Sons (7 page)

She made me promise upon pain of death and torture that I would never reveal my source of information, and I kissed her swiftly on the check and then raced back to my home room, which was what we’d been trained to do like robots whenever those three successive gongs sounded. A fire drill was a single steady repetitive gong, and an air-raid drill was three gongs in quick sequence, and then a long pause, and then three gongs again. For the fire drills, we always marched out of the school silently and solemnly and looked back at it from four blocks away, near St. Chrysostom’s Church, presumably to witness the old brick building crumbling in flames.

I thought of what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, and I began planning and scheming all the way back to home room about how I would break the news to Charlotte Wagner. This was, of course, the eighth period, which was the last period of the day. We had never had an air-raid drill in the history of Grace School that did not take place during the eighth period. The routine was unvarying. Sometime between three-thirty and four-fifteen, the successive gongs would sound sharply and insistently, and we’d all rush back to our home rooms, crouch under our desks, clasp our hands behind our heads, and wait in cramped silence for about ten minutes until the gong sounded for the all-clear. Our teachers would then dismiss us, since by that time the last period would be almost over, the school day practically ended. It was my theory that this imaginative approach to protection against enemy attack was based on secret information delivered to our city officials by the Japanese themselves, who had doubtless promised that any bombing of the school would come sometime during the eighth period.

It was no different this time, except that this time I knew what “Keep ’Em Flying!” meant. I could hardly wait. The whole thing with Charlotte Wagner had started about two weeks ago, on the way home from school. Charlotte, like myself, was a senior at Grace, which had not been named after God’s greatest gift to the soul, but merely after a man named Jeremiah Grace who had founded the school back in 1891. Grace was a private school, the nearest public school being Robert A. Waller High over on Orchard Street, which was quite a bus ride from the Gold Coast, where we lived. Our house was on East Scott, and Charlotte lived on Banks. Most of the other kids going to Grace lived in the immediate neighborhood, too, so we usually walked over to Division after school, for sodas. The only kid in our crowd who drove to and from school, in a black ’39 Buick, was a guy named Dickie Howell, whose father was supposed to be in “essential industry,” and therefore in possession of valuable C coupons which entitled him to an unlimited amount of gasoline.
My
father was in the paper industry, but Uncle Sam did not consider that essential enough to rate anything better than a B ration. Besides, he actually used the car to go back and forth to work at his mill in Joliet every day, and we only had the one car, so I couldn’t have driven even if I’d wanted to.

Actually, I enjoyed that walk home after school every day. Linda sometimes came with us, but I tried to discourage that because she was only fifteen and a lot of the jokes and kidding around were over her head. We were, after all, seniors. Michael Mallory had, in fact, enlisted in the Air Force just before his eighteenth birthday, and was expecting to be called right after graduation. His move, of course, was the only sensible one. Nobody in his right mind wanted to be drafted into the Army just then, because it was an almost certain bet that the Infantry would grab you, and you’d wind up in the invasion of Italy, which was definitely coming as soon as North Africa fell. Michael had thought of enlisting in the cavalry, having always been fond of horses, but then he’d learned that cavalry meant
mechanized
cavalry, which meant tanks, and we both knew a kid named Sal Brufani who had been burned to a crisp in a tank outside Bizerte, just before Christmas. Michael furthermore got sick even riding a boat on Lake Michigan, which eliminated the Navy as a possibility. So, unless he wanted to have his ass shipped to Italy or, worse yet, to the Aleutians or the Solomons, the only logical open choice (I convinced him) was the Air Force.

In any case, our language on the way home from school each day was inclined to get a bit salty, and I didn’t like Linda hearing such stuff. For example, just last week, Michael had come up with a new Confucius Say joke, which broke everybody up, but which made Linda
— and
me — very uncomfortable. He’d told it without any warning, just popping it out of the blue, “Confucius say, ‘Girl who marry basketball player get gypped; he always dribble before he shoot.’” Charlotte Wagner had thrown back her head and opened her mouth wide to let out one of her horse bellows, delicately feminine and designed to knock over the Wrigley Building. The other girls all followed suit, of course, except Linda. She started to laugh, and then quickly glanced at me, and blushed, and smiled only tentatively and in a frightened way, and then put on a very grave and serious look when she saw I wasn’t laughing at all. Sarah Cody had meanwhile knocked Michael’s books into the gutter and called him a dirty slob. He laughed wildly and said, “Who? Me? What’d I say?” and began wrestling first with her and then Charlotte, with a lot of indiscreet cheap feeling going on, and with Linda walking very silently beside me, her eyes lowered. I later warned Michael to be a little more careful with his language when my sister was around, and he promised he would.

I was surprised by what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, not because it was really so dirty, but only because she’d told me at
all,
though with a blush. As I crouched under my desk now and listened for our punctual eighth-period Japanese raiders, I thought of how much pleasure it would give me to break the news to Charlotte as soon as this drill was over. The whole thing had started about two weeks ago when Charlotte, climbing the steps of her house on Banks, had waved to the other girls and said, “Well, girls, keep ’em flying,” causing all the girls to burst into hysterical laughter which none of the boys understood.

“What’s so funny?” Michael asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Charlotte said breezily, and then turned to the girls again, and again said, “Keep ’em flying, girls,” and went up the steps and into her house. Nor had that been the end of it. Every day since, the girls had given each other the same mysterious farewell, “Keep ’em flying!” They were obviously delighted by our puzzlement, and the harder we pressed them for an explanation, the sillier they became, giggling and exchanging sly glances, and shoving at each other, and generally behaving as though they were carrying around the ultimate secret of the female universe. Up to now, or more accurately up to the minute Linda had let me in on the secret outside the bio lab, I had always thought the slogan was a patriotic reminder to the folks at home, urging them to do their share in the war effort by respecting rationing and the like, and buying war bonds, and keeping silent about troop shipments. But now I knew. And whereas the slogan had a great deal to do with the war effort, it had nothing to do with pilots (although the silk was probably needed for parachutes — that
was,
in fact, the point) but only to do with the selfless contribution busty Charlotte and her girlfriends were being asked to make in these trying times.

I could hardly wait to let her know I knew.

A single gong sounded into the stillness.

“Okay, kids,” Mr. Hardy said, “drill’s over. You can all go home.”

Outside the school, I looked for Charlotte. I found her just as she was climbing into Dickie Howell’s black Buick and, wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t get a chance to say a word to her.

The house we lived in was the third one we’d owned since I was born, each larger than the one preceding it. It was on a street of similarly old houses, most of them built around the turn of the century, when Chicago’s moneyed landholders were reconstructing after the Great Fire. The street ran from North State to the Drive, and had been surrounded for years by huge modern apartment buildings. It was my guess that the only thing sparing it now was wartime building restrictions. If we won the war — and I couldn’t conceive of our losing it — I was certain that within ten years’ time, East Scott would succumb to the bulldozer as well, and all these lovely old homes would give way to glass and concrete towers.

I loved that old house.

It reminded me, in style though not in grandeur, of what used to be the old Kimball mansion on Prairie and Eighteenth. My father said the Kimball house had been modeled after the Chateau de Josselin in Brittany, and had cost the old piano manufacturer a million dollars to build. Standing on the sidewalk and looking up at it one day, I could well believe it. The house was made entirely of Bedford stone, with turrets and gables everywhere, balconies and stone chimneys, a roof crowned with ornamental ironwork. There were more windows than I could count, flat windows and rounded windows, an oriel window on the north façade. A high fence of iron grillwork surrounded the entire house, and whereas I could have gone in, I suppose (it was then headquarters for the Architects Club of Chicago), I think I was too awed to move from my spot on the sidewalk. My father later told me there were beamed ceilings inside, walls paneled in oak and mahogany, onyx fireplaces in most of the rooms, and even onyx washbowls in the bathrooms, which were tiled from floor to ceiling.

Our house was built in the same French château style, but of course was neither as sumptuous nor as large. The entry hall and dining room were paneled in mahogany, but none of the other rooms were, and there were only three bedrooms in the house, not counting the maid’s room, which was on the ground floor behind the pantry. My father’s library was on the second floor at the top of a winding staircase with a banister Linda and I used to slide down daily. The top panel of our front door was made of frosted glass into which my father had had inserted a sort of Tyler family crest he’d designed, beautifully rendered in stained glass, leaded into the original panel: two green spruce trees towering against a deep blue sky. The doorknob was made of brass, kept highly polished by the succession of colored maids my mother was constantly hiring and firing. (My father said to her one day, “Nancy, you just don’t
want
another woman living here, now let’s face it.”) From the time I was seven, however, I don’t think we ever went for more than a month without a maid (and sometimes
two
) in the house. Whether this was at the insistence of my father or not, I couldn’t say. I did sometimes get the feeling, though, that my mother often longed for the simpler existence she had known in Freshwater, Wisconsin.

She was in the kitchen when I got home that afternoon, but she barely looked up when I came in, being very used to air-raid drills by now. Though, come to think of it, she’d hardly paid any attention to our first air-raid drill, either. That first one had been very exciting to me, because it had come about two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and half the kids in the school thought the enemy was really over Chicago. The sense of impending disaster was heightened by the fact that the teachers sent us running home, none of that hiding under desks, just
run straight home,
they told us. So naturally we expected to see a Japanese Zero or two diving on the school, or perhaps a few Bettys unloading their cargo of bombs, it was all very thrilling. Coincidentally, a few Navy Hellcats from the training station winged in over the lake just as we were pouring out of the school, and this nearly started a panic, what with our high expectations for obliteration. I ran all the way home that day, and when I got into the kitchen, out of breath, my mother said, “What is it, Will?”

“The Japs are coming!” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

“I saw them,” I answered. “Four of them in formation, flying in low over the lake!”

“On earth are no fairies,” my mother said calmly. “You probably saw some planes from the Navy base,” which of course was the truth, but which I wasn’t yet ready to accept. She was standing by the kitchen sink, shelling peas and listening to the radio on the window sill, and her attention never once wandered from her slender hands, a thumbnail slitting each pod, the peas — almost the color of her eyes — tumbling into the colander. The radio was on very loud. My mother was a little hard of hearing in her right ear, and she favored the other car now, her head slightly cocked to the side, as the trials and tribulations of “Just Plain Bill” flooded the kitchen the way they did every afternoon at four-thirty, the indomitable barber desperately trying to turn his lively daughter into a lady, while simultaneously fretting over her stormy marriage to the lawyer Kerry Donovan. I think if the Japanese had really been overhead, my mother would have waited till the end of that day’s installment before running down to the basement. I had never seen her rattled in my life, and she was certainly as calm as glass that day of the first air-raid drill. Honey-blond hair behind her ears, reading glasses perched on top of her tilted head, eyes gazing down at the tumbling peas, she said, “If the Japanese were in Chicago, I’d have heard it on the radio. They’d have interrupted the program. Where’s your sister?”

“On her way home,” I said dejectedly.

I kept watching her in fascination, admiring her calm in the face of certain destruction, yet resenting it as well. She was not a tall woman, five-three or five-four, but whereas I was almost six feet tall, I had the feeling I was looking up at her; it was very unsettling.

“They told us to come
straight home,”
I said ominously, but my mother went right on shelling peas.

We naturally had a maid living in at the time, a colored girl from the Washington Park section, but my mother never allowed her to prepare meals, mindful of a Wisconsin homily about two women in the kitchen being akin to a horse with a head on both ends, or something to that effect. My mother was a great one for proverbs. Sometimes, when she reeled off one of her homespun sayings, absolutely unsmilingly and with a sense of discovery (as if she hadn’t said the very same thing a hundred times before), my father would roll his eyes heavenward and sigh deeply, and I would remember that she had been his childhood sweetheart and that he’d probably been listening to her words of wisdom since almost the turn of the century. The thought was frightening. She had a proverb for every occasion, the same ones in fact for totally different situations, and I lived in fear of the day she’d come up with a new and entirely fresh one because I knew I’d die of a heart attack on that day and
never
get into the Air Force.