“Dad . . .”
“Yes, son.”
“It wasn’t her fault, or my fault,” Tommy breathed.
“You loved her?”
“Yes, a lot . . . more than anything.”
“Who interfered?”
“I-I have to start at the beginning. Dad, I don’t know if I did right or wrong, honestly. But, in the end, I did what I felt I had to do.”
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“I see. I’ll understand it, if you tell me.”
“Marie was a good girl, Dad,” Tommy said. “Her father is a carpenter. Her mother keeps house. They’re converted Catholics.”
“I know. John Wiggins is law-abiding. And Marie is beautiful.”
“We’d been going together for quite a bit,” Tommy whispered, his voice still charged with dread. “She is in a class just below mine, and I helped her a lot. We were together night and day—almost all the time. Her family trusted me. She was mine.
That is how we felt. Well, you know . . . It happened one night.
We knew we were going to marry, so it was not something terribly serious. But I was careful.” Tommy looked defi antly at his father. “She was not pregnant. I’m Catholic. She’s Catholic. And we knew how to be cautious. Well, this went on for a year. Then we decided to get married. I told you and Mama, and you both said it was a good thing. Marie’s parents said so too.
The wedding was all set. Then we went to the doctor to get our blood tested.”
“Yes?”
“I handled all that for her,” Tommy said. “That is, I took her to the doctor with me. And I arranged to go and pick up the blood tests.”
There was silence. From far off came the faint wail of a police siren.
“Yes, son?”
“Well, I went after four days for the blood tests,” Tommy resumed with a weary sigh. “The doctor handed me mine.
‘Yours is okay,’ he told me. I waited. The doctor sat there staring at me. And I said: ‘And where’s Marie’s?’ And he asked me:
‘How well do you know this girl?’ I thought that that was a funny kind of question. I said, ‘I’m going to marry her.’ The
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doctor stood up and began to pace the floor. He said: ‘I know you want to marry her. That’s why you came to me for these blood tests.’ Then he sat down. ‘There’s something wrong with that girl,’ the doctor said. I kind of froze. I could not imagine what he meant. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘She’s sick, real sick,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter? What has she got?’ I asked him.” Tommy’s head sagged low and his lips hung open. But no words came.
“Yes, son? What was it?”
“Dad, the doctor told me, ‘Son, this girl has four-plus syphilis!’”
Tommy’s body shuddered and Ruddy felt the boy’s skin grow ice cold. Ruddy felt for a second that he could not breathe.
Good Lord.
“Jesus, Tommy . . . What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy murmured.
“Was . . . s-she a virgin?”
“That’s the odd part. She was. There was nothing that she did and nothing that happened to her that gave her that disease.”
“Then how did she get it? Oh, this is horrible . . . oh, Tommy, I’m so sorry . . .”
“I asked the doctor and he said that he would talk to Marie,” Tommy related. “Dad, I left that doctor’s office a blind man. The sun was shining, but I could not see it. I don’t think the world will ever look or seem the same to me. Well, I waited for the doctor to call me. He did; he asked me to come in. I went. He told me, ‘Son, this is tragic. Your girl has congenital syphilis. She inherited it. This is the first case of this kind I’ve ever had.’ Then, Dad, I knew that it was true. You see, the doctor had the report checked, had the test done over again, just to make sure that there would be no mistake. I hadn’t
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eaten for four days, practically. And now I knew the worst. I felt a kind of cold night come down over me. Then the doctor asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ Strangely, Dad, I hadn’t until that moment thought of what I was going to do. I was numb. Yet—” Tommy paused, then continued, whispering. “I knew what I was going to do. I had already done it. I was going to ditch that girl. I couldn’t marry her. One night I even dreamed that I killed her. I couldn’t blame her for what had happened, but I was hurt, hurt as I had never been hurt in all my life. I asked the doctor, ‘What can I do?’ I asked him that just to make sure that he had told me the truth. ‘We could cure her,’ he said. ‘How long would that take?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And I would have to wait while that happened, wouldn’t I?’ I asked. ‘You can’t, under the law, marry this girl while she is ill,’ he said. ‘You slept with her, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’
I said. Then a new fear—one I had until then not allowed myself to think of—swept down over me. The first fear had been a cold one. This second one was as hot as fire. Had I caught syphilis?” Tommy’s body gave a long shudder. “I asked the doctor and he said, ‘I don’t know. We’ll test you.’ I sat and sat.
Dad, I could not move. Then I asked the doctor, ‘How did she take it?’ He said, ‘She collapsed. She was hysterical. I’ve never seen a girl go to pieces so absolutely. She tried to get drunk but could not. She wept for three days. Haven’t you seen her?’
I told the doctor that I had not, that I could not. ‘What are you going to do?’ the doctor asked me again. Then I blurted out what I knew I had to say: ‘Can’t marry her!’ Oh, Dad, I didn’t decide. Something in me decided. It was moral. I felt unclean. Polluted, contaminated, poisoned. I swear to God. Oh, you’ll never know. Each time I walked the streets, I trembled with each step. I felt the world would dissolve, melt, fade away before my eyes.” Tommy bent forward, his body shaking, and
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he sobbed. “Dad, I did wrong. But I couldn’t help it. I went back and asked the doctor: ‘I don’t have to marry her, do I?’
He said, ‘No, of course not. But I can cure her.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want her now.’ It was true, Dad. I couldn’t ever have slept with that girl again, no matter what.”
“Did the doctor ever find out how she got it?”
“No. It was congenital, he said,” Tommy related.
“What’s happened to Marie?”
“Dad, I don’t know,” Tommy cried. “I’ve never seen her. I know you’re going to say I’m wrong, hard-hearted. But I can’t see her. That she was sick, wasn’t my fault. The doctor said so.”
“Good God,” Ruddy murmured. “And you lived with this all to yourself?”
“Yes.”
“And you? Did you have tests to find out if you had been contaminated?”
“Yeah, hundreds of ’em,” Tommy confessed. “I went crazy for a while, I guess. I went for a Wassermann each month, until the doctor said he would send me to a mental clinic if I could not believe that I had nothing, that I was clean. Oh, Dad, you’ll never know. I sent Marie my savings, told her she could sell the ring.”
“What did she say? Did she cry?”
“I talked to her by phone, Dad. I never saw Marie again, Dad,” Tommy whimpered.
“Why?”
“I just couldn’t bear to look at her . . .”
“Good God. That poor girl.”
“I know, I know . . . you’re going to say that I was a shabby man. But Dad, I couldn’t. That’s all, I couldn’t. ”
“I knew that something had happened to you,” Ruddy declared, justifying his insistence.
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“After that, Dad, I changed my outlook on everything,”
Tommy said.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s how I got to know Brentwood Park,” Tommy said in a low voice.
“What do you mean, son?”
&nbs
p; “Don’t you see, Dad?” Tommy asked wailingly. “I could no longer do my fieldwork in the Black Belt. It was contaminated.
Poisoned. I told my professor I had to quit. I begged off and asked to change my thesis. He consented. I was assigned to Brentwood Park.”
“Oh, I see. My God,” Ruddy said.
“I’ve never been in the Black Belt since. I fled it, Dad. I never want to go back into it. What kind of a world is that? How could a thing like that happen? I ride past the Black Belt now.
Whenever I walk the streets there, I feel like I’m going to faint, fall down.”
“You’re sick,” Ruddy said.
“Only when I’m there, am I sick,” Tommy contended.
“Good God Almighty.” Ruddy rose and stared at his son.
“Dad, do you blame me?” Tommy begged.
“You did what you felt you had to do, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But would you have waited for her and married her?”
Ruddy hesitated a long time, then mumbled, “Don’t know, son.”
“I couldn’t,” Tommy insisted.
“What did the doctor say?”
“He said I was acting within my rights.”
“He didn’t say anything about the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ of it?”
“No,” Tommy said and choked.
“And you’ve lived with this since that time?” Ruddy asked.
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“Yes, alone, each day and night,” Tommy confessed. “Until I felt I was going crazy . . .”
Yes, that was why Tommy had always acted so casually, so detatched, with such a ready smile. He had been hiding all this.
Ruddy embraced his son and mumbled as he wept. “I’m sorry for you, son. You must have been through hell.”
C H A P T E R 8
Never had Ruddy felt more deeply protective toward his son than now. To realize that Tommy had gone through that whole stormy period alone, saying not one word! He should have told me! Yet what good could he have done? And not even Agnes had guessed at what was wrong. He must have sweated, Ruddy said to himself.
Yes, Ruddy felt that Tommy was, in a manner, a better man than he was, for Ruddy surely would not have been able to en-dure such an agony without confiding in somebody. He just sweated it out alone. Ruddy’s past experience in police work now enabled him, without his knowing it, to judge Tommy a bit objectively—but not all the way. At this moment he felt that peculiar kind of need that a doctor feels when a member of his family falls sick; he yearned to call in one of his colleagues for help, somebody upon whose objectivity he could rely. But, no, not for something like this. The dreaded disease that Ruddy had mentioned was as morally loathsome to him as to his son, and he easily felt how stunned poor Tommy had been. Jesus, I must get that kid a gal, for I don’t want ’im to develop any crazy complexes. Just because one gal is contaminated does not mean
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that they all are, he reasoned. Yet, deep down in him, he blamed Tommy for having abandoned the girl, and yet he could not have said that he wanted him to marry her. And Tommy had slept with the girl. Thank God he didn’t give her that disease and thank God he didn’t catch it himself, he prayed half-aloud to himself. Congenital? Yes, the sins of fathers were visited upon the sons and daughters. A tainted stream of life had run close past his door and actually brushed itself against his own fl esh and blood. A dreadfully damaged girl! A rotten girl—though rotten through no fault of her own—who would pass her rottenness on to others—and especially to her children! Jesus God. He sank upon his bed. No, he, too, would not tell Agnes.
Tommy, in a way, had been right; no woman ought to know of such. It was as though, if Agnes knew of it, it would somehow communicate itself to her.
Yeah, he knew how Tommy had felt, why he had gone again and again to that doctor for tests; he had been trying to prove to himself a cleanliness deeper than that of blood. Ruddy’s processes of reasoning stopped. Good Lord, the poor boy had been so shaken that he had fled the Black Belt! The sense of uncleanliness he had felt had been extended to the entire area.
How awful . . . The Black Belt must look to him like a coiled rattlesnake, Ruddy thought. What a crushing blow! Now, more than ever, he had to be near that boy. Yes, he would take Tommy with him as much as possible into the Brentwood Park police headquarters and let him see that all areas had their tragedies, that all areas had their poisons, their sources of contamination.
Tommy had to see this thing in a balanced way. Ah, he could pretend that he wanted Tommy’s advice about the crime in the area; that was a way of bringing Tommy near him, placing the boy in a position where he could regain his confi dence.
Should Tommy have married that poor girl? Frankly, Ruddy
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did not know. He adhered to his religion, but he had never met the problem in a form that brought his religion so much into play. He was sorry for the girl, but ought a young man to saddle himself with a girl that ill? True, there were miracle drugs on the market. But how could you marry a girl whom you were afraid to touch? Aw, that’s why that kid has veered from the girls around us! Jesus, that’s it. And I never dreamed. . . . How goddamn complicated life is. And, oh God, you see how right and just law was! He would point out to Tommy, next time they talked, how wonderful it was that there existed a law that compelled him and that girl to take blood tests. Why, if he had been in some of the backward states that had no such law, he would have found himself married to a tainted girl! And, years later, when children were born, or when the disease had broken out in him, the girl would perhaps have said that Tommy had given her the disease! Ruddy’s brow grew hot and damp. Jesus, that was a close shave. And to have children in whose blood seething spirochetes would be raging, and those poor doomed children would, in turn, pass it on to others! And God help ’em if they were girls!
Ruddy stood at the window and stared out, feeling that maybe Tommy ought to have stood by the girl, gotten her well, and then married her. But could you build a marriage on such foundations? Suppose Tommy had done that and suppose in the years to come there had risen arguments between Tommy and the girl—could not Tommy have, in a moment of blind fury, hurled an accusation against the girl? And would not the girl have been emotionally crushed and wounded beyond measure?
Yeah, that’s always a risky business, Ruddy breathed. Sometimes one ought to be noble and forgiving, but one’s feelings won’t let one. Hell, after all, according to the doctor, the girl had not been at all at fault. It was she who had sustained the brunt of
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the brutal shock. Would she ever get over it? Her marriage had gone glimmering for no reason or fault of her own. Would she not always feel that she was a damaged girl? Not worth what other girls were worth? Somehow excluded? But how could such a girl presume that a man should overlook her affl iction and marry her and save her? Jesus, what a moral problem!
Never had he heard anything in the law about a situation like that. It was something, really, that went beyond the law. Ruddy grew tense. Was that why Tommy had been talking of men who lived beyond the law? Men who acknowledged no laws? Men who just acted according to their own notions of having a good time? No, no, he was not talking about that, Ruddy told himself uneasily. Two vague ideas simmered in Ruddy’s mind: the wildness of lawless Brentwood Park and the desolate emotional state of his son, but though his feelings linked the two things in some way, his rational mind pushed the two things apart. After all, nobody’s asking Tommy to be Jesus Christ and marry that girl, and if he felt wounded in his heart, he had a damned right to be. But how wounded had Tommy been? That was a question he could not answer. Maybe even Tommy did not know how much he had suffered. You had something untoward hit you, and the blow was so vast and powerful that you felt numb all over and you turned and fled, never being able to gauge or judge correctly just how much y
ou had been wounded. I’ve got to save my boy, Ruddy wailed inwardly.
And from now on he would raise no more questions with Agnes about Tommy; he would take the poor boy’s part from now on. How much strength Tommy could muster would depend upon how warm and loving and understanding his home was. And a woman need not be told about such horrors. Yes, it would be something just between him and his son. I’ll send that boy to Europe, to Asia, to Africa. I’ll make ’im forget that
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sad experience. I’ll make it up to ’im. That’s what a father’s for, goddamn. He won’t have to go it alone with a festering wound like that in him. And, he would, unknown to Tommy or Agnes, seek out that poor girl and try to help her! That was it. One could not expect poor Tommy to have done that. He was too carried away by his loss, a loss that could not be blamed on any-one, a loss that had shattered him, had taken away the sights and sounds and color of the world in which he lived. Yes, I can imagine how he felt. He was like an ox hit between the eyes by an axe.
“Ruddy,” Agnes was calling.
“Yeah?”
“Lunch is ready,” Agnes said.
“Coming. Shall I call Tommy?”
“Tommy had to go,” Agnes told him up the stairs.
“Oh.”
So Tommy had gone. Okay. He would not raise any ques -
tions about it, but he strongly suspected that Tommy had cho-sen to be out, not to eat lunch with them. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe he wants to get hold of himself. When Ruddy descended to the table, he found Agnes already seated and Bertha standing, ready to serve.
“Feeling better?” Agnes asked with a compassionate smile.
“A lot,” he lied.
“Did you sleep?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”
“I heard you and Tommy talking,” Agnes said.
He shot her a quick glance; she was smiling confi dently.
“Yeah. Look, we’ve got together,” Ruddy said.
“I told you there was nothing wrong,” Agnes said triumphantly.
“Nothing that a father couldn’t help with,” Ruddy said.