Collected Fictions (8 page)

Listen
, Chap. The father of your body is speaking to you. Will you recognize his voice? You were not much more than two years old when you last heard the peculiar American resonance that made your dad a regular on
Rosemary of Hilltop House
and
When a Girl Marries
, a kind of choked vibrancy that must have softened when he blessed you to sleep and drew the covers up to just under your chin, high enough that not one whisper of cold would chill your breast, but not so high that your restlessness would slip the blanket higher and impede the glorious song of your breath. This is the father of your body whose voice you are going to hear. Will it be at all familiar to you after fifteen voiceless years? Will it frighten you to hear a silence broken? Certainly the speech he makes will seem frightening—for it is a statement in support of his decision to secure your death. But it is, nonetheless, a reasoned argument, and if you are your father's son, Chap, you will see he has a point.

Listen
, boy! A brother I love like life itself, your true father, on the fourth day of November, by long-distance telephone, just after the dinner hour, his voice all repose, his heart deranged, in tumult, said
this
:

"
I HAVE A PAD AND PENCIL
here, and it's all worked out, that thing you know I do with columns, this on one side, that on the other. Buddy, can you grab a piece of paper and something to write with? I think it'll help—I think it'll help if you make notes as I go along. I mean, it's just that I want you to know how it happened. Most of it has been happening for years. I think it has always been in the back of my mind since Pert was born. Maybe even before that, in a crazy kind of way. Maybe it dates back to when I kissed Chap goodbye and could never get back to kiss him again. In any case, I don't want you to think this
wasn't
among the premonitions that always go on in my head—because the head will
do
these things, Buddy, and you just can't, you know, stop it. Aren't you the expert in this subject? I'm rambling; I'm sorry. All right, I'm going to pick it up from what I've got
written
here. By the numbers, okay, big brother?

"About two weeks ago—hell, I know the
exact
day, who am I kidding?—Scharfstein told me I've got it bad. Wall-to-wall cigars and three packs of Raleighs a day for almost twenty-five years, and I get cancer of the goddamn
spleen
. I've always agreed with you that Scharfstein is a bastard, but his medicine is the best. Anyway, he sent me over to Sloan Kettering that afternoon, and by the next morning they'd confirmed. Three to six months with routine measures, maybe another three to six with heavy antiprotein therapy. But that's it—that's tops.

"Maggie knows, of course. I didn't tell Mom or any of the rest, although I promise I will just as soon as I can figure out how I want to do it. And maybe you
can
help me with
that
. For the time being, all I am doing is getting my life in order, squaring away my affairs, as Maggie would call them. Everything's pretty shipshape, actually—all the durables. There's plenty of money and there's nobody better than Maggie at managing. Then there's
Pert
—and that's, of course, clear sailing too. He could be the President of the United goddamn
States
, or change the theory of zero, and
this
won't stop him. My being dead, I mean—my dying. Pert could
be
anything,
do
anything. You know him; you've seen the probability in him for yourself. You just have to take one look at Pert to
know
.

"Except there's this one thing—and that's Chap. And if you don't mind, Buddy, I think I want to refer to Chap as David from here on out. There's David—
he's
the one thing. There's my son and there's my son—and
that's
the whole of mathematics of it for you there! Are you following me? Because you better be doing it.

"What David's mother has done lots of divorced women do—I know that. Except I think she's done it better. But I'm only guessing, of course—because for fifteen years the evidence has been withheld from me. Can you believe it, Buddy? With people who feel about blood the way we do? Not one word, not one touch, in fifteen
years
? Jesus God, the woman is a trained
analyst.
If she can unravel a synthesis, I guess she can ravel a good enough one up. Can you just imagine what she's probably
achieved
with that boy? It's not just a job of contamination we're talking about—it must be more like the making of a system refined to a single principle. Or do I mean aim? Anyway, I'm only guessing—but that's where my imagination takes my reasoning—and what else do I have to go on?

"I
believe
in David's rage. Let's just say it's an article of faith with me—and with me dead, that rage will logically get pinned on
Pert
, don't you see? Loathing, envy, spite, you name it—and all of it susceptible to even greater intensity when David actually finds out what Pert
is
. I mean, what I see happening, when I'm gone, when all the rest of us are gone, Margaret and you and Mom and me and that woman—Buddy, I just
can't
say her name, not even now—I see a world with just the
two
of them in it—an openness named Rupert, who owns all my heart, and a man named David with a heart with such a lot of hate in it. What would Rupert ever know of what his brother must feel for him? How could Rupert ever
imagine
? No boy could—no boy like Rupert—and, Buddy, you know what Rupert is like. He is all light—a lightness, this one diaphaneity.

"Pert would never
guess
even. But
I
can.
More
than that—I
know
. David will wait, he will wait his time—like his mother, he will be patient, deliberate, a fury waiting for his chance. All right, perhaps I'm imagining
too
much. Perhaps it will never come to this—something violent, an injury, a killing, who knows? Perhaps instead it will be a civilian act, but decisive, devastating—David sitting on some committee that Rupert happens to be petitioning, David behind the interviewer's desk for some job Rupert must have, David installed at a judicial bench before which Rupert pleads his case, David standing with gloved hands while Rupert lies beneath him, chest swabbed and bare to the scalpel—hell, I don't know, Buddy, but I know it'll be
some
thing. Some way none of us can predict, my firstborn will stalk my second, find a way to hurt
him
because my death
robs
him of
chance
to hurt
me
.

"Look, there's nothing fishy in this, but I don't want to talk anymore—and besides, I'm calling from home and, with Maggie in the house, it's making me jittery—and I right now can't risk being
jittery
. I'll telephone tomorrow—around noon—so, for Christ's sake,
be
there. Because I gave Scharfstein my promise I'd come in and see him in the morning—the jerk thinks he can teach me how to die—and I plan to fly up to Hanover in the afternoon. I guess Mom wrote you that David started Dartmouth this fall—all the way from Texas to my
brother's
backyard! Buddy, he writes these letters to his grandmother that I cannot believe and
do
not believe—like a geometer, as if a
geometer
made them. It gives me the willies to see them, but Mom always makes sure I do. He writes to
her!
Does he write to
me?
Does he answer
one
goddamn letter? Anyway, that's where he is and that's where I'm going tomorrow to get it taken care of. Jesus, man, I've got to
choose,
don't you see—and I choose
Rupert!"

YOUR FATHER HUNG UP
, Chap, with the delivery of that declaration. I didn't wait until the next day, though. I called him back right away—and this time I did get a piece of paper and a pencil—for no good reason, actually, but in moments of this kind one sometimes does things like this. I didn't say much. I didn't try to argue with him. I don't think I then knew what arguments to argue
with
—and I am not certain I know that even now. All I did know was that I had to try to stop him—not because there was in me a conviction that held him
wrong
—but only because there was a will in me to keep him from doing what he said. He did not answer right away, but when he did lift the receiver I immediately said, "Me again," and then I heard him say, "Mags, I've got a call and I need to talk in private. I'm sorry, but I need to," and then there was a moment's quiet and then my brother said, "Yes?" and I knew there was no arguing, nothing to do but state the livable range marked off by the mad logic of his assumptions.

"I have one thing to say," I said, "and that's this. Let it rest for three months. They've guaranteed you three months,
at least
three months, so you can wait that long and
then
do it. Not saying you
shouldn't
do it—just saying you can wait the three lousy months. Not that I think you'll change your mind—or that I'm sitting here trying to get you to—but just that you're in this position where you
can
add three months to Chap's life with no danger to Rupert. The minimum they've given you is the minimum you
can
and therefore
must
give Chap."

I was writing the numeral 3 again and again across the paper that I had pressed with the heel of my hand up against the wall. But the plaster, if that's what you call it, was making them all come out crooked, no matter how carefully I tried to control the pencil.

Chap, your father said, "Yes," and then he hung up the phone. He hung up without one other word. But the word he had uttered left no doubt—it was said so I would know there was no doubt. My brother knew that I knew he would do it—that your father would give you all the life he could.

That was the fourth of November.

I began writing these sentences that night,
last
night—and as I write this sentence now, it is morning.

I PROMISED A COURTESY
, and this is it. I make this gesture to exist in the place of all the gestures I have not made. I am keeping every promise I have not kept. I am leading along to this courtesy everyone I have loved and ever misled.

There is an American writer, a woman, the only American writer I read. She has not written many stories, so it is no great undertaking to read everything she has written, which she has let have a life in print, that is. I take it that her public, unlike mine, is very, very small. This, I believe, is because she is unwilling to mislead, as I have so very often done and then tried to undo by my silence and now am trying still harder so desperately to undo by this last speaking-up.

It
is
a great undertaking to understand even
one
of her stories, such as the
one
she brought forth into the world about two years ago. It is a story that begins as a story that this writer has stolen from another writer—but only because
he
had earlier stolen it from
her
. It was
her
story, she says, and it has to do with magic and with miracles and with many, many things. I think it has to do with everything.

Near to its infernal conclusion, the story happens on the writings of a very wise man, a man now in prison for knowing too much—about the weakness of man and about the terrible power of God, never more terrible than in the performing of His justice.

Among these writings, as the story calls the wise man's diaries, there is a tale the criminal has recorded.

Here is the tale.

A father is in a concentration camp. He learns that the list for the next day's gassings includes the name of his son, a boy of, say, twelve. So the father bribes a German (a diamond ring, he promises) to take some other boy instead—for who will really know
which
boy is taken? But then the father is uncertain of the rightness of his design. So he goes for guidance to the rabbi in the camp. And the rabbi will not help him. The rabbi says, "Why come to me? You made your decision already." And the father says, "But they'll put
another
boy in my son's place." The rabbi hears this, and he says, "Instead of Isaac, Abraham put a ram. And that was for God. Whereas you put another child, and for what? To trick the devil."