Evan Hunter - Sons

“Okay.” he said, and jabbed a finger at me, “tie and jacket, on the double,” and then turned to my mother and said, “Do you know what they say in France?”

“What do they say in France?” my mother asked.

“In France, they say ‘This Will Tyler, he is one lucky son of a bitch!”” and burst out laughing.

“Hey, watch the language,” I said, “there are little kids around.”

“Who wants a drink?” my father asked. "I want a drink,” he said. “Dolores? Would you like a drink?”

“All right,” she said, “if you’re...”

“Hey!” he said, and snapped his fingers. “He knows Linda! "

“Who knows Linda?”

“Michaud. He met her and Stanley when they were in Paris last year. Do you think I should call her?”

“Sure, if you want to,” my mother said.

“The rates go down after six, don’t they?”

“Last of the big spenders,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” he said.

“Debating a phone call to Chicago.”

“Put-down artist,” my mother said to me, but she was grinning.

My father went to the telephone. “Come on, come on,” he said, “what’s everybody standing around for?”

“I thought I was getting a drink,” my mother said.

“I’ll bring it up, hon,” my father said, and lifted the receiver, and waited for a dial tone. My mother was watching him from the steps leading upstairs. “Hey,” he said to her.

“Mmm?”

“I love you,” he said.

My mother smiled and gave a brief pleased nod. Then she turned and went up the steps.

“Hello,” my father said into the telephone, “I’d like to make a person-to-person call to Mrs. Linda Kearing in Chicago. The number...”

It was my kid sister Linda, of all people, who clued me in. I had met her completely by accident outside the bio lab on the fourth floor, and casually asked what it was all about. To my surprise, she blushed and said, “I can’t tell you, Will,” and then went right on to tell me. That was when the bell sounded for the air-raid drill.

She made me promise upon pain of death and torture that I would never reveal my source of information, and I kissed her swiftly on the check and then raced back to my home room, which was what we’d been trained to do like robots whenever those three successive gongs sounded. A fire drill was a single steady repetitive gong, and an air-raid drill was three gongs in quick sequence, and then a long pause, and then three gongs again. For the fire drills, we always marched out of the school silently and solemnly and looked back at it from four blocks away, near St. Chrysostom’s Church, presumably to witness the old brick building crumbling in flames.

I thought of what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, and I began planning and scheming all the way back to home room about how I would break the news to Charlotte Wagner. This was, of course, the eighth period, which was the last period of the day. We had never had an air-raid drill in the history of Grace School that did not take place during the eighth period. The routine was unvarying. Sometime between three-thirty and four-fifteen, the successive gongs would sound sharply and insistently, and we’d all rush back to our home rooms, crouch under our desks, clasp our hands behind our heads, and wait in cramped silence for about ten minutes until the gong sounded for the all-clear. Our teachers would then dismiss us, since by that time the last period would be almost over, the school day practically ended. It was my theory that this imaginative approach to protection against enemy attack was based on secret information delivered to our city officials by the Japanese themselves, who had doubtless promised that any bombing of the school would come sometime during the eighth period.

It was no different this time, except that this time I knew what “Keep ’Em Flying!” meant. I could hardly wait. The whole thing with Charlotte Wagner had started about two weeks ago, on the way home from school. Charlotte, like myself, was a senior at Grace, which had not been named after God’s greatest gift to the soul, but merely after a man named Jeremiah Grace who had founded the school back in 1891. Grace was a private school, the nearest public school being Robert A. Waller High over on Orchard Street, which was quite a bus ride from the Gold Coast, where we lived. Our house was on East Scott, and Charlotte lived on Banks. Most of the other kids going to Grace lived in the immediate neighborhood, too, so we usually walked over to Division after school, for sodas. The only kid in our crowd who drove to and from school, in a black ’39 Buick, was a guy named Dickie Howell, whose father was supposed to be in “essential industry,” and therefore in possession of valuable C coupons which entitled him to an unlimited amount of gasoline. My father was in the paper industry, but Uncle Sam did not consider that essential enough to rate anything better than a B ration. Besides, he actually used the car to go back and forth to work at his mill in Joliet every day, and we only had the one car, so I couldn’t have driven even if I’d wanted to.

Actually, I enjoyed that walk home after school every day. Linda sometimes came with us, but I tried to discourage that because she was only fifteen and a lot of the jokes and kidding around were over her head. We were, after all, seniors. Michael Mallory had, in fact, enlisted in the Air Force just before his eighteenth birthday, and was expecting to be called right after graduation. His move, of course, was the only sensible one. Nobody in his right mind wanted to be drafted into the Army just then, because it was an almost certain bet that the Infantry would grab you, and you’d wind up in the invasion of Italy, which was definitely coming as soon as North Africa fell. Michael had thought of enlisting in the cavalry, having always been fond of horses, but then he’d learned that cavalry meant mechanized cavalry, which meant tanks, and we both knew a kid named Sal Brufani who had been burned to a crisp in a tank outside Bizerte, just before Christmas. Michael furthermore got sick even riding a boat on Lake Michigan, which eliminated the Navy as a possibility. So, unless he wanted to have his ass shipped to Italy or, worse yet, to the Aleutians or the Solomons, the only logical open choice (I convinced him) was the Air Force.

In any case, our language on the way home from school each day was inclined to get a bit salty, and I didn’t like Linda hearing such stuff. For example, just last week, Michael had come up with a new Confucius Say joke, which broke everybody up, but which made Linda — and me — very uncomfortable. He’d told it without any warning, just popping it out of the blue, “Confucius say, ‘Girl who marry basketball player get gypped; he always dribble before he shoot.’” Charlotte Wagner had thrown back her head and opened her mouth wide to let out one of her horse bellows, delicately feminine and designed to knock over the Wrigley Building. The other girls all followed suit, of course, except Linda. She started to laugh, and then quickly glanced at me, and blushed, and smiled only tentatively and in a frightened way, and then put on a very grave and serious look when she saw I wasn’t laughing at all. Sarah Cody had meanwhile knocked Michael’s books into the gutter and called him a dirty slob. He laughed wildly and said, “Who? Me? What’d I say?” and began wrestling first with her and then Charlotte, with a lot of indiscreet cheap feeling going on, and with Linda walking very silently beside me, her eyes lowered. I later warned Michael to be a little more careful with his language when my sister was around, and he promised he would.

I was surprised by what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, not because it was really so dirty, but only because she’d told me at all, though with a blush. As I crouched under my desk now and listened for our punctual eighth-period Japanese raiders, I thought of how much pleasure it would give me to break the news to Charlotte as soon as this drill was over. The whole thing had started about two weeks ago when Charlotte, climbing the steps of her house on Banks, had waved to the other girls and said, “Well, girls, keep ’em flying,” causing all the girls to burst into hysterical laughter which none of the boys understood.