Sons (26 page)

I thought of a forest at dusk and the lone barking of a dog against the approaching night, the laughter of a lumberjack booming from the bunkhouse, “or if there be any present who can show just cause why these parties should not be legally joined together, let him now speak or forever hold his peace.”

I wanted to say Yes,
I
can show very just and reasonable cause why we should not be joined. I hardly know this girl. I’ve known her forever, but I don’t know her at all, why are you all rushing us into this? Why are you insisting that I become a man when I’m still not done being a boy, a father when I want to remain a son? Stop them, somebody, I thought,
stop
them! Papa, tell them I’m still your son, tell them there are still a boy’s worlds to conquer, there are still hoptoads to catch.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” Reverend Boland asked, and Nancy’s father said, “I do,” gruflly, his two seconds on stage after eighteen years and one month of caring for his Nancy, feeding her, clothing her, loving her, all finished in the two words, “I do,” I give her to be married to this man, I do, his chance to stop it gone, wasn’t
anyone
going to stop it? Reverend Boland put Nancy’s right hand into my own right hand, and suddenly looked very solemn and frightening.

“Bertram Alfred Tyler...”

(My secret gone, he had given away my secret, he had given me one less thing to confide to Nancy, to bind her to me in the night.)

“Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” I said.

“Nancy Ellen Clark, wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband, to live together in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, honor and obey him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” Nancy said.

“The ring,” Reverend Boland whispered.

The ring was in my hand, Danny Talbot immediately pressed the ring into my hand. Reverend Boland again said, “The ring,” and gently pried the golden circle loose from my fingers, and said, “The wedding ring is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual bond which unites two loyal hearts in endless love,” and then gave me the ring again. I took Nancy’s left hand in my own, and repeated what I had learned at yesterday’s rehearsal, “In token of the pledge of the vow made between us, with this ring I thee wed,” and quickly slipped the ring onto her finger.

Reverend Boland stood still and tall and majestic for a moment, a pleased awed smile on his face, as though he had been privileged to witness a miracle. Then, as I stood before him with Nancy’s trembling hand in my own, he intoned in a rich and solemn and echoing voice the words we were in this church to hear, the words that had taken less than ten minutes (I had met her in the summer of 1915!) to reach, “Forasmuch as Bertram Alfred Tyler and Nancy Ellen Clark (it was still not too late, I could bolt for the doors at the rear of the church, run west for California and the Pacific Ocean) have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company (get a boat to Hong Kong, become a rich silk merchant there, wear a little black hat on my head) and have declared the same by joining hands (and have a dozen concubines, Lotus Blossom, Peach Tree Honey) and by giving and receiving a ring (it’s not too late, I thought, run, I thought, run!) I pronounce that they are husband and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Reverend Boland paused and raised his face heavenward. “Those whom God hath joined together,” he said, “let not man put asunder.” He paused again. He looked at us both. “Amen,” he said.

Nancy lifted her head and her eyes and her veil, and I brushed my lips against hers, embarrassed to be kissing her here in public, even though she was my wife now, my
wife!
And I said, not knowing if I meant it, “I love you, Nancy,” and she tilted her head to one side and, eyes glistening, said, “Pardon?” and I knew that I had meant it.

There was pot in the apartment, of course, provided by Lenny as matter of factly as he provided the silverware and the sheets, nothing to write the Federal Bureau of Narcotics about, just enough for a little smoke every now and again. Actually, it would have been just as simple for Dana and me to have bought our nickel bags in Cambridge or New Haven, but it was more convenient to have the stuff waiting there for us in Providence each weekend (not to mention a good deal safer besides, what with all those state lines being crossed). Lenny would leave it in a little plastic bag in the refrigerator (“Oregano, in case anyone asks; livens up the cuisine”) and we would pay him for it on a consumer basis, using an honor system Dana and I scrupulously respected. Neither of us were potheads. We’d bust a joint on Friday night when we got to the apartment, and maybe have oh at the most two or three more over the weekend, something like that. It was good.

Everything was good that spring.

Dana said that nobody in Hollywood would have been interested in Our Love Story because it was so plebeian; we had not met cute, and we didn’t do any kookie offbeat things like buying red onions on Olvera Street, the commute being a long one from Providence. I informed her, however, that she possessed a couple of natural attributes long considered viable commodities on the Hollywood mart, and that perhaps we could approach a movie sale under the table, so to speak, Our Romance being weak on plot, true enough, but at least one of the characters being well-developed, if she took my meaning. (“Oh
yes,
sir,” she trilled, “I
take
your meaning, and I
do
so want to be a star!”) But I suppose our relationship
was
singularly lacking in spectator interest. We did not, for example, walk barefoot in the rain even once that spring. We walked — yes, sometimes when the sky over that old city was an unblemished blue, and the spring air came in off the Atlantic with a tangy whiff of salt and a promise of summer suddenly so strong it brought with it the tumbled rush of every summer past, the lingering images of crowded vacation highways and white sand beaches, fireworks and beer, hot dogs, lobster rolls, children shrieking, weathered oceanfront hotels, last summer crowding next summer in that Providence spring — we walked hand in hand and told lovers’ secrets no more important than that I had cheated to win a prize in the third grade (and had not been found out) or that Dana had lettered in eyebrow pencil when she was twelve years old, on her respective budding breasts, “Orangeade” and “Lemonade.”

But we had no favorite restaurant, we did not discover a great Italian joint with red-checked tablecloths and candles sticking in empty Chianti bottles dripping wax, where Luigi whom we knew by name rushed to greet us at the door
(“Mama mia,
you no binna here long time!”) and led us to a table near a cheerful fire that dispelled whatever winter’s bite still hovered, though spring was surely upon us and we were in love. We had no such rendezvous where jealous patrons watched as Luigi fussed over our glowing romance and waited while we tasted the rubious wine, and kissed his fingers and nodded and went out to the kitchen to tell his wife that the young lovers loved the wine, our personal Henry Armetta, while we ourselves grandstanded to the crowded cozy restaurant, I staring deep into Dana’s eyes, she touching my hand on the checked tablecloth with one slender carmine-tipped forefinger, we had no such place.

We had instead a hundred places, all of them lousy. We ate whenever we were hungry, and we were hungry often. Like frenzied teeny-boppers, we became instantly ravenous, demanding food at once lest heads roll, and then were instantly gratified by whatever swill the nearest diner offered — until hunger struck again and we became wild Armenians striding the streets in search of blood. Dana was at her barbaric worst immediately after making love. She would leap out of bed naked and stalk through the apartment, a saber-toothed tigress on a hunt, heading directly for the refrigerator where she would fling out food like the dismembered parts of victims, making horrible sounds of engorgement all the while, and then coming back to me to say, “Shall I make us something to eat?” She was an excellent cook, though a reluctant one, and she sometimes whipped up ginzo delights learned from her father’s mother, and unlike anything even dreamt of by
my
mother, Dolores Prine Tyler, with her Ann Page pasta.

The games we played were personal and therefore exclusive, lacking in universality and therefore essentially dull to anyone but ourselves. The Tyler-Castelli Television Commercial Award was invented one Saturday night while we were watching a message-ridden late movie on Lenny’s old set, wheeled to the foot of the bed. The judges for the TCTC Award (Dana and I) gave undisputed first prize to the Wrigley Spearmint Chewing Gum commercial as the best example of freedom from complexity, pretentiousness, or ornamentation; the coveted runner-up prize went to the Gallo Wine Company, whose handsome baritone actor-vineyard owner on horseback was forced to sing “wine country” as “wine cun-
tree”
for the sake of the jingle’s scan. In similar fashion, there was the Tyler-Castelli Award for Literary Criticism (first prize went to Martin Levin of the New York
Times
for having reviewed ten thousand books in five months, somehow skipping only the novels of Styron, Salinger, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Updike); the Tyler-Castelli Award for Athletic Achievement (first prize went to Sonny Liston for his recent one-minute performance in Lewiston, Maine); and the Tyler-Castelli Award for Quick Thinking (which went to Lyndon Baines Johnson for his speedy dispatch of the United States Marines to Santo Domingo, his second such award in three months).

There was (I knew, Dana knew) nothing very special about our love, except that it was ours and it was good. We floated, we drifted toward a limbo of not-quite irresponsibility, lulled by each other’s presence and the soporific vapors of spring. I was protected from the draft by my student status at Yale, and I was smart enough (Wat Tyler on black-and-white film asserts to his own high intelligence while assorted professors and scientists applaud his modesty) to be able to grapple with whatever old Eli threw at me in the semester to come, confident in short that I could preserve my deferment. Dana was a bright girl and an honor student, and if we slouched through most of our courses, it didn’t show in our grades. We bathed regularly. We wrote or called home even when we didn’t need money. We were a pair of passionate isolationists who sought neither followers nor converts, involved in a love we knew was genuine and true. And since it was ours alone, and since it was so good, we naturally felt free to abuse it.

(This is Wat Tyler’s first screen appearance in color, idol of millions, and he is disturbed by his red-faced image, did he look that way in the rushes? Apart, he wonders how Dana can have caused such rage in him. The flickering frames of film reveal the camera coming in for a tight close shot of his fists clenching and unclenching. The audience Wat Tyler watches the star Wat Tyler as the sound track shrieks under the tense, homicidal hands, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”)

Dana was sitting in the center of Lenny’s bed, eyes averted the way they’d been that first night here in January, partially turned away from me, hands in her lap. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a green sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. There was no lipstick on her mouth. It was ten o’clock on a Friday night. She usually caught the five o’clock train from Boston and was at the apartment by six-thirty.

“Why are you so late?” I asked her.

“I ran into someone.”

“Who?”

“An old friend.”

“Where?”

“In Boston, where do you think? My God, Wat, it’s only...”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I wasn’t anywhere near a phone.”

“Well, where, what do you mean, there’re phones all
over
Boston, how could you possibly not be anywhere near a
phone?
Didn’t you know I’d be worrying?”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Well, I was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where were you?”

“By the river.”

“What river?”

“There’s only one undergraduate river in Boston, which river do you think?”

“I’m not that goddamn familiar with Boston.”

“The Charles,” Dana said softly.

“With who, whom?”

“With Max.”

(The close shot of Wat Tyler’s eyes reveals jealousy, fury, fear, unreasoning black rage, all represented by a superimposed fireworks display erupting in each pupil. The soundtrack features his harsh breathing. The Stones’s “Satisfaction” has segued into The Yardbirds’ “I’m a Man.” It is wintertime in the film, the window behind Wat Tyler is rimed with frost, there is the distant jingle of Dr. Zhivago sleigh bells on the icebound street outside. In the room it is May and Lenny Samalson has put flowered Bonwit Teller sheets on the bed in celebration of spring, but it is a dank winter in Wat Tyler’s mind; her body will hardly have deteriorated at all when they find it naked in the snow a week from now.)

“Max,” I repeated.

“Yes. Max.”

“You ran into him.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I didn’t exactly run into him. He called.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. I went back to the dorm to pick up my bag, and Max called.”

“To say what?”

“To say how was I, and it had been a long time, and all that.”

“So how’d you end up by the river?”

“He said he had a few minutes and would I like to go for a walk or something? So I said I was on my way to catch the train to Providence, and he said Oh, in that case. So I felt sorry for him and I said Okay I’ll take a walk with you, Max.”