Short Stories: Five Decades (31 page)

Nelson looked at the leather clock. 10:40. The train was leaving at 11:15. Robert had better hurry.

Nelson looked at the
$3,100,456.25
he had written. For the thousandth time he admired the delicate, tilted, bookkeeper’s 2 he had early in his career learned to make. Somehow that 2 was to him a badge of his profession, a sign of his talents, an advertisement of the difficult rare world of figures in which he moved skillfully and at ease, turning sweat and clamor, heat and smoke, bonanza and disaster, into clear, rigid, immutable tables.

10:43. Where was Robert? Nelson got up and went to the window and looked out. He looked down the steel and granite fifty stories to the street. He laughed a little to himself when he realized he was trying to pick his son out of the hurry and confusion of Forty-ninth Street, five hundred feet below.

He went back to his desk and sat down and picked up the sheet of paper on which he had been working. Tax sheets represented a formal and intricate game in which the players solemnly and conventionally juggled abstractions, like Spinoza proving God, to bring about very real and tangible results, like the great man who, in 1932, proved that J. P. Morgan had no taxable income. Once, in 1936, Nelson, in a rare burst of capriciousness, had made up two tax sheets. One, that Marshall and Co. had actually submitted to the government. And the other, with a change here and there to conform more to the actual realities of iron and sweat rather than the formal accountant’s symbolism of numbers and deductible percentages. There had been a difference of $700,962.12. Nelson had carried the second sheet around with him for his private amusement for a week and then burned it, wisely.

This year, with the blossoming expansion of Marshall and Co. for war orders and the jump in the surplus profits tax, the difference between the real and the formal would be immense, over a million dollars, Nelson figured. Marshall and Co. paid him $40,000 a year. He was quite a bargain, he told himself grimly.

10:47. No Robert yet. Nelson put down the paper because the figures were beginning to jump before his eyes. More and more frequently he found that happening to him. Well, along with the waistline that grew an inch a year and the tendency to wake at five in the morning and his lack of shock at overhearing people calling him a middle-aged gentleman, that had to be expected of a man who had led a quiet, rather unhealthy life at a desk and was now over fifty.…

The door opened and Robert came in in his new lieutenant’s uniform, with the rawhide suitcase Nelson had given him in his hand.

“On our way, Pop,” Robert said. “The U.S. Army is waiting on tiptoe.”

They smiled at each other and Nelson took his beautiful gray Homburg out of the closet and put it carefully on before the mirror.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it,” he said, delicately fingering the brim of the hat.

Robert was over at the window, staring out at New York, shining all around in the early summer sun, with the Hudson a flat blue highway against the cliffs of New Jersey and the buildings piled against each other like stiff confectionery in the light morning air. “Lord, Lord …” Robert murmured. “What a place to work! You ought to be sitting here writing the Ninth Symphony, Pop.”

Nelson smiled at him and took his arm. “I’m not writing the Ninth Symphony.” He would have liked to carry Robert’s bag for him to the elevator and even made a move for it, but Robert detected it and switched the bag without a word to the other hand.

There was a pretty, dark-haired woman in a fine, severe black dress that looked on her as black dresses are supposed to look on smart women who work in fashionable businesses, and rarely do. She had her hair swept up for the summer morning and she looked pert and sharp and pretty and grownup all at once, and she looked coolly and approvingly, Nelson noticed, at his tall son, standing beside him, very slender and straight and self-consciously handsome in his new dark-green lieutenant’s blouse with the proud gold bar shining on each shoulder.

Robert smiled a little to himself, conscious of the cool approving stare, helplessly and a little ashamedly pleased with himself for provoking it.

“Sometimes,” he said, as he and Nelson got out of the elevator and walked toward Fifth Avenue, with the woman lost behind them, “sometimes, Pop, they ought to be allowed to arrest a man for the thoughts that pass through his head.”

They grinned at each other and Robert took a deep full breath, looking around him, the smile still on his lips, before he got into the taxicab and said, “Grand Central, please.”

They sat quietly as the cab dodged through the streets. Nelson looked steadfastly at the shining rawhide bag. You saw bags like that, he thought, on Friday afternoons in the summertime, on station platforms where people in summer clothes gaily waited for trains going to New England, to the Adirondacks, to Cape Cod … Somehow, he felt, to make the picture complete, there should be a tennis racket lying beside it, in its bright rubber case, and a girl’s voice, light and excited, dominating the scene, saying swiftly, laughing, “Olive oil and vinegar in equal parts and a few drops of glycerin and just smear yourself, darling, every hour. There was this lifeguard at Hobe Sound and he was out in the sun twelve hours a day and that was all he used and he was as brown as the outside of an old piece of roast beef.…”

But instead it was Robert’s voice saying, “Five medium tanks …”

“What was that?” Nelson looked at his son, apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite …”

“When I get back,” Robert said, “I’m put in command of five medium tanks. Twelve tons apiece, with a crew of four men. They represent an investment of about three hundred thousand bucks. And I’ve got to tell them, start, stop, go here, go there, kindly demolish that hot dog stand to the left, would you be so good as to put six shells into that corset and lingerie shop five blocks down the street.” He grinned widely. “Me. I never even ran a set of electric trains before in my life. The faith that the U.S. Government has in me! I’m going to develop a beautiful case of stage fright when the time comes for me to look those five medium tanks in the eye.”

“You’ll do all right,” Nelson said soberly.

Robert stared at him seriously for a moment, the smile gone. “I suppose so,” he said.

The cab wheeled into Grand Central and they got out.

“We have fifteen minutes,” Robert said, looking up at the clock. “How about one quick one, to oil the wheels?”

“Is anyone else seeing you off?” Nelson asked, as they walked through the dim, shuffling, echoing vault, toward the bar of the Commodore Hotel. “No girls?”

“Nope,” said Robert, smiling. “Can’t start that. If you invite one you’ve got to invite them all. It’d look like a reunion of Vassar graduates, classes of ’38 to ’41, inclusive.” He laughed aloud. “I wouldn’t like to make such a showy exit.”

Nelson smiled at the joke, but was aware that the joke covered the fact that Robert had saved his final private good-bye before he went to war for his father. He wished there was some way to tell Robert he understood and was grateful, but whatever words he could think of would be clumsy and tragic, so he said nothing. They went into the Commodore and stood at the long bar, quiet now and cool and dim in the eleven o’clock pause before the day’s drinking began.

“Two martinis,” Robert said to the bartender.

“I haven’t had a drink in the morning,” Nelson said, “since Arthur Parker’s wedding. 1936.”

“What the hell,” Robert said. “There’s a war on.”

There was the pleasant sound of the ice clinking in the mixer and the faint strange smell of the gin rising in the empty bar and the pungent tiny smell of the lemon peel that the bartender twisted delicately over the full cold glasses.

They lifted their drinks and Nelson looked past his son’s lean, well-loved head, capped and young and martial, with the gold and leather of the United States Army shining on it. Nelson looked along the bar into the dim recesses of the low-ceilinged, long room, as neat and orderly and expectant with its empty and regular tables and chairs as only a bar or restaurant prepared for the day’s eating and drinking can be. How many farewells had been said in this room, this drinking place next to the trains that spread out across the whole huge continent. How many final good-byes. How many last kisses between husband and wife. How many gulped and tasteless drinks, how much shock of alcohol to take the first terrible edge off the pain of loss and distance. How many farewelling ghosts sat at those regular tables, their endless irrevocable good-byes echoing among the frivolous glasses. How full the company of grieving leavetakers, each of them tasting death in this snatched last moment over whisky, before the train rolled out.…

Nelson looked squarely, steadily at his one child’s military head. He raised his glass a little higher, touching his son’s glass. “To a quick end of the business,” he said.

They drank. The drink tasted powerful and rich and burning and immediately effective against his morning palate. Robert drank with zest, tasting the full savor of the drink happily, rolling it over his tongue. “You’d be surprised,” he said, “how hard it is to get a good martini in the Tank Corps.”

Nelson watched him drink and remembered a day in the country, three years ago, when Robert was twenty. It was summertime and they were both on vacation and had a house in Vermont and Robert had been out swimming all afternoon and had come in, wet-haired, tan, barefoot, wrapped in a huge white bathrobe, with a faded blue towel swung around his shoulders, summertime printed on his freckled nose and the tan backs of his lake-washed hands … He had swung through the screen door, singing loudly, “Stormy weather, since my gal and I ain’t together.…” He had padded along barefoot, leaving high-arched stains of lakewater on the grass rugs directly to the kitchen. When Nelson had gone into the kitchen, he saw Robert sitting at the porcelain table, still humming “Stormy Weather,” with an open bottle of cold beer in one hand, the moisture condensing coolly on the glass, and in the other hand a huge, ludicrous sandwich he had made for himself with two great jagged slices of rye bread and a quarter pound of Swiss cheese and two mountainous slices of cold baked ham and a tremendous cold beefsteak tomato cut in three fat, meaty slices. Robert was sitting there, tilted back in the flimsy kitchen chair, the late afternoon sun shining obliquely on him through the high old-fashioned window, slowly dripping lakewater, the giant of a sandwich and the bottle of beer happily in his hands, his mouth full of cheese and tomato and ham and bread and cold beer, the song somehow working out of his throat in a bumbling joyous monotone. He waved the sandwich airily at Nelson when Nelson appeared at the door.

“Starving,” he mumbled. “Swam four miles. Got to keep my energy up.”

“You’ve got to eat dinner in an hour,” Nelson said.

Robert grinned through the food. “I’ll eat dinner. Let nobody worry.” And he took another fabulous bite from the monstrous sandwich.

Nelson watched him eat, smiling a little to himself.

“Want me to make you a sandwich?” Robert asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Great maker of sandwiches …”

Nelson shook his head, smiling. “I’ll wait for dinner.” He watched his son eat. The full white teeth shining in the sunburned face, biting strongly and evenly into the food, the lean muscles of the strong throat, rising out of the white bathrobe, moving calmly as he tilted the bottle back and gulped the beer.…

“When I was your age,” Nelson said, “I ate just like that.…”

And suddenly Robert had looked at him very soberly as though seeing his father twenty years old—and loving him—and seeing the long years that came after with pride and pity …

“Well …” Robert ate the olive at the bottom of his glass and put the glass down with a little flat tinkle that ran lightly through the quiet bar. “Well, the train’s waiting.…”

Nelson looked around and shook his head and the Vermont kitchen and the sunburned boy and the bottle of beer beaded with icebox-cold all disappeared. He finished his drink and paid and together he and Robert hurried across the station to the gate where Robert’s train was waiting. There was an air of bustle and impatience about the gate, and a soldier and his mother and two female relatives were weeping together in a sodden mass and somehow he and Robert shook hands and there was a last wave and no words because they each knew that any word through the tortured throat would bring with it sobs—and Robert went down the long incline to the dark station below. His rawhide bag gleamed among the descending passengers and he was gone.…

Nelson turned and walked slowly toward the street. As he walked he thought of the capped head and the rawhide bag going down the long incline to the waiting train, to the medium tanks, to the waiting guns, the waiting agony, going lightly and zealously and unquestioningly off to war. He remembered, although a little mistily, with the martini and the shuffling steps on the marble floor, and the weeping at the gates of the soldier’s women, all serving to blur and confuse and make remote, he remembered watching Robert playing tennis last summer. Robert played very smoothly and well, lanky and easy over the court, like those tall kids in California who play 365 days a year in a kind of lazy, expert boredom. Robert had a habit of talking jovially and half-irritably to himself when he missed a shot, looking up to heaven and muttering under his breath, “Weaver!
Weaver!
Why don’t you just give up? Why don’t you just go home?” He had seen his father looking down at him, smiling, and knew that his father understood the mumbled tirade he was delivering to himself. He had grinned and waved his racket and slammed the next three services so hard no returns were possible.…

Nelson walked up Madison Avenue toward the office of Marshall and Co., toward the formal and intricate sheets of figures waiting on his desk, toward the neat, professional, bookkeeper’s 2 he was proud of.…

As he walked he wondered where his son would be sent to meet the enemy. Africa? Australia? India? England? Russia? Desert, plain, mountain, jungle, sea-coast—and a twenty-three-year-old boy, ex-swimmer, ex-tennis-player, ex-eater of great sandwiches and drinker of cold beer, ex-lover of his father, hungry and full of jokes and ready for any climate, while his father, full of his slack fifty years, walked daily to his office.…