“Well,” Biff said, “you’re free, white and—twenty-two?”
“Three in October,” Sonny said.
“So now you seek your fortune.”
“I guess,” Sonny said. “Soon, anyway.”
“One generation riseth, and another generation passeth away.”
“Not you” Sonny said with some alarm, not wanting Biff to think of himself as old or passing.
Biff bit on his cigarette, making it tilt upward, like FDR. “Not yet,” he said.
“Naw,” said Sonny. “Hey, I liked your Speedway stuff.”
“Yeh? You go to the race this year?”
“No.”
“Mr. Vukovich did right nicely.”
Biff always called sports guys “Mister,” maybe because most other people called them by their first names even when they didn’t know them.
“I saw he did,” Sonny said.
Biff bent his head down and sipped at his coffee. He smacked his lips and said, “So, you ready to come to the paper and make a nice, dishonest living?”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t even know if they’d hire me. Regular.”
“Only trouble is those pinch-penny”—he looked in the front room, where Carolyn was doing some darning, and instead of saying the word with which he would have described the management, he paused, making the blank space, and continued—“probably won’t hire anyone new till one of our speed-graphic grandpas kicks off. We got enough deadwood around there to build a raft.”
“Well, it might be a long time,” Sonny said, “till there’s an opening.”
Biff shrugged. “Might. But we’re not the only paper in town. Not to say in the country. Ever think of getting out?”
“Well, I have been thinking about the GI Bill. I could get a masters in something.”
“Ah-ha! And Uncle Sam foots the bill.”
“Most of it, anyway.”
“What’re you waiting for? You could go to Chicago, New York, even Paris. Pick yourself up some free-lance work with the camera.”
“Well, I don’t know. You’d have to be awfully good, in a big city.”
“Phhhht. You’re young. Now’s the time.”
“Well, maybe.”
“Just remember, if you want to move up and out, don’t wait till it’s too late.” Biff tightened his lips on the cigarette and sucked in hard. “Take it from yours truly,” he said.
Sonny took a hot swallow of his coffee and asked, warily, “How do you mean?”
“The time to talk to the Big Boys is when you’re young. I waited till just a year ago. Went to New York and made the rounds. Showed ’em my stuff.”
“What happened?”
Biff made a kind of snort. “They patted me on the head and sent me back to the farm, where I belonged.”
“But how? How could they do that?”
“Easy.”
“But you’ve won prizes!”
“So’ve a lot of other hayseeds.”
Sonny hated hearing Biff talk that way about himself; it depressed him in an embarrassing way, like hearing your own father cry.
“Aw, come on,” Sonny said feebly.
“Them’s the facts,” Biff said. “The big city’s full of bright young men.”
“You’re not old.”
“Pressin’ forty.”
“That’s not too old.”
“It’s too late.”
Biff mashed out his cigarette, popped from his chair, and led Sonny down to the darkroom. He had some prints drying of some action stuff from an Indianapolis Indians game with the Toledo Mudhens.
“They’re great,” said Sonny.
“Minor league,” Biff said. “Triple A. Just short of the majors. That’s my league.”
“You shouldn’t say that.”
Biff didn’t answer, but started talking about what shutter speed he’d used to get the shot of a guy stealing home. Sonny tried to listen, but he wasn’t really hearing it. When they went back upstairs, Sonny said he had to be getting home, and Biff said he’d give him a lift. They didn’t talk on the way, and when Biff let Sonny off in front of his house, he pointed a finger at him and said, “Remember, you’re young. Now’s the time. You’re one of the special ones. You could really make it out, you could really get out of here. Don’t wait till it’s too late.”
Sonny nodded and turned away. There was something in Biff’s alert, lean face he had never seen before. It was like he’d turned sour.
Sonny went straight to his room and turned the record on, hoping to regain his high spirits. Seeing that sour part of Biff made him feel pretty low, and Biff saying he had the stuff to get out, to make it as a photographer in some big city, scared him more than it made him feel good. It meant he really had choices, which meant he might have to choose. And he didn’t know how.
He thought of other, less scary stuff to worry about. That morning, in the general mood of his effort at self-mastery, he had stunned his mother by accepting without any argument her plea that “just the three of us” go out and have supper at a nice restaurant. Ordinarily Sonny shied from any situation that put “just the three of us” together, alone—for it often seemed that their alleged family was lonelier in one another’s company than any other situation. They always seemed to get locked into straining silences and awkward formalities; a kind of embarrassed gloom would settle over them until, many times, tears would start to form in the corners of Mrs. Burns’ eyes and Sonny would frantically find some excuse to escape. Today, though, he wanted to face responsibility, to play his rightful part like a man. Besides that, he’d begun to feel guilty about always being so grumpy and farting off his mother all the time. He even began to feel that maybe she wasn’t much different from other mothers. Watching Gunner’s old lady go to pieces about the Jewish girl had somehow been a comfort to Sonny, made him realize he wasn’t the only guy whose mother got crazy. He sometimes wondered if perhaps there wasn’t something that happened to a woman’s head when she became a mother, like some of the screws getting loose up there. Maybe it was something they couldn’t even help.
Mrs. Burns came home a little after five and said she and Sonny were supposed to pick Mr. Burns up at work and they’d go on from there to the restaurant. She drove the church station wagon in her usual jolting style, but Sonny tried not to let it get on his nerves.
“I talked to Biff Barkely today,” Sonny said, which for him to volunteer to his mother was a regular gossip column of information.
“How nice! Did you talk about a job?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, no need to rush. You’re only young once.” She sighed and said, “It goes so fast. It’s gone before you know it.”
Sonny hated to hear his mother talk about her youth; it was one more treasure that was lost, like her shape, like his faith. It was actually hard for Sonny to imagine her being a young girl. The albums with snapshots of her wearing the bobbed hair and long beads and funny dresses of the flapper era seemed to him like pictures of another person. And yet she had been that person. He suddenly wondered if she had felt like a different person then, if she had been different on the inside as well as the outside in the days when she posed for those old, smiling pictures. He wanted to ask her about it, yet it was hard to put in words, the thing he meant.
“Do you still feel the same now as you did then?” he asked. “When you were young?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, do you feel like it’s still the same you, right now, that you are the same person as when you were a young girl?”
She coughed, and the car bumped to a halt at a stoplight. “Yes,” she said. “If I know what you mean. You mean, am I the same inside, only older on the outside?”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s it.”
“Yes. That’s why it’s so hard to look in a mirror. You are looking at yourself, but you don’t recognize yourself. It’s a shock. The person you see is older, and heavier, and has wrinkles. But you don’t feel
that way inside, and it’s hard to believe that’s how you really look now, how other people see you.”
“It must be very hard.”
“Sonny? I tell you. It’s the hardest thing in the world.”
It was something that Sonny had never really thought about before, and he felt a sudden, sharp sympathy for his mother, not as “his mother” but as Alma, a person, a woman who was growing old. He looked away from her, out the window, at the stores on Broad Ripple Avenue. Hardware. Five and Ten. Drugs. And there was nothing in the stores, nothing in any of the stores, that would help. There was nothing you could buy that would help; no monkey wrench from the hardware store, no toys from the Five and Ten, not even any drugs from the drugstore that could change anything, really. Maybe just looking at the things, though, and buying a few of them now and then helped take your mind off the thing that you couldn’t change at all, which was that you were getting old, that very moment, everyone everywhere, turning into the person who would finally die and not be a person at all, no matter how hard that was to believe. Sonny knew it was true of his own mother; she had said it in a way, and he could see it. He was sorry, and yet it didn’t really make him sad down deep, because he couldn’t really believe it was happening to him, too. He believed it in his head, but not in his feelings inside. Even when he tried to grasp the fact, he felt that it wouldn’t be happening to him for so long that by the time it did he wouldn’t really care, it wouldn’t matter very much. Of course, maybe his mother had felt that way too once, back when she lived in the snapshots before they got curly and yellow.
Mr. Burns was waiting for them on the sidewalk outside his office, and he insisted on getting in the back, leaving Sonny up front with Mrs. Burns.
“Have a good day, folks?” he asked.
“Mmmm,” Sonny murmured.
“So-so,” Mrs. Burns said. “How about you?”
“Just fine.”
Any day that went along pretty much as it should, without any major upset or unexpected catastrophe, was just fine with Sonny’s father. Somewhere along the line, some years back, Mr. Burns seemed to have turned his emotions down to low, like the barest flame you could get on a gas burner before it went out altogether. That way you didn’t feel much, one way or the other; the decrease of joy was maybe compensated by the decrease of pain. It was a kind of bargain you made; a pact with neither God nor the Devil but some gray, purgatorial mediator who fixed your spirit with Novocain.
“Where we going?” Sonny asked.
His mother was driving far north on Meridian, and he couldn’t think of any restaurants out that way.
“We’re going someplace first, before we eat,” Mrs. Burns said.
“Where?”
Sonny’s father reached from the back and patted him on the shoulder, smiling mysteriously. “You’ll see,” he said.
“It’s a surprise,” Mrs. Burns said.
Sonny was afraid of that. He started chewing at his thumb.
“Sonny,” his mother said. “Your thumb.”
He took his thumb away and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.
The car turned off Meridian onto a dirt road, and they were in a flat, scrubby area with most of the trees cut down. A big white wooden sign said in flourishing scroll letters:
Rolling Hills Estates
For gracious modern living.
E. T. Garnisch, contractor
There was no hill, rolling or otherwise, as far as the eye could see. The goddamn place was flat as a pancake. There was a series of dirt roads laid out, like a grid, and wooden stakes that evidently indicated the subdivision of the lots. The pretend streets all had little street signs, wooden ones with hand-painted names. They turned on one that said “Wildbrook Lane.” There wasn’t any brook, but maybe there would be later. It would be easier to make a brook than a rolling hill.
Sonny wondered if his parents were about to go through the awful agony of housebuilding again, perhaps this time constructing a special wing on the place to serve as a bachelor suite, with personal den and private entrance. Then Sonny would be ungrateful as hell not to live in it after they had gone to all that trouble and expense. His mother was always mentioning Randolph Marbury, a nice, very shy fellow who worked at the Medallion Men’s Wear on 38th Street and helped Mrs. Burns pick out presents for Sonny. The thing that his mother found so marvelous about Randolph Marbury was that even though he was thirty-something years old he still lived with his parents and claimed to be crazy about the arrangement. Randolph was always telling Mrs. Burns stuff like “Alma, I know some people think I’m funny or something, but I love my parents and I don’t see why I shouldn’t live with the people I love.” Mrs. Burns would report Randolph’s sentiments and add her own comment, such as “Personally, I think it’s a wonderful thing for someone to love his parents and not be ashamed of it.” Sonny would make a noncommittal grunt, understanding all too clearly the moral of the story.
Mrs. Burns stopped the car and said, “Well, here we are.” They all got out and stood on the edge of an empty field, staring into the distance. There wasn’t any grass in the field, just dirt and weeds.
“You tell him,” Mrs. Burns said. “You tell him what it is.”
Mr. Burns cleared his throat. “It’s your lot, Sonny,” he said.
Sonny looked at him blankly. “My lot?”
“We had a little something saved up,” Mr. Burns said, “and we bought you this lot. Someday, when you’re ready to build, you’ll already have the lot.”
“We know you won’t be our little boy forever,” Mrs. Burns said, forcing a smile that looked like someone was choking her. “Someday, sooner or later, you’ll find the right girl, and you’ll settle down. We want to help all we can, but of course we don’t want to interfere. Do we, El?”
“Lord, no,” Mr. Burns said.
“We just want to help. We manage to save a little now and then, and we get more pleasure out of doing a little something for you than we would for ourselves. We only want your happiness, isn’t that right, El?”
“Lord, yes.”
Sonny wished desperately that they wanted something else; it would make it easier for him to breathe.
“That’s what we live for,” his mother said. “Your happiness.”
He couldn’t look at them and he wanted to start running over the grubby fields, into the woods, as far as possible. The silence was smothering, and Sonny felt like screaming, but instead he said, “Well, thanks. Thanks very much.”
Mr. Burns tentatively put a hand on his shoulder, which was the sort of thing a father should probably do at such a time. “Well, it’s your lot,” he said.
Sonny looked out on the flat, dusty stretch of land and said to himself, This is my lot. My lot in life.
Far off, beyond a scruffy stretch of woodland, the sun collided with the flat horizon and began to bleed.
5
There was going to be a party of some art-student friends of Marty on Saturday night, and Gunner fixed it so Sonny could come, too. Sonny was really excited about it, figuring something might happen that would open up new possibilities for him, serve as an entry into real life. The problem was Gunner said he could either come alone or bring a girl, and Sonny couldn’t decide whether or not he should take Buddie Porter. Taking her might be best because it would show the other girls there that he could get a girl if he wanted, that he wasn’t some poor shlunk who couldn’t get a date for Saturday night. On the other hand, there might be some fabulous girl at the party who he’d see across a crowded room and know was for him, and they’d madly embrace and live happily ever after. In that case Buddie would just be in the way, and he’d wish he hadn’t taken her.
The more Sonny thought about the idea of a girl art student, the more aroused he got. He pictured her as having long, flowing hair and a very thin, bony body fitted out in black leotards. This girl would probably believe in free love and scoff at all convention. She might have studied in Paris and learned a lot of things there—not just thing
s about art. The more he thought about the imaginary girl, the less he wanted to be saddled with Buddie, and even though he’d made a date with her for Saturday night, he called and explained he had to go to a party but wasn’t allowed to take anyone. He said the party was being held in a very small house and there just wouldn’t be room for one more person. Buddie said that was all right, she understood. She always understood. It annoyed the hell out of Sonny.
It was hard to figure what to wear to the party, especially since Sonny didn’t know the people, but he knew they would be artistic and therefore different. He wanted, as always, to fit in and be approved of by everyone, but it was extra hard to do that if you were trying to fit in with people who didn’t want to fit in themselves. If he knew they would all wear gunnysacks, he would gladly have gone out and got him a gunnysack. But he didn’t know at all, and that was the worst thing. Finally he settled on his summer seersucker suit, which was pretty plain and neutral, but he wore with it his old white bucks, for a casual touch, and an orange, satiny sport shirt for dash and color. The shirt wasn’t really like him, which is why he’d bought it, hoping to add a little flavor to himself. The satiny material had some sort of electric quality about it and kept sticking to his skin in different places. The arms were way too long, and he had to keep nipping at the sleeves to keep the cuffs from bagging down over his wrists almost to his knuckles. It was especially hard to keep nipping up the sleeves when you had a coat on. You had to reach your hand in under the coat and tug up the shirt from around the shoulder. Keeping the sleeves up that way under a coat made it look like Sonny had some kind of terrible itch that he couldn’t lay off of. Still, it was the only shirt he had that was kind of flashy, and he settled on wearing it.
He got all dressed and splashed some Old Spice on him right after supper, but the party didn’t begin till nine, and he didn’t want to just hang around the house and let his mother try to sniff out a lot of information from him about where he was going and who he was going with and why he wasn’t taking Buddie. He closed the door to his room and played Victory at Sea over once to get in the right mood of confidence and positive thinking, and then he got the keys to his father’s car and took off.
Going All the Way Page 17