An Unfinished Season (2 page)

That's good, Wils.

That's very good.

But I wish you didn't spend all your life with books.

There's more to life than homework.

Book-smart's one thing. Nothing wrong with book-smart. But books only take you so far when you're in a jam.

After this interval my mother would comment on the events of her day, a trip to the hairdresser's and a call from her father (they spoke nearly every day), an invitation to dinner on the weekend, harmless gossip concerning the so-and-sos who wanted
very badly
to join the club, but perhaps not this year. There were so many new members now it was hard to keep them straight, their names and the names of their children, and what he did. Where do they come from anyhow?

My mother sat on the davenport and my father in the leather chair, the one with the reading lamp and the footstool, a Munnings sporting print on the wall behind him, the phonograph playing softly, usually Benny Goodman or Eddy Duchin. My father was irritable most nights and his irritability increased with the second cocktail, overflowing when I entered the room. He was disappointed in my refusal to participate in team sports, football in the fall, ice hockey in the winter, and baseball in the spring. He believed in team sports, so important in building lasting friendships. Team play was what made America the great country that it was, cooperation and teamwork, teamwork and team spirit, a common effort leading always to success. You played as a team for the team, a philosophy that endured for a lifetime. You couldn't run a business without teamwork, focusing always on
product.
Do you want to be a loner your whole life? Teamwork built character. Wars were won on the playing fields of youth, he said; and when I replied that the expression was English and the word was “Eton” and it hadn't helped them much in World War One—my history instructor had assigned an essay on Siegfried Sassoon's
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
and I was caught up with the futility of life in the trenches of the Somme, a melancholy hopelessness that was attractive to a nineteen-year-old living on the grounds of a golf club north of Chicago—my father told me not to get fresh with
him,
that I didn't know the score and would never know the score without knowing teamwork. Teamwork and team spirit and hard knocks that led to lasting friendships and success in the world generally.

And as I recall, he said, the English won the war.

Not according to Sassoon, I muttered, not quite loud enough for him to hear.

With the help of Pershing and the Americans, my father added. God damn Europeans never could've done it alone.

My mother said mildly, Now, Teddy, that's harsh. Everyone has to find their own way. Not everyone—and here she smiled fractionally as Eddy Duchin ran off a silky riff—has a taste for the locker room, as you do. Wils is a fine Student. Can't we let it go at that? It's not his fault—

It's not good to be a loner, my father said.

Wils was out for
a year,
my mother said. Hard knocks enough for anyone, she said slyly, nodding at me. I had had a mysterious illness in the eighth grade, diagnosed first as scarlet fever, then as pneumonia. Finally the doctors admitted they didn't know what it was but that I probably wouldn't die of it. Meanwhile, I was bedridden with a high fever and hallucinations that accompanied the fever. My legs ached. I lost weight and lay for days in a kind of dreamless torpor. From my hospital window I watched the crowns of the trees change color, the leaves brittling, vanishing one by one; and then they were gone. I was uncomfortably aware of my own body, my skin slack, the muscles made of putty. I had the idea that my body was betraying me, and that I was divided against myself. During the worst of it my parents would appear at my bedside, their faces huge and indistinct; they would murmur something and go away. They stood in the doorway with the doctor, talking in whispers, and my mother would cover her eyes and go into the corridor while my father and the doctor talked man-to-man, the doctor's hand on my father's shoulder while he made his explanations. I was in the hospital for six weeks, then quarantined at home in bed for four months. I devoted myself to books and jazz music on the phonograph, except in the afternoon when I listened to soap opera on the radio, the backstage wife and the woman who was married to the richest and most handsome lord in England, though these romantic deep-voiced men rarely made an appearance. The backstage wife and the lord's lady led turbulent emotional lives in which housework did not figure, so there was time to solve the many misunderstandings that plagued the household. Illness was often present and toward dusk it was with relief that I turned to
Terry and the Pirates
and the other thrillers. I discovered that no one wanted to be around a sick person, and not only for fear of contagion. Something medieval about it, an evil spirit that could leap from one body to another without warning. When the quarantine was lifted, my friends would come to visit and never knew what to say to me except that I was different somehow, and hard to reach. What was it like in the hospital? What do they do to you there? We lived in different worlds. I began to think of my sick year as a vanished year, and the next year my friends were in the ninth grade and I was a year behind. I had learned that I did not mind being by myself, even if my self was divided. My hearing became acute, the smallest sound or the whisper of a conversation audible to me as I lay in my bed. My father thought my contentment unnatural, and let me know it.

Loners lose, he said.

Teddy, my mother said, her voice rising an octave.

A father can speak his mind to his own son, he said.

Wils was
sick,
my mother said again.

And now he's well, my father said.

When she retired to the kitchen to see about dinner, my father turned to the evening news. This was the month Hollywood personalities were testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Communist influence in the entertainment industry. The enemy within, it was called. Quarterday was on the margins of effective television reception from Chicago, so the picture was erratic, the screen mottled with visual static, “snow,” so that Chairman Velde and his committee appeared as phantoms. The witness was a phantom, too, an actor unknown to me but very well known to the prewar American Communist underground; he had since left the party but was happy to name colleagues he had seen at meetings. The quality of the sound began to fail, the hearing suddenly a flickering pantomime; and then Chairman Velde's gavel crashed and the screen went black for a moment. My father nursed his drink while he listened to the news and then, in a gesture of reconciliation, asked me if I wanted a beer. I drank a glass of Pabst while he sat hunched in his leather chair, his eyes half shut, watching the pantomime. The line of muscles in his jaw worked to and fro, and all the while he was muttering, mostly to himself but partly to me, “Bastards ... lowlifes.” Artists, they called themselves, but they had no loyalties, not to their art, not to their country, not even to each other. They called themselves intellectuals but they'd sell their mothers for a dime and a film credit. Listen to them, he said, they talk like politicians, up one side and down the other. They did not have respect for a committee of the Congress going about its lawful business. It was alien influence, an unwholesome, un-American influence. The country was in a hell of a mess, altogether better off if both coasts were amputated and allowed to drift away, the East in the direction of Soviet Russia and the West to Red China, allowing the heartland to manage its own affairs.

Then I wouldn't be in the fix I'm in, my father said.

 

At dinner that night I asked my father if Tom Felsen intended to run for the legislature this election or wait for the next. And if he ran, would he make a good candidate? Tom's sound, my father replied. A small-government man, all for a balanced budget and lower taxes, a practical approach to things. Whether he's a good campaigner, we'll have to wait and see. Probably it won't matter because he knows where the bodies are buried. Obviously he has the sheriff's department behind him, so he begins with a solid base. Deputies know how to get out the vote. That's why they're deputies, he added with a smile. But he's a good friend. I'll support him.

He's been a good friend to you, my mother said.

He's gone above and beyond the call. Tom's staunch. He's the man to have on our side.

Loyal, my mother said.

You don't want him on your wrong side.

Why not? I asked.

My father paused before answering, and when he did he lowered his voice as if he feared being overheard. Tom can be—rough, he said. Tom's no-nonsense. Tom flies into the boards with his stick high.

My mother raised her eyebrows and looked at me. She said, Your father says that Tom Felsen keeps the lid on.

He nodded. There's an unsavory element here, like everywhere else. Tom keeps things in check. He's broken the rules, that's for sure.

Rules? I said.

Whatever do you mean? my mother asked.

My father had grown expansive, enjoying the story. He pushed his chair back from the table and grinned as one does when disclosing an unsettling secret. He said, Tom knows their plans. The how and the when and the where. And when my mother looked at him strangely, my father steepled his fingers and looked across the table to the wall opposite, a hunting scene from the eighteenth century, supercilious Frenchmen in plumed hats accompanied by wolfhounds, chasing a stag through a country park, the scene repeated every few yards around the room. The glass chandelier cast little broken shards of light; and at the kitchen door, the Frenchmen, the wolfhounds, and the stag vanished.

He listens in to them, my father said at last.

Listens in?

We can talk about it later, he said.

There's cake in the kitchen, my mother said to me.

Cut a slice for me, too, my father said with a bemused smile. He continued to stare at the French dandies on horseback, waiting while I rose from the table and retreated to the kitchen, where he mistakenly believed I was out of earshot.

Tom's tapped their phones, he said.

Oh, dear, my mother said.

So he listens in. And shares the information.

With you, she said.

With me, he replied. I think he has some help. Someone at the FBI owes him a favor. He's listening to them day and night, two deputies on the phones full-time. Calls between the national headquarters and the local here. Pretty rough stuff, what they say to each other. My father paused there and lowered his voice. If I could find a way to split them, to make our boys see that the national's just a bunch of left-wing troublemakers, don't have their best interests at heart, well, then, this strike would be over in a week. My father paused again and I imagined him staring across the table at the Frenchmen on their high-stepping horses and wondering what they were doing in his dining room. He said, The national sees my business as a test case. Win here, they win everywhere. They're dug in for the duration. As long as it takes. They're cocky as hell. They think I'll throw in the towel, just give them whatever they damn want on a silver platter, same's Roosevelt did at Yalta. That bastard Hiss. Same thing exactly. So it'll go on for a while.

I returned with two plates of cake.

My father said, Did you hear any of that?

Some, I said. Not much.

Forget what you heard.

I heard you say it'll go on for a while.

It will, he said. How long's hard to say. As long as it takes. As long as they have their strike fund. And if their morale doesn't crack. You know the secret weapon, when you're management and there's a strike? It's the women. Mama goes a few months pinching pennies for groceries, the old man hanging around the house drinking beer and bitching because the kids're crying and there's dirty laundry everywhere and he's gone most evenings to a union meeting and comes back smelling of more beer. Drives the women crazy, their husbands underfoot all day long. So they'll settle eventually. They'll settle because their wives'll make them settle.

I couldn't stand you around the house all day long, my mother said.

No chance of that, my father said. I'll never retire. And when you own the company, you don't go on strike.

I said tentatively, Are you worried?

He moved his head, neither yes nor no. He was picking at a slice of chocolate cake, edging it around the plate as if it were a hockey puck, apparently thinking through the answer to my question. Then he looked up suddenly, rising from the table and striding into the den, where he stood rigidly at the French doors leading to the terrace. He was looking across the terrace to the pond and the fairway beyond the pond and the green, rising in the moonlight. I thought I saw something, he said. Something moving. He flicked the switch that illuminated the arc lights in the trees surrounding the pond. Then he switched them off and darkness returned.

He said, You can't be too careful.

Maybe when this is over we can take a trip, my mother said.

No one wins a strike, my father said.

A second honeymoon, my mother went on. She had a dreamy look, staring fondly at my father. The Caribbean, Havana. One of the boats that leaves from New Orleans. We could spend a day or two in New Orleans, dinner at Antoine's—

That's what gets lost sight of, my father said.

—and then a week in Havana. We could go from Havana to Curaçao. Dancing every night with an orchestra, black tie. Teddy, it would be such fun. Get away from this for a while. It's been such a long time for us, a vacation.

All that production lost, you never make it up. Wages lost, revenues lost because your customers don't think they can depend on you to deliver. Rumors everywhere, none of them to your advantage. Teddy Ravan's bust, his firm's down the drain, you can't count on Teddy. So your customers begin to trade with the competition, and your competition is only too happy to oblige. It's business after all. The business has to go somewhere. These idiots talk about class solidarity but there is no class solidarity, on my side or their side, either. And you and the people who work for you are divided, suddenly on opposite sides of the ring, gloves off, no referee. Loyalty vanishes, and men you've known for years, you know the names of their wives and their children, they turn their backs because they see you as their enemy. The atmosphere's poisoned, and some mornings you just hate to go to work. The bad blood can last for a generation.