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Authors: Evan Hunter

Sons (6 page)

BOOK: Sons
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“Thanks, Danny,” I said.
“You guys are really coming along fine,” Boll said. “I can remember when you first started, and there’s been a tremendous development.”
“Thanks,” Nelson said. “Thanks, Danny.”
“I mean it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
But we were still angry and bitter, especially me, because I had a few other choice items bugging me besides. My father, for example, had refused me permission to drive the station wagon that night, his point being that there’d be a lot of heavy equipment in it, and it was dangerous to be lugging two tons of amplifiers and instruments on a Friday night, when half the population of Connecticut would be drunk and zigzagging all over the roads. I personally could not see the difference between driving heavy equipment around during the day or driving it around at night, and I’d informed my father that I’d shuttled the loaded car all the way to Stamford just last weekend, with six kids packed into the damn thing besides, and I was a very careful driver, and what dire thing did my father expect to happen, would he mind telling me? (This isn’t a locker room, my father had said, watch your language.) I’d lost the battle with my father, and I’d lost the band battle, and now it looked as if I were losing the battle of Cass Hagstrom as well, to no less a hood than Scott Dundee, who ran around with a bunch of boozers, the dumbest asses in the school. How could you expect to ask- a girl if you could take her home when you knew your
father
would be waiting in the parking lot? What was the sense of taking Driver s Ed a whole damn six months, what was the sense of having night lights if your father never let you
drive
the damn car at night?
As I carried Nelson’s snare drum out to the loading ramp near the school commons, I heard Cass telling Dundee that she would just
love
to see
Dr. Strangelove,
she had heard it was a perfectly marvelous film, but she knew that
Love with the Proper Stranger
was playing in Westport, and Steve McQueen was her absolute favorite, so couldn’t they go
there
tomorrow night instead? “Hello, Cass,” I said as I went by, and she said, “Oh, hello, Wat, you were terrific.” and I said, “Yeah,” and walked off. Nelson was waiting outside on the ramp, the big bass drum in his hands.
“Where’s your father?” he asked.
“I don’t know, don’t you see him?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s get the rest of the junk,” I said. “He’ll be here.”
Cass was heading for the phone booth when I went inside again, undoubtedly to give her mother a ring, tell her she might be delayed as she had run into one of the school’s intellectuals and they wished to discuss the satirical content of
Dr. Strangelove.
“Hey,” I said.
“Oh, hi,” she said, “did I tell you you were terrific?”
“Yeah, you told me,” I said. “What’s with Dundee?”
Cass shrugged. She was a slender, diminutive girl with straight blond hair falling to her shoulders, dark brown eyes, a frightened smile that tentatively budded on her mouth even when she was deliriously happy, as she seemed to be now. “He’s very nice,” she said, and I immediately said, “He’s a hood.”
“Well, I have to make a phone call,” Cass said. She was wearing a gray flannel jumper over a white turtleneck sweater, and she tossed her long blond hair now, and smoothed her skirt, and went clicking oft down the corridor to the phone booth while I glared at her with something less than masked hostility. Nelson helped me lift the organ, and we carried it together out to the ramp. The Ford station wagon was waiting at the curb, but my father was not behind the wheel. Instead, my mother was sitting there, staring straight ahead through the windshield.
“Hey, hi,” I said in surprise. “Where’s Dad?”
“Stuck in the city,” my mother said. “How’d it go?”
“We didn’t even show.”
“We got robbed,” Nelson said.
“You want to lower this back window, Mom?”
“Who won?”
“Sound, Incorporated.”
“Which group is that?”
“You don’t know them, Mom.”
“They stink, Mrs. Tyler.”
“I thought Rog was going to start crying,” I said from the tailgate of the wagon.
“We should have taken it, I mean it, Mrs. Tyler.”
“Am I dropping you off?”
“If it’s okay,” Nelson said.
“Sure.”
“Something wrong?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“You seem...” I shrugged. “Give me a hand here, will you, Nelson?”
I could see the back of my mother’s head as we loaded the drums and organ into the car. She wore her brown hair short, the collar of her beige car coat high on the back of her neck. She was sitting very stiff and straight, staring through the windshield, puffing on a cigarette even though she’d given up smoking more than a month ago.
“I see you’re back on the weed again,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “I just...” and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Shove the bass drum all the way back,” I said.
“Why don’t we put the organ in first? I’m getting out before you.”
“Good thinking, Maynard.”
We arranged the equipment with meticulous care, stacking it in tight to prevent it from sliding or bouncing on the rutted country roads. My mother sat silently smoking as we heaved and pushed and adjusted. The radio was on, classical music, QXR, I supposed, her favorite station. The engine was running, a bluish-gray exhaust rising lazily and steadily on the brittle air. At midnight, the news came on, and I listened vaguely as I worked, the words floating back through the heated car and out over the lowered tailgate, “... three months after the assassination of Diem and his brother, General Minh’s regime was itself overthrown tonight in a coup that took most Saigon citizens totally by surprise. Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh, thirty-six years old, considered by United States military advisers to be one of South Vietnam’s ablest corps commanders...”
“Where’s that other mike stand?” I asked.
“I’ll get it,” Nelson said.
“We ought to mark them, you know? I’m always afraid somebody’ll walk off with them.”
“Yeah,” Nelson said.
“... five miles from the Cambodian border, inflicting the worst toll upon South Vietnamese troops to date: ninety-four dead, and thirty-two wounded. Three American advisers were also killed in the bloody battle.”
We shoved both mike stands in alongside the organ, wedging the heavy metal bases in solidly against the covered hump of the spare tire.
“You can roll it up,” I said to my mother.
“... won’t expire until March of next year. Mayor Wagner, though, apprehensive after New York’s 114-day siege, has already begun talks...”
The roads were deserted. The newscaster’s voice gave way to recorded music, Stravinsky, I guessed, though I wasn’t sure. We passed the university, where lights still gleamed in the new science building, and the three chapels sat like snow-cowled nuns, and then drove past the old campus on Fieldston Street, where buildings erected in 1876 rose in turreted stillness against a sky dusted with stars. On the other side of the wooden bridge near the university’s western gate, the car’s headlights illuminated a mole who stopped dead still for just an instant and then waddled clumsily to the side of the road. We climbed the hill over Corrigan and then took the short cut through Pleasant, my mother handling the wheel expertly around each hairpin turn, although she looked somewhat like a gun moll, with the cigarette dangling from her mouth that way.
“You’re going to lose that ash,” I said, annoyed.
“Thank you,” she answered, and took one gloved hand from the wheel, flicked the long ash into the ash tray, and immediately put the cigarette into her mouth again. She did not put it out until we were in Nelson’s driveway. I helped him unload the drums and then carried them in with him through the garage entrance.
“We rehearsing tomorrow?” Nelson asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll buzz Connie in the morning and let you know.”
“Okay,” Nelson said. He paused for a moment, idly worrying a pimple near his mouth. “We got robbed,” he said, almost to himself, and then from the open garage door called, “’Night, Mrs. Tyler. Thanks a lot.” In the idling automobile, my mother raised her hand in farewell. By the time I got back to the car, she had lighted a second cigarette. I glanced at it but said nothing.
She smoked silently as she drove, her face alternately illuminated by the green light of the dash and the glowing coal of the cigarette whenever she puffed on it.
“We should have taken it,” I said.
“Well,” she said, and gave a slight shrug.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You seem down.”
“We were supposed to go to a dinner party. I had to cancel.”
“Oh.”
“I suppose I could have gone alone. They asked me to.” She shrugged again.
“How’d Dad get stuck?”
“The De Gaulle book,” she answered.
“They still working on that?”
“Apparently so.”
We were silent the rest of the way home.

 

My father must have been watching for the car. The minute we pulled into the driveway, the kitchen door opened, and he came out without a coat, grinning, walking swiftly to the driver’s side as my mother rolled down the window.
“Hi,” he said, and leaned through the open window to kiss her on the cheek, and then looked across to me and said, “How’d it go, Wat?”
“We lost,” I said.
“What docs Leon Coopersmith know about good music?” my father said. “You want a hand with that organ?” He was very excited. His eyes were glowing, and his face was flushed, and I knew he was bursting to tell us something, and I felt the energy of his secret flowing through the open window and suffusing the automobile. I loved him most when he was this way. He seemed to me in these moments to be very tall and powerful. I half-expected him to reach into the car and pick me up and hold me out at arm’s length and then clasp me suddenly to his chest, laughing, the way he used to when I was very young. I found myself grinning with him.
“Will,” my mother said, “I thought...”
“Man of surprises,” my father said, “man of surprises,” and kissed her again in punctuation, on the mouth this time. “Do you still want to go to that party?”
“Well, I...”
“Let me help Wat,” he said, and opened the door for my mother, and gave her a hug when she stepped out of the car, and then came to the tailgate with me. We carried the organ into the house, and then brought in the amplifier and the mike stands and the two speakers. My father kept putting down Leon Coopersmith all the while we worked, telling me he had a tin car, telling me the people who selected judges for these band battles should make certain they picked someone attuned to the sound of youth, all the while bursting with his own secret, but taking the time and the trouble to console me about Dawn Patrol’s loss. As we made our last trip inside, he said, “Well, you’ll win the next one,” and then shouted, “Dolores, do we
have
to go to that damn party?”
My mother, still looking bewildered, said, “I suppose not, I’ve already called to...”
“Then let’s forget it,” he said. “Let’s all go over to Emily Shaw’s and celebrate.”
“What are we celebrating?” my mother said. She was excited now, too. The energy he radiated was positively contagious. We stood by the kitchen sink, the three of us, grinning at each other idiotically, my father savoring the moment when he would tell us his secret, my mother and I relishing the suspense. When he finally revealed his coup — he had made arrangements with a French photographer named Claude Michaud to take a series of candid shots of De Gaulle, with the general’s permission and cooperation — it hardly seemed as important as the buildup had been, but we showered him with congratulations nonetheless, telling him how marvelous it was, and agreeing that we had good cause for celebration. My mother looked radiant. As my father spoke, her eyes never left his face. She listened to him intently, proud and pleased, shining with adoration.
“Okay.” he said, and jabbed a finger at me, “tie and jacket, on the double,” and then turned to my mother and said, “Do you know what they say in France?”
“What do they say in France?” my mother asked.
“In France, they say ‘This Will Tyler, he is one lucky son of a bitch!”” and burst out laughing.
“Hey, watch the language,” I said, “there are little kids around.”
“Who wants a drink?” my father asked.
"I
want a drink,” he said. “Dolores? Would you like a drink?”
“All right,” she said, “if you’re...”
“Hey!” he said, and snapped his fingers. “He knows
Linda! "
“Who knows Linda?”
“Michaud. He met her and Stanley when they were in Paris last year. Do you think I should call her?”
“Sure, if you want to,” my mother said.
“The rates go down after six, don’t they?”
“Last of the big spenders,” I said.
“Ha-ha,” he said.
“Debating a phone call to Chicago.”
“Put-down artist,” my mother said to me, but she was grinning.
My father went to the telephone. “Come on, come on,” he said, “what’s everybody standing around for?”
“I thought I was getting a drink,” my mother said.
“I’ll bring it up, hon,” my father said, and lifted the receiver, and waited for a dial tone. My mother was watching him from the steps leading upstairs. “Hey,” he said to her.
“Mmm?”
“I love you,” he said.
My mother smiled and gave a brief pleased nod. Then she turned and went up the steps.
“Hello,” my father said into the telephone, “I’d like to make a person-to-person call to Mrs. Linda Kearing in Chicago. The number...”
March
It was my kid sister Linda, of all people, who clued me in. I had met her completely by accident outside the bio lab on the fourth floor, and casually asked what it was all about. To my surprise, she blushed and said, “I can’t tell you, Will,” and then went right on to tell me. That was when the bell sounded for the air-raid drill.
BOOK: Sons
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