The Will

by Harvey Swados

  The doctor turned the corner, colliding with a Volunteer bell ringer, first of the season, timid and blotchy-faced beside her little cardboard chimney. “Sorry,” he mumbled, even though he was not, and raised his head to see how far he was from his destination. The small neon sign of the Hazard Travel Agency (a poor name for almost any business, he had always thought) glowed in the dull winter sunlight, pale but encouraging because it was only two more blocks away. What he had finally to confront, he pondered with a queer sharp pang just below the sternal region (a bit like gastritis, but more ominous), was the home truth that if anyone should have known what Marty was up to, it should have been not the Land boys, but his father.

  For he had known, from the moment Marty had exploded his ingenious device, not underground, but there before them all in the highly charged atmosphere, that it was a terror weapon. I was morally certain, he said to himself, that very day, that very morning, that Marty had cooked the whole thing up; and that Marty had used his etiolated friend Treadwater to browbeat them all into ending their battle by the absurdly simple but factually and humanly untrue assertion that there was nothing left for them to battle over.

  And I, he thought, I went along. Was it because I was ultimately the one responsible? Who else had saddled Marty with a client who filed phony tax returns (when he deigned to file at all)? No wonder Marty had been more concerned than anyone else with cleaning out the whole mess as expediently as possible, even if he had to resort to a transparent maneuver. Now, months later, everyone knew what should have been perfectly clear that very morning: for the government to make a deal, to accept a schedule of reparations, it would have to make allowances, and let the estate realize the best possible profits out of Max’s properties.

  Not that there hadn’t been good reason for going along with Marty’s maneuver. The overriding consideration had been to get the boys together, to impose upon them a pact which they would be unable to breach no matter how things might work out with the estate, the nominal source of their trouble.

  If Marty had had to be a little devious and lawyerlike, that was his professional method—a small price to pay for such a triumph.

  But how small was the price? That was what nagged at the doctor, and made his footsteps drag as he approached the point of departure. Willy-nilly he was back in the very center of the picture, when all he had wanted was to be an amused and occasionally helpful spectator. What he knew, too, and would never be able to say to a living soul, was that his son’s motives had been more mixed than anyone else could imagine, and that the impulse to devise his theatrical stunt had sprung not merely from that noble disinterestedness with which the path to the Nobel Peace Prize is supposedly paved, but from certain imperious demands of the superego.

  Granted that Marty disclaimed any patience for psychologizing. Granted even that for a peacemaker he had an extraordinarily military turn of mind, ruthless, blinkered. What stuck now in his father’s craw and would stick there until he had said his good-bys to this intriguing but infuriating world, was that his son had driven swiftly through every roadblock, and had attained an all but impossible goal, because he was ashamed of his father.

  There it was. Why try to explain it away as an extravagant example of Marty’s shrewd decisiveness? His son had passed his fortieth year, a decisive point in a man’s life. He had come far, considering—or maybe because—he had been bequeathed a leg that would keep him off balance all his days (something for which no son could ever forgive a father). He had an intelligent wife, a gracious home, three lively daughters, a partnership in a lucrative law practice, a professorship at the Law School.

  He also had a father who refused to move his office from its run-down neighborhood, and who plodded through the dull rounds of his general practice just as he had done twenty and thirty years earlier, drifting into flyblown drugstores to psychologize by the hour and to entangle himself inextricably with his friend’s messy offspring.

  Marty had never complained, not by so much as a grimace of distaste. He had cheerfully taken on the job of representing the crazy family with which his father persisted in being mixed up. But Solomon Stark knew, as he knew his own name, that Marty had despised it all from the very beginning, had hated the Saturday mornings at the Settlement House teaching sullen kids like Ralph Land an instrument for which they had no feeling, had loathed the sessions, before and after the Settlement School, in the pharmacy that stank of spilled medicines, rats’ nests in secret corners, and the hoards and droppings of speculative eccentrics.

  Then, years later, it had all come back from the outlived past to plague Marty again. The deaths of the old men had not finished off his father’s connection with that dismaying tribe. Quite the contrary. The arrivals of the sons had given the reporters, the radio, the television even—with its cameras trained on the old house from the parking lot of the shopping center—the opportunity to make of them all a community joke and a community horror.

  Specious to argue that a lawyer was no more labeled by the types he represented than by his father’s patients or friends. The longer the battle dragged out, the more the name of Stark would be associated in the public mind with this tribe of crackpots, cranks, and castoffs. It was an intolerable situation for an ambitious man. With ruthless surgical skill, Marty had operated precisely as indicated: he had cut, removed the growth, sewed, bandaged.

  And I don’t dare even discuss it with him, Solomon Stark said to himself as he opened the door of the Hazard Travel Agency with his gloved hand and was met by a dizzying wave of heated air. Even if you did not take it upon yourself to preach at your children, you had to expect that they would do what you wouldn’t. Marty had at best a kind of relaxed contempt for his father’s dabbling in psychoanalysis (which he regarded as an overgrown jungle of poisonous metaphysical weeds choked with impossible verbiage). In turn the doctor himself had protected his own privacy by never telling his son of what he had gone through long years ago in deciding whether or not to specialize in psychoanalysis.

  On the positive side had been his infatuation with the seductive possibility of being paid to devote all of his waking life (and his dream life too, for that matter!) to what could otherwise be only dilettantism.

  On the negative had been his very practical fear of economic squeeze. He was no youngster, he had no father to whom he could turn. He was, rather, himself the father of a handicapped boy who needed, right away and for years to come, every advantage that you could possibly buy with money—music lessons, prep school, college, professional studies. The abandonment of his practice would mean that Celia, already afflicted with the multiple sclerosis that could have only occasional remissions, would be forced to scratch along on their dwindling savings while he spent years in training analysis and re-established himself. What was more, he would have to bow out of the lives of his old patients, some of whom he loved better than he did his own wife.

  In the end he had lost his nerve. Persuading himself that his obligations to his wife, his son, and his patients outweighed his possibilities in a field which was perhaps not his vocation anyway, he had given up the idea. (No one else even knew of it but that sweetly impractical fool, Leo Land.) He had continued, always wondering, on his tiring way, only to see that now—so winded that he was compelled to lean against parking meters—his son was proceeding without compunctions to his own goal, apparently untroubled by the effect of his action on relatives, friends, or foes.

  Besides, the doctor thought as he waited for Donald Hazard (who smiled a silent welcome at him and pointed despairingly to the telephone clasped like a violin between left jaw and shoulder), there was his own lifelong uncertainty about how far you had the right to intrude upon the lives of others, even when they invited you to trespass. At his age he knew that there was no answer, and yet it was a riddle that never ceased to intrigue him, and one that had also weighed in the balance against his becoming a psychoanalyst. Despite the intimacies that had been revealed to him in forty-five years of general practic
e, he never ceased to marvel at the nerve of the proselytizer, whether for party or cult, who blithely demanded of others that they quit their jobs or divorce their mates, stand on street corners in the rain, desert old friends or make new ones solely for the purpose of conversion, go to jail or to the stake.

  True, you had to intervene, nobody lived alone, even Raymond knew that, and if there were any interventions more radical than surgery itself, the doctor had performed them too in his lifetime—telling a young father that he would soon die of Bright’s disease, telling a young girl that she should have the baby even though the boy would not marry her. And yet he was painfully aware that a line had to be drawn. But where?

  He was inclined now to think that it must be at the point where you stood to benefit personally from interference in the lives of your fellow men. You had to overstep the line with your parents, your wife, your children; indeed, every time a boy slept with a girl he would be breaking Solomon Stark’s Law. And more power to him! Still, as moral laws went, it was worth striving toward.

  But as he gazed around him, half-seeing, at Hazard’s bright but cheap office displays, the cross-sectional aircraft, the snow white cruise- ships in replica, the posters of Scottish castles and Mexican sun gods, the absurd exotic dolls—all the little gadgets designed to prove that motion was pleasure, and to tempt people toward that pleasure—the doctor was ruefully aware that, even if it were possible to kid around with Marty (which it was not) about Solomon Stark’s Law, his son would find it as tiresome as his dabbling in psychoanalysis.

  He sighed, and turned his attention to Donald Hazard, who had finally hung up the telephone on his small cluttered desk and was approaching the counter. Hazard was a little old for such a pushing business, and was far from being the most efficient travel agent in town; but he was a patient, which meant that he was a kind of friend too.

  Hazard could have used some of the sun he sold. His skin was almost as gray as his thin strands of hair, and his deep-set eyes were bloodshot as a bookkeeper’s from reading timetables by artificial light. But he had bravely given up the security of his railroad ticket agent’s job to try his hand at this business, not to make a bundle for his children, for he had none; but because as an old-style Yankee he cherished his freedom.

  “Sorry, sorry to hold you up, Doctor,” he said.

  “No harm done, Donald,” the doctor replied. “Listen, you shouldn’t hold the phone like that, it won’t help your bursitis.”

  Hazard bent his grizzled head apologetically. “Say, say, it’s a good thing you phoned me early. I booked you into a hotel right in the heart of things. I know how you like to participate in people’s lives.”

  He laughed. “Hey, wait, using my camera isn’t participating, it’s the exact opposite. That’s why I enjoy it. Just being a spectator is a healthy change for me.”

  “I don’t see that at all,” Hazard protested. “When a man like you takes all those pictures of people at work, you’re participating in their lives. Maybe it only takes a second, but it’s the idea of the thing, the human sympathy. They look at themselves differently afterwards. I can’t explain it better than that, but you know what I mean?”

  Well, I’ll be damned, the doctor said to himself. Who would have thought fussy old Hazard had it in him? But then, how many strangers divined the lovely flights of fancy which poor dead Leo Land could conjure up for you, barricaded in the dust and must of his old pharmacy? How precious life was, and how beautiful, if only you could raise your head from time to time, push yourself away from the parking meter, free yourself for the unexpected!

  He said confidently, “I know. I just want to be sure that there won’t be any hitch about my return flight. Am I all set?”

  “Absolutely. Absolutely. You’ll be home for New Year’s, Doctor.”

  “That’s very important. For one thing, there’s a baby due, and a promise is a promise.”

  It was too wearing, delivering babies, and he had just about given it up. But Kitty’s baby was another matter. It was the least—and the last—he could do for Leo and Jenny: to stand by for the arrival of their first grandchild, a new Land to usher in the new year.

  He had to be at the hospital for the midyear nurses’ graduating class anyway, to hand Laura her diploma. It was another promise he had made, not to Ralph and Kitty, but to Ray. And, the doctor thought, if Mel was going to forget his promise—which he undoubtedly would—to return for it from whatever new plunge into the dark caverns of the western world, why should I?

  On an impulse, he leaned forward across the counter to Donald Hazard, whose hand, wormy with protruding blue veins, was adding up the final figures.

  “I want to tell you something, Donald. My son Martin is being appointed to the bench. He’ll be sworn in shortly after New Year’s. You can imagine how important it is to me to be home in time.”

  Hazard’s sunken eyes, close to his of a sudden, were as innocent and wondering as Leo’s had been. For an instant they seemed to be swimming in fluid.

  “Doctor,” he said, his voice quavering just a bit, “that’s wonderful, that’s wonderful. You must be very proud.”

  “Yes, in fact I am. It’s a long hard row with children, but when they accomplish something, it makes you feel that all your effort has been worth while.”

  “My congratulations.” Hazard set aside the proffered check, and clasped the doctor’s outstretched hand in his own. “My congratulations,” he said again. “Edna and I have been following him in the papers for years. In a way we feel almost like he’s our own.”

  “I’ll tell him what you said. He’ll be pleased.”

  Hazard nodded after him, his hands resting flat on the glassed-in map of the United States, framing it, the check still ignored.

  “Bon voyage, Doctor,” he called out, his voice following him to the door. “And a Happy New Year. Now I’m sure you’ll have one.”

  “Let’s just hope that it will be better than the last one, Donald.”

  From the sidewalk Dr. Stark raised his arm in farewell to the travel agent, already somewhat blurred behind his window cluttered with the little flags of many nations and their excited assurances of fervent hospitality. What a foolish fraud I am, the doctor thought; five minutes after I formulated it, I violated my Law. Not only did I brag about my son and lie about my pride to a childless man, but by tonight I will have persuaded myself that the bragging and the lying were even praiseworthy, because they gave him a little vicarious happiness.

  Catching sight of his distorted reflection, warped and wrinkled, in a shop window peopled with elegantly mustached dummies leaning on rolled-up umbrellas, the doctor struck a solemn pose and stuck out his tongue at himself. Then, chuckling, he squared his shoulders to the rising wind and strode on briskly through the frosty twilight streets.

  About the Author

  Harvey Swados (1920–1972) was born in Buffalo, the son of a doctor. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he served in the merchant marine during World War II and published his first novel, Out Went the Candle, in 1955. His other books include the novels The Will, Standing Fast, and Celebration. His collection of stories set in an auto plant, titled On the Line (1957), is widely regarded as a classic of the literature of labor. He also penned various collections of nonfiction, including A Radical’s America. Swados’s 1959 essay for Esquire, “Why Resign from the Human Race?,” is often credited with inspiring the formation of the Peace Corps.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1963 by Harvey Swa
dos

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4804-1484-6

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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