Read Online An Unfinished Season by Ward Just - Free Book Online

what’s Hotchkiss really like? How do the masters live? Do they have dormitory apartments or houses of their own? I understood after a while that even the instructors wanted to migrate east, trading up, Hotchkiss or Choate or Deerfield a settled perch at the top of the tree. Who wanted to spend his life at a struggling day school north of Chicago? Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be moving on to somewhere else. Meanwhile, I had
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,
the romance of the trenches of the Somme.
    Â 
    In May my mother went back east to visit her parents. It had been a year since she had seen them, and her father was not well. She stayed two weeks and then announced she would be a while longer, owing to her father’s second stroke. He was bedridden and needed assistance around the clock but was improving every day. She and my father had many long conversations in the evening, my father’s voice a low rumble punctuated by long silences during which I heard ice cubes rattle into his glass. He was sitting in his leather chair in the den, his voice all but inaudible to me, bent over homework in my room upstairs, and finally the sharp click of the receiver when he replaced it in the cradle. Later, during my evening walkabout, I looked in through the French doors and saw him sitting in his chair, disconsolate, a closed book in his lap.
    My mother returned for my graduation in June but left again the next day. A week later my father flew to New York, where he had reserved a suite at the Waldorf and arranged for theater tickets and dinner at “21” and a carriage ride in Central Park at midnight, when he would present her with a gold bracelet from Marshall Field’s. But he returned a day ahead of schedule, explaining cryptically that Yalta was no place to decide the future of the world.
    We needed a neutral venue.
    We should have gone to Havana when she wanted to, he said to me.
    While my mother was in the East, my father and I played golf regularly on the weekends and joked about “batching it,” a disheveled locker-room life in which women did not figure. We existed on a diet of sirloin steaks, baked potatoes, caesar salad, and chocolate ice cream, and after dinner we played pinochle. Alone together, we grew close, much closer than when my mother was with us. I discovered I hardly knew him at all, and of course I was surprised that there was anything to know. I never understood much of what my parents said to each other because I was not aware of the private language of married people, a tongue I came to believe was invented to keep outsiders at a distance, like a military code in wartime. My mother’s things were all around us, the pictures she owned and her grandfather’s set of the Harvard Classics, and the objects that dressed up the coffee table and the mantel over the fireplace in the den. These things reminded us of her every day. But she herself was absent and seemed to slip from us, a photograph fading in the sun. When she called on the telephone, I described to her the golf matches and the evening diet and the pinochle and how well we were getting on, my father and I—though we both missed her and hoped she would return soon. Things weren’t the same without her. Dad and I have long talks every night and he’s teaching me things—
    What things? she asked.
    Things, I said. Things that men have to know, I added, and when she did not reply I knew I had blundered. I had said too much without saying enough, and when I asked if she wanted to speak to “him,” she said she couldn’t, someone was at the door, and rang off without another word.
    My father told me a good deal about his business and much else besides during the hour of drinks before dinner, when he was in a reflective state of mind. I had the idea that he was telling me things he had never told anyone. He said we were in an enviable zone of trust and I did not know how rare that was, so we should