Sons (43 page)

“Hey!” I said.

The girl turned. She looked at me with vague bemusement, head tilted, brown hair falling loose over one eye à la Veronica Lake, the opposite eyebrow raised in imitation of God knew how many other movie queens. I had a sudden feeling of prescience, I thought I knew for one insane moment exactly what dumb thing she would offer in response, and I hoped against hope that she would not say it, but she lifted her eyebrow impossibly higher, and in a very young and hopelessly affected voice said exactly what I knew she would, “Hay is for horses.”

“Oh shit,” I answered, and snapped a smart salute at her, and then executed a military about-face, and marched into the living room. She came in directly behind me, but I didn’t know she had followed me until I turned from the bar, where I was refilling my glass, and found her standing at my elbow.

“Would you like to apologize?” she said.

“For what?”

“For what you just said.”

“What did I say?”

“You
know
what you said.”

“Okay, I apologize.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Goodnight.”

“Hey, hold it a minute.”

“What do you want?”

“You live here?”

“I live here.”

“Who are you?”

“Dolores Prine.”

“Oh. Is the guy with the patch your brother?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Why?”

“I like to know how old people arc.”

“I’m almost eighteen.”

“Which means you’re only seventeen.”

“If a person is almost eighteen, why yes, I guess that
does
mean she’s only seventeen, how clever of you.”

“Where’re you running to?”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Why?”

“I’m tired.”

“Big night on the town with your pale little boyfriend?”

“Yes, big night on the town.”

“Radio City Music Hall?”

“No, the Roxy.”

“What’s the Roxy?”

“It’s a theater. You mean you don’t know the
Roxy?”

“I’m not a New Yorker.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Chicago.”

“Foo.”

“What do you mean
foo?
It’s a good city.”

“It’s not as good as New York.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No. But no city in the world is as good as New York.”

“How about Ocracoke, North Carolina?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“A drink? I’m only seventeen.”

“You’re almost eighteen.”

She was only seventeen and still attending the McKeon School. I felt somewhat like Lazarus the following Monday waiting outside the building as little girls in uniforms came skipping down the steps into a New York April gilded with sunshine. “Aren’t you going to carry my books?” she asked, and I sensed that she was kidding me, but I took them anyway because I hadn’t yet learned to decipher the meaning in her hazel eyes, my mother’s own green with an overtint of the palest brown, flecked with pure cat’s-eye yellow, remarkable eyes that claimed complete attention whenever she spoke.

It was, of course, her youth that attracted me, though I myself was not yet twenty, born on June the sixth, nineteen hundred and twenty-five, A date to remember, my mother had often said when she was still alive, though generally she said it when I was being particularly abominable, fun in
her
eyes too, broad midwestern sarcasm, You don’t
know
how long we hoped and prayed, Will, you don’t
know
how your father and I longed for our first child, and then to be blessed with
you,
oh surely we were chosen, flinty green sparked with humor, and then a hug and a slap on the behind, I loved that woman, I loved her still.

Dolores Prine’s mother called her Dec, and her brother called her Lolly, and she asked me to call her one or the other because she hated the name Dolores, each diminutive sounding equally childish to my octogenarian cars, each reminiscent of a world I had left behind a long time ago, those walks home from Grace School in the afternoon, Michael Mallory cracking his dirty jokes and Charlotte Wagner bellowing her horse laugh in response, educated elbows and compliant breasts, ice cream sodas on Division Street, portable record players on the Oak Street Beach. The name Dolores conjured images of a tall Spanish lady, hair pulled back into a bun, mantilla falling in a lacy cascade from a high comb, eyes brimming with sorrow and pain, her walk erect and dignified, but each long stride so sensuous besides, a promise of surging passion under that long black skirt. But Lolly? Dee? Lolly was the child who skipped along beside me and prattled about the latest Woody Herman record, flicking her brown hair back and away from the eye it had been trained to cover, giggling unexpectedly, asking me if I ever killed a man, and then opening her hazel eyes wide (hand flicking at the falling brown curtain, fingernails revealed as bitten to the quick) when I said that I had been credited with four and a half enemy planes, “How can you shoot down only half a plane?” she asked. I explained to her that my wingman and I (it was amazing how I could mention his name without feeling pain any more), a fellow called Ace Gibson, from Reading, Pennsylvania, had shot down this one enemy airplane together, and therefore had to share credit for the kill, and she nodded in quick understanding and then said, “It must have taken guts,” and that was all. Lolly had become Dec in the crack of an instant, the girl child had become at least the adolescent and in the adolescent there was some promise of the woman. I wanted to put my arm around her narrow shoulders, wanted to hold her close and touch her breasts beneath the gray school jacket, green-gold crest over the left pocket, green tic separating the twin mounds under the white cotton blouse, so young, so very young. And yet Francesca could not have been much older, and I had done things to her, we had done things to her, so why did I feel so guilty now, why did I feel that if I touched this slender coltish thing beside me, I would be arrested and imprisoned for life? If she was only seventeen, then I was only nineteen; if I was almost twenty, then surely she was almost eighteen. I did not touch her. I carried her books like a tongue-tied oaf, discovering sunlight along the line down on her wrist where it jutted from the too-short sleeve of her jacket, and listened as she explained to me in all seriousness the tremendous sacrifices Clark Gable, James Stewart, and Tyrone Power had made for their country in wartime by giving up their profitable Hollywood careers and going off to fight. “It must have taken guts,” she said, and bingo, we were back in the third grade again, with little Lolly swallowing the linger paint and getting her frock all messy besides.

If the Air Force had permitted me to go back to Chicago while awaiting redeployment orders, I probably would never have seen Dolores Prine again after that awkward Monday. But at Mitchel Field there was only confusion and procrastination; everyone seemed to know that the war in Europe was rushing to a close, yet no one seemed prepared for its end. The Air Force could hardly allow an experienced combat pilot to go home for even a few days, because nobody knew what was going to happen once Germany surrendered; the Japanese might launch a wholesale Kamikaze attack against San Francisco, in which case we’d all be rushed to the West Coast. Since the Air Force didn’t know what the hell to do with me, all they asked was that I check in for formation each morning. If my orders had not yet arrived (and God only knew where those orders were supposed to be coming from), I was free to leave the field until formation the following day. It was a very sweet setup. Michael, enjoying the same country-club status at Fort Dix would take a bus in to meet me in the city, and together we wandered through those early April days, bright with sunshine, sparkling with just enough of winter’s lingering bite. As far as I was concerned, the war was already over. I did not for a moment believe I would be shipped to the Pacific, and I found myself talking to Michael about plans for the future — should I go into my father’s business, should I go to college, should I try writing — I had written some very good letters while I was overseas. Together, we explored our philosophies and our ideals, our hopes and our ambitions, usually in one or another of New York’s bars. I only mentioned Ace Gibson once, and that was because Michael and I had been talking to a lieutenant-commander in a Third Avenue bar, and the guy started telling us about a Dear John letter he had received, and it called to mind that other bar in Los Angeles, where a drunken captain in Supply had told Ace and me about his wife running off with the local — dentist, had it been?

It was Michael who suggested that we stroll over to McKeon and surprise the little Prine girl. I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but we’d been sitting in a bar for close to two hours, and it was so beautiful and bright outside that it seemed a shame to kill the rest of the day that way. So we paid for the drinks, and then walked east toward Madison Avenue, and at three-fifteen were standing before the wide front steps of the school waiting for her to emerge. Michael seemed immediately at ease with her, even though I could not yet shake the thought that I was robbing the cradle. He cracked a few exploratory dirty jokes which caused her to burst into delighted laughter (I remembered all at once the day he told the Confucius Say joke in Lindy’s presence) and then asked her if she was old enough to drink beer, and when she said they wouldn’t allow her inside a bar unless she could show identification, went into a grocery store on Lexington Avenue (I
guess
it was; I was still unimaginably confused by New York’s simple layout of avenues and streets) and we walked over to Fifth Avenue and took a double-decker bus up to Fifty-ninth (outside the Plaza Hotel?) and walked into the park there and sat on the grass and drank the beer and spent the afternoon together.

It must have been five-thirty, a quarter to six, when we decided to take Dolores home before her mother called out the National Guard. We were coming out of the park when we passed an old man snuffling into his handkerchief (I don’t think we really noticed him at the time, I think he only registered in retrospect) and several yards behind him was a woman, a younger woman obviously in no way connected with the old man, and she was openly weeping. And the next person we passed had a stunned look on his face, and there was an odd ominous buzz on the air as we walked past the fountain outside the hotel, and Dolores suddenly turned to me and said, “Something terrible has happened. We’ve lost the war.”

A sailor was standing alongside the plate glass window of the department store on Fifty-seventh and Fifth, blinking as if trying to hold back tears. I went over to him and said, “What’s the...?” but before I could finish my question, he snapped to attention and threw a salute at me, and I patiently returned the salute, and then said, “What’s the trouble, sailor?” and he said, “The President is dead, sir.”

“What?” I said.

“Roosevelt,” he said.

“Roosevelt?” I said, and felt enormously stupid all at once, as if we were engaged in a baggy-pants vaudeville routine. He had
told
me the President was dead, hadn’t he? And the President was Roosevelt, wasn’t he? Then why had I repeated his name as though saying it aloud would deny the fact — no, he could
not
be dead, he had been President for as long as I could remember, he could not now be dead, we would lose the war, oh Jesus, we would lose the war and the world would be enslaved.

Dolores suddenly threw herself into my arms and began weeping against my shoulder.

It was then that I began to think I was falling in love with her.

The war in Europe, which had seemed so close to ending, now seemed fiercely determined to prolong itself. A rattle was sounding on the expectant air, signaling the death of something quite familiar, something almost loved, this war that had been with us for so long a time and which now refused to expire the way a proper invalid should have, coughing itself out in the stillness of the night. Our new President, Harry S. Truman, said, “Our demand has been, and it remains, unconditional surrender,” but Allied Supreme Headquarters in Paris announced that despite persistent rumors to the contrary, there had been no substantial advances toward Berlin, and our closest units to the city were still more than fifty miles away. It was a time of dying, that April, beginning with the death of Roosevelt, the largest death I had known since my mother’s, and then dwindling into a series of anticlimactic smaller deaths as we awaited the ultimate collapse, the end of the European war — the deaths of cities, the deaths of rivers crossed, the deaths of bastions stormed and bunkers demolished, the death of an era. Into this time of dying, into this loud and raucous, constant and endless communique from the front, there was insinuated like a delicate flute refrain, the beginning of Dolores Prine and me, or rather (like the smaller deaths) a series of smaller explorations that were leading, we suspected, to a larger beginning for us both.

Troops of the Third Army were thirteen miles from the Czech border on the north and on the west, the Seventh Army pushed to within fifteen miles of Nuremburg, the Canadians advanced toward the Zuider Zee, the United States First swept northward through the Ruhr pocket and engaged in bloody street-to-street combat in Halle, the French took Kenl on the Rhine, and in a hamburger joint on Sixth Avenue, when I asked Dolores if she minded my eating onions, she answered, “Yes, I mind terribly,” and suddenly kissed me for the first time. The French marched to within ten miles of the Swiss border, the United States Seventh crossed the Fils River and took Weilhelm, we were ten miles from Bremen, we had occupied Bologna after a nineteen-month campaign, the Soviet High Command announced that Russian troops “had marched a thousand miles from the gates of Moscow” to capture Erkner at the eastern limits of Berlin, and in a taxicab heading for Sutton Place, I put my hand under Dolores Prine’s skirt, and she tightened her thighs on it at first, catching it and stopping my advance, and then opened slowly to my pressure, my fingers touching the mound bulging crisply beneath her cotton panties, “Will,” she said, “please,” but I did not remove my hand, the American armies were standing on the banks of the Mulde River, and the Russians were only forty-eight miles away.