Judd made a half-turn in his chair so that his gaunt face picked up light from the window; it looked remotely savage. He spoke in a whisper. “What happens to the quality of human life, even in this rich country, when we’ve tripled the population of the earth, Russ?”
Then his head wheeled, and he leveled a bony finger. “You are the last generation that can save us, Russ. You, not your kids or your grandkids. For them it will be all over but the burying.”
He drew a ragged breath. His eyes stared, defiant, and he went on more gently: “We spend two thousand dollars on military hardware for every dollar we spend on population control. If we keep doing it, you’ll have no grandchildren, Russ. The race of man will be dead.”
Hastings stirred. “You’re a very wise old bird.”
“I’m just a crusty old fart with his eyes open to see. Now I had better tell you why I’ve inflicted this impassioned speech on you-I confess I’ve rehearsed it for some time. I’m going to ask you to do something, Russ, so pay attention now.” He eased himself back in his chair, heartbreakingly feeble. “My personal fortune,” he said, “is larger than the national budgets of some small countries. I’m putting it to use. I’ve set up trusts here and in Canada and Australia and several other foreign parts-because frankly I don’t trust America to survive-to work toward the rigid enforcement of population control throughout the world. I have not contributed to organizations that seek to control the conception of unwanted children, because we have got to prevent births of children whether they are wanted or not. Governments are going to have to prohibit childbearing by law, not by individual choice. I’m pessimistic, I don’t think it’s going to work, but it’s the only chance we have.
“At the same time, I’ve set up a trust to operate the land we’re standing on-about twenty-five million acres. It’s set up to maintain this land as a perpetual wilderness. No tree cutting, no digging for minerals, no construction of any buildings aside from the replacement of worn-out structures on the same sites. The place will become an inviolable park when I die. I don’t trust the National Park people-they’re subject to lobbyists, and they’d throw it wide open the minute somebody discovered gold here-and so I’m keeping it in private hands. It’s to be a completely private park. No trespassing.”
“What?”
The old man’s creased mouth had stretched into a strict, stern smile. “A few years ago,” he murmured, “the last time I was in New York, I rented a bicycle and pedaled my way through Central Park. It was a Monday morning, and the park was reasonably deserted. Do you know what I saw?”
“I can imagine.”
“Yes. The excrement of a thousand human savages. The leavings of a population of mindless animals who’d had their Sunday outing in the sun, and left their spoor behind. There wasn’t a square yard of grass that wasn’t covered with broken glass, crumpled napkins, bent beer cans, torn newspapers, spilled mustard, discarded condoms and brassieres, crushed sunglasses, bloody sanitary napkins, paper plates, half-pint whiskey bottles. All right. I believe the parks weren’t put there for savages to defile. They don’t deserve the use of it. I don’t suppose there’s any way to prevent the wildlife here from being stunned by a periodic sonic boom, but short of that I want this land untouched by human beings. The time is going to come when people will need to know there’s an untouched wilderness like this still on the map of the United States. The public parks will soon be so mobbed with campers and picnickers there won’t be room left to see the landscape, and I refuse to let that happen here. They won’t get in here, they’ll never see it with their own eyes, but they’ll know it’s here, Russ, and I believe that’s pricelessly important.”
Hastings moved to the window and swept the horizon. Finally he said, “You’re dead right, of course.”
It brought a wide smile to Judd’s face. “You can’t know how happy it makes me to hear you say that. Because I’m offering it to you.”
Hastings’ mouth dropped open. He spun on his heel and stared.
“I need a man I trust to take it over,” Judd said. “To oversee the birth-control trusts and see to it this place is kept intact. Someone to live here, on this land, and watch over it. When I set it up, I had you in mind.”
Hastings was shaking his head. The old man murmured, “Don’t say anything yet. Think about it, that’s all I’m asking.”
He had forgotten what a straightforward affair supper was at Elliot Judd’s house. Judd had always been a meat-and-potatoes man. The old Indian woman rustled in and out of the dining room, serving; the conversation, with Lewis Downey at table, was light and inconsequential.
There were fourteen rooms in the house, most of them connected to one another only by the common porch-roofed walkway that ran around the patio. The front of the house contained three enormous rooms interconnected by wide double doorways.
The dining room contained Monets, and a Renoir worth close to a million dollars; the front room was hung with postimpressionists, Leger, and Lichtensteins; the office-library contained a hodgepodge of Wyeths and Sargents and a Remington cowboy in bronze. Judd was talking about his artwork: “I loathe museums. They’re as bad as zoos. Hang a picture in a museum, and it takes the life out of it-museums are for the dead. Paintings were made for the walls of houses, where people live.”
Downey said in his irritatingly impersonal voice, “Hadn’t you better take it easy on that Rothschild?”
The old man’s hand made a claw around the wineglass. “You’re an old woman, Lewis. We’re celebrating a homecoming.”
It made Hastings feel awkward. The meal concluded, Downey excused himself and left. Hastings sat back, finishing his wine, feeling logy and inert; the wine moved like a soft warm hand across his tired joints.
The old man sat slack and indifferent, like an animal going into hibernation; he was awake, but unmoving, his breathing hard to detect, his metabolism slow in the suspended animation of the very old. He stirred and said, “Do you ever see Diane? Or did I ask you that before? I apologize-sometimes memories get stuck together like pages in a book. But the strange thing is, even now when I look in the mirror I still expect to see a young face looking back at me… I was asking about Diane, wasn’t I?”
“We-don’t see each other.”
“Just as well, of course.”
There was another stretch of silence; finally Judd said, “When I sit here dozing I like to think it passes for deep thinking. Actually, I’m distantly aware of the beating of my old heart, but that’s about all. Oh, Christ, Russ, when you’re old it takes so damned much frustrating time to do even the simple things like getting to the bathroom, reading, getting in and out of chairs. You’ve noticed I’ve pared the staff here down to nearly nothing-the old Indian woman cooks and cleans, and Lewis pretends to nurse me, and there’s a fellow who comes up from the bunkhouse once or twice a week to make repairs and do the gardening. But I got rid of the rest of them-they all started treating me with humorous amicability, which I hated bitterly. I can’t stand being patronized. I envy my late wife, you know-she died within two days of falling ill with bulbar polio. No time for the kind people to come around and croon their sycophantic sympathy. You never knew her, did you-Diane’s mother? No, of course not, she died long before. On this last page of my life I tend to confuse things in time. But sometimes I wake up in the morning and twist my head around, and I’m surprised to discover I’ve slept alone.”
After a silent while, sipping wine, Hastings said in a soft voice, “Are you all right, Dad?”
“What do you mean? I’m old, Russ. Nobody gets out of this life alive.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
The old man stared at him, his lids beginning to droop as if to cover his soul. “I know,” he said at last. “Of course, you’re right-it would take a blind man not to know. This thing I’m in, this body, it ought to be in a hospital, but I’ll be damned if I’ll lie in a stinking hospital with plastic tubes rammed up my ass and prick and nose. Too many old ones have their lives stretched out by modern medicine-what good is it? Once I lose my ability to see with my mind and think with my soul, I want to get out of it fast.”