Vital Parts (55 page)

Reinhart seized a fresh sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Blaine,

I am taking your advice. But the Freudian cliché, reflected in the old school of literature, Dostoevski and Synge, is Out. Only squares still believe that the father-figure embodies the threat of emasculation.

I suppose that as the young fogey you are, you will do the right, the right-wing, thing by the girl next door, unless the whole business was a put-on. If you want to cop out, however, there is a Dr. Wilhelm in Northdale who can handle it. Mention the name of Dr. Barker Munsing. The latter, by the way, is a specialist in sex-identity problems, if you ever have need of one.

I mention this without irony, because if I ever knew anyone who accepted his maleness, it is you. You fearlessly wear your hair and clothes in a fashion which cannot be distinguished from the female style, yet you are securely masculine in what counts. You have proved that clothing is the product of social convention. There is no fundamental reason, under the aspect of eternity, why a man should wear a suit and a woman a frock.

As to your political views, which have so often clashed with mine—

Reinhart had begun bitterly, but having lied to the effect that he did not write in irony, he found himself inadvertently going straight on the force of the assertion.

—it would be false for me to announce my sudden conversion. And grotesque. There is a genuine and natural difference between the opinions of a man of forty-four and a twenty-one-year-old. Were there not, there would be little point in continuing to age. The joy of life and also the sorrow—taken together they constitute the
interest
—come in and through the accumulation of moments. In middle age one looks back on as many as he looks forward to. The teetertotter is in perfect balance. At the next step it begins its downward tilt, the back end rising commensurately. The
saw
outranks the
see
: there is ever more of it towering behind. But you are still confronted by a fascinating, challenging incline, which rewards your every movement by a loss in the acuteness of its angle.

One should feel his efforts have effect. You should be gratified that your opposition to the war, to outmoded sexual attitudes, to social injustice has made its discernible mark on events. If you persist in a belief that the times they are a-changin', they will indeed change. The whole of life, as we know it, is a construct of mind, perhaps of language. We hardly share anything, any more, with the dumb animals. Maybe human beings will even abolish death. If so, we will have removed ourselves from the evolutionary process altogether, from the status of creatures. In the oldest morality, the aim was not to be a beast. Then, with the development of machines, came subtlety. Immanuel Kant, I think it was, who made the useful distinction between men and
things
. Obviously, this would no longer apply if we were no longer mortal and could, as with cars, replace our vital parts when they failed.

One of the old arguments brought by the devout against atheism was that if there were no God, there would be no good and evil. And armed with that principle the true believers committed every known crime. They were succeeded by the secularists, for whom supernaturalism was the opium with which the masses were drugged to accept slavery, and I suppose in the statistical sweepstakes so popular in our time, social-totalitarianism has run up quite a score in corpses after a much shorter engagement than Christianity or Islam.

But the new composite immortal might get the brain of a sex maniac, the heart of a nun, the gonads of a cost accountant. A standoff. And the brain donor might have been a psychopath only because of a derangement in his endocrine glands: his gray matter, wired into another system, perhaps will not exude poison.

With your quick mind you will have seen the apparent fault in my example: the sex fiend, the nun, and the accountant, three persons, are lost to maintain one. Not true. Their incomplete cadavers will be frozen until mechanical devices have been developed to perform the function of the missing organs.

Neither your morality, as I understand it, nor mine will obtain in this state of affairs. They are separated by only a couple of decades, mine being a product—to put it in the terms which you, a child of the TV era, prefer—of the “generation” which came to majority in the forties. Your epoch has come along only twenty years after.

This new world will be timeless and make obsolescence itself obsolete. No more ripening and no more rot. After a few eons, no part of the father or son will be the original. The old man will have ever-renewed endurance and potency. Both will be immortal. The noble old institutions of put-on and -down, cop-out, sell-out, will have joined the divine right of kings in oblivion.

Even as you and I, for you are not all that young. It always takes a while to iron the bugs out of a new process. When the space program began they had difficulty in getting the rockets off the ground. And the physical sciences have centuries of sophistication over medicine. The trip to the moon might well have become an afternoon excursion before eternal life is a serious possibility.

By that time you will be old, at best, and low on the list of candidates for renewal, for surely if precedent is meaningful, and even though the aged or ill should obviously get first crack, men will not have changed in their partiality for vigorous youth. This will probably be all the more marked if the whole concept of youth is in danger of vanishing: man is a persistent innovator, but he also clings to old sentimentalities.

In short, you will have time to die. I used to think a lot about death when I was your age, without ever feeling it. In melancholy moments I was wont to craft farewell speeches. They were generally characterized by what I would call a noble bitterness. I had read
The Mayor of Casterbridge
and was much impressed by the hero's valedictory wish to be buried in an unmarked grave. I had not yet done anything from which an untimely death could have resulted, except by pure chance—and I limited the opportunities of fate by never sitting beneath a tree in a lightning storm, by treating cuts promptly, by keeping my life jacket nearby during travel on water.

Yet I was ready in fantasy. But when I got into a lethal situation, with the Army in Berlin, I did not recognize it as such. My friend and I got into a fight with some black marketers. Before I knew it he was knifed to death. I apparently killed one of them, suffocated him or broke his spine—I don't quite remember and don't want to. It seemed so long ago only a few days later. I have never been a man of action, even when in action, though I was strong in those days as a result of weight-lifting I had done while in high school. You have hated sports. I never cared for the group ones. I have always been a loner, in a lifetime of preparation for a lonely death—and now I shall not die one.

You will not understand that statement, and you would not care one way or another if you did. It is even likely that you will not have read this far in the letter. Which is OK by me, because I am not writing it to you. Maybe you have seen the TV rerun of the old Marx Bros. picture in which Groucho, asking Chico to sign a contract, gives him a pen without ink. But that's OK, because Chico cannot write anyway.

But they agree: “We've got a contract!”

So have you and I.

Y
OUR LOVING
F
ATHER

Reinhart found a matchbook imprinted with the name of the hotel. He watched the letter go up in smoke in one of the super-sized ashtrays with which the suite was furnished.

19

Dear Genevieve,

When you receive this I will be not only gone but dead. You may proceed with your plans without hindrance. I am changing beneficiaries from you to Winona, not out of revenge, but because you can take care of yourself.

Faithfully,

C
ARLO
R
EINHART

He would not burn this one, but mail it on the last day.

Which left Maw, as well as Winona. But there was nothing to tell your mother when you were rearranging fate's schedule and dying before her. She would be jealous enough without his aggravating it by mail.

He seized the phone book instead and looked up Dr. Wilhelm, who was there all right, with a Northdale number.

“When will he be in?” he asked the answering service.

“You can't ever reach him directly. He has to call you back.”

Having nothing to do while he waited, Reinhart decided to eat. He had unintentionally fasted all day.

“Room service?” the operator cried in disbelief. “It's now one
A.M
. They close the kitchen at ten.”

“Look at your board,” said Reinhart. “This is the suite where Eisenhower stayed overnight in 1956. I too am a veteran, and I am paying one twenty-five a day.”

It now amazed him that he had got the writing paper so easily; perhaps there was some sort of cutoff of services at midnight. She switched on the night manager, who sniveled about unions, but eventually Reinhart was delivered a ham-and-Swiss on rye and a bottle of That Bud, That's Beer. But he was not hungry. As a boy he had never eaten Swiss cheese. Another kid told him the holes were made by worms, keeping him off it for a good five years. He took the piece out of the sandwich before him and looked through the orifices at the wall of golden fiberglass drapery, behind which were presumably windows giving onto a night-lit city under a sky of a thousand stars.

Baloney, he should have ordered. Baloney on seeded rye with a combination of horseradish and catsup. Or bacon and peanut butter. Or a wiener, split and covered with melted cheese and chili sauce. You had to make your favorite sandwiches, you could never buy them. But once or twice in a lifetime you might by chance, in a strange section of town, have an unprecedented taste thrill, a hamburger on a toasted English muffin, anointed with some vermilion relish you would afterwards try to reproduce, or look for in the stores, and fail. A unique experience. Neither could you ever find the lunch counter again, or if you did, they had gone back to buns and mustard and denied all memory of their former practice, angrily if you insisted.

In sex it was much the same: the memorable moments could neither be forecast nor repeated. Reinhart was about to relive certain of the happier memories—he had two weeks in which his life could pass leisurely before his eyes; it was not like jumping off the Bloor Tower and having to pack it all into a few seconds' descent—when the telephone jangled.

He answered. It was Dr. Wilhelm.

“I'd like to come see you tomorrow,” Reinhart said. “Referral is by Dr. Barker Munsing.”

“Munsing is on vacation now at Swan Lake,” said Wilhelm. “I'm afraid I don't have an open appointment for three weeks, and then I'm going to Valparaiso, Chile, where their winter is in progress.”

“You ain't going nowhere, noplace, notime,” Reinhart said in Hollywood gangster style.

Wilhelm had a dispassionate, professional voice, the kind that issued from beneath a graying moustache.

“Why don't you check that out with Captain Reynolds of the Fifth Precinct?” he asked.

“All right,” said Reinhart, “so like everybody else you pay off the police. What does that prove? I know a black militant whom the city bribes not to start a riot, but he might do it anyway. Munsing is a transvestite, behind the mask of his profession. I know a man who raises money on cocoa beans that are actually gravel, and my son is talking of assassinating the Democratic Presidential nominee. I couldn't care less.”

“I am afraid I do not offer the sort of treatment you seem to need,” responded Wilhelm. Yet he did not hang up.

“You are speaking to a robust man,” Reinhart said. “Yet I expect to die suddenly. I am toying with the idea that life is the disease, and death the cure. This is in accord with Christian theory.”

“Dr. Munsing must have given you a number to call if you needed help while he was away.'

“Yes, yours. But you still don't understand. I am not a patient of his, but a colleague.”

“A physician?” asked Dr. Wilhelm. “Why didn't you say so? I'm a busy man, Dr. Reinhart, and it is one thirty in the morning. We G.P.'s don't keep the banker's hours of you fellows.”

“And we can't cure a soul with an aspirin,” said Reinhart. “But I suppose you have had your failures too, and buried them. I'd like to consult with you on a professional matter tomorrow.”

“How would eleven o'clock be, at my office?” He gave Reinhart the address.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“And,” said Reinhart, “I don't want to split the fee. It's all yours.” He put down the funny prick-phone, which action, depressing a button underneath, broke the connection.

He went into the bedroom where Eisenhower had slept in '56. It was furnished with twin king-sized beds, the blue counterpanes of which were embroidered with five stars in a circle. Gilded eagles surmounted the posts, claws sunk in the finial balls. A colored, framed blowup hung on the pale blue wall above the near bed: Herd of Black Angus Cattle, Gettysburg, Penna. Reinhart fell onto the spread and stared at the Presidential seal in the middle of the ceiling. Suddenly and unaccountably he was horny, after all, as if in reaction against the decor, which managed to recapture that certain
je ne sais quoi
that had made the Fifties so deadly.

Reinhart pawed for the telephone, a Princess model this time, atop a white-and-gilt night table made in the form of a military trap drum, and asked for the bellhop who had earlier fetched the writing paper.

Since it was even later now, the operator was even more impudent. She said: “Bellman.” Though of course it made sense.

“Hi,” said the servitor when he appeared. “Change your mind, guy?”

“Let me tell you something,” said Reinhart, sitting up in bed. “If you are a bellman, I am ‘sir.' If I am ‘guy,' you are back to bellboy. I am spending my money for luxury accommodations. I don't expect obsequiousness, but I do demand courtesy.”