Kenny | Page 7

napkin in his hand, "you mean, John, it's all you will tell me!"
"Sit down," said Whitaker, toasting a cracker over the alcohol flame. "I prefer a sensible talk without fireworks."
Surprised and nettled, Kenny obeyed in spite of himself.
"Now," went on Whitaker quietly, "I came here to-night because I'm Brian's friend and yours." He ignored the incredulous arch of Kenny's eyebrows. "Where Brian is, where he will be, I don't propose to tell you, now or at any other time. His wheres and his whens are the boy's own business. His whys I think you know. He won't be back."
"He will!" thundered Kenny and thumped upon the table with his fist.
Whitaker patiently reassembled his supper.
"I think not," he said.
"You're not here to think," blazed Kenny. "You're here to tell me what you know."
"I'm here," corrected John Whitaker, "to get a few facts out of my system for your own good and Brian's. Kenny, how much of the truth can you stand?"
Kenny threw up his hands with a reminiscent gesture of despair.
"Truth!" he repeated. "Truth!"
"I know," put in Whitaker, "that you regard the truth as something sacred, to be handled with delicacy and discretion. But--"
Kenny told him sullenly to tell it if he could.
"I don't propose to urge Brian back here for a good many reasons. In the first place, he's not a painter--"
"John," interrupted Kenny hotly, "you are no judge of that. I, Kennicott O'Neill, am his father."
"And more's the pity," said Whitaker bluntly, "for you've made a mess of it. That's another reason."
Kenny turned a dark red.
"You mean?"
"I mean, Kenny," said Whitaker, his glance calm and level, "that as a parent for Brian, you are an abject failure."
The word stung. It was the first time in his life that Kenny had faced it. That he, Kennicott O'Neill, Academician, with Heaven knows how many medals of distinction, could fail at anything, was a new thought, bewildering and bitter. This time he escaped from the table and flung up a window. Whitaker, he grumbled, never toasted crackers without burning them. Whitaker brought him back with a look.
"Sit down," he said again. "I don't propose to talk while you roam around the studio and kick things."
Kenny obeyed. He looked a little white.
"I've tried to think this thing out fairly," said Whitaker. "Why as a parent for Brian you're a failure--"
"Well?"
"And the first and fundamental cause of your failure is, I think, your hairbrained, unquenchable youth."
Kenny stared at him in astounded silence.
"I remember once around the fire here you told a Celtic tale of some golden islands--Tirnanoge, wasn't it?--the Land of the Young--"
Might have been, Kenny said perversely. He didn't remember.
"Ossian lived there with the daughter of the King of Youth for three hundred years that seemed but three," reminded Whitaker. "Well, no matter. The point is this: The Land of the Young and the King of Youth always make me think of you."
"It is true," said Kenny with biting sarcasm, "that I still have hair and teeth. It is also true that I am the respectable if unsuccessful parent of a son twenty-three years old and I myself am forty-four."
"Forty-four years young," admitted Whitaker. "And Brian on the other hand is twenty-three years old. There you have it. You know precisely what I mean, Kenny. Youth isn't always a matter of years. It's a state of being. Sometimes it's an affliction and sometimes a gift. Sometimes it's chronic and sometimes it's contagious enough to start an epidemic. You're as young and irresponsible as the wind. You've never grown up. God knows whether or not you ever will. But Brian has. There's the clash."
"Go on," said Kenny with a 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