Vital Parts by Thomas Berger

Author:Thomas Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497674691
Publisher: Open Road Media

11

There were various possibilities: that Blaine had lied to Maw, in whole or part; that the girl had lied to Blaine; that each was lying to the other; that Maw was lying deliberately or suffering from senile delusions or merely making a malicious joke in stopping the check.

Blaine of course was quite capable of the bad feeling behind this bit of character-assassination, and he certainly would be in the market for revenge. He was a pretty ugly kid without his long golden locks. To Reinhart’s taste he had not been much with them. Up to puberty he had resembled his father. Then for no good reason he had begun to get this ratty look along with the change of voice and a skin condition. At fourteen or fifteen, when acne was still in vogue, he had a faceful of purple welts. Sympathetically Reinhart supplied him with a new type of lotion—advertised on late-afternoon teen dance shows which, during idle periods, Reinhart tuned in on to watch the jouncing thoraxes and sturdy thighs of adolescent girls—the kind that masked the lesions with a beige cosmetic while “hidden medication did its work.” But Blaine was by then already well embarked on his career of defiance—though not as yet openly vile.

Reinhart knew his own trouble as a father resulted from a preoccupation with the ideal which actuality delighted in continually proving impractical. Hence he was ever insecure. To Blaine he could not speak straight without considering the ironies. He had not been able to order him to do his homework, say, without reflecting on a number of considerations which, evident in his voice, vitiated the command to a mere wheedle devoid of sufficient reason. For one, Blaine had always got good grades without apparent study. For another, Reinhart abhorred the idea of enforced learning as illiberal, un-American, antidemocratic, and contrary to the best psychosocial theory. The life of the mind must be pursued by love alone. He had heard often enough that Shakespeare will be hated if read under compulsion. At the same time he was secretly pleased to have had As You Like It rammed down his own throat as a high-school freshman, else he would have preserved nothing from those days but memories of Reader’s Digest accounts of now-outmoded scientific breakthroughs.

Reinhart had always lacked the essential of the commander: the conviction not that his orders were sensible or just, but that they would be carried out.

A brassard labeled DAD and a steel helmet, that was what Reinhart needed, nightstick, handcuffs. As one grows older he becomes more of a policeman. Yet his own father had been anything but a cop, and Reinhart could not remember having defied him. They had this instinctive, tacit agreement by which each observed the decencies towards the other. When their needs conflicted, something was always worked out. If Reinhart was supposed to cut the grass, on the one hand, and play ball with his pals, on the other, his custom was to put the situation to Dad, who would always find a civilized exit from the dilemma.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.