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

grown up with and dated, and how things changed when he went away to Dartmouth and the wider world of Hanover, New Hampshire. He freely admitted his experience was limited, yet when he arrived in Hanover he discovered a strait-laced attitude at odds with the earthier climate of Quarterday.
    You would have thought it would be the reverse, but it wasn’t.
    Quarterday was Sodom and Gomorrah compared to Hanover.
    And believe me, not much was happening in Quarterday.
    But at least we knew what girls looked like. And they knew what we looked like, too.
    Well, there were the town girls. Girls out for some fun.
    I’d forgotten about them.
    I didn’t know them. My roommate did.
    Those girls were too much like the girls I’d grown up with.
    He grew apart from his childhood friends, those who had stayed home and gone to work on the farm or in one of the shops or become teachers or policemen, like Tom Felsen. My father’s vocabulary changed, the slang he used and the jokes he laughed at. He came home for Christmas wearing a long green scarf and whistling Gershwin tunes. “Lady Be Good” was a favorite. He had taken up the drums and was playing in his fraternity’s jazz band. His second night home he went to a party and got into a scuffle with a boy he had known for years, and after that his Quarterday friends avoided him, except the girl he had known since grade school who sought him out to ask him about college life. What do you learn? Is it fun? What is there about it that can change a person so? And is it worthwhile? My father felt he was living in two worlds at once, the adult world of Hanover and the childhood world of Quarterday, and these worlds did not fit. The first year he was away, my father had dreams at night, homesick dreams of the prairie teeming with skaters in strange hats speaking exotic tongues. The prairie went on forever, a monotonous tableland with not a house or a tree in sight. When he awakened from these dreams he went at once to his desk and began reading where he’d left off, making notes as he went, as if they were sentences of atonement. He thought of forfeiting his scholarship and returning home for good, though his experience at Christmas was not encouraging. He felt he had abandoned his family and friends and only later did it occur to my father that the reverse could as easily be said; he thought of these friends as leftovers and hated himself for thinking it but knew also that he was not the first American to betray his origins, moving on. When he tentatively mentioned his fears to his parents, his mother said she would love him no matter what he did or who he became, but perhaps it was a good idea to return home for a semester and take stock. His father listened impatiently and stated that if he forfeited the scholarship he was not welcome in “my house.” You started it, now you finish it. Harsh words from the best dad a guy ever had.
    Then hockey came along and in the spring his roommate suggested they spend the summer in Maine as sailing instructors, his family had a house there with a cottage they could live in and sailing was a cinch, anyone could learn to sail; and Teddy Ravan said yes, why not, so he spent that summer in Maine and the subsequent summers as well and that was where he met Jo Wilson, a freshman at Pembroke, whose family summered in the neighboring village. It took a while for my father to understand a society that summered in one state and wintered in another, but he was always quick so he caught on soon enough, as he had caught on to hockey, jazz, sailing, the stammer in the dramas of Eugene O’Neill, and the urban architecture of the Italian Renaissance. He was especially successful with older people, mature for his age, serious-minded, good at games, altogether winning.
    Doesn’t that Ravan boy have the most beautiful manners?
    Where is he from again?
    What does his father do, actually?
    That long-ago summer, my father