Evan Hunter - Sons

“I’m just not sure, Grandpa.”

“Don’t you like school?”

“I like it.”

“Having trouble with somebody there? One of the teachers?”

“No.”

“Is it Dana?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“All right,” my grandfather said, and smiled, and looked down at the shingles and said, “Think we’ve got enough to get us through the winter?” and smiled again, and put the ax back in the shed and then rolled down his cuffs, and I started piling the rest of the split wood in orderly rows against the chimney. I wanted to tell my grandfather what I was thinking of doing, wanted to get an opinion other than Dana’s, but I was afraid he’d think I was a coward. So I worked silently, with my brow wrinkled, longing to communicate with him and knowing I could not. And finally, when I’d stacked all the wood, I said, again, “I’m just not sure, Grandpa,” and he said, “Well, why don’t we take a little walk?” and I looked at him curiously for just a moment because the last time I’d taken a walk with him was when I was six years old and we had gone up the hill behind the house on Ritter Avenue and looked out on a bright October day to where Long Island Sound stretched clear to the end of the world.

I had told him that day that there was a girl in the sixth grade whose name was Katherine Bridges, and I loved her, and she was the most beautiful girl in all Talmadge, even though she wasn’t born there but was adopted and had come from Minnesota. But I did not want to tell him now that Dana Castelli was the most beautiful girl in the world; I wanted only to tell him of what I’d been slowly but certainly deciding to do come fall, and I didn’t want to tell him that, either, because this was a man who had faced German bayonets in the trenches at Château-Thierry. Nor was it a particularly inviting day for a walk, the drizzle having grown heavier, not quite yet a true rain, but forbidding nonetheless.

We walked down to the ferry slip and watched the boat coming in through the fog, her horn bleating, and watched the passengers unloading. My grandfather suddenly said, Isn’t that Will?” and I looked to where he was pointing and saw a tall man wearing a Burberry trenchcoat coming down the gangway and striding onto the dock in a duck-footed walk that could have belonged to no one but a Tyler.

(In Wat Tyler’s camera eye, the man he sees striding toward him and his grandfather is simultaneously the villain who is keeping him from Dana and a rather impressively handsome gentleman with an expansive smile on his face. The images, double-exposed, are confusing. He wants to hate this man for his offhanded treatment of the Love Affair of the Century, and yet he cannot help but respect and admire him. For the first time in his life, or at least for the first time that he can remember, he wants to say, “Pop, I love you.” The screen images dissolve.)

My father saw us immediately and came to us, embracing first my grandfather, kissing him on the cheek, and then going through the same family ritual with me.

“I didn’t expect anyone to meet me,” he said. “I caught an earlier boat.”

“Actually, we were just going for a little walk, Will,” my grandfather said.

“Well, good,” my father said, and threw his arms around our shoulders, comrades three, and said, “I’ll join you,” which did not overly thrill me, because frankly I did not want him to know about the plan I’d been considering, and I was afraid my grandfather might mention the doubts I’d voiced about going back to Yale.

But we took off our shoes, all of us, and went onto the beach where the mist enveloped us, and walked close to the water’s edge, the ocean seeming warmer than the air, and we talked. We talked about the weather first, it being omnipresent, I explaining to my grandfather that the summer people were divided into two factions, those who believed the best weather came in July, and those who favored August. And from there, as a natural extension of talking about the weather, we began to discuss the riots that had taken place in Watts the week before, Watts being a Los Angeles community I’d never heard of before it made racial headlines, and I said something about heat probably being a contributing factor, and my grandfather expressed the opinion that heat had very little to do with emotions that had been contained for more than a century.

“I can remember once...” my father started, and then shook his head and fell silent.

“Yes, Will?” my grandfather said.

“No, nothing,” he answered, and shook his head again. He was walking between me and my grandfather, his shoes in his hands, his socks stuffed into the pockets of his trenchcoat, his trousers rolled up onto his shins. Together, the three of us skirted the sea’s edge, silent now.

(The screen is suddenly filled with the image of three spruces against a sky certainly much bluer than the real sky over Fire Island. The trees are swaying slightly, there is the whisper of wind on the sound track. The film must be a foreign import, the first such in Wat Tyler’s memory. There are English subtitles traveling along the bottom of the screen, as though blown there by the same wind rustling in the treetops. The titles are abominable. The first title reads HERITAGE, and the next reads GENERATIONS. Wat Tyler wishes to leave the theater of his mind, perhaps to buy some popcorn in the lobby.)

My grandfather began speaking again. He was a wise old bird, my grandfather, I don’t think I realized just how wise until that day on the beach when the mist insulated the three of us from the world. He must have understood, long before I did, that my father was truly in the center of our solitary march along the beach, geographically and genealogically, the only one of our company who could lay claim to being a father to one of us and a son to the other. Because of this, because my grandfather must have sensed the strain of this double role being exerted on his son and my farther, he led us gently into conversation, talking across my father to me, talking across me to my father, transforming our three-way discussion into something remarkably crazy.

(On the screen, the three spruces, one slightly taller than the next, have dissolved into the three Tyler men walking in the mist. But the men refuse to maintain fixed camera positions. One becomes interchangeable with another and yet another, so that it seems sometimes that Wat is talking directly to his father when he is really in conversation with his grandfather, seems at other times that Will is talking to Bertram when he is actually looking at Wat. The whole thing is very avant-garde. Wat is sure it will cop the Golden Lion Award at Venice.)

“You can’t expect violence to be self-restrictive,” my grandfather said.

“What do you mean?” my father said.

“The riots. Surely they’re linked to what’s happening in Vietnam.”

“I don’t see any connection.”

“He’s talking about our way of life,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Our way of life,” I repeated, knowing I still had not made myself clear, and looking to my grandfather for help. But his attention seemed momentarily captured by a boat barely visible through the fog on the water, and as we walked on the edge of ocean merged with shore, equally lost in obliterating fog, he remarked how crazy it was for a boat to be out in this kind of weather and then abruptly mentioned that he had read about the forty-one-year-old singer Frank Sinatra coming off his yacht, Southern Breeze, in the company of the nineteen-year-old actress Mia Farrow and two somewhat older actresses, for a Hyannis Port visit with the father of one assassinated President and two current United States senators.