NINETEEN

EVEN as I came to the head of the stairs, I could hear squeals coming from McLeod’s room. I opened his door and looked within, but for many seconds neither he nor Monina was aware of me. The child twisted in the air, giggling in rare delight, her thighs flailing, fists pummeling his bony arms which threw her up and caught her, threw her up within a handspan of the ceiling and caught her not six inches from the floor. They were both laughing, and when he set her astride his shoulders, she grasped his straight black hair, and jogged up and down. “Horsie, horsie, play horsie,” she cried. He made a pretense of galloping, clumping his heels against the floor, and she was almost helpless with glee.

Then McLeod saw me, and his gaiety ceased. He removed the child from her perch, set her on the floor, and greeted me coolly. “Where have you been?” he asked.

“I just saw your wife.”

“Mmm.” He inclined his head. And did she tell you I’ve become a new man?”

“In a sense.”

Monina was tugging at his pants, and he tousled her hair almost unconsciously. “Yes, I’ve been attempting to force a revolution into my life, and that’s a touchy business at best.” I have the idea he must have been a little drunk. There was liquor on his breath, and his speech had become slurred just perceptibly. Monina hopped restlessly from one foot to the other. She gave a sigh of boredom and began to poke at the mattress with her finger. “Bah, bah, blah, blah,” she burbled.

“What’s the matter, Monina?” he asked.

Her head was turned down. She would not look at him.

“I lived in this room for two years,” McLeod said to me.

“It’s a long time.”

“It’s a very long time when a child is growing up. There’s the trespass if one is looking for punishment. Do you know there’d often be a month go by, and I wouldn’t see her more than once or twice. We’re strangers to each other now.” He caught Monina by the arms. “Do you love your daddie?” he asked.

She twisted uncomfortably and like a wild bird struggled to be free. “No.” Once loose from him, however, she giggled.

“If her tongue were developed, she could well add that she loves no one and trusts no one for that is her birthmark. Yes, she’s my daughter right enough,” he said blackly. With scorn upon his mouth he reached forward and tapped me with one finger on the knee. “You see me as the sentimental parent, but there were other times. D’ye have any conception of the desperate anger which can come upon a man when he sits in his living room with a legally engraved spouse, the act of marriage having divorced them from all passion and all friendship so that they live in guilt and hate and very occasionally in love. And there before them on the floor is the sweet product of their distaste, an infant mewling with snot on her lip and turd in her seat. So a man like m’self sits there, and reflects that very few of the good years are left to him, and he’s bound not only to the woman but to the child until it chokes him so much he could crush the infant’s skull with his fist.” The finger jabbed my knee again. “You draw back from that, do you? A horror. Yet I sat there, and with impeccable reason I would not care to refute even today, came to the conclusion that to murder one’s own child is the least reprehensible form of murder. For do in a stranger, and you know nothing of what lives you snarl and what grief you bestrew. But take the axe to your own brat, and the emotional price is yours alone. Murder is nothing and consequence is all.” He took a breath. “I’d give an arm to have the child love me,” he said abruptly, “and that’s a barometer to my weakness which increases with the years.”

“She may yet,” I suggested.

He nodded. Perhaps he grappled a beast who threw him first to one side and then another, for he reversed everything he had said. “There’s hope in the situation, Mikey. It’s just that I’ve been starved too long, and I’m suspicious of food.” Into his impassive eyes a glint of feeling wavered. “She … that is my wife … I would say that all capacity for feeling is not dead between us. There are times when I sense that it moves her, my being there. She does odd things, you know. There are times when she comes to me, there’s a softness in her, but she’s wary. I don’t say as I can blame her, the truth being that I must always fight with myself to keep from looking for the first train west. But still I like to think there are possibilities for us.”

My last conversation with Guinevere was quite vivid. “You’ve a sentimental idiot,” I said to him.

McLeod lit a cigarette. “And you are taken in by appearances. No doubt she had a few choice words to apply to me.”

“More than a few.”

He rode past this with a shrug. “Lovett, you’ve got a deficient imagination. You can’t conceive how she and I could construct something together. But that’s because you think love is a spirit vapor.”

“It’s as good an explanation as any.”

He laughed at me. “Love is simple to understand if you haven’t got a mind soft and full of holes. It’s a crutch, that’s all, and there isn’t a one of us doesn’t need a crutch. You take a mixture of lust and compassion, affection and ego, you shake it well, and you pour it into the mold of your own need. And after that you got a crutch. Makes it easier to rear back and look at the cosmos.”

“Still, it can’t be just anybody,” I protested.

“Not today, no. Existence warps too much. It sets us so we can only receive certain kinds of opposite numbers. But in the abstract, in essence, any two human beings can find warmth together. It’s a primitive notion, and history won’t set it free again until socialism is established. That’s the human assumption of socialism, to find relationships with everybody, and none of your dope needles about marriage, family, and the spirit vapor of love and God.” The expression on his mouth of a man who sips vinegar, he added, “And it’s in the Soviet that you’ll find this freedom.”

With that, he looked at his watch and said to me, “Now, I hope you’ll excuse me, but I must ask you to leave, m’dear. And if you’d take Monina down to her mother, I’d accept it all as a favor.”

“I intend to stay here,” I announced.

He looked at me with no humor whatsoever. “Are you serious?”

I nodded.

McLeod turned to Monina and in a quiet voice said, “Go downstairs now, baby.”

She shook her head. “Monina, you go downstairs,” he repeated firmly. She made no more than a gesture of rebellion, and then accepted his decision. “Daddie play with me later?” she asked.

“No bribes,” he told her. “We’ll play when we both feel like it next.”

To my surprise, she obeyed him. He locked the door behind her, motioned me to a chair, and sat himself on the desk in such a position that his face was looking down into mine. “What makes you think you want to stay?” he demanded.

“Perhaps I’m curious.”

“I never buy curiosity no matter how cheap it comes.”

“There are other reasons too.”

“You think you can be of assistance to me?” He laughed. “Hollingsworth wants me to continue his political education, and since our discussion on the bridge … well, you’re not exactly sympathetic.”

“I hardly know why,” I said, “but I believe you misrepresented yourself that night.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk, debating what I had said. “Perhaps, perhaps.” In aside, he murmured, “The fact that I’ve been drinking is hardly promising.” When he looked up, there was an odd expression on his mouth. “So you stay in spite of my political opinions?”

“I reserve decision.”

His mouth twisted. “I know very little about you.” Running his finger along the desk, he held it up to see how much dust he had garnered. “Lovett, I don’t think you appreciate the situation.”

“I’ve never pretended to,” I told him.

“If you stay, you’ll be committed to this.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“It may have certain consequences for you.” His voice had become so soft I strained to hear him, and it was in the resolute absence of any threat that I felt the force of what he said. He had succeeded in frightening me.

“Perhaps I look for consequences,” I muttered.

“You?”

“I don’t know why,” I told him. “Or maybe I do. But there it is. In any case what have I to lose?” I blurted out suddenly.

McLeod shrugged. “I can hardly decide what to say, and yet . .” For himself, he murmured, “There’s a limit to what a man may support.”

Someone rapped gently on the door.

“Well, he’s here,” McLeod said. He was quite pale. “Stay then, Lovett.”

Turning the key, he turned his back as well and returned to the center of the room. Hollingsworth opened the door and held it aside for Lannie who followed behind him. He was dressed nattily in a gabardine suit with a knit tie and brown-and-white sport shoes. His blond hair was plastered down with oil, and he looked as if he had just taken a shower. “My, it’s a warm day,” he said pleasantly. He looked about the room, took cognizance of me, and in a continuation of the same movement, perhaps to mask his surprise, took the leather brief case he had brought with him and laid it on the table. Then he took a chair from the wall, set it at one end of the desk, and motioned Lannie to it. Looking at neither McLeod nor me, she drifted into it, set her hands on the desk, and seemed to stare at them, examining indifferently the frayed cuff of her violet suit.

Then Hollingsworth sat down, opened the flap of the brief case toward him so that he might lay his hand on any of the contents and lit a cigarette. McLeod had not yet taken the remaining chair, and I stood almost behind him, near the bed, waiting diffidently for a position to be assigned.

Hollingsworth cleared his throat. “Before we begin,” he said, “I think Mr. Lovett ought to leave the room.”

McLeod’s voice was unexpectedly husky. “He wants to stay.”

“That’s all very fine, but I think he’ll have to go.” Hollingsworth had disposed of the problem.

“I haven’t made up my mind about it,” McLeod drawled, “but I’m half inclined to let him remain.”

“One would have to say you’re not in a position to …”

McLeod cut him off. “I’ve agreed to this procedure. You’re not obliged to follow it. You’ve got an alternative. Until you choose to use it, I’ll insist on my prerogatives.”

Hollingsworth jabbed out his cigarette. “This is entirely unforeseen.”

McLeod studied him intensely. “There’s a good deal that’s unexpected,” he murmured.

“I want him out,” Hollingsworth said.

“Then he’ll have to take your … colleague with him.”

A breeze might have ruffled Lannie’s hair. She looked up at us for a moment, before returning to her study. With a concentration of which she was probably unaware, she picked at dead skin on a fingernail.

Hollingsworth slid a sheet from the brief case. “I think a fellow ought to sit down,” he said to McLeod, “and if Mr. Lovett does not mind staying on the bed, owing to the informality …” He adjusted his tie. “I suppose we may as well begin.”