SON (concerned): Now you are going too far, Dad. You mustn’t blame yourself for—
FATHER (ignoring the sympathy): —and because I actually enjoyed your awed embittered admiration. You were such a gullible audience! And then during the last years, instead of turning outward, I lost interest in almost everything except the self-portraits. I poured all of myself into them, finally the life-force itself, so that now I live on in them—a solitary self-created Hell. A human being’s punishment for his misdeeds is having to watch and sometimes suffer their consequences . . . but to have to watch them minute after minute from 237 vantage points, unable to take the slightest action, unable even to comment, without the boon of a moment’s forgetfulness, a moment’s nirvana . . . (His voice grows ghostly.) Ten years! Thirty-six hundred interminable twilights. Thirty-six hundred empty dawns. To have to watch this house and garden die. To watch your mother mooning about day after day, wasting herself on memories and sentimental bric-a-brac. To watch you narrow your life down as I did mine, but before you’ve even lived it, and all your sodden drinking. To have to observe in all its loathsome detail the soul-rotting, snail-slow creep of inanition . . .
SON (angry again, in spite of himself, and once more quite frightened): Well, don’t bellyache to me about it. It’s your own fault that there are 237 of you, all corroding with life-force—another man would have been satisfied with being damned just once. There’s nothing I can do for you.
FATHER (grinning evilly from the head of Mephistopheles peering from between bushes opposite Hamlet): But there is. Break us, burn us, melt us down. Give us oblivion. Smash us!
SON (rushing back into house, partly to grab up poker from fireplace and partly because, all in all, the talking portraits in the house are less eerie than those hidden about the garden): By God, I’d like to! I don’t know how often I’ve thought of this house as a musty old museum, the lumber room of one man’s vanity.
FATHER (a chorus): Strike!
SON (hesitating with poker lifted above his head): But they’d think I was crazy. They’d believe that envy of you pushed me over the line into psychosis. They’d probably put me away.
FATHER (as Leonardo again): Nonsense! They’d merely say that you were ridding the world of some amateurish daubs and thumb-scoopings. Smash us!
SON (veering into argument): Amateurish is too strong a word. They’re not that bad, certainly.
FATHER (pleased): You think my work has enduring professional quality?
SON (frowns): No, that would be going too far in the opposite direction.
FATHER: Smash us!
SON (raises the poker, but again hesitates): There’s another thing: Mother would never forgive me.
FATHER: Don’t bring your mother into this!
SON: Why not? For that matter, if you’ve really been wanting oblivion for ten years, why didn’t you ask Mother to smash you? Or at least to put you all away, where you’d have something nearer oblivion, I gather. Or give you all away to people who would either destroy you or provide you with more diverse environments and a more interesting shadow-life.
FATHER: Son, I’ve never been able to make things like that clear to your mother. Somehow the more she fitted herself to me, the less she was really in touch with me. She was as close to me and yet as far beyond my ken as . . . my gall bladder. I’ve tried to talk to her, but she doesn’t hear. I don’t think she even sees my self-portraits any more, but only the image of me—her own creation —which she carries in her mind. But you, at long last, hear me. And I tell you: smash us!
FATHER (as plaster head of Don Juan, calling from studio): Think of the fiery impetuous philanderer imprisoned in the icy rigid statue he invites for dinner. Three girls glimpsed in ten year! Smash us!
FATHER (as the painted Leonardo): You were always scared to take action. I wasn’t!—I expressed myself, even in these miserable self-portraits. Now it’s your turn—and your opportunity. Smash us!
FATHER (as Peer Gynt): Plunge me back in the crucible. Melt me down.
FATHER (as Beethoven): Strike a great healing discord!
FATHER (as Jean Valjean): Explode the prison!
FATHER (as St. John the Divine): Unleash the apocalypse!
FATHER (a muffled chorus of photographs): Break our glass, shred us, touch a match to us. Destroy us!
FATHER (all 237 with the dark undertones of the imprisoned ones): smash us!
SON (swings up the poker a third time, then lowers its tip to the floor with a smile, his manner suddenly easy): No. Why should I let myself be agitated by a bunch of old pictures and sculptures, even if they do talk? How would destroying them change me? And why should I be intimidated by a dead father, even if he lives on in various obscure ways? It’s ridiculous.
FATHER (once more King Lear): Have you lost your respect for us? Are you not at least filled with supernatural terror at this morning’s events?
SON (shaking his head): No. I think it’s just my hangover talking with a strong psychotic accent—or 237 accents. And if it really is you, Dad, somehow talking from somewhere, I think you mean me well and so I’m not frightened. And finally, to be very honest with you, I don’t think you really want to be destroyed, Dad, even in effigy—or effigies. I think you’ve just been getting your feelings off your chest, especially your boredom.
FATHER (as Peer Gynt, smiling an inscrutable smile, perhaps of relief, perhaps of triumph, perhaps of resignation): Well, if you can’t bring yourself to destroy us, at least stir up this old house, stir up your own life.
SON (nodding): There’s something to that, all right, Dad.
FATHER: If you don’t take the initiative—and moderate your drinking, too—we’ll probably start talking again some morning or night, and not nearly as pleasantly, or even sanely. So stir things up.
SON (seriously): I’ll remember that, Dad.
FATHER (calling as Don Juan, from studio): Invite some— (The voice breaks off abruptly.)
SON looks around at the portraits. They have suddenly all gone mum. He can detect no movement in any of them, or changes in their features. The front door opens and his mother comes in excitedly with an opened letter in her hand.
MOTHER: Francis, I’ve just received the most interesting request. The Merrivale Young Ladies’ Academy wants a bust of your father for their library or lounge room. I think we should grant their request—that is, if you agree.
SON (poking elaborately at the ashes in the fireplace, to account for the poker): Why not? (Then getting an inspiration and growing wily.) How about the Hamlet head?
MOTHER: Out of the question—that’s his masterpiece. Besides, it’s riveted to its pillar in the garden.
SON: Well, then the Lear.
MOTHER: Certainly not, it’s my favorite. Besides, it’s a painting, not a bust.
SON (baiting his trap): Well, I suppose you could give them . . . No, it’s not good enough.