White People (3 page)

I see I might have been wrong. He’s twenty-seven years old and I think the only women he ever talks to are waitresses. He lives with some actor-model roommate. We had lunch with them in New York. The roommate met us at the restaurant. I was expecting somebody thin who looked pretty much like Bryan. In walks this big, broad-shouldered kid, taller than me and with a suntan and a jaw like a lifeguard’s. For a second, I was ashamed of myself for having jumped to certain conclusions. Then the first thing I noticed was his handshake. One of those dead fish. Second thing I noticed was, he’d smashed his thumbnail in something; it was black. Third thing was that all his fingernails were black. Nail polish. I could hardly understand what this meant. I thought it must be for medicinal purposes, because how could anybody do that for decoration? Helen was staring so hard I had to nudge her under the table. Usually she’s the one nudging me. Afterwards she said she wouldn’t have been so startled if it had been red polish, but black?

Now that we’ve met Jacques, he seems to be everywhere we look. Helen never forgets a face, and she keeps finding his picture in magazine ads—mostly for whiskey and shirts, once for soap. In these ads his nails are never black. I won’t get over that. The kid looked like he should be on the U.S. Olympic team carrying a torch—and then the handshake, the nails, and his trying to talk all during lunch
about the music of the forties. He kept asking Helen and me about Kay Kayser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge, and about the Andrews Sisters. Helen surprised me by remembering the name of each Andrews Sister and knowing the order in which some’d died. She entered right into the discussion. He asked her how it felt to have heard “Tangerine” when it was new, and Helen was sitting right there telling him. Jacques kept saying over and over again, “What a period, what a period!” For a person like myself, who loved the forties, the silliness of this kind of conversation made me sick. As if anybody like that could ever understand what it meant to be alive then.

You send your sons to the best schools possible, and you hope that their friends will be bright kids from similar backgrounds. Sometimes I wonder what my son and this type of person have in common. Then I take a guess, and right away I’m wishing I could forget my own conclusions.

I was not going to mention it, but as long as I’ve built up this much steam I might as well. Last spring, Bryan came down to his brother’s wedding in Baltimore. We were glad he came. It was right that he should be there, but I won’t even begin to describe the person, the creature, he brought along with him. Everyone who saw this particular person immediately got very disturbed. This particular person somehow managed to get into and spoil about half of Bradley and Elaine’s wedding pictures. Elaine’s parents were obliged to find a place for Bryan and his guest to stay during the weekend of the wedding. They were certainly very gracious about it and never said one word about this person’s appearance. But Helen was so upset and embarrassed she cried most of the nights we were there. Because of the strain, she looked terrible at the wedding.

Of course, it was Helen who was always telling Bryan he was gifted. She was enrolling him in adult art classes with nude models when he was twelve damn years old, buying him thirty-dollar picture books full of abstract paintings, driving him fifteen miles to the next town because our local barbers couldn’t “cut with the curl.” I told her she was spoiling him, but beyond that what could I do? I’d always said that the boys should have nothing but the best. No, I’m
definitely not blaming Helen. After all, that’s one reason you make your money, so you can spoil your kids in ways you weren’t.

You start off with a child, a son, and for the first six years he’s on your side. It’s clear there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s healthy, and you’re relieved. He’s pretty much like all the others. Not quite as noisy, maybe not quite as tough, but that might be a good sign, too. Then things somehow get off the track. He’s coming in with a bloodied nose once a week, and you know damned well that nothing happened to the kid that did it. He’s inside listening to records when he ought to be outside playing with the others. His face starts looking unlike yours and hers. You come home from a hard day’s work and find him sitting in a high-backed chair cutting shapes out of colored paper and spreading them on the rug. You wonder for a moment if this white-skinned kid can be fourteen years old; can he be half your responsibility, half your fault? Of course, there are times when everything seems well enough. He takes out girls. He learns to drive. His tenor comes and goes, then comes to stay. One day you see he’s nicked himself while shaving, and all the time you feel you should be grooming an heir he grows paler, taller, and more peculiar. He locks doors behind himself and startles you in the dark hallways of your own house. You’re afraid of his next phase—afraid how the finished product will compare with the block’s other boys, with his own kid brother who plays on the junior varsity and mows other people’s lawns for money.

At the PTA open house a teacher pulls you aside and tells you, all excited, “Bryan can do anything he likes in the world. How few of us can do absolutely anything we like. He’s among the chosen few, and I thought you both should know.” His mother beams all evening, but afterwards you find him in the kitchen, at the table, dripping candle wax on black paper. “An experiment,” he mumbles as you walk into the room toward the refrigerator. You feel clumsy and you try with your expression to apologize for having barged in like this through the swinging door. But, after all, you tell yourself, it
is
your kitchen and your table, that is your son. The “anything” his sad teacher promised gives you more distress than comfort.

He drops calling you just Dad and changes you to Father. One night you turn on the television and hear him say, “Television is for fools,” and dash out of the room, offended by your need to see the news. You expect more from him as he gets older, but the distance grows. He reminds you of a thin, peculiar fellow you knew slightly in the Army, a bookworm nobody spoke to.

Till last New Year’s Eve, I felt I’d had a pretty good track record as a father. I mean, I knew I’d made some mistakes, but somehow, over the years, you forget specifically what they’ve been. Bryan had come south for Christmas for the first time in two years. Helen and I got home from a party at the Club. We were slightly drunk. Bryan was sitting up reading when we got in. He was curled on the living-room couch in a floor-length maroon bathrobe he’d worn most of his visit. He was reading something he’d brought down from New York. He laughs at our books and magazines, picks up Helen’s novels and giggles at them and puts them down again.

Charlie Fentress had announced his daughter’s engagement at the New Year’s Eve party. The band played a few bars of the Wedding March. Bradley and Elaine weren’t married yet and Brad had decided to spend Christmas with his college roommate on St. Thomas. Only Bryan was home. Edward and Mildred Fox took Helen and me aside at the party to say they just wanted to let us know they were going to be grandparents. They were hugging each other and they both had tears in their eyes. The band played “Auld Lang Syne.” It seemed everyone was being honored and rewarded by their children but us. Bryan had laughed at our suggestion that he come to the party and see his old friends. “What would I talk to them about?” he asked. “The pill, kindergarten car pools?” His quickness with words has made him all the more upsetting. But we got home and there was our son on the couch. There he was. His hair cut in a shaggy expensive way, and wearing a silk bathrobe. He looked over his shoulder at us as we stood in the foyer taking off our coats and rubbers with a little drunken difficulty.

“How was the prom, kids?” he asked and turned back to his book. I walked into the living room. On the coffee table before the couch
I saw a bottle of cognac I’d paid forty bucks for, three years earlier. A snifter was beside it and a lot of wet rings, some of the cognac spilled on the tabletop.

“Who told you you could open that bottle?” I asked him.

“Father, it’s New Year’s Eve. Let up a little.” The back of his head was still toward me.

“Look what you’ve done to that table. Your mother breaks her back keeping this place decent and you act like you’re at the goddamned Holiday Inn.”

It’s easy enough now to say I shouldn’t have cuffed him. But I felt like doing it, and I was just drunk enough to do what I felt like doing. He hadn’t even bothered to turn around while I was talking. I took a backswing while he was reading. Helen said, “Richard!” in a warning tone of voice, but, like me, she really didn’t think I’d do it. I smacked him with my best golfer’s swing right across his fashionable haircut, and knocked him off the couch onto the floor. It scared me as much as it seemed to scare him. For a minute he lay blinking up at me, mouth open, on the carpet. We were like that for a second. His mouth open, mine open, and Helen with both hands pressed over hers. Then she was all over me, trying to hold my arms like I was going to kill him. He got up, straightened his robe, and marched upstairs. The whole thing was so sloppy it made me sick. Even with all I’d drunk I couldn’t sleep.

The next morning there was to be a New Year’s Day church service at Trinity Episcopal. Helen had asked Bryan to come with us, but we didn’t think he’d get up, since it was before his usual rising time, which was anywhere from noon till three. Helen and I were eating breakfast. We were dressed for church, eating without talking, trying not to think about the night before, but thinking about it anyway.

We were both staring at our eggs and coffee when Bryan came downstairs, all dressed for church. His head was bound up in a professional-looking gauze-and-tape bandage that covered most of his hair and forehead. The tanned ears stuck up over the white cap. He looked like someone recovering from brain surgery. Helen was drinking her coffee as he came in. In the middle of swallowing, she went into a genteel coughing fit. Bryan poured himself a cup. As he
was adding cream and sugar, he said cheerfully, “Father, when people at church ask what happened to me—and inevitably they will ask—I intend to tell them exactly who’s responsible for this.”

I sat staring down the table at him. We were squared off, me at my usual place, he at his. I started chewing on my back molars in a way I hadn’t done since the War. He went on drinking his coffee. Once in a while, he’d glance up at me over his cup. He seemed pleased with himself. Helen was staring at him with her mouth half open. She would look from him to me, her face all strained, as if she wanted me to explain him to her. So this is it, I thought. That one over there with the bandages, that’s my elder son and heir. I had to decide then whether I would really break his head or if I’d let things go. At some point, you have to decide with children whether you’re going to kill them or let them go.

I thought of those foreign-exchange students we sometimes had to dinner when they passed through our town. Odd-looking kids with funny-shaped glasses, sometimes bad teeth, and accents half the time Helen and I couldn’t understand. But we always pretended we did. You could tell when they had asked a question, and even though you hadn’t really caught it, you still nodded and said, “Yes.” And when it turned out that the question couldn’t be answered with a simple Yes, when they stared at us, at least we’d shown that we had wanted to agree. In the long run, that was all Helen and myself could do for International Good Will.

So at this breakfast I decided to give Bryan the benefit of the doubt. I told myself I’d treat him at least as well as we treated these nonwhite foreign students who come to dinner for just one night. You didn’t even expect thank-you notes from them. These kids’ customs were so different, their homes so far from us here. But we were always kind to them, thinking of American kids who’d be in their country someday. So I told myself there at the table, if not as a father then at least as a host and an American, I should treat Bryan at least as well as one of them. After all, a foreigner is mostly what he’s been to us.

Helen didn’t want him to go out bandaged like that, but you have to take your own kid to church. Besides, if we hadn’t taken him he’d
have called a cab and how would that have looked? I’m sure he told whoever asked about his head whatever it was he’d decided to tell.

He left for New York that very afternoon, still wrapped up like somebody with amnesia. Except for Bradley’s wedding, we haven’t seen him since. I suspect that he’s in secret correspondence with his mother, and that’s fine and natural, I suppose. Some days she’s more tearful than others. In the middle of a meal, she’ll fold her napkin, place it on the table, leave the room.

Someday he’ll probably publish a story or a whole book about what a tyrant I’ve been. I can imagine a chapter listing all the times I ever raised my voice or hit him. Of course, people always believe what’s down in black and white before they’ll listen to just one man’s word about what happened. I have made some mistakes, I know. But I won’t accept his verdict of me. I’m not a villain. If anything, I’ve wanted too much for him, and, considering all the ways you can go wrong with a son, it seems the one he would be quickest to forgive.

I
N THIS DRAWING
I am doing, a tall red man holds the hand of a small white boy. The man wears a decorative uniform: policeman, soldier, milkman. He is much taller than the child, but his right arm has been conveniently elongated, elasticized like a sling or bandage so it easily supports the boy’s white hand.

My art teacher called me out into the hallway on the last day of school and whispered, “You mustn’t tell the other children, but you’re the best drawer I have ever taught in eighteen years. The most imaginative. Of your age group, I mean.” Now, deciding to place the man and boy before a doorway just like that one there, with a similar selection of Mother’s houseplants sprouting all around them, I recall Miss Whipple’s compliment. I feel fully capable of adding exactly what I intend. When I’m done, people will say, “Look. He’s drawn a man, a boy, a doorway, and some plants in pots.” There is a comfort in knowing you can make things recognizable.