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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781450284202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/19/2011 |
| Pages: | 356 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Three Boys Like You
A NovelBy William M. Gould
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 William M. GouldAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-8420-2
Chapter One
After the unexpected phone call, Tony and Lily sat in his apartment, talking quietly."We were inseparable," he told her, explaining a friendship of long ago. "When I think about it I feel a special warmth in here."
Hand on chest, he smiled, remembering how the bond had been substantially reinforced by a particular school punishment. No, he'd never had another friendship like it. For Miss Biggs, on the other hand, it had been an exasperating moment, and afterwards she had growled that 'three boys like you' sorely tested her life as a teacher. Still, what a creative educator! It was she who had promptly come up with the idea of requiring them to read an entire book about real friendship, and so it was that The Three Musketeers—'all for one and one for all'—had gloriously sparked continuing flights of fancy.
The phone call had caused this stirring of memory, and the shift in tone of the November afternoon was a move from fretful tristesse to puzzlement and expectancy.
Earlier, Tony Dorfman and Lily Kemp had gone to the Guggenheim, taking Lily's baby with them, and they had come back to his place the long way, pushing the stroller across the park and around the reservoir, up Central Park West, and then over to West End Avenue. Before the call, Tony had been rather wistful.
"What a strange, sweet, sad day it is," he had said slowly.
The baby, exhausted by their outing, was sleeping on a quilt in a shadowed corner of the living room. Sections of The Times lay scattered about on the floor after they'd both read the stories about the recent Beirut barracks bombing which killed two hundred forty-one Marines, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and Reverend Jesse Jackson announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President.
From out on the river came three impatient hoots of a ship's horn. That sound affected Tony, and he sighed, leaning back in his chair and feeling the effect of a Budweiser thirstily downed. The Hudson, only a short block away, held the promise of the great world he had known as a newspaperman. One could smell the river, even if not able to see it from this old-fashioned, rent-controlled, spacious apartment, but even a good apartment didn't take away the yearning. He knew he wanted to move on, to see something new. "I've lived here eight years," he said, turning to look at Lily. "For me, it's a record."
"Sundays are like that," Lily said. "They make me philosophical, too. And introspective." She was half-reclining on the sofa, turning pages of a catalog she'd bought at the museum. Tony wanted to go over and kiss her fair autumn-flushed cheeks, but he waited, savoring a little the lazy feeling the beer had given him. He had known Lily just six months, but lately he had come to feel that meeting her had been the only good thing to happen to him for a long while.
She lived just two blocks further uptown and they had met at a laundromat where she had actually helped him open a tricky washing machine door.
Medium of height, ruddy and bearish, Tony was round-faced, with a thin ring of sparse hair circling his bald cranium, but his sideburns were full, almost mutton chop, and this curling facial fringe was still mostly red with only touches of gray. There were crinkles beside his somewhat sad brown eyes and, with a noticeable gap between his two top front teeth, he had a wide, endearing, and even cheery smile. People expected him to be good-natured.
It wasn't the city, Tony knew, that caused his Sunday gloom. It was the drying up of imagination—to a writer, death. For years Tony had been much sought after, and writing had brought him modest success. Reporter and foreign correspondent; three novels of adventure (which the public liked, although the critics had not); a dozen or so short stories (one an O. Henry selection); lots of travel pieces from exotic places. The name Tony Dorfman wouldn't fade into oblivion, not for a while at least, but there had been nothing really good for a year.
Perhaps there wouldn't be a fourth book. Was his career as a writer over? These days he worked for Columbia University's news bureau and in four days he would fly to San Francisco to cover the trial of one Richard Coombes, a doctor in Berkeley. Coombes, a graduate of Columbia's medical school, was on trial for injecting a fatal dose of an opiate into his comatose ninety-eight year old mother-in-law's feeding tube. Tony looked forward to seeing San Francisco again and he felt he had an open mind about what Dr. Coombes had done. Life is always precious; but so is human dignity. Everything hangs on what the patient wants, Tony knew. Did the family know her wishes? That would come out at the trial.
Meanwhile, creativity lay fallow, and although he accepted that, it didn't soothe Tony. Damn it! He was still a writer, barely fifty, and yet here he was, creating only a quantity of self-pity. In an odd moment of pride, he had once imagined a legacy, The Collected Works, but now he dwelled continually on the very troubling question of whether he had anything left to say. Was he washed up? Finished?
Sometimes he thought that Vietnam could have been the high point of his life. The danger, the adrenalin, the sheer physicality of jungle heat, gunfire and the stink of death, the battles, not just on the ground but with the newspaper's management and with the military brass—he had lived those years on a high plain of excitement. Okay, there had been terrible moments. He'd never be rid of the image of a GI tortured by the VC and lying face up in a swamp. And he had been present at the edge of a village when the American lieutenant gave the command to open fire on a school even while kids were in the building. But, there were also flashes of pride when he remembered moments of courage. And there had been enormous creative energy. His stories from the field had shown the stupidity and futility of the war, the wrong-headedness and gross incompetence of experts, the horrors inflicted on the local people, and, maybe even more sadly, on the young Americans drafted into a conflict that should never have happened.
Did he wish to return to anything like that? Probably not. He knew it was healthier to pace himself. And that meant to act his age. Forty-nine. Almost fifty. How would he do these days in a war? Ah, but he wasn't sure he didn't want to try it again.
Occasionally, and lately more than ever, Tony's thoughts went way back to his boyhood and to certain old friends. He found it amusing that, for someone like himself who had lived all over the world and had had many adventures, returning to those early days gave him a sense of stability. He wondered if other men ever felt nostalgia. No, people were caught up with paying bills and raising kids. Mundane stuff, but real. He himself certainly lived in the present, and maybe even thought too much about the future, but mental excursions back in time did have a kind of soothing effect.
"My mother called yesterday," Lily said. "She keeps reminding me not to forget that we have a date with her in two weeks."
"I haven't forgotten, and I want to meet her, too."
The baby stirred with a little moan and Tony jumped up. "Isn't it cold for her on the floor?" he asked, crouching over the tiny form. Maybe he would spend the rest of his life not writing, but ruminating about human continuity and the fact that he was not going to leave an heir. This little baby, so lovely, so perfectly formed, and so full of concentrated future, was not his child. He had no family, not a whole, unbroken one at any rate.
Tony's father, Russian born, had come to America at seven and gone to work by twelve. Moses Dorfman had worked as a shoe salesman, as a door-to-door collector of installment payments for a music store that sold radios to immigrant families, and as a tenor sax player in a roadhouse dance band, but he had higher ambitions. It took him six years, mostly at night, to put himself through pharmacy school, and after a time of working for others he eventually bought a small drug store in Flatbush where he worked continually, never taking a vacation. "Life is a serious business," he warned his son. That was an anthem sung many times, and Moses Dorfman was surely still convinced of its truth on the sweltering day in July 1970 when, after sitting through an exasperating series of traffic jams on the Long Island Expressway, he arrived at the doorstep of his cherished Middleport home, collapsed, and died.
Sylvia Dorfman had been a traditional wife and mother, a wonderful baker and a person who, while devoted to her husband, her home, and her only child, had never really understood that her selflessness was also somehow tied to sudden resentments that regularly bubbled to the surface.
Tony had loved his parents, but once he went off to college, he'd never again felt really close to them. They didn't understand him, and he, try as he might, couldn't subscribe to what seemed to him like old-country tribal strictures. Sometimes he realized that the three of them had left so many things unsaid, so many feelings pushed down, that they were more like an association than a family. He didn't know anymore what a real family would be like.
He had been married once, but Tony's pairing with Brenda Shipley had been a disaster, and its six painful years had come to an end only when he himself, so stubborn, so resistant, had finally acknowledged the utter wrongness of its beginnings in misguided altruism. How stupid he'd been! At least now he knew himself a little better. He had lived these last eight years in New York, but he understood that he was still basically a traveler, a mover, never wanting to stay in one place long enough to take root. He had buoyed himself up by whoever was at hand, and when he wrote, stringing words together, it was surely to find out what he knew. Sometimes, like now, he remembered that writing wasn't living, and he was stricken by loneliness and the fear that what he had produced was weak and pitiful.
The child's fingers moved slowly, clutching at the edge of the pink quilt. Her eyes were closed and a bright little bubble of spit popped from her lips.
"Don't worry, she's fine," said Lily. "You profess to be bored by children, but you're actually very attentive. And I like you that way."
"Isn't there a little draft?"
"She's wrapped up; she's sleeping; she's fine. Why so jumpy?"
He stood up. "I get this way if I'm not writing," he said. "Vague thoughts, but nothing real enough to work on."
"Tell me the vague thoughts."
"I want to do something with psychological guts. Maybe from my childhood, people I used to know. I ponder, but nothing goes anywhere. Dead ends."
"You haven't told me about your childhood."
"I know," he said. "Or about my old friends, either. Guys I used to know." This idea, he thought, might have grown directly out of his gloom. When he sat fumbling with pencil and pad, scribbling doodles on the edges of the paper until they filled the entire page and not a single word had been written, then thoughts of old friends came into his mind.
Lily smiled and sat up, moved over on the couch, and held out her arms for him. "Come," she said. "Tell me."
That's when the phone rang.
"Tony Dorfman?"
"Yes?"
"Is that you, Tony?"
"Who is this?"
"Philip Levinsky."
What he would remember weeks later was the portentous quality of the voice. Deep, resonant, and unsuspected. No warning. The tremendous impact of words: Philip—Levinsky. The shivers along the skin of his arms and back.
"What?" Tony blurted. He knew his afternoon mood had been complex, but was surprised to realize now how much nostalgia had been a part of it. The doodles on the pages he'd just been telling Lily about led to old friends. What you got from old friends was stability and perspective; they forced you to see origins, made you grasp what you had become. That was what he wanted to write about. "Philip! You're in New York? Here?"
"A quickie," the voice said. "Only two days."
"I was just this minute thinking about you." Of course, Tony thought. People obtain their bearings by learning how they stand in relation to others.
"Can we have dinner tomorrow night, Tony?"
"Dinner!" Had he mused about the possibility of an old friend actually telephoning? "Dinner! Absolutely. How about coming here? Or shall we go out?" He'd written to Philip over the years without receiving a word in response and had slowly transformed the memory of his friend into an image of a deaf mute. "Damn, Phil! I never expected to hear your voice again." The fleeting thought came to Tony that he had conjured something real from a phantom. "How the hell are you?"
"I'm okay. I have a favor to ask, but we can talk about it tomorrow."
"You sound different."
"Older," Philip laughed. "But still an iconoclast. Still nasty."
"Do you know how many times I've written to you?"
"But you didn't know my address."
"That's true. I write to that place in Dakar."
"Oh, my God. That's so long ago."
"How was I to know? Anyway, the letters come back."
Only a few weeks before, Tony had written his old friend (a ghost?) a rambling, but honest lament over blocked creativity, and also a paean to Lily. 'She's different,' he had written. 'Intelligent and beautiful, and I feel she's going to change my life.'
"I can't really believe I'm talking to you," Tony said. "You can meet Lily."
"Who is Lily?"
"I wrote you about her, but obviously you didn't get that one either."
Lily stood, tiptoed over to check the baby, then turned and went into the bedroom.
"I'd like to see you alone, Tony," Philip said.
"What's wrong?"
"I can't say much on the phone." Philip wanted to meet him at the Oyster Bar at seven-thirty.
"Sure. That's fine, but how about during the day, too? I'm completely free. I'll meet you somewhere."
Philip couldn't. He had appointments all day long.
"Tuesday, then."
No, Philip would be gone by then. He was sorry.
Tony brought the receiver down from his ear and stared at it for a moment before replacing it on the phone. Across the room he saw the little pink bundle on the floor. He got up and stood in the doorway of his darkened bedroom. Lily was lying back on the bed. She leaned over and switched on the light.
"Who was it?" Lily asked.
"One of my two oldest and best friends," Tony murmured. He was stunned by the brevity of the conversation he'd just had.
She wanted to know all about his friend—who he was, what he did, where he lived. Tony lay down next to her and began to reminisce about Middleport in the late forties. "We were inseparable," he said. "Like The Three Musketeers—'all for one and one for all.' We had a teacher who made us read it. She told us 'three boys like you ought to know this book.'" "You still keep up with high school friends. I think that's charming. Who is Robert?"
"Well, I don't really keep up."
"Who is Robert?"
"Robert's a doctor out in California. I saw him about ten years ago, but I haven't set eyes on Philip in twenty-five or thirty years."
"Where does Philip live?"
"Abroad somewhere, but I don't know. An expatriate."
"A nice Jewish boy from Middleport, Long Island?"
"God, I haven't thought about it for such a long time. This all goes back to Korea. Philip was an objector to a war that had no objectors. There was no such thing as a protest movement in those days. We were in college and no one wanted to get drafted, but you could get a deferment just by staying in the top half of your class. A cinch for everyone I knew except Philip. He was brilliant, but he hated school. Too confining, too bourgeois. So, he quit school—and left the country."
"He never came back?"
"Not as far as I know."
Lily sat up. "How can he get back in now? Or is it so long ago they don't even care?"
Tony had a dèjá vu sense of what was coming.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Three Boys Like You by William M. Gould Copyright © 2011 by William M. Gould. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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