The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (2 page)
Read The Rebellion of Yale Marratt Online
Authors: Robert Rimmer
Anne continued, "While it is not of supreme importance to me, Mr. Baker,
I can tell you that Yale, Cynthia and I have checked; my marriage to
Yale is recognized as legal by the laws of the United States."
Baker frowned at her. "It is not necessary for you to teach me the law,
young lady," he said drily. "Just answer the questions that I ask you,
if you please. Is it true that in March of this year, knowing that Yale
Marratt had contracted an illegal marriage with Cynthia Carnell Chilling,
that instead of bringing this action to the attention of the law you
and Cynthia decided to live under the same roof with Yale Marratt?"
"Yes," Anne said calmly, smiling at Baker. "We agreed that it seemed
to be the most practical thing to do under the circumstances. Since
we loved Yale individually it didn't seem an insurmountable problem to
join forces."
A roar of laughter greeted her remark. Judge Small, maintaining a poker
face, rapped for order and threatened to clear the court.
Baker looked at her disgustedly. "It seems superfluous for me to ask
whether you have regular sexual intercourse with Yale Marratt."
"Yes," Anne agreed, "it is superfluous."
"Then you do have regular sexual intercourse with Yale Marratt?"
"We are normal human beings," Anne snapped. She looked at Baker
disdainfully. "If you want a yes answer, the answer is yes. . . ."
Baker asked Saul if he wished to question the witness. Saul rose
leisurely from his chair. "The court will notice that while the
defense has not objected to the manner of questioning the witness,
it is not because the defense approves or admires the approach of the
prosecution. However, to save the time of this court we wish to make
it as simple as possible. . . ." Saul grinned at Baker. "So that even a
legal novice could prove, if he wished, that Yale Marratt is responsibly
living with, and married to, these two women. The defense feels that
Anne Marratt has handled herself creditably. While it has no bearing on
this case, the defense would like to point out that the law itself is
certainly questionable, regardless of circumstances, that could allow
a wife to testify against her husband. The defense has no questions for
this witness." Saul sat down, amused at Baker's flushed countenance.
Baker called Cynthia to the stand. While not quite so self-possessed
as Anne, Cynthia looked so virginally fresh with her large brown eyes
open and innocent that she unnerved Baker a little. He didn't want to
give the impression that he was asking an innocent child dirty, sexual
questions. Gently, he queried her on her feelings about sharing the same
household with another woman. He wondered if when she married Yale Marratt
she was fully aware that he was in fact already married. He probed into
her marriage with Mat Chilling, and discovered, to the interest of the
spectators, that the child, Adar, was really Mat Chilling's child.
"What you have really done, Cynthia," Baker said sadly, "is to tolerate
this dual relationship and enslave your body to this man's whims for
the protection of Mat Chilling's child. Isn't that so?"
"That is not so, Mr. Baker," Cynthia said indignantly. "I love Yale Marratt.
We don't use each other's body as you so disgustingly put it. We share each
other's love. In our family we are on an endless voyage of discovery of the
possibilities of any human being bridging the gulf of flesh and blood and
bones that separates him from another, and by using the gift of our brains
instead of animal emotions such as you are invoking, discovering what love
really means." Cynthia looked coldly at Baker. "If it will make the
situation any clearer to you, Mr. Baker, I love Anne as much as I love
Yale, and the children we will have will be taught this kind of love."
Baker looked at her thoughtfully. "You mean that you are pregnant!"
Cynthia smiled. "Both Anne and I will have our babies sometime in April
next year."
Amidst the confusion and excitement that Cynthia's statement made,
Baker concluded that the testimony was sufficient for conviction without
going further.
He turned the case over to the defense.
PART ONE
Live, my Lesbia, love. I live -- I love you.
Not a fig will we care what grim old men say.
Setting sun will come back again tomorrow.
We, when once our brief daylight has faded,
Needs must sleep an unending night forever.
-- Catullus
1
Pat Marratt drove his Packard convertible slowly down the elm-lined
street that bisected the campus of Buxton Academy without speaking to
his wife. At the highway he jammed the accelerator to the floor and
pushed his massive body back in the seat with a sigh of relief. Yale's
graduation day was over at last, capping the disappointment that had
been building in him for the past two years.
"I don't care whose fault it is, Liz. Maybe it's mine maybe it's yours.
There's no use of any further postmortems. The plain truth is that I don't
know what the hell I'm going to do about Yale. As for Buxton Academy . . .
thank God we don't have to continue driving up here once a month."
Pat looked at his wife expectantly, wondering why their son's failure to
be admitted to one of the Ivy League colleges didn't seem to bother her.
"Please watch the road, Pat! I can hear you without you looking at me
. . . especially when you are roaring in that frustrated executive
voice." Liz Marratt took off her hat, a wide-brimmed straw affair
decorated with artificial flowers. She flung it carelessly on the back
seat. "God" she moaned, "it really was an ordeal. I think those deans
and professors just gloat over graduations. Did you ever hear such a
collection of platitudes and nonsense? Right out of Benjamin Franklin
with a little frosting added." She fiddled with her girdle. "You'll have
to stop at the next filling station, Pat. I can't stand this thing a
minute more. It's cutting me to pieces."
"That's about how much Yale has worried you over the past few years,"
Pat said grimly. "Your son has been turned down by every major college in
the East. Now he has the nerve to tell me that I should send him to Europe
for a year just to bum around. . . . And you worry about a tight girdle!"
"My son! He's your son, too!" Liz retorted. "How much time have you
spent with Yale in the last four years? All you have ever done is gripe
to me. You complain that he reads too much. Yet . . . what do you know
about him? No one can get close to Yale. Your only contribution was
teaching him how to play golf. He confided to me last summer that he
only played to please you. Golf bores him."
"What doesn't bore him?" Pat asked with disgust. "The two summers that
I've had him down to the plant, he acted as if I were infringing on his
valuable time." Pat shrugged his shoulders. He pushed one hand through
his thick, grey-black hair. "It's a screwball world. I've worked and
sweated to create a business worth at least twenty million dollars,
and what happens? I end up with a daughter who, if I let her alone,
could blow every cent I've accumulated in a couple of years, and a son
who would prefer to starve to death trying to write poetry, or figure
out some crazy philosophy in a cold water flat in Greenwich Village. Of
course, he wouldn't mind if I supported him in the meanwhile . . . just
so long as I let him alone."
"But you won't let him alone, will you, Pat?" Liz worried about Pat's
unceasing drive toward perfection. Patrick Marratt believed that he could
pound and shape his environment to reflect his own image. Liz sighed. So
far, with the notable exception of Yale, he had succeeded.
"Damned right, I won't let him alone," Pat said. "Someday, Yale Marratt
will thank God that he has a father like me. Every kid goes through
this wishy-washy phase. Our 'friend' in the White House with his
pseudo-intellectual braintrusters has given these radical ideas a lot
of glamour. Because we are in a depression it is smart to figure that
capitalism is done. It frightens hell out of me, Liz . . . to think what
some of the stupid asses who are running the country today would do,
if there weren't a few Republicans left to restrain them." Pat swung
into a filling station. "There's your rest room. Hurry up. I want to
get home by five and play a few holes. We can eat at the Club."
He watched Liz walk toward the ladies' room at the rear of the station,
pleasured with the shapely wiggle of her behind. A pretty good figure,
he thought, for a woman in her late forties. Compared with some of
the mothers to whom he had been introduced today with their matronly
bosoms hanging down to their bellies, Liz looked like a young girl.
It had been some time, Pat reflected, since he and Liz had mingled with
such an assortment of Connecticut blue-bloods. Stacked up against the
tweedy looking men and overstuffed women that they had met this morning,
Pat felt that he, as well as Liz, came out well on top.
At least five men that morning had recognized Pat immediately. "Oh . . .
Marratt? You must be the Marratt Corporation down in Midhaven." When Pat
admitted that he was, he noticed (and he couldn't help grinning)
their heightened interest. He guessed that they had read the write-up
about him in
Fortune
magazine, or had examined his Dun and Bradstreet
rating. In the past several years men like these had approached him with
plans for selling his stock. "You are ready for the American Exchange
at least, Pat," they told him. "Spread the stock around. Cash in while
the going is good."
The men who came to him came with a banker's knowledge of a good thing.
The Marratt Corporation was a good thing, Pat thought, and he controlled
eighty percent of its stock. None of these sideline spectators . . .
these stock jugglers, would get it. Someday it would be an even better
thing. Come hell or high water, Yale Marratt, his son, would be a part
of that future.
Sitting in a hard wooden chair under newly budded elms, Pat had watched
Yale receive his diploma. It should have been a special day. A day that
would be remembered not only by his parents, but by Yale as well. But,
it hadn't been that kind of day. Pat and Liz had arrived just after
lunch. They found Yale, alone in his room, reading. He acted as if they
weren't expected, as if his own graduation were an unpleasant interruption
to whatever was preoccupying his mind.
Pat had looked out the windows of Yale's room, across the rolling green
lawns that flanked the dormitories and classrooms of Buxton Academy. Liz
was putting the finishing touches to Yale, checking his tie, adjusting
his graduation cap. And Pat remarked, as he had many times before,
that this was a damned splendid layout.
Pat compared this room with its separate study and bedroom shared only
by Yale and his roommate, with the linoleum covered kitchen table he
had used when he was studying his International Correspondence Courses
in Business Administration and Accounting. Here, each boy not only had
his own private desk and lounge chair, but they shared their own tiled
bathroom. In addition, each room had a fireplace that actually worked.
Pat had done his studying nights, after an eight or nine hour day as
a pipefltter at Latham Shipyards. Some different was this life. Here a
man could study in solid comfort and then go to bed for a good night's
rest without the worry of getting up at five thirty in a freezing house
or having to walk the dark streets of Midhaven shivering with cold as
he plodded to work.
"I didn't make it, Pat," Yale said when they had completed their
questions on his health, and how long the actual graduation would take,
and whether he would drive home tonight or tomorrow morning with his
things. "Princeton turned me down, too. I'm not the college type,
I guess."
Pat's tanned face turned a deep red. He tried to conceal his anger.
"Listen to me, son, you are going to college. I don't know what in the
devil has gotten into you in the last year or so, but you can just get
it out of your head that you are one of these rich man's sons who is
going to live on his old man's hard earned dough. I went through the
sixth grade. My advanced education was the school of hard knocks. My
father was an Irish fruit peddler. I've come up from nothing. Nothing,
do you hear me?" Pat's voice was hard and vibrant with controlled fury.
It exasperated him to see Yale flipping the pages of a book, and seemingly
only half listening. "You're not of age yet. I've got three years yet
to work on you. I'm not buying this stuff about sending you to Europe
for a year. You can come down off your cloud and get a grip on yourself."
Pat looked around the book-littered room. Books were piled high on
the window seats, dropped in confusion on the floor and in heaps on
top of Yale's desk. "This is your trouble," he said, waving his hand
disgustedly at the books. He picked up a couple of them muttering their
titles aloud. "Kant, Santayana, T. S. Eliot. You think I'm ignorant;
that I don't know these names, don't you? Well, I know them." Pat
slammed the books down on the desk. "They were jerk professors living in
a dream world. Two of these fine fellows couldn't even stomach American
democracy. They gave up their citizenship. They went to live in Europe
because they were such gentlemen. The other one was a German kike."
Yale stared out the window, a sullen look on his lean face. "Go ahead,
sulk. You think I'm a Babbitt, don't you? Well, I'll tell you something,
I learned long ago to fight fire with fire. The only way for me was to
know more than the next guy. I ploughed through plenty of this type of
so-called literature." Pat walked to the door. "You stay here with your
Mother while I look up Dean Tracy. Just get it into your head that you're
going to college. I'm going to see that you get an education and finish
cooking some of your half-baked ideas."
Pat found Dean Tracy near the gym supervising several workmen who were
completing the erection of an outdoor stage. The Dean's expression implied
that he was busy now. He would talk to Pat later. Pat ignored it. "I want
your advice," he said to the reluctant Tracy. "For the past three years
I have donated five thousand dollars a year to this institution. That's
pretty good money for times like these. It would seem to me that with
this trifling incentive, I should now be pleased to hear that my son had
been accepted into one of the better colleges. I understand that you,
yourself, have some affiliations with Harvard. That should have made it
possible to smooth the way for Yale."
I can tell you that Yale, Cynthia and I have checked; my marriage to
Yale is recognized as legal by the laws of the United States."
Baker frowned at her. "It is not necessary for you to teach me the law,
young lady," he said drily. "Just answer the questions that I ask you,
if you please. Is it true that in March of this year, knowing that Yale
Marratt had contracted an illegal marriage with Cynthia Carnell Chilling,
that instead of bringing this action to the attention of the law you
and Cynthia decided to live under the same roof with Yale Marratt?"
"Yes," Anne said calmly, smiling at Baker. "We agreed that it seemed
to be the most practical thing to do under the circumstances. Since
we loved Yale individually it didn't seem an insurmountable problem to
join forces."
A roar of laughter greeted her remark. Judge Small, maintaining a poker
face, rapped for order and threatened to clear the court.
Baker looked at her disgustedly. "It seems superfluous for me to ask
whether you have regular sexual intercourse with Yale Marratt."
"Yes," Anne agreed, "it is superfluous."
"Then you do have regular sexual intercourse with Yale Marratt?"
"We are normal human beings," Anne snapped. She looked at Baker
disdainfully. "If you want a yes answer, the answer is yes. . . ."
Baker asked Saul if he wished to question the witness. Saul rose
leisurely from his chair. "The court will notice that while the
defense has not objected to the manner of questioning the witness,
it is not because the defense approves or admires the approach of the
prosecution. However, to save the time of this court we wish to make
it as simple as possible. . . ." Saul grinned at Baker. "So that even a
legal novice could prove, if he wished, that Yale Marratt is responsibly
living with, and married to, these two women. The defense feels that
Anne Marratt has handled herself creditably. While it has no bearing on
this case, the defense would like to point out that the law itself is
certainly questionable, regardless of circumstances, that could allow
a wife to testify against her husband. The defense has no questions for
this witness." Saul sat down, amused at Baker's flushed countenance.
Baker called Cynthia to the stand. While not quite so self-possessed
as Anne, Cynthia looked so virginally fresh with her large brown eyes
open and innocent that she unnerved Baker a little. He didn't want to
give the impression that he was asking an innocent child dirty, sexual
questions. Gently, he queried her on her feelings about sharing the same
household with another woman. He wondered if when she married Yale Marratt
she was fully aware that he was in fact already married. He probed into
her marriage with Mat Chilling, and discovered, to the interest of the
spectators, that the child, Adar, was really Mat Chilling's child.
"What you have really done, Cynthia," Baker said sadly, "is to tolerate
this dual relationship and enslave your body to this man's whims for
the protection of Mat Chilling's child. Isn't that so?"
"That is not so, Mr. Baker," Cynthia said indignantly. "I love Yale Marratt.
We don't use each other's body as you so disgustingly put it. We share each
other's love. In our family we are on an endless voyage of discovery of the
possibilities of any human being bridging the gulf of flesh and blood and
bones that separates him from another, and by using the gift of our brains
instead of animal emotions such as you are invoking, discovering what love
really means." Cynthia looked coldly at Baker. "If it will make the
situation any clearer to you, Mr. Baker, I love Anne as much as I love
Yale, and the children we will have will be taught this kind of love."
Baker looked at her thoughtfully. "You mean that you are pregnant!"
Cynthia smiled. "Both Anne and I will have our babies sometime in April
next year."
Amidst the confusion and excitement that Cynthia's statement made,
Baker concluded that the testimony was sufficient for conviction without
going further.
He turned the case over to the defense.
PART ONE
Live, my Lesbia, love. I live -- I love you.
Not a fig will we care what grim old men say.
Setting sun will come back again tomorrow.
We, when once our brief daylight has faded,
Needs must sleep an unending night forever.
-- Catullus
1
Pat Marratt drove his Packard convertible slowly down the elm-lined
street that bisected the campus of Buxton Academy without speaking to
his wife. At the highway he jammed the accelerator to the floor and
pushed his massive body back in the seat with a sigh of relief. Yale's
graduation day was over at last, capping the disappointment that had
been building in him for the past two years.
"I don't care whose fault it is, Liz. Maybe it's mine maybe it's yours.
There's no use of any further postmortems. The plain truth is that I don't
know what the hell I'm going to do about Yale. As for Buxton Academy . . .
thank God we don't have to continue driving up here once a month."
Pat looked at his wife expectantly, wondering why their son's failure to
be admitted to one of the Ivy League colleges didn't seem to bother her.
"Please watch the road, Pat! I can hear you without you looking at me
. . . especially when you are roaring in that frustrated executive
voice." Liz Marratt took off her hat, a wide-brimmed straw affair
decorated with artificial flowers. She flung it carelessly on the back
seat. "God" she moaned, "it really was an ordeal. I think those deans
and professors just gloat over graduations. Did you ever hear such a
collection of platitudes and nonsense? Right out of Benjamin Franklin
with a little frosting added." She fiddled with her girdle. "You'll have
to stop at the next filling station, Pat. I can't stand this thing a
minute more. It's cutting me to pieces."
"That's about how much Yale has worried you over the past few years,"
Pat said grimly. "Your son has been turned down by every major college in
the East. Now he has the nerve to tell me that I should send him to Europe
for a year just to bum around. . . . And you worry about a tight girdle!"
"My son! He's your son, too!" Liz retorted. "How much time have you
spent with Yale in the last four years? All you have ever done is gripe
to me. You complain that he reads too much. Yet . . . what do you know
about him? No one can get close to Yale. Your only contribution was
teaching him how to play golf. He confided to me last summer that he
only played to please you. Golf bores him."
"What doesn't bore him?" Pat asked with disgust. "The two summers that
I've had him down to the plant, he acted as if I were infringing on his
valuable time." Pat shrugged his shoulders. He pushed one hand through
his thick, grey-black hair. "It's a screwball world. I've worked and
sweated to create a business worth at least twenty million dollars,
and what happens? I end up with a daughter who, if I let her alone,
could blow every cent I've accumulated in a couple of years, and a son
who would prefer to starve to death trying to write poetry, or figure
out some crazy philosophy in a cold water flat in Greenwich Village. Of
course, he wouldn't mind if I supported him in the meanwhile . . . just
so long as I let him alone."
"But you won't let him alone, will you, Pat?" Liz worried about Pat's
unceasing drive toward perfection. Patrick Marratt believed that he could
pound and shape his environment to reflect his own image. Liz sighed. So
far, with the notable exception of Yale, he had succeeded.
"Damned right, I won't let him alone," Pat said. "Someday, Yale Marratt
will thank God that he has a father like me. Every kid goes through
this wishy-washy phase. Our 'friend' in the White House with his
pseudo-intellectual braintrusters has given these radical ideas a lot
of glamour. Because we are in a depression it is smart to figure that
capitalism is done. It frightens hell out of me, Liz . . . to think what
some of the stupid asses who are running the country today would do,
if there weren't a few Republicans left to restrain them." Pat swung
into a filling station. "There's your rest room. Hurry up. I want to
get home by five and play a few holes. We can eat at the Club."
He watched Liz walk toward the ladies' room at the rear of the station,
pleasured with the shapely wiggle of her behind. A pretty good figure,
he thought, for a woman in her late forties. Compared with some of
the mothers to whom he had been introduced today with their matronly
bosoms hanging down to their bellies, Liz looked like a young girl.
It had been some time, Pat reflected, since he and Liz had mingled with
such an assortment of Connecticut blue-bloods. Stacked up against the
tweedy looking men and overstuffed women that they had met this morning,
Pat felt that he, as well as Liz, came out well on top.
At least five men that morning had recognized Pat immediately. "Oh . . .
Marratt? You must be the Marratt Corporation down in Midhaven." When Pat
admitted that he was, he noticed (and he couldn't help grinning)
their heightened interest. He guessed that they had read the write-up
about him in
Fortune
magazine, or had examined his Dun and Bradstreet
rating. In the past several years men like these had approached him with
plans for selling his stock. "You are ready for the American Exchange
at least, Pat," they told him. "Spread the stock around. Cash in while
the going is good."
The men who came to him came with a banker's knowledge of a good thing.
The Marratt Corporation was a good thing, Pat thought, and he controlled
eighty percent of its stock. None of these sideline spectators . . .
these stock jugglers, would get it. Someday it would be an even better
thing. Come hell or high water, Yale Marratt, his son, would be a part
of that future.
Sitting in a hard wooden chair under newly budded elms, Pat had watched
Yale receive his diploma. It should have been a special day. A day that
would be remembered not only by his parents, but by Yale as well. But,
it hadn't been that kind of day. Pat and Liz had arrived just after
lunch. They found Yale, alone in his room, reading. He acted as if they
weren't expected, as if his own graduation were an unpleasant interruption
to whatever was preoccupying his mind.
Pat had looked out the windows of Yale's room, across the rolling green
lawns that flanked the dormitories and classrooms of Buxton Academy. Liz
was putting the finishing touches to Yale, checking his tie, adjusting
his graduation cap. And Pat remarked, as he had many times before,
that this was a damned splendid layout.
Pat compared this room with its separate study and bedroom shared only
by Yale and his roommate, with the linoleum covered kitchen table he
had used when he was studying his International Correspondence Courses
in Business Administration and Accounting. Here, each boy not only had
his own private desk and lounge chair, but they shared their own tiled
bathroom. In addition, each room had a fireplace that actually worked.
Pat had done his studying nights, after an eight or nine hour day as
a pipefltter at Latham Shipyards. Some different was this life. Here a
man could study in solid comfort and then go to bed for a good night's
rest without the worry of getting up at five thirty in a freezing house
or having to walk the dark streets of Midhaven shivering with cold as
he plodded to work.
"I didn't make it, Pat," Yale said when they had completed their
questions on his health, and how long the actual graduation would take,
and whether he would drive home tonight or tomorrow morning with his
things. "Princeton turned me down, too. I'm not the college type,
I guess."
Pat's tanned face turned a deep red. He tried to conceal his anger.
"Listen to me, son, you are going to college. I don't know what in the
devil has gotten into you in the last year or so, but you can just get
it out of your head that you are one of these rich man's sons who is
going to live on his old man's hard earned dough. I went through the
sixth grade. My advanced education was the school of hard knocks. My
father was an Irish fruit peddler. I've come up from nothing. Nothing,
do you hear me?" Pat's voice was hard and vibrant with controlled fury.
It exasperated him to see Yale flipping the pages of a book, and seemingly
only half listening. "You're not of age yet. I've got three years yet
to work on you. I'm not buying this stuff about sending you to Europe
for a year. You can come down off your cloud and get a grip on yourself."
Pat looked around the book-littered room. Books were piled high on
the window seats, dropped in confusion on the floor and in heaps on
top of Yale's desk. "This is your trouble," he said, waving his hand
disgustedly at the books. He picked up a couple of them muttering their
titles aloud. "Kant, Santayana, T. S. Eliot. You think I'm ignorant;
that I don't know these names, don't you? Well, I know them." Pat
slammed the books down on the desk. "They were jerk professors living in
a dream world. Two of these fine fellows couldn't even stomach American
democracy. They gave up their citizenship. They went to live in Europe
because they were such gentlemen. The other one was a German kike."
Yale stared out the window, a sullen look on his lean face. "Go ahead,
sulk. You think I'm a Babbitt, don't you? Well, I'll tell you something,
I learned long ago to fight fire with fire. The only way for me was to
know more than the next guy. I ploughed through plenty of this type of
so-called literature." Pat walked to the door. "You stay here with your
Mother while I look up Dean Tracy. Just get it into your head that you're
going to college. I'm going to see that you get an education and finish
cooking some of your half-baked ideas."
Pat found Dean Tracy near the gym supervising several workmen who were
completing the erection of an outdoor stage. The Dean's expression implied
that he was busy now. He would talk to Pat later. Pat ignored it. "I want
your advice," he said to the reluctant Tracy. "For the past three years
I have donated five thousand dollars a year to this institution. That's
pretty good money for times like these. It would seem to me that with
this trifling incentive, I should now be pleased to hear that my son had
been accepted into one of the better colleges. I understand that you,
yourself, have some affiliations with Harvard. That should have made it
possible to smooth the way for Yale."
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