Random Winds (46 page)

“Last night in the hotel arcade, you were looking at a tablecloth.”

“The Venetian lace? It was awfully expensive, Martin.”

“You loved it I could tell.”

“Well, but, can we afford it?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think we can,” and was pleased at the smile that came and went on her mouth.

From the terrace outside their room, he could hear her singing cheerfully while changing into a swimsuit. He had been concerned that she would regret having come on this trip, that her mind would be at home with the children. They were her center, as they were not for him. (Yet, hadn’t he always seen himself at the head of the table surrounded by the wealth of family?)

To tell the truth, at fifty-plus he was over-age to father
such young children as the last two were. When he came home at night, he was tired, and quite naturally, they were noisy. He was sometimes impatient with them. Hazel never was. She was so patient with Claire, too! Once, not long ago, she had even spoken up when he had scolded Claire for something.

“I’m surprised,” she had said. “You so seldom criticize Claire, even when she needs it. This time she didn’t need it.”

Suddenly, now, he remembered that And he wondered whether Hazel ever thought he might favor Claire over the others. Because in his heart he did, and he knew he shouldn’t. He had such hopes for Claire! And up to this minute, every one of his hopes had been fulfilled.

She had done brilliantly, had even written a paper on genetics which might possibly see publication. For such a girl one was justified in having extravagant hopes. She qualified for the finest training, the best internship. After that a neurosurgical residency, or perhaps her interests might lie more deeply in neurological research. Whichever she might choose, there would be a place for her on his team. Father and daughter; she would™

“Sure you won’t change your mind about a swim?” Hazel inquired.

Through the open robe he could see her full breasts, her strong thighs in the swimsuit, a figure no longer young, but firm still and sturdy. She looked like health itself.

“No, you go. At the moment I feel too lazy.”

“Good. It’s what you need, to feel lazy.” She smoothed his hair. “I do worry about you, Martin. You never have any private time. Between patients and teaching, working three nights in the lab, and now this institute business—” She reminded him more and more of the way his mother had used to worry over Pa. “And writing another textbook on top of it all!” she added.

“Not writing,” he corrected. “I’m only contributing a chapter this time. The rest is a symposium.”

“Well, whatever it is, I don’t know how you do it all.”

“Go along with you,” he said, “and work up an appetite for dinner. We’re going to Trader Vic’s.”

He lay back in the lounge chair. The good warmth of the sun went through to his bones. How he loved it, and how he hated the cold! It shriveled his spirit and always had, even when he had been a child in Cyprus.

The beach, that was what he loved. Tomorrow they’d go down to Carmel, and for a whole week he’d get up early every morning, he promised himself. While everyone still slept, he’d go down to the beach and stand there looking out at the endless blue, the sea blue and the diamond dazzle. At dawn there would be no footprints on the sand except the ones he would put there. All others would have been washed away during the night. In a cleansed and pristine world there would remain only the pure curve of sea and the parallel curve of sky.

I could have been a beach-bum, he thought, and was amused at himself, knowing that that was one thing which he, the precise, the exacting, the apprehensive and conscience-laden, could never, never be.

Even here, even now in this hour of solitary peace, while the wind hummed in his ears and his eyes were bemused by two sailboats on the bay heading outward under the Golden Gate Bridge, his thoughts were traveling back east They’d made tremendous, incredible progress! After almost six years of arduous effort they’d reached the Dobbs Foundation at last, and now finally were moving in high gear.

In part the crucial contact had been brought about through efforts of Bob Moser’s, but the decision to make the grant had come because of Martin.

“I’ve gone as far as I can go,” Moser had told him. “The ball’s in your court, now. You’ll have to put the idea across.”

And he had done so. In one fateful evening on the Moser’s terrace after dinner, Martin had been able to convince Bruce Rhinehart, then the acting president of the foundation. Rhinehart had been a careful listener. There had been something southern about him, with his long, narrow face and pince-nez, his way of inclining the head in courteous deference. Bob Moser was obviously in awe of him. The control of millions, even though they are not your
own, commands respect, Martin thought. The power of money. Human nature.

First he had produced an estimate of the cost. Then, restraining the tremble of his hand, he’d shown the rough sketch, dog-eared by now, which he always carried in his pocket.

“You’re familiar with our old two-story wing on the side street, Mr. Rhinehart? Our thought is we’d tear that down and build ten floors up, with entrance into the main building, of course. We’d have laboratories and auditoriums for teaching on the first two floors, with patient floors above.” He’d kept his voice even, not too boldly confident, but not pleading, either. “I’ve got a lot of thoughts about the operating rooms. There’s been so many improvements since ours were built. We’ll need facilities for photography of the brain, somewhere near the Department of Encephalography. See? Over here on this end.”

Rhinehart had inquired when and how Martin had first got his idea. He recalled now that he had answered, “It’s been a dream of my whole life, my life as a doctor, that is,” and hoped that hadn’t sounded grandiose, because it was the simple truth. “We’re an old, honored hospital,” he’d explained. “I’ve felt deep loyalty to it ever since I first came to work here under Dr. Eastman. I believe we need and deserve this institute.”

They had talked until midnight, Rhinehart listening all the time with that attentive courtesy.

“It’s gratifying to see how much we’ve been able to raise from private contributions, Mr. Rhinehart. Three hundred thousand dollars.”

At that moment Bob Moser had injected humor.

“That includes fifty from a friend of mine, a plastics manufacturer looking for a tax deduction,” he’d said with a grin. More soberly he had added, “We’ve a long, long way to go, Mr. Rhinehart, and I hope you’ll see the road ahead as clearly as we do. We—I—that is, Martin here, Dr. Farrell, is in my opinion, for what it’s worth, one of the outstanding—”

And Rhinehart, perhaps observing Martin’s embarrassment, had put in quietly, “Indeed I know of Dr. Farrell.
His text on neuropathology is the current standard. We do so much medical philanthropy, we have to keep abreast of these things.” And he had turned to Martin. “ I assume, of course, you will expect to head the institute.”

Martin had made a small gesture of assent.

“It would be a question, then, of our gambling on you.”

“To an extent, yes. Although I would hope the project would encompass a broader span than any one personality, and last a good deal longer.”

He had asked Martin in what ways this institute would differ from existing ones.

“Naturally, every man has his individual methods,” Martin had told him. “This has been part of me for so long, this conviction that I have about encompassing mind and brain in one study—Yes, it’s done elsewhere, of course. But I have worked out my own ideas about modes of research and patient care.”

“Well,” Rhinehart had said, and there had been something so decisive in the syllable that Martin had stopped with a tug of fear that he had perhaps overreached himself. “Well, Dr. Farrell, I’d like you to come before my committee next week and tell them everything you have been telling me.”

And so they’d be laying the cornerstone, if all went well, sometime next spring!

Hazel wanted the date to coincide with his birthday. She loved grand celebration. Half drowsing now, he lay back in the chair, reflecting on birthdays. What a great fuss Hazel always made! They, like holidays, were an excuse for having a crowd, from Mends like Perry and Tom to distant cousins whom one never saw during all the rest of the year. She would cook Martin’s favorites: roast beef, corn pudding and apple pie. The bought and fancy decorated birthday cake was for the children’s benefit so each one could have an icing-flower. He could see them now: Enoch, so cautious and agreeable, that you wondered what he might truly be thinking; the little ones, Peter and Marjorie, who had more of Hazel than of himself, although Marjorie looked like him. And Claire. She seemed to bring air into the house with her. She’d fling her coat to a hall chair, and
Hazel would hang the coat up in the closet, for Hazel was neat like Martin. Where did Claire get her careless ways? Why, from Pa, of course!

And he thought, with smiling rueful remembrance, of Pa’s desk and his mother’s sighs over things forever mislaid or lost. Yes, of course, from Pa. Genes were a funny business.

A liner was coming in at the Golden Gate; coming from Japan, perhaps? He’d like to see Japan sometime.

What had he been thinking? Oh, yes, that genes were a funny business. Families were a funny business. You’d never think Hazel belonged in hers! When they got talking, the whole lot of them, it sounded like the rattle of machine guns. It made you aware that English is a guttural language. Tess, her sister, had the drone and sibilance of a nonstop talker.

But he had been, and would go on being, good to them. One of them was always in some need or other, either because of illness, or simply because of having more children than he could afford. He never minded helping them, even rather liked it, in an odd way. Because their need made him feel superior to them? Yes, because after all these years, he still smarted over having needed the help of Donald Meig. He could still feel half-naked shame at the memory of standing in that room.

“If it weren’t for me, you’d be peddling aspirin tablets.” That was what Meig had said, and the worst part of it was that it was true.

So it was good for the ego, it was salve and balm, to be a kindly, tactful giver when one could just as easily say to one’s brother-in-law, “You’re a fool and you’re lazy; you shouldn’t have had seven children when you can’t even support two.”

No Meig, he! And Martin wondered what Meig would think if he were still alive and could know about the institute.

Hazel came out onto the terrace. “Oh, did I wake you? We’ve a letter, or rather you have. You won’t believe it—it says Jessie Meig on the envelope.”

He sat up instantly and opened the letter which had been forwarded from his office.

“Dear Martin,” he read, “No doubt you will be astonished to receive this. I thought it better to write because, frankly, it’s less of an embarrassment for both of us than the telephone would be.

“I’ll be brief. Claire has returned from Europe with shocking news. While in England she took it upon herself to visit Lamb House. There she met young Ned Lamb. They spent three weeks touring together and have now decided to be married. He is to come to New York in the fall—has a job in the offing. The wedding will take place next summer after Claire’s graduation.

“You have influence over Claire, maybe more than you realize. You need not answer this. I shall simply assume you will do what you can to prevent this folly. Sincerely, Jessie Meig.”

“Whatever’s the matter?” Hazel cried.

Martin crumpled the letter. Did anything ever go smoothly? Was there ever a time when you could sit back and say to yourself: “Come now, rest a little. You’ve earned it”? Only a moment ago he had been feeling fairly satisfied; perhaps he had been
self
-satisfied and this was to be his rude punishment?

“Talk to me, Martin!”

He came to. “It’s all right. I mean, it’s Claire. She wants to get married.”

“I thought someone had died, you looked so stricken!”

“She met him in England. Went to visit Lamb House. Goddamned crazy thing to do! It’s Ned, her aunt’s son.”

“Oh? But then, he’s a cousin, isn’t he? How can they marry?”

He realized he had never given her any more than a few barest facts at their first meeting, so long ago.

“They’re not. His mother died when he was born. She—Mary—brought him up.”

“I see. Well?” Hazel touched his arm. “Martin, you look dreadful. Does it really matter so?”

He turned on her. “Of all the stupid questions! It’s an insane folly, and you can ask me—”

His vehemence appalled her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t mean anything. But oh, damn it, one’s children can wreck things!”

“You’re thinking of Jessie, aren’t you? Yes, I can see why. It would be awful for her, wouldn’t it?”

He pressed his lips together and leaned against the wall. He felt like a traveler in a depot in a strange city, uncertain where to go.

What the hell had she been doing, going to that house? She shouldn’t have gone abroad this summer! But how in blazes could he have guessed, when he made her a present of the trip, that she’d do a crazy thing like that? And then he remembered how the child Claire had come to him. Independent as hell, she did what she wanted and the devil take the hindmost! Well, the devil had taken it now, that was sure.

How in God’s name to bear with this, when he already had so much to crowd his brain: the institute, the daily round, the family? For so long he had stifled memory, by sheer force he had crowded it down. Would “anguish” be too strong a word for what he was feeling at this minute? He thought not. There would be grandchildren. They would belong to him and to Mary. Also to Jessie. It was—It was unthinkable! He groaned.

“Oh,” Hazel cried, “I’ve never seen you like this!” She mourned over him. “But surely if there’s nothing wrong with the young man, it can be worked out somehow. I mean, you don’t even know him, do you?”

“He’s her son. That’s awkward enough.”

“Yes, of course, but much more so for Jessie than for you. After all, you only had a few days’—affair—and never saw her again. My goodness, it’s ancient history! Anyway, there’s nothing you can do to stop it, is there? I mean, Claire’s a woman. You can’t very well order her around, can you?” She gave a small, nervous laugh. “Especially not Claire.”