Walker sat looking at his son’s unanswered letter, smarting with guilt and shame. So stricken was he that he nearly put it aside. Ever since his sons had left home he had written them regularly, demanding replies. Even when his older boy, Tom Moore who was called Deak, had stopped writing or phoning back — had, in effect, stopped speaking — Walker had gone on writing, composing what he himself called sermonettes. That he had forgotten Stuart’s letter was a measure of the low place in which he found himself.
“Dear Parents,” Stuart Walker had written. “When I woke up this morning I asked myself where’s my change of season? Here it’s mid-September and the sugar maples are turning awesome colors. Everything’s the way it’s supposed to be except me because I’m just not feeling it …”
Walker folded the letter, put it aside and went to the suitcase for his book of telephone numbers. He looked at his watch: it was nearly twelve in Maine and he might catch his son in the dorm between his last morning class and lunch. When he had found the number he dialed it and asked the boy who answered for Stuart Walker. His son came on the line.
“Christ, kid,” Walker said, “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your letter. Things have been confused. I’ve been busy.”
“I guess that’s good, huh?”
“Yeah,” Walker said, trying to sound as though it was good. “Better busy than not.”
“Hey, Dad,” the boy said. “You know Mom was here. She was on her way to London.”
“That’s right. How was she?”
“She was really funny about it.”
“Was she indeed?”
“Really,” Stuart told his father. “She was a riot. Good old Mom.”
“Good,” Walker said cautiously. His son was opaque, a politician. “So it was all pleasant?”
“She was fine,” Stuart said. “You don’t have to worry about her.”
Walker felt a wave of simmering anger rise in his breast. He mastered it quite easily.
“When you wrote you said … you said … you weren’t feeling the change of seasons. I wondered … whether, you know … everything was all right with you. And if you were down … whether you still were. And if … I was hoping,” he stammered on, “that it was better.”
“Right,” the boy said. “Well, that was a couple of weeks ago.”
Yes indeed, Walker thought. How tidily this kid kept score. Deak never did, never in the same relentless fashion. Nor did Walker himself. His wife did but her way was gentler. She was forgiving. Her younger son was not.
“Sure,” Walker senior said. “Of course.”
“I think I was down because I’d just been hanging out with Deak. You know how he’s been.”
Walker knew something about the way his son Deak had been for the past year and his heart went cold with fear.
“He doesn’t write or call us,” Walker said to his younger son. The taste of a whine hung on his lips, a savor of special pleading. “We don’t know how it is with him.”
“Sometimes I get mad at him,” Stuart said. “Then I get brought down, you know, and I wish there was something I could, like, tell him. But what can I tell him? It was always Deak who told me what was what.”
“What I worry about,” Gordon Walker said, “is drugs.” It was painful for him to say it; his sons knew his ways well enough. Yet it was what he worried about.
“Yeah,” Stuart said, and no more.
Walker hesitated.
“Well,” he finally asked, “should I worry?”
“No,” the boy said without conviction. “I don’t think so.”
“Is he dealing?”
“You have to ask him, Dad.”
“I thought,” Walker said, “because we both loved him … we might … as it were … take counsel together.”
“Oh,” Stuart said. “Oh, for sure.”
Walker bit his lip.
“Did your mother see him?”
“Yeah. We went to dinner in Portland.”
“Good,” Walker said. “How was it?”
“He was a little wasted,” Stuart said. There was a suggestion of good-natured laughter in his voice.
“Oh God,” Walker said aloud.
“I think we ought to get together all of us. We might all go over to London. Deak would go for that.”
“I don’t know about that,” Walker said.
“I guess,” Stuart Walker said, “I’m being naive.”
Walker sighed. “I’m glad you enjoyed your summer of stock.”
“Oh yeah,” the boy said, “it was excellent. They asked me back, O.K.?” For the first time in their conversation Stuart seemed to speak without calculation. “Next year, wow, am I looking forward to that.”
“And you’ll be in the school play this year?”
“Hey, Dad,” Stuart said, “are you kidding? You know I’ll be in it. They don’t call it the school play,” he added. “They don’t like that. They call it Masquers. Because we’re all so preppie pre-professional here.”
“I suppose,” Gordon Walker said, “that’s what I’m paying for.” He heard his son laugh politely.
“Listen, kid,” he said. “Take care of yourself. I’ll see you at Christmastime.”
“How will we do that this year, Dad?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you. And Stu—” he called before the boy could hang up. “If you hear from Deak — if you see him — tell him for Christ’s sake to call me.”
After a few minutes he took up Stuart’s letter and read it through again. Reading it oppressed him; when he had finished it he was left with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief.
The letter was a good one, observant, witty, boyishly rueful. There was a little about the opening of term and a few cautious lines about Deak that were at once concerned and humorous. Most of it recounted Stuart’s adventures with a summer theater company in Rhode Island. He wrote tellingly about the two plays that had been done — a ten-year-old Broadway comedy and Ah, Wilderness! He described his humiliation at being scorned for his youth by girls his own age who competed for the older actors. He described, without names, the artful, courteous and good-natured manner in which he had turned aside the advances of a homosexual actor who was an old friend of his father’s. He wrote about the audiences, the town, the adolescent social scene, about a drama student whose name was Blanche and who had called him an odious buffoon. It was a delightful letter. Any reader would conclude that its author was openhearted, generous and affectionate — all of which Walker knew well his younger son was not. Tom — Deak — the older boy, was all those things, or had been once.
Stuart Walker had talent and his parents’ good looks. He was unusually literate for a seventeen-year-old and successful at school. But it was as an actor that he truly dazzled. At fifteen he had performed on the Off-Broadway stage in the limited run of a surreal English drama. Since that debut he had been offered parts on the average of two a month. His summer theater experience had been intended by his parents as an exercise in humility and he had not objected. He was preternaturally wise, would wait, study longer, listen and learn. At times Walker and his wife would look on their younger son with superstitious dread, so bright did his possibilities appear.
In his oceanside hotel room, Gordon Walker examined the letter once more. He realized now one of the reasons that he had not answered it on receipt, unconfronted at the time but plain enough now. The letter had provided Stuart with an opportunity for one of his uncanny imitations of his older brother. “Uncanny” was one of the words critics had used in praising Stuart’s performance.
He was a shrewd, unconfiding boy, four years younger than Deak. Circumstances or a harder nature had driven him inward, toughened him and toughened him until his heart shriveled. The years of Stuart’s childhood had been a stormy time for Walker and his wife. They were both ambitious, jealous of each other, consumed with the Life. Connie had tried to keep working, rehearsing, studying. There had been the business with Lu Anne. Probably neither of them was there enough, in the right ways. They never spoke of it although they both knew; it was too hard.