Sons (33 page)

We walked the rest of the way up the beach in silence, my grandfather, my father, and I.

The bedroom Dana occupied was adjacent to the master bedroom and opposite the john. In the off-season, it belonged to the Rosens’ little girl who, judging from the evidence arrayed around the perimeter of the room, was a child with a scientific bent. On bookshelf and dresser top, end table and vanity was a formidable collection of spiders in jars. The spiders were all currently dead, but this was no indication that they had not been alive and hale when little Dwight (for such was the darling’s name — Dwight Rosen) had incarcerated them and fed them their wingless, legless flies, the withered carcasses of which now littered the bottom of each jar. As a homey touch (or perhaps as further nourishment — who knew the mysterious workings of the scientific mind?) Dwight had further provided a carpet of lettuce for each of her jarred prisoners, which leaves were now wilted, brown, and mildewed. Altogether, her collection was a little unappetizing.

Her room was an airless chamber, a single screened window facing the door, an opposition adequate perhaps for cross ventilation if the door were left ajar, but since Dana and I were naked on little Dwight’s bed, I had not deemed it appropriate to leave the door ajar, or even unlocked. Yes, the pink door was locked, and the flowered window shade was drawn over the screened window, so that the groping and the writhing on the bed was contained within those four walls even as the spiders were contained in their jars, unseen by any eyes save those of the Walt Disney characters who cavorted on the wallpaper, they being only dumb forest animals who could register neither complaint nor surprise.

My mother, while not wishing to aggravate our tenuously resolved Oedipal situation by letting on that she knew Dana and I were, uh, ah, enjoying an, uh, ahem, sexual relationship, had nonetheless collared me in the kitchen on the Friday after my grandfather left for London and informed me that she had been invited to a party down the beach at the Stenquists’ (Erik Stenquist being a closet queen with a wife who was apparently deaf, dumb, and blind) starting at live p. m. and that she’d be there until eight o’clock, at which time she planned to meet my father’s ferry, it being his habit (now that his vacation had ended) to take the six-thirty p. m. boat from Sayville every Friday night, and the eight-ten a. m. back each Monday morning.

“So I’ll be gone from five o’clock to a little after eight o’clock,” my mother said.

I said, “Oh, okay, Mom.”

She looked at me steadily, hazel eyes unwavering, and said, “I’ll be leaving at about ten to five, and your father and I won’t be back until a little after eight.”

“Fine,” I said.

“We’ll have dinner then,” my mother said. “Just some cold cuts, will that be all right?”

“Great,” I said.

“At eight o’clock or a little after,” my mother said. “When your father and I return.”

“Right,” I said, “you’ll be gone from five to eight.”

“Yes, from five o’clock to eight o’clock,” my mother said.

“Okay,” I said.

We nodded at each other like teacher and pupil who had just come through a particularly difficult educational experiment and were now anxious to march off to our just and separate rewards, hers being a few martinis at the Stenquists’, mine being Dana.

It was about seven o’clock, I suppose (I don’t really
know
because I had taken off my watch and put it on Dwight’s vanity alongside a jar containing a very large black and, I was sure, poisonous and thankfully dead spider) but it was
probably
around seven or thereabouts because we had come into the bedroom at five-thirty, giving Mom a half-hour’s grace period, and had made fast and furious love, and were now beginning to explore each other again, not truly explore because you cannot explore territories already claimed, but beginning to walk around our acquisitions like proud landholders with pleased smiles and small nods, appreciatively and gratefully, and beginning also to get a little excited in the bargain, all metaphors aside. It was about seven o’clock, then, when I heard footsteps in the hallway outside, and sat straight up in bed, and heard the bathroom door closing across the hall, and heard someone urinating. Dana had clutched the sheet to her naked breasts (it’s true that girls do that, I had never believed it when I saw it on the screen) and had turned to me with her brown eyes wide, neither of us speaking, both of us listening to the interminable stream across the hall behind the closed bathroom door, and then the door opened again, and there were more footsteps, retreating, the floorboards creaking in the old seaside house, and I heard my father’s voice call from the living room, “Dolores?” and hesitate and then call again, “Anybody home?”

I was, by this time, already out of bed and pulling on my blue jeans while Dana fumbled with bra and panties, neither of us speaking, listening for those footsteps that would bring Old Sherlock directly to the spider lab of Dwight Rosen, but hopefully not before we were both properly dressed and admiring all those lovely dead arachnids in their jars. The footsteps instead stopped outside the master bedroom next door. My father hesitated in the corridor again, called “Dolores!” again, and then went into the bedroom. I heard the door whisper shut behind him. I heard the slip bolt being thrown. I looked at Dana. She was dressed now and frantically combing her hair. I heard the telephone being dialed in the bedroom next door, a toll call, judging from the number of times the dial was twirled, and I thought several things in tumbling succession. I thought first what a good thing it was that my father
hadn’t
allowed Dana and me to share this bedroom next to the master bedroom because the walls were obviously paper-thin and he would have been able to hear every rattle and creak of every spring on Dwight’s narrow bed, and I thought it odd that Dana hadn’t mentioned hearing any of my parents’ own nocturnal action, and suddenly wondered if they still engaged in such action (Oedipal wish), and thought also that my father was probably calling his office with some last-minute instructions, having undoubtedly left some time after lunch to catch an earlier boat than usual, forgetting for the moment that it was now seven o’clock or thereabouts and the office would be closed, forgetting
all
of these things in the next few moments because that was when my father’s voice cut through the cardboard walls with their Disney characters cavorting, cut through my thoughts, cut through my life and made it abundantly clear that this my America was a phony bitch of a land where anything of worth or value was becoming buried under an overwhelming heap of garbage. All of this my father accomplished in less than twenty sentences.

“Hello,” he said. “Everything all right?”

“I just got here,” he said. “It’s okay, she’s out somewhere.”

“I ache all over,” he said.

“Oh, really,” he said, and chuckled. “That’s very interesting.”

“Stop it,” he said, “you’re giving me a hard-on.”

“Listen,” he said, “I’d better go now.”

“Will I see you Monday?” he said.

“I love you,” he said.

“Goodbye,” he said.

That was how my father honed the steel blade my grandfather had helped to pour and hammer. That was how my father — in a voice strangely unlike his own, coy, flirtatious, arch — convinced me that I would not go back to Yale in the fall, I would no longer use my student deferment as an excuse to avoid confronting the draft, I would instead drop out of school and do whatever I could in protest against this war that seemed to me representative of everything rotten in America, including my father.

I could not look at Dana.

We left little Dwight’s bedroom and walked noisily out of the house, the fucking hypocrite.

I was Lieutenant William Francis Tyler of the 94th Fighter Squadron of the 1st Fighter Group of the 306th Fighter Wing of the Fifteenth Air Force based in Foggia, Italy. I had got to bed at two A. M. the night before after having drunk myself into a stupor at the Allied Officers Club in town. It was now six-thirty a. m. and the sergeant who shook me awake kept saying over and over again, “Let’s go, lieutenant, let’s go,” and I mumbled in my sleep, “You’re kidding,” even though I had seen my name chalked onto the blackboard at Group Headquarters yesterday afternoon, and knew that I would be Hying this morning. “You’re on, lieutenant,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You up?”

“I’m up.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure, goddamnit.”

“Okay, lieutenant.”

It was cold in the tent. I unzipped my sleeping bag and heard the sergeant moving over to Ace’s cot to shake him awake, and then going down the line past Tommy Rodwin and over to where Archie Colombo was snoring. There were only four of us in the tent. For the past month, we had been paying an Italian mason to build us a permanent shelter out of tufa block and corrugated steel, but he was working slowly and the house was not yet finished. I sat on the edge of my cot, shivering on my air mattress even though I was wearing long johns.

“What the fuck time is it?” Ace asked.

“Six-thirty,” I said.

“Never let a fuckin’ man
sleep
around here,” he said, and swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood up and began waving his arms in big circles while running in place.

“Hey, Colombo, you up?” I shouted.

“I’m up,” Colombo answered.

“We’ll all be up, you don’t keep quiet,” Rodwin mumbled from his cot, the only one of us who was not flying that day.

I pulled on a pair of coveralls, picked up my toilet kit, and stumbled out into the dawn, glancing automatically at the sky above, clear and blue, which was no indication it would be the same over the target, wherever that might be today. The autumn countryside was yellow and soft in the early morning light, a faint mist still clinging to the ground where the sun had not yet touched the shadowed hollows.

I had shaved the night before, so I just washed my face now, and brushed my teeth, and looked at my watch and tried to tell myself I did not have a hangover. The officers’ area was adjacent to the flight line, and the P-38s were lined up with their noses facing the runway, catching glints of sunlight, crew chiefs and mechanics moving up and down the line as they coughed the airplanes into life, warming them up in case we would be flying today. I dropped off my gear at the tent and then walked diagonally out of the area into the officers’ mess hall where I ate my usual breakfast of canned orange juice, oatmeal with powdered milk, powdered scrambled eggs, Spam, and coffee. If we flew, I would not be eating again until late this afternoon.

The Briefing Room was in an old church taken over by the Fifteenth as its headquarters. I took a chair alongside Ace, who had not shaved and who would probably eat after the briefing, as was his superstitious custom. Our Operations Officer, Major Dimple, who was second in command to Colonel Spiller, was standing behind a table at the front of the church, where the altar once must have been. An Air Force map of southern Europe, covered with a sheet of plexiglas, hung on the wall behind him. A crayoned red circle on the plexi located today’s target, some place in Yugoslavia. Crayoned blue lines to the target area indicated our headings from Foggia. Crayoned red dots along our flight route indicated expected flak points. Major Dimple consulted the clipboard in his hand, cleared his throat, and said, “Good morning, gentlemen,” and no one answered. It was still dim inside the church; the huge map was illuminated by a long fluorescent tube; the half-light of dawn pressed against the arched stone windows like faded silk. “Mission and target,” the major said. “Rendezvous with B-24s over Kraljevo, Yugoslavia, provide penetration, target, and withdrawal cover.” This was hardly a surprise, since those crayoned blue lines led straight to Yugoslavia, but an audible sigh of relief went up nonetheless from the assembled pilots. It would be a short run. Our last raid had been deep into Germany, and we had lost eight B-17s over the target, a heavily defended synthetic petroleum plant, five of them to flak and three to mid-air crash. It was an incredible feeling to be sitting a thousand feet above the heavies as they flew into the box barrage put up by the Germans, knowing there was nothing you could do but wait until they had dropped their load and come of the target, at which time you would try to protect them from any fighters the Luftwaffe still had. You saw those poor bastards sailing directly into the black puffs of flak, each evil-looking blossom indicating the explosion of a shell, and even though you could not hear anything over the roar of your own engines, you knew that each of those unfolding black flowers was malign but oddly impersonal. The barrage the Germans laid up into the sky was in the shape of a box through which they knew with certainty the bombers
had
to fly if they expected to reach the target. It was as simple as that, no question of marksmanship, no question of ground battery crews zeroing in. The flak exploded and the bombers flew through it, and each black puff was only objectively deadly. It was different when, flying unarmed through soup on a weather reconnaissance mission deep behind enemy lines, you saw nothing, no explosive puffs, but suddenly felt the airplane rock from a percussive blast behind you, and knew the ground radar was closing in on your tail, and suddenly swerved to the right in panic, and dropped two thousand feet and dodged to the left, knowing you could in your stripped-down state outrun any fighter they put into the air against you, but terrified of those invisible bursts tracking you in the eyeless night. Over the target on a bombing mission, you were safe if you flew a fighter plane because you veered up and away to wait while the B-17s or B-24s dropped their loads, unable to assist them in any way (the Luftwaffe would not send its own fighters into the teeth of a ground barrage) until the ordeal was over, and they broke from the target and headed home. And oh the goddamn pitiable sight of those poor bastards coming off the target, broken, smoking, losing altitude, limping away after they had arrived in such bold formation and suicidally rushed that wall of exploding flak. If you ever talked to a bomber pilot, you wondered how he managed to keep his sanity, and you felt oddly embarrassed when he told you the prettiest sight in the world was a P-38 coming down to cover him as he broke off target.