The Will

by Harvey Swados

  And her parents had come to her graduation, no doubt? Had closed the store early to dress up and hear her valedictory speech?

  “Well, of course. They came to my college graduation too. It wasn’t as if they had far to go, just across town.”

  “Or as if they had other children to worry about.”

  Not that her mother hadn’t tried to have more, until the doctor had told her it was dangerous.

  “If Dr. Stark had told my mother that from the outset, we all would have been better off. You included.”

  What a horrible thing to say! She protested vehemently, asserted with the warmth of her own body her happiness that he had been born, but in vain, for now he came to the point, teaching her—who had had no way of knowing—what desolation could mean in a family where there was not enough love to go around.

  “Mel ran off six weeks before my high-school graduation. May, nineteen forty-nine. I don’t know whether he was sick of hanging around, banging around. I think they were after him. It makes no difference. Five weeks after he left, Raymond came down with polio, and my mother nursed him. We didn’t know that she was the one who was going to die, we thought it was Ray. My father was stuck in the drugstore, my uncle was no help—he was a lost soul after Mel ran away. The night before my graduation the crisis came.”

  “But Ray shows no traces of polio.”

  “Some people are lucky, aren’t they? It was in the hip, he had to start exercises afterwards. That’s how he went on the physical culture kick. I’m convinced Ray never would have gotten polio if it hadn’t been for Mel. Ray went swimming, Mama would never have let him go so early in the season, he came home at suppertime shivering, I remember, his lips blue. Mama didn’t pay any attention, only because her eyes were swollen from all her crying over Mel. When she realized about little Ray, it was almost too late. The next night, after Dr. Stark had seen Ray safely through the crisis, everyone in the family was too exhausted to go with me to high school. There were a hundred and seventy-six in my graduating class. I was the only one without a relative in the audience.

  “Even Vinnie Barbera, whose parents had been killed in an auto accident that winter, had his aunt and two cousins there. No one was supposed to applaud the individual recipients, but they did anyway. When the principal came to the L’s, nothing but silence for me. I tripped and dropped my diploma. Somebody laughed. I had a crush on a girl named Olivia Tagliaferro. For months I’d been hoping to dance with her in the gym on graduation night, and maybe ask her out afterwards. I never even said good-by to her, I went right home instead, to see how Ray was doing. I found everybody dead asleep. My father on this bed with his clothes on, my mother in Ray’s room sitting up on a chair beside him. Uncle Max was drowsing over solitaire in the kitchen. He’d done without food to go to college. He glanced up and said, ‘So you got the diploma.’

  “And that was all. My parents didn’t even wake up until the next morning.”

  Pressing him to her breast, Kitty had forborne from questioning Ralph about Mel and his mother, knowing that more would come out one night. Certainly the lonely graduation from high school had crystallized all of his envy and dislike of his older brother. After that there was good and sufficient reason to hate without stint.

  And Ralph had suffered, unquestionably, no matter if his hatred seemed a little excessive to another human being, even to a wife. With a young brother too small for friendship and a big brother whose games were tricky and adult, with no real home, to which to bring his friends, he had stopped trying to make friends, and had made his own retreat to a world walled with hate, but commodious within and furnished with the unostentatious luxury of a comradely but disembodied aristocracy that he must have learned about from books and movies. This had served him well, at least it had gotten him through Korea, through college, into the business world, partway therefore to success even as it was measured by those he admired. But now it could serve him so no longer; trapped in his uncle’s lair, it could not be a goad, only a painful dream reminding him that in actuality he had fouled it up somewhere along the line, so badly that he was back where he had started from.

  Back, but worse off than when he had had a big brother to blame everything on, a little brother to pick on, a crazy uncle, and a weakling father. For now all the excuses had crumbled away, leaving what he himself in his darker moments called only the keel and ribs of a personality. At the age of twenty he had been able to imagine that he could turn his back, sail away from all of them, and one day by the force of his own proud and solitary ambition become whatever it was that the world would most respect. Now he had to stay, he had to play games with his brother (neither of them knowing for sure which role was his, or whether perhaps they were interchanging parts, internal emigrant becoming external immigrant as the days wore on), he had to mime the wife-enwrapped suburban junior executive—or everything would collapse, including the last shored-up remnants of his self-respect.

  He could not stay indefinitely, that was the rub. Raymond’s deadline was his; and Kitty began to feel communicated to her, through the very sweat of her husband’s heaving rib cage, his lonely terror at what faced him if he could not come to an accommodation with Raymond: He would have to face it out like some doomed figure in a Shakespearean tragedy, make common cause with his mother’s cousins, break with Solomon and Martin Stark and incur their contempt, and do his very damnedest to have his own brother publicly branded as incompetent and committable. The kind of total war that he shrank from, including making public the connection between himself and Mel, and making public the hatreds he had cherished through the years partly because they were private, he would have to undertake brazenly, to blazon forth as a moral act, the responsibility for which he not only admitted but gloried in.

  There began to grow in Kitty, so strangely, unfamiliarly, insidiously, that she was not sure whether it resembled more a fetus, fruit of her womb, or a malignant tumor, result of some poisonous misbehavior, the conviction that to be truly Ralph’s partner she must become more than his receptacle. For she knew now—and the knowledge degraded her—that despite his nocturnal assaults upon her (or perhaps even because of them) Ralph was coming to regard her as yet another of the encumbrances that weighed upon him like an albatross. Without her, perhaps he could have fled; without her willingness to share his last stand, he would probably never have undertaken to play the dual role of Ulysses and Telemachus.

  The best that Kitty could say for herself was that from a man’s point of view during this perilous time she was a repository of confidence as well as of passions and effusions. But the idea that she was nothing more than a vessel did not suit her. This was something that almost any woman could be; there was nothing particular enough about it to make it a uniquely sufficient undertaking, in short to make it fit her own notion of herself—even if she were to think of her husband as being the most important man in the world and of herself as his indispensable safety valve. That was almost nothing, not even a feminine image.

  So she decided, one morning that bore with the wind through the open window the hint that winter had blown itself out and another northern spring was in the air, to present herself to Raymond in order to discover whether there might be a way for her to achieve what her husband had so far been unable to gain. She picked up a jar of olives, she regarded herself long and carefully in the mirror (she was wearing—and it did seem to her a little odd that she should have dressed this way before making the conscious decision, in fact even before thinking about it—a candy-striped blouse with pushed-back sleeves and deep V neck, no brassiere, pink corduroy pants, and leather and cork sandals through which her toes showed, pink also), and she began to mount the stairs to Raymond’s retreat, her heart thumping loudly in her ears with each step.

  Since Kitty had moved into the house Raymond had kept very much to himself. She had no way of knowing whether this was his habitual practice, or whether he was being particularly considerate during these early weeks of her marriage. Perhaps
too he was making himself as inconspicuous as possible in order to impress upon her and Ralph the practicality, even the viability, of an unnatural arrangement.

  Just how reasonable he could be she would find out now. Up until this day she had never entered his attic; it had always been Ralph who had gone up, or Ray himself who had come down, for his books and the food she bought him several times a week.

  Arrived at the third floor, panting a little, she walked down the narrow corridor that had still not been thoroughly cleaned, and paused at the foot of the attic entrance, which was simply a closed trap door, the underside of a flight of steps that could be lowered only from above or from a dangling chain. Kitty held the jar to her breast for an instant, allowing the glass to cool her warm flesh, and then reached up to pull firmly on the chain.

  In the attic a bell tinkled. She heard Ray’s slippered, muffled footsteps, and then his resonant, calm voice: “Kitty? Groceries?”

  The stairs emerged from the ceiling, then Ray’s head.

  “I can’t get this jar open. Could you help me?”

  “Be right down.”

  She said coolly, “Would you mind if I came up, just for a minute?”

  Ray smiled and extended his arm. “Watch your head.”

  He was wearing his undertaker’s trousers with the satin stripes down the sides, and the same carpet slippers, shredding so that his stockinged toes looked as though they too were made of the same stuff. In place of the army sweaters, however, since the attic was very warm, Raymond wore only a white T-shirt on the breast of which was stenciled in green CAMP WA-TUM-WA, in a circle around the silhouette of an Indian with headdress, like the one they used to put on pennies.

  There was nothing funny, though, about Ray in his T-shirt. His pectoral muscles stretched the cotton, and how had he gotten his massive upper arms through the skin-tight sleeves?

  Fascinated, Kitty stared at his biceps as Ray plucked the jar of olives from her grasp and twisted it quickly. The lid turned with absurd ease.

  “Next time,” he said, “let it soak for a minute in hot water.”

  “Yes,” Kitty laughed, “but I can never remember whether it’s hot water or cold … What an extraordinary place you have here.”

  “It is a little different from the rest of the house.”

  Kitty stood at the head of the stairway, facing Ray’s desk, which was surmounted by what seemed a gray wall with myriad little eyes and knoblike protuberances. On either side of it, like sentinels, stood two old-fashioned wooden filing cabinets, each of their four drawers neatly labeled.

  “That’s your radio station?”

  “I hope it doesn’t disturb you. I’m on mostly quite late at night.”

  “I never hear a thing.”

  Where did he sleep? She glanced down at the floor, which Raymond had tiled from the very edge of the steps to the eaves which came steeply sloping down to meet it on two sides. He had covered the tiles here and there with threadbare Oriental throw rugs which his uncle must have dug up somewhere. But there was barely enough clear floor space in the center of the attic with the steep slope of the peak, for a single bed. And there was no bed.

  A skylight threw a rhomboid of sunshine on the rug at her feet, but the ventilating window at the front end of the house, facing the street, to the right of the radio set, seemed to emit light rather than to admit it. Through the tilted slats of its louvers Kitty could see, perhaps sixty feet below, the border of the driveway, with its gray cones of melting snow, and by cocking her head to the other side, the life of the street, the development houses of Happy Valley, even the blacktop parking lot of the shopping plaza dominated by the neocolonial supermarket. But no one there could very well see up here, which was rather exciting.

  Raymond had covered the two sloping eaves and the blank back wall (which must once have had a window looking down on the junk-heaped backyard) with maps, prints, working drawings, and charts scissored out of books, magazines, newspapers—all neatly trimmed, Scotch-taped, and then shellacked to a pale brown. At a glance the garret had the atmosphere of a rather unusual laboratory, or college workroom, except that when you looked again you saw signs that someone not only worked but lived here—a hot plate, a sweater flung across the one chair before the desk, two cans of Campbell’s vegetarian-vegetable soup and a jar of French’s mustard atop the left-hand filing cabinet, a handkerchief and a towel both neatly folded on the desk itself, and, next to them, a stack of ledger books stamped ACCOUNTS PAYABLE. One of these lay open, with a ball point pen across its face, and as Kitty approached it, her husband’s name leaped up at her, not once but two, three times, from the page where it had been written in his brother’s surprisingly firm, bold hand.

  It was obviously Raymond’s diary, all six volumes of it.

  Surely there would be things about her in it, about her and Ralph? Feeling Ray’s uneasy eyes upon her, she forced herself to look away from it, like a young girl fighting not to stare at the nude Apollo in a museum. Instead she examined an iron chinning bar that Ray had screwed into the beams near where she stood, and a matched set of barbells that lay neatly stacked on the floor beside the desk. What a funny boy, to build up his body and then hide it so that no one could ever see it! The sudden unbidden memory of his brother prowling after her, naked, but hairy and grappling as you never saw a nude in a museum, made her flush in the presence of this innocent boy. She smiled at him.

  “Where on earth do you sleep? Not curled up on the little rug?”

  He indicated what she had taken to be a laundry bag, dangling from an eye hook on a two-by-four. He unfolded it. “Here, see, nothing more than a plain old hammock. But it’s adequate.”

  “Looks a little skimpy.”

  “Oh no, it’s quite comfortable.”

  “For two, I meant,” Kitty persisted, looking at him sidelong.

  “I never expect to have anyone else stay here,” he protested seriously, and then, seeing her grin, began to stammer. “I mean … there are such things as Mexican double hammocks …”

  “It’s all right. But I’ve been wondering about you. You and Robinson Crusoe, Ray. Mind if I sit here?” She indicated with her thumb a neatly stacked pile of magazines on the carpet before the filing cabinet.

  “No, no, please,” protested Ray, “take the chair.”

  “Nonsense.” Kitty seated herself on the magazines. “Sit in your own chair, come on.”

  Reluctantly Ray lowered himself to the chair, on which he poised himself stiffly above her, his arms hanging. He placed his fists on his knees, elbows defensively rigid, a nineteenth-century youth posing for a daguerreotype, and as Kitty disposed herself almost at his feet, she was tempted to reach up and tickle him in that dense thicket of beard, or tell him a dirty joke, to see if it would make him laugh.

  Instead she remarked, “I don’t think it’s at all queer, your wanting to live like this. Especially now that I’ve seen the place. I wondered about how you spent your time, but now I can see that you’re kept busy.”

  “You’ve been to college, you know how much I’ve missed. It’s not easy to educate yourself all alone, but I think I’m making progress. I haven’t got a systematic disposition like Ralph, but I’m trying to keep to a regular schedule.”

  “A schedule?” Kitty rested her chin on her fist and gazed up at him.

  “With radio you have to be punctual. I’ve learned a lot about electronics and physics from my ham operation. And I’m in touch with some very interesting people, with whom I can discuss scientific problems.”

  “And never have to see them.”

  “But we are friends, in a way. Except that it never gets personal, we simply discuss matters of mutual interest.”

  “You don’t like things to get personal, do you?”

  “I don’t think I have the right …” Ray clenched and unclenched his fists on his kneecaps. “You see, my interests either have to help me directly, like radio and astronomy and math, or indirectly, like my program of exercising, b
y keeping me from going stale, or getting stoop-shouldered and anemic.”

  “You have a wonderful physique.” Kitty stared into his face until she caught his eyes. She held them. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to such a powerful man. But what good does it do you, all this studying and body-building? Can I be frank? It seems to me a terrible waste.”

  “What you have to understand, Kitty, is that I’m committed to this.” He indicated the attic around them. “Wouldn’t it be even more of a waste if I didn’t try to better myself during this time, to make as much of myself as I can?”

  “But for what?” And what did he mean by “during this time”? How could that be a permanent commitment?

  “I’ll tell you how I feel. It’s hard even to explain it to myself, although I’ve tried to write about it in my diary.”

  Ray hesitated, then leaned forward eagerly. “I’m in training, like a fighter. I know, you’re going to ask again, for what? I can only say, for a purpose that hasn’t been revealed to me yet. But it will be for life and not for destruction.”

  He bent so close to her that Kitty could feel his warm breath, fresh and scentless, on her cheek. “I do something else. I look down out of this window, through these louvers, for several hours every day, to see how much I can learn about people’s lives from this distance. That is, without participating in them, simply as a spectator at specified hours.”

  This wild dive from her own bourgeois regularity into the murky waters of diurnal voyeurism was both frightening and exhilarating. Kitty asked unsteadily, “Ray, you haven’t been doing that with me? Studying me?”

  He was too naive, and at the same time too intense, even to try to lie. Instead he tried, crudely but charmingly, to disarm her by diverting her attention.

  “A girl used to stand down there by the parking lot, in front of the supermarket, every Thursday and Saturday evening, when the stores are open late. Partly because her own schedule was so regular, I watched her more closely and more regularly than I’ve ever watched anyone in my life. She was selling the Watchtower, out of one of those little canvas bags. Yes, a Jehovah’s Witness. She was smaller than you, dark, very beautiful. I always knew just when to expect her, and she showed up, no matter if it was raining or hailing. Her life had purpose, she had courage, she had a message.”