Free Sons by Evan Hunter

breakfast with the fork (one of my mother’s expressions, translated from the English to mean a breakfast including some kind of meat, usually sausage), and since I didn’t get to school each day until nine o’clock, I wasn’t hungry enough to cat very much of the school lunch at noon. But neither did I dare eat anything substantial when I got home in the afternoon because dinner was at six-fifteen sharp and my mother was a stickler for eating everything put before you. So I usually just took the edge off my appetite with a little milk and maybe a chocolate pudding, or a few cookies, and then went into the living room to do my homework. We had a new Philco floor-model radio there, complete with push buttons, and as I worked I would listen first to “Terry and the Pirates” and “The Adventures of Jimmy Allen” in breathless succession on WENR, then a quick flick of the dial at five-thirty for “Jack Armstrong” on W67C, and then back to WENR for “Captain Midnight” at five forty-five. At six on the button. I’d hear my father’s key in the latch, and the front door would open, and he would call his customary greeting, “Hello, anybody home?”
    At dinner that night, I decided to reopen the Air Force issue.
    My father seemed to be in a very good mood. He was talking about a recent War Production Board memo that eulogized the paper industry and made the printed word sound as important to the war effort as bullets. I always listened in fascination when my father talked about paper. I could never visualize him doing anything but work of a physical nature; his lumberjack background seemed entirely believable to me. When he came home from work each evening wearing a gray fedora and a gray topcoat and a pinstriped business suit, I was always a little surprised that he wasn’t wearing boots and a mackinaw and a turtleneck sweater. He was a big man, still very strong at forty-three, with penetrating blue eyes and a nose I liked to consider patrician (since I had inherited it). The table in the paneled formal dining room was eight feet long without additional leaves, and whereas my father always sat at the head of it, my mother did not sit at the opposite end but instead took a chair on his right, closest to the kitchen. She refused to keep a bell on the table (“Never count the number a bell tolls, for it’ll bring you that many years of bad luck”) and would more often than not rise and go into the kitchen herself if the maid didn’t respond to her first gentle call. My sister Linda always sat on my father’s left, and I sat alongside her, which was not the happiest of arrangements, since she was left-handed and invariably sticking her elbow in my dish.
    “Well,” I said, subtly I thought, “it looks as if Michael Mallory will be leaving for the Air Force soon.”
    “And here I thought we were actually going to get through a meal without hearing Will’s enlistment pitch,” my father said.
    “The wheel that docs the squeaking is the wheel that gets the grease,” my mother said. “Don’t you know that, Bert?”
    “If I wait till my eighteenth birthday,” I said, unrattled, “and then get drafted, I’ll end up in the Infantry.”
    “Let’s wait till your eighteenth birthday and find out, shall we?” my father said.
    “Sure, I’ll send you letters from Italy. Written in the mud or something.”
    “You spent six summers at camp without writing a single letter,” my father said. “I have no reason to believe you’ll be changing your habits when and if you get to Italy.”
    “That wasn’t my point,” I said.
    “Your father knows your point,” my mother said.
    “I’ll be eighteen in June,” I said.
    “We know when you’ll be eighteen.”
    “Well, for crying out loud, do you
want
me to go into the Infantry?”
    “I don’t want you to go
anywhere,”
my father said flatly.
    “Well, that’s fine, Pop, but Uncle Sam has other ideas, you know? Whether you realize it or not,