Bright Flows the River

  “I’m sure the judge will kiss his arse again and take him home to dinner,” said James, and the sergeant smiled grimly. “We need vigilantes,” said James. “And, by God, we’ll probably have to come to that eventually.”

  He and Emil went to Mountain Valleys. “You seem elated,” said Emil.

  “Oh, I am, in a way. But I’m not in form, I discovered last night. I must practice again. I think every young man should be taught commando tactics.”

  “The mothers of America wouldn’t agree with that,” Emil laughed.

  James suggested what the mothers could do and Emil said, “Tut, tut.”

  James said, “They have what they call Death Squads in Rio de Janeiro, composed of off-duty policemen who are disgusted with light sentences meted out to habitual criminals, and murderers and such. Once assured that the criminal is guilty, they go out and kill him, neatly, silently, then drift away. We should have such squads in America and England.”

  “Think of the screams of the social workers and others who receive large salaries for ‘caring,’” said Emil, “and having ‘compassion.’”

  James laughed. “I believe Prince Philip said just recently that we are wasting compassion on the wrong people, and I thoroughly agree with him. And that reminds me, I have been reading a very interesting book by one of your American writers in which it is explained that when the Industrial Revolution came men abandoned their traditional role of agriculturists and became businessmen and entrepreneurs and such, which removed them from their women a great deal of the time. So the ladies felt they were bereft of importance in an urban environment and so sought importance somewhere else—in motherhood. They made motherhood sacred, and then exalted their children to fortify the new role. And that’s part of the terrible trouble today. In an agricultural society children and women are important only when they deserve importance—as valuable contributors to labor, on the land, not as mere ornaments in bed or takers-up-of-space in the schoolroom, where the poor devils don’t want to be anyway.”

  When they arrived at Mountain Valleys they were greeted by the day nurse, who was distressed. “Mr. Jerald spent a very bad night and he seems to have relapsed again. Mr. Lippincott did try to keep the children and Mrs. Jerald from seeing Mr. Jerald, but Mrs. Jerald got in, and she came out crying, and Mr. Jerald—well, Dr. Grassner, you can see for yourself.”

  “Oh, damn,” said Emil. “I’ll go by myself for a minute or two, James.”

  James waited. Then he saw Beth Turner at the nurses’ desk and went to her. She looked at him and attempted to smile but her anxiety was manifest. They shook hands, and Beth said, “Dr. Meyer, one of the nurses told me Guy has had a very bad night, and isn’t doing well.”

  He took her arm and drew her away to near the elevators. He said, “Well, we can expect these setbacks occasionally. They aren’t a cause for worry. Not really.”

  She scrutinized his face. Her own was very pale and drawn and her tawny eyes were dim with moisture. He went on: “As you probably know, Mrs. Turner, Jerry has been talking to me and to Dr. Grassner lately, and seemed quite rational. This is a great step forward, and we’re encouraged.”

  She still scrutinized him. Then she said in a low voice, “Does he ever ask—for me—mention me?”

  “No. Not yet. I’m sorry. I thought of speaking of you, but decided against it.”

  She nodded. “That was very wise, I think.” But her eyes were sad and heavy, and her mouth was forlorn. He saw that in a moment she would be unable to control herself and would burst out crying, so he said with haste, “Mrs. Turner, would you be kind enough to a stranger in the city to have dinner with him tonight?”

  She again tried to smile. She thought for a moment, then said, “Better still, why don’t you drive out with me later to my house and have dinner with me? I am supposed to be a good cook.”

  I know, thought James, with pity. She wants a masculine presence in her house, one who knows old Jerry and will talk of him. A masculine presence to fill up the emptiness where once he was. Perhaps she could overcome her reticence long enough to give me some information, too. He said, “That is most kind of you, Mrs. Turner. I have an excellent cook at home, and I miss him. I also miss my friend’s cook in London.” Again, she was trying to smile, and he patted her arm. “Say, after lunch, if you are remaining in town.”

  “I am buying some supplies for my farm in Cranston. Could you be ready to leave at four?” There was an eager note in her fine voice, and a pleading in her face. “I have my car here, Doctor, and it is only a short drive of ten miles, and I will bring you back to your hotel after dinner. You’re staying at the Old House? Suppose I pick you up there at four?”

  “Capital,” he said, and she really smiled at the old-fashioned word.

  She watched him go to Guy’s suite. Emil came out and the two joined in an earnest conversation. She wished she could overhear them. But what a nice man he is, she thought, what a kind man, and that is rare. Her last glance, as she entered the elevator was of that large burly back and the fringe of red-gray curls at his nape. In some way she felt comforted, and supported by a superior strength.

  Emil said, “Well, it isn’t so good. He’s lapsed back into his lethargy. Why that damned woman insisted on seeing him, after I talked to her and advised against it, I don’t know. I did mention his wife to him but he only stirred in his chair as if to get up and go away.”

  “In a manner of speaking, I’m sorry for her, too,” said James. “After all, she was his wife for over twenty-seven years. Yes. We do get ourselves into difficulties when we get married, don’t we?”

  He went into the suite alone. Guy was back in his wing chair, unmoving, staring starkly at the opposite wall. He did not look at James, who sat down near the fraudulent fire. Guy’s face was more skull-like than ever, taut with jutting bones, and he looks, thought James, like death. I’ve seen dead men look better.

  James let some time pass. Guy did not move. He hardly blinked. James began to talk casually. “I had quite an experience last night,” and he went on to tell of his encounter with the thief and his knife.

  “A fattish well-fed bastard,” he said, finally, wondering if Guy had heard him. “And fairly well dressed, too. None of those storybook rags, and starvation.”

  He might have been talking to a picture on the wall. Guy merely sat and stared emptily. James went on:

  “There was a convention of neurologists and psychiatrists in London six months ago, from all over Britain and the Continent. It was near a college, or some other damned place of alleged education. The youngest of us must have been about forty, the oldest seventy-five—distinguished men in their field, and quite notable all over the world. I was walking beside a physician from Bonn, who has written many learned books, published everywhere. A gentleman about seventy.

  “Well, then. Students from that infernal ‘comprehensive’ school were ‘protesting’ something or other, with placards, unkempt brutes. They happened to see us, and several of them surged towards us, shouting, ‘Go home, old people, and die!’”

  James gave a snort of bitter amusement. “The reputable Herr Doktor from Bonn stopped to look at them, and he said, ‘Kinder, you are already dead.’”

  Did old Jerry stir then or make a sound? James was not sure. He continued:

  “The young monsters were suddenly very quiet, glaring at us, then they shrieked, in wild affirmative rage, that they were indeed dead, though they did not consciously know it, even if their souls knew it. Dead, irrevocably dead. I am beginning to believe that the soullessness of modern youth, the emptiness, is due to the nihilism of their elders, the abandonment of authority by parents and government, the lack of a moral focus, the loss of the imperative to be whole. A permissive society such as we have in England, and you in America, is anarchy, for it has no restraints, no commitments to ethics and purposes, none to the Absolute, none to order, none to rational thought.

  “There were newspapermen in attendance who had heard the exch
ange, and all reported the incident fairly except one, a yellow rag full of sensationalism and moral turpitude and lewdness. The good Herr Doktor was reported to have ‘insulted our children.’ It sang the infernal song of ‘the children, the children,’ as if nothing valuable existed in the world except uncouth offspring of spiritually immoral parents. The children—”

  Guy suddenly sat up, and turned his face to James, and it was profoundly ugly and full of rage. James leaned forward. He waited. For a long moment or two that face confronted him, black with memory, looking inward.

  “The children, the children!” Lucy cried over the telephone to her husband, who was in New York. “You never cared about your children! You were a dreadful father! And now this—”

  It was eight years ago.

  Guy said, with pent patience, “You haven’t told me what is wrong.”

  His wife was sobbing. The shrill gulping sounds tore at his ear. He said, “Did Bill hit someone with that fucking racing sports car you insisted on buying for him? You know he’s a reckless driver; he’s been in enough trouble with his driving over the past two years.”

  “Don’t you dare use such language to me, Guy Jerald! I never heard such words in all my life! No, it wasn’t the car. William is home for the Easter holidays; you know that, but you insisted on going to New York, and yesterday was Good Friday and you weren’t here! Your business always came first, never your family. Never your family!” She wailed over and over.

  “God damn it, Lucy! What’s wrong?”

  She moaned, “And he’s only eighteen, only a child! A child! How could they do this to him? It was that disgusting girl, on Thursday. You knew William was coming home Wednesday night for the holidays, but you insisted on going to New York. If you’d been a decent father, a real father to your children, this would never have happened! It’s all your fault.”

  Guy wished she were present in the room with him. He had never struck Lucy, now he wanted to hit her savagely, not once but many times. He began to sweat with his rage and frustration. “What girl? What the hell is all this about? Stop that damned moaning and try to tell me, if it’s possible for a fool like you to talk sensibly for once.”

  He had shocked her. He had never called her a fool before, though he had implied it many times. Her gulpings came slower, softer. Then she almost shrieked, “It was that girl! Thursday night. On the street at nine o’clock! Her mother, a very nasty woman, is a waitress, and she claims her daughter is only eleven, well, less than eleven, not quite eleven, and her daughter, she claims, was coming home from a friend’s house, where they were doing their homework!”

  A cold chill ran over Guy. He clutched the receiver. Lucy was sobbing incoherently. “Go on, damn you, go on!” he yelled at her. He had shocked her again. She was dithering now.

  “William, the poor child, saw her on the street at nine o’clock. You know how friendly—how good he is. It was raining hard, and that woman, that girl, was walking, and he saw she had no umbrella and he called to her, you know, from the car I bought him, and offered her a ride home. He was so sorry for the wretch. She told him she lived a long way—in one of those awful ratty poor sections, and he said he’d drive her home—”

  “Go on!” he shouted, when she stopped. The sweat was very cold on his face, and his heart was beating in his throat in great thumps.

  She began to make sounds like a whimpering kitten, and Guy, who was trembling now, hated her as he had never hated her before. “The police—they took him—to jail—your son, your child, the poor child—they didn’t let him go until this morning, until I got our lawyer and my brother—They had to put up bail—Oh, the disgrace, the poor child, how he suffered through all that! He’ll never be the same again. If you’d been here it wouldn’t have happened—he’d have stayed home with us both instead of going to see Kenneth Fields that night. But you weren’t here, where you should have been—”

  The receiver was very wet in Guy’s hand. In a slow and terrible voice he said, “What did Bill do to that girl?”

  “That woman, you mean!” she screamed. “A full-grown woman, and her mother claiming she isn’t yet eleven, not for three months! The mother’s worse than she is! A waitress in a low-class restaurant, you know, on Westfield Street, where all those dirty bars are. What is a mother doing working at night when she should be home with her daughter?”

  Guy said, “Lucy, I swear to God I’ll kill him when I get home if you don’t stop jabbering. I want to know all about it.”

  “You’ll kill—You are as bad as that evil woman, the mother, threatening your poor boy! Yes, she threatened your very own son, to kill him. My child. Oh, my God!” moaned Lucy, who had never taken that name in vain before, not even during difficult childbirth. “William’s so kind, so gentle, so good. He took that young woman to a perfectly awful section, all miserable little apartments, crumbling away, to her home. A filthy place, he said, tiny little rooms and practically no heat. He was afraid for that wicked girl, so he went into the apartment with her—” Her sobs were now out of control.

  “And raped the kid,” said Guy, in a very quiet voice. “Is that it? He raped the little girl.”

  The sobs went on and on, interspersed with moans, long drawn out. “Lucy—”

  “That’s what she claims! Hugh and our lawyer tried to get you all day yesterday, and even left a message for you to call home—home, where you never are! And you never called!”

  Guy heard himself saying in a dull lifeless voice, “I was out on Long Island—some property. I stayed in East Hampton overnight. I just got back to the hotel. I picked up messages, and haven’t had time to look at them yet.” He felt so nauseated that he wanted to vomit. He heard Lucy’s groaning voice very dimly.

  “—five thousand dollars bail. The judge, he wanted more. But Hugh knows him well—I had to be sedated all this time—When your child needed his father, he wasn’t here, where he belongs. And that woman, the mother, came to the judge with a birth certificate, a false one, I’m sure, saying her daughter wasn’t yet eleven, and making an awful noise, Hugh said. Crying and stamping and threatening—”

  “Where is the little girl now?” asked Guy, dreading the answer.

  There was a long pause. His knees were shaking so badly that he had to fumble for a chair and fall into it.

  Then Lucy whimpered, “She’s in the hospital. They said she was—badly—hurt. Her mother—she claims the girl wasn’t—isn’t—” Her voice dwindled.

  “You mean the child hadn’t reached puberty yet?”

  “Oh, how awful to have to talk this way, Guy! Yes, that’s what she said. And the girl—the woman—is a great big thing, a hussy. Hugh’s kept it partly out of the newspapers. The mother’s threatening—”

  “Where’s Bill now?”

  Another long pause. “I called the doctor for him. After all, it’s after midnight, isn’t it? The doctor, Dr. Parkinson, you know, gave him some pills. He had to have them! Two nights in jail—your son, Guy Jerald, and it’s all your fault. You were a very bad neglectful father. You never loved your children the way a father should. Bill’s sleeping, poor lamb. I—”

  “How was he picked up? Lucy! I’ve got to know.”

  “I didn’t know where he was all that Thursday night! I thought he’d stayed with Kenneth! So I wasn’t worried. And then yesterday—”

  “How did they pick him up? Who knew him?” A faint hope came to Guy.

  “Oh, that appalling woman, the mother, came home to her messy little flat, just as poor William was leaving, and she says she heard her daughter screaming in the bedroom, and she ran after William, all down three flights of stairs, and he got into his car, and she got the license number.”

  “And—she called the police.”

  Still another long empty pause. Then Lucy said, “Yes. The police caught him just as he was coming into our house, and took him away. They—they said—” She wailed until his numb ear rang.

  “What did they say, Lucy?”

  “I
don’t care what the police and Hugh and the mother and Jack Whitney, your lawyer, says. William—and I believe him—says the police hit him—police brutality; you know, you read about it all the time—and it was his own blood on his clothes. On his—shorts.”

  “Christ,” said Guy. He felt spent and weak, dazed and dizzy. A little virgin, raped by his huge stout son, his overgrown son, his son who was a man not a child. With all the whores available, the free and available high school and college girls with their Pill—his son had to attack a little virgin. Only six months ago Guy informed his son of a very secluded and high-priced brothel in Cranston, and had given him money to go there, and an introduction. Even at seventeen William was experienced, as he had frankly informed his father, and knew of “Houses” near his expensive preparatory school in Philadelphia and had patronized them. His introduction to sin in Cranston had taken place last summer. He told Guy later, with sniggerings, that this one was the “best.”

  I should have hit him, thought Guy, Lucy’s voice a far clamor in his ear. But—I sent him there myself, with a fistful of money. Why didn’t he go there Thursday night?

  He said, “Shut up a minute, Lucy. I have appointments Monday but I’ll go home tomorrow. On the twelve o’clock plane. Have Hugh pick me up.”

  He could no longer endure his wife’s voice and her moans. He abruptly replaced the receiver. He began to walk up and down the room, Lucy’s last words pounding in his ear: “The children—the children—the children—”

  The children. Guy thought of the twins, his son and his daughter, Marcy.

  He had never wanted children. He had been honest enough with himself before his children were born to admit that many men and many women—perhaps more than sentimental society will acknowledge—are not of the stuff of parents, and have no longing to see themselves perpetuated. They have other aims, other desires, other plans. They were neither “selfish” and “unloving” or “unnatural.” They were simply differently constituted. So they refrained from begetting and conceiving, understanding that it was unfair to bring unwanted children into the world. They did not condemn those who desired offspring and had them. What was normal for some was not normal for others. Scientists had proved that paternal and maternal affections were not instinctive. They were learned, they were imitated. Every zoologist knew that.