Tony sat there dully, looking at the tablecloth, wondering when the wild, unexpected monologue would end, yearning suddenly for all the old, stiff, silence-studded meetings of other years, when his father had always been so polite, awkwardly restrained, painfully searching for subjects to talk about with Tony in the two or three hours a month that they spent together.
“My father, for example,” Oliver said expansively, “killed himself. That was the year you were born. He walked into the sea at Watch Hill and just went and drowned himself. That was a hell of a fashionable place to commit suicide in those days, except, of course, nobody mentioned the word suicide, what they said was he had a cramp. Maybe he caught me looking at him that morning and he said, ‘That does it—this is the day for it.’ We never found the body. Rolling somewhere to this day in the Gulf Stream, maybe. The insurance was respectable. It was a windy day and there was a big sea. My father was always very careful of appearances. It’s a family characteristic and I can see it’s come down to you. Have you any theories on why your grandfather drowned himself at Watch Hill in 1924?”
Tony sighed. “Father, I have to get up early tomorrow and you’ve probably got a big day ahead of you … Why don’t we get through here and go home?”
“Home,” Oliver said. “My home is Room 934 in the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue, but I’ll go there if you come with me.”
“I’ll take you in a taxi,” Tony said, “and drop you.”
“Oh, no.” Oliver put his finger slyly along his nose. “None of that. I’m not buying any of that. I have a lot of things to talk to you about, young man. I may be gone thirty years and we have to plan out the plan. Ulysses’ final instructions to Tele—Telemachus. Be good to your mother and keep a running count of the guests.” He grinned. “See—I’m just a simple soldier—but there are still relics of a former and more gracious life, before the Hotel Shelton.”
Tony looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten already. He looked across at Elizabeth. She and the Sergeant were at their coffee already.
“Don’t worry,” Oliver said. “She’ll wait. Come on.” He stood up. The chair teetered behind him, but he didn’t notice it, and finally, it settled back without falling. Elizabeth smiled at them as they went out, after Oliver paid the check, and Tony tried to make his face express his resolution to get down to the Number One Bar as close to eleven-fifteen as possible.
When they stepped out of the elevator on the ninth floor, Tony opened the steel door, because Oliver couldn’t get the key into the lock, and put on the light in his father’s room. The room was a small one, littered with gear, a Valpack sprawled open on the floor, a greenish raincoat on the bed, a pile of laundered khaki shirts in a rumpled pile on the dresser, some newspapers on the desk, hastily flipped together by a maid.
“Home,” Oliver said. “Make yourself comfortable.” Without taking off his cap or trenchcoat he went over to the dresser and opened a drawer and brought out a bottle of whisky. “This is an amazing hotel,” he said, holding the bottle up to see how much was left. “The maids don’t drink.”
He went into the bathroom and Tony heard him humming Pore Jud is daid while he ran some water into a glass. Tony went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The room was on a court and on all sides blind windows looked back at him. The sky was an indeterminate black distance above him.
Oliver came back cuddling his glass and poured some whisky in it. Then, still in his cap and coat, he sank into the one easy chair.
He sat there, slumped deep in the chair, sunk in his rumpled trenchcoat, with his cap back on his head, holding his glass in his two hands, looking like an aging soldier just returned from a defeat, caught for a moment in an escapable posture of exhaustion and despair. “Ah, God,” he said. “Ah, God.”
Outside the door, down the hotel corridor, the elevator shafts howled softly, ominous and jittery in the metropolitan night.
“A son,” Oliver said, mumbling. “Why does a man have sons? Ordinarily, you don’t ask yourself a question like that. If you lead an ordinary life, if you sit down to dinner with him every night, if you crack him across the ears once in a while because he’s annoying you, you take it for granted. What the hell, everybody has sons. But if the whole thing is torn apart, ruptured, departed”—he drawled out the verbs of division and farewell with mournful pleasure—“that’s another story. Another story.” Oliver sipped at his drink, deep in the chair, mumbling. “You ask yourself—why did I do it? What was in it for me? You want to hear? You want to know what I decided?”
Tony turned away from the window and moved soothingly over toward the chair and stood in front of his father. “Do you want me to help you get ready for bed?” he asked.
“I don’t want to get ready for bed,” Oliver said. “I want to tell you about sons. Who knows—one day you might have some of your own and you might be curious on your own hook. You have a son to renew your optimism. You reach a certain age, say, twenty-five, thirty, it varies with your intelligence, and you begin to say, ‘Oh, Christ, this is for nothing.’ You begin to realize it’s just more of the same, only getting worse every day. If you’re religious, I suppose you say to yourself, ‘The goal is death. Hallelujah, I hear them tuning the golden harps, my soul is in training for glory.’ But if you’re not religious—if you say, ‘That’s more of the same, only it includes Sunday,’ what have you got? A bankbook, unpaid bills, the cooling of the blood, what have we got for dinner, who’s coming to dinner—Last week’s menu, last year’s guests. Take a train full of commuters on their way home at six o’clock any evening in the week and you’ll have enough boredom collected in one place to blow a large-sized town off the face of the map. Boredom. The beginning and end of pessimism. And that’s where a child comes in. A little boy doesn’t know anything about pessimism. You watch him and listen to him and he’s in a fury every minute he breathes. He’s in a fury of growing, feeling, learning. There’s something in him that tells him it’s worthwhile to get bigger, to learn to communicate, to learn to eat with a spoon, to learn to go to the toilet, to learn to read, fight, love … He’s on that big wave, pushing him ahead—anyway he thinks it’s ahead—and it never occurs to him to look back and ask, ‘Who’s pushing me? Where am I going?’ You look at your son and you see that there is something in the human race that automatically believes in the value of being alive. If you had a father who walked into the waves at Watch Hill, that can be a damned important consideration. When you were three years old I used to watch you sitting on the floor trying to learn how to put on your own shoes and socks, working hard, and I would roar with senseless laughter. And while I was sitting in your room, among the toys, laughing like a farmer at the circus, I was on the wave with you, I leached away some of the optimism for my own uses. I was grateful to you and I treasured you. Now …” Oliver sipped his drink and grinned cunningly at Tony over the rim of the glass. “Now I don’t treasure you at all. More of the same. A young man with a grudge who reminds me of myself when I was younger, who reminds me of a pretty woman I happened to marry, who reminds me we screwed up the whole works …”
“Father,” Tony said painfully, “there’s no need for all this.”
“Sure,” Oliver said, mumbling into his glass. “Sure there’s a need. Last will and testament. On the way to the wars. The wars help, too. You can’t have a son, have a war. That’s another wave. No time to look back and say who’s pushing me, where am I going. An illusion of purpose, of accomplishment. Take a town. Don’t ask what town. Don’t ask who’s in it. Don’t ask what they’re going to do after you’ve passed through. Don’t ask if it had to be taken. Just hope the war lasts long enough and the supply of towns holds out and that you don’t come back …”