The Will: A Novel

By Harvey Swados

Finalist for the National Book Award: On the verge of receiving a vast inheritance, three brothers’ clashing aspirations turn into an all-out war 
Brothers Leo and Max Land came to America from Romania in 1911, but they took different paths in pursuit of the American dream. Even as they worked together, Max sought out material things while Leo made a simple, private life for himself. Now, after the death of both brothers, Leo’s three sons—the only surviving heirs—learn that they stand to inherit a fortune. As they battle for control, they come to expose their own deeply complicated visions of success in America. The Will is a stunning portrait of American idealism crushed under the weight of material desires.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480414846

Harvey Swados

Harvey Swados (1920–1972) was born in Buffalo, the son of a doctor. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he served in the merchant marine during World War II and published his first novel, Out Went the Candle, in 1955. His other books include the novels The Will, Standing Fast, and Celebration. His collection of stories set in an auto plant, titled On the Line (1957), is widely regarded as a classic of the literature of labor. He also penned various collections of nonfiction, including A Radical’s America. Swados’s 1959 essay for Esquire, “Why Resign from the Human Race?,” is often credited with inspiring the formation of the Peace Corps. 

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The Will

A Novel

Harvey Swados

TO

Henry Allen Moe

AND THE

Guggenheim Foundation,

WITH GRATITUDE

FOR THE TIME

AND TRANQUILLITY

GRANTED TO ME.

Contents

1 Dr. Stark

2 Ralph

3 Kitty

4 Ray

5 Kitty

6 Ray

7 Ralph

8 Kitty

9 Mel

10 Laura

11 Ralph

12 Ray

13 Kitty

14 Mel

15 Dr. Stark

About the Author

1: DR. STARK

WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG and a friend died, Solomon Stark reflected as he steered absently through the slush on the road to the municipal airport, you wept; but when you were past seventy, the tears did not come so easily, even though the loss was correspondingly greater. Instead you felt the shuddering wind that was building up to gale force to blow you down too, in your turn; and, driven onward by the wind, a swirling flood of reminiscence. At least the memories were less chilling than the frosty intimations of mortality, and if you had been lucky there was a certain sweetness about them, as if flowers had been uprooted and were borne past you on the crest of the flood.

Leo Land, that strange man, his friend of forty years’ standing, had died the day before, on New Year’s Eve. Now Leo’s son Ralph, having been away ten years and more, was flying out from New York to bury him and to find out what he—and his older brother Max, carried off by a malignancy only the week before—had left behind. Ralph would find out a lot more than that before he was through.

If not for me, Dr. Stark thought, in all likelihood there would have been no Land sons; but at this point he was uncertain whether it would be worth while to take credit for the consequences of his single exercise in matchmaking. When he had first met Leo, shortly after World War One, the druggist had been a shy young man, still a greenhorn, content to let Max do the pulling and hauling, both in their pharmacy and in their personal affairs. Left to his own, and to the domination of a brother aggressively confirmed in bachelorhood, he would surely never have married. But Solomon Stark had intervened at last, after ten years, by introducing the timid schoolteacher daughter of some patients to his friend, who at thirty-nine was fifteen years her senior. With luck and a shove, he had married them off over the opposition of Max, already cracked and more excited by hoarding than by women.

The years before Leo’s marriage had been the best ones of their friendship, the doctor thought as he rolled through suburbs still silently sleeping off the New Year’s celebration. Not that they hadn’t remained close thereafter, through the Depression, the war, and the rest, until the moment yesterday when he had leaned over the hospital bed and lowered Leo’s blue-veined lids over his faded lifeless eyes. But it was Leo’s bachelor years—less careworn for them both, not yet marked by their mutual retreat to personal concerns, and punctuated with leisurely encounters and the exchange of intimacies that neither had ever been able to discuss with others—that had welded the bonds between them. The friendship would have continued, by occasional correspondence, even if one or both had moved away; and perhaps, the doctor thought wryly, that would have been easier on them both.

Certainly he himself would not now be stuck with the multitude of miserable problems that refused to follow either Max or Leo Land to their graves. Nor would he have had to watch, over the years, the slow dying of the glow in Leo’s beautiful eyes, as he cringed in the dusty depths of the store, shrinking from his brother’s growing mania for the collecting of everything from bottle tops to broken scooters.

Installed behind the brothers’ pharmacy in their dank and airless rooms, Jenny Kadin Land had done her best to make a home, and within two years had presented Leo with two sons. All that she had succeeded in doing, however, was in confusing two men who had been committed bachelors, making their common life impossibly crowded, and squeezing out her brother-in-law to satisfy his eccentric cravings by pawing over garbage. As the boys grew, Jenny came to feel that she was losing them, to admiration of the wrong traits in their uncle, and worse, to hatred and disgust for their whole mean existence. In a last desperate effort to have something that would be all her own, she gave birth during the Second World War to her last son—and drove out Max for good, to the rambling relic of Victorian eccentricity that he had picked up for tax arrears.

As for Leo, pinched in a vise between younger brotherhood and fatherhood, he had shrunk almost visibly, frightened by what was happening to his sons. In the process he had lost whatever connection he and his wife had, however shyly, established between them. Almost inevitably, it seemed when you looked back on it, Jenny had given up the struggle and died apologetically, of a myocardial infarction, leaving Leo to do what you might have known he would: take his motherless remaining boy to that nutty house of the brother who had wished for nothing else than a resumption of their interrupted bachelors’ menage.

But before all that, good God, what a charming and sympathetic man Leo had been! And how few people had known or understood this! Max had been quick and clever, and occasionally even admirable (at least in the youthful immigrant’s doggedness with which he had whipped the two of them through pharmacy school, helped by no one, and into their own drugstore just in time for the flu epidemic). But if Max himself had not recognized the rare virtues of a brother to whom he was devoted only because he wished to dominate him, how could anyone else? At his best, not yet haunted by a sense of failure and dissolution, Leo had been full of whimsy. Imagine, whimsy, in a town like this! Dr. Stark was rather proud that he had spotted Leo’s special qualities, for the druggist had been a man who withdrew tortoiselike into himself if you didn’t extend yourself to him.

In the Land brothers’ drugstore—with Max ostensibly at the wholesaler’s or delivering prescriptions, but usually roaming the streets for other people’s leavings or searching for bargains that no one else would want—Leo had always been hospitable with a glass of beer rushed from the saloon next door, always eager to discuss scraps of news and gossip he had picked up on odd subjects: symbiosis, parthenogenesis, photosynthesis, words which despite his mispronunciation he breathed with a lover’s fervor. Half the time he wasn’t wholly serious, with his schemes for preserving sperm, abolishing eyeglasses in favor of his own eyeball exercises, rearranging the menstrual cycle for women athletes. When you proved to him that he was all wet, he’d even giggle.

He was willing to listen. That was rare enough to make anyone endearing and, with Leo, what made it more so was that he understood you. You could talk about Strindberg, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, to say nothing of Stekel or Stack Sullivan, without his calling you evil-minded—an expression which had actually been used on the doctor by a local matron.

So, weary from climbing long flights of stairs, satchel in hand, to attend young women with fibroids, middle-aged women with imaginary ailments, and old women with varicose veins, he had refreshed his spirits from time to time with Leo, in his clutter of powders, salves, unguents, and tinctures, surrounded also by the incredible junk that Max was sneaking in through the back door.

For years the back of that store had been Dr. Stark’s haven, in a city that had no membership bars or private sporting houses where a man like him might cock a leg, down a beer, and discuss matters that no ambitious clubwoman or gossipy shrew would want to, or even ought to, comprehend. Leo had been the only man in whom he had ever been able to confide his unrealized aspiration …

Well, all that was over. Aside from any sentiment aroused by the finality of death, the truth was that their connection hadn’t suddenly been ruptured yesterday, or even the week before, when Max had died, but had perished slowly and for a long time, over the years. All that time, though, it had flickered; during the young manhood of his own son Marty, Dr. Stark had been glad to drop in on Leo while Marty had taught fiddle to the snot-nosed kids at the Settlement House down the block from the pharmacy. Among those kids had been Ralph Land, a good ten years younger than Marty, but white-faced and withdrawn even then.

Ralph had grown up and gotten out, as so many of them did. He had never come back, not until now, when the old man was laid out waiting for the boys to bury him next to his wife and his brother, and to dig out the dirt that had surrounded them.

What a mess Ralph would be walking into! No, it was no time for tears. Remembering what Ralph had been like before he went off, the doctor rather doubted that he would cry today. Not he, a man who had been all too glad to leave the city and the other Lands, and must now be around thirty, with his own life and hopes elsewhere.

He swung his car into the airport interchange and coasted slowly to a stop in a two-hour parking zone. Ten minutes early, just as he had calculated. He locked the car carefully, checking all four doors (it was his satchel, and the drugs in it, that tempted certain kinds of strangers), and picked his way through hummocks of crusted dirty snow into the waiting room. A few flakes of confetti, bright but forlorn, still speckled the glossy tile just inside the glass doors; either they had escaped the washer-waxer or they had since fallen from the clothing of flying travelers, molting after New Year’s Eve. As if somewhere people were still celebrating, a hidden melliferous loud-speaker emitted, barely audibly, Auld Lang Syne. But nobody was celebrating here, neither the yawning ticket clerks leaning, half awake, on the counter tops, nor the bored kids pawing fretfully over comic books. The lounge—who the hell would want to lounge in it?

Nevertheless, Dr. Stark adored airplane travel. The saving of time on his semiannual vacations was considerable, but that was just an excuse. It was fun to float above the clouds and sip coffee poured for you by a well-corseted Big Sister whose seams were always straight. He admired too the impersonal architecture, airport-modern, with its airy escalators, floating mobiles, endless baggage-delivery belts. They made moving about seem easier, they directed you toward the future rather than the past, they made you feel younger.

More important, though, he had associated travel for the greater part of his life with the city’s drafty, vaulted railroad station. Its moth-eaten bison, defeated, killed in fact, without ever knowing what had hit it, stuffed and mounted on a pedestal near the Information Booth, had always been for him a symbol of the city and of all his years in it, the whole kit and caboodle. Depression and war, those were what came to mind when he entered the overblown terminal and stood beneath the bison, gazing at dwarfed travelers hurrying to or from misery (a job lost, a funeral, a draft call), stumbling lopsided under the burden of sagging suitcases strapped with rotten leather belts. Mothers weeping as they turned away from their boys; white-faced children shipped off like parcels, tags tied to their buttonholes; sailors blustering to conceal their loneliness. The arrivals passed under the bison without a glance, huddling outside on the raw and wind-whipped mall, waiting numbly for a bus to jerk them away.

With the airlines, you came or went in a limousine, by God, you didn’t stagger along with monstrous heavy valises (if only because you couldn’t afford the overweight), and you didn’t have to carry baloney sandwiches to eat on the way, either.

The music, melting like a pat of butter on a pancake, disappeared. A sexually indeterminate announcer proclaimed the arrival of Flight 181 from New York City at Gate Three. Obediently, Dr. Stark made his way to Gate Three and, gloved hands deep in his pockets, surveyed the disembarking passengers. They did not seem pleased with the advantages of air travel. Bilious and weary, looking as though they had stayed up all night to celebrate their soon-to-be-severed connection with the greatest city in the world, they might have been all but shanghaied aboard, to be conveyed for whatever depressing reasons to this provincial city on the frozen margin of the lake. Well, never mind. Which of them was Ralph Land?

There he was, no doubt of it. Resisting the impulse to hurry up to him, the doctor hung back to observe his friend’s son for a moment. Ralph was a head taller than his father had been, but the years since he had left home had not fleshed out his angular form. His stern and essentially humorless face, with its narrow upper lip and high-bridged nose, was pallid, almost garishly so, in the morning light: razor nicks, with their bright dried beads of blood along his stubborn chin, bespoke a hasty careless shave and threw his city pastiness into relief. He did not appear grief-stricken, though, as he proceeded swiftly, storm coat swinging, to retrieve his bags. Rather he looked, the doctor thought, angry and—despite the quick abruptness of his walk—uncertain. He had a lot to be uncertain about; if he were to know how much, maybe he would never have come.

Dr. Stark strode up to him from behind and gripped him by his thin but wiry upper arm.

Welcome home, my boy.

Ralph whirled about tensely. If his recognition was unsmiling, it was nevertheless unhesitating. Yet it seemed to Dr. Stark that it was his own voice more than his features which had at once resonated in the young man’s mind. Weren’t people supposed to remember more readily what they had seen than what they had heard? But then of course they had spoken only yesterday, when he had phoned Ralph long distance to inform him of the second Land death in a week.

As Ralph was saying nothing, he went on doggedly, I only wish that we could be meeting under happier circumstances. Still, it is good to see you after all these years. You look very well.

I never thought … Ralph started to speak in his rather reedy voice, revealing that he had acquired a New York accent—neva for never—which to one who had known him forever was funny, like a mustache on a growing boy. He stopped abruptly and started again: I just couldn’t get away last week for Uncle Max’s funeral. But Papa’s death … He stopped again, his Adam’s apple working.

Yesterday, on the phone, he had said Father. Now he said Papa. Did it mean anything? For ten years, practically ever since his departure for Korea, he had rarely troubled to write home.

We’ll talk about that in a little while, the doctor said in his most businesslike fashion. Are these your bags? He took Ralph’s claim checks from him and bent over the belt line. I’ll take one.

Please, you mustn’t.

Nonsense. You shouldn’t consider me as feeble just yet. He inclined his head toward Ralph’s shoes, which, like most New Yorkers’, were not even encased in rubbers. And the going is treacherous outside. Come, follow me.

He led Ralph Land out into the frosty air, saying, You’ve managed to keep from putting on weight, but then none of you ever were good eaters. Care to stop on the way for a cup of coffee?

I had some on the plane. It was kind of you to meet me. I’m sure you’re busy.

The doctor waved this away with his free hand and pressed on to his car, a big newish model with flaring fins and many lights fore and aft, like a small yacht. It was splattered with dried salt crystals and bore frozen crusts of drifted snow along its window edges, but inside it was still warm and close. Dr. Stark tossed his satchel into the back seat alongside Ralph’s valises, then quickly started up the motor. Almost at once, the hot air began to circulate about their legs.

Ralph cleared his throat. I didn’t know how much to bring along, because I wasn’t sure—

Yes of course. A rotten way to start off the new year, I’m afraid. I’d say you’re going to have to stay on quite a while. You might as well face it, Ralph: things are a mess.

Ralph did not even blink. They’ve been a mess ever since I can remember. Certainly ever since my mother’s death. So I’m not surprised. I don’t suppose you approved my staying away, but I’ve never regretted it.

Approved? You’ve got the wrong guy. The doctor grunted as he swung the car out of the lot and headed back for the city. Listen, I’ve put a lot of effort in trying to dope out why people’s bodies, to say nothing of their minds, behave the way they do. That’s a hard enough job. As for passing judgment, I leave that to the priests and the novelists. And whoever else gets ego gratification from it.

I would have stifled if I’d stayed here.

Or died of shame, right?

Ralph did not respond to this. He remained sitting quite stiffly upright as the doctor stole a glance at him. His thin lips were pressed firmly together.

Well anyway, Dr. Stark said casually, I think I understand why you pulled out. But I think I understand too—although that’s a little more complicated—why your uncle and your father lived the way they did. And died the way they did too, for that matter. He felt compelled to add, As for your kid brother, that’s another question.

That jerked Ralph around. Nervously he undid the buttons of his storm coat and loosened his scarf. What about him?

The doctor considered for a while before replying. This was a poser, harder by far than picking up the telephone to tell Ralph that his father of seventy-one had been laid low by a doughnut truck. At last he began, Raymond took both deaths very hard. Just the same, he didn’t go to Max’s funeral, even though he was right here in town.

Ralph turned to face him. The doctor could feel his stare, hard and full. Why not?

Because he hasn’t left Max’s house in three years. Dr. Stark looked sidewise at his passenger. Didn’t know that, did you?

Is he sick?

He’s perfectly fit. He simply doesn’t want to go out.

But … Ralph pulled off a glove and bit at a thumbnail. My father never wrote me about this.

Didn’t want you to worry, no doubt. Anyway, he was embarrassed and scared, and he wanted to protect the kid. Max couldn’t have cared less—I bet he was pleased. It gave him another dependent, made him more the master of the house, you know? But except for me and, I think, your mother’s cousins, nobody realizes that he is still in that damned house. Nobody. The few who remember him from school, or the neighborhood, believe that he’s gone off. Like you, and … The doctor let his voice trail off, then picked up decisively. Raymond is going to be your number-one problem.

Ralph pushed the wind wing closed and shrank into his coat, as though he had received a sudden chill to the marrow. My problem?

Who else’s? Annoyed, the doctor decided to stop horsing around. I’m sorry, Ralph. I like Raymond very much, and I think he likes me, but by the average man’s standards he’s lost his marbles. Ever know any monks? He lives more or less like one. He has no desire to see the outside world, not a movie, not even a mailbox. With Max and Leo gone, someone is going to have to look after him.

Why me? I’m not trying to duck out, I’m only being practical. Ray was ten years old when I left for Korea. I hardly know him. After Korea, when I was finishing college in New York, I wrote and told him, Get out as soon as you can. No reaction. I pleaded with him. It was useless. Whatever he’s like now, I don’t think he’ll listen to me. I got the feeling from his last letter that he was smiling at me, as though I was the one to be pitied, not he.

Exactly. Then you understand him already, at least to that extent. He feels as though the whole world ought to be pitied. I think he does see, after a fashion, that the world doesn’t want to be pitied, which is probably why he’s locked himself in.

He’s going to have to get out of that dump. If he wants me to help him, I will, but he’s got to get out.

How simple things looked and sounded when you were young! Although he found Ralph to be the least appealing of all the Lands, Dr. Stark had no wish to be cruel to him; still, he was going to have to shock him into comprehension, even though he had already been shocked—you couldn’t tell how severely—by the deaths.

I’ve told Raymond you’re on your way, he said. He’s counting on you. I don’t mean to get sticky, but all you have left in the world is each other. He counted to three and added, That is, each other and Mel.

Never mind that. I appreciate your help, but never mind that. I’ll do whatever has to be done for Ray, but the kid is going to have to co-operate with me.

At least now I know his attitude toward Mel, the doctor thought; as for Raymond, Ralph would see with his own eyes in a matter of minutes. Still he felt an obligation, having gone this far, to set Ralph straight.

Remember, he hasn’t been out in three years. Not only that—he stays in the attic. I don’t think he could just walk out. It would be like letting Rip Van Winkle loose in Times Square. And he’s very idealistic.

You mean he thinks he’s better than anyone else, is that it?

Is that your definition of idealism? Dr. Stark raised his hand from the steering wheel to forestall any more of this. I meant that he thinks the world is bad. It doesn’t follow that he thinks he’s good. Quite the contrary.

My father wrote me very little, Raymond wrote me practically nothing. If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, who will?

I wish I could. Raymond discovered suddenly that he was physically very powerful. But since this happened during his adolescence, it was very confusing to him. He became fearful that he might hurt someone, even accidentally. So he decided to take himself out of circulation, instead of adding to the confusion, until such time as the world was ready to handle him, or vice versa.

But that’s crazy.

Ah, you too. Is it any crazier than those zealots who walk halfway around the world, or swim under the hulls of atomic submarines, because they’re afraid of the bomb?

I didn’t say—

"For that matter, who’s to say that he—or they—are any crazier than the presidents and prime ministers, and the way they behave? Isn’t Raymond, hiding behind his muscles, doing exactly what they all want us to?"

I’m not saying that I’m not my brother’s keeper, but supposing he won’t listen? Supposing he looks down his nose at me?

The doctor reached inside his overcoat for a handkerchief, shook it out, and blew his nose with a firm honk. There’s another reason why you boys are going to have to come to terms. I don’t suppose you’ve given it any thought, but there is a substantial fortune involved.

Ralph yawned suddenly, or at least opened his jaws. No, he was not bored; he must have experienced a sudden pressure on his ears, as though at these last words the automobile had taken an unexpected leap into the air. Dr. Stark asked pleasantly, I guess this time I surprised you, hey?

It’s very confusing. Ralph ran his hand over his face. All I can think of is my uncle’s bicycle pumps and Ann Sheridan pictures. And my father’s correspondence with the Patent Office.

And real estate? How come you don’t think of real estate?

The doctor observed that Ralph Land was cracking his hairy knuckles, quite unaware of what he was doing. Uncle Max’s house? It may have a million rooms, but it’s in the middle of nowhere.

Not any more it’s not. You’ll see very soon. But besides, you must recall the houses where your Uncle Max used to go knocking on every door to collect his rents.

Those dumps? They were nothing but slums.

Times change. It’s funny how young people resist such simple truths. It’s the younger ones who are always saying, My God, the war seems like only yesterday, or some such rubbish. That’s when I feel almost complacent about growing old. It makes for realism, and recognition of change.

Ralph was growing restless beside him. The doctor gestured ahead, at the street beyond the long massive hood of his automobile. I’ve been taking the liberty of driving you considerably out of the way before we head for Max’s house, and your brother. For one thing, it gave me the. opportunity to prepare you a little for Raymond. For another, I do think that before we head out to the other end of town, you ought to take a look at the old neighborhood, where I first met your father so many years ago, and where you grew up. After all, that’s where most of Max’s property is, in the Thirteenth Ward, not far from the Land Brothers’ Pharmacy—the slums, as you call them so aptly.

And my father …

Your father’s body is at the funeral parlor. Presumably that was what Ralph had been going to ask about. There’ll be a brief service there before the interment. Just as was done with Max. There was simply no place to lay either of them out in the house. It’s an unimaginable mess. I can tell you I dreaded this day for more reasons than one.

Ralph did not come back to the estate, or the money, although surely he was itching to ask about it? Instead he remarked somberly, You said on the phone that my father didn’t suffer before he died.

Fortunately. He suffered a good deal from your uncle’s illness and death, yes, and maybe he felt that there was no compelling reason to step out of the way of the doughnut truck. But that’s neither here nor there. Leo didn’t last more than forty minutes after being hit. They notified me from the emergency room, but by the time I reached the hospital he was gone. They assured me, and of course I determined for myself when I got there, that he was unconscious from the second his head hit the fender, which was merciful. In actual fact, Ralph, it was your Uncle Max who really suffered before his death. No one ever knew how much, how painful it must have been. He kept it strictly to himself.

Why? Ralph seemed more polite than concerned. What good did it do him?

Your brother Raymond says Max’s silence was a form of penance for the sin of avarice. Myself, I think of his silent suffering—and boy, I’d hate to have what he had, I’d blow my brains out—as an expression of his old penury. Both of them were anal-erotic in origin, the way I look at it; I don’t have to tell you how stingy the old boy was. He figured, I suppose, why should he call me in, or any other doctor, he’d been misreading our prescriptions for forty years and more, those few of us who still sent patients to him. We’d only have prescribed expensive medication and insisted on hospitalization. So he dosed himself, first with salts, then with a mess of stale patent medicines that nobody else has even heard of for twenty years, anything he could find rotting on the shelves of the Land Brothers’ Pharmacy. Toward the end he knew perfectly well what was gnawing at his insides—Max was cuckoo, yes, but he was no fool—and if he didn’t want anybody with a license, like me, to tell him what he had, it wasn’t that he was afraid to hear. He just wanted to keep it to himself as long as possible, like his old bicycle pumps, his real estate … and his family too, your father, your brother …

The doctor paused, and wound up briskly, He was in the hospital less than two weeks, and then he died.

Ralph was staring out the window at the familiar streets, weirdly quiet on the holiday morning as though the great graying heaps of snow at the curbs had silently buried the city’s inhabitants. His jaw resting on his fist, he said, without turning away from the window, And my father knew all along. I mean about Uncle Max.

Oh, I think so. The pain got too bad for Max to hide, and your father was too intelligent to deceive himself. The last time I saw Leo alive, at Max’s funeral last week, he told me that the two of them had more or less settled things between them. If we only knew what they settled, your job would be a lot easier.

I’ve had no experience in handling estates. And especially with my family …

I know. Don’t worry, though, we’ll see it through. The first thing you ought to get clear on is what’s been happening to this town since you left. That’s why I thought we’d head for the old haunts first. The value of Max’s property will be more evident after you get a sense of the city. We’ve all changed in the years you’ve been gone, the city itself perhaps more than any individual. You remember how the lakefront was, flophouses, saloons, tattoo parlors. Now it’s being renewed, the planners’ word. And out at the east end of the city, where there were only truck farms when you were a kid, suburbs are popping up like rows of cabbages.

Deliberately, the doctor allowed himself the luxury of a digression, at the cost of being thought a long-winded old bastard. Even though I’ve delivered my share, I’m flabbergasted at all the thousands of kids in the new developments. Where the hell do they come from? Sometimes it seems to me that the whole damn United States must be thirty-three years old, with two point five kids between the ages of one and six. You know what that makes me? A fossil, a freak that hasn’t got sense enough to exile himself with the rest of the senile has-beens to St. Petersburg or Santa Barbara.

Dr. Stark stopped, not because he had wearied of the topic—actually, he could have gone on at length along the same lines—but because it was clear that Ralph Land, who was not even married yet, much less a suburban father, had absolutely no interest in what he was saying.

Besides, the area through which they were driving had nothing directly to do with the new suburban generation. As Ralph Land stared out at the streets on which he had played as a friendless kid, the corners of his mouth drew down with disgust and horror. No wonder he didn’t want to listen to complaints about the insipidities of the suburbs. Despite his guide’s little lecture, it must have seemed to him that his native city was hideously unchanged, the more