“I don’t mean to sound sententious, but the truth is always your best spokesman. Ray hasn’t acted on the will because he wanted to consult with his other brother, who’s been unavailable. You haven’t disclosed his presence in the house simply because you respected his wishes. As for Mel, since it will have to come out anyway, why don’t we just say that he was serving a sentence in Pennsylvania under an assumed name, since he didn’t want to bring disgrace on his family. I know that manliness is a word that’s almost gone out of the language, but I still feel that the public will respond to an appeal to its sense of sportsmanship.”
“Well, I don’t. The public wants thrills and dirt. But I don’t see any way out of it. All I want to know now is, what do we say to Mel when we walk in?”
Martin did not immediately respond. Ray felt anyway that the question was really directed at him and not at the lawyer, so he said, “Why don’t we just listen to him, and then decide? Maybe that’s what he really wants, for us to listen.”
“You mean, go in there cold, with no plan at all? That’s typical of you. It means we’re completely unprepared if he tries to pull a fast one. Instead of acting, all we’ll be able to do is react.” He turned to their host. “What do you think, Martin?”
The lawyer said slowly, “I think Ray is right.”
Ralph made one last tearing wrenching bite at the quick of his little finger. Then he looked up, measuringly, at Ray. “What do you say?”
“I’m ready to go.”
Having surprised himself with his own forthrightness, Ray found that he was unable to meet his brother’s tormented gaze. He bent down on one knee and straightened out the rug, near where the globe had fallen.
“We can all go together,” Martin said. “I’ll take the station wagon, it’s very roomy.”
“I wouldn’t want to come all the way back here to pick up my car. Besides, I may need it for a fast getaway.” Ralph laughed shortly, without amusement. “I’ll hop out now and pull mine off to the side, so you can back yours out. Ray, you drive along with Martin and keep him company. I’ll follow.”
Ralph was gone and making for the driveway before Martin could say a word. Ray surprised himself yet again by extending his arm to bar the lawyer’s way for a moment.
“I think he’d prefer to go alone. It’s not just Mel. Or even the police and the newspapers, although he’s been brooding about this moment for months. It’s Kitty.”
“And what about you? I didn’t hear him say what a trying experience this is for you.”
“He knows that. All this time, he’s been trying to buck me up to face the outside world. But in my crazy way I have been facing it. And in his own way, he hasn’t. Can you imagine how he feels, having to see his wife and his brother just as he’s discovered that about himself?”
Seated in the car next to Martin Stark, Ray felt called upon to make a formal family apology.
“I’m afraid we’re imposing on you, making you run all over town like this.”
“Not a bit of it. Even if it weren’t a professional obligation, I’d feel it my personal duty to go along and see you through it.”
“Still, you’re very kind.”
“Well, if I am, you’re very courageous. That strikes me as a superior virtue. So let’s say no more about either.”
The flies buzzed lazily in the summery air, the boys cruised languidly on their bikes, not pumping, in these last moments of freedom before supper and the family reunion. Even the voices of the girls who played hopscotch, and with their blue chalk marked mystic hearts and monograms on the sidewalk, were muted on the June streets.
Martin Stark glanced at him. “Ray, what are your expectations?”
“I don’t know that I’ve got expectations any more. But I’ve still got hopes, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The lawyer smiled his slow private smile. His eyes were fastened briefly on Ray before being recalled to the thickening dinner-hour traffic. “Want to tell me about them?”
Raymond twisted about until he could see the Triumph behind them, so that he could keep his brother in sight as well as in mind.
“They used to be pretty grandiose,” he said. “Now, I’d just like for us all to be free to go on in whatever ways would be best for us.”
“Do you know what those ways are?”
“Not even for myself. But finally I’m ready to find out. I think Ralph is too.”
“Would it make much of a difference to you …” the lawyer paused to negotiate a left-hand turn in the face of oncoming traffic, “… if there wouldn’t be much money forthcoming?”
“I’ve tried for six months to tell Ralph that I didn’t need the money. After all, in my own way I’ve been living in the lap of luxury.”
“But you weren’t any more successful with Ralph than he was with you.”
“He claimed all along it was the principle that mattered, but I always thought that with him it was the money. Does that sound unfair? I mean it was his idea of what the money would buy for him, that’s what I think has driven him on all these months. We’d always lived miserably as children, not just shabbily like poor people, but miserably. Peculiarly. Ralph thought this was his chance to live it up, no matter exactly how, so long as it would be different. But it’s frightened him, how desperately he’d come to want the money. I think now at last he really is more interested in principle than in money.”
“Then what about Mel?”
“You’d think he’d be after the money, wouldn’t you? Who could need it more? But it sounds like he’s so set on his principles, whatever they are, that he’s forgotten about the money.”
“I must say, that for a person who has supposedly cut himself off from the world, you have more savvy than some trial lawyers of my acquaintance. If only my father, and your brothers, and everybody else who’s mixed up in this, would worry less about you and simply concentrate on being reasonable, we’d wrap this thing up in no time.”
The lawyer’s words were flattering, but something about his manner was not. I’ve been telling him more than he’s been telling me, Ray said to himself. It was not so much that you had to learn mistrust when you went out into the world, as that you had to teach yourself a prudence, a holding back.
“Well, there’s the hospital. We’ll take the emergency entrance, we’re less likely to be observed there. Is Ralph still with us?”
Ray glanced back and then nodded. He squeezed his hands hard between his thighs to conceal their trembling. In a few minutes, he knew, terrible things were going to be revealed, things which no lawyer or family friend should hear or even know of.
Martin Stark swung the car deftly into an empty space, and hoisted his long legs out onto the gravel, moving with grace despite his limp.
“This is about dinner hour, they eat early in hospitals, you know. So I don’t imagine well encounter too many people. Still, let’s go in the side door. If there’s anything that has to be said, I’ll take care of it, and you and Ralph can go on ahead.”
He indicated the emergency entrance, a sloping ramp up which they scrambled, Martin hoisting himself with the aid of the railing, and found themselves at the end of the ground-floor corridor, already safely beyond both Information and Registration desks. They turned to the left, and suddenly Laura stood before them. She was radiant.
Ray had been trying to imagine her in this ambience which she had chosen for herself, but he could not, it evaded him. When he thought of her she remained obstinately as she had been before, determined but forlorn, in a cause that was wildly irrelevant to her own inner life and to those of the people who had passed her by without a glance.
But to see her here was to erase the earlier memory, to make her new, to make it marvelous that they should know each other. Her welcoming smile illuminated this dark place as if she bore a candelabra to light the way for him.
They did not greet each other. Instead she spoke in a rush, but shyly, as though she might be talking out of turn.
“I’ve been waiting. Dr. Stark told me to watch for you. We’ll go this way.”
He wanted to take her by the hand and go away with her, someplace where neither of them had ever been, where they could sit quietly and look at each other. Instead he had to say, “Laura, this is Martin Stark, the attorney, Dr. Stark’s son.”
Embarrassed, she shook the lawyer’s extended hand. “I think you’d better go right on.”
“Let’s just wait one minute for Ralph.” Martin seemed amused. “Here he comes now.”
I almost forgot him, Ray thought, I almost forgot why we’re here.
Ralph hurried toward them, his open jacket flapping with his quick nervous stride. His clothes hung on him, he looked more gaunt than he had only an hour earlier.
“Ralphie,” Ray said quickly, “this is Laura.”
Ralph nodded impersonally.
Laura said to him, “Mrs. Land is already in the pavilion.”
Ralph closed his eyes for an instant. To anyone but a brother, he might only have been blinking. “And my—”
Martin Stark interrupted him, casually, but quite low. “Let’s follow the nurse, shall we?”
Rumpled and defiant, but hot-blooded again—maybe he had swallowed some more pep pills in the car?—Ralph muttered curtly, “Come on.”
They walked in twos, Ralph with Martin, Ray with Laura but not touching her. He had the sense of her at his side, the sound of her starched skirt, the sweet fresh smell of her, all through their swift passage down the lime-green corridor.
They turned abruptly to the right and were just as abruptly in the midst of the maternity receiving ward.
It was a zone which he would have thought would be serene if not sacred, tiptoe in tone and churchly in spirit, reverential at the arrival of new life. Instead he saw not only doctors but husbands and brothers-in-law, talking not in whispers but in loud assertive tones; and he shrank from the chattering women, no more glamorous than if they were going to the toilet—which in fact most of them were. They shuffled about in bathrobes, in wrappers, in hospital gowns; they bore their swollen postnatal bellies not like holy vessels but like goitrous encumbrances; they gossiped, they complained, they hardly troubled to give way to one of their sisters who was being wheeled to the labor room with her globe jutting like a basketball. Relatives hovered, noisy with felicitations and encouragement, bearing baskets of chicken wings, jelly doughnuts, and pizza. Surrounded by female flesh and smells, Raymond would hardly have been startled to see one of the harried nurses dumping a bloody basin of clotted slops into the jammed and odorous hallway.
He was even less prepared, though, to find here the detective who had come to the house in the morning to talk to Ralph. Shadowed by a summer straw, the detective’s pale heavy face showed but little surprise.
Ralph drew in his breath audibly. Ray wished only that there were some way for him to protect his brother from this sullen stranger in the sport shirt and business suit.
Martin Stark stepped forward, coming between him and Laura, and said amiably, “If you people will just go on ahead, I’d like to have a few words with Lieutenant Karpinski.”
How easy he made it seem!
Walking three abreast now, he and Laura and Ralph turned left, away from Martin and the detective, and were out of the female zone, back into the order of the impersonal clinic, where patients lay strapped or in traction as they were intended to, drooling quietly into basins behind half-open doors or staring patiently at the ceiling, waiting for the alternative releases of healing or death.
At the end of this corridor was their goal, the pavilion. Large-windowed, sunny, its glossy potted plants lightened by a sun now low enough to stream in through the glass, it harbored not merely the ambulatory, but outsiders soon to be told the most important news of their lives. Red-eyed wives awaiting the findings of exploratory operations sat beside expectant fathers who leafed aimlessly, their eyes unfocused, through tattered tracts of the Religious Information Bureau of the Knights of Columbus. Pregnant women virtually at term huddled into their distended housecoats, embarrassed by the false labor which had brought them here too soon, and glared with wretched envy at the convalescents in mid-passage to the world of the well. One of these latter was Kitty, who was carefully made up, Raymond observed, despite her dressing gown and mules, and sat relaxed with a cigarette and a fashion magazine, her legs crossed, at ease.
Hearing them approach, she glanced up. Her poise vanished. She tried to rise, her legs caught awkwardly beneath her, the magazine fell from her hand, cigarette ash scattered the front of her gown.
“Ralph!” Her voice was lower, older, than Raymond remembered. “Ralph, Ralph, I’m sorry. Do you believe me, I’m so sorry!”
His brother was clutching her arms. He was crying. Ray turned away, stunned, but Laura had already left them and was hurrying off. He heard Ralph as all the strangers, grateful for the distraction, must have too.
“Please don’t apologize, Kitty, I beg of you, please don’t apologize.”
“If you’ll just believe me, that’s all I want.” Now Kitty was weeping. “The only reason I phoned for help after you told me not to was because I was afraid, I couldn’t stop you. I didn’t want it to end like this, I didn’t mean for you to suffer too. I tried to make it up to you, I thought these few days would give you a little more time. I didn’t want—”
“Who cares, who cares, who cares,” Ralph was crooning as he rocked his wife in his arms.
The two were oblivious to all the hungry onlookers who watched, pleased with this passion, from every corner of the solarium. Ray, staring as frankly as any of them, learned of love from the rounded back of his weeping brother and the curled clasping fingers of his brother’s wife.
Because he had been afraid to weep before others, he himself had sat out two funerals and a battle between his two brothers. What a fool I am, he thought, and turned to see Dr. Stark entering the pavilion with his familiar slouch, his arm extended in imperial but friendly salutation.
“Hello, Ray,” Dr. Stark greeted him, as casually as if this were their customary meeting place.
Ralph and Kitty released each other abruptly. Suddenly blank-eyed and wary, they awaited news and instructions.
“Supposing we shove a couple of these chairs over to the couch. That way we can all relax and be by ourselves for a bit.”
The doctor spoke then to Ralph and Kitty, ignoring the tears still damp on their cheeks. “Mel will be along any minute. Did you folks really think I wouldn’t recognize him? I did deliver him, you know. Fortunately for everyone, his cranium is tougher now than it was then. Ah, here we are.”
Laura was approaching their newly arranged corner, her face set to the task of pushing a wheel chair before her.
Ray stared at the man in the wheel chair. Swathed in a boxer’s bathrobe that enfolded everything but the neck of his hospital gown, he held himself still in concealment to his very finger tips which held the robe together. To see his face was enough, though, and maybe that was what he wanted to insist upon.
Swollen and bloated, patched and scarred, it could have been the battered visage of some weirdly misplaced Roman-gladiator—except that the eyes were the eyes of a Tartar. It was the eyes finally which drew Raymond forward.
He approached, trembling. “I’m Ray.”
The eyes did not blink but narrowed even more, as if what they saw amused them beyond measure. The amusement was tormenting, unbearable.
Ray threw himself to his knees and buried his face in the folds of the robe, hiding from the dispassionate gaze.
“Mel,” he cried, his mouth muffled against his brother’s body, “forgive me, Mel.”
13: KITTY
MEL MIGHT HAVE BEEN, Kitty thought, the central figure in some odd religious tableau. With his bearded repentant brother kneeling under the drapery of his sheltering arm, with his other brother and wife standing on his left, red-eyed witnesses to the benevolent scene, with the elderly family counselor soberly attending, w
ith the young nurse in white like a representative from on high, it was practically all that the most spiritually-minded could have hoped for. It was a wonder that he didn’t demand, just to round off the scene, that she and Ralph also kneel for his benison.
But if he was savoring his triumph, he was apparently in no mood to prolong the moment, for he gave a convulsive wrench to free himself from Raymond’s embrace.
“This is a lot of crap,” he said harshly. “Come on, Ray, get up. You’re hurting my ribs.”
Raymond backed away awkwardly. “I don’t want you to be hurt any more. Or any of us.”
“Very noble. But there’s been too much melodrama in this family already. Look at you, hiding behind that beard. What did you think you were doing, bucking for a monastery?”
“I didn’t mean this to happen to you, Mel.”
Mel gazed at him with weary distaste. Was this why he had been so insistent on seeing the boy, merely to make it clear that he found him a bore? Surely he must have something more subtle in mind. He was impassive as Raymond continued his plea.
“I’m not just a stooge of Ralph’s. I was afraid for you both, but I couldn’t see how to resolve it.”
“So you let the two of them gang up on me. Maybe you were hoping that we’d beat each other to death, and leave you ruling the roost?”
“No! At least, not consciously. And besides, I was physically weak.”
“The way I heard it from Dr. Stark, you’re full of muscles.”
Kitty held her breath. Although she held Ralph’s hand, she dared not look at him while they waited to hear how much Ray would tell.
“For six months I struggled for you, Mel. If you don’t believe me, ask Ralph.”
“What a laugh!”
“Will you at least listen? I’ll listen to you.”
“You should have made that offer a few days ago. But go ahead.”
Mel was drawing his brother out in order that Ray, tangled between denial and guilt, would accept anything just to obtain absolution. She was more sure of it every moment, but there was nothing she could do about it.
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