Evan Hunter - Sons

“How?” my father asked.

“By refusing to fight the goddamn thing,” I said.

I was very close now. I was very close to telling him. We stopped walking for an instant, the three of us. I was trembling. My grandfather was suddenly standing between us, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on my father’s. I was not aware that he had moved, but he was between us.

“These are different times, Will,” he said gently.

“I fought my war,” my father said.

“So did I.”

“Then why...”

“And we also made our peace.”

A strange thing happened then. We both turned to our fathers at the same moment, we were both sons at the same moment. Simultaneously, my father and I both said, “Pop...” and then fell abruptly silent. I no longer knew what I wanted to say, or even if I wanted to say it. My father shook his head. We began walking up the beach again. The air seemed suddenly dense, the fog suffocating. It was my grandfather who broke the silence again.

“Have either of you seen The Sandpiper?” he said.

Quickly, with a glance at my father, I said, “We gave Burton and Taylor the award for August.”

“Award?” my father said. There was a dazed expression on his face, as though he had wandered into an alien world from a familiar and much-loved landscape. He had tucked his shoes under his arms, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat, looking first to me, and then to my grandfather, as though he did not recognize either of us.

“The Tyler-Castelli Award,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, and nodded, though I was sure he did not yet understand.

“For the Most Convincing Performances in a Religious Film,” I said.

“Supposed to be packing them in all over the country,” my grandfather said.

“That’s because truck drivers enjoy watching a man kiss his own wife,” I said.

“In Metrocolor,” my grandfather said.

“And Panavision,” I said.

“It isn’t always possible,” my father said abruptly.

“What isn’t?”

“Peace.”

“I’m sure Hanoi wants peace every bit as much as we do,” I said. “If we could just...”

“Do you mean Vietnam?” my grandfather said, and suddenly looked his son full in the face.

“Yes,” my father said too quickly, and I suddenly realized he had not been talking about Vietnam at all, and was immediately ashamed of my own driving need to make clear my position on the war. I wanted to shout, No, please, Pop, say what you were about to say, tell us what you really meant, but I knew the moment was gone. I thought Oh, Jesus, if only I hadn’t been here, he’d have told my grandfather, they’d have talked, they’d have talked together. And then I recognized that I was really thinking about myself and my father, and felt suddenly desolated, the way I’d felt that day waiting for the elevator, when he’d sent Mrs. Green to find out what I wanted for my graduation.

We walked the rest of the way up the beach in silence, my grandfather, my father, and I.

The bedroom Dana occupied was adjacent to the master bedroom and opposite the john. In the off-season, it belonged to the Rosens’ little girl who, judging from the evidence arrayed around the perimeter of the room, was a child with a scientific bent. On bookshelf and dresser top, end table and vanity was a formidable collection of spiders in jars. The spiders were all currently dead, but this was no indication that they had not been alive and hale when little Dwight (for such was the darling’s name — Dwight Rosen) had incarcerated them and fed them their wingless, legless flies, the withered carcasses of which now littered the bottom of each jar. As a homey touch (or perhaps as further nourishment — who knew the mysterious workings of the scientific mind?) Dwight had further provided a carpet of lettuce for each of her jarred prisoners, which leaves were now wilted, brown, and mildewed. Altogether, her collection was a little unappetizing.

Her room was an airless chamber, a single screened window facing the door, an opposition adequate perhaps for cross ventilation if the door were left ajar, but since Dana and I were naked on little Dwight’s bed, I had not deemed it appropriate to leave the door ajar, or even unlocked. Yes, the pink door was locked, and the flowered window shade was drawn over the screened window, so that the groping and the writhing on the bed was contained within those four walls even as the spiders were contained in their jars, unseen by any eyes save those of the Walt Disney characters who cavorted on the wallpaper, they being only dumb forest animals who could register neither complaint nor surprise.

My mother, while not wishing to aggravate our tenuously resolved Oedipal situation by letting on that she knew Dana and I were, uh, ah, enjoying an, uh, ahem, sexual relationship, had nonetheless collared me in the kitchen on the Friday after my grandfather left for London and informed me that she had been invited to a party down the beach at the Stenquists’ (Erik Stenquist being a closet queen with a wife who was apparently deaf, dumb, and blind) starting at live p. m. and that she’d be there until eight o’clock, at which time she planned to meet my father’s ferry, it being his habit (now that his vacation had ended) to take the six-thirty p. m. boat from Sayville every Friday night, and the eight-ten a. m. back each Monday morning.

“So I’ll be gone from five o’clock to a little after eight o’clock,” my mother said.

I said, “Oh, okay, Mom.”

She looked at me steadily, hazel eyes unwavering, and said, “I’ll be leaving at about ten to five, and your father and I won’t be back until a little after eight.”

“Fine,” I said.

“We’ll have dinner then,” my mother said. “Just some cold cuts, will that be all right?”

“Great,” I said.

“At eight o’clock or a little after,” my mother said. “When your father and I return.”

“Right,” I said, “you’ll be gone from five to eight.”

“Yes, from five o’clock to eight o’clock,” my mother said.

“Okay,” I said.

We nodded at each other like teacher and pupil who had just come through a particularly difficult educational experiment and were now anxious to march off to our just and separate rewards, hers being a few martinis at the Stenquists’, mine being Dana.

It was about seven o’clock, I suppose (I don’t really know because I had taken off my watch and put it on Dwight’s vanity alongside a jar containing a very large black and, I was sure, poisonous and thankfully dead spider) but it was probably around seven or thereabouts because we had come into the bedroom at five-thirty, giving Mom a half-hour’s grace period, and had made fast and furious love, and were now beginning to explore each other again, not truly explore because you cannot explore territories already claimed, but beginning to walk around our acquisitions like proud landholders with pleased smiles and small nods, appreciatively and gratefully, and beginning also to get a little excited in the bargain, all metaphors aside. It was about seven o’clock, then, when I heard footsteps in the hallway outside, and sat straight up in bed, and heard the bathroom door closing across the hall, and heard someone urinating. Dana had clutched the sheet to her naked breasts (it’s true that girls do that, I had never believed it when I saw it on the screen) and had turned to me with her brown eyes wide, neither of us speaking, both of us listening to the interminable stream across the hall behind the closed bathroom door, and then the door opened again, and there were more footsteps, retreating, the floorboards creaking in the old seaside house, and I heard my father’s voice call from the living room, “Dolores?” and hesitate and then call again, “Anybody home?”