Vital Parts (33 page)

Genevieve said: “Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Jealous of a young boy? Who is furthermore your own son? You make me sick.”

But the moral question was: Why should Blaine get everything? He already had early youth, perfect health, and an allowance of five dollars a week for which he performed no chores. For the weekly four bits Reinhart had also, when the grass was out of season, raked leaves, shoveled snow, and organized the basement. Having begun these jobs as a son, he continued them as a father, getting help from his father when a son, but when a father himself he worked alone, except of course for sporadic aid from Winona, whose will was good but whose effectuality was impaired by daydreaming, the practical use of only her left hand, her right ever occupied with wedge of cake or jelly doughnut, and a flow of tears whenever she flushed an insect from “his little house.”

While Blainey was indoors running up puppet dresses on the sewing machine. At that time he reminded Reinhart of Genevieve's brother Kenworthy, who after a career of harassing them in their courtship, had gone off to the Navy and thence to New York, where he allegedly had enjoyed success as an interior decorator, though he never visited back or wrote. Gen once displayed a page from one of those snotty fashion magazines, showing a serpentine model lounging amidst a total environment of jaguarskin, to carpet, wall, and ceiling which an entire jungle must have been emptied. Among the credits one read: “
Mise en scène
—Kenworthy Raven.”

“What I wonder,” Reinhart had noted, “is who shot those wild animals. You can't drop a jaguar with a slap from a limp wrist.”

“I think you are a dirty shit,” said Gen, who had developed quite a foul mouth over the years though she was careful to use it only when they were home alone.

At parties she was most demure of speech, even when, as the punchbowl got down to the discolored orange rounds, the rest of the crowd waxed raunchy. From the sort of smut related by a Harry Healy, whose conceit it was to use physician's jargon (“He palpated her clitoris with his glans …”), Genevieve would indeed retreat to the lavatory or, finding it occupied, to the bedchamber-checkroom and sit sulkily upon the piled coats. Reinhart became privy to this practice once when, leading Harriet Birdsall, who loosened up to the point of harlotry after two drinks, to a private place so they could join tongues and he cup her rather juvenile buttock-globes in his large paws, they staggered into a bedroom and saw Gen; fortunately her head was turned away and he could pretend he came to fetch her for leaving.

But what did Gen want? Reinhart had had less of a clue each succeeding twelvemonth of an era lasting twenty-two years. Pregnant with what turned out to be Blaine, which was to say for a period of ten months immediately following their marriage—the nine bearing Blaine added to the one for the pretense of pregnancy, by means of which she had induced Reinhart to marry her—Gen lay about in a wrapper and read mystery novels, the sort set in country estates and peopled with tea-pouring dowagers who disposed of parvenus with devastating adjectives, trust-fund lawyers, lapdogs, and rose gardens, the lot pussyfooting around in New or Old England.

Yet Genevieve had never shown a penetrating interest in Reinhart's schemes to make money—if the grand life was what she wanted, with upstairs maids and porte cocheres and snowy napery. It was not. That happened to be Reinhart's own dream. He understood that people did not necessarily lust for that which they read about. Reinhart liked private-eye yarns, but he neither wished to be a shamus nor live in California. On the other hand, though he could not endure ten pages of the sissy type of thriller he would have liked to be an intimate of the houses depicted therein or, better, own one of sufficient magnitude to require a “staff.”

Money. So simple was his need. The strange thing was that in the early days, when Gen and he both worked for Humbold the realtor, she had been quite ambitious for him. On the strength of her urging and her expertise in office matters, he had even squeezed a raise out of Claude. Pregnancy had changed her, and Reinhart as well. He insisted she quit her job: he would not have a child of his carried to employment for another man. (So early did he begin to give Blaine special treatment!) Neither would he let her turn a hand at home. He did the meals and cleaning himself, and of course when the baby came, with all its requirements, it would have been shameful to dump all the old duties on Gen in addition. In fact Reinhart also took on several of the feedings and most of the diaper-changings—it was not unpleasant to deal with the intake and outgo of one's own flesh, and in the cradle Blaine was a dead ringer for Reinhart, in miniature and surely much finer-made, but with ears set at the same angle and the characteristic depression of the cranium just below the summit in back.

Genevieve's descent was allegedly
echt
English, at least on her father's side. Her mother was a dim figure, apparently some kind of spiritualist crank, though in twenty years Reinhart had not talked with her more than an aggregate of twenty minutes, and that mainly on the phone if he called the Raven house and she answered. In nonelectronic encounters he had seldom seen her except in the company of his father-in-law, to characterize whom as an arrogant, tyrannical, narcissistic, and thoroughly nasty king of pricks was to circumlocute to the point of mealy-mouthed inarticulation.

And yet Reinhart had had to name his own son after this individual, had been forced to watch another Blaine grow to majority. The two Blaines of course got on famously, demonstrating what's in a name after all, for Reinhart's father-in-law was a blatant fascist in marvelous physical trim though a drunkard.

He claimed to be a former Marine officer and had the uniform and Jap combat souvenirs to back him up, though no doubt these could have been acquired by purchase or theft from the genuine article, and such an item as the gold incisor tooth—reputedly knocked by him personally, with the horizontal butt-stroke of an M-I carbine, from a Nipponese monkey-mouth on the Canal or Iwo—could have been swiped from a local dentist. (He had been trained at “Tico” and shipped out of “Dago.” His jargon had an authentic sound.) Stolen from the dentist, because the elder Blaine was never known to pay for services rendered or goods received, and being a lawyer by training and an indeterminate period of practice before he was disbarred, he could not effectively be bluffed by his creditors.

Reinhart for example usually owed certain debts, like the one at Gino's restaurant, but he would pay them when he could and at no time did he challenge the basic principle of obligation. But his father-in-law, who frequented the haute cuisine establishments downtown—L'Etable à Cochon and the Epicure's Nook in the Shade-Milton Hotel—might eat three-quarters of a dish before returning it to the kitchen as ill-prepared, spray a mouthful of wine through his perfect teeth and send back the bottle, abuse the waiters and the maître d', then sign the check including tip, and not only never pay it but if he were subjected to the proprietor's importunities, threaten to boycott the place forever. He was of course only dunned by mail. On personal appearances he received a red carpet the nap of which grew deeper and the obsequiousness with which it was unrolled more slavish in the degree of his indebtedness.

Reinhart finally worked out an explanation: for one, his father-in-law persistently put on their mettle these persons whose business it was to cater to what began as a basic human need for nourishment and became a highly stylized self-indulgence. Obviously you did not require
caneton aux cerises
for life. Existentially speaking, such a menu was most arbitrary, even irrelevant. Therefore it would be difficult to establish that payment for it was necessary in the absolute moral sense in which a hungry man was obliged to return money for the hamburger filling his but lately hollow maw.

The other thing was that the elder Blaine actually cowed these persons with his connoisseurship, which was authentic at least in passion. Though the servitors were a mixed bag of nationalities, some from no farther than Kentucky, the chefs were approximate Frenchmen, and more than once a baggy white toque drooped in contrition as the haricots flageolets were identified as rather American Great Northern or the eggs Benedict were smothered in hollandaise and not sauce Mornay or if the latter, the constituent cheese was domestic and not imported Swiss. Perhaps his father-in-law was a genuine gastronome, or merely a shrewd psychologist. It was not likely that Reinhart, who bought California wine by the gallon, could fault him on technical matters.

What interested Reinhart in all this was Raven's assurance. The man was a monster of certainty. He could survey a room in a single glance and identify its inhabitants as base swine or sum up a historical situation, for others fraught with agonizing complexity, with the stark statement, “The coons are taking over everywhere.” But organized right-wing groups were beyond his pale, with their flabby faces and loutish clothes, and anybody Southern because of the accent, and Hitler and his associates had all been grotesquely deformed in body. Raven could not endure people who deviated from the physical norm in any direction, fat or bone, wore facial hair, walked with an irregular stride, or whose nostrils, ears, eyebrows, etc., were either exceptionally tiny or gross.

He was particularly a nut on posture, and might strike Reinhart painfully in the small of back if he passed behind him—probably a holdover from his officer-days, but after the breaking-in period of the marriage, Reinhart felt within his rights to protest. Raven however was a master in rising above what he considered meanness. He would not argue. For that matter he would not fight though he kept himself in beautiful trim in the gymnasium of his club (on the upstairs bulletin board of which his name was permanently posted as being in arrears on dues), hefting barbells and making the cable weights scream.

Raven's style was not everywhere triumphant. The lower on the social scale his involvements, the more likely the resistance, and the attendant of a parking lot, say, being virtually immune to any kind of approach, in fact sharing with Raven a sense of disjunction from the rest of humankind, would fetch his car with no more grace than a sane man would expect, abusing the transmission and brakes, ripping the ticket from the hand, spitting on the ground, the usual series of natural uglinesses. Raven's practice was to get back of the wheel, close and lock the door, and, lowering the window two inches, call out in a penetrating but not loud voice: “You are a filthy hyena.” Oftentimes the attendant was too far sunk in the mire of his spirit to hear the statement or at any rate to apprehend and/ or apply it to himself. But on at least one occasion, Reinhart being present, a short, underweight fellow, with a ripe boil on his cheek, correctly divined he was the target of an insult and ran to the window uttering obscene imprecations. At which Raven smiled victoriously through the glass, turning once to show Reinhart, and accelerated into the street.

The truth was, Reinhart envied his father-in-law. He too loathed persons who were paid to render service and did it badly, but found himself paralyzed when it came to entering a complaint: his conscience would invariably begin to snivel about how little the flunky must earn in wages, how dreary the job, how limited the opportunity. In the old days Reinhart would swallow his bile and congratulate himself on his compassion. He now had the courage anyway to admit his failure to protest was due exclusively to cowardice.

Raven's solution was perfect, but you had to be a scoundrel to execute it. What Reinhart envied in his father-in-law was not finally the arrogance in itself, but rather the solipsism of which it was a product, and he hated him the more, without sympathizing with any of Raven's victims. On his side Raven had always been more or less oblivious to Reinhart. Yet, in the early days Reinhart had often found himself, willy-nilly, in his father-in-law's company. More than once he had come upon a drunken Raven and helped him home. Reinhart himself was wont to soak his depression in strong drink, which made his spirit despair even more strenuously and his body swell with fat, but though twenty-odd years older, Raven seemed immune to the deleterious effects of liquor. His belly was flat and his wind inexhaustible, at least by Reinhart, who had many occasions on which to gauge it, for Raven in his cups could become quite bestial when pursued, leaping onto bartops and car roofs and swinging on overhead projections with a simian's insouciance.

As a lawyer he had seemed rarely to have a client. The only one Reinhart could remember was the streetwalker who had hired Raven to beat a bum rap brought by a vice-squad dick who had been getting freebies from her for six months in exchange for immunity and then treacherously, to fill an arrest-quota in response to a mayoral cleanup push, put the collar on her. While planning her defense, Raven went into one of his crazy drunks and gave his client a savage pummeling. The hooker took
him
to court and won. Another issue of this incident was his disbarment.

But Raven not only survived the experience but through it became favorably known to the fellowship of local pimpery, who recognized a kindred soul when it came to handling women and retained his services for a decent annual stipend. He could not practice, but dispensed advice equipping the clients to represent themselves quite effectively.

Gen did not know the whole story, and overrode with screams and howls Reinhart's attempts to put her in the picture. To her Raven was still “the greatest Daddy who ever lived,” her literal inscription on the cards accompanying Xmas and birthday gifts. Reviewing this state of affairs in a mirror, Reinhart could watch himself turn blue.

But as his own daughter grew into a usable consciousness, Reinhart recognized that he might well be the Raven to Winona's Genevieve. The girl worshiped him. It had not been little Blaine who smeared aerosol-canned whipped-cream substitute on his cheeks and scraped it off with a pencil, in imitation of his shaving Dad, but Winona, who subsequently licked off the froth and swallowed it. When hardly out of the staggering stage she had already begun to pick up Reinhart's peculiar stride. It was amusing to see that little blob loping along a block away, and of course touching as well.