Nevertheless as, dressed, in a burnt orange turtleneck sweater beneath his gray flannels, he descended the Spanish staircase, he was outwardly calm and possessed. The delicate iron balustrade and the marble steps coiled down to the tilefloored and barnlike living room beyond which he could hear his wife and son talking on the breakfast terrace.
The son’s name was Voyd. He and his wife had named the two children by what might have been called mutual contemptuous armistice — his wife called the boy Voyd, for what reason he never knew; he in his turn named the girl (the child whose woman’s face had met him from every paper he touched for two days now beneath or above the name, April Lalear) Samantha, after his own mother.
He could hear them talking — the wife between whom and himself there had been nothing save civility, and not always a great deal of that, for ten years now; and the son who one afternoon two years ago had been delivered at the door drunk and insensible by a car whose occupants he did not see and, it devolving upon him to undress the son and put him to bed, whom he discovered to be wearing, in place of underclothes, a woman’s brassière and step-ins.
A few minutes later, hearing the blows perhaps, Voyd’s mother ran in and found her husband beating the still unconscious son with a series of towels which a servant was steeping in rotation in a basin of ice-water. He was beating the son hard, with grim and deliberate fury. Whether he was trying to sober the son up or was merely beating him, possibly he himself did not know.
His wife though jumped to the latter conclusion. In his raging disillusionment he tried to tell her about the woman’s garments but she refused to listen; she assailed him in turn with virago fury. Since that day the son had contrived to see his father only in his mother’s presence (which neither the son nor the mother found very difficult, by the way) and at which times the son treated his father with a blend of cringing spite and vindictive insolence half a cat’s and half a woman’s.
He emerged onto the terrace; the voices ceased. The sun, strained by the vague high soft almost nebulous California haze, fell upon the terrace with a kind of treacherous unbrightness. The terrace, the sundrenched terra cotta tiles, butted into a rough and savage shear of canyonwall bare yet without dust, on or against which a solid mat of flowers bloomed in fierce lush myriad-colored paradox as though in place of being rooted into and drawing from the soil they lived upon air alone and had been merely leaned intact against the sustenanceless lavawall by someone who would later return and take them away.
The son, Voyd, apparently naked save for a pair of straw-colored shorts, his body brown with sun and scented faintly by the depilatory which he used on arms, chest and legs, lay in a wicker chair, his feet in straw beach shoes, an open newspaper across his brown legs. The paper was the highest class one of the city, yet there was a black headline across half of it too, and even without pausing, without even being aware that he had looked, Ira saw there too the name which he recognized.
He went on to his place; the Filipino who put him to bed each night, in a white service jacket now, drew his chair. Beside the glass of orange juice and the waiting cup lay a neat pile of mail topped by a telegram. He sat down and took up the telegram; he had not glanced at his wife until she spoke:
“Mrs. Ewing telephoned. She says for you to stop in there on your way to town.”
He stopped; his hands opening the telegram stopped. Still blinking a little against the sun he looked at the face opposite him across the table — the smooth dead makeup, the thin lips and the thin nostrils and the pale blue unforgiving eyes, the meticulous platinum hair which looked as though it had been transferred to her skull with a brush from a book of silver leaf such as window painters use. “What?” he said. “Telephoned? Here?”
“Why not? Have I ever objected to any of your women telephoning you here?”
The unopened telegram crumpled suddenly in his hand. “You know what I mean,” he said harshly. “She never telephoned me in her life. She don’t have to. Not that message. When have I ever failed to go by there on my way to town?”
“How do I know?” she said. “Or are you the same model son you have been a husband and seem to be a father?” Her voice was not shrill yet, nor even very loud, and none could have told how fast her breathing was because she sat so still, rigid beneath the impeccable and unbelievable hair, looking at him with that pale and outraged unforgiveness. They both looked at each other across the luxurious table — the two people who at one time twenty years ago would have turned as immediately and naturally and unthinkingly to one another in trouble, who even ten years ago might have done so.
“You know what I mean,” he said, harshly again, holding himself too against the trembling which he doubtless believed was from last night’s drinking, from the spent alcohol. “She don’t read papers. She never even sees one. Did you send it to her?”
“I?” she said. “Send what?”
“Damnation!” he cried. “A paper! Did you send it to her? Don’t lie to me.”
“What if I did?” she cried. “Who is she, that she must not know about it? Who is she, that you should shield her from knowing it? Did you make any effort to keep me from knowing it? Did you make any effort to keep it from happening? Why didn’t you think about that all those years while you were too drunk, too besotted with drink, to know or notice or care what Samantha was—”
“Miss April Lalear of the cinema, if you please,” Voyd said. They paid no attention to him; they glared at one another across the table.
“Ah,” he said, quiet and rigid, his lips scarcely moving. “So I am to blame for this too, am I? I made my daughter a bitch, did I? Maybe you will tell me next that I made my son a f—”
“Stop!” she cried. She was panting now; they glared at one another across the suave table, across the five feet of irrevocable division.
“Now, now,” Voyd said. “Don’t interfere with the girl’s career. After all these years, when at last she seems to have found a part that she can—” He ceased; his father had turned and was looking at him. Voyd lay in his chair, looking at his father with that veiled insolence that was almost feminine.
Suddenly it became completely feminine; with a muffled halfscream he swung his legs out to spring up and flee but it was too late; Ira stood above him, gripping him not by the throat but by the face with one hand, so that Voyd’s mouth puckered and slobbered in his father’s hard, shaking hand. Then the mother sprang forward and tried to break Ira’s grip but he flung her away and then caught and held her, struggling too, with the other hand when she sprang in again.
“Go on,” he said. “Say it.” But Voyd could say nothing because of his father’s hand gripping his jaws open, or more than likely because of terror. His body was free of the chair now, writhing and thrashing while he made his slobbering, moaning sound of terror while his father held him with one hand and held his screaming mother with the other one.
Then Ira flung Voyd free, onto the terrace; Voyd rolled once and came onto his feet, crouching, retreating toward the French windows with one arm flung up before his face while he cursed his father. Then he was gone. Ira faced his wife, holding her quiet too at last, panting too, the skillful map of makeup standing into relief now like a paper mask trimmed smoothly and pasted onto her skull. He released her.
“You sot,” she said. “You drunken sot. And yet you wonder why your children—”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “All right. That’s not the question. That’s all done. The question is, what to do about it. My father would have known. He did it once.” He spoke in a dry light pleasant voice: so much so that she stood, panting still but quiet, watching him. “I remember. I was about ten. We had rats in the barn. We tried everything. Terriers. Poison. Then one day father said, ‘Come.’ We went to the barn and stopped all the cracks, the holes. Then we set fire to it.
What do you think of that?” Then she was gone too. He stood for a moment, blinking a little, his eyeballs beating faintly and steadily in his skull with the impact of the soft unchanging sunlight, the fierce innocent mass of the flowers.
“Philip!” he called. The Filipino appeared, brownfaced, impassive, with a pot of hot coffee, and set it beside the empty cup and the icebedded glass of orange juice. “Get me a drink,” Ira said. The Filipino glanced at him, then he became busy at the table, shifting the cup and setting the pot down and shifting the cup again while Ira watched him. “Did
