Sins of the Fathers

Chapter 7

I got off the BMT at Sixty-second Street and New Utrecht and walked a couple of blocks through a part of Brooklyn where Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst rub shoulders with one another. A powdery rain was melting some of yesterday’s snow. The weather bureau expected it to freeze sometime during the night. I was a little early and stopped at a drugstore lunch counter for a cup of coffee. Toward the rear of the counter a kid was demonstrating a gravity knife to a couple of his friends. He took a quick look at me and made the knife disappear, reminding me once again that I haven’t stopped looking like a cop.

I drank half my coffee and walked the rest of the way to the church. It was a massive edifice of white stone toned all shades of gray by the years. A cornerstone announced that the present structure had been erected in 1886 by a congregation established 220 years before that date. An illuminated bulletin board identified the church as the First Reformed Church of Bay Ridge, Reverend Martin T. Vanderpoel, Pastor. Services were held Sundays at nine thirty; this coming Sunday Reverend Vanderpoel was slated to speak on “The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions.”

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.”

“Richard’s mother—”

He closed his eyes. “I lost my wife almost fifteen years ago,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“It was hard for both of us. For Richard and for myself. In retrospect I think that I should have married again. I never… never entertained the idea. I was able to have a housekeeper, and my own duties facilitated my spending more time with him than the average father might have been able to manage. I thought that was sufficient.”

“And now you don’t think so?”

“I don’t know. I occasionally think there is very little we can do to change our destiny. Our lives play themselves out according to a master plan.” He smiled briefly. “That is either a very comforting thing to believe or quite the opposite, Mr. Scudder.”

“I can see how it could be.”

“Other times I think there ought to have been something I could have done. Richard was drawn very much into himself. He was shy, reticent, very much a private person.”

“Did he have much of a social life? I mean during high school, while he was living here.”

“He had friends.”

“Did he date?”

“He wasn’t interested in girls at that time. He was never interested in girls until he came into that woman’s clutches.”

“Did it bother you that he wasn’t interested in girls?”

That was as close as I cared to come to intimating that Richie was interested in boys instead. If it registered at all, Vanderpoel didn’t show it. “I was not concerned,” he said. “I took it for granted that Richard would ultimately develop a fine and healthy loving relationship with the girl who would eventually become his wife and bear his children. That he was not involved in social dating in the meantime did not upset me. If you were in a position to see what I see, Mr. Scudder, you would realize that a great deal of trouble stems from too much involvement of one sex with the other sex. I have seen girls pregnant in their early teens. I have seen young men forced into marriage at a very tender age. I have seen young people afflicted with unmentionable diseases. No, I was if anything delighted that Richard was a late bloomer in this area.”

He shook his head. “And yet,” he said, “perhaps if he had been more experienced, perhaps if he had been less innocent, he would not have been so easy a victim for Miss Hanniford.”

We sat for a few moments in silence. I asked him a few more things without getting anything significant in reply. He asked again if I wanted a cup of coffee. I declined and said it was time I was getting on my way. He didn’t try to persuade me to stay.

I got my coat from the vestibule closet where the housekeeper had stashed it. As I was putting it on I said, “I understand you saw your son once after the killing.”

“Yes.”

“In his cell.”

“That is correct.” He winced almost imperceptibly at the recollection. “We didn’t speak at length. I tried only to do what little I could to put his mind at rest. Evidently I failed. He… he elected to mete out his own punishment for what he had done.”

“I talked to the lawyer his case was assigned to. A Mr. Topakian.”

“I didn’t meet the man myself. After Richard… took his own life… well, I saw no point in seeing the lawyer. And I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“I understand.” I finished buttoning my coat. “Topakian said Richard had no memory of the actual murder.”

“Oh?”

“Did your son say anything to you about it?”

He hesitated for a moment, and I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he gave his head an impatient shake. “There’s no harm in saying it now, is there? Perhaps he was speaking truthfully to the lawyer, perhaps his memory was clouded at the time.” He sighed again. “Richard told me he had killed her. He said he did not know what had come over him.”

“Did he give any explanation?”

“Explanation? I don’t know if you would call it an explanation, Mr. Scudder. It explained certain things to me, however.”

“What did he say?”

He looked off over my shoulder, searching his mind for the right words. Finally he said, “He told me that there was a sudden moment of awful clarity when he saw her face. He said it was as if he had been given a glimpse of the Devil and knew only that he must destroy, destroy.”

“I see.”

“Without absolving my son, Mr. Scudder, I nevertheless hold Miss Hanniford responsible for the loss of her own life. She snared him, she blinded him to her real self, and then for a moment the veil slipped aside, the blindfold was loosed from around his eyes, and he saw her plain. And saw, I feel certain, what she had done to him, to his life.”

“You almost sound as though you feel it was right for him to kill her.”

He stared at me, eyes briefly wide in shock. “Oh, no,” he said. “Never that. One does not play God. It is God’s province to punish and reward, to give and to take away. It is not Man’s.”

I reached for the doorknob, hesitated. “What did you say to Richard?”

“I scarcely remember. There was little to be said, and I’m afraid I was in too deep a state of personal shock to be very communicative. My son asked my forgiveness. I gave him my blessing. I told him he should look to the Lord for forgiveness.” At close range his blue eyes were magnified by the thick lenses. There were tears in their corners. “I only hope he did,” he said. “I only hope he did.”