The Will

by Harvey Swados

  Ralph pushed the wind wing closed and shrank into his coat, as though he had received a sudden chill to the marrow. “My problem?”

  “Who else’s?” Annoyed, the doctor decided to stop horsing around. “I’m sorry, Ralph. I like Raymond very much, and I think he likes me, but by the average man’s standards he’s lost his marbles. Ever know any monks? He lives more or less like one. He has no desire to see the outside world, not a movie, not even a mailbox. With Max and Leo gone, someone is going to have to look after him.”

  “Why me? I’m not trying to duck out, I’m only being practical. Ray was ten years old when I left for Korea. I hardly know him. After Korea, when I was finishing college in New York, I wrote and told him, Get out as soon as you can. No reaction. I pleaded with him. It was useless. Whatever he’s like now, I don’t think he’ll listen to me. I got the feeling from his last letter that he was smiling at me, as though I was the one to be pitied, not he.”

  “Exactly. Then you understand him already, at least to that extent. He feels as though the whole world ought to be pitied. I think he does see, after a fashion, that the world doesn’t want to be pitied, which is probably why he’s locked himself in.”

  “He’s going to have to get out of that dump. If he wants me to help him, I will, but he’s got to get out.”

  How simple things looked and sounded when you were young! Although he found Ralph to be the least appealing of all the Lands, Dr. Stark had no wish to be cruel to him; still, he was going to have to shock him into comprehension, even though he had already been shocked—you couldn’t tell how severely—by the deaths.

  “I’ve told Raymond you’re on your way,” he said. “He’s counting on you. I don’t mean to get sticky, but all you have left in the world is each other.” He counted to three and added, “That is, each other and Mel.”

  “Never mind that. I appreciate your help, but never mind that. I’ll do whatever has to be done for Ray, but the kid is going to have to co-operate with me.”

  At least now I know his attitude toward Mel, the doctor thought; as for Raymond, Ralph would see with his own eyes in a matter of minutes. Still he felt an obligation, having gone this far, to set Ralph straight.

  “Remember, he hasn’t been out in three years. Not only that—he stays in the attic. I don’t think he could just walk out. It would be like letting Rip Van Winkle loose in Times Square. And he’s very idealistic.”

  “You mean he thinks he’s better than anyone else, is that it?”

  “Is that your definition of idealism?” Dr. Stark raised his hand from the steering wheel to forestall any more of this. “I meant that he thinks the world is bad. It doesn’t follow that he thinks he’s good. Quite the contrary.”

  “My father wrote me very little, Raymond wrote me practically nothing. If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, who will?”

  “I wish I could. Raymond discovered suddenly that he was physically very powerful. But since this happened during his adolescence, it was very confusing to him. He became fearful that he might hurt someone, even accidentally. So he decided to take himself out of circulation, instead of adding to the confusion, until such time as the world was ready to handle him, or vice versa.”

  “But that’s crazy.”

  “Ah, you too. Is it any crazier than those zealots who walk halfway around the world, or swim under the hulls of atomic submarines, because they’re afraid of the bomb?”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “For that matter, who’s to say that he—or they—are any crazier than the presidents and prime ministers, and the way they behave? Isn’t Raymond, hiding behind his muscles, doing exactly what they all want us to?”

  “I’m not saying that I’m not my brother’s keeper, but supposing he won’t listen? Supposing he looks down his nose at me?”

  The doctor reached inside his overcoat for a handkerchief, shook it out, and blew his nose with a firm honk. “There’s another reason why you boys are going to have to come to terms. I don’t suppose you’ve given it any thought, but there is a substantial fortune involved.”

  Ralph yawned suddenly, or at least opened his jaws. No, he was not bored; he must have experienced a sudden pressure on his ears, as though at these last words the automobile had taken an unexpected leap into the air. Dr. Stark asked pleasantly, “I guess this time I surprised you, hey?”

  “It’s very confusing.” Ralph ran his hand over his face. “All I can think of is my uncle’s bicycle pumps and Ann Sheridan pictures. And my father’s correspondence with the Patent Office.”

  “And real estate? How come you don’t think of real estate?”

  The doctor observed that Ralph Land was cracking his hairy knuckles, quite unaware of what he was doing. “Uncle Max’s house? It may have a million rooms, but it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Not any more it’s not. You’ll see very soon. But besides, you must recall the houses where your Uncle Max used to go knocking on every door to collect his rents.”

  “Those dumps? They were nothing but slums.”

  “Times change. It’s funny how young people resist such simple truths. It’s the younger ones who are always saying, My God, the war seems like only yesterday, or some such rubbish. That’s when I feel almost complacent about growing old. It makes for realism, and recognition of change.”

  Ralph was growing restless beside him. The doctor gestured ahead, at the street beyond the long massive hood of his automobile. “I’ve been taking the liberty of driving you considerably out of the way before we head for Max’s house, and your brother. For one thing, it gave me the. opportunity to prepare you a little for Raymond. For another, I do think that before we head out to the other end of town, you ought to take a look at the old neighborhood, where I first met your father so many years ago, and where you grew up. After all, that’s where most of Max’s property is, in the Thirteenth Ward, not far from the Land Brothers’ Pharmacy—the slums, as you call them so aptly.”

  “And my father …”

  “Your father’s body is at the funeral parlor.” Presumably that was what Ralph had been going to ask about. “There’ll be a brief service there before the interment. Just as was done with Max. There was simply no place to lay either of them out in the house. It’s an unimaginable mess. I can tell you I dreaded this day for more reasons than one.”

  Ralph did not come back to the estate, or the money, although surely he was itching to ask about it? Instead he remarked somberly, “You said on the phone that my father didn’t suffer before he died.”

  “Fortunately. He suffered a good deal from your uncle’s illness and death, yes, and maybe he felt that there was no compelling reason to step out of the way of the doughnut truck. But that’s neither here nor there. Leo didn’t last more than forty minutes after being hit. They notified me from the emergency room, but by the time I reached the hospital he was gone. They assured me, and of course I determined for myself when I got there, that he was unconscious from the second his head hit the fender, which was merciful. In actual fact, Ralph, it was your Uncle Max who really suffered before his death. No one ever knew how much, how painful it must have been. He kept it strictly to himself.”

  “Why?” Ralph seemed more polite than concerned. “What good did it do him?”

  “Your brother Raymond says Max’s silence was a form of penance for the sin of avarice. Myself, I think of his silent suffering—and boy, I’d hate to have what he had, I’d blow my brains out—as an expression of his old penury. Both of them were anal-erotic in origin, the way I look at it; I don’t have to tell you how stingy the old boy was. He figured, I suppose, why should he call me in, or any other doctor, he’d been misreading our prescriptions for forty years and more, those few of us who still sent patients to him. We’d only have prescribed expensive medication and insisted on hospitalization. So he dosed himself, first with salts, then with a mess of stale patent medicines that nobody else has even heard of for twenty years, anything he could find ro
tting on the shelves of the Land Brothers’ Pharmacy. Toward the end he knew perfectly well what was gnawing at his insides—Max was cuckoo, yes, but he was no fool—and if he didn’t want anybody with a license, like me, to tell him what he had, it wasn’t that he was afraid to hear. He just wanted to keep it to himself as long as possible, like his old bicycle pumps, his real estate … and his family too, your father, your brother …”

  The doctor paused, and wound up briskly, “He was in the hospital less than two weeks, and then he died.”

  Ralph was staring out the window at the familiar streets, weirdly quiet on the holiday morning as though the great graying heaps of snow at the curbs had silently buried the city’s inhabitants. His jaw resting on his fist, he said, without turning away from the window, “And my father knew all along. I mean about Uncle Max.”

  “Oh, I think so. The pain got too bad for Max to hide, and your father was too intelligent to deceive himself. The last time I saw Leo alive, at Max’s funeral last week, he told me that the two of them had more or less settled things between them. If we only knew what they settled, your job would be a lot easier.”

  “I’ve had no experience in handling estates. And especially with my family …”

  “I know. Don’t worry, though, we’ll see it through. The first thing you ought to get clear on is what’s been happening to this town since you left. That’s why I thought we’d head for the old haunts first. The value of Max’s property will be more evident after you get a sense of the city. We’ve all changed in the years you’ve been gone, the city itself perhaps more than any individual. You remember how the lakefront was, flophouses, saloons, tattoo parlors. Now it’s being renewed, the planners’ word. And out at the east end of the city, where there were only truck farms when you were a kid, suburbs are popping up like rows of cabbages.”

  Deliberately, the doctor allowed himself the luxury of a digression, at the cost of being thought a long-winded old bastard. “Even though I’ve delivered my share, I’m flabbergasted at all the thousands of kids in the new developments. Where the hell do they come from? Sometimes it seems to me that the whole damn United States must be thirty-three years old, with two point five kids between the ages of one and six. You know what that makes me? A fossil, a freak that hasn’t got sense enough to exile himself with the rest of the senile has-beens to St. Petersburg or Santa Barbara.”

  Dr. Stark stopped, not because he had wearied of the topic—actually, he could have gone on at length along the same lines—but because it was clear that Ralph Land, who was not even married yet, much less a suburban father, had absolutely no interest in what he was saying.

  Besides, the area through which they were driving had nothing directly to do with the new suburban generation. As Ralph Land stared out at the streets on which he had played as a friendless kid, the corners of his mouth drew down with disgust and horror. No wonder he didn’t want to listen to complaints about the insipidities of the suburbs. Despite his guide’s little lecture, it must have seemed to him that his native city was hideously unchanged, the more they penetrated into its grimy and crumbling core. The very names fading on the cracked walls of the Victorian red-brick factories were the same: PREITZ BEER BREWED WITH PRIDE—PIEROSELLI FOR PEPPERS AND SPICES—FINE’S TANNERY, FINE HIDES. Characterless and rotten, the seedy metropolis rose up on both sides, still mournfully proclaiming NEHI and KIRMAN’S VALUABLE PREMIUMS, reinforcing Ralph Land’s conviction that he had indeed been right in fleeing from it … and never returning until this moment, when at last it might be ready to present him with the means of final escape. Not simply the physical escape which he had in a measure already achieved, but freedom to enter a world which, Dr. Stark strongly suspected, Ralph Land had been unable to conquer in the decade since he had left home.

  The doctor’s cumbersome but comfortable automobile lurched silently over the frozen humps of ice that had resisted the snow plows. Spreading his gloved fingers over the narrow steering wheel, he went on, “I’ve been rambling, I know. But there’s a connection. Those new suburbanites are going to have to be able to reach the waterfront easily, because that’s what’s being redeveloped and that’s where they’ll earn their livings. So an elevated speedway will be built across town, across all this old crap, to connect lakefront and highway, industry and suburb. Most of those old dumps that your uncle bought around here lie smack on the right of way. D’you follow me?”

  His passenger nodded mutely. Was he dazed by the news? He was gazing out the steamy window at the frozen buildings that teetered lifelessly on either side of the ice-patched street, staring at them hard, his brow so contracted that his heavy eyebrows met to form one thick black accent mark, as if he were trying to assimilate the notion that these were to be the means of his deliverance, these less than worthless structures that had surely been the shameful bane of his childhood—and, probably, the backdrop to the secret nightmares of his manhood.

  Cut-rate funeral parlors, curtained taverns lingering half alive from the era when they had been saloons, basement poolrooms with bleached and peeling orange arrows pointing the way downward into their corroded depths, empty ice-cream parlors behind whose unwashed windows stood discolored glass jars packed with long-stale stuck-together candies, wholesale cleaning plants closed today so that at least their rank hiss of hot steam did not escape into the sunless street, secondhand clothing stores with rusted racks of five- and seven-dollar suits, bicycle repair shops which had surely done no business since the days of the Model T—anyone who had grown up here must know them all by heart, these decaying excrescences of a decaying city.

  The Lands’ drugstore had been one more such, Ralph’s prison and his springboard. How well Dr. Stark remembered the relief with which this boy, a college junior he must have been, had greeted the opportunity of the Korean War: he had fled in horror, appalled that other thousands remained, unwilling to seize the opportunity to escape the collapsing city before its cracking mortar and splitting, rotten-hearted beams should have crushed the marrow out of their bones. And yet—this was what puzzled and intrigued the doctor—had Ralph really been so pleased with himself for escaping that he had not even once suspected how, concealed in these ruins, there lay the substance which would free him once and for all?

  Ralph turned to him at last, his eyes veiled. “Dr. Stark,” he asked in a neutral tone, “did my father leave a will?”

  “I’m honestly not sure. The fact that one hasn’t been found means nothing—there must be tons of papers in the house. I’m inclined to think he did, because he talked to my son Marty once about the mechanics of it, and not long ago I witnessed some document for him with my signature. He didn’t tell me what it was, though, and I didn’t ask. I suppose I should have.”

  “And my uncle?”

  Took you long enough to get around to it, the doctor wanted to reply, for somebody who must like money at least as much as the rest of us.

  “Why yes,” he said instead. “Your uncle left a will. They found it at his bedside when he died.”

  Ralph Land’s fingers paused in midair on their way to the heater knob, then rather too casually went on to turn down the heat just a bit. But he remained stubbornly silent, refusing to ask the imperiously necessary question. Pride, maybe.

  “He left everything to your father.”

  The only sign that Ralph had heard was a tightening of his frame, as if something were happening inside his chest that he did not want the doctor’s trained ear to detect. Dr. Stark coasted slowly alongside an abandoned cheese factory and stopped, then cut the motor.

  “Here’s your old block,” he murmured. “Familiar?”

  It was indeed the Lands’ old street. Tattered green shades hung limply behind the sooty bay windows of off-center clapboard houses sinking slantwise into their foundations; rows of rumpled garbage cans lined the narrow alleyways, stained with dogs’ urine and girdled by circlets of orange peel and eggshells frozen fast in the ice. Coffee grounds blacker than poison lay sprinkl
ed like rotted seed on the crusted curbside snow. There was no visible life, not even on the leafless trees which had been allotted one to every fourth house, as if no more could be spared.

  “It’s practically all colored now,” the doctor said. “Yours was about the last white family on the block. How long ago was it that the Lands left?”

  “It was in 1952, after I went to Korea, that Papa and Ray closed up the flat and moved in with Uncle Max. It was too lonesome for them to stay here, just the two of them,” Ralph replied, and began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said, after he had recovered from his own surprise. “I suppose you think it was insensitive of me to bring you here. But I meant well. Sooner or later—”

  “It’s all right,” Ralph muttered, his hand still to his face. “I was thinking of my mother.”

  Then he peered out, as the doctor had known he would have to, at the boarded-up drugstore across the street, eater-corner from the closed-down cheese factory. The second-story sign, LAND BROS. PHARMACY, raised gold letters on black in the style of another day, hung askew on its rusting iron cross-piece, bird droppings streaking its face. Below the sign the grilled window revealed a hopeless clutter: an absent cat’s pallet, a cracked and fallen mortar and pestle, the cardboard BEFORE display of a proprietary drug (an expressionless man in steel-rimmed glasses, his nose and cheeks mottled with swollen to bursting red pustules), a spider-webbed cardboard rack of children’s sunglasses, most of them broken or dangling. Tacked to the door was a scrawled notice, unreadable at this distance. Did it announce, to anyone at all interested, or even curious, Max Land’s death? Or Leo’s? Or the fact that there were no longer any such Lands to scurry like rodents through the musty shelving in search of an occasional Bromo, enema bag, or tin of condoms?