Vital Parts (6 page)

“You have hounded that boy since he was born,” said Genevieve, to whom time had dealt a better hand than to Reinhart, though true enough she was his junior by several years. Short and apparently threatening to turn plump in her early twenties, she had instead acquired several inches of height—which may have been an optical illusion—and lost ten pounds of her youthful weight by the end of the first decade of their marriage. Now, twenty-two anniversaries after the fact, Gen was sharp-featured, spare-figured, and leather-skinned, to put it one way, but handsome, svelte, and flawlessly tanned, to put it the other. Which was to say she had made much the same progress as Reinhart had in the order of familial resemblance; both of them had begun as run-offs of their respective mothers (Reinhart's being muscular) and moved in middle life to favor their fathers.

Gen sat in the corner of the couch, in her usual cloud of smoke. Yet semiannual X-rays showed her lungs were clean, whereas Reinhart's chest often ached though he had given up cigarettes years since.

From his chair Reinhart said: “Look here, this is not the subject for argument, Genevieve. What I am talking about is law. That girl is underage, and Blaine was twenty-one last February.” A cold bleak day, the yard spotted with clumps of dirty snow, a bucketful of which Reinhart had gathered to chill an eight-dollar bottle of champagne to salute the new manhood, but Blaine did not come home until the next morning, having had his own party with hyena friends who raved on hashish and amplified music, obscenely mutilated an effigy of the President of the United States, then buggered one another till dawn (for all Reinhart knew).

Until tonight he had never seen a jot of evidence that the boy was not queer. He still found it hard to believe that a girl would accept the sexual attentions of a male whose hair was not only longer than hers but finer, whose body was softer, and whose wardrobe at least as gaudy.

But the legal question was serious. Reinhart in his time had been a frequent law-bender but never a candid breaker of ordinances however unjust. When he himself had enjoyed the favors of an underaged girl it had been in the context of Occupation Berlin, where codes were as yet unformulated.

Gen spat smoke at him. “All right, Mr. Cop,” she said through the blue stream. “Get your billyclub and pound the child's head to a bloody jelly, like the pigs did to the youngsters at Columbia who were appealing for a better life. The human body is a beautiful thing, only we have made it filthy with our stinking hypocrisy.”

“Genevieve, please don't widen the scope of this discussion. I don't want to get enmired in social theories while my son is naked and in the room of the girl next door with her parents away on vacation. She is a minor person.”

“Well, he isn't,” said Gen. “Therefore you have no responsibility for him.”

“Aw, Gen, Gen.”

“I am sure,” said Genevieve, as always imperfectly crushing the cigarette butt in the ashtray so that it would smolder and stink for some time to come, “I am sure there is some reasonable explanation if he is there at all, which frankly I don't place any credentials in.” She had her own way with idiom. “Blaine told me definitely when he left he was heading for the Heliotrope Thing.”

This discothèque occupied the disused movie house in which Reinhart had spent every Sunday afternoon as a boy, watching never-resolved serials and main features in which the cowboy did not kiss a girl, did not even, in the earliest years, sing songs. Later Reinhart had owned a piece of this theater, served as manager, helped to close its doors forever.

“Will you at least then,” he asked his wife now, “go and look? Why should I tell such a vile lie?”

“Because you hate Blaine,” Genevieve said flatly. “You hate all young people. Youth is hated in this country. Their idols are always shot. No, I will not go and peep through the window like a dirty perver. I am going to bed now, as I have a job to get up and go to every morning, and if I did not, we would be on relief.”

Gen had developed the stride of a horsewoman or anyway the type used by a bygone generation of film actresses with square shoulders and jodhpured legs, a little black fox-hunting derby atop their heads and married to a man who wore a houndstooth jacket and hairline moustache. Gen's locks had got darker through the years—though Reinhart had never actually caught her dyeing them—and were pulled back into a flat doughnut at the nape. The tension served to keep her face smooth as a drumskin. She cultivated a timeless look that defied estimates of age and was relative to her companions: often she made the nearby young seem callow and those whose years matched her own, elder. And from Blaine, perhaps partly for her own uses though she doted on him, she had picked up the lie that America persecuted its youth, the country in which a teen-ager's allowance might well exceed the wages paid a European for laboring all week, not to mention the income of adult Africans and the child prostitutes of Hong Kong.

However she in no way played fast with the truth when she spoke of her job. Indeed she had one, and without it the Reinharts, at least for the moment, might have been a statistic on the roster of snouts in the public trough. Because of the reversal of roles signified by this state of affairs, Reinhart could not be too harsh with her. Breadwinner Gen deserved to come home to serenity and a hot meal, slippers, and pipe if she wanted them. Until he got going again in business he must speak softly.

Therefore he pulled in the horns which were unseemly on a parasite and blew a kiss at her departing back. He must face this crisis alone. He had a certain history of extremities, as who did not at his age; however, a precedent was lacking in this case. It takes no long deliberation to defend your life from an assailant who would destroy or mutilate it. Had Blaine and/or the neighbor's daughter jumped Reinhart in a dark alley he would instinctively have fought like a tiger. But bare-assed and in bed together they were a much more formidable enemy, and his own position was badly eroded owing on the one hand to the incessant castration of having a son like Blaine, and on the other to his own voyeuristic lech for the girl.

He who as a radiant young man had gone to fight the Nazis was now just another dirty old fascist. Reinhart had volunteered for the Army. Blaine was deferred as a college student and threatened to flee to Canada if the immunity was revoked and he was called to the colors. Reinhart half believed “we” should get out of S.E. Asia and with the remaining half-opinion, compounded of TV pictures of Vietcong atrocities, a historical sense of America's world mission created initially by Adolf Hitler's unopposed rise to tyrannical power, and the strident selfish objection of punks who served no cause but nihilism, favored the use of the hydrogen weapon. In less nervous moments he knew the latter of course as the expression of empty bombast, which he allowed himself since in no event was he ever consulted by White House or Pentagon.

He was wont, in heat, to tell Blaine: “Christ, I had to go to a much bigger war. The Japs held the Pacific and the Krauts all of Europe except plucky little England, who swore to fight on the beaches and in the fields until the New World came to redress—”

“Shi-i-i-i-t,” said Blaine in his poisonous, effeminate style of drawing out one-syllabled obscenities. “Why should I be a sucker just because you were?”

And if Genevieve were in attendance, as she always tried to be lest Reinhart become physical with her darling—women and undersized, infirm, and nonviolent kinds of men tended to imply that Reinhart because of his size alone would answer reason with force; thugs like Gino on the other hand enjoyed a conviction that he would respond to their threats with pusillanimous cajolery: both in fact were right, Reinhart being a realist—if Gen were nearby she might at this juncture say. “He's got you there, Carl, ha-HA.”

The cruel feature of this was that never could Reinhart have been described as a superpatriot. Indeed, in his youth he had been much more cynical than Blaine. However, if he pointed this out to his son, Blaine would suddenly turn into that flabbiest of philosophers, the young idealist.

Would swing his hair behind his right ear and squeeze his eyes into slits and then release the lids so as to flutter the long lashes while the blue irises swam in self-induced fury and pain and simulated compassion. “You still
are
a cynic about the poor and the blacks and youth and everything that represents change from the rotten system which has made you what you are.”

“The system! What the hell have I ever got from it but debts? Am I a rich exploiter of the deprived? And don't tell me anything about Negroes. Before you were born I had a colored friend whom I helped out of several scrapes. For which incidentally I can't remember being thanked. I have been pro-Negro all my life, and in a time when it was not exactly popular.”

Blaine wrinkled his long, skinny nose, an appendage the model for which could be found nowhere else on either side of the family. Reinhart might have been suspicious of Gen had Blaine been born so; but in fact as a baby the boy had shown a marked facial resemblance to Reinhart and his nose had actually been modest till puberty. Reinhart's own now was somewhat porcine.

“If I have ever called you fascist, I am sorry,” Blaine said. “You are far worse. You are a liberal, Northern style. The Southern type wears a sheet.”

Then, as Reinhart lifted his fists in chagrin, Blaine quailed as if about to be struck.

Which indeed put the thought into Reinhart's head and not for the first time that day or this life. But he had never laid a hand on Blaine in twenty-one years. Blaine was legally a man. Reinhart could not get over that. Today, when the young clamored for power as never before, they nevertheless refused to grow up. In spirit a spoiled infant, Blaine was physically far from being a child. There were black shadows under his eyes and bird-tracks in the corners. As an Olympic swimmer he would have been an old man. Without his exaggerated growth of hair he might look thirty; with it he could be seen, through wincing eyes, as a homely woman fighting middle age.

Yet there he was, over in the house next door, impugning the morals of a luscious minor. Reinhart had a dreadful thought, remembering an incident from a pornographic eight-page cartoon book of thirty years ago: a potbellied, balding dad finds young son in garage putting blocks to teen-aged girl, routs son, and climbs on maiden himself. A perfect situation for the unscrupulous, like that of the corrupt cop bursting in on a prostitute and her client. But the only way Reinhart could have managed it, and perhaps not even then, was if the initiative were taken by the girl: “If you won't tell, I'll—” Hardly likely in a shameless bitch who cared so little about publicity as not even to draw the blinds.

He lurched through the hall and into the darkened bedroom, hurting the tender instep of his bare foot on a nasty shoe Genevieve had discarded just inside the door, by blind touch found his street clothes in a chair, and climbed into shirt, trousers, and sockless brogans. Gen was at length established as a dark breathing lump in the oversized bed, bought originally so as to accommodate his large figure but from which he had since been banished on charges of snoring, striking out with brutal fists while his consciousness was lost in dreams, muttering loathsome words, and being unemployed. For some time he had taken his nightly repose upon a studio couch against the windows.

Dressed and back in the living room, his hand on the knob of the front door that projected one, in this tract house, directly into the yard, vestibules and front porches being now as obsolete as he, he hesitated. What would be the use? A rhetorical question on which his self-dialogues so often concluded. Try to borrow more money from Maw, apply for a job with Hal, make a pass at Elaine, attempt to converse with Gen, ask the bank for more time, expect the plumber to be prompt, even anticipate that a ham sandwich would be made with fresh bread and lean meat. What was the use?

You are only beaten if you think so
, said Thomas Edison or George Washington or Satchel Paige, as popularly quoted.
But I think so
, said Reinhart. I can't invent a phonograph or lead armies or pitch a sinker. I am just a guy who regardless of what he thought at twenty knows at forty-four only that he will die. It is now grotesque to talk of anything else, especially suicide, which no real loser ever commits because it would deny him the years of pain he so richly deserves.

He threw the lever freeing the brass bar which sealed the door against the entry of militant Negroes bent on massacring white households who had never done them wrong, and stepped out. Too late he saw another person preparing to enter, a girl shorter than he but, in a context relative to her own height and age, quite as stout, so sturdy in fact that their collision was a standoff from which each recoiled in an equal degree.

“Sorry, Winona,” he said and backstepped inside.

“Hi, Daddy,” said she, from a perspiring pumpkin-face under the proscenium of high wet bangs and skimpy side curtains of her Buster Brown coiffure.

“How was the picture?”

She breathed out heavily and ran a chubby finger through the channel between temple and ear. “Not as good as
The Dead, the Maimed, and the Ravished
. But not bad.”

“Isn't it funny they make those Westerns nowadays in Italy?” Reinhart observed, trying to make his mood seem light.

“Italy?” Her soft brown eyes watered. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Now there's no need to cry about that, Winona. They do it for economic reasons, I understand. Italian extras don't cost so much.”

She was already in full sob. “But it's supposed to be
Texas
. Oh, that just ruins it.” Winona was sixteen years old. With fallen shoulders she went to the couch and dumped herself into the corner spot earlier vacated by Gen, throwing her fat red thighs wide and clasping both chins.

Reinhart reminded her of all the trouble in the world and what was worth tears and what not and gradually she peeped waterily up at him. “You see, darling,” he explained. “Even if it had been shot in present-day Texas it would be fictional, because cowboys don't carry guns any more. It's imaginary, anyway. As long as it's believable on its own terms nothing else matters.” But she was not yet quite mollified, so he sat down next to her and put his heavy arm around her thick waist. She smelled of clean sweat, rather pleasantly, something like ginger in fact, but no doubt it added to her many social difficulties and he would have liked to find a way to tell her about it without reinciting a despair so hairtrigger as to be set off by disillusionment over a trashy movie.