The Sins of the Fathers - Page 8/23

I turned the corner and found the rectory immediately adjacent to the church. It was three stories tall and built of the same distinctive stone. I rang the bell and stood on the front step in the rain for a few minutes. Then a small gray-haired woman opened the door and peered up at me. I gave my name.

"Yes," she said. "He said he was expecting you." She led me into a parlor and pointed me to an armchair. I sat down across from a fireplace with an electric fire glowing in it. The wall on either side of the fireplace was lined with bookshelves. An Oriental rug with a muted pattern covered most of the parquet floor. The room's furniture was all dark and massive. I sat there waiting for him and decided I should have stopped for a drink instead of a cup of coffee. I wasn't likely to get a drink in this cheerless house.

He let me sit there for five minutes. Then I heard his step on the stairs. I got to my feet as he entered the room. He said, "Mr. Scudder? I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I was on the telephone. But please have a seat, won't you?"

He was very tall and rail-thin. He wore a plain black suit, a clerical collar, and a pair of black leather bedroom slippers. His hair was white with yellow highlights here and there. It would have been considered long a few years ago, but now the abundant curls were conservative enough. His horn-rimmed glasses had thick lenses that made it difficult for me to see his eyes.

"Coffee, Mr. Scudder?"

"No, thank you."

"And none for me, either. If I have more than one cup with my dinner, I'm up half the night." He sat down in a chair that was a mate to mine. He leaned toward me and placed his hands on his knees. "Well, now," he said. "I don't see how I can possibly help you, but please tell me if I can."

I explained a little more fully the errand I was running for Cale Hanniford. When I had finished he touched his chin with his thumb and forefinger and nodded thoughtfully.

"Mr. Hanniford has lost a daughter," he said. "And I have lost a son."

"Yes."

"It's so difficult to father children in today's world, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps it was always thus, but it seems to me that the times conspire against us. Oh, I can sympathize fully with Mr. Hanniford, more fully than ever since I have suffered a similar loss." He turned to gaze at the fire. "But I fear I have no sympathy for the girl."

I didn't say anything.

"It's a failing on my part, and I recognize it as such. Man is an imperfect creature. Sometimes it seems to me that religion has no higher function than to sharpen his awareness of the extent of his imperfection. God alone is perfect. Even Man, His greatest handiwork, is hopelessly flawed. A paradox, Mr. Scudder, don't you think?"

"Yes."

"Not the least of my own flaws is an inability to grieve for Wendy Hanniford. You see, her father no doubt holds my son responsible for the loss of his daughter. And I, in turn, hold his daughter responsible for the loss of my son."

He got to his feet and approached the fireplace. He stood there for a moment, his back perfectly straight, warming his hands. He turned toward me and seemed on the point of saying something. Instead, he walked slowly to his chair and sat down again, this time crossing one leg over the other.

He said, "Are you a Christian, Mr. Scudder?"

"No."

"A Jew?"

"I have no religion."

"How sad for you," he said. "I asked your religion because the nature of your own beliefs might facilitate your understanding my feelings toward the Hanniford girl. But perhaps I can approach the matter in another way. Do you believe in good and evil, Mr. Scudder?"

"Yes, I do."

"Do you believe that there is such a thing as evil extant in the world?"

"I know there is."

He nodded, satisfied. "So do I," he said. "It would be difficult to believe otherwise, whatever one's religious outlook. A glance at a daily newspaper provides evidence enough of the existence of evil." He paused, and I thought he was waiting for me to say something. Then he said, "She was evil."

"Wendy Hanniford?"

"Yes. An evil, Devil-ridden woman. She took my son away from me, away from his religion, away from God. She led him away from good paths and unto the paths of evil." His voice was picking up a timbre, and I could imagine his forcefulness in front of a congregation. "It was my son who killed her. But it was she who killed something within him, who made it possible for him to kill." His voice dropped in pitch, and he held his hands palms down at his sides. "And so I cannot mourn Wendy Hanniford. I can regret that her death came at Richard's hands, I can profoundly regret that he then took his own life, but I cannot mourn your client's daughter."

He let his hands drop, lowered his head. I couldn't see his eyes, but his face was troubled, wrapped up in chains of good and evil. I thought of the sermon he would preach on Sunday, thought of all the different roads to Hell and all the paving stones therein. I pictured Martin Vanderpoel as a long, lean Sisyphus arduously rolling the boulders into place.

I said, "Your son was in Manhattan a year and a half ago. That was when he went to work for Burghash Antiques." He nodded. "So he left here some six months before he began sharing Wendy Hanniford's apartment."

"That is correct."

"But you feel she led him astray."

"Yes." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "My son left my home shortly after his high school graduation. I did not approve, but neither did I object violently. I would have wanted Richard to go to college. He was an intelligent boy and would have done well in college. I had hopes, naturally enough, that he might follow me into the ministry. I did not force him in this direction, however. One must determine for oneself whether one has a vocation. I am not fanatical on the subject, Mr. Scudder. I would prefer to see a son of mine as a contented and productive doctor or lawyer or businessman than as a discontented minister of the gospel.

"I realized that Richard had to find himself. That's a fashionable term with the young these days, is it not? He had to find himself. I understood this. I expected that this process of self-discovery would ultimately lead him to enter college after a year or two. I hoped this would occur, but in any event I saw no cause for alarm. Richard had an honest job, he was living in a decent Christian residence, and I felt that his feet were on a good path. Not perhaps the path he would ultimately pursue, but one that was correct for him at that point in his life.

"Then he met Wendy Hanniford. He lived in sin with her. He became corrupted by her. And, ultimately-"

I remembered a bit of men's-room graffiti: Happiness is when your son marries a boy of his own faith. Evidently Richie Vanderpoel had functioned as some variety of homosexual without his father ever suspecting anything. Then he moved in with a girl, and his father was shattered.

I said, "Reverend Vanderpoel, a great many young people live together nowadays without being married."

"I recognize this, Mr. Scudder. I do not condone it, but I could hardly fail to recognize it."

"But your feeling in this case was more than a matter of not condoning it."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because Wendy Hanniford was evil."

I was getting the first twinges of a headache. I rubbed the center of my forehead with the tips of my fingers. I said, "What I want more than anything else is to be able to give her father a picture of her. You say she was evil. In what way was she evil?"

"She was an older woman who enticed an innocent young man into an unnatural relationship."

"She was only three or four years older than Richard."

"Yes, I know. In chronological terms. In terms of worldliness she was ages his senior. She was promiscuous. She was amoral. She was a creature of perversion."

"Did you ever actually meet her?"

"Yes," he said. He breathed in and out. "I met her once. Once was enough."

"When did that take place?"

"It's hard for me to remember. I believe it was during the spring. April or May, I would say."

"Did he bring her here?"

"No. No, Richard surely knew better than to bring that woman into my house. I went to the apartment where they were living. I went specifically to meet with her, to talk to her. I picked a time when Richard would be working at his job."

"And you met Wendy."

"I did."

"What did you hope to accomplish?"

"I wanted her to end her relationship with my son."

"And she refused."

"Oh, yes, Mr. Scudder. She refused." He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. "She was foulmouthed and abusive. She taunted me. She-I don't want to go into this further, Mr. Scudder. She made it quite clear that she had no intention of giving Richard up. It suited her to have him living with her. The entire interview was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life."

"And you never saw her again."

"I did not. I saw Richard on several occasions, but not in that apartment. I tried to talk to him about that woman. I made no progress whatsoever. He was utterly infatuated with her. Sex-evil, unscrupulous sex-gives certain women an extraordinary hold upon susceptible men. Man is a weakling, Mr. Scudder, and he is so often powerless to cope with the awful force of an evil woman's sexuality." He sighed heavily. "And in the end she was destroyed by means of her own evil nature. The sexual spell she cast upon my son was the instrument of her own undoing."

"You make her sound like a witch."

He smiled slightly. "A witch? Indeed I do. A less enlightened generation than our own would have seen her burned at the stake for witchcraft. Nowadays we speak of neuroses, of psychological complications, of compulsion. Previously we spoke of witchcraft, of demonic possession. I wonder sometimes if we're as enlightened now as we prefer to think. Or if our enlightenment does us much good."

"Does anything?"

"Pardon?"

"I was wondering if anything did us much good."

"Ah," he said. He took off his glasses and perched them on his knee. I hadn't seen the color of his eyes before. They were a light blue flecked with gold. He said, "You have no faith, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps that accounts for your cynicism."

"Perhaps."

"I would say that God's love does us a great deal of good. In the next world if not in this one."

I decided I would rather deal with one world at a time. I asked if Richie had had faith.

"He was in a period of doubt. He was too preoccupied with his attempt at self-realization to have room for the realization of the Lord."

"I see."

"And then he fell under the spell of the Hanniford woman. I use the word advisedly. He literally fell under her spell."

"What was he like before that?"

"A good boy. An aware, interested, involved young man."

"You never had any problems with him?"

"No problems." He put his glasses back on. "I cannot avoid blaming myself, Mr. Scudder."

"For what?"

"For everything. What is it that they say? 'The cobbler's children always go barefoot.' Perhaps that maxim applies in this case. Perhaps I devoted too much attention to my congregation and too little attention to my son. I had to raise him by myself, you see. That did not seem a difficult chore at the time. It may have been more difficult than I ever realized."