“Well, good,” my father said, and threw his arms around our shoulders, comrades three, and said, “I’ll join you,” which did not overly thrill me, because frankly I did not want him to know about the plan I’d been considering, and I was afraid my grandfather might mention the doubts I’d voiced about going back to Yale.
But we took off our shoes, all of us, and went onto the beach where the mist enveloped us, and walked close to the water’s edge, the ocean seeming warmer than the air, and we talked. We talked about the weather first, it being omnipresent, I explaining to my grandfather that the summer people were divided into two factions, those who believed the best weather came in July, and those who favored August. And from there, as a natural extension of talking about the weather, we began to discuss the riots that had taken place in Watts the week before, Watts being a Los Angeles community I’d never heard of before it made racial headlines, and I said something about heat probably being a contributing factor, and my grandfather expressed the opinion that heat had very little to do with emotions that had been contained for more than a century.
“I can remember once...” my father started, and then shook his head and fell silent.
“Yes, Will?” my grandfather said.
“No, nothing,” he answered, and shook his head again. He was walking between me and my grandfather, his shoes in his hands, his socks stuffed into the pockets of his trenchcoat, his trousers rolled up onto his shins. Together, the three of us skirted the sea’s edge, silent now.
(The screen is suddenly filled with the image of three spruces against a sky certainly much bluer than the real sky over Fire Island. The trees are swaying slightly, there is the whisper of wind on the sound track. The film must be a foreign import, the first such in Wat Tyler’s memory. There are English subtitles traveling along the bottom of the screen, as though blown there by the same wind rustling in the treetops. The titles are abominable. The first title reads HERITAGE, and the next reads GENERATIONS. Wat Tyler wishes to leave the theater of his mind, perhaps to buy some popcorn in the lobby.)
My grandfather began speaking again. He was a wise old bird, my grandfather, I don’t think I realized just how wise until that day on the beach when the mist insulated the three of us from the world. He must have understood, long before I did, that my father was truly in the center of our solitary march along the beach, geographically and genealogically, the only one of our company who could lay claim to being a father to one of us and a son to the other. Because of this, because my grandfather must have sensed the strain of this double role being exerted on his son and my farther, he led us gently into conversation, talking across my father to me, talking across me to my father, transforming our three-way discussion into something remarkably crazy.
(On the screen, the three spruces, one slightly taller than the next, have dissolved into the three Tyler men walking in the mist. But the men refuse to maintain fixed camera positions. One becomes interchangeable with another and yet another, so that it seems sometimes that Wat is talking directly to his father when he is really in conversation with his grandfather, seems at other times that Will is talking to Bertram when he is actually looking at Wat. The whole thing is very avant-garde. Wat is sure it will cop the Golden Lion Award at Venice.)
“You can’t expect violence to be self-restrictive,” my grandfather said.
“What do you mean?” my father said.
“The riots. Surely they’re linked to what’s happening in Vietnam.”
“I don’t see any connection.”
“He’s talking about our way of life,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Our way of life,” I repeated, knowing I still had not made myself clear, and looking to my grandfather for help. But his attention seemed momentarily captured by a boat barely visible through the fog on the water, and as we walked on the edge of ocean merged with shore, equally lost in obliterating fog, he remarked how crazy it was for a boat to be out in this kind of weather and then abruptly mentioned that he had read about the forty-one-year-old singer Frank Sinatra coming off his yacht, Southern Breeze, in the company of the nineteen-year-old actress Mia Farrow and two somewhat older actresses, for a Hyannis Port visit with the father of one assassinated President and two current United States senators.
“I grew up listening to that man,” my father said.
“You don’t have to tell me,” my grandfather agreed, smiling. “You had that Victrola going day and night.”
His archaic language suddenly rankled. I wanted to get the conversation back to Vietnam, back to the truly modern idea he had offered but only tentatively explored, the idea that this pointless war of ours was beginning to seep into every phase of our national life, the idea that violence as a solution for problems abroad was most certainly being emulated as a solution for problems here at home. I resented the digression. Without so much as a preamble, I said, “First they take the air war north of the Hanoi line, and bomb only eighty miles from the Chinese border, and then...”
“But of course, there’s a great deal of violence everywhere you turn,” my grandfather said, interrupting me, and causing me to frown momentarily. “Not only in Vietnam.” There seemed to be a note of warning in his voice, as though he were anachronistically saying, Cool it, baby. You want to rap about this Yale thing, then let your wise omniscient venerable old guru lead us into it gentle-like, dig? I blinked my eyes.
(The screen conversation is taking a ridiculous turn. The film is becoming even a bit far-out for the likes of Cahiers. Someone asks if anyone has read Up the Down Staircase, someone else — it sounds like Wat but it could just as easily be Foxy Grandpa — says that laughter is cleansing, it is good for America to enjoy a healthy laugh, not to mention a sob or two, over the problems of a teacher in a slum school, the same way it is good for America to enjoy the James Bond cinema spoofs.)
“They’re not spoofs,” I said. I was certain now that both of them, father and grandfather, had veered off on a tangent because they refused to discuss something that was terribly important to me. Together, father and son, they had decided in secret conspiracy to prevent an airing of my thoughts, thereby scuttling my plans even before they were fully formed. So I very loftily said something about the “spoof” label being a very handy way of alleviating our Puritan guilt over enjoying a sado-masochistic reaction to Bond’s screen exploits, the same way we had felt it necessary to call Candy a spoof as well, so that it would then become acceptable reading for all the ladies of Garden City.
“Did you read Candy?” my father asked, surprised.
“Yes, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes, but...”
“But it was a spoof, right?”
“No, it was pornography,” my grandfather said.
“So what’s wrong with pornography?” I said.
“Nothing,” my grandfather said.
“I just didn’t think you were reading pornography,” my father said.
“What’d you think I was reading? Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle?”
“No, but not pornography.”
“I’ve also read the Marquis de Sade,” I said.
“Where’d you get hold of that?”
“From the top shelf of books in your bedroom,” I said.
“Got to be more careful with your dirty books, Will,” my grandfather said, and smiled.
“I guess so,” my father answered, and returned the smile, and again I had the feeling they were excluding me, that their bond with each other was closer than mine with either of them. So I forced the conversation back to Vietnam again, because Vietnam was what was on my mind, and I wanted them to know this, while simultaneously wanting to keep my formative plans from them, telling them that first Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had informed the nation that the aggression was from the north, while 8000 of our Marines landed at Danang, bringing our total number of men in arms to 75,000 with experts predicting 150,000 American troops in Vietnam before the end of 1965. Then President Johnson had said, “What we want to do is achieve the maximum deterrence with the minimum danger and cost in human lives,” and announced that 50,000 more men would be sent there right away, bringing our total to 125,000 with the estimate for year’s end now being 200,000 and the draft quota more than doubled from 17,000 to 35,000 a month.