The Big Rock Candy Mountain (98 page)

Quietly he set the mug down, folded pawn tickets and papers into the envelope, and stood up, thinking of the radiator downstairs, the little hall with the carpet taken up, the door with the bullet hole. His father had wasted himself in a thousand ways, but he had never been an incompetent. Even in that last despair, that last shattered minute when rage led him to include the woman in his plan of death, he had done a workmanlike job. He killed the woman with one shot through the door, and he killed himself cleanly with another. There were so many things the old man could do a good job on. He had had a knack for versifying and story-telling, he was a dead shot with any kind of gun, he could take an automobile apart and put it back together in the dark, he was a carpenter, a cabinet-maker, he was strong as a bull, stubborn as a mule, single-minded as a monk. And all of that wasted in the wrong causes, all of that coming to its climax with a neat and workmanlike job of murder and suicide.

There was a light knock on the door, and he swung around, stuffing the papers into his coat as if he had stolen them. A tall and very thin woman stood there, looking at him with a soft, almost dewy expression in her eyes. Her mouth twitched. “You're his son,” she said.

“I heard you were here,” she said. “I had to come and see you. I'm Mrs. Winter, I live just down the hall.”

“I see,” he said, wondering what she had to do with it, where she came in. Another of his father's women?

“You look like your picture,” Mrs. Winter said. “He showed it to me once.”

“You mean he had a picture of me?”

“In his wallet.”

That shamed him too. The man he had hated all his life carried a picture around in his wallet, showed it to people, perhaps with pride. Everything in this bare, cheap little room shamed him.

“Did you see much of him ... before?” he said.

She had started to cry, without noise. “He was just desperate,” she said. “He told me a month ago he was going to do it, and he was so violent and hard you couldn't come near him. He told me a couple of weeks ago he was going to do it the next day.”

“What stopped him then?” Bruce said. His imagination was on ahead of her, seeing the despair and hopelessness and desperation coming face to face with the final violence, and shying away, weakening.

“I don't know,” she said. “I did what I could. I got a friend of mine with a car and we all went out to the lake and drove around all afternoon, and I talked to him. I told him he'd get back on his feet, but he just looked out the window and gritted his teeth. I kept him up as late as I could that night, but when he left I was scared to death. Then I saw him the next morning, and I was so relieved!”

“Yes,” Bruce said.

“I thought he was all over it,” Mrs. Winter said. “The last three or four days before it happened he was just as sweet, just as gentle and smiling, you'd have thought all his troubles had been settled. And all the time he had that gun he'd got the permit for.”

“I guess,” Bruce said, “that nobody could have done anything to stop him. You were good to try.”

“I liked him,” Mrs. Winter said. “He was honest.”

Honest? Bruce said. Honest? Well, maybe, with everyone but himself. He could cheat himself, and fool himself, and justify himself, every time. But those last few days? he said. Those three or four days when he went around quiet and smiling and gentle, with the pawn-shop gun in his pocket? He was honest with himself then, for perhaps the first and last time. Everything was over for him then. Even the last act, then, must have seemed unimportant.

He put out his hand to Mrs. Winter. “Thank you for being his friend,” he said. “I guess he didn't have many, at the last.”

“Everybody turns against you when you're down,” she said. “I know.” With her face bent she went with short quick steps down the hall and turned in a door.

And there was one version. Harry Mason, that old lush who hung around the Winston lobby and sponged meals and five-dollar loans from anybody he could collar, that old broken-down Big Shot who still dreamed of fantastic wealth out of a Nevada gold mine, was to one woman at least an honest man, a kind man, a misunderstood man, an unhappy man.

Oh most certainly an unhappy man, he said, and stood in the open door of his father's room with the tears hot and sudden in his eyes, thinking of that picture in the wallet and of those three or four days when he was kind and gentle and smiling, with a gun in his pocket.

 

At eleven thirty he fell into bed at Joe's and lay sleepless for hours, his eyes burning up into the darkness and his hands and feet feeling immense, swollen, elephantine from the quarts of coffee he had drunk on the road. He threshed it all through and cried hard racking sobs into the dark, and when he finally fell asleep he slept until noon.

Then there was the undertaker to see, and the discovery, this third time he had used him, that the undertaker was an old whiskey customer of his father's. He laid out the things taken from Bo Mason's clothes—a wallet with five dollars in it, a handful of change, an address book, some keys, a couple of pencils—and talked sadly and thoughtfully, drumming with his finger tips on the desk. He had seen Harry around occasionally. No idea he was hard up or in trouble. It was a terrible and mysterious thing. Couldn't have been money only, because Harry had plenty of friends who would have been glad to see him through a bad spot. He'd have given him a loan himself, if he'd known. He was full of friendship and sympathy and careful avoidances, he made no effort to sell Bruce an expensive casket, he loaned him a car to run errands in. Bruce wanted to despise him for his profession and his careful talk, but he couldn't despise him. He was too genuinely helpful.

While he was talking in the office a woman came into the hushed parlor, and through the door, in a tearful whisper, asked if she could see Mr. Mason, asking as if she expected not to be allowed to. She looked at Bruce once, then ignored him, but as she was starting down the hall she turned to look again, stared steadily with an anguished pucker between her eyes. Her face was vaguely familiar.

“Aren't you,” she said, coming back a few steps. “You aren't ... Bruce?”

“Yes.”

In an instant she was in his arms, hanging onto him, sobbing, her ravaged and repaired face close to his, crying out that it was terrible, oh my God it was terrible, why did he do it, why did he ever get mixed up with that woman, oh my God she couldn't believe it. She would have come to him, she would have left her family and everything else, and had told him so, but not while Elsa was alive, she wouldn't have hurt Elsa for anything in the world, but she could have kept him from that woman, and my God, Bruce, she wished she had, she wished she had.

Leaning back a little, Bruce said yes, and no, and yes. She mustn't take it so hard, there was nothing anyone could do now, nobody was to blame.

She clung to him for a little while, got control of her babbling and her tears, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, looked at him yearningly, and finally went down the hall, and he never did find out who she was or where he had known her or what connection there had ever been between her and his father.

Next there was the insurance man, Hammond. He too shook Bruce's hand, asked him about his studies, wanted to know where he was going to hang up his shingle. He too kept his face closed and his mouth discreet, looked up the policy and found that sixty dollars had been borrowed on it. That would have to be deducted from the claim.

“I got Harry this policy after he got sick a couple years ago,” he said. “Pretty hard to get it through the office. He wasn't well, he wasn't well at all. Had some kind of stroke, blood pressure way up.”

He filled in blanks and asked questions, shook his head as he waited for the ink to dry. Words of condolence, of sympathy, were on the tip of his tongue, and Bruce knew it. The man might even be grieved at Bo Mason's death. But it was not a death you could talk about. All Hammond could say was “Yes sir, I've known Harry for almost fifteen years.” That seemed to express what it was possible to express under the circumstances. He repeated it when he shook Bruce's hand in farewell and assured him that the policy would come right through, two weeks or so at the most. A graying and not-too-prosperous business man, he stood shaking Bruce's hand thoughtfully, saying Yes sir, he'd known Harry for fifteen years.

Not, Bruce thought angrily on his way out, “Yes sir, Harry was a swell guy, one of the best, his death is a loss.” Not that. Not even “Yes sir, Harry and I have been friends for fifteen years.” It took courage to say to the son of a murderer and suicide that you liked him, that he was your friend. It took courage even to talk about the manner of his death. The best you could say was ...

Damn them, he said, if they can't say anything good about him why don't they keep their mouths shut?

The minister who said the few ritual words in the funeral parlor was obviously embarrassed. He clearly found it difficult to say much over the body of one who had lived and died by violence, and though he was bound to ask God's grace on this poor sinner, he did it only with half a heart, and spent most of his ten minutes on the afflictions that are visited upon mankind, the trials that come in life, the unhappiness that burdens us from the cradle to the grave. Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. This little family, for instance, had been grievously stricken. Within three years the mother, the son, and now the father had been struck down. He prayed that God's mercy would be with them all, and with the young man who survived.

As he halted on, avoiding direct reference to Bo Mason, making solemn generalities in the solemn padded parlor, talking about a man he had not known, and lamenting for a family he had never heard of until today, Bruce could feel him all the way wanting to make the body of this Bo Mason the subject of a sermon on the wages of sin, holding back because the offices he was conducting prohibited any ill-speaking of the dead; and so, morally indignant and yet unable to speak his mind, limping through his solemn and meaningless ten minutes. As he talked, Bruce's mind worked in ironic counterpoint:

This man whom today we consign to the grave, this Harry Mason, was a man whom I and many others have condemned. We have sat in judgment on him, and we have found him guilty of violence, brutality, wilfulness. He was frequently inconsiderate of others, he was obtuse about other people's wishes. He was a man who never knew himself, who was never satisfied, who was born disliking the present and believing in the future. He was not, by any orthodox standard, a good husband or a good father. He chafed against domestic restraints, ruled by violence instead of love, forced his wife and children to live a life they despised and hated. He broke the law, he blasphemed, he served Mammon, he was completely incapable of anything remotely resembling social responsibility, and with dedicated selfishness he went after the Big Money. He wore out his wife and broke her heart, he destroyed one son and turned the other against him. At the end he degenerated into a broken old man, sponging a bare living and sustaining himself on a last gilded and impossible dream; and when he could no longer bear the indignities which the world heaped upon him, and when the dream broke like a bubble, he sought some way, out of an obscure and passionate compulsion to exonerate himself, to lay the blame onto another, the woman who had been his mistress. He shot her and then turned the gun upon himself, thus ending his life appropriately and fittingly, in violence. God may have mercy on this Harry Mason, but he may also wreak justice. God's will be done.

Yet this Harry Mason, violent and brutal and unthinking, this law-breaker and blasphemer, kept for over a quarter of a century the love of as good a woman as ever walked, my mother, and when he appeared to abandon her just before her death, he did so because the prospect of her death was intolerable to him, because in spite of his bullying and self-willed spirit he loved and cherished her, and he knew that the best of himself would die when she died.

This same father who broke the spirit and spoiled the chances of his older son took a very great pride in that son's exploits, had dreams for him as golden as his dreams for himself, shook with nightmares for months after that son died. This same father who turned his second son into an animate cold hatred carried a photograph of that son in his wallet to the morning of his death. This same selfish fortune-hunter was so little cold and calculating that in his last years he was a sucker for the really calculating, the women and promoters who drained off his money and left him sick and broke in a second-rate hotel. This Harry Mason, this anti-social monster, could be nobly generous on occasion, could be affectionate, could weep like a child.

It is of that child that we should be talking and thinking while we sit here in judgment over the body of Harry Mason, that child with a quick mind and talented hands, a child off on the wrong foot and unable to see that he was wrong, a child with tremendous self-reliance and tremendous energy and a tremendous drive toward the things that seemed to him good. If he went wrong, he was mistaken, not vicious; or if vicious, his viciousness was merely the product of the balking of his will. And let us remember that at the end he did not run or try to hide from himself, he saw himself for a little while honestly, and only the last minute of rage which led him to kill the woman too prevented his death from being a thing almost humble. As it was, he saw near at hand two people who had wronged and betrayed and disgraced him, and as his last act he killed them both.

Harry Mason was a child and a man. Whatever he did, any time, he was a completely masculine being, and almost always he was a child, even in his rages. In an earlier time, under other circumstances, he might have become something the nation would have elected to honor, but he would have been no different. He would always have been an undeveloped human being, an immature social animal, and the further the nation goes the less room there is for that kind of man. Harry Mason lived with the woman who was my mother, and whom I honor for her kindness and gentleness and courage and wisdom. But I tell you at his funeral, and in spite of the hatred I have had for him for many years, that he was more talented and more versatile and more energetic than she. Refine her qualities and you would get saintliness, but never greatness. His qualities were the raw material for a notable man. Though I have hated him, and though I neither honor nor respect him now, I can not deny him that.