Vital Parts Read online

  Therefore he pulled in the horns which were unseemly on a parasite and blew a kiss at her departing back. He must face this crisis alone. He had a certain history of extremities, as who did not at his age; however, a precedent was lacking in this case. It takes no long deliberation to defend your life from an assailant who would destroy or mutilate it. Had Blaine and/or the neighbor’s daughter jumped Reinhart in a dark alley he would instinctively have fought like a tiger. But bare-assed and in bed together they were a much more formidable enemy, and his own position was badly eroded owing on the one hand to the incessant castration of having a son like Blaine, and on the other to his own voyeuristic lech for the girl.

  He who as a radiant young man had gone to fight the Nazis was now just another dirty old fascist. Reinhart had volunteered for the Army. Blaine was deferred as a college student and threatened to flee to Canada if the immunity was revoked and he was called to the colors. Reinhart half believed “we” should get out of S.E. Asia and with the remaining half-opinion, compounded of TV pictures of Vietcong atrocities, a historical sense of America’s world mission created initially by Adolf Hitler’s unopposed rise to tyrannical power, and the strident selfish objection of punks who served no cause but nihilism, favored the use of the hydrogen weapon. In less nervous moments he knew the latter of course as the expression of empty bombast, which he allowed himself since in no event was he ever consulted by White House or Pentagon.

  He was wont, in heat, to tell Blaine: “Christ, I had to go to a much bigger war. The Japs held the Pacific and the Krauts all of Europe except plucky little England, who swore to fight on the beaches and in the fields until the New World came to redress—”

  “Shi-i-i-i-t,” said Blaine in his poisonous, effeminate style of drawing out one-syllabled obscenities. “Why should I be a sucker just because you were?”

  And if Genevieve were in attendance, as she always tried to be lest Reinhart become physical with her darling—women and undersized, infirm, and nonviolent kinds of men tended to imply that Reinhart because of his size alone would answer reason with force; thugs like Gino on the other hand enjoyed a conviction that he would respond to their threats with pusillanimous cajolery: both in fact were right, Reinhart being a realist—if Gen were nearby she might at this juncture say. “He’s got you there, Carl, ha-HA.”

  The cruel feature of this was that never could Reinhart have been described as a superpatriot. Indeed, in his youth he had been much more cynical than Blaine. However, if he pointed this out to his son, Blaine would suddenly turn into that flabbiest of philosophers, the young idealist.

  Would swing his hair behind his right ear and squeeze his eyes into slits and then release the lids so as to flutter the long lashes while the blue irises swam in self-induced fury and pain and simulated compassion. “You still are a cynic about the poor and the blacks and youth and everything that represents change from the rotten system which has made you what you are.”

  “The system! What the hell have I ever got from it but debts? Am I a rich exploiter of the deprived? And don’t tell me anything about Negroes. Before you were born I had a colored friend whom I helped out of several scrapes. For which incidentally I can’t remember being thanked. I have been pro-Negro all my life, and in a time when it was not exactly popular.”

  Blaine wrinkled his long, skinny nose, an appendage the model for which could be found nowhere else on either side of the family. Reinhart might have been suspicious of Gen had Blaine been born so; but in fact as a baby the boy had shown a marked facial resemblance to Reinhart and his nose had actually been modest till puberty. Reinhart’s own now was somewhat porcine.

  “If I have ever called you fascist, I am sorry,” Blaine said. “You are far worse. You are a liberal, Northern style. The Southern type wears a sheet.”

  Then, as Reinhart lifted his fists in chagrin, Blaine quailed as if about to be struck.

  Which indeed put the thought into Reinhart’s head and not for the first time that day or this life. But he had never laid a hand on Blaine in twenty-one years. Blaine was legally a man. Reinhart could not get over that. Today, when the young clamored for power as never before, they nevertheless refused to grow up. In spirit a spoiled infant, Blaine was physically far from being a child. There were black shadows under his eyes and bird-tracks in the corners. As an Olympic swimmer he would have been an old man. Without his exaggerated growth of hair he might look thirty; with it he could be seen, through wincing eyes, as a homely woman fighting middle age.

  Yet there he was, over in the house next door, impugning the morals of a luscious minor. Reinhart had a dreadful thought, remembering an incident from a pornographic eight-page cartoon book of thirty years ago: a potbellied, balding dad finds young son in garage putting blocks to teen-aged girl, routs son, and climbs on maiden himself. A perfect situation for the unscrupulous, like that of the corrupt cop bursting in on a prostitute and her client. But the only way Reinhart could have managed it, and perhaps not even then, was if the initiative were taken by the girl: “If you won’t tell, I’ll—” Hardly likely in a shameless bitch who cared so little about publicity as not even to draw the blinds.

  He lurched through the hall and into the darkened bedroom, hurting the tender instep of his bare foot on a nasty shoe Genevieve had discarded just inside the door, by blind touch found his street clothes in a chair, and climbed into shirt, trousers, and sockless brogans. Gen was at length established as a dark breathing lump in the oversized bed, bought originally so as to accommodate his large figure but from which he had since been banished on charges of snoring, striking out with brutal fists while his consciousness was lost in dreams, muttering loathsome words, and being unemployed. For some time he had taken his nightly repose upon a studio couch against the windows.

  Dressed and back in the living room, his hand on the knob of the front door that projected one, in this tract house, directly into the yard, vestibules and front porches being now as obsolete as he, he hesitated. What would be the use? A rhetorical question on which his self-dialogues so often concluded. Try to borrow more money from Maw, apply for a job with Hal, make a pass at Elaine, attempt to converse with Gen, ask the bank for more time, expect the plumber to be prompt, even anticipate that a ham sandwich would be made with fresh bread and lean meat. What was the use?

  You are only beaten if you think so, said Thomas Edison or George Washington or Satchel Paige, as popularly quoted. But I think so, said Reinhart. I can’t invent a phonograph or lead armies or pitch a sinker. I am just a guy who regardless of what he thought at twenty knows at forty-four only that he will die. It is now grotesque to talk of anything else, especially suicide, which no real loser ever commits because it would deny him the years of pain he so richly deserves.

  He threw the lever freeing the brass bar which sealed the door against the entry of militant Negroes bent on massacring white households who had never done them wrong, and stepped out. Too late he saw another person preparing to enter, a girl shorter than he but, in a context relative to her own height and age, quite as stout, so sturdy in fact that their collision was a standoff from which each recoiled in an equal degree.

  “Sorry, Winona,” he said and backstepped inside.

  “Hi, Daddy,” said she, from a perspiring pumpkin-face under the proscenium of high wet bangs and skimpy side curtains of her Buster Brown coiffure.

  “How was the picture?”

  She breathed out heavily and ran a chubby finger through the channel between temple and ear. “Not as good as The Dead, the Maimed, and the Ravished. But not bad.”

  “Isn’t it funny they make those Westerns nowadays in Italy?” Reinhart observed, trying to make his mood seem light.

  “Italy?” Her soft brown eyes watered. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Now there’s no need to cry about that, Winona. They do it for economic reasons, I understand. Italian extras don’t cost so much.”

  She was already in full sob. “But it’s supposed to be Texas
. Oh, that just ruins it.” Winona was sixteen years old. With fallen shoulders she went to the couch and dumped herself into the corner spot earlier vacated by Gen, throwing her fat red thighs wide and clasping both chins.

  Reinhart reminded her of all the trouble in the world and what was worth tears and what not and gradually she peeped waterily up at him. “You see, darling,” he explained. “Even if it had been shot in present-day Texas it would be fictional, because cowboys don’t carry guns any more. It’s imaginary, anyway. As long as it’s believable on its own terms nothing else matters.” But she was not yet quite mollified, so he sat down next to her and put his heavy arm around her thick waist. She smelled of clean sweat, rather pleasantly, something like ginger in fact, but no doubt it added to her many social difficulties and he would have liked to find a way to tell her about it without reinciting a despair so hairtrigger as to be set off by disillusionment over a trashy movie.

  Winona rubbed her nose. She said: “Just as you begin to like something, you find it is not what you thought it was.”

  Reinhart stretched his left arm along the top of the sofa, “Yes, dear,” said he. “You begin to discover that at your age. And some people never get beyond it.” Meaning himself, for one. But the great thing about having a sympathetic child was that by projecting oneself into him or her one could look at universal difficulties in an equilibrium between intimacy and distance. For example, Winona could be considered as himself as a pudgy female of sixteen. At the same time, she was not he but an independent entity. He did not actually bleed if she were wounded, but of course he would willingly have taken any blows directed at her.

  On the other hand he could understand why people might want to abuse her: with very little effort they could elicit an expression of pain, succeeding which they naturally found her presence an unbearable reminder of the meanness they had hoped to discharge and forget about. This kept Winona in a state of imbalance. Those companions who tormented and then escaped from her today would welcome her back tomorrow for another episode of the same.

  A human condition to which she no doubt referred in her latest comment on the failure of reality and appearance to jibe. This was no new observation.

  “Did your friends give you the slip again?” Reinhart asked gently.

  “You guessed it.” However, Winona had by now returned to her usual phlegmatic state, which was the mask of pride. On her own initiative she complained only of seeing her principles mocked in the area of false animation, like movies, or gross materiality, like cheeseburgers and pizza. Until baited she would never mention her living contemporaries.

  “You want to talk about it?” asked Reinhart.

  She shrugged, which meant that her father felt the shifting of some seventy-five pounds of her upper body.

  “It might help,” he said. Or simply recall unpleasantness: one never really knows the soul of another, even one’s own offspring. Perhaps in bringing up the subject he was merely joining Winona’s persecutors.

  She dropped her wet head on his shoulder. “When I came out of the ladies’ room they were gone.”

  Reinhart threw his own legs out upon the carpet to match Winona’s position, and looking at his sockless shoes, he said: “They’ve done that before, haven’t they?”

  “They always do it.”

  She had her tiresome side. Reinhart raised his voice. “Well, hell, Winona, then you should be prepared. Those who can’t remember history are condemned to repeat it. Are you the only one who goes to the bathroom after the picture? You better train yourself to hold it.”

  She pulled away and said indignantly: “I always get a Coke from the machine on the way in, or a black cherry except that’s usually empty I don’t know why, because nobody much likes it but me. Beth has Seven-Up and Carol drinks Tab, and sometimes Dodie won’t have anything, but generally they all drink as much as I do and really we all go to the ladies’ afterward but they take the booths first and I have to wait and—”

  “OK,” said Reinhart. Somehow Winona had, in a day when other teen-aged girls had the sophistication of courtesans in the Age of Pericles, got herself into a crowd of creeps with nothing better to do postcinematically than practice toilet one-upmanship. But something good came of this in a selfish way: when he thought of Winona and her crowd he could never remember his lust for teen-agers.

  “OK,” he repeated. “You have a problem. The first thing to do is to identify it. Once that is done you can set about solving it. One, you don’t have to give up your soft drink. Two, the john must be visited. Three, you don’t want to get involved in a vulgar race for a booth, which would be undignified in a young lady.” Also, with her bulk she couldn’t run fast; he left that unsaid.

  She writhed against his arm. “Ummm. Daddy, this is embarrassing.”

  “Not to me, Winona,” he said quickly. “I see it as an exercise in tactics. Remember how you always beat me at checkers?” Because he let her. “You distract me by sacrificing one of your pieces, thus getting me into a position where you can jump three of mine. Now what I suggest is that before the picture is over, you get up and go to the toilet.”

  “What’s that got to do with checkers?”

  “I didn’t mean literally. I meant a similar use of the unexpected.”

  “And miss part of the picture?” Winona wailed.

  “Think of it this way,” said Reinhart. “You’re giving up one thing to get a better.”

  “You don’t know them. No matter when it was they would say it was the best part.”

  Winona had managed to carry losing to a rarefied height of proficiency that Reinhart himself seldom could attain.

  “What does it matter what they say?”

  “Then why,” howled Winona, “have them as friends?” She began to weep again, he saw from the southeast corner of his eye, looking down her cheeks which were also still running with sweat.

  “A good question, dear. Friends who are not friendly are not worth much.” Reinhart thought bitterly of various inert if not treacherous types for whom he had once entertained affection: few enough, actually, but he was attempting a vicarious projection into his daughter’s frame of life. “You are lucky to have discovered that this early. We all die alone, Winona, though we are accompanied when we come into the world. Living is a process of developing independence.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Winona said, settling against him like a bag of sand. “You are big and strong and popular and successful.”

  There were resplendent joys in having a daughter. At that moment Reinhart shook off the mortal coil: he had spent only half his years, in this era of improved medicine. He could still be anything he wanted, as at twenty. He could even realize Winona’s fantastic opinion of him.

  But why bother when, for no reason except that he had helped to conceive her, he already wore the crown? Reinhart loved this chubby child who, defying her epoch, refused to mature. He loved her for that, of course, and for her troubles, and for her resemblance to him, and because he had known her all her life, and because she loved him. But several of these same motives, or others of equal substance, also informed his feeling towards Blaine, and Gen too for that matter. He had enough cause to loathe his wife and son, perhaps, but he loved them. The difference was that Winona uniquely refused to confirm his self-hatred.

  She deserved to hear him say: “Well, it hasn’t always been easy. Daddy has had his knocks like everybody else.” She made some comfortable puppy-sound. “The main thing is not to quit, dear, not to lose your hope. Something wonderful may happen at any time, and you should be ready for it.” His arm was going to sleep at its broken-wing angle. For years he had worshiped the god of benevolent chance, who had repaid him in such bad fortune that the ringing of a telephone was often a knell and he could not bear to open his mail immediately.

  But now he cleaned off his ancient faith for presentation to his daughter, as one might take from the attic an old Flexible Flyer sled with which one had once broken his collarbone, apply new
varnish, and pass it on to a young heir. Blaine, who had from the age of twelve onwards an invincible sense of self-possession, had never given him an opportunity to do that.

  Subtly disengaging his sleeping arm, Reinhart noticed that Winona was also snoozing. So secure did she feel with her old dad. Her best features were a flawless skin that, though perspiring, did not show a pore, and long, fine lashes, now stuck to her moist lower lids by the sandman. “Does he really come and sprinkle your eyes, Daddy?” Not so many years ago she still asked that, and not before her first menses would she tolerate a Christmas Eve at which Reinhart did not steal in in a Santa suit (into which the last few times there had been no room for both his natural gut and a pillow) and laugh Ho-ho-ho while stuffing her capacious stocking.

  She awakened, though, as he levered himself up, freeing the couch of two hundred and sixty-five pounds—he had about a hundred on her when it came to weight—and asked, in terrified suspicion: “Where are you going, Poppy?” She had always called him that at bedtime.

  No longer could he seriously consider going next door and accosting Blaine and the girl. By making him feel superior, Winona also invariably weakened his moral resolve. Were he what she thought he was, he should have a lackey do his dirty work. Failing that, forget about it. Anyway, by now Blaine had surely emptied himself, impregnating the girl, and would run off scot-free while her father shot Reinhart: in the head, quickly, was his prayer.

  “I thought I might have a little snack,” Reinhart said, lumbering towards the kitchen, soon followed by her amble, and the two of them with greedy efficiency transferred many comestibles from the refrigerator to Formica tabletop and proceeded to wade in. Winona polished off a quart of homogenized milk and two and a half peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches while Reinhart cooked for each of them a one-eyed man, an egg fried into a hole in a slice of white bread. He washed his down with two sixteen-ounce cans of beer.