Cold Spring Harbor Read Free Page B

the talk started after a very few miles.
    “Memory’s a curious thing,” he began, and he was afraid at once that this might be a weak, dead-giveaway kind of opening line, like the first sentence of a radio commercial, but he didn’t stop. “I don’t suppose you can remember much about Fort Benning, Georgia, can you?”
    “Oh, a little, yeah,” Evan said. “I remember a few things.”
    “Well, you were still pretty small then, but that time at Benning’s been on my mind a lot lately. Your mother and I had these great—”
    He spoke carefully, listening to the words as they came and trying as hard as an actor not to let them sound rehearsed, though in fact they were: he had rehearsed the whole of this speech last night in whispers, in bed, right down to the pauses where Evan could make a comment or two. Striving in every breath for the illusion of spontaneity, he was only reciting material he knew by heart.
    “Your mother and I had these great friends in those years, Joe and Nancy Raymond. Do you remember them at all? Had a girl of about your age and a younger boy?”
    “Yeah, I do,” Evan said. “I mean, I do now.”
    “We took to spending an awful lot of time together, in our place or theirs, or down at the club, and we never seemed to get tired of each others’ company. Then one night Joe told us he’d decided to resign his commission. Said he wanted to find out what making money would be like. He’d been looking into the sales end of the radio business—radio was still brand-new then, you see, and people were saying it was a field with an unlimited future. His idea was to get started selling for one of the manufacturers, Philco or Majestic or one of the others, then move over into the management side and go on up from there.
    “Well, naturally, your mother and I felt bad. We’d belosing our best friends—really the only friends we had, at the time—and I can remember your mother saying ‘What’re we going to
do
without you?’
    “And here’s what I’ve been leading up to, Evan: Joe Raymond asked me to go along with him. He said we’d probably starve for a year or two, or three, but he said once we got our bearings we’d begin to move forward and nothing in the world would ever stop us. Then your mother spoke up again and said ‘Oh, let’s
do
it, Charles.’
    “And I’m afraid I can never forget what happened after that. I’ll always remember how crestfallen, how disappointed she looked when I started making excuses and shying away from it, backing down, trying to laugh it off by saying I couldn’t picture myself as a salesman, and that kind of thing. I felt like a coward, and I think that’s probably because I
was
a coward. I simply didn’t have Joe Raymond’s spirit, or Joe Raymond’s guts.
    “Well, I can’t tell you what became of the Raymonds because we lost touch with them after a while, the way people always seem to do, even with dear friends. I don’t know whether Joe ever did get ahead in business or whether he went down and out in the Depression. But I’ll tell you this much, Evan: years later, after your mother’s illness, I would’ve given anything to take it all back. Time and again over the years I’ve wanted to go back to that night at Fort Benning and say ‘Right; good; me too. That’s what we’ll do, Joe. We’ll get out and sell radios.’ ”
    Charles’s voice had grown a little more intense than he’d meant it to, so he waited a few seconds to bring his breathing back to normal. Then he said “I think you can probably guess why I wanted to tell you about this, Evan. It’s because I really don’t like the way things are sort of idling and drifting for you these days. I don’t like the kind of job you have; I don’t like your living at home instead of off somewhere else by yourself. You’ll be twenty-four soon, and itseems to me you ought to be taking command of your life. What I’m trying to say is, I’d like you to be a little more like Joe