Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (14 page)

Frank rose to his psychological advantage. “Okay, Sled-boy. You've run things so far. Now I take over. You keep them here, and I'll search the place. You can't tell
me
there's no cash in a layout like this.” He started for the door to the den.

“Frank, I'll make a bet with you,” Ben said.

Frank wheeled around. “What kind of bet?”

Ben turned to me enthusiastically. “How much do you have in your drawer?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You
always
know.”

“About four dollars and sixty-five cents, I think.”

“Okay. Frank, I'll bet you her four dollars and sixty-five cents that we don't have another nickel anywhere in this house, except what's in my father's pocket, and, here—” he pulled a crumpled dollar out of his pants—“what's in mine. If you
do
find more, it's yours. If you
don't
, you give us four dollars and sixty-five cents. Okay?”

“What we ought to do is call the police,” said Aunt Catherine quietly.

“Y'see?
You
said this'd be easy,” Frank said to Sled-boy.

Sled-boy dutifully leveled his gun at Aunt Catherine. She buried her head in her arms, trembling.

“Of course she isn't going to call anyone,” my father said comfortingly. “Frank, do you accept Ben's bet or not?”

“Why not?” Sled-boy said.

“Sure,” Frank said. “Dammit, if there's dough here, I'm gonna find it.”

“That's the spirit!” Ben said.

“To be certain that the bet is perfectly fair, let's see how much I actually
do
have on my person.” My father dug into his trousers' pocket, and extracted some wrinkled bills and a few coins, then drew the pocket and the one on the other side inside out. He put the bills and change in a basket-woven china dish on the lamp table next to his chair. “Exactly two dollars and seventeen cents.”

“Okay,” Frank said, and sprinted out of the room into the den.

I traced his search by the lights that went on throughout the house. But he hardly made a sound. I couldn't stop thinking that it was a pity Frank hadn't taken up ballet dancing—he was so lithe.

“Catherine, won't you please sit down?” my father said. “It may be quite a wait.”

She perched on a corner of the sofa, grasping its arm with clawed fingers. Her cheeks looked like cement.

“Try to relax, Catherine,” he said more kindly.

I could see by the light trail that Frank was in Ben's room, and I couldn't stay out of things any longer. “He won't find anything in there,” I said, “except a bunch of plays and books on acting.”

“And of course those are of no value whatever,” said Ben, fuming.

“They're not money. You make fun of me for saving money, but you
never
have any.”

“My son's going to be a very successful actor,” my father explained to Sled-boy. “But I'm afraid he'd better find himself a very cautious
business manager or he'll never accumulate any money. Or, then again, Ben, it's just possible that you may turn into the most penurious, penny-pinching actor yet known.”

“An actor, huh?” Sled-boy mused. “I once knew a guy, was in all the plays in high school when I went. A real good lookin' guy. He was gonna get in the movies. You know what? His old man gave him two hundred bucks, for nothin' except to go out to California. An' you know what? The guy damn near starved to death. I think he finally got a job at Lockheed.” Sled-boy raised and resettled his thick thighs, one at a time. “Mr. Briard, how come you're so sure your boy there gonna be such a big success? You know some big Hollywood producer or somebody?”

My father laughed. “No. If I did, I certainly would recommend Ben to him, when he's ready. Not that it would do him any good in the long run.”

“I don't want anybody's help,” Ben said.

“That's a very proper, immature attitude, and a very easy one to have when you don't need help, Ben. But Sled-boy asked me how I know you'll be successful. It's apparent.”

“Why, Dad?”

I was as interested in the answer as I was in the question. I had known from the moment, years before, on some church steps in some now almost forgotten town, that Ben was going to be an actor. It had never occurred to me that he wouldn't be a successful actor. My reasoning being that there weren't actors who didn't appear any more than there were plumbers who didn't do plumbing.

“Success, as we categorize it, is a simple and pitiable thing,” my father said. “It's only a matter of degree of wanting, and accident. Wanting plays the major role in everybody's life—accident all the others. The only condition any of us can be sure of in this universe is wanting. How tepid or burning hot the want is depends on accident.
But since accident isn't really as accidental as we'd like to think—accident is the great fooler and comforter of mankind—we become ‘successful' exactly to the degree we want.”

Sled-boy bent forward, concentrating. “But, Mr. Briard, say a guy like me wants, really wants, like hell, a lot of things. A house like this …say he wants, well, to be a guy like you, when he's your age.”

“One moment, Sled-boy. The first thing one must want, in order to gain anything, is to be
himself
, gaining. Don't confuse sterile wishing with true wanting. I think it was Dryden who described that mistake: ‘I strongly wish for what I faintly hope: / Like the day-dreams of melancholy men, / I think and think on things impossible…' You must want to be
you
, Sled-boy, and then, if your want is sufficient, equal to, or stronger than the want of the people who have houses like this, you'll get yours.”

“According to you, all you need is just to want something, Mr. Briard. I
want
all right. I'm plenty good in that department. What I need is money.”

“No, Sled-boy. You only think you want money. Which is interchangeable with a house like this, etcetera. Perhaps you don't understand what I mean because I haven't said it comprehensibly. What I call want has also been called ambition—which Shakespeare decries again and again with soaring odium, or pluck, as Mrs. Tippet might call it, or dedication, as our artists have always looked upon it. Or, as Mr. Freud's flock sees it, ‘sublimation and hostility.'

“Ben is doomed to be a successful actor simply because his want in that direction is as great, or greater in my opinion, than most of the wants in his generation. And, accident happens to be in his favor.”

“What accident?” Ben said.

“That I'm your father. That I'm not successful.”

“You're
not?” Sled-boy said, perplexed, but no more so than Ben and me.

Ben spoke for both of us. “How do you mean, you're not?”

“Consider the history. It took me forty years to understand what I'm telling you now—to define the importance of want. It took me even longer, inexcusably longer, to find a direction for my want. A successful man is positive of his direction when he's your age, Ben. He's not so sure, in his twenties. He's even more doubtful in his thirties—and, at my age, he's reached whatever goal he set out for and is too busy enjoying it to spend precious time analyzing it.”

“But you've reached a goal,” I said. I couldn't have said what his goal was, but it hurt me to hear him say he was unsuccessful.

“Yeah. You got this house,” Sled-boy said.

“That's no more a goal than money is. My want was the simplest and most popular one in the world—for a home and family. And that want became enormous, unbearably heavy. But it came late, and, as accident had it, too late. Or, it could be, I too, right now, am costuming fact as accident. Was my wife's death accidental? Or was it the result of both our greeds, our late-arriving, overwhelming wants?” He spoke without speaking to any of us, as though he forgot we were there.

“The human body is sometimes tragically impractical for human wants. We'd been told it was dangerous for her to have another child. But we couldn't make ourselves hear. Once, one feeble little once, I tried to talk to her about it…but she was so used to painting the world the colors she wanted it to be…”

“She could have stayed home,” Aunt Catherine said in a tight voice.

“She couldn't have or she would have,” my father responded bluntly, and he was aware of us all again. “So, Sled-boy. I have part of a family—and a house. I've had a couple of dozen houses. Don't worry about getting a house.”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Briard,” Sled-boy said, “I
wasn't
worried about that when I came in here tonight. I was only worried about maybe somebody tipping off the police.”

My father laughed. “That's a good, sensible worry, Sled-boy. Survival. You just keep worrying about surviving, and you'll get the house to worry about it in.”

The light in the guest room went on. Aunt Catherine noticed too, her cheeks flushing. It went off, and we heard Frank's quick steps down the stairs. He danced into the room, a broad grin on his face, Aunt Catherine's black leather pocketbook dangling from one triumphantly upraised hand.

“Hey!” Ben cried in instantaneous protest.

“Know what happens to be in here?” Frank orated. “I'll happen to tell you.” With exaggerated delicacy, he lowered and opened the pocketbook.

“Dear Lord, dear Lord,” murmured Aunt Catherine.

“There happens to be…let's just looky see,” said Frank, “two hankies with little flowers on the edge, one comb, two bottles of pills, a bunch of Kleenex, a bunch of keys, one bus ticket to Tulsa, Oklahoma—”

“Oh!” cried Aunt Catherine.

“Catherine!” said my father in an astonished tone. “What happened to the plane ticket? You
promised
this time.”

She bit her lower lip.

“Where was I?” Frank said, in his mincing satire of impossibly good manners. “One bus ticket, a pair of ladies' stockings, a hair net,
and
, it just happens, eighty-seven dollars and fifty-six cents in this little zip-place!”

“This is outrageous,” my father said calmly.

“Oh, Walter…I was going to tell you,” Aunt Catherine said, blanching and starting to weep again.

I couldn't interpret that exchange right off. My first understanding was confused. Aunt Catherine never carried more than twenty dollars. She was certain any sum over twenty mystically magnetized thievery—which seemed to be the case here this evening. But how was it that she had trusted herself with eighty-seven? My father's “outrageous”
clearly referred to Frank's or anyone's unallowed and blatant inspection of another's private property. Yet Aunt Catherine was apologetic to my father, rather than as incensed as my father at Frank's rank intrusion.

It wasn't until Ben, more loudly objecting than my father, yelled, “That's not fair. That's hers!” and Aunt Catherine sobbed, “No, Ben…” that I realized that the extra sixty-seven had been contributed by the airline company to whom she had returned my father's gift of a plane ticket—a gift which she'd accepted with effusive, nervous appreciation. Of course, the cheaper bus ticket was her real preference. In her present guilt and remorse at keeping the refunded money from the airline, obviously she thought “outrageous” referred to her embezzlement.

But all of this was lost on Ben. “Her money wasn't part of the bet,” he said to Frank. “I bet that we—meaning the people that live in this house—didn't have more than what was in my pocket and my father's and Lucresse's four sixty-five anywhere in this house.”

“You said ‘in this house,' ” Frank rebutted, his voice rising.

“Now wait a minute!” Sled-boy yelled at both of them.

“Take it; take it!” Aunt Catherine wailed.

“The bet was, if you found any more money than what's here and her four sixty-five of
ours
, in this house,” Ben steamed.

“So I
found
more—in this house!” Frank hollered.

“Just a
minute!
” Sled-boy hollered back.

Frank and Ben held their breath. But given quiet, Sled-boy found his mind inhibited by forces more powerful than noise. Uncomfortably, he fell as silent as the ones he had silenced for his say.

“The problem is an enigma,” my father said, seeming greatly pleased about it. “But then,
every
problem is, while it exists. Did Ben designate ‘money in this house,' or, ‘money belonging to people who dwell, currently, in this house'? What he actually said makes little difference.
Did you, Sled-boy, and you, Frank, understand that he meant the money in this house, or, the money owned by the people who live in this house?
That
is of crucial importance. That makes this an issue of morality.”

“We were talking about Briard money,” Ben said.

“We were talking about money. Plain, ordinary money. Anybody's,” Frank said.

“It would seem that we've come to an impasse,” my father said. “This is why some people live as lawyers. So often, what was
understood
is
not
understood. Because nothing is ever fully said, you know. In fact, the more intelligent the people involved are, the less is usually said. In this case, for example, we all agree that it wasn't necessary to say, ‘the money we have in this house precludes from the bet any monies in the Terters' place down the street or in the Third National Bank.' It was sufficient to say, ‘in this house,' thereby,
ibidem
, limiting the bounds of the bet to funds, bullion, currency, specie, belonging in this house. Now comes the question of ethics. Does the money in Mrs. Tippet's purse belong in this house?”

“It was here,” Frank said.

Sled-boy looked troubled. “But if it's a question of ethicalness, like Mr. Briard says, then it don't
belong
here, stupid.”