And then he started crying, sobbing wretchedly. I had always imagined men could cry like this, but I had never heard it. It went on for a long time, and I was glad it did, because I believed that whatever had given it to occur would wear itself out this way and that would be that.
But it wasn't. Smithy stopped his weeping as abruptly as he'd started it, and when he began his first new sentence, it moved to its period with austere dispassion.
There's something else I have not told you. If he wanted, my brother could give the Viennese logician cards and spades. Smithy is very, very smart, endowed with an intelligence unsurpassed in our family and as statuesque as any I've come across. Moreover — and this is why I am not sure I am doing the right thing but only what I, like our Smithy, am convinced I must do — Smithy's unyielding custom is rationalism, all the way to the gallows if this were his destiny. There has never been anyone who could break him of the habit, and this goes for our older brother too — who could, just mentionably, break anyone of anything if he wanted to, and who would not flinch over breaking himself into nineteen pieces to do it. Except Smithy of his rationalism, of course.
But our big brother never had a very long run at it.
Anyway, Smithy's next sentence, and all the sentences that came rushing after that one and that I would not have dared to interrupt even to assert Fallacy of the Middle! were proportioned and stately in the organization of their argument. And this is what my brother said — and why my brother has concluded that he must kill his son — and why I am publishing what the reader may apprehend as a "story," but which Smithy, ever the rationalist, will understand is a disclosure one step short of my informing the police and a step quite far enough to stop him in his tracks.
And, of course, the boy Chap will have his fair warning.
It is the least a loving uncle who has made his fortune (and his misfortune) writing can do. He can write as he is able. He can write a "story" that no one but the ones who most matter to him will quite be certain is true. I do see now that it is only through the miracle of the falsehood of fiction that I can catch up the people I love from the truth and consequences of what they might do. The cost to me is very slight in comparison — the exception in a habit for silence (Are you smiling now, dear dead brother, master of ceremonies in all my deliberations?) and the reinstatement, for a time, of the shame that covers me whenever I play the thief of hearts and come like a highwayman to the unsuspecting page.
Speak, Smithy! I am the instrument by which you may submit your supreme reasoning and the dark circumstance that stirred it to unfurl its awful syllogism. And when you have stated your case, I will return for a parting courtesy to the reader, a gesture I swear to be greater than that to which I proved equal when I wished to say the right thing to soothe that splendid girl of Devon. I am thinking I owe a very particular politeness to the reader — who, for the purpose before us, and as do his mother and father, I call Chap.
Listen, Chap. The father of your body is speaking to you. Will you recognize his voice? You were not much more than two years old when you last heard the peculiar American resonance that made your dad a regular on Rosemary of Hilltop House and When a Girl Marries, a kind of choked vibrancy that must have softened when he blessed you to sleep and drew the covers up to just under your chin, high enough that not one whisper of cold would chill your breast, but not so high that your restlessness would slip the blanket higher and impede the glorious song of your breath. This is the father of your body whose voice you are going to hear. Will it be at all familiar to you after fifteen voiceless years? Will it frighten you to hear a silence broken? Certainly the speech he makes will seem frightening — for it is a statement in support of his decision to secure your death. But it is, nonetheless, a reasoned argument, and if you are your father's son, Chap, you will see he has a point.
Listen, boy! A brother I love like life itself, your true father, on the fourth day of November, by long-distance telephone, just after the dinner hour, his voice all repose, his heart deranged, in tumult, said this:
"I HAVE A PAD AND PENCIL here, and it's all worked out, that thing you know I do with columns, this on one side, that on the other. Buddy, can you grab a piece of paper and something to write with? I think it'll help — I think it'll help if you make notes as I go along. I mean, it's just that I want you to know how it happened. Most of it has been happening for years. I think it has always been in the back of my mind since Pert was born. Maybe even before that, in a crazy kind of way. Maybe it dates back to when I kissed Chap goodbye and could never get back to kiss him again. In any case, I don't want you to think this wasn't among the premonitions that always go on in my head — because the head will do these things, Buddy, and you just can't, you know, stop it. Aren't you the expert in this subject? I'm rambling; I'm sorry. All right, I'm going to pick it up from what I've got written here. By the numbers, okay, big brother?
"About two weeks ago — hell, I know the exact day, who am I kidding? — Scharfstein told me I've got it bad. Wall-to-wall cigars and three packs of Raleighs a day for almost twenty-five years, and I get cancer of the goddamn spleen. I've always agreed with you that Scharfstein is a bastard, but his medicine is the best. Anyway, he sent me over to Sloan Kettering that afternoon, and by the next morning they'd confirmed. Three to six months with routine measures, maybe another three to six with heavy antiprotein therapy. But that's it — that's tops.
"Maggie knows, of course. I didn't tell Mom or any of the rest, although I promise I will just as soon as I can figure out how I want to do it. And maybe you can help me with that. For the time being, all I am doing is getting my life in order, squaring away my affairs, as Maggie would call them. Everything's pretty shipshape, actually — all the durables. There's plenty of money and there's nobody better than Maggie at managing. Then there's Pert—and that's, of course, clear sailing too. He could be the President of the United goddamn States, or change the theory of zero, and this won't stop him. My being dead, I mean — my dying. Pert could be anything, do anything. You know him; you've seen the probability in him for yourself. You just have to take one look at Pert to know.
"Except there's this one thing — and that's Chap. And if you don't mind, Buddy, I think I want to refer to Chap as David from here on out. There's David—he's the one thing. There's my son and there's my son — and that's the whole of mathematics of it for you there! Are you following me? Because you better be doing it.
"What David's mother has done lots of divorced women do — I know that. Except I think she's done it better. But I'm only guessing, of course — because for fifteen years the evidence has been withheld from me. Can you believe it, Buddy? With people who feel about blood the way we do? Not one word, not one touch, in fifteen years? Jesus God, the woman is a trained analyst. If she can unravel a synthesis, I guess she can ravel a good enough one up. Can you just imagine what she's probably achieved with that boy? It's not just a job of contamination we're talking about — it must be more like the making of a system refined to a single principle. Or do I mean aim? Anyway, I'm only guessing — but that's where my imagination takes my reasoning — and what else do I have to go on?