Aunt Ursula looked across the line of demarcation at my father, the roundest and most massive of the Egans, saw that he had subsided momentarily, and said in the forbearing tone of one who has been rudely interrupted in the middle of a monologue but is willing to overlook it, “What I was telling you, Neil, is that since we’re leaving Tuesday on the Elizabeth, and the apartment will be empty all summer, there’s no reason you can’t take advantage of it. You and Dan can share our room, and Peg can have the guest room. And don’t be stubborn about it.”
“Air-conditioning makes all the difference,” said Uncle Ruppert.
“Well, you won’t find much of it in London,” Aunt Lottie told him with rich gratification, and Aunt Nora, promptly picking up her cue, said, “London’ll be jammed with tourists now, what with the Coronation. I don’t know why you picked this time to go, Ursula; it doesn’t make sense to me. Either you should have gone earlier and seen the Coronation or waited until next season.”
“We probably saw more of the Coronation than anyone there,” said Uncle Ruppert. “We caught the whole thing on television. Wonderful show. Wonderful.”
Austin Thwaite next to me perked up. “Yes, wasn’t it?” he said. “The pageantry of it!”
Aunt Lottie turned a withering look on him. “I didn’t think much of it. As far as I was concerned, those commercials spoiled everything. Having them break in on church ceremonies to sell cars is a little too much for me, if you don’t mind.”
My uncle Charles smiled. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Desecration by General Motors. I believe you hold quite a few of their shares, don’t you, Lottie?”
Aunt Lottie did. “Just the same,” she said, but without the old fire, “I don’t see why they have to sell cars just when they’re at the altar starting the Sanctus. They could have waited, couldn’t they?”
“The Sanctus?” said Aunt Nora. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Well, somebody’s got to pay the bill,” said Uncle William on behalf of the Asquiths and General Motors. “I notice that it didn’t stop you from watching it.”
My father roused himself. “I didn’t watch it,” he said. “I’ve been too busy watching otherwise sane people go hog-wild over British nonsense. You’d think they elected that woman to office. You’d think it meant something to them. Well, it means nothing to me. I don’t forget my heritage that easily.”
He meant his Irish heritage, which, although occasionally made to sound as if he had descended from wild Fenian stock, was actually Belfast Protestant. It was the Asquith fits of Anglophilia which brought out the Fenian in him.
The assembled Asquiths knew this and did not choose to answer the gambit; it was too old and stale for that. Aunt Ursula and Uncle Ruppert glanced at each other, sharing polite amusement. Uncle Charles yawned, patting the back of his pale, slender hand against his lips. Uncle William shifted his weight from one lean buttock to the other and looked vaguely at the reproduction of Kindred Spirits above my sister’s head. It was a Sunday Afternoon like so many Sunday Afternoons I could remember, and I was aware of my body’s trying to live and breathe under restraint. Next to me Austin Thwaite idly drummed his fingertips on his knee, and I wondered if he too were writhing inwardly. Possibly he was. But if so, it was the way a dog does while it waits to see which way its master will throw the stick to be returned. Austin had come out of the west highly recommended as a good faithful hound; my sister had completed his course in how to fetch and carry; my father now threw the stick. Good Austin. See how Austin can roll over and play dead. But not quite as dead as Ben Gennaro, now under six feet of Hudson Valley dirt and on his way to becoming thirty-two perfect teeth and a silver kneecap. A dog would have barked and warned Ben Gennaro of death; a cat would flee him in panic.
It was a Sunday Afternoon like others I could remember, but worse. It was the first one Ben Gennaro had attended with me.
I was compelled to escape at last; it was either that or risk a burst bladder. Thus, while conscience makes cowards of us, the flesh may sometimes overwhelm it. With all eyes on me I left the room and went upstairs to the bathroom and spent a good deal more time there than was necessary. When I emerged, my father, looming huge in the darkness of the hallway, stood outside the door waiting for me.
“I want to talk to you,” he said.
“I know you do. Can’t we wait until the family is gone?”
“Gone?” he said. “Why? What secrets are there to keep from them? Don’t you think they read the newspapers, too?”
He led the way into my room and shut the door behind us. I had undergone the same sort of trial many times before in this room. The echo of all the charges and threats and pleas that had been dinned into it over the years was as much with me now as the old sketchpad full of worthless drawings on my desk, and the folders of manuscript paper full of worthless stories on my bookcase, and the whole choking, terrifying sense of futility that was as thick and palpable as the dust on the furniture around me. And good intentions, dry and worthless, were thick in that room, too. I had always been one for good intentions. I sowed them like a profligate, knowing, as they withered and turned to dust, that there were always more where they came from. But they were too much like my talents to be worth anything. They were exorcisms against present sorrows, not assurances of future joys.
My father faced me across the room and said in a half whisper, “What is wrong with you? I want to know what is wrong with you,” and then in a sudden, surprising gesture he clapped his hand against his chest and said passionately, “Before God, I tell you that I am willing to forgive and forget, I am willing to be sweetness and light itself, if you tell me straight out why you are what you are. I can’t go on this way. I can’t keep apologizing to the world for your worthlessness without knowing at least what causes it. It isn’t me, that much I know. You’ve been given every possible advantage. You’ve been brought up to know the difference between right and wrong, to understand your responsibilities to me and your sister, and to yourself for that matter. But the little effort it takes to live up to them is beyond you. Why? Damn it, I have the right to know why, don’t I?”
“I suppose so.”
“You suppose so. All right then, why did you run like a rabbit and leave your friend to be killed? Were you too drunk to think of anyone but yourself?”
“No.”
“Ah, you mean you were just sober enough to save your own skin and let everyone else go to hell.”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“Yes, I want to put it that way. And I suppose you were still sober ten minutes after you got out of that building stark-naked and assaulted the people who were trying to put out the fire. Fighting and carrying-on at a time like that are perfect symptoms of sobriety, wouldn’t you say?”
I said: “There’s more than one way of looking at it. Claiborne made a nasty remark to me, and I wanted to shove it down his throat. And when some of the police and firemen stepped in, there was a mix-up. But I wasn’t drunk. I could say I was, but I wasn’t. I knew what I was doing.”
“Did you know what you were doing when you didn’t show up at the funeral services? Did you know what it felt like for me to stand there and have Victor Gennaro console me at his son’s funeral, because my son didn’t have the courtesy to pay his respects? Don’t tell me you did, God damn it, because I happen to know you have no more feelings in you than a stone. That’s been true since your mother died. Any feelings you ever had must have been buried with her. All that’s left now is a lump of vanity and willfulness. All you know is that any time you’re in trouble the answer is to hit out at someone. Knock him down, maybe kill him if you can! And don’t try to deny that. You’ve got a long record of boozing and brawling to answer for.”
He seemed to have forgotten all his preachments about standing up for your rights. “If you say so.”
“I do say so! But I also say that there’s going to be some changes made around here. Some drastic changes. When you go back to college this fa
ll wherever they’ll have you, you’ll be a different man. You’ll reach for a book instead of a bottle any time you’re looking for something to do. And you’ll stay away from the kind of crackpots who did such a good job on you at the University. I mean people like your friend McGhan and his wife. I know that type of dirty Bohemian who puts on such a great show for the kids. Well, you’re done with that kind, because from now on you’ll be at some school of commerce where nobody has any more use for them than I have!”
This was the point where in previous passages I had yielded, sworn fealty, made good resolutions. It was the point where I was given my cue to briefly play the role of dutiful son and exit chastened. I saw it and recognized it, and the answer I had been conditioned to came to my tongue as promptly as saliva comes to the tongue of a Pavlovian dog. But for the first time in my life I managed to hold it back. There was no one reason for that. I don’t think that, aside from attending to his physical needs, a man ever acts out of a single reason. People, for better or worse, are not like pianos, where one finger may poke out a tune; they are always being struck by ideas and emotions in whole chords at a time, and usually jangling and dissonant chords at that. So I was struck at that point of no return, and out of the welter of confusion in me only one thing emerged clearly. McGhan had been right. I was fleeing the ghost of Ben Gennaro, and now in some strange way it dwelt in my father.
So I said what had to be said, and my father, looking as if the devil had risen before him, said incredulously, “Not finish school? A job? Do you think I would take you into the company under those conditions?”
I said: “I don’t expect you to. There are other jobs to be had.”
“What other jobs? What do you think you’re equipped for? If you’ve got the idea that some advertising company will pay you to warm one of its chairs—”
“It might, but I wouldn’t want it to.”
“Oh, it might, but you wouldn’t want it to. Then would you mind telling me,” said my father with elaborate patience, “what other sort of business you intend to grace with your services?”
The way he put it enraged me. It was not only the idea that I was obviously unfit to earn my bread which cut deep, but also the implicit expression of his credo. He knew with a single-minded, unshakeable knowledge that business was real, business was earnest, that the office, the counting room, the stock market were the sum and substance of life, the meaning of it all, and that anything apart from them had the unreality of children’s games. And since I was still at the games stage I was not yet prepared for reality. It was inconceivable to him, could not possibly penetrate to him, that what he called Business was the greatest unreality of all, the most meaningless function, the ultimate game of golf or bridge or tiddledywinks. He and the rest of my family and everyone they knew would have been horrified at the concept that they played at a game all day long, farther removed from reality than a child playing marbles, since they never even touched the objects of their amusement. And their only pleasure in the game lay in keeping score. It was up to others to create and use what my father haggled over and dealt in. It was up to them to know the reality of what they used and of the pleasure derived from that use which is the only true reality. It was up to my father to be a paid score-keeper. And that I would not be. And that I could not tell him.
All I could say was, “I’m young and healthy. I’ll find a job somewhere.”
“You might at that. With enough application you’d probably make a competent garage mechanic.”
“I might.” It didn’t seem worth mentioning to him that the garage mechanics he dealt with were among the few people he treated politely.
“I’d almost like to see you try it. It would teach you things about hard work and the value of money that you never dreamed of.”
I said: “When Ben had you get him that shipyard job last summer you thought it was highly commendable of him.”
“Are you comparing yourself to Ben? By God, you know as well as I do that he wanted that job to keep himself in condition for football. He wasn’t the kind of fool who’d think of making a career out of punching a factory time clock. He had too much respect for himself for that. He had plans for himself, and he had the guts to see them through. Do you think I liked Ben just because he happened to be a great football player? The hell I did. I liked him because he was a man. He had everything in him that I used to dream I’d find in my own son, and it’s a fine day that’s come to me when I see how empty that dream was. When I can stand here and tell you from the heart that I have only one hope left in me. The hope that some day you’ll have a son of your own who gives you just what you’ve given me, no more and no less. And if there’s a God in heaven it’ll happen. It must happen, if there’s any justice!”
He came close to me, his head thrust forward, his fist pounding his chest like that of a man performing penance. “What do you think a man wants from his son? Well, I’ll tell you what he wants. It’s not profit or glory or any such damn cynical notion as you might have. It’s just one thing—knowing he raised a man who can stand on his own two feet and meet his responsibilities. He doesn’t ask to be applauded for his son, but, by Jesus, he doesn’t want to have to be forgiven for him!”
I said: “What makes you think that by doing the kind of work I want to do I’m not meeting my responsibilities?”
“Ah, none of that, boy. Let’s not start playing around with words, let’s not get tangled in that fine rhetoric you’re so expert at. For once this is going to be kept straight and simple. Your responsibilities are to go back to school and look the world in the eye and live down your record. You think that’s any harder than sweating away at a machine somewhere with an ignorant bastard of a foreman always on your tail?”
“I don’t know. I’m willing to find out.”
“Do you think you could last on that kind of job for more than ten minutes?”
“I don’t know. I’m still willing to find out.”
My father’s lip curled. “You’re still willing to find out. Then why the hell didn’t you find out for yourself before this? You’ve had time enough on your hands the last few years. Why didn’t you go to work for a dollar an hour and see what it was like?”
That’s what Ben Gennaro did, he was saying. If you don’t believe it, you can find it in his obituary among the other evidences of his godhead. You can be told it by the red-headed nurse Ben Gennaro used to take regularly on the examination table in the medical office of Voorhees’ shipyard. You can have it cooed to you by the fat, useless pigeons strutting on your window sill.
“All right,” I said, “up to now I wasn’t sure what job I wanted. Now I am.”
“Oh, you are.”
“Yes. I want the same job Ben had at the same place. At that shipyard. But you’ll have to arrange it. You know the owner there, and I don’t.”
“I see. The same job at the same place. Now that Ben’s gone you’ll fill his shoes. That’s nice of you.”
We stood looking at each other in hard-breathing silence, a foot apart and a million miles apart, and then I said, “I should have been the one to die, and Ben should be standing here now telling you to dry your tears. You’d give your soul for that, wouldn’t you?”
My father’s face turned white. He gaped at me, his eyes bulging, his mouth round with horror. He raised a hand and pointed at me, the trembling forefinger aimed like a dagger between my eyes. “I’ll get you your job,” he whispered. “I’ll do that for you, all right. And then I’m done with you. Do you understand? Not another cent of mine goes into your pockets. Live on what you make, or beg, borrow, and steal, but don’t come crawling to me for help. Stay out of my sight, stay out of my hearing, and be damned!”
The agony in him was real. It spurted from him like gouts of blood and washed over me, filling me with shame, sluicing away the courage I had found in the face of his rage. “I’m sorry,” I said, not wanting to say it, but he flung open the door and lurched from the room without a backward glance while
the echo of his be damned fluttered invisible, mocking, and pitiless as the Furies over my head.
SIX
“I must admit,” said my uncle Charles, “that after hearing your side of it I am moved to the same sympathy I felt for your father when he opened his heart to me. But I don’t have to tell you that such sympathy comes cheap. After all, as some wise man once remarked, there is no one so weak that he can’t bear his friend’s calamities with fortitude. But it’s different when he’s asked to invest in them.”
“I wouldn’t call a loan of two hundred dollars much of an investment,” I said.
“I dare say you wouldn’t, and in terms of the amount involved you’d be right. But if I were to give you this money—”
“Lend,” I said.
“Lend or give. If I were to turn this money over to you, it would also mean an investment of loyalty in you. It would mean that I’m taking your side in your quarrel with your father. When I tell him about that—and I’d be honor-bound to do so—you can see what it would mean.”
“Yes, I can.”
“I thought so,” said my uncle. He was obviously enjoying himself immensely, but I had been prepared for that. “What’ll you have to drink?” he asked me.
“Anything you do.”
He crooked a finger at the waiter hovering nearby. “Emile, Chivas Regal for Mr. Egan and me. And ask the chef what he recommends.” When the waiter had gone he said to me, “You’ve never been here before, have you?”
The Winter After This Summer Page 6