Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  “I want all the details,” said Splendor. “Squeamishness is for those who plan to stay deceased.”

  Reinhart went to the bedside. “Old friend,” he said, “everything’s going to come out all right. By the way, I don’t know whether you know it, but this happens to be the house in which I was raised.”

  Splendor smiled wearily. “Yes, I know that. It gives me a feeling I suppose you could call serenity.” He closed his eyes, and the nurse returned to show out the trio from Cryon.

  10

  “Why,” said Maw, “you big sentimental slob. When you were little you wouldn’t let me cuddle you. I’d come near you as a baby and you would ball your tiny fists. So don’t get sloppy at this late date.”

  Reinhart had asked her if she remembered holding him as an infant, and what lullabies he had seemed to like especially. They sat in her room at Senior City. The bed did up to form a sofa of modern design. The other furniture was all-purpose as it stood, no converting necessary, and made of an impervious synthetic wood that looked like plastic and could not be touched by the results of routine forgetfulness: a cigarette dropped onto the coffee-occasional-bedside-card table would dwindle away harmlessly into gray powder and could be whisked off with a Kleenex.

  “OK, then,” said Reinhart, coming clean. “What I really came about was that check you gave me the other day. You see, it bounced.”

  Maw grinned into his face, though not with amusement. “Far from accidental, buddy-boy,” she said.

  Reinhart’s smile signified polite incomprehension. “I’m a little confused, Maw. So much has happened to me in the past couple days, I’m a little slow on the draw.”

  “That’s rich. When were you speedy?”

  “Look,” said her son, “all you had to do was refuse if you didn’t want to give me any money. Why go through such an elaborate performance?” He was sitting in an icy draft as usual: another air-conditioning duct was spraying him with chill. And because the outlet was concealed he could not divine whether the cold wind was above, below, or to the side.

  “Carlo,” Maw said, “you misrepresented your situation the other day. I have often known you for a fool but never a liar. You have degenerated, boy. I expect you are on your way to the gutter. People homeward bound from a hard day’s work will see your body slumped against a wall, an empty wine bottle nearby and the flies buzzing around your stinking mouth.”

  Maw always had been capable of creating vivid word-pictures on unpleasant themes. “A shuffling bum in an old Army overcoat, eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in a fifty-cent flop,” she went on. “That’s how sex maniacs invariably end.”

  She had confused two types of going-bad, perhaps owing to her old prejudice against strong drink. Maw always saw alcoholism behind any villainy. Hitler, a famous teetotaler, was to her but another boozer. It was useless to attack this lifelong mania, but the juxtaposition of sex was quite new.

  “Maw, do you intend to explain this assault on my integrity?” The persistent draft was causing his neck to stiffen. It seemed to issue from the blank wall, painted in dusty rose, behind his head, but there was no visible grille.

  “I’ll talk turkey with you, Carlo. Hardly had you left here the other day when your son made his appearance and showed me how you went at him with a shears. I consider that a vicious stunt—”

  In traditional fashion Reinhart was always a child in Maw’s presence, but mention of Blaine made him a father, a competitor as parent, and furious.

  “He’s lucky I didn’t cut his throat. My conscience is clean towards that boy. I have given him everything, and he has turned out completely rotten. He has bad blood in him from his mother’s side. That’s the only explanation. I never used to believe in heredity, but I see it working in him.” Reinhart slammed a hand on the vinyl armrest. It felt like cold liver. He stared wildly around the room. “And where is that goddam air-conditioning coming from? Can’t you turn the lousy thing off? I’m catching cold, for God’s sake.”

  Now, like many another free-swinging temperament, Maw pulled in her horns when the other guy grew aggressive. She shrank into the bed-couch and pulled her cardigan together. “Try to get hold of yourself, Carlo. You are a huge man and you are shouting. And if you go about threatening old ladies and young children you should maybe get professional treatment.” She looked into her lap. “You are real lucky, you know, that Genevieve never chose to make more of it and put the cops on you.”

  “Oh, come on,” Reinhart roared. “The police would give me a medal for cutting off those golden locks. They hate hippies and punks.”

  Maw said modestly: “I don’t refer to that incident and I think you know it. Let me go back in time, Carlo, for a few years. You were five, Carlo, a little towhaired tyke, playing down cellar with that little Wisely girl who lived next door then and the same age as you, and your dad happened to look into the basement window from outside in search of whether he had forgotten a rake indoors, and he marched around to me on the front porch and says: ‘Carlo is piddling in front of the little Wisely.’ That cellar toilet we had, remember? With the door open. Now you know your dad, he was not a buttinsky. He considered it impolite to even correct a tiny snotnosed kid like yourself. I says: ‘George, you must go down there and get that boy out of the basement with his pants closed. If he begins that young to show a filthy inclination, God knows where he will turn up later.’ Well sir, your dad went back and takes another glimpse in case he made an error, so careful he was, then he comes back and I says: ‘Did you do it?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘for the little Wisely has her own underwear down at her ankles and hands on her tiny hips and is demonstrating herself. ’”

  Maw made a strange triumphant face at Reinhart, who proceeded to guffaw. Had he forgotten this experience he might have been embarrassed, but as it happened he remembered it fairly well, from that long ago, except that in his memory Emma Wisely was absolutely smooth between the legs. Not seeing the organ he had expected, he saw nothing else. It was an early example, in his experience, of the limitations of the eyewitness.

  “Kid stuff, Maw!” Reinhart howled. Then he had a sobering thought. Emma Wisely was today forty-four years old, wherever she was, you could count on that, whether rich or poor, loved or damned. He wondered jealously whether she was also overweight.

  Maw threw back her head and magnified her eyeballs behind the lower half of her bifocals. “You might jeer, Carlo, being as huge a monstrosity as you are today, and get away with it, but I never tolerated impudence and insolence when you was a child.”

  Reinhart decided to humor her. “True enough, Maw. I can well recall your favorite admonitions, which tended towards violence.” He smiled. “You always had a way with words.”

  For some reason this had the opposite effect from that intended. Maw flared up, shook her fist at him, and said: “You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re picking your teeth up off the floor.”

  “Gee,” said Reinhart, “how that takes me back over the years.”

  Maw made one of her quick changes. “Not that I blame you exclusively by any means. You were a clean boy up to then, and I expect that little devil lured you into it, being no better than a common prostitute. Still, the seed took root. I never told you this, but your third-grade teacher, a couple of years later, sent me a note to the effect you were inclined to drop your pencil and shoot your beady eyes up her skirts. For this reason she moved you to the very back of the classroom.”

  Reinhart sagged in the chair. Of this crime he had no recollection, nor little of the teacher. He had a succession of reedy spinsters in those days, of whom he had a horror when they stood close. All females were repugnant to him until he was almost out of grade school, and then suddenly he had started to play with himself over the mental image of any at all, including comic-strip characters, but he still did not enjoy the company of actual girls. Next he began frequently to fall in love but never with any object of his self-abuse. And so on into young manhood. A routine and sometimes a rather
sordid story. He was not obsessed, as many were, with his own sexual history. His adult lust had been for money.

  “All right, Maw, I was a regular Marquis de Sade as a boy. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “I wish you had, Carlo. But then you got hooked up with this Genevieve. I know that was for sex pure and simple, but I never opened my mouth at the time.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Maw! I married her.”

  “For sex, Carlo, and no mistake. It don’t change a thing that you made it legal.” Maw shook her head and cackled. Her senility was really getting out of hand. Reinhart had an ugly thought: perhaps she should be put out of his misery, then hastily assured his conscience that the possibility occurred to him only because he feared and abhorred the event of her death. There was a name for that technique: you hypocritically hoped for what you feared, so as to disarm the devil.

  He asked abruptly: “What bearing does this have on your bad check, Maw?”

  “Don’t give me that D.A. look, Carlo. You had your chance to study law and you never did it, with all the free education of the GI Bill, which you wasted on Liberal Arts. And you never have been artistic in one iota. As for the Liberal, as you know your dad and me were always Republicans, straight through from Warren G. Harding. And let me tell you: your son agrees with me.”

  Reinhart caught his lower lip and pinched it painfully. “Blaine?”

  “Oh sure!” Maw crowed. “He told me liberals like yourself are what’s wrong with the country, and the young kids would like to see you all shot. Your generation has botched everything from the word Go. We seniors and the youngsters see eye to eye on that. You have sold out the world to Communism and whipped the colored people into a frenzy, built up the national debt, and you are losing the war. Look at the labor unions, run by gangsters, and the schoolteachers are all atheists and traitors, and the niggers think the world owes them a living.”

  “So you and Blaine are making common cause,” Reinhart said rigidly. “That figures. You always were a big free-lover, anarchist, nihilist, and junkie, just like him.”

  Maw grinned. “Don’t think you can sweet-talk me out of this, Carlo. Good sense usually skips a generation. Blainey has made the dean’s list every semester he has gone to college. He’s smart as a whip and no chip off your blockhead.”

  “He also had a plan to kidnap the dean and burn his office,” Reinhart said. “I suppose he told you about that. But a police spy informed the dean, who prudently went to an out-of-town conference that day. Imagine an important official being run out of his own college by some longhaired little rotters.”

  “That’s another thing, Carlo. You are neurotic about hair. I could understand if you was bald which you are not. I call it cute for those young fellows to let their locks sprout. It’s surely better than those crew cuts of your day and I wish you would let yours grow a little. You look mighty old-fashioned, Carlo. If you watched TV you would appreciate that all the New York personalities have taken up the hairy style. You’re not In, Carlo. In fact, you are downright square: that skinny tie, for example, and you’re one of the last left with a white button-down shirt.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Reinhart.

  “I say thank God that Blaine never inherited your foul mouth, either,” said Maw. “Even as a tiny child you were always saying poo-poo and doodoo. I have many a time believed the babies got mixed up in the hospital and I brought home the illegitimate offspring of some thug and a cootch dancer.”

  Reinhart started to say—

  But Maw held him off. “Yeah, the check,” said she. “You are quite the monomaniac on some subjects. Which brings me back to sex. See, I know about the little teenybopper next door.” She pride-fully explained: “That’s what they call them, teenyboppers, if you are With It.” Then her face, amazingly smooth for her age, took on the hue of bad blood. “She’s a child, Carlo. Even I never thought you’d come to that. You could be locked away in the penitentiary for fifty years, and the other inmates, even murderers, all despise the sex criminal and will knife him with shivs they fashion from metal fragments from the license-plate shop.”

  Somehow Blaine, or Gen, or perhaps the girl herself, had discovered his voyeurism. This was indeed a crisis. You could never clear yourself of charges of sexual unorthodoxy. Reinhart had once read a magazine article about some poor devil accused and convicted at law of indecent exposure. Another man’s subsequent confession had eventually cleared him—the familiar case of lookalikes. All the same, injustice’s victim had to change his name and move to another town. Though flung in error, shame’s stain persisted.

  And Reinhart was caught dead to rights. That in European cultures the dirty old scopophiliac was a traditional figure of farce; that Reinhart though venially guilty had caught Blaine in mortal miscreance; that the girl’s habitual failure to lower her blind suggested conscious exhibitionism—the fine moral complexities would be overlooked.

  On the other hand Reinhart was democracy’s child and did not bear the burden of proof.

  “Maw,” he said, “that bathroom screen never has fit properly, and you know how sloppy workmen are today and how insolent when you call them to rights. I prefer the old-fashioned type to these combination screen and storm windows, anyway. Remember when Dad and I used to change them every spring and fall? It was a ritual. Ah, those were the days.”

  He said this knowing full well that his mother was utterly devoid of nostalgia, whereas it was his own major emotion, so much so that ten years hence, if he lived that long, he might even look back on this currently dreadful indictment with perhaps no actual pleasure but at least relief that he had survived it: if he did. Obsolete horrors got more and more quaint as they receded in time. So he watched a teen-ager undress. She would smile at that when seventy-five and he long since pushing up the daisies.

  He had all but eased himself out of panic when Maw bared her dentures at him.

  “You are warped worse than I thought, Carlo. I have a mind to go to that telephone across the room and call the cops down on you. Yapping about window screens at a time like this, when that little girl is carrying your child.”

  For a moment Reinhart actually interpreted this curious statement to mean the girl next door was bearing Blaine, his child, on her body, between spread legs. Yes, he had suspected that was the case, and it was deplorable. He was also willing to accept that general, journalistic guilt that all parents are saddled with by public spokesmen for the crimes of their children, but in particularities his conscience was impeccable. Time and again he had spoken to Blaine about honor, pride, responsibility, courage, and manhood; the need for hard work and meeting your bills; the moral gauge of human actions, nothing pompous, mind you, about God and flag, but as to whether a projected action would injure another.

  And not only that. He had also omitted mention of the tiresome truth that every action by one person inevitably hurt someone else, so that incessant decency required incessant analysis of the sort of the practice of which had made him both unpopular and poor. Why discourage the boy?

  But he supposed he had known all the while that what Maw meant was he, forty-four years old, two hundred and sixty-five pounds of middle-aged blubber, had climbed wheezing, sweating, between the tender thighs of this young girl and drenched her intimate channels with seed.

  He checked up on this assumption: “The teen-ager next door to the house where I used to live?”

  Maw nodded smugly.

  “Where I lived until a couple of days ago?”

  Maw scratched her chin.

  “From which Gen threw me out?”

  Maw pulled the lobe of her right ear. She was wearing silver, iridescent nail polish.

  “This girl claims I—” What was the idiom when talking to a mother? In four decades this subject had never come up in a personal, illicit way. “She is—” Shit, Reinhart said to himself, that dirty little lying cunt, says I fucked her, does she? But it was bravado.

  “Carlo,” Maw said, though without a trace
of worry, “you are turning purple all over your head. I’d have my blood pressure taken if I was you. You are not too young to die of a heart attack, given your excess weight.”

  He was also suffocating. Injustice alone would not cause these symptoms. Captain Dreyfus survived many years on Devil’s Island. Innocent men often spent their best days, in terms of health both psychic and physical, while awaiting execution.

  As Reinhart continued to fight for air, Maw said: “I think I would be capable of murdering you with my bare hands would it not make the scandal known. Also, did I not think that person you married was responsible in part.” Maw glared at him. “Which doesn’t lessen your guilt one whit, you filthy, disgusting hog. But it was her who got you into sex in the first place. I can’t forget that. You never knew what it was until she got hold of you. It’s like drinking. You take a sip and you are hooked for life.”

  Reinhart suddenly remembered that under the new scheme of things it was no longer really malignant to hope for someone’s clinical death. You could merely wish them into the freezer. He began to breathe with less effort.

  “This girl has made certain accusations,” he said. Now he felt a pricking in his chest as if the point of a knife were seeking entry. Reinhart had already cried Wolf several times to his doctor on the occasion of mere gas pains. The real strike would no doubt catch him by surprise, far from the haunts of medical men, hardly here in Senior City with its resident practitioners. Anyway, he was born to be hanged.

  “I wouldn’t waste your breath, short as it is,” said Maw. “I have always lived by common decency, but am also a realist to whom what is done is done. Little Blainey somehow in that house of evil grew up to be a saint, don’t ask me how and kindly don’t make a dirty grin if I say that whatever example I set might have been useful to him. You don’t know this because you haven’t set foot back there since She threw you out and you better not try either, but Blaine is marrying this child to give her child a name and that is why I cut off your five thousand and gave it to him.”