The Will

by Harvey Swados

  Henrietta and Lillian moved in on me.

  “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” Henrietta said.

  “Only part of it,” I pointed out.

  “The best part,” Lillian insisted. She nodded so hard that the bird’s nest wobbled dangerously on her little hat.

  “How can you tell beforehand?” I asked. “Maybe I’ve already had the best part. Maybe we all have.”

  “It doesn’t pay to be morbid,” Mr. Lurie said. “What if everybody talked like that?”

  “Questions like that,” Dr. Stark said in his leisurely way, “are of no particular help to Raymond.”

  Ben Lurie persisted. “Ray, look at your brother. He didn’t let any grass grow under his feet.”

  “We’re different,” I said in desperation. “No two people are alike.”

  Martin Stark surprised me by saying quietly, “We can’t expect other people to do exactly what we would, if we were in their shoes. On the other hand, if they want to be helped, we ought to be ready to help them.”

  “I do want that,” I said. “Ralph knows it. If you’ll just give me a chance, I’ll try not to disgrace anybody.”

  Dr. Stark put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me. “Nobody can ask any more of you than that. You have to make allowances for us. Remember, everybody isn’t concerned simply with your welfare. They’re worried too about how your behavior is going to affect them. Not just in publicity but also in dollars and cents.”

  It was as though the radiators had suddenly cut off and the living room had turned to ice. Only Martin didn’t seem chilled by what his father had said. The two sisters puffed up furiously, and Henrietta’s husband, Ben, let his face go long and slack again. Ralph threw a warning glance at Kitty. Or maybe it wasn’t warning but beseeching.

  Whatever it was, she jumped up and said, “I’m going to heat some coffee. Would you ladies care to join me in the kitchen? I’m going to slice up the beautiful cake that you brought.”

  Henrietta and Lillian waddled off eagerly after Kitty. They were glad to get off the hook.

  Then Martin took it upon himself to smooth things over with Ben Lurie. They talked politics, which has never interested me, and then ice hockey, which I don’t follow. The doctor pulled down his jaw in a comical way and winked at me.

  After the women came back with the trays I was out of it, I was able to sit in the corner and watch them all, the next best to being back in my attic. Lillian’s chapped mouth opened like a pecking bird’s whenever she wanted to talk. Henrietta, I saw, was much heavier than her sister (because she was married, or because she ate up her skinny husband’s portions too?). She was hovering over the cake, eating too much and pouring too much cream and sugar into her coffee. Deep creases in her back where the girdle cut into her flesh.

  Ralph was calm again, outwardly, but he didn’t finish his coffee, and his fingers were drumming nervously against his ankle. Maybe if he hadn’t shown me how much he felt he had to gain by my silence about the will, the afternoon wouldn’t have wound up as it did.

  As it was, the doctor shuffled his thick brogues and got up to go. He growled in his sardonic way, “There’s something to be said for family get-togethers. The bride shows us how she has made this god-awful house look homey, and we show her how polite we are—de mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

  The Kadins didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, but they were uneasy. The man of the family spoke: “We said good-by to a way of life the other day. Let’s hope these young people are saying hello to a new way of life.”

  “Life isn’t that discontinuous,” Dr. Stark replied. “You couldn’t sell me on the idea that these boys’ father really enjoyed living in the middle of this mountain of junk any more than Kitty would. He wasn’t that acquisitive, but he allowed himself to be dominated by someone who was.”

  Suddenly he turned to me. “Ray, you’re the direct link. Wouldn’t you agree that we’re surrounded here more by the smell of old Max than by the sweeter memory of your father?”

  I felt my face getting hot. “You can’t blame everything on Uncle Max. Something about this life and this house must have appealed to Papa too, or he wouldn’t have put up with it. The same goes for me, I don’t deny it.” I swallowed, and added: “What’s more, the same went for Mama. If she didn’t find the Lands appealing, she wouldn’t have stood for them.”

  Then, because everyone started talking at once, I had to yell, “She wasn’t such a weak sister!”

  “When you were born,” Ralph said loudly, “Mama kicked Uncle Max out of our flat. That’s how he wound up in this house with this junk. She was an angel to put up with him as long as she did. So why try to make out that she was like the Lands, or found them appealing, for God’s sake?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Henrietta said.

  “Not absolutely.” The doctor shook his head as he shook himself into his bulky overcoat. “The fact is simply that the flat behind the drugstore was too small to hold Max too, after the unexpected arrival of Raymond.”

  Ralph turned on him. “I’ll bet you one thing: If it had been Papa instead of Mama who died twelve years ago, you never would have caught her moving into this rat’s nest with her boys.”

  “That’s hardly logical.” The doctor bundled his hand-knitted scarf around his neck. “It sounds more like an unconscious preference. Or a suppressed wish.”

  Ralph was livid. In the front hall, while everyone was putting on galoshes, Ben Lurie tried to step into the social breach again by inviting Ralph and Kitty to spend a family evening at the Luries real soon.

  Then he tapped me on the chest. “Don’t forget what I told you, young fellow. It’s up to you to make something of yourself. Your life is in your hands alone.”

  “I wish that was true,” was all I could say.

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Lurie reared back. The little half-moons of his bifocals glinted. “Thirty-one years I’m selling insurance, I come in contact with all kinds, I speak from experience. Let me tell you, you’re the master of your fate, you’re the captain of your soul. As a student of life, I can assure you that the only thing about your life that you can’t control is when it’s going to end. And even that you can protect your loved ones against.”

  It was at that moment that Martin Stark proceeded to ask the question that no one else had had the nerve to ask. He did it so innocently that it had to be calculated, he being a lawyer and forty years old.

  “I assume,” he said to Ralph and me, “that you’ve already begun to look hard for the will?”

  Mr. Lurie started breathing hard, like a firehouse dog. His wife and sister-in-law, grateful to Martin Stark for having asked what they dared not, paused avidly in their farewells. Lillian stopped in the middle of drawing on a black kidskin glove, one long finger of which hung free like a dark teat from the plump udder of her hand.

  It was Ralph who decided me. He pursed his lips judiciously, as though Martin had asked his opinion about the chances for more snow. He wasn’t kidding me. He had been hoping against hope that the afternoon could be gotten through without anyone’s raising the question of the will. Here he had been laughing at me for not wanting to come down and mix, when he had been more worried than I.

  And here I had been waiting for the company to go away so that I could sneak back where I belonged. Suddenly I was terrified at the idea of their leaving without knowing what only Ralph and Kitty and I knew.

  “We have some ideas about that,” Ralph said ponderously, desperately.

  “We’ve found it,” I said. “You mean Ralph hasn’t told you? We’ve found the will.”

  January 12

  Ralph’s reaction to my springing the news wasn’t just immediate—burned up, naturally, counting on me keeping my big mouth shut—but long drawn out. It is still going on, or maybe even just getting started. No end in sight. For us to come to terms Ralph is going to have to change at least as much as he expects me to.

  January 14

>   Snowed all night. Still coming down. According to the experts, a real blizzard. Lovely to watch. Kids having great fun. But their fathers are struggling with shovels and stuck cars. When I think how much worse it must be in other places I do feel guilty at how snug and cozy I am up here. Ralph has been bearing down on that ever since I let the cat out of the bag. Every time he comes up the ladder with food or books he gives me a dig.

  January 15

  Ralph reminded me this morning how many people have starved and frozen to death since the storm began. He’s not going to let me alone. Better take it for granted and assume it as part of my problem. Doesn’t make any difference to him that since Dr. S. knew about the will, he probably knew what was in it. If the doctor was keeping quiet for the time being, he wanted to know, why couldn’t I?

  In the middle of all the hubbub that day, although the doctor had insisted blandly that he didn’t know the contents of the will which he had most likely witnessed, nobody believed him. Not that he cared.

  If Dr. Stark knew Papa’s intent and still kept his mouth shut, it was understandable. He thinks people should be free to arrange their own lives. Still, it’s a little devilish, like giving a man enough rope.

  But of course Ralph had very little rope left. He couldn’t very well deny that the will had been found, or even that Papa had left everything to me. He was stuck with the situation, which was what I was counting on. At least it gave me temporary protection here.

  Henrietta and Lillian and Ben Lurie looked bruised. They couldn’t wait to get out, as if they were saying to themselves, Why did we come, why did we bring cake? Not Martin Stark, who had precipitated the whole thing as much as I had. He must be accustomed to hearing terrible confessions: that people have committed crimes for which they want to go unpunished; that they hate their wives and wish to be rid of them; that they hope to buy something for less than it is worth or sell it for more than it is worth; that they intend to cheat, or already have cheated, the government; that they desire documents binding their heirs by means of the goods that are their final weapon, even from beyond the grave.

  Martin must be accustomed too, that’s lawyers’ business, to making deals, compromising, feeling out the opponent. As far as I was concerned, he was a representative of the world in this house, and it frightened me to see him turning over the whole new situation in his mind.

  Ralph didn’t see any of this. No reason why he should have. He had to keep smiling and saying his good-bys all the while he was furious with me, and letting it be understood that of course the only reason the will hadn’t been mentioned, aside from his marriage, was that he and I had a number of things to settle before my twenty-first birthday.

  “Raymond may not be quite a man yet in the eyes of the law,” Dr. Stark said, standing on the porch. “But you know, Leo had a point when he made out his will. Because Raymond acts like a man.”

  On that he stomped off, followed by his silent son, who left behind him a fragrant blue haze from his pipe, thin but sharp like wood smoke in the wintry air.

  Only then did Ralph turn on me. I wanted to run back up to the attic but he literally wouldn’t let me. He had me by the arm and was shouting, “I hope you’re proud of yourself for going back on your word!”

  There was no way out, I tried to explain to Kitty as well as to him. “If I hadn’t spoken up,” I said, “you’d have found a way to do something about the will, as long as nobody knew about it. You know you would.”

  Ralph started swearing. I tore loose, and took the stairs two at a time. He was going to come after me, I looked over my shoulder, but Kitty was at the newel post pleading with him. The last sound I heard before I got up here was my brother’s panting breath.

  January 17

  Just heard on the 7 o’clock news that a 20-year-old girl, identified only as the daughter of a prominent military expert, walked into a police station and said calmly, “I have just declared war on the world. You have thirty minutes to give yourself up.” The desk sergeant gave her a cup of coffee and then had her carted off to the hospital, where she is “under observation.” Which means that the world declared war on her. How about me? Who has me under observation?

  January 18

  Haven’t been finishing anything I start. Keep trying to get caught up on the situation with Ralph and Kitty, don’t seem able to. Never used to write such interminable entries. Why should it take more time and trouble to write about yourself than about the people you watch through a window?

  Maybe I have been studying the wrong subjects.

  If only the Witness hadn’t disappeared.

  January 19

  Must try to put down what happened when Ralph and Kitty got me to come down for “a talk.” Not even sure which day it was. Within the last week.

  Started with Ralph saying to me, “For a would-be saint, you certainly know how to look after yourself.”

  His attempt at self-control was a failure even before it began. Kitty could barely bring herself to smile.

  “Come on, Ralphie,” I said. “I never claimed I was trying to be a saint. All the saints I know of got there by doing penance for their sins or by overcoming great temptations. I’m not like that.”

  “Why not?” Kitty was staring at me, puzzled. Almost fascinated.

  “Because I’m a coward. I never even expose myself to temptation. I know beforehand what would happen. I wouldn’t be able to resist, I’d be as bad as the worst.”

  Ralph made a noise with his mouth.

  “I had to tell the others about the will. You’d have done the same. Now we can start over. It’s months yet until I become twenty-one. I promise you that before then we’ll come to an agreement. Isn’t that fair?”

  “For you. You can hop back into the attic and sit there laughing at me. But what am I supposed to do in this filthy dump? I’ve stayed on too long already.”

  Kitty stood apart, her face shadowed by the chandelier. Even so, her pallor was plain. I knew what she knew, that Ralph had taken a tremendous gamble, and that for days he had been thrashing about, trying to figure out a quick way to recoup. If only I could make her see that I was doing this for her and Ralph as much as for myself!

  “What’s the matter,” I asked, “aren’t you enjoying your honeymoon here?”

  Ralph was shocked.

  Kitty said, “Ralph has been doing everything he can to make you comfortable, and to make you confront your situation. Don’t taunt him. Not when he’s making such sacrifices.”

  I refrained from pointing out why he was making the sacrifices. She knew as well as I. (Besides, maybe there’s something to what she said? I do begin to feel that Ralph is oscillating in his feelings. One day genuinely friendly, anxious to help, to come to terms with my “situation” as well as his. The next, mean and suspicious, convinced I’ll screw him if he’s not extra careful.)

  “This could be a great house,” I said. “If you don’t like it now, you will when the weather gets better.”

  “You should live so long. Kitty doesn’t know a soul here and I don’t intend that she ever will. We’re running out of money, and if we’re going to have to live on love, we’ll do it in New York. From now on, you can communicate with me by mail.”

  I didn’t want them to see how I was trembling. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m telling you now, if you pull out I’ll have the will probated and divide up the estate my own way.”

  “I’ll have you declared incompetent.”

  “Try it. Dr. Stark knows I’m all right, just ask him.” I was astonishing myself with my own boldness. “Martin will stick with me too. All you’ll get out of it will be a lot of bad publicity.”

  Ralph cried out in anguish, “Ray, what do you want from me?”

  That hurt. I knew what I wanted, I think Ralph did too, but how could I put it into words? It was ambitious, romantic, maybe it was even wild. He knew, he knew, but I didn’t dare answer.

  Still, he wanted me to speak, so I said, “Just for you to sta
y. You and Kitty. We’ll help each other.”

  “I told you. My dough is almost gone already.”

  “Can’t you take out a temporary loan? As soon as I come of age, you’ll have all you need. All this will be yours.”

  “I never borrowed money in my life. Should I start now”—he was practically sneering—“when the word is getting around that my father cut me off? What do you take me for, one of the poor slobs in Happy Valley, mortgaged from balls to brain?”

  “But this is different. It would only be for a short while. I promise.”

  “What good is your promise?” Ralph added cruelly, “Look at yourself in the mirror. Who’d give me a nickel with you as security?”

  “Dr. Stark would. I bet he’d be glad to loan you enough to tide us all over, until we can probate the will.”

  My brother turned to his wife. “Can you fathom it? He insists on sharing the estate with someone like Mel. But he has no compunctions about sending me to beg from a man who doesn’t even particularly like me.” Then he turned on me. “Is that your morality? To mooch off Dr. Stark on the long shot that you and I will get together?”

  “It can’t be a long shot. We have to come to an agreement. Otherwise what is there to live for?”

  He didn’t answer that, any more than I had answered all of his questions. He simply turned his back on me and stood rigid, as though he was at attention before the flag or the national anthem. Kitty was biting at her lower lip again and again, as though something on it tormented her.

  I went on upstairs.

  January 21

  Something special about this day? Can’t remember. Those noises downstairs in the dead of night! Haven’t been able to bring myself to write about them. Still can’t.

  January 22

  Outside, a slight thaw. Not inside. Ralph came up this morning and dumped everything at me contemptuously, all my groceries. I think he cares more for Sasha than he does for me.

  January 27

  It has changed my whole life, having Ralph downstairs. And I have changed his whole life too. Whether, for better or for worse is not for either of us to say—we’re too dependent on each other.