Steel (5 page)

“Iverson, your wrist,” said the doctor.

“Who knuckle-tap our chests and sound our hearts yet have no more conception of our ills than plumbers have of stars or pigs of paradise.”

“Your wrist, Iverson,” the doctor said.

Iverson Lord was near ninety. His limbs were glasslike and brittle. His blood ran slow. His heartbeat was a largo drum. Only his brain hung clear and unaffected, a last soldier defending the fort against senility.

“I refuse to die,” he announced as if someone had suggested it. His face darkened. “I will not let bleak nature dim my light nor strip the jewel of being from my fingers!”

“There, there,” said his wife.

“
There, there! There, there!
” rasped the poet, false teeth clicking in an outrage. “What betrayal is this! That I, who shape my words and breathe into their forms the breath of might, should be a-fettered to this cliché-ridden imbecile!”

Mrs. Lord submitted her delicate presence to the abuse of her husband. She strained out a peace-making smile which played upon her features of faded rose. She plucked feebly at mouse-gray curls.

“You're upset, Ivie dear,” she said.

“Upset!” he cried. “Who would not be upset when set upon by gloating jackals!”

“Father,” his daughter implored.

“Jackals, whose brains like sterile lumps beneath their skulls refuse to emanate the vaguest glow of insight into words.”

He narrowed his eyes and gave his life-long lecture once again. “Who cannot deal with word cannot deal with thought,” he said. “Who cannot deal with thought should be dealt with—mercilessly!” He pounded a strengthless fist on the counterpane.

“Words!” he cried. “Our tools, our glory and our welded chains!”

“You'd better save your strength,” his son suggested.

The jade eyes stabbed up, demolishing. Iverson Lord curled thin lips in revulsion.

“
Bug
,” he said.

His son looked down on him. “Compose your affairs, Father,” he said. “Accept. You'll find death not half bad.”

“I am not dying!” howled the old poet. “You'd murder me, wouldn't you! Thug! I shall not listen further!”

He jerked up the covers and buried his white-crowned head beneath them. His scrawny, dry fingers dribbled over the sheet edge.

“Ivie, dear,” entreated his wife. “You'll smother yourself.”

“Better smothered than betrayed!” came the muffled rejoinder.

The doctor drew back the blankets.

“Murdered!” croaked Iverson Lord at all of them, “brutally, foully murdered!”

“Ivie, dear, no one has murdered you,” said his wife. “We've tried to be good to you.”

“
Good!
” He grew apoplectic. “Mute good. Groveling good.
Insignificant
good. Ah! That I should have created the barren flesh about this bed of pain.”

“Father, don't,” begged his daughter.

Iverson Lord looked upon her. A look of stage indulgence flickered on his face.

“So Eunice, my bespectacled owl,” he said, “I suppose you are as eager as the rest to view your sire in the act of perishing.”

“Father, don't talk that way,” said myopic Eunice.

“What way, Eunice, my tooth-ridden gobbler—my erupted Venus? In literate English? Yes, perhaps that does put rather a strain on your embalmed faculties.”

Eunice blinked. She accepted.

“What will you do, child,” inquired Iverson Lord, “when I am taken from you? Who will speak to you? Indeed, who will even look?” The old eyes glittered a
coup de grâce.
“Let there be no equivocation, my dear,” he said gently. “You are ugly in the extreme.”

“Ivie, dear,” pleaded Mrs. Lord.

“Leave her alone!” said Alfred Lord. “Must you destroy everything before you leave?”

Iverson Lord raised a hackle.

“
You
,” he intoned, darting a fanged glance. “Mental vandal. Desecrator of the mind. Defacing your birthright in the name of business. Pouring your honored blood into the sewers of commerciality.”

His stale breath fluttered harshly. “Groveler before check books,” he sneered. “Scraper before bank accounts.”

His voice strained into grating falsetto. “
No
, madame.
Assuredly
, madame. I kiss with reverent lips your fat, unwholesome mind,
Madame!
”

Alfred Lord smiled now, content to let the barrages of his father fall upon himself.

“Let me remind you,” he said, “of the importance of the profit system.”

“Profit system!” exploded his sire. “Jungle system!”

“Supply and demand,” said Alfred Lord.

“Alfred, don't,” Eunice cautioned.

Too late to prevent venous eyeballs from threatening to discharge from their sockets. “Judas of the brain!” screamed the poet. “Boy scout of intellect!”

“I pain to mention it,” Alfred Lord still dropped coals, “but even a businessman may, tentatively, accept Christianity.”

“Christianity!” snapped the jaded near-corpse, losing aim in his fury. “Outmoded bag of long-suffering beans! Better the lions had eaten all of them and saved the world from a bad bargain!”

“That will do, Iverson,” said the doctor. “Calm yourself.”

“You're upset, Ivie,” said his wife. “Alfred, you mustn't upset your father.”

Iverson Lord's dulling eyes flicked up final lashes of scorn at his fifty-year whipping post.

“My wife's capacity for intelligible discourse,” he said, “is about that of primordial gelatine.”

He patted her bowed head with a smile. “My dear,” he said, “you are nothing. You are absolutely nothing.”

Mrs. Lord pressed white fingers to her cheek. “You're upset, Ivie,” her frail voice spoke. “You don't mean it.”

The old man sagged back, dejected.

“This is my penitence,” he said, “to live with this woman who knows so little of words she cannot tell insult from praise.”

The doctor beckoned to the poet's family. They moved from the bed toward the fireplace.

“That's right,” moaned the rotting scholar, “desert me. Leave me to the rats.”

“No rats,” said the doctor.

As the three Lords moved across the thick rug they heard the old man's voice.

“You've been my doctor twenty years,” it said. “Your brain is varicosed.” “I am to perish,” it bemoaned, “sans pity, sans hope, sans all.” “Words,” it mused. “Build me a sepulcher of words and I shall rise again.”

And domineered: “This is my legacy! To all semantic drudges—irreverence, intolerance and the generation of unbridled dismay!”

The three survivors stood before the crackling flames.

“He's disappointed,” said the son. “He expected to live forever.”

“He
will
live forever,” Eunice emoted. “He is a great man.”

“He's a little man,” said Alfred Lord, “who is trying to get even with nature for reducing his excellence to usual dust.”

“Alfred,” said his mother. “Your father is old. And … he's afraid.”

“Afraid, perhaps. Great? No. Every spoken cruelty, every deception and selfishness has reduced his greatness. Right now he's just an old, dying crank.”

Then they heard Iverson Lord. “Sweep her away!” howled the sinking poet. “Whip her away with ninetails of eternal life!”

The doctor was trying to capture the flailing wrist. They all moved hastily for the bed.

“Arrest her!” yelled Iverson Lord. “Let her not embrace me as her lover! Avaunt—black, foul-faced strumpet!” He took a sock at her. “Avaunt, I say!”

The old man collapsed back on his pillow. His breath escaped like faltering steam. His lips formed soundless, never-to-be-known quatrains. His gaze fused to the ceiling. His hands twitched out a last palsied gesture of defiance. Then he stared at the ceiling until the doctor reached out adjusting fingers.

“It's done,” the doctor said.

Mrs. Lord gasped. “
No
,” she said. She could not believe.

Eunice did not weep. “He is with the angels now,” she said.

“Let justice be done,” said the son of dead Iverson Lord.

*   *   *

It was a gray place.

No flames. No licking smoke. No pallor of doom obscured his sight. Only gray—mediocre gray—unrelieved gray.

Iverson Lord strode through the gray place.

“The absence of retributive heat and leak-eyed wailing souls is pre-eminently encouraging,” he said to himself.

Striding on. Through a long gray hall.

“After-life,” he mused. “So all is not symbolic applesauce as once I had suspected.”

Another hallway angled in. A man came walking out briskly. He joined the scholar. He clapped him smartly on the shoulder.

“Greetings, mate!” said the man.

Iverson Lord looked down his mobile, Grecian nose.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, distaste wrinkling his words.

“What do you know?” said the man. “How's life treating you? What do you know and what do you say?”

The semanticist drew back askance. The man forged on, arms and legs pumping mightily.

“What's new?” he was saying. “Give me the lowdown. Give me the dirt.”

Two side halls. The man buzzed into one gray length. Another man appeared. He walked beside Iverson Lord. The poet looked at him narrowly. The man smiled broadly.

“Nice day, isn't it?” he said.

“What place is this?” asked Iverson Lord.

“Nice weather we've been having,” said the man.

“I ask, what place is this?”

“Looks like it might turn out nice,” said the man.

“Craven!” snapped Iverson Lord, stopping in his tracks. “Answer me!”

The man said, “Everybody complains about the weather but nobody…”

“Silence!”

The semanticist watched the man turn into a side hallway. He shook his head. “Grotesque mummery,” he said.

Another man appeared.

“Hi, you!” cried Iverson Lord. He ran. He clutched the man's gray sleeve. “What place is this?”

“You don't say?” said the man.

“You will answer me, sirrah!”

“Is that a fact?” said the man.

The poet sprayed wrath upon the man. His eyes popped. He grabbed at the man's gray lapels. “You shall give intelligence or I shall throttle you!” he cried.

“Honest?” said the man.

Iverson Lord gaped. “What density is this?” he spoke incredulously. “Is this man or vegetable in my hands?”

“Well, knock me down and pick me up,” said the man.

Something barren and chilling gripped the poet. He drew back muttering in fear.

Into an enormous room. Grey.

Voices chattered. All alike.

“It's swell here,” said a voice. “It isn't black as pitch.”

“It isn't cold as ice,” said another.

The poet's eyes snapped about in confused fury. He saw blurred forms, seated, standing, reclining. He backed into a gray wall.

“It isn't mean as sin,” a voice said.

“It isn't raining cats and dogs,” said another.

“Avaunt.” The ancient lips framed automatically. “I say…”

“Gee whiz, but it's super dandy swell-elegant!” a voice cried happily.

The poet sobbed. He ran. “Surcease,” he moaned. “Surcease.”

“I'm in the plumbing game,” said a man running beside him.

Iverson Lord gasped. He raced on, looking for escape.

“It's a rough game, the plumbing game,” said the man.

A side hall. Iverson Lord plunged in frantically.

He ran past another room. He saw people cavorting around a gray maypole.

“By George!” they cried in ecstasy. “Great Guns! Holy Mackerel! Jiminy Cricket!”

The scholar clapped gaunt hands over his ears. He hurled himself on, driven.

Now, as he ran, there started in his ears a murmuring. A chorusing.

“A Stitch In Time Saves Nine. Time And Tide Wait For No Man.” They chanted. “Early To Bed, Early To Rise. Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth.”

Iverson Lord cried out. “Gods of moulded symbol!
Pity!
”

The chorus hallelujahed. “Oh Boy!” they sang. “Wow! Gee Whiz! Hot Stuff!” Their voices swelled into a mighty “Land O' Goshen!”

“Aaaaah!” howled the poet. He flung himself against a gray wall and clung there while the voices surrounded like melodic fog.

“Oh, my God,” he rasped. “This is complete, this is unmitigated hell!”

“YOU SAID IT!” paeaned the chorus of thousands. “AIN'T IT THE TRUTH! OH WELL, YOU CAN'T LIVE FOREVER! THAT'S THE WAY IT GOES! HERE TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW! THAT'S LIFE!”

In four part harmony.

THE WEDDING

Then he told her they couldn't be married on Thursday because that was the day the Devil married his own mother.

They were at a cocktail party and she wasn't sure what he'd said because the room was noisy and she was a little high.

“What, darlin'?” she asked, leaning over to hear.

He told her again in his serious straightforward manner. She straightened up and smiled.

“Honest, you're a card,” she said, and took a healthy sip from her Manhattan.

Later, while he was driving her home, she started talking about the day they were going to get married.

He said they'd have to change it: any day was all right except Thursday.

“I don't get you, darlin'.” She put her head on his unbroad and sloping shoulder.

“Any day is all right except Thursday,” he repeated.

She looked up, half the amusement dying hard. “All right hon,” she said. “A joke's a joke.”

“Who's joking?” he inquired.

She stared at him. “Darlin', are you crazy?”