Sons (32 page)

“I can remember once...” my father started, and then shook his head and fell silent.

“Yes, Will?” my grandfather said.

“No, nothing,” he answered, and shook his head again. He was walking between me and my grandfather, his shoes in his hands, his socks stuffed into the pockets of his trenchcoat, his trousers rolled up onto his shins. Together, the three of us skirted the sea’s edge, silent now.

(The screen is suddenly filled with the image of three spruces against a sky certainly much bluer than the real sky over Fire Island. The trees are swaying slightly, there is the whisper of wind on the sound track. The film must be a foreign import, the first such in Wat Tyler’s memory. There are English subtitles traveling along the bottom of the screen, as though blown there by the same wind rustling in the treetops. The titles are abominable. The first title reads HERITAGE, and the next reads GENERATIONS. Wat Tyler wishes to leave the theater of his mind, perhaps to buy some popcorn in the lobby.)

My grandfather began speaking again. He was a wise old bird, my grandfather, I don’t think I realized just how wise until that day on the beach when the mist insulated the three of us from the world. He must have understood, long before I did, that my father was truly in the center of our solitary march along the beach, geographically and genealogically, the only one of our company who could lay claim to being a father to one of us and a son to the other. Because of this, because my grandfather must have sensed the strain of this double role being exerted on
his
son and
my
farther, he led us gently into conversation, talking across my father to me, talking across me to my father, transforming our three-way discussion into something remarkably crazy.

(On the screen, the three spruces, one slightly taller than the next, have dissolved into the three Tyler men walking in the mist. But the men refuse to maintain fixed camera positions. One becomes interchangeable with another and yet another, so that it seems sometimes that Wat is talking directly to his father when he is really in conversation with his grandfather, seems at other times that Will is talking to Bertram when he is actually looking at Wat. The whole thing is very
avant-garde.
Wat is sure it will cop the Golden Lion Award at Venice.)

“You can’t expect violence to be self-restrictive,” my grandfather said.

“What do you mean?” my father said.

“The riots. Surely they’re linked to what’s happening in Vietnam.”

“I don’t see any connection.”

“He’s talking about our way of life,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Our way of
life,”
I repeated, knowing I still had not made myself clear, and looking to my grandfather for help. But his attention seemed momentarily captured by a boat barely visible through the fog on the water, and as we walked on the edge of ocean merged with shore, equally lost in obliterating fog, he remarked how crazy it was for a boat to be out in this kind of weather and then abruptly mentioned that he had read about the forty-one-year-old singer Frank Sinatra coming off his yacht,
Southern Breeze,
in the company of the nineteen-year-old actress Mia Farrow and two somewhat older actresses, for a Hyannis Port visit with the father of one assassinated President and two current United States senators.

“I grew up listening to that man,” my father said.

“You don’t have to tell me,” my grandfather agreed, smiling. “You had that Victrola going day and night.”

His archaic language suddenly rankled. I wanted to get the conversation back to Vietnam, back to the truly modern idea he had offered but only tentatively explored, the idea that this pointless war of ours was beginning to seep into every phase of our national life, the idea that violence as a solution for problems abroad was most certainly being emulated as a solution for problems here at home. I resented the digression. Without so much as a preamble, I said, “First they take the air war north of the Hanoi line, and bomb only eighty miles from the Chinese border, and then...”

“But of course, there’s a great deal of violence everywhere you turn,” my grandfather said, interrupting me, and causing me to frown momentarily. “Not only in Vietnam.” There seemed to be a note of warning in his voice, as though he were anachronistically saying, Cool it, baby. You want to rap about this Yale thing, then let your wise omniscient venerable old guru lead us into it gentle-like, dig? I blinked my eyes.

(The screen conversation is taking a ridiculous turn. The film is becoming even a bit far-out for the likes of
Cahiers.
Someone asks if anyone has read
Up the Down Staircase,
someone else — it sounds like Wat but it could just as easily be Foxy Grandpa — says that laughter is cleansing, it is good for America to enjoy a healthy laugh, not to mention a sob or two, over the problems of a teacher in a slum school, the same way it is good for America to enjoy the James Bond cinema spoofs.)

“They’re
not
spoofs,” I said. I was certain now that both of them, father and grandfather, had veered off on a tangent because they refused to discuss something that was terribly important to me. Together, father and son, they had decided in secret conspiracy to prevent an airing of my thoughts, thereby scuttling my plans even before they were fully formed. So I very loftily said something about the “spoof” label being a very handy way of alleviating our Puritan guilt over enjoying a sado-masochistic reaction to Bond’s screen exploits, the same way we had felt it necessary to call
Candy
a spoof as well, so that it would then become acceptable reading for all the ladies of Garden City.

“Did
you
read
Candy?”
my father asked, surprised.

“Yes, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, but...”

“But it was a spoof, right?”

“No, it was pornography,” my grandfather said.

“So what’s wrong with pornography?” I said.

“Nothing,” my grandfather said.

“I just didn’t think you were reading pornography,” my father said.

“What’d you
think
I was reading?
Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle?”

“No, but not pornography.”

“I’ve also read the Marquis de Sade,” I said.

“Where’d you get hold of that?”

“From the top shelf of books in your bedroom,” I said.

“Got to be more careful with your dirty books, Will,” my grandfather said, and smiled.

“I guess so,” my father answered, and returned the smile, and again I had the feeling they were excluding me, that their bond with each other was closer than mine with either of them. So I forced the conversation back to Vietnam again, because Vietnam was what was on my mind, and I wanted them to know this, while simultaneously wanting to keep my formative plans from them, telling them that first Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had informed the nation that the aggression was from the north, while 8000 of our Marines landed at Danang, bringing our total number of men in arms to 75,000 with experts predicting 150,000 American troops in Vietnam before the end of 1965. Then President Johnson had said, “What we want to do is achieve the maximum deterrence with the minimum danger and cost in human lives,” and announced that 50,000
more
men would be sent there right away, bringing our total to 125,000 with the estimate for year’s end now being 200,000 and the draft quota more than doubled from 17,000 to 35,000 a month.

“Well,
you
don’t have to worry about the draft,” my father said.

“Pop,” I said, “maybe we
all
...”

“He’s a student,” my father explained.

“I know,” my grandfather said.

“Suppose I wasn’t?”

“Weren’t.”

“Weren’t. What then?”

“But you are.”

“But a lot of kids
aren’t.
And when the bomb falls, it’s not going to ask who’s a student and who isn’t.”

“There’s not much danger of that,” my father said. “Not with a hotline between Washington and Moscow.”

“Assuming somebody has a dime to make a call.”

“It’s not a pay telephone,” my father said, exhibiting monumental humorlessness.

“I once got a call in Chicago,” my grandfather said, “from a man who told me, ‘Mr. Tyler, this is your exterminator.’ Seared me out of my wits.”

"You?”
my father said. “Scared you?”

“Sure,” my grandfather said. “Turned out he really
was
the exterminator. Your mother had called about ants in the kitchen.”

“We’re
all
scared of the exterminator,” I said. “We’re like a gambler down to his last chip, down to his underwear in fact, with nothing more to lose. We’re saying, ‘The hell with everything, I’ll take my chances,’ and we’re putting shorts and all on the next roll, figuring we’ll either walk out naked or fly home in a private jet.”

“Survival’s
always
been a gamble,” my father said. “Do you think you’re saying something new?”

“Yes!”

“Well, you’re not. The first time a caveman picked up a club...”

(The screen is filled with the impressive image of William Francis Tyler, publisher and lecturer as he expounds his theories on
The Ultimate Weapon,
relating to a dozing audience the alarm felt in the civilian population each time a new weapon is developed, going on to explain while the camera zooms in on a busty blond co-ed picking her nose that mankind has always had the good sense, the camera is back on his face now, in close-up, to place restrictions on its own capacity to destroy itself, his voice droning on as the camera suddenly cuts away to a shot of the grandfather, Bertram Tyler, staring moodily out to sea, and then intercuts close shots of Will Tyler’s face with those of Wat Tyler’s, to emphasize the point that this is strictly between father and son now, the provocateur oddly removed. Nobody understands the film any more. The theater is half empty.)

“Yes, thank you very much, Pop,” I said, “but that kind of thinking no longer applies. This Vietnam thing
is
new. It’s new because a lot of kids aren’t willing to
gamble
any more, don’t you see? Why should we? So a hotshot Vietcong-killer like Ky can go on running his cruddy little country? Who the hell cares?”

“South Vietnam is important to our security,” my father said.

“Whose
security?”

“Ours. Yours, mine.”

“How about the security of the five hundred Americans who’ve already wasted their lives there?”

“Some people would not consider that a...”

“... or the God knows how many more we seem
ready
to waste?”

“Do you want all Asia to go Communist?”

“I don’t give a damn
what
it goes, Pop.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I mean it.”

“You don’t.”

“It’s a bad war, and...”

“There are no good wars,” my grandfather said suddenly.

“... and the only way to make it any better is to end it.”

“How?” my father asked.

“By refusing to
fight
the goddamn thing,” I said.

I was very close now. I was very close to telling him. We stopped walking for an instant, the three of us. I was trembling. My grandfather was suddenly standing between us, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on my father’s. I was not aware that he had moved, but he was between us.

“These are different times, Will,” he said gently.

“I fought my war,” my father said.

“So did I.”

“Then why...”

“And we also made our peace.”

A strange thing happened then. We both turned to our fathers at the same moment, we were both sons at the same moment. Simultaneously, my father and I both said, “Pop...” and then fell abruptly silent. I no longer knew what I wanted to say, or even if I wanted to say it. My father shook his head. We began walking up the beach again. The air seemed suddenly dense, the fog suffocating. It was my grandfather who broke the silence again.

“Have either of you seen
The Sandpiper?”
he said.

Quickly, with a glance at my father, I said, “We gave Burton and Taylor the award for August.”

“Award?” my father said. There was a dazed expression on his face, as though he had wandered into an alien world from a familiar and much-loved landscape. He had tucked his shoes under his arms, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat, looking first to me, and then to my grandfather, as though he did not recognize either of us.

“The Tyler-Castelli Award,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, and nodded, though I was sure he did not yet understand.

“For the Most Convincing Performances in a Religious Film,” I said.

“Supposed to be packing them in all over the country,” my grandfather said.

“That’s because truck drivers enjoy watching a man kiss his own wife,” I said.

“In Metrocolor,” my grandfather said.

“And Panavision,” I said.

“It isn’t always possible,” my father said abruptly.

“What isn’t?”

“Peace.”

“I’m sure Hanoi wants peace every bit as much as we do,” I said. “If we could just...”

“Do you mean Vietnam?” my grandfather said, and suddenly looked his son full in the face.

“Yes,” my father said too quickly, and I suddenly realized he had not been talking about Vietnam at all, and was immediately ashamed of my own driving need to make clear my position on the war. I wanted to shout, No, please, Pop,
say
what you were about to say,
tell
us what you really meant, but I knew the moment was gone. I thought Oh, Jesus, if only I hadn’t been here, he’d have told my grandfather, they’d have talked, they’d have
talked
together. And then I recognized that I was really thinking about myself and my father, and felt suddenly desolated, the way I’d felt that day waiting for the elevator, when he’d sent Mrs. Green to find out what I wanted for my graduation.