White People Read online

  BUT WHEN you are definitely home from the European Theater, which is dead now, and war buddies you’d have given your life for now phone less and less, are more and more just Christmas cards with photos of new children, cards signed in a woman’s hand, when insurance (fire, burglary, auto, and life) is now what people think of when they think of you, when Marilyn Monroe is filling the shoes of Betty Grable, who’s retired, what do you do then?

  You find that the headaches are because you suddenly need reading glasses. You resign yourself to buying bourbon by the case because it is cheaper and you now have room to store that much, and you have no doubt that it will somehow get drunk up. You call your two sons soldiers when they submit stiff-faced, thin-armed, to Jonas Salk’s discovery. You pay someone to keep the yard worthy of your wartime aerial-photo vision of its symmetry and shape from overhead. You take your wife to the occasions you count on the country club to invent, and there, with friends who have become clients and friends who have not become clients and with clients who want to become your friends, the two of you get more than genteelly drunk, even by Eastern Carolina’s lubricated standards. And afterward, after the baby-sitter has been overpaid to cover your tardiness and the fact that the front of your jacket is dark from some accidental spillage and to cover the expense of the cab that must be called to get her home, in the silence after that, of the house becoming increasingly more valuable as the boxwoods expand themselves outside, with the hint of dawn coming on, you both manage to know what a prime moment in the history of your physiques this is.

  Otherwise, you learn to make do, and when some threat arises you are soldierly in disposing of it. Almost, there are not enough threats anymore. Here you are, among the most successful of the bombardiers, now grounded, in the awful safety of this decade, in its suburbs. You do what you can around the house and grounds to re-create some of that drama you remember from the forties. All the events that made one’s life eventful: The Axis. Roosevelt Dead. Hiroshima.

  The furnace explodes early one morning. You carry Helen outside, dump her onto a lawn chair, rush back for the sleeping boys, dash across the street and pull the fire alarm. Later the fire chief emerges from the basement of the house and ambles around the engine and out toward your family group, huddled in pajamas among the neighbors, who have brought blankets, coffee, garden hoses. “Nothing serious,” he says. “The furnace sort of exploded. A little soot, but nothing serious.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing serious’? You should have heard it. I thought we were being attacked or something.”

  “Noisy,” the fire chief admits, scratching his head, trying to be both tactful and professional, “but nothing serious.”

  The next day, you order a fire-alarm system for the house. While the children grumble, while a siren howls and neighbors watch over fences, you stage your first weekly fire drill. After two of these, the drills are discontinued.

  It is a personal affront when tent caterpillars invade four of the yard’s eleven trees. A neighbor says you’ll have to burn them out; only thing they understand. The yardman prepares to do it, till you curtly give him the day off. This job, worthy of you, will require a little strategy. There are moments when a father and his boys must work together. Standing in the back door, you shout, “Now is the time for all good boys to come to the aid of their father and their yard!” “What?” Helen asks.

  You put a torch together—a broom handle, rags, some kerosene. You ignite it with your wartime Zippo. Up into the infested tree nearest the house you crawl. This is a mission; for once, in peacetime, you know exactly what you’re going to do. The boys watch idly from the ground as you sear the first lumps of worms out of the plum tree. Smoke suddenly everywhere and such a smell. “You two down there, don’t just stand around. Stomp on the ones getting away.” Clusters of black caterpillars, pounds of them, are toppling from their webs, falling to the ground and steaming.

  Making girlish noises, your sons start hopping on the smoldering worms. Bradley jogs about, eyes straight ahead; he lifts his knees and makes a calisthenic game of it. Feeling dizzy, Bryan shuts his eyes, holds out his arms for balance, and earnestly pretends he’s dancing, though his tennis shoes keep slipping out from under him.

  In the tree, you find you’ve started muttering almost forgotten, complicated curses from the war as, one by one, you solemnly eradicate these black colonies of pests. Your sons’ whimpering infuriates you suddenly. “Shut up down there, you two. You’ll do your job and keep your mouths closed. These things are going to get to other trees. They’ll get over into the Bennetts’ yard if we don’t kill them now. This is no game here, this is an emergency, so quit squealing like sissies and stomp on them. That clear?”

  Your two children look up at the orange glow inside the tree, at a single wing-tip shoe visible among the leaves. In unison, they say, “Yes sir.”

  2. MY ELDER SON

  I’M NOT as young as I used to be and it follows that my sons aren’t either. Bradley, our baby, is twenty-five now and makes a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. He graduated third in his class from the law school of the University of Virginia. He’s now with a fine corporation-law firm working out of Georgetown. Brad married Elaine last May at a garden wedding that was rained out but that was nice anyway. The bridesmaids’ dresses were made of some thin material that got transparent when wet. Elaine is from a fine old Maryland family. Her father served as attorney general of the state a few administrations back. Now Brad and Elaine are renovating a townhouse in Washington, doing most of the work themselves. What with Elaine’s small private income and her looks and taste, and with Brad’s salary, my wife and I feel good about their progress in life. Elaine always remembers us with little cards and gifts on birthdays and anniversaries. It’s a comfort.

  Bryan is our elder son. He’s twenty-seven and a mystery to me. Two years ago he gave up a fairly good job as a designer of furniture. He decided to become a writer. When he was home last Christmas, we heard him typing a few times, but he never offered to show us anything he’d written. I have no doubt that it’s good. He has always had a real flair for the arts. But if you’ve never read a word your son has written and if you understand the kind of money a writer can expect to make, it’s hard to work up any real enthusiasm for this occupation.

  To support himself, Bryan does articles for a magazine called Dance World. When people ask me what he’s doing, I tell them he writes for a magazine in New York. If they ask me which one, then I’m forced to level with them. I’d have to be a writer myself to describe the sinking feeling I get when I tell this about my elder son. Helen says that my attitude in the matter is unreasonable. All I know is, the first year he worked for the magazine he sent us a free subscription, and it got so I couldn’t even stand to see copies on the coffee table. I could hardly believe some of the pictures of the men. Looking at them, you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or get angry or what.

  My wife also informs me that there are two kinds of dance, ballet and modern, and that Bryan’s specialty is modern. Helen says, with lots of enthusiasm, that modern is less costumed but just as athletic as ballet. Somehow, knowing this doesn’t help.

  You might say Bryan and I have never really seen eye to eye. He has always had certain mannerisms and his talents are unlike my own. When he was younger he stayed pale from spending too much time indoors. I kept telling Helen that one day he’d discover the world outside. I said, “Now he keeps a diary, he paints still lifes, he reads French like a Frenchman, but believe you me, one day he’ll come around. You watch.”

  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 smacke
d 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.