Ice-Cream Headache (30 page)

They had not all four actually become veterinarians, in fact. Just the first son and the third son, Tom’s father. The first son didn’t really give a damn what he became, since all he really cared about was gambling, drinking and whores. Tall, ramrod-straight like the grandfather and ice-faced, he was the unmarried one, the bitter one who later had called the grandfather smart, or at least lucky, for having died when he did. He and the grandfather hated each other with cold implacability. He had wound up with his own dwindling—and neglected—livery stable in another county seat over near Evansville, while spending all his serious moments gambling in Evansville or Cincinnati. But the second son had rebelled. He did not like animals, and never had. Especially horses. When presented with his older brother’s tools, instruments and textbooks and ordered off to vet’s school he had run away from home and apprenticed himself to a drunken carpenter and cabinet-maker in a nearby town and become a drunken carpenter and cabinet-maker himself. Though he was still underage the grandfather did not try to bring him back. Instead he publicly disowned him as his son and disinherited him. A lean, gnarled, twisted man, bent from leaning over his cabinetry and carpentry tools, he and the grandfather loved each other as implacably as the grandfather and the oldest son hated each other. But this did not help make it possible for them to speak to each other during the next twenty years, and he did not get reinstated to his inheritance until the last weeks of the grandfather’s final illness, so that he had very little time to get used to it or enjoy it before The Crash wiped it out and forced him back to being a drunken carpenter again. But it was the fourth son, the “baby”—whom the other three insisted had been “babied,” all his life—who was the lucky one. By the time he was old enough to go off to vet’s college, inheriting from the third brother, Tom’s father, the tools and textbooks the third brother had inherited from the first, the grandfather had seen his mistake—if not about the low position of the veterinarian in the emerging social scale, at least about the emergence of the automobile. He was shipped off to law school, from which he graduated to become the grandfather’s law partner. After the grandfather’s death he inherited the law practice. But even that could not help him when The Crash came and everything was in Insul stock. After getting involved in a bootleg liquor deal while running for District Judge the very next year, he was forced to leave town. He went, leaving his wife behind him, but this did not stop him from taking with him everything else left of the family inheritance that was not nailed down, including the grandfather’s pistol collection, ownership of the family farm in the riverbottoms, and ownership of the big house on West Main Street, just how nobody ever quite knew. Mainly it was in fees for having done the legal work of the inheritance for all of them.

What could have flawed them all so? the four of them. Within five years of the grandfather’s death in 1929 the three of them, the uncles, would be dead of some violent death or other, each connected with some woman in some way or other. The eldest, the gambler, would be found sitting in his car with a knife in his chest on a back street in Henderson, Kentucky, and without his customary large roll of bills in his pocket; although the claim was that it was the irate husband of some enamored wife. The second son, the carpenter-cabinet-maker, would be found dead, burned, in the remains of his concrete-block workshop, where a gasoline stove—apparently—had exploded and caught fire while he slept in a chair with a whiskey bottle between his knees—this, after having found out two days before that he had gotten pregnant a young countrygirl distant cousin from down in the bottom part of the county near where the old family farm used to be. And the fourth son, the “baby,” after settling in Iowa and remarrying, then moving on from there minus his second wife to California, where he became a somewhat shady scandal- and divorce-lawyer on the periphery of Hollywood, would die at the wheel of his own (unpaid-for) Cadillac convertible in a drunk-driving accident with the wife of another man dead beside him.

That left the one. Tom’s father. The third son. Who might just as well be as dead as the rest of them, as far as his son was concerned. He had probably never argued with the grandfather once in his life. And he was a goddam veterinary today to prove it. A drunk veterinary. It was pretty obvious he hated his work. And what kind of life was that. For a man. Tom jetted spit at the white stone again, morosely, and hit it center. He knew a bit more than he was telling, too, about his father’s women. This was back when there were still any of them who would still have anything to do with him. He secretly suspected that in about five years his father would be dead too, a suicide maybe, dead of a pistol shot in the heart, or an overdose of pills, and without even having the prestige of the courage of having killed himself sober.

Tom was tired of sitting. And he had solved nothing. What was there to solve? That house. That damned big old house. He stretched out his legs in their corduroy pants in the cinder dust. There was a pissy smell in here, due to the working men taking a quick leak against the boards of the truck ramp inside the lumber yard, but he didn’t really mind it. After a moment he looked at his five dollar Bulova watch. It was barely eight o’clock, and he did not want to go home this soon. He didn’t want to go home at all. Except that he had to. He had to because he had to confront his sister about their date with her friend this afternoon in the deserted old house. The thought made his heart jump again despite his depression. But he wanted to wait to do that, to see his sister, until his idiot mother was busy.

But what could he do? He decided to ride out to the depot and watch the 8:53 go through. That would do it, that was it. Gingerly he crawled out of his sanctuary and after looking all around to make sure he hadn’t been seen, got his bike from against the yellow brick of the bank building.
Sanctuary—
that had been a good one. And he bet he was the only one in town who had read it, except maybe the librarian.

On the bike, riding out Main Street toward the tracks, his thoughts came back to his father despite himself. It had been Tom’s father, the grandchildren’s father, who had more or less emerged as the new family leader there in the white hospital room of the grandfather’s death, largely by default. He had become the grandfather’s favorite when he had fathered two children. None of the other three had had any children. And the grandfather cared a great deal, after the fashion of his time, about his family continuity. So he bought his third son a large fine family house—his reward—directly in back of his own big place with its Corinthian columns and huge old lawns on West Main, so that their backyards adjoined and he could be near the kids. Then he remodeled it for him, put it in his name, and installed him in it with his family; although of course, naturally, he could not stand the wife—the mother—who could not stand him either. Probably it was this being the old man’s favorite that had caused his father to step into the role of leader, Tom mused. But more likely it was that none of the other three wanted the job. At any price. In any case there wasn’t much of anything that needed leading at that moment. They were all “well-provided-for.” In Insul stocks. Even the two children appreciated that. Ha.

Tom remembered that outside the hospital under the stone and brick carriage porch of the
Sanitarium,
on the newly curving and richly planted driveway which the old self-taught doctor had just had redone commemorating that his one son had just graduated from Harvard Medical School, the men had shouldered into their topcoats in the chilly September night and got into their cars, switched on their lights and pulled away. His father had been the last to pull away, in his brand-new Studebaker. As he did, his wife, Tom’s mother, had begun to sob and cry again. She had hated the old man, the grandfather, ever since she had first met him, and he had equally disliked and detested her. Tom and his sister had whispered together in the backseat about this new state of things where they were no longer grandchildren. They knew all about the active dislike between their mother and the grandfather, since she had told them over and over how miserable and unhappy he made her life having to live so close to him, so they did not put too much stock in her weeping and grief. They were much more interested in where people went when they died.

Strangely enough, Tom thought, or perhaps not strangely at all, the grandfather although he had been quite hard on his own sons had gotten along remarkably well with his grandchildren. Maybe he was trying to undo with them what he felt he had done wrong with his sons? During summer vacations he would invite them over across the two backyards to drink heated milk in coffee mugs with him, while he himself had his morning coffee. He kept boxes of chocolates hidden around the house from which, if the children could find them, he would allow them to have one or two chocolate creams. He loved to feed them large doses of ice cream on summer afternoons, would laugh at them gently when they got the terrible sharp headaches from eating too much too fast, and then give them a gentle lecture on gluttony. He took them for walks around the big lawns and grounds and showed them trees, shrubs and flowers he had planted and nurtured. Did he ever look at them and wonder, Tom wondered now himself, study them and try to discover if the “Mark of Cain” he had somehow passed on to his sons had also passed on to them? “Mark of Cain” was certainly what he would have called it, Tom thought. By this time he must have been convinced he had failed them all. His guilt must have been an enormous felt mat, blanketing everything. “Mark of Cain” was almost what Tom would call it himself. Now. If he believed in things like “Marks of Cain,” But back then the children had known nothing of this. They knew only that their mother hated for them to spend so much time with grandpa, was jealous and complained that he gave them candy. All their spare time was spent whispering about ways to outwit and lie to her and get back to the grandfather.

At the railroad station four old men had taken over and apportioned among themselves the two benches on the station platform. Their knotty hands clasped and leaning on their creaky knees, these relics of another age, two of them chewing tobacco and spitting quietly down between their feet off the platform onto the gravel roadbed, sat and chatted while they waited for that same 8:53 Tom had come to look at. He did not go near them but backed off slowly and simply stood in the shadow of the depot, leaning against the wall. He had no use for the old-timers in the town except to be contemptuous of them. They were almost always mean and teasing all the kids, as if being old gave them certain special rights, and at the same time as if they were in some way jealous of the young. He certainly did not want to wind up spending his whole life in one town like them, to end up at the railroad station watching trains go through.

A sort of bleak despair of total hopelessness took him, making it unworth the effort it took to breathe, at the thought that that was probably just about what would happen to him. With no more money—and no more desire than his family had to educate and set up well their children, it was almost certainly what would happen to
him.
And his sister Emma.

The Crash, The Crash, always The Crash. The Crash and the Depression. Would his grandfather really have had the foresight, had he lived, to get out from under and save himself—and them? Other families had saved themselves, at least partially, and still lived in their big family houses. But Tom saw no reason to assume the old man would have. He had already made at least two serious mistakes in thinking. The future of the automobile was one, and the social status of the veterinarian was another. And what about the Insul stock itself? having so damned much of it? Total despair came over Tom Dylan again. They had done a hell of a lot for him and Emma, hadn’t they? He owed them a lot. He and Emma owed them an awful lot, didn’t they?

He did not even wait for the train to come through, but got on his bike and left. The encapsulated old men horrified him and at the same time scared him. The livery stable of course had been the first thing to go. It was going downhill all through the 1920s, and only the grandfather’s money kept it going. The man who bought it for a little of nothing was a mechanic and immediately turned it into a garage, a money-making garage, and his father was immediately reduced to a grubby one-room office and the taking care of people’s pets. The grandfather’s house could not be sold. It was a white elephant; nobody had money to lay out for a mansion of an earlier, wealthier time; everyone was retrenching. Anyway the lawyer uncle—and then his widow—wound up owning that, and she didn’t even live in the town. And then they, Tom’s family, had lost their own house.

It was about then, Tom remembered grimly, that all the party invitations and come-to-play requests had stopped coming in from the old family friends still in the old, once-familiar big houses along East and West Main Streets.

It was true the house had been in their name, his father’s name. But he had had to mortgage it almost at once, for the money to set himself up in a new vet’s office after giving up the livery stable. Then, when they could no longer keep up the payments, the foreclosure came. Since then they had been living in a rented house, an old inelegant place, given them—allowed them—at a very low rent, like poor relatives, by a rich old crony of the grandfather. The only thing at all nice about it was that it had three huge hard-maple trees in its small front yard. That was where he was going now.

He could tell the moment he walked into the darkly shaded old house that his mother was down in the basement washing. He could hear the washing machine motor hum-chugging away down there, and the house had an unanxious, unpreoccupied feel; the late-summer air outside sucked gently at the curtains at the windows. His sister lay on the divan in the tree-darkened livingroom, her favorite place, reading a book. For a moment he stood in the doorway motionless, studying her. If the grandfather had ever wondered about that “Mark of Cain” of his in his family, Tom thought suddenly, that flaw in the blood passed on in his seed, then he ought to see the two of us now. And yet he knew nothing would deter him. An earthquake might. They had done a hell of a lot for him, hadn’t they, and Emma? And their damned town had too, for that matter. His heart was pounding in him again, so hard it seemed to cut off half his breathing in his throat. Not as if she had just seen him, but as if she had been aware of him all the time, Emma lowered her book and looked at him and smiled. “Hello. You’re late getting home.”