Evan Hunter - Sons

The Garretts entered my life only peripherally in those early days at Circle. We saw them socially perhaps once a week, sometimes less, and I knew that our friendship was dying a normal death, and that it might have been dead already had his betrayal not, paradoxically, spurred a renewed interest in it. What I had earlier regarded as his inquiring mind, I came to realize was only a sponge invariably absorbing the wrong opinions of others. I can remember one night in the parlor of the Garrett flat when I mentioned that Circle had given me a brand-new Ford to drive, and Allen suddenly began endorsing all the horse manure being printed in the Dearborn Independent, rising to his full height and telling us that the claims about an international Jewish leadership were absolutely true, that the Jews were hellbent on confounding and confusing and finally overcoming the Gentile world by creating wars, revolutions, and civil disorders, that the Jews were getting all the profits from the sale of illegal whiskey, the Jewish landlords were charging exorbitant rents, (he Jewish manufacturers were making all the shorter skirts responsible for our decadence (while Rosie’s skirt inched higher and higher every week), the Jewish producers were making movies about orgies and putting on filthy Broadway plays, the Jews were doing this, the Jews were doing that, the Jews in short were responsible for everything that was wrong in the nation and the world because, just as the Independent had reported, everything was “under the mastery of the Jews.” I didn’t argue with him. Nancy and I left early instead. I knew the friendship was dying, and yet I clung to it, telling myself at first that Allen really wasn’t too bad a fellow, telling myself that Rosie was good company for my wife, but wondering even then, I suppose, if I wasn’t just waiting for exactly what was happening now.

Now, two months and a little bit later, in an alleyway outside a speakeasy, I knew the sweet revenge of kissing Allen’s wife, hot and trembling in the sweltering summer night as a gang of kids went by in one of Mr. Ford’s tin lizzies, and inside the vocalist sang, “And so I think I’ll travel on, to Avalon.” She put her tongue into my mouth, she pulled her face away from mine and laughed, she arched herself against me, and said, “Where’d he park the car? Let’s get in the car, Bert.”

“Rosie,” I said, “we’d best go back.”

“No,” she answered, and took my hand.

In the rear of the Jeffery Sedan, the windows open, passing automobile lights intermittently illuminating the interior roof, Rosie lay back against the cushioned seat and lifted her dress above her waist and said, “Do you like my stockings rolled?” and I touched her legs, touched silk the color of her flesh (a year ago, two years ago, a century ago, girls wore stockings that were either white or black), “All the girls are doing it,” Rosie said. (Doing what? Turkey trot? The world had changed, everything had been changed by the war.) Her mouth in the darkness was bright with paint, there was a vapid smile upon it, would she later claim that she’d been drunk? The smell of homemade gin climbed into the steamy interior of that silent automobile, our alcohol-scented breaths rushing to merge a moment before we locked lips again, my hands under her dress, clutching at her. She reached up with her thumbs to hook the elastic of her teddies, and then pulled them down over her belly and her thighs. I could dimly see the pale whiteness of her skin and against it a narrow black triangle, “Kiss me,” she said, my hands on her flesh so warm beneath the white tulle, her legs opening now, her slender fingers pressing the back of my neck, I thought again of a silent forest (there was, as always, that moment when she seemed to resist) and of a boy whose dreams in the violet dusk were proscribed by an insulated world, and I entered her, and she said, “What, Bert, what?” and I think I whispered, “I don’t know,” (and then she trembled, and I could hear her groan again, almost as if she were in pain) and I sought her mouth, sought that bright scarlet slash and drew from it whatever secrets Rosie knew, drew from it prognostications, scathing visions of what was yet to come, tasting of gin, long silken legs enveloping me, distant music swelling through the open car windows, “Here’s the Japanese sandman, trade him silver for gold,” (and there was a long heavy shudder and then a hundred echoing crackings, and then there was silence).

I drove them home in the Chicago midnight.

There was the smell of gin in the automobile, that and a stronger scent, but Allen Garrett was unconscious on the back seat and incapable of detecting Rosie’s lingering feral aroma, incapable of knowing what I had done to his wife not a half-hour before. She sat beside me now with her legs recklessly crossed, coat open, skirt high on her thighs, the rolled stockings lewdly suggestive (a Chicago streetwalker had been quoted in last week’s newspaper as saying, “You can’t tell the ladies from the trollops any more.”) I did not think Rosie Garrett was a trollop, but I’m not sure I thought she was a lady, either. I knew only that I had taken her with an explosive violence I had never before experienced, and felt now the same confusing aftermath of shame and guilt I had known in France, when i’d failed to stop what was happening to that little girl. I told myself as Rosie sat beside me with her head thrown back against the seat, humming “Avalon” as though I needed reminders of what we had together accomplished in the space of five minutes, told myself that this was the first time and the last time, and knew even then that I was lying to myself. But I tried nonetheless to understand what was happening, because it all seemed to be part of the bewildering labyrinth that had been constructed around me without my knowledge or consent. I felt as though I had, in the past few months, become a very minor if not totally insignificant figure in a changing landscape over which I had no personal control, as though the events of my own life were only secondary to the much larger events taking place. But more than that, it seemed to me that the nucleus of my intimate universe had somehow become dislocated, the nucleus was no longer me, Bertram A. Tyler. I was, instead, only an expendable moon that could be burned to cinders in the upper atmosphere without being missed or mourned, in danger of being replaced in an instant by some other revolving satellite created in outer space from the boiling matter of our time. I was certainly blameless for what had happened (Rosie’s hand on my thigh now, fingers widespread; strangers at eleven, lovers at midnight) if I could point to the speed of the modern-day world as the source of my confusion, the dial on the telephone, the closed automobile, the shorter skirts, the more liberal drinking habits (in themselves a confusing paradox), the whole surging momentum of a nation rushing back to a “normalcy” quite unlike anything it had known before. I blamed all these things, and hoped to become blameless in the process, but the guilt persisted.

So I blamed Nancy as well, blamed her for not being here tonight but being instead in Eau Fraiche with her sister Clara, blamed her besides for being not as female as she might have been, even though the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with either of us (I knew there was nothing wrong with me, but I could not believe there was nothing wrong with her), told myself that somehow her inability to conceive a child made her less womanly, while knowing of course this was not true, and suspecting that perhaps there were passions in her I preferred not to explore lest she become in my mind the equivalent of a whore, neither a mother (which she could not become, it seemed) nor a respected wife. The deception having failed, the guilt and the shame persisting, I allowed the excitement to take complete control, allowed Rosie’s humming to envelop me, allowed her hand to work its way toward my fly, allowed her fingers to unbutton me and to enclose me while we drove slowly toward South Lawndale and Allen snored in the back seat.