Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  Reynolds had built his solitary life on one dream: the perfectibility of man. He tried to be a perfect man himself, and he tried to believe that the people he lived among were striving for the same goal. He had thought it possible that Londonton was a model town, one of the best gatherings of human beings on earth. He had needed to believe that.

  Eighteen months ago the people of Londonton had been drawn together in a new and exciting endeavor: they were building a youth recreation center. Quite probably this was Mitchell Howard’s idea, at least at first, for he had been a philanthropic man and a concerned citizen, the sort of man who would notice that the young people of Londonton needed such a place, and the sort of man rich enough to think a building within the realms of possibility. However, Mitchell had died of a heart attack shortly after the first plans for the center were drawn up, and while no one person claimed the center as his own idea, everyone closely involved with the project seemed to feel that he or she had been intimately associated with its inception. It was as if the town itself had had the idea and spread it through the minds of its citizens through the drinking water or the air. At any rate, it was an idea that aroused great enthusiasm throughout the town, and after the first early discussions about it over coffee or cocktails, five men got together and made themselves into a committee in charge of the construction.

  On the official Londonton Recreation Center Foundation committee was Jake Vanderson, who was almost as wealthy as Mitchell Howard but not nearly as bright or kind. Still, he donated the land to build on and $100,000 of his company’s money. Gary Moyer, a lawyer, donated his time in setting up the initial contracts. Daniel Weinberg, a local surgeon, and Reynolds Houston were also on the committee. The other member of the founding committee had of course been Mitchell Howard, and when he died, his wife Liza became a nominal member of the committee; it had seemed the only correct thing to do, especially since Liza had donated $150,000 of the Howard money to the rec center fund. But while the other members automatically sent her letters notifying her of business meetings, she never attended any of them, never showed any interest in the center. They let her name remain on the roster listed on the stationery they had had printed up for their money-raising drive.

  Gary Moyer had spent a few days studying the municipal and state statutory requirements on public buildings, and he had decided very quickly that in order to save a lot of red tape and hassle, the five members of the committee should join together to form a private charitable organization; this way it would be tax-exempt, and the five members of the committee would be free to make certain decisions without the interference of public officials. One of the main reasons the five decided to form in this private way was to preclude the necessity for putting the job of building the center out to bid. Every man on the committee knew just which contractor he wanted to build the center, and they were unanimous on this, they wanted no discussions, no competition: they wanted Ron Bennett.

  Ron had been building houses and small buildings in Londonton for as long as anyone could remember, at least twenty years, and what he built was of fine quality, and lasted, and they were buildings to be proud of. He was a good man, a good worker, he was the best, and he was one of them, a real member of the community. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that if he built the center it would be built with the best quality and the least money that was possible. They appointed Ron contractor; he estimated the cost of the center at around six hundred thousand dollars. Mitchell and Jake gave their vast donations, and the members of the committee set out to raise the rest of the money from the town itself. It was an exciting time for the town, a time when everyone who lived there felt a surge of belonging, a surge of civic pride; and almost everyone, rich and poor, contributed what he could.

  On June 3, half the town had turned out to watch the mayor of Londonton shovel the first load of dirt from a plot of ground next to the Blue River. The earth was broken, the building begun. That day and in the long summer days to come, people from Londonton, young and old, would stroll by to lean against a tree or a pile of lumber, watching the foundation being dug, the cinder blocks being placed, the giant grinding machines lifting the earth and replacing vacant space with man’s materials. In its own way, the building of the rec center stirred within the hearts of the Londonton population a communal pride and warmth of the same sort that barn-raisings had caused a century before.

  Reynolds, too, often stopped by to watch the construction. He would never use the rec center, which was to be devoted exclusively to the children of the town, but even so it was a building of great importance to him—he saw it as a monument to human achievement and accomplishment. He had helped raise the money; now Ron Bennett and his men were raising the walls, and this building would stand for years as a haven for the community’s children and a hallmark of the community’s optimistic affiliation.

  Now all of that had changed.

  Last week Reynolds had attended a formal dinner for the local alumni of the college. Seated on his left had been Ben Martin, who owned a large hardware store in Southmark, thirty miles from Londonton. There were two small hardware stores in Londonton, but if one wanted something more elaborate than a few nails or a garden hose, it was necessary to make the thirty-mile drive to Martin’s Lumber and Building Supply in Southmark. Much of the lumber and other materials for the rec center were coming from Martin’s. Ben Martin and Reynolds knew each other only slightly, but they were amiable men, made more amiable by the excellent meal and abundant wine and cordial reunion atmosphere. As they finished their desserts, and before the speaker was introduced, they discussed the new rec center.

  “Tell me,” Ben said, bending closer to Reynolds and dropping his voice, “is Ron Bennett having some personal trouble? Perhaps I shouldn’t pry.”

  “Personal trouble? I don’t think so. Why do you ask?” Reynolds replied.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I shouldn’t talk shop here. But on a lot of Ron’s orders, he’s been returning about half of the materials. It’s not like him to make such big mistakes on estimating what he’ll need. Last month he ordered sixty thousand feet of copper pipe and returned more than half of it. Well, it’s of no consequence.”

  It was of consequence to Reynolds, who appreciated that he was a bit of an old maid busybody but could not help being curious and worried. He had never liked to let minor problems go unsolved, because they could blossom into major problems if left untended. He knew that Ben Martin’s words would buzz at him unless he settled the matter to his own satisfaction. So the next day, last Sunday, he walked to the town hall, let himself in with his own key, and went into the office where Ron kept the blueprints and financial records for the rec center.

  Reynolds did not turn on a light. It was sunny enough outside and bright enough inside to see without artificial help, and he did not especially want any passersby to know someone was there. He had a perfect right, every right, to be doing what he was doing; still, he felt clandestine. This was, he suspected, an unsavory task, and he was not even sure what he was looking for. But he thought he had found it when he came upon the bill submitted in Ron Bennett’s handwriting for sixty thousand feet of copper pipe—and, after a thorough search, found no corresponding credit slip.

  The committee paid Ron in portions as the work progressed and different stages of the building were complete, so that the few checks that had been written out to him already were large: forty thousand dollars, eighty thousand dollars, sixty-five thousand dollars. Ron in turn paid his workers and the various establishments from which he bought his materials: Zabski Steel, Martin’s Lumber and Building Supply, Mazani Window and Glass. Reynolds was in fact the man who glanced at Ron’s itemized bills and made the check out to him. Now he studied the figures more carefully and realized, with a slight chill, that of the six hundred thousand dollars allocated for the building, over three hundred and fifty thousand had already been spent. How could that be possible? The swimming pool had not been started yet, the heating system was not in, nor
were any of the interior walls. Ron had been complaining of inflation—everyone had been complaining of inflation—but surely this was unusual. He wondered how it fit in with Ron’s recurrent mistakes in ordering supplies at Martin’s.

  Reynolds was bewildered, which was a state of mind he had never enjoyed. And he was uncomfortable, and wished he had not sat next to Ben Martin at the alumni reunion. But Thursday, he drove over to a small town between Londonton and Southmark to visit the owners of Zabski Steel. He entered a rather grime-covered metal building and, feeling conspicuous in his three-piece tweed suit, asked for Mr. Zabski. After much shouting, a man in a greasy navy blue coverall appeared.

  “Mr. Zabski?” Reynolds said. “I’m Reynolds Houston, from Londonton. I’m on the committee that’s in charge of the rec center building.”

  Mr. Zabski was not impressed. “What can I do for you?”

  Reynolds realized that no insidious subtlety would work with this man: he had to make the plunge.

  “We paid you for forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of hot tar and gravel and other roofing material, and then we returned almost half of it.”

  “So what?” Mr. Zabski said. “I reimbursed you guys. I gave the check to Mr. Bennett a month ago.”

  Reynolds stared at Mr. Zabski.

  “So?” Mr. Zabski said, taking the conversation into his own charge after several moments of silence. “So what do you want?”

  “Nothing,” Reynolds said. “Thank you.”

  Back home in Londonton, he sat in his study, doodling figures on a pad. He was torn. He wanted his suspicions disproved; but he did not want to prove himself a man who dealt in suspiciousness. He decided to sleep on it. Friday evening he dialed Gary Moyer’s number. Gary was a lawyer, a member of the committee, and one of Ron’s closest friends.

  “Reynolds,” Reynolds said to himself as Gary’s phone rang, “you’re probably going to make an ass of yourself.”

  But that was not what had happened. Gary was as appalled at Reynolds’s suspicions as Reynolds himself had been. He canceled a Saturday afternoon tennis match in order to join Reynolds in the town office. They went over the books together, and Gary called Mazani Window and Glass. When he had finished talking, he put the receiver down and bent his head to rest in his hands.

  There seemed to be only one conclusion: Ron Bennett had been siphoning money from the committee by ordering twice as much material as he needed, returning half of it, and pocketing the refund himself.

  They had no way of knowing exactly how much money Ron had appropriated for himself, because the merchants were bound by common courtesy to keep secret the exact amount they charged the contractor for each item. Usually they gave a discount ranging from two to twenty percent. Some of this was passed on to the buyer, and some of it went straight to the contractor; it was one customary way the contractors made money. But the merchants were able to give out information about the amount of materials bought and returned, and everywhere, Ron Bennett had returned almost half of everything that he had bought and the rec center committee had paid for. If Reynolds and Gary were anywhere close in their figures, Ron Bennett so far in the past six months had kept for himself refunds amounting to a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

  “Well, you know,” Gary said quietly, raising his head to look sadly at Reynolds, “John just graduated from college, and Cynthia is only in her junior year at Smith. It takes a lot of money to put kids through college.”

  “Still,” Reynolds began.

  “Still,” Gary said, then sighed. “Listen, Reynolds. We have to discuss this with him first before we tell the rest of the committee. This is going to destroy him.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Reynolds said. “This is going to destroy him. He’s been stealing money from every family in Londonton as surely as if he were a thief entering their homes at night, taking money from their pockets. He’s a crook.”

  “I know, I know. But maybe we’re wrong.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “No. I don’t see how we can be. In fact, I’m not all that surprised; I’ve almost been expecting something like this. Pam had mentioned to me that she thought the Bennetts were overextending themselves financially. But Reynolds, he’s a friend of mine. Do me a favor. Make an appointment to go see him tomorrow night, to tell him what we suspect. I’ll go with you. I want to go with you. But I just don’t know if I can face him—” Gary’s eyes filled with tears. “If this is true, it’s just an awful damned shame. It just breaks my heart. Why should he ruin himself like this?”

  “I’ll make the phone call,” Reynolds said. “I’ll call now.” But when he dialed, the number was busy, and although he tried off and on the rest of the evening, he wasn’t able to get through to the Bennetts until Sunday morning, just before church. Judy Bennett had answered cordially; when he said he wanted to drop in that evening to visit with Ron, she had sounded pleased.

  Now Reynolds sat in church, looking out at Judy Bennett, who sat so serenely at her husband’s side. Poor woman, he thought; she would soon feel that when she let Reynolds in the door she was letting a viper into the house. Reynolds was glad he had thought to ask Peter Taylor to join them this evening; the minister’s presence would surely provide a sense of comfort to them all.

  Reynolds could only guess at the outcome of the meeting. Perhaps Ron would return the money, perhaps he could prove they were wrong, or he would admit they were right. What would they do then? They would probably have to prosecute. They would certainly have to call in another contractor, and let the town know what Ron had done. They would have to raise even more money somehow, much more money, before the rec center could be completed.

  Reynolds had over the years learned to control his emotions, and he was not a passionate man to begin with. But now in this consecrated building, he felt a holy anger rise within him. He felt like some kind of human volcano about to erupt. He hated Ron Bennett, and this was as intimate and powerful an emotion as he had ever felt for any living man or woman. He hated him not so much for the individual act of greed and corruption as for the repercussions this would have on the broader community. The money was almost beside the point—but not, of course, entirely. One hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money, especially when it had been raised from the personal donations of almost every single family, rich and poor, in the town. Ron had done worse than merely steal money; he had violated the trust of the town, and he had done it in a despicable manner, casually, taking the town’s trust in him for granted. He must have thought the committee was made of fools. He must have held—he must hold—his community in contempt. And he was not an outsider—he was one of them. People in such a close community judged themselves by each other, and if an adult or child performed a noble act, each individual felt himself capable of just that much more nobility. In this democratic little society, the members of Londonton looked at one another to reflect the best in themselves. Ron Bennett would reveal to them all the selfishness which bred in every man’s heart. The center itself would lose its aura of communal dignity and unity; the atmosphere of the town would turn angry, vengeful, and grievous.

  Reynolds had been wrong all along, a fool, to hope that humankind differed from the rest of the physical universe and could somehow shoot away from the deteriorating course that nature followed and aim at uniquely human heights. Now Reynolds knew that in spite of his hopes, mankind, represented in this instance by that fellow citizen Ron Bennett, was doomed to fail, one way or the other.

  This sad knowledge Reynolds took personally, and it was the final blow in a summer of disappointments. Like a man hanging from the edge of a cliff, Reynolds felt he would now stop grappling and clawing for a fingerhold in the infirm ground of optimism and slide down into the metaphorical arms of the only faith that was trustworthy: despair.

  It would be such a relief to despair at last.

  All of his life, Reynolds had clambered up the treacherous and unassisting ground of hope, trying to believe tha
t men were not bad and that life was not senseless. He had come at an early age to believe in the perfectibility of man: this seemed to him to be the point of all life. He also learned very quickly that as an individual, and one not given to theatrics or incendiarism, he had little chance of changing the course of humankind in general. He was an optimist, not a madman. So he set about to control what he could control: himself. He decided that he would try to be a perfect man.

  It was easy to be perfect while he was young. His parents taught languages in a prep school just outside of Boston. They had little money, but lots of hauteur. Reynolds was their only child, born late in their lives, and he was delighted to find how effortlessly he could earn their approval. He had only to sit quietly with them in the damasked living room of their apartment with his head bent over a book. He learned to read at the age of four (he didn’t intend that, he was too young then to think about perfection, his precocity was pure accident). His parents made much ado about this, so he felt doubly blessed: what seemed to them to be compliance was to him a natural pleasure. He simply loved to read. This was fortunate for him, because his parents read so constantly that it seemed to him as a watching infant that reading was actually another vital bodily function, like breathing or walking or eating. He learned to fit into his family almost immediately. His father would sit in a huge armchair, his mother would recline gracefully on the couch, with her stockinged feet on a pillow. Reynolds would lie on the floor between them, and they would all turn pages in silence together. In the winter there would be the accompanying crackle and warmth from the fireplace; in the summer breezes and birdsong would drift through the open window and over their bent heads and engrossed consciousnesses. In the winter, his mother would at some point in the evening serve sherry to her husband and herself and hot chocolate to her son. In the summer she served sherry and lemonade.