Evan Hunter - Sons

“Do you know the kind of town Hicksville was?” Dana said. “When I was still a kid, the suggestion came up that they should change the name of the town to something better, you know? Like there are some towns on Long Island with really beautiful Indian names — Massapequa, Ronkonkoma, Syosset — and even some very nice, well, suburban -sounding names like Bethpage and Lynbrook and, well you know. So guess what? The town fathers objected! They actually preferred Hicksville, can you imagine that? Which is just what it is, of course — Hicksville, U.S.A., I lived there until I was thirteen years old; the most thrilling thing that happened was the erection of a shopping center, you should pardon the expression.”

At the age of thirteen, as she was entering puberty (“and beginning to blossom,” Dana said, and winked and gave me a burlesque comic’s elbow), Dr. Castelli moved his practice and his family to Park Avenue...

“In the mid-Eighties, right?” I said.

“Seventy-ninth,” Dana said.

“Close,” I said.

“No cigar,” she said.

... and Dana began attending the Dalton School, no mean feat for a kid whose Italian grandfather still ran a latticeria on First Avenue, and whose Jewish grandfather made a good living keeping the fleishedig plates from the milchedig. She was now, she told me, an English major at Boston University, and she hoped one day to write jokes for television comedians, which I might think a strange and curious ambition for a girl, but after all some of the funniest people in America were women, witness Lady Bird Johnson, she said, without cracking a smile.

We began talking about Kennedy then, both of us realizing with a sudden shock that he had been killed just a year ago, and then doing what people inevitably did when talking about that day in November remembering with almost total recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news broke (“I could hear them saying, ‘The head, the head,’ and i listened in bewilderment and fear because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about my head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet.”). Dana had been in her father’s office, necking on his couch with a boy from CCNY, Friday being Dr. Castelli’s day at Manhattan General, where he worked with addicts on the Narcotics Service. The radio had been tuned to WABC, Bob Dayton spewing machine-gun chatter and canned goodies from The Beatles, when the announcer broke in to say that Kennedy’s motorcade had been fired upon, the news causing Dana to leap up from the couch not a moment too soon, being as she was in a somewhat vulnerable position just then.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, and felt violently protective all at once, ready to strangle the snot-nosed, pimply-faced City College rapist who had dared put his hand under her skirt or whatever it was he’d been doing.

“Well, you know,” Dana said.

“Sure,” I said.

Which led us into talking about the MIT sweatshirt she was wearing, and how she had come into possession of it so early in her college career, the fall term at B.U. having started only in September.

She told me that she had met this dreamy boy at the Fogg Museum one rainy Saturday (Oh, please, I said, where are the violins?) and he’d turned out to be a very sensitive young man who had managed to get out of East Berlin immediately after the Russians lifted their blockade in 1949. (A German, I said, that’s real groovy. What was his father during the war? A baker?) His father, Dana promptly informed me, was Jewish and in fact a survivor of Auschwitz, which, I might remember, was a German concentration camp, in fact the camp where four million Jews were annihilated, in fact. His father had chosen to continue living in Germany...

“What’s this guy’s name?” I said.

“I don’t see what difference that makes,” she said.

“I like to know who we’re talking about, that’s all,” I said.

“His name is Max Eckstein,” she said.

“He sounds like a Max Eckstein,” I said.

“The way I sounded like a Radcliffe girl, right?” she said.

“All right, go on, go on,” I said.

... his father had chosen to continue living in Germany, Dana told me, rather than emigrating to Israel or America because he felt that Hitler had almost succeeded in destroying the entire German Jewish community, and if there were to be any Jews at all in Germany, some survivors had to elect to stay and raise their families there. But whereas he had been slow to recognize what was happening in Germany in ’38 and ’39, he immediately realized in 1949 that the Communists were constructing in Berlin a state not too dissimilar from Hitler’s. He had packed up his wife Dora, his seven-year-old daughter Anna, and his five-year-old son Max, and together they had fled to America. Anna had since married a football player for...

“A what?” I said.

“A football player. For the New York Giants,” Dana said.

“How’d a German refugee get to meet a...?”

“She’s quite American,” Dana said. “She was only seven when she came here, you know.”

“Yes, and little Maxie was five.”

“Little Maxie is now twenty,” Dana said. “And not so little.”

Her relationship with Max, she went on to say, was amazingly close, considering the fact she’d known him such a short time, actually only a month and a half, she’d met him in the middle of October on a...

“Yes,” I said, “a rainy Saturday, I know.”

“He’s a very nice person. You’d like him.”

“I hate him,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just how close is this relationship?” I asked.

“Close,” Dana said.

“Are you engaged or something?”

“No, but...”

“Going steady?”

“Well, we don’t have that kind of an agreement. I mean, I can see anybody I want to, this isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. I just haven’t wanted to go out with anyone else.”

“Well, suppose I asked you out?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what you have in mind.”

“You mean you want to know where I’d take you?”

“No, no. I mean the relationship between Max and me is very close, and I haven’t really any need for what you might have in mind, if it’s what you have in mind. That’s what I mean.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean Max and I are very, well, close,” she said, and shrugged. “Do you see?”

“No.”

“Well, I really don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“So if you want to just go to a movie or something, or maybe take a walk if you’re in the city one weekend...”

“Gee, thanks a whole heap,” I said.

“Well, there’s no sense being dishonest.”

“You’re sure Maxie won’t disapprove? I certainly wouldn’t want to get him upset.”

“His name is Max, " Dana said.

“Say, maybe the three of us could go to a movie together,” I said. “You think Max might be able to come down one weekend?”

“He’s carrying a very heavy program,” Dana said.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to go alone,” I said. “How about Thursday?”

“Thursday’s Thanksgiving.”

“Friday then.”

“All right. So long as you understand.”

“I understand only one thing.”

“Which is what?”