The Will

by Harvey Swados

  Here was Monday morning, and the executioner awaited. Not with cyanide, ax, high voltage, or firing squad, but with the whips and scourges of his own conscience, and the desolate awareness that he had gone beyond infallibility into a murderous new land where the old rules and regulations on which you based your expectations were meaningless and dangerously misleading. Infinitely weary, he allowed the Triumph to stall in the carriageway, and stumbled up the steps for news of Kitty and Mel, both of whom had taught him things about himself that he had never wanted to know.

  Ray was waiting for him in the front hall. Ralph had found him there each time he had returned, ever since the battle, and had brushed past him impatiently. Now, however, he felt neither the need nor the desire to side-step his younger brother, whose eyes were glowing with a strange new light.

  Ralph crammed his fists into the pockets of his zipper jacket. “You look different.”

  “I am different.”

  “You’ve trimmed your beard.”

  “It’s not just that. I’ve left the attic. It’s time, Ralph. We’ve done terrible things, all of us.”

  Ralph removed one hand from his jacket pocket and passed it across his mouth; it grated over the stubble sprouting around his lips, and it trembled noticeably. Thrusting it back into his pocket, he said, “I’m not going to argue with you.”

  “If we make a start, each of us, no matter how—”

  “What’s your start?”

  “This.”

  Ralph saw then that Raymond had put on a fresh shirt, and combed back his hair. And he was panting a little, not from any physical exertion, but as though the utterance of every word was a great expense of moral currency. Am I responsible for this, Ralph wondered? It came to him—gradually, but none the less with enormous force—that Ray had at last been moved of his own free will to do just what he had been so bitterly resisting. Who could have guessed that he would been impelled to it not by any concessions to his demands but rather by the converse, a vile attempt to drown Mel in his own blood? It was borne in upon Ralph that he had not yet seen anything like the final consequences, so unpredictable as to be unimaginable, of his acts, both the premeditated and the passionate.

  He said to his brother, “What do you expect of me?”

  Ray shook his head. “I lost the right to answer that when I let you two fight it out. I knew it was Mel, and yet I couldn’t—”

  “You lost the right? How do you suppose I feel? This is as fruitless as our old arguments used to be, in reverse.”

  Oh, I am so tired, he thought, if only I could lie down and forget for a while.

  “You did come down, though, Ray. You made the move. All right, tell me what you think we ought to do.”

  His young brother’s eyes lightened and hardened, jewel-like. “There is no more my way or your way. Whatever we do from now on, I think we ought to try to do together.”

  At that moment Sasha tottered erect, hackles rising and a rusty growl issuing from his throat. The doorbell rang behind Ralph, and he started, feeling his face contort involuntarily.

  “Quick,” he said. “Get upstairs. Or into the kitchen. Quick.”

  Ray did not move. “It’s too late, Ralph. I can’t hide any more.”

  “Will you get out so I can answer the door? It may be reporters, my car’s in the drive, they won’t go away. It may be-”

  “It makes no difference. We have to start now.”

  The bell rang again, Sasha’s growl was rising to a bark. Ralph shoved his brother in the chest, pushing him back toward the kitchen.

  “For God’s sake,” he cried, “get back. Go!”

  “You were the one who wanted me here. You pleaded, you threatened, you starved me. Now open the door.”

  Ralph felt the tears of frustration springing to his eyes. “What do I have to do, get down on my knees? Maybe you’re ready. I’m not. Give me a little time. I can’t get a megaphone and yell. Here he is, here’s Ray, it’s just a little game we’ve been playing. I can’t, I can’t, I—”

  Abruptly, wordlessly, Ray turned and slipped back to the kitchen. Ralph looked briefly at his expressionless countenance in the hall mirror. Nothing might have happened, nothing at all. Calmly he opened the front door.

  For a moment he thought Mel had come back again. The man before him was also blond, also high-cheekboned, also narrow-eyed. But his face was unscarred, marked by nothing more than the souvenirs of adolescent acne and a fresh razor cut above the Adam’s apple.

  “Detective Lieutenant Karpinski.” The man presented a leatherette case which Ralph declined to examine. “I saw you the other night. You were probably too shook up to remember.”

  “I remember now.”

  “Can I come in for a few minutes? It won’t take long.”

  “Of course. Let’s go in here.” He led the way to the parlor. “A cup of coffee?”

  Karpinski displayed his vertical palm in refusal, like a traffic cop. “Well, your wife’s coming along. I guess you’ll be glad when she gets home.”

  “Naturally.”

  “That’s right. It’s been rough all around. I had a long talk with her in the hospital. She’s pretty smart. Good-looking too, if you don’t mind my saying so. I can see how you’d miss her. Still, it isn’t like she’d left you here all alone, is it?”

  And suddenly, shockingly, a sickly shit-eating grin spread across the detective’s face. It was a face unaccustomed to smiling, it seemed to Ralph, except at the bought and paid-for agonies of others: football players piling one on the other in a muddy heap of bloody jerseys and clotted cleats, television gladiators grimacing as they wrenched at each other’s extremities. What stunned Ralph all over again, though, was not Karpinski’s obscene happiness at springing a trap, but his own irrepressible desire to smash the man’s face in—just as he had with one brother, and had almost done again with the other not five minutes ago.

  He demanded, “What are you getting at, Karpinski?”

  He would not have been surprised to hear the man charge him with having brought a mistress into the house while his wife lay bleeding in the hospital; it was an offense commonly attributed to expectant fathers. The detective allowed his face to relax into sullen somberness as he shifted his heavy haunches on the sofa.

  “Police investigation is like house cleaning,” Karpinski said sententiously. “It’s not always exciting, but it’s got to be thorough. We were interested in the whereabouts of your brother, Raymond Land, just like lots of other people. You were supposed to be too, but nobody saw you doing much about it. Well, the Federal Communications Commission granted Raymond Land an amateur radio operator’s license a while ago. Want to see it?”

  It was Ralph’s turn to raise his hand, palm outward, in negation, as the detective made a casual gesture toward his jacket pocket.

  “His home address and the address of his transmitter are the same. This house, this house right here. We believe your brother never left here, and that for your own reasons you’ve been concealing him. Now are we going to have to bring a search warrant to prove it?”

  “Supposing he was here, whose business is it that a man stays put in his own house, if that’s what he wants?”

  “If that’s what he wants. There’s other reasons why it’s our business. According to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Raymond Land is still a minor. According to Martin Stark, he’s the inheritor of the Land estate. We want to hear from his own mouth that nobody’s holding him against his will.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! If he decided to be a hermit, he decided years ago. And I only got here New Year’s Day. You ought to know that much.”

  “We know. We haven’t pressed you. But like I say, lots of people have been interested in Raymond Land. One of them broke in here the other night.”

  “You think so?” Ralph asked carefully. It was no good. The man was playing with him.

  “Mr. Land, I thought so from the time this here dog first barked his head off at me.” He indicated Sasha, who
raised neither chops nor tail from the hearth on which he was snoring fitfully. “If he barked like that at the housebreaker, how come it didn’t wake up you or your wife? And if he didn’t bark, why not? Another thing. When you started to get the better of him, the man didn’t run down here and try to get out of the house. He headed upstairs, to the third floor, where as I remember there’s two more bedrooms, and an attic entrance too. That’s where the boys found you. And stopped you from killing him. Why did he go up instead of down?”

  “By that time I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing.”

  Karpinski shook his head. A strand of long straight blond hair fell forward across his forehead; he brushed it back.

  “Nobody’s that crazy. And he wasn’t after a bunch of old movie posters. If you want to convince me different, you’ll have to let me take a little tour of the upstairs.”

  Ralph pressed his upper arms to his sides; sweat was trickling icily down his ribs. Take it, he said to himself, take it a little longer.

  “If you’ll just give us a while to straighten out the family affairs, I can assure you everything will be all right. There’s been no intention on anyone’s part to violate the law.”

  Karpinski leaned back and regarded him smugly. “You and your family have been giving the Department an awful lot of trouble.”

  He said this with pride, as though he were reciting statistics on traffic fatalities caused by speed violators. But it was worse than that. His tone was not official but personal, and it struck Ralph suddenly that he had come not so much on police business as to batten off the misery of others; he might have been pursuing a private grudge against the Land family. They were kookie, they were foreign, so they were dangerous to those taxpayers who were not, and who hired the cops. For the first time since the death of his mother, Ralph was drawn to the defense of his family, against this brute in a business suit. A thousand years of pogroms lurked behind his shallow Slavic smile; he gave off the smell of one born to the pursuit of the odd and the uneasy, heir to the pleasures of countless generations of drunken hunters of the dispossessed.

  Ralph said coldly, “We didn’t have you in mind when we went to settle our affairs. Was there anything else?”

  “You figuring on pressing assault and battery charges?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I didn’t think you would. But supposing he does? If it turns out that he had as much right to be here as you, then what?”

  “I’ll worry about that when it happens. You might do the same. I’ve already said that everything will be straightened out shortly.”

  Dismissed, Karpinski arose. But he could not resist a grinning threat. “It better be. Except for those things that take a lifetime to straighten out. Those are your own problems.”

  In the hall again, at the door, he put on his cheap summer straw and turned for a final word.

  “Some people might take it for kindness, having your family doctor take care of somebody that attacked you and almost made your wife lose her baby. Then again, others might take it for collusion. Especially with nurses running back and forth between the hospital and here.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Karpinski was patient. “If you stayed home more, you’d see that it’s getting pretty lively and popular, for a haunted house.”

  He opened the front door. With his thumb he indicated the telephone lineman across the street.

  “We’ve had the place staked out ever since the fight. One of the nurses that’s been attending your housebreaker dropped in here yesterday. Somebody let her in. Maybe it was a ghost?”

  He added reassuringly, “I’m taking that man off the stakeout now that you’ve turned up. You sure now there’s nothing else you want to tell me?”

  Still shaking his head no, Ralph closed the door on him, weak and trembling with anger, and turned to confront Raymond.

  “You heard that Polack. You were listening from the kitchen. He said you let some nurse in here yesterday.”

  “That’s right. I was just going to tell you about it when the detective came. She brought a message for you from Mel. Let’s have a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and I’ll tell you as best as I can. I waited up for you last night, but I didn’t hear you come in or go out. And every time I’ve tried to talk, you’ve brushed me aside.”

  “I’ve been in no shape. But tell me now.”

  Ray repeated the message carefully while they sat at the kitchen table, with the coffee perking on the stove and the birds singing in the apple trees in the backyard. Not only had Ray changed physically; he had never talked with such vivacity, and with such an absence of that beggar’s dolefulness which afflicted him even at his most cheerful.

  “That nurse seems to have made quite an impression on you.

  “I kissed her.”

  “You what? Tell me more.”

  “She’s the same girl who used to stand across the street when she was a Jehovah’s Witness, selling the Watchtower in front of the A & P. That’s what was so remarkable.”

  “Remarkable? It’s preposterous. A Jehovah’s Witness!”

  “Why? It’s no more preposterous than being a Democrat or a Republican. And if I hadn’t recognized her, I never would have found the courage to open the door to her. You remember, don’t you, I told you about her one day.”

  Ralph searched his mind. He was blurry with fatigue. “No, I’m sure you never did.”

  Raymond blushed. “Then it was Kitty.” He went on quickly, “I guess she thought it wasn’t important enough to mention to you.”

  There was something wrong about this, but he was too weary to put his finger on it. It was hard to visualize Ray and Kitty chatting companionably in his absence. And about girls? He gazed speculatively at his brother.

  “So that’s why you came down. Why you cleaned yourself up. Why you’re not going back to the attic.”

  “Only partly. It was the fight too. When Laura came I was sitting up there crying, I admit it, thinking of Mel in the hospital and you wandering blindly through the city just like Mel used to. And of Kitty trying to keep her baby, after the three of us almost took it away from her. Me included. I was as responsible as if I had taken part in everything. What’s the difference? None, in my mind.”

  Glancing up from his steaming coffee cup, Ralph saw that his brother was transfigured.

  “And when I looked down at the street below and saw her approaching the house, so human, so substantial, a plain ordinary Italian girl, but so beautiful and hesitating, all in white, in the bright sunlight, I went racing down the stairs. I almost broke my neck to open the door before she should go away, and when she asked was I Mr. Land I just looked her in the eye and said yes.”

  “Fine. But what do we do about Mel’s message?”

  “It was for you, not me. It’s for you to say.”

  “Are you going to start evading all over again? Speak up, I’m dead on my feet.”

  “Forgive me. I’m ready to go. I’ll say to him … First I’ll take his hand, then I’ll say … Mel, tell me what you want.”

  “Don’t be surprised if he still wants the world. I doubt that you can change him.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t try. But I should find out, shouldn’t I?”

  “Yes.” Resting his forehead in the cupped palm of his hand, Ralph added, “Listen, kid. I’ll go along. I don’t know what to say to him, or what he’ll say to me, but—”

  Ray broke in eagerly, “Don’t you think that people usually respond to what you expect of them?”

  “No.” The boy would always be a fool. And yet, Ralph thought, if you pitch your expectations too low, won’t people respond by giving you less? Instead of my ally, I offered only to make Kitty my accomplice—and hasn’t she behaved like one? Still he persisted, “Don’t expect a cannibal to discuss philosophy with you just because you’d like him to. Now let’s call up Martin Stark.”

  “Why Martin?”

  “If we want to settle with
Mel, who else is there to tell us what we can and can’t do?”

  He closed his eyes and saw orange flashes and green circles. With his hand over his eyes, he muttered, “Who else but the Starks could keep us from killing each other?”

  Ray replied, slowly, “I thought maybe we could work it out among ourselves. But if you think we need Martin, go ahead.”

  But when he dialed the lawyer’s office, it was all wrong. Mr. Stark was already in court. He would be there the entire morning. He had a two o’clock lecture at the Law School. Thereafter a series of office appointments which could not be canceled. He would not be free until the end of the day.

  “Ralphie,” Ray pleaded, “let’s try it without him.”

  “Won’t work.”

  “Please.”

  Ralph shrugged. He dialed the hospital. “This is Mr. Land, L-A-N-D,” he said. “I’m calling again to inquire about my wife.”

  He was switched to Kitty’s floor. After a moment he recognized the already familiar mannish voice of the duty nurse.

  “Dr. Stark left instructions for your wife to be discharged tomorrow morning.” Her tone was impatient and barely civil. “Do you want her sent home in a cab?”

  “I’ll come for her first thing in the morning. About eight-thirty? Very good. May I have the switchboard, again?” When he was reconnected, he demanded, “I’d like some word on the condition of Marc Lafarge.”

  “Out of danger.”

  “I wish to visit him. My name is Ralph Land.”

  He could hear the woman suck in air. He counted to twenty-two, waiting, looking across the kitchen at his brother’s bowed head. Finally the voice said, “Sorry, no visitors. This is not a hospital ruling, it’s a police matter.”

  He hung up. “It’s no use, without Martin. They won’t even let us in to see him.”

  Ray blurted out, “But Kitty saw him!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Laura found her with him—”

  “Who’s Laura?”

  “I told you. The student nurse, my friend. In fact she had to ask Kitty to leave.”

  Ralph sank into a chair. So Kitty knew too. It figured. The only ones who were deluded were those who, like himself and Ray, had clung to the childish belief that you could keep secrets. What he should do was to go to Kitty at once and learn from her what Mel had said. He should go to her anyway, that was what Ray was thinking, you could see it in his eyes. Partly to forestall him, partly to persuade himself, he said aloud, “It doesn’t matter what Kitty was doing there. Maybe even apologizing. I’ll find out from her in the morning. The point is, we’re stymied at least until then. And in another day, who knows, maybe in another hour, it’s all going to be out in the open. We’ve had it, and we can’t even get to Mel.”