America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (10 page)

The winter was long and cold and there was hardly any spring at all. Summer came without warning about June 1. I had trouble with the novel I was writing since I had to rush constantly to the telescope to see whether the ospreys, my prospective tenants, had returned.

Then school was out and my boys moved to Sag Harbor and I put them on watch.

One morning Catbird charged into my study, which is a corner of the garage.

“Ospreys!” he shouted. “Come running—ospreys!”

“Sh!” I shouted back. “Keep your voice down. You'll disturb them.”

I rushed for my telescope, bowling Catbird over in my rush and tripping over Thom's feet.

There were the ospreys all right. But they weren't settling into my beautiful nest. They were dismantling it, tearing it to pieces, lifting out the carefully bound reed pads and carrying them across the bay and propping them clumsily on top of the same transformer.

Of course my feelings were hurt. Why should I deny it? And on top of all my work. But on the heels of injury came anger. Those lousy, slip-shod, larcenous birds, those ingrates, those—those ospreys. My eyes strayed to the shotgun that hangs over my fireplace, but before I could reach for it a Machiavellian thought came to me.

I wanted to hurt the ospreys, yes. I wanted revenge on them, but with number-four shot? No. I ached to hurt them as they had hurt me in their feelings—psychologically.

I am an adept at psychological warfare. I know well how to sink the knife into sensibilities. I was coldly quiet, even deadly in my approach and manner, so that my boys walked about under a cloud and Thom asked, “What's the matter, Father, did you lose some money playing poker?”

“You stay out of the garage,” I said quietly.

I had made my plan. I declared the garage off limits to everyone. My novel came to a dead stop. Daily I worked in the garage using pieces of chicken wire and a great deal of plaster of Paris.

Then I paid a call on my neighbor, Jack Ramsey, a very good painter, and asked him to come to my workshop and to bring his palette and brushes. At the end of two days we emerged with our product—a life-size perfect replica of a nesting whooping crane. It is my belief that there are only thirty-seven of these rare and wonderful birds in the world. Well, this was the thirty-eighth.

Chuckling evilly I hoisted the plaster bird up in the tree and wired her firmly in the nest where her blinding white body, black tail and brilliant red mask stood out magnificently against the sky. I had even made her bill a little overlarge to take care of foreshortening.

Finally I went back to the sun porch and turned my telescope on the ospreys, who pretended to go about their nest building on the transformer as though nothing had happened. But I knew what must be going on over there, although they kept up their façade of listlessness, and I must say they were building an even messier nest than usual.

Mrs. Osprey was saying, “Lord almighty, George! Look who has moved into the apartment you didn't want. Why did I listen to you?”

To which he was replying, “I didn't want—what do you mean I didn't want? It was you who said the neighborhood wasn't good enough. Don't you put words in my mouth, Mildred.”

“Everybody knows you have no taste or background,” she was replying. “Your Uncle Harry built his nest over a slaughterhouse.”

And I laughed to myself. These are the wounds that never heal. This is psychological warfare as it should be fought.

Two days later, Thom came running into my study in the garage.

“The nest,” he cried. “Look at the nest.”

I bolted for the door. The ospreys in jealous rage were dive-bombing my whooping crane, but all they could accomplish was the breaking of their talons on the hand surface of the plaster. Finally they gave up and flew away, followed by my shouts of derision.

I did hear my oldest boy say to his brother, “Father has been working too hard. He has gone nuts.”

Catbird replied, “His id has been ruptured. Sometimes one broods too much on a subject and throws the whole psychic pattern into an uproar.”

That isn't quite where it rests.

It is true that the ospreys have not attacked anymore, but we have had other visitors, human visitors.

One morning I looked out the window to see a rather stout lady in khaki trousers and a turtle-neck sweater creeping across my lawn on her hands and knees. Field glasses dangled from her neck and she held a camera in front of her. When I went out to question her, she angrily waved me away.

“Go back,” she whispered hoarsely. “Do you want her to fly away?”

“But you don't understand—” I began.

“Will you keep your voice down,” she said hoarsely. “Do you know what that is? The club will never believe me. If I don't get a picture of her I'll kill you.”

Yes, we have had bird watchers—lots of them. You see, our whooping crane can be sighted from a long way off. After a time they discovered the nature of the thing, but they would not listen to my explanation of the ruse. In fact, they became angry; not at the ospreys, where the blame rests—but at me.

As I write, it is autumn of 1956 and from the coldness and the growing winds, an early winter and a cold one is indicated. I have taken my whooping crane down and restored the nest to its old beauty. When the spring comes again—we shall see what we shall see. No one can say that I am unforgiving. The nest is ready and waiting. Let us see whether the ospreys are big enough to let bygones be bygones.

My wife says that if she has to go through another year like this she will—no, I won't tell you what she says. Sometimes her sense of humor seems a little strained.

The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then—

Pore thang!

He sit in the barn,
To keep himself warn,
And put his head under his wang—

Pore thang!

 

I DO NOT SUBSCRIBE to Togetherness, which seems to me to foster active dislike between American parents and their children. A father being a pal to his son not only is nonsense but can be dangerous. Father and son are natural enemies and each is happier and more secure in keeping it that way.

My friend Jack Ratcliff has reduced the problem to two sentences. “If you can catch them, hit them,” he says. “If you can't catch them, bribe them.”

My two sons understand and admire the principle of Apartness, and this being so, we sometimes take an exclusively masculine trip during their spring vacation in March, the coldest, meanest and most treacherous part of the winter.

My boys were thirteen and fifteen years old. They had all the faults and some of the virtues of their ages. They are inmates of separate boarding schools, and although well equipped in delinquency, neither of them has so far made the pokey, but they have been close.

Last year we decided to go to Sag Harbor, near the end of Long Island. Ours is no attempt to be pals but rather for each side to spy out and neutralize the changing weapons of the other. I have a warm and cozy little fishing cottage there, set on a point of land that extends into a protected bay. Going alone permits us to eat, talk and act in ways that would not be possible under the civilizing influence of femininity—in other words to be slobs.

It was very cold, the longest cold spell of any recorded March. The hundred-mile highway from New York was high-walled on either side with snow tossed up by the plows, but snow doesn't bother us much. My vintage station wagon wears snow tires from November until May. We were a traveling nightmare—the car radio yowled and the boys tapped their feet, patted rhythm with their hands, squirmed and occasionally threw a secret punch at each other. I'll be glad when they are old enough to drive and I can sit back and criticize. “Watch out! You're going too fast! For God's sake don't pass on the right!”—that kind of thing.

At exactly halfway we stopped at a big silver diner. They loaded the jukebox and each boy had three hamburgers and a bottle of Coke. For dessert one had chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce, and the other vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Their main problem seems to be getting from one meal to the next without starving to death. While I paid the bill, they bought candy bars to tide them over until dinnertime.

Back in the car they were a little sluggish and conversational, too sluggish to squirm. In honor of the occasion we took new names. This does for us what a new hairdo or a flowered hat does for a woman. My oldest son became The Tingler, and the younger The Fly, a character from another horror picture. I kept my old calypso name, Insidestraight, which was awarded me in Trinidad.

We passed a few guarded remarks—weather, how we felt, how good it was to be together—not really fighting, just feinting and getting the range but enough for me to relearn the always amazing fact that in the short time since I had seen them at Christmas they were changed, grown, enlarged.

The Fly has become arrogant—an arbiter of manners, clothes and ideas, and his standard is strict. He described many persons, ideas and things as corny, square or sentimental.

I threw a sneak punch. “The only people I know who are afraid of being corny or sentimental are adolescents and second-raters. Homer wasn't afraid of it. Neither was Shakespeare. And can you think of a cornier character than Albert Einstein?” I don't think I got over.

“It's a sign of insecurity,” said The Tingler. And lest you think this profound, I must explain that just as The Fly uses “corny” and “square,” The Tingler substitutes “insecure” for the same qualities. The boys were a little edgy. They knew the infighting was to come.

It was evening when we got to Discove Point and the sun was bleeding into the clouds over the hills to the south of Great Peconic Bay. The Point was deep-drifted. We had to shovel out a road to get the car in the garage. Our own bay was frozen over with only tide channels of open water. The huge oak trees on the Point were black against the whiteness of the snow and the steel blue of the ice. Our little shingled cottage with its good oil furnace was lovely and warm and immaculate. At least it was clean when we arrived. We lighted the water heater and loaded the refrigerator with the exotic and indigestible foods we had brought from town.

Then it was night and the beauty thing was the full moon, white and serene and lonely. The ridged ice of the bay was piled in high wreckage along the shores where the tides had thrust it. The plumed stalks of the pampas grass whispered wonderfully in the night wind. On the frozen surface of the bay the seagulls in congress assembled stood like hunch-backed old men, beaks into the wind to keep their feathers down. In the open water of the tide race the wild ducks gabbled, shovelers in transit now, competing with the mallards which never leave us. A blue heron lives on our shore, a friend and neighbor named Poor Harry. He stood on one leg, his head scrunched down, his long sword of a beak hidden in his breast feathers. Because he stands upright, he turns his back to the wind to keep his feathers down, a pitiful, doleful-looking bird. In the sterling silver of the moon-white night, the ice cricked and rustled on the falling tide. And O, the limbs of the oaks were as black against the sky as those Sung paintings in ink made from fir smoke and the glue from wild asses' hides. Jack pines were yellowy from the cold, and the naked grape vines hung like ragged spiderwebs on the white walls of the garage. Far away, almost like Aurora Borealis, the winking town lights of Sag Harbor put up a dome of glow.

Most of the houses in sight were closed up for the winter. We walked about on the Point, our feet crunching through the crusted snow, and it was a joy to see the lights of the cottage, and to smell the pine smoke of the new-built fire.

The Fly is a hot trumpet boy. He roared up the phonograph, and with head thrown back and glazed eyes, he sat in and belted out riffs with some of the best sidemen in the business.

Tingler unpacked his drawing board. We are designing a catamaran entirely new in principle and method which will undoubtedly make our fortune, and we can use it—a fortune, I mean.

Best not to describe our dinner. Strong and competent women have been known to flag and fail at our menus. We finished, however, with our spécialité de la maison, known as pousse capudding, a handsome dessert made by pouring every known kind of do-it-yourself pudding in layers, black, white, pink, yellow, green.

The Fly was a good hour away from his trumpet. He cooked the dinner and he cannot play while eating. Pudding gums up the valves. He took his ease while The Tingler and I cleaned the kitchen—not the dishes, the whole bloody kitchen. The Fly had prepared his Sag Harbor mignon, which puts up a mushroom cloud of real mushrooms and has a fallout of hamburger particles.

The Tingler is in what has been called his God and Girl Period. Sometimes he can't tell them apart. I remember it myself, a kind of half-strangling sensation and sudden urges to laugh or weep and an outer layer of utter cynicism for show.

I asked, “How's the girl situation?”

“Just the same,” he said. “You've either got too many or none at all. I don't know which is worse. Makes you insecure.”

“And it won't get any better,” I reassured him.

“I wish I didn't love them so much,” he said, “ 'cause I hate 'em.”

“Well, at least you didn't invent them. Look, I know I didn't get all the grease off those plates, but you might do me the honor of wiping it off. How's your religion? Still aiming to be a Catholic?”

“I'm an atheist,” he said.

“That's a hard religion to live up to. Better leave yourself an escape hatch for walking under ladders and wishing on the new moon.”