“Well, you don’t have to worry about the draft,” my father said.
“Pop,” I said, “maybe we all...”
“He’s a student,” my father explained.
“I know,” my grandfather said.
“Suppose I wasn’t?”
“Weren’t.”
“Weren’t. What then?”
“But you are.”
“But a lot of kids aren’t. And when the bomb falls, it’s not going to ask who’s a student and who isn’t.”
“There’s not much danger of that,” my father said. “Not with a hotline between Washington and Moscow.”
“Assuming somebody has a dime to make a call.”
“It’s not a pay telephone,” my father said, exhibiting monumental humorlessness.
“I once got a call in Chicago,” my grandfather said, “from a man who told me, ‘Mr. Tyler, this is your exterminator.’ Seared me out of my wits.”
"You?” my father said. “Scared you?”
“Sure,” my grandfather said. “Turned out he really was the exterminator. Your mother had called about ants in the kitchen.”
“We’re all scared of the exterminator,” I said. “We’re like a gambler down to his last chip, down to his underwear in fact, with nothing more to lose. We’re saying, ‘The hell with everything, I’ll take my chances,’ and we’re putting shorts and all on the next roll, figuring we’ll either walk out naked or fly home in a private jet.”
“Survival’s always been a gamble,” my father said. “Do you think you’re saying something new?”
“Yes!”
“Well, you’re not. The first time a caveman picked up a club...”
(The screen is filled with the impressive image of William Francis Tyler, publisher and lecturer as he expounds his theories on The Ultimate Weapon, relating to a dozing audience the alarm felt in the civilian population each time a new weapon is developed, going on to explain while the camera zooms in on a busty blond co-ed picking her nose that mankind has always had the good sense, the camera is back on his face now, in close-up, to place restrictions on its own capacity to destroy itself, his voice droning on as the camera suddenly cuts away to a shot of the grandfather, Bertram Tyler, staring moodily out to sea, and then intercuts close shots of Will Tyler’s face with those of Wat Tyler’s, to emphasize the point that this is strictly between father and son now, the provocateur oddly removed. Nobody understands the film any more. The theater is half empty.)
“Yes, thank you very much, Pop,” I said, “but that kind of thinking no longer applies. This Vietnam thing is new. It’s new because a lot of kids aren’t willing to gamble any more, don’t you see? Why should we? So a hotshot Vietcong-killer like Ky can go on running his cruddy little country? Who the hell cares?”
“South Vietnam is important to our security,” my father said.
“Whose security?”
“Ours. Yours, mine.”
“How about the security of the five hundred Americans who’ve already wasted their lives there?”
“Some people would not consider that a...”
“... or the God knows how many more we seem ready to waste?”
“Do you want all Asia to go Communist?”
“I don’t give a damn what it goes, Pop.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I mean it.”
“You don’t.”
“It’s a bad war, and...”
“There are no good wars,” my grandfather said suddenly.
“... and the only way to make it any better is to end it.”
“How?” my father asked.
“By refusing to fight the goddamn thing,” I said.
I was very close now. I was very close to telling him. We stopped walking for an instant, the three of us. I was trembling. My grandfather was suddenly standing between us, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on my father’s. I was not aware that he had moved, but he was between us.
“These are different times, Will,” he said gently.
“I fought my war,” my father said.
“So did I.”
“Then why...”
“And we also made our peace.”
A strange thing happened then. We both turned to our fathers at the same moment, we were both sons at the same moment. Simultaneously, my father and I both said, “Pop...” and then fell abruptly silent. I no longer knew what I wanted to say, or even if I wanted to say it. My father shook his head. We began walking up the beach again. The air seemed suddenly dense, the fog suffocating. It was my grandfather who broke the silence again.
“Have either of you seen The Sandpiper?” he said.
Quickly, with a glance at my father, I said, “We gave Burton and Taylor the award for August.”
“Award?” my father said. There was a dazed expression on his face, as though he had wandered into an alien world from a familiar and much-loved landscape. He had tucked his shoes under his arms, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat, looking first to me, and then to my grandfather, as though he did not recognize either of us.
“The Tyler-Castelli Award,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, and nodded, though I was sure he did not yet understand.
“For the Most Convincing Performances in a Religious Film,” I said.
“Supposed to be packing them in all over the country,” my grandfather said.
“That’s because truck drivers enjoy watching a man kiss his own wife,” I said.
“In Metrocolor,” my grandfather said.
“And Panavision,” I said.
“It isn’t always possible,” my father said abruptly.
“What isn’t?”
“Peace.”
“I’m sure Hanoi wants peace every bit as much as we do,” I said. “If we could just...”
“Do you mean Vietnam?” my grandfather said, and suddenly looked his son full in the face.
“Yes,” my father said too quickly, and I suddenly realized he had not been talking about Vietnam at all, and was immediately ashamed of my own driving need to make clear my position on the war. I wanted to shout, No, please, Pop, say what you were about to say, tell us what you really meant, but I knew the moment was gone. I thought Oh, Jesus, if only I hadn’t been here, he’d have told my grandfather, they’d have talked, they’d have talked together. And then I recognized that I was really thinking about myself and my father, and felt suddenly desolated, the way I’d felt that day waiting for the elevator, when he’d sent Mrs. Green to find out what I wanted for my graduation.
We walked the rest of the way up the beach in silence, my grandfather, my father, and I.