The Will

by Harvey Swados

  “I have two hundred and twenty dollars in the bank.”

  “Draw it out. We’ll need it. I’ll pay you back later, with interest.”

  “Jokes, at a time like this!”

  “I want you to go into the office tomorrow morning and tell Wollenweber about my father’s death—I haven’t had the chance. Tell him that I had to come out here for the funeral, that it will take time to settle the estate, and that I’d like a two-week leave. Actually I never expect to see the place again.”

  “Does that go for me too?”

  “In spades. Tell him simply that you’re leaving at the end of the day and that you’ll send him a forwarding address for your check.”

  “And my parents?”

  “Phone them from here. They’ll give you their blessing. Wait until they hear that I’m coming into money.”

  “Is it that sure? I couldn’t care less, I swear to you, I’ll come even if you tell me it was an invention, a trick. But for you to throw over your job …”

  Ralph winced. It was bad enough to be baited by an old man like Dr. Stark, but to be reminded by the girl whom you had just proposed to that she thought of you as cautious and careful—that was too much. A petulant response, however, could only make him lose momentum, so he said quickly, buoyantly, “The money is there, but it’s frozen in chunks of real estate. The trick is going to be to unfreeze it, with speed and without publicity. You must say nothing to anyone—”

  “I won’t.” Kitty’s assurance was almost humble.

  “—and we’ll make out somehow, until we find the will and probate it. I promise you, Kitty, you won’t regret it.”

  “I don’t care if I do! I don’t care, because I’m coming anyway. And Ralph …”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Happy New Year, darling.”

  Then he was no longer there, but back in his father’s room, alone and barefooted, his belongings instead of his father’s scattered about the room, the door ajar, the silence closing in upon him once again like fog.

  He stuck his feet into his slippers. There was nothing more he could do this day, even though it would be a coup if he could find the will alone. But the odds were too great; better to search for a sleeping pill instead, to keep the aspirins company. He stepped quietly into the hallway.

  A sense of presence, not a noise, simply a feeling that he was not alone, made him stop before he had taken two steps toward the bathroom. His flesh shrinking inside his pajamas, he swiveled his head slowly to look up and down the hall. Nothing. But there, at the head of the darkened stairway, on the landing of the third floor to which he had not yet ascended, glowed a pair of blue eyes, luminous as a cat’s in the sepulchral gloom. His brother was sitting, listening, watching.

  “Don’t be afraid, Ralph,” he whispered. “I’m on guard.”

  3: KITTY

  THE CITY OF HIS birth, Ralph had told Kitty, was as dull and paltry as hers, but as she closed in on it now, winging in so unexpectedly from the science fiction world of Idlewild, it rose up for her out of the night like a fairy capital, a Venice, a Peking, a Lhasa.

  The bridal lights winked on for her as the plane banked over the braceleted boulevards, arms flung out from the burning body of the glittering city. Tiny seed pearl rows of pinprick lights crisscrossed the brilliant columnar avenues, and in its heart the steady glow erased the night for her. Kitty caught a glimpse of her own peering face, reflected momentarily in the tilting window; she was as flushed as a virgin. But why not? Why not?

  Motors went out, music and lights came on, and the bride was making her way unsteadily down the aisle and the freezing gangway to the arms of the man who had so suddenly, so unexpectedly, declared himself.

  Kitty buried her face for a long time in the thick, damp fur collar of Ralph’s storm coat before she raised her head to gaze at those familiar, forbidding features: the hooded eyes with the thick single brow that overscored them; the solid stubborn forehead; the unhandsome but powerfully assertive nose, highly ridged down the middle like stone; the drawn and secretive mouth. How much it must have cost him to make that telephone call!

  “Darling,” she said. She hugged him hard. “I did everything you told me to.”

  “I knew you would.” Against her temple she could feel the muscles move in his jaw as he spoke. “I was sure you would.”

  “Wollenweber said—”

  “The hell with him. Let’s jump in a cab before you get pneumonia.”

  In the back of the taxi, nestled protectively in the crook of Ralph’s right arm, reality returned to her comfortingly. The street names were different, the days would be chancy and unregulated by office hours or pay checks, but it made sense because of Ralph.

  “First thing in the morning, we’ll go for our blood tests and marriage license. In three days you’ll be Mrs. Land.” He uttered one of his infrequent, abrupt laughs. “Lucky girl.”

  “Don’t joke about it,” Kitty protested. She twisted around to look at him. His guarded countenance was creased into a smile that hid, she suspected, the wretched uncertainty of the man who asks himself, Was I a fool? She said insistently, “I am lucky. I have great faith in you.”

  “Why?” he demanded.

  He wants an explanation of why I’ve come, she thought; love—or their kind of love—wasn’t enough, and in this he was quite right. Meeting in the office they had liked each other, and after a few dates had fallen into bed together. It had been convenient for them both, but at twenty-five, Kitty was beginning to be frightened, and so through the months of their intimacy she wondered uneasily whether, if she had been a little less complaisant, a little more reserved, Ralph might have been less inclined to refer to her as his girl and more inclined to think of her as a possible wife. Not that he ever foreclosed the latter possibility. Indeed that was one of the troubles with their relationship: in exact proportion to Ralph’s tacit concession that one day—when he had produced a feature film or struck it rich or liberated himself in some other way from the white-collar class—they would be married, Kitty had found her doubts multiplying about the wisdom of marrying a man who regarded her as an item on his agenda. It was the other side of him, dark, troubled, immoderately ambitious, that made him appealing as a lover; like a slumbering volcano, he gave promise of an eruptive power that could very well engulf her (she knew that she too possessed this quality—a married man with whom she had yielded to a brief and deadly binge had assured her of it—and it increased her uneasiness to think that perhaps Ralph measured her as she did). That power kept her from breaking with him and trying her luck elsewhere.

  How was she to tell him that it was his subterranean sexual attractiveness, and not his office exterior, that had impelled her to tie herself to him on his terms, at the cost of talk in their place of work and loss of opportunities for her elsewhere? Nevertheless, she had to try to explain what it was that had happened the night before, if their marriage was to have any prospects for success.

  Somewhat frightened, but with a determination that approached obstinacy, she said, “My faith in you comes from love. If you must know, I think it was only last night, when you telephoned, that I really fell in love with you for the first time. Does that sound strange? Remember, it was the first time you ever said you needed me. I’ve had lots of men tell me they wanted me, and I guess they did, because in some cases it was mutual, but no one, until you, ever insisted that he needed me.”

  “I meant it, Kitty.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have believed it if we hadn’t been intimate, and if I had less confidence in myself, but I know I can give you what you need. As soon as you asked me, I knew the answer was yes. And when you started telling me what to do—my God, I’ve been aching to be told what to do! Does that sound so awful? Because it’s the truth, and it’s why I would have come here from New York on my hands and knees, if you’d ordered me to.”

  Ralph replied, in a queer, choked voice, “It was only when I discovered that I needed you … and you resp
onded … that I felt I could talk to you in a way that I never presumed to before, not with any woman.” He wrenched about convulsively and blurted out, “You know why I was sure I could count on you? Because underneath that flip New York manner you’re passionate, like me.”

  Kitty felt a sudden twinge in her loins, a wonderful stabbing pain as though Ralph had violently, shockingly, gripped her there. She said nothing, but stared unseeingly out the fogged window of the taxi, her eyelids drooping. He does know, she thought, he does know.

  “You want what I want,” he whispered. “Not the ten-dollar raise or the ten-dollar bet at the bridge table. The real ambition, to break away from what we’ve had, the real gamble, to reach out for what we want. There is no one else in the world to whom I could have said, Pack up, come to this lousy town, for something I can’t even tell you about on the phone. Most women are jelly, in the spirit as much as in the flesh. You’re strong, you’re firm, you’re passionate.”

  In an agony of pleasure, Kitty pulled open her plaid coat and tore aside the knitted scarf folded over her chest. Grasping Ralph’s free hand, she pressed it to her bosom and covered it with her own. “Feel my heart,” she cried softly, “feel how it’s beating for you.”

  It was not alone her heart that she wanted this stranger, so suddenly exciting, to feel, but the flesh that covered it, soft and curving but not jelly, not mush. Her breast was as firm and proud, as sharply thrusting, as her will: she heard a voice whispering this—her own, Ralph’s? Her lips apart, panting, the breath catching in her throat, she kissed him deeply, for the first time since he had asked her to marry him. Let him take me tonight, she thought blindly, I won’t need to say yes, I’ll show him.

  But by the time they had arrived at the hotel, they were both somewhat more composed. Kitty stepped sedately from the taxi, holding her coat collar almost to her lips against the raw January air, more bitter than New York’s, and waited under the marquee while Ralph paid the driver and passed on her valises to the doorman.

  “Eight dollars for that crazy ride,” she said, staring after the departing cab (suddenly she missed it terribly, that warm dark nameless shelter in which they declared themselves), “and I never saw a thing. But I don’t care.”

  “Come in out of the cold.”

  Obediently she followed Ralph into the hotel lobby, which was vast, impersonal, like a movie palace or an interdenominational church, and decorated in the manner of the twenties, with much stainless steel and brass used in severe geometrical patterns to suggest a straining toward the infinite.

  “Cozy,” she murmured.

  “Don’t knock it.” Ralph led her to the register. “We’re not buying it. Just check in, it’s your last chance to put your maiden name on a hotel register.”

  “You make me feel like an undergraduate.”

  Actually he made her feel momentarily uncomfortable. They had slept together in hotels once or twice, but always under his name; why did he now place the burden of identification upon her? The answer could only be that this was his home town and so a place where he dared not use his name carelessly—and surely not now. Somewhat abashed, Kitty followed him across the carpet to the elevator and, after he had brushed aside a bellhop, up to the eleventh floor.

  There he opened the door of her room and set down her valises. But instead of turning on the lights he led her to the window in the darkness and drew aside the curtain.

  “That’s why I didn’t want a bellhop. He’d have flipped on every switch and showed you how the shower works.”

  “It’s beautiful, the city, even more so here than from the plane.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “I don’t believe you. Is that why you wanted me to see it like this? That boulevard below is the one I saw from the plane, I’m sure, with all the streets radiating off it. I can’t wait to see it in the sunlight, with the snow on the boughs of all those trees. It must be even more beautiful in the summer, with the sun shining through the leaves.”

  “You won’t be here then. Oh, I suppose I did want you to be impressed. It’s true, the boulevard is stately. It’s still lined for a dozen blocks with the stone houses of the barons who made it here, seventy and eighty years ago, in chemicals, paper, printing, power. None of us has ever laid eyes on any of those people. They’re long since gone, to Paris and Palm Beach and Newport. They come back once or twice a year, some of them, for a board meeting or a ball, but for the most part they’ve disposed of their mansions to the Archdiocese, the Red Cross, the Welfare Board, the Girl Scouts.”

  Ralph turned from the window in disgust, his saturnine features immediately in shadow. “The rest of the slobs, the Germans, the Jews, the Hunkies, the Polacks, the Italians, the blacks, have been jammed into their ghettos, grubbing away their stupid lives in the plants and the mills, paying rents to people like my uncle—who wasted his stupid life with my father in their cruddy drugstore.”

  This was not what Kitty had expected when Ralph had led her by the hand into the darkened room. She came to him at the writing desk, where he stood tensely folding and unfolding the hotel blotter in his hairy hands, and she said, extending her hand, “But this is no different from Syracuse.”

  “Does that make it good? You left there, didn’t you? And I left here—or at least I tried to.”

  “But your inheritance …” Kitty withdrew her hand. Better not to press him. Ralph was a moody man, a sullen one according to some in their office; but this was, she recognized, because there warred in him two conflicting elements—an eagerness to be not simply like everybody but like the most substantial people (like those, she began to see, of whom he had just been speaking with such envious bitterness, those who had inherited money and manners and the consequent liberation from having to compete and to compromise); and a desire to be more ruthless than they, to be able to ignore the ordinary rules of conduct that governed the lives of ordinary people.

  Then suddenly, once again self-possessed, he stepped behind the club chair and bowed like a headwaiter, but sardonically. “Sit down, Kitty. You’re right, there’s the inheritance. But it’s going to be tricky, and I want you to know the odds before we start. You still have the opportunity to change your mind.”

  Kitty started to protest, but Ralph waved her to silence as he seated himself on the edge of the bed, after having turned on the lights. He began to outline the situation as though they were back in the office. She listened obediently, knees together and skirt tucked primly beneath her.

  Ralph had never spoken much of his family or his past. She knew that he had left his city college to go into the Army, and that after returning from Korea he had come to New York to finish school and make a fresh beginning. She knew too that he never visited home, the way people usually did, because for unstated reasons he wanted to be reminded of home as little as possible.

  Listening to him now while he sketched his childhood for her with the cold fury of disgust—the dusty drugstore in a deteriorating neighborhood, the obsessed uncle trotting about tirelessly, collecting his rents and his roomfuls of garbage, the mother overborne by squalor and seediness, cold sores and sties, the father pottering, inventing, allowing himself to be dominated by his brother—Kitty felt herself melting once again, yielding in the innermost corners of her being to the plea that was all the more demanding for being unstated. She craved as never before to hold that dark troubled head to her bosom until his voice had fallen silent and his rigidity had relaxed in her arms.

  “But all of that is past,” he said. He glanced across at her briefly, then returned his gaze to his knotted hands. “I wanted you to know where the money will come from. First, there is Raymond. My number-one hangover from the past. Everyone thinks that he’s cleared out, the way”—he hesitated for an instant—“I did. But no, he’s playing hermit, perched in the attic of Uncle Max’s castle like a butterfly on a garbage heap. In a sense, he’s sitting on the estate, do you see? And that’s why I’ve got to find the will before I pry him out of the attic. M
aybe he even knows where the will is, but wants me to hunt for it in order to keep me in the house, so he won’t have to stay there alone. And I have no alternative—at least not until I locate the will. Or establish that there isn’t any.”

  “He knows that I’m coming?”

  Ralph glanced up, his eyes hooded. “He eavesdropped on my call. After that of course I told him. He claims to be delighted—and maybe he is. After all, he’s playing for time. You’ll be sorry for him, I know you, you might even like him. But don’t let him con you. We’ve got to get him out of there as quickly as possible, or …”

  “Or what?”

  “There’ll be a public scandal much worse than what we’ve already got.”

  “But, Ralph, I don’t care about that.” Was he worried for her or for himself? She added insistently, “I really don’t. So if you’re concerned on my account—”

  “I’m bringing you into what’s left of a miserable family.” He arose and knelt beside her chair. “I have hopes for you and me, but first we’re going to have bad trouble. You’ve never known real shame.”

  “If you mean family shame, no. And I never expect to. We’re ready for more important things, and if you have to find the will and do something about your brother first, I’m going to help all I can. I swear it, Ralph.”

  “I promise you,” he whispered, his lips moving against the palm of her hand, “that you’ll never think twice again about an eight-dollar taxi ride. I promise you style, Kitty, the kind you deserve. Style, and—”

  Kitty bent her head and put her lips to Ralph’s to silence them. They seemed to throb beneath hers, and the thick pounding began again in her bosom, almost like a message. But this time he would not have to ask her, there would be no need for words.

  She strained to lift him from the carpet into her arms, but he held off stiffly, as if he were an embarrassed stranger. Alerted, she desisted, and then was startled to hear him saying thickly, “Kitty, listen to me.”