Evan Hunter: Sons

The driver honked his horn.

“Coming,” I said.

Nothing had changed.

The Tyler crest was still there, leaded into the frosted glass panel on the front door, green spruces against a blue sky. I rang the bell below the small brass Tyler escutcheon set in the richly carved oak jamb, and Linda opened the door and flung herself into my arms. My father came through the sliding doors from the living room, and smiled broadly and held out both his hands to me, and I thought, He looks the same, a trifle older perhaps, but essentially the same, nothing has changed. We went into the living room, and my father slid the doors shut behind us, and then poured scotch for himself and me, and a glass of sherry for my sister who was, after all, eighteen years old now, and going steady with a boy my age who expected to enter college as soon as he was discharged from the Navy.

“He wants to be an accountant,” Linda said.

“That’s very nice,” I said.

“You’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“His name is Stanley.”

“That’s nice.”

“I call him Stan.”

The glasses were passed around. My father stood in the middle of the room with the portrait of my mother hanging behind him over the fireplace mantel, not a good likeness, I had hated that picture even when she was alive. He raised his glass and said, “To Will,” and my sister echoed simply, “To Will,” and I said, “To all of us.”

My sister wanted to know whether New York was really as exciting as everybody said it was, and my father asked if I’d been to this or that restaurant which he went to whenever he was there on business, most of them too expensive for me. Linda went out to the kitchen to see how the new maid was managing with the roast, and my father and I talked some more about New York, and then he got around to asking me what my plans for the future were.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you expect to go to college?”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said.

“What do you want to study?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course, there’s no rush.”

“No.”

“I suppose you’d like to take it easy for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any school in mind?”

“No.”

“I imagine you’d be given preference at a school in Illinois.”

“Yes, I would imagine so.”

“Of course, there’s no rush.”

“Mmm.”

My father poured a little more scotch into each of our glasses.

“I’m glad you’re home, Will,” he said.

Critical revision, he had called it.

I was eight years old and sitting at the dining room table in another house, Linda on my right with her elbow in my ribs as usual, my mother listening attentively, oddly silent. He was telling us about the paper industry, and of how he would not have risen to his present position (Sales Manager, I think it was) had he remained inflexibly committed to an original false notion. When the opportunity for critical revision had presented itself (remember those words, son, critical revision) he had eagerly seized it and, as a result, his entire life had changed. (All of this was terribly fascinating to an eight-year-old boy who was anxious to get upstairs to his comic books.) Critical revision, he said again, and I remembered hoping he would not go into another of his long-winded sermons, but he sure enough did, explaining that all too often people pursued a wrong idea with the same zeal and energy that could be devoted to the right one, developing a life style that was based upon a fallacy or a series of fallacies. Or worse yet, people and even nations — failing to recognize that once-worthy goals, causes, or ideas could become obsolete, being creatures of habit, and lacking this capacity for critical revision — remained steadfastly devoted to a way of life that was no longer a valid response to the times.

It was funny the way words meaningless to me then, despite my father’s eagerness to explain (my mother listening so attentively, as though he were telling her something private, not to be heard by the children, a glance exchanged at the table, their eyes meeting, had he said something to her that I did not understand, why had he been so insistent on defining the way of life a man chose, the way of life to which he irrevocably committed himself — well, never mind.) The words had meaning for me now because, home and safe, surrounded by all the things I had known through eighteen years of boyhood, I suddenly felt a lack of direction or will, and wondered whether it wasn’t time to engage in some of that critical revision my father had tried to promote those many years ago.

I told myself that what I missed most was flying. I had not been inside an airplane since I left Foggia early in April, and I wished now that I could climb the access ladder onto the wing of a Lightning again, open the top hatch and settle into the pilot’s scat, lock my safety belt and run through all the familiar pre-flight checks, battery switch on, cross-feed switch off, tank selector valves to outer wing on, half a hundred more burned into my memory through repetition. I longed to taxi out to the end of a runway, and then hold hard on the brakes and open the throttles, manifold pressure and rpm mounting, the airplane trembling around me, and suddenly let her go, release the brakes and allow her to roll away, speed building, fifty miles an hour, eighty, airborne at a hundred, memory taking over completely as I thought again about flying. I wanted to be in the sky again. I missed flying terribly, I told myself, and had no right to deny myself its pleasure any longer. So I went out to the Elmhurst Airport one day, and rented a twin-engine Beech for fifteen dollars an hour, and took her up and put her through some simple maneuvers, and then landed her, and went back home to the house on East Scott, still filled with an odd sense of deprivation.

I took out Charlotte Wagner that Friday night, and discovered that she wanted to talk exclusively about the old days at Grace School, recalling incidents I had either forgotten or never been a part of, remembering classroom jokes and school outings, student and teacher characters, all the games she had cheered, and even the cheers themselves, turning to me in the parked automobile, eyes glowing, to chant, “With a G! and an R! and an A! and a C! and an E! With a Grrrrace School...” and then pulling away when I tried to kiss her, and telling me I had never answered the postcards she’d sent me from Cape Cod in the goddamn summer of 1944! I called Sarah Cody the next day, and went to pick her up in high expectation because she had always been a fun-loving kid with a fine Irish sense of humor and adventure, and a smile that broke like a sunrise, with a good figure besides and a reputation for being pretty easy, or so Michael Mallory had reported. She was even prettier than I remembered, sleek black hair and a pert fresh mouth and sparkling blue eyes, the conjured image of every Irish lass who’d ever been kissed in a haystack, but she told me almost immediately that she had been scheduled to go out with a senior from Northwestern who had come down with a bad cold, and so I was extremely lucky that she was free, it being a Saturday night and all, and then expressed keen disappointment when I told her that what I had in mind was a movie when her original plans had been for dancing at The Empire Room. Sarah Cody, it seemed, was being dated almost every night of the week by university boys who found her ravishing, witty, sexy, responsive, inventive, brilliant, and nothing if not perfect. The movie was lousy. I did not try to kiss her goodnight because I didn’t wish to mar the flawless line of her lipstick. In desperation, I called Margaret Penner that Wednesday and said, “Hello there, Margie, this is Will Tyler, I don’t know if you...” and she hung up, small surprise. In an agitated state of extreme critical revision, I decided that perhaps I missed Dolores Prine, I guessed.