Kenny | Page 8

dangerous flash of interest in his eyes.
"You've an undeniable facility, John, with what you call the truth."
"It's an unfortunate characteristic of highly temperamentalized
individuals--"
"Painters, Irishmen and O'Neills," put in Kenny with sulky impudence.
"That they frequently skirt the rocks for themselves with amazing skill.
I mean just this: They don't always shipwreck their own lives."

Was that, Kenny would like to know, an essential of successful
parenthood?
"I mean," he paraphrased dryly, "must you wreck your own life, John,
to parent somebody else with skill?" The wording of this rather pleased
him. He brightened visibly.
Whitaker ignored his brazen air of assurance. It was like Kenny, he
reflected, to find an unexpected loophole and emerge from it with the
air of a conqueror.
"People with an over-plus of temperament," he said, "wreck the lives of
others. Brian has just stepped out in the nick of time."
"You mean," flashed Kenny with anger in his eyes, "you mean I've
tried to wreck the life of my own son? By the powers of war, John,
that's too much!"
"I didn't say you had tried. I mean merely that you were accidentally
succeeding. The sunsets--"
"Damn the sunsets!" roared Kenny, losing his head.
"It was time for that," agreed Whitaker.
"Time for what?"
"You usually damn the irrefutable thing. Why you wanted Brian to
paint pictures," went on Whitaker, ignoring Kenny's outraged sputter,
"when he couldn't, is and always has been a matter of considerable
worry and mystery to me--"
"It needn't have been. That, I fancy, John, you can see for yourself. I
worry very little about how your paper is run."
"But I think I've solved it. It's your vanity."
"My God!" said Kenny with a gasp.

"You wanted to have a hand in what he did. Then you could afford to
be gracious. There are some, Kenny, who must always direct in order to
enjoy."
There was a modicum of enjoyment with Whitaker around, hinted
Kenny sullenly.
Whitaker found his irrelevant trick of umbrage trying in the extreme.
He lost his temper and said that which he had meant to leave to
inference.
"Kenny, Brian's success, in which you, curiously enough, seem to have
had a visionary faith, would have linked him to you in a sort of artistic
dependence in which you shone with inferential genius and generosity."
It hurt.
"So!" said Kenny, his color high.
"It may be," said Whitaker, feeling sorry for him, "that I've put that
rather strongly but I think I've dug into the underlying something which,
linked with your warm-hearted generosity and a real love for Brian,
made you stubborn and unreasonable about his work. Of the big gap in
temperament and the host of petty things that maddened Brian to the
point of distraction, it's unnecessary for me to speak. You must know
that your happy-go-lucky self-indulgence more often than not has
spelled discomfort of a definite sort for Brian. You're generous, I'll
admit. Generous to a fault. But your generosity is always congenial. It's
never the sort that hurts. The only kind of generosity that will help in
this crisis is the kind that hurts. It's up to you, Kenny, to do some
mental house-cleaning, admit the cobwebs and brush them away,
instead of using them fantastically for drapery."
Whitaker thanked his lucky stars he'd gotten on so well. Kenny,
affronted, was usually more capricious and elusive.
"Whitaker," said Kenny, his eyes imploring, "you don't--you can't mean
that Brian isn't coming back?"

Whitaker sighed. After all, Kenny never heard all of anything, just as
he never read all of a letter unless it was asterisked and under-lined and
riveted to his attention by a multitude of pen devices.
"Kenny, have you been listening?"
"No!" lied Kenny.
"Brian," flung out Whitaker wrathfully, "isn't coming back. I thank God
for his sake."
His loss of temper brought a hornet's nest about his ears. Kenny swung
to his feet in smoldering fury. He expressed his opinion of Whitaker,
editors, Brian and sons. The sum of them merged into an unchristian
melee of officiousness and black ingratitude. He recounted the events
of the night before with stinging sarcasm in proof of Brian's regularity.
He ended magnificently by blaming Brian for the disorder of the studio.
There were handles everywhere. And Brian in an exuberance of
amiability had broken a statuette. Likely Whitaker would see even in
that some form of paternal oppression.
"Whitaker," flung out Kenny indignantly, "Brian plays but one
instrument in this studio and we have a dozen. Wasn't it precisely like
him to pick out that damned psaltery there with the crooked stick? I
mean--wasn't it like him to pick out something with a fiendish
appendage that could be lost, and keep the studio in an uproar when he
wanted to play it?"