Vital Parts (13 page)

“Wouldn't you like to know?” Maw replied instantly.

“I have to, you see, or I won't know what to bring you.”

“Oh you're keen,” said Maw. “I wouldn't take that away from you. Bring me the usual and double it because this lard is my son and he eats like a hippo.”

Being young and pretty, the girl naturally would not look at Reinhart. She went away.

“Actually, it's the same menu every day,” Maw explained. “Weak tea and greasy toast, waxy jam in a teeny paper cup. But I banter with that one. She's fresh.”

“Why,” Reinhart asked, “does she call you Molly?” Which was not her name.

Maw said smugly: “I told her to. It makes them feel intimate. Else they would spit in your face.”

The girl was back immediately with the order. Reinhart found himself in a fantasy of her bronze breasts, uncovered beneath sparkling white nylon, but a vision of terror squads of black huskies, wearing jackboots and berets, trampled down his wonder. She had not yet looked at him.

Maw smeared her toast with the gorelike jam. “How's your wife?” She and Gen had always loathed each other on terms of the utmost formality.

“She threw me out today.”

“That makes sense,” Maw said, munching. Reinhart assumed this speech was but another manifestation of her senility—which was interesting in itself, Maw not being all that old; under seventy, he believed—but as she was wont to do without warning, she had turned coldly rational. “Now you can make something of yourself, Carlo, with that bitch off your back. I never said a word against her though until this juncture, and you know it. I have been the soul of diplomacy, but it sure cut my heart to see what she did to you.”

Reinhart found this embarrassing but also oddly comforting, so much so that he could afford to throw a fish Gen's way.

“Well, I'm far from perfect.”

“Don't I know that!” Maw said fervently. “I put up with you for twenty-some years less your Army time, and it often took the patience of a saint, but I succeeded in raising you to be a decent man. You are a stupid goof, you're disgusting overweight, I expect you've told your lies and done many a thing that won't pass muster, you may be a lazy atheist or what have you, but you're not nasty.”

She pretty well hit the nail on the head. He had never been Maw's favorite, though an only child, but perhaps because of that she understood him, at least better than anyone else. Ardent affection never led her into mistakes of assessment, as happens so often with the spoiled son who thus in later life has no option but to go into crime or homosexuality simply to confound the hostile or indifferent world outside the nursery.

Maybe Maw characterized him nicely only for purposes of contrast to someone she liked even less, but hell, it was something, and Reinhart did not get much nowadays from anybody.

But to make a point of pride—Gen had been his choice, willy-nilly, for twenty-two years—Reinhart said: “Well, I'd just as soon not discuss negative matters. To look towards the horizon has always been my motto.”

“While somebody has been kicking your feet out from under you,” Maw observed. As long as he was down, she being a practical soul would rest her heel on his neck. “I figure you have come to pick my pocket, as usual,” she went on, talking through toast.

Reinhart winced, though he knew any show of hurt would likely encourage Maw to continue working the pain-vein. On the other hand it would also put her finally in a benevolent mood. He wondered why he did not use this understanding of human justice when dealing with others. After reducing Germany and Japan to rubble, America had loaned them billions. God knows he lost often enough to make everyone love him. Trouble was, pride usually kept him from admitting failure to strangers.

“There's no getting away from the fact that you pulled me out of a bad jam with the gas station, Maw. I freely admit that. As Dad did, years back, with the TV store.” He swallowed some tea, in which there seemed to be more than a little alum: his tongue grew thin.

“Your basic trouble is due to one thing, Carlo,” said Maw. “I'd like to know where you got the idea you were a businessman. You used to talk about becoming a headshrinker, years ago, when the government was footing the bill for your education merely because you laid about in uniform for a number of years. It strikes me that would have been the right vocation for you, for it's all nutsy talk of the kind you always specialized in. They got a couple of them here and I understand they pull down fifteen grand or more per annum, which no doubt is why it costs so much to stay here. It sure couldn't be the food.”

Nevertheless Maw bit a great crescent from the next piece of toast.

“I got sidetracked,” Reinhart said. “Marriage and all. Then my training under Claude Humbold gave me the idea that the real challenges lay in business.”

“But Claude is the creative type. He has one of the biggest car dealerships in Southern Cal now, comes on the TV commercials all night long, I understand, selling autos to those Mexicans who come up to L.A. to make their chili-money.
You
got to get your sleep.”

Reinhart smiled. “That's on video tape,” he said cynically.

Maw sniffed. “I get a nice card from him every Christmas, along with a box of stuffed dates. But the point is, Claude's a born salesman. You always been too much of a materialist for that. You're like your late dad, except he never had big windy ideas. He worked for Ecumenical his life long, and when he retired he had his choice of several gifts, among them the movie camera which he took. He knew his limits, and he left me well fixed as a result. What do you have to show for going to college?”

Reinhart did not have the stomach to defend cultivation. In his day there had been a lot of talk, generally if not invariably by people who, because they had no gift for it, abused moneymaking—on the same principle by which the weak and awkward reviled athletics, the unarmed denounced violence, and to be fair, much as the illiterate hated and feared books—quite a blast of hot air to the effect that the sonnets of Milton would provide an expansion of interior horizons, an irradiation of soul, and intimations of immortality far in excess of those you could get from a pint of gin. This was to put it vulgarly, but if life was not vulgar it was not life.

Somewhere along the line, not long after pedagogues began to make decent salaries, one grew conscious he never heard that argument again. Presumably you now read
Samson Agonistes
so you could subsequently teach it and thereby pull down twelve thousand a year and live as high on the hog as a union carpenter. But meanwhile impatient Reinhart had gone into business. In a confusion of pre- and post-war credits he had had about a year more to go for his B.A. That was another thing he still intended to do when he found time. Meanwhile the college in reference was the same one in which Blaine was enrolled and which he had threatened, certainly not personally but rather as the voice of the mob, to destroy next semester unless the president submitted to various demands: the dropping of all academic requirements, the end of sexual distinctions in the toilets, and others.

“I could have taken a job,” Reinhart said, “calling for a college education.”

“But not if they wanted to see the sheepskin,” Maw said. “It don't mean a thing unless you have got those letters. You could go ten years, and read every book, and you would still be an ignoramus when it comes to getting a good position. ‘Let's see your B.A., my boy.' Nobody will listen to a complicated explanation as to why you happened to hang around college for years without getting one. Which information would in fact make you seem more of a loser than if you never went beyond high school. Records, Carlo, you got to have official records that come to some kind of conclusion.”

She took some tea and flushed it through her dentures. “Let's face it, Carlo. You'll never see forty again. You are over the hill in that respect, as well as most others. What employer would take you as a present when he can have any bright youngster?” She winked at him. “You should have gone into police work years ago, rather than run around with that colored fellow. In those days he was only too happy to get your help, but now he'd cut your throat, I expect, merely for being born with a white skin.” Maw made pious eyes. “I saw it all coming years ago and rooted for Max Schmeling, which didn't make me many friends, I tell you, and most of the people who would remember that are dead.” One of the ex-post-facto delusions Maw was given to. Reinhart remembered quite clearly that she favored, with savage ardor, the American's cause in both fights, sitting beside the radio with clenched fists, crying, “Kill that dirty Nazi, Joe.” Though she was of German descent. She did not like the buffoonizing of her breed by a dictator who looked like Charlie Chaplin. Neither did she like Chaplin, and when his later scrapes were publicized she would say, “He looks just like Hitler,” though that was true only in reel life.

But just as Reinhart became surly when he read the ravings of Negro militants, he was still capable of a nostalgic defense of the race—or perhaps merely of his own old sentiments.

“They are under pressure, Maw. What they generally destroy in those riots are their own neighborhoods. It may even be a form of self-hatred caused by—”

“Fooey,” Maw said. “Show me an African country where they all drive lilac-colored Cadillacs.”

“That's all changed now,” said Reinhart. “Other times, other manners, Maw. They—Shh,” he was relieved to be able to say, “here comes that waitress.”

Maw instantly turned up a grinning face. “I was just telling my son here about your husband, Pauline, and his fine job at the U.S. Post Office. Bet he had to take a civil-service exam to get the appointment, did he not?”

“No, in fact it was political, Molly.”

“Well, isn't that nice,” Maw said, with a moue at Reinhart.

The waitress asked whether there would be seconds on tea. She was herself tea-colored, with a translucent effect. You not only saw Negroes everywhere nowadays, but they were often beautiful, and never black. Why they propagandized in favor of the latter adjective was but one of their many current peculiarities. But Reinhart was momentarily bored by the whole problem. What he would have liked to do was kiss this girl on her ripe orange mouth and bite her tan ear. Let's call time out and be utter savages, wallowing in sensuality.

Maw declined and the girl did not ask him, and went away.

The time had come. “Maw,” he said. “How would you like to live forever?”

Shocking him, she answered jovially. He had expected a derisive snicker. She said: “I'm not about to turn up my toes, brother. So don't think my will will save you.” When Maw had been in the years which now enmired him, she was a notorious hypochondriac, taking frequently to bed with imaginary attacks of leukemia, muscular fibrosis, and other then à la mode maladies, impersonating poor-devil neighbors and relatives who expired painfully enough to evoke her jealousy. But after Dad's demise, which, a modest man, he performed quietly in his sleep, without warning—his heart stopped, his face smiled at the ease with which he had got away, his right hand was, as usual, inserted between pillow and case, his feet pigeon-toed—when Dad was gone, taking with him her prime audience, Maw soon became a monster of good health, ate anything, walked robustly through the rain, and sought out drafts to sit in. It might well be her megalomaniac intent to live forever on her own steam.

“I'm not joking, Maw,” Reinhart said. “What I am about to tell you is fantastic, incredible—”

“You mean that stuff about freezing, huh?”

Apparently he was never going to have a chance to spring it on anybody. “Oh, you saw the show,” he said. “Well, do you know who that man was?”

“I didn't catch the name, but he looked just like that kid you went to school with years ago, that little one with the pimples.”

“Aw, Maw,” Reinhart groaned. “You spoiled it.” She always managed to make him childish.

Maw cackled. “And that's what you'll be if you let them pop you into a deep-freeze:
spoiled
. Why, you can't even keep a pork chop frozen for long. Those doctors are all crooks, Carlo, and work hand in hand with the undertakers. They're like the people who make cars. Years ago a fellow invented a machine that would run on a aspirin tablet and water, and the auto people had him secretly murdered and sunk in concrete in the Detroit River.”

“That would be the gasoline people, wouldn't it?” humoringly asked Reinhart. Not that he would put anything past the dirty sons of bitches who had made his last car, which happened to be a lemon.

“They're all in it together,” Maw said, opening her purse. She withdrew a pack of cigarettes, plucked one out, lighted it, and inhaled so vigorously you might have seen smoke issue from her shoes. This was a recently acquired habit, perhaps more bravado against fate. Reinhart had long since given up the vice and now found the fetor of it nauseating, like that of singed hair or incinerating garbage. Maw kept blowing aureolas around his moonface.

“But, for the sake of argument, what if it worked?”

“The way I understand it,” Maw said, “you wouldn't know for a thousand years whether you would be brought back to life or just stay like a snowman into eternity. That's a long time, Carlo, for an experiment. You might as well be dead forever as for ten centuries. And who's going to pay for a pig in a poke?”

“I don't suppose there has ever been a scientific advance or invention that has not been thought unfeasible when first announced,” Reinhart said sententiously. “And yet here we are today with jet aircraft and rocket ships to outer space.”

“I wouldn't whine about that. They got here, didn't they? What difference did it make when? I thought time was everlasting.” Maw blew some more smoke into his face. “What's the hurry?”