Bullet Park (7 page)

The train stopped at Tremont Point, Greenacres, Lascalles, Meadowvale and Clear Haven. The trip seemed intolerable, but why? He had made it a thousand times. Why should this link between his home and his office seem torturous? His breathing was heavy, his palms were wet, there was a quaking feeling in his gut and the dark rain seemed to beat upon his heart. When the train reached Longbrook, Nailles suddenly grabbed his raincoat,
pushed his way past the oncoming passengers and left the car. The train coasted on and he found himself alone in a suburban railway station at half past eight in the morning.

Nailles’s sense of being alive was to bridge or link the disparate environments and rhythms of his world, and one of his principal bridges—that between his white house and his office—had collapsed. He stepped out of the rain into the waiting room. What he needed was guts but where could he find them? He could not summon them, that much was clear. Could he develop them in a gymnasium, win them in a lottery, buy them from a mail-order house or receive them as a heavenly dispensation? There was another local in fifteen minutes and commuters had begun to gather for this. Nailles boarded it, trying to sell himself a specious brand of cheerfulness. He stayed on that local for two more stops and got off again. Station by station he made a cruel pilgrimage into the city.

After dinner that night Nailles poured a strong whiskey and took it up to Tony’s room. He sat in a chair beside Tony’s bed as he had done so many times in the past when he used to read to the boy
Treasure Island
.

“How do you feel, Sonny?”

“About the same.”

“Did you eat any supper?”

“Yes.”

“There was a long thing in the paper on Sunday about how your generation thinks the world is terribly compromised.
Do you think the world is terribly compromised?”

“No, I don’t think it’s compromised.”

“You don’t think this has anything to do with your trouble?”

“I love the world. I just feel sad, that’s all.”

“Well I suppose there’s plenty to be sad about if you look around, but it makes me sore to have people always chopping at the suburbs. I’ve never understood why. When you go to the theater they’re always chopping at the suburbs but I can’t see that playing golf and raising flowers is depraved. The living is cheaper out here and I’d be lost if I couldn’t get some exercise. People seem to make some connection between respectability and moral purity that I don’t get. For instance, the fact that I wear a vest doesn’t necessarily mean that I claim to be pure in heart. That doesn’t follow. All kinds of scandalous things happen everywhere but just because they happen to people who have flower gardens doesn’t mean that flower gardens are wicked. For instance, Charlie Stringer was indicted last year for sending pornography through the mails. He claims to be some kind of a publisher and I guess dirty pictures is his business. He lives in one of those Tudor houses on Hansen Circle and he has a pretty wife and three children. Flower gardens. Trees. A couple of poodles. The critics would say: Look, look, look what a big façade he’s constructed to conceal the fact that he deals in obsceneness and corruption, but what’s the point? Why should a man who deals in filth have to live in a cesspool? He’s a bastard for sure but why shouldn’t a
bastard want to water his grass and play softball with the kids?

“We talk an awful lot about freedom and independence. If you were going to define our national purpose I don’t guess you could avoid using words like freedom and independence. The President is always talking about freedom and independence, the army and navy are always fighting to defend freedom and independence and on Sundays at church Father Ransome thanks God for our freedom and independence but you and I know that the blacks who live in those firetraps down along the river don’t have any freedom or independence in the choice of what they do and where they live. Charlie Simpson is really a great fellow but he and Phelps Marsden and a half a dozen other prominent and wealthy men around here make their money in deals with Salazar, Franco, Union Minière and all those military juntas. They talk about freedom and independence more than anybody else but they furnish the money and the armaments and the technicians to crush freedom and independence whenever it appears. I hate lying and I hate falsehoods and when you get a world that admits so many liars I suppose you’ve got something to be sad about. I don’t, as a matter of fact, have as much freedom and independence as I’d like myself. What I wear, what I eat, my sex life and a lot of my thinking is pretty well regimented but there are times when I like being told what to do. I can’t figure out what’s right and wrong in every situation.

“The newspapers are sometimes very confusing. They keep running photographs of soldiers dying in jungles and mudholes right beside an advertisement for a forty-thousand-dollar emerald ring or a sable coat. It would be childish to say that the soldier died for emeralds and sables but there it is, day after day, the dying soldier and the emerald ring. And homosexuality. You read a lot about that these days and it bothers me. I wish it didn’t exist. Before I joined the Chemists Club I used to have to pump ship in Grand Central and I almost never went into those choppers without getting into trouble. Once when I was going up the stairs this guy came along and took my arm. I had on a Brooks suit and a Locke hat and Peal shoes and the reason I had all this stuff on was to make my intentions clear. So I walked away from him. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t see his face. I’ve never seen any of their faces. The only reason I joined the Chemists Club was so that I could have a place in midtown where I could pump ship without getting into a moral crisis. Of course I’m not really a chemist and pushing mouthwash isn’t a very inspiring life but when you think of the things we need you realize that someone has to make them. I mean razor blades and soap and bacon and eggs and gasoline and train tickets and shoes. Somebody has to make all that stuff. Tony? Tony?” Tony slept.

Nailles finished his drink and looked lovingly at his mysterious son. Tony was born in Rome, where Nailles had worked as a chemist for FAOU. Nailles had taken Nellie to the international hospital across the river late one afternoon. The doctor was a very fat man. He timed
Nellie’s pains and told Nailles to return to the hospital at half past ten. When Nailles returned he was taken into an office to have his blood typed. There was no explanation. Later a friend appeared with a bottle of scotch and a package of American cigarettes, both of which were difficult to get at the time. The nuns seemed to have no objection to their drinking; in fact they brought them glasses and ice. Nailles’s friend left at midnight. The doctor came in at three. He was sweating and seemed worried. “Is she in danger,” Nailles asked. “Yes,” the doctor said harshly, “she is in danger. Life is dangerous. Why do Americans want to be immortal?”

“Please tell me,” Nailles said.

“I will tell you that when this is over I would advise her not to have any more children.”

There were some peacocks in a park across the street. They began to shriek as the sun rose. This sounded to Nailles portentous. The doctor came in again at eight. “Take a walk,” he said to Nailles. “Divert yourself. Breathe some fresh air.” Nailles walked down the hill to St. Peter’s and said his prayers. Then he climbed the stairs to the roof where all the gigantic saints and apostles stood with their backs to him. He had liked the city of Rome. Now it seemed sinister; the city of the wolf. Rome would kill Nellie. The bloody history of the place seemed to have some bearing on her life. Rome would murder Nellie.

He walked across the city on foot, trying to sweat out his pain. In some back street he encountered an old man selling phallic symbols and death’s heads. He walked to
the zoo and had a Campari at the café. Beside the café was a cage of carnivorous birds, tearing at raw meat. Leaving the café he saw a hyena; then a cage of wolves. When he got back to the hospital a nun told him that he had an eight-pound son and that his wife was out of danger. He howled with relief and banged drunkenly around the waiting room. He saw Nellie and his son that night and Tony seemed to him then to be brilliant, impetuous and strong. Much later they had discussed the possibility of adopting a brother or sister for Tony, but a foundling would have challenged Tony’s sovereignty and this was something they did not want.

He had no way of judging his worth as a father. They had quarreled. When Tony was nine. He had suddenly given up all his athletics and friendships and settled down in front of the television set. The night of the quarrel was rainy. Nailles came into the house by the kitchen door. Nellie was cooking. Nailles kissed her on the back of the neck and raised her skirts but she demurred. “Please darling,” she said. “It makes me feel as if I were in a burlesque skit. Tony’s report card is on the table. You might want to take a look at it.” Nailles mixed a drink and read the report. The marks were all C’s and D’s. Nailles walked through the dining room, crossed the dark hall to the living room where Tony was watching a show. The tube was the only light, shifting and submarine, and with the noise of the rain outside the room seemed like some cavern in the sea.

“Do you have any homework,” Nailles asked.

“A little,” Tony said.

“Well I think you’d better do it before you watch television,” Nailles said. On the tube some cartoon figures were dancing a jig.

“I’ll just watch to the end of this show,” Tony said. “Then I’ll do my homework.”

“I think you’d better do your homework now,” Nailles said.

“But Mummy said I could see this show,” Tony said.

“How long has it been,” said Nailles, “that you’ve asked permission to watch television?” He knew that in dealing with his son sarcasm would only multiply their misunderstandings but he was tired and headstrong. “You never ask permission. You come home at half past three, pull your chair up in front of the set and watch until supper. After supper you settle down in front of that damned engine and stay there until nine. If you don’t do your homework how can you expect to get passing marks in school?”

“I learn a lot of things on television,” Tony said shyly. “I learn about geography and animals and the stars.”

“What are you learning now?” Nailles asked.

The cartoon figures were having a tug of war. A large bird cut the rope with his beak and all the figures fell down.

“This is different,” Tony said. “This isn’t educational. Some of it is.”

“Oh leave him alone, Eliot, leave him alone,” Nellie called from the kitchen. Her voice was soft and clear. Nailles wandered back into the kitchen.

“But don’t you think,” he asked, “that from half past
three to nine with a brief interlude for supper is too much time to spend in front of a television set?”

“It is a lot of time,” Nellie said, “but it’s terribly important to him right now and I think he’ll grow out of it.”

“I know it’s terribly important,” Nailles said. “I realize that. When I took him Christmas shopping he wasn’t interested in anything but getting back to the set. He didn’t care about buying presents for you or his cousins or his aunts and uncles. All he wanted to do was to get back to the set. He was just like an addict. I mean he had withdrawal symptoms. It was just like me at cocktail hour but I’m thirty-four years old and I try to ration my liquor and my cigarettes.”

“He isn’t quite old enough to start rationing things,” Nellie said.

“He won’t go coasting, he won’t play ball, he won’t do his homework, he won’t even take a walk because he might miss a program.”

“I think he’ll grow out of it,” Nellie said.

“But you don’t grow out of an addiction. You have to make some exertion or have someone make an exertion for you. You just don’t outgrow serious addictions.”

He went back across the dark hall with its shifty submarine lights and outside the noise of rain. On the tube a man with a lisp, dressed in a clown suit, was urging his friends to have Mummy buy them a streamlined, battery-operated doll carriage. He turned on a light and saw how absorbed his son was in the lisping clown.

“Now I’ve been talking with your mother,” he said, “and we’ve decided that we have to do something about
your television time.” (The clown was replaced by the cartoon of an elephant and a tiger dancing the waltz.) “I think an hour a day is plenty and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which hour you want.”

Tony had been threatened before but either his mother’s intervention or Nailles’s forgetfulness had saved him. At the thought of how barren, painful and meaningless the hours after school would be the boy began to cry.

“Now crying isn’t going to do any good,” Nailles said. The elephant and the tiger were joined by some other animals in their waltz.

“Skip it,” Tony said. “It isn’t your business.”

“You’re my son,” Nailles said, “and it’s my business to see you do at least what’s expected of you. You were tutored last summer in order to get promoted and if your marks don’t improve you won’t be promoted this year. Don’t you think it’s my business to see that you get promoted? If you had your way you wouldn’t even go to school. You’d wake up in the morning, turn on the set and watch it until bedtime.”

“Oh please skip it, please leave me alone,” Tony said. He turned off the set, went into the hall and started to climb the stairs.

“You come back here, Sonny,” Nailles shouted. “You come back here at once or I’ll come and get you.”

“Oh please don’t roar at him,” Nellie asked, coming out of the kitchen. “I’m cooking veal birds and they smell nice and I was feeling good and happy that you’d come home and now everything is beginning to seem awful.”

“I was feeling good too,” Nailles said, “but we have a
problem here and we can’t evade it just because the veal birds smell good.”

He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted: “You come down here, Sonny, you come down here this instant or you won’t have any television for a month. Do you hear me? You come down here at once or you won’t have any television for a month.”

The boy came slowly down the stairs. “Now you come here and sit down,” Nailles said, “and we’ll talk this over. I’ve said that you can have an hour each day and all you have to do is to tell me which hour you want.”