Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

“To get back to my proposition,” Blaine said. “We’ve had our differences, you and I, but I have not forgotten that I have an obligation—limited, true enough, but it’s there. Also, I’m sure you believe, whether justifiably or not, that you have gotten a dirty deal in life, and maybe you even blame it on me, for all I know.”

  To this incredible statement Reinhart could only respond: “You?”

  “Well, I’m as convenient a scapegoat as any, am I not?” Blaine asked, going into a kind of bass whisper.

  There was no reason to take this kind of thing seriously. “I suppose you are, at that,” said Reinhart.

  The technique proved an effective one for dealing with the most offensive of Blaine’s poses. Reinhart must remember that: it frightened Blaine to hear a confirmation of his own exaggerated expression of self-pity.

  Blaine hastily said: “I’m willing to let bygones be.” He slipped into the righthand lane of the expressway, and Reinhart could see the turn signal blink on the dashboard. Good, they were about to turn around and head back, having accomplished what they usually did with each other: pure and simple nought.

  But when Blaine took the next exit and at ramp’s end made a choice, he went not south in the direction of urbanity, but rather towards the pastoral north.

  “Say,” said Reinhart, “aren’t we getting pretty far from home for no great purpose?”

  “If you’d ever let me explain,” Blaine peevishly replied. “I’ve been trying for the last half-hour to get a word in edgewise. There’s a thing our church sponsors—and before you begin to shout me down with atheist opinions, hear me out, please: there are no religious requirements made of anyone.”

  “When did you ever hear me say a word about atheism?” Reinhart asked in wonderment. His mother used to make such irrelevant charges as a rhetorical device to throw him vis-à-vis off balance.

  “So be it,” said Blaine. “But knowing how you operate, I’m trying to dispose of all capricious objections beforehand.”

  “You’re taking me to some kind of religious service? I can’t say I’m fascinated by the prospect, if that’s what you mean. Is this necessary?” A devilish impulse claimed him. “Shall we pray for the salvation of sex deviates?”

  Blaine shrank into himself. “Why you fil—” He caught control at the last moment it could still be captured, and coughed violently. “I’m not always prepared for what you call humor, dear Dad,” he said in a voice made guttural by resentment, “but will you let me explain?”

  Reinhart exposed his two palms.

  “It’s a little Christian community,” Blaine said, assuming an expression that suggested sanctity, “on what used to be a farm, what still is a farm, on good, rich Ohio farmland.” He showed the kind of smile that is obviously more eloquent to him who produced it than to the innocent bystander. “Clean air, fertile soil, honest labor.”

  “Are you serious?” Reinhart had never seen his son in this mood, which seemed perilously near the rhapsodic.

  “For God’s sake, haven’t you the remotest shred of decency?” cried Blaine. “Can’t you see this isn’t easy for me?”

  “Sorry,” said Reinhart. He tried to contribute to a polite conversation. “It takes a certain kind of person to be a farmer, though, I’m sure. It has never seemed attractive to me.”

  Blaine suddenly looked too bland to be true. “But have you given it a try? How would you know?” He produced a sly smile. “I thought you always prided yourself on a liberal approach to things.”

  Reinhart shrugged. “I know enough about my basic tastes. But listen, I’ll be glad to buy some home-grown vegetables, if you want to drop in for a minute or two. I just don’t want to stay too long, because I have a feeling Winona might get home meanwhile and want to talk.” He frowned. “But wait a minute: they wouldn’t have fresh produce yet at this time of year. We’re just getting into spring.” He put the rest of it together, and peered at Blaine. “You’re not proposing that I be installed at this farm, are you? Put out to pasture with the other old fogies? ...Your point is that if Winona ceases to support me, as you fear she might, if as expected she abandons herself utterly to unnatural pursuits, I can’t count on you. But I have already accepted that fact. Why elaborate on it?”

  Blaine pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, adjacent to a wire fence. In the middle distance was a group of cows, an animal of which Reinhart could not remember having seen an example at close range since he was a child. In college he had read a passage in Nietzsche casting doubt on the possibility that the beast of the field could ever explain its serenity to a human being. “Tell me why you’re happy,” says the man. The animal would like to answer, “Because I forget,” but the creature forgets even this before it can reply, and the would-be dialogue comes to nothing.

  “What concerns me, Dad, is that at fifty-four years of age you have no profession, no occupation, no means of support, and no property, and if you would ever have to go it alone, I can’t see how you could survive without going on welfare.”

  Reinhart stretched his long frame. “These land-cruisers really are more comfortable than cars that make sense,” said he. “You simply can’t get away from that truth. ... That’s not beside the point, Blainey: long before it was fashionable, I hated big cars, probably because I couldn’t afford one. But the funny thing now is that, without benefit of a movement, I am liberated from all sorts of restraints, including those I have imposed on myself. It was ridiculous that I lived almost half a century trying to measure up to the principles of other people.” He smiled with genuine good feeling. “The fact is that I love to cook, and I am really good at it. I know you don’t agree, but the reason for that is, gastronomically speaking, you’re naïve. Not wrong, but childish. Your diet consists of essentially one kind of meat and three or four vegetables, whereas almost everything that lives can be eaten by a human being, and in fact is eaten somewhere in the world.”

  Blaine was sneering at the dashboard. “You could be kidding yourself. What does she eat of that gourmet stuff? And what else do you do? Mop the floors? Do the laundry?”

  “Whatever has to be done. But the cooking is the center of it. I don’t suppose I can ever explain to someone like you what that means: you who spurn Bordelaise sauce and drench your steak with A.1.”

  Blaine said levelly: “But you’ll admit that whatever I eat, I buy myself.” He sighed, and then pulled the car onto the road and accelerated. “You’re not in an independent position. I want you to take a look at this place.”

  Reinhart could see that Blaine was determined, and he really didn’t want to get into a downright quarrel with his son. Therefore he submitted quietly to being driven some few miles farther on and eventually up a dirt road, to a cluster of farmhouse and outbuildings, the former a shabby white and the barn and sheds the traditional faded red. The vehicles in view were routine automobiles, two of them the worse for wear, with dents and rust and jagged antenna-stems. Farm machines and/or beasts of burden were presumably behind closed doors, as was the local humanity. Reinhart remembered it was Sunday, the most inopportune time (for all concerned) to traffic with persons of sincere religious conviction, Christians anyway.

  “Perhaps we’re intruding.”

  “Nonsense,” said Blaine. He parked his opulent car alongside the rusting heaps and stepped out. The parking place would have been an extravagance of mud if any rain had fallen lately. Fortunately the moment was windless and the dust lay passive. The buildings seen from closer up looked none too sturdy, but the paint was not flaking badly, and the windows of the house were clean, and the roof was still there.

  “Your church sponsors this?” Reinhart asked. Obviously they spared great expense. Blaine belonged to a prosperous Episcopalian flock at which the lesser breeds might sneer, with the encouragement of the needle’s-eye metaphor, but there seemed no actual law that would forbid a rich man from being devout.

  Blaine stepped up to his father and stared defiantly at him. “These folks are very religious.
I don’t make fun of them, though I might not agree in all respects.”

  Reinhart glanced at the farmhouse. No one stirred there. “You’re an odd one, Blaine. I’d say this would be one of the last places to find you.”

  Changes in those close to you are generally phases in a long and slow process, so that at any point the other person seems routine enough. But in his later adolescence Blaine had without warning, almost within a day, become what for simplicity’s sake was known, to anyone who was himself not one, as a “hippie.” It was hard to remember that when one looked at him today. Even on a Sunday afternoon in early spring he wore an orthodox shirt and a foulard necktie, a gray suit, and black shoes in the old-fashioned wing-tipped style. Like his father he had fair hair, but Reinhart’s now was actually longer and lighter, though at one time Blaine had bleached his hair and worn it shoulder-length. Once Reinhart had vengefully crept into his son’s room when Blaine was asleep and sheared away his golden locks just below the ears. They had both changed since those days.

  “I know you think me the young fogy,” Blaine said now, “but you might be surprised to learn that my values have been more or less the same all my life.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For example,” Blaine went on, “I have always had the greatest respect for those with faith.”

  “You have?” Reinhart asked incredulously.

  “Mock me if you will,” said his son, staring in defiance, “but that was really what I was groping for in the Sixties, with so little help from you: faith in the essential goodness of humanity. Perhaps we were naïve, but at least we were searching.”

  Reinhart indicated the porch of the farmhouse, which only now he noticed was sagging ever so slightly. “Shouldn’t we proceed with whatever we’ve come here for?”

  Blaine shook his head. “I’m trying to prepare you. These people may have something of merit if you’ll just be patient.”

  “O.K., O.K! Though it does nothing for my patience to stand here in this bleak parking lot.” Reinhart walked to the porch and mounted the steps.

  Blaine hastened to overtake his father, who perhaps he feared might disgrace him even among down-at-the-heels religious zealots.

  While they were still approaching the door it was opened from within by a small woman of indeterminate age, i.e., she might have been anywhere from prematurely seasoned forties to well-preserved sixties. She wore a workman’s outfit of blue-denim trousers and jacket and a shirt of chambray.

  “High-dee-ho,” she said cheerily. “I’m Sister Muriel.”

  Blaine quickly said: “This is my father, Carl Reinhart.”

  “God loves you, Carl,” said Sister Muriel, but in a lackluster monotone that contrasted with the first phase of her greeting.

  Reinhart nodded in neutral courtesy. Time was, he responded to everybody with classic Midwestern amiability, but somewhere along the line he recognized this as either hypocrisy or folly, an invitation to either bores or crooks, and he adopted his current style.

  “If you’d like to make your contribution now,” said Sister Muriel, “then there won’t be any awkwardness inside.”

  Blaine formed his lips in an O even before he patted his pockets.

  Again, in the old days Reinhart would guiltily have whipped out his wallet, but now he showed more patience. “Contribution?” he asked. “For what?”

  Sister Muriel sighed and looked at the ceiling of the porch. Meanwhile Blaine slipped inside the door. Reinhart then splayed his right hand.

  “After you,” he said to Sister Muriel.

  “Not without a contribution, brother!” she said with force.

  But he could no longer so easily be lured into a cul-de-sac. “Heavens above!” he murmured, raising and lowering his hands and eyes, until he had dizzied her. Then he followed his son indoors.

  The interior of the house was for some reason darker than it should have been in daytime—and with hardly any furniture, rugs, or curtains to absorb light. Reinhart followed Blaine through several small, dark, empty rooms until they reached the kitchen, which in old-farmhouse style was of a generous size. It was also, uniquely, furnished: a large wooden table and chairs occupied the center of the room, and along the walls were stove and fridge, sink and cabinets.

  A few living souls, representing either sex and dressed much like Sister Muriel (who had remained behind as front-door Cerberus), were either in the kitchen proper or on the screened-in porch just beyond. The youngest seemed in late middle age and none was moving with purpose. They ignored the Reinharts.

  Blaine went onto the porch, his father following. The old folks there were also oblivious to them, in the usual passive manner and not necessarily as a positive statement of scorn: they ignored one another in the same fashion.

  Reinhart opened the screen door that led to the yard, and he and Blaine went out. The yard was a desolate place, as dusty as where they had parked the car, though, according to the indoor precedent, neat by reason of being devoid of objects.

  Suddenly a door in the earth was flung open—half of a double-paneled entrance to a cellar, set almost horizontally against the house wall—and a tall, solemn person mounted deliberately to the upper world on the unseen, sunken steps. Whether or not he was being intentionally mythological—Pluto visiting the surface of the earth—it was a dramatic entrance, or, looking at it in another way, exit. That he was of the race called, according to the era, colored, Negro, or black was as always worthy of note as well as being conspicuous.

  Not to mention that Reinhart thought he recognized him as the son of his old friend, now deceased, Splendor Mainwaring. When last seen, a decade earlier, Raymond had been involved with a militant group called the Black Assassins and had himself answered to the name Captain Storm. In ten years (if indeed it was he) he had got a bit thinner and his expression was no longer a fixed scowl. He too was dressed in blue denims.

  “High-dee-ho,” he said to Blaine.

  Once again Blaine introduced his father. “Dad, this is Brother Valentine.”

  “God loves you, Carl,” said the black man, and he showed Reinhart a pious smirk. He was not quite so burnished-handsome as he had been when displaying ritualistic malevolence towards those deficient in melanin, but perhaps that was only an effect of age.

  Reinhart asked: “Aren’t you Raymond Mainwaring?”

  “I was once many things,” said Brother Valentine, his eyes disappearing behind his upper lids, “rapist, addict, hooligan, blasphemer, traitor, mocker of the right, defamer of the good.” His voice swelled with feeling, and for a moment it sounded as if he might produce an outright yodel. But suddenly he spoke in a quiet, level voice: “Praise Gee-zuz.”

  “Well,” said Reinhart, at something of a loss for a response (whether to congratulate or commiserate). He decided to ignore the whole business. Instead he said: “I suppose you don’t remember me? I was a close friend of your father’s.”

  Brother Valentine had not yet looked directly at Reinhart, and he did not do so at this moment: he stared between the white men, towards the empty yard, beyond which was an empty field. “I hope,” he said at last, “you are still a friend of your Father. For He is a friend to you.” He managed very clearly to represent the capital letters.

  “I hope so,” said Reinhart, who had no wish to mock anyone’s faith, but “friendship” was hardly the word to characterize adequately his own association with divinity.

  “Brother Valentine,” Blaine said, “I hope this was a convenient time to come. My father insisted.” Alas, Reinhart was too far away to kick him.

  Valentine’s style seemed by now pretty well confirmed as being one that took as little note of others as it could get away with. Thus he made no answer, direct or implied, to Blaine’s false statement, which of course was no less than Blaine deserved.

  “I was a fiend incarnate,” he cried, his voice swelling again, “a minion of Satan. I even befouled Old Glory. No vileness did I spurn.”

  Reinhart nodded and walked near
Blaine. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Brother Valentine,” Blaine said, leaving Reinhart’s vicinity, “is it not true that newcomers are welcome to your little flock?”

  Valentine narrowed his eyes and dropped the subject of his own evil past. “We erect no artificial barriers. On the other hand, no one has a special privilege. Each must contribute what he can, in the spirit of Christian America. God bless you, brother.”

  Ten years back, Raymond had been of the “burn, baby, burn” school, but then we all change from time to time according to our challenges and opportunities, and Reinhart did not find him ipso facto a rogue.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” he said. “This has been very interesting.” He was about to walk away, irrespective of Blaine, when Valentine at last displayed a squint of recognition.

  “Brother Reinhart!” cried the black man. “Forgive me. Oh, God love you.” He spoke to Blaine: “I used to call this dear man Uncle Carl.”

  This was utter fantasy. In truth Reinhart had seen nothing of Raymond’s father during those years when the boy would have been small enough to attract the avuncular. He had known Splendor just after World War II, and then not again until the man lay dying, twenty years later. At that time Raymond had been altogether hostile to any white man.

  Blaine looked sharply at his wristwatch and then gave a too casual glance at his father. “I can see you’ve lots of old times to exchange. Why don’t I just run a couple of errands meanwhile and pick you up on the way back?”

  But Reinhart blocked his route of escape. “I wouldn’t think of letting you work on the day of rest! Am I right, Brother Valentine?”

  The latter gave him a look that was both knowing and wary. “Quite so, brother, quite so.”

  Blaine whined sotto voce: “We’ve got people coming...”

  Reinhart said to Valentine: “We can’t stay long, but since we’re here, would you like to give us the tour?”

  “No,” surprisingly said Splendor’s son, “because if you’ve come through the house, you’ve seen as much as there is to see. Upstairs are the dormitories, and underneath is a cellar. We haven’t been here long enough to do much but clean the living quarters.”