Evan Hunter: Sons

“Hey, hi,” I said in surprise. “Where’s Dad?”

“Stuck in the city,” my mother said. “How’d it go?”

“We didn’t even show.”

“We got robbed,” Nelson said.

“You want to lower this back window, Mom?”

“Who won?”

“Sound, Incorporated.”

“Which group is that?”

“You don’t know them, Mom.”

“They stink, Mrs. Tyler.”

“I thought Rog was going to start crying,” I said from the tailgate of the wagon.

“We should have taken it, I mean it, Mrs. Tyler.”

“Am I dropping you off?”

“If it’s okay,” Nelson said.

“Sure.”

“Something wrong?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “No.”

“You seem...” I shrugged. “Give me a hand here, will you, Nelson?”

I could see the back of my mother’s head as we loaded the drums and organ into the car. She wore her brown hair short, the collar of her beige car coat high on the back of her neck. She was sitting very stiff and straight, staring through the windshield, puffing on a cigarette even though she’d given up smoking more than a month ago.

“I see you’re back on the weed again,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “I just...” and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Shove the bass drum all the way back,” I said.

“Why don’t we put the organ in first? I’m getting out before you.”

“Good thinking, Maynard.”

We arranged the equipment with meticulous care, stacking it in tight to prevent it from sliding or bouncing on the rutted country roads. My mother sat silently smoking as we heaved and pushed and adjusted. The radio was on, classical music, QXR, I supposed, her favorite station. The engine was running, a bluish-gray exhaust rising lazily and steadily on the brittle air. At midnight, the news came on, and I listened vaguely as I worked, the words floating back through the heated car and out over the lowered tailgate, “... three months after the assassination of Diem and his brother, General Minh’s regime was itself overthrown tonight in a coup that took most Saigon citizens totally by surprise. Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh, thirty-six years old, considered by United States military advisers to be one of South Vietnam’s ablest corps commanders...”

“Where’s that other mike stand?” I asked.

“I’ll get it,” Nelson said.

“We ought to mark them, you know? I’m always afraid somebody’ll walk off with them.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said.

“... five miles from the Cambodian border, inflicting the worst toll upon South Vietnamese troops to date: ninety-four dead, and thirty-two wounded. Three American advisers were also killed in the bloody battle.”

We shoved both mike stands in alongside the organ, wedging the heavy metal bases in solidly against the covered hump of the spare tire.

“You can roll it up,” I said to my mother.

“... won’t expire until March of next year. Mayor Wagner, though, apprehensive after New York’s 114-day siege, has already begun talks...”

The roads were deserted. The newscaster’s voice gave way to recorded music, Stravinsky, I guessed, though I wasn’t sure. We passed the university, where lights still gleamed in the new science building, and the three chapels sat like snow-cowled nuns, and then drove past the old campus on Fieldston Street, where buildings erected in 1876 rose in turreted stillness against a sky dusted with stars. On the other side of the wooden bridge near the university’s western gate, the car’s headlights illuminated a mole who stopped dead still for just an instant and then waddled clumsily to the side of the road. We climbed the hill over Corrigan and then took the short cut through Pleasant, my mother handling the wheel expertly around each hairpin turn, although she looked somewhat like a gun moll, with the cigarette dangling from her mouth that way.

“You’re going to lose that ash,” I said, annoyed.

“Thank you,” she answered, and took one gloved hand from the wheel, flicked the long ash into the ash tray, and immediately put the cigarette into her mouth again. She did not put it out until we were in Nelson’s driveway. I helped him unload the drums and then carried them in with him through the garage entrance.

“We rehearsing tomorrow?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll buzz Connie in the morning and let you know.”

“Okay,” Nelson said. He paused for a moment, idly worrying a pimple near his mouth. “We got robbed,” he said, almost to himself, and then from the open garage door called, “’Night, Mrs. Tyler. Thanks a lot.” In the idling automobile, my mother raised her hand in farewell. By the time I got back to the car, she had lighted a second cigarette. I glanced at it but said nothing.

She smoked silently as she drove, her face alternately illuminated by the green light of the dash and the glowing coal of the cigarette whenever she puffed on it.

“We should have taken it,” I said.

“Well,” she said, and gave a slight shrug.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“You seem down.”

“We were supposed to go to a dinner party. I had to cancel.”

“Oh.”

“I suppose I could have gone alone. They asked me to.” She shrugged again.

“How’d Dad get stuck?”

“The De Gaulle book,” she answered.

“They still working on that?”

“Apparently so.”

We were silent the rest of the way home.

My father must have been watching for the car. The minute we pulled into the driveway, the kitchen door opened, and he came out without a coat, grinning, walking swiftly to the driver’s side as my mother rolled down the window.

“Hi,” he said, and leaned through the open window to kiss her on the cheek, and then looked across to me and said, “How’d it go, Wat?”

“We lost,” I said.

“What docs Leon Coopersmith know about good music?” my father said. “You want a hand with that organ?” He was very excited. His eyes were glowing, and his face was flushed, and I knew he was bursting to tell us something, and I felt the energy of his secret flowing through the open window and suffusing the automobile. I loved him most when he was this way. He seemed to me in these moments to be very tall and powerful. I half-expected him to reach into the car and pick me up and hold me out at arm’s length and then clasp me suddenly to his chest, laughing, the way he used to when I was very young. I found myself grinning with him.

“Will,” my mother said, “I thought...”

“Man of surprises,” my father said, “man of surprises,” and kissed her again in punctuation, on the mouth this time. “Do you still want to go to that party?”

“Well, I...”

“Let me help Wat,” he said, and opened the door for my mother, and gave her a hug when she stepped out of the car, and then came to the tailgate with me. We carried the organ into the house, and then brought in the amplifier and the mike stands and the two speakers. My father kept putting down Leon Coopersmith all the while we worked, telling me he had a tin car, telling me the people who selected judges for these band battles should make certain they picked someone attuned to the sound of youth, all the while bursting with his own secret, but taking the time and the trouble to console me about Dawn Patrol’s loss. As we made our last trip inside, he said, “Well, you’ll win the next one,” and then shouted, “Dolores, do we have to go to that damn party?”

My mother, still looking bewildered, said, “I suppose not, I’ve already called to...”

“Then let’s forget it,” he said. “Let’s all go over to Emily Shaw’s and celebrate.”

“What are we celebrating?” my mother said. She was excited now, too. The energy he radiated was positively contagious. We stood by the kitchen sink, the three of us, grinning at each other idiotically, my father savoring the moment when he would tell us his secret, my mother and I relishing the suspense. When he finally revealed his coup — he had made arrangements with a French photographer named Claude Michaud to take a series of candid shots of De Gaulle, with the general’s permission and cooperation — it hardly seemed as important as the buildup had been, but we showered him with congratulations nonetheless, telling him how marvelous it was, and agreeing that we had good cause for celebration. My mother looked radiant. As my father spoke, her eyes never left his face. She listened to him intently, proud and pleased, shining with adoration.