Evan Hunter - Sons

“Hey, how’d you know that?” I said, surprised.

“How’d I know what?”

“About Wat Tyler. Not many people do.”

“Luck,” she said.

“Come on, how’d you know?”

“I had to do a paper on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

“What’s that got to do with Wat Tyler?”

“Nothing. But that’s how I got to him.”

“How?”

“Well... can you name the Four Horsemen?”

“Sure. Plague, Pestilence...”

“Wrong.”

“You’re not talking about the Notre Dame foot...”

“No, the Bible.”

“Plague...”

“Wrong.”

“I give up.”

“I’ll give you a clue.”

“Give me a clue.”

“They’re on different colored horses — white, red, black, and pale.”

“Pale what?”

“Just pale.”

“I still give up.”

“Death’s on the pale horse,” she said. “War’s on...”

“... the black one.”

“Wrong, the red one. Famine’s on the black one.”

“Then Plague’s on the white one.”

“There isn’t any Plague.”

“Has to be a Plague.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But there isn’t.”

“Then who’s on the white horse?”

“Christ. At least, a lot of people suppose it was Christ. Nobody really knows for sure who John the Divine meant.”

“But you thought it was Plague.”

“Yes. That’s why I went to the library to see what they had.”

“What’d they have?”

“Plagues, epidemics, blights, everything. But there was a very popular plague back in 1348...”

“Popular?”

“In that it was widespread. The Black Death, you know?”

“From the Tony Curtis movie of the same name,” I said.

“It was bubonic.”

“It certainly was.”

“Killed a third of England’s population.”

“Sound of Music was even worse.”

“Anyway,” she said, and raised her eyebrows and quirked her mouth as though in exasperation, but it was clear she was enjoying herself now, feeling comfortable enough with me to be able to make a fleeting facial comment on my corny humor, and then move right on unperturbed to the very serious business at hand, which was how she happened to know anything at all about Wat Tyler who had been killed by the mayor of London in 1381, lo, those many years ago, when both of us were still only little kids. “Anyway,” she said again, and turned her brown eyes full onto my face, demanding my complete attention, as though knowing intuitively it was wandering to other less important topics, never once suspecting, heh-heh, that I was lost in thought of her alone, of how absolutely adorable she looked when she struck her professorial pose, relating talcs of poxes and such, and stared back into her lady-hypnotist eyes and wanted to bark like a dog or flap like a chicken, “ Anyway , when I was looking up all this crap, I learned that a couple of the labor statutes put into effect around the time of the plague were thought to have caused the great peasant rebellion of 1381, do you see?” she said.

“You have a tiny little beauty spot right at the corner of your mouth,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Listen, are you sure you know who Wat Tyler was?”

“Oh sure,” I said. “He led the great peasant rebellion of 1381. Against Richard II.”

“So what did I just say?”

“I don’t know, what did you just say?”

“I said that certain labor statutes...”

“That’s right...”

“... caused the rebellion of 1381.”

“So?”

“So Richard II was married to Anne of Bohemia.”

“I know.”

“So that’s why when you said you were Wat Tyler, I said I was Anne of Bohemia. Because when I was looking up plagues in the library... the hell with it,” she said. “What’s your real name?”

“That’s my real name.”

“Wat Tyler, huh?”

“Walter Tyler. Everybody calls me Wat, though. Except my grandfather sometimes. What’s yours?”

“Dana. Don’t laugh.”

“Dana what?”

“Castelli. Guess who I’m named after?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“You can imagine.”

“Oh no! Really?”

“Really. I was born in 1946, right after my mother saw him in The Best Years of Our Lives.”

“When in 1946?”

“Was I born, or did she see the picture?”

“Born.”

“December. Two days before Christmas.”

“So what did you find out about him?”

“Dana Andrews?”

“No, Plague. On the white horse.”

“I told you, there was no Plague. Only War, Famine, Death, and Jesus.”

“Then all your research was for nothing.”

“I didn’t mind. I like libraries.” She smiled again. “Besides, it gives me something to talk about on trains.”

“Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry I asked you to move your bags.”

“Don’t be silly. I was being a hog.”

“Would you like a beer or something?”

“I don’t think there’s a bar car.”

“Has to be a bar car.”

“Had to be a Plague, too, but there wasn’t.”

“You watch the seats,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”

In the next to the last car on the train, I ran into Scott Dundee who was now a freshman at Tufts and who was sitting with a girl he introduced as “Gail Rogers, Simmons ’67,” the same asshole he’d always been. He asked if he could give me a lift home from Stamford, but I lied and said I was being picked up, preferring a taxi to his Great Swordsman company, and then hurrying into the last car, knowing by then of course that Dana Castelli had been right, there was no bar car. I lurched and staggered my way forward again, the New Haven Railroad performing in its usual glassy-smooth style, and when I got back to where she was sitting I nearly dropped dead on the spot. The guitar, the duffle bag, and both suitcases were piled onto the seat again, and Dana was turned away from the aisle, legs up under her, one elbow on the window sill, staring out at the goddamn telephone poles. I felt, I don’t know what, anger, rejection, embarrassment, stupidity, clumsiness, everything. And then, suddenly, she turned from the window, whipping her head around so quickly that her black hair spun out and away from her face like a Revlon television commercial, and her grin cracked sharp and clean and wide, confirming her joke, and we both burst out laughing.

That was the real beginning.

We talked all the way to Stamford.

She told me her father was Italian and her mother Jewish, this WASP princess of the western world. They had met while he was still a budding psychoanalyst in medical school, an ambition that cut no ice at all with her mother’s father, who objected to the marriage and who threatened to have this “Sicilian gangster” castrated or worse by some gangster friends of his own, he being the owner of a kosher restaurant on Fordham Road in the Bronx and therefore familiar with all kinds of Mafia types who rented him linens and collected his garbage. Joyce Gelb, for such was her mother’s maiden name, was then a student at Hunter College and running with a crowd the likes of which had only recently signed petitions for the release of the Scottsboro Boys. She wasn’t about to take criticism of her Sicilian gangster, who in reality was descended from a mixture of Milanese on his mother’s side and Veronese on his father’s and who anyway had blue eyes which she adored. Joyce told her father he was a bigot and a hypocrite besides, since he hadn’t set foot inside a synagogue since her mother’s death eight years ago, when he had said the Kaddish and promptly begun playing house with his cashier, a busty blond specimen of twenty-four. The couple, Joyce Gelb and Frank Castelli, eloped in the summer of 1941, fleeing to Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace in Elkton, Frank constantly glancing over his shoulder for signs of pursuing mohelim. In 1942, the Castellis bought a small house in Hicksville, Long Island. Secure from the draft (he had been classified 4-F because of his asthma) he began analyzing the neurotics in Hempstead and environs.