The Will

by Harvey Swados

  “I’ll take Papa’s. I’m not superstitious. You let me know when you’ve got something ready to eat. Why the bottles?”

  Ray touched a switch. A massive bronze chandelier hanging in the stairwell, a great hammered circle and a series of smaller forged circlets, lit up the entire hallway; like an Elizabethan prop left over from an old Laughton or Olivier movie, it was at once too good for the house and too wrong for it. Surprisingly, all the bulbs worked.

  “The milk bottles were being held in case the deposit went up. Uncle Max thought it would, on account of a glass shortage.”

  “What glass shortage?”

  “He always expected shortages. The other bottles he was going to sell to a lamp maker. Well,” Ray said more cheerfully, “I’ll start supper.”

  Ralph had chosen his father’s room because here he might begin at once to search for the will. First, however, the bed had to be stripped (it seemed to Ralph that he could still discern on the sheet the imprint of his father’s body) and the room aired. Now he knew that he had also chosen this room to test himself, for suddenly he was breathing badly, his chest constricted and stabbing with every inhalation. He flung open the single window, not without effort; apparently it had not been opened for years.

  The freezing air moved in. Its draft was a knife laid across his bent back as Ralph moved about the room, gathering up his father’s miscellaneous personal belongings. None were familiar to him. He dragged in a carton from the hallway, lined it with newspapers, and proceeded to fill it with shirts and socks and underwear from the bureau drawers, old suits and hats and neckties from the closet, several pairs of shoes from under the bed. Raymond would have gone all weepy over every bunion bulge in the shoes, no doubt.

  On his knees, Ralph cast about at the bedside, and among the fluff under the springs, for those objects which had fallen from his father’s tired hands during the last week of his life. A paperback, cracked in two, on the social life of the animals, a Black & White Scotty ash tray with four cigar butts (his father liked to smoke his self-imposed ration before going to sleep), a child’s spiral notebook with a row of dates adjoining a column of indecipherable figures (rents, perhaps?—he slipped it into his shirt pocket), a Number 2 Eagle pencil stub, George Sarton’s History of Science, and two or three copies of the previous week’s Inquirer. Ralph’s eye was caught by his own name in type.

  Still kneeling, he read Ed Burgholzer’s account of Uncle Max’s funeral. His father had not only folded the paper back to the story of the “aged eccentric,” he had cut one side of it with a penknife. Why he had not then removed it from the paper—whether because he had been too shaken, or too weary, or had realized that he had no one to whom to send it—Ralph would never know.

  But he could imagine all too vividly his father lying in this outsize four-poster, no longer with even the terrible consolation and reproach of hearing his older brother moaning between clenched teeth next door, and reading the lurid account not only of the bleak funeral, but of the deceased’s oddities and the disappearance one by one of the three nephews who had been his only blood kin beyond their father, his surviving brother. The fact that the brother still survived had been apparently the only restraint on Burgholzer or his superiors. At that, the story was seasoned with hints that Max Land’s nephews had taken off, one after the other, as his eccentricities became intolerable to them, and had left their father (himself no paragon) to carry on alone.

  Ralph read it through twice, stung with the fury of impotence, pounding his fist hollowly into his father’s mattress. How miserable and ashamed the old man must have been! And muzzled, not even free to say that it wasn’t so, that Ray had never left home and Ralph had always kept in touch. But no, not in touch. That they had never been; one wrote, and if the other answered, it was only, Ralph knew, because he, like a cowardly lover, had lacked heart—or maybe guts—to let it die.

  Earlier, kneeling before the dog Sasha, it had been his dead uncle, that horrible man, whom he had suddenly … not missed, but recognized once and for all to be alive in himself. And in Mel. At the cemetery, sprinkling soil on the lid that covered his father’s closed face, and wiping off the snow from the gravestone beside him, it had been his mother who had suddenly risen up before him once again, in all her silent sweetness and despair. But now, beside this bed, his knees on the stained hooked rug, clutching in his fist the very newspaper that his father had stared at just four nights before, he felt for the first time, all the way to the bone, the harrowing reality of his father’s presence—and absence.

  Ray coughed. He was standing in the doorway, a tray in his hands. “Are you all right?” he asked. “It’s freezing.”

  Who was solicitous? Who was worried about the other’s behaving unnaturally?

  “I was just airing the room,” Ralph explained hastily. “I’ll close the window now. You’re sure you don’t mind my staying in here?”

  “No, no! I’m very pleased. It’ll help keep things as they were. I could hardly have suggested it to you, but I thought, now that you’ve done it, why don’t we seal it by eating here tonight? I’ll set up the card table—Papa used to play solitaire on it—and you can sit in the old armchair.”

  This suggestion of an entry into permanence was as unsettling as Ray’s gratuitous approval. Ralph was suddenly struck by the incongruity of his labors. He had been gathering up his father’s effects with a cool efficiency which would have been beyond Ray, but for what end? To see that they would go to a suitable charity, when all eleven other rooms of the house were crammed with enough junk to keep any charity, suitable or not, occupied for months?

  “What are you smiling at?” Ray asked, hopefully.

  “I was just thinking that I’m a slave to orderliness, when there’s no proof yet that it will do me any good. Never mind. You make a delicious omelet.”

  “I didn’t forget that you like strong coffee, Ralphie. I only made it weak this once because I didn’t want you to be sleepless after such a terrible day.”

  Was there no end to the boy’s kindness? Ralph began to suspect that if he did not challenge Ray’s implicit claim of moral superiority, every effort to help him and to close out the estate could be paralyzed.

  “Now that Papa’s gone,” he said casually, “I think it would be a good idea for you to come down from the attic. I’ll help you fix up any room you like.”

  “I’d rather not, thanks.”

  Ralph prided himself on his self-control. With all the fraternal charm he could muster, he murmured, “This bed is big enough for the two of us, buddy. You can bunk in here with me.”

  How much more could one offer? Did he want to be carried down, like a bride?

  Ray stared at him in puzzlement. Then he smiled. “If you’re nervous about staying, you’re perfectly welcome to share the attic with me. I’ve got it insulated, and we can bring up a sleeping bag and an air mattress.”

  The boy was grinning gently through his tangle of beard. Staring at him, Ralph began to sweat. Spookiness, even the hermit’s terror induced by moral paralysis, was one thing; but how could you cope with someone who insisted on being pitying instead of pitiable?

  “Never mind,” he muttered, “we’ll talk about you and that attic tomorrow. Let’s get started on the papers.”

  But he had not bargained either on Ray’s motive for rummaging: a passionate curiosity about the family history, and the motives of its members in choosing their partners and their professions. Ray was in love with all the Lands, or so it seemed to Ralph as they finished eating and began what Ralph had hoped would be a systematic inventory, starting with this room. The principal object of his immediate curiosity was an oak bookcase with glass doors that was stuffed to the hinges with photograph albums, ledgers, diaries, loose-leaf notebooks, bridge pads, score cards, receipted bills, photostats of birth certificates and naturalization papers, and compositions written ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier by the three brothers.

  “Look, here’s a book report on The
Life of the Spider. Papa’s influence, but I don’t recognize the handwriting. Must have been Mel’s. Wouldn’t it be interesting to learn how Mel feels, not just about bugs, but about people too?”

  Ralph snatched the yellowing sheets from Ray’s hand and pitched them into the wastebasket. “Forget the scraps—let’s find the will.”

  “But, Ralphie, how can you find the future without the past? In order to find the will, we have to go through all this.” He waved his hand to include the bookcase, the room, the house. “Even if we do find it, we’ll still have to figure out our real heritage.”

  “You’re talking philosophy, I’m talking dollars and cents. I have to think of your future as well as mine, so you can afford to play at philosophy. At least until we find the will, do me a favor. Stop worrying about the past.”

  “But I have to worry about it. And about you. You’re my brother.”

  “Are you going to help me, brother, or aren’t you? Because if I have to do this alone, it may take so long that the district attorney will come busting in here, and the U.S. Treasury Department, and God knows who else. Would you like that?”

  Ray shook his head, smiling deep in his beard. “No more than you would.”

  It was like trying to run through a quagmire. No matter which way you turned, the ground slipped from under you; as confidence oozed away, panic moved in like quicksand.

  “Ralph, I do want to help. But can’t we get some pleasure, or at least some knowledge, out of the search?”

  He was exhausted. Ray had an eager question for every scrap of paper. The fear began to grow in him that even in the morning he would not be any better equipped to master the boy and exert his will upon him.

  Over the card table his brother was opening a limp leather photograph album, embossed “Souvenir of Saratoga Springs” above a brave bearing a tomahawk. It could not possibly contain anyone’s last will and testament. On the other hand, why couldn’t it? And if that was possible, anything was; and he faced the appalling prospect of weeks of poring over family photos and letters better burned unread, while Ray babbled about bombs and brotherhood and hounded him, like one more reporter, for the inside dope.

  Staring first at his dead mother’s frightened, tentatively smiling countenance as she posed, gawky and rawboned, before Grant’s Tomb, beside her husband on their honeymoon, then at his brother’s rapt expression as he regarded the photograph, Ralph knew the sinking fear that comes to the man who has taken on too much. This was what Dr. Stark and Martin had been trying to convey to him—that he was in beyond his depth and would never be able to make it on his own to his goal.

  “Poor Mama,” Ray was saying, “that’s almost the way I remember her, don’t you? She never had the chance to become old, like Papa of Uncle Max.”

  “Whose fault was that?”

  It was not that Ray wanted to be quarrelsome, he warned himself, it was only that so much had happened when he was very small, or even before his belated accidental arrival (he had been only eight when Mama had died), that he was as eager to visualize it as a small boy who pesters his father for news of what it was like when Daddy was young.

  But how much that I have been trying so hard to forget will I have to tell him, Ralph thought despairingly, how many photographs will I have to stare at until my heart bursts and the blood veils my eyes—and all for a piece of paper that may not even exist?

  He arose, knocking over the chair behind him. “I’ve got a foul headache.”

  Ray was at once contrite. “I should have insisted that you turn in, after such a day. Wait here, I’ll hunt up some aspirins. I never take them, I never seem to have headaches.”

  You wouldn’t, Ralph thought vindictively. Waiting for Ray to return from the bathroom, he prowled the room in an agony of weariness and restlessness. In the corner, atop the filing cabinet, was an old-fashioned telephone, the stand-up kind with a pronged hook. He lifted the earphone idly and was surprised to hear a live drone.

  “The thing works,” he said aloud.

  “I connected it.” Ray, returned with the pills and a pitcher of water, glowed with pride. “Papa and Uncle Max had a lot of old phones, from the drugstore and from the properties. So I set up an extension system.” He hesitated, then blurted out, “I’m very practical, I’m not as crazy as you think.”

  And I’m not as tough as you think, Ralph wanted to reply. How soothing it would be to pick up the telephone and permit himself to be comforted by Kitty’s low, reassuring voice. But the danger—he knew this so well that it had thus far protected him effectively—was that he would lose his head, which was what women counted on, and say something to her that he did not mean, in order to gain her compassion. In this sense the telephone incited as much temptation as a plastic bomb, lying on the same cabinet, would have to a terrorist.

  “Now I’m going to clear out and let you get some sleep.”

  Ralph did not protest. He was determined to resist the temptation alone.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, Ralphie.” Ray paused, his hand on the knob. With his next words he destroyed Ralph’s determination as surely as if that had been his exact intention. “We’ll have some good times together, you’ll see. I’ll make your coffee strong, and I’ll help you look. I’ll come down for that, I promise. And we can argue”—he said this as if he were a thirteen-year-old talking about God—“about all the really important things.”

  When the boy had finally mounted to his loft, Ralph strove to forestall the inevitable by rummaging furiously through his valise in search of pajamas, shaving equipment, slippers, like an adolescent trying to exorcise erotic fantasies with gymnastics. As he did so, he carried on the silent and losing argument. To confound loneliness with love was worse than stupidity, it was a crime, it was surely what his own father—and maybe his mother too—had done. Why compound the prescription once again? Wait, wait, he cried to himself, she’ll be there. Bring her the will first, bring her the money first, then you can do it on your terms.

  But in the end it was no use, as he had known when he had first cast eyes on the phone, or perhaps even before that, when he had begun to see that there stretched before him something even worse than the dead-end job and the insanely sullen boss to whom he had been tied like a penniless husband to a rich nagging jealous wife—days of being trapped here in this dying house with his bearded brother, the two of them poring over letters, diaries, and photos of the dead, infecting old memories as do those who pick over sores, while the press and the public waited on the porch, gloating at the ludicrous spectacle.

  He slammed out of the bathroom and stumbled through the hall. If he was going to go through with it he had to be supported by someone who could warm him with the reassurance that what he was doing was good, just, and right; someone whose very presence would serve as a living reminder of a goal that might otherwise be dissolved in his balmy little brother’s overheated mixture of bathos and bewilderment. He ran to the phone.

  Summoned with a twist of his index finger, Kitty Brenner’s contralto, saying hello twice, with that familiar rising inflection as though she were French or still in the finishing school which she had never attended but wished she had, made him as weak with relief and gratitude as if she were already beside him.

  “Kitty,” he said, “it’s me. Ralph.”

  “As if I didn’t know. And long distance, too!” Then, more seriously, “Was it terribly rough?”

  “It was rough,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. I called to tell you that I’m not coming back.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  “Kitty,” he said tensely, “I want you to come here.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I need you,” he whispered. He felt himself growing hoarse, as if he had been too long in a smoky room. “You must come. There’s a fortune waiting here. But I can’t do it alone, do you understand?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “I have to find my father’s will. But i
t may take time, do you see? And it’s too hard, I can’t go into it now, but my brother is half cracked, and it’s in the papers already, and I need you, for God’s sake, I need you!”

  Kitty said, very slowly, “Ralph, you mustn’t talk to me as though I were an old friend. I’m not an old friend. I’m not your roommate, even though I’ve been sleeping with you, and I won’t pack my bags and throw everything over just because you’re down in the mouth.”

  “Then you won’t come.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you I love you, is that it?”

  “That wouldn’t hurt, considering what you’re asking of me. I’d like to know how much you love me.”

  “More than I ever thought possible.” Hearing no reply, he said loudly, desperately, “Enough to marry you. I mean now, as soon as you can get here.”

  It was then that he heard her crying, muffled but unmistakable. “How can this happen in one day, if it didn’t happen in six months?”

  “You find things out. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. If you’re lucky, it takes a minute. Do you love me?”

  “I do. You know I do.”

  “You’ll come?”

  “Yes,” he heard her saying faintly, “yes, I’ll come. Tell me what to do.”

  Now he could relax his grip on the telephone, which he had been clutching so tightly that his palm was wet and his knuckles ached. Now that he had put his chips down, he who hated gambling, on the longest odds of all, he felt suddenly enormously cool and self-possessed.

  “Try to get a seat on the six o’clock plane out of Idlewild tomorrow night. That should give you time to pack. Wire me care Dr. Solomon Stark, Coolidge Building, and I’ll reserve a hotel room and meet you at the airport. Do you have enough money for the ticket and immediate expenses?”