. All right, all right! Shut up and listen. Lorry, if you cry any more you’ll be wearing spectacles the rest of your life. Your face looks like a suet dumpling now. Here, take my handkerchief. God, women! And I’m marrying one of them myself! Should be shut up in an insane asylum for even thinking of it. Well, anyway, she’s a good cook, so maybe it won’t be too bad. Barry, while you’re walking around, how about getting somebody to give us some drinks? We all need it. And no martinis!”

  “Just cyanide for you,” said Barry, but he rang for a maid.

  “You said something earlier, Al, about Dr. Granger’s part in MacDonald’s illness,” said Esther, and her eyes sparkled with cold wrath. “I knew it all the time, but I never learned what influence that man had over my husband.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said the doctor. He waited until all were served with drinks by the maid. The girl was extremely curious, so the doctor made certain she had gone before he began to speak.

  “When I first examined Mac I thought it was his heart; it was going a mile a minute, and his blood pressure was dropping, and he had that breathing, and the pain. Looked like angina; it’s usually brought on by mental stress. Well, anyway, he began to talk to the parson and me; he wouldn’t talk even after the sedative until Barry went out, at my request. Kind of ashamed of what he had to tell, or maybe he thought Barry might do something violent to Granger and get himself in trouble. I told Mac,” added the doctor, eying Barry severely, “that his son’s got more sense. I hope.” Barry made no reply, but gazed somberly into his glass.

  “Well,” Dr. McManus continued, “I shouldn’t wonder if it was a familiar story, especially with men like Granger, who have other irons in the fire as well as their profession. By the way, we’re going to send Mac to a sanitarium for a while; get him away from his emotional family where he can have peace and quiet, and though they’ve got head-shrinkers there they don’t meddle with a man’s soul and pervert it. John Kanty told me about the place: it’s religious, and they heal a man’s spirit the right way, through spiritual means.

  “Granger’s got an office here in Barryfield, though his real office is in Philadelphia; he only comes here once a week, to treat local patients. His important object was Mac, Mac the rich man who could be depended upon to donate, and Mac, who had newspapers, and who wrote for other newspapers. You know,” continued the doctor, “I’ve been wondering a long time what makes so many rich men Communists, or fellow travelers like Mac. They got everything to lose under Communism—sort of committing suicide by just being rich. So I talked to people who know about them in New York and other places. Know what? Lots of ’em actually think the American people are so stupid that they’re going to let the Communists go on infiltrating government and all our means of public communication and our schools indefinitely! But there’s one thing about the American people: they got good hard horse sense, and they let criminals go so far and then they crack their heads open, kind of getting tired of tolerance. So, many of the rich fellers, believing Communism is taking over, are trying to make their peace with it, and toadying to it, or giving money to it. And then there are the boys with inherited wealth, who made fools of themselves with it, not working or carrying on their dads’ work, and so they feel guilty. And then there’re the haters, the born haters, and people with grudges against society, and incompetents and irresponsibles who want the goods of the earth without working for ’em, and who hate men who accept life on its own terms and get successful.

  “Not to mention the insane. And the perverts. And the misfits. They go for Communism like birds for worms.”

  Barry stopped wrathfully before the doctor. “And in what category does my father fit?”

  Dr. McManus smiled. “In none that I just mentioned. He’s a special case, but not too rare.” His smile stopped suddenly. “Not too unknown. But the worst kind. Barry, your dad was a victim of Granger, and if the law weren’t so damn persnickety about murder I’d be out gunning for Granger. Not that you’re going to be that kind of fool,” he added hastily.

  “You mean,” cried Lorry in the shrill voice of u
tter anguish, “that our father was blackmailed by Somer Granger?”

  “Now look, honey,” said the doctor with concern, “this isn’t unusual. Don’t get your bowels upset too much. Yes, he was. You got to be calm in these emergencies, and Mac’s in the worst kind of emergency. Now shut up and let me talk.

  “You both know how Mac got to be rich; he inherited all that money from his father, the schoolmaster, who got it from an oil strike when Mac was a kid. So they went away to Philadelphia to live and built that great big mansion of theirs. Mac loved his father; he didn’t think his mother appreciated the precious so-and-so. Mac was jealous; wanted all his father’s pompous attention. Evelyn interfered, according to Mac’s kid way of thinking.

  “Evelyn and the new servants were getting the new house ready to live in, and Evelyn was on the top landing, dusting off the new chandelier. Mac was about fourteen then. Poor Evelyn, losing her balance, fell three stories and was killed.”

  “I know,” said Esther. “He’d talk about it in his sleep, poor dear.”

  “But there’s something you don’t know. Mac was in the house; his new room was right off the landing. He was a dreamy, foolish kind of boy, had fantasies, and delusions of grandeur, and all the other disagreeable traits of an egotist. Like his son,” said the doctor, scowling at Barry. “Sure you’re an egotist, son. If you hadn’t been, you’d have been thinking of your dad and trying to find out what made him the way he was, and trying to help him. Shut up. And stop soaking up all that whisky; remember your kidneys. And don’t glare at me; I didn’t make your dad.

  “Mac had no business being in the new house just then. He was playing hooky, so he could sneak back in and gloat. Remember, he’d been poor until then. He came out of his room, not knowing anyone was there, for he got there before his mother and the servants, and he was on the landing just as his mother reached over the railing to dust off the new chandelier.”

  Esther said in a penetratingly quiet voice, “MacDonald didn’t push his mother over that railing to her death. Even though he used to rave about it in his nightmares.”

  “Lorry, if you don’t stop jumping up and down and wringing your hands and whimpering, I’m going to spank you,” said the doctor menacingly. “And stop beating your feet up and down the room all the time, Barry. This’s a madhouse.

  “Do I get to finish, or do I go home? All right, then, be quiet. Now we come to a serious point. Mac had often wished his mother would die and leave him alone with his father. Not uncommon. Lots of offspring think this about one or the other of their parents. Kind of natural, in a twisted sort of way. A fantasy. But Mac’s an intense feller. He dreamed about it, and thought of it, and how wonderful it would be, if his mother just wasn’t there. He and his dad would travel, fish, walk together, go boating together, and have soul-communion. Mac was a lonely and insufferable kid. I remember. He never had a beating in his life; spare the rod and you make your kid a misfit or a criminal, or even worse.

  “Well, he comes padding out of his room, the sneak, and saw his mother leaning too far over that railing. She was a little thing, but heavy, and she began to teeter. Mac’s impulse, in spite of his jealousy, was to run and catch her. But he couldn’t; he froze. People like Mac panic easy. Now the head-shrinkers would say that he didn’t want to save his mother at all. Fool idea; a feller comes right at me one night on the wrong side of the road, with lots of room to turn in on the right side, but he froze. Never saw me in his life before; he panicked; he didn’t want to kill me. He was just a hysteric. Lucky thing for me there was room to run off the road, and I did. He just panicked, the goddam idiot. Got his license taken away and probably saved a dozen lives, though he hates me to this day.

  “Well,” and the doctor, remembering, wiped his damp forehead. “That’s what happened to Mac. He wanted to save his mother, and he couldn’t move. She went over the railing, and he got enough strength back to bolt into his room before she hit bottom.”

  “Oh, my God,” murmured Esther, and for the first time she began to cry. “Poor MacDonald. Poor child.”

  The doctor nodded grimly. “I repeat again, you’re a sensible female, Esther. Mac stole out of the house, shaking like mad, and went back to the hotel where they’d all been staying. The news had got to his father; Mac saw his father crying, and he knew then, without any fantasy or anything, that he’d wanted to save his mother. It’s as simple as that. So his mind was quieted, and he could console his father normally, and be sorrowful for his mother. Simple as that. Until Granger got hold of him a few years ago.”

  “When does Granger come next to Barryfield?” asked Barry, casually.

  “Now look, Barry, no fool stuff,” said the doctor with alarm. “I’m taking care of Granger, through the AMA. No heroics, see?

  “Well, everything was all right with Mac until he met Granger. He sees, now, that the meeting wasn’t accidental, and that it was arranged by others. Granger built up quite a story to give Mac, who was always a shaky and doubting, if arrogant, character, the kind of feller who’ll distrust even himself yet is wide open to liars and charlatans who have plans, such as Granger had—for Mac’s newspapers and his money. He had to get a hold on Mac, and as Mac, at that particular time, was more than usually unstable, Granger ‘treated’ him. During the treatment, out comes the story about Evelyn and her death; Mac just talked of it because his dad had never gotten over his wife’s death and had only lived a few years after that. Well, that’s when the terror started, and the spiritual blackmail.

  “In some way Granger persuaded Mac that he hadn’t frozen when his mother had begun to fall to her death, but that he had run at his mother, blindly, instinctively, and had pushed her over the railing! He just hadn’t remembered that part, said Granger, but it had all come out under sodium pentathol! Mac, according to Granger, was in ‘conflict’ because his subconscious mind recalled the whole thing but his conscious mind was cutting off the memory, and telling him lies so he could live with himself. So now Mac had a brand-new, full-blown guilt complex, and that’s when he became really sick. How could he expiate the involuntary murder of his mother? Why, by helping the ‘downtrodden, the unprivileged,’ of course, in class warfare, Granger said. Added to this was the old resentment against those who had snubbed his dad when he was poor, and the fact that all his money couldn’t make Mac as important as he thought he should be. He had always hated, and envied, ‘aristocrats’ who had inherited money and had never been poor.”

  “I’ll kill Granger,” said Barry.

  “No you won’t, so stop talking like a fool. I told you I’d take care of Granger. We’ve got sensible men in the AMA. So, Granger got Mac. Granger never met Johnny, but people like Johnny are a danger to the Grangers. They’ve got to be eliminated. So, the editorials, Granger-inspired, against Johnny.”

  “But Johnny’s just a clergyman, an obscure clergyman, in an obscure town,” said Lorry, appalled. “Why should a man like Somer Granger, so influential, so prosperous, bother about poor Johnny?”

  “Honey,” said the doctor in a low voice, “nobody who fights Communism is humble or obscure, according to the Communists. And nobody’s too big to attack.”

  He stood up. “Mac’s crack-up, under Granger, would’ve come at any time, for it was against Mac’s nature to be a murderer. I’ve been watching him. Don’t feel too guilty, Lorry, honey. You just precipitated something which would have come at any moment or hour. He’ll be all right. He understands things now. By the way, the parson’s been up there a long time. Think I’ll look in on them.”

  The lights were sheltered and dimmed in Mr. Summerfield’s large French Provincial-style bedroom. The sick man lay immobile on his pillows, breathing audibly and uneasily, his bluish face as colorless as the linen sheets. His eyes were closed and sunken. His pale fine hair, so like Lorry’s, glimmered in the shaded lamplight, and his features had a far look of closed austerity, an expression similar to that of his children under certain conditions. Johnny, seated near the foot of the
bed, facing his old enemy, could feel no anger against him, but only compassion. This was Lorry’s and Barry’s father; this man would be the grandfather of his, Johnny’s, children. This was a man who suffered, and had suffered, cursed by his own imaginative and unstable character, his own secret griefs and bewilderments, a man incapable of accepting love simply and giving it as simply. Everything must be complicated and torturous for him, must have its “rational reasons,” its explanations. But, so God had made him. Had he ever had faith he would have been reconciled in himself, and all the disparate elements—the hidden vehemence, the lostness, the simultaneous desire for love and the subconscious rejection of it—would have flowed together and have been lost in a mature serenity and confidence. God, thought Johnny, brings order to chaos, light to darkness, and the way to the lost traveler. But if men cannot accept Him as the compass, then they are always wanderers.

  The nurse sat in a distant corner, reading, but alert for any movement or sigh from her patient. She had a dark and merry face, and glanced frequently at Johnny, as if waiting for a signal. She was one of Johnny’s parishioners, and she told herself that if anyone could help Mr. Summerfield, Mr. Fletcher was the man. Hadn’t he helped her when she had been about to give up nursing, in despair, because of ungrateful patients, long hard work which was not appreciated, and poor recompense? “We can’t all make a lot of money,” he had gently reminded her. “If you had wanted that in the beginning you’d never have become a nurse. You knew what it meant. You’ve just forgotten. I knew I’d never be a fashionable minister, and that I’d never have any money to amount to anything, but still I became a minister. Not that I haven’t wondered why, too, very often!” She had seen, then, that he and she were in almost the same service, and had gone back to her work with renewed dedication and courage. And, best of all, with renewed and youthful inspiration.