The Will

by Harvey Swados

  Nonsense, she said to herself, nonsense; fear always invents excuses not to do what has to be done. If the doctor had his motives for immobilizing her, she had hers for moving ahead. For each of them everything started with Ralph and the baby, but for her the two were inextricably commingled, in her blood as in her conscious concern for them, the two Lands who were utterly dependent upon her. She pulled open the door decisively and peered up and down the hall.

  The fat Sister was just stepping into an elevator. No one else was in sight. Kitty closed the door quickly behind her and walked unhesitatingly in the opposite direction. She gained the end of the corridor unremarked, but at the head of the stairway all but bumped into a young intern, who pivoted smartly on his rubber-soled white shoes to appraise her, fortunately quite incuriously.

  On the floor below it took some wandering about—she dared not ask anyone or even look uncertain—before she could find Section A. The duty nurse at the entrance was busy at her switchboard and did not notice her. But a uniformed policeman stood at the desk beside the nurse. Kitty could feel his eyes on her back all the way down the corridor until she reached 115 and put her hand to the knob. Even as she strolled on past him with false casualness, she remembered that he was the young one, Hetzel, who had been hustled out to summon the ambulance.

  Then he called out to her, “Hey, you can’t go in there.”

  She smiled at him, brilliantly. “Don’t you remember me?” She reassured him. “I’m Mrs. Land. Dr. Stark said I might see him for a few minutes.”

  While he hesitated she pushed open the door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be out before you can say boo.”

  At that moment two men came out of the toilet between her and the policeman. They had been having a quick smoke—the blue haze still curled over their shoulders—but they both stiffened when they saw her.

  “Wait up, there’s no visitors allowed.”

  “But it’s Mrs. Land. Ed Burgholzer, Mrs. Land.” The smaller one smiled a terrible smile, as obligatory and anticipatory as Karpinski’s. “We’ll wait right here for you.”

  Quickly Kitty squeezed the door shut behind her. She turned, leaning against it, panting a little, and faced the man lying in the bed.

  He was prone, his head wedged like a raw hamburger between two doughy sandbags. A tube, taped to his mouth, brought nourishment directly to his stomach from a bottle clipped to a stand. His forehead bulged like that of a fetus; his skull was strapped, but had not been shaved. His eyes were Slavic, as she had remembered them, almost as blue as Raymond’s, but shallow and slanting like Harold Karpinski’s. His blond hair, leaking here and there from the bandage, appeared still damp and shaggy. Oh yes, I remember that too, Kitty said to herself. The eyes showed no more emotion than hers, neither surprise nor fear, as they gazed up at her patiently.

  “Do you recognize me?” she asked. “I’m Ralph’s wife Kitty. I’ve come to settle up.”

  9: MEL

  ROUSED BY THE SOFT thump of rubber meeting rubber, the clean connection of iron clasping iron as his door clicked closed, he rolled his eyes as far as he could, but was still unable to see even so much as the feet of his visitor until she had advanced to the middle of the room. There she hesitated for a moment, waiting either to be invited to take the only chair, or to give him a chance, immobilized as he was, to look her over before she stated her business.

  “Excuse me for not getting up,” he said. His voice was at once rusty and muffled. Well, this was virtually the first occasion he had had to use it since she had crowned him with the pitcher. “I’m not used to entertaining with a tube in my stomach. And they’ve got my head wedged in between these two things like lox in a bagel. Thanks to you.”

  “I’m here to apologize.”

  “Not to finish me off?”

  She shook her head seriously, but smiled then, and began to laugh, low in her throat.

  Mel stared at her. Yes, he had recognized her at once, as if she had been someone he had known, or even slept with. But in a different guise. Three different guises. It was confusing. His head ached. He motioned her to the chair.

  She sat with her hands folded composedly in her lap, just beneath the thickness of her pregnancy, looking not demure but, rather, maternal and statuesque. The folds of her dressing gown concealed the close outline of her figure as if they had been sculpted. But her eyes, bluer than his, shone with a charitable humor. She might have been some distant relative of the different aspects of her that he had already encountered in the dark of night. An older sister, perhaps, of the disheveled barefooted young woman in the rumpled blue pajamas, her nostrils flaring and her blond hair tumbled about her forehead, who had thrust into the bloody hands of her naked husband a whole junkyard of weapons with which to belabor him. Not an older sister, though, more like a mother to the strange young blonde he had encountered for the first time, sprawled in sated sleep alongside Ralph, so black and hairy and satisfied in his own sexual sweat that Mel had been overcome with rage and had flung himself upon him with insensate fury.

  Peering between his outspread feet at this poised mother-to-be, who for all he knew held in the folds of her robe a butcher knife ready to plunge into his gut, Mel was willing to grant her handsomeness as well as controlled intelligence, if not erotic appeal in the mind of someone she had helped to beat into senselessness. But then, he thought as he gazed into her smiling, patiently attentive eyes, you couldn’t hold that against her. It was just funny that after all those months of institutional saltpeter, he had returned to the highly seasoned world of women only long enough to be bashed over the head by one and carted off to still another institution.

  He laughed, and instantly regretted it, as a sharp sinoidal stab cut through the strange unknown space behind his eyes. He pressed his hand to his nose, and to the tube.

  “I hope it only hurts when you laugh.”

  “Ever try laughing with a tube down your throat?”

  “Why start now?”

  “I was thinking that you don’t look very sexy. Isn’t that comical enough, considering you practically killed me?”

  “At this moment,” she replied, “you don’t look like Valentino yourself. Since that’s partly my doing, I’ve come to apologize.”

  “The point is that I don’t look like a Land. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because nobody knows yet, except for you and Ralph? And maybe Doc Stark? So never mind the apology crap.”

  “I’m not here stooging for Ralph. He doesn’t even know that I know who you are.”

  “Prove it.”

  But the door opened again before she could reply. Mel turned his neck as much as possible until he could make out a pair of sturdy white-stockinged legs. They belonged to the little Italian student nurse who had been in and out ever since he had come to.

  “I’m sorry, there can be no visitors here.” She was so stern that it was obvious she was scared. “You’ll have to leave, Mrs. Land.”

  Kitty arose with infinite leisureliness and began to rummage in the pockets of her dressing gown. She might have been hunting for a handkerchief, but Mel would not have put it past her to try to slip a bill to the nurse.

  He said hastily, “Give us ten minutes, kid.”

  “I can’t. It’s not me. It’s orders. You’re not to see anybody, not even—” she stopped short, in confusion.

  “The cops, you mean. It’s all right, you can say it.”

  “I meant the reporters, too, that are hanging around the corridor.”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I promise I’ll tell you all about them later on. Now run along and leave me alone with the nice lady that beat me up.”

  “I just don’t have the authority—”

  “But Dr. Stark does, doesn’t he?” asked Kitty.

  “Well, yes. He was the one who told the detective he’d have to wait before questioning you.”

  “He’s my doctor also, Nurse. And he told me less than ten minutes ago that I might visit here. Check with hi
m and verify it.”

  “But he’s left the hospital.”

  “Oh Christ, don’t be so square,” Mel grumbled. “Go ring his office. Go ahead.”

  As the door closed behind the reluctant nurse, Kitty was already drawing her chair to his bedside. “So you do want to talk.”

  “You started it,” he said hoarsely. “You got an offer, or do I unload?”

  “Unload what?”

  All right, he thought, you asked for it. “I’m going to file assault and battery charges. I was no burglar. Ralph attacked me in a house where I’ve got as much right to be as he does. Now toddle on home and watch him turn purple.”

  “Why do you hate him so?” She was leaning forward, hands clasped under her chin, as though she were listening to a lecturer.

  Mel shifted the tube. “You better give me your proposition. The nurse or the cops will be breaking this up soon.”

  “I’m here to see that Ralph doesn’t ruin his life over you. He’s sick ashamed over what happened. He can’t face you. He can’t even face me. He hasn’t been here since Dr. Stark signed me in. You can check on that. And remember, you’re going to need me more than I need you.”

  Once again he found himself drawn, tempted to take her at her word, to tell her his sad story. A nice plump shoulder to weep on. That was fine for Ralph, the social-climbing sellout artist, it was just what he had been after, all these years. Not for me, Mel swore to himself, no band-aids for battle wounds. Supposing what she said was true? She’d fight like a wildcat for her baby, if not for Ralph. That alone put her on the wrong side.

  “Whatever I can do,” she pressed on, “to bring this crazy business between you two to an end—”

  “First, you can stop claiming he hasn’t told you who I am.”

  “But he hasn’t.”

  “Balls.”

  “You’re in enough trouble,” she said severely, “without threatening suits. You ought to be giving thanks that I haven’t lost my baby. Now start talking sense.”

  “All right, Where’s Ray?”

  She blinked. “He’s in hiding.”

  “I think he’s someplace right in that house.”

  “It’s his own idea, not Ralph’s.”

  “Tell Ralph I want to see Ray. As soon as possible.”

  “That’s not up to me. Or Ralph.”

  “Are you going to deliver my message or not?”

  “I said I’d do anything I could. But Ralph doesn’t control Ray. In a sense it’s the other way around.”

  “You still think, don’t you,” he said, his tongue sliding around the tube, “that you’re going to walk off with Uncle Max’s dough.”

  She frowned, furious, and her eyebrows came together over the bridge of her nose. Married only months and already she had Ralph’s mannerisms. Fascinated, he raised himself on his elbows as high as he could and gazed at the newest member of his family. The grimace gave you a hint of what she would look like in her middle years: her face etched with the years of struggle to guard those whom she loved. She must have been a knockout when she was a girl, people would say.

  “I couldn’t care less about the Land money,” she was saying, in a voice that had become a little hoarse, like his own. She added passionately, “Ralph did. He cared. Now he knows better, but he’s so ashamed the knowledge is killing him.”

  She fixed him with her handsome eyes. “I asked you before, why do you hate him so much?”

  His head was beginning to ring. He pointed shakily at the glass on the night table. “Let me have some ice water. You’re giving me another headache.”

  “We’ve got to break the circle. The money is an excuse for the hate. Nothing more.”

  Mel passed the back of his hand across his cracked lips, touching his cheekbones gingerly, then rubbed his bare biceps, where the faded tattoo of a dragon, foolish product of his fire-breathing youth, was roughened by goose pimples on flesh still white as a skinned fish from the months of confinement.

  “Ralph is struggling in his mind to confront you as a human being. Not just as the reason for his troubles. As a brother. If only you would too!”

  “I know him better than you. He’s always been desperate for respectability.”

  “And you were always desperate to be an outlaw. Isn’t it time you both got over it?”

  “Got over it? When he went and married you in order to borrow respectability?”

  “What a lousy rotten thing to say.”

  “He was buying time. He had to be a solid citizen while he was getting his hands on the Land money.”

  Now he had broken through. Her nails, he observed with interest, were digging into her palms. She leaned forward, disregarding her robe as it fell open at the bosom, and whispered in a rage, “He was in love with me. What would you know about love?”

  “I loved him when we were kids. Did he ever tell you that?”

  She stared at him in astonishment, her face suffused with fresh blood. At the base of her throat a pulse tapped, filling and emptying the hollow. “He told me other things about you. Never that.”

  “Why do you suppose he hates me? I protected him at the Settlement House because he was younger, he didn’t know the score. It was always the two of us—until I found out that he was willing to sell his own brother down the river. He talked big about revolting, but in the end he was the biggest Babbitt of all. You want him? You’re welcome to him. I’ve had no use for him ever since he stood and watched while I got the shit kicked out of me.”

  She was no longer looking at him. She managed to mutter defiantly, “What do you mean, watched? It’s typical of you to use a word like that.”

  “Ralph has snowed you, hasn’t he? This is what really happened.

  “I’m backed into a blind alley. Three dagos are trying to cool me. I’m bent over double to protect my crotch from their cleats, my hands are on my head to protect my ears from the knucks on their fists, my arms are across my face, my spine is grinding the mortar out of the brick wall behind me. I hear another noise, I squint out of the corner of my eye. It’s Ralph, with a sack of handbills over his shoulder.

  “Help me, kid, for God’s sake, I call out. He’s big for his age, all he has to do is throw his sack at them and come in swinging. They’re cowards, the dagos. But Ralph stands with his mouth hanging open, you’d think he was watching his sister putting out, and then he takes off. I’ll get Pops, he yells over his shoulder, or maybe I’ll get cops. What difference does it make? He left them to finish me off.

  “When I crawled home that night, so banged up I couldn’t lie down—I was hemorrhaging through my ass for two days—I found Ralph sitting at the dining-room table, calmly doing his algebra. The miserable creep, I grabbed him by the neck. I said, You let a bunch of hoods work me over so you could get back and do your homework? I could have drowned in my own blood, it’s your blood too, did you ever think of that? I’m not proud of it, he said, and ducked his head back into his book.

  “That was the kid I’d protected. That’s your husband, the man that’s got me sandbagged here.”

  Ralph’s wife had gone very pale during this recital. Where does all that tide of blood flow, Mel asked himself, to the brain, or the belly? Or maybe to the new baby?

  In any case she was not about to give up, much less change sides. She said coldly, “This time I was there. You were the instigator, you were the aggressor, you were the attacker.”

  “Maybe I wanted vengeance, mostly I wanted information. But Ralph? He had murder in his heart, and you know it. That’s why you’re here.”

  “The vengeance, that’s what gets me. You bitch a lot about Ralph. Considering that you just had your face sewed up, and you’ve still got a glass tube in your esophagus, there’s no stopping you. But where did you earn the self-righteousness?”

  “If it makes you gag you can always shove off.” Mel put his hand to his eyes to blot her out. “In fact I wish you would.”

  “Not so fast. I’m not going to have Ralph tormente
d for the rest of his life simply because he didn’t mix into one of your gang wars when you were kids.”

  “That was only an example. Who is entitled to the loot, Ralph or me? Who made the dough? My mother, the old-maid schoolteacher? My old man, who couldn’t even make change from the register? If it hadn’t been for Max, there wouldn’t be any estate for Ralph and me to be fighting about. And I was Max’s boy. Not Ralph.”

  To this Kitty made no reply.

  “It was Max who looted his old man’s till in the first place for the passage money to the States. Did you know that?”

  Kitty shook her head. “Their father never got here.”

  “I suppose Ralph blames it on Grandpa marrying again, while the boys were struggling to get started.”

  “It wasn’t Ralph who told me, it was Dr. Stark.”

  “They got started by Max helping himself to the old man’s dough. It was Max who made the decision to shove on past Rivington Street. It was Max who made the decision for pharmacy school.”

  His throat felt as though he were still swallowing blood, but he could not stop. “When Max and Leo went to work for the post office, it was my old man who took the inside job sorting mail, but it was Max who went off with the heavy horsehide pouch on his back. It was Max who was willing to buck that mean icy wind off the lake. You know why?” He was falling into the very trap, trying to make her understand, trying to convert an enemy into an ally, against which he had been trying to stay alert. Nevertheless he went on. “He told me himself. It was to learn the city, and the real-estate market. It was to find where to open a drugstore, at a time when he and my old man were living on Silvercup bread and peanut butter.

  “It was always Max who took the initiative, from the time they both were kids. It’s easy enough for the newspaper writers, your husband, all the Rotarians, to say that Max turned prick after he had made his pile. But he was the one who made the pile. The difference between them and me is that they’re hypocrites and I’m not.”

  “You’re still satisfied with yourself, after all the beatings you’ve taken.”