The Nail and the Oracle (12 page)

“I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t know why you’re … 
bullying
me like this!”

“I believe you,” said Poteen, and there was real wonderment in his voice. “All right, Clewie—you win. You can tell her. Little Sister, this boy lay every night in the reformatory thinking and dreaming of just one thing—to tell you something you ought to know. I didn’t think he should because I don’t like people to get hurt and because I knew it would get him into more trouble. That’s all I wanted to stop him for. But now—go ahead, Clewie.”

The boy got up and came across the room on silent feet. He was huge. He was smiling, or perhaps just baring his teeth. She shrank back on the bed. He said softly, “It’s the same thing I wanted to tell you that first night, when you screamed so much. You saw me out there that day, and I saw you, just your face, peekin’ through that curtain.

“I thought you was a
little funny-lookin’ old man
. That’s why I took my time, finished what I was doin’. And that’s why I had to see you so bad when the cops came around and told the guys they were lookin’ for me on a complaint by some
woman
. I had to find you and tell you I never realized it was a woman watchin’ me!”

“That was the first time,” said Poteen. “Now tell her what you spent every night for a year dreaming about telling her. Go ahead. I think you should.”

The boy laughed. “It’s the same thing, really. When I saw you through that curtain, I thought you were a funny-lookin’ little old man. Well after that I seen you close up, without no curtain, and all I want is to tell you—you still look like a funny little old man!”

Little Sister’s face turned grey.

Poteen rose and motioned the boy toward the door. “The circus is in town,” he said, “I got him a job with it. That takes care of some of the justice. I think he just took care of the rest.”

He let the boy precede him through the door and, with his hand on the knob, turned to face her. “You knew he thought that, didn’t you? Is that why? Is that the reason you waited two hours to make your complaint? Is that why you wouldn’t let him talk to you? To grab this one chance to tell the world you were a woman, when the world never really knew it before? Is that why you told the reporters ‘everybody calls me Little Sister’ when nobody ever called you that before?”

“Yes they did!” she shrieked. “Yes they did! My daddy used to call me that!”

Politely, understandingly, Detective Sergeant Peter Poteen closed the door.

He was beautiful in her bed.

When you care, when you love, when you treasure someone, you can watch the beloved in sleep as you watch everything, anything else—laughter, lips to a cup, a look even away from you; a stride, sun a-struggle lost in a hair-lock, a jest or a gesture—even stillness, even sleep.

She leaned close, all but breathless, and watched his lashes. Now, lashes are thick sometimes, curled, russet; these were all these, and glossy besides. Look closely—there where they curve lives light in tiny serried scimitars.

All so good,
so
very good, she let herself deliciously doubt its reality. She would let herself believe, in a moment, that this was real, was true, was here, had at last happened. All the things her life before had ever given her, all she had ever wanted, each by each had come to her purely for wanting. Delight there might be, pride, pleasure, even glory in the new possession of gift, privilege, object, experience: her ring, hat, toy, trip to Trinidad; yet, with possession there had always been (until now) the platter called
well, of course
on which these things were served her. For had she not wanted it? But this, now—
him
, now … greatest of all her wants, ever; first thing in all her life to transcend want itself and knowingly become need: this she had at last, at long (how long, now) long last, this she had now for good and all, for always, forever and never a touch of
well, of course
. He was her personal miracle, he in this bed now, warm and loving her. He was the reason and the reward of it all—her family and forebears, known by so few and felt by so many, and indeed, the whole history of mankind leading up to it, and all she herself had
been
and done and felt; and loving him, and losing him, and seeing him dead and bringing him back—it was all for this moment
and because the moment had to be, he and this peak, this warmth in these sheets, this
now
of hers. He was all life and all life’s beauty, beautiful in her bed; and now she could be sure, could believe it, believe …

“I do,” she breathed. “I do.”

“What do you do?” he asked her. He had not moved, and did not now.

“Devil, I thought you were asleep.”

“Well, I was. But I had the feeling someone was looking.”

“Not looking,” she said softly. “Watching.” She was watching the lashes still, and did not see them stir, but between them now lay a shining sliver of the gray, cool aluminum of his surprising eyes. In a moment he would look at her—just that—in a moment their eyes would meet and it would be as if nothing new had happened (for it would be the same metal missile which had first impaled her) and also as if everything, everything were happening again. Within her, passion boiled up like a fusion fireball, so beautiful, so huge—

—and like the most dreaded thing on earth, without pause the radiance changed, shifting from the hues of all the kinds of love to all the tones of terror and the colors of a cataclysm.

She cried his name …

And the gray eyes opened wide in fear for her fears and in astonishment, and he bounded up laughing, and the curl of his laughing lips turned without pause to the pale writhing of agony, and they shrank apart, too far apart while the white teeth met and while between them he shouted his hurt. He fell on his side and doubled up, grunting, gasping in pain … grunting, gasping, wrapped away from her, unreachable even by her.

She screamed. She screamed. She—

A Wyke biography is hard to come by. This has been true for four generations, and more true with each, for the more the Wyke holdings grew, the less visible have been the Wyke family, for so Cap’n Gamaliel Wyke willed it after his conscience conquered him. This (for he was a prudent man) did not happen until after his retirement from what was euphemistically called the molasses trade. His ship—
later, his fleet—had carried fine New England rum, made from the molasses, to Europe, having brought molasses from the West Indies to New England. Of course a paying cargo was needed for the westward crossing, to close with a third leg this profitable triangle, and what better cargo than Africans for the West Indies, to harvest the cane and work in the mills which made the molasses?

Ultimately affluent and retired, he seemed content for a time to live among his peers, carrying his broadcloth coat and snowy linen as to the manor born, limiting his personal adornment to a massive golden ring and small square gold buckles at his knee. Soberly shop-talking molasses often, rum seldom, slaves never, he dwelt with a frightened wife and a silent son, until she died and something—perhaps loneliness—coupled his brain again to his sharp old eyes, and made him look about him. He began to dislike the hypocrisy of man and was honest enough to dislike himself as well, and this was a new thing for the Cap’n; he could not deny it and he could not contain it, so he left the boy with the household staff and, taking only a manservant, went into the wilderness to search his soul.

The wilderness was Martha’s Vineyard, and right through a bitter winter the old man crouched by the fire when the weather closed in, and, muffled in four great gray shawls, paced the beaches when it was bright, his brass telescope under his arm and his grim canny thoughts doing mighty battle with his convictions. In the late spring, he returned to Wiscassett, his blunt certainty regained, his laconic curtness increased almost to the point of speechlessness. He sold out (as a startled contemporary described it) “everything that showed,” and took his son, an awed, obedient eleven, back to the Vineyard where, to the accompaniment of tolling breakers and creaking gulls, he gave the boy an education to which all the schooling of all the Wykes for all of four generations would be mere addenda.

For in his retreat to the storms and loneliness of the inner self and the Vineyard, Gamaliel Wyke had come to terms with nothing less than the Decalogue.

He had never questioned the Ten Commandments, nor had he knowingly disobeyed them. Like many another before him, he attributed the sad state of the world and the sin of its inhabitants to their
refusal to heed those Rules. But in his ponderings, God Himself, he at last devoutly concluded, had underestimated the stupidity of mankind. So he undertook to amend the Decalogue himself, by adding “… or cause …” to each Commandment, just to make it easier for a man to work with:

“… or cause the Name of the Lord to be taken in vain.”

“… or cause stealing to be done.”

“… or cause dishonor to thy father and thy mother.”

“… or cause the commission of adultery.”

“… or cause a killing to be done.”

But his revelation came to him when he came to the last one. It was suddenly clear to him that all mankind’s folly—all greed, lust, war, all dishonor—sprang from humanity’s almost total disregard for this edict and its amendment: “Thou shall not covet … 
nor cause covetousness!
”

It came to him then that to arouse covetousness in another is just as deadly a sin as to kill him or to cause his murder. Yet all around the world empires rose, great yachts and castles and hanging gardens came into being, tombs and trusts and college grants, all for the purpose of arousing the envy or covetousness of the less endowed—or having that effect no matter what the motive.

Now, one way for a man as rich as Gamaliel Wyke to have resolved the matter for himself would be St. Francis’ way; but (though he could not admit this, or even recognize it) he would have discarded the Decalogue and his amendments, all surrounding Scripture and his gnarled right arm rather than run so counter to his inborn, ingrained Yankee acquisitiveness. And another way might have been to take his riches and bury them in the sand of Martha’s Vineyard, to keep them from causing covetousness; the very thought clogged his nostrils with the feel of dune-sand and he felt suffocation; to him money was a living thing and should not be interred.

And so he came to his ultimate answer: Make your money, enjoy it, but
never let anyone know
. Desire, he concluded, for a neighbor’s wife, or a neighbor’s ass, or for anything, presupposed knowing about these possessions. No neighbor could desire anything of his if he couldn’t lay a name to it.

So Gamaliel brought weight like granite and force like gravity to bear upon the mind and soul of his son Walter, and Walter begat Jedediah, and Jedediah begat Caiaphas (who died) and Samuel, and Samuel began Zebulon (who died) and Sylva; so perhaps the true beginning of the story of the boy who became his own mother lies with Cap’n Gamaliel Wyke and his sand-scoured, sea-deep, rock-hard revelation.

—fell on his side on the bed and doubled up, grunting, gasping, wrapped away from her, even her, unreachable even by her.

She screamed. She screamed. She pressed herself up and away from him and ran naked into the sitting room, pawed up the ivory telephone: “Keogh,” she cried; “For the love of God,
Keogh!
”

—and back into the bedroom where he lay open-mouthing a grating horrible
uh uh!
while she wrung her hands, tried to take one of his, found it agony-tense and unaware of her. She called him, called him, and once, screamed again.

The buzzer sounded with inexcusable discretion.

“Keogh!” she shouted, and the polite buzzer
shhh
’d her again—the lock, oh the damned lock … she picked up her negligee and ran with it in her hand through the dressing room and the sitting room and the hall and the living room and the foyer and flung open the door. She pulled Keogh through it before he could turn away from her; she thrust one arm in a sleeve of the garment and shouted at him, “Keogh, please, please, Keogh, what’s wrong with him?” and she fled to the bedroom, Keogh sprinting to keep up with her.

Then Keogh, chairman of the board of seven great corporations, board-member of a dozen more, general manager of a quiet family holding company which had, for most of a century, specialized in the ownership of corporate owners, went to the bed and fixed his cool blue gaze on the agonized figure there.

He shook his head slightly.

“You called the wrong man,” he snapped, and ran back to the sitting-room, knocking the girl aside as if he had a been a machine on tracks. He picked up the phone and said, “Get Rathburn up here.
Now
. Where’s Weber? You don’t? Well, find him and get him here
 … I don’t care. Hire an airplane.
Buy
an airplane.”

He slammed down the phone and ran back into the bedroom. He came up behind her and gently lifted the negligee onto her other shoulder, and speaking gently to her all the while, reached round her and tied the ribbon belt. “What happened?”

“N-nothing, he just—”

“Come on, girl—clear out of here. Rathburn’s practically outside the door, and I’ve sent for Weber. If there’s a better doctor than Rathburn, it could only be Weber, so you’ve got to leave it to them. Come!”

“I won’t leave him.”

“Come!” Keogh rapped, then murmured, looking over her shoulder at the bed, “He wants you to, can’t you see? He doesn’t want you to see him like this.
Right?
” he demanded, and the face, turned away and half-buried in the pillow shone sweatly; cramp mounded the muscles on the side of the mouth they could just see. Stiffly the head nodded; it was like a shudder. “And … shut … door … tight …” he said in a clanging half whisper.

“Come,” said Keogh. And again, “Come.” He propelled her away; she stumbled. Her face turned yearningly until Keogh, both hands on her, kicked at the door and it swung and the sight of the bed was gone. Keogh leaned back against the door as if the latch were not enough to hold it closed.

“What is it? Oh, what is it?”