Evan Hunter: Sons

We had said goodbye one October night, huddled together in a hotel bed, Dolores warm and trusting and weeping in my arms as I let lies fall like autumn rain around us, gently pattering on the sodden leaves of what she thought was an undying love. Dolores, I said to her, I’ve never met anyone like you in my life, I hate to leave you now, but I’ve got to go back to Chicago, I’ve got to go home to find my roots again, can you understand that (and she said, Yes, love, weeping) and I said, I’ve been through a war, Dolores, and there are a lot of things I don’t yet know about myself or about what’s waiting for me in civilian life, and so I’ve got to go back, and I can’t take you with me, not yet, can you understand that (and she said, Yes, love, weeping) and I said, Maybe after I’ve been there a while, maybe after I’ve had a chance to find this person who is Will Tyler, to look at myself in the mirror (Yes, love) and come to terms with myself, know what it is I really want, why then maybe, Dolores, I can send for you and we can be together again, but not now, Dolores, can you understand that, not now (Yes, love, weeping) and made love to her again before dawn because if I was going to be a rat, if I was going to lie to this eighteen-year-old kid (Yes, love, yes) and cause her to believe that I would one day send for her, cause her to believe that this was not truly the end, not truly goodbye, then I might as well go whole hog, might as well be the consummate bastard, take all I could get from her before I left her flat, yes love yes love yes, and we said goodbye.

She had written eight letters to me, none of which I’d answered. I went upstairs to my room now, and read them over again. In the last letter, she had enclosed the snapshots we’d taken the day before I left New York. Clipped to the twelve prints was a slip of white paper with the single word “Remember?” scrawled onto it. I looked at the black-and-white photographs now, trying to reconstruct in my mind the exact moment when the camera’s shutter had clicked to freeze Dolores into one or another characteristic pose, realizing all at once that the girl whose pictures lay spread out beside me on the bed was not just one girl, not only Dolores Prine, but really a rather extraordinary and startling collection of girls: Dolores munching on a jellied apple, her hazel eyes opened wide in surprise as the camera clicked on a ravenous bite; Dolores striking a mock sexy pose against a lamppost on Lexington Avenue, coat open, one hand on her hip, the very image of a Parisian streetwalker, eyes slitted, mouth curled in sensuous invitation; Dolores gazing down at the river outside her building, sunlight caught in the shimmering web of her hair, her eyes all but closed, her face in silhouette as clear as alabaster, as soft as snow; Dolores leap-frogging a fire hydrant, legs akimbo, hair floating, eyes and mouth wide open, shrieking in girlish delight as the shutter clicked; Dolores angry and frowning because I had been saying, “No, your head a bit more to the right, that’s it, no, a little more, yes, perfect, no,” until she shouted, “Go to hell, Will!” just as I snapped the picture. I studied this crowd that was Dolores, trebled it, multiplied it by a thousand, converted it into a mob of Doloreses, and then reversed the procedure, condensing, solidifying this universe of girls into one alone, Dolores Prine, who seemed to me now the most marvelous girl I had ever known. In those frozen snapshots on the bed, I detected a pulsating life, and I wanted to hold it close and fierce, and never let it go again. I went into my father’s library, missing her desperately, telling myself that what I wanted to do was go down to New York for a few days, maybe a week, spend some time with her, nothing was happening in Chicago anyway. Dear Dolores, I wrote, and crossed it out, Dolores darling, I wrote, and crossed it out, and wrote Dear Dolores again, and then wrote, I’ve been here in Chicago for several weeks now, doing all the thinking I told you I’d have to do before corning to any knowledge of myself and, oh, shit, I thought, and crumpled the letter and threw it into my father’s wastebasket. I got up from the desk and began pacing the room, walking past the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, my eye traveling over books that must have been bestsellers when my father was about my age, stuff like Miss Lulu Belt by Zona Gale and The Valley of Silent Men by James Oliver Curwood, and Mooncalf by Floyd Dell and a very hot little number called Jurgen by James Branch Cabell, which I took from the shelf and thumbed through, finding a long underlined passage in it. I became curious about some of the other books then, and began leafing through them at random to see if my father had marked any more pages. Most of them looked unread. There was, however, a corner niche of World War I books which were dog-eared and heavily annotated. I carried some of those over to the desk and scanned the notes he had boldly scribbled into the margins, indignant outbursts like Nonsense! or This did not happen! sympathetic praise like Yes, God, yes! or I remember the stink, too! Intrigued, I found myself reading a paragraph in the middle of one book, and then turned back to the first chapter, and then moved from my father’s desk to the big leather chair near the Franklin stove, and suddenly lost all interest in writing my letters. That afternoon, I discovered that I did not miss Dolores and I did not miss flying.

What I missed was war.

I missed the uniform, and I missed the routine, and I missed being awakened in the pre-dawn hours and going to the latrine with a dozen other guys and shaving and putting on my flying gear and going to the briefing hut and being told that today we would provide penetration, cover, and withdrawal for another bombing raid. I missed the excitement, I missed the killing, I missed the war.

That night, I went out to get drunk.

I found a bar on the South Side that reminded me a lot of The Eucalyptus on Wilshire Boulevard, which Ace and I used to frequent a lot when we were hotshot pilots in Transitional Training and making the long haul down from Santa Maria every chance we got because there was so much sweet pussy in those Los Angeles hills. It was late, the jukebox was going, a few hookers were hanging on the bar, there was a pleasant hum, a familiar clink of glasses. I felt warm and cozy. I knew I would get drunk and that pleased me because I did not feel like thinking about my future, or wondering whether I’d go to college or go to New York or go into my father’s business or try writing or contact Pan-American to see if they needed a very good combat-experienced pilot to fly one of their airplanes. I didn’t want to think about anything. I merely wanted to get drunk and then go home to sleep.

I don’t know what was on the jukebox, I really can’t remember. I’d had two or three drinks already when the guy sitting next to me at the bar turned and said, “This is a nice number,” and I said, “I’m sorry, what...?” and he said, “This song,” and I listened for a moment, and then said, “Oh yeah, it is.”

“I’m a musician,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yes, I play tenor sax and clarinet. I work with a little combo over on Woodlawn. Do you know a place called Frankie’s?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s where I work. Tonight’s my night off, though. It’s the chord pattern that makes a song good or not, you know. This one’s got a particularly good chart.”

“There’re so many new ones,” I said, “I can hardly keep up with them.”

“Especially when you’ve been away for a while,” he said. “That’s right, how can you tell?”

“I don’t know what it is, but a guy who hasn’t been wearing civvies for a long time looks really weird in them. Take me, for example. I look as if I just got out of prison last week, and this is the suit they gave me, do you know what I mean?”