World's End (24 page)

Marguerite gave him another demure little blink and dropped her voice to soften the blow: “He did mention a figure.”

“Yes?”

“Don't get excited now. Remember, we
are
bargaining with him.”

“Yeah, yeah: what's he want?”

Her voice was nothing, tiny, a voice speaking from the depths of a cavern: “Thirty-five hundred.”

“Thirty-five!” he echoed. “Thirty-five?” He had to turn away from her again, his hands trembling, and take another quick hit of dust. The unfairness of it all! The cheat and deception! He was no megalomaniac, no cattle baron, no land-greedy parvenu: all he wanted was a little piece of his own back.

“We could bargain him down, I'm sure of it.” Marguerite's voice rose up in lusty crescendo, rich and strong, invigorated by the prospect of the deal. “All's I need is your go-ahead.”

Depeyster wasn't listening. He was reflecting sadly on how far the Van Warts had fallen. His ancestors—powerful, indomitable, hawk-eyed men who tamed the land, shot bears, skinned beavers and brought industry and agronomy to the valley, men who made a
profit,
for Christ's sake—had owned half of Westchester. They'd built something unique, something glorious, and now it was finished. Eaten away, piece by piece, by blind legislators and land-hungry immigrants, by swindlers and bums and Communists. First they started carving it up into towns, then they built their roads and turnpikes,
and before anyone could stop them they'd voted away the rights of the property owners and deeded the land to the tenants.
Democracy:
it was a farce. Another brand of communism. Rob the rich, screw the movers and shakers, the pioneers and risk takers and captains of industry, and let all the no-accounts vote themselves a share of somebody else's pie.

And if the politicians weren't bad enough, the crooks and confidence men were right there behind them. His great-grandfather was fleeced in the
Quedah Merchant
scheme, his grandfather lost half his fortune to touts and tipsters and the other half to thespian ladies in bustles and black stockings, and then his own father, a man with developed tastes, fell like a gored toreador among the trampling hoofs of the stockbrokers. Sure, there were ten acres left, there was the house and the business and the other interests too, but it was nothing. A mockery. The smallest shard of what had been. Landless, heirless, Depeyster Van Wart stood there in that venerable parlor, the last offshoot of a family that had ruled all the way to the Connecticut border, frustrated over a matter of fifty acres. Fifty acres. His forefathers wouldn't have pissed on fifty acres.

“What do you say? Should we split the difference with him and come in at three thousand?”

He hadn't forgotten Marguerite—she was there at his back, calculating, homing in, his woeful ally—but he was too caught up in his fugue of bitter reflection to respond. The thing that galled him above all was that the slobbering incontinent senile old pinko bastard had held his subversive rallies on the place—on land that had been in the Van Wart family from time immemorial. He'd sullied it, bloodied it, defiled it. This was land Depeyster's ancestors had fought the Indians for, and old man Crane had turned it into a picnic ground for fellow travelers. All right, yes, Depeyster had got him back for that—got him good, what with organizing the Loyalty rallies and then pressuring the school board till they forced the old fraud into early retirement—but still, even after all this time, the thought of those ragtag niggers and Jews and folksingers trampling over his property made his face go hot with rage.

“Depeyster?”

“Hm?” He turned back around again. Marguerite was leaning so far forward she looked like a sprinter crouching in the blocks.

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Splitting the difference. Coming in at three thousand.”

What he thought was that he wouldn't pay three thousand an acre for the tip of Mount Ararat when the second flood came, what he thought was that he'd wait till the old bastard kicked off and then go after the half-wit grandson. What he said was: “Forget it.”

If Marguerite was about to remonstrate with him, she never got the chance. Because at that moment the door was flung open and what appeared to be a troop of marauding gypsies invaded the cool antique confines of the parlor. Depeyster caught a glimpse of scarves and feathers and headbands, hair matted like a dog's, the stuporous troglodytic expression of the dropout, burnout and drug abuser: his daughter was home. But that wasn't the worst of it. Behind her, slouch-shouldered and gleaming as if he'd been rubbed with chicken fat, was some sort of spic with an earring and the sick dull eyes of a colicky cow, and behind
him,
speak of the devil, was the Crane kid, looking as if he'd just been hoisted up out of the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Oh,” Mardi mumbled, on the defensive for once, “I thought you'd … uh, be at work.”

What could he say? Embarrassed in his own parlor, humiliated in front of Marguerite Mott (she was gazing up at the invaders as if at some esoteric form of animal life her sister might have photographed around the Tanzanian water holes), his very hearth and home transmogrified into a hippie crash pad. He could hear the gossip already: “Yes, his daughter. Trumped up like a dope addict or streetwalker or something. And with this, this—God, I don't know
what
he was, a
Puerto Rican,
I guess—and the Crane boy, the one that dropped out of Cornell? Yes, dope is what I heard it was.”

The spic gave him a toothy grin. Mardi, taking the offensive now, shot him a look of the deepest loathing and contempt, and the Crane kid slouched so low his body seemed to collapse in on itself. At that moment, all Depeyster sought was to act casual, to cover himself, brush the whole thing off as if it were just another minor aberration of the environment, on the order of the catalpa tree that dropped its pods in the swimming pool or the mosquitoes that swarmed in great whining clouds over the porch at dusk. But he couldn't. He was too wrought up. First the news about the property, and now this. He
looked down and saw that he was waving his hand spasmodically, as if shooing flies. “Go away,” he heard himself say. “Scat.”

This was what Mardi had been waiting for: an opening, a chink in his armor, a place to drive the spikes in. Glancing over her shoulder for support, she drew herself up, squared her legs and let loose: “So this is what I get, huh? Go away? Like I'm your pet dog or something?” She allowed a fraction of a moment for her rhetoric to hit home, and then delivered the coup de grace: “I do happen to live here, you know. I mean,” and here the great black-rimmed eyes filled with tears and her voice thickened with emotion, “I
am
your daughter.” Pause. “Even though I know you hate me.”

Behind her, the spic had stopped smiling and begun to shuffle his feet; the Crane kid, stricken with a sudden palsy of the facial muscles, was halfway out the door. Depeyster stood there, poised between grief and surcease, a sordid domestic scenario playing itself out on the Persian carpet while Marguerite Mott looked on. Would he blow up in a rage, take his daughter in his arms and comfort her, stalk out of the room and book the next flight for San Juan? He didn't know. His mind had gone numb.

And then suddenly, unaccountably, he found himself thinking of Truman's kid—Walter—and the way he'd looked propped up on his crutches in the office. His hair was longer than Depeyster would have wanted it and there was the first adolescent shadow of a mustache clinging to his upper lip, but he was a solid-looking kid, raw and big-boned, with his father's jaw and cheekbones and pale faded eyes. Mardi had mentioned him that afternoon in the kitchen. She knew him. Tried to shock her father with it, in fact. Well, he wasn't shocked. He took one look at these deadheads she was running around with and wished she
would
take up with somebody like Walter.

“All right,” she was saying, and even the smallest trace of dole had faded from her voice; when she repeated the phrase half a beat later, it had all the punch of a war cry.

He didn't respond. Or if he did, it was with that same involuntary shooing motion, his hand working of its own accord. No, he wasn't a bad kid, Walter. A little confused, maybe, but then who wouldn't be, what with his crazy mother starving herself to death and his father running off with his tail between his legs—worse, running
off and leaving him to grow up with a bunch of bleeding hearts and fellow travelers and the like. It was criminal. The kid had heard one side of the story all his life—the wrong side, the twisted, lying and perverted side. It was just the beginning of course, a shot in the dark, one voice raised against a howling multitude, but Depeyster had tried to straighten him out on a few things that afternoon. Beginning with his father.

Patriot, Walter had spat. What do you mean he was a patriot?

I mean he loved his country, Walter, and he fought for it too—in France and Germany, and right here in Peterskill. Tenting his fingers, Depeyster had sunk back in his chair, watching Walter's eyes. There was something there—the anger, yes, the confusion and the hurt—but something else too: Walter
wanted
to believe him. For Depeyster it was a revelation. If the child rejected the parent, if Mardi paraded around like a whore and espoused her dime-store radicalism at the dinner table to spit in her father's eye and undermine everything the community held sacred, then here was a kid who was ready to turn the other way. His parents—foster parents: Jews, Communists, the worst—had fed him hate and lies and their vicious propaganda all his life till he was ready to choke on it. He was clay. Clay to be molded.

You think the Peterskill incidents were nothing? Depeyster said. Walter just stared at him. Well, look what your Communists did four years later with the A-bomb secrets. A patriot fights that kind of business, Walter, fights it with all his heart. And that's why I say your father was a patriot.

Walter shifted his weight, leaned forward on his crutches. Yeah? And do patriots sell out their friends, their wife, their son?

Yes,
Depeyster wanted to say,
if they have to.
But then he glanced down at the shiny new boot on Walter's right foot and reminded himself to go easy. Look, Walter, he said, changing tack, you don't seem to be following me. Communism doesn't work, it's as simple as that. Look at Russia today. China. Vietnam. The whole damned Iron Curtain. You want to live like that?

Walter shook his head. But that's not the point, he said.

No, of course it wasn't, but it was true, and Depeyster opened up on him anyway. He cited the Pilgrims, Brook Farm and hippie communes,
deplored the fate of the kulaks, railed against the Viet Cong and pointed a finger at the face of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy, but Walter refused to budge. Worse, he kept bringing the dialogue around to that single sore point that lay between them like a bloody stick. Whether or not communism worked wasn't the question, Walter kept insisting—the question was what had gone down on Peletiah Crane's property on that hot August evening in 1949. Depeyster dodged around the issue—not yet, not yet—vehemently asserting that he was within his rights, that everything he'd done he would do again. He looked into Walter's face and saw Truman, and at that moment he understood that he was no longer defending the vanished father—Truman was mad, he was indefensible—no: he was defending himself.

He wanted to give it to him straight, wanted to tell him just how far Morton Blum and Sasha Freeman had gone to provoke the confrontation—how he himself had been duped into responding when it would have been far better to leave it alone—wanted to ask him if he really thought a peaceful rally was worth as much to the cause as a loud and dirty riot with its front-page photographs of bloodied women, screaming children and colored men beaten till they looked like prizefighters on the losing end of a unanimous decision. But he held back. All that was for the next lesson.

Look, Depeyster had said finally, I know how you feel. I admit your father was wrong to go off and desert his family like that—and I admit he had his crazy streak too—but what he did was in the name of freedom and justice. He sacrificed himself, Walter—he was a martyr. Be proud.

But what, Walter gasped, what was it? What
did
he do?

Depeyster dropped his eyes to slip open the drawer and fortify himself with a pinch of dust, but thought better of it. He looked up before he answered. He was with us, Walter, he said, slamming the drawer home. He was with us all along.

But then the image of Walter was gone and Depeyster found himself staring into the null faces of the subversives and draft dodgers his daughter had brought home with her. Human garbage, and they were here in his house, under his roof; for all Marguerite knew, he approved of them, liked them, shared their dope and bean sprout sandwiches. “Get out,” he repeated.

Through the wild frizzed fluff of her hair, Mardi was giving him a half-hateful, half-frightened look. Perhaps he'd gone too far. Yes: he could see it in her eyes. He wanted to stop himself, soften the blow, but he couldn't.

“All right,” she shouted for the third time, “all right,” for the fourth, “I'm leaving.” There was a scurry in the hallway, the spic kid ducking out of her way, Tom Crane's hands fluttering like flushed quail, the frame-wrenching boom of the door, and then they were gone.

Depeyster glanced at Marguerite. She'd gone pale beneath the ruddy film of her makeup, her pupils were dilated and the tip of her tongue was caught between her lips. She looked as if she'd awakened from a trance. “I, um,” she murmured, gathering up her things, rustling papers, reaching for her coat, “I have to be going. Appointments, appointments.”

At the door, he tried to apologize for his daughter, but she waved him off. “Three thousand,” she said, brightening just a bit. “You think about it.”