Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“Naw,” said Sonny. “Hey, I liked your Speedway stuff.”

“Yeh? You go to the race this year?”

“No.”

“Mr. Vukovich did right nicely.”

Biff always called sports guys “Mister,” maybe because most other people called them by their first names even when they didn’t know them.

“I saw he did,” Sonny said.

Biff bent his head down and sipped at his coffee. He smacked his lips and said, “So, you ready to come to the paper and make a nice, dishonest living?”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t even know if they’d hire me. Regular.”

“Only trouble is those pinch-penny”—he looked in the front room, where Carolyn was doing some darning, and instead of saying the word with which he would have described the management, he paused, making the blank space, and continued—“probably won’t hire anyone new till one of our speed-graphic grandpas kicks off. We got enough deadwood around there to build a raft.”

“Well, it might be a long time,” Sonny said, “till there’s an opening.”

Biff shrugged. “Might. But we’re not the only paper in town. Not to say in the country. Ever think of getting out?”

“Well, I have been thinking about the GI Bill. I could get a masters in something.”

“Ah-ha! And Uncle Sam foots the bill.”

“Most of it, anyway.”

“What’re you waiting for? You could go to Chicago, New York, even Paris. Pick yourself up some free-lance work with the camera.”

“Well, I don’t know. You’d have to be awfully good, in a big city.”

“Phhhht. You’re young. Now’s the time.”

“Well, maybe.”

“Just remember, if you want to move up and out, don’t wait till it’s too late.” Biff tightened his lips on the cigarette and sucked in hard. “Take it from yours truly,” he said.

Sonny took a hot swallow of his coffee and asked, warily, “How do you mean?”

“The time to talk to the Big Boys is when you’re young. I waited till just a year ago. Went to New York and made the rounds. Showed ’em my stuff.”

“What happened?”

Biff made a kind of snort. “They patted me on the head and sent me back to the farm, where I belonged.”

“But how? How could they do that?”

“Easy.”

“But you’ve won prizes!”

“So’ve a lot of other hayseeds.”

Sonny hated hearing Biff talk that way about himself; it depressed him in an embarrassing way, like hearing your own father cry.

“Aw, come on,” Sonny said feebly.

“Them’s the facts,” Biff said. “The big city’s full of bright young men.”

“You’re not old.”

“Pressin’ forty.”

“That’s not too old.”

“It’s too late.”

Biff mashed out his cigarette, popped from his chair, and led Sonny down to the darkroom. He had some prints drying of some action stuff from an Indianapolis Indians game with the Toledo Mudhens.

“They’re great,” said Sonny.

“Minor league,” Biff said. “Triple A. Just short of the majors. That’s my league.”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

Biff didn’t answer, but started talking about what shutter speed he’d used to get the shot of a guy stealing home. Sonny tried to listen, but he wasn’t really hearing it. When they went back upstairs, Sonny said he had to be getting home, and Biff said he’d give him a lift. They didn’t talk on the way, and when Biff let Sonny off in front of his house, he pointed a finger at him and said, “Remember, you’re young. Now’s the time. You’re one of the special ones. You could really make it out, you could really get out of here. Don’t wait till it’s too late.”

Sonny nodded and turned away. There was something in Biff’s alert, lean face he had never seen before. It was like he’d turned sour.

Sonny went straight to his room and turned the record on, hoping to regain his high spirits. Seeing that sour part of Biff made him feel pretty low, and Biff saying he had the stuff to get out, to make it as a photographer in some big city, scared him more than it made him feel good. It meant he really had choices, which meant he might have to choose. And he didn’t know how.

He thought of other, less scary stuff to worry about. That morning, in the general mood of his effort at self-mastery, he had stunned his mother by accepting without any argument her plea that “just the three of us” go out and have supper at a nice restaurant. Ordinarily Sonny shied from any situation that put “just the three of us” together, alone—for it often seemed that their alleged family was lonelier in one another’s company than any other situation. They always seemed to get locked into straining silences and awkward formalities; a kind of embarrassed gloom would settle over them until, many times, tears would start to form in the corners of Mrs. Burns’ eyes and Sonny would frantically find some excuse to escape. Today, though, he wanted to face responsibility, to play his rightful part like a man. Besides that, he’d begun to feel guilty about always being so grumpy and farting off his mother all the time. He even began to feel that maybe she wasn’t much different from other mothers. Watching Gunner’s old lady go to pieces about the Jewish girl had somehow been a comfort to Sonny, made him realize he wasn’t the only guy whose mother got crazy. He sometimes wondered if perhaps there wasn’t something that happened to a woman’s head when she became a mother, like some of the screws getting loose up there. Maybe it was something they couldn’t even help.

Mrs. Burns came home a little after five and said she and Sonny were supposed to pick Mr. Burns up at work and they’d go on from there to the restaurant. She drove the church station wagon in her usual jolting style, but Sonny tried not to let it get on his nerves.

“I talked to Biff Barkely today,” Sonny said, which for him to volunteer to his mother was a regular gossip column of information.

“How nice! Did you talk about a job?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, no need to rush. You’re only young once.” She sighed and said, “It goes so fast. It’s gone before you know it.”

Sonny hated to hear his mother talk about her youth; it was one more treasure that was lost, like her shape, like his faith. It was actually hard for Sonny to imagine her being a young girl. The albums with snapshots of her wearing the bobbed hair and long beads and funny dresses of the flapper era seemed to him like pictures of another person. And yet she had been that person. He suddenly wondered if she had felt like a different person then, if she had been different on the inside as well as the outside in the days when she posed for those old, smiling pictures. He wanted to ask her about it, yet it was hard to put in words, the thing he meant.

“Do you still feel the same now as you did then?” he asked. “When you were young?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, do you feel like it’s still the same you, right now, that you are the same person as when you were a young girl?”

She coughed, and the car bumped to a halt at a stoplight. “Yes,” she said. “If I know what you mean. You mean, am I the same inside, only older on the outside?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s it.”

“Yes. That’s why it’s so hard to look in a mirror. You are looking at yourself, but you don’t recognize yourself. It’s a shock. The person you see is older, and heavier, and has wrinkles. But you don’t feel that way inside, and it’s hard to believe that’s how you really look now, how other people see you.”

“It must be very hard.”

“Sonny? I tell you. It’s the hardest thing in the world.”

It was something that Sonny had never really thought about before, and he felt a sudden, sharp sympathy for his mother, not as “his mother” but as Alma, a person, a woman who was growing old. He looked away from her, out the window, at the stores on Broad Ripple Avenue. Hardware. Five and Ten. Drugs. And there was nothing in the stores, nothing in any of the stores, that would help. There was nothing you could buy that would help; no monkey wrench from the hardware store, no toys from the Five and Ten, not even any drugs from the drugstore that could change anything, really. Maybe just looking at the things, though, and buying a few of them now and then helped take your mind off the thing that you couldn’t change at all, which was that you were getting old, that very moment, everyone everywhere, turning into the person who would finally die and not be a person at all, no matter how hard that was to believe. Sonny knew it was true of his own mother; she had said it in a way, and he could see it. He was sorry, and yet it didn’t really make him sad down deep, because he couldn’t really believe it was happening to him, too. He believed it in his head, but not in his feelings inside. Even when he tried to grasp the fact, he felt that it wouldn’t be happening to him for so long that by the time it did he wouldn’t really care, it wouldn’t matter very much. Of course, maybe his mother had felt that way too once, back when she lived in the snapshots before they got curly and yellow.