ONLY SON OF JOHN G. RARICK, AMERICAN CHAIN-STORE MILLIONAIRE,
DISCOVERED BY LANDLADY DEAD FROM ASPHYXIATION
DEATH ATTRIBUTED TO DEMAND FOR LUXURIES WHICH WERE DENIED HIM BY
SELF-MADE FATHER
SOCIETY SHOCKED BY SUICIDE DEATH OF ONLY SON OF JOHN G. RARICK. COMES
AS SHOCK TO FAMILY. MRS. RARICK PROSTRATED. FAMILY IN SECLUSION.
Let them bray. Let them bray. It was better so. It covered up the
private, timid truth. The truth lay scattered in documents, some of
them torn across the page; in composition-books filled with boyish
scrawls; in half-written letters; in hand-written and hand-bound
volumes of verse that lay in a heap on the table on which John Rarick
leaned his face into his hands.
It was as if the contents of the heart of Avery, the soul and the mind
of Avery, unlocked from the vault of his nineteen years, had been
spilled there in broken utterances of torment.
This was his boy out there, in strange autopsy before him, the history
of his defeat, his pain, his lightnings of ecstasy that had apparently
been as unbearable as the pain, like chipped bits of cornice of the now
cold marble of his being.
There, spread over the table, in writings, were the truths that for
nineteen years had lain hidden from his father by the mere wall of
boy-flesh.
God! God! God! That wall had been flesh of Rarick’s and yet it had
shut him out. The door through that wall, not forty-eight hours
before, had been a living, breathing heart with a key to it--nobody
to blame--nobody to blame--least of all Avery--except--unbearable
loneliness of the thought--not even his mother had ever found the key
to it. Certainly Rarick had not.
He beat with his fists upon the table; he scorched his eyes upon the
revealing lines of the documents that had been brought him from his
dead son’s effects. He read and reread:
This boy, then, written there on the scraps of paper, whose torment
had been the strange inchoate torment of poet, adolescent, dreamer and
diviner, potential lover, and adventurer in Hellenic islands around
which flowed the blue Mediterranean of imagination, had been the Avery
of the flesh. The fledgling who had smoked the strange little hooked
pipes, that looked insolent and smelled badly. The Avery who had
piled up card debts. The Avery whose wants, at least as interpreted
by his mother, God forgive her, had been the speed motor-boats,
the special-body roadsters, the dressing-cases, gold-fitted, the
five-thousand-dollar camping outfits, the monstrous checking accounts,
polo ponies....
Some lispings of what Avery had really wanted rose in faint perfume off
the pages of the book of sophomoric verse which he had written in a
fine, painstaking, private kind of chirography that bore no resemblance
to the modish scrawl he had shown the world.