“Thank you,” Dana said. She always seemed a bit shy in my mother’s presence. I suspected she didn’t like my father at all, but I knew she was genuinely fond of my mother, and I could never understand her reserve. We were coming away from the slip now, walking past the plumbing supply store, threading our way through the swarms of bicycles, wagons piled with luggage and groceries, summer people in shorts and swimming suits, all scattering off the dock and onto the narrow wooden walks. The Pines, when we had first begun coming to it in 1956 had been a quiet family community with one or two fags living in blissful silence far from the gay hectic life at Cherry Grove. It was now, I would guess, fifty per cent queer and fifty per cent straight, which was at least giving everybody a fair shot at equal housing opportunities. I still felt a little strange, though, whenever I was candidly appraised, as now, by a mincing boardwalk stroller (“Never take candy from strange men,” my grandmother had told me in the fastnesses of her Tudor City apartment, she being my only living grandmother, a spry old dame of sixty-six, with the same quick energy as her daughter Dolores Prine Tyler), but the discomfort wasn’t anything like what I had felt the first time my father took us to visit Cherry Grove. My embarrassment then, of course, had been caused only by deep insecurities about my own manhood, I being all of ten at the time. But I had not dug the scene, and I had never gone back.
My mother seemed excited to see us. She immediately told us all about the cocktail parties we’d been invited to during the next week (“Everyone’s dying to see you, Wat, and of course to meet Dana”) and the surprise birthday party being given for her on Tuesday night, and the possibility that we might be able to borrow a boat for a sail on Wednesday, but then assured us we could be by ourselves whenever we wanted (I thought at first she meant something other than she did) and that we were under no obligation to trail along with her and Dad.
“Where is Dad?” I asked.
“Back at the house,” she said. “He’s looking forward to seeing you both.”
I wondered, in that case, why he had not been at the dock, hmmm? It was my guess that he was still wrestling with the problem of who would sleep where and do what to whom, a surmise that was immediately confirmed when he grabbed our suitcases at the door of the house. “Wat!” he said. “Dana! Hey, it’s great to see you! How was the traffic coming out?”
“Oh, not bad,” I said, and found Dana and myself being drawn in his wake to the bedroom at the rear of the house, where he quickly deposited Dana’s bag, “This is your room, Dana,” and then turned to take my elbow in a firm, fatherly, guiding grip, wheeling me around the bend in the hallway and leading me to the bedroom near the kitchen (where I knew the damn screen needed repairing) and saying, “This is yours, Wat, do you both want to freshen up, or would you like a drink first?” He was being very tolerant in his attitude, including us in his adult world where you offered grown-ups drinks if they didn’t want to freshen up first after those tedious Long Island parkways, but he was also making it clear he didn’t expect any adult hanky-panky under his roof for the several weeks Dana and I would be there, preferring us to fornicate on the open beach instead, I guessed.
I looked at the single bed against the torn screen, and then I looked at my father, and his eyes met mine and clearly stated, That’s the way it is, son.
And my eyes dearly signaled back, Aren’t we being a little foolish?
And his said, If you want my approval, you’re not getting it, son.
And mine said, Okay, you prick.
Out loud, I said, “I see the screen’s still torn.”
Out loud, my father said, “I’ll get John to fix it in the morning,” John being the Pines idiot who went around fixing torn screens and putting bedboards under sagging beach mattresses.
I went back to Dana. She was still standing in the corridor around the bend, her hands on her hips. She looked totally forlorn. I took her in my arms.
“Drink, Dana?” my father called from out of sight somewhere, the liberal Spanish dueña sans mantilla or black lace fan.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Tyler,” Dana piped, and then whispered, “Listen, are we supposed to...”
“What are you having?” my father called.
“Whatever you’ve got!”
“We’ve got everything!”
“Just some scotch, please,” Dana said. “With a little water. Wat, are we supposed to even know each other?” she whispered.
“I’ll climb the trellis each night,” I said.
“There is no trellis,” Dana said. “Besides, what’s that big bedroom right next door? That’s the master bedroom, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“Wat...”
“In fact, I know so.”
“Wat, do you want a drink?” my father called.
“Yes!” I shouted. “I think I need one.”
“What?”
“Yes, a little scotch on the rocks, please.”
“Coming up,” my father said.
“Did you get the kids settled?” my mother asked from the kitchen.
“Yes, Dolores, the kids are settled,” my father said, not without a trace of smug satisfaction in his voice.
“I’ll wither and die,” Dana whispered. “Oh, Wat, it’ll be just awful.”
The first week was, in fact, absolute hell because it was the week my father was taking away from his office (ten days, actually — he had come out on Friday the sixth). The way he wanted to spend his vacation, it seemed, was by wandering around that old gray clapboard house like one of the queen’s own guard, Dana being Her Majesty, and I being a surly peasant trying to break into her bedchamber. He scarcely ever left us alone during the day, and his snores from the master bedroom each night were an un-subtle reminder that the old family retainer was sleeping right there, man, ready to spring into action at the first hint of a footfall in the corridor outside. We finally did make love on the beach one night, but Dana was ashamed to take a shower after we tiptoed back into the house, because she said everyone (meaning Old Hawkeye) would know she’d got “sand all up her.”
I couldn’t understand my father at all. He was charming and pleasant to Dana, telling her really entertaining stories about the publishing field, spicing them with gossip about this or that literary celebrity, “Did you know that Jimmy Baldwin?” or “Were you aware that Bill Styron?” pretending to a vast inside knowledge that he honestly was not privy to; my father’s list consisted largely of books of photographs. (It was as if, in allowing the Tyler evolution to follow its natural growth pattern, he had brought it from lumber-jacking, through papermaking, into book publishing, and then had sophisticated it a step further by publishing books that were non-books; even as America itself had evolved from a nation where men first labored with their hands into a nation where machines did the work for men — and often did work that was utterly without meaning.) But despite what seemed to be his total acceptance of the girl I had chosen, he adamantly refused to let me possess her. I had the feeling more than once that he was actually coming on with her himself, that he looked too longingly at her breasts, leaped too hastily to light her cigarette, tried too hard for a cheap laugh to an old joke. I didn’t want a goddamn sparring match with my own father; I wasn’t attempting to turn the old bull out to pasture, but neither did I want him gamboling around with the young heifers. It was all very unsettling. I was having my own doubts about where I lit into the scheme of things just then (if my father’s publishing of picture books was a logical development in the growth of the Tyler family, what came next? Where did I take it from there? Was I the comparatively stunted tree in the foreground of the colophon, or the giant spruce towering against a limitless sky?), and I did not need added aggravation from dear old Dad.