THE UNSUCCESSFUL PARENT
Kenny slept as he lived, with a genius for dreams and adventure. He
remembered moodily as he rose at noon that he had dreamed a
kaleidoscopic chase, precisely like a moving picture with himself a
star, in which, bolting through one taxi door and out another with a
shotgun in his hand, he had valiantly pursued a youth who had,
miraculously, found the crooked stick of the psaltery and stolen it.
The youth proved to be Brian. That part was reasonable enough. Brian
was the only one who could find the thing long enough to steal it.
It was not likely to be a day for work. That he felt righteously could
not be expected. Nevertheless, with hurt concession to certain talk of
indolence the night before, he donned a painter's smock and, filled
with a consciousness of tremendous energy to be expended in God's good
time, telephoned John Whitaker.
Yes, Brian had been there. Where he was now, where he would be,
Whitaker did not feel at liberty to divulge. Frankly he was pledged to
silence. Kenny willing, he would be up to dinner at six. He had a lot
to say.
Kenny banged the receiver into the hook in a blaze of temper, hurt and
unreasonable, and striding to the rear window flung it up to cool his
face. There were bouillon cups upon the sill. Bouillon cups!
Bouillon cups! Thunder-and-turf! There were bouillon cups everywhere.
Nobody but Brian would have bought so many handles. A future of
handles loomed drearily ahead. Brian could talk of disorder all he
chose. Half of it was bouillon cups. Bitterly resenting the reproach
they seemed to embody, stacked there upon the sill, Kenny passionately
desired to sweep them out of the window once and for all. The desire
of the moment, ever his doom, proved overpowering. The cups crashed
upon a roof below with prompt results. Kenny was appalled at the
number of heads that appeared at studio windows, the head of Sidney
Fahr among them, round-eyed and incredulous. Well, that part at least
was normal. Sid's face advertised a chronic distrust of his senses.
Moreover, when Pietro appeared after a round of alarmed inquiry, Kenny
perversely chose to be truthful about it, insisted that it was not
accidental and refused to be sorry. Afterward he admitted to Garry, it
was difficult to believe that one spontaneous ebullition of a nature
not untemperamental could provoke so much discussion, frivolous and
otherwise. The thing might grow so, he threatened sulkily, that he'd
leave the club.
As for the immediate present, Fate had saddled him again with an
afternoon of moody indolence. Certainly no Irishman with nerves strung
to an extraordinary pitch could work with Mike crawling snakily around
the lower roof intent upon china remnants whose freaks of shape seemed
to paralyze him into moments of agreeable interest. Kenny at four
refused an invitation to tea and waited in growing gloom for Reynolds,
a dealer who, prodded always into inconvenient promptness by Kenny's
needs, had promised to combine inspection of the members' exhibition in
the gallery downstairs with the delivery of a check. There were
critical possibilities if he did not appear.
Mike disappeared with the final fragment and Reynolds became the
grievance of the hour. Kenny, fuming aimlessly around the studio,
resorted desperately at last to an unfailing means of stimulus. He
made a careful toilet, donned a coat with a foreign looking waist-line,
rather high, and experimented with a new and picturesque stock that
fastened beneath his tie with a jeweled link. As six o'clock arrived
and Reynolds' defection became a thing assured, his attitude toward
John Whitaker underwent an imperative change. It would be impossible
now to greet him with hostile dignity. He had become a definite need.
When at ten minutes past six the studio bell tinkled, Kenny, opening
the door, stared at Whitaker in tragic dismay and struck himself upon
the forehead.
"Mother of Men!" he groaned. "I thought of course it would be
Reynolds. He's bringing me a check."
John Whitaker looked unimpressed. He merely blinked his recognition of
a subterfuge.
There was a parallel in his experience, a weekend arrival at Woodstock
when Kenny, farming in a flurry of enthusiasm, had come riding down to
meet his guest on a singular quadruped whose area of hide had thickened
strangely. Brian called the uncurried quadruped a plush horse. Kenny,
remembered Whitaker, had searched with tragic eyes for an invited
editor who had recklessly agreed to pay in advance for an excursion of
Kenny's into illustrating, ostensibly to pay for a cow. And Kenny's
words had been: "My God, Whitaker! Where's Graham?" Moreover he had
struck himself fiercely on the forehead and Whitaker had grub-staked
his host to provisions until Graham arrived.
"Can't we eat in the grill?" asked Whitaker. "It's raining." Kenny
regarded him with a look of pained intelligence.
"I'm posted," he said.
"Then," said Whitaker, "I'll go out and buy something. I'd rather eat
in the studio. What'll I get?"
Kenny capriciously banned oysters.
"If you want a rarebit," he added, "we have some cheese."
He was still searching excitedly for the cheese when Whitaker returned.
"Reynolds," he flung out vindictively, "is positively the most
unreliable dealer I know. He's erratic and irresponsible. A man may
work himself to death and wait in the grave for his money. Do you
wonder poor Blakelock met his doom through the cupidity of laggard
dealers? Here am I on the verge of God knows what from overwork--"
Whitaker spared him disillusion. Painting with Kenny was an
occupation, never work. When it slipped tiresomely into the class of
work and palled, he threw it aside for something more diverting.
"The cheese in all probability," suggested Whitaker mildly, "wouldn't
be under the piano. Or would it? And don't bother anyway. I took the
liberty of buying an emergency wedge while I was out."
Kenny wiped his forehead in amazed relief and piously thanked God he
hadn't wasted his appetite on middle-aged cakes.
"If you hadn't come when you did," he said, "I'd likely had to eat 'em,
thanks to Reynolds. Now I'll send 'em up to H. B." He peered
disgustedly into the bag and removed an irrelevant ace of spades. Its
hibernation there seemed for an instant to annoy him as well it might.
There had been a furore in whist about it barely a week before. Then
he used it irresponsibly for an I.O.U. and impaled it upon a strange
looking spike that seemed to pinion a heterogeneous admission of petty
debt.
Together they made the rarebit. Whitaker waited with foreboding for
the storm to break. But for some reason, though he was constrained and
impatient and feverishly active, Kenny avoided the subject of Brian.
He lost poise and patience all at once, pushed aside his plate and
challenged Whitaker with a look.
"Why did you want to eat in the studio?"
"I came to talk."
"Whitaker," blustered Kenny, "where's Brian?"
"Working."
"On your paper?"
"No. Brian's left New York. He's driving somebody's car. And I found
the job for him through my paper. When he has money enough he plans to
tramp off into God's green world of spring to get himself in trim.
Says he's stale and tired and thinking wrong. In the fall he's going
abroad for me and that, Kenny, is about all I can tell you."
"You mean," flared Kenny, rising with a ragged napkin in his hand, "you
mean, John, it's all you will tell me!"
"Sit down," said Whitaker, toasting a cracker over the alcohol flame.
"I prefer a sensible talk without fireworks."
Surprised and nettled, Kenny obeyed in spite of himself.
"Now," went on Whitaker quietly, "I came here to-night because I'm
Brian's friend and yours." He ignored the incredulous arch of Kenny's
eyebrows. "Where Brian is, where he will be, I don't propose to tell
you, now or at any other time. His wheres and his whens are the boy's
own business. His whys I think you know. He won't be back."
"He will!" thundered Kenny and thumped upon the table with his fist.
Whitaker patiently reassembled his supper.
"I think not," he said.
"You're not here to think," blazed Kenny. "You're here to tell me what
you know."
"I'm here," corrected John Whitaker, "to get a few facts out of my
system for your own good and Brian's. Kenny, how much of the truth can
you stand?"
Kenny threw up his hands with a reminiscent gesture of despair.
"Truth!" he repeated. "Truth!"
"I know," put in Whitaker, "that you regard the truth as something
sacred, to be handled with delicacy and discretion. But--"
Kenny told him sullenly to tell it if he could.
"I don't propose to urge Brian back here for a good many reasons. In
the first place, he's not a painter--"
"John," interrupted Kenny hotly, "you are no judge of that. I,
Kennicott O'Neill, am his father."
"And more's the pity," said Whitaker bluntly, "for you've made a mess
of it. That's another reason."
Kenny turned a dark red.
"You mean?"
"I mean, Kenny," said Whitaker, his glance calm and level, "that as a
parent for Brian, you are an abject failure."
The word stung. It was the first time in his life that Kenny had faced
it. That he, Kennicott O'Neill, Academician, with Heaven knows how
many medals of distinction, could fail at anything, was a new thought,
bewildering and bitter. This time he escaped from the table and flung
up a window. Whitaker, he grumbled, never toasted crackers without
burning them. Whitaker brought him back with a look.
"Sit down," he said again. "I don't propose to talk while you roam
around the studio and kick things."
Kenny obeyed. He looked a little white.
"I've tried to think this thing out fairly," said Whitaker. "Why as a
parent for Brian you're a failure--"
"Well?"
"And the first and fundamental cause of your failure is, I think, your
hairbrained, unquenchable youth."
Kenny stared at him in astounded silence.
"I remember once around the fire here you told a Celtic tale of some
golden islands--Tirnanoge, wasn't it?--the Land of the Young--"
Might have been, Kenny said perversely. He didn't remember.
"Ossian lived there with the daughter of the King of Youth for three
hundred years that seemed but three," reminded Whitaker. "Well, no
matter. The point is this: The Land of the Young and the King of Youth
always make me think of you."
"It is true," said Kenny with biting sarcasm, "that I still have hair
and teeth. It is also true that I am the respectable if unsuccessful
parent of a son twenty-three years old and I myself am forty-four."
"Forty-four years young," admitted Whitaker. "And Brian on the other
hand is twenty-three years old. There you have it. You know precisely
what I mean, Kenny. Youth isn't always a matter of years. It's a
state of being. Sometimes it's an affliction and sometimes a gift.
Sometimes it's chronic and sometimes it's contagious enough to start an
epidemic. You're as young and irresponsible as the wind. You've never
grown up. God knows whether or not you ever will. But Brian has.
There's the clash."
"Go on," said Kenny with a dangerous flash of interest in his eyes.
"You've an undeniable facility, John, with what you call the truth."
"It's an unfortunate characteristic of highly temperamentalized
individuals--"
"Painters, Irishmen and O'Neills," put in Kenny with sulky impudence.
"That they frequently skirt the rocks for themselves with amazing
skill. I mean just this: They don't always shipwreck their own lives."
Was that, Kenny would like to know, an essential of successful
parenthood?
"I mean," he paraphrased dryly, "must you wreck your own life, John, to
parent somebody else with skill?" The wording of this rather pleased
him. He brightened visibly.
Whitaker ignored his brazen air of assurance. It was like Kenny, he
reflected, to find an unexpected loophole and emerge from it with the
air of a conqueror.
"People with an over-plus of temperament," he said, "wreck the lives of
others. Brian has just stepped out in the nick of time."
"You mean," flashed Kenny with anger in his eyes, "you mean I've tried
to wreck the life of my own son? By the powers of war, John, that's
too much!"
"I didn't say you had tried. I mean merely that you were accidentally
succeeding. The sunsets--"
"Damn the sunsets!" roared Kenny, losing his head.
"It was time for that," agreed Whitaker.
"Time for what?"
"You usually damn the irrefutable thing. Why you wanted Brian to paint
pictures," went on Whitaker, ignoring Kenny's outraged sputter, "when
he couldn't, is and always has been a matter of considerable worry and
mystery to me--"
"It needn't have been. That, I fancy, John, you can see for yourself.
I worry very little about how your paper is run."
"But I think I've solved it. It's your vanity."
"My God!" said Kenny with a gasp.
"You wanted to have a hand in what he did. Then you could afford to be
gracious. There are some, Kenny, who must always direct in order to
enjoy."
There was a modicum of enjoyment with Whitaker around, hinted Kenny
sullenly.
Whitaker found his irrelevant trick of umbrage trying in the extreme.
He lost his temper and said that which he had meant to leave to
inference.
"Kenny, Brian's success, in which you, curiously enough, seem to have
had a visionary faith, would have linked him to you in a sort of
artistic dependence in which you shone with inferential genius and
generosity."
It hurt.
"So!" said Kenny, his color high.
"It may be," said Whitaker, feeling sorry for him, "that I've put that
rather strongly but I think I've dug into the underlying something
which, linked with your warm-hearted generosity and a real love for
Brian, made you stubborn and unreasonable about his work. Of the big
gap in temperament and the host of petty things that maddened Brian to
the point of distraction, it's unnecessary for me to speak. You must
know that your happy-go-lucky self-indulgence more often than not has
spelled discomfort of a definite sort for Brian. You're generous, I'll
admit. Generous to a fault. But your generosity is always congenial.
It's never the sort that hurts. The only kind of generosity that will
help in this crisis is the kind that hurts. It's up to you, Kenny, to
do some mental house-cleaning, admit the cobwebs and brush them away,
instead of using them fantastically for drapery."
Whitaker thanked his lucky stars he'd gotten on so well. Kenny,
affronted, was usually more capricious and elusive.
"Whitaker," said Kenny, his eyes imploring, "you don't--you can't mean
that Brian isn't coming back?"
Whitaker sighed. After all, Kenny never heard all of anything, just as
he never read all of a letter unless it was asterisked and under-lined
and riveted to his attention by a multitude of pen devices.
"Kenny, have you been listening?"
"No!" lied Kenny.
"Brian," flung out Whitaker wrathfully, "isn't coming back. I thank
God for his sake."
His loss of temper brought a hornet's nest about his ears. Kenny swung
to his feet in smoldering fury. He expressed his opinion of Whitaker,
editors, Brian and sons. The sum of them merged into an unchristian
melee of officiousness and black ingratitude. He recounted the events
of the night before with stinging sarcasm in proof of Brian's
regularity. He ended magnificently by blaming Brian for the disorder
of the studio. There were handles everywhere. And Brian in an
exuberance of amiability had broken a statuette. Likely Whitaker would
see even in that some form of paternal oppression.
"Whitaker," flung out Kenny indignantly, "Brian plays but one
instrument in this studio and we have a dozen. Wasn't it precisely
like him to pick out that damned psaltery there with the crooked stick?
I mean--wasn't it like him to pick out something with a fiendish
appendage that could be lost, and keep the studio in an uproar when he
wanted to play it?"
Whitaker laughed in spite of himself. The psaltery stick was famous.
Moreover, Brian--Brian, mind you, who talked of truth with
hair-splitting piety--Brian had that very day at noon forced his father
to the telling of a lie.
"But he wasn't here," said Whitaker, mystified. "He lunched with me."
"The fact remains," insisted Kenny with dignity. "I myself told Garry
Rittenhouse he'd gone up to Reynolds to collect some money. And Garry,
thinking he had come back, believed it."
"Kenny," said Whitaker, his patience quite gone, "are you mad? How on
earth did Brian force you into that lie?"
"By not coming home," said Kenny sulkily. "If he'd come home as a lad
should, I needn't have told it. You can see that for yourself."
Whitaker dazedly threw up his hands.
Having successfully baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his
unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when
Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification,
in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by
his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his temper and went home.
He left his host in a dangerous mood of quiet.
It was a quiet unlike Kenny, who hated to think, and presently he flung
his pipe across the studio, fuming at what seemed to him unprecedented
disorder. It was getting on his nerves. No man could work in such a
hodge-podge. Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic.
Small blame to Brian if he resented it all. To-morrow, if Reynolds
deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty, and
the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame would
remember. Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the present
disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new
interest upon a jumble of musical instruments in a corner.
With a muffled objurgation he fell upon the jumble and began to
overhaul it. The object sought defied his fevered efforts to unearth
it and with teeth set, he ransacked the studio, resentfully flinging a
melee of hindrances right and left.
The telephone rang.
"Kenny," said Garry's patient voice, "what in Heaven's name are you
doing? What hit the wall?"
"I'm hunting the stick to that damned psaltery," snapped Kenny and
banged the receiver into the hook, one hand as usual clenched
frenziedly in his hair.
Later, with the studio a record of earthquake, he found it under a
model stand and wiping his forehead anchored it to the psaltery for
good and all with a shoestring.
Horribly depressed he thumped on the wall for Garry, who came at once,
wondering wryly if Brian had come in and the need again was mediation.
"You might as well know," began Kenny at once, "that Brian didn't go up
to Reynolds for me this noon--"
Garry stared.
"It was a lie," flung out Kenny with a jerk, "a damnable, deliberate,
indecent lie. Whitaker says he's gone for good." His look was wistful
and indignant. "Garry, what's wrong?" he demanded. "What on earth
_is_ it? Why couldn't things have gone on as they were, without God
knows how many people picking _me_ for a target? As far as I can see
I'm merely maintaining my usual average of imperfection and all the
rest of the world has gone mad."
"I suppose, Kenny," began Garry lamely, "you must be starting a new
cycle. Jan could tell you. He talks a lot about the cycle of dates
and the philosophy of vibrations--"
"I know that I regard the truth as something sacred, to be handled with
delicacy and discretion," began Kenny with bitter fluency. "I'm an
unsuccessful parent with an over-supply of hair and teeth, afflicted
with hairbrained, unquenchable youth. I'd be a perennial in the Land
of the Young and could hobnob indefinitely with his Flighty Highness,
the King of Youth. I'm forty-four years young and highly
temperamentalized. I've made a mess of parenting Brian and I'm an
abject failure."
Garry looked at him.
"Just what are you talking about?" he asked.
"I know," pursued Kenny elaborately, "that it's unfortunate I haven't
wrecked my own life when I'm an accidental success at wrecking Brian's.
I'm full of cobwebs. I damn irrefutable things and I've forced Brian
to a profession of sunsets to gratify my vanity. Can you personally,
Garry, think of anything else?"
"Sit down!" said Garry. "You're about as logical as a lunatic--"
"Tell Whitaker, do," begged Kenny. "There's one he missed. Garry,
what's back of all this turmoil? What's the real reason for Brian's
brain-storm? I'm sick to death of Whitaker's wordy arabesque and
abuse. I want facts."
"Brian said it all last night," reminded Garry. "It's just another
case of a last straw."
"You honestly mean that the ancestors of the straw are the sunsets, the
disorder here--the--the--" He thumped the table. "Garry, I don't
lie. I swear I don't. I hate a liar. I mean a dishonorable liar. A
lie is an untruth that harms. That's my definition. Any man
embroiders sordid fact on occasion."
"On occasion!" admitted Garry.
Kenny, with his eye upon the fern in the window, missed the
significance. It had registered his sincere regret--that fern--at the
need of pawning Brian's fishing rods and golf clubs. Like Brian! He
had failed utterly to comprehend the delicacy of the tribute.
Finding this point upon which he dwelt with some length equally
over-nice for Garry's perception, Kenny in a huff sent him home,
watered the fern, without in the least understanding the impulse, and
went to bed. And dreaming as usual, he seemed to be hunting cobwebs
with a gun made of ferns. He found them draped over huge pillars of
ice, marked in Brian's familiar sunset colors. Truth. And when
panting and sweating he had swept them all away with a wedge of cheese
he seemed to hear Whitaker's voice--calling him a failure.
Kenny felt that he had been visited by Far Darrig, the Gaelic bringer
of bad dreams.