White People (2 page)

But when I was eight years old, some adult would take me aside and say, “Bryan, do you know what your father did before you were even born? Has he told you about what he did?” I said I didn’t know for sure but that they used to paint little German planes on their bombers every time they shot a real one down, and my daddy’s score was very high. They said no, not that. Not exactly. It was Dresden, the terrible and decisive firebombing of Dresden, that had been his real moment.

I nodded and always imagined a city of plate and saucer monuments and crockery apartments and wartime’s smoking smokestacks made of stacked white bottomless coffee cups. And in the center of the shining city was an oil depot, looking very like a soup tureen of Mother’s—a white one too large for just us to use but brought out for dinner parties and reunions and once, I remembered, filled with vegetable alphabet soup. I’d stood, amazed to see the very spindly
alphabet I was then learning to draw between blue lines fattened up and floating on the top of something I and all my family, even my illiterate younger brother, could drink down like reading. But the tureen I imagined there in Dresden was a million gallons high and filled to the top with the crudest, blackest German oil that fueled the deadly U-boats. A remarkable target for my father in his clear air over the heart of gleaming Dresden. In my conception, the black bomb wobbles toward the very shadow of it growing on the glossy upper disc of all those gallons. The life-sized shadow meets the real bomb falling in and going off down at the very bottom. Such beautiful war-movie slow motion now allows a perfect view of all the damage as the tank pops jaggedly open and out the gallons gush into the tranquil city. Black oil gluts the sewers of the sanitation system. The overflow is fingering up and out into the gutters and makes a black street map of the white municipality. Borne along in the dark gloss are clusters of diced carrots and chopped celery from my mother’s kitchen, and there come the fat paste letters of the alphabet, movable type sucked down with the black into the gasping manholes. The level rises—filling, incidentally, the holes, which are the handles of the chaste white coffee cups. Darkness crawls about and then above the town and finally defines a surface that a cup or saucer may float along on briefly, till tilting, then filling viscously, they sink in, one by one, until they all are underneath. Now everything is underneath. All the quaintness of Germany, all the cuckoo clocks are under, all the perfect German sheet music played by countless amateurs on Sundays, and, worst for me, all the inedible lost letters of my mother’s English alphabet have become one glossy black deluge which now shows just the tiny moving shadow of my father’s bomber, speeding back to England, back to the USO show, which will not begin till he is there in a seat being saved for him.

The photographers are smoking at the airport now; they are awaiting him. They are men also in the Army. Their job is to photograph the bombardiers like my handsome father, crawling from the cockpit, less exerted than excited by the damage he has done, looking clean and highly combed as when he left some hours ago.

B
UT BY THE TIME
I was imagining the bombing of Dresden, my father was done with all that. The war had been won. Dresden’s place setting was being sorted out. With Germany having an Occupation forced upon it, it was time my father settled into a job himself. His fading local glamour at least proved useful in helping him choose a career. Cashing in on people’s memories of him, he became an insurance salesman. It was not hard, selling insurance, and with his law degree, with the certificates Grandfather had given him, with the smattering of rents collected from the colored-tenant houses—the only remnants of Grandmother’s “fortune”—Father felt he could more than make do. He married a clever girl he’d met at a deb party before the war. He brought her south from Richmond and carried her into a thirty-thousand-dollar house already paid for in advance by his cashing in certificates in companies making aluminum and small-screened televisions—all companies on the brink of booming when he sold their stocks. But though he was without much business sense, still there was the thirty-thousand-dollar house, much larger than what one could buy oneself today for that amount of money. So my father and my mother moved into a house that echoed slightly because it had more rooms than furniture. Sometimes the guest room was occupied by a recurrent itinerant aunt; but when she was gone the doors were closed, the heating ducts turned off, and three bedrooms, now accommodating only boxes full of unused wedding gifts, again stood very vacant.

My father still wrote to war buddies. They often passed through town en route to Florida, howling in through the front door to hug him. A lot of them were dark men, hairy in a way my father and his fair Carolina friends were not. It seemed that all New Yorkers were brown-eyed and sooty from the city; they looked odd here in the clear to amber light of our Tidewater. Mentioning their wives waiting out in the car, they lifted eyebrows suggestively, as in the old days—as if that were some notorious and easy girl out there. Mother never liked their wives much, and when they’d left, Father told her she
was a snob. “War buddies’ wives are not necessarily war buddies themselves,” she quipped. Once, when he insisted, after hanging up the phone, that they drive two hundred miles to a motel where someone from his squadron was staying on the way to Miami, Mother mentioned a bridge tournament; she said, “Show him my picture,” and settled luxuriously back onto the couch with the latest novel by Daphne du Maurier. “He already saw your picture and he’s heard more about you than you’d ever guess!” my father shouted as he stormed out with the car keys and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and, slamming the door, rattled the china cabinet. Very early the next morning, he came in drunk and in a loud voice over the telephone canceled an afternoon appointment to sell Group Life. My mother wandered down to breakfast in her quilted yellow housecoat, and noticed a broken headlight on the Packard parked at the wrong angle outside. When they’d settled at the table, coffee poured, she offered him the usual tirade about his egotism, her suffering, and their marriage, which she liked to say was “crumbling, Richard, crumbling!” I sat eating scrambled eggs with a big round training spoon, and my younger brother dropped his baby bottle on the floor, then looked down at it till I picked it up. “Oh yeah?” my father said. And then she said, “Don’t you use that trashy New York slang around your children.” “Oh yeah?” he said.

B
UT WHEN
you are definitely home from the European Theater, which is dead now, and war buddies you’d have given your life for now phone less and less, are more and more just Christmas cards with photos of new children, cards signed in a woman’s hand, when insurance (fire, burglary, auto, and life) is now what people think of when they think of you, when Marilyn Monroe is filling the shoes of Betty Grable, who’s retired, what do you do then?

You find that the headaches are because you suddenly need reading glasses. You resign yourself to buying bourbon by the case because it is cheaper and you now have room to store that much, and you have no doubt that it will somehow get drunk up. You call your two sons soldiers when they submit stiff-faced, thin-armed, to Jonas Salk’s
discovery. You pay someone to keep the yard worthy of your wartime aerial-photo vision of its symmetry and shape from overhead. You take your wife to the occasions you count on the country club to invent, and there, with friends who have become clients and friends who have not become clients and with clients who want to become your friends, the two of you get more than genteelly drunk, even by Eastern Carolina’s lubricated standards. And afterward, after the baby-sitter has been overpaid to cover your tardiness and the fact that the front of your jacket is dark from some accidental spillage and to cover the expense of the cab that must be called to get her home, in the silence after that, of the house becoming increasingly more valuable as the boxwoods expand themselves outside, with the hint of dawn coming on, you both manage to know what a prime moment in the history of your physiques this is.

Otherwise, you learn to make do, and when some threat arises you are soldierly in disposing of it. Almost, there are not enough threats anymore. Here you are, among the most successful of the bombardiers, now grounded, in the awful safety of this decade, in its suburbs. You do what you can around the house and grounds to re-create some of that drama you remember from the forties. All the events that made one’s life eventful: The Axis. Roosevelt Dead. Hiroshima.

The furnace explodes early one morning. You carry Helen outside, dump her onto a lawn chair, rush back for the sleeping boys, dash across the street and pull the fire alarm. Later the fire chief emerges from the basement of the house and ambles around the engine and out toward your family group, huddled in pajamas among the neighbors, who have brought blankets, coffee, garden hoses. “Nothing serious,” he says. “The furnace sort of exploded. A little soot, but nothing serious.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing serious’? You should have heard it. I thought we were being attacked or something.”

“Noisy,” the fire chief admits, scratching his head, trying to be both tactful and professional, “but nothing serious.”

The next day, you order a fire-alarm system for the house. While the children grumble, while a siren howls and neighbors watch over
fences, you stage your first weekly fire drill. After two of these, the drills are discontinued.

It is a personal affront when tent caterpillars invade four of the yard’s eleven trees. A neighbor says you’ll have to burn them out; only thing they understand. The yardman prepares to do it, till you curtly give him the day off. This job, worthy of you, will require a little strategy. There are moments when a father and his boys must work together. Standing in the back door, you shout, “Now is the time for all good boys to come to the aid of their father and their yard!”
“What?”
Helen asks.

You put a torch together—a broom handle, rags, some kerosene. You ignite it with your wartime Zippo. Up into the infested tree nearest the house you crawl. This is a mission; for once, in peacetime, you know exactly what you’re going to do. The boys watch idly from the ground as you sear the first lumps of worms out of the plum tree. Smoke suddenly everywhere and such a smell. “You two down there, don’t just stand around. Stomp on the ones getting away.” Clusters of black caterpillars, pounds of them, are toppling from their webs, falling to the ground and steaming.

Making girlish noises, your sons start hopping on the smoldering worms. Bradley jogs about, eyes straight ahead; he lifts his knees and makes a calisthenic game of it. Feeling dizzy, Bryan shuts his eyes, holds out his arms for balance, and earnestly pretends he’s dancing, though his tennis shoes keep slipping out from under him.

In the tree, you find you’ve started muttering almost forgotten, complicated curses from the war as, one by one, you solemnly eradicate these black colonies of pests. Your sons’ whimpering infuriates you suddenly. “Shut up down there, you two. You’ll do your job and keep your mouths closed. These things are going to get to other trees. They’ll get over into the Bennetts’ yard if we don’t kill them now. This is no game here, this is an emergency, so quit squealing like sissies and stomp on them. That clear?”

Your two children look up at the orange glow inside the tree, at a single wing-tip shoe visible among the leaves. In unison, they say, “Yes sir.”

I’
M NOT
as young as I used to be and it follows that my sons aren’t either. Bradley, our baby, is twenty-five now and makes a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. He graduated third in his class from the law school of the University of Virginia. He’s now with a fine corporation-law firm working out of Georgetown. Brad married Elaine last May at a garden wedding that was rained out but that was nice anyway. The bridesmaids’ dresses were made of some thin material that got transparent when wet. Elaine is from a fine old Maryland family. Her father served as attorney general of the state a few administrations back. Now Brad and Elaine are renovating a townhouse in Washington, doing most of the work themselves. What with Elaine’s small private income and her looks and taste, and with Brad’s salary, my wife and I feel good about their progress in life. Elaine always remembers us with little cards and gifts on birthdays and anniversaries. It’s a comfort.

Bryan is our elder son. He’s twenty-seven and a mystery to me. Two years ago he gave up a fairly good job as a designer of furniture. He decided to become a writer. When he was home last Christmas, we heard him typing a few times, but he never offered to show us anything he’d written. I have no doubt that it’s good. He has always had a real flair for the arts. But if you’ve never read a word your son has written and if you understand the kind of money a writer can expect to make, it’s hard to work up any real enthusiasm for this occupation.

To support himself, Bryan does articles for a magazine called
Dance World
. When people ask me what he’s doing, I tell them he writes for a magazine in New York. If they ask me which one, then I’m forced to level with them. I’d have to be a writer myself to describe the sinking feeling I get when I tell this about my elder son. Helen says that my attitude in the matter is unreasonable. All I know is, the first year he worked for the magazine he sent us a free subscription, and it got so I couldn’t even stand to see copies on the coffee
table. I could hardly believe some of the pictures of the men. Looking at them, you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or get angry or what.

My wife also informs me that there are two kinds of dance, ballet and modern, and that Bryan’s specialty is modern. Helen says, with lots of enthusiasm, that modern is less costumed but just as athletic as ballet. Somehow, knowing this doesn’t help.

You might say Bryan and I have never really seen eye to eye. He has always had certain mannerisms and his talents are unlike my own. When he was younger he stayed pale from spending too much time indoors. I kept telling Helen that one day he’d discover the world outside. I said, “Now he keeps a diary, he paints still lifes, he reads French like a Frenchman, but believe you me, one day he’ll come around. You watch.”