Evan Hunter - Sons

It was Michael who suggested that we stroll over to McKeon and surprise the little Prine girl. I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but we’d been sitting in a bar for close to two hours, and it was so beautiful and bright outside that it seemed a shame to kill the rest of the day that way. So we paid for the drinks, and then walked east toward Madison Avenue, and at three-fifteen were standing before the wide front steps of the school waiting for her to emerge. Michael seemed immediately at ease with her, even though I could not yet shake the thought that I was robbing the cradle. He cracked a few exploratory dirty jokes which caused her to burst into delighted laughter (I remembered all at once the day he told the Confucius Say joke in Lindy’s presence) and then asked her if she was old enough to drink beer, and when she said they wouldn’t allow her inside a bar unless she could show identification, went into a grocery store on Lexington Avenue (I guess it was; I was still unimaginably confused by New York’s simple layout of avenues and streets) and we walked over to Fifth Avenue and took a double-decker bus up to Fifty-ninth (outside the Plaza Hotel?) and walked into the park there and sat on the grass and drank the beer and spent the afternoon together.

It must have been five-thirty, a quarter to six, when we decided to take Dolores home before her mother called out the National Guard. We were coming out of the park when we passed an old man snuffling into his handkerchief (I don’t think we really noticed him at the time, I think he only registered in retrospect) and several yards behind him was a woman, a younger woman obviously in no way connected with the old man, and she was openly weeping. And the next person we passed had a stunned look on his face, and there was an odd ominous buzz on the air as we walked past the fountain outside the hotel, and Dolores suddenly turned to me and said, “Something terrible has happened. We’ve lost the war.”

A sailor was standing alongside the plate glass window of the department store on Fifty-seventh and Fifth, blinking as if trying to hold back tears. I went over to him and said, “What’s the...?” but before I could finish my question, he snapped to attention and threw a salute at me, and I patiently returned the salute, and then said, “What’s the trouble, sailor?” and he said, “The President is dead, sir.”

“What?” I said.

“Roosevelt,” he said.

“Roosevelt?” I said, and felt enormously stupid all at once, as if we were engaged in a baggy-pants vaudeville routine. He had told me the President was dead, hadn’t he? And the President was Roosevelt, wasn’t he? Then why had I repeated his name as though saying it aloud would deny the fact — no, he could not be dead, he had been President for as long as I could remember, he could not now be dead, we would lose the war, oh Jesus, we would lose the war and the world would be enslaved.

Dolores suddenly threw herself into my arms and began weeping against my shoulder.

It was then that I began to think I was falling in love with her.

The war in Europe, which had seemed so close to ending, now seemed fiercely determined to prolong itself. A rattle was sounding on the expectant air, signaling the death of something quite familiar, something almost loved, this war that had been with us for so long a time and which now refused to expire the way a proper invalid should have, coughing itself out in the stillness of the night. Our new President, Harry S. Truman, said, “Our demand has been, and it remains, unconditional surrender,” but Allied Supreme Headquarters in Paris announced that despite persistent rumors to the contrary, there had been no substantial advances toward Berlin, and our closest units to the city were still more than fifty miles away. It was a time of dying, that April, beginning with the death of Roosevelt, the largest death I had known since my mother’s, and then dwindling into a series of anticlimactic smaller deaths as we awaited the ultimate collapse, the end of the European war — the deaths of cities, the deaths of rivers crossed, the deaths of bastions stormed and bunkers demolished, the death of an era. Into this time of dying, into this loud and raucous, constant and endless communique from the front, there was insinuated like a delicate flute refrain, the beginning of Dolores Prine and me, or rather (like the smaller deaths) a series of smaller explorations that were leading, we suspected, to a larger beginning for us both.

Troops of the Third Army were thirteen miles from the Czech border on the north and on the west, the Seventh Army pushed to within fifteen miles of Nuremburg, the Canadians advanced toward the Zuider Zee, the United States First swept northward through the Ruhr pocket and engaged in bloody street-to-street combat in Halle, the French took Kenl on the Rhine, and in a hamburger joint on Sixth Avenue, when I asked Dolores if she minded my eating onions, she answered, “Yes, I mind terribly,” and suddenly kissed me for the first time. The French marched to within ten miles of the Swiss border, the United States Seventh crossed the Fils River and took Weilhelm, we were ten miles from Bremen, we had occupied Bologna after a nineteen-month campaign, the Soviet High Command announced that Russian troops “had marched a thousand miles from the gates of Moscow” to capture Erkner at the eastern limits of Berlin, and in a taxicab heading for Sutton Place, I put my hand under Dolores Prine’s skirt, and she tightened her thighs on it at first, catching it and stopping my advance, and then opened slowly to my pressure, my fingers touching the mound bulging crisply beneath her cotton panties, “Will,” she said, “please,” but I did not remove my hand, the American armies were standing on the banks of the Mulde River, and the Russians were only forty-eight miles away.

Who was this girl?

I hardly knew.

Beautiful, yes, I thought she was perhaps the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, but I had thought that from the very start, when she’d walked into the apartment on the arm of her Lebanese rug salesman, and that had never changed. There was too, I suppose, the promise of passion in her hazel eyes, daring me, mocking me, a passion only partially unleashed — her twistings beneath me on the grass in Central Park, dusk falling, “We’ll get mugged if we don’t watch out, Will,” and a schoolgirl giggle — it was only a matter of time, she knew it, I knew it, and I dreamt each night at Mitchel Field of entering her and hearing her shriek aloud in ecstasy. That was there, then, the promised passion of Dolores my flamenco dancer, that and a suspected capacity for pain, too, which seemed equally Spanish in origin, though her father was Irish (“With a fifth of scotch thrown in,” he told me) and her mother was Dutch. But beyond the wild expectation of taking her to bed — she seemed to me the materialization of every pin-up picture I had hung on barracks walls from Mississippi to Italy and back again — was there really a beginning here, a gentle flute song floating on the wind of a dying April, was there really anything to love about this lovely girl? (She was, it occurred to me once, when I was feeling unusually Freudian, the total opposite of Francesca, the beauty of Foggia, and perhaps to me the symbol of everything clean, innocent, and alive, as opposed to everything soiled, corrupt, and dead — well, not the total opposite, I suppose, since the old man Gino had a cataracted eye and Dolores’ brother wore a patch over an empty socket. I didn’t too often think psychoanalytically, however, and I was probably dead wrong.)

She wrote poetry. She showed me one of her efforts several days before I finally took her naked on her quilted bed in the back bedroom of the Sutton Place apartment while her one-eyed brother was out dancing and her parents were visiting friends in Connecticut for the weekend and two Russian armies were pushing the Germans further back into Berlin. The poetry was terrible.