The Will

by Harvey Swados

  So it’s his mother he’s weeping for, the doctor thought. Well, maybe so, who knows? He sighed.

  “Look here,” he said, “you can’t imagine what a load of responsibilities a man accumulates as he goes through life. The irony is that half the time he isn’t even aware of the moral cargo he’s taking on. Do you think, when I introduced Leo Land to Jenny Kadin, that I gave any serious thought to how tough it might be for her, living in this neighborhood with two eccentric brothers? I assure you, it never even occurred to me then that in a sense I’d be responsible for the appearance of you boys in this world.”

  “Once I’m here, I’m here.” Ralph blew his nose. “But I’ve never understood how you could have encouraged my mother to get lost in this rathole. She was your friend, or your patient. If she couldn’t see what she was getting into, certainly you must have.”

  “It’s true, she couldn’t see. But what makes you think I could? Here’s one thing you may not know: I was never inside the flat behind the drugstore until after Leo’s marriage. Your father and I were good friends, but for ten years or so we met only in the drugstore. And half of the time—no, more—your Uncle Max wasn’t even there. I knew he was odd, and I suspected how much he dominated his brother, but I didn’t really see the junk he was storing up in the flat until after the marriage that he resented so much.”

  “Still—”

  “Still what? Your father was shy, but even if he let Max walk all over him, he was serious-minded and he had charm. Jenny responded to those qualities. It’s very possible that your mother stayed in love with your father until her dying day, despite all this ugliness that he surrounded her with. We have no way of knowing for sure that she didn’t, do we?”

  Ralph was cold and self-possessed again. He said simply, “I’d doubt it.”

  Stung, the doctor violated his own injunction to calmness. “If you would,” he retorted, “it would be because you’d want to, not because of any evidence to the contrary. So I’ll just take advantage of my years to assert my opinion. And whether or not it was love, you boys were the fruit of that connection.”

  “Just as Uncle Max’s junk was the fruit of his bachelorhood. But even with us boys my mother was disappointed. She had married two bachelors, that’s what it came down to, and she wanted one of her children to be a girl.”

  “She actually said that?” the doctor inquired sharply.

  “I could tell.”

  “Well, in any case, here is the crop: you boys, Max’s junk over there in the store, in the flat behind it, and in his house, and”—he swung his arm, about in a sweeping arc in the warm closed space between them—“Max’s tenements, scattered through this whole miserable neighborhood. There’ll be no need, though, for you boys to go around collecting Max’s rents, with his dog at your heels. Once the condemnation proceedings go through and the wreckers get cracking, there won’t be any more tenants. But since I do have a certain responsibility, which as you say goes back before your birth, I’ll do my best to help you see it through.”

  Ralph remained silent.

  The doctor swore to himself. He said aloud, “Ready for your brother?”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Dr. Stark backed his car around and drove off, heading across the city now at a faster clip.

  Ralph wrenched about and turned his back on the streets. Leaning against the door, he said, as if the hour had struck for polite conversation, “You haven’t told me yet about your own family, Doctor.”

  “Maybe you remember, my wife suffered for many years from multiple sclerosis. Her death was a release for her, if not for me. I’ve been in a little bachelor apartment for three, four years now. Marty wanted me to move in with him, but I said no to that.”

  “He’s married, isn’t he?”

  “And how! He’s got a wife, a mother-in-law, and three daughters—five women, that’s more than I could ever manage. Oh, Marty’s doing famously, he was just recently made full professor at the Law School.”

  “I’d like to see him again.”

  “You will. He’ll be at the funeral this afternoon.”

  The doctor could not tell whether it was the definiteness of his reply or the reference to Leo’s burial that took Ralph aback; in any case, he was momentarily silenced. Then he asked, obviously uninterested, “I suppose Martin still plays the fiddle.”

  “He certainly does, even though it’s been many years since he taught it to the likes of you at the Settlement School. We’re just around the corner from it, in case you want me to make a detour for sentimental reasons.”

  “I don’t care if I never see that place again.”

  “Understandable. But do you still play?”

  “I’ve given it up. Too busy with other things.”

  “Your father told me only recently that you’ve been making your way in the movies.”

  “Making a living, and not much more. I haven’t been doing as well as I’d hoped when I went into the picture business.”

  “I used to think movies were made in Hollywood.”

  “Not the specialized ones. I’ve been working as a kind of glorified salesman, persuading business firms that we ought to make their films. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t even particularly interesting, after the first half-dozen trips to cities like Utica and Toledo. The Uticas and Toledos in Greece and Spain must be better.”

  “Perhaps they are, but life can be disappointing if you don’t enjoy your daily work.”

  “I used to have ideas about producing on my own. Or even going into feature films. New York has pretty much knocked all that out of me.” To the doctor’s surprise, Ralph’s voice roughened as he blurted, “But there’s one thing I do believe with all my heart. That is that I have the ability to control my future by planning it. And that I can take advantage of opportunities in order to achieve a decent life style. Ray will never be able to do that, because he’s committed to irrationality. He’s ten years younger than I am, but from what you yourself say, he’s acting like a little old man. I’ll never settle for that.

  Taken unawares, the doctor did not immediately reply. On the one hand he was pleased to be addressed frankly at last, with youthful impetuous honesty. It was much more agreeable than Ralph’s earlier cold and withdrawn manner (and certainly more tolerable than his strange brief moment of tears). On the other hand, what was that stuff about a life style? Did he just mean that if he fell into money, he’d know how to spend it? What an unoriginal illusion!

  The doctor said tentatively, “You need a wife, I think, for the kind of thing you’re talking about.”

  “I do have a girl. And I think she’d marry me if I asked her. But I’m holding off. Don’t misunderstand me, Doctor. It isn’t just bachelor fear of being trapped. I dislike living alone as much as anyone, but I don’t want to become a statistic. You know those suburban couples you were talking about, with the two point five kids? I can’t take the chance, the prospect is too awful.”

  “Yes, it comes back to me,” the doctor remarked ruminatively. He fingered the pouch of flesh under his left eye as he waited for a red light to change. “You were always the conservative one in the family.”

  Now why did I say that? he asked himself. Even if it was true, it was uncalled for. Ralph had offered a confidence; after this rebuff he would have to withdraw, if only to protect himself against more such jibes. Still, he was being stuffy even when he turned to intimacies. It was this which impelled the doctor willfully to needle Ralph even more sharply.

  “Hasn’t your girl friend got money? Traditionally that’s the best solution for a poor but ambitious young man.”

  Ralph Land flashed him a glance of purest hatred. It was the kind of hatred, with the nostrils of his narrow sharply bridged nose flaring wide, that grew from shame at having so lately attempted to confide in the kind of man who not only rejects but mocks your confidences. He said coldly, “Kitty hasn’t got a dime. She went to Syracuse University. Her parents have got a mill-end store there. Sh
e does research in my office. They pay her a fast ninety-five bucks a week.”

  “You don’t say,” Dr. Stark murmured noncommittally. So he’s really an idealist, he thought. Like all good Americans he’s outraged at the suggestion that a poor boy ought to take up with a rich girl. Just the same he wants “style.” He means he wants dough, already he’s hungry to sink his teeth into the Land estate. That was always a dangerous combination, an idealist who yearned for money.

  The sleeping city, which they had been traversing diagonally, now came slowly to life, or at least thawed ever so little under the pale disk of the new sun. As they proceeded northeast they passed areas which had been uninhabited swamp twenty years earlier, even ten—“Remember?” he demanded of Ralph. Here and there had been a bankrupt machine shop or tire retreading plant among the scatter of grubby subsistence farms on whose rutted side roads high-school couples parked to neck. The echelons of bulldozers had obliterated even the memory of all this more effectively than the lava that had submerged Pompeii. The side roads had become streets, the subsistence farms and potato fields had become housing developments, the swamp itself a business block. The avenue down which they drove was a jungle of garden tool supply stores whose frozen snakes of hose lay greenly looped among snow shovels and rock salt; floor-and wall-covering depots ablaze with spatter, Saran, and Sanitas; patio and swimming-pool builders hooked back to back against the huts of used-car dealers whose lots were filled with machines standing stiffly to attention beneath flags which flapped, not to lead them into battle, but solely to catch your distracted eye. And real-estate wolves, hiding in fake log cabins.

  Max Land’s house, which Ralph must surely remember from childhood visits as his uncle’s prize of prizes, his private white elephant, had for sixty years stood all alone in the middle of noplace, sticking, solitary, out of field and swamp like a great discolored tooth jutting up from an otherwise empty lower jaw. Now that field and swamp had been overwhelmed by suburban midden, it loomed up before them, more crazily out of place than ever. You could not see it from any distance, so it was always shocking to come upon it, bulking on its block-wide lot, its countless bays, dormers, barge-boards, and fluted porch posts grimacing wildly at what had sprung up before it: A shopping center climaxed with Early American A & P, servicing endless cubes of three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom tract homes, a veritable and literal Happy Valley complete with the doctor’s earlier evocation: kids on tricycles and daddies washing Chevys.

  “My God,” Ralph muttered.

  “A little different from when you were a kid, isn’t it?”

  The doctor could not keep the complacency of the professional guide from his voice as he brought the car into a carriage drive deep with unspotted snow, just far enough to get its tail clear of the street. “No point in commenting on either Happy Valley or Gargoyle Acres. But you should know that a man is already interested in buying up this property. He wants to pull down the house and put up a taxpayer—isn’t that what they call it?—with professional offices.”

  “In other words, Ray is going to have to—”

  “Exactly. There’s one other thing.” Dr. Stark paused, his fingers on the door handle. With his free hand he reached out and touched Ralph on the arm. “Ever since Max’s death, people have been guessing as to what he left here. It’s only natural that you should be the number-one target for the local reporters. They don’t know about Raymond’s still being up in the attic, but they want to find out about the haunted house. The Liberty Bonds, the Czarist jewels, all that crap. You follow me?”

  Ralph’s thick brows were coming together again over his long narrow nose. “I’m going to have to cover for Ray? But for how long? Supposing he won’t want me to? Supposing I can’t?”

  Now he was beginning to get the pitch.

  “Supposing we go inside and see,” the doctor said, smiling. “It’s cold out here.”

  They left the car together, the doctor pausing to lock the door with his habitual caution, and proceeded up the unswept walk, through freshly drifted snow marked only by a dog’s paw prints. The porch steps creaked thinly, like a kitten crying, as they mounted them.

  Dr. Stark had the feeling that they were being watched, that they had been watched ever since they had pulled into the drive. He glanced at Ralph. The young man was paler than ever, not in the least flushed from the fresh air or the expectation of what lay within; his face was expressionless. The doctor looked past him. Was that an eye peering at them from behind the porch window, through the slats of the wooden blind?

  He rapped smartly at the door with his gloved knuckles, ignoring the old bellpull. Once, pause, then twice rapidly. “Our signal,” he explained to Ralph, looking not at him but at the knob before them. Finally it turned, slowly, and a bolt groaned as it was withdrawn.

  The hallway into which they could barely squeeze, the doctor urging Ralph ahead with his hand, was so dark and crowded that for a moment it was possible to discern only an Alps of dimly looming white mounds. Slowly they took shape as old newspapers, stacked head-high and more, teetering in great piles to within inches of the tall ceiling, from which a cloudy festoon of spider webs descended to attach itself to the peaks.

  Between two of these moldering mountains shrank a stoop-shouldered but powerful figure. He wore a khaki army sweater, formal trousers with a satin stripe down the side of each leg, and plaid carpet slippers through which his little toes protruded. His untrimmed tangle of beard disappeared into the V neck of the sweater, and his eyes, extraordinarily blue even in this dimness, glinted with wariness and fear. At last he spoke.

  “Hello, Ralph,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  2: RALPH

  UNABLE TO TEAR HIS eyes away from those of the stranger who held himself in shadow like some wary woodland creature, Ralph did not realize until Dr. Stark had murmured his few words and departed that the old man must have had an additional motive in escorting him here. Besides preparing him for this apparition, the doctor had perhaps feared that Raymond would not recognize his brother, and would therefore not have unbarred the door had Ralph arrived alone.

  “Tell me something,” he said to Ray. “Did you recognize me just now?”

  “Of course. My own brother?”

  “Yes, but you were expecting me. Supposing I’d come unannounced?”

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference. I’ve got pictures of you. Anyway, you haven’t changed so much since you were going to college, Ralph. I wasn’t a baby when you left, I was in fifth grade. The real question is, do you recognize me?”

  The boy sounded no more crazy than Ralph’s boss, a man given to choleric mutterings and, when hung over, to unreasonable Monday morning rages. “I’d be a liar if I said yes. You weren’t shaving in fifth grade. Not that you are now.” Partly because of his relief, Ralph could not keep the irritation from creeping into his voice. “Why don’t you? That beard makes you look like one of those phony poets.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m no poet. If anything, I’m more the scientific temperament than the poetic. Still, I don’t trust the scientists, do you? I mean, look what they let the politicians do with their work. That’s why I don’t trust myself either. I’m as much of a coward as any of them, with all my strength. So I’m protecting other people, as well as myself, by staying upstairs.” He laughed a high unnatural laugh that filled Ralph with alarm, even more than had his words. Almost immediately, however, he reverted to matter-of-factness. “And if I don’t go out, why should I get dressed up, or shave? I never see anyone, no one ever sees me.”

  “Isn’t there someplace where we can sit down and talk?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think. Would you like to come up to the attic; where I stay?” Ray added eagerly, “It’s the only comfortable spot in the house.”

  Ralph hesitated. Crawling up to the hide-out could only lead them away from what they really had to talk about, the funeral, the estate, the will. “No,” he said, “let’s put that off. We’ve got some important
matters to settle first.”

  “Only one thing is important,” Raymond replied, with the precise dogmatism of a schoolteacher. “That’s for the strong not to misuse their strength. I haven’t yet figured out how that can be done. So until I do, I think I ought to stay right here. You know what I mean? Take the bomb, for example.” For a moment Ralph thought he might have misunderstood. The palm? The balm? But Raymond was already pressing on, leaving no room for doubt.

  “Do you think we should have dropped it, Ralph?”

  “How do I know? I assume they had good reason.”

  “Not they. We. Did we abuse our strength?”

  So this was what Dr. Stark had been trying to explain. If you talked about practical matters, Ray came back at you with abstractions. But why? And how could you get him off his cloud?

  “I’ll be glad to discuss all that with you by the hour,” Ralph said reasonably. “You can take one side and I’ll take the other. But first I need your help with this mess we’ve inherited. One thing at a time, all right?”

  He had been leaning against a sooty player piano. As he stepped forward persuasively, anxious for his brother to behave and to be helpful, his arm brushed against a pile of perforated piano rolls. They crashed to the floor like so many logs, raising a cloud of dust and sending a train of barely visible specks (maybe dead insects?) scattering across the dismal floor.

  Ray stood quite still. But in the dim wintry light, filtered and colored by an incongruous stained-glass window on the landing behind him, a tear stood out with perfect clarity in the inner corner of each eye. “Poor Papa,” he said.

  Ralph stared at him wordlessly, uneasily.

  “The rolls were Uncle Max’s idea, but Papa was crazy about them. Don’t you remember? I must have been in kindergarten or first grade, and Uncle Max made me ask all the kids in school if they had any player-piano rolls at home. He tried to get you into it too, only you were more interested in Henry Wallace. The funny part is that those rolls did become valuable again, just as Uncle Max predicted. At least, a man called about them only a few weeks ago, but poor Papa was so upset about Uncle Max’s condition that he put him off.”