An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

  Son, he said. Go next door. Call Tom Felsen. Tell him to come here. The hospital, my mother said.

  Will you do that, son?

  Yes, I said.

  You’re shot, my mother said.

  I’m not shot, he said. I’m cut.

  We could all have been killed, she said.

  Flying glass, he said.

  We could all have been killed, she said in her clarinet voice.

  Call Tom now, my father said to me.

  You’re bleeding, my mother said.

  He raised his arm to look at his wounds, the ones on his forearm, and then he noticed his hand, blood rising from his fingers. A shard of glass was lodged in the skin at the base of his thumb, and as we watched he deftly plucked it out, looked at it, and dropped it on the floor where he ground it under his heel. The lips of the wound gaped white and red. When he looked at it with his slow smile, I smiled with him; and he looked at me and winked.

  We’ll go now, my mother said. You must have your hand seen to.

  It wasn’t gunshot, my father said. They weren’t armed except for that, he said, pointing to the brick at his feet. They threw a brick through the window when I answered the telephone. I never should have done it. They were waiting for me to do it. Watching me through the window—that was their signal. He turned to my mother, standing impatiently at his side. They’re just cuts, nothing more. I don’t need a doctor. I need a Band-Aid. It’s not a question of anyone being shot, Jo.

  It’s raining, he added.

  Your arms are cut, my mother said.

  Yes, they are, my father said, and reached down to pick up the brick, hefting it in his hand. He said, I never believed they’d do something like this. Never believed it in the world. Tom warned me—

  What do you think? my mother demanded. They’d do anything given half a chance, the threats they’ve made. Why did you think they wouldn’t act? They told you they would. My God, Teddy.

  Threats are one thing, my father said. Acts are something else.

  Have it your way, my mother said. Don’t ask me to believe it.

  When did it start to rain? my father asked in his normal voice. He was trying to return things to normal, to our family dinner before the telephone began to ring; and then I realized how far from normal our family had become, my mother frightened by cars in the road and threatening telephone calls, my father carrying a gun and worried about the Communists and the future of his business, and I—I, so far on the margins of the family, a spectator only, trying to read between the lines and discovering that the spaces were infinite but that one thing was certainly true, my father and mother loved each other and cared about each other, and then from the moment the brick crashed through the window I knew that was an illusion and the space between them was infinite, too.

  I’ll be in the car, she said. Unless you want Wils to drive you.

  Tom Felsen first, my father said, nodding at me and moving to the sideboard where he poured a glassful of scotch. When he raised the glass to his mouth, his hand was steady as a metronome, but when he bent to sip, something went awry and the whiskey splashed on his shirtfront.

  Tell Tom to get here pronto, he said, his hand now locked at his side, and then he thought to ask the question that must have been on his mind all along. Are you both all right?

  They never caught the brick thrower, though the sheriff suspected it was Clyde, the foreman, bitter that the strike had gone on for so long, bitter at the strikebreakers, bitter that he could not afford medical attention for one of his children. When the telephone calls didn’t work, he thought he’d try something dramatic, calculating that my father would yield and settle the strike. Clyde thought you’d be scared shitless, the sheriff said to my father. He thought you’d cave, Teddy; but he doesn’t know you like I do. When he heard the name, my father was shaken. He and Clyde had worked together for fifteen years, ever since Clyde arrived as an eighteen-year-old apprentice. You’re sure? my father asked the sheriff, and Tom Felsen tapped his ear and smiled.

  Clyde left the morning after. He’s downstate now, with the wife and kids.

  We’re keeping an eye on him.

  My father had trouble believing. What had he done to provoke such an attack, so carefully planned, so potentially lethal. He had never thought of himself as one who collected enemies. He came to accept my mother’s prophetic words. Why did you think they wouldn’t act? They told you they would. Unnerved, my father came to believe that enemies were part of every life and there was nothing to be done about them except to remain alert and take nothing for granted, reserving to yourself the right of self-defense. He did not inform my mother of the sheriffs suspicions; there was enough between them already without adding yet another irritant, this one so deeply troubling.

  Your mother can’t take much more, he said to me one night.

  So not a word to her about this.

  I’m afraid, he went on. I’m afraid I haven’t handled this situation very well. I’m going to have to make it up to her. I underestimated the threat, what they were capable of. I just never believed it would go this far. Never in a million years. I got careless, Wils. I neglected things.

  People don’t understand about a business, he continued thoughtfully. You have a loyalty to it because it’s yours. It’s a living thing, it’s not inanimate, only bricks and mortar and numbers. Even a balance sheet is alive when you know how to read it. You have a duty to protect the business and you can’t walk away from the duty, any more than you can walk away from your family. Business is healthy, you play with it. Business is sick, you look after it. Course, it’s not what it was. Some things were said, can’t be unsaid. I did some things, too, that I wish I hadn’t done. And I have to make it up with your mother.

  Take her to Havana, I said. I can look after things here.

  You can’t look after the business, Wils.

  I meant the house, I said.

  Anyone can look after a house, he said gruffly.

  No charges were ever filed against Clyde and the threatening telephone calls ceased, but that is not to say that in our family a ringing telephone did not cause anxiety, that year and for many years to come. The strike continued through the spring and the early summer and then petered out—“the exhaustion factor,” according to my father, by which he meant the anger and frustration of the strikers’ wives. Naturally he was happy to see it end, though he acknowledged the terms were similar to what he could have had at the beginning; and he repeated his glum assessment that no one ever won a strike. He gave up his real estate partnership—he seemed to see it as frivolous when measured against his responsibility toward his business—and now he spent all his time at the office, though less time in the backshop. The Linotypes and presses lost their allure, and he was irritated at the ink smeared on his shirts, a damn nuisance.

  Now and again he received notes of encouragement from friends, businessmen who had labor troubles of their own, and these cheered him—though where were these friends when he needed them? Profits were down, and he complained now that he worked twice as hard to make half as much money. He never looked on his business in the same way, with affection and pride in the company’s growth. He said he felt he was mopping up after a war, clearing out pockets of resistance and caring for the refugees. There were frequent small acts of sabotage that interfered with production. The work force was sullen, men calling in sick with dubious ailments. Each evening at five the plant was empty, no matter what work remained to be done. The strikebreakers drifted away, back to wherever they had come from, awaiting fresh assignments. My father said that in some cracked way he almost envied them; there was something to be said for mercenary work, here today, gone tomorrow, but always a paycheck at the end of the week.

  My father came home early, too, and refused to speak of his business at the dinner table, preferring instead to make tentative vacation plans with my mother or to chat with me about my entrance into college in September, repeating his assurances that it was all right with
him if I didn’t go to Dartmouth but, Jesus, why did I have to choose the University of Chicago, the hotbed of American socialism. I agreed with him that it was a hotbed, all right, and when I found out where the hotbed was, I’d let him know. He spoke to my mother about improvements to the house and grounds, about which he had developed a sudden enthusiasm. She was pleased at his interest and announced she had a number of ideas but first she wanted to hire a landscape architect. There was so much to do because they’d let things slide for so long, and he agreed, they certainly had, though it was also true that they’d come a long way.

  Remember what we started with, Jo. Two rooms, one of them the size of an ashtray.

  Don’t remind me, my mother said. We’ll see what we can do with this place when we put our minds to it. Now that we don’t have to worry so much. That’s true, isn’t it, Teddy? We don’t have to worry anymore?

  My father nodded pleasantly but did not answer the question.

  The death threats ceased but he continued to carry the long-barreled Colt in the crimson duffel, eventually paying no more attention to it than if it were an umbrella.

  3

  THAT LONG SEASON I lived in a morbid condition of continual anticipation, always with an eye on the clock: tomorrow, the weekend, the summer, the university following the summer, the working life following the university. No moment seemed complete or satisfying in itself, only a forced step on the way to somewhere else. I was fixed on a fabulous point in the middle distance; and I could not define it, except that whatever it was, I would not find it tomorrow or the day after. And would I know it when I saw it? On weekends I would drive to Chicago to listen to jazz, old music from New Orleans. I walked through the door of the jazz club on Bryn Mawr and I belonged, losing myself inside the music and between sets talking to whoever was at my elbow, the advertising man and his girlfriend or the airline pilot and his young wife or the graduate student from Loyola, the talk impersonal, sports or the latest municipal scandal or the new Ford line, or the fashionable foursome in black tie sitting at the table in the corner. And at midnight I would drive back to Quarterday, the music alive inside my head.

  Weekdays I marked time at the day school, half an hour’s drive from my house. I had few friends because of the age difference and my own dissatisfied state of mind. By befriending my classmates I would regress one year, a year too hard won to forfeit. Many of the students were transfers from eastern prep schools, boys who had had disciplinary problems; a few had flunked out. Their brusque manners set them apart from the local boys like me. They met the world eye-to-eye with a sneer and a fart (as one of them said), believing themselves infinitely superior to the day school they had been exiled to, aristocrats obliged to make do in the company of yeomen. Of course the girls found them attractive, men of the world who didn’t give a damn about anything except the day’s pleasure. Nothing would stand in their way except their parents, guardians of the family money; and it went without saying that their disgraceful behavior in the East meant a short leash in the Midwest. These boys were objects of curiosity, not least from the instructors. Tell me, what’s Hotchkiss really like? How do the masters live? Do they have dormitory apartments or houses of their own? I understood after a while that even the instructors wanted to migrate east, trading up, Hotchkiss or Choate or Deerfield a settled perch at the top of the tree. Who wanted to spend his life at a struggling day school north of Chicago? Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be moving on to somewhere else. Meanwhile, I had Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the romance of the trenches of the Somme.

  In May my mother went back east to visit her parents. It had been a year since she had seen them, and her father was not well. She stayed two weeks and then announced she would be a while longer, owing to her father’s second stroke. He was bedridden and needed assistance around the clock but was improving every day. She and my father had many long conversations in the evening, my father’s voice a low rumble punctuated by long silences during which I heard ice cubes rattle into his glass. He was sitting in his leather chair in the den, his voice all but inaudible to me, bent over homework in my room upstairs, and finally the sharp click of the receiver when he replaced it in the cradle. Later, during my evening walkabout, I looked in through the French doors and saw him sitting in his chair, disconsolate, a closed book in his lap.

  My mother returned for my graduation in June but left again the next day. A week later my father flew to New York, where he had reserved a suite at the Waldorf and arranged for theater tickets and dinner at “21” and a carriage ride in Central Park at midnight, when he would present her with a gold bracelet from Marshall Field’s. But he returned a day ahead of schedule, explaining cryptically that Yalta was no place to decide the future of the world.

  We needed a neutral venue.

  We should have gone to Havana when she wanted to, he said to me.

  While my mother was in the East, my father and I played golf regularly on the weekends and joked about “batching it,” a disheveled locker-room life in which women did not figure. We existed on a diet of sirloin steaks, baked potatoes, caesar salad, and chocolate ice cream, and after dinner we played pinochle. Alone together, we grew close, much closer than when my mother was with us. I discovered I hardly knew him at all, and of course I was surprised that there was anything to know. I never understood much of what my parents said to each other because I was not aware of the private language of married people, a tongue I came to believe was invented to keep outsiders at a distance, like a military code in wartime. My mother’s things were all around us, the pictures she owned and her grandfather’s set of the Harvard Classics, and the objects that dressed up the coffee table and the mantel over the fireplace in the den. These things reminded us of her every day. But she herself was absent and seemed to slip from us, a photograph fading in the sun. When she called on the telephone, I described to her the golf matches and the evening diet and the pinochle and how well we were getting on, my father and I—though we both missed her and hoped she would return soon. Things weren’t the same without her. Dad and I have long talks every night and he’s teaching me things—

  What things? she asked.

  Things, I said. Things that men have to know, I added, and when she did not reply I knew I had blundered. I had said too much without saying enough, and when I asked if she wanted to speak to “him,” she said she couldn’t, someone was at the door, and rang off without another word.

  My father told me a good deal about his business and much else besides during the hour of drinks before dinner, when he was in a reflective state of mind. I had the idea that he was telling me things he had never told anyone. He said we were in an enviable zone of trust and I did not know how rare that was, so we should enjoy ourselves while the trust lasted. He taught me how to read a balance sheet, more complicated than it looked at first glance, assets and liabilities not always obvious; often they were fungible (and he was careful to define the word), and assigned with an eye always on the taxman and the shareholders. He resolved to teach me how to drink well, drinking well being a skill like anything else, playing the piano or coming but of a fairway sand trap with a five iron. Sloppy drunks were a menace, and none more menacing than teenage drunks, a menace to themselves and everyone around them. Clichés, he called them. Nothing more trustworthy than a young man who can hold his liquor and be seen to hold his liquor. That way, my father said, you gained the respect of older men. That counted for something. That was the world we lived in, like it or not. He smiled and said in a voice not his own, Never cheat at golf; never get rough with women.

  You get a reputation for being sound. You have standing.

  This voice that was not his own puzzled me. Sarcasm lay beneath its skin.

  They won’t worry when you take out their daughters, he went on. And you’ll have the respect of your own cohort. He paused then, his thought unfinished. He was worried that I did not have a close circle of friends, and disconcerted that I seemed to enjoy the company of older people
. But he left the thought hanging.

  Girls like it, he said suddenly. You’ll seem older to them. Experienced. Discreet. Capable. Up to the mark.

  Up to the mark, I repeated in a reasonable imitation of his borrowed voice.

  Yes, he said, smiling broadly now. That’s the ticket.

  Sounds boring, I said.

  It does have that disadvantage, he said, rising and stepping to the sideboard, pouring a finger of whiskey. But you can live with it, he said, his back to me as he dropped ice cubes into his glass. He was silent a moment. I envy you your summer. I never had one like it. It’s only a few weeks now, the dances begin. How many invitations do you have?

  About twenty-five so far, I said.

  Twenty-five, he repeated, staring at the ceiling, cradling his scotch in both hands. You’ll need a new tux—

  Mother calls it a dinner jacket, I said.

  Does she? Well, you’ll need a new one for your summer season, and remember to get it cleaned now and then. And don’t forget what your mother told you. Always dance with the deb and the deb’s mother and shake hands with her father and say How do you do, sir, and generally kiss ass up and down the receiving line. I laughed but my father did not laugh with me, absorbed as he was with the shadows on the ceiling.