Sons (31 page)

I wondered, in that case, why he had not been at the dock, hmmm? It was my guess that he was still wrestling with the problem of who would sleep where and do what to whom, a surmise that was immediately confirmed when he grabbed our suitcases at the door of the house. “Wat!” he said. “Dana! Hey, it’s great to see you! How was the traffic coming out?”

“Oh, not bad,” I said, and found Dana and myself being drawn in his wake to the bedroom at the rear of the house, where he quickly deposited Dana’s bag, “This is your room, Dana,” and then turned to take my elbow in a firm, fatherly, guiding grip, wheeling me around the bend in the hallway and leading me to the bedroom near the kitchen (where I knew the damn screen needed repairing) and saying, “This is yours, Wat, do you both want to freshen up, or would you like a drink first?” He was being very tolerant in his attitude, including us in his adult world where you offered grown-ups drinks if they didn’t want to freshen up first after those tedious Long Island parkways, but he was also making it clear he didn’t expect any adult hanky-panky under his roof for the several weeks Dana and I would be there, preferring us to fornicate on the open beach instead, I guessed.

I looked at the single bed against the torn screen, and then I looked at my father, and his eyes met mine and clearly stated, That’s the way it is, son.

And my eyes dearly signaled back, Aren’t we being a little foolish?

And his said, If you want my approval, you’re not getting it, son.

And mine said, Okay, you prick.

Out loud, I said, “I see the screen’s still torn.”

Out loud, my father said, “I’ll get John to fix it in the morning,” John being the Pines idiot who went around fixing torn screens and putting bedboards under sagging beach mattresses.

I went back to Dana. She was still standing in the corridor around the bend, her hands on her hips. She looked totally forlorn. I took her in my arms.

“Drink, Dana?” my father called from out of sight somewhere, the liberal Spanish
dueña
sans mantilla or black lace fan.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Tyler,” Dana piped, and then whispered, “Listen, are we supposed to...”

“What are you having?” my father called.

“Whatever you’ve got!”

“We’ve got everything!”

“Just some scotch, please,” Dana said. “With a little water. Wat, are we supposed to even
know
each other?” she whispered.

“I’ll climb the trellis each night,” I said.

“There
is
no trellis,” Dana said. “Besides, what’s that big bedroom right next door? That’s the master bedroom, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Wat...”

“In fact, I know so.”

“Wat, do you want a drink?” my father called.

“Yes!” I shouted. “I think I need one.”

“What?”

“Yes, a little scotch on the rocks, please.”

“Coming up,” my father said.

“Did you get the kids settled?” my mother asked from the kitchen.

“Yes, Dolores, the kids are settled,” my father said, not without a trace of smug satisfaction in his voice.

“I’ll wither and die,” Dana whispered. “Oh, Wat, it’ll be just awful.”

The first week was, in fact, absolute hell because it was the week my father was taking away from his office (ten days, actually — he had come out on Friday the sixth). The way he wanted to spend his vacation, it seemed, was by wandering around that old gray clapboard house like one of the queen’s own guard, Dana being Her Majesty, and I being a surly peasant trying to break into her bedchamber. He scarcely ever left us alone during the day, and his snores from the master bedroom each night were an un-subtle reminder that the old family retainer was sleeping right
there,
man, ready to spring into action at the first hint of a footfall in the corridor outside. We finally
did
make love on the beach one night, but Dana was ashamed to take a shower after we tiptoed back into the house, because she said everyone (meaning Old Hawkeye) would know she’d got “sand all up her.”

I couldn’t understand my father at all. He was charming and pleasant to Dana, telling her really entertaining stories about the publishing field, spicing them with gossip about this or that literary celebrity, “Did you know that Jimmy Baldwin?” or “Were you aware that Bill Styron?” pretending to a vast inside knowledge that he honestly was not privy to; my father’s list consisted largely of books of photographs. (It was as if, in allowing the Tyler evolution to follow its natural growth pattern, he had brought it from lumber-jacking, through papermaking, into book publishing, and then had sophisticated it a step further by publishing books that were non-books; even as America itself had evolved from a nation where men first labored with their hands into a nation where machines did the work for men — and often did work that was utterly without meaning.) But despite what seemed to be his total acceptance of the girl I had chosen, he adamantly refused to let me possess her. I had the feeling more than once that he was actually coming on with her himself, that he looked too longingly at her breasts, leaped too hastily to light her cigarette, tried too hard for a cheap laugh to an old joke. I didn’t want a goddamn sparring match with my own father; I wasn’t attempting to turn the old bull out to pasture, but neither did I want him gamboling around with the young heifers. It was all very unsettling. I was having my own doubts about where I lit into the scheme of things just then (if my father’s publishing of picture books was a logical development in the growth of the Tyler family, what came next? Where did I take it from there? Was I the comparatively stunted tree in the foreground of the colophon, or the giant spruce towering against a limitless sky?), and I did not need added aggravation from dear old Dad.

My mother’s tactful intervention helped the situation somewhat. She was very careful to let me know whenever she and my father planned on being out of the house for more than a few hours, and on one occasion she managed to cajole him into taking her into the city for dinner. I even overheard her discussing the entire spectrum of morality with him one night, and whereas her admonitions did nothing to lessen his surveillance of the sanctum sanctorum, he at least quit hanging around Dana and me during the daytime, when all we wanted to do was lie on the beach together and talk quietly about my developing plans.

I found out about my father during our last week at the beach, so I guess you can say he had a lot to do with the decision I finally reached. But if there are endings, there are likewise beginnings, and my grandfather Bertram Tyler — the beginning — also had something to do with shaping my molten thought.

Grandpa, en route from Chicago to London where he was negotiating a contract for the export of clay-coated boxboard, came out to the beach unexpectedly, a few days after my father had gone back to work, amen. He had met Dana briefly at Christmastime, and was delighted to see her again now. But he looked tired, his blue eyes paler than I remembered them, his face somewhat drawn. As it turned out, I was unduly worried about him; he had had a truly harrowing trip from Chicago, with his plane circling Kennedy in the fog for an hour and a half before finally being turned away to Philadelphia International. He had taken a train to Pennsylvania Station (which was in the throes of a massive overhaul) and then
another
train out to Sayville, and
then
the ferry to the Pines, and was now near total collapse. Dana mixed him a martini that would have curled the toes of an Arabian used to drinking camel piss. My grandfather said, “Dana, this is just what I used to drink in Chicago in 1920,” and then called to my mother in the kitchen to come join us. “In a second, Pop,” she yelled back, “I’m getting some snacks,” and my grandfather put his feet up on the wicker ottoman and sighed and said, “It’s good to be home.”

We had our talk two days later.

The weather, heralded by the fog that had marked his arrival, had turned surly and gray again; a lire was needed each morning to take the chill out of the old house. We had used up the small supply of shingles in the living room scuttle, and my grandfather and I volunteered to replenish it. It was a pleasure to watch him work with an ax. I always felt that unless I was careful I’d chop off a couple of my own fingers, but he used the ax without even looking at it, almost as if it were an extension of his right hand, talking all the while he worked, the way some men can play piano and smoke and drink beer all at the same time without once missing a beat. He would hold the shingle upright in his left hand, the ax clutched close to the head in his right hand, and
whick,
a single sharp stroke and the shingle was split, another shingle appeared in his left hand, another
whick,
“How are you doing at school, Wat?” he asked.

“Oh, great,” I said. “Everything’s great.”

“Getting good marks?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I like your Dana.”

“I like her, too.”

“When do you go back?”

I didn’t answer him. He was looking directly at me, his left hand reached out automatically for another shingle, he felt sightlessly along its top for the true center, jabbed it with the ax once, sharply, raised his eyebrows and said, “Walter?”

“I’m not sure, Grandpa.”

“Not sure when you’re due back?”

“Not sure if I’m
going
back.”

“Oh?”

We didn’t say anything for several moments. My grandfather busied himself with splitting the shakes, and I busied myself with stacking them up against the chimney. The air was penetratingly bitter, tendrils of fog sliding in off the beach, a needle-fine drizzle cutting to the bone. I was wearing blue jeans and my Yale sweatshirt, but I was cold. My grandfather had not brought any beach clothes with him; he worked in pin-striped trousers and an open-throated white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his gold cuff links, studiously bent over each shingle now, even though he could have done the job blindfolded. At last, he said only, “How come, Walter?”

“I’m just not sure, Grandpa.”

“Don’t you like school?”

“I like it.”

“Having trouble with somebody there? One of the teachers?”

“No.”

“Is it Dana?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“All right,” my grandfather said, and smiled, and looked down at the shingles and said, “Think we’ve got enough to get us through the winter?” and smiled again, and put the ax back in the shed and then rolled down his cuffs, and I started piling the rest of the split wood in orderly rows against the chimney. I wanted to tell my grandfather what I was thinking of doing, wanted to get an opinion other than Dana’s, but I was afraid he’d think I was a coward. So I worked silently, with my brow wrinkled, longing to communicate with him and knowing I could not. And finally, when I’d stacked all the wood, I said, again, “I’m just not sure, Grandpa,” and he said, “Well, why don’t we take a little walk?” and I looked at him curiously for just a moment because the last time I’d taken a walk with him was when I was six years old and we had gone up the hill behind the house on Ritter Avenue and looked out on a bright October day to where Long Island Sound stretched clear to the end of the world.

I had told him that day that there was a girl in the sixth grade whose name was Katherine Bridges, and I loved her, and she was the most beautiful girl in all Talmadge, even though she wasn’t born there but was adopted and had come from Minnesota. But I did not want to tell him now that Dana Castelli was the most beautiful girl in the world; I wanted only to tell him of what I’d been slowly but certainly deciding to do come fall, and I didn’t want to tell him
that,
either, because this was a man who had faced German bayonets in the trenches at Château-Thierry. Nor was it a particularly inviting day for a walk, the drizzle having grown heavier, not quite yet a true rain, but forbidding nonetheless.

We walked down to the ferry slip and watched the boat coming in through the fog, her horn bleating, and watched the passengers unloading. My grandfather suddenly said, Isn’t that Will?” and I looked to where he was pointing and saw a tall man wearing a Burberry trenchcoat coming down the gangway and striding onto the dock in a duck-footed walk that could have belonged to no one but a Tyler.

(In Wat Tyler’s camera eye, the man he sees striding toward him and his grandfather is simultaneously the villain who is keeping him from Dana and a rather impressively handsome gentleman with an expansive smile on his face. The images, double-exposed, are confusing. He wants to hate this man for his offhanded treatment of the Love Affair of the Century, and yet he cannot help but respect and admire him. For the first time in his life, or at least for the first time that he can remember, he wants to say, “Pop, I love you.” The screen images dissolve.)

My father saw us immediately and came to us, embracing first my grandfather, kissing him on the cheek, and then going through the same family ritual with me.

“I didn’t expect anyone to meet me,” he said. “I caught an earlier boat.”

“Actually, we were just going for a little walk, Will,” my grandfather said.

“Well, good,” my father said, and threw his arms around our shoulders, comrades three, and said, “I’ll join you,” which did not overly thrill me, because frankly I did not want him to know about the plan I’d been considering, and I was afraid my grandfather might mention the doubts I’d voiced about going back to Yale.

But we took off our shoes, all of us, and went onto the beach where the mist enveloped us, and walked close to the water’s edge, the ocean seeming warmer than the air, and we talked. We talked about the weather first, it being omnipresent, I explaining to my grandfather that the summer people were divided into two factions, those who believed the best weather came in July, and those who favored August. And from there, as a natural extension of talking about the weather, we began to discuss the riots that had taken place in Watts the week before, Watts being a Los Angeles community I’d never heard of before it made racial headlines, and I said something about heat probably being a contributing factor, and my grandfather expressed the opinion that heat had very little to do with emotions that had been contained for more than a century.