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Page 10
"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.
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