Friend of My Youth (16 page)

“Is it possible to have cancer of the buttock?” she asked the doctor. “What an undignified thing!”

The doctor said that the lump could be a floater—malignant cells that had their origin somewhere else in the body. A sealed message. And they could remain a mystery—bad cells whose home base could never be found. If indeed they proved to be bad cells at all. “The future is unclear till we know,” said the doctor.

Yesterday the doctor’s receptionist phoned and said that the results were in. She made an appointment for Barbara to see the doctor in his office in Walley that afternoon.

“Is that all?” Murray said.

“All what?”

“Is that all she said?”

“She’s just the receptionist. That’s all she’s supposed to say.”

They are driving between walls of corn. The stalks are eight or nine feet high. Any day now the farmers will start to cut them. The sun is low enough even by midafternoon to shine through the cornstalks and turn them to coppery gold. They drive through an orderly radiance, mile after mile.

Last night they stayed up late; they watched an old, old movie,
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
. Murray had seen it when he was a child, in the Roxy Theatre, in Walley. All he had remembered was the part about Buddy getting killed and Henry Fonda chipping out the pine-tree coffin.

Thinking about that, he starts to sing. “ ‘Oh, they cut down the old pine tree, and they hauled it away to the mill.’ I always thought,” he says, interrupting himself, “that that song came from that movie.”

Barbara continues singing. “ ‘To make a coffin of pine, for that sweetheart of mine.’ ” Then she says, “Don’t be squeamish.”

“I wasn’t,” says Murray. “I forgot what came next.”

“Don’t come and sit in the waiting room. It’s awful. Go down to the beach and wait for me. I’ll come down the Sunset Steps.”

They have to drive past the farm where Beatrice Sawicky used to keep horses. At one time she had a riding school. That didn’t last very long. She boarded horses then, and she must have made a living out of that, because she kept at it, she stayed there, until four or five years ago, when she sold out and, presumably, moved away. They didn’t know where she would go;
they had seen her a few times in town but never talked to her. When they used to drive past, and saw the horses in the fields, one or the other of them would say, “I wonder what happened to Victor.” Not every time they passed, but about once a year, one of them would say that, and the other would answer, “God knows,” or something of the sort. But they haven’t bothered saying it since Beatrice and the horses left.

The first time that Victor Sawicky came into the store, he scattered the clerks—so Murray said to Barbara—like a cat among the pigeons. And, in fact, many of the clerks whom Murray had inherited with the store did look like pigeons—they were gray-haired maiden ladies whom maidenhood had not kept from growing stout and bosomy. It was easy to imagine a clammy dew of alarm between those bosoms at the sight of Victor. One of the women came pattering up the ramp to Murray’s little office to tell him that there was a foreigner and that none of them could make out what it was he wanted.

He wanted work clothes. It wasn’t so difficult to tell what he was saying. (After all, he had lived for several years in England.) It was not the Polish accent that dismayed the clerks in Zeigler’s store, it was Victor’s looks. Murray put Victor immediately into the same class of human beings as Barbara, but of the two he found Victor far the more splendid and disturbing. He had been able to look at Barbara and think, That is a rare girl. But she was still a girl, and he wanted to sleep with her. (He had been married to her now for seven years.) Victor drew his attention as a sleek and princely animal might—say, a golden palomino, bold but high-strung, shy about the stir he created. You’d try to say something soothing but deferential and stroke his shining neck, if he’d let you.

Murray said, “Work clothes.”

Victor was tall and light-boned and looked polished. In the coffee shop of the British Exchange Hotel, where he and Murray
got in the habit of going, a waitress said to him one day, “You mind telling me? Because we kind of have a bet going on? How tall are you?”

“I am six feet and five inches,” said Victor.

“Is that all? We had you going up as high as seven feet.”

His skin was a pale-olive color, his hair a dark blond, his eyes a light, bright blue. The eyes protruded a little, and the eyelids never lifted quite all the way. His teeth were large and stained, like his fingers, from nicotine. He smoked all the time. He was smoking while he gave his puzzled consideration to the overalls in Zeigler’s store. They were all too short in the legs.

He said that he and his wife, who was English, had bought a farm just on the edge of town. Murray wanted to talk to him without the clerks hanging around in amazement, so he took him along the street, for the first time, to the British Exchange. He knew the farm Victor was talking about, and he didn’t think much of it. But Victor said that they were not intending to farm it. They were going to keep horses and run a riding school. Victor asked Murray’s opinion about whether or not this would be a success. Were there enough little rich girls around? “I think if you have a riding school you must have the little rich girls. They are the ones for the horse riding.”

“You could advertise in the city papers, and they could come in the summers,” Murray said.

“Of course. To the camp. To the horse camp. Here and in the United States they always go in summer to the camp, isn’t that so?”

Victor seemed delighted with this idea. Everything was absurd to him, everything acceptable. The winters—is it true that there is frost from October to May? Does the snow actually reach to the windowsills? Can one drink the well water without boiling, or is there a danger of catching typhoid fever? What kind of trees, cut down, will provide the best heat in the stove?

Murray could not remember afterward which questions came the first day, or if there was ever a boundary between the practical
questions and the more general or personal. He didn’t think there was—they came all mixed up together. When Victor wondered about anything, he asked. When were those buildings put up? What is the people’s main religion and are they very serious about it? Who is that important-looking man, that sad-looking woman? What do the people work at? Are there agitators, freethinkers, very rich people, Communists? What sort of crimes are committed, when was the last time there was a murder, is there a certain amount of adultery? Did Murray play golf, did he own a pleasure boat, did his employees call him sir? (Not much, and no, and no.) Victor’s blue eyes continued to shine with pleasure, whatever the question, whatever the answer. He stretched his long legs out of the coffee-shop booth and clasped his hands behind his head. He luxuriated, taking everything in. Soon Murray was telling him about how his grandfather threw coins down into the street, and about his father’s dark suits and silk-backed vests, and his own notions of becoming a minister.

“But you did not?”

“I lost my faith.” Murray always felt he had to grin when he said this. “That is—”

“I know what it is.”

When he came to find Murray at the store, Victor would not ask any of the clerks if he could see him but would go straight up to the office, up the ramp to the little cage. It had wrought-iron walls around it, about as high as Murray was—about five-nine. Victor would try to come up stealthily, but of course his presence would have already disturbed the store, stirring up ripples of attention, misgiving, excitement. Murray usually knew when he was coming but pretended not to. Then Victor, for a surprise, would rest his gleaming head on the top of the wall, his neck held between two of the pointed, decorative spikes. He grinned at the idiotic effect.

Murray found this inexpressibly flattering.

Victor had a history of his own, of course. He was ten years older than Murray; he had been nineteen when the war broke
out. He was a student then, in Warsaw. He had been taking flying lessons, but did not yet have his pilot’s license. Nevertheless he went out to the airstrip where the planes of the Polish Air Force were sitting—he and some of his friends went out there almost as a prank, on the morning of the German invasion, and almost as a prank they took some of the planes into the air, and then they flew them to Sweden. After that, he got to England and joined the Polish Air Force, which was attached to the Royal Air Force. He flew on many raids, and was shot down over France. He bailed out; he hid in the woods, he ate raw potatoes from the fields, he was helped by the French Underground and made his way to the Spanish border. He got back to England. And he found to his great disappointment that he was not to be allowed to fly again. He knew too much. If he should be shot down again and captured and interrogated, he knew too much. He was so disappointed, so restless, he made such a nuisance of himself, that he was given another job—he was sent to Turkey, on a more or less secret mission, to be part of a network that helped Poles, and others, who were escaping through the Balkans.

That was what he had been doing while Murray and his friends had been building model airplanes and fixing up a kind of cockpit in the bicycle shed at school, so that they could pretend to be bombing Germany.

“But do you believe all that stuff, really?” Barbara said.

“They did fly Polish planes to Sweden before the Germans could get them,” Murray said stubbornly. “And people did get shot down over France and escape.”

“Do you think anybody as conspicuous as Victor could escape? Do you think anybody that conspicuous would ever get sent on a secret mission? You have to look more like Alec Guinness to get sent on a secret mission.”

“Maybe he’s so conspicuous he looks innocent,” Murray said. “Maybe he’d look like the last person on earth to be sent on a secret mission and that would be the very reason nobody would suspect.”

Perhaps for the first time, he thought that Barbara’s cynicism was automatic and irritating. It was like a quirk she had, a tic.

They had this conversation after Victor and Beatrice had come to dinner. Murray had been anxious for Victor and Barbara to meet. He wanted to present them to each other, almost to show them off to each other. But when the opportunity arrived they were not at their best. Each seemed standoffish, lukewarm, nervous, ironical.

The day of the dinner party, in late May, had been freakishly cold and rainy. The children—Felicity was five then, and Adam three—had been playing indoors all day, getting in Barbara’s way, messing up the living room, which she had cleaned, and by bedtime they weren’t tired enough to settle down. The long, light evening was no help. There were many calls for drinks of water, reports of a stomachache, complaints about a dog that had almost bitten Felicity last week. Finally, Adam raced into the living room wearing only his pajama top, shouting, “I want a bicky, I want a bicky!” “Bicky” was a baby word for “biscuit,” which he didn’t normally use anymore. It seemed very likely that he had been inspired to this performance and probably rehearsed in it by Felicity. Murray scooped him up and carried him into the children’s room and whacked his conveniently bare bottom. Then he whacked Felicity’s once for good measure and returned to the dining room rubbing his hands together, playing a role he detested, that of the hearty disciplinarian. The bedroom door stayed shut, but it could not shut out a prolonged and vengeful howling.

Everything had gone wrong from the start with this visit. Murray had opened the door and said expansively, “ ‘The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers stream from the hawthorn on the wind away!’ ”—referring to the weather, and thinking that Beatrice would appreciate an English poem. Victor, smiling distractedly, said, “What? What do you say?” And Beatrice said, “It’s a poem,” just as if somebody had asked,
“What’s that running across the road?” and she had replied, “It’s a groundhog.”

Victor’s gaiety remained muted. His large, bright-eyed grin, his laughter seemed misplaced and forced, without energy. Even his skin looked dull and putty-colored. He was like the statue of a prince in a story Murray remembered, a children’s story. The prince has his jewel eyes plucked out to be sold to help the poor, and finally gives all his gold-leaf skin to serve the same purpose. A little swallow helps him when he is blind, and remains his only friend.

The whole house smelled of the cooking. Barbara had done a pork roast. She had made the potatoes according to a new recipe, slicing them and cooking them in the oven in a buttered dish. They seemed greasy to Murray, and slightly on the raw side. The other vegetables were overcooked, because she had been so harassed in the kitchen, distracted by the children. The pecan pie was too rich a dessert for the meal, and the crust was too brown. Beatrice did not even try it. Beatrice did not finish the potatoes on her plate. She did not laugh when Adam made his disastrous sortie. She probably felt that children should be trained and kept in line as strictly as horses.

Murray reflected that he had never met a woman who was crazy about horses whom he had liked. They were narrow, righteous, humorless women, and usually not good-looking. Beatrice had a rosy, almost raw-looking complexion. Her hair was dull and graying and cut with no style. She wore no lipstick—an eccentricity that was a declaration of piety or contemptuous carelessness in a woman at that time. Her loosely belted mushroom-colored dress announced that she had no hopes of this dinner party and made no concessions to it.

Barbara, by way of contrast, was wearing a polished-cotton skirt of yellow and orange and copper colors, a tight black belt, a low-necked black blouse, and large, cheap hoop earrings. One of the things about Barbara that Murray did not understand and was not proud of—as opposed to the things he did not understand
but was proud of—would have to be this taste she had for cheaply provocative clothes. Low necklines, cinch belts, tight toreador pants. She would go out into the streets of Walley showing off her body, which was lavish, in the style of the time—or one of the styles of the time, the style not of Audrey Hepburn but of Tina Louise—and the embarrassment Murray felt about this was complex and unmentionable. He felt that she was doing something that didn’t fit in with her seriousness and aloofness, her caustic tone. She was behaving in a way that his mother might have predicted. (“I’m sure she is really a nice girl, but I’m not sure she has been very well educated,” his mother had said, and even Murray understood that she was not referring to the books Barbara might have read or the marks she had got at school.) What was more troubling was that she was behaving in a way that didn’t even tie in with her sexual nature, or what Murray knew of it—and he had to assume he knew everything. She was not really very passionate. Sometimes he thought that she pretended to be more passionate than she was. That was what these clothes reminded him of and why he couldn’t mention them to her. There was something unsure, risky, excessive about them. He was willing to see all sorts of difficult things about Barbara—her uncharitableness, perhaps, or intransigence—but nothing that made her seem a little foolish, or sad.