The Will

by Harvey Swados

  “Ralph wanted to give you nothing. I stayed in the attic, trying to think of, some way to persuade him. I said we’d divide it three ways. He said no. I said I’d give you half, and him the other half. He said no. He was only interested in freezing you out, in punishing you. We were stalemated, like Indian wrestlers.”

  “But now the stalemate’s broken.”

  “Right! It’s got nothing to do with my being brainwashed. It was your coming back that did it, and you had to suffer for it. But now we’re all paying the price. And maybe we can all be saved yet.”

  “Hallelujah.” Mel smiled coldly, with one side of his mouth only. Kitty was astonished to see that Laura, the little nurse, had flinched. Why? And why was she moving, her face flaming, from behind the wheel chair to Ray’s side?

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Mel.” Ray wet his lips. “Ralph and I want to settle with you, right now, with Martin’s help, on any terms that the three of us can agree on.”

  “There ain’t no such animal.”

  “But there has to be! Nobody wants to win any more. Nobody can win.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I want to. And I can.”

  Ray hesitated before this decisiveness, and when he finally did respond, averted his head from Kitty and Ralph, so that he was barely audible.

  “When Ralph and I still believed that, I tried to win by sitting tight. And he tried to win by cutting off first my books, then my mail, then most of my food.”

  “So you really were physically weak. Sounds like the old Ralph. But he couldn’t have starved you without help. Kitty, you gave him a hand, no doubt?”

  Dr. Stark sighed, not in judgment, but with the weary comprehension of the old. Hearing only that wavering drawn-out sigh, groping for the chair behind her, Kitty could not bring herself to look at anyone, but held her hand pressed to her eyes as she fell back in the chair.

  “It’s true,” she mumbled, hating herself for crying all over again, “I did it for love.”

  “I’m getting awfully sick of that word,” Mel said. “Aren’t you, Ray?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Mel laughed. He laughed! And Kitty, clenching her husband’s hand so tightly that she could feel him wince, took her fingers from her eyes and peered at Mel, who didn’t really want the money, but only what he was getting now, at this moment.

  “She brains me with a lamp, a vase, God knows what else. And all for love.”

  “But it’s true,” she heard herself crying, “I did it for love, why else? And what right have you got to hold that against me?”

  Temporarily startled into silence, Mel allowed Ray to renew his plea.

  “If I bear no grudge against Ralph or Kitty, can’t you—”

  Mel held up a bandaged hand, the first two fingers raised hieratically, in caricature of a Byzantine icon. “One saint is enough for the family, Ray. Let me cherish my grudges.”

  “But Ralph has given up his. He’s ready for a settlement.”

  “That’s white of him.”

  “It proves that he’s changed.”

  “To me it proves that Ralph knows when the jig’s up. Nothing more. I learned that about him when your face was still in Mama’s titty. Don’t kid yourself, Ray, you haven’t converted Ralph. If he’s got religion, it’s Karpinski who brought him the Word, not you. He’s practical, just like he was when he used to run to Papa saying that I was stealing cigarettes from the store, or when he ran away instead of helping me fight, or … when he ran me out of town.”

  Glancing up, Kitty saw that the color was bleached out of Ralph’s face. Still holding her hand, he said monotonously, “It’s not true. None of it. If Ray can’t persuade you, I won’t try. All I’m saying is, I want you to have a share now, and I leave the details to Ray. Never mind about my motives. I never admired yours, but they’re not at issue. It’s not easy for me to tell you that I’m sorry. The only way I can show it is by offering in good faith to settle.”

  “Bully for you.” Mel would undoubtedly have said more, but just at that moment Martin Stark walked into the solarium. He came up from behind, placed one hand on the shoulder of the man in the wheel chair, and extended the other for a handclasp. The handshake was mere good form; what mattered was the coldness in his eyes.

  “It looks as though you’ll be out of here soon,” he said to Mel, “but it doesn’t sound as though you’ve been making much progress in other ways.” The lawyer added, “I’d like you to clarify something.”

  “As long as you don’t claim to be on my side too. Everybody else here is just a little too busy loving their neighbor.”

  “Love isn’t my business. Settlements are. From what I just overheard, you sound as though you don’t want any kind of settlement on any kind of terms.”

  “Not with Ralph I don’t. He’s not the heir—Ray is.” Mel swiveled about swiftly and jabbed his finger at his younger brother. “Now’s your chance, kid. You want to negotiate? Come on, speak up.”

  “On what terms?”

  My God, Kitty thought, he has grown up.

  “You and me. No Ralph, no outsiders. You want to get even, you want to make it up? Let’s negotiate. Just you and me.

  Ray had folded his arms. He bent his head toward the little student nurse, not to confer with her, but almost as if he wanted to indicate to everyone that there was an unspoken compact between them; and as he did so Kitty realized with a little thrill of surprise that somehow a connection had been established between these two. How? She could not imagine, but she found herself looking at the nurse with different eyes and so seeing her not as a mouse in uniform but as a tough and determined girl, worthy of a man’s trust and confidence. Then Ray raised his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I couldn’t do that with Ralph, I don’t see how I can with you. It’s out of the question.”

  The nurse was breathing deeply, her bosom rising, her plain reddened hands clasped tightly before her. She was as transformed as if she were in love. And, in fact, what else could account for it? Wonderingly Kitty watched her as Mel returned to the attack.

  “Okay. That tears it.”

  “Just a second.” The lawyer ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “What difference does it make whether it’s Ralph or Raymond who offers you what you came for, as long as you get it?”

  “Correction. Nobody’s offering me what I came here for.”

  “Which is?”

  “Vengeance.”

  Once again Dr. Stark’s heavy doglike sigh filled the air. The strangers in the pavilion had retreated to their private concerns, but the softness of Mel’s tone—and particularly his final word—had served to draw his own circle so tightly about him that they all swayed forward, awaiting his next word with a silent breathless expectancy. All except Ralph, whom Kitty could not contain. Thrusting aside her restraining hand, he glared at Mel with congested eyes, and spoke in an unsteady voice.

  “If you’re trying to make me ashamed of having apologized …” Kitty could feel his trembling as if it were a wire vibrating against her. “If you’re trying to make me regret that I didn’t kill you …”

  “I owe my life, such as it is, to Kitty’s conscience, and to the cops. Not to you. So don’t make me laugh. My head still hurts.”

  “What are you after?” Ralph pushed Kitty back into her chair. “You punished Mama, now you’re punishing Kitty. Do you want to inflict suffering on the third generation, on her baby, is that your game?”

  Mel said furiously, “You’d rather play to the doctor, to the lawyer, to your kid brother, to your wife, than face up to me. I’ll tell you what I’m after, but I’ll have to start at the beginning.”

  “I’m waiting.

  “Do you want the rest of us to go?” Dr. Stark jerked his thumb at his expressionless son and at the nurse, who was biting her lip but not budging from Ray’s side.

  “You might as well all hear what I’ve been up to during the last fourteen years. The history of my counter-punching
has its moments. Running, mooching, hiding, covering, never able to straighten up, forced to let go of my own name—not because I was ashamed of it but because my own family was ashamed of me. Ralph was the one who was ashamed of the family, not me. Ralph was the one who went away and stayed away voluntarily. Ralph was the one who was too good for the town, for his uncle, his old man, his brothers. But every time I wanted to try again, I’d write to Max and he’d say, Not now, Roughneck, not yet. Not now, not yet. Now, when I finally do come back, when they’re all safely dead, Ralph has beaten me to it. He beats me up to boot, and he thinks I’ll sit here with my busted nose and settle for an apology.”

  His face shone with sweat as the words poured out, hot, gushing, blissful, in a sudden release.

  “Everybody thought, including me, that I was a pretty tough kid when I left home. Tough? I was a baby. In Chicago I learned about double-dealing at the hands of a kindly Italian hood. He hired me to drive his hot cars, skipped before the pay-off, and left me to take the rap. In Iowa I learned about saying good-by, after detasseling corn with a Swedish philosopher who talked to me all the way out to the Montana wheat fields, day and night. Inside of two weeks he had chopped up his leg in a binder, and I had to leave him and his one leg in the hospital. He was my first friend. I haven’t had many since.

  “In California I learned about loneliness. I wrote Max and he said, No, not yet. On a bet I joined the Navy to save the world from the North Koreans. As good that as anything else, I thought. It was after boot camp, when I was halfway across the Pacific, that I learned Mama had died. I wasn’t surprised that Ralph blamed me for it.

  “I drew a chief machinist’s mate who climbed on my tail at Pearl Harbor and stayed there all the way up to Pusan. He called me Chink, he asked me which side I was on, he explained how the Jews started up the war in Washington and sold it out in Seoul. Uncle Max sent word that if I behaved myself I could come home when my hitch was up and go to college, like Ralph and all the other good little heroes. But first there were six hundred million Chinamen to wipe out, and there was that C.P.O. on my back.

  “I got everything you can get for slugging a C.P.O. When they discharged me in Algiers, Louisiana, without honor, my spineless father was back rooming with his brother as though he had never married and had kids.

  “After that it was the same old story, trial and error, illusion followed by disappointment. New Orleans, Biloxi, Boston, Saratoga, Monmouth, Miami. You name it, I was there. In Biloxi a little old nurse gave me a lecture on germs and shooed me out of the Negro waiting room at the Trailways Terminal, where I was looking for a cup of coffee. It was before the days of the Freedom Riders, I had no message for the blacks or anyone else, not even for Uncle Max, but I made the mistake of telling the old lady to bugger off. She turned out to be the sheriff’s aunt.

  “I’ve forgotten more about Southern jails than any of you will ever learn. It was in Miami, after I got back from Cuba—never mind why—that I found a letter from Uncle Max. He was still proud of me, if I had lived fifty years earlier I would have been fighting the Czar. Et cetera. As for him, he was still in love with Ann Sheridan. A safe romance. I had no home to come home to, my father was busy with a project for promoting world brotherhood by filling in the Bering Strait and the English Channel with a plastic cement. Meanwhile, his sons were pushing their own notions of brotherhood in various ways, all of them phony.

  “Myself, I was serving time in Pennsylvania for something I’m not defending. I did it in a fit of despair, that’s all. It was then that I got word of Max’s death, and of Pop’s. When I read about the will, and Ralph being the only one here, I smelled more brotherly love.

  “I’ve come to stake my claim. I’m not Lafarge any more. I’m as much a true son of the Lands as either of you two. Probably more.”

  He stopped, his chest working a little. He might have been having one of those nightmares in which you run, your heart pounding, trying to catch a train that is just out of reach. Not one of his little circle of listeners had made the slightest move to interrupt him. Ray sat hunched, elbows on his knees and fists digging into his cheeks, which were a little reddened. The pressure had forced his mouth open a bit, or perhaps he was simply filled with wonder. Laura, her fists clenched in her uniform pockets, did not seem to mind that her nose was red, nor that her eyes were watering as she gazed, not at Mel, but at Ray. Why are we women always at the mercy of our tear ducts? Kitty thought angrily. She turned away, toward her husband and the other men.

  Ralph’s eyes were closed and his jaw clamped tight. The mandibles worked steadily beneath his expressionless features. Martin Stark, his legs crossed at the ankles, maintained the fixed polite smile of a man watching an amateur entertainment in which his own children are not involved. He was looking at his hands, which he held before him, finger tips just meeting in an ecclesiastical arch; am I imagining things, Kitty wondered, or are his fingers the tiniest bit unsteady? His father had been slouched in the corner chair all this time, leaning on his hand, his face pushed somewhat out of shape by the pressure of his hand, like an old hound dog resting his chops on the hearth. His eyes were veiled by the drooping lids. Aside from his occasional mournful aspirations, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. Not one of them, Kitty observed, was looking directly at the man who had just finished speaking.

  “Well,” Mel demanded impatiently, “no reaction? Fourteen wasted years in forty different places. The least you can do is thank me for not disgracing the family name.”

  Ralph opened his eyes. They were cold. They bore no trace of either shame or misery. He said, “Maybe Ray is bleeding for you. I’m not. Who asked you to piss your life away?”

  “Do you think I enjoyed it? Is that all it means to any of you?”

  Ray muttered, “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s funny—I understand you. You locked yourself in because you didn’t want what happened to me to happen to you. Right?”

  Ray whispered, “Something like that.”

  “Then why can’t you feel what I felt, creeping from place to place all those years, like a turtle with the wrong name scratched on his back, waiting to be turned over by anybody’s toe?”

  Kitty arose, pressing her palms flat against her hips, holding herself very steady. “If Ray doesn’t understand, none of us does. Why blame your life on Ralph? If you liked it here, if this was the only family you knew or wanted, who forced you to leave?”

  Mel pushed himself out of the wheel chair. Erect, he grasped her by the elbows; she could feel his pulse in the pressure of his spatulate fingers.

  “My mother,” he said.

  “What a dirty lie!” Ralph, his face congested, lunged forward to pull her loose from his brother’s grip.

  Kitty shook her head at Ralph. “Don’t make a scene.” She turned to Mel. “The way you told it to me, you left for the noblest of reasons. To show your mother by your example what was in store for her.”

  “You misunderstood. Maybe you preferred to, I meant more than you thought.” He was looking not at her but at Ralph. “Go ahead, tell her.”

  “He knocked up a girl. A Polish girl I knew in high school, I used to go out with her myself. Her big brother was a cop. Mel was scared of him, he packed up and skipped town. He never came back, not when Mama died, or Papa, or Uncle Max. But now he’s trying to blame everyone else, even his dead mother, for that cheap little seduction. He wants to make out that his life was a tragedy. He’s probably done the same thing half a dozen times since, in one town after another, with one high-school girl after another.”

  “What’s the use,” Mel muttered. “What’s the use.”

  He sank back into the wheel chair. “I didn’t leave town of my own accord. Mama took me aside one day. Papa was too ashamed, he was too much of a coward. Mama said she and Papa knew about Stella. She said that if I didn’t go I would have to marry a common tramp. That Stella’s father was drunk at the saloon more often than he was sober at the mill.”
r />   “You were afraid of Stella’s brother,” Ralph said. “You were afraid he’d beat your brains out.”

  “Harold never knew. He still doesn’t, or he would have made life even more miserable for the Lands.”

  Harold, Kitty said to herself, Harold! “Wait,” she commanded. “Harold what?”

  Mel smiled coldly. “Yes, Karpinski. He’s worked his way up from traffic cop. But he wasn’t the reason why I left town. And he’s not stopping me now from what I intend to do. There was only one other person who knew, who told my mother, who turned her against me.”

  Ralph whispered, “I never said a word.”

  “Balls. You knew, Stella went crying to you, she even told me she did. You were jealous that she did it with me and not with you.”

  “That’s true. But I never said a word to anyone.”

  Kitty was frightened to see how suddenly everyone was staring, not at Mel, but at her husband.

  “I swear it,” Ralph said. “From the day that Stella told me until this very minute, I’ve never opened my mouth about it. Not to Mama, not to Ray, not to Kitty. Not to anyone.”

  Mel seemed a little puzzled by this obstinacy. Or maybe, Kitty thought, he was uneasy that his brother just might be telling the truth—and then what would he be, deprived of the hatred that had sustained him all these years? He persisted: “Mama must have learned it from you. There was no one else.”

  Ralph replied, “There was someone else.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Where did you get the pills? You were dosing Stella with pills.”

  “From Uncle Max.” Now they were all staring at Mel again. He added quickly, “But he was on my side. He was the only one I could count on.”

  “If Mama talked to you, if she really did ask you to go away, then she heard it from Max. And he must have put her up to it. Not me, not Papa. Uncle Max.”

  In the instant that Mel’s face crumpled, Kitty said to herself, He loved the girl. And more than that, she thought, as she heard Mel delving into the past again, not venomously this time, but as though its meaning were only now being disclosed to him, He has always loved what he remembers of her.