Vital Parts (11 page)

She said: “I'll see you prosecuted for battery.” She was a lawyer's daughter—to be precise, a disbarred lawyer's daughter, but she knew her terms. “That's just for starters. I'll ask Daddy to consult the statutes with reference to sexual perversions. There are deviates who snip hair from people in crowds—”

Reinhart hoped to conceal his fear behind a blustering show of indignation. “Genevieve, you know damn well why I took that measure. Enough is too much. That boy has embarrassed me continually in recent years, and I have reason to believe he does it deliberately. Sheer malice. He admitted as much last night, after we had another set-to.”

Blaine howled an imprecation into his mother's collarbone.

“There, there, dear,” said she tenderly. “I'm going to fix his wagon one for all.” Gen managed somehow always to warp a cliché.

“This is disgusting,” said Reinhart. “He's twenty-one years old. At that age I was in the Occupation of Berlin. If I ever tried hanging on my mother and blubbering about my troubles, she'd have punched me in the mouth.”

“That's where your insanity comes from, your mother. She's a crazy old lady.” This was not complete nonsense, but had no relevance to the situation. “But not even she would have approached her child with a lethal instrument.”

“Wrong!” crowed Reinhart. “Many a time when I annoyed her while she prepared meals she would throw the knife at me, usually a little paring knife, true, but more than once the big carver used by chefs. But come off this stuff about edged weapons. A scissors, a pair of library shears, and none too sharp at that.” He snickered. “That's why the job is not so hot. He's lucky I didn't charge him. Barbers get two-fifty nowadays.”

Gen picked up a glass of orange juice that Reinhart had just squeezed and had her son make a mouth and poured some in. Reinhart kept his back against the kitchen counter.

Winona chose this moment to waddle into the kitchen, in the sort of charwoman outfit she wore to a school otherwise attended by go-go girls. Even Reinhart thought the skirt too long, though he sympathized with her intent to hide her fat limbs.

“Hi,” she said in the glee aroused by an imminent meal. “Oh, I hope it's waffles, I do hope it is. I have my heart set on maple syrup and lots of butter. I think I dreamed of waffles.”

“Leave the room, Winona,” Genevieve said harshly.

Winona had not yet seen anything untoward. She was looking for food, not people. Now, without an interest in the motive behind the command, she blurted out a great cry of desolation and her eyes streamed. She addressed the ceiling: “Without breakfast! Ohhhh-oooo-ahhhh.”

This however brought Blaine briefly out of his act—which it was at least in part; his own eyes were quite dry.

He snarled: “Get out, Fat-ass.”

Reinhart showed him a fist. “I won't tolerate that kind of talk to your sister.”

This was when Genevieve picked up the breadknife, a serrated-blade instrument that would deliver a cut with deckle edges, a kind of saw, really.

She threatened him in a quiet way that was definitely sinister. Her voice was so low that he had to lean towards her to hear it.

“Make your move,” she said. “I'm just praying for the opportunity.”

“Talk of legality,” Reinhart pointed out. “What you're doing constitutes assault, I believe.”

“Just put me in court, with my size alongside of yours,” Gen asserted, no doubt fashioning her combat style from those movies, already long outmoded, in which juvenile delinquents belonging to criminal gangs menaced solid citizens. What had become of leather jackets, motorcycles, and switchblades? Already stuffed into the garbage can of history.

Squealing like the rabbit Reinhart shot imperfectly, twenty years before, and then lost his stomach for hunting, leaving the small game to the mutilation of unsentimental hawks and ferrets, Winona propelled her flesh from the kitchen. This bothered Reinhart most.

He said: “How can you be so cruel?”

“Hypocrisy won't stand you in good stead any more,” Genevieve cried. “You introduced violence into this house, and now you can lie in it.”

Blaine cackled. Were his hair still long he would have resembled a witch. As it was he recalled for his father an old animated character called Woody Woodpecker, the mention of which like so many other bits of lore, would mean nothing to this generation. Woody was always being blown up by dynamite or TNT and reassembling without hurt. How harmless the culture used to be.

Blaine said: “Up against the wall!”

“You little fraud,” said Reinhart. “I'd have some respect for you if you held the knife, and even more if you used it against a real enemy. But your game is to threaten only those who wish you well, only those who in affection have placed you in a position where you can be a threat, those who abolished child-labor, those who let their children choose their own careers and pay them enormous allowances, get them the best in medical care and warm clothing and—”

Blaine said: “Why don't you die?”

“Excuse me,” said Reinhart. He really did not mind Gen's knife-play that much. In twenty-odd years of marriage he had seen her fury a thousand times and more. In recent manifestations it had crested more quickly because the general level of her ill will was so high that only a flash flood could distinguish itself from the mean. By the same token it soon subsided, not having far to fall. At any moment she would return to the familiar state of cold contempt. Then, if he made a success in business, which he still intermittently expected to do, he could rely on her to be the feasible wife she had been long ago. Or so he told himself. At moments of extremity Reinhart could be very cavalier about time.

He did not believe she would actually cut him, that is, or if she did, it would only be a nick. Perhaps if it bled sufficiently she might even be contrite. It was something he could hold over her in the future—now, ease off, you remember that time with the breadknife, etc.

Blaine's suggestion, however, was something else. A truism of Reinhart's day held that sons were normally psychic murderers of their male parent on the one hand and mother-lovers on the other, reflecting a quaint Austro-Jewish theory that, however, had once been revolutionary. Reinhart used to catch himself in slips of the pen regarding his own father, of whom he could not consciously have been fonder. He could also recall having said, “Darn you, Daddy,” once at the age of eight when having been led to a drugstore for a malted milk he found it closed. Dad said: “Well, Carlo, I didn't know.” And being already of a reflective nature, little Reinhart said: “OK, I'm sorry.” “No offense taken, Carlo,” answered Dad. Reinhart remembered this because he had never before heard that turn of phrase: where would you take a fence? When he repeated it to a schoolmate, he got punched on his vaccination.

“Excuse me,” he said now to Blaine. “What I really can't stand about you is something that unfortunately I can't trim with a pair of shears. That is your outlandish rhetoric. You don't know what dying is, and as far as I can see, you've scrupulously avoided any form of violence, even the contact sports. College rioters often howl their praises of Ché and Ho Chi Minh, professional killers, but snivel and whimper when the cops hit them with nightsticks—just as you used to do when some years back I tried to show you some of the jujitsu we learned in Army basic training. And I of course was only trying to teach you some self-defense. But even in just learning it you get hit once in a while and are dumped on your prat.”

Reinhart shook his head. “Christ, Blaine, you are old enough to get a sense of reality. Not everything can go your way.”

Much of this reasonable turn applied to his own needs. It is no joke to be told to die, even allowing for youth, passion, and the fashions in idiom by which a man could be termed a crypto-Nazi merely for shaving off his sideburns, a genocide because he deplores a mob, and a bully for questioning the credentials of folksinger-statesmen. Though it did occur to him that he might have thrown Blaine too hard occasionally. But the young have rubber bones. “Here's another one,” Reinhart would say, and with left foot and right wrist quickly floor him. Indeed, Reinhart had never before been able properly to accomplish these judo maneuvers and certainly never tried them when involved in bar-fights as a soldier. And he had never been in combat. He suspected they were pretty useless except to beat up a son.

At this point Winona reentered smiling, obsessively pretending it was the first time or having weakmindedly forgotten the earlier scene. “Good morning!” she said brightly, and all three of them, Reinhart included, shouted at her.

“I'm going to kill myself.” she screamed and retired again, sobbing from the vast empty cavern of her stomach.

Reinhart said to Blaine: “All right, for the purpose of peace-making, I apologize. I'm sorry I cut your hair, I regret having been rough in playing with you as a little boy. But I'll tell you something: you can't ever get your father back for his flaws. The traditional way is to get your revenge on your own son, and you will certainly want to, I'll tell you that. Besides, I slipped you five bucks last night.”

Blaine put his hair against his mother's shoulder. He was wearing his gangster pants and a soiled strap-undershirt, filthy bare feet with evident toe-jams, but preposterously enough it looked as if he had shaved his armpits, though not his skinny jowls.

Carving several slices of air, Gen said: “Now hear this. It is too late for apologetics. We've got you on the run. I intend to call the police cruiser unless you're out of here pronto.”

“I can't be thrown out of my own house,” Reinhart observed, throwing in the authority of Robert Frost, “‘Home is where when you come they have to let you in.'” But in point of fact, his name was not on the deed. The down payment and most of the subsequent payments on the mortgage had been from Genevieve's own funds. Thus it had been just for her to insist on exclusive ownership.

Gen sneered, so sure of her power now that she tossed the knife aside. “You're finished, Carl. Can't you see that? I mean, really. For some years now you've been living on sheer sentiment and habit. If you were a dog the ASPCA would have put you out of your misery long ago. I am not a calloused person, as you well know. I was willing for years to feed and house you, but I can't endure attacks on my children. You are sick, and have become a menace to yourself as well as others. I suggest, in all kindness, that you turn yourself in to some public facility.”

Reinhart sensed this was some hideous dream, but he could not come to.

“Can I call time out, to collect my thoughts? What you propose may have a certain justification from your perspective, yet all things being relative—”

And Blaine, the nonviolent champion of civil rights versus the pig-police, shouted: “Don't try reason. Call the cops.”

Genevieve made a wry smile. “There you have it, Carl. The clarion call of youth. They simply will not put up with the nonsense any more. Maybe it's the result of being brought up on television. You just can't fool that camera lens.”

Reinhart got his second wind. He began in the nostalgic vein. “When I was Blaine's age the world seemed to be run by guys the age I am now and I thought them complete frauds. I have never had reason to change my mind. Now the balance of power has altered. I know you and he find it politic to pretend you are victims, but statistics show that women control most of the money in America and young people are dominant in the population and certainly the mass media.

“Somehow I have always missed the advantage, and this has probably warped me with jealousy. Ever since I was born I have had to listen incessantly to someone else's propaganda, and not only an account of their superiorities, but, what is worse, their pains, for which they have always contrived to make me responsible. As a youth I was a pleasure-loving punk, as an adult I am a bully, as a white man a former slaveholder, as a member of the middle class an all-purpose exploiter. When in good shape I was thought to be stupid and insensitive, and now as overweight and with short breath, I am considered ugly and moribund.”

Reinhart in fact stopped here for a moment to catch air. He knew his face was purple though not in the least royal.

He resumed: “But did you ever think of this: How the hell could you ever have got along without me?” Yet he did not want to leave it there; a still stronger statement was needed; these were ruthless people: Gen, Blaine, and everybody else. So Reinhart stood very straight and said: “Long reflection on this state of affairs has led me to an inescapable conclusion:
You can all go fuck yourself
.”

(Or should it have been “-selves”?)

In practice great lines never go unanswered, as on the stage and in historical accounts of Oscar Wilde's snotty repartee. When sounded in life they are quickly obscured by abusive responses from unimpressed listeners. The defense against which is of course an edited memory.

Thus the rush of the opening doors of the grounded elevator in the Bloor Building obscured Gen's and Blaine's shrieking, mouth-foaming, pathological ripostes, which in
their
reminiscences no doubt figured as the final blows which sent Reinhart packing. He did pack thereafter, filling an old valise with, mainly, soiled underwear, took the bus downtown, and checked into a YMCA full of seemingly the exact fairies he had encountered in one twenty-five years before and in another town altogether. Then to the Bloor Building and Sweet's office.

Until Sweet reappeared Reinhart must find a way to survive. Now that he was not under the secretary's pressure he could remember quite clearly the precise amount of his funds. Twelve dollars constituted the billfolded wad, with another sixty-three cents swinging in the cool nylon pocket to the left of his genitals. Naturally, before leaving home he had emptied the secret depository in the
World Almanac
. A sudden sharp turn, caused by the inexorably departing crowd in the lobby—large men and small are buffeted by the mean herd—motivated the small change to smite him in what astrology charts nicely called the reins, passion's seat. The blunt and brutal mini-blow was not altogether unpleasant. Nowadays incongruity was almost the only stimulation Reinhart could recognize.