Evan Hunter - Sons

I tried to break away, to get back to Nancy. I saw a knife suddenly appear in a Negro’s hand, I felt the same sense of futile confrontation I had felt in that Marne wheatfield so long ago, was I now to face another stranger, was I now to kill for another meaningless piece of real estate? The shouting, the noise, the insane chatter of sweaty combat filled the gravid air, a wooden club came down upon the man’s brown forearm, a gash of bright red blood ran from his elbow to his wrist, there were other men upon him now, and more running from every corner of the beach, a white man’s face pressed into the sand, a Negro stepped upon, a kick, more blows, cursing, I thought only Nancy, I must get to Nancy. I shoved my way through. She was on her feet when I readied her, I had never before seen a look of such utter disbelief on her face as I seized her hand and yanked her to me and, leaving our blanket and our picnic basket behind, rushed her away from this frightening mass of struggling humans.

“Meanwhile, the fighting continued along the lake,” I read to Allen Garrett from the Chicago Tribune on our lunch hour the next day. “Miss Helen Mehan and her sister, Marie, had been bathing with a friend, Lieutenant Banks, a convalescing soldier. A colored woman walked up to the trio and made insulting remarks, it is said. Banks attempted to interfere, but the colored woman voiced a series of oaths and promptly struck the soldier in the face. Negroes in the vicinity hurled stones and rocks at the women and both were slightly injured. In less than a half hour after the beach outbreak, Cottage Grove Avenue and State Street from 29th South to 35th were bubbling cauldrons of action.”

That cauldron was still bubbling and would continue to bubble until the end of the week, when 6000 troops of the state militia and 350 °Chicago policemen managed to restore order. By that time, 23 Negroes and 15 whites had been killed, 537 people had been injured, and 1000 more had been left homeless.

The militia was withdrawn on August 8.

When Dana and I got off the ferry at Fire Island Pines, my mother was waiting on the dock with a little red wagon upon which was painted the name of the people from whom we had rented for nine summers, ROSEN, the lettering expertly rendered, not for nothing was Sid Rosen an art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

My mother looked terrific.

She would be thirty-eight years old on the tenth of the month, Tuesday in fact, but summer did something for her each year, and from a distance I could visualize her as she must have looked as a young girl. She was wearing faded dungaree shorts and a blue tee shirt, her grin white against a deep tan, her brown hair windblown and curling somewhat from the salt air, legs and breasts still good (those never change, King Oedipus, sir, Your Majesty), moving swiftly toward the gangway with a nervous quick energy that made every step she took seem impulsive, almost impetuous. Summer robbed her of ten years each year; rob her of another ten gratuitously, and you had the eighteen-year-old girl Will Tyler, the returning lighter pilot ace, met in New York City in the spring of 1945. Not quite eighteen actually. I looked out over the dock. Will Tyler, ex-Air Force Wunderkind and current somewhat aging enfant terrible of the publishing world was nowhere in evidence. Home sulking, I thought, ruminating in his martini about the tastelessness of only sons who bring home girls with whom they are undoubtedly sleeping, for shame.

My mother embraced us both, lifting her cheek for Dana’s kiss.

“You brought the sun with you,” she said. “We’ve had nothing but rain for the past five days. Dana, you look lovely.”

“Thank you,” Dana said. She always seemed a bit shy in my mother’s presence. I suspected she didn’t like my father at all, but I knew she was genuinely fond of my mother, and I could never understand her reserve. We were coming away from the slip now, walking past the plumbing supply store, threading our way through the swarms of bicycles, wagons piled with luggage and groceries, summer people in shorts and swimming suits, all scattering off the dock and onto the narrow wooden walks. The Pines, when we had first begun coming to it in 1956 had been a quiet family community with one or two fags living in blissful silence far from the gay hectic life at Cherry Grove. It was now, I would guess, fifty per cent queer and fifty per cent straight, which was at least giving everybody a fair shot at equal housing opportunities. I still felt a little strange, though, whenever I was candidly appraised, as now, by a mincing boardwalk stroller (“Never take candy from strange men,” my grandmother had told me in the fastnesses of her Tudor City apartment, she being my only living grandmother, a spry old dame of sixty-six, with the same quick energy as her daughter Dolores Prine Tyler), but the discomfort wasn’t anything like what I had felt the first time my father took us to visit Cherry Grove. My embarrassment then, of course, had been caused only by deep insecurities about my own manhood, I being all of ten at the time. But I had not dug the scene, and I had never gone back.

My mother seemed excited to see us. She immediately told us all about the cocktail parties we’d been invited to during the next week (“Everyone’s dying to see you, Wat, and of course to meet Dana”) and the surprise birthday party being given for her on Tuesday night, and the possibility that we might be able to borrow a boat for a sail on Wednesday, but then assured us we could be by ourselves whenever we wanted (I thought at first she meant something other than she did) and that we were under no obligation to trail along with her and Dad.

“Where is Dad?” I asked.

“Back at the house,” she said. “He’s looking forward to seeing you both.”

I wondered, in that case, why he had not been at the dock, hmmm? It was my guess that he was still wrestling with the problem of who would sleep where and do what to whom, a surmise that was immediately confirmed when he grabbed our suitcases at the door of the house. “Wat!” he said. “Dana! Hey, it’s great to see you! How was the traffic coming out?”

“Oh, not bad,” I said, and found Dana and myself being drawn in his wake to the bedroom at the rear of the house, where he quickly deposited Dana’s bag, “This is your room, Dana,” and then turned to take my elbow in a firm, fatherly, guiding grip, wheeling me around the bend in the hallway and leading me to the bedroom near the kitchen (where I knew the damn screen needed repairing) and saying, “This is yours, Wat, do you both want to freshen up, or would you like a drink first?” He was being very tolerant in his attitude, including us in his adult world where you offered grown-ups drinks if they didn’t want to freshen up first after those tedious Long Island parkways, but he was also making it clear he didn’t expect any adult hanky-panky under his roof for the several weeks Dana and I would be there, preferring us to fornicate on the open beach instead, I guessed.

I looked at the single bed against the torn screen, and then I looked at my father, and his eyes met mine and clearly stated, That’s the way it is, son.

And my eyes dearly signaled back, Aren’t we being a little foolish?

And his said, If you want my approval, you’re not getting it, son.

And mine said, Okay, you prick.

Out loud, I said, “I see the screen’s still torn.”

Out loud, my father said, “I’ll get John to fix it in the morning,” John being the Pines idiot who went around fixing torn screens and putting bedboards under sagging beach mattresses.

I went back to Dana. She was still standing in the corridor around the bend, her hands on her hips. She looked totally forlorn. I took her in my arms.