“I can’t see any pertinence to it.”
“If you could understand the significance of that, you could understand how all the rest of it happened.”
“Yes, I...”
“I’ve explained to you the way I plan to defend you.”
“Yes, sir. This business of working on each other... intoxicating each other. You want to make us sound like an accident that just got together and happened. Do you think it will work, sir?”
“I don’t think anything else will.”
“Okay, if I was alone maybe I couldn’t have killed that salesman. That’s a stupid answer to a stupid question, sir, but maybe it will help you out.”
“My purpose is to help you out, Kirby.”
“I’m co-operating, sir. I’m with you all the way.”
And that is the way it goes. In the beginning I had hoped to be able to put the Stassen boy on the stand. But the prosecutor would shred him. He wouldn’t upset Kirby. I don’t think he could dent that poise. But he would make Kirby expose himself, in his own words, as a monster.
I used that word without thought. A monster? If he is indeed a monster, we have created him. He is our son. We have been told by our educators and psychologists to be permissive with him, to let him express himself freely. If he throws all the sand out of the nursery-school sandbox, he is releasing hidden tensions. We deprived him of the security of knowing right and wrong. We debauched him with half-chewed morsels of Freud, in whose teachings there is no right and wrong — only error and understanding. We let sleek men in high places go unpunished for amoral behavior, and the boy heard us snicker. We labeled the pursuit of pleasure a valid goal, and insisted that his teachers turn schooling into fun. We preached group adjustment, security rather than challenge, protection rather than effort. We discarded the social and sexual taboos of centuries, and mislabeled the result freedom rather than license. Finally we poisoned his bone marrow with Strontium 90, told him to live it up while he had the chance, and sat back in ludicrous confidence expecting him to suddenly become a man. Why are we so shocked and horrified to find a child’s emotions in a man’s body — savage, selfish, cruel, compulsive and shallow?
Walter and Ernestine Stassen can never equate their love-image of their son with this imprisoned, unreachable thing. The contradiction will kill them both.
One can imagine that Helen Wister made a somewhat similar error when she fell into the hands of this dangerous foursome. As an intelligent and perceptive young woman, she must have seen how great was her danger from Koslov, Hernandez and Golden. In this extremity of her terror she would have turned, quite naturally, to Kirby Stassen, sensing a kinship, hoping for protection. To her he would be the only reassuring factor in a nightmare situation, a boy like the boys she had dated.
One wonders how long it took her to learn that this was the gravest mistake of her life.
It seems a pity that Dallas Kemp missed Arnold Crown and Helen Wister by such a narrow margin...
Five
After Dallas Kemp dropped Helen off at her house on that late Saturday afternoon in July, he drove directly to the small building which housed his bachelor apartment and his office. He felt swollen with righteous anger. He knew he had handled her clumsily, but that did not give her the right to be such a damn fool about that crackpot Arnold Crown.
He was twenty-six, a tall, slender man, swarthy, with a bristling black brushcut, premature pouches under his eyes, large clever hands, great architectural ability, and an enduring capacity for painstaking work. Upon graduation, aided by a small inheritance, he had taken the calculated risk of opening his own office in his home city. His father was retired, and his parents had moved to Venice, Florida. An elder sister lived in Denver with a husband and two small children.
His first year had been bitter and anxious. The first half of the second year had been touch and go. Now, in his third year in practice, he knew he had made it. He employed one draftsman and a part-time secretary. Though he had become the fashionable young architect, he knew his work was sound and good. Two recent residences had received awards. He had that precious flexibility and understanding from which comes houses to fit the owners, not houses to which the owners must dubiously adjust themselves.
Until a few months ago, marriage had been something to consider in the misty future. He had been so completely engrossed in his work that he could readily sublimate his sexual drive, and could thus skillfully avoid the often shockingly overt suggestions of the sillier wives of his clients. When the need was upon him, too pressing for sublimation, he took his pleasure far from Monroe, in the casual, capable, affectionate arms of a girl he had known at school, who was at the beginning of an impressive career as an industrial designer.
He had told himself that when he became thirty-two, he would begin the search for a wife. He had no idea why he had selected thirty-two as the proper age, nor could he foresee how Helen Wister would upset that scheduling.
He met her at a cocktail party at a client’s house. He would not have gone had he known it would be a large party. A large cocktail party inevitably produced a small contingent of drunks who felt oddly competent to criticize modern architecture. He supposed the other professions had their own problems with drunks. But at any large cocktail party it was a dreary certainty that he would be concerned by tipsy laymen who felt that they were being keen and challenging when they told him that they, by God, didn’t want to live in anything built of pieces of bowling alleys and department-store windows. He was supposed to be enchanted and intrigued by their perception and taste. He was supposed to argue defensively. But he was more bored than appalled by the excruciating banality of their statements about a creative field in which they enjoyed almost total ignorance.
He learned that Helen Wister was distantly related to his hostess, and that she was a Smith graduate now doing office work at City Hall. He knew that her father, Dr. Paul Wister, was a dedicated, highly competent and successful orthopedic surgeon, with a socialite do-gooder wife, wealthy in her own right.
She came over to him, over to where he stood in a corner of the long living room, smiling with warm and total confidence as she came. It was the winter season. She wore a knit suit, in a dull, heathery green. The light behind her haloed the silky texture of her fine, blond hair. Beautiful women made him feel uncomfortable and suspicious. Helen Wister was tallish, slender, poised, luminous and beautiful. His drawbridges clanked shut, and archers stood ready behind the walls.
“Marg says you’re going to do them a new house, Mr. Kemp.”
“That’s right.”
“They’re both very excited about it.”
“Clients usually are.”
She had stared at him then, looking a little less certain of herself. “Are you cross about something?”
“Cross? No. Don’t you want to tell me what kind of a house I should design for them?”
She laughed. Her voice was a clear contralto, melodic. Her laugh was husky and earthy. “Why should I? Don’t you have any ideas?”
“Certainly.”
“Then you don’t need my help.”
“I had the impression I’d get it, whether I needed it or not.”
“Mr. Kemp, maybe rudeness is becoming to shaggy, famous old architects. I can’t say it improves you any.”
She spun away and joined a small group, leaving him stung and angry. He had not planned to stay until the end of the party, but he did. Finally he and Helen were the only guests left. He talked to Willie Layton about the house-to-be while the women cleaned up after the party. They all went out to a late dinner together. He and Helen Wister sniped at each other.