Evan Hunter - Sons

“Oh,” I said. We lay stiffly beside each other in the darkness. I could hear her expectant breathing, the sound of the water tap dripping in the kitchen, a train chugging along the tracks a mile away to the south. “Nancy,” I said, “are you sure you want to go back to him? Maybe we ought to...”

“Bert,” she whispered, “a person’s not worthy of the honeycomb if he shuns the hive because the bees have stings.”

I nodded in the darkness.

“Don’t you want to do it to me?” she asked.

“Yes, sure... what’d you say?”

“I feel like one of those women you told me about a long time ago,” she whispered. “The ones who jazz,” she whispered, and suddenly, surprisingly, began giggling, and threw herself into my arms, and kissed me with her mouth open.

At the end of January, we climbed the steps to Dr. Brunner’s office again, dreading what he might tell us. He shook hands with me, nodded to Nancy, and then led us into his consulting room, where we both took chairs opposite his desk. Dr. Brunner glanced at a sheaf of papers, moved a tongue depressor to the side of the desk where he neatly arranged it parallel to the edge of the blotter, cleared his throat, and told us that there was nothing wrong with either of us, the laboratory tests had shown the number and motility of my sperm to be normal (how casually he discussed my sperm in the presence of my wife!) and he had been able to determine from the daily record of Nancy’s oral temperature that she was indeed ovulating. In other words, we were both healthy and normal and not what could be even remotely considered an infertile couple. Very often, though, perfectly healthy normal couples like us could go for five years (Nancy winced) or even ten years (she turned to give me a swift hopeless glance) without having a baby, but then suddenly the woman would get pregnant, and would go on to have a dozen children after that, it was all a matter of patience. Nancy cleared her throat and asked the doctor whether the influenza might have had something to do with her not being able to conceive, and he said, “Nothing at all, Mrs. Tyler, I’ve just told you, there’s nothing wrong with either of you.” But she persisted, asking next about the encephalitis, and receiving the same response, and then telling him that she had come out of her illness a bit deaf, wasn’t it possible that something else — finally causing Dr. Brunner to shout (I remember thinking he would not have lost his temper that way if we’d been rich) “My dear child, I assure you you’re a healthy young horse, and that you can have children and probably will have children if only you’ll be patient.” Thank you, Nancy had said politely, and we left his office in silence.

As we walked down the narrow steps to the street outside, I said, “Well, Nance, we’ll just have to keep trying, that’s all. He says there’s nothing wrong with us.”

Nancy only nodded.

I remember thinking that if a woman could get pregnant just by nodding her head in a certain way, Nancy would have conceived right that minute on Twenty-sixth Street.

A paper mill is not an attractive place.

Aesthetically, Ramsey-Warner Papers, Incorporated, was perhaps as beautiful, say, as the prison at Joliet, with stacks puffing great billows of smoke onto the air, giant digesters rising like steel barn silos from the landscape, concrete buildings cramped side by side, each a different height and shape, some as tall and as narrow as machine-gun towers, others squat and lying close to the land, railroad sidings twisting past the mill or curving into it, freight cars clacking and clattering, huge rolls of stacked wrapped paper silently waiting, jackladders lifting logs onto stockpiles, chains clanging, wood looming in tangled pyramids, trucks and men in motion, everything painted a flat institutional gray, as bleak as February itself, as depressing as my own state of mind. I needed something to happen, but nothing ever did. And so I shouted my complaints over the tumbling bellow of the drum barker, and Allen Garrett shouted back, and in that way we made the days pass.

“I’m not siding with the radicals, Allen, but you can’t expect me to side with Palmer, either!”

“He’s a good man!”

“Oh sure! ‘My motto for the Reds is S.O.S. — ship or shoot.’ Is that a way for the Attorney General of the United States to be talking, like some ignorant uneducated greenhorn? ‘Ship or shoot,’ what kind of language is that for a man in high office?”

“You always quote only half!” Allen shouted.

“That is not half!”

“He also said, ‘I believe we should place them on a ship of stone, with sails of lead...’”

“All right, all right.”

“ ‘... and that their first stopping place should be Hell.’ That’s good language, Bert. It’s almost poetic.”

“Poetic or not, it’s crazy! Reacting this way to some kind of imaginary takeover of America...”

“It’s not imaginary, damn it!”

“... is just plain crazy. And I don’t care if you start calling me a Red or a Communist or...”

“Did I call you anything?”

“... whatever, I just refuse to get as crazy as everybody else in this country is getting. Do you know how many Communists there are in America?”

“Yes.”

“Why, if there are fifty thousand...”

“There’re more like five hundred thousand!”

“Oh sure, there are! Who’s counting them, would you like to tell me? And why aren’t we worrying about the Klan, that’s going around tarring colored people and hanging them, now that’s a terrible thing, Allen, that’s worse than what we were told the Germans were doing during the war. But instead — now here’s what I mean, Allen, here’s exactly what I mean...”

“I think you’d like some coon to get your job, that’s what I think.”

“No, you just listen to me. There’re two Dixieland bands right here in Chicago who wear the same costumes that the Klan docs, the same white sheets and hoods, you know, with the eye holes in them, and one of the bands calls itself The Phantom Four, and the other one’s The Night Riders. They’re both very good bands, I hear, but what happens to the whole idea of right and wrong, Allen, if you can wear the same costumes as killers and make music in them? Where’s the reality, Allen, do you see what I mean? What’s real?”

“These logs are real, the drum barker’s real, the mill is real. America is real,” he said.

I was in Saigon.

The Army had flown me (via a commercial carrier called Saturn Airways) to Cam Ranh Bay three days ago, with orders to report to the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry in Cu Chi, about eighteen miles northwest of Saigon, and not too distant from the Cambodian border. From Cam Ranh, a Chinook had lifted me to the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where I was billeted at a processing center called Camp Alpha, awaiting transportation.

There was a permanent party of about forty-five men on the post, the rest of us being soldiers in transit to base camps all over the country, or headed out on R and R tours. Peter Lundy was a guy from Stamford, against whom I’d played football when I was on the Talmadge team. He was in Army Finance now, and part of the permanent party at Tan Son Nhut. I met him in the mess hall my first night there. We talked a little about the old rah-rah days, and then he filled me in on the chow situation, and the girl situation, and told me how fortunate I was to have run into him because only permanent party were allowed off the post and into Saigon, but he thought he could get me past the security guards at the gate if I wanted to go in with him tomorrow afternoon.