The Man Who Was Left Behind (3 page)

The secretary stiffened for a moment as he walked in,
seemed nailed to her chair, and then rose, smiling uncomfortably.

“Mr. Mackenzie?”

“Hello, Jeanie.”

“I hardly knew you with your beard.”

“Not a beard. I’ve just been forgetting to shave. Maybe I’ll grow one.”

“I’ll just tell Mr. Bender you’re here.”

Mr. Bender. Young Stukely Bender, who was Ben’s age; very outgoing, but not smart enough to deserve the job he had. He got it through his father, who had been Mackenzie’s best friend. They had been in the war together and after the funeral he thought: people say that, we’ve been through the wars together, and that’s exactly what it means, it says everything.

The door opened and the secretary came out, showing him in with her hand. At the far end of the room Bender could be seen advancing with his hand out to be shaken, his face as the door closed still friendly but rigid. Mackenzie nodded, said, “Hello, Stuke,” put his hands in his pockets, and sat down. He hoped they would dive straight into the business. But Stuke just wanted to say how sorry, fiddling with a paperweight on the desk, how very sorry he had been to hear, and Mrs. Bender too, in fact how sorry they all were, and though of course he must have gotten his letter of condolence, what can you ever say except you sympathize, which is true of course, but so difficult not to make it sound like a hollow commonplace.

Mr. Mackenzie had nothing to answer. Something evidently was needed, so he managed a sound, a grunt of assent to show he had been listening. It wasn’t enough. Young Bender’s round face coloured up with annoyance. He had expected more in return for his sympathy. Most people did. There is only one thing pity can do, make you a better person. It cannot help the one you pity. He’s old
enough to know that, Mackenzie thought. Maybe if he had been in a war like his brother he would know.

“Well then, about the will. Have you thought about that? I suppose you’ll be wanting to set something aside for your daughter-in-law.”

“She’s no kin,” said Mr. Mackenzie. It came out abruptly, even surprising himself. Then he thought: well, it’s true enough, she isn’t.

“Still——”

“And she’s got the insurance money, anyway.”

“What about your grandchildren, then?”

“They’re not even related to me.”

“But when they grow up, education, enough to start a business on—insurance money doesn’t stretch that far.”

“She’ll probably be married again by that time. Besides, her folks are pretty well off. I imagine she’ll get by all right.”

“Well. Well, let’s see now. Daddy said you had a brother, as I recall.”

“He died four years ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Did he leave any children?”

“Two. The family’s rolling in money. They don’t need it.”

“I see. Any cousins?”

“One or two. Too distant. I haven’t seen them for years.”

“What about your wife’s relatives?”

“There’s her Aunt Sophie. I never did like her. And I believe she’s got a nest egg she’s been sitting on for the past fifty years or so. When she dies she’ll leave it for the care and upkeep of that orange cat she’s got.” Cassandra—the cat was called Cassandra, he remembered.

Young Bender laid down his pencil and swivelled his chair from side to side. Mr. Mackenzie thought: Christ, he’s going to tell me that old office anecdote again.

“You know, Mr. Mackenzie, Mr. Buxted told me his uncle once had a client named Mrs. Cartwright, an old lady
that owned a little piece of land over near Baton Rouge. One day he calls her in and says, ‘You’re getting on now, Mrs. Cartwright, don’t you think you should make a will just in case? You’ve got this little bitty piece of land and it should go to somebody. Would you like to leave it to your cousin Sue?’ ‘Not on your life,’ says the old lady, ‘I never did like her.’ ‘Well, do you want to leave it to your nephew?’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘I never did like him.’ Mr. Buxted’s uncle went right on down the line, about twelve people she could have bequeathed something to, and at last she gets up and says, ‘You know, Mr. Buxted, I don’t believe I want to leave nobody nothing.’ ”

Young Bender began to laugh. His teeth were larger than you would have thought. When he stopped, the annoyance came over his face again. Mr. Mackenzie was not responding to treatment.

“I think she was right,” he said. And then suddenly a great devil laugh burst from him and he said, “I think that old lady was pretty damn smart. And right.” Young Bender looked uncomfortable now and fingered some papers on the desk. His hands were trembling slightly.

“Perhaps if you could hunt up the last addresses of your cousins. Any rate, think about it. There’s always charity.”

Not charity. Sixty-eight per cent of what you give goes on advertising and paying the staff and what’s left over is spread so thin it’s never enough to get any one person out of a hole.

“It’s a sizeable sum,” Bender said. “A very sizeable sum,” and the eyebrows went up in his round face, staying there astonished at the size of the sum.

“I’ll think about it some more,” Mr. Mackenzie said.

Out on the street again, he did think about it for the first time. It had not really crossed his mind before the interview.

He thought about Jim’s first wife. When Jim went into the army, after Ben, Betty said she’d die if anything happened
to him. He applied to be sent to Germany but in the end he was shipped to Hawaii instead. And he married a Japanese girl. He called her Mitsy, from her Japanese name, though she had been brought up in the western way, speaking English, and had the English name of Lily. Betty took it badly at first. “Think of the children,” she said. He did not think it mattered. But there were no children, and two years later Betty told him that Jim had asked her to talk some sense into Mitsy because she refused to have tests done and they should both go together, otherwise there was no point to it. “I tried to explain, but Charlie, she just sat there and cried and cried and said no. I can’t do a thing. Maybe you can. She likes you.” He had a talk with Mitsy and asked her why she wouldn’t agree to the tests. She told him, “Because if I find out for certain that I can’t, it’s the end of my life.” “There could be all sorts of reasons,” he said, but she was afraid to find out any of the reasons and he did not insist because he was not quite sure how occidental she really was; she might do something terrible and Japanese, unforseen, like killing herself because her husband did not consider her the perfect wife. However, she didn’t do anything terrible after all. That was Ben. Also, the matter was soon taken out of her hands, since by that time Jim had met Alice. Mr. Mackenzie thought his son was behaving shamefully. But you can’t run your children’s lives for them. He went to see Mitsy and talk to her all through the divorce proceedings. He liked her. He wished she were still his daughter-in-law. Three years after the divorce, after Jim and Alice had adopted the first grandchild and were taking steps to adopt the second, she sent him a letter. It arrived just before Christmas, a short letter telling him that she thought of him often and always with gratitude and affection and that he had been right and very wise in all the advice he had given her. A photograph was enclosed, showing her and her second husband, very tall, standing
with his arm around her, and towards the camera Mitsy was holding, half as big as herself, an enormous sleeping baby wrapped up in a blanket. Jim saw the envelope lying on his desk. “From Mitsy?” he said. “Can I see it?” He said, because there was nothing he could do, “If you like.” And Jim picked it up, read the letter, and looked for a long time at the photograph. Then he said, “Well, that’s settled. I was worried about her—she never wrote. But she seems to be happy now. I’m glad. I hope she’s forgotten now.” And Mr. Mackenzie thought: it took a lot to say that, probably took more than I’ll ever know, and maybe he’s more like Ben than I thought.

Perhaps he would leave something in his will for Mitsy and her child. Then he reconsidered it and decided no, she was happy, there was no need.

If Ben had lived there would be no question about where to leave the money.

Ben was younger, and his favourite. Not so good-looking as Jim, almost ugly, but more attractive. Brave. It was a thing you didn’t talk about and Ben never gave it a thought, but Mr. Mackenzie loved it in him. He went out to Korea with Cal Bender’s son Carl, who died in his arms. And Ben was shipped back with one leg missing and the other one off at the knee. They put him in a rehabilitation hospital. He was not ready for it, but the doctors believed it good psychology to place him where he could see other boys like himself who were making the best of their amputations and preparing to begin life again. There was some trouble about getting to see him, and Betty was down with flu, so Mr. Mackenzie went alone. And the doctor took him aside beforehand, telling him that at first Ben had been so wild that none of the staff could touch him, then he went on a laughing fit; it took five interns to hold him until the sedative had been administered. And when he woke up he refused to talk. He had not talked for three days. They
had had to put him in a room by himself—the effect on the other patients had to be considered. It was a major battle to get a dose of penicillin into him, he wouldn’t eat, he threw things, he was in pain but it still needed more staff than could be expended to change his bandages. Naturally the wounds weren’t healing so quickly as they ought to. Mr. Mackenzie entered and looked at his son’s head turned away towards the window. He sat down by the bed and put his hand on the boy’s head, smoothing his hair which had grown out from being so long in the field and had not been cut again because he wouldn’t let anyone near him. “Ben?” he murmured. “Don’t say anything,” said his son. His voice was hoarse and fierce, hardly above a whisper. “Just stay like that, but don’t say anything.” Mr. Mackenzie began to cry. He blew his nose and continued to stroke his son’s head. He wanted very much to talk, to say even if they’d shipped you home so mutilated that I didn’t know you, even if all that was left was something the size of a stamp, I’d thank God, thank God you’re still alive. And he wanted to say that there are lots of things to live for, on all levels, small and big. And it could be worse, he might have been paralyzed or blind. But he would walk again and there was everything in the world still there, good friends and good talk, a spring day and coffee in the morning, music, laughter, learning, and he mustn’t let it go. And he mustn’t also because whatever he thought or wished for himself, he could not be more than he was now and always had been, his father’s heart. But Ben wouldn’t let him speak. Only at the end of the time, when the doctor came in to say he might consider ending his visit, Ben turned his head and looked at him and he was surprised because Ben’s eyes were blue-grey and usually looked grey, but on that day they looked blue. He stretched out his arm and pulled Mr. Mackenzie to him by the elbow. All the strength in him even then—he had always been strong even
as a little boy. “Listen,” he said in that strange whisper, “you know me, Dad. I can stand anything. Don’t mind the pain. Don’t care about hurt, I can take it all. I can face it, anything. Anything but this. I can’t take this. You understand?”

“I understand,” he said. “But you’re wrong. You can take this, too, Ben. I know it. It’s going to work out all right. It won’t be easy, but we’re behind you. We’ll help.”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t want it,” he whispered. “You don’t understand.”

“I do, Ben. Believe me. And it’s going to be all right.”

Ben turned his head away again. He said, “It’s the shame.” He let his arm fall back and rest on the blanket.

Shame? What shame? Wounded fighting for your country? Decorated how many times—they had lost count.

“Ben, I don’t understand. What shame can there be?”

His son wouldn’t turn his head again and the doctor stood at the door. Mr. Mackenzie said goodbye and that he’d see him again the next day.

He thought some more about the will and couldn’t decide. He deliberated where to go to fill up the rest of the day and found himself walking towards the library. He had hardly ever used the ticket; Betty used to get books from the library. He had all he needed, but now they were all in storage and it seemed too much trouble to get at them.

A young girl was behind the counter, talking on the phone to her boyfriend. She looked up as he came in, gave him a cold look, and turned her back to continue talking. He held the ticket in his hand and stood there, leaning on the counter, looking at the trays of tagged cards and waiting. She let him stay there until at last she thought fit to turn, the receiver in her hand, and said, “Yes?”

“I wonder if this ticket is still good.”

She put down the receiver, highly vexed, and came forward,
darting a look at the clock on the wall and muttering something about her lunch hour. Only quarter to twelve, it couldn’t be time for anyone’s lunchtime. She snatched the ticket from him, stared at it, and told him, incredulous and angry, “This card has expired.”

“How do I renew it?”

She sighed. “Just a minute,” she said, and went back to her telephone conversation, at last saying into the mouthpiece that she had to go.

She produced a card from a drawer, began to write on it, slapped a rubber stamp over it twice, and said, “That’ll be two dollars and thirty cents.” She watched him with distaste as he got out the money; all his movements had seemed to slow down lately. Her face watching him told him how old and ugly and dirty he was and the Salvation Army should deal with people like that, not someone like her. As she put the money away in the cash drawer he looked at her—once, seeing her hair snagged up into a ball, beehive they called it, and orange makeup. You could see the seam where it stopped, as though you could take hold of the skin there and start peeling the face off. Her lipstick was a whitish orange colour too, and there was something on her eyes, the eyebrows above plucked very thin and shiny, looking as though they were made out of metal.

And she thought she was beautiful. She must, or how could she do all that to herself? Her hands had long orange-painted nails that recoiled from him as he handed her the money and drummed on the counter afterwards while she waited for her lunch hour. He noticed that she was wearing a pin on her sweater, a wooden mouse with leather ears, a long leather tail, and red glass eyes.