Evan Hunter - Sons

“Drink, Dana?” my father called from out of sight somewhere, the liberal Spanish dueña sans mantilla or black lace fan.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Tyler,” Dana piped, and then whispered, “Listen, are we supposed to...”

“What are you having?” my father called.

“Whatever you’ve got!”

“We’ve got everything!”

“Just some scotch, please,” Dana said. “With a little water. Wat, are we supposed to even know each other?” she whispered.

“I’ll climb the trellis each night,” I said.

“There is no trellis,” Dana said. “Besides, what’s that big bedroom right next door? That’s the master bedroom, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Wat...”

“In fact, I know so.”

“Wat, do you want a drink?” my father called.

“Yes!” I shouted. “I think I need one.”

“What?”

“Yes, a little scotch on the rocks, please.”

“Coming up,” my father said.

“Did you get the kids settled?” my mother asked from the kitchen.

“Yes, Dolores, the kids are settled,” my father said, not without a trace of smug satisfaction in his voice.

“I’ll wither and die,” Dana whispered. “Oh, Wat, it’ll be just awful.”

The first week was, in fact, absolute hell because it was the week my father was taking away from his office (ten days, actually — he had come out on Friday the sixth). The way he wanted to spend his vacation, it seemed, was by wandering around that old gray clapboard house like one of the queen’s own guard, Dana being Her Majesty, and I being a surly peasant trying to break into her bedchamber. He scarcely ever left us alone during the day, and his snores from the master bedroom each night were an un-subtle reminder that the old family retainer was sleeping right there, man, ready to spring into action at the first hint of a footfall in the corridor outside. We finally did make love on the beach one night, but Dana was ashamed to take a shower after we tiptoed back into the house, because she said everyone (meaning Old Hawkeye) would know she’d got “sand all up her.”

I couldn’t understand my father at all. He was charming and pleasant to Dana, telling her really entertaining stories about the publishing field, spicing them with gossip about this or that literary celebrity, “Did you know that Jimmy Baldwin?” or “Were you aware that Bill Styron?” pretending to a vast inside knowledge that he honestly was not privy to; my father’s list consisted largely of books of photographs. (It was as if, in allowing the Tyler evolution to follow its natural growth pattern, he had brought it from lumber-jacking, through papermaking, into book publishing, and then had sophisticated it a step further by publishing books that were non-books; even as America itself had evolved from a nation where men first labored with their hands into a nation where machines did the work for men — and often did work that was utterly without meaning.) But despite what seemed to be his total acceptance of the girl I had chosen, he adamantly refused to let me possess her. I had the feeling more than once that he was actually coming on with her himself, that he looked too longingly at her breasts, leaped too hastily to light her cigarette, tried too hard for a cheap laugh to an old joke. I didn’t want a goddamn sparring match with my own father; I wasn’t attempting to turn the old bull out to pasture, but neither did I want him gamboling around with the young heifers. It was all very unsettling. I was having my own doubts about where I lit into the scheme of things just then (if my father’s publishing of picture books was a logical development in the growth of the Tyler family, what came next? Where did I take it from there? Was I the comparatively stunted tree in the foreground of the colophon, or the giant spruce towering against a limitless sky?), and I did not need added aggravation from dear old Dad.

My mother’s tactful intervention helped the situation somewhat. She was very careful to let me know whenever she and my father planned on being out of the house for more than a few hours, and on one occasion she managed to cajole him into taking her into the city for dinner. I even overheard her discussing the entire spectrum of morality with him one night, and whereas her admonitions did nothing to lessen his surveillance of the sanctum sanctorum, he at least quit hanging around Dana and me during the daytime, when all we wanted to do was lie on the beach together and talk quietly about my developing plans.

I found out about my father during our last week at the beach, so I guess you can say he had a lot to do with the decision I finally reached. But if there are endings, there are likewise beginnings, and my grandfather Bertram Tyler — the beginning — also had something to do with shaping my molten thought.

Grandpa, en route from Chicago to London where he was negotiating a contract for the export of clay-coated boxboard, came out to the beach unexpectedly, a few days after my father had gone back to work, amen. He had met Dana briefly at Christmastime, and was delighted to see her again now. But he looked tired, his blue eyes paler than I remembered them, his face somewhat drawn. As it turned out, I was unduly worried about him; he had had a truly harrowing trip from Chicago, with his plane circling Kennedy in the fog for an hour and a half before finally being turned away to Philadelphia International. He had taken a train to Pennsylvania Station (which was in the throes of a massive overhaul) and then another train out to Sayville, and then the ferry to the Pines, and was now near total collapse. Dana mixed him a martini that would have curled the toes of an Arabian used to drinking camel piss. My grandfather said, “Dana, this is just what I used to drink in Chicago in 1920,” and then called to my mother in the kitchen to come join us. “In a second, Pop,” she yelled back, “I’m getting some snacks,” and my grandfather put his feet up on the wicker ottoman and sighed and said, “It’s good to be home.”

We had our talk two days later.

The weather, heralded by the fog that had marked his arrival, had turned surly and gray again; a lire was needed each morning to take the chill out of the old house. We had used up the small supply of shingles in the living room scuttle, and my grandfather and I volunteered to replenish it. It was a pleasure to watch him work with an ax. I always felt that unless I was careful I’d chop off a couple of my own fingers, but he used the ax without even looking at it, almost as if it were an extension of his right hand, talking all the while he worked, the way some men can play piano and smoke and drink beer all at the same time without once missing a beat. He would hold the shingle upright in his left hand, the ax clutched close to the head in his right hand, and whick, a single sharp stroke and the shingle was split, another shingle appeared in his left hand, another whick, “How are you doing at school, Wat?” he asked.

“Oh, great,” I said. “Everything’s great.”

“Getting good marks?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I like your Dana.”

“I like her, too.”

“When do you go back?”

I didn’t answer him. He was looking directly at me, his left hand reached out automatically for another shingle, he felt sightlessly along its top for the true center, jabbed it with the ax once, sharply, raised his eyebrows and said, “Walter?”

“I’m not sure, Grandpa.”

“Not sure when you’re due back?”

“Not sure if I’m going back.”

“Oh?”

We didn’t say anything for several moments. My grandfather busied himself with splitting the shakes, and I busied myself with stacking them up against the chimney. The air was penetratingly bitter, tendrils of fog sliding in off the beach, a needle-fine drizzle cutting to the bone. I was wearing blue jeans and my Yale sweatshirt, but I was cold. My grandfather had not brought any beach clothes with him; he worked in pin-striped trousers and an open-throated white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his gold cuff links, studiously bent over each shingle now, even though he could have done the job blindfolded. At last, he said only, “How come, Walter?”