Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

“That is correct.”

“But you feel she led him astray.”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “My son left my home shortly after his high school graduation. I did not approve, but neither did I object violently. I would have wanted Richard to go to college. He was an intelligent boy and would have done well in college. I had hopes, naturally enough, that he might follow me into the ministry. I did not force him in this direction, however. One must determine for oneself whether one has a vocation. I am not fanatical on the subject, Mr. Scudder. I would prefer to see a son of mine as a contented and productive doctor or lawyer or businessman than as a discontented minister of the gospel.

“I realized that Richard had to find himself. That’s a fashionable term with the young these days, is it not? He had to find himself. I understood this. I expected that this process of self-discovery would ultimately lead him to enter college after a year or two. I hoped this would occur, but in any event I saw no cause for alarm. Richard had an honest job, he was living in a decent Christian residence, and I felt that his feet were on a good path. Not perhaps the path he would ultimately pursue, but one that was correct for him at that point in his life.

“Then he met Wendy Hanniford. He lived in sin with her. He became corrupted by her. And, ultimately—”

I remembered a bit of men’s-room graffiti: Happiness is when your son marries a boy of his own faith. Evidently Richie Vanderpoel had functioned as some variety of homosexual without his father ever suspecting anything. Then he moved in with a girl, and his father was shattered.

I said, “Reverend Vanderpoel, a great many young people live together nowadays without being married.”

“I recognize this, Mr. Scudder. I do not condone it, but I could hardly fail to recognize it.”

“But your feeling in this case was more than a matter of not condoning it.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Wendy Hanniford was evil.”

I was getting the first twinges of a headache. I rubbed the center of my forehead with the tips of my fingers. I said, “What I want more than anything else is to be able to give her father a picture of her. You say she was evil. In what way was she evil?”

“She was an older woman who enticed an innocent young man into an unnatural relationship.”

“She was only three or four years older than Richard.”

“Yes, I know. In chronological terms. In terms of worldliness she was ages his senior. She was promiscuous. She was amoral. She was a creature of perversion.”

“Did you ever actually meet her?”

“Yes,” he said. He breathed in and out. “I met her once. Once was enough.”

“When did that take place?”

“It’s hard for me to remember. I believe it was during the spring. April or May, I would say.”

“Did he bring her here?”

“No. No, Richard surely knew better than to bring that woman into my house. I went to the apartment where they were living. I went specifically to meet with her, to talk to her. I picked a time when Richard would be working at his job.”

“And you met Wendy.”

“I did.”

“What did you hope to accomplish?”

“I wanted her to end her relationship with my son.”

“And she refused.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Scudder. She refused.” He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. “She was foulmouthed and abusive. She taunted me. She — I don’t want to go into this further, Mr. Scudder. She made it quite clear that she had no intention of giving Richard up. It suited her to have him living with her. The entire interview was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.”

“And you never saw her again.”

“I did not. I saw Richard on several occasions, but not in that apartment. I tried to talk to him about that woman. I made no progress whatsoever. He was utterly infatuated with her. Sex — evil, unscrupulous sex — gives certain women an extraordinary hold upon susceptible men. Man is a weakling, Mr. Scudder, and he is so often powerless to cope with the awful force of an evil woman’s sexuality.” He sighed heavily. “And in the end she was destroyed by means of her own evil nature. The sexual spell she cast upon my son was the instrument of her own undoing.”

“You make her sound like a witch.”

He smiled slightly. “A witch? Indeed I do. A less enlightened generation than our own would have seen her burned at the stake for witchcraft. Nowadays we speak of neuroses, of psychological complications, of compulsion. Previously we spoke of witchcraft, of demonic possession. I wonder sometimes if we’re as enlightened now as we prefer to think. Or if our enlightenment does us much good.”

“Does anything?”

“Pardon?”

“I was wondering if anything did us much good.”

“Ah,” he said. He took off his glasses and perched them on his knee. I hadn’t seen the color of his eyes before. They were a light blue flecked with gold. He said, “You have no faith, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps that accounts for your cynicism.”

“Perhaps.”

“I would say that God’s love does us a great deal of good. In the next world if not in this one.”

I decided I would rather deal with one world at a time. I asked if Richie had had faith.

“He was in a period of doubt. He was too preoccupied with his attempt at self-realization to have room for the realization of the Lord.”

“I see.”

“And then he fell under the spell of the Hanniford woman. I use the word advisedly. He literally fell under her spell.”

“What was he like before that?”

“A good boy. An aware, interested, involved young man.”

“You never had any problems with him?”

“No problems.” He put his glasses back on. “I cannot avoid blaming myself, Mr. Scudder.”

“For what?”

“For everything. What is it that they say? ‘The cobbler’s children always go barefoot.’ Perhaps that maxim applies in this case. Perhaps I devoted too much attention to my congregation and too little attention to my son. I had to raise him by myself, you see. That did not seem a difficult chore at the time. It may have been more difficult than I ever realized.”

“Richard’s mother—”

He closed his eyes. “I lost my wife almost fifteen years ago,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“It was hard for both of us. For Richard and for myself. In retrospect I think that I should have married again. I never… never entertained the idea. I was able to have a housekeeper, and my own duties facilitated my spending more time with him than the average father might have been able to manage. I thought that was sufficient.”

“And now you don’t think so?”

“I don’t know. I occasionally think there is very little we can do to change our destiny. Our lives play themselves out according to a master plan.” He smiled briefly. “That is either a very comforting thing to believe or quite the opposite, Mr. Scudder.”

“I can see how it could be.”

“Other times I think there ought to have been something I could have done. Richard was drawn very much into himself. He was shy, reticent, very much a private person.”

“Did he have much of a social life? I mean during high school, while he was living here.”

“He had friends.”

“Did he date?”

“He wasn’t interested in girls at that time. He was never interested in girls until he came into that woman’s clutches.”

“Did it bother you that he wasn’t interested in girls?”

That was as close as I cared to come to intimating that Richie was interested in boys instead. If it registered at all, Vanderpoel didn’t show it. “I was not concerned,” he said. “I took it for granted that Richard would ultimately develop a fine and healthy loving relationship with the girl who would eventually become his wife and bear his children. That he was not involved in social dating in the meantime did not upset me. If you were in a position to see what I see, Mr. Scudder, you would realize that a great deal of trouble stems from too much involvement of one sex with the other sex. I have seen girls pregnant in their early teens. I have seen young men forced into marriage at a very tender age. I have seen young people afflicted with unmentionable diseases. No, I was if anything delighted that Richard was a late bloomer in this area.”