Critical Mass Part 6

Especially to these children, poised, calm, beautiful, strong and gay. Only the prettiest, sweetest children visited Elphen DeBeckett, half a dozen or a score every day, a year-in, year-out pilgrimage. He would not have noticed if they had been ugly and dull, of course. To DeBeekett all children were sweet, beautiful and bright.

They entered and ranged themselves around the bed, and DeBeckett looked up. The eyes regarded them and a dying voice said, "Please read to me," with such resolute sweetness that it frightened. "From my book," it added, though they knew well enough what he meant.

The children looked at each other. They ranged from four to eleven, Will, Mike, blonde Celine, brown-eyed Karen, fat Freddy and busy Pat. "You," said Pat, who was seven.

"No," said five-year-old Freddy. "Will."

"Celine," said Will. "Here."

The girl named Celine took the book from him and began obediently. " 'Coppie thought to herself-'"

"No," said Pat. "Open."

The girl opened the book, embarra.s.sed, glancing at the dying old man. He was smiling at her without amus.e.m.e.nt, only love. She began to read: Coppie thought to herself that the geese might be hungry, for she herself ate Lotsandlots. Mumsie often said so, though Coppie had never found out what that mysterious food might be. She could not find any, so took some bread from Brigid Marie Ann-Erica Evangeline, the Cook Whose Name Was So Long That She Couldn't Remember It All Herself. As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles's Very Own Pond- Celine hesitated, looking at the old man with sharp worry, for he had moaned faintly, like a flower moaning. "No, love," he said. "Go on." The swelling soft bubble before his heart had turned on him, but he knew he still had time. The little girl read: -As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles's Very Own Pond, she thought and thought, and what she thought finally came right out of her mouth. It was a Real Gay Think, to be Thought While Charitably Feeding Geese: They don't make noise like little girls and boys, And all day long they're aswimming. They never fret and sputter 'cause they haven't any b.u.t.ter, They go where the water's wetly br.i.m.m.i.n.g. But say- Anyway- I Like Geese!

There was more, but the child paused and, after a moment, closed the book. DeBeckett was no longer listening. He was whispering to himself.

On the wall before Mm was painted a copy of one of the ill.u.s.trations from the first edition of his book, a delightful picture of Coppie Brambles herself, feeding the geese, admirably showing her shyness and her trace of fear, contrasted with the loutish comedy of the geese. The old man's eyes were fixed on the picture as he whispered. They guessed he was talking to Coppie, the child of eight dressed hi the fas.h.i.+ons of eighty years ago. They could hardly hear him, but in the silence that fell on the room his voice grew stronger.

He was saying, without joy but without regret. "No more meadows, no more of the laughter of little children. But I do love them." He opened his eyes and sat up, waving the nurse away. "No, my dear," he said cheerfully, "it does not matter if I sit up now, you know. Excuse me for my rudeness. Excuse an old and tired man who, for a moment, wished to live on. I have something to say to you all."

The nurse, catching a sign from the doctor, took up another hypodermic and made it ready. "Please, Mr. DeBeckett," she said. Good humored, he permitted her to spray the surface of his wrist with a fine mist of droplets that touched the skin and penetrated it. "I suppose that is to give me strength," he said. "Well, I am grateful for it. I know I must leave you, but there is something I would like to know. I have wondered . . . For years I have wondered, but I have not been able to understand the answers when I was told them. I think I have only this one more chance."

He felt stronger from the fluid that now coursed through his veins, and accepted without fear the price he would have to pay for it. "As you know," he said, "or, I should say, as you children no doubt do not know, some years ago I endowed a research inst.i.tution, the Coppie Brambles Foundation. I did it for the love of you, you and all of you. Last night I was reading the letter I wrote my attorneys-No. Let us see if you can understand the letter itself; I have it here. Will, can you read?"

Will was nine, freckled darkly on pale skin, red haired and gangling. "Yes, Mr. DeBeckett."

"Even hard words," smiled the dying man.

"Yes, sir."

DeBeckett gestured at the table beside him, and the boy obediently took up a stiff sheet of paper. "Please," said DeBeckett, and the boy began to read in a highpitched, rapid whine.

" 'Children have been all my life and I have not regretted an instant of the years I devoted to their happiness. If I can tell them a little of the wonderful world in which we are, if I can open to them the miracles of life and living, then my joy is unbounded. This-I have tried, rather selfishly, to do. I cannot say it was for them! It was for me. For nothing could have given me more pleasure.'"

The boy paused.

DeBeckett said gravely, "I'm afraid this is a Very Big Think, lovelings. Please try to understand. This is the letter I wrote to my attorneys when I instructed them to set up the Foundation. Go on, Will."

" 'But my way of working has been unscientific, I know. I am told that children are not less than we adults, but more. I am told that the grown-up maimers and cheats in the world are only children soiled, that the hagglers of commerce are the infant dreamers whose dreams were denied. I am told that youth is wilder, freer, better than age, which I believe with all my heart, not needing the stories of twenty-year-old mathematicians and infant Mozarts to lay a proof.

" 'In the course of my work I have been given great material rewards. I wish that this money be spent for those I love. I have worked with the heart, but perhaps my money can help someone to work with the mind, in this great new science of psychology which I do not understand, in all of the other sciences which I understand even less. I must hire other eyes.

" 'I direct, then, that all of my a.s.sets other than my books and my homes be converted into cash, and that this money be used to further the study of the child, with the aim of releasing him from the corrupt adult cloak that smothers him, of freeing him for wisdom, tenderness and love.'"

"That," said DeBeckett sadly, "was forty years ago."

He started at a sound. Overhead a rocket was clapping through the sky, and DeBeckett looked wildly around. "It's all right, Mr. DeBeckett," comforted little Pat. "It's only a plane."

He allowed her to soothe him. "Ah, leveling," he said. "And can you answer my question?"

"What it says in the 'Cyclopedia, Mr. DeBeckett?"

"Why- Yes, if you know it? my dear."

Surprisingly the child said, as if by rote: "The Inst.i.tute was founded in 1976 and at once attracted most of the great workers in pediatric a.n.a.lysis, who were able to show Wiltshanes's Effect hi the relations.h.i.+p between glandular and mental development. Within less than ten years a new projective a.n.a.lysis of the growth process permitted a reorientation of basic pedagogy from a null-positive locus. The effects were immediate. The first generation of-"

She stopped, startled. The old man was up on his elbow, his eyes blazing at her in wonder and fright. 'Tm-" She looked around at the other children for help and at once wailed, "I'm sorry, Mr. DeBeckett!" and began to cry.

The old man fell back, staring at her with a sort of unbelieving panic. The t.i.ttle girl wept abundantly. Slowly DeBeckett's expression relaxed and he managed a sketchy smile.

He said, "There, sweetest. You startled me. But it was charming of you to memorize all that!"

"I learned it for you," she sobbed.

"I didn't understand. Don't cry." Obediently the little girl dried her eyes as DeBeckett stretched out a hand to her.

But the hand dropped back on the quilt. Age, surprise and the drug had allied to overmaster the dwindling resources of Elphen DeBeckett. He wandered to the plantoms on the wall. "I never understood what they did with my money," he told Coppie, who smiled at him with a shy, painted smile. "The children kept coming, but they never said."

"Poor man," said Will absently, watching him with a child's uncommitted look.

The nurse's eyes were bright and wet. She reached for the hypodermic, but the doctor shook his head.

"Wait," he said, and walked to the bed. He stood on tiptoe to peer into the dying man's face. "No, no use. Too old. Can't survive organ transplant, certainty of cytic shock. No feasible therapy." The nurse's eyes were now flowing. The doctor said to her, with patience but not very much patience, "No alternative. Only kept him going this long from grat.i.tude."

The nurse sobbed, "Isn't there anything we can do for him?"

"Yes." The doctor gestured, and the lights on the diagnostic dials winked out. "We can let him die.?*

Little Pat hiked herself up on a chair, much too large for her, and dangled her feet. "Be nice to get rid of this furniture, anyway," she said. "Well, nurse? He's dead. Don't wait." The nurse looked rebelliously at the doctor, but the doctor only nodded. Sadly the nurse went to the door and admitted the adults who had waited outside. The four of them surrounded the body and bore it gently through the door. Before it closed the nurse looked back and wailed: "He loved you!"

The children did not appear to notice. After a moment Pat said reflectively, "Sorry about the book. Should have opened it."

"He didn't notice," said Will, wiping his hands. He had touched the old man's fingers.

"No. Hate crying, though."

The doctor said, "Nice of you. Helped him, I think." He picked up the phone and ordered a demolition crew for the house. "Monument?"

"Oh, yes," said another child. "Well. Small one, anyway."

The .doctor, who was nine, said, "Funny. Without him, what? A few hundred thousand dollars and the Foundation makes a flexible world, no more rigid adults, no more-" He caught himself narrowly. The doctor had observed before that he had a tendency to over-identify with adults, probably because his specialty had been geriatrics. Now that Elphen DeBeckett was dead, he no longer had a specialty.

"Miss him somehow," said Celine frankly, coming over to look over Will's shoulder at the quaint old murals on the wall. "What the nurse said, true enough. He loved us."

"And clearly we loved him," piped Freddy, methodically sorting through the contents of the dead man's desk. "Would have terminated him with the others otherwise, wouldn't we?"

A HINT OF HENBANE.

This is unlike the other stories in this volume in two respects. First, it isn't science fiction. Second, it wasn't left as an incomplete fragment. It was a finished story, which had somehow gone sour, and never sold. I thought I could see why, so I put it through the typewriter again, and gave it to Bob Mills as agent, and it was published at once in Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Mystery Magazine.

I USED TO THINK, not that it bothered me, that my wife systematically lied to me about her family, but one by one I met them and found it was all true. There was Uncle H______, for one. He earned his unprintable nickname on the day in 1937 when he said to the bank examiner, "Oh, h______!", walked right down to the depot and got on a westbound train, never to return. He sounded like a wish-fumlhnent myth, but two summers ago we drove through Colorado and looked him up. Uncle H._____ was doing fine; brown as a berry, and gave us bear ham out of his own smokehouse for lunch. And, just the way the story went, his shanty was papered with color comics from the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

Uncle Edgar, the salesman, was real too. Sarah claimed that in 1942 he had sold a Wisconsin town on turning over its munic.i.p.al building to him so he could start a war plant. Well, last year I visited him in his executive suite, which used to be the mayor's office. He had converted to roller skates. Whenever anyone hinted to him that he might start paying rent or taxes or something he would murmur quietly that he was thinking of moving plant and payroll to Puerto Rico, and then there would be no more hinting for a while.

Grandma and Grandpa were right off the cover of the Sat.u.r.day Everting Post, rocking and dozing on the porch of their big house. Grandpa, if pressed, would modestly display his bullet scars from the Oklahoma land rush, and Sarah a.s.sured me that Grandma had some too. Great Grandmother, pus.h.i.+ng the century mark a couple miles down the road, gloomily queened it over five hundred central Ohio acres from her dusty plush bedroom. She had decided in '35 that she would go to bed, and stuck to this decision while suburban housing developments and shopping centers and drive-in movies encroached on the old farm, and the money rolled in. Sarah had a grudging respect for her, though she had seen the will, and it was all going to a Baptist mission hi Naples, Italy.

There was even at last a strained sort of peace between Sarah and her father. He came out of World War I with a D.S.C., a silver plate in his skull and a warped outlook on civilian life. He was a bootlegger throughout most of the twenties. It made for an unpleasant childhood. When it was too late to do the children much good, the V.A. replaced his silver plate with a tantalum plate and he prgmptly enrolled in a theological seminary and wound up a Lutheran pastor hi southern California.

Sarah's att.i.tude toward all this is partly "Judge not lest ye be judged" and partly "What the h.e.l.l," but of her cousin's husband, Bill Oestreicher, she said dogmatically: "He's a lousy b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

We used to see more of bun than of the rest of her family, as an unavoidable side effect of visiting Sarah's Cousin Claire, to whom he was married. Sarah was under some special indebtedness to Cousin Claire.

I think Claire used to take her in during the rough spells with Dad.

On the way to meet them for the first time-they lived in Indiana, an easy drive from Detroit-Sarah told me: 'Try to enjoy the scenery, because you won't enjoy Bill. Did I say you weren't to lend him money or go into any kind of business deal with him?"

"You did."

"And one other thing, don't talk to bun about your own business. Uncle Edgar let him mail a couple of customers' statements for him, and Bill went to the customers offering to undercut Edgar's prices. There was h.e.l.l's own confusion for a month, and Edgar lost two customers to the j.a.ps. To this day Bill can't understand why Edgar won't talk to him any more."

"I will come out fighting and protect my chin at all tunes."

"You'd better."

Claire was a dark, bird-like little woman with an eager-to-please air, very happy to see Sarah and willing to let some of it splash over onto me. She had just come from work. She was a city visiting nurse and wore a snappy blue cape and hat. Even after eight hours of helping a nineteen-year-old girl fight D.T.'s, she was neat, every hair hi place. I suspected a compulsion. She wore a large, incongruous costume-jewelry sort of ring which I concluded to be a dime-store anniversary present from good old Bill.

Bill's first words to me were: "Glad to meet you, Tommy. Tommy, how much money can you raise in a pinch?" I came out fighting. I've got an automotive upholstery business with a few good accounts. The Ford buyer could rum me overnight by drawing a line through my name on his list, but until that happens I'm solvent. I concealed this from Bill. It was easy. At fifty-odd he was a fat infant. He was sucking on candy sourb.a.l.l.s, and when he crunched them up he opened a box of Cracker Jacks. I never saw him when he wasn't munching, gulping, sucking. Beer, gum, chocolates, pretzels-he was the only person I ever heard of who lapped pretzels-pencils, the ear pieces of his horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, the ends of his moustache. Slop, slurp, slop. With his mouth open.

Bill maneuvered me into the kitchen, sucked on a quartered orange and told me he was going to let me in on a can't-miss sc.r.a.p syndicate which would buy Army surplus and sell it right back to the government at full price. I told him no he wasn't.

His surprise was perfectly genuine. "What do you want to be like that for?" he asked, round-eyed, and went over it again with pencil and paper, sucking on the end of the pencil when he wasn't scribbling with it, and when I said no again he got angry.

"Tommy, what're you being so stupid for? Can't you see I'm just trying to give one of Claire's people a helping hand? Now listen this time, I haven't got all day." My G.o.d, what can you do? I told him I'd think about it.

He shook my hand. Between chomps and slurps he said it was a wise decision; if I could pony up, say, five thousand we'd get underway with a rush; had I thought of a second mortgage on my house? "Let's celebrate it," he said. "Claire. Claire, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

She popped hi. "Case of beer," he said. He didn't even look at her. "The beauty of this, Tommy, is it's Air Force money. Who's going to say no when the Air Force wants to buy something. Tommy, what about borrowing on your insurance?"

Cousin Claire came staggering up from the bas.e.m.e.nt with a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. "Nice and cold," she panted. "From the north corner."

He said, "Giddadahere. Now the markup-" She fluttered out. He turned to the case of beer, and his eyes popped. "How do you like that?" he asked me incredulously. "She didn't open any. She must have thought I wanted to look at beer."

"Well," I said, "you know." Martyred, he got a bottle opener from a drawer.

Driving back to Detroit I was in a state of shock for about twenty miles. Finally I was able to ask Sarah: "Why in G.o.d's name did she marry him?"

She said hopelessly: "I think it's because they won't let you be an old maid any more. She got middle-aged, she got panicky, Bill turned up and they were married. He gets a job once in a while. His people are in politics. . . . She's still got her ring," Sarah said with pride.

"Huh?"

"The Charlier ring. Topaz signet-didn't you see it?"

"What about it?"

"Bill's been trying to get it away from her ever since they were married, but I'm going to get it next. It's family. It's a big topaz, and it swivels. One side is plain, and the other side has the Charlier crest, and it's a poison ring."

I honked at a convertible that was about to pull out in front and kill us. "You'll hate me for this," I said, "but there aren't any poison rings. There never were."

"Nuts to you," she said, indignant. "I've opened it with my own little fingers. It comes apart in two little slices of topaz, and there's a hollow for the poison."

"Not poison. Maybe a saint's relic, or a ladylike pinch of snuff. In the olden days they didn't have poisons that fitted into little hollows. You had to use quarts of what they had. Everything you've heard to the contrary is bunk because everybody used to think everybody else had powerful, subtle poisons. Now, of course, we've got all kinds of-"

She wasn't listening. "Somebody unwisely told Bill that the Ford Museum offered my grandmother a thousand dollars for the ring. Ever since then he's been after her to sell it so he can 'put the money into a business.' But she won't. . . . She doesn't look well, Tommy." I spared a second from the traffic to glance at her. There were tears hi her eyes.

A week later began a series of semiliterate, petulant letters from Cousin Bill.

He was, or said he was, under the impression that I had pledged my sacred word of honor to put up $30,000 and go in with him on the junk deal. I answered the first letter, trying to set him straight, and ignored the rest when I realized he couldn't be set straight. Not by me, not by anybody. The world was what he wanted it to be. If it failed him, he screamed and yelled at the world until it got back into line.

We saw them a couple of months later. He bore me no malice. He tried to get me to back a chain of filling stations whose gimmick would be a special brand of oil-filtered crankcase drainings, picked up for a song, dyed orange and handsomely packaged. He took to using my company name as a credit reference, and I had my lawyer write him a letter, after which he took to using my lawyer's name as a credit reference. We saw him again, and he still was not angry. Munching and s...o...b..ring and prying, he just didn't understand how I could be so stupid as not to realize that he wanted to help me. At every visit he was fat, and Claire was thinner.

He complained about it. Licking the drips off the side of an ice cream cone he said: "By G.o.d you ought to have more meat on your bones. The way the grocery bills run."

"Has it ever occurred to you," Sarah snapped, "that your wife might be a sick woman?"

Cousin Claire made shus.h.i.+ng noises. Cousin Bill chewed the cone, looking at her. "No kidding," he said, licking his finger. "For G.o.d's sake, Claire. We got Blue Cross, Blue s.h.i.+eld, City Health, we been paying all these years, won't cost a nickel. What's the matter with you? You go get a checkup."

"I'll be all right," said Cousin Claire, b.u.t.tering a ' slice of pound cake for her husband.

Afterward I burst out: "All right, I'm not a doc- tor, I supply auto upholstery fabrics, but can't you get her to a hospital?"

Sarah was very calm. "I understand now. She knows what she's doing. In Claire's position-what would yon do?" v I thought it over and said, "Oh," and after that drove very carefully. It occurred to me that we had something to live for, and that Cousin Claire had not.

My wife phoned me at the office a few weeks later, and she was crying. "The mail's just come. A letter from a nurse, friend of Claire's. Bill's put her in the hospital."

"Well, Sarah, I mean, isn't that where she ought to-"

"No!" So that night we drove to Indiana and went direct to Claire's hospital room-her one-seventh of a room, that is. Bill had put her in a ward. But she was already dead.

We drove to their house, ostensibly to get a burial dress for Cousin Claire, perhaps really to knock Cousin Bill down and jump on his face. Sarah had seen the body, and neither on the clawed finger nor in the poor effects I checked out at the desk was the ring. "He took it," Sarah said. "I know. Because she was three weeks dying, the floor nurse told me. And Claire told me she knew it was coming, and she had Jiyoscine in the ring." So Sarah had her triumph after all, and the ring had become a poison ring, for a sick, despairing woman's quick way out of disappointment and pain. "The lousy b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Sarah said. "Tommy. I want her buried with the ring."

I felt her trembling. Well, so was I. He had taken the ring from a woman too sick to protect herself and for the sake of a thousand lousy bucks he had cheated her of her exit. I don't mean that. I'm a businessman. There is nothing lousy about a thousand bucks, but ... I wanted to bury her with the ring too.