America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (11 page)

“I don't believe in anything,” he said fiercely.

“Hallelujah! What's her name?”

“Helen.”

“A brute, eh?”

“A bitch,” said The Tingler.

“Shall we join The Fly? At least he believes in C-sharp minor.”

“He's just a kid,” said The Tingler.

He was watching a newborn fly, his namesake, crawling heavily up the new-warmed windowpane. “Say,” he asked, “how much does it cost an hour to fly a jet 707?”

“I don't know. Pretty much, I guess. Why?”

“Oh, nothing.”

Then I heard the sound too—the droning cry of a flight of jets from an airfield not far away. We went outside to look for them and they flew across the white face of the moon. Then they crashed the barrier with a sound that always makes me think the furnace has exploded. In our shirt-sleeves the cold air bit deep and raised goose bumps on our arms, so that we went inside again.

The Fly asked, “Why are they pouring the heat on those poor disk jockeys?”

“Payola,” I said.

“Plugola,” The Tingler said.

“What's wrong with it?” The Fly demanded. “He plays records and maybe somebody gives him a buck. Is it against the law?”

I put on my fatherly-logic-and-reason tone. How they must hate it. “I don't know whether it's against the law or not, but it is said to be immoral.”

Tingler explained to his brother, whom he considers a little kid and probably always will. “You see, people buy what they hear. It's not what's good but what gets played. The DJ's play the ones they get paid to play. They say some of the jocks own part of the recording companies. They spin their own cookies.”

You can see how valuable these outings are in the matter of language.

The Fly fixed us with a glittering self-righteous eye. (I might mention here that neither of my kids has ever made or brought home an honest or a dishonest dime.) “Those Eisenhower kids got a vacation in Puerto Rico,” said The Fly. “They went in an Air Force jet 707.”

“Jealous?” I asked.

“Sure I am. What did it cost the taxpayer?”

“What do you care?” I said. “You don't pay any taxes.”

Then an uneasy silence fell on that pleasant room. I could feel the boys brace themselves against the usual lecture, or at least prepare not to listen. I'd been thinking about it for a good time, and I let the silence ride.

“Well, I guess we might as well get to it,” I said at last.

The boys exchanged a glance that said, “Oh, brother, here it comes.”

“I have prepared a few remarks,” I began.

The Fly looked as though he had bitten down on a No. 5 shot in a piece of wild goose. Tingler put on the earnest and Oriental look that means he is courteously not listening.

“At intervals, it becomes my duty, through the accident of being your father, to give you what for.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, the rotters.

“I have in hand the reports of your teachers and masters, who urge me to influence you. You, Tingler, have done a little better in school but not nearly well enough. You, Fly, are a scholastic disgrace. Not only have you done little or no work, you have engaged in a contest of wills with a master and caused pain and anxiety. Are these facts correct?”

“Yes, sir”—synchronized.

“Have you excuses?”

“Yes, sir. We mean, no, sir.”

“Have I not given you good and fatherly advice in letters and in speech?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you believe what I've told you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you continue your lives of sin and gold bricking.”

“It creeps up on you,” said The Fly.

“I'm at my wits' end,” I said. “And I mean that literally. I've told you all I know and it isn't much but you've had it.”

I paused for answer, but the sons of guns know when to keep still. The room was silent and then from far off—a gunshot.

“Somebody shooting ducks with a flashlight,” Tingler observed.

“All right—all right. Don't change the subject or the mood. After much thought I am prepared to do something painful, something drastic.”

Both boys looked at the floor. They were trying to look pitiful, humble and respectful waiting for the blow to fall. I have a feeling they weren't very scared. “Yes, sir.”

“I am going to give you your freedom.”

“Sir?”

“I'm getting off your back.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean no more lectures, no more come-uppances. You are crowding manhood and you'll have to take some of the pain. You are free.”

“How do you mean free?”

“I'll tell you. If you get a good grade, it's your grade. If you fail, it's your failure. That's what freedom means and it's awful.” I think for the moment I had caught their attention.

“What's awful about it?” The Fly asked.

“I'll tell you, but you'll have to find it out yourselves. Freedom is the worst slavery of all. No boss to cheat, no teacher to fool. No excuses that work. And nobody to bitch to.”

“Do you mean it? About—getting off—our backs?”

“I mean it, all right. It's a lonely feeling, isn't it?”

I could feel their dishonest little minds scurrying about looking for a trick, and I answered their thoughts.

“It's not a trick,” I said. “Of course if you get in trouble beyond your control, I'll stand by. But I want no more details. That part of your lives is over.”

Tingler said, “I'll bet the masters won't go for that.”

“No, of course they won't. Neither will the cop, neither will the judge if you come before him. But that's your business. Being a man is a good thing, maybe the best, but a man has to do his own time, take his own rap, be his own man.”

“Yes,” said Fly, “but how about all those people on the couch, or the drunks?”

“They're sick or they're children but they aren't men. I think the lecture is over; I think it's over for good. I've taught you everything I know. From now on we can only discuss.”

I could hear them let out their breaths like a slow leak in a tire. “Let's put on coats and go for a walk,” I said. “The moon is beautiful.”

The outside was crisp and crusted as a pie. We heard the ice crackling around the piles of our small pier as the tide changed level. Just above the high-water mark in the thick pampas grass a colony of muskrats live, nice secret little creatures, so silent and quick that we had not been able to see one up close. Someone had told us that muskrats love parsnips. We set one of those Havahart wire traps baited with parsnips by the burrows in the pampas grass. The trap doesn't hurt an animal. We planned to look at a customer for a little while and then turn him loose. We also have a pair of otters on our shore, but they are much harder to catch.

The Fly took his trumpet to the end of the pier. He keeps the mouthpiece warm in his breast pocket. He blew taps to break the hearts of neighbors two miles away, and then to prove his virtuosity he did it again, three times in different keys. If he would give the attention to his school work that he lavishes on his trumpet, he would be in Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study right now.

Hopelessly, whitely beautiful as was the night and sweet and bitter the wind and attractive the conversation of the mallards, we got blue with cold and our ears felt like wounds. We rushed back to the warm house and played the whole album of the Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall. The only difference was that we played it much louder than the original could possibly have been. I drank a beer and the kids made a horrid mixture of chocolate that poured like fudge. Then we went to bed, half praying for a snowstorm. The Point is wonderful when the good snow blows over it riding the wind like a horse.

(Note 1—Must winter-spray my fruit trees tomorrow if possible.)

(Note 2—Take lawn mower to town to be repaired against the time when we will have a lawn.)

(Note 3—Stay off their backs.)

We slept sweetly and long.

 

The morning was sharp and clean as a blade. Even the tide channels were crusted over with ice. Tingler cooked a fine breakfast. He will make a late-sleeping woman very happy some day. He's a good cook because he loves to eat. The Fly doesn't give a damn. He'd eat his socks if not reminded.

Coffee time is a good time and one to prolong, sitting in the little glassed-in porch with the sun pouring in, just staring at the distant hills furry with leafless trees. I swear they seemed to be changing toward green already. I always think so even when I know it isn't true. The crested bluejays worked away at the seed-and-suet cake in a basket on the tree outside the window. A herd of brownish birds fed like sheep on the bare place that will be a lawn later in the year. Wonder what they find to eat? Wonder what kind of birds they are? I look them up every year and then forget.

One thing I could truly say and know it isn't wishfulness. The lilac buds were indeed swelling and getting a glossy milky look. If you squeeze them they run sticky juice. It's good to have one true and provable thing on a morning in the sun, a golden quiet time, no loud music for the moment.

With our first rising we had gone out to look at the trap. No muskrat. The parsnips were untasted and a little withered.

A beastly clamor broke out near the kitchen steps. An old lady mallard nests regularly in our reed bed. She has a game leg she uses for show. Now she came limping to the house for bread crusts, complaining bitterly about how attractive she is to drakes and what a burden it is to her.

“Here comes Gimpy,” said The Fly. “Don't you know people like her? And there's that big old bull-bitch of a rabbit at the carnations again. I thought you trapped her and took her halfway to East Hampton.”

“I did,” I replied. “She came back.”

The theory that kids wake up bright as buttons is nonsense. Mine wake up as though they were coming out of ether.

“Do you remember my lecture last night?” I asked.

“Sure do.”

“Well, I meant it. But just as a matter of discussion, Fly, what was your difficulty with the master that caused so much fuss?”

“Well, he—” and then he grinned. “I don't remember how it started. But I'd do something and then he'd do something until we were so far out we couldn't get together anymore. We just didn't like each other.”

“I understand that very well. I'm not suggesting it but simply stating a fact. If you were to say that last sentence to him, you might make a good and lasting friend.”

“I couldn't,” he said. “I don't think I could.”

“Bothered you, didn't it?”

“Sure.” The Fly has moments of devastating honesty. “It got so I blamed him for things I didn't do.”

“I know how it is. I remember—you may not believe it but I really do remember. One of you turn on the radio for the news.”

The report was a detailed account of Eisenhower's tremendous success in Europe and India—millions of people, millions of children waving flags.

“He sure is popular,” I said.

Fly said cynically, “You give me a half holiday and a flag and I'll wave at King Kong. Who's going to walk away from a parade?”

“What a monster I have spawned,” I said. “Tingler, sometimes in the morning you are a kindly and a loving child. Exude some honey, will you?”

“I've got a friend at school that his father is on Madison Avenue.”

“I wish you had a friend who speaks good English.”

“You ought to hear him,” Tingler said enthusiastically. “That boy can speak pure Madison Avenue. Can't understand a word of it.”

“I've read some of it in John Crosby's column. What shall we do today? We could put the catamaran in the water and see whether our invention works.”

“We'll freeze our twinks, but I'm game. We can wear that Navy storm stuff you got war-surplus.”

Launching the new-type catamaran which will make our fortune was not easy. We edged it out on the ice and then inched it along toward the tide channel and every moment we expected to plunge through into the icy water. The old, refrozen holes of the eel fishermen were all about it. They cut holes in the ice and probe the bottom with many-tined spears until they jam into a big eel. Out in the channel a few small outboard boats were anchored, for the spring flounder were beginning to pay attention. The men crouched in the boats were bundled up like feather beds, hooded and helmeted so that nothing but their noses and eyes could be seen. This early in the season the flounder are sleepy and sluggish with cold. The fishermen drag a piece of iron or an old bedspring back and forth along the bottom a few times to stir the lazy things awake. Then before they settle back to rest, they will sometimes take a bait. It is just one of the fishing theories and it works.

As we neared the open water, the ice became more mushy and treacherous so that we put most of our weight on the pontoons of the catamaran and pushed it along with one foot like boys pushing a scooter. I broke through once and half filled a boot with water. Finally we were afloat in the wind-rippled open with a strong tide running. We set our motor where we thought it should be and started it and the craft jumped like a horse and nearly reared over backward. Fortunately we stalled the motor in time and changed its position, giving it a very generous safety factor.

I freely admit that most of our inventions are dogs, but not this one. A couple of adjustments and we went skittering along like a blinking bobsled. I don't know what speed we made. We got so cold bouncing into the wind that we couldn't feel our fingers at all even with gloves on. Even my worldly sons were impressed. They admire anything that goes very fast or very high or very deep, and I must say I do, too, but we began to realize we were slowly freezing to death and we had to turn about and run in. Kids are all alike.