"I have no son," Richard muttered. How many times had he read that melodramatic phrase in bad novels? A hundred? Two hundred? It had never rung true to him. But here it was true. Now it was true. Oh yes.
The wind gusted, and Richard was suddenly seized by a vicious stomach cramp that doubled him over, gasping. He passed explosive wind.
When the cramps passed, he walked into the house.
The first thing he noticed was that Seth's ratty tennis shoes--he had four pairs of them and refused to throw any of them out--were gone from the front hall. He went to the stairway banister and ran his thumb over a section of it. At age ten (old enough to know better, but Lina had refused to allow Richard to lay a hand on the boy in spite of that), Seth had carved his initials deeply into the wood of that banister, wood which Richard had labored over for almost one whole summer. He had sanded and filled and revarnished, but the ghost of those initials had remained.
They were gone now.
Upstairs. Seth's room. It was neat and clean and unlived-in, dry and devoid of personality. It might as well have had a sign on the doorknob reading GUEST ROOM.
Downstairs. And it was here that Richard lingered the longest. The snarls of wire were gone; the amplifiers and microphones were gone; the litter of tape recorder parts that Seth was always going to "fix up" were gone (he did not have Jon's hands or concentration). Instead the room bore the deep (if not particularly pleasant) stamp of Lina's personality--heavy, florid furniture and saccharin velvet tapestries (one depicting a Last Supper at which Christ looked like Wayne Newton, another showing deer against a sunset Alaskan skyline), a glaring rug as bright as arterial blood. There was no longer the faintest sense that a boy named Seth Hagstrom had once inhabited this room. This room, or any of the other rooms in the house.
Richard was still standing at the foot of the stairs and looking around when he heard a car pull into the driveway.
Lina, he thought, and felt a surge of almost frantic guilt. It's Lina, back from bingo, and what's she going to say when she sees that Seth is gone? What ... what ...
Murderer! he heard her screaming. You murdered my boy!
But he hadn't murdered Seth.
"I DELETED him," he muttered, and went upstairs to meet her in the kitchen.
Lina was fatter.
He had sent a woman off to bingo who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds or so. The woman who came back in weighed at least three hundred, perhaps more; she had to twist slightly sideways to get in through the back door. Elephantine hips and thighs rippled in tidal motions beneath polyester slacks the color of overripe green olives. Her skin, merely sallow three hours ago, was now sickly and pale. Although he was no doctor, Richard thought he cold read serious liver damage or incipient heart disease in that skin. Her heavy-lidded eyes regarded Richard with a steady, even contempt.
She was carrying the frozen corpse of a huge turkey in one of her flabby hands. It twisted and turned within its cellophane wrapper like the body of a bizarre suicide.
"What are you staring at, Richard?" she asked.
You, Lina. I'm staring at you. Because this is how you turned out in a world where we had no children. This is how you turned out in a world where there was no object for your love--poisoned as your love might be. This is how Lina looks in a world where everything comes in and nothing at all goes out. You, Lina. That's what I'm staring at. You.
"That bird, Lina," he managed finally. "That's one of the biggest damn turkeys I've ever seen."
"Well don't just stand there looking at it, idiot! Help me with it!"
He took the turkey and put it on the counter, feeling its waves of cheerless cold. It sounded like a block of wood.
"Not there!" she cried impatiently, and gestured toward the pantry. "It's not going to fit in there! Put it in the freezer!"
"Sorry," he murmured. They had never had a freezer before. Never in the world where there had been a Seth.
He took the turkey into the pantry, where a long Amana freezer sat under cold white fluorescent tubes like a cold white coffin. He put it inside along with the cryogenically preserved corpses of other birds and beasts and then went back into the kitchen. Lina had taken the jar of Reese's peanut butter cups from the cupboard and was eating them methodically, one after the other.
"It was the Thanksgiving bingo," she said. "We had it this week instead of next because next week Father Phillips has to go in hospital and have his gall-bladder out. I won the coverall." She smiled. A brown mixture of chocolate and peanut butter dripped and ran from her teeth.
"Lina," he said, "are you ever sorry we never had children?"
She looked at him as if he had gone utterly crazy. "What in the name of God would I want a rug-monkey for?" she asked. She shoved the jar of peanut butter cups, now reduced by half, back into the cupboard. "I'm going to bed. Are you coming, or are you going back out there and moon over your typewriter some more?"
"I'll go out for a little while more, I think," he said. His voice was surprisingly steady. "I won't be long."
"Does that gadget work?"
"What--" Then he understood and he felt another flash of guilt. She knew about the word processor, of course she did. Seth's DELETION had not affected Roger and the track that Roger's family had been on. "Oh. Oh, no. It doesn't do anything. "
She nodded, satisfied. "That nephew of yours. Head always in the clouds. Just like you, Richard. If you weren't such a mouse, I'd wonder if maybe you'd been putting it where you hadn't ought to have been putting it about fifteen years ago." She laughed a coarse, surprisingly powerful laugh--the laugh of an aging, cynical bawd--and for a moment he almost leaped at her. Then he felt a smile surface on his own lips--a smile as thin and white and cold as the Amana freezer that had replaced Seth on this new track.
"I won't be long," he said. "I just want to note down a few things."
"Why don't you write a Nobel Prize-winning short story, or something?" she asked indifferently. The hall floorboards creaked and muttered as she swayed her huge way toward the stairs. "We still owe the optometrist for my reading glasses and we're a payment behind on the Betamax. Why don't you make us some damn money?"
"Well," Richard said, "I don't know, Lina. But I've got some good ideas tonight. I really do."
She turned to look at him, seemed about to say something sarcastic--something about how none of his good ideas had put them on easy street but she had stuck with him anyway--and then didn't. Perhaps something about his smile deterred her. She went upstairs. Richard stood below, listening to her thundering tread. He could feel sweat on his forehead. He felt simultaneously sick and exhilarated.
He turned and went back out to his study.
This time when he turned the unit on, the CPU did not hum or roar; it began to make an uneven howling noise. That hot train transformer smell came almost immediately from the housing behind the screen, and as soon as he pushed the EXECUTE button, erasing the HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! message, the unit began to smoke.
Not much time, he thought. No ... that's not right. No time at all. Jon knew it, and now I know it, too.
The choices came down to two: Bring Seth back with the INSERT button (he was sure he could do it; it would be as easy as creating the Spanish doubloons had been) or finish the job.
The smell was getting thicker, more urgent. In a few moments, surely no more, the screen would start blinking its OVERLOAD message.
He typed:
MY WIFE IS ADELINA MABEL WARREN HAGSTROM.
He punched the DELETE button.
He typed:
I AM A MAN WHO LIVES ALONE.
Now the word began to blink steadily in the upper right-hand corner of the screen: OVERLOAD OVERLOAD OVERLOAD.
Please. Please let me finish. Please, please, please ... The smoke coming from the vents in the video cabinet was thicker and grayer now. He looked down at the screaming CPU and saw that smoke was also coming from its vents ... and down in that smoke he could see a sullen red spark of fire.
/> Magic Eight-Ball, will I be healthy, wealthy, or wise? Or will I live alone and perhaps kill myself in sorrow? Is there time enough?
CANNOT SEE NOW. TRY AGAIN LATER.
Except there was no later.
He struck the INSERT button and the screen went dark, except for the constant OVERLOAD message, which was now blinking at a frantic, stuttery rate.
He typed:
EXCEPT FOR MY WIFE, BELINDA, AND MY SON, JONATHAN.
Please. Please.
He hit the EXECUTE button.
The screen went blank. For what seemed like ages it remained blank, except for OVERLOAD, which was now blinking so fast that, except for a faint shadow, it seemed to remain constant, like a computer executing a closed loop of command. Something inside the CPU popped and sizzled, and Richard groaned.
Then green letters appeared on the screen, floating mystically on the black:
I AM A MAN WHO LIVES ALONE EXCEPT FOR MY WIFE, BELINDA, AND MY SON, JONATHAN.
He hit the EXECUTE button twice.
Now, he thought. Now I will type: ALL THE BUGS IN THIS WORD PROCESSOR WERE FULLY WORKED OUT BEFORE MR. NORDHOFF BROUGHT IT OVER HERE. Or I'll type: I HAVE IDEAS FOR AT LEAST TWENTY BEST-SELLING NOVELS. Or I'll type: MY FAMILY AND I ARE GOING TO LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Or I'll type--
But he typed nothing. His fingers hovered stupidly over the keys as he felt--literally felt--all the circuits in his brain jam up like cars grid-locked into the worst Manhattan traffic jam in the history of internal combustion.
The screen suddenly filled up with the word:
LOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVERLOADOVER LOAD
There was another pop, and then an explosion from the CPU. Flames belched out of the cabinet and then died away. Richard leaned back in his chair, shielding his face in case the screen should implode. It didn't. It only went dark.
He sat there, looking at the darkness of the screen.
CANNOT TELL FOR SURE. ASK AGAIN LATER.
"Dad?"
He swiveled around in his chair, heart pounding so hard he felt that it might actually tear itself out of his chest.
Jon stood there, Jon Hagstrom, and his face was the same but somehow different--the difference was subtle but noticeable. Perhaps, Richard thought, the difference was the difference in paternity between two brothers. Or perhaps it was simply that that wary, watching expression was gone from the eyes, slightly overmagnified by thick spectacles (wire-rims now, he noticed, not the ugly industrial horn-rims that Roger had always gotten the boy because they were fifteen bucks cheaper).
Maybe it was something even simpler: that look of doom was gone from the boy's eyes.
"Jon?" he said hoarsely, wondering if he had actually wanted something more than this. Had he? It seemed ridiculous, but he supposed he had. He supposed people always did. "Jon, it's you, isn't it?"
"Who else would it be?" He nodded toward the word processor. "You didn't hurt yourself when that baby went to data heaven, did you?"
Richard smiled. "No. I'm fine."
Jon nodded. "I'm sorry it didn't work. I don't know what ever possessed me to use all those cruddy parts." He shook his head. "Honest to God I don't. It's like I had to. Kid's stuff."
"Well," Richard said, joining his son and putting an arm around his shoulders, "you'll do better next time, maybe."
"Maybe. Or I might try something else."
"That might be just as well."
"Mom said she had cocoa for you, if you wanted it."
"I do," Richard said, and the two of them walked together from the study to a house into which no frozen turkey won in a bingo coverall game had ever come. "A cup of cocoa would go down just fine right now."
"I'll cannibalize anything worth cannibalizing out of that thing tomorrow and then take it to the dump," Jon said.
Richard nodded. "Delete it from our lives," he said, and they went into the house and the smell of hot cocoa, laughing together.
The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands
Stevens served drinks, and soon after eight o'clock on that bitter winter night, most of us retired with them to the library. For a time no one said anything; the only sounds were the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the dim click of billiard balls, and, from outside, the shriek of the wind. Yet it was warm enough in here, at 249B East 35th.
I remember that David Adley was on my right that night, and Emlyn McCarron, who had once given us a frightening story about a woman who had given birth under unusual circumstances, was on my left. Beyond him was Johanssen, with his Wall Street Journal folded in his lap.
Stevens came in with a small white packet and handed it to George Gregson without so much as a pause. Stevens is the perfect butler in spite of his faint Brooklyn accent (or maybe because of it), but his greatest attribute, so far as I am concerned, is that he always knows to whom the packet must go if no one asks for it.
George took it without protest and sat for a moment in his high wing chair, looking into the fireplace, which is big enough to broil a good-sized ox. I saw his eyes flick momentarily to the inscription chiseled into the keystone: rr is THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
He tore the packet open with his old, trembling fingers and tossed the contents into the fire. For a moment the flames turned into a rainbow, and there was murmured laughter. I turned and saw Stevens standing far back in the shadows by the foyer door. His hands were crossed behind his back. His face was carefully blank.
I suppose we all jumped a little when his scratchy, almost querulous voice broke the silence; I know that I did.
"I once saw a man murdered right in this room," George Gregson said, "although no juror would have convicted the killer. Yet, at the end of the business, he convicted himself--and served as his own executioner!"
There was a pause while he lit his pipe. Smoke drifted around his seamed face in a blue raft, and he shook the wooden match out with the slow, declamatory gestures of a man whose joints hurt him badly. He threw the stick into the fireplace, where it landed on the ashy remains of the packet. He watched the flames char the wood. His sharp blue eyes brooded beneath their bushy salt-and-pepper brows. His nose was large and hooked, his lips thin and firm, his shoulders hunched almost to the back of his skull.
"Don't tease us, George!" growled Peter Andrews. "Bring it on!"
"No fear. Be patient." And we all had to wait until he had his pipe fired to his complete satisfaction. When a fine bed of coals had been laid in the large briar bowl, George folded his large, slightly palsied hands over one knee and said:
"Very well, then. I'm eighty-five and what I'm going to tell you occurred when I was twenty or thereabouts. It was 1919, at any rate, and I was just back from the Great War. My fiancee had died five months earlier, of influenza. She was only nineteen, and I fear I drank and played cards a great deal more than I should. She had been waiting for two years, you understand, and during that period I received a letter faithfully each week. Perhaps you may understand why I indulged myself so heavily. I had no religious beliefs, finding the general tenets and theories of Christianity rather comic in the trenches, and I had no family to support me. And so I can say with truth that the good friends who saw me through my time of trial rarely left me. There were fifty-three of them (more than most people have!): fifty-two cards and a bottle of Cutty Sark whiskey. I had taken up residence in the very rooms I inhabit now, on Brennan Street. But they were much cheaper then, and there were considerably fewer medicine bottles and pills and nostrums cluttering the shelves. Yet I spent most of my time here, at 249B, for there was almost always a poker game to be found."
David Adley interrupted, and although he was smiling, I don't think he was joking at all. "And was Stevens here back then, George?"
George looked around at the butler. "Was it you, Stevens, or was it your father?"
Stevens allowed himself the merest ghost of a smile. "As 1919 was over sixty-five years ago, sir, it was my grandfather, I must allow."
"Yours is a post that runs in the
family, we must take it," Adley mused.
"As you take it, sir," Stevens replied gently.
"Now that I think back on it," George said, "there is a remarkable resemblance between you and your ... did you say grandfather, Stevens?"
"Yes, sir, so I said."
"If you and he were put side by side, I'd be hard put to tell which was which ... but that's neither here nor there, is it?"
"No, sir."
"I was in the game room--right through that same little door over there--playing patience the first and only time I met Henry Brower. There were four of us who were ready to sit down and play poker; we only wanted a fifth to make the evening go. When Jason Davidson told me that George Oxley, our usual fifth, had broken his leg and was laid up in bed with a cast at the end of a damned pulley contraption, it seemed that we should have no game that night. I was contemplating the prospect of finishing the evening with nothing to take my mind off my own thoughts but patience and a mind-blotting quantity of whiskey when the fellow across the room said in a calm and pleasant voice, 'If you gentlemen have been speaking of poker, I would very much enjoy picking up a hand, if you have no particular objections.'
"He had been buried behind a copy of the New York World until then, so that when I looked over I was seeing him for the first time. He was a young man with an old face, if you take my meaning. Some of the marks I saw on his face I had begun to see stamped on my own since the death of Rosalie. Some--but not all. Although the fellow could have been no older than twenty-eight from his hair and hands and manner of walking, his face seemed marked with experience and his eyes, which were very dark, seemed more than sad; they seemed almost haunted. He was quite good-looking, with a short, clipped mustache and darkish blond hair. He wore a good-looking brown suit and his top collar button had been loosened. 'My name is Henry Brower,' he said.
"Davidson immediately rushed across the room to shake hands; in fact, he acted as though he might actually snatch Brower's hand out of Brower's lap. An odd thing happened: Brower dropped his paper and held both hands up and out of reach. The expression on his face was one of horror.
"Davidson halted, quite confused, more bewildered than angry. He was only twenty-two himself--God, how young we all were in those days--and a bit of a puppy.