“You can go right in, Wat,” Mrs. Green said.
“Thank you. Is he in a good mood?”
“Why, Wat dear, your father’s always in a good mood,” Mrs. Green said.
“Oh yes, certainly,” I said, and went past her desk into the corridor. A brunette secretary in a tight woolen dress swiveled out of one of the offices, smiling at me as she went by. Neck craning, I knocked on my father’s door.
“Come in,” he called.
I went into the office. My father was standing behind his desk, shirt sleeves rolled up, tic pulled down, desk top covered with photographs. His attitude of concentration seemed posed, as though he had hastily rushed behind his desk, rolling up his sleeves the moment he heard the knock on the door, anxious to present to his son an image of a working publisher. If such were truly the case, he needn’t have bothered; I’d always had enormous difficulty imagining my father at work, and each time I came to his office the task became perversely more difficult. I shouldn’t have expected Tyler Press to be a mirror image of our own house in Talmadge — a man was, after all, entitled to decorate his offices to suit his own taste. But the difference here was so startling that it was difficult to imagine the man Will Tyler being comfortable in either place.
Our house was an early eighteenth-century colonial, while clapboard and slate, paneled doors and chimney architrave, leaded casements and molded panels. My mother, presumably with my father’s assistance and blessing, had decorated in the style of the period, creating a warm and welcoming shelter that nudged the side of a hill from which you could sometimes see Long Island Sound. Crewel-embroidered curtains, blue-green with a touch of red, draped the living room windows. The walnut sofa was upholstered with blue-green damask, the cabriole-leg wing chair with tapestry. There was an oriental rug before the fireplace, which was flanked by two Hogarth-type side chairs and a tall-back wing chair, also done in red tapestry. The house was rich with brass and burled walnut, needlepoint and marble, the faint lingering aroma of woodsmoke.
In contrast, the first thing you saw when you entered my father’s office was the huge gray Formica-topped work desk dominated at its far end by a wooden piece he had bought in a First Avenue shop, an African mask resting on a stainless steel cube. Two walls were a pristine white, a third wall was covered floor to ceiling with bookcases, their jacketed spines adding a patchwork quilt of color to the room. The fourth wall framed a window view of New York City, mocha-colored drapes hanging at either side of the glass expanse. The chairs were upholstered in brown leather and tweed, the carpet was beige. Out of a bosky glen of plants in the corner opposite the desk, there rose like some metallic woodland sprite, a joyously leaping Giacometti imitation. On one of the white walls, there hung an original Larry Rivers, and on the other a Goodenough. The lighting was hidden in walnut coves, except for two hanging white globes. The over-all effect was hardly similar to that in our home, and it made me believe that perhaps there were two Will Tylers, neither of whom I understood or even came close to understanding.
I went behind the desk and kissed him on the cheek without embarrassment; I could never understand those guys who have hangups about kissing their own fathers. He said, “Hello, son,” and then spread his hands wide over the desk top. “What do you think of it?”
There were perhaps two hundred photographs of different sizes on the desk. All of them were of General De Gaulle, whom I had never considered a particularly photogenic subject, handsome though he may be.
“I thought it was further along than this,” I said.
“Well, this is the final selection. What do you think?”
“It’s hard to say. I mean, without any text...”
“Yes, but what do you think of the pictures?”
“Oh, they’re great,” I said.
“We’ll be laying it out sometime this week,” my father said. “Great. When’s publication?”
“God knows,” he said, and waved the question aside. “Have you had lunch?”
“I grabbed a hot dog,” I said.
“I thought...”
“Actually...”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Close to one. Pop, the reason I stopped by...”
“I thought we were having lunch together. I purposely kept lunch free.”
“Well, I’ve got to get back, you know. We’re rehearsing this afternoon...”
“How come no school?” he asked suddenly.
“It’s teachers’ conferences.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I’m not cutting or anything, if that’s what you thought.”
“Why would I think that?”
“Anyway, Pop, there’s something I’ve got to discuss with you.”
“Shoot,” he said, and sat in the brown leather Eames chair behind his desk. He took a cigar from the humidor near the African mask, sniffed it the way I’d seen Adolph Menjou do in a thousand old movies on television, lighted it with a wooden match, blew out an enormous cloud of poisonous smoke, laced his hands across his chest, and looked at me expectantly. I cleared my throat.
“Well,” I said, “as you know, I’ll be graduating this June.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And this is May,” I said, “and I thought I should be making some plans for the summer now. I mean, before it’s here, you know. Because I’ll be leaving for Yale in September, and I wanted to make some use of the summer, you know.”
“Where do you want to go?” my father said.
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Well, that’s what we’re doing is talking,” he said, and smiled, and puffed on the cigar, and said, “I have a feeling this is going to cost me money.”
“No, no,” I said, “no.” I cleared my throat again. “You see, these arc, you know, changing times in America, and I thought, you see, I didn’t want to just lay around on some beach all summer, though that would be nice, still...”
“You don’t want to come to Fire Island, is that it?”
“I love Fire Island, it isn’t that.”
“It’s some girl.”
“No, no, I’m not serious about anybody right now. But the idea of just laying around all summer isn’t too appealing to me right now. I want to do something.”
“Like what?”
“You agree these are changing times?” I said, figuring I’d start my buildup now, get him to agree in principle the way I’d planned it, and then ask him for permission.
“Yes, these are changing times,” he agreed.
“Okay,” I said, “I want to go south this summer and help with voter registration. Negro voter registration.”
My father puffed on his cigar.
“A guy I know from school is going,” I said, “and I want to go with him. They pay a salary. I can earn between fifteen and twenty-five dollars a week.”
“Is he colored or white?” my father asked.
“He’s colored,” I said. “His name is Larry Peters, I think you met him once.”
“I don’t remember meeting him,” my father said.
“After one of the dances. He was helping us load the wagon.”