The Toynbee Convector (21 page)

I could not help myself. Sid was long gone. I waited on the balcony of the hotel overlooking the pool, having a final drink, not able to take my gaze off the marching father and the statue son. At dusk, the father double-timed it to the outer gate and almost as an afterthought called over his shoulder:

“Tenshun! Squad right One, two—”

“Three, four!” cried the boy.

The boy strode through the gate, feet clubbing the cement as if he wore boots. He marched off toward the parking lot as his father snap-locked the gate with a robot’s ease, took a fast scan around, raised his stare, saw me, and hesitated. His eyes burned over my face. I felt my shoulders go back, my chin drop, my shoulders flinch. To stop it, I lifted my drink, waved it carelessly at him, and drank.

What will happen, I thought, in the years ahead? Will the son grow up to kill his old man, or beat him up, or just run away to know a ruined life, always marching to some unheard shout of “Hut” or “harch!” but never “at ease!”?

Or, I thought, drinking, would the boy raise sons himself and just yell at
them
on hot noons by far pools in endless years? Would he one day stick a pistol in his mouth and kill his father the only way he knew how? Or would he marry and have no sons and thus bury all shouts, all drills, all sergeants? Questions, half-answers, more questions.

My glass was empty. The sun had gone, and the father and his son with it.

But now, in the flesh, straight across from me on this late night train, heading north for unlit destinations, one of them had returned. There he was, the kid himself the raw recruit, the child of the father who shouted at noon and told the sun to rise or set.

Merely alive?
half
alive?
all
alive?

I wasn’t sure.

But there he sat, thirty years later, a young-old or old-young man, sipping on his third martini.

By now, I realized that my glances were becoming much too constant and embarrassing. I studied his bright blue, wounded eyes, for that is what they were: wounded, and at last took courage and spoke:

“Pardon me,” I said. “This may seem silly, but—thirty years back, I swam weekends at the Ambassador Hotel where a military man tended the pool with his son. He—well. Are you that son?”

The young-old man across from me thought for a moment, looked me over with his shifting eyes and at last smiled, quietly.

“I,” he said, “am that son. Come on over.”

We shook hands. I sat and ordered a final round for us, as if we were celebrating something, or holding a wake, nobody seemed to know which. After the barman delivered the drinks, I said, “To nineteen fifty-two, a toast. A good year? Bad year? Here’s to it, anyway!”

We drank and the young-old man said, almost immediately, “You’re wondering what ever happened to my father.”

“My God,” I sighed.

“No, no,” he assured me, “it’s all right A lot of people have wondered, have asked, over the years.’’

The boy inside the older man nursed his martini and remembered the past.

“Do you
tell
people when they ask?” I said.

“I do.”

I took a deep breath. “All right, then. What did happen to your father?”

“He died.”

There was a long pause.

“Is that
all
?”

“Not quite.” The young-old man arranged his glass on the table in front of him, and placed a napkin at a precise angle to it, and fitted an olive to the very center of the napkin, reading the past there. “You remember what he was like?”

“Vividly.”

“Oh, what a world of meaning you put into that ‘vividly’!” The young-old man snorted faintly. “You re member his marches up, down, around the pool, left face, right, tenshun, don’t move, chin-stomach in, chest out, harch two, hut?”

“I remember.”

“Well, one day in nineteen fifty-three, long after the old crowd was gone from the pool, and you with them, my dad was drilling me outdoors one late afternoon. He had me standing in the hot sun for an hour or so and he yelled in my face, I can remember the saliva spray on my chin, my nose, my eyelids when he yelled: don’t move a
muscle
! don’t
blink
! don’t
twitch
! don’t
breathe
till I tell you! You hear, soldier?
Hear
? You
hear
! Hear?!”

“ ‘Sir!’ ” I gritted between my teeth.

“As my father turned, he slipped on the tiles and fell in the water.” The young-old man paused and gave a strange small bark of a laugh.

“Did you
know
? Of course you didn’t I didn’t either...that in all those years of working at various pools, cleaning out the showers, replacing the towels, repairing the diving boards, fixing the plumbing, he had never, my god, never learned to swim! Never! Jesus. It’s unbelievable. Never.

“He had never
told
me. Somehow, I had never guessed! And since he had just yelled at me, instructed me,
ordered
me: eyes right! don’t twitch! don’t move! I just stood there staring straight ahead at the late afternoon sun. I didn’t let my eyes drop to see, even once. Just straight ahead, by the numbers, as told.

“I heard him thrashing around in the water, yelling. But I couldn’t understand what he said. I heard him suck and gasp and gargle and suck again, going down, shrieking, but I stood straight, chin up, stomach tight, eyes level, sweat of my brow, mouth firm, buttocks clenched, ramrod spine, and him yelling, gagging, taking water. I kept waiting for him to yell, ‘At ease!’ ‘At ease!’ he should have yelled, but he never did. So what could I do? I just stood there, like a statue, until the shrieking stopped and the water lapped the poolrim and everything got quiet. I stood there for ten minutes, maybe twenty, half an hour, until someone came out and found me there, and they looked down in the pool and saw something deep under and said Jesus Christ and finally turned and came up to me, because they knew me and my father, and at last said, At Ease.

“And then I cried.”

The young-old man finished his drink.

“You see, the thing is, I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t faking. He’d done tricks like that before, to get me off guard, make me relax. He’d go around a corner, wait, duck back, to see if I was ramrod tall. Or he’d pretend to go in the men’s room, and jump back to find me wrong. Then he’d punish me. So, standing there by the pool that day, I thought, it’s a trick, to make me fall out. So I had to wait, didn’t I, to be sure?...to be sure.”

Finished, he put his empty martini glass down on the tray and sat back in his own silence, eyes gazing over my shoulder at nothing in particular. I tried to see if his eyes were wet, or if his mouth gave some special sign now that the tale was told, but I saw nothing.

“Now,” I said, “I know about your father. But...what ever happened to
you
?”

“As you see,” he said, “I’m here.”

He stood up and reached over and shook my hand.

“Good night,” he said.

I looked straight up in his face and saw the young boy there waiting for orders five thousand afternoons back. Then I looked at his left hand; no wedding ring there. Which meant what? No sons, no future? But I couldn’t ask.

“I’m glad we met again,” I heard myself say.

“Yes.” He nodded, and gave my hand a final shake.

“It’s good to see you made it through.”

Me, I thought. My God!
Me
?!

But he had turned and was walking off down the aisle, beautifully balanced, not swaying with the train’s motion, this way or that. He moved in a clean, lithe, well-cared-for body, which the train’s swerving could do nothing to as he went away.

As he reached the door, he hesitated, his back to me, and he seemed to be waiting for some final word, some order, some shout from someone.

Forward, I wanted to say, by the numbers!
March
!

But I said nothing.

Not knowing if it would kill him, or release him, I simply bit my tongue, and watched him open the door, slip silently through, and stride down the corridor of the next sleeping car toward a past I just might have imagined, toward a future I could not guess.

A Touch of Petulance

On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fete, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

His fete was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fete disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:

“Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?”

“No!” The older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, “Yes. A very late edition.”

Hughes glanced around. “Excuse me, but—all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?”

“Future?” The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. “Indeed,” he whispered. “Future change. God, what a joke.”

Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline:

May 2, 1999.

“Now, see here—” he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page:

WOMAN MURDEBED

POLICE SEEK HUSBAND

Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—

The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.

The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened. In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:

Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant,
of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—

“My God!” he cried. “Get away!”

But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.

Christ, he thought, who would
do
such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us—
us
? What land of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!

The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with traveling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to con front the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous traveling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.

“Who are you?”

Someone must have shouted that.

The train rocked as if it might derail.

The old man stood up as if shot in the heart, blindly crammed something in Jonathan Hughes’s hand, and blundered away down the aisle and into the next car. The younger man opened his fist and turned a card over and read a few words that moved him heavily down to sit and read the words again:

JONATHAN HUGHES, CPA
679-4990. Plandome.

“No!” someone shouted. Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is...
me
.

There was a conspiracy, no, several conspiracies. Someone had contrived a joke about murder and played it on him. The train roared on with five hundred commuters who all rode, swaying like a team of drunken intellectuals behind their masking books and papers, while the old man, as if pursued by demons, fled off away from car to car. By the time Jonathan Hughes had rampaged his blood and completely thrown his sanity off balance, the old man had plunged, as if felling, to the farthest end of the commuter’s special.

The two men met again in the last car, which was almost empty. Jonathan Hughes came and stood over the old man, who refused to look up. He was crying so hard now that conversation would have been impossible.

Who, thought the young man, who is he crying for? Stop, please, stop.

The old man, as if commanded, sat up, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and began to speak in a frail voice that drew Jonathan Hughes near and finally caused him to sit and listen to the whispers:

“We were born—”

“We?” cried the young man.

“We,” whispered the old man, looking out at the gathering dusk that traveled like smokes and burnings past the window, “we, yes, we, the two of us, we were born in Quincy in nineteen fifty, August twenty-second—”

Yes
, thought Hughes.

“—and lived at Forty-nine Washington Street and went to Central School and walked to that school all through first grade with Isabel Perry—”

Isabel, thought the young man.

“We...” murmured the old man. “Our” whispered the old man. “Us.” And went on and on with it:

“Our woodshop teacher, Mr. Bisbee. History teacher, Miss Monks. We broke our right ankle, age ten, ice-skating. Almost drowned, age eleven; Father saved us. Fell in love, age twelve, Impi Johnson—”

Seventh grade, lovely lady, long since dead, Jesus God, thought the young man, growing old.

And that’s what happened. In the next minute, two minutes, three, the old man talked and talked and gradually became younger with talking, so his cheeks glowed and his eyes brightened, while the young man, weighted with old knowledge given, sank lower in his seat and grew pale so that both almost met in mid-talking, mid-listening, and became twins in passing. There was a moment when Jonathan Hughes knew for an absolute insane certainty, that if he dared glance up he would see identical twins m the mirrored window of a night-rushing world.

He did not look up.

The old man finished, his frame erect now, his head somehow driven high by the talking out, the long lost revelations.

“That’s the past,” he said.