Going All the Way (6 page)

“Promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“Come give Nina a kiss.”

She surged up in her chair, her face lifted high and her tits pressing against the tight silk blouse. Gunner went over and leaned down to kiss her and Sonny looked away. He stood up and went to the door and Gunner was there in a moment, his eyes still sunk back, a lipstick stain on his mouth.

“Good-bye, nice to meet you, Mrs. Casselman,” Sonny said.

“Nina,” she corrected.

“Nina,” said Sonny, not looking at her directly, and hurried out the door behind Gunner.

On the way to Sonny's house, Gunner apologized for Nina's questions about all the social crap, the fraternity jazz.

“She's still impressed by that shit,” he explained.

“That's O.K.”

Gunner said he was trying to get her to take a broader view of things. He had brought her a real kimono and some incense from Japan, and tried to get her interested in Oriental culture, but she got to suspecting that he was secretly married to a Japanese girl and was trying to soften the blow by making the country sound so great. Gunner got mad once and said, Well, what if he
had
married one, what difference did it make, but Nina went to pieces and he had to drop the whole thing. As Gunner put it, she wasn't too philosophical.

“Most mothers aren't,” Sonny said.

“Right,” said Gunner. “I can't think of any who are, offhand.”

4

The day after Sonny met Gunner at the Red Key he didn't sleep till noon, like he'd been doing since he got home, but woke up a little after ten, dragged himself right out of bed, and did seven push-ups. He shaved, dressed, and went downstairs humming, thinking of a lot of stuff he wanted to do. Constructive stuff. Like going down to the darkroom and getting it back in shape again, going out to get some new chemicals and film, and maybe pick up the latest
Newsweek
.

“You're up early,” Mrs. Burns said suspiciously. She was puttering around the kitchen, no doubt making more tempting pastries to fatten the world with. She didn't just feed them to Sonny, but to all the sweet-starved people she met in the course of her work at the church office. She could pretty much make her own hours, and more than being in the office itself she liked driving around on errands of mercy to the sick, the sad, the troubled. It took a load off Reverend Halverson's back and left him more time for fishing, which was his greatest passion—next to God, of course. He tied his own flies.

Sonny sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the front page of the Indianapolis
Star
. The main headline was about the Traffic Toll rising. It usually was. If the Reds didn't get you, the highways would, or so it seemed from reading the
Star
. He turned to sports and was happy to see Willie Mays still leading the league in batting. The Indianapolis Indians had dropped a double-header to the Toledo Mudhens. Sonny could never get too excited about the Indianapolis Indians. Not being major league, they didn't seem “real” in a funny way.

“Are you hungry?” his mother asked.

“Yeh, I am.”

He felt he could eat one of those he-men lumberjack breakfasts, with smoked sausage, heaps of eggs, and hot black coffee.

“That Casselman boy,” his mother said, “you say he lives with his mother?”

“Yes. I mean for now, anyway. He just got home from Japan.”

“He looked very familiar.”

When Gunner had taken Sonny home the night before, he had come in to use the phone, and met Mrs. Burns. She was gushy with friendliness and please to stay and have a bite to eat, but there was that little edge in her voice, the way there always was before she had sized up any new friend of Sonny and taken her stand on how he or she would aid or hinder her little boy's life.

“He was an athlete,” Sonny explained. “His picture used to be in the paper a lot.”

“Isn't he the one who was awfully fast? In high school?”

“Damn right. He ran the hundred in ten-one.”

“No, dear. I mean fast with the girls.”

“I dunno,” Sonny muttered, looking at the major-league standings.

“I thought everyone knew. I mean, he had quite a reputation, didn't he? For sowing his wild oats?”

“I dunno.”

Cleveland was in first place in the American League. Maybe the Yankees weren't invincible.

“Does he always go to bars in the afternoon?”

Sonny put the paper down. “For Christ sake, what business is it of yours? What if he goes to bars in the morning? What if he sleeps in bars overnight?”

“Don't yell. There's no need to yell.”

“I'm not yelling! I'm asking what business of yours is it what Gunner Casselman does?”

“It's my business what happens to my own son.”

“What's that got to do with Gunner?”

“If you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.”

“Listen. That guy is a friend of mine.”

“That's exactly what I'm saying.”

“Well, it's none of your damn business. For your information, he happens to be a great guy.”

He picked up the sports page again and tried to concentrate on the standings, but they blurred before his eyes.

“Really, I just thought maybe you'd want him to come to your party. Now that he's such a good friend of yours.”

Sonny looked up, eyeing his mother carefully. She was peeking in the stove.

“What do you mean, my party?” he asked.

“Just a little party. A little dinner for you.”

“
What
party? I don't know about any party.”

“Well, of course you don't. It's a surprise party. For your homecoming. This Friday night.”

Sonny squeezed his hands together and tried not to raise his voice. “Who's coming?” he said.

His mother let out a high, nervous little laugh. “Well, I couldn't tell you
that
, or it wouldn't be any surprise at all.”

She set a plate in front of him with a fresh homemade apple turnover topped with fudge ripple ice cream, and beside it, a large glass of Pepsi with a lot of ice. It was, or used to be, his favorite breakfast, though in college and the Army he had tried to learn to like eggs and sausage and hot black coffee because it seemed more manly. And yet whenever he was home, his mother got him back on the gooey stuff, and he couldn't resist it, even though it made him mad at her and at himself, and after eating those fattening sweets he felt almost as guilty and depressed as he did after jacking off. He often wondered why he couldn't help doing things that made him feel so awful after he did them.

“Would it now?” she asked. “Be a surprise if I told you who was coming?”

“Is it people I know?”

“Some you do, some you don't. But the ones you don't I promise you're going to like.”

He had heard such promises before. “Who is it?” he insisted. “Who's coming that I don't know?”

“Well, since you don't know them, you wouldn't know their names anyway.”

“Who are they?”

The fudge ripple was beginning to melt down the hot sides of the homemade apple turnover.

“I won't eat till you tell me,” he said, laying down the ultimate threat.

Mrs. Burns sighed and said with a fake casual tone, “Oh, just some of the MRA bunch who happen to be in town.”

Sonny very deliberately folded his napkin, set it on the table, and went into the living room. He sat on the antique velvet settee and lit a cigarette, trying very hard to be calm. The very initials of Moral Re-Armament made him want to scream. It was a nondenominational (but mainly WASP) religious movement with great appeal for middle-class people who found in its doctrine of “Absolute Purity, Absolute Honesty, and Absolute Love,” and in its tearful, wrenching, free-lance confessional sessions, a sort of fulfillment that was lacking in the ordinary going-to-church kind of religion. The adherents to this faith seemed to Sonny a band of smiling, self-satisfied, well-mannered fanatics. They didn't drink or smoke or jack off, or screw anyone unless they were married, and the girls gave up makeup and pulled their hair into knots and tried not to look sexy. They sang cheery, uplifting songs and looked bright-eyed and serene, in a lobotomized kind of way. Some of the full-time salaried members traveled around in “teams” trying to recruit people, and put on shows and plays proving how wonderful it was to be like they were and believe as they did. Mrs. Burns had gone to one of their performances in Indianapolis and seen the happy shining faces of those wonderful young people and felt a great surge of hope that this might be the answer for her troubled, faith-stripped son.

Sonny had been deeply religious as a boy but, as his mother so often explained to people in a trembling voice, “in college he lost his faith.” She ascribed the loss to the insidious influence of intellectuals, who were known to be almost all atheistic and who yet were given the task of teaching the young. Her suspicion of the influence of college was bolstered by most of her friends, including some who had been there, like Cousin Harriet Van de Kamp, who was on the Indianapolis school board and told Mrs. Burns on good authority that every college faculty in the country was riddled with Reds. Even the ones in Indiana! Sonny was only one of many innocent young people who had fallen under their atheistic influence and was brainwashed by their Godless doctrines. It was Mrs. Burns' most fervent desire to help Sonny find his faith again, and toward this end she had enlisted an impressive array of spiritual counselors. The fact that none had succeeded in helping Sonny locate what he had lost (his mother seemed to think of it as a tangible object, like a misplaced car key) did not in the least discourage her but in fact drove her on to even greater efforts.

Once, on the pretense of taking “a different kind of family vacation,” she had got him to Mackinac Island in Michigan, the MRA's U.S. headquarters, where whole teams of firm-jawed young men who all seemed to have been champion pole-vaulters or halfbacks when they were in college (which for many was quite some time ago) had tried to make him see the light. They explained how much fun purity could be and told Sonny he would feel a lot better if he told them about some of the dirty things he had done which most every guy did at some time or other, like jacking off and thinking dirty stuff about girls (maybe even
doing
the dirty stuff!) before marriage. Sonny fled from the island after two sleepless nights, during which he was terrified that if he beat off, an entire team of former Ohio State football stars would burst in the room and demand that he confess and repent, in the name of God Almighty and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Mrs. Burns had to admit that the MRA system “hadn't taken” with Sonny, but she evidently felt that later injections might do the trick. Like the bunch who were coming to supper for Sonny's “surprise party” welcome-home from the service.

“Fuckin-A,” he said to himself. “Fuckin-A John Do.”

“It's melting, dear,” his mother said.

She had put the ice cream and apple shit on a tray and brought it into the living room. It sat there before him, a runny disaster.

“What kind of potatoes would you like for the party supper, baked or sweet?”

“Either,” he said.

“I could make sweet with marshmallow topping.”

“Who else is coming?”

“Oh, Sonny, it wouldn't be any surprise at all then. I wanted it—I wanted it—” Her voice was beginning to quiver.

“O.K.,” he said. “But listen.”

“Yes?”

“Don't ask Gunner to come.”

“I thought it might do him some good,” she sniffed.

“Don't ask him.”

“All right, dear. After all, it's your party.”

Sonny stuck the spoon in the melting goo on the plate and started to eat, so she'd go away. And seeing him eat, she smiled and tiptoed out of the room. A little later, he heard the motor of the wagon burst to a start, like a mortar shell, and gravel churned noisily as Mrs. Burns ripped out of the driveway, hurrying to her missions.

Sonny didn't feel like doing too much stuff now, and he went to the den and flipped through some magazines.
Life
had a story of a nun who had outwitted the Commies. It said:

The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia

A resourceful nun who trusted in St. Joseph tells unique story of flight from Reds.

Sonny was getting tired of the damned Reds. He was tired of the damned Christians, too. He wished they'd fight it out and leave everybody alone. They were always “battling for men's minds” instead of minding their own business. The Reds and the Christians both.

They even had it on television. Every day they broadcast the Army vs. McCarthy show. It sounded to Sonny like a trial, but they called it a “hearing.” Everything seemed to be called something different than it was anymore, like the war in Korea was a “police action,” or a “conflict,” instead of a war. Even though they bombed and shot people. It was like they were trying to water things down so you wouldn't get too upset about them.

A lot of people were upset about the Army vs. McCarthy “hearings” and most of the people Sonny knew around Indianapolis thought Joe McCarthy was a great hero, hunting down all the dirty Reds in government. The liberal professors Sonny knew, and some of the guys he met in the Army who had gone to college in the East, thought it was McCarthy who was the menace instead of the Reds. Sonny didn't like the guy's looks, and he liked the defense guy, old Joe Welch, who was against McCarthy, but he found the whole thing hard to really follow and he didn't like to get in arguments about it because if you were against McCarthy the people for him suspected you of being a Commie, and Sonny had enough things to worry about without worrying about whether people thought he was a Red. Some people in Indianapolis probably suspected he was already because he didn't believe in God and he thought colored people should go to school with whites and he didn't agree that laziness was the only cause of unemployment.