Sons (22 page)

“Paris,” she said, “well, well.”

Her laughter trailed. She took one hand from her muff, wiped at the corners of her eyes, and then quickly tucked it away again. We sat silently on the huge rock overlooking the frozen lake.

“Bert,” she said, “if it’s because you don’t love me, please don’t feel... please don’t go away because of that.”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Bert,” she said, “please don’t go to Paris.”

“I wouldn’t go to Paris.”

“Please don’t go anywhere.”

“Well...”

“Without me,” she said. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I thought...” She shook her head. “Here I am being so forward and you’ve... made all sorts of plans that don’t include me.” She readied up suddenly with one clenched hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Forgive me,” she said.

“Nancy,” I said, “I killed seven men.”

“Pardon?”

“I killed...” She lifted her face to mine, her eyes immediately seeking my lips. I took her naked hand in both my own, and very softly said, “I killed seven men.”

“Yes, Bert,” she said.

“I shot one of them in the back.”

“Yes, Bert.”

“I stole from dead soldiers. A ring from one German and a pair of boots from another. I threw away the ring.”

“Yes.”

“In a town one day, I can’t remember the name of it, we... Nancy, there were five of us on patrol, and there was this dead horse in the courtyard and a French girl standing in the doorway, and we... we took her upstairs to where one wall of the house had been blown away, and they, on a straw pallet up there, they did it to her, Nancy.
J’ai treize ans!
she screamed.
Une vierge!
But they forced her, Nance, and... I... I didn’t try to stop them, I didn’t do anything to stop them. And then we left her there and walked down the wooden steps and out into the courtyard again where the horse lay dead in bright sunshine with flies buzzing around his bleeding mouth, and a soldier named Kerry showed us a silver pendant necklace he had taken from the second bedroom upstairs where the girl’s mother was dead on the floor from the shell that had hit the house, and which he said would bring him luck, I didn’t try to stop them, I didn’t even try.”

I was out of breath. I bent and put my forehead down on Nancy’s hand. She sat unmoving.

Then she said only, “Yes, Bert.”

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“Yes, Bert,” she said. “I heard you.”

On the weekends I had to play, I would die from wanting Dana.

I had got together with three other freshmen guys at Yale, one of whom was in pre-med and who had suggested the name for the group, a great name, The Rhinoplasticians, a rhinoplastician being a doctor who docs nose bobs. We didn’t sound as great together yet as the old Dawn Patrol had, but we were getting there, and also we were beginning to play a lot of local jobs, especially at preppie parties in the vicinity, where college MEN made a big hit with all the little girls from Miss Porter’s. We usually pulled down about twenty-five bucks a man whenever we played, and we played approximately once every other weekend, which meant that I was earning between fifty and seventy-five dollars a month, more than enough to pay for the apartment in Providence. I was living on a tight allowance from my father, and I didn’t think it was fair to ask him for additional money to pay for the apartment, so the new group was a godsend. But at the same time, whenever I played to earn money to pay for the apartment, I couldn’t get up to Providence to
use
the apartment; it was something of a dilemma, not to mention painful besides.

The apartment belonged to a guy named Lenny Samalson, who was studying graphic design at Risdee. Lenny had a girlfriend in New York, and her name was Roxanne, and she went to Sarah Lawrence but her parents were very strict, making it necessary for Lenny to go down to the city each weekend if he wanted to see her. Roxanne lived in the same building as Dana, on Seventy-ninth and Park, and when Dana casually mentioned, you know, that it would be convenient if she and I had, you know, a place where we could be alone together on weekends, Roxanne said, Well, how about Lenny’s place in Providence? and we grabbed it. Lenny was delighted to let us have it because I paid him thirty dollars a month for using it only on weekends, and not
every
weekend, at that. On the other hand, we were delighted to get it because it was only two hours from New Haven and an hour from Boston, which meant that Dana and I could both leave for Providence after our respective Friday afternoon classes, and get there for dinner, by which time Lenny was already on his way to New York and the carefully guarded Roxanne, who, Dana said, had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen on the roof with the boy from 12C.

I had very little difficulty getting away from Yale for weekends, but our trysts involved a certain amount of subterfuge on Dana’s part. Dana was but a mere female freshman living in Shelton Hall and blanket permission (pun unintended by the administration of B.U., I’m sure) for overnights had to be in writing from her parents. With permission, she was entitled to unlimited weekends, provided she signed out before the two a. m. curfew, and left a telephone number where she could be reached. Dana had little difficulty convincing Dr. Castelli that blanket permission would be far simpler than having to call home each time she was invited to spend a weekend with a girlfriend. And the telephone number she left at Shelton each Friday afternoon before putting her check in the overnight column was of course the one at Lenny’s apartment.

Providence was a singularly grubby town, but Lenny’s apartment was really quite nice. I had always thought artists were sloppy people who left twisted paint tubes and dirty rags all over the place, but Lenny was very tidy. In fact, since he was in Graphic Design rather than Fine Arts, he hardly ever worked in oils, and the place was miraculously free of the aroma of paint or turpentine, which could have been disastrous in a one-room apartment with a screen separating the kitchen from the bedroom-living room. Lenny had hand-decorated the screen himself, using the Nuclear Disarmament symbol in various sizes as an over-all black-and-white pattern. The symbol, Dana informed me, was a composite of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D, this information having incidentally been garnered by her in library research for a paper she was doing on William Shakespeare, figure it out. The screen stood at the foot of the bed, and tacked to it was a very decorative poster Lenny had painted in blues and reds, advising everyone to MAKE love, not war, though actually we didn’t need any reminders.

I loved Dana very much.

Before Dana, I had only had a relationship with one other girl in my life, and that had been Cass Hagstrom. The time with Cass had been very exciting for me because she was the first girl who had let me do anything substantial to her and I was overwhelmed and grateful. That was also when everything else was really going great for me — Dawn Patrol was playing almost every Friday and Saturday night, I was the football team’s captain and quarterback, and I was maintaining a ninety average at Talmadge High. I was as much in love with
life,
I guess, as I was with Cass.

But even the most exciting times with Cass, and there were some, did not compare with what I experienced with Dana. I loved everything about Dana, and this wasn’t a matter of a first sex experience, nor were things going so great at Yale, either, because they weren’t. In fact, to be perfectly truthful, I was having a very difficult time adjusting to college life, being burdened with two creepy roommates, and carrying a full program of English, French, History, Economics, and Physics. Moreover, I was confused about a lot of things.

I had dutifully registered for the draft in October 1964, within five days after my eighteenth birthday, aware that I owed the Army two years of compulsory service, and ready though reluctant to pay my debt to the country. Well, that’s corny, banners waving and bugles blowing and all that crap. But I
believed
in freedom, you see, I
believed
in the concept of self-government, and I recognized that a great nation
did
have responsibilities to the rest of the world, and I was committed to sharing those responsibilities. I knew my Army duty would be postponed so long as I kept up my grades at Yale and continued to be classified a student, but I knew that eventually I would have to serve, and whereas the idea was a pain in the ass, patriotism aside, I was nonetheless ready to do what had to be done.

In February 1965, I began to get confused.

I don’t think Dana had anything to do with my confusion, though perhaps she may have. She was a very opinionated beautiful young lady, and her contempt for President Johnson was something monumental. Like a lot of girls, she had accepted Kennedy as a sort of father-image with whom incest was not only thinkable but perfectly acceptable. And then, cut of all cuts, this positively groovy guy had been replaced by a real father-type who had a stern demeanor and a disapproving down-turned mouth, who wore eyeglasses when he read his speeches, who whooped it up with all the ladies at the inaugural ball, and who spoke in a lazy Texas way designed to alienate every kid on the eastern seaboard, if not the entire world. Dana’s favorite nickname for him was “Ole Flannel Mouth,” though she also began calling him “Loony Bins Johnson” shortly after the inauguration. In Lenny’s apartment one night, she performed for me a ten-minute argument between LBJ and his daughter, which ended with him shouting, “Well, I reckon
Ah’m
the Pres’dent, and y’all kin
not
have the automobile tonight!” When I told her that he was a good administrator who could goose Congress into giving us some much-needed legislation, Dana said, “Oh, crap, Wat,” and tacked another anti-Johnson Pfeiffer cartoon to Lenny’s Ban-the-Bomb screen, and then did a devastating take-off of Johnson collaring unsuspecting senators in the cloakroom and twisting their arms to vote for legislation on new bird sanctuaries, her imitation developing to the point where I’m positive it was slanderous (though I have to admit it was funny as hell, too.)

February got confusing.

I’m not trying to say that everything wasn’t pretty confusing to begin with. I had two roommates in Edwin McClellan Hall. One was named Alec Kupferman, and he was a spooky kid with a beard who hardly ever said a word to anyone, wandering around the campus and the room immersed in whatever private thoughts consumed him day and night. I don’t think he attended classes. He would appear like a sudden hallucination in the doorframe, and merely nod, and go to his bed, and put his hands behind his head and stare up at the ceiling. I felt very uneasy whenever he was around, which thank God was not too often. My other roommate was a winner, too. He was a kid named Abner Nurse from Salem, Massachusetts, who claimed that he was a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse who had been tried and hanged for a witch in 1692. I believed it. If ever there was a warlock in the world, it was Abner Nurse. He had red eyes. I swear to God, they were red. Not fire-engine red, of course, but a brown that was so close to orange it was red, especially when he sat at his desk late at night with the single lamp burning, probably reading up on evil potions and deadly brews from a witch book hidden behind his copy of
Playboy.
He had black hair that stuck up on his head in two spots,
exactly
like horns. I had never seen him naked, because he was very shy about taking showers when anybody else was around, but I think that’s because he had a long tail he kept tucked up inside his underwear. He changed his underwear every day. He always left his Jockey shorts in a corner of the room, like a neat little burial mound, until there was a week’s supply piled up there, and then he would pick them up and carry them down the hall to the john where he would hand-launder them as though they were dainty delicate unmentionables. I once heard him talking in his sleep, and what he said was “Hanna-Kribna” over and over again in rising cadence, which I’m sure was authentic Salem witch talk. When I caught him reading a rather personal letter from Dana to me, I told him I would bust him in the mouth if he ever did it again, and he rooted me to the spot with his red-eyed satanic gaze and shouted, “Descend in flames, turd!” and then laughed maniacally and stalked out of the room. I didn’t hit him because he was somewhat larger than I, measuring six feet four inches from the top of his head to the tips of his cloven hoofs, and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds in his Jockey shorts.

So the room situation at old Eli was somewhat confusing, as was the situation with The Rhinoplasticians (Jesus, I really
dug
that name!) because we were trying to develop a unique and original sound that was far-out and divorced from hard rock, but at the same time we knew we couldn’t get
too
experimental or we’d never get any jobs, and I needed the job-money to keep up the Providence apartment, but I couldn’t get to use the apartment if we played too
many
jobs, which we
wouldn’t
play if our sound got too shrill or unintelligible.

“Now
this
is what I call providence,” Dana said the first time we used the apartment, and then sat shyly on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, as demurely and expectantly as a bride. And though we had made love before, several times in the back of the station wagon and once in her bedroom on Park Avenue while Dr. Castelli and his wife were at the opening of
I Had a Ball,
this was in a sense the first time for us.

She studied me with a solemn brown-eyed look, as though aware that something memorable was about to happen, that we were
really
about to commit to each other here in Lenny Samalson’s apartment on Lenny Samalson’s bed, about to share an intimacy that would be infinitely more binding than our previous hurried and awkward couplings had been. She stared at me for several moments, as though trying to read on my face the knowledge that I, too, knew this was extremely important. And then she rose silently and fluidly from the bed and walked toward the john at the other end of the apartment, near the kitchen, and came back to me naked not five minutes later.