America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  “Go back,” she whispered hoarsely. “Do you want her to fly away?”

  “But you don’t understand—” I began.

  “Will you keep your voice down,” she said hoarsely. “Do you know what that is? The club will never believe me. If I don’t get a picture of her I’ll kill you.”

  Yes, we have had bird watchers—lots of them. You see, our whooping crane can be sighted from a long way off. After a time they discovered the nature of the thing, but they would not listen to my explanation of the ruse. In fact, they became angry; not at the ospreys, where the blame rests—but at me.

  As I write, it is autumn of 1956 and from the coldness and the growing winds, an early winter and a cold one is indicated. I have taken my whooping crane down and restored the nest to its old beauty. When the spring comes again—we shall see what we shall see. No one can say that I am unforgiving. The nest is ready and waiting. Let us see whether the ospreys are big enough to let bygones be bygones.

  My wife says that if she has to go through another year like this she will—no, I won’t tell you what she says. Sometimes her sense of humor seems a little strained.

  Conversation at Sag Harbor

  The north wind doth blow,

  And we shall have snow,

  And what will the robin do then—

  Pore thang!

  He sit in the barn,

  To keep himself warn,

  And put his head under his wang—

  Pore thang!

  I DO NOT SUBSCRIBE to Togetherness, which seems to me to foster active dislike between American parents and their children. A father being a pal to his son not only is nonsense but can be dangerous. Father and son are natural enemies and each is happier and more secure in keeping it that way.

  My friend Jack Ratcliff has reduced the problem to two sentences. “If you can catch them, hit them,” he says. “If you can’t catch them, bribe them.”

  My two sons understand and admire the principle of Apartness, and this being so, we sometimes take an exclusively masculine trip during their spring vacation in March, the coldest, meanest and most treacherous part of the winter.

  My boys were thirteen and fifteen years old. They had all the faults and some of the virtues of their ages. They are inmates of separate boarding schools, and although well equipped in delinquency, neither of them has so far made the pokey, but they have been close.

  Last year we decided to go to Sag Harbor, near the end of Long Island. Ours is no attempt to be pals but rather for each side to spy out and neutralize the changing weapons of the other. I have a warm and cozy little fishing cottage there, set on a point of land that extends into a protected bay. Going alone permits us to eat, talk and act in ways that would not be possible under the civilizing influence of femininity—in other words to be slobs.

  It was very cold, the longest cold spell of any recorded March. The hundred-mile highway from New York was high-walled on either side with snow tossed up by the plows, but snow doesn’t bother us much. My vintage station wagon wears snow tires from November until May. We were a traveling nightmare—the car radio yowled and the boys tapped their feet, patted rhythm with their hands, squirmed and occasionally threw a secret punch at each other. I’ll be glad when they are old enough to drive and I can sit back and criticize. “Watch out! You’re going too fast! For God’s sake don’t pass on the right!”—that kind of thing.

  At exactly halfway we stopped at a big silver diner. They loaded the jukebox and each boy had three hamburgers and a bottle of Coke. For dessert one had chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce, and the other vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Their main problem seems to be getting from one meal to the next without starving to death. While I paid the bill, they bought candy bars to tide them over until dinnertime.

  Back in the car they were a little sluggish and conversational, too sluggish to squirm. In honor of the occasion we took new names. This does for us what a new hairdo or a flowered hat does for a woman. My oldest son became The Tingler, and the younger The Fly, a character from another horror picture. I kept my old calypso name, Insidestraight, which was awarded me in Trinidad.

  We passed a few guarded remarks—weather, how we felt, how good it was to be together—not really fighting, just feinting and getting the range but enough for me to relearn the always amazing fact that in the short time since I had seen them at Christmas they were changed, grown, enlarged.

  The Fly has become arrogant—an arbiter of manners, clothes and ideas, and his standard is strict. He described many persons, ideas and things as corny, square or sentimental.

  I threw a sneak punch. “The only people I know who are afraid of being corny or sentimental are adolescents and second-raters. Homer wasn’t afraid of it. Neither was Shakespeare. And can you think of a cornier character than Albert Einstein?” I don’t think I got over.

  “It’s a sign of insecurity,” said The Tingler. And lest you think this profound, I must explain that just as The Fly uses “corny” and “square,” The Tingler substitutes “insecure” for the same qualities. The boys were a little edgy. They knew the infighting was to come.

  It was evening when we got to Discove Point and the sun was bleeding into the clouds over the hills to the south of Great Peconic Bay. The Point was deep-drifted. We had to shovel out a road to get the car in the garage. Our own bay was frozen over with only tide channels of open water. The huge oak trees on the Point were black against the whiteness of the snow and the steel blue of the ice. Our little shingled cottage with its good oil furnace was lovely and warm and immaculate. At least it was clean when we arrived. We lighted the water heater and loaded the refrigerator with the exotic and indigestible foods we had brought from town.

  Then it was night and the beauty thing was the full moon, white and serene and lonely. The ridged ice of the bay was piled in high wreckage along the shores where the tides had thrust it. The plumed stalks of the pampas grass whispered wonderfully in the night wind. On the frozen surface of the bay the seagulls in congress assembled stood like hunch-backed old men, beaks into the wind to keep their feathers down. In the open water of the tide race the wild ducks gabbled, shovelers in transit now, competing with the mallards which never leave us. A blue heron lives on our shore, a friend and neighbor named Poor Harry. He stood on one leg, his head scrunched down, his long sword of a beak hidden in his breast feathers. Because he stands upright, he turns his back to the wind to keep his feathers down, a pitiful, doleful-looking bird. In the sterling silver of the moon-white night, the ice cricked and rustled on the falling tide. And O, the limbs of the oaks were as black against the sky as those Sung paintings in ink made from fir smoke and the glue from wild asses’ hides. Jack pines were yellowy from the cold, and the naked grape vines hung like ragged spiderwebs on the white walls of the garage. Far away, almost like Aurora Borealis, the winking town lights of Sag Harbor put up a dome of glow.

  Most of the houses in sight were closed up for the winter. We walked about on the Point, our feet crunching through the crusted snow, and it was a joy to see the lights of the cottage, and to smell the pine smoke of the new-built fire.

  The Fly is a hot trumpet boy. He roared up the phonograph, and with head thrown back and glazed eyes, he sat in and belted out riffs with some of the best sidemen in the business.

  Tingler unpacked his drawing board. We are designing a catamaran entirely new in principle and method which will undoubtedly make our fortune, and we can use it—a fortune, I mean.

  Best not to describe our dinner. Strong and competent women have been known to flag and fail at our menus. We finished, however, with our spécialité de la maison, known as pousse capudding, a handsome dessert made by pouring every known kind of do-it-yourself pudding in layers, black, white, pink, yellow, green.

  The Fly was a good hour away from his trumpet. He cooked the dinner and he cannot play while eating. Pudding gums up the valves. He took his ease while The Tingler and I cleaned the kitchen—not the dishes, the wh
ole bloody kitchen. The Fly had prepared his Sag Harbor mignon, which puts up a mushroom cloud of real mushrooms and has a fallout of hamburger particles.

  The Tingler is in what has been called his God and Girl Period. Sometimes he can’t tell them apart. I remember it myself, a kind of half-strangling sensation and sudden urges to laugh or weep and an outer layer of utter cynicism for show.

  I asked, “How’s the girl situation?”

  “Just the same,” he said. “You’ve either got too many or none at all. I don’t know which is worse. Makes you insecure.”

  “And it won’t get any better,” I reassured him.

  “I wish I didn’t love them so much,” he said, “ ’cause I hate ’em.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t invent them. Look, I know I didn’t get all the grease off those plates, but you might do me the honor of wiping it off. How’s your religion? Still aiming to be a Catholic?”

  “I’m an atheist,” he said.

  “That’s a hard religion to live up to. Better leave yourself an escape hatch for walking under ladders and wishing on the new moon.”

  “I don’t believe in anything,” he said fiercely.

  “Hallelujah! What’s her name?”

  “Helen.”

  “A brute, eh?”

  “A bitch,” said The Tingler.

  “Shall we join The Fly? At least he believes in C-sharp minor.”

  “He’s just a kid,” said The Tingler.

  He was watching a newborn fly, his namesake, crawling heavily up the new-warmed windowpane. “Say,” he asked, “how much does it cost an hour to fly a jet 707?”

  “I don’t know. Pretty much, I guess. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  Then I heard the sound too—the droning cry of a flight of jets from an airfield not far away. We went outside to look for them and they flew across the white face of the moon. Then they crashed the barrier with a sound that always makes me think the furnace has exploded. In our shirt-sleeves the cold air bit deep and raised goose bumps on our arms, so that we went inside again.

  The Fly asked, “Why are they pouring the heat on those poor disk jockeys?”

  “Payola,” I said.

  “Plugola,” The Tingler said.

  “What’s wrong with it?” The Fly demanded. “He plays records and maybe somebody gives him a buck. Is it against the law?”

  I put on my fatherly-logic-and-reason tone. How they must hate it. “I don’t know whether it’s against the law or not, but it is said to be immoral.”

  Tingler explained to his brother, whom he considers a little kid and probably always will. “You see, people buy what they hear. It’s not what’s good but what gets played. The DJ’s play the ones they get paid to play. They say some of the jocks own part of the recording companies. They spin their own cookies.”

  You can see how valuable these outings are in the matter of language.

  The Fly fixed us with a glittering self-righteous eye. (I might mention here that neither of my kids has ever made or brought home an honest or a dishonest dime.) “Those Eisenhower kids got a vacation in Puerto Rico,” said The Fly. “They went in an Air Force jet 707.”

  “Jealous?” I asked.

  “Sure I am. What did it cost the taxpayer?”

  “What do you care?” I said. “You don’t pay any taxes.”

  Then an uneasy silence fell on that pleasant room. I could feel the boys brace themselves against the usual lecture, or at least prepare not to listen. I’d been thinking about it for a good time, and I let the silence ride.

  “Well, I guess we might as well get to it,” I said at last.

  The boys exchanged a glance that said, “Oh, brother, here it comes.”

  “I have prepared a few remarks,” I began.

  The Fly looked as though he had bitten down on a No. 5 shot in a piece of wild goose. Tingler put on the earnest and Oriental look that means he is courteously not listening.

  “At intervals, it becomes my duty, through the accident of being your father, to give you what for.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said in unison, the rotters.

  “I have in hand the reports of your teachers and masters, who urge me to influence you. You, Tingler, have done a little better in school but not nearly well enough. You, Fly, are a scholastic disgrace. Not only have you done little or no work, you have engaged in a contest of wills with a master and caused pain and anxiety. Are these facts correct?”

  “Yes, sir”—synchronized.

  “Have you excuses?”

  “Yes, sir. We mean, no, sir.”

  “Have I not given you good and fatherly advice in letters and in speech?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you believe what I’ve told you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you continue your lives of sin and gold bricking.”

  “It creeps up on you,” said The Fly.

  “I’m at my wits’ end,” I said. “And I mean that literally. I’ve told you all I know and it isn’t much but you’ve had it.”

  I paused for answer, but the sons of guns know when to keep still. The room was silent and then from far off—a gunshot.

  “Somebody shooting ducks with a flashlight,” Tingler observed.

  “All right—all right. Don’t change the subject or the mood. After much thought I am prepared to do something painful, something drastic.”

  Both boys looked at the floor. They were trying to look pitiful, humble and respectful waiting for the blow to fall. I have a feeling they weren’t very scared. “Yes, sir.”

  “I am going to give you your freedom.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m getting off your back.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean no more lectures, no more come-uppances. You are crowding manhood and you’ll have to take some of the pain. You are free.”

  “How do you mean free?”

  “I’ll tell you. If you get a good grade, it’s your grade. If you fail, it’s your failure. That’s what freedom means and it’s awful.” I think for the moment I had caught their attention.

  “What’s awful about it?” The Fly asked.

  “I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to find it out yourselves. Freedom is the worst slavery of all. No boss to cheat, no teacher to fool. No excuses that work. And nobody to bitch to.”

  “Do you mean it? About—getting off—our backs?”

  “I mean it, all right. It’s a lonely feeling, isn’t it?”

  I could feel their dishonest little minds scurrying about looking for a trick, and I answered their thoughts.

  “It’s not a trick,” I said. “Of course if you get in trouble beyond your control, I’ll stand by. But I want no more details. That part of your lives is over.”

  Tingler said, “I’ll bet the masters won’t go for that.”

  “No, of course they won’t. Neither will the cop, neither will the judge if you come before him. But that’s your business. Being a man is a good thing, maybe the best, but a man has to do his own time, take his own rap, be his own man.”

  “Yes,” said Fly, “but how about all those people on the couch, or the drunks?”

  “They’re sick or they’re children but they aren’t men. I think the lecture is over; I think it’s over for good. I’ve taught you everything I know. From now on we can only discuss.”

  I could hear them let out their breaths like a slow leak in a tire. “Let’s put on coats and go for a walk,” I said. “The moon is beautiful.”

  The outside was crisp and crusted as a pie. We heard the ice crackling around the piles of our small pier as the tide changed level. Just above the high-water mark in the thick pampas grass a colony of muskrats live, nice secret little creatures, so silent and quick that we had not been able to see one up close. Someone had told us that muskrats love parsnips. We set one of those Havahart wire traps baited with parsnips by the burrows in the pampas grass. The trap doesn’t hurt an animal. We plann
ed to look at a customer for a little while and then turn him loose. We also have a pair of otters on our shore, but they are much harder to catch.

  The Fly took his trumpet to the end of the pier. He keeps the mouthpiece warm in his breast pocket. He blew taps to break the hearts of neighbors two miles away, and then to prove his virtuosity he did it again, three times in different keys. If he would give the attention to his school work that he lavishes on his trumpet, he would be in Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study right now.

  Hopelessly, whitely beautiful as was the night and sweet and bitter the wind and attractive the conversation of the mallards, we got blue with cold and our ears felt like wounds. We rushed back to the warm house and played the whole album of the Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall. The only difference was that we played it much louder than the original could possibly have been. I drank a beer and the kids made a horrid mixture of chocolate that poured like fudge. Then we went to bed, half praying for a snowstorm. The Point is wonderful when the good snow blows over it riding the wind like a horse.

  (Note 1—Must winter-spray my fruit trees tomorrow if possible.)

  (Note 2—Take lawn mower to town to be repaired against the time when we will have a lawn.)

  (Note 3—Stay off their backs.)

  We slept sweetly and long.

  The morning was sharp and clean as a blade. Even the tide channels were crusted over with ice. Tingler cooked a fine breakfast. He will make a late-sleeping woman very happy some day. He’s a good cook because he loves to eat. The Fly doesn’t give a damn. He’d eat his socks if not reminded.

  Coffee time is a good time and one to prolong, sitting in the little glassed-in porch with the sun pouring in, just staring at the distant hills furry with leafless trees. I swear they seemed to be changing toward green already. I always think so even when I know it isn’t true. The crested bluejays worked away at the seed-and-suet cake in a basket on the tree outside the window. A herd of brownish birds fed like sheep on the bare place that will be a lawn later in the year. Wonder what they find to eat? Wonder what kind of birds they are? I look them up every year and then forget.