Vital Parts (58 page)

Reinhart felt his eyebrows coming together. “That's right, that's right,” he said vaguely, then collected himself. “Of course, you can't live only for other people, though. If, being human, they deserve help, so, being human yourself, do you. I mean, your own self is sacred too. That's why, I think, the Church calls suicide as great a sin as murder.”

Winona also frowned. “But if someone wants you to do something they cannot do for themself, and it has to be done or they will go crazy, well, don't you have to be pretty nasty not to help them out?”

A nun entered the room at this point. She was a young woman, healthily colored within the white coif. Reinhart had always found them female yet sexless, and stayed away from those obscene movies in which voluptuous actresses, negligeed or bikinied in their last feature, wore the habit.

“Hi!” she said, breezing up to the bed. “How's the girl? This your dads? Groovy gear you're wearing, man!”

“This is Sister Mary Margaret, Daddy,” said Winona. “She is my friend.”

“You know it.” She put her hand at Reinhart. He shook it. “I'm going off now, and came to say good night.” She smiled brazenly into Reinhart's eyes. “I'm glad I did.”

He opened his hand but did not succeed in getting rid of hers. He said: “I want to thank you for taking care of my little girl.”

“Oh, that's my specialty,” said Sister Mary Margaret, twisting her trunk in such a way that her breasts made themselves known. “I take care of everybody.”

Reinhart blushed. She still had his hand. He mumbled: “Winona was just telling me she might like to become a sister.”

“It can be pretty dreary,” said Mary Margaret, hooking her free hand into her waist rope and arching her hip, “but thank God, not what it used to be. I mean, we have to wear this sheet at work, because it is more practical than even a nurse's uniform when the blood and pus are flying, but when you're off you can go back to the barracks and get into something human.” She leered at Reinhart. “You should see the clear plastic miniskirt I got the other day at Switched-On. You really should.”

Winona said excitedly: “That's my mother's shop.”

The nun ignored her. “But,” she said, “not tonight. I'm spoken for.” She pinched Reinhart's palm. “Hey, wait a minute. We're going to the Gastrointestinal System. He'll probably get stoned after an hour. So if you want to come around later—you know the Funky Broadway? You look like a mean dancer.”

Reinhart said: “Sorry, I'm all tied up.”

“That figures.” She ran a hand across his crew cut. “Sexy. I thought they were out.” She turned to Winona: “Keep it cool, baby.” And left, like a sloop in a gale.

“Isn't she nice?” asked Winona. “She told me to call her Marge.”

“Really a terrific person,” Reinhart said, “and full of pep.”

“So everything's just fine now, Daddy. I was pretty worried for a while, because though, well, you weren't around to talk to, and you know how Mother is, working her fingers to the bone, poor thing, and I don't like to bother her, and Blaine, he would just make fun—”

Reinhart said, not listening: “It is certainly something to think about, dear, being a nun. But you might check into the various orders. Sister Mary Margaret is an excellent type, no doubt, but not everybody has the same personality, Winona. You might find you prefer the serenity of some secluded convent. You do see a lot of ugly sights around a hospital.”

“I don't mean that, Daddy.” She giggled. “It's kind of embarrassing, really. But at first he reminded me of you—you know how sometimes when you have worked terribly hard and all sorts of big business deals are on your mind, you look so sad? Well, so did he, standing there in the lobby last night, looking at the stills for the coming attractions. I waited about twenty minutes for the girls to come out of the ladies', before I realized they had slipped out the back exit.”

Reinhart sat there quietly while a great hairy beast slouched towards him.

Winona said: “He saw me looking at my watch, and he looked at his, and he said: ‘Well, I guess we both have been stood up. We are the kind of people to whom other people do that, aren't we?' So terribly sad. I remembered what you told me once. I said, ‘I guess so, but you shouldn't ever give up. Something really fabulous might happen at any time.' ‘You give me hope,' he said. ‘And that's what a woman's for, all in all.' He had the nicest boyish voice, like yours, you know, Daddy, and was about the same age. He said, ‘I trust you won't think me forward, miss, but if you don't have anything better to do, I would call it a fabulous event right now if I could buy you a milk shake. Do you know Alfie's, where they make 'em so thick a spoon will stand up?'”

Winona was at pains to be accurate: “I think it was Alfie's, but it might have been Ralphie's. Anyhow, I never heard of either one and in fact I don't really like the double-thick ones, which are almost solid ice cream and stick in the straw. But I could tell by looking at his sad face that he thought they were fabulous and I wouldn't have wanted to disappoint him when he had already been ditched by whoever he was waiting for. So I said, ‘If you could wait a minute while I check the ladies' lounge and see if my friends are there.' But he said, ‘I have such a fear that if you leave me I will never see you again.'

“Well, Daddy, I guess you have never had the experience, but when everybody else in the world makes you feel useless, and then suddenly somebody seems to require you for an important purpose. …”

Reinhart nodded in his rigidity. Control, control must be imposed. Inevitable as this fantasy seemed, it could be rewritten:
Nevertheless, I said I had to check on the ladies' and as it turned out my friends were still there and when we came out he was gone
.

Winona responded to this silent direction, just as she had done on the sidewalk outside Dr. Wilhelm's office.

“But still I had to make sure my friends were not looking for me after all, to be fair, you know, and I went there, but they were gone, and I came back and said, ‘It would be a pleasure.'” She carried obedience only so far: had turned away from the doctor's office but lost direction at the curb.

“‘Is it close enough to walk there or should we get a bus?' I asked him. ‘Little princess,' he said, he said that, I'm not making it up, and he seemed so happy all of a sudden, he smiled when I came back, you should have seen how happy he was, Daddy, and he clasped me by the hand.”

The beast had now reached Reinhart. He could feel the stinking heat of its breath.

“He had a beautiful car, but we had a hard time finding it because everybody else was parked there for the second show, rank after rank, but it was fun looking for it, because he kept calling me nice things I never heard outside of movies and every time I giggled at them he would squeeze my hand, and when we found it he gave me the keys and said, ‘Would you like to drive, my treasure?' ‘I have trouble operating a bicycle,' I said. He said, ‘Nonsense, dearest! You just never have had the right instruction. Remember this: you can do anything you want to, if you tell yourself you can.'”

Winona looked at her suspended leg. “He had your manner, Daddy. You know, the kind of confidence that won't take no for an answer, like when the fuses kept blowing at home?”

At last Reinhart had caught Blaine under the hair dryer, air-conditioner on full blast, and a hot iron propped on the dresser-top. Blaine ironed his hair in hot weather, else it developed a slight curl.

“But what bothered me was that you never had suggested I learn to drive. He said, ‘Your Dad is too busy for that.' ‘You know him?' ‘I certainly do. He's one of the people I admire most,' he said. ‘I've even tried to model myself after him, but that's not easy. He's one great guy. Of course he's told me a lot about you, how beautiful and smart you are, but I don't mean any disrespect when I say that not even his extravagant statements did justice to you.'”

“You got his name then,” Reinhart tried to say nonchalantly.

“Sure,” said Winona. “It rhymed: Gordon Horton. Remember me to your Dad when you get home,' he said. ‘Gordon Horton.'”

There was a telephone on the bedside table, and a metropolitan-area book on a shelf below. Reinhart seized the latter and looked for this diabolically impossible name.

“Yes,” he said, “old Army pal. Here he is, Howard J. Horton. Good old Howie.” He peered at his daughter through pinpoint eyes.

“No,” said Winona, “Gordon, because he told me to call him Gordie, and he doesn't live here but in Delaware, I think he said, which is why he hasn't seen you for a while. I saw the license plate and it said ‘Delaware.'”

“Happen to get the number?”

“I'm hopeless at numbers, Daddy.”

True. Winona had to look up their home phone when she was out.

“Wait a minute, I think the Delaware plate was on the car ahead. I saw it when I put on the headlights. I think he said Iowa was where he lived now. I put on the lights when I was trying to start the motor and pulling the different knobs, but he told me where to put the key and how to move the lever to ‘Drive' and what to do with your feet, and we
moved!
I tell you it was a thrill, Daddy. We moved out of the slot and across the aisle, real slow, and we almost banged the Delaware car, but Gordie put his foot across and braked just in time. And then we backed into the slot. And that was all there was to it. We never did go for the milk shake.”

Winona's grin was resplendent. The monster clutching Reinhart turned out to be one of those amusement-park illusions, 3-D fakery, luminescent paint.

“That was all?” he cried triumphantly.

“Absolutely,” said Winona. “I sure didn't want to wreck his nice car, a nice man like that, and maybe you won't believe it, but for once I wasn't interested in treating my sweet tooth. So then he turned off the motor and the lights and said, ‘Let's just sit here for a while and talk. I seldom get the chance to talk to a beautiful and intelligent girl. Girls have always made a fool of me. I give them everything they want and yet the more I do, the more contempt I get in return. I sometimes think I am under an evil curse.' The poor man, he began to cry then, the way you did when Granpa died and I'll never forget that as long as I live. ‘I have
never
been loved,' he said, ‘never in my life. A lovely creature like you can't understand that, but it is terrible to always want and never be wanted in return. You feel you don't exist.'

“I said I couldn't understand that, big and handsome as he was, with a new car. ‘It's something about me, I guess,' he said. ‘Some sort of radiation that other people feel. It tells them that I mean well, that I am good, that they have nothing to fear. People don't like you unless they fear you. The way to succeed is to be mean.'”

“No, no, no,” Reinhart shouted, shutting his eyes as the beast returned gnashingly to life. “You told me that was all, Winona. After the little driving lesson, that was all. You said good-bye and walked to the bus stop.”

“That was all of the
driving
,” she said. “But it wasn't all of our friendship. I gave him my handkerchief. I carry two in this hot weather, one to wipe the sweat off my face. He buried his face in it and said, ‘What is this heavenly fragrance?' ‘Only Fab with enzyme-active borax, I think,' I said. Isn't that the soap you use in the wash machine, Daddy?”

“New blue Cheer,” said Reinhart. Precision could save your soul.

“Then I was wrong.”

“Well, not very. I might have used Fab once or twice, when there was a special on it. A penny here and a penny there, you know.” He had a desperate urge to keep this trivia going forever.

“I guess it really doesn't matter.”

“Oh, it does, Winona! It matters awfully.” She got a stricken look, and Reinhart shouted horribly: “No, it doesn't! Go on.”

“I only want to get it right, Daddy. About your friend.”

The chimera was sniffing around Reinhart's large body, seeking a vital part for its fangs.

Winona said: “Well, nobody had been that nice to me in all my life. I mean, nobody but you of course. I knew he was just being kind. I'm not beautiful for gosh sakes, and I am anything but brilliant, that's for sure. I am fat and I am stupid. I can't get a date, and I flunked geometry and barely squeaked through social studies.”

There is a kind of pain that can be exquisitely pleasurable, gratifying the thrill-seeker who through surfeit has become immune to simple amusements. But that was not the kind which Reinhart now experienced.

“I know I can get by only if somebody shows me what they need,” Winona said. “Those girls
need
someone to ditch. If I wasn't good for that, they wouldn't ask me to come with them. They would get somebody else, and I would not have anyplace to go. You see, the way I have figured it out, I actually am popular.”

Reinhart nodded. Winning and losing were relative states of being, perhaps only matters of definition.

“So when he asked me, I said OK, if that's what would make him happy.”

Reinhart instinctively found a means of survival, like certain living things in a drought: they burrow.

“You're a good person, Winona,” he said as the cool, moist earthworks rose around him. “And the really good are—” As the surface grew more remote he might have said, since like all philosophy it did not matter now, “even more frightening than the really evil, for we cannot punish them.”

But Winona said quickly: “No, I'm not, Daddy. I didn't like it. It hurt. And I got to thinking—” Her face wrinkled, smoothed, blushed. “I got to hating—you, Daddy, you of all people. He was your friend, you see. You were both men. Oh, I was pretty rotten, and it's not easy to confess this, but if you love someone you can hate him temporarily, can't you, if in the end you come back to loving him? I mean, it would be bad only if it was permanent, wouldn't it?”