Evan Hunter - Sons

I had very little difficulty getting away from Yale for weekends, but our trysts involved a certain amount of subterfuge on Dana’s part. Dana was but a mere female freshman living in Shelton Hall and blanket permission (pun unintended by the administration of B.U., I’m sure) for overnights had to be in writing from her parents. With permission, she was entitled to unlimited weekends, provided she signed out before the two a. m. curfew, and left a telephone number where she could be reached. Dana had little difficulty convincing Dr. Castelli that blanket permission would be far simpler than having to call home each time she was invited to spend a weekend with a girlfriend. And the telephone number she left at Shelton each Friday afternoon before putting her check in the overnight column was of course the one at Lenny’s apartment.

Providence was a singularly grubby town, but Lenny’s apartment was really quite nice. I had always thought artists were sloppy people who left twisted paint tubes and dirty rags all over the place, but Lenny was very tidy. In fact, since he was in Graphic Design rather than Fine Arts, he hardly ever worked in oils, and the place was miraculously free of the aroma of paint or turpentine, which could have been disastrous in a one-room apartment with a screen separating the kitchen from the bedroom-living room. Lenny had hand-decorated the screen himself, using the Nuclear Disarmament symbol in various sizes as an over-all black-and-white pattern. The symbol, Dana informed me, was a composite of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D, this information having incidentally been garnered by her in library research for a paper she was doing on William Shakespeare, figure it out. The screen stood at the foot of the bed, and tacked to it was a very decorative poster Lenny had painted in blues and reds, advising everyone to MAKE love, not war, though actually we didn’t need any reminders.

I loved Dana very much.

Before Dana, I had only had a relationship with one other girl in my life, and that had been Cass Hagstrom. The time with Cass had been very exciting for me because she was the first girl who had let me do anything substantial to her and I was overwhelmed and grateful. That was also when everything else was really going great for me — Dawn Patrol was playing almost every Friday and Saturday night, I was the football team’s captain and quarterback, and I was maintaining a ninety average at Talmadge High. I was as much in love with life, I guess, as I was with Cass.

But even the most exciting times with Cass, and there were some, did not compare with what I experienced with Dana. I loved everything about Dana, and this wasn’t a matter of a first sex experience, nor were things going so great at Yale, either, because they weren’t. In fact, to be perfectly truthful, I was having a very difficult time adjusting to college life, being burdened with two creepy roommates, and carrying a full program of English, French, History, Economics, and Physics. Moreover, I was confused about a lot of things.

I had dutifully registered for the draft in October 1964, within five days after my eighteenth birthday, aware that I owed the Army two years of compulsory service, and ready though reluctant to pay my debt to the country. Well, that’s corny, banners waving and bugles blowing and all that crap. But I believed in freedom, you see, I believed in the concept of self-government, and I recognized that a great nation did have responsibilities to the rest of the world, and I was committed to sharing those responsibilities. I knew my Army duty would be postponed so long as I kept up my grades at Yale and continued to be classified a student, but I knew that eventually I would have to serve, and whereas the idea was a pain in the ass, patriotism aside, I was nonetheless ready to do what had to be done.

In February 1965, I began to get confused.

I don’t think Dana had anything to do with my confusion, though perhaps she may have. She was a very opinionated beautiful young lady, and her contempt for President Johnson was something monumental. Like a lot of girls, she had accepted Kennedy as a sort of father-image with whom incest was not only thinkable but perfectly acceptable. And then, cut of all cuts, this positively groovy guy had been replaced by a real father-type who had a stern demeanor and a disapproving down-turned mouth, who wore eyeglasses when he read his speeches, who whooped it up with all the ladies at the inaugural ball, and who spoke in a lazy Texas way designed to alienate every kid on the eastern seaboard, if not the entire world. Dana’s favorite nickname for him was “Ole Flannel Mouth,” though she also began calling him “Loony Bins Johnson” shortly after the inauguration. In Lenny’s apartment one night, she performed for me a ten-minute argument between LBJ and his daughter, which ended with him shouting, “Well, I reckon Ah’m the Pres’dent, and y’all kin not have the automobile tonight!” When I told her that he was a good administrator who could goose Congress into giving us some much-needed legislation, Dana said, “Oh, crap, Wat,” and tacked another anti-Johnson Pfeiffer cartoon to Lenny’s Ban-the-Bomb screen, and then did a devastating take-off of Johnson collaring unsuspecting senators in the cloakroom and twisting their arms to vote for legislation on new bird sanctuaries, her imitation developing to the point where I’m positive it was slanderous (though I have to admit it was funny as hell, too.)

February got confusing.

I’m not trying to say that everything wasn’t pretty confusing to begin with. I had two roommates in Edwin McClellan Hall. One was named Alec Kupferman, and he was a spooky kid with a beard who hardly ever said a word to anyone, wandering around the campus and the room immersed in whatever private thoughts consumed him day and night. I don’t think he attended classes. He would appear like a sudden hallucination in the doorframe, and merely nod, and go to his bed, and put his hands behind his head and stare up at the ceiling. I felt very uneasy whenever he was around, which thank God was not too often. My other roommate was a winner, too. He was a kid named Abner Nurse from Salem, Massachusetts, who claimed that he was a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse who had been tried and hanged for a witch in 1692. I believed it. If ever there was a warlock in the world, it was Abner Nurse. He had red eyes. I swear to God, they were red. Not fire-engine red, of course, but a brown that was so close to orange it was red, especially when he sat at his desk late at night with the single lamp burning, probably reading up on evil potions and deadly brews from a witch book hidden behind his copy of Playboy. He had black hair that stuck up on his head in two spots, exactly like horns. I had never seen him naked, because he was very shy about taking showers when anybody else was around, but I think that’s because he had a long tail he kept tucked up inside his underwear. He changed his underwear every day. He always left his Jockey shorts in a corner of the room, like a neat little burial mound, until there was a week’s supply piled up there, and then he would pick them up and carry them down the hall to the john where he would hand-launder them as though they were dainty delicate unmentionables. I once heard him talking in his sleep, and what he said was “Hanna-Kribna” over and over again in rising cadence, which I’m sure was authentic Salem witch talk. When I caught him reading a rather personal letter from Dana to me, I told him I would bust him in the mouth if he ever did it again, and he rooted me to the spot with his red-eyed satanic gaze and shouted, “Descend in flames, turd!” and then laughed maniacally and stalked out of the room. I didn’t hit him because he was somewhat larger than I, measuring six feet four inches from the top of his head to the tips of his cloven hoofs, and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds in his Jockey shorts.