Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Sonny wished he could think of something to say to his father, something to indicate he wished him well, and yet he didn’t know how to do it. He lit a cigarette. His father sighed. They were saved by the double-dime chime of the doorbell, a muffled sort of ping-pong sound. Sonny jumped to answer it.

“Greetings and salutations!”

It was Uncle Buck, Mrs. Burns’ half-brother. He was eight years older than Sonny and had been one of his childhood tormentors, yet Sonny really got a kick out of the guy. He liked his tall stories and his wild reputation with women, which Sonny secretly envied whenever he heard the family tongues clucking on the subject. He would gladly take the clucking if only he could get as much tail as Uncle Buck.

“Hey, Unc,” Sonny said, knowing it galled him a little to be thought of as anyone’s uncle, because it made him seem old.

“Prepare to defend yourself!” Uncle Buck said, putting up his dukes as he had done with Sonny ever since they were kids, doing a little fancy footwork, as he called out, “Look to your God!,” and jabbed a quick left into Sonny’s gut. It was just hard enough to make Sonny start to double over, at which time Uncle Buck, as always, said, “Sorry, old buddy,” gave him a friendly slap on the back, and whispered confidentially, “How they hangin’?,” then gave a great gin-aroma laugh and sailed his hat across the room. Mrs. Burns worried herself sick over Buck’s drinking and carousing, but she couldn’t resist him. Mr. Burns could resist him quite well, especially when he wanted to borrow a little money. Buck was a natural salesman, but he was prone to going off on a toot and having to start from scratch with another company. Right now he was with Federated Siding, which sold brick stuff to put on frame houses.

“Hello, Buck,” Mr. Burns said.

“Greetings and salutations, good sir! I trust the world goes well with thee?”

“Fine.” Mr. Burns sighed. He stood up and asked Buck, “Would you like to have a drink—or have you already had one too many?”

Buck raised his finger like a schoolmaster and said, “Good sir, there is no such thing as one too many. There is only one too few.” Buck roared and then, changing his voice to a quieter, almost sacred tone, said, “Seriously, I’d appreciate one.”

Mr. Burns shook his head and left the room.

“So,” Buck said to Sonny, “Ya gettin’ much?”

Sonny blushed and said, “Sure.”

“Way to go,” said Buck. “Remember my motto—always choose fast women and pretty horses.”

He whooped appreciation of his well-worn line and lit himself a cigarette. The chime ponged again, and Sonny went to answer. He opened the door, and just stood for a moment, staring at the girl. It was Buddie Porter, who had sort of been his girl friend ever since high school. When he hadn’t called her on his last leave home, his mother had questioned him about it until he got mad and said it was nobody’s business. Buddie was just standing there on the porch, sheepishly, and finally she said, “Sonny? I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have come.”

“Huh?”

“Your mother called and said it was a surprise party for you, and I told her I didn’t know if you’d want to be surprised—by me, I mean. She sort of insisted. You know how your mother is.”

“Yes,” Sonny said, “I do.”

“Well—”

“No, I mean, it’s O.K. I was just surprised.”

Buddie was still standing on the porch, looking nervous and apologetic. She was holding a straw-basket kind of purse with imitation flowers on it, and she had on a blue summer dress with white flowers, and white flat shoes with a yellow plastic flower on each toe.

“You look like a regular garden,” said Sonny.

Buddie seemed puzzled for a moment and then she looked down at her dress, and her purse, and her shoes, and she laughed and said, “Oh,” like she might have known he wouldn’t like the outfit. Somehow she could never seem to dress in a way that pleased him. He was always pointing out other girls to her when he liked the way they were dressed, but even though Buddie would get the same kind of thing, he wouldn’t seem to like it. The more she tried to please him, the more he got annoyed and impatient with her.

“Well,” he said, “come on in.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“Hey, Buddie-O, old Buddie,” Uncle Buck called out when she came in the room. Mr. Burns came in with the drink for Buck, and he asked Buddie if she wanted one too but just then the MRA people came, and there wasn’t any more liquor dispensed.

There were four of them, and Sonny only knew one of them. That was Leona Scholz, a local Jewish lady who had forsaken her faith and her husband of that faith for the Presbyterians and MRA. She offered her lavish home as a sort of hostel for the movement’s representatives who were passing through town on their many missions. Sonny had vaguely known one of Mr. Scholz’ daughters at Shortley, a dark, sexy thing like her mother had been before she got into MRA and took to pulling her glistening black hair back to a hard bun, eliminating all makeup, and wearing baggy tweed suits and English oxfords with leather tongues. She also wore a permanent expression of satisfaction that seemed to indicate that she either had seen a vision that brought her inner peace or had been struck on the head by a blow that rendered her senseless.

She took Sonny’s hand and made the expression at him.

“Hello, Mrs. Scholz,” he said.

Mrs. Scholz was able to speak through her serene expression without changing it, and in that manner she introduced the visiting MRA bunch. There was a husband-wife pastoral team from Nebraska, the Reverend and Mrs. Ludlow Darney, and a regular MRA full-time traveling “team” member stationed in Mackinac, Hap Merriman. From what Sonny had seen of MRA people, the Darneys were not typical, lacking as they did the robust good-fellowship aura that exuded from most. The Darneys, in fact, seemed to have been the victims of a vampire attack or perhaps had donated their blood to the YMCA. Hap Merriman was much more the MRA type that Sonny had met on the island, and in fact, he had a horrible suspicion that Hap might have been one of the clean-cut fellows who asked Sonny to “confess’ about jacking off and thinking dirty stuff. Merriman was a big, broad-shouldered guy with a receding hairline who must have been in his early thirties, but he still wore an old varsity letter sweater over a white button-down shirt, along with a pair of summer slacks and sneakers with white sweat socks. He rubbed his hands together a lot, as if he were always about to propose some absolutely madcap scheme, such as everyone going out to the kitchen and cooking up a batch of taffy to pull.

Mrs. Burns came out of the kitchen, where she had been laboring all day long, and said supper was just about ready, they might as well all come in and sit down right now. The kitchen was the largest room in the house, and there was a huge oval table that everyone could fit around. There was, as usual, about three times as much food as anyone could eat, even though there were all those people. Since Sonny had not made a choice between which kind of potatoes he wanted, Mrs. Burns had made both his favorites, the sweet with marshmallow topping and the Idaho baked with melted cheese on top. There was a mammoth roast, done to a brown, bloodless turn (Mrs. Burns couldn’t stand “raw meat” the way they ate it in the East, and at fancy restaurants unless you told them different, and then they got snotty about it). There was corn pudding, lima beans, stewed tomatoes, hot rolls, and four kinds of homemade preserves. For dessert you could have your choice of fresh cherry pie with ice cream, or devil’s food cake with caramel icing, or both. Most everyone was stuffed by then, and only Hap Merriman had both.