Evan Hunter - Sons

“When he gets home at night.”

“Home?”

“My husband.”

“Home?” Ace said. “Home from where?”

“He’s a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He’s stationed at Northington General in Tuscaloosa. He gets home every night about six o’clock. Unless there’s an epidemic or something.”

“I take it there is no epidemic right now,” Ace said.

“No,” Hattie said.

“Nor one expected for Sunday.”

“No. I really don’t think he’d mind, though, if you fellows came over. He likes steak.”

“Might be difficult to find an open butcher on Sunday,” I said.

“Mmm, yes, hadn’t thought of that,” Ace said. “And what about ration coupons?”

“What about that Lycoming radial?” I said.

“What about it?” Ace said.

“That faulty horse. Supposed to be two ninety-five,” I said.

“He’s talking about the Curtiss AT-9,” Ace explained to Hattie. “Oh,” Hattie said.

“We’re supposed to check the red-line entry,” I said.

“There’re these two Lycoming radial engines, each two hundred and ninety-five horses.”

“Oh,” Hattie said.

“One of them’s missing,” Ace said.

“One of the horses,” I said.

“Dangerous to fly her that way.”

“Have to tend to the horses.”

“Supposed to do it before tomorrow morning.”

“Almost tomorrow morning now,” I said.

“Better be going,” Ace said, and rose. He executed a courtly bow, lifted Hattie’s left hand with the wedding band and small gleaming diamond to his lips, brushed a gentle kiss against it, and said, “Until next time, Hattie.”

“Goodnight, Hattie,” I said.

“Charmed,” Hattie said.

Outside the mess hall, Ace took off his hat, wiped the sweat band, and replaced it on his head at a precariously jaunty angle, but not before I’d noticed that his thatch of brown hair was already beginning to thin at the crown. On the way over to the EM’s Club, he told me he would be nineteen years old in a few months, and that his real name was Avery Gibson. The nickname, he explained, had nothing whatever to do with his flying prowess. It was instead the result of an inventive WASP father who, in fine Saturday Evening Post tradition, had bestowed “Ace” on Avery at the age of three, and “Skipper” on his older brother Sanford. The older brother was now in the Pacific with a PT-boat squadron, his rate being Gunner’s Mate/Third, his nickname apparently causing no end of conflict with the lieutenant (j.g.) who commanded the boat. Ace said he hated his own nickname because it gave him all the renown of a Western gunslick; everyone was waiting to shoot him down long before they met him. But I noticed that he walked with a cocky rolling gait, as though he were carrying an invisible swagger stick in one clenched fist, and he wore his uniform with all the authority of an already commissioned officer.

In the club, we sat drinking beer and talking.

Ace was from Reading, Pennsylvania, where his father, Stuart Gibson, was a stockbroker. His mother, Miriam, whom everyone called “Mims,” kept horses. Six horses. Ace hated horses, an aversion directly attributable to the fact that he had been thrown from the saddle at the tender age of ten and then dragged, foot caught in the stirrup, for some twenty feet before Mom-Mims caught the horses bridle and brought the beast to a stop. His father kept a forty-four-foot ketch on the Schuylkill, and he could be found out on the sailboat most good weekends, though it was Ace’s estimate that he was lucky if he got to use it twenty days all summer. It was apparent from what Ace said that he had as little love for boats as he had for horses.

Surprisingly, I said out loud, “Don’t you like your parents?”

“Do you like yours?” he asked.

“My mother’s dead,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“She died last year. I liked her, though. I think I liked her.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s okay,” I said, and shrugged. “He sure gave me a lot of static about joining up.”

“Mine was eager to get me out of the house,” Ace said, and smiled.

“It’s just he’s so dumb about some things,” I said. I guess I felt a little guilty saying it; he was, after all, my father. So I quickly told Ace how much I respected a man who had started as a lumberjack in Wisconsin and had gone on to become a very important man in the paper industry. I sketched in his early days as a trainee at Ramsey-Warner, relating the story the way I’d heard my father tell it so many times at the dinner table, and then explained how he had taken a job as salesman for the Circle Mill after he’d lost his first job, and how after fifteen years of tough in-fighting he had become Executive Vice President, from which position he was finally able to challenge the company’s president, an older party who was slowly becoming incapable of making tough business decisions. The challenge had involved two vital points, and perhaps my father would have lost the battle if he hadn’t convinced the board that he was right about both. One was a takeover offer from Ramsey-Wamer, the company he’d once worked for, and the other had something to do with wallpaper, either with severely cutting production of it, or increasing production, I’d forgotten which. But the board sided with him. and almost eighteen years to the day he’d started at Circle, my father became president of the company, which was certainly something to admire. Ace admitted that it was certainly something to admire and then, probably shamed by his own earlier references to old Stu, told me how his father, too, had been an uneducated man who took it upon himself to learn the workings of the market and then had amassed a fair fortune playing with stocks, which was certainly nothing to sneeze at. It certainly wasn’t anything to sneeze at, I agreed. Thus having coped with our separate heresies, we went on to discussing more pleasant matters, namely Ace’s brother Skipper, of whom he seemed genuinely fond, and whom he described as “a really handsome guy, Will, the original golden boy.” I told him a little about Linda then, and what a great crazy kid she was.

We finished our beers and walked over to the flight line, where the planes sat in a moonlit row, ready for the morning (light. Ace told me he couldn’t wait to begin flying that old P-38, which was only the best damn fighter plane ever built. I told him that the way the war was going, we might not get over there in time to fly one, and he said, “Don’t you worry, Will. This war ain’t going to end till I get there to end it,” and then laughed his cluttering little laugh, which I still found annoying.

There were several other annoying things about him.

I discovered, for example, that he had a remarkable sense of humor and a truly enormous stockpile of jokes for every occasion. (That wasn’t the annoying thing.) The annoying thing was that whenever he saw or heard something that nudged his joke file, he would automatically recall the punch line out loud, “Yeah, but lost time we were taking movies,” and then would say, “Do you know that joke, Will?” and whether you knew it or not, “Yes, I know it, Ace,” he would go right on to tell the entire joke, anyway. So if you’d heard it, you would have to sit through it again in Technicolor with Ace relishing each hilarious syllable. And if you hadn’t heard it, you had in effect heard it because he’d already given the punch line before telling the joke. The result was mind-numbing. Then, in a luncheonette later that night, after we’d taken a jitney into Columbus, and after Ace had told seven jokes, three of which I’d already heard, the punch lines to the other four already delivered, I discovered another of his little faults, and this one really bothered me.