Bagombo Snuff Box (28 page)

“Why?” said Karl. “Why?” He was angry.

“It makes the old man happy, and I don’t have any better
ideas.”

“You can do it,” Karl said. “You can go away. You can be anything
you want!”

Franklin put his hands together, then opened them to form a
flower of fatalism. “So can anybody.”

Karl’s eyes grew huge. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t! Your
father doesn’t just have you. He’s got his big success.” He turned away, so
Franklin couldn’t see his face. “All my old man’s got is me.”

“Oh, now, listen,” said Franklin. “Hey, now!”

Karl faced him. “I’m what he’d rather have than the half of
Waggoner Pump he could have had for two thousand dollars!” he said. “Every day
of my life he’s told me so. Every day!”

“Well, my gosh, Karl,” said Franklin, “it is a beautiful
relationship you’ve got with your father.”

“With my father?” said Karl incredulously. “With yours—with
yours.

It’s him I’m supposed to get to love me. He’s supposed to be
eating his heart out for a son like me. That’s the big idea.” He waved his
arms. “The station wagon, the duets, the guns that never miss, the damn-fool
son that works on hand signals—that’s all for your father to want.”

Franklin was amazed. “Karl, that’s all in your head. You are
what your own father would rather have than half of Waggoner Pump or anything!”

“I used to think so,” said Karl.

“The plate and cube you made,” said Franklin, “you gave them
to my father, but they were really a present for yours. And what perfect
presents from a son to a father! I never gave my father anything like that—anything
I’d put my heart and soul into. I couldn’t!”

Karl reddened and turned away again. “I didn’t make ‘em,” he
said. He shivered. “I tried. How I tried!”

“I don’t understand.”

“My father had to make ‘em!” said Karl bitterly. “And I
found out it didn’t make any difference to him who made ‘em, just as long as
your father thought I’d made ‘em.”

Franklin gave a sad, low whistle.

“When my old man did that, he rubbed my nose in what the big
thing was to him.” Karl actually wiped his nose on his jacket sleeve.

“But Karl—” said Franklin.

“Oh, hell,” Karl said, tired. “I don’t blame him. Sorry I
said anything. I’m OK—I’m OK. I’ll live.” He flicked the foil target with a
fingertip. “I’m gonna miss, and the hell with ‘em.”

Nothing more was said. The two trudged back to their
fathers. It seemed to Franklin that they were leaving behind all they’d said,
that the rising wind was whirling their dark thoughts away. By the time they
had reached the firing line, Franklin was thinking only of whiskey, steak, and
a red-hot stove.

When he and Karl fired at the foil, Franklin ticked a
corner. Karl hit it in the middle. Rudy tapped his temple, then saluted Karl
with a crooked finger. Karl returned the salute.

After supper, Rudy and Karl played duets for flute and
clarinet. They played without sheet music, intricately and beautifully.
Franklin and Merle could only keep time with their fingers, hoping that their
tapping on the tabletop sounded like drums.

Franklin glanced at his father. When their eyes met, they decided
that their drumming wasn’t helping. Their drumming stopped.

With the moment to think about, to puzzle him pleasantly,
Franklin found that the music wasn’t speaking anymore of just Rudy and Karl. It
was speaking of all fathers and sons. It was saying what they had all been
saying haltingly, sometimes with pain and sometimes with anger and sometimes
with cruelty and sometimes with love: that fathers and sons were one.

It was saying, too, that a time for a parting in spirit was
near—no matter how close anyone held anyone, no matter what anyone tried.

Moonlight is all right for young lovers, and women never
seem to get tired of it. But when a man gets older he usually thinks moonlight
is too thin and cool for comfort. Turley Whitman thought so. Turley was in his
pajamas at his bedroom window, waiting for his daughter Nancy to come home.

He was a huge, kind, handsome man. He looked like a good
king, but he was only a company cop in charge of the parking lot at the
Reinbeck Abrasives Company. His club, his pistol, his cartridges, and his
handcuffs were on a chair by the bed. Turley was confused and upset.

His wife, Milly, was in bed. For about the first time since
their three-day honeymoon, in 1936, Milly hadn’t put up her hair in curlers.
Her hair was all spread out on her pillow. It made her look young and soft and
mysterious. Nobody had looked mysterious in that bedroom for years. Milly
opened her eyes wide and stared at the moon.

Her attitude was what threw Turley as much as anything.
Milly refused to worry about what was maybe happening to Nancy out in the
moonlight somewhere so late at night. Milly would drop off to sleep without
even knowing it, then wake up and stare at the moon for a while, and she would
think big thoughts without telling Turley what they were, and then drop off to
sleep again.

“You awake?” said Turley.

“Hm?” said Milly.

“You decided to be awake?”

“I’m staying awake,” said Milly dreamily. She sounded like a
girl.

“You think you’ve been staying awake?” said Turley.

“I must have dropped off without knowing it,” she said.

“You’ve been sawing wood for an hour,” said Turley.

He made her sound unattractive to herself because he wanted
her to wake up more. He wanted her to wake up enough to talk to him instead of
just staring at the moon. She hadn’t really sawed wood while she slept. She’d
been very beautiful and still.

Milly had been the town beauty once. Now her daughter was.

“I don’t mind telling you, I’m worried sick,” said Turley.

“Oh, honey,” said Milly, “they’re fine. They’ve got sense.
They aren’t crazy kids.”

“You want to guarantee they’re not cracked up in a ditch
somewhere?” said Turley.

This roused Milly. She sat up, frowned, and blinked away her
sleepiness. “You really think—”

“I really think!” said Turley. “He gave me his solemn
promise he’d have her home two hours ago.”

Milly pulled off her covers, put her bare feet close
together on the floor. ‘All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m awake now. I’m
worried now.”

“About time,” said Turley. He turned his back to her, and
dramatized his responsible watch at the window by putting his big foot on the
radiator.

“Do—do we just worry and wait?” said Milly.

“What do you suggest?” said Turley. “If you mean call the police
to see if there’s been an accident, I took care of that detail while you were
sawing wood.”

“No accidents?” said Milly in a small, small voice.

“No accidents they know of,” said Turley.

“Well—that’s—that’s a little encouraging.”

“Maybe it is to you,” said Turley. “It isn’t to me.” He
faced her, and he saw that she was now wide awake enough to hear what he had
been wanting to say for some time. “If you’ll pardon me saying so, you’re
treating this thing like it was some kind of holiday. You’re acting like her
being out with that rich young smart-aleck in his three-hundred-horsepower car
was one of the greatest things that ever happened.”

Milly stood, shocked and hurt. “Holiday?” she whispered. “Me?”

“Well—you left your hair down, didn’t you, just so you’d
look nice in case he got a look at you when he finally brought her home?”

Milly bit her lip. “I just thought if there was going to be
a row, I didn’t want to make it worse by having my hair up in curlers.”

“You don’t think there should be a row, do you?” said
Turley.

“You’re the head of the family. You—you do whatever you
think is right.” Milly went to him, touched him lightly. “Honey,” she said, “I
don’t think it’s good. Honest I don’t. I’m trying just as hard as I can to
think of things to do.” “Like what?” said Turley.

“Why don’t you call up his father?” said Milly. “Maybe he
knows where they are or what their plans were.”

The suggestion had a curious effect on Turley. He continued
to tower over Milly, but he no longer dominated the house, or the room, or even
his little barefoot wife. “Oh, great!” he said. The words were loud, but they
were as hollow as a bass drum.

“Why not?” said Milly.

Turley couldn’t face her anymore. He took up his watch at
the window again. “That would just be great,” he said to the moonlit town. “Roust
L. C. Reinbeck himself out of bed. ‘Hello—L.C.? This is T.W What the hell is
your son doing with my daughter?’” Turley laughed bitterly.

Milly didn’t seem to understand. “You’ve got a perfect right
to call him or anybody else, if you really think there’s an emergency,” she
said. “I mean, everybody’s free and equal this time of night.”

“Speak for yourself,” Turley said, overacting. “Maybe you’ve
been free and equal with the great L. C. Reinbeck, but I never have. And what’s
more, I never expect to be.”

‘All I’m saying is, he’s human,” said Milly.

“You’re the expert on that,” said Turley. “I’m sure I’m not.
He never took me out dancing at the country club.”

“He never took me out dancing at the country club, either.
He doesn’t like dancing.” Milly corrected herself. “Or he didn’t.”

“Please, don’t get technical on me this time of night,” said
Turley. “So he took you out and did whatever he likes to do. So whatever that
was, you’re the expert on him.”

“Honey,” said Milly, full of pain, “he took me out to supper
once at the Blue Mill, and he took me to a movie once. He took me to The Thin
Man. And all he did was talk, and all I did was listen. And it wasn’t romantic
talk. It was about how he was going to turn the abrasives company back into a
porcelain company. And he was going to do the designing. And he never did
anything of the kind, so that’s how expert I am on the great Louis C. Reinbeck.”
She laid her hand on her bosom. “I’m the expert on you,” she said, “if you want
to know who I’m the expert on.”

Turley made an animal sound.

“What, sweetheart?” said Milly.

“Me,” said Turley, impatient. “What you’re an expert on—me?”

Milly made helpless giving motions Turley didn’t see.

He was standing stock-still, winding up tighter and tighter
inside. Suddenly he moved, like a cumbersome windup man. He went to the telephone
on the bedside table. “Why shouldn’t I call him up?” he blustered. “Why shouldn’t
I?”

He looked up Louis C. Reinbeck’s number in the telephone
book clumsily, talked to himself about the times the Reinbeck company had
gotten him up out of bed in the middle of the night.

He misdialed, hung up, got set to dial again. His courage
was fading fast.

Milly hated to see the courage go. “He won’t be asleep,” she
said. “They’ve been having a party.”

“They’ve been having a what?” said Turley.

“The Reinbecks are having a party tonight—or it’s just over.”

“How you know that?” said Turley.

“It was in this morning’s paper, on the society page.
Besides,” Milly continued, “you can go in the kitchen and look and see if their
lights are on.”

“You can see the Reinbeck house from our kitchen?” said
Turley.

“Sure,” said Milly. “You have to get your head down kind of
low and over to one side, but then you can see their house in a corner of the
window.”

Turley nodded quizzically, watched Milly, thought about her,
hard. He dialed again, let the Reinbecks’ telephone ring twice. And then he
hung up. He dominated his wife, his rooms, and his house again.

Milly knew that she had made a very bad mistake in the past
thirty seconds. She was ready to bite off her tongue.

“Every time the Reinbecks do anything,” said Turley, “you
read every word about it in the paper?”

“Honey,” said Milly, “all women read the society page. It
doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a silly something to do when the paper comes.
All women do it.”

“Sure,” said Turley. “Sure. But how many of ‘em can say to
theirselves, ‘I could have been Mrs. Louis C. Reinbeck’?”

Turley made a great point of staying calm, of being like a father
to Milly, of forgiving her in advance. “You want to face this thing about those
two kids out there in the moonlight somewhere?” he said. “Or you want to go on
pretending an accident’s the only thing either one of us is thinking about?”

Milly stiffened. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“You duck your head a hundred times a day to look at that
big white house in the corner of the kitchen window, and you don’t know what I
mean?” said Turley. “Our girl is out in the moonlight somewhere with the kid
who’s going to get that house someday, and you don’t know what I mean? You left
your hair down and you stared at the moon and you hardly heard a word I said to
you, and you don’t know what I mean?” Turley shook his big, imperial head. “You
just can’t imagine?”

The telephone rang twice in the big white house on the hill.
Then it stopped. Louis C. Reinbeck sat on a white iron chair on the lawn in the
moonlight. He was looking out at the rolling lovely nonsense of the golf course
and, beyond that and below, the town. All the lights in his house were out. He
thought his wife, Natalie, was asleep.

Louis was drinking. He was thinking that the moonlight didn’t
make the world look any better. He thought the moonlight made the world look
worse, made it look dead like the moon.

The telephone’s ringing twice, then stopping, fitted in well
with Louis’s mood. The telephone was a good touch—urgency that could wait until
hell froze over. “Shatter the night and then hang up,” said Louis.

Along with the house and the Reinbeck Abrasives Company,
Louis had inherited from his father and grandfather a deep and satisfying sense
of having been corrupted by commerce. And like them, Louis thought of himself
as a sensitive maker of porcelain, not grinding wheels, born in the wrong place
at the wrong time.