Heinlein, Robert A - Time Enough for Love, page 60
“No. First cousins. Although with Ned gone there’s no way to prove it. I think—”
Mr. Johnson was interrupted by a yell from the front staircase landing: “Mama! Gramp! I want to be buttoned up!”
Ira Johnson answered, “Woodie, you rapscallion, get back upstairs!”
Instead the child came down—small, male, freckled, and ginger-haired, dressed in Dr. Denton’s with the seat flapping behind him. He stared at Lazarus with beady, suspicious eyes. Lazarus felt a shiver run dawn his spine and tried not to look at the child.
“Who’s that?”
Mrs. Smith said quickly, “Forgive me, Mr. Bronson.” Then she added quietly, “Come here, Woodrow;”
Her father said, “Don’t bother, Maureen. I’ll take him up and blister his bottom—then I’ll button him.”
“You and what six others?” the boy child demanded.
“Me, myself, and a baseball bat.”
Mrs. Smith quietly and quickly attended to the child’s needs, then hurried him out of the room and headed him up the stairs. She returned and sat down. Her father said, “Maureen, that was just an excuse. Woodie can button himself. And he’s too old for that baby outfit. Put him in a nightshirt.”
“Father, shall we discuss it another time?”
Mr. Johnson shrugged. “I’ve overstepped again. Ted, that one’s the chessplayer. He’s a stem-winder. Named for President Wilson, but he’s not ‘too proud to fight.’ Mean little devil.”
“Father.”
“All right, all right—but it’s true. That’s what I like about Woodie. He’ll go far.”
Mrs. Smith said, “Please excuse us, Mr. Bronson. My father and I sometimes differ a little about how to bring up a boy. But we should not burden you with it.”
“Maureen, I simply won’t let you make a ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ out of Woodie.”
“There’s no danger of that, Father; he takes after you. My father was in the War of ‘Ninety-eight, Mr. Bronson, and the Insurrection—”
“And the Boxer Rebellion.”
“—and he can’t forget it—”
“Of course not. I keep my old Army thirty-eight under my pillow, my son-in-law being away.”
“Nor would I wish him to forget; I am proud of my father, Mr. Bronson, and hope that all my sons will grow up with his same spirit. But I want them to learn to speak politely, too.”
“Maureen, I would rather have Woodie sass me than be timid with me. He’ll learn to speak politely soon enough; older boys will take care of that. A lesson in manners punctuated with a black eye sticks. I know from experience.”
The discussion was interrupted by the jingle of the doorbell. “That should be Nancy,” Mr. Johnson said and got up to answer. Lazarus heard Nancy say good-night to someone, then stood up himself to be introduced, and was not startled only because he had already picked out his eldest sister at church and knew that she looked like a young edition of Laz and Lor. She spoke to him politely but rushed upstairs as soon as she was excused.
“Do sit down, Mr. Bronson.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Smith, but you were staying up until your daughter returned. She has, so I will leave.”
“Oh, there’s no hurry; Father and I are night owls.”
“Thank you very much. I enjoyed the coffee and the cake, and most especially the company. But it is time for me to say good-night. You have been most kind.”
“If you must, sir. Will we see you at church on Sunday?”
“I expect to be there, ma’am.”
Lazarus drove home in a daze, body alert but thoughts elsewhere. He reached his apartment, bolted himself in, checked windows and blinds automatically, stripped off his clothes, and started a tub. Then he looked grimly at himself in the bathroom mirror. “You stupid arsfardel,” he said with slow intensity. “You whirling son of a bitch. Can’t you do anything right?”
No, apparently not, not even something as simple as getting reacquainted with his mother. Gramp had been no problem; the old goat had given him no surprises—other than being shorter and smaller than Lazarus remembered. He was just as grumpy, suspicious, cynical, formally polite, belligerent—and delightful—as Lazarus had remembered.
There had been worrisome moments when he had “thrown himself on the mercy of the court.” But that gambit had paid off better than Lazarus had had any reason to hope—through an unsuspected family resemblance. Lazarus not only had never seen Gramp’s elder brother (dead before Woodie Smith was born), but he had forgotten that there ever was an Edward Johnson.
Was “Uncle Ned” listed with the Families? Ask Justin. Never mind, not important. Mother had put her finger on the correct answer: Lazarus resembled his grandfather. And his mother, as Gramp had pointed out. But that had resulted only in conjectures concerning dear old Uncle Ned and his “trifling ways,” ones that Mother did not mind listening to, once she was certain that her guest was not embarrassed.
Embarrassed? It had changed his status from stranger to “cousin.” Lazarus wanted to kiss Uncle Ned and thank him for those “trifling ways” that made kinship plausible. Gramp believed the theory—of course; it was his own—and his daughter seemed willing to treat it as a possible hypothesis. Lazarus, it’s just the inside track you need—if you weren’t such a blithering idiot!
He tested the bath water—cold. He shut it off and pulled the plug. A promise of hot water all day long had been one inducement when Lazarus had rented this musty cave. But the janitor turned off the water heater before he went to bed, and anyone looking for hot water later than nine was foolish. Well, he qualified as foolish, and perhaps cold water would do more for his unstable condition than hot—but he had wanted a long, hot soak to soothe his nerves and help him think.
He had fallen in love with his mother.
Face it, Lazarus. This is impossible, and you don’t know how to handle it. In more than two thousand years of one silly misadventure after the other this is the most preposterous predicament you ever got into.
Oh, sure, a son loves his mother. As “Woodie Smith,” Lazarus had never doubted that. He had always kissed his mother good-night (usually), hugged her when he saw her (if he wasn’t in a hurry), remembered her birthday (almost always), thanked her for cookies or cake she left out for him whenever he was out late (except when he forgot), and sometimes had told her he loved her.
She had been a good mother. She had never, screamed at him (or at any of them) and, when necessary, had used a switch at once and the matter was over with—never that Wait-till-your-father-gets-home routine. Lazarus could still feel that peach switch on his calves; it had caused him to levitate, better than Thurston the Great, at a very early age.
He recalled, too, that as he grew older, he found that he was proud of the way she looked—always neat and standing straight and invariably gracious to his friends—not like some of the mothers of other boys.
Oh, sure, a boy loves his mother—and Woodie had been blessed with one of the best.
But this was not what Lazarus felt toward Maureen Johnson Smith, lovely young matron, just his “own” age. That visit this night had been delicious agony—for he had never in all his lives been so unbearably attracted, so sexually obsessed, by any woman any where or when. During that short visit Lazarus had been forced to be most careful not to let his passion show—and especially cautious not to appear too gallant, not be more than impersonally polite, not by expression or tone of voice or anything else risk arousing Gramp’s always-alert suspicions, not let Gramp suspect the storm of lust that had raged up in him as soon as he touched her hand.
Lazarus looked down at proof of his-passion, hard and tall, and slapped it. “What are you standing up for? There’s nothing doing for you. This is the Bible Belt.”
It was indeed! Gramp did not believe in the Bible or live by Bible-Belt standards, yet Lazarus felt sure that, were he to provoke it by breaching those standards, Gramp would shoot him quite dispassionately, on behalf of his son-in-law. Possibly the old man would let the first shot go wide and give him a chance to run. But Lazarus was not willing to bet his life on it. Gramp acting for his son-in-law might feel duty bound to shoot straight—and Lazarus knew how straight the old man could shoot.
Forget it, forget it, he was not going to give either Gramp or his father any reason to shoot, or even to be angry—and you forget it too, you blind snake! Lazarus wondered when his father would be home, and tried to remember how he looked—found his memory blurred. Lazarus had always been closer to his Grandfather Johnson than to his father; not only had his father often been away on business, but also Gramp had been home in the daytime and willing to spend time with Woodie.
His other grandparents? Somewhere in Ohio— Cincinnati? No matter, his memory of them was so faint that it did not seem worthwhile to try to see them.
He had completed all that he had intended to do in Kansas City—and if he had the sense God promised a doorknob, the time to leave is now. Skip church on Sunday, stay away from the pool hall, go down Monday and sell his remaining holdings—and leave! Climb into the Ford—no, sell it and take a train to San Francisco; there catch the first ship south. Send Gramp and Maureen polite notes, mailed from Denver or San Francisco, saying that he was sorry but that business trip, etc.—but Get Out of Town!
Because Lazarus knew that the attraction had not been one-sided— He thought that he had kept Gramp from guessing his emotional storm…but Maureen had been aware of it—and had not resented it. No, she had been flattered and pleased. They had been on the same frequency at once, and without a word or any meaningful glance or touch, her transponder had answered him, silently…then, as opportunity made it possible, she had answered overtly, once with a dinner invitation—which Gramp had tromped on—and she had promptly tromped back in a fashion that made it acceptable by the mores. Then a second time, just as he was leaving, with the also fully acceptable suggestion that she would expect to see him in church.
Well, why should a young matron, even in 1917, not be pleased—and flattered, and unresentful—to know that a man wanted most urgently to take her to bed and treat her with gentle roughness? If his nails were clean…if his breath was sweet…if his manners were polite and respectful—why not? A woman with eight children is no nervous virgin; she is used to a man in her bed, in her arms, in her body—and Lazarus would have bet his last cent that Maureen enjoyed it.
Lazarus had no reason then, or in his earlier life, to suspect that Maureen Smith had ever been anything but “faithful” by the most exacting Bible-Belt standards. He had no reason to think that she was even flirting with him. Her manner had not suggested it; he doubted if it ever would. But he held a deep certainty that she was as strongly attracted as he was, that she knew exactly where it could lead—and he suspected that she realized that nothing but chaperonage would stop them.
(But a father in residence and eight children, plus the contemporary mores concerning what can and can’t be done, constituted a lot of chaperonage! Llita’s chastity belt could hardly be more efficient.)
Let’s haul it out into the middle of the floor and let the cat sniff it. “Sin?” “Sin” like “love” was a word hard to define. It came in two bitter but vastly different flavors. The first lay in violating the taboos of your tribe. This passion he felt was certainly sinful by the taboos of the tribe he had been born into—incestuous in the first degree.
But it could not possibly be incest to Maureen.
To himself? He knew that “incest” was a religious concept, not a scientific one, and the last twenty years had washed away in his mind almost the last trace of his tribal taboo. What was left was no more than that breath of garlic in a good salad; it made Maureen more enticingly forbidden (if such were possible!); it did not scare him off. Maureen did not seem to be his mother—because she did not fit his recollection of her either as a young woman or as an old woman.
The other meaning of “sin” was easier to define because it was not clouded by the murky concepts of religion and taboo: Sin is behavior that ignores the welfare of others.
Suppose he stuck around and managed somehow (stipulate safe opportunity) to bed Maureen with her full cooperation? Would she regret it later? Adultery? The word meant something here.
But she was a Howard, one of the early ones when marriage between Howards was a cash contract, eyes wide open, payment from the Foundation for each child born of such union—and Maureen had carried out the contract, eight paid-for children already and would stay in production for, uh, about fifteen more years. Perhaps to her “adultery” meant “violation of contract” rather than “sin”—he did not know.
But that is not the point, Bub; the real question is the only one that has ever stopped you when temptation coincided with opportunity—and this time he could consult neither Ishtar nor any geneticist. The chance of a bad outcome was slight when there were so many hurdles in the way of any outcome. But it was the exact risk that he had always refused to take: the chance of placing a congenital handicap on a child.
Hey, wait a minute! No such outcome could result because no such had resulted. He knew every one of his siblings, alive now or still to be born, and there had not been a defective in the lot. Not one. Therefore no hazard.
But— That was grounded on the assumption that his “no paradoxes” theory was a law of nature. But you’ve long been aware that the “no-paradoxes” theory itself involves a paradox—one that you’ve kept quiet about so as not to alarm Laz and Lor and the rest of your “present” (that present, not this one) family; to wit, the idea that free will and predestination are two aspects of the same mathematical truth, and the difference is merely linguistic, not semantic: the notion that his own free will could not change events here-&-now because his freewill actions here-&-now were already a part of what had happened in any later “here-&-now.”
Which in turn depended on a solipsistic notion he had held as far back as he could remember— Cobwebs, all of it!
Lazarus, you don’t know what trouble you might cause. So don’t! Get out of town now and don’t come back to Kansas City at all! Because, if you do, you’re certain to try to get Maureen’s bloomers off…and she’s going to breathe hard and help. From there on only Allah knows—but it could be tragic for her and tragic for others, and as for you, you stupid stud, all balls and no brain, it could get your ass shot off…just as the twins predicted.
In which case, since you are not going to see your family again, there is no sense in waiting in South America for this war to end. You’ve seen enough of this doomed era; ask the girls to come pick you up now.
Was her waist really that slender? Or did she lace it in? Shucks, it didn’t matter how she was built. As with Tamara, it simply did not matter.
* * *
Dear Laz and Lor,
Darlings, I’ve changed plans. I’ve seen my first family, and there isn’t anything else I want to do in this era— nothing worth sweating out most of two years in a backwater while this war drags on to its bloody and useless finish. So I want you to pick me up now, at the impact crater. Forget about Egypt; I can’t get there now.
By “pick me up now” I mean Gregorian 3 March 1917—repeat, third day of March one thousand nine hundred and seventeen Gregorian, at that meteor impact crater in Arizona.
Much to tell you when I see you. Meanwhile—
My undying love,
Lazarus
* * *
Was it her voice? Or her fragrance? Or something else?
DA CAPO
IV
Home
27 March 1917 Greg.
Beloved Family,
Repeat of Basic Message: I got here three years too early—2 August 1916—but still wish to be picked up exactly ten T-years after drop, 2 August 1926—repeat six. Rendezvous points and alternatives from basic date as before. Please impress on Dora that this results from bad data I gave her and is not her fault.
I’m having a marvelous time. I got my business cleaned up and then got in touch with my first family by looking up my grandfather (Ira Johnson, Ira) and got acquainted with him first—and with the aid of a horrendous lie and a most fortunate family resemblance, Gramp is convinced that I am an unregistered son of his (deceased) brother. I didn’t suggest this; it’s his own idea. Consequently it’s solid—and now I’m a “long-lost cousin” in my first home. Not living there, but welcome, which is very nice.
Let me give a rundown on the family, since all of you are descended from three of them: Gramp, Mama, and Woodie.
Gramp is described in that junk Justin has been cutting down to size. No changes, Justin, save that instead of being two meters tall and carved out of granite, Gramp is almost exactly my size. I am spending every minute with him that he will let me, which usually means playing chess with him several times a week.
Mama: Take Laz and Lor and add five kilos in the best places, then add fifteen T-years and a big slug of dignity. (Quit quivering your goddamn chins!) Add hair down to her waist but always coiled up on top. I don’t actually know what Mama does look like other than her head and hands became of the curious custom here of wearing clothes all over at all times. And I do mean “all over.” I know that Mama has slender ankles because I once caught a glimpse. But I would never dare stare at them; Gramp would toss me out of the house.
Papa: He is away now. I had forgotten what he looks like—I had forgotten all their faces except Gramp (who uses the same face I do!) But I’ve seen pictures of Papa and he looks a bit like President Teddy Roosevelt— that’s “Theodore,” Athene, not “Franklin”—in case you have a picture in your gizzards.
Nancy: Laz and Lor as of three standard years before I left. Not as many freckles and very dignified—except when it slips. She is acutely aware of (young) males, and I think Gramp is urging Mama to tell her about the Howard setup at once, so that she’ll be sure to marry in the Families.
