Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“Mmm.”

He knew what his old high school looked like, knew exactly the stern and impressive facade of brick and limestone, the wide plaza at the entrance, and the steps rising upward in two long tiers. He knew how scared and excited he was when he first walked up them as a freshman, and in through the massive doors to the clatter and din of the bustling hall. He had thought, back then, that his real life might be beginning, but it hadn’t turned out that way.

“It’s a shame,” Mrs. Fenstermaker said. “About Shortley.”

Sonny opened his eyes and asked, “What’s a shame about it?”

Though it had given him less than he had hoped, he still was loyal to the old school. It was best in the city, and its graduates were proud.

Mrs. Fenstermaker smiled sadly. “It’s getting dark inside. A fine school like that. They say eventually it will be completely dark inside.”

“Dark inside?” Sonny asked.

He didn’t know what the hell the, old doll was talking about. Had the lights gone out? Was the electrical system breaking down?

“It’s coming,” his father sighed.

Mr. Burns turned around toward Sonny, cleared his throat, and his face took on that look of grim intensity that came when he spoke of the wrongs and outrages of the modern, immoral, something-for-nothing, tradition-destroying world—the world that was launched and shaped in America by FDR, and that even Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed powerless to reconvert to its old, decent ways.

“The Supreme Court laid down the law, just this week. The races will be mixed, right in the schools, whether anyone likes it or not.”

Sonny understood then how his old school was “getting dark inside.” When he went to high school, all the Negroes had to go to Crispus Attucks; no one questioned that, it was part of the natural order of things. But a few years after he graduated, the city saw the handwriting on the wall, the coming tides of socialistic integration sweeping across the country out of Washington, and so had “voluntarily” (before being forced) decreed that colored kids could go to any high school they wanted—that is, if they lived in the neighborhood. And the catch was that colored were slowly but surely spreading north to the neighborhood of grand old Shortley.

“I visited school last year,” Sonny said. “There weren’t many then.”

It was a feeble kind of defense and sort of a betrayal of Sonny’s own belief that all men were created equal, including the colored. That was one of the radical notions he had picked up from liberal professors in college, and he didn’t like to argue with his parents about it. If you talked about it much, the danger-signal vein of anger would start to show in his father’s forehead, pulsing and throbbing, the sign that Sonny most feared as a kid when he did something wrong and his father found out. He wasn’t in any condition for an argument right now, of any kind.

“Well,” his father said, “it’s coming. It’s only just begun.”

“That’s right.” Mrs. Fenstermaker grimly nodded. “They’re up to Twenty-eighth Street now.”

Every time Sonny came home from college or the Army he heard the latest report on how far They had advanced out of their old small, crowded, rickety bastion. The ominous They , like some relentless army, crept north past one parallel block after another, destroying real-estate values as they went, as brutally as Sherman laid waste the property of Georgia in his march to the sea. This time They were on the march, invading formerly forbidden territories, forcing the retreating whites farther north to the suburb fortresses.

“Thank God you went to Shortley when you did, Sonny,” Mr. Burns said.

Sonny sat straighter up in his seat, feeling he had to somehow gather his thoughts and speak out his own position on the matter, but before he could say anything, Mrs. Burns bolted the car away from a stoplight with a lurch of special force, and then in a loud voice said, “Adele, have you been to the sale at Ayres? I understand they have some wonderful things in cotton.”

Sonny’s mother hated controversy, especially the political kind. Mr. Burns turned around to face the front again and Sonny sat back, pressing his eyes closed, until almost ten minutes later the car jerked to a halt in the gravel drive and Mrs. Burns gaily announced, “Sonny, you’re home,” and, in an extra comment that made his stomach spin even more frighteningly, “Home for good! ”

Sonny pulled himself out of the car and saw the Colonial-style two-story house—it looked like a little slice off the end of Mt. Vernon—waver before him in the afternoon sun. The house, in a new development that had never quite caught on, always made him feel guilty, for he knew his mother had insisted on it being built for the pleasure of his adolescence, over his father’s migraine fears that it was way out of line with what they could really afford.

“Look, Sonny. There’s Winkie!” Mrs. Burns said.

“I see him,” Sonny said.

Winkie, the mongrel dog that Mrs. Burns had found and adopted when Sonny went off to college, came bounding off the porch, his great tongue flapping like a wet pink flag.

“Good old Winkie,” Mrs. Burns said. “Sonny, say hello to Winkie.”

“Hello, Winkie.”

Winkie barked, sending waves of pain through Sonny’s reeling head.

“Winkie says hello to you,” Mrs. Burns explained.

“I heard him,” Sonny said.

“Good old Winkie.”

Mrs. Burns knelt down and nuzzled the friendly mutt, cooing in his ear while he licked and yipped his love. Mrs. Burns loved to hug and cuddle Winkie, explaining that ever since Sonny “grew up” and “grew away from me” she couldn’t hug and cuddle him anymore, but good old Winkie didn’t mind. It sounded like a reproach, suggesting that Winkie was nicer and more understanding than Sonny. Sonny supposed that was true.

“Ohh,” Mrs. Fenstermaker said, “how I love this wonderful home. I can’t wait to get inside and kick off my shoes.”

Mr. Burns had unlocked the front door, and Sonny went straight upstairs to the bathroom. He loosened his tie, knelt down in front of the toilet like a communicant before an altar, bowed his head in thankfulness at having the bowl there below him, and heaved up a mixture of sake, beer, and breakfast. When he finished he lay down next to the toilet, his head on the cool linoleum floor, which smelled reassuringly of childhood.

There was a soft, tentative rap at the door, and his mother’s voice said, “Sonny?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said under his breath.

“What is it?”

“I’ll be right out.”

He pulled himself off the floor and splashed his face with cold water. His mouth was fuzzy and sour, but his toothbrush was in his gear and he didn’t want to use someone else’s. His mother’s, for instance.

He took a deep breath and opened the door.

“You’re white as a sheet,” his mother said.

“I just have to go lie down a minute.”

Sonny headed for the door to his bedroom, her following. He flopped down on the lower bunk of his All-American-boy double-decker bed and unbuttoned his jacket. His mother sat down on the bed beside him, and he closed his eyes.

“How do you feel?”

“Fine,” he said.

“I hope you’ll have an appetite. I cooked a big roast for supper. There’s so much of it, I asked Adele to stay. I hope you don’t mind.”

Sonny said nothing. He concentrated on breathing.

“She dolls herself up kind of flashy, I guess, for a widow. But she’s a wonderful person. Very intelligent, too.”

Mrs. Burns’ voice lowered to a whisper, and she said, “I don’t know how she got herself mixed up with that Italian. Remember that little Dominick fellow, works at the little vegetable store in Broad Ripple? The one on Guilford? Well, I don’t know what he has, but he sure had her eating out of his hand. And then one day he cut her off just like that. Priest’s orders or something. Well, she went to pieces. Slashed her wrists and turned on the gas. A neighbor found her and got an ambulance, and when she got home from the hospital, this neighbor—she’s in our church—told Reverend Halverson about her, and he went to call, and I took her some soup and some books I thought might help, and we got to be great friends. That was only two weeks ago, but I feel I’ve known her all my life. What I can’t understand is what she saw in that little Dominick. But, you know what they say about the Italians. The men—”