Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

“I’m sorry, Tom. But didn’t something crucial happen that Sunday morning?”

He peered at me under his raised arm. “They told you, eh?”

“No. I’m asking you to tell me.”

“Ask them.”

It was all he would say.

I drove up the winding blacktop lane to the top of the knoll. Lights were blazing outside and inside the house. The harsh white floods made the stucco walls look ugly and unreal. Black shadows lurked under the melodramatic Moorish arches.

There was something a little melodramatic in the way Ralph Hillman stepped out from one of the arches into the light. He wasn’t the wreck Susanna had described, at least not superficially. His handsome silver head was sleekly brushed. His face was tightly composed. He held himself erect, and even trotted a few steps as he came toward my side of the car. He was wearing a wine-colored jacket with a rolled collar.

“Prodigal son returneth,” Tom was saying beside me in scared bravado. “But they didn’t kill the fatted calf, they killed the prodigal son.”

Hillman said: “I thought you were Lieutenant Bastian.”

“Are you expecting him?”

“Yes. He says he has something to show me.”

He stooped to look in the window and saw Tom. His eyes dilated.

“My boy!”

His hoarse, whisky-laden voice hardly dared to believe what it was saying. “You’ve come back.”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

Hillman trotted around to the other side of the car and opened the door. “Come out and let me look at you.”

With a brief, noncommittal glance in my direction, Tom climbed out. His movements were stiff and tentative, like a much older man’s. Hillman put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, turning him so that his face was in the light.

“How are you, Tom?”

“I’m okay. How are you?”

“Wonderful, now that you’re here.”

I didn’t doubt that Hillman’s feeling was sincere, but his expression of it was somehow wrong. Phony. And I could see Tom wince under his hands.

Elaine Hillman came out of the house. I went to meet her. The floodlights multiplied the lines in her face and leached it of any color it might have had. She was pared so thin that she reminded me vaguely of concentration camps. Her eyes were brilliantly alive.

“You’ve brought him back, Mr. Archer. Bless you.”

She slipped her hand through my arm and let me take her to him. He stood like a dutiful son while she stood on her toes and kissed him on his grimy tear-runneled cheek.

Then he backed away from both of them. He stood leaning against the side of my car with his thumbs in the waistband of his slacks. I’d seen a hundred boys standing as he was standing against cars both hot and cold, on the curb of a street or the shoulder of a highway, while men in uniform questioned them. The sound of the distant highway faintly disturbed the edges of the silence I was listening to now.

Tom said: “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I never did. Or maybe I did, I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no use going on pretending. You see, I know who I am. Mike and Carol Harley were my father and mother. You knew it, too, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t,” Elaine said quickly.

“But you knew you weren’t my mother.”

“Yes. Of course I knew that.”

She glanced down at her body and then, almost wistfully, at her husband. He turned away from both of them. His face had momentarily come apart. He seemed to be in pain, which he wanted to hide.

“One of you must have known who I really was.” Tom said to Hillman: “You knew, didn’t you?”

Hillman didn’t answer. Tom said in a high desperate voice: “I can’t stay here. You’re both a couple of phonies. You put on a big act for all these years, and as soon as I step out of line you give me the shaft.”

Hillman found his voice. “I should think it was the other way around.”

“Okay, so I did wrong. Stand me up against a wall and shoot me.”

The boy’s voice was slightly hysterical, but it wasn’t that that bothered me so much. He seemed to be shifting from attitude to attitude, even from class to class, trying to find a pace where he could stand. I went and stood beside him.

“Nobody’s talking about punishing you,” Hillman said. “But a homicidal attack is something that can’t be laughed off.”

“You’re talking crap,” the boy said.

Hillman’s chin came up. “Don’t speak to me like that!”

“Or what will you do? Lock me up with a bunch of psychos and throw away the key?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. You just went ahead and did it.”

“Perhaps I acted hastily.”

“Yes,” Elaine put in. “Your father acted hastily. Now let’s forget the whole thing and go inside and be friends.”

“He isn’t my father,” Tom said stubbornly.

“But we can all be friends, anyway. Can’t we, Tom?”

Her voice and look were imploring. “Can’t we forget the bad things and simply be glad they’re over and that we’re all together?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to go away for a while and live by myself and think things through. What would be wrong with it? I’m old enough.”

“That’s nonsense.”

Hillman shouldn’t have said it. A second later his eyes showed that he knew he shouldn’t have. He stepped forward and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Maybe that isn’t such a bad idea, after all. We’re intelligent people, we ought to be able to work something out between us. There’s the lodge in Oregon, for example, where you and I were planning to go next month. We could step up our schedule and synch our watches, eh?”

The performance was forced. Tom listened to it without interest or hope. After a bit Elaine put her hand inside her husband’s arm and drew him toward the house. Tom and I followed along.

Mrs. Perez was waiting at the door. There was warmth in her greeting, and even some in Tom’s response. They had a discussion about food. Tom said he would like a hamburger sandwich with pea soup. Mrs. Perez darted jouncily away.

Hillman surveyed the boy in the light of the chandelier. “You’d better go up and bathe and change your clothes.”

“Now?”

“It’s just a suggestion,” Hillman said placatingly. “Lieutenant Bastian of the sheriffs department is on his way over. I’d like you – you should be looking more like yourself.”

“Is he going to take me away? Is that the idea?”

“Not if I can help it,” Hillman said. “Look, I’ll come up with you.”

“I can dress myself, Dad!”

The word slipped out, irretrievable and undeniable.

“But we ought to go over what you’re going to say to him. There’s no use putting your neck in a noose – I mean–”

“I’ll just tell him the truth.”

The boy walked away from him toward the stairs. Ralph and Elaine Hillman followed him with their eyes until he was out of sight, and then they followed his footsteps with their ears. The difficult god of the household had returned and the household was functioning again, in its difficult way.

We went into the sitting room. Hillman continued across it into the bar alcove. He made himself a drink, absently, as if he was simply trying to find something to do with his hands and then with his mouth.

When we came out with the drink in his hand, he reminded me of an actor stepping out through a proscenium arch to join the audience.

“Ungrateful sons are like a serpent’s tooth,” he said, not very conversationally.

Elaine spoke up distinctly from the chesterfield: “If you’re attempting to quote from King Lear , the correct quotation is: ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’ But it isn’t terribly appropriate, since Tom is not your child. A more apt quotation from the same work would be Edmund’s line, ‘Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’ ”