Evan Hunter: Sons

We naturally had a maid living in at the time, a colored girl from the Washington Park section, but my mother never allowed her to prepare meals, mindful of a Wisconsin homily about two women in the kitchen being akin to a horse with a head on both ends, or something to that effect. My mother was a great one for proverbs. Sometimes, when she reeled off one of her homespun sayings, absolutely unsmilingly and with a sense of discovery (as if she hadn’t said the very same thing a hundred times before), my father would roll his eyes heavenward and sigh deeply, and I would remember that she had been his childhood sweetheart and that he’d probably been listening to her words of wisdom since almost the turn of the century. The thought was frightening. She had a proverb for every occasion, the same ones in fact for totally different situations, and I lived in fear of the day she’d come up with a new and entirely fresh one because I knew I’d die of a heart attack on that day and never get into the Air Force.

“Would you like some milk?” she asked me now.

“Another air-raid drill today,” I said, going to the refrigerator.

“I gathered,” she answered.

There was some leftover icebox cake on the second shelf, and I cut a small slice of it. Then I poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took everything over to the round kitchen table under the Tiffany lamp. We generally took breakfast with the fork (one of my mother’s expressions, translated from the English to mean a breakfast including some kind of meat, usually sausage), and since I didn’t get to school each day until nine o’clock, I wasn’t hungry enough to cat very much of the school lunch at noon. But neither did I dare eat anything substantial when I got home in the afternoon because dinner was at six-fifteen sharp and my mother was a stickler for eating everything put before you. So I usually just took the edge off my appetite with a little milk and maybe a chocolate pudding, or a few cookies, and then went into the living room to do my homework. We had a new Philco floor-model radio there, complete with push buttons, and as I worked I would listen first to “Terry and the Pirates” and “The Adventures of Jimmy Allen” in breathless succession on WENR, then a quick flick of the dial at five-thirty for “Jack Armstrong” on W67C, and then back to WENR for “Captain Midnight” at five forty-five. At six on the button. I’d hear my father’s key in the latch, and the front door would open, and he would call his customary greeting, “Hello, anybody home?”

At dinner that night, I decided to reopen the Air Force issue.

My father seemed to be in a very good mood. He was talking about a recent War Production Board memo that eulogized the paper industry and made the printed word sound as important to the war effort as bullets. I always listened in fascination when my father talked about paper. I could never visualize him doing anything but work of a physical nature; his lumberjack background seemed entirely believable to me. When he came home from work each evening wearing a gray fedora and a gray topcoat and a pinstriped business suit, I was always a little surprised that he wasn’t wearing boots and a mackinaw and a turtleneck sweater. He was a big man, still very strong at forty-three, with penetrating blue eyes and a nose I liked to consider patrician (since I had inherited it). The table in the paneled formal dining room was eight feet long without additional leaves, and whereas my father always sat at the head of it, my mother did not sit at the opposite end but instead took a chair on his right, closest to the kitchen. She refused to keep a bell on the table (“Never count the number a bell tolls, for it’ll bring you that many years of bad luck”) and would more often than not rise and go into the kitchen herself if the maid didn’t respond to her first gentle call. My sister Linda always sat on my father’s left, and I sat alongside her, which was not the happiest of arrangements, since she was left-handed and invariably sticking her elbow in my dish.

“Well,” I said, subtly I thought, “it looks as if Michael Mallory will be leaving for the Air Force soon.”

“And here I thought we were actually going to get through a meal without hearing Will’s enlistment pitch,” my father said.

“The wheel that docs the squeaking is the wheel that gets the grease,” my mother said. “Don’t you know that, Bert?”

“If I wait till my eighteenth birthday,” I said, unrattled, “and then get drafted, I’ll end up in the Infantry.”

“Let’s wait till your eighteenth birthday and find out, shall we?” my father said.

“Sure, I’ll send you letters from Italy. Written in the mud or something.”

“You spent six summers at camp without writing a single letter,” my father said. “I have no reason to believe you’ll be changing your habits when and if you get to Italy.”

“That wasn’t my point,” I said.

“Your father knows your point,” my mother said.

“I’ll be eighteen in June,” I said.

“We know when you’ll be eighteen.”

“Well, for crying out loud, do you want me to go into the Infantry?”

“I don’t want you to go anywhere,” my father said flatly.

“Well, that’s fine, Pop, but Uncle Sam has other ideas, you know? Whether you realize it or not, there happens to be a war going on.”

“Living in the same house with you, it’d be difficult not to realize that,” my father said, and picked up his napkin, and wiped his mouth, and then looked me in the eye and said, “What’s your hurry, Will? You anxious to get killed?”

“I’m not in any hurry,” I said.

“You sound like you’re in one hell of a hurry, son.”

My sister glanced up at him quickly; it was rare to hear my father using profanity, even a word as mild as “hell.”

“I’m only trying to protect myself,” I said.

“Yes, by rushing over there to fly an airplane.”

“Yes, which is a lot safer than...”

“No one’s safe in war,” my father said. “Get that out of your head.”

“Look,” I said, “can we talk reasonably for a minute? Can we just for a minute look at this thing reasonably?”

“I’m listening,” my father said.

“It’s reasonable to expect that I have to register when I’m eighteen, and it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be put in 1-A, and it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be drafted.”

“Yes, that’s reasonable. Unless the war ends before then.”

“Oh, come on, Pop, you can’t believe the war’s going to end before June!”

“It may end before you’re trained and sent overseas.”

“Okay, then you should be very happy to let me join the Air Force. It takes longer to train a fighter pilot than it docs an infantryman.”

My father was silent. I felt I had made a point.

“Isn’t that reasonable?” I asked.

“It’s only reasonable for my son to stay alive until he becomes a man,” my father said.

“You stayed alive, didn’t you?” I said.

“I was lucky,” he answered.

I didn’t know what I was doing on a troopship in Brooklyn. I wanted to be with Nancy. Instead, I was sitting in the blacked-out hold of a British vessel, on the edge of a bunk which was the bottom one in a tier of four, waiting to sail for Brest. I couldn’t believe it. Nor could I even understand how I had got here.

My father was fond of saying that all of America’s troubles had started with the assassination, a premise I couldn’t very well argue, since I was only a year old when McKinley got shot. And even though the shock of the murder seemed to sift down through the next ten years or more, as if the idea of something so primitive happening in a nation as sophisticated as America took that long to get used to, it was never more than a historical event to me, vague and somehow unbelievable. I was, frankly, more moved when the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife got killed. Not shaken to the roots, mind you (I was fourteen, going on fifteen, too old to be carrying on like an idiot) but frightened and excited by everything that happened in the month that followed: Austria-Hungary declaring war on Servia; Russia moving 80,000 troops to the border; Germany declaring war on Russia; Germany declaring war on France; Germany invading Belgium; England declaring war on Germany; everybody declaring war on everybody else — except the United States.