An Unfinished Season (7 page)

Weekdays I marked time at the day school, half an hour's drive from my house. I had few friends because of the age difference and my own dissatisfied state of mind. By befriending my classmates I would regress one year, a year too hard won to forfeit. Many of the students were transfers from eastern prep schools, boys who had had disciplinary problems; a few had flunked out. Their brusque manners set them apart from the local boys like me. They met the world eye-to-eye with a sneer and a fart (as one of them said), believing themselves infinitely superior to the day school they had been exiled to, aristocrats obliged to make do in the company of yeomen. Of course the girls found them attractive, men of the world who didn't give a damn about anything except the day's pleasure. Nothing would stand in their way except their parents, guardians of the family money; and it went without saying that their disgraceful behavior in the East meant a short leash in the Midwest. These boys were objects of curiosity, not least from the instructors. Tell me, what's Hotchkiss really like? How do the masters live? Do they have dormitory apartments or houses of their own? I understood after a while that even the instructors wanted to migrate east, trading up, Hotchkiss or Choate or Deerfield a settled perch at the top of the tree. Who wanted to spend his life at a struggling day school north of Chicago? Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be moving on to somewhere else. Meanwhile, I had
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,
the romance of the trenches of the Somme.

 

In May my mother went back east to visit her parents. It had been a year since she had seen them, and her father was not well. She stayed two weeks and then announced she would be a while longer, owing to her father's second stroke. He was bedridden and needed assistance around the clock but was improving every day. She and my father had many long conversations in the evening, my father's voice a low rumble punctuated by long silences during which I heard ice cubes rattle into his glass. He was sitting in his leather chair in the den, his voice all but inaudible to me, bent over homework in my room upstairs, and finally the sharp click of the receiver when he replaced it in the cradle. Later, during my evening walkabout, I looked in through the French doors and saw him sitting in his chair, disconsolate, a closed book in his lap.

My mother returned for my graduation in June but left again the next day. A week later my father flew to New York, where he had reserved a suite at the Waldorf and arranged for theater tickets and dinner at “21” and a carriage ride in Central Park at midnight, when he would present her with a gold bracelet from Marshall Field's. But he returned a day ahead of schedule, explaining cryptically that Yalta was no place to decide the future of the world.

We needed a neutral venue.

We should have gone to Havana when she wanted to, he said to me.

While my mother was in the East, my father and I played golf regularly on the weekends and joked about “batching it,” a disheveled locker-room life in which women did not figure. We existed on a diet of sirloin steaks, baked potatoes, caesar salad, and chocolate ice cream, and after dinner we played pinochle. Alone together, we grew close, much closer than when my mother was with us. I discovered I hardly knew him at all, and of course I was surprised that there was anything to know. I never understood much of what my parents said to each other because I was not aware of the private language of married people, a tongue I came to believe was invented to keep outsiders at a distance, like a military code in wartime. My mother's things were all around us, the pictures she owned and her grandfather's set of the Harvard Classics, and the objects that dressed up the coffee table and the mantel over the fireplace in the den. These things reminded us of her every day. But she herself was absent and seemed to slip from us, a photograph fading in the sun. When she called on the telephone, I described to her the golf matches and the evening diet and the pinochle and how well we were getting on, my father and I—though we both missed her and hoped she would return soon. Things weren't the same without her. Dad and I have long talks every night and he's teaching me things—

What things? she asked.

Things, I said. Things that men have to know, I added, and when she did not reply I knew I had blundered. I had said too much without saying enough, and when I asked if she wanted to speak to “him,” she said she couldn't, someone was at the door, and rang off without another word.

My father told me a good deal about his business and much else besides during the hour of drinks before dinner, when he was in a reflective state of mind. I had the idea that he was telling me things he had never told anyone. He said we were in an enviable zone of trust and I did not know how rare that was, so we should enjoy ourselves while the trust lasted. He taught me how to read a balance sheet, more complicated than it looked at first glance, assets and liabilities not always obvious; often they were fungible (and he was careful to define the word), and assigned with an eye always on the taxman and the shareholders. He resolved to teach me how to drink well, drinking well being a skill like anything else, playing the piano or coming but of a fairway sand trap with a five iron. Sloppy drunks were a menace, and none more menacing than teenage drunks, a menace to themselves and everyone around them. Clichés, he called them. Nothing more trustworthy than a young man who can hold his liquor and be seen to hold his liquor. That way, my father said, you gained the respect of older men. That counted for something. That was the world we lived in, like it or not. He smiled and said in a voice not his own, Never cheat at golf; never get rough with women.

You get a reputation for being sound. You have standing.

This voice that was not his own puzzled me. Sarcasm lay beneath its skin.

They won't worry when you take out their daughters, he went on. And you'll have the respect of your own cohort. He paused then, his thought unfinished. He was worried that I did not have a close circle of friends, and disconcerted that I seemed to enjoy the company of older people. But he left the thought hanging.

Girls like it, he said suddenly. You'll seem older to them. Experienced. Discreet. Capable. Up to the mark.

Up to the mark, I repeated in a reasonable imitation of his borrowed voice.

Yes, he said, smiling broadly now. That's the ticket.

Sounds boring, I said.

It does have that disadvantage, he said, rising and stepping to the sideboard, pouring a finger of whiskey. But you can live with it, he said, his back to me as he dropped ice cubes into his glass. He was silent a moment. I envy you your summer. I never had one like it. It's only a few weeks now, the dances begin. How many invitations do you have?

About twenty-five so far, I said.

Twenty-five, he repeated, staring at the ceiling, cradling his scotch in both hands. You'll need a new tux—

Mother calls it a dinner jacket, I said.

Does she? Well, you'll need a new one for your summer season, and remember to get it cleaned now and then. And don't forget what your mother told you. Always dance with the deb and the deb's mother and shake hands with her father and say How do you do, sir, and generally kiss ass up and down the receiving line. I laughed but my father did not laugh with me, absorbed as he was with the shadows on the ceiling.

He said softly, It is not boring, Wils. Experience and discretion will make you seem to them just the slightest bit dangerous, not a man who'll say anything that comes to mind, and it's my guess that dangerous is what you are. You go your own way, that's for damned sure. Women like danger, my father said and cocked his eyebrow. Let me put that another way. Women like to be around a dangerous man, perhaps a man who seems in his nature to be not entirely reliable. Not entirely predictable in his emotions or anything else. Because, he said, taking a thoughtful sip of whiskey; and he said no more.

Because what? I asked after a moment.

Because women like excitement, too, same as the rest of us.

I said something noncommittal because I did not believe he said what he meant; he had something else in mind but was not ready to disclose it.

Loyalty also, he added, and when he said it the word had the weight of the world. And then he went to the heart of the matter: You have to exercise some control over yourself or someone else will do it for you.

Women, I said, catching on at last, though my father's sidelong glance suggested otherwise. After a moment he said, Women are among them.

My father had many theories about women, older women and younger women, loose women and modest women, girls he had grown up with and dated, and how things changed when he went away to Dartmouth and the wider world of Hanover, New Hampshire. He freely admitted his experience was limited, yet when he arrived in Hanover he discovered a strait-laced attitude at odds with the earthier climate of Quarterday.

You would have thought it would be the reverse, but it wasn't.

Quarterday was Sodom and Gomorrah compared to Hanover.

And believe me, not much was happening in Quarterday.

But at least we knew what girls looked like. And they knew what we looked like, too.

Well, there were the town girls. Girls out for some fun.

I'd forgotten about them.

I didn't know them. My roommate did.

Those girls were too much like the girls I'd grown up with.

He grew apart from his childhood friends, those who had stayed home and gone to work on the farm or in one of the shops or become teachers or policemen, like Tom Felsen. My father's vocabulary changed, the slang he used and the jokes he laughed at. He came home for Christmas wearing a long green scarf and whistling Gershwin tunes. “Lady Be Good” was a favorite. He had taken up the drums and was playing in his fraternity's jazz band. His second night home he went to a party and got into a scuffle with a boy he had known for years, and after that his Quarterday friends avoided him, except the girl he had known since grade school who sought him out to ask him about college life. What do you learn? Is it fun? What is there about it that can change a person so? And is it worthwhile? My father felt he was living in two worlds at once, the adult world of Hanover and the childhood world of Quarterday, and these worlds did not fit. The first year he was away, my father had dreams at night, homesick dreams of the prairie teeming with skaters in strange hats speaking exotic tongues. The prairie went on forever, a monotonous tableland with not a house or a tree in sight. When he awakened from these dreams he went at once to his desk and began reading where he'd left off, making notes as he went, as if they were sentences of atonement. He thought of forfeiting his scholarship and returning home for good, though his experience at Christmas was not encouraging. He felt he had abandoned his family and friends and only later did it occur to my father that the reverse could as easily be said; he thought of these friends as leftovers and hated himself for thinking it but knew also that he was not the first American to betray his origins, moving on. When he tentatively mentioned his fears to his parents, his mother said she would love him no matter what he did or who he became, but perhaps it was a good idea to return home for a semester and take stock. His father listened impatiently and stated that if he forfeited the scholarship he was not welcome in “my house.” You started it, now you finish it. Harsh words from the best dad a guy ever had.

Then hockey came along and in the spring his roommate suggested they spend the summer in Maine as sailing instructors, his family had a house there with a cottage they could live in and sailing was a cinch, anyone could learn to sail; and Teddy Ravan said yes, why not, so he spent that summer in Maine and the subsequent summers as well and that was where he met Jo Wilson, a freshman at Pembroke, whose family summered in the neighboring village. It took a while for my father to understand a society that summered in one state and wintered in another, but he was always quick so he caught on soon enough, as he had caught on to hockey, jazz, sailing, the stammer in the dramas of Eugene O'Neill, and the urban architecture of the Italian Renaissance. He was especially successful with older people, mature for his age, serious-minded, good at games, altogether winning.

Doesn't that Ravan boy have the most beautiful manners?

Where is he from again?

What does his father do, actually?

That long-ago summer, my father acknowledged, he and my mother were at odds, bitter arguments that would spring from nowhere. The importance of “background” in the life of a family. The beauty of a triple pass approaching the crease of a hockey rink, game on the line. He was unable to identify the sources of these arguments that arrived from nowhere, so emotionally complex; and much later he came to understand that they were not complex at all but simple. He and my mother did not believe in the same things. They were equipped with different measuring sticks as to the people they admired and the qualities they valued. My father believed this was the direct result of the differences of family background and the values of the region they each grew up in. My father believed that you arrived in the world unencumbered and my mother did not; encumbrances were what you were given and not allowed to surrender. Encumbrance was my mother's word for personality. Yet the mutual attraction, the force of nature, was so strong they knew they belonged together whatever their differences of taste and outlook.

Her family had a place on the Connecticut shore, the gray-green waters of Long Island Sound glittering in the distance. The morning light was crystalline. On bright days the light was so sharp it hurt your eyes. It had the quality of platinum, as opposed to the dull iron of the Midwest. My father, standing on a sand dune at Westport, called it the edge-of-the-continent light, an eastern doomsday light without interference until you reached Portugal; and when he mentioned this to his girlfriend Jo she looked at him with a slow smile and said, Well, yessss, except Long Island would get in the way, wouldn't it?