Sons (50 page)

“Then why’d you ask about it?”

“Because you didn’t mention anything about traveling expenses.”

“You won’t need traveling expenses, you’ll be selling to retail stores in the Chicago area. Can you drive?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, which was true. But I had been living in Chicago for more than a year now, and had not driven a car since I’d left Wisconsin, and was really a little apprehensive about driving in Chicago traffic. I did not tell him any of these things, though. I was learning fast that one way to get a job was to sprinkle a few lies here and there among the petunias.

“Can you start work tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, sir, I can.”

“Good. Report to Mr. Goss in Room 314 at eight o’clock.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Welcome,” Gerald Hawkes answered, and stroked his mustache.

I began working at the Circle Mill on a Wednesday morning. That Saturday night, Allen and Rosie came up to the South Lawndale flat bearing gifts — a turkey Rosie had roasted, and a bottle of gin her brother had made. (He had actually made two
cases
of the stuff, which qualified him as the biggest bootlegger I personally knew.) The visit was not unexpected. Nancy had prepared me for it, or, to be more precise, had bludgeoned me into accepting it. There was a lot of embarrassed foot-shuffling and eye-shifting when the Garretts arrived, but at last Allen and I shook hands like two schoolyard kids who had had a knockdown-dragout fistfight and were now reluctantly making up. We all toasted my new job (including Nancy, whom I had never before seen drinking hard liquor), and then we toasted Allen’s promotion, which I was still convinced he’d got by lying about me. Nancy and Rosie went out to the kitchen to warm the turkey and set the table. Allen and I sat opposite each other silently in the parlor.

He offered me a cigar, which I declined.

He cleared his throat.

He shifted his weight in the big easy chair.

Then he said, “Bert, no matter what you think, I never said anything to anybody about you being a radical.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“I believe you,” I said. But I didn’t.

The job was a good one. Circle ran a huge operation, with two mills on the West Coast, another in New York State, and of course the one in Joliet. Since the company manufactured a wide variety of paper products — newsprint, industrial papers, bond and writing and ledger and manifold papers, bags and boxes, book and offset papers, butcher’s wrap, you name it — my selling job took me to a great many different kinds of retail outlets, and I was certainly never bored. Circle’s main paper product that year, though (as was the case with ail of the Joliet mills), was wallpaper, and I guess I earned most of my commissions selling to the housewares sections of the big department stores, or to the smaller paint and wallpaper retailers scattered all over Chicago. By the end of my third week at Circle, I began to think that Allen had done me a big favor. My earlier ideas on how to become a corporation executive now seemed terribly naive. The way to get into the board room was not by spiking and rolling logs off the conveyer belt.
This
was the way. I found myself outlining a plan for my rise through the Circle Mill ranks, allowing three to live years for each phase of the escalation, from salesman to District Manager, in which position I would begin supervising salesmen, and fighting with plant managers for deliveries, and influencing mill schedules, and meeting regularly with management, and then moving up to Sales Manager where my salary would take a sudden jump and company stock would be offered to me, and then on to Vice President-Sales where I would undoubtedly come into conflict with the Vice President-Manufacturing because the next job upward on the ladder was Executive Vice President, third highest position at Circle, with only the Chairman of the Board and the President of the company above. This was 1920. If everything went as I expected it to go, I could become President of Circle by as early as 1932, but certainly no later than 1940. None of it seemed beyond my grasp. I was, perhaps, just an uneducated lumberjack from the Wisconsin woods, but (as I had once told Mr. Moreland) this was America, and I knew that here a man could become whatever he chose to become.

The Garretts entered my life only peripherally in those early days at Circle. We saw them socially perhaps once a week, sometimes less, and I knew that our friendship was dying a normal death, and that it might have been dead already had his betrayal not, paradoxically, spurred a renewed interest in it. What I had earlier regarded as his inquiring mind, I came to realize was only a sponge invariably absorbing the wrong opinions of others. I can remember one night in the parlor of the Garrett flat when I mentioned that Circle had given me a brand-new Ford to drive, and Allen suddenly began endorsing all the horse manure being printed in the
Dearborn Independent,
rising to his full height and telling us that the claims about an international Jewish leadership were absolutely true, that the Jews
were
hellbent on confounding and confusing and finally overcoming the Gentile world by creating wars, revolutions, and civil disorders, that the Jews
were
getting all the profits from the sale of illegal whiskey, the Jewish landlords
were
charging exorbitant rents, (he Jewish manufacturers
were
making all the shorter skirts responsible for our decadence (while Rosie’s skirt inched higher and higher every week), the Jewish producers
were
making movies about orgies and putting on filthy Broadway plays, the Jews were doing this, the Jews were doing that, the Jews in short were responsible for everything that was wrong in the nation and the world because, just as the
Independent
had reported, everything was “under the mastery of the Jews.” I didn’t argue with him. Nancy and I left early instead. I knew the friendship was dying, and yet I clung to it, telling myself at first that Allen really wasn’t too bad a fellow, telling myself that Rosie was good company for my wife, but wondering even then, I suppose, if I wasn’t just waiting for exactly what was happening now.

Now, two months and a little bit later, in an alleyway outside a speakeasy, I knew the sweet revenge of kissing Allen’s wife, hot and trembling in the sweltering summer night as a gang of kids went by in one of Mr. Ford’s tin lizzies, and inside the vocalist sang, “And so I think I’ll travel on, to Avalon.” She put her tongue into my mouth, she pulled her face away from mine and laughed, she arched herself against me, and said, “Where’d he park the car? Let’s get in the car, Bert.”

“Rosie,” I said, “we’d best go back.”

“No,” she answered, and took my hand.

In the rear of the Jeffery Sedan, the windows open, passing automobile lights intermittently illuminating the interior roof, Rosie lay back against the cushioned seat and lifted her dress above her waist and said, “Do you like my stockings rolled?” and I touched her legs, touched silk the color of her flesh (a year ago, two years ago, a century ago, girls wore stockings that were either white or black), “All the girls are doing it,” Rosie said. (Doing what? Turkey trot? The world had changed, everything had been changed by the war.) Her mouth in the darkness was bright with paint, there was a vapid smile upon it, would she later claim that she’d been drunk? The smell of homemade gin climbed into the steamy interior of that silent automobile, our alcohol-scented breaths rushing to merge a moment before we locked lips again, my hands under her dress, clutching at her. She reached up with her thumbs to hook the elastic of her teddies, and then pulled them down over her belly and her thighs. I could dimly see the pale whiteness of her skin and against it a narrow black triangle, “Kiss me,” she said, my hands on her flesh so warm beneath the white tulle, her legs opening now, her slender fingers pressing the back of my neck, I thought again of a silent forest (there was, as always, that moment when she seemed to resist) and of a boy whose dreams in the violet dusk were proscribed by an insulated world, and I entered her, and she said, “What, Bert,
what?”
and I think I whispered, “I don’t know,” (and then she trembled, and I could hear her groan again, almost as if she were in pain) and I sought her mouth, sought that bright scarlet slash and drew from it whatever secrets Rosie knew, drew from it prognostications, scathing visions of what was yet to come, tasting of gin, long silken legs enveloping me, distant music swelling through the open car windows, “Here’s the Japanese sandman, trade him silver for gold,” (and there was a long heavy shudder and then a hundred echoing crackings, and then there was silence).

I drove them home in the Chicago midnight.

There was the smell of gin in the automobile, that and a stronger scent, but Allen Garrett was unconscious on the back seat and incapable of detecting Rosie’s lingering feral aroma, incapable of knowing what I had done to his wife not a half-hour before. She sat beside me now with her legs recklessly crossed, coat open, skirt high on her thighs, the rolled stockings lewdly suggestive (a Chicago streetwalker had been quoted in last week’s newspaper as saying, “You can’t tell the ladies from the trollops any more.”) I did not think Rosie Garrett was a trollop, but I’m not sure I thought she was a lady, either. I knew only that I had taken her with an explosive violence I had never before experienced, and felt now the same confusing aftermath of shame and guilt I had known in France, when i’d failed to stop what was happening to that little girl. I told myself as Rosie sat beside me with her head thrown back against the seat, humming “Avalon” as though I needed reminders of what we had together accomplished in the space of five minutes, told myself that this was the first time and the last time, and knew even then that I was lying to myself. But I tried nonetheless to understand what was happening, because it all seemed to be part of the bewildering labyrinth that had been constructed around me without my knowledge or consent. I felt as though I had, in the past few months, become a very minor if not totally insignificant figure in a changing landscape over which I had no personal control, as though the events of my own life were only secondary to the much larger events taking place. But more than that, it seemed to me that the nucleus of my intimate universe had somehow become dislocated, the nucleus was no longer
me,
Bertram A. Tyler. I was, instead, only an expendable moon that could be burned to cinders in the upper atmosphere without being missed or mourned, in danger of being replaced in an instant by some other revolving satellite created in outer space from the boiling matter of our time. I was certainly blameless for what had happened (Rosie’s hand on my thigh now, fingers widespread; strangers at eleven, lovers at midnight) if I could point to the speed of the modern-day world as the source of my confusion, the dial on the telephone, the closed automobile, the shorter skirts, the more liberal drinking habits (in themselves a confusing paradox), the whole surging momentum of a nation rushing back to a “normalcy” quite unlike anything it had known before. I blamed all these things, and hoped to become blameless in the process, but the guilt persisted.

So I blamed Nancy as well, blamed her for not being here tonight but being instead in Eau Fraiche with her sister Clara, blamed her besides for being not as
female
as she might have been, even though the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with either of us (I knew there was nothing wrong with
me,
but I could not believe there was nothing wrong with
her),
told myself that somehow her inability to conceive a child made her less womanly, while knowing of course this was not true, and suspecting that perhaps there were passions in her I preferred not to explore lest she become in my mind the equivalent of a whore, neither a mother (which she could not become, it seemed) nor a respected wife. The deception having failed, the guilt and the shame persisting, I allowed the excitement to take complete control, allowed Rosie’s humming to envelop me, allowed her hand to work its way toward my fly, allowed her fingers to unbutton me and to enclose me while we drove slowly toward South Lawndale and Allen snored in the back seat.

And then we had a conversation that seemed to me representative of the precarious balance we were all trying to maintain between the simplicity we had known before the war and the sophistication rapidly engulfing us. With her hand curled around me, with her husband drunk and unconscious on the back seat of the automobile, Rosie Garrett casually asked, “How’s Nancy’s sister?”

“Still in bed,” I said, “but coming along.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Oh, just a bad cold is all. But she’s been running a fever.”

“She’s got how many children?”

“Two.”

“It’s terrible when the woman of the house comes down with something,” Rosie said.

“Especially when she’s married to someone like Ed.”

“What’s the matter with Ed?”

“Can’t stand anybody being sick. Gets absolutely furious, treats Clara like a dog just when she needs him most.”

“When’s Nancy coming back?”

“Wednesday, I think. Or Thursday. It depends on how Clara’s doing.”

“Will you come see me Monday night?”

“What?”

“Monday night. Allen’s staying late in Joliet.”

“I... don’t know, Rosie. Maybe we’d just better forget what happened.”

“No,” she said. “You’ll come see me.”

There were five rows of protective barbed wire around the base camp at Cu Chi, and the sandbagged bunkers were spaced at seventy-five-yard intervals inside the perimeter, with one man in each bunker during the daylight hours, and three at night. During the daytime, the line troops manned the perimeter. But between six p. m. and six a. m., two men from the rear echelon joined a single combat-experienced soldier in the bunker, and it was then that things got a little tense. Rear-echelon troops were inclined to shoot at anything that moved, and orders had come down from above that no one was to fire a weapon without permission from the sergeant or officer of the guard in the CP bunker, it being reasoned that the folks out there could be a returning friendly patrol as easily as some Vietcong infantrymen setting up a mortar. So whereas there were plenty of weapons in each bunker — M-60s and M-50s, grenade launchers, M-79s, Claymore mines, and of course our own pieces, the M-16s — we weren’t allowed to use them before we checked upstairs. It was a very comical war, all right.