Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

Tom was telling Stella how he first met his father. Mike had been kept in the background the first week; he was supposed to be in Los Angeles looking for work. Finally, on the Saturday night, Tom met him at the auto court.

“That was the night you borrowed our car, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. My fa– Ralph had me grounded, you know. Carol spilled some wine on the front seat of the car and he smelled it. He thought I was driving and drinking.”

“Did Carol drink much?”

“Quite a bit. She drank a lot that Saturday night. So did he. I had some wine, too.”

“You’re not old enough.”

“It was with dinner,” he said. “Carol cooked spaghetti. Spaghetti a la Pocatello, she called it. She sang some of the old songs for me, like ‘Sentimental journey’. It was kind of fun,” he said doubtfully.

“Is that why you didn’t come home?”

“No. I–” The word caught in his throat. “I–” His face, which I could see in the rear-view mirror, became contorted with effort. He couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Did you want to stay with them?” Stella said after a while.

“No. I don’t know.”

“How did you like your father?”

“He was all right, I guess, until he got drunk. We played some gin rummy and he didn’t win, so he broke up the game. He started to take it out on Carol. I almost had a fight with him. He said he used to be a boxer and I’d be crazy to try it, that his fists could kill.”

“It sounds like a terrible evening.”

“That part of it wasn’t so good.”

“What part of it was?”

“When she sang the old songs. And she told me about my grandfather in Pocatello.”

“Did that take all night?” she said a little tartly.

“I didn’t stay with them all night. I left around ten o’clock, when we almost had the fight. I–” The same word stuck in his throat again, as if it was involved with secret meanings that wouldn’t let it be spoken.

“What did you do?”

“I went and parked on the view-point where I picked her up the first time. I sat there until nearly two o’clock, watching the stars and listening, you know, to the sea. The sea and the highway. I was trying to figure out what I should do, where I belonged. I still haven’t got it figured out.”

He added, in a voice that was conscious of me: “Now I guess I don’t have any choice. They’ll put me back in the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

“Me too,” she said with a nervous giggle. “We can send each other secret notes. Tap out messages on the bars and stuff.”

“It isn’t funny, Stell. Everybody out there is crazy, even some of the staff. They get that way.”

“You’re changing the subject,” she said. “What did you do at two A.M.?”

“I went to see Sam Jackman when he got off work. I thought I could ask him what to do, but I found out that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t tell him that they were my parents. So I went out in the country, and drove around for a few hours. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go back to the auto court.”

“So you turned the car over and tried to kill yourself.”

“I–” Silence set in again, and this time it lasted. He sat bolt upright, staring ahead, watching the headlights rise out of the darkness. After a time I noticed that Stella’s arm was across his shoulders. His face was streaked with tears.

I DROPPED STELLA off first. She refused to get out of the car until Tom promised that he wouldn’t go away again, ever, without telling her.

Her father came out of the house, walking on his heels. He put his arms around her. With a kind of resigned affection, she laid her head neatly against his shoulder. Maybe they had learned something, or were learning. People sometimes do.

They went inside, and I turned down the driveway.

“He’s just a fake,” Tom said. “Stella lent me the car, and then he turned around and told the police I stole it.”

“I believe he thought so at the time.”

“But he found out the truth later, from Stella, and went right on claiming I stole it.”

“Dishonesty keeps creeping in,” I said. “We all have to watch it.”

He thought this over, and decided that I had insulted him. “Is that supposed to be a crack at me?”

“No. I think you’re honest, so far as you understand what you’re talking about. But you only see one side, your own, and it seems to consist mainly of grievances.”

“I have a lot of them,” he admitted. After a moment he said: “You’re wrong about me only seeing one side, though. I know how my– my adoptive parents are supposed to feel, but I know how I feel, too. I can’t go on being split down the middle. That’s how I felt, you know, these last few nights, like somebody took a cleaver and split me down the middle. I lay awake on that old brass bed, where Mike and Carol, you know, conceived me with old Sipe snoring in the other room, and I was there and I wasn’t there. You know? I mean I couldn’t believe that I was me and this was my life and those people were my parents. I never believed the Hillmans were, either. They always seemed to be putting on an act. Maybe,” he said half-seriously, “I was dropped from another planet.”

“You’ve been reading too much science fiction.”

“I don’t really believe that. I know who my parents were. Carol told me. Mike told me. The doctor told me, and that made it official. But I still have a hard time telling myself.”

“Stop trying to force it. It doesn’t matter so much who your parents were.”

“It does to me,” he said earnestly. “It’s the most important thing in my life.”

We were approaching the Hillmans’ mailbox. I had been driving slowly, immersed in the conversation, and now I pulled into the driveway and stopped entirely.

“I sometimes think children should be anonymous.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Archer?”

It was the first time he had called me by my name.

“I have no plan. I’d just like to change the emphasis slightly. People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody’s living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn’t make too much sense, and it isn’t working too well.”

I was trying to free his mind a little, before he had to face the next big change. I didn’t succeed. “It doesn’t work when they lie to you,” he said. “They lied to me. They pretended I was their own flesh and blood. I thought there was something missing in me when I couldn’t feel like their son.”

“I’ve talked to your mother about this – Elaine – and she bitterly regrets it.”

“I bet.”

“Let’s not get off on that routine, Tom.”

He was silent for a while. “I suppose I have to go and talk to them, but I don’t want to live with them, and I’m not going to put on any phony feelings.”

No phoniness, I thought, was the code of the new generation, at least the ones who were worth anything. It was a fairly decent ideal, but it sometimes worked out cruelly in practice.

“You can’t forgive them for Laguna Perdida.”

“Could you?”

I had to think about my answer. “It would depend on their reasons. I imagine some pretty desperate parents end up there as a last resort with some pretty wild sons and daughters.”

“They’re desperate, all right,” he said. “Ralph and Elaine get desperate very easily. They can’t stand trouble. Sweep it under the rug. All they wanted to do was get me out of sight, when I stopped being their performing boy. And I had all these terrible things on my mind.”

He put his hands to his head, to calm the terrible things. He was close to breaking down.