Sons (10 page)

When I readied the bottom of the page, Timothy, who had been reading silently over my shoulder, began chuckling. I laughed with him. In the hold of a foreign ship waiting to sail across thousands of miles of ocean to a foreign battlefront, we laughed softly in the darkness, and I wondered if we’d ever in our lives see New York City again.

I loved that city.

It took an hour and a half to get there from Talmadge, but ever since we’d organized Dawn Patrol, one or another of us guys would go in almost every Saturday to shop Forty-eighth Street or to catch whichever of the groups were downtown in the Village. My mother said I was a native New Yorker, which wasn’t quite true in spite of the fact that I was horn in New York; at Lenox Hill Hospital, in fact, on Seventy-seventh and Park. At the time, my father was attending NYU on the GI Bill of Rights, and living with my mother in a run-down apartment in what was then considered a terrible slum but was now euphemistically called the East Village. With a little help from my grandfather (or perhaps from
both
my grandfathers, since Grandpa Prine was still alive at the time) my father started his own business in November 1946, at first publishing stuff like street maps and industrial pamphlets, and then bringing out a series of one-shot, newsstand exploitation magazines, and then finally moving into hardbound books. We moved to Talmadge just before Christmas that year, two months after I was born, to the same house we still lived in on Ritter Avenue. So I hardly felt honest calling myself a native New Yorker, although it was technically true. Nonetheless, whenever I went into that city, I felt as if I were going home.

I didn’t feel quite that way today.

I had come in to see my father because there was something important I wanted to discuss, and I had learned over the years that the best place to talk business with him was in
his
place of business. This was Wednesday, and Talmadge High was having teachers’ conferences, so I’d caught the 9: 34 out of Stamford, and was in the city by 10:19. I’d spent a half-hour in Manny’s on Forty-eighth, looking over some of the new Japanese amplifiers, and then I’d called my father to ask him if I could come up. He sounded surprised but pleased, which was at least one point for our side. Still, I was scared.

I walked over to Forty-second and spent an hour or so in Bryant Park, where a fag tried to pick me up. I never knew what to say when a fag approached me. This one looked especially sad and uncertain, as if it were the first time he’d ever done anything like this, though that was probably his style. Anyway, I just said “Sorry,” and got off the bench and walked away. I was unhappy about leaving the park because it had been a good place to think; I still hadn’t come up with an approach to my father. I stopped for a hot dog and a Coke in a place on Forty-fourth and Sixth, and then ambled down to Fifth Avenue as if I didn’t have a care in the world. It was a great day for walking.

We’d once had a man from California visiting us, a publisher my father was anxious to do business with, and he’d said the only time he really enjoyed New York City was “when they started taking their coats off.” This was that kind of a day, with a blue sky stretched tight between the buildings, and bright sunshine spanking the sidewalks, and people walking along with their coats off, grinning. By the time I reached the Doubleday’s on Fifty-seventh, I’d worked out a plan, so I immediately headed back for my father’s office on Forty-eighth and Madison.

All the way up in the elevator, I rehearsed my scheme.

He’s too smart to con, I told myself, though why I should even have to
think
of conning him is certainly a matter for speculation, considering the fact that I’ll be eighteen in October — well, suppose he says no? Well, he can’t say no if I get him to agree with me in principle first. Because if he concedes in
principle,
he can’t refuse permission on any valid moral ground, that’d be hypocritical, he certainly isn’t a hypocrite, whatever else he is. Anyway, I’ve never won a frontal assault against him in my life, why try now? Logic, that’s the thing. Get him to yield intellectually, and then zing in the fast ball. It should work.

I hope.

The elevator doors opened. I took a deep breath.

Tyler Press occupied the entire sixth floor of the building, and so the company colophon and the company receptionist were the first things anyone saw when stepping out of the elevator. Of the two, I infinitely preferred the colophon, my father’s taste in receptionists running rather toward the motherly type. This particular mother, one of a long line who had sat behind this selfsame desk since the company’s formation in 1946, was in her fifties, a gray-haired dignified lady with pleasant blue eyes and a warm, helpful smile, ample mother breasts in a white blouse, gold chain hanging, semiprecious purple stone cradled, “Hello, Wat,” she said, “how nice!”

“Hello, Mrs. Green,” I answered. “Is my father in?”

“Let me check,” she said, and smiled again, and lifted the telephone.

The company colophon was on the wall behind Mrs. Green’s desk, a circular blue disc upon which were three spruce trees of varying heights, their towering tops protruding from the upper rim of the circle. There was a strong sense of growth and tradition inherent in the colophon, and I felt oddly moved each time I looked at it. Whatever the Tylers were, we had all most certainly descended from my grandfather Bertram Tyler, the lumberjack, and this heritage was clearly the intent of the colophon. Studying it now, though, I wondered for the first time which of those three spruces represented me — the shortest one in the foreground, or the tallest one reaching for the sky.

“You can go right in, Wat,” Mrs. Green said.

“Thank you. Is he in a good mood?”

“Why, Wat dear, your father’s
always
in a good mood,” Mrs. Green said.

“Oh yes, certainly,” I said, and went past her desk into the corridor. A brunette secretary in a tight woolen dress swiveled out of one of the offices, smiling at me as she went by. Neck craning, I knocked on my father’s door.

“Come in,” he called.

I went into the office. My father was standing behind his desk, shirt sleeves rolled up, tic pulled down, desk top covered with photographs. His attitude of concentration seemed posed, as though he had hastily rushed behind his desk, rolling up his sleeves the moment he heard the knock on the door, anxious to present to his son an image of a working publisher. If such were truly the case, he needn’t have bothered; I’d always had enormous difficulty imagining my father at work, and each time I came to his office the task became perversely more difficult. I shouldn’t have expected Tyler Press to be a mirror image of our own house in Talmadge — a man was, after all, entitled to decorate his offices to suit his own taste. But the difference here was so startling that it was difficult to imagine the man Will Tyler being comfortable in either place.

Our house was an early eighteenth-century colonial, while clapboard and slate, paneled doors and chimney architrave, leaded casements and molded panels. My mother, presumably with my father’s assistance and blessing, had decorated in the style of the period, creating a warm and welcoming shelter that nudged the side of a hill from which you could sometimes see Long Island Sound. Crewel-embroidered curtains, blue-green with a touch of red, draped the living room windows. The walnut sofa was upholstered with blue-green damask, the cabriole-leg wing chair with tapestry. There was an oriental rug before the fireplace, which was flanked by two Hogarth-type side chairs and a tall-back wing chair, also done in red tapestry. The house was rich with brass and burled walnut, needlepoint and marble, the faint lingering aroma of woodsmoke.

In contrast, the first thing you saw when you entered my father’s office was the huge gray Formica-topped work desk dominated at its far end by a wooden piece he had bought in a First Avenue shop, an African mask resting on a stainless steel cube. Two walls were a pristine white, a third wall was covered floor to ceiling with bookcases, their jacketed spines adding a patchwork quilt of color to the room. The fourth wall framed a window view of New York City, mocha-colored drapes hanging at either side of the glass expanse. The chairs were upholstered in brown leather and tweed, the carpet was beige. Out of a bosky glen of plants in the corner opposite the desk, there rose like some metallic woodland sprite, a joyously leaping Giacometti imitation. On one of the white walls, there hung an original Larry Rivers, and on the other a Goodenough. The lighting was hidden in walnut coves, except for two hanging white globes. The over-all effect was hardly similar to that in our home, and it made me believe that perhaps there were
two
Will Tylers, neither of whom I understood or even came close to understanding.

I went behind the desk and kissed him on the cheek without embarrassment; I could never understand those guys who have hangups about kissing their own fathers. He said, “Hello, son,” and then spread his hands wide over the desk top. “What do you think of it?”

There were perhaps two hundred photographs of different sizes on the desk. All of them were of General De Gaulle, whom I had never considered a particularly photogenic subject, handsome though he may be.

“I thought it was further along than this,” I said.

“Well, this is the final selection. What do you think?”

“It’s hard to say. I mean, without any text...”

“Yes, but what do you think of the pictures?”

“Oh, they’re great,” I said.

“We’ll be laying it out sometime this week,” my father said. “Great. When’s publication?”

“God knows,” he said, and waved the question aside. “Have you had lunch?”

“I grabbed a hot dog,” I said.

“I thought...”

“Actually...”

“What time is it, anyway?”

“Close to one. Pop, the reason I stopped by...”

“I thought we were having lunch together. I purposely kept lunch free.”

“Well, I’ve got to get back, you know. We’re rehearsing this afternoon...”

“How come no school?” he asked suddenly.

“It’s teachers’ conferences.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, I’m not cutting or anything, if that’s what you thought.”

“Why would I think that?”

“Anyway, Pop, there’s something I’ve got to discuss with you.”

“Shoot,” he said, and sat in the brown leather Eames chair behind his desk. He took a cigar from the humidor near the African mask, sniffed it the way I’d seen Adolph Menjou do in a thousand old movies on television, lighted it with a wooden match, blew out an enormous cloud of poisonous smoke, laced his hands across his chest, and looked at me expectantly. I cleared my throat.

“Well,” I said, “as you know, I’ll be graduating this June.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And this is May,” I said, “and I thought I should be making some plans for the summer now. I mean, before it’s here, you know. Because I’ll be leaving for Yale in September, and I wanted to make some use of the summer, you know.”

“Where do you want to go?” my father said.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Well, that’s what we’re doing is talking,” he said, and smiled, and puffed on the cigar, and said, “I have a feeling this is going to cost me money.”

“No, no,” I said, “no.” I cleared my throat again. “You see, these arc, you know, changing times in America, and I thought, you see, I didn’t want to just lay around on some beach all summer, though that would be nice, still...”

“You don’t want to come to Fire Island, is that it?”

“I love Fire Island, it isn’t that.”

“It’s some girl.”

“No, no, I’m not serious about anybody right now. But the idea of just laying around all summer isn’t too appealing to me right now. I want to
do
something.”

“Like what?”

“You agree these are changing times?” I said, figuring I’d start my buildup now, get him to agree in principle the way I’d planned it, and
then
ask him for permission.

“Yes, these are changing times,” he agreed.

“Okay,” I said, “I want to go south this summer and help with voter registration. Negro voter registration.”

My father puffed on his cigar.

“A guy I know from school is going,” I said, “and I want to go with him. They pay a salary. I can earn between fifteen and twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Is he colored or white?” my father asked.

“He’s colored,” I said. “His name is Larry Peters, I think you met him once.”

“I don’t remember meeting him,” my father said.

“After one of the dances. He was helping us load the wagon.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, that’s who, anyway. He’s leaving for Mississippi in July. If I’m going with him, I’ve got to sign up as a task force worker right away. That’s why I wanted to discuss it with you first.”

“A task forcer worker, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“And that’s why you came into the city today?”

“No, I looked at a new amp at Manny’s, too. But while I was in, I figured I’d call you and we could talk about it here. I haven’t told Mom yet, I wanted to dear it with you first.”

“She’ll say no.”

“Well, not if you’ve already given permission.”

“She’ll say no because it’s dangerous down there. You can get hurt down there.”

“Pop, you can get hurt crossing the street right here in New York.”

“Why do you want to go down there, anyway?”

“I already told you. These are changing times...”

“Yes, yes...”

“... and I want to help.”

“You can help right here. If you want to do something for the Negro, why don’t you get a job in Harlem this summer? At a playground or a youth center. Help them start a band, coach them in some sport, you’re good at those things, Wat, you could be very useful in an area like Harlem.”