Part 40 (1/2)
Dares not confront her. Or them. Though keenly aware of her small swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her hard swelling belly with its bluish pallor, sin pulled tight as a drum's.
Spying on them, the lovers. Though they must be aware of him for how innocently they behave: never so much as touching, not even fingertips, while he's a witness.
To Darian's astonishment, and the surprise of the Lutheran congregation, Abraham Licht turns up one Sunday for the ten o'clock service in snappy red suspenders, a yellow scarf knotted about his old-man wattled throat, in handsome if soiled homburg and those fine hand-sewn leather shoes promised to last a lifetime (as they will); to hear the twenty-member choir sing choruses and arias from Handel's Messiah, with creditable results. Abraham, aficionado of grand opera, a musical elitist, finds himself moved by this country-church choir and has to suppose that, yes, his son has had something to do with the beauty of their combined, thrilling voices. Yet abruptly he slips away before the service ends for a pulse has begun beating in his head Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing. An unmistakable message for the elderly husband of a young wife pregnant with another's seed.
A PROLONGED RAINY-WINDY October. Shall we never survive October. The insult of the banker Carr (Vanderpoel Trust) still fresh in Abraham's memory, refusing to lend him $1,200: a mere fraction of $12,000. Nothing is but what is not Abraham writes in a careful hand across the top of a clean sheet of stationery.
The well water, always so clear, and so delicious, now has a flat metallic taste. Its purity lost, contaminated by toxins. Yet when Abraham slyly invites Darian to sample it in his presence, Darian drinks a full gla.s.s of the stuff; and calmly denies to his father that there's anything wrong with it.
Abraham bursts into laughter. ”My boy, you should have gone onto the stage, not me. How brave, how reckless-to drink that poison down without flinching.”
”Father, there's nothing wrong with our water. I'm sure.”
And, ”Abraham, there's nothing wrong with our water. I'm sure.”
(Mrs. Licht, hair tied back in a rag of a scarf, in a much-laundered old white bag of a s.h.i.+rt and a pair of formerly glamorous wool-silk slacks, must contribute her two cents worth from a corner of the kitchen. Her forced, anxious smile. Those eyes glazed with guilt.) Abraham, chuckling, drifts away. Checking the Winchester in his study closet: well oiled, but beginning to pick up minuscule bits of grit and dust. He stares into the twin sockets of the barrels. Eyeless. If an emergency comes, old Katrina flying down the chimney another time, or government agents crawling through the marsh in their ingenious rubber suits (he'd been issued one, involved in surveillance for the Bureau), he won't have time to load the shotgun and so must keep it loaded. A gentleman does not soil his gloves.
In addition, unknown even to the household, adulterous spies, Abraham has acquired a second firearm: a .38-caliber handgun, Smith & Wesson, nickel-plated with a handsome mother-of-pearl handle, surprisingly heavy, purchased in a sporting goods store in Innisfail, in a back room. A ”debt collector” the storekeeper called it. This, too, Abraham keeps loaded at all times; and since it's small enough, no problem to slip it into his coat pocket when he leaves the house.
Once an enemy is dead, however, he's dead; and nothing can be collected from him. A principle of British common law.
He'd had a law practice once. A flouris.h.i.+ng practice. In Philadelphia. The Shrikesdale woman had been his client, seeking her lost son. And though he'd found her son for her, the woman had repudiated him. ”And now all is lost. Ridiculous!”
He wonders: if his enemies are dead, who is spying on him from the outside, as surely they are; ransacking his doc.u.ments, perusing his journal so he's obliged now to write exclusively in code.
Starlings, grackles, red-winged blackbirds calling excitedly to one another in the old Nazarene graveyard. A flocking of birds-how like a flocking of men. And old Katrina disguised as one of the birds, wide wings flapping close to his (shade-drawn) window. It's those closest to us in blood-kins.h.i.+p who return to haunt us. Most urgent then their corpses must be buried deep!
HE HAS YET to experiment with either the handgun or the shotgun.
He fears their explosive power. Once detonated, set loose upon the (guilt-ridden) world.
Frankly he confronts Rosamund and in astonishment she denies she's pregnant. As she'd denied she has Arthur Grille's money secreted away in an account in Vanderpoel Trust.
(It's Rosamund's claim that Abraham invested all her money years ago and that it was lost with his.) Yet she's his wife. ”Lawful wedded.”
”In sickness and in health.”
”Till death do us part.”
If she carries another's b.a.s.t.a.r.d in her belly, this child will be Abraham Licht's under the law. Does she know that?
Denies it. Denies it.
. . . Approximately $2 million in securities and property out on Long Island, Abraham is certain, moving the kerosene lamp so that he can see his wife's tense face more clearly. (Perhaps to spite him, who so dotes upon female beauty, Rosamund has allowed her hair to become shapeless, a wavy mop of silvery-brown; she now wears schoolgirl wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, with the excuse that she's nearsighted.) I remember our joint surprise, that your father hadn't disinherited you after all.
But you invested it, Abraham. I signed it over to you that day. Father's lawyers were witnesses don't you remember. Please remember. You invested it, it was lost with everything else.
The woman lies, lies. Yet not at all as Millicent lied, for she lacks Millicent's dramatic talent as she lacks Millicent's cla.s.sic beauty. A country-wife slattern, in men's rubber boots clucking as she scatters kernels of corn for the chickens, a noisy brood of red hens lacking a rooster; and a bad influence upon the little girl in thrown-together clothes and bobbed hair showing the tips of her ears, allowed to play with neighbors' brats up the Pike where talk is of Abraham Licht brought low, Abraham Licht a ruined man. In the sacred privacy of the marital bed there must never be lies, Abraham warns the woman. Tell me where the vault is, where you've hidden the money, a wife's property is her husband's property under the law. Tell me. Why you no longer love me.
”Abraham, no! Please!”-hiding her guilty face, beginning to weep.
Now when she disrobes she'll have something to show her lover: a kidney-shaped bruise on her upper arm, a peach of a bruise beneath her eye, and those ugly wire gla.s.ses bent. Don't tempt me farther Abraham whispers.
At dusk of a November day there comes Abraham Licht to his son's window, in a jocular mood; thin cheeks overgrown with stubble, eyes playful, a grimy green cap found on the road pulled down low on his forehead; raps on the pane, and is admitted by the makes.h.i.+ft door to declare, ”My boy, you're making a fool of yourself in the world's eyes. I know what people are saying, though I scorn gossip. You should marry before it's too late. You can't know what joy it is to have a wife and a child of your own.”
A not-subtle emphasis upon the words ”of your own.”
Darian, just returned from an eight-hour stint at Muirkirk High School (where this half year he's a full-time teacher of something called social studies and music and helps out with boys' gym), stares at his father without comprehending. Decides to make a joke of it-”True, Father. I don't know. But life isn't so easily arranged.”
Glaring about the cluttered room, at the madman pianos and other instruments, stringed, of gla.s.s, bamboo, G.o.d knows what-tin cans, baling wire-Abraham says sneering, ”Life is never arranged 'easily,' Darian. It's arranged by force.”
As if I had never been.
Licht-extinguished!
(For where one can pun, like Shakespeare's Falstaff, in fact one hasn't yet gone out.) THOUGH BY DEGREES he's swinging away from Time. Its wearying cycle of caprices. Who has just captured the Presidency of the United States with the ridiculous promise of a New Deal; who is lost and consigned to oblivion.
That marshy oblivion in which enemies, like lovers, like one's own children, are swallowed up.
Mere bubbles on the sc.u.mmy surface. Silence, once the birds' shrieking ceases.
He's lucid. He's calm. He's in excellent physical condition.
His eyes . . . his eyesight. A wavy, wavering brightness. Sunspots. Cataracts? He's explaining to Deerfield, a fattish young man with thick-lensed gla.s.ses, that he wouldn't trust Vanderpoel General Hospital to operate on an ingrown toenail of his let alone his eyes. Telling Deerfield he doesn't wish to be examined with a stethoscope thank you. His heart, lungs, inner organs listened to. No thank you.