Manticore Page 5

  “Is this hour nearly finished, by the way? I feel wretched.”

  “I am sure you do. Have you told anyone else about the death-mask?”

  “Nobody.”

  “That was very good of you.”

  “Did I hear you correctly? I thought you analysts never expressed opinions.”

  “You will hear me express many opinions as we get deeper in. It is the Freudians who are so reserved. You have your schedule of appointments? No doubts about coming next time?”

  “None.”

  (6)

  Back again, after two days’ respite. No: respite is not the word. I did not dread my appointment with Dr von Haller, as one might dread a painful or depleting treatment of the physical kind. But my nature is a retentive, secretive one, and all this revelation went against the grain. At the same time, it was an enormous relief. But after all, what was there in it? Was it anything more than Confession, as Father Knopwood had explained it when I was confirmed? Penitence, Pardon, and Peace? Was I paying Dr von Haller thirty dollars an hour for something the Church gave away, with Salvation thrown in for good measure? I had tried Confession in my very young days. Father Knopwood had not insisted that I kneel in a little box, while he listened behind a screen; he had modern ways, and he sat behind me, just out of sight, while I strove to describe my boyish sins. Of course I knelt while he gave me Absolution. But I had always left the two or three sessions when I tried that feeling a fool. Nevertheless, despite our eventual quarrel, I wouldn’t knock Knopwood now, even to myself; he had been a good friend to me at a difficult time in my life—one of the succession of difficult times in my life—and if I had not been able to continue in his way, others had. Dr von Haller now—had it something to do with her being a woman? Whatever it was, I looked forward to my next hour with her in a state of mind I could not clarify, but which was not wholly disagreeable.

  “Let me see; we had finished your father’s funeral. Or had we finished? Does anything else occur to you that you think significant?”

  “No. After the Bishop’s sermon, or eulogy or whatever it was, everything seemed to be much what one might have expected. He had so irrevocably transposed the whole thing into a key of fantasy, with his rhapsodizing on that irrelevant motto, that I went through the business at the cemetery without any real feeling, except wonderment. Then perhaps of the funeral people a hundred and seventy trooped back to the house for a final drink—a lot of drinking seems to go on at funerals—and stayed for a fork lunch, and when that was over I knew that all my time of grace had run out and I must get on with the job of the will.

  “Beesty would have been glad to help me, I know, and Denyse was aching to see it, but she wasn’t in a position to bargain with me after the horrors of the morning. So I picked up copies for everybody concerned from my father’s solicitors, who were well known to me, and took them to my own office for a careful inspection. I knew I would be cross-examined by several people, and I wanted to have all the facts at my finger-tips before any family discussion.

  “It was almost an anti-climax. There was nothing in the will I had not foreseen, in outline if not in detail. There was a great deal about his business interests, which were extensive, but as they boiled down to shares in a single controlling firm called Alpha Corporation it was easy, and his lawyers and the Alpha lawyers would navigate their way through all of that. There were no extensive personal or charity bequests, because he left the greatest part of his Alpha holdings to the Castor Foundation.

  “That’s a family affair, a charitable foundation that makes grants to a variety of good, or apparently good, causes. Such things are extremely popular with rich families in North America. Ours had a peculiar history, but it isn’t important just now. Briefly, Grandfather Staunton set it up as a fund to assist temperance movements. But he left some loose ends, and he couldn’t resist some fancy wording about ‘assisting the public weal,’ so when Father took it over he gently eased all the preachers off the board and put a lot more money into it. Consequence: we now support the arts and the social sciences, in all their lunatic profusion. The name is odd. Means ‘beaver’ of course, and so it has Canadian relevance; but it also means a special type of sugar—do you know the expression castor-sugar, the kind that goes in shakers?—and my father’s money was made in part from sugar. He began in sugar. The name was suggested years ago as a joke by my father’s friend Dunstan Ramsay; but Father liked it, and used it when he created the Foundation. Or, rather, when he changed it from the peculiar thing it was when Grandfather Staunton left it.

  “This large bequest to Castor ensured the continuance of all his charities and patronages. I was pleased, but not surprised, that he had given a strong hint in the will that he expected me to succeed him as Chairman of Castor. I already had a place on its Board. It’s a very small Board—as small as the law will permit. So by this single act he had made me a man of importance in the world of benefactions, which is one of the very few remaining worlds where the rich are allowed to say what shall be done with the bulk of their money.

  “But there was a flick of the whip for me in the latter part of the will, where the personal bequests were detailed.

  “I told you that I am a rich man. I should say that I have a good deal of money, caused, if not intended, by a bequest from my grandfather, and I make a large income as a lawyer. But compared with my father I am inconsiderable—just ‘well-to-do,’ which was the phrase he used to dismiss people who were well above the poverty line but cut no figure in the important world of money. First-class surgeons and top lawyers and some architects were well-to-do, but they manipulated nothing and generated nothing in the world where my father trod like a king.

  “So I wasn’t looking for my bequest as something that would greatly change my way of life or deliver me from care. No, I wanted to know what my father had done about me in his will because I knew it would be the measure of what he thought of me as a man, and as his son. He obviously thought I could handle money, or he wouldn’t have tipped me for the chairmanship of Castor. But what part of his money—and you must understand money meant his esteem and his love—did he think I was worth?

  “Denyse was left very well off, but she got no capital—just a walloping good income for life or—this was Father speaking again—so long as she remained his widow. I am sure he thought he was protecting her against fortune-hunters; but he was also keeping fortune-hunters from getting their hands on anything that was, or had been, his.

  “Then there was a bundle for ‘my dear daughter, Caroline’ which was to be hers outright and without conditions—because Beesty could have choked on a fishbone at his club any day and Caroline remarried at once and Father wouldn’t have batted an eye.

  “Then there was a really large capital sum in trust ‘for my dear grandchildren, Caroline Elizabeth and Boyd Staunton Bastable, portions to be allotted per stirpes to any legitimate children of my son Edward David Staunton from the day of their birth.’ There it was, you see.”

  “Your father was disappointed that you had no children?”

  “Certainly that is how he would have expected it to be interpreted. But didn’t you notice that I was simply his son, when all the others were his dear this and dear that? Very significant, in something carefully prepared by Father. It would be nearer the truth to say he was angry because I wouldn’t marry—wouldn’t have anything to do with women at all.”

  “I see. And why is that?”

  “It’s a very long and complicated story.”

  “Yes. It usually is.”

  “I’m not a homosexual, if that’s what you are suggesting.”

  “I am not suggesting that. If there were easy and quick answers, psychiatry would not be very hard work.”

  “My father was extremely fond of women.”

  “Are you fond of women?”

  “I have a very high regard for women.”

  “That is not what I asked.”

  “I like them well enough.”

  “W
ell enough for what?”

  “To get along pleasantly with them. I know a lot of women.”

  “Have you any women friends?”

  “Well—in a way. They aren’t usually interested in the things I like to talk about.”

  “I see. Have you ever been in love?”

  “In love? Oh, certainly.”

  “Deeply in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had sexual intercourse with women?”

  “With a woman.”

  “When last?”

  “It would be—let me think for a moment—December 26, 1945.”

  “A very lawyer-like answer. But—nearly twenty-three years ago. How old were you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Was it with the person with whom you were deeply in love?”

  “No, no; certainly not!”

  “With a prostitute?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “We seem to be approaching a painful area. Your answers are very brief, and not up to your usual standard of phrasing.”

  “I am answering all your questions, I think.”

  “Yes, but your very full flow of explanation and detail has dried up. And our hour is drying up, as well. So there is just time to tell you that next day we should take another course. Until now we have been clearing the ground, so to speak. I have been trying to discover what kind of man you are, and I hope you have been discovering something of what I am, as well. We are not really launched on analysis, because I have said little and really have not helped you at all. If we are to go on—and the time is very close when you must make that decision—we shall have to go deeper, and if that works, we shall then go deeper still, but we shall not continue in this extemporaneous way. Just before you go, do you think that by leaving you nothing in his will except this possibility of money for your children, your father was punishing you—that in his own terms he was telling you he didn’t love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you care whether he loved you or not?”

  “Must it be called love?”

  “It was your own word.”

  “It’s a very emotional term. I cared whether he thought I was a worthy person—a man—a proper person to be his son.”

  “Isn’t that love?”

  “Love between father and son isn’t something that comes into society nowadays. I mean, the estimate a man makes of his son is in masculine terms. This business of love between father and son sounds like something in the Bible.”

  “The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose. King David’s estimate of his rebellious son Absalom was certainly in masculine terms. But I suppose you recall David’s lament when Absalom was slain?”

  “I have been called Absalom before, and it isn’t a comparison I like.”

  “Very well. There is no point in straining an historical comparison. But do you think your father might have meant something more than scoring a final blow in the contest between you when he arranged his will as he did?”

  “He was an extremely direct man in most things, but in personal relationships he was subtle. He knew the will would be studied by many people and that they would know he had left me obligations suitable to a lawyer but nothing that recognized me as his child. Many of these people would know also that he had had great hopes of me at one time, and had named me after his hero, who had been Prince of Wales when I was born, and that therefore something had gone wrong and I had been a disappointment. It was a way of driving a wedge between me and Caroline, and it was a way of giving Denyse a stick to beat me with. We had had some scenes about this marriage and woman business, and I would never give in and I would never say why. But he knew why. And this was his last word on the subject: spite me if you dare; live a barren man and a eunuch; but don’t think of yourself as my son. That’s what it meant.”

  “How much does it mean to you to think of yourself as his son?”

  “The alternative doesn’t greatly attract me.”

  “What alternative is that?”

  “To think that I am Dunstan Ramsay’s son.”

  “The friend? The man who was grinning at the funeral?”

  “Yes. It has been hinted. By Netty. And Netty might just have known what she was talking about.”

  “I see. Well, we shall certainly have much to talk about when next we meet. But now I must ask you to give way to my next patient.”

  I never saw these next patients or the ones who had been with the doctor before me because her room had two doors, one from the waiting-room but the other giving directly into the corridor. I was glad of this arrangement, for as I left I must have looked very queer. What had I been saying?

  (7)

  “Let me see; we had reached Friday in your bad week, had we not? Tell me about Friday.”

  “At ten o’clock, the beginning of the banking day, George Inglebright and I had to meet two men from the Treasury Department in the vault of the bank to go through my father’s safety-deposit box. When somebody dies, you know, all his accounts are frozen and all his money goes into a kind of limbo until the tax people have had a full accounting of it. It’s a queer situation because all of a sudden what has been secret becomes public business, and people you’ve never seen before outrank you in places where you have thought yourself important. Inglebright had warned me to be very quiet with the tax men. He’s a senior man in my father’s firm of lawyers, and of course he knows the ropes, but it was new to me.

  “The tax men were unremarkable fellows, but I found it embarrassing to be locked up in one of the bank’s little cubbyholes with them while we counted what was in the safety-deposit box. Not that I counted; I watched. They warned me not to touch anything, which annoyed me because it suggested I might snatch a bundle of brightly coloured stock certificates and make a run for it. What was in the box was purely personal, not related to Alpha or any of the companies my father controlled. It wasn’t as personal as I feared, however; I’ve heard stories of safety-deposit boxes with locks of hair, and baby shoes, and women’s garters, and God knows what in them. But there was nothing of that sort. Only shares and bonds amounting to a very large amount, which the tax men counted and inventoried carefully.

  “One of the things that bothered me was that these men, obviously not paid much, were cataloguing what was in itself a considerable fortune: what did they think? Were they envious? Did they hate me? Were they glorying in their authority? Were they conscious of putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek? They looked crusty and non-committal, but what was going on in their heads?

  “It took most of the morning and I had nothing whatever to do but watch, which I found exhausting because of the reflections it provoked. It was the kind of situation that leads one to trite philosophizing: here is what remains of a very large part of a life’s effort—that kind of thing. Now and then I thought about the chairmanship of Castor, and a phrase I hadn’t heard since my law-student days came into my head and wouldn’t be driven out. Damnosa hereditas; a ruinous inheritance. It’s a phrase from Roman Law; comes in Gaius’s Institutes, and means exactly what it says. Castor could very well be that to me because it is big already, and with what will come into it from my father’s estate it will be a very large charitable foundation even by American standards, and being the head of it will devour time and energy and could very well be the end of the kind of career I have tried to make for myself. Damnosa hereditas. Did he mean it that way? Probably not. One must assume the best. Still—

  “I gave George lunch, then marched off like a little soldier to talk to Denyse and Caroline about the will. They had had a chance to go over their own copies, and Beesty had explained most of it, but he isn’t a lawyer and they had a lot of points they wanted clarified. And of course there was a row, because I think Denyse had expected some capital, and in fairness I must say that she was within her rights to do so. What really burned her, I think, was that there was nothing for her daughter Loren
e, though what she had been left for herself would have been more than enough to take care of all that. Lorene is soft in the head, you see, though Denyse pretends otherwise, and she will have to be looked after all her life. Although Lorene’s name was never mentioned, I could sense her presence; she had called my father Daddy-Boy, and Daddy-Boy hadn’t lived up to expectation.

  “Caroline is above fussing about inheritances. She is really a very fine person, in her frosty way. But naturally she was pleased to have been taken care of so handsomely, and Beesty was openly delighted. After all, with the trust money and Caroline’s personal fortune and what would come from himself and his side of the family, his kids were in the way of being rich even by my father’s demanding standards. Both Caroline and Beesty saw how I had been dealt with, but they were too tactful to say anything about it in front of Denyse.

  “Not so Denyse herself. ‘This was Boy’s last chance to get you back on the rails, David,’ said she, ‘and for his sake I hope it works.’

  “ ‘What particular rails are you talking about?’ I said. I knew well enough, but I wanted to hear what she would say. And I will admit I led her on to put her foot in it because I wanted a chance to dislike her even more than I did already.

  “ ‘To be utterly frank, dear, he wanted you to be married, and to have a family, and to cut down on your drinking. He knew what a balancing effect a wife and children have on a man of great talents. And of course everybody knows that you have great talents—potentially.’ Denyse was not one to shrink from a challenge.

  “ ‘So he has left me the toughest job in the family bundle, and some money for children I haven’t got,’ I said. ‘Do you happen to know if he had anybody in mind that he wanted me to marry? I’d like to be sure of everything that is expected of me.’

  “Beesty was wearing his toad-under-the-harrow expression, and Caroline’s eyes were fierce. ‘If you two are going to fight, I’m going home,’ she said.