She smoked silently as she drove, her face alternately illuminated by the green light of the dash and the glowing coal of the cigarette whenever she puffed on it.
“We should have taken it,” I said.
“Well,” she said, and gave a slight shrug.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You seem down.”
“We were supposed to go to a dinner party. I had to cancel.”
“Oh.”
“I suppose I could have gone alone. They asked me to.” She shrugged again.
“How’d Dad get stuck?”
“The De Gaulle book,” she answered.
“They still working on that?”
“Apparently so.”
We were silent the rest of the way home.
My father must have been watching for the car. The minute we pulled into the driveway, the kitchen door opened, and he came out without a coat, grinning, walking swiftly to the driver’s side as my mother rolled down the window.
“Hi,” he said, and leaned through the open window to kiss her on the cheek, and then looked across to me and said, “How’d it go, Wat?”
“We lost,” I said.
“What docs Leon Coopersmith know about good music?” my father said. “You want a hand with that organ?” He was very excited. His eyes were glowing, and his face was flushed, and I knew he was bursting to tell us something, and I felt the energy of his secret flowing through the open window and suffusing the automobile. I loved him most when he was this way. He seemed to me in these moments to be very tall and powerful. I half-expected him to reach into the car and pick me up and hold me out at arm’s length and then clasp me suddenly to his chest, laughing, the way he used to when I was very young. I found myself grinning with him.
“Will,” my mother said, “I thought...”
“Man of surprises,” my father said, “man of surprises,” and kissed her again in punctuation, on the mouth this time. “Do you still want to go to that party?”
“Well, I...”
“Let me help Wat,” he said, and opened the door for my mother, and gave her a hug when she stepped out of the car, and then came to the tailgate with me. We carried the organ into the house, and then brought in the amplifier and the mike stands and the two speakers. My father kept putting down Leon Coopersmith all the while we worked, telling me he had a tin car, telling me the people who selected judges for these band battles should make certain they picked someone attuned to the sound of youth, all the while bursting with his own secret, but taking the time and the trouble to console me about Dawn Patrol’s loss. As we made our last trip inside, he said, “Well, you’ll win the next one,” and then shouted, “Dolores, do we have to go to that damn party?”
My mother, still looking bewildered, said, “I suppose not, I’ve already called to...”
“Then let’s forget it,” he said. “Let’s all go over to Emily Shaw’s and celebrate.”
“What are we celebrating?” my mother said. She was excited now, too. The energy he radiated was positively contagious. We stood by the kitchen sink, the three of us, grinning at each other idiotically, my father savoring the moment when he would tell us his secret, my mother and I relishing the suspense. When he finally revealed his coup — he had made arrangements with a French photographer named Claude Michaud to take a series of candid shots of De Gaulle, with the general’s permission and cooperation — it hardly seemed as important as the buildup had been, but we showered him with congratulations nonetheless, telling him how marvelous it was, and agreeing that we had good cause for celebration. My mother looked radiant. As my father spoke, her eyes never left his face. She listened to him intently, proud and pleased, shining with adoration.
“Okay.” he said, and jabbed a finger at me, “tie and jacket, on the double,” and then turned to my mother and said, “Do you know what they say in France?”
“What do they say in France?” my mother asked.
“In France, they say ‘This Will Tyler, he is one lucky son of a bitch!”” and burst out laughing.
“Hey, watch the language,” I said, “there are little kids around.”
“Who wants a drink?” my father asked. "I want a drink,” he said. “Dolores? Would you like a drink?”
“All right,” she said, “if you’re...”
“Hey!” he said, and snapped his fingers. “He knows Linda! "
“Who knows Linda?”
“Michaud. He met her and Stanley when they were in Paris last year. Do you think I should call her?”
“Sure, if you want to,” my mother said.
“The rates go down after six, don’t they?”
“Last of the big spenders,” I said.
“Ha-ha,” he said.
“Debating a phone call to Chicago.”
“Put-down artist,” my mother said to me, but she was grinning.
My father went to the telephone. “Come on, come on,” he said, “what’s everybody standing around for?”
“I thought I was getting a drink,” my mother said.
“I’ll bring it up, hon,” my father said, and lifted the receiver, and waited for a dial tone. My mother was watching him from the steps leading upstairs. “Hey,” he said to her.
“Mmm?”
“I love you,” he said.
My mother smiled and gave a brief pleased nod. Then she turned and went up the steps.
“Hello,” my father said into the telephone, “I’d like to make a person-to-person call to Mrs. Linda Kearing in Chicago. The number...”
March
It was my kid sister Linda, of all people, who clued me in. I had met her completely by accident outside the bio lab on the fourth floor, and casually asked what it was all about. To my surprise, she blushed and said, “I can’t tell you, Will,” and then went right on to tell me. That was when the bell sounded for the air-raid drill.
She made me promise upon pain of death and torture that I would never reveal my source of information, and I kissed her swiftly on the check and then raced back to my home room, which was what we’d been trained to do like robots whenever those three successive gongs sounded. A fire drill was a single steady repetitive gong, and an air-raid drill was three gongs in quick sequence, and then a long pause, and then three gongs again. For the fire drills, we always marched out of the school silently and solemnly and looked back at it from four blocks away, near St. Chrysostom’s Church, presumably to witness the old brick building crumbling in flames.
I thought of what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, and I began planning and scheming all the way back to home room about how I would break the news to Charlotte Wagner. This was, of course, the eighth period, which was the last period of the day. We had never had an air-raid drill in the history of Grace School that did not take place during the eighth period. The routine was unvarying. Sometime between three-thirty and four-fifteen, the successive gongs would sound sharply and insistently, and we’d all rush back to our home rooms, crouch under our desks, clasp our hands behind our heads, and wait in cramped silence for about ten minutes until the gong sounded for the all-clear. Our teachers would then dismiss us, since by that time the last period would be almost over, the school day practically ended. It was my theory that this imaginative approach to protection against enemy attack was based on secret information delivered to our city officials by the Japanese themselves, who had doubtless promised that any bombing of the school would come sometime during the eighth period.