My Son, the Murderer

CHAPTER ONE

It was a Saturday morning and I was still in bed. Leora, the maid, who liked to mother me now I was alone, had brought me some breakfast on a tray. I don’t enjoy eating in bed, but I’d done so because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I had read the mail and was glancing at one of the novel manuscripts I had brought home from the office. I could hear Leora tidying the living-room on heavy tiptoe. To her a publisher was a sensitive creature who was inevitably working, even when lying in bed, and whose inspiration could vanish before the too vigorous flick of a duster.

When you work with your head, Mister Duluth, that’s real difficult. That takes concentration.

The phone rang for the first time that morning. I picked up the receiver and it was Bill. In spite of myself, a foolish joy, denying all the trouble there’d been between us, rose in me.

Hi, Pop.

Hi, Bill.

There was silence again. I could feel my son’s awkwardness as if he were in the room. I wanted to help him out but suddenly I was awkward, too. Well, Pop, how are you?

I’m fine. And you?

I’m okay.

It had been four months since I had heard his voice. I had imagined this moment many times, hoped for it, even planned optimistically how to attempt a reconciliation. Now all I could say was: Where are you?

Here. In the apartment. Been busy, Pop?

Pretty busy. Ronnie’s still in England, you know. But I’m expecting him back soon.

Usually when I mentioned my senior partner Bill made some sarcastic remark about my lord and master, but now all he said was: Oh. There was the empty gap again and then: You doing anything right now, Pop?

No.

Well, something’s come up. It’s kind of important.

I felt the old, familiar anxiety. Nothing wrong?

Oh, no, nothing like that. In his voice I could hear the old, familiar impatience. There lie is fussing again. But he was trying to keep it in control. For some reason, he was being terribly polite. Pop, could I maybe come up right away?

Of course.

I wouldn’t be butting in on anything?

What would there be to butt into?

Okay, Pop. Thanks. Well—be seeing you.

He paused again as if the conversation had not been satisfactory and he was thinking of something to add. Then I heard the click of his receiver dropping back on the stand.

For a moment, I lay in bed. My joy had subsided or, if it was still there, it was neutralized by a feeling of inadequacy to face what I knew, somehow or other, would turn out to be an ordeal. Bill wasn’t going to ask to come back. I was almost sure of that from his voice. And, even if he had been, I wasn’t certain that I wanted it any more.

Since that morning four months ago, after our last, most bitter and most futile argument, when he had finally packed every one of his possessions and left, I had grown used to the calm of being without him. I knew it was a sterile calm. Without my son, my life, at forty-three, had become an emotional blank, adding up to nothing but my work at the publishing house, my complex relationship with Ronnie, my casual affection for my younger brother, Peter, and his wife, Iris, and my memories of Felicia which were more of a nightmare than anything else. But there is something to be said for even a sterile calm after three years of passionate conflict with a son whom I could neither understand nor help and who had been able, with an expertness frightening at his age, to keep me in a constant state of humiliation.

Leora had started to use the vacuum cleaner in the living-room. I could hear its boring drone. I put on a bathrobe and went out to her.

Leora, Bill called. He’ll be here pretty soon.

She bent ponderously and switched off the vacuum cleaner. What’s that, Mister Duluth?

Bill’s going to be here in about half an hour.

Her face darkened. He gonna come back?

I don’t think so.

Then what’s he after?

I don’t know.

She stood looking at me, with her large fist around the handle of the cleaner.

Now don’t you go letting him get around you again, Mister Duluth. You done more than enough for that boy already. Fixing him up with an apartment, giving him fifty dollars a week. Fifty dollars! And him an ungrateful little snot just nineteen years old with no more respect for his—

I didn’t feel up to one of Leora’s loyal tirades. She had only seen the Bill of the last three years. She didn’t know or care about how he had been before his mother died or what that death had done to him. But I knew, all too well. That was why, even at my angriest and most hurt, I could never really blame Bill for something that was Felicia’s fault. Fault? Was that too definite a word? Then—something of which Felicia had been the cause.

I patted Leora’s arm. Okay, Leora. Just let him in. That’s all. I’m going to take a shower.

Let him in! Sure I’ll let him in. This ain’t my house. Ain’t nothing to me who comes into this house—

Her scolding, loving voice followed me back into the bedroom. I passed Felicia’s photograph in its silver frame on my way to the bathroom. I glanced at it, as I always glanced at it, no longer trying to guess the secret behind the dark, ambiguous eyes and the tense elegance of the tilted head, but just noticing it, recording, again, the fact that it was there.

Many people, I’m sure, wondered why I didn’t put it away. Some of them perhaps imagined I was still in love with her. Only I—and maybe Bill—knew that it had all gone far beyond love or hate. It wouldn’t have done any good to put the picture away. Felicia would still have been just as oppressively there. She had insured that immortality for herself on the sunny June morning, three years before, when she had thrown herself out of the window.

I had been in California fixing up some contract with an author. It was Bill, coming home unexpectedly from a weekend with a school friend, who had found the apartment filled with policemen.

That—which had been the start of Bill’s troubles—had made Felicia a very memorable wife and mother.

As I took a shower, I thought about Felicia with that dull bitterness which had outlived love and even curiosity. At first when the news had been wired to me and I was on the plane coming home, it had, in a way, been easier to bear because I had been blindly sure that the fall must have been an accident. But the five witnesses who, from opposite apartments, had seen her sitting on the sill, smoking a cigarette for a full minute before she jumped, put an end to that—and a humiliating end to my belief that my wife had been as happy with me as I had been with her.

Now I no longer speculated why a woman, adored by her husband and son, should have chosen, in one sunny June moment, to render meaningless all the years of her marriage and motherhood. I just accepted it as a fact. The Fact. The poison which, although neither of us would mention it, would soon be infecting yet another interview between Bill and me.

To put myself in a better mood, I made myself think of Ronnie in England. Ronnie Sheldon was not merely the millionaire who had hired me straight out of college and set me up in equal partnership in the publishing house of Sheldon and Duluth. Ronnie was my one real friend. Most of the people who knew him were dazzled by his charm, his vitality, and the impression of great assurance with which his wealth endowed him. These same people, I knew, thought of me as his shadow, his stooge, his expensive doormat. But I have never particularly cared about what other people think. I played Court Chamberlain to Ronnie’s Emperor because I knew how much he needed me in the role. Apart from his sister and maybe his butler, I was the only person who was allowed to see behind the façade to his touching, almost childlike insecurity—to Ronnie Sheldon, the lonely little rich boy, always fearful that the world would turn on him, never really convinced that he was acceptable. It is flattering, I suppose, when someone who is generally admired picks you for their anchor. But it wasn’t a one-sided relationship. Ronnie was my support, too. He’d never been at ease with Felicia because she’d always kept herself aloof from him, but, after her suicide, it had been Ronnie, and only Ronnie, who had got me on my feet again through infinite patience, tenderness, and affection—human qualities which don’t always belong with the very rich and courted.

It was typical of Ronnie suddenly to have taken six months off leisurely to study the literary climate of England, old boy. Ronnie was like a child, too, with his enthusiasms. Once he got a new one, he plunged into it like a nine-year-old hand plunging into a candy box. He’d made the decision to go to Europe and acted on it in a couple of days, leaving me in full charge of Sheldon and Duluth. Apart from a flurry of cables about the American rights to some British novelist called Basil Leighton, I’d hardly heard from him. That meant things were going well. The moment anything went wrong, the transatlantic telephone would have been shrilling.

For God’s sake, Jake, take the next plane … It’s disaster, old boy … Why do I ever leave you? … You know what always happens when your back is turned. …

The thought of Ronnie in his Clinging Vine characterization made me smile as I finished drying myself and put on my robe. I suppose I was still smiling as I went back into the bedroom.

Bill was sitting on my bed.

For a moment he didn’t notice me and, sitting there half turned from me, fingering the pages of the strewn novel manuscript, he looked so absurdly like the reflection of myself I had just seen in the bathroom mirror, that the resemblance, as so often before, touched me and disarmed me. The same straight fair hair, the same broad forehead, the same blunt nose, the same jaw which, from the side, looked deceptively self-confident. It was as if, by some confusion of time, twenty years had been rescinded and there I was, stubborn, undaunted by doubts, green as a reed, in my first Manhattan furnished room, determined to conquer the world on the strength of the editorship of the college paper and two seasons on the football team.

When he saw me, he got up quickly, smiling and nodding the flap of hair back from his forehead. Instantly the resemblance was blurred. The smile and the tilted head were Felicia—and the brown, ambiguous eyes were, frighteningly, Felicia, too.

He said in his charm voice, Leora tried to bar the bedroom door like an angel with a flaming sword. But I didn’t think you’d mind. My coming in—I mean.

We were standing close together. Both of us were acutely conscious that this was a difficult moment, and then suddenly we were shaking hands. I don’t think we’d ever done it before. It wasn’t a good idea. It made the mood even more artificial.

Trying to slacken the tension, I asked banal questions about his new Greenwich Village life. He answered politely but guardedly, making it plain by his manner that he hadn’t come for a reconciliation or even to suggest any closer relations. He’d never told me the address of his apartment and he didn’t now. He merely said it was small but he liked it; he’d met quite a few interesting people; his novel was going okay, he guessed.

Bill had decided to be a writer. At the time, he’d been in his freshman year at Columbia, doing very badly through restlessness and lack of interest. Then he’d decided that college was a waste of time anyway. It was sterile and suffocating. So was my life and everything about my influence. He could only breathe, only find himself if he got away from everything on his own.

I hadn’t for a moment believed in his talent for writing or even in his sudden desire to be a novelist. This was just another plunge, another attempt to escape from himself and the horror, whatever it was, with which Felicia’s suicide had impregnated him. But his childish arguments had worn me down like water drops. At last, when that look half of contempt, half of pity, showed in his eyes and I knew he was thinking: You failed Mother and now you’re failing me, I was automatically defeated. That was how he had won his independence, his apartment, and the fifty dollars a week which were such a thorn in Leora’s flesh.

As we stood there together in the bedroom, his meager description of his new life soon wore out. I was both too close to him and too alienated from him to be able to ask baldly what he had come for. I let him curve and edge his way toward it as best he could. He went back to talking about his new friends and then mentioned a special one of them—a girl.

"She’s brilliant. A real talent. A little too highbrow for you, of course. Sylvia Rymer. She wrote a long novel in verse. Ronnie took her up. Almost published it. That’s how we got to be friends—I mean, through talking about Ronnie at a party. She’s had several poems in the Literary Review and—She’s a wonderful person. I’ve never in my life met such a wonderful person."

Bleakly, I thought: Now he’s fallen in love with some dreary vie de Bohème female and is going to want to marry her. Sylvia Rymer! I had a dim memory of an interminable Whitmanesque manuscript that had drifted around the office a couple of years ago. I dug in my heels. Here, at least, I would make a last-ditch stand.

He hadn’t been looking at me. Now he turned abruptly to face me head on.

That’s what I’ve come about, Pop. Please, listen to me. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ll never ask for anything else. I swear it. But I’ve got to do this. Sylvia’s got a Guggenheim. She’s going to Rome.

She is?

She’s leaving in two months. She’ll be over there a year. Pop—let me go, too. Please, let me go. I won’t need any more money over there than you’re giving me now—maybe, even less. It’s only the fare. I’ll go on a freighter. It’s only a few hundred bucks. It’s—Pop, if you knew what it’d mean to me to get out of this country, to make some sort of contact—

His eyes, shining with his new enthusiasm, were heart-breaking to me. He went on, talking excitedly, parroting, almost certainly, Sylvia Rymer. But what did that matter? His emotion, even if it had been acquired from someone else, was genuine enough. Rome was the only really alive capital in the world today, he said. American artists of all sorts were flocking there. It was the Paris of the fifties. If only he could get there, he would expand. He knew it. Sylvia knew it.

I listened with the painful anxiety of indecision. This, at least, was less disastrous than a marriage. But what should I do? Wasn’t it irresponsible and dangerous to let him do everything he wanted? Hadn’t I, through love and fear of losing him completely, drifted much too far already? Was the right thing, perhaps, to say to him what I had never dared say and hardly dared admit even to myself—that his violent and inexplicable rejection by his mother might have brought him to a point where he needed psychiatric aid?

He was holding the sleeve of my robe. He hardly ever touched me. The unfamiliar feeling of his fingers brought a sudden rush of affection, confusing the issue.

Pop, will you? Will you let me go? I know I haven’t been much of a son. We’ve got mixed up, had fights, but—

There was a knock and Leora came in. She had a telegram in her hand. She brought it to me, elaborately ignoring Bill. Pardon the interruption, Mister Duluth, but this just came. It’s a cablegram.

I took it and, as she left, opened it. I read:

ARRIVING IDLEWILD L.R.T. FLIGHT #124 AT NOON TODAY WITH NEW BRIDE AND COVEY OF IN-LAWS. BE THERE TO MEET ME WITH PSHAWMS AND TIMBRELS. LOVE. RONNIE.

The very idea that Ronnie, the perennial bachelor, should have married was in itself enough to stagger me. The fact that he would be at the airport in a few hours made me, for a moment, almost forget Bill and his problems.

Then, of course, I remembered.

Glancing up, I said, I’m sorry, Bill. But it’s from Ronnie. Can you believe it? He’s got married. He’s arriving at Idlewild any minute. I’ll have to get ready.

If surprise hadn’t made me less intuitive than usual, I would have realized that this was the worst thing I could have done to my son with his baffling and exasperating fixation against Ronnie. At the mention of Ronnie’s name, his young body stiffened. The square blond face, which nature had designed to be so calm and candid but which was so haunted and vulnerable, was quivering with an intensity of anger that was almost rage.

Ronnie! he cried. My God! I come to you with the most important decision of my life. And all you can think of is The Great Ronnie. You have to go creeping and crawling to the airport to meet The Great Ronnie.

I said, Ronnie’s back. What do you expect me to do?

Me? I should expect you to do anything! What about Rome? For pity’s sake, can’t you make up your mind?

His sudden furies always infected me.

What the hell do you think I am—a slot machine, installed here to dole out dollars to you whenever you get a crazy whim? How can I possibly make up my mind about Rome now?

He stuck out his lower lip. How long will it take you to think?

How do I know?

But Sylvia wants to know. Sylvia—

"Sylvia will have to contain herself and write a couple more poems for the Literary Review to soothe her savage breast."

Suddenly I was ashamed of losing my temper, and my old aching love took possession of me. I put my hand on his sleeve. His arm was quivering but he didn’t draw it away.

I’m sorry, I said. There’s no point in getting mad with each other. I’ll think it over seriously. And I’ll let you know in a couple of days. I’ll call you. Then I remembered. You’d better leave me your number.

He stood, glaring at me. Then with crude theatricalism, he swung around to the bed, took out his pen, and, in huge, sprawling figures, wrote his telephone number across the back of one of the pages of the novel manuscript.

There it is. That’s where you can always find me. Call whenever you deign to feel in the mood. And, meanwhile, give my love to your little friend—to Ronnie Hitler Stalin Napoleon Casanova Sheldon!

He pushed past me to the door, went through if, and slammed it.

I heard the front door slam, too.

CHAPTER TWO

I didn’t think any more about Bill. I knew it would only depress me. I got my car out of the garage and drove to Idlewild.

I was, perhaps, too fussy and possessive about Ronnie. But the fact that he had married without giving me the slightest warning hurt me a little and filled me with vague misgivings. Intimately as I had known him for almost twenty years, I had never seen Ronnie even halfway to the altar. Dozens of women, eyeing the Sheldon millions, had made every known play for him, but with an infallible instinct for self-preservation, he had always managed to avoid any emotional entanglement and slip back into his own, oddly monastic isolation. The right wife, of course, would be wonderful for him. But the right wife for a very rich, oversensitive man with a romantic dread of competing with his own bank balance is not to be found on every street corner.

I tried to visualize the new Mrs. Sheldon. I failed completely.

At Idlewild, the plane had already arrived, but the passengers were still in customs. Standing by the gate through which they would emerge, was Angie Sheldon, Ronnie’s sister who kept house for him.

Angie was older than Ronnie, a pale, rather shapeless woman whose clothes were always expensive and never quite right. I had known her and even been fond of her for as long a time as I had worked with Ronnie, but her personality had never really impinged on me. She had been