Contrary Pleasure (2 page)

It was nearly six thirty. A bit later than usual. The big car moved
smoothly up the hill. He decided as he neared the crest that on this night the
robot had been decisively defeated, but at that moment a child’s ball rolled
into the road. He swerved away from it, lifting his foot from the gas pedal,
and heard the disheartening clunk as the car went into a lower gear. He felt
annoyed out of all proportion to the defeat and at the same time amused at his
own childishness.

Once he was over the crest of the hill, the robot permitted a return to
the higher gear. Ahead, on his left, was the land his father had purchased.
Eight acres which the will had divided into four parcels of two acres each, one
for each of the four children of Michael Delevan. And they had not even known
he owned the land until the will was read. It had seemed a strange remote place
then, a hilltop near an outlying village. But with the years, with the growth
of commuting, Clayton Village had changed character. The old man had made a
good guess. When the village became fashionable as a commuter community, there
were the four Delevan kids with nice big lots on high ground. The four Delevan
kids. Ben, the eldest. Quinn and Alice, the twins. Robbie, the kid.

It was so alarmingly easy, even at fifty, to think of yourself again as
one of the Delevan kids. Half a century and yet the mind, with one deceptive
twist, could wipe away the years. Fifty had a dreadful sound. The very
consonants of the word itself. A withered, secretive sound. A dried bell. Half
of a century. Five decades. Two and a half generations. This, you knew, was
beyond midpoint. More than half of life was gone. There were some who lived to
be a hundred. But it was not life. It was a trick, faintly obscene, to be
treated by the working press with that familiar mixture of heavy-handed humor
and bathos.

It seemed utterly unfair of the old man, Michael Delevan, to have made
this one good guess on property value, thus leaving one false hint of
shrewdness after having, with blind and stubborn arrogance, with both greed and
carelessness, milked the Stockton Knitting Company into spavined sickness
before he died. It could never come back completely. It could never be well
again. It could be levered and pried and prodded along, staggering from one
year into the next.

There were four parcels of land on top of the hill. The parcel nearest
the village was vacant, brush-grown, wild. That was the place where Robbie, the
youngest of the Delevan children, might build one day should he come back from
far places.

Benjamin, the eldest, the President and Chairman of the Board of the
Stockton Knitting Company, Incorporated—he who now drove this big car swiftly
through the transition hour of Job to Home—lived in the middle house. He lived
in that white house with his wife, Wilma, that white-haired lady who had
comfortably shared so many of his years, and with his teen-age son, Brock, and
with his teen-age daughter, Ellen.

Ben’s was the middle house, with the twins on either side of him. In the
house nearest the village lived Quinn Delevan, vice-president of the company,
low-handicap golfer, mild husband of the husky Bess, stepfather of her son, David.

Quinn’s twin was Alice, who shared his tallness and thinness and
quietness. She was now a
Furmon
, having married the
hearty George
Furmon
, having borne his three
children—two of them simultaneously in accord with that hereditary gene. It was
George
Furmon
who had built the three white houses on
the hill, building his own no more honestly and solidly than the two he built
for Benjamin Delevan and for Quinn Delevan—his wife’s twin brother. They were
rambling houses, pleasant to live in, hellish to heat, cool in the summer,
designed for maximum privacy.

Ben turned in his driveway remembering again that he had forgotten to
order gravel for the driveway, the coarser grade Sam had recommended so that it
could not be so easily washed away by the spring rains. Sam Coward was the
leathery old man who took care of the grounds around the three houses. If
requested to plant something that did not appeal to him, it would be taken with
some mysterious blight. Left to his own plans and programs, he made everything grow
with unexpected lushness, and on this day the lawns looked remarkably well, Ben
thought.

As he made the turn in the drive to park by the garages he saw, to his
instantaneous dismay, that his terrace was crowded with people. He thought for
a moment that it was a party which had slipped his mind. But as he glanced
quickly at individuals, he saw that it was all family. Though they lived here
together, it was a rare time when everyone was together. He stopped the car and
saw them there, looking toward him. Quinn and Alice with the twin stamp and the
Delevan stamp on their lean faces, meaty florid George
Furmon
.
And the two women, brought into the tribe, into the name, by marriage—
breasty
, vivid Bess, who was Quinn’s wife. And his own
wife, Wilma, sitting there with their two almost adult children, Brock and
Ellen. Out in the yard, in the long shadows, the blond little girl called
Sandy—Alice’s youngest—turned solemn and dedicated and tireless cartwheels on
the deep, soft green of the grass.

He stopped the car and reached to turn off the key, seeing them all there
as people dear and well-known to him, and then suddenly seeing them all as
strangers again. Very pleasant people. Sitting there in sunlight, in assurance,
in their casual ease. With bright clothes and wrought-iron furniture on
flagstones, and late sun
prisming
through the shaker
and pitcher and glasses, touching the acid yellow of lemon rind. He had a
sudden and vivid urge toward violence, wanting to put the big car in gear so
that it would surge through the tailored hedge and bound up over the flagstone
edge and into the lot of them. It was so clear an image that he could hear the
screams, the sound of breaking glass, the coarse grinding of wrought iron
against the bowels of the car.

He turned the key and turned the motor off and sat for a moment feeling
oddly pleased with the image he had created, and somewhat shaken. The pleasure
was that oblique pleasure of imagined horror. These random impulses toward
violence seemed to occur too often lately. Crazy impulses. Perhaps everyone had
them. But only a madman would go around responding to such impulses. Maybe with
all normal people it remained in proper perspective. A game. Nothing more.

Yet when he got out of the car and walked toward the gap in the hedge,
smiling, they still looked like strangers to him, so much so that he was, in
turn, sharply aware of how he must look to all of them, a rather dumpy man in a
dark, rumpled suit, balding, his jowls shadowed with the day’s beard, his hat
in his hand, like someone approaching with faint apologetic air to beg from
them, without quite knowing what he intended to ask for. Or how he would use it
were it given him.

“The gang’s all here,” he said, almost pleased with the fatuousness of
the expression.

“You’re late, dear,” Wilma said, and met him at the edge of the terrace
for the uxorial kiss, which he implanted quickly on her soft, dry,
textureless
mouth. There was about her an unaccustomed air
of excitement. That air, combined with the gathering of the clan, meant news.
For one good moment he wondered if it meant that Brock had been accepted by a
decent college, though God knew the odds were against that. He glanced at his
son, but it was not a moment when he could read his son’s face. Brock sat
slouched, his head tilted back, eyes shut against the sun as he slowly drained
a bottle of Coke.

Ben nodded and spoke to all of them, Quinn and Bess, George and Alice,
Brock and Ellen.

“Shall we tell him now or wait until he sits down?” George
Furmon
asked, his heavy voice a little loose at the edges,
as it became each day of his life at five thirty. And there was a slurred bite
of sarcasm which, to Ben, meant that George did not consider the news as
impressive as the others did.

“I’ll get a drink and then sit down,” Ben said. He was aware of their
faces. At least it wasn’t bad news. Perhaps a local scandal of some sort that
did not affect them. Yet Wilma wouldn’t bring up something like that with both
kids around. She avoided such topics when the children were there, even though
she knew they had their own sources and would find out in any case.

Ben poured himself a martini. The glass was warm from being in the sun.
The drink was acid and tepid. He sat down with it, took a sip, said, “Ready or
not.”

The women all tried to speak at once, but Wilma got the floor. “What do
you know, Ben? Robbie has gotten married. In Mexico City. He’s flying up with
her. He’ll be here Saturday, three days from now.”

It took him a moment to comprehend. “Good Lord,” he said softly. “Is she
a Mexican?”

“Oh, no, dear,” Wilma said. “Her name is—was—Susan Walton, and she was a
civil service person in the embassy there. I guess it was all very sudden.”

Robbie Delevan, the youngest of the
Delevans
,
only twenty-eight, had been working in Mexico City on some sort of vague
project that bore a dim relationship to the State Department. They had not seen
him in over two years. It was one of Wilma’s self-imposed “duties” to write to
him regularly, but Robbie had been neither a very interesting nor a very
consistent correspondent.

“Here’s the letter, dear,” Wilma said. “And her picture.”

Ben looked at the picture first. A young girl who looked into the camera
in a clear-eyed way, not quite smiling. A girl with pale hair and a look of
graveness and dignity and a soft, young mouth.

“Hmm,” he said.

“My sentiments exactly,” George said thickly.

“Read the letter, dear,” Wilma said in the soft voice of command.

The letter said the expected things. Much in love. Arranged our leave at
the same time. Suzy had no family. Decided we’d be married here. Flying to
Washington first and then up to see you. Should arrive Saturday the
twenty-third. And it was near the end of the letter that Ben read a line that
gave him a twinge of alarm: “Could be I have had enough of foreign parts. But
we’ll talk about that when we see you all.”

One dead-weight Delevan on the executive payroll of the Stockton Knitting
Company was quite enough. It would indeed be unfortunate if Robbie thought
that, because of his name and his inheritance, he could ask that a place be
found for him. A well-lighted place with short hours, handsome salary, and
pleasing title.

The bride had added a postscript to the letter: “Dear Robbie’s Family—I’m
nervous as a bride. Robbie says that’s to be expected. I want you to know that
we’re very happy, and I’m looking forward to meeting you all at last. Robbie
has told so much about you that I feel as if I know you already. All our
love—Suzy.”

“That’s a sweet note from her at the end, isn’t it?” Bess said warmly.

“She sounds like a good addition,” Ben said. He liked the look of her
handwriting. It was not peculiarly slanted, nor tinted, nor affected. It had a
look of decision.

He left them talking and planning, and went into the house. He stopped in
the kitchen and floated two ice cubes in bourbon in an old-fashioned glass and
took the drink to his bedroom. He was glad he hadn’t had to finish the warm
martini. He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the ice to chill the
bourbon. The window was open and he could hear them talking out on the terrace,
the sound of the voices, but not the actual words. The voices had a summer
sound. Already there were insects in the fields. The birds were making a great
racket these mornings.

He heard his daughter laugh. Clear young voice of seventeen. Clean and
young and fresh. Gay enough and sad enough to break your heart. There was
nothing more miraculous than a daughter of seventeen.

Lately all of them had seemed like strangers, except Ellen. He wondered
if Ellen would grow up to be like his own mother. Whenever he thought of that
long-dead woman, that was the phrase he used. His own mother. A private person,
not shared by the rest of the children of Big Mike.

He remembered his own mother as being tiny and crisp and tidy and always
laughing, and with a smell of soap when she hugged him, which was often. Soap
made of flowers and the cakes were oval and lavender in color and when they
were new and crisp, there were flower patterns on them. It was a big old house,
but she had filled it for him. She died when he was ten, and then that aloof
stranger in the house, his father—Big Mike they had all called him at the
plant—had married again, two years later, married a woman who was tall, young,
elegant, poised, dignified. As aloof as his father. It had taken Ben many
months to learn that her cool poise and dignity had concealed a dull,
frightened and conventional mind. When he had learned that, she ceased to awe
him, and he began to love her, and she responded with starved affection, for
there was very little love or warmth in Michael Delevan, and the big old house
had been very cold after Ben’s own mother had died.

When Ben was fourteen, the second wife, Elaine, had borne the twins,
Alice and Quinn, and they had grown into tall, poised children, of fine, lean,
almost arid construction, full of themselves and their quiet games. Robbie was
born eight years later. Two years after that, when Ben was twenty-four, Elaine
had died. Ben had gotten there in time. She died with simple poise and dignity
and only Ben had seen the fear that was sharp and thin behind placid eyes, only
Ben had felt the odd strength, the frantic strength of hands and nails, strange
in one so wasted. Her name had been Elaine and it had suited her.

Twenty-six years ago she had died. And though Michael Delevan had never
seemed to be emotionally involved with her, had seemed to accept her as a
convenience in his house, he was not the same after that. He lasted a year and,
in dying, he sprung the trap that snapped shut on Ben. The twins were eleven.
Robbie was three. There was the plant and the job and that was where he went.
It was that simple.