In October, just as the leaves turned, when the last few tomatoes no one could possibly find a use for were overripe and rotting in the garden, Henrietta was pulling up cornstalks and putting them on the compost pile. She happened to see something brown moving down by the end of the driveway, past the barberry hedge. She looked again, squeezing her eyes, then pushed her glasses away from the always sensitive grooves they made in the bridge of her nose. There was a tall man, a soldier, and she wondered why he turned from the road and came walking up their driveway, a bulging canvas suitcase in his hand.
A soldier, she thought. What is that soldier coming here for? The day was bright, the light hard, and leaves blew past her eyes as she watched him. The maples were red and gold, and here came this soldier, out of place on their street. He waved. Suddenly she recognized him by his gesture as she hadn’t by his face, and it was her child in the dangerous foreign clothing. Wood, her firstborn, who had shed all of his need for her, piece by piece, and now came back, big as a man in clothes she hadn’t chosen for him. He set down his bag and came toward her over the grass, smiling, all blurred by her tears. Gold glinted from his uniform and from his hat, from the leaves, from the odd imperfect lenses of her tears.
“Goodness!” she said. “Wood?”
He reached her and put his arms around her, and for a moment she felt as if she had walked up to the side of a house. He was so unexpectedly big. The gold buttons and bars of his uniform jacket wavered and shone. She leaned back and her eyes focused again. His face was different. It was older and smoother and harder, more muscular and handsome. His chin was hardened by the even shadow of his shaven beard, and his throat was reddish and hard. She stared at the strange devices upon his chest; suddenly she recognized in gold the crossed rifles. Rifles. He wore the insignia of his new calling.
“Oh, come in,” she said. “Come in and see your father.” Wood had said something. What had he said? He looked down at her for a moment.
“I’ll get my bag,” he said. She still held him, but now she remembered to let him go, and he strode away. She wiped her hands hard on her smock.
He came back to her and they walked toward the kitchen door. “I’m sorry I had to surprise you,” he said. “I tried to call but I couldn’t get off the train until Boston, and then it didn’t seem worth the money.”
“You wrote it might be next week.”
“Yeah, they…” His hesitation struck her with worry.
“They what?”
“They’re just speeding things up a little.”
“Speeding up?”
“Well, not very much,” he said, and held the door for her. She didn’t understand, but before she would ask him about it he must meet his father.
“Harvey!” she called as they came through the dining room. “Wood’s home! Look who’s here!”
As the wheelchair turned, his tortured white face came around, grimacing. “Oh,” he said. “You caught me at a…At a bad time hello Wood.” The words slurred. “Sorry,” he said. A glass half full of whiskey sat next to his adding machine. “So sorry, really. Don’t feel good.” He tried to shake it off. “So he’s a shavetail! I can see that. R.O.T.C., y’know.” An agonized expression, the teeth bared; he tried to shake it off, to be sober. “Don’t do this often, Wood. Lieutenant. Honest. True, Hank? True? True? Feel better later. I mean it, so glad. Happy. Proud.”
He turned his face away with a jerk, as if from a blow. Wood took a step toward him and stopped. “Dad,” he said.
“See you later. Don’t feel good. You understand. Hanky, wheel the guts out of here, will you?”
Something made her look to Wood, and he nodded, serious and concerned. She wheeled Harvey into their bedroom and shut the door behind them. He raised himself from his wheelchair, shaking and sweating, then awkwardly rolled over onto the bed. She loosened his shirt and pants and took the pencils, pen and matches from his shirt pocket. “Do you want something over you?” she asked him.
His eyes were open, staring at her with an intensity she first thought was rage, or vindictiveness. She braced, waiting, but nothing else happened. He stared. Whatever words moiled in his head didn’t come out. He stared for a while, then blinked several times before his plump white hand gestured for hers. She let the hand take hers, conscious of her calloused hard hand, a rock in the soft white.
“Does he remember me?” Harvey asked.
“We all remember you,” she said.
“I don’t…Don’t humor me. Don’t mean wormy dog shit I am now. Inside ‘n out. He rember? Remember. Taught him how to shoot?”
“Go to sleep and you’ll be all right at suppertime,” she said.
“God damn it,” he said. “Pile of shit.”
“Of course we all remember,” she said. “Now go to sleep.”
Soon he was sleeping, his red lips open slightly. In the corner of his mouth a bubble of spit trembled in each heavy breath.
She came out, shutting the door quietly. Wood wasn’t there; of course he wouldn’t have taken a chance of hearing what they’d said. She stood in the high room Harvey loved so much—or used to, until it had become his prison. The curving staircase, light flowing across the vast dustiness of the air, the omate false balcony so high up she could trick her eyes into believing it was a real balcony in some great Gothic hall. The stained-glass window on the landing beamed its rich colors down through the balustrade to the parquet floor and dark wall paneling: green on brown, red on oak. The parlor, now their bedroom, had been Harvey’s gun and trophy room, where antlers bristled yellow on the walls, and rifles, shotguns, nets, fishing rods—all his gear and tackle-were displayed on racks and in glassed cabinets. Now they had all been put away in an attic storeroom. Harvey had loved his gun room so much he used to stand in the doorway, just looking at it. He’d even go around on the porch and look in at it through the tall windows, an expression of surprise and wonder on his face. The things he liked had never lost their wonder, then. His Orvis fly rods, his Packard phaeton, his sailboat, his castle, his incredibly obedient reflexes. How he had enjoyed them all.
And yet there should be something left. Were the things of his times of triumph all there were? And had she been merely another of his pretty toys—smooth, well made, obedient protoplasm?
She pitied him; she loved the man, but back inside somewhere, somewhere in her feelings for him, was that judgment: grow up. We must all grow old and brittle and useless at children’s games. That is one of the rules we were born to, and we accept our pleasures, knowing that we must pay when the time comes.
But then she thought of Wood, who couldn’t live his own life even at nineteen. Nineteen, and they made him wear a uniform decorated with their murderous symbols. They. They were only men, and had no right. They had no right to set the children to killing each other. All the armies were made of children. The pilots were children, and the sailors, all of them flattered into thinking they were men and then having to go out and die real deaths. Most of them had no idea of the meaning of the pain they inflicted or would have to suffer, no idea of that iron on the tongue. Stupid, stupid! Wood was coming down the stairs, and she turned away, her tears blurring and refracting the afternoon sunlight that fell so richly across the room.
Peggy had choir practice after school. They were going to sing for Thanksgiving in the school auditorium before vacation, in the Town Hall the day of Town Meeting, and at the Thanksgiving services in the Congregational Church. They didn’t have to practice “God Bless America” or “Goin’ Over Jordan” so much as the Bach chorales. For an encore (except in the church) they had “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ “and “That Old Black Magic.” She wouldn’t get home—back to the Whipples’ house—until just before supper, so Kate would have set the table and done all the things Peggy usually helped with.
After rehearsal she came up High Street in the dusk of the clear day; the sun was gone, and darkness seemed to flow along the ground, past tree trunks, flowers, hedges, the sides of houses-like dimming fog, while the sky above was still clear daylight, still bright blue. She had always come home this way, but now she wouldn’t go on past the big house to the woods road, she would go right up to the house, let it loom with all its strength and warmth, its turrets and battlements, right over her head. Up in the woods the little sugarhouse was all alone, dark and damp. She’d gone up to see it once, in the summer, and it had grown so small and dingy she wondered how anyone could have considered it home. It had smelled of earth, and the door was stuck so firmly to its jamb she’d had to take an old leaf spring that was lying there and pry it open.
The oil stove had rusted in the places where the enamel had cracked off that time her mother had nearly burned them out. Bluish, fuzzy mold had taken over the fleece slippers her mother had left in the closet-place. The little Christmas tree was a brown skeleton, pitiful with ribbons and balls, standing in a soft bed of its own needles. Mice had been everywhere, and their little dashes lay scattered all over the sink and table, the stove top, in the coffee mugs, the soap dish, the spoons and on the blades of table knives. Her father’s deer rifle was rusty, and she took it with her so David could clean it. When she left the little house she jammed the warped door back shut again. Sadness had come in waves.
As it did now, only now it seemed more the happy anticipations that came in waves above an old sadness. She came toward the Whipples’ house that would be full of light and human voices. Kate and Horace, Mr. and Mrs. Whipple would be there, and almost as reassuring and important would be their lives and their problems going on, going on, surely and independently of her. Yet she was allowed, and given a place at their table.
The house rose up, lights in windows. She went in through the kitchen, into that busy place. Kate and Mrs. Whipple were getting supper; something steamed on the black warm presence of the woodstove, and dishes warmed on the reservoir.
“Peggy!” Kate said.
“I’ll be right down,” she said, and ran up the back stairs to take her music and her books to her room. There had been something a little more imperative and excited than usual in Kate’s voice. Even in the tempo of the kitchen’s bustle, somehow. Mrs. Whipple had been beating something in a bowl—beating (was it all imagination?) faster than usual, her shoulders hunched a little more. What was it? She washed quickly and came back down.
Now Kate had changed—she was very calm and matter-of-fact. But different, still. Some kind of pressure, some excitement glowed behind her perfect calm, behind the always startling beauty of her face.
“What is it?”
“What’s what?” Kate said, turning away and pretending to straighten the pile of plates.
“You’re acting funny.”
“Me?”
“Now, Kate,” Mrs. Whipple said, smiling. She was obviously in on it.
“Oh, Peggy,” Kate said. “The plates aren’t on yet. Would you put them on? I’ve got to grease the biscuit pans.”
Mystified, half trying not to believe anything was going on, Peggy picked up the pile of warm plates, took them into the dining room and began to place them around the table. Kate and Mrs. Whipple came in and seemed to be watching her, and when she got around so her back was to the living-room arch, big warm hands came from behind and covered her eyes.
“Who is it? Who is it?” Kate shouted.
Horace? David back from the farm at Cascom? Not Mr. Whipple. The hands, warm and dry, never moved, but there was a low laugh, a man’s, and from farther back Horace’s pleased bark.
Wood.
She put her hands over those warm hands and nodded her head because she couldn’t quite say his name. Tears were coming out of her eyes, and she had to take a quick, deep breath.
“Why, Peggy,” Wood said, concerned and it seemed to her pleased and amused. No, different than that. He turned her around and there he was, looking down at her, happy to see her.
“Hey, hey,” he said to her tears, and picked her up, his hands like great warm slings cupping her rib cage, his fingers on her spine. “You’re growing up!” he said. She came up toward his strong face, his dark hair and eyes, as though she were his equal in height. Yet her feet dangled like a child’s, and she didn’t dare put her hands on his shoulders, though it seemed powerfully the thing to do, for balance, for some demand of the playfulness of the moment; perhaps it was fear of doing something too grownup, when she was only a child. Fear, yes, of something too momentous and gigantic, an impending sacred fusion; she loved him too much, she would catch fire, she would die, she did not love him as a child. But the child judged still.
“I’m fourteen!” she said.
“Fourteen!” he said wonderingly, and put her down. “My goodness, everybody’s growing up. Except me. I feel younger every day.”
“Sure!” Horace said. “Oh, sure!”
“We’re all growing up,” Kate said. “We can’t stop it.”
Then they were all quiet. They had heard the glee in Kate’s voice, but it had changed to something else and become sad. With one unformulated intent they looked at Mrs. Whipple.
“And I’m grown-up already, is that it?” she said, smiling sadly. “Well, it’s not much of a time to grow up in.”
“It’s no time,” Kate said. “David said that. The war and all. He said…” She stopped, and looked at her mother. Then they all looked at Wood, handsome and straight in his uniform.
“I wish David were here,” Kate said.
They sat down to supper without Mr. Whipple, who wasn’t feeling good. Wood told them that he had almost a month before he had to go back. As he said this, time began with an almost tangible lurch to move forward.
Everybody mashed his potatoes, clink, clink. The seconds passed, the minutes passed. Horace made a potato pool and poured his gravy in it—white chicken gravy. The platter of roast chicken, country-style the way Wood liked it, had no bones in it. Wood liked the white meat, with cheese and bread-and-butter pickles, olives, canned beet greens with vinegar. He’d gone downtown that afternoon and bought some beer, so he and Mrs. Whipple drank beer. Kate had a juice glass of it, but said it was bitter. Peggy couldn’t stand the smell of it, close, but she liked the smell of it from farther away. She liked Wood drinking it, the man drinking beer and eating his supper.
He wore his uniform shirt with his tie off—the crossed gold rifles on one side of the collar, the gold bar on the other. Mrs. Whipple said wasn’t he young to be an officer, and Wood said maybe a little, but they wanted young officers in the infantry. Horace said why did they call it infantry—was it like infants? Wood said yes, it came from that word, because they had to be young. They needed young men because the old ones couldn’t stand the marches and the running. Mrs. Whipple, looking unhappy, nodded her head.
“My captain in basic training was only twenty-four,” Wood said.
“It was illegal for you to buy this beer,” Mrs. Whipple said. “You’re not even twenty, much less twenty-one.”
“That’s crazy,” Kate said.
Wood shrugged. “In Phenix City you could buy anything.”
Peggy watched them talk. Clear light rose from the tablecloth to shine upon their faces. A glint from a piece of silverware touched Wood’s cheek. Next to Wood, Horace seemed random and unformed, not quite a complete person yet. Kate was so alive she gave off a kind of glow, almost like vibrations, that everybody had to be aware of. Her light brown hair—honey-colored, or maybe almost the color of light toast, or of the clean sand at the beach on Cascom Lake—fell lively and even about her face.
Horace grinned at Wood, big teeth with slots between them, grinning, yet his pale sunken eyes might as easily have been crying if you looked at them alone. He told Wood that he could go down cellar now.
“You’ve got over your fear, then,” Wood said.
“No, it’s just different.”
“That’s wonderful, anyway,” Wood said.
“I sweat like a pig!”
“How did you make yourself do it?”
“It’s funny. I’ve got to think right.” Horace blushed, and looked quickly around the table.
“Think right?” Kate said.
“Yeah, I’ve got to think right.”
“Like what?” Kate said.
“Well, I think of…” Horace blushed some more, and grinned so hard it must have hurt his cheeks. “I think of Susie Davis, as a matter of fact.”
“And that works?” Wood said.
“That does the trick?” Kate said.
Wood gave Kate a quick look, for some reason, but then appeared satisfied with what he’d seen.
“Horace is sweet on Susie,” Kate said.
“That’s all right!” Horace said, nearly shouting. “Maybe I am!”
“That’s all right, Horsie,” Kate said. “That’s all right. Susie’s nice. She’s awfully nice.”
“Okay,” Horace said.
“Horace has changed a lot,” Mrs. Whipple said to Wood. Horace nodded. “He wasn’t too good right after you left, for a while,” she added. Horace nodded. Wood looked closely at Horace, as if he might read those changes in his face.
“I take care of the furnace now,” Horace said proudly.
“That’s wonderful,” Wood said. “That’s really wonderful, Horace.” He looked at Horace curiously, and finally said, “Does Susie protect you from those things?”
“No,” Horace said. His face had grown dark and secretive, as if he’d said too much. He peered out furtively, and his eyes touched each of them in turn, seeming to find no one to trust. It was odd, even for Horace, that he would admit that about Susie Davis, yet say nothing else. Peggy had always found him secretive about those things that frightened him, even when she had tried to help him. He was grateful, but he said nothing. He’d get that same dense, watchful look, even begin to sweat. His teeth would clamp and grind, as they did now. Not so she could hear them, but little bulges of muscle came and went along his jaw. It was frightening, even if it was Horace, because the tension in him was too great. His muscles grew, and quivered under his skin. It was not just fright, either, not just shivering. He fought some terrible fight inside himself, seeming to grow unhuman, almost monstrous, right before her eyes.
Then he would come out of it, piece by piece. Something broke, and something snapped, and he’d seem to get his jaw loose, and then maybe an arm, and then his neck would loosen up. She felt so sorry for him, yet there was a kind of triumph too, as he came back to them. He did come back, and then he was Horace again, who was so kind, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She thought that about the fly, then realized it was true.
No one said anything about Horace’s trouble. They had all seen it happen to him before, so they went on eating, pretending not to notice. Soon he was eating again too, bite by bite narrowing the edges of his potato pool of chicken gravy.
Wood’s leave went fast for the first week, but then he began to get restless. He had nothing really to do in Leah. Lois Potter came home from college for the weekend, and they went to the last dance of the season at the Blue Moon, on the lake. She was so proud of his uniform, it made him uneasy. Everything was too smooth and perfect, too moony-spoony. She acted as if she were an actress in the sweet-furlough interlude of a movie, with just the right amount of stiff upper lip for what lay ahead. But she cried when she had to go back, and he felt some of that romance too. It was a real war, and she was a lovely girl. He just didn’t love Lois. It made him feel nasty when he admitted this to himself, as if he were a cheat, an impostor (which he was). He could never tell Lois the truth. He’d never be able to. Maybe time would take care of that problem. Maybe he’d get killed; that would solve it, if in a rather drastic fashion.
David hitchhiked from Cascom to see him on the second weekend. He lived, he said, on a farm with slightly crazy people, but it was interesting. He’d never had so much homework in his life, but he guessed he was learning things. The boys who lived at Dexter-Benham had to be in their rooms during study hours at night. In fact they practically locked them in, and they didn’t have much else to do. So they really piled the homework on.
David made him talk about the Army, especially about the weapons. Had he fired the .50 caliber machine gun? The bazooka? Yes, he’d fired them all, at one time or another, and taken most of them apart in the dark and put them together again. Had he fired the bazooka at a tank? Yes, at an old hulk of a medium tank that had been hit hundreds of times. They all missed the first time because they were nervous, but then on the second shot they found that a bazooka didn’t kick or burn, so they took a careful sight picture and hit the tank. He had to explain to David about the “shaped charge,” the rocket, the use of molten metal as the killer inside the tank. He told him how two colored kids, news vendors about ten years old, had out of curiosity poked around on the bazooka range—this at Camp Wheeler—and found a dud round. Somehow they had tapped it, or dropped it, and it had killed them both.
What had it done to them? David wanted to know.
Wood said he hadn’t seen the bodies and hadn’t wanted to.
“Just curious,” David said.
“Do you want to get into the war?”
“I don’t want to get killed,” David said. “But the war’s what’s going on, isn’t it?”
“It’s men getting killed, or being so bored they think goosing each other is high entertainment. Don’t be a sucker.”
David was pleased by this. “That doesn’t sound like you,” he said. “Well, anyway, maybe it isn’t the war. What I want to do, mostly, is grow up.”
“I hope you like it when you get there,” Wood said, and David looked at him again, quickly, pleased and surprised that Wood should say such a thing. For a moment Wood resented this as being slightly patronizing. But then he reconsidered: he had changed a lot in a year, in this last year, and maybe David had a right to be surprised.
“I’ll be seventeen in a little over a month,” David said.
On Sunday afternoon when David had to start hitchhiking back to Cascom, he said goodbye. “I don’t like to say goodbye,” he said, with some difficulty. “When I left for Cascom last month I sort of snuck out before anybody was up.”
“Let’s keep in touch, though,” Wood said. They shook hands.
“Um,” David said. His jaw twitched as he clamped down on a word. “Take.” He cleared his throat. “Take care of yourself, huh?” And then something shifted in David’s head; Wood had seen this happen before. For the emotion that kept him from speaking he substituted a sort of swooping garrulity that could touch lightly upon any subject. “I mean,” David said, taking a breath. “I mean it always seemed to me that I was the one that lived with reality, you know? And you lived a kind of crazy ideal life that made you have to ignore about eighty percent of what was going on. You know what I mean? Boy scout stuff, you know? DeMolay. Reverend Bledsoe’s Wednesday Evening Discussion Group. Nobody’s ever queer, nasty, nobody wants to play with his own crap, nobody’s born cruel.”
“I think you’ve got it a bit wrong,” Wood said. “Trying and ignoring are different.”
“I know. Maybe I know. I’ve got a lot of nerve, anyway. Christ, here you are, a second lieutenant in the infantry, you’ve been down South for half a year. Who the hell am I? But what made you…made you able, for instance, to go see Susie Davis last winter and face up to her father. Jesus! Sam Davis! He’d suck woodpecker eggs!”
“I felt responsible for Susie.”
“Why? Did you lay her? Now, wait a minute. Don’t go all stern on me, Wood. Sure, it’s cruel and all that, but Susie’ll go out with anybody. I’ve seen her in Bruce Cotter’s car parked up by Scrotum Pond, for God’s sake. And Bruce Cotter’s no sparkling conversationalist.”
“All right, David,” he said.
“I mean, Bruce Cotter’s about the definition of anybody.”
“Don’t say anything like that in front of Horace.”
“See? That’s what I mean!” David shook his head in disbelief, then turned serious and shy. “That’s just what we mean about you, Wood.”
He heard love and respect, as near as David could get to uttering those ideas, and because he understood the burden their brotherhood carried, of irony and history going back to all the indignity and self-protection of childhood, he was touched. David moved away from the porch across the lawn strewn with bright maple leaves, and jumped lightly over the barberry hedge, itself festooned with impaled leaves quivering in the dry October breeze.
“So long!” he called back. He had neglected to say goodbye to anyone else, Wood noticed.
“So long, Davy!”
David waved, turned and strode lightly away, with a hop and a skip to kick flying a pile of leaves the wind had rolled up just for him, for the lightness and energy of what was left of his childhood.
One evening the October air began to bite. The temperature fell into the twenties, and as the registers grew warm, the big house began to creak away its summer tensions. Horace brought in a pile of split hardwood logs for the big fireplace. He wouldn’t let Wood help with the furnace or with the fire, and even Harvey Whipple evidently decided not to unnerve Horace with remonstrations, or with directions about how to place the paper and kindling. Wood sat near his father’s oak table, drinking a glass of his father’s whiskey mixed with water. After starting the fire, Horace left them with, Wood suspected, a touch of discretion, and he wondered if his mother had anything to do with the setting of this scene of father and oldest son alone with their toddies before the baronial fire.
They were alone, sipping their drinks as they watched the fire grow into its familiar limits. The massive owl’s-head andirons blinked through their reddish crystal eyes, and above the high mantle the heavy and ornate wood paneling glowed soft as old gunstocks. Lamps made circles of muted light in the high room, and they began to feel the fire’s benevolent push against the chill. Wood began to feel that inner dullness, or looseness, caused by the whiskey—perhaps also a benevolent force. He rarely drank hard stuff, and the reason seemed to be a voice that suggested—not a command, but evidently a powerful suggestion—that he keep ready, keep awake, that he might have need of the edge whiskey so subtly stole from him. It was a voice he could at times resent.
His father lit a pipe, waved out his kitchen match and flicked it into the fire. “I always wondered why you didn’t start college,” his father said.
“The colonel who was head of the OCS Board asked me that too. I told him I knew I was going in the service within a year anyway, and my heart wouldn’t have been in it. I can wait. Anyway, I’ll save some money in the Army.”
“I always intended to pay your tuition, you know.”
“I know that,” Wood said. When he looked at his father, his father turned his head back to the fire.
“Maybe it’s that I hate to be a cripple. I wonder if you know. To ask people to wait on me.”
“I think I understand,” Wood said. He did understand all that had been skipped, how his father had come right to the point.
“Me!” his father said with wonder. “I just never will get over it. I don’t seem to have any…resources. You understand? This is a confession. What have I got to lose? You’ve got me beat all hollow. I never got into the last war because it ended before I got my commission. It’s in my mind like a worm, maybe more like a little jewel, a cyst, that I would have been damned good. I knew I was a leader—everybody did what I suggested. They followed me. I’m no good, sitting around stinking and thinking. Never been any good at that. What I’ve been is a man of action, and I’m not going to sit here and smile at myself with any goddam deprecation or modesty or whatever it is you’re supposed to do in such a case. I’ve got no medals to prove anything, only a bunch of trophies and cups saying I was a captain of sports. Games. But I can’t tell you how much I envy you. I envy you so much I can taste it. It’s like copper on my tongue. Your mother tells me I ought to grow up, and I suppose she’s right, as usual. I’m supposed to bow gracefully to rot. Shit, what I used to do was jump gracefully. I never bowed. I used to run up the trunks of trees. And then you come home on leave looking like a recruiting poster, bigger than life, and you find a drunken slob indulging himself in a messy little fit of self-pity. This is all by way of excuse, you understand. Or apology, I don’t know which.”
“I do understand,” Wood said.
“Yeah, but it’s an apology you’d never have to make. How do you think that feels stuffed in my craw?”
“How do you know that? I’ve never been put in your position. How do you know I could stand it at all?”
“I do know, and that’s what hurts. It’s why I’ve never been able to—Christ, since the accident—never been able to talk to my own son, nor you to me.”
“We’re talking now,” Wood said, but his father shook his head, his white jowls moving.
“Not really. No. I’m not big enough. I’m putting on a show, can’t you tell? Tough Harvey Whipple, bowed but unbent—what is it? A poem, ‘Out of the Night,’ is it? No, it had a Latin name to it. Bloody but unbowed. Christ! William Ernest Henley. Bunch of crap. I remember the goddam thing from college. See? I can’t stop talking, acting.”
But then he did stop, and he did several little things in quick, mechanical succession, as if each were allotted a certain number of seconds. He took a drink, tapped out his pipe, lit a cigarette and adjusted himself in his chair.
“But,” he said finally, “it’s a two-way street, isn’t it? Am I supposed to take all the blame for it?”
“No, I realize—” Wood said.
“As a matter of fact,” his father said quickly, “something very peculiar began to happen to you…to me…a long time ago. I’ve never been a man with any reticence. You know what I mean? Like right now. It’s go on or stop, even though I’m blabbing too much and I resent you for hearing it, and making any of your callow judgments of me. See, you can hear it. It creeps in. ‘Callow.’ You’re only nineteen. I resent that. I’m a typical Yankee blabbermouth and you keep your mouth shut and think too much. Christ, you were born looking around and making judgments. Even when I dumped crap out of your diapers you were watching me. When I spanked you, you gave me the feeling it was only my superior strength, power, that made you cry, not right or justice or shame—no matter what you’d done to deserve it. You always seemed to be ahead of me on morals. When I taught you something you were grateful. You weren’t like me at all. It was a nightmare. Here I was…am…a sinner, a hypocrite, a normal goddam puling, bragging specimen of humanity, and it looked like I had a son who was going to be everything I pretended to believe in. Every time I looked at you it knocked the shit out of my cynicism, and man, that hurt!”
His father stopped, looked at him quickly, then finished his drink. “Shit,” he said in a calmer voice, “I can’t make anybody answer that. How about getting us another?”
Wood took their glasses to the kitchen, thinking how he could answer his father. He should try to say something that would make the man feel better, of course. But was that right, and wouldn’t his father see immediately, almost before he opened his mouth, that it was all happening again, that he was being given therapy, moral superiority? At least that was how his father would see it. What his father said was true. It was a nightmare; it was all upside down. The child was father to the man. What came first, the chicken or the egg? He couldn’t find much resentment toward his father, either. All was forgiven; the nightmare was that all was forgiven. And no attempt to recount his own sins would be anything but a kind device. He wondered how David and his father managed with hardly any words at all to be easy, to be all right with each other. Nothing seemed to hang over their heads, even when it came to shouting.
He brought the drinks back to the living room.
“Ah, thanks,” his father said. They were silent for a while, listening to the smooth breath of the fire.
“I don’t know what to say,” Wood said finally.
“I don’t blame you.”
More silence, and then his father said, “It’s funny how I don’t seem to be able to get rid of this jealousy. It’s competition, I suppose, which is overweening pride—in myself. Take Gordon Ward, for instance. I mean Gordon, Sr. Evidently Gordon, Jr., is quite a hero. Did you hear that?”
Wood nodded. He’d read about it in the Leah Free Press.
“Anyway, he’s getting some kind of big medal and a battlefield promotion. Gordon, Sr., called me up and banged my ear about it for three quarters of an hour. Christ, he knows more military shop talk now than Sergeant York. But I suppose some of his excitement was pure surprise. I always thought the boy would end up in the guardhouse. But proud? You ought to have heard him. I sat there, listening and saying ‘Ayuh,’ and ‘My, isn’t that fine,’ but all the time I was thinking: Well, I know a father ought to feel that way, because that’s what I’ve always heard and seen—but it still made me wonder. Now, I admire what you’ve done. You’re young to be an officer and so on. I admire you, and I give you the compliment of being jealous, but I could no more go and brag on you, as if I’d had anything to do with it, than I could run rabbits and bark at the moon. You understand?”
“I guess so. It seems logical, anyway,” Wood said.
“Sure, but it’s sick. Is that what you mean?”
“People are proud of their flesh and blood, sort of, aren’t they?”
“Oh, sure, but that always seemed kind of stupid to me. It’s only one half of the blood right at the start, anyway, unless you think of a woman as just a kind of incubator. And then don’t start looking back, or you’ll scare yourself to death. One of your greatgrandfathers was a brilliant man, a college president, and his son got senile at fifty and pissed his pants every three hours for the rest of his life. Or look at Peggy Mudd. How the hell could blood ever account for that girl? She’s got her father’s ugly puss, all right, but where’d she get that intelligence?”
Wood shook his head. As he’d listened to his father he could remember very clearly the quick, slim man he used to be. His voice was lean, a little high, and the clipped, slightly breathless sharp phrases were still the same.
He’d always been impatient, with his teammates and his children, but before the accident he would show it by a sudden stiff smile and a nervous turning away of his head, as though he didn’t want to see such awkwardness. The smile would be gone when he turned back to whatever clumsy human he had to teach. Whatever activity it was, he’d say “Here, let me show you,” and do it so perfectly, the various moves would blend into each other and disappear, and the example would be useless to the pupil. Casting a fly line, shooting, throwing a ball—whatever it was, his father seemed to flash into his stance, and then it was over; the fly floated lightly down upon the exact center of the rise, the clay bird turned to black dust, the ball appeared, stationary, in the pocket of the mitt. He was a leader, but no teacher. It was poor Horace who really suffered from this impatience. The rest were quick enough on their own, especially David, who was obviously his father’s favorite, who looked most like him too. Wood thought of asking him if he were jealous of David, then shied away from that. His father had chosen the subjects for his evening of confession, and it would be a touchy thing to tamper with. Let sleeping dogs lie.
Then Wood was filled, overcome, drowned in the knowledge of his own coldness, presumption, intolerance. The words fell about him like the stern judgments of God. The child is father to the man! No, youth is selfish and intolerant. To forgive is to be indifferent, and youth wants away.
His father sat there a prisoner of his pain and the soft, fat body he must despise. He looked like a melting snowman—if a snowman could quiver so precariously. His father had offered him a great deal, but he couldn’t use it. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Their history was too full of stalking, still-hunting, avoidance. They had no common jokes, no common ironies.
What if he were to confess how he’d betrayed his friend Stefan? How would he begin? What tone would he assume? If this were a night for confession, why not try?
Because his father would consider that cuckolding a triumph, and it was not a triumph. The world of smut was subtle and was everywhere. No one could be trusted with that knowledge. He’d gone back to Lenore whenever he could get a pass, and though Perrone and Quillen were suspicious, they never knew. Each time he’d curse himself and vow not to go on with it, but he knew where he was going and what he would do. She purred like a cat, and yowled softly in his ear. He couldn’t stop hearing that curving, modulant warble in his ear, day and night. He was out of his mind. He would betray helplessness, the most utter helplessness. Now the outfit had gone to Europe, Stefan, God help him, included; Lenore was back in Ohio. At infantry school at Fort Benning he’d received a letter from her every day. At every mail call the blue envelope he dreaded was pressed into his helpless hand. Sheets of blue paper, her round, sincere, half-literate handwriting, the t’s dotted with huge circles: Wood my darling my dearest lover I lay all night thru dreaming of you in my arms. He read each letter in a fit of self-disgust, even breaking into sweat. O Wood sweetheart do you think of “doing it” with me my handsome “beast.” O my goodness some of the things I say you could black mail me so burn this!
And he would groan for pity. Pity for her, pity for himself. He never answered, and finally the letters stopped. No, it was a confession he would never make. She sent her pitiful letters out into nowhere. If he could treat any person that way he would take his sin, unalloyed and unabsolved, to the final judgment.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” his father said.
“No, I guess I never have.”
“We never talked,” his father said.
There was a hint of sadness—his father’s kind, perhaps—a sort of cynical jauntiness, if that was possible. His father had given nothing up, really, and would give nothing up. Nothing would become so painful or so lost it couldn’t be mentioned. Wood stretched his own healthy legs toward the fire, calves and thighs pleasurably defining themselves. His father’s glass was empty, so he finished his and got up to make them another drink. “Maybe another of these will prime the pump,” he said.
His father’s answering smile was knowing, grateful, and Wood yearned to do something for him. He wanted to touch him, but how did one comfort his father? He couldn’t figure out how to do it—he couldn’t feel how to do it. Something powerful gleamed from that face sick with corpulence. Memories of pride in his father stirred, were still there from long ago. Also fear, but more a sense of residing justice that might or might not have been a child’s standard delusion. He turned away, a glass in each hand, conscious of the breadth and strength of his own young body. He was his father’s son; he perceived that knowledge in the other person. Though he might never hear pride expressed, they would sit late, drink, and watch the embering fire they had in common.