Reinhart's Women (7 page)

Reinhart made what once was called a happy-go-lucky shrug. “Makes sense,” he said blithely.

“I’m happy you agree,” said Blaine, nodding at the rushing road ahead. “Well, then, I suddenly got suspicious and I said, ‘Winona, I hope that what you’re contemplating is not living with a man. I know that’s popular nowadays with certain trashy sorts, but the best people still prefer the traditional ways, and my profession, for one, is very sensitive to such matters. Do you think a man would be very keen to let me invest his money if he knew my sister was living with someone who had no legal attachment to her? Suppose she got pregnant, and her roommate ran off in the classic way? Who would be expected to pay the bills? Forgive me for saying, ‘Not her father.’”

“Certainly not!” Reinhart agreed with an enthusiasm that even Blaine took brief, frowning notice of before he went on.

“‘Oh,’ said she, goddamn her! ‘Oh, you’ve got no worry about that.’ And, ass that I was, I fell right into the trap.”

Reinhart could now see the essential cause of Blaine’s fury:
he
had always been the clever child, Winona the dope and dupe.

“I insisted on my point, you see,” said Blaine, spitting his words now. “‘Don’t be too arrogant,’ I said. ‘No means is foolproof. We weren’t ready for our second child when Mercer somehow conceived in spite of never having failed to take measures, and I doubt very much whether you, with your woolly mind, dear sister, could be relied on to’—well, so forth and on and on, and of course, malicious as she is, she gave me enough rope.” Here Blaine again showed the tragic mask he had worn on his arrival. “When I was finally ready for the kill, she did it!

“‘Don’t worry, Blainey,’ said she.” He spoke in a falsetto impression of his sister’s voice: “‘As it happens, my lover is a woman.’”

Reinhart put his hands over his mouth. For him it had been greatly preferable to hear this information from Winona herself. To have it repeated now by another (and by such another) was excessively dispiriting. He came out to swallow some air.

“It
is
unfortunate,” he said, “if you want my opinion. I can’t deny that. I doubt whether any person of the standard persuasion really thinks it’s
preferable
that someone is homosexual—still less a member of his own family. We can accept it, think it’s O.K., anybody’s right, not a hanging offense, and all that, and even applaud geniuses like Sappho and Michelangelo and Proust, but would you want your sister to be one? Not in the best of all worlds, probably.

“Then if you’re a parent, you wonder about your own contribution, by commission or omission.” He winced at his son. “But finally you recognize that whatever else it might be, it is a fact. And most things of a sexual nature have developed naturally, however unnatural they might seem to some. That is, people don’t just up and decide to deviate from the norm and against their own will, even in our decadent place and time. They would seem to be impelled by some force or another.”

“Hah!” savagely cried Blaine. “So are murderers!”

Reinhart smiled at him. “What keeps striking me as ironic is a memory of ten years ago. As usual we were on the wrong side of the fence from each other, but in a decade we seem to have changed sides. More importantly, and with all respect, your position has always been extreme. If I recall, in those days any person who defied the generally accepted standards of conduct, political, moral, or sexual, was a hero to you, whereas you were ready to shoot anyone identified as conventional. Now sexual inversion is criminally loathsome?”

One thing that was perhaps to be admired about Blaine: despite his emotion his control of the car was flawless. By now, by virtue of the expressway, they were clearing the outermost suburbs of the city, where there had still been fields when Reinhart came home from the War—more than thirty years before. Certain events seemed to remain in an eternal only-yesterday. To wear the clothes of a bygone era was to be in historic costume: pegged pants and padded shoulders were quaintly incredible, but it was still very real to remember the girl who broke one’s heart when one was so dressed.

Blaine answered loftily: “I think my gradual change of opinion has made sense. ‘Show me a man who’s not a radical at twenty, and I’ll show you a man with no heart. Show me a man who’s still one at forty, and I’ll show you a man with no brain.’ Or however it goes. I’m not forty, but I am a husband, a father, and I have had a certain success in my profession. I don’t want to hit below the belt, but perhaps if I had had—well, no matter.”

“I’ll go on for you,” said Reinhart. “If you had had a father who was like you yourself are now? Well, you did get shortchanged in that way. But consider this: maybe in that event you wouldn’t have had the burning desire to make something of yourself; maybe my bad example was as effective as a good one might have been. Think of this: if I were you,
then perhaps you’d be me.
Repulsive thought, eh?” Reinhart was joking bitterly, but speaking for himself, he thought he had got off lucky: there had been a brief period in his life when his goal was to be very like what Blaine was now.

“Look here,” Blaine suddenly said in a mercantile sort of voice, “I’ve come up with a proposition that should put us all in a situation we can live with. Queers are notoriously unreliable. She may assure you that she’ll continue to look out for you financially—and sticking up for her as you have, you do have some claim on her good will—but next she’ll fall in love with some other female, maybe even a little child. My God, think of that, my sister trailing a Camp Fire Girl into the park!” He made a loathing face. “It’s just unthinkable, that dirty, detestable—”

“Hell,” said Reinhart, “I wish you wouldn’t put me in the position where I have to repeat all that tedious rhetoric of the homosexual apologists: ‘alternate life-styles,’ et cetera. But I really don’t think it’s inevitable that a ‘gay’ person is necessarily an uncontrollable sex fiend merely because he or she prefers his or her own kind.”

Blaine showed an odd expression. “I take it you have had a sheltered life in that respect.”

Ah, thought Reinhart, you have not, is that it? But he had no wish to explore the subject of Blaine’s experience with his fellow man. Reinhart himself had felt the hand of Time upon his shoulder when, some twenty years before, he had sensed that he was at last beyond the range of homosexual solicitation.

“To get back to my proposition,” Blaine said. “We’ve had our differences, you and I, but I have not forgotten that I have an obligation—limited, true enough, but it’s there. Also, I’m sure you believe, whether justifiably or not, that you have gotten a dirty deal in life, and maybe you even blame it on me, for all I know.”

To this incredible statement Reinhart could only respond: “You?”

“Well, I’m as convenient a scapegoat as any, am I not?” Blaine asked, going into a kind of bass whisper.

There was no reason to take this kind of thing seriously. “I suppose you are, at that,” said Reinhart.

The technique proved an effective one for dealing with the most offensive of Blaine’s poses. Reinhart must remember that: it frightened Blaine to hear a confirmation of his own exaggerated expression of self-pity.

Blaine hastily said: “I’m willing to let bygones be.” He slipped into the righthand lane of the expressway, and Reinhart could see the turn signal blink on the dashboard. Good, they were about to turn around and head back, having accomplished what they usually did with each other: pure and simple nought.

But when Blaine took the next exit and at ramp’s end made a choice, he went not south in the direction of urbanity, but rather towards the pastoral north.

“Say,” said Reinhart, “aren’t we getting pretty far from home for no great purpose?”

“If you’d ever let me explain,” Blaine peevishly replied. “I’ve been trying for the last half-hour to get a word in edgewise. There’s a thing our church sponsors—and before you begin to shout me down with atheist opinions, hear me out, please: there are no religious requirements made of anyone.”

“When did you ever hear me say a word about atheism?” Reinhart asked in wonderment. His mother used to make such irrelevant charges as a rhetorical device to throw him vis-à-vis off balance.

“So be it,” said Blaine. “But knowing how you operate, I’m trying to dispose of all capricious objections beforehand.”

“You’re taking me to some kind of religious service? I can’t say I’m fascinated by the prospect, if that’s what you mean. Is this necessary?” A devilish impulse claimed him. “Shall we pray for the salvation of sex deviates?”

Blaine shrank into himself. “Why you fil—” He caught control at the last moment it could still be captured, and coughed violently. “I’m not always prepared for what you call humor, dear Dad,” he said in a voice made guttural by resentment, “but
will you let me explain?”

Reinhart exposed his two palms.

“It’s a little Christian community,” Blaine said, assuming an expression that suggested sanctity, “on what used to be a farm, what still is a farm, on good, rich Ohio farmland.” He showed the kind of smile that is obviously more eloquent to him who produced it than to the innocent bystander. “Clean air, fertile soil, honest labor.”

“Are you serious?” Reinhart had never seen his son in this mood, which seemed perilously near the rhapsodic.

“For God’s sake, haven’t you the remotest shred of decency?” cried Blaine. “Can’t you see this isn’t easy for me?”

“Sorry,” said Reinhart. He tried to contribute to a polite conversation. “It takes a certain kind of person to be a farmer, though, I’m sure. It has never seemed attractive to me.”

Blaine suddenly looked too bland to be true. “But have you given it a try? How would you know?” He produced a sly smile. “I thought you always prided yourself on a liberal approach to things.”

Reinhart shrugged. “I know enough about my basic tastes. But listen, I’ll be glad to buy some home-grown vegetables, if you want to drop in for a minute or two. I just don’t want to stay too long, because I have a feeling Winona might get home meanwhile and want to talk.” He frowned. “But wait a minute: they wouldn’t have fresh produce yet at this time of year. We’re just getting into spring.” He put the rest of it together, and peered at Blaine. “You’re not proposing that I be installed at this farm, are you? Put out to pasture with the other old fogies? ...Your point is that if Winona ceases to support me, as you fear she might, if as expected she abandons herself utterly to unnatural pursuits, I can’t count on you. But I have already accepted that fact. Why elaborate on it?”

Blaine pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, adjacent to a wire fence. In the middle distance was a group of cows, an animal of which Reinhart could not remember having seen an example at close range since he was a child. In college he had read a passage in Nietzsche casting doubt on the possibility that the beast of the field could ever explain its serenity to a human being. “Tell me why you’re happy,” says the man. The animal would like to answer, “Because I forget,” but the creature forgets even this before it can reply, and the would-be dialogue comes to nothing.

“What concerns me,
Dad,
is that at fifty-four years of age you have no profession, no occupation, no means of support, and no property, and if you would ever have to go it alone, I can’t see how you could survive without going on welfare.”

Reinhart stretched his long frame. “These land-cruisers really are more comfortable than cars that make sense,” said he. “You simply can’t get away from that truth. ... That’s not beside the point, Blainey: long before it was fashionable, I hated big cars, probably because I couldn’t afford one. But the funny thing now is that, without benefit of a movement, I am liberated from all sorts of restraints, including those I have imposed on myself. It was ridiculous that I lived almost half a century trying to measure up to the principles of other people.” He smiled with genuine good feeling. “The fact is that I love to cook, and I am really good at it. I know you don’t agree, but the reason for that is, gastronomically speaking, you’re naïve. Not wrong, but childish. Your diet consists of essentially one kind of meat and three or four vegetables, whereas almost everything that lives can be eaten by a human being, and in fact
is
eaten somewhere in the world.”

Blaine was sneering at the dashboard. “You could be kidding yourself. What does
she
eat of that gourmet stuff? And what else do you do? Mop the floors? Do the laundry?”

“Whatever has to be done. But the cooking is the center of it. I don’t suppose I can ever explain to someone like you what that means: you who spurn Bordelaise sauce and drench your steak with A.1.”

Blaine said levelly: “But you’ll admit that whatever I eat, I buy myself.” He sighed, and then pulled the car onto the road and accelerated. “You’re not in an independent position. I want you to take a look at this place.”

Reinhart could see that Blaine was determined, and he really didn’t want to get into a downright quarrel with his son. Therefore he submitted quietly to being driven some few miles farther on and eventually up a dirt road, to a cluster of farmhouse and outbuildings, the former a shabby white and the barn and sheds the traditional faded red. The vehicles in view were routine automobiles, two of them the worse for wear, with dents and rust and jagged antenna-stems. Farm machines and/or beasts of burden were presumably behind closed doors, as was the local humanity. Reinhart remembered it was Sunday, the most inopportune time (for all concerned) to traffic with persons of sincere religious conviction, Christians anyway.

“Perhaps we’re intruding.”

“Nonsense,” said Blaine. He parked his opulent car alongside the rusting heaps and stepped out. The parking place would have been an extravagance of mud if any rain had fallen lately. Fortunately the moment was windless and the dust lay passive. The buildings seen from closer up looked none too sturdy, but the paint was not flaking badly, and the windows of the house were clean, and the roof was still there.

“Your church sponsors this?” Reinhart asked. Obviously they spared great expense. Blaine belonged to a prosperous Episcopalian flock at which the lesser breeds might sneer, with the encouragement of the needle’s-eye metaphor, but there seemed no actual law that would forbid a rich man from being devout.