Free The Death of All Things Seen by Michael Collins Page B

panel on a TV show was debating the constitutionality of the draft. Nate had been engrossed.
    In listening to the show, his father was decided that too much life had been lost in what Eisenhower had called the Industrial Military Complex. If the time came, there was the National Guard as a measure of last resort. His father had connections. It was the best of both worlds. Nate might save face, serve and never see action.
    In the interim, there was life to be lived.
    *
    Nate used the carriage house out back of the main house as his domestic quarters. His father had been liberal and generous and impressed on Nate that he felt that trying to dissuade men from their natural desires, as he put it, was a perversion of the natural order of things, implying a salaciousness in Nate that was never the case. At times, Nate felt he was being absolved for sins he hadn’t actually committed.
    His father communicated his tolerance not in so many words but in the way he announced his arrival at the carriage house, his noisy footsteps across the flagstone crossway, ostentatiously sniffing the scent of someone who, he imagined, had just gone scrambling through the back egress. In reality, few girls ever visited Nate in the carriage house, and those who did were acquaintances or study partners.
    And yet, his father swore he knew all Nate’s girlfriends by their perfume. He called them Duchess and he called Nate Swank . It was just one of his foibles.
    When his draft number came up in the fall of 1970, Nate was attending Northwestern but living at home. He decided that he would not seek a college deferment. He told no one, least of all his father. Nate would not be pressured. He kept his father at bay, while in the back of his mind he was advancing on the idea of seeking his place in the world in the act of serving. It was the unpopular choice, no doubt, but it carried with it, for men like him – college men who did not defer – a noble and gratifying significance.
    At the time, he was in a platonic situation with a junior in high school whom he was tutoring in Math – Janice Marsh, the kid sister of his best friend. He eventually told his mother of his decision and begged she say nothing to his father.
    A week later his mother betrayed him.
    His father arrived at the top of the carriage house stairs while Janice was sitting at a table beside Nate. A book was open between them. The fire threw shadows on the exposed red brick. It could have been a scene from a hundred years before.
    Nate had grown. His hair was long. He had the beginnings of a goatee beard. He was wearing bell-bottomed pants with a hip-hugger waist and a paisley shirt.
    It was one of the few times that Nate had ever seen Helen Price. Below, he saw her leave in the crescent arc of the circular drive in his father’s car. His father was that loaded he hadn’t been able to drive.
    His father insisted on being introduced to the duchess. He was aggressive and lurching in his advance.
    Janice Marsh hardly understood what he was saying. She looked for her coat.
    Nate’s father had a bottle of Scotch in his hand. Nate reached out to steady him. His father swung wildly. He would not be handled, not by his goddamn son ! It was the most awful Nate had ever seen him.
    Janice Marsh let out a squeak like a mouse. With her books clamped to her chest, she was the very picture of what men were fighting so hard to keep safe.
    Then Nate’s father wanted to shake Nate’s hand in a sudden shifting reconciliation in the way a drunk might advance and retreat on an argument. There was no call for language like that. He was sorry. He insisted Janice stay. He wanted her to hear what he had to say.
    Nate stood protectively by Janice.
    His father blocked the stairway. He set his Scotch on a step beside him and began to show them how you strangled someone. He had strangled more than one gook with his bare hands. That, he said, was what hand-to-hand combat was about, his hands still around the