My mother’s tactful intervention helped the situation somewhat. She was very careful to let me know whenever she and my father planned on being out of the house for more than a few hours, and on one occasion she managed to cajole him into taking her into the city for dinner. I even overheard her discussing the entire spectrum of morality with him one night, and whereas her admonitions did nothing to lessen his surveillance of the sanctum sanctorum, he at least quit hanging around Dana and me during the daytime, when all we wanted to do was lie on the beach together and talk quietly about my developing plans.
I found out about my father during our last week at the beach, so I guess you can say he had a lot to do with the decision I finally reached. But if there are endings, there are likewise beginnings, and my grandfather Bertram Tyler — the beginning — also had something to do with shaping my molten thought.
Grandpa, en route from Chicago to London where he was negotiating a contract for the export of clay-coated boxboard, came out to the beach unexpectedly, a few days after my father had gone back to work, amen. He had met Dana briefly at Christmastime, and was delighted to see her again now. But he looked tired, his blue eyes paler than I remembered them, his face somewhat drawn. As it turned out, I was unduly worried about him; he had had a truly harrowing trip from Chicago, with his plane circling Kennedy in the fog for an hour and a half before finally being turned away to Philadelphia International. He had taken a train to Pennsylvania Station (which was in the throes of a massive overhaul) and then another train out to Sayville, and then the ferry to the Pines, and was now near total collapse. Dana mixed him a martini that would have curled the toes of an Arabian used to drinking camel piss. My grandfather said, “Dana, this is just what I used to drink in Chicago in 1920,” and then called to my mother in the kitchen to come join us. “In a second, Pop,” she yelled back, “I’m getting some snacks,” and my grandfather put his feet up on the wicker ottoman and sighed and said, “It’s good to be home.”
We had our talk two days later.
The weather, heralded by the fog that had marked his arrival, had turned surly and gray again; a lire was needed each morning to take the chill out of the old house. We had used up the small supply of shingles in the living room scuttle, and my grandfather and I volunteered to replenish it. It was a pleasure to watch him work with an ax. I always felt that unless I was careful I’d chop off a couple of my own fingers, but he used the ax without even looking at it, almost as if it were an extension of his right hand, talking all the while he worked, the way some men can play piano and smoke and drink beer all at the same time without once missing a beat. He would hold the shingle upright in his left hand, the ax clutched close to the head in his right hand, and whick, a single sharp stroke and the shingle was split, another shingle appeared in his left hand, another whick, “How are you doing at school, Wat?” he asked.
“Oh, great,” I said. “Everything’s great.”
“Getting good marks?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I like your Dana.”
“I like her, too.”
“When do you go back?”
I didn’t answer him. He was looking directly at me, his left hand reached out automatically for another shingle, he felt sightlessly along its top for the true center, jabbed it with the ax once, sharply, raised his eyebrows and said, “Walter?”
“I’m not sure, Grandpa.”
“Not sure when you’re due back?”
“Not sure if I’m going back.”
“Oh?”
We didn’t say anything for several moments. My grandfather busied himself with splitting the shakes, and I busied myself with stacking them up against the chimney. The air was penetratingly bitter, tendrils of fog sliding in off the beach, a needle-fine drizzle cutting to the bone. I was wearing blue jeans and my Yale sweatshirt, but I was cold. My grandfather had not brought any beach clothes with him; he worked in pin-striped trousers and an open-throated white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his gold cuff links, studiously bent over each shingle now, even though he could have done the job blindfolded. At last, he said only, “How come, Walter?”
“I’m just not sure, Grandpa.”
“Don’t you like school?”
“I like it.”
“Having trouble with somebody there? One of the teachers?”
“No.”
“Is it Dana?”
“No.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“All right,” my grandfather said, and smiled, and looked down at the shingles and said, “Think we’ve got enough to get us through the winter?” and smiled again, and put the ax back in the shed and then rolled down his cuffs, and I started piling the rest of the split wood in orderly rows against the chimney. I wanted to tell my grandfather what I was thinking of doing, wanted to get an opinion other than Dana’s, but I was afraid he’d think I was a coward. So I worked silently, with my brow wrinkled, longing to communicate with him and knowing I could not. And finally, when I’d stacked all the wood, I said, again, “I’m just not sure, Grandpa,” and he said, “Well, why don’t we take a little walk?” and I looked at him curiously for just a moment because the last time I’d taken a walk with him was when I was six years old and we had gone up the hill behind the house on Ritter Avenue and looked out on a bright October day to where Long Island Sound stretched clear to the end of the world.
I had told him that day that there was a girl in the sixth grade whose name was Katherine Bridges, and I loved her, and she was the most beautiful girl in all Talmadge, even though she wasn’t born there but was adopted and had come from Minnesota. But I did not want to tell him now that Dana Castelli was the most beautiful girl in the world; I wanted only to tell him of what I’d been slowly but certainly deciding to do come fall, and I didn’t want to tell him that, either, because this was a man who had faced German bayonets in the trenches at Château-Thierry. Nor was it a particularly inviting day for a walk, the drizzle having grown heavier, not quite yet a true rain, but forbidding nonetheless.
We walked down to the ferry slip and watched the boat coming in through the fog, her horn bleating, and watched the passengers unloading. My grandfather suddenly said, Isn’t that Will?” and I looked to where he was pointing and saw a tall man wearing a Burberry trenchcoat coming down the gangway and striding onto the dock in a duck-footed walk that could have belonged to no one but a Tyler.
(In Wat Tyler’s camera eye, the man he sees striding toward him and his grandfather is simultaneously the villain who is keeping him from Dana and a rather impressively handsome gentleman with an expansive smile on his face. The images, double-exposed, are confusing. He wants to hate this man for his offhanded treatment of the Love Affair of the Century, and yet he cannot help but respect and admire him. For the first time in his life, or at least for the first time that he can remember, he wants to say, “Pop, I love you.” The screen images dissolve.)
My father saw us immediately and came to us, embracing first my grandfather, kissing him on the cheek, and then going through the same family ritual with me.
“I didn’t expect anyone to meet me,” he said. “I caught an earlier boat.”
“Actually, we were just going for a little walk, Will,” my grandfather said.