The Young Lions (15 page)

Without a word, with his mouth set in a sunken line, Tony followed Michael into the house. He was still clutching the straw hat with the gaily striped band.

Michael got out two glasses and poured two big shots of whisky. Silently he gave Tony one of the glasses. Outside, the conversation was starting again, and, over the noise of the crows, Michael heard Moran saying, earnestly, "Aren't they wonderful types? Right out of a 1925 French movie." Tony sipped slowly at his drink, holding on to his stiff, oldfashioned straw hat, his eyes far away and sorrowful. Michael wanted to go over to him and embrace him, the way he had seen Tony's brothers embrace each other in times of trouble, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He turned the radio on and took a long sip of his whisky as the machine warmed up, with a high, irritating crackle.

"You, too, can have lovely white hands," a soft, persuasive voice was saying. Then there was a click on the radio and a sudden dead silence and a new voice spoke, slightly hoarse, trembling a little. "We have just received a special bulletin," the voice said. "It has been announced that the Germans have entered Paris. There has been no resistance and the city has not been harmed. Keep tuned to this station for further news."

An organ, swelling and almost tuneless, took over, playing the sort of music that is described as "light-classical".

Tony sat down and placed his glass on a table. Michael stared at the radio. He had never been to Paris. He had never seemed to find the time or the money to go abroad, but as he squinted at the little veneered box shaking now with the music of the organ and the echo of the hoarse troubled voice, he pictured what it must be like in the French city this afternoon. The broad sunny streets, so familiar to the whole world, the cafes, empty now, he supposed, the flashy, rhetorical monuments of old victories shining in the summer light, the Germans marching rigidly in formation, with the noise of their boots clanging against the closed shutters. The picture was probably wrong, he thought. It was silly, but you never thought of German soldiers in twos or threes, or in anything but stiff, marching phalanxes, like rectangular animals. Maybe they were stealing along the streets timidly, their guns ready, peering at the shut windows, dropping to the sidewalks at every noise.

He looked at Tony. Tony was sitting with his head up, crying. Tony had lived in Paris for two years and again and again he had outlined to Michael what they would do together on vacations there, the little restaurants, the beach on the Marne, the place where they had a superior light wine in carafes on scrubbed wooden tables…

Michael felt the wetness in his own eyes and fought it savagely. Sentimental, he thought, cheap, easy and sentimental. I was never there. It's just another city.

"Michael…" It was Laura's voice. "Michael!" Her voice was insistent and irritating. "Michael!"

Michael finished his drink. He looked at Tony, nearly said something to him, then thought better of it, and left him sitting there. Michael walked slowly out into the garden. Johnson and Moran and Moran's girl and Miss Freemantle were sitting around stiffly, and you could tell the conversation was all uphill. Michael wished they would go home.

"Michael, darling," Laura came over to him and held his arms lightly, "are we going to play badminton this summer or wait till 1950?" Then, under her breath, privately and harshly for him, "Come on. Act civilized. You have guests. Don't leave the whole thing up to me."

Before Michael could say anything she had turned and was smiling at Johnson.

Michael walked slowly over to the second pole that was lying on the ground. "I don't know if any of you are interested," he said, "but Paris has fallen."

"No!" Moran said. "Incredible!"

Miss Freemantle didn't say anything. Michael saw her clasp her hands and look down on them.

"Inevitable," Johnson said gravely. "Anybody could see it coming."

Michael picked up the second pole and started pushing the sharp end into the ground.

"You're putting it in the wrong place!" Laura's voice was high and irritated. "How many times must I tell you it won't do any good there?" She rushed over to where Michael was standing with the pole and grabbed it from his hands. She had a racket in her hand and it slapped sharply against his arm. He looked at her stupidly, his hands still out, curved as they were when he was holding the pole. She's crying, he thought, surprised; what the hell is she crying about?

"Here! It belongs here!" She was shouting now, and banging the sharp end of the pole hysterically into the ground.

Michael strode over to where she was standing and grabbed the pole. He didn't know why he was doing it. He just knew he couldn't bear the sight of his wife crazily yelling and slamming the pole into the grass.

"I'm doing this," he said idiotically. "You keep quiet!"

Laura looked at him, her pretty, soft face churned with hatred. She drew back her arm and threw the badminton racket at Michael's head. Michael stared heavily at it as it sailed through the air at him. It seemed to take a long time, arching and flashing against the background of trees and hedge at the end of the garden. He heard a dull, whipping crack, and he saw it drop to his feet before he realized it had hit him over his right eye. The eye began to ache and he could feel blood coming out on his forehead, sticking in his eyebrows. After a moment, some of it dripped down over the eye, warm and opaque. Laura was still standing in the same place, weeping, staring at him, her face still violent and full of hate.

Michael carefully laid the pole down on the grass and turned and walked away. Tony passed him, coming out of the house, but they didn't say anything to each other.

Michael walked into the living-room. The radio was still sending forth the doughy music of the organ. Michael stood against the mantelpiece, staring at his face in the little convex mirror in a gold, heavily worked frame. It distorted his face, making his nose look very long and his forehead and chin receding and pointed. The red splash over his eye seemed small and far away in the mirror. He heard the door open and Laura's footsteps behind him as she came into the room. She went over to the radio and turned it off.

"You know I can't stand organ music!" she said. Her voice was trembling and bitter.

He turned to face her. She stood there in her gay cotton print, pale orange and white, with her midriff showing brown and smooth in the space between the skirt and the halter. She looked very pretty, slender and soft in her fashionable summer dress, like an advertisement for misses' frocks in Vogue magazine. The bitter, hard-set face, streaked with tears, was incongruous and shocking.

"That's all," Michael said. "We're finished. You know that."

"Good. Delightful! I couldn't be more pleased."

"While we're at it," Michael said, "let me tell you that I'm pretty sure about you and Moran, too. I was watching you."

"Good," said Laura. "I'm glad you know. Let me put your mind at rest. You're absolutely right. Anything else?"

"No," said Michael. "I'll get the five o'clock train."

"And don't be so goddamn holy!" Laura said. "I know a couple of things about you, too! All those letters telling me how lonely you were in New York without me! You weren't so damned lonely. I was getting pretty tired of coming back and having all those women look at me, pityingly. And when did you arrange to meet Miss Freemantle? Lunch Tuesday? Shall I go out and tell her your plans are changed? You can meet her tomorrow…" Her voice was sharp and rushed and the thin childish face was contorted with misery and anger.

"That's enough," Michael said, feeling guilty and hopeless.

"I don't want to hear any more."

"Any more questions?" Laura shouted. "No other men you want to ask me about? No other suspects? Shall I write out a list for you?"

Suddenly she broke. She fell on the couch. A little too gracefully, Michael noted coldly, like an ingenue. She dug her head into the pillow and wept. She looked spent and racked, sobbing on the couch, with her pretty hair spread in a soft fan around her head, like a frail child in a party dress. Michael had a powerful impulse to go over and take her in his arms and say, "Baby, Baby," softly, and comfort her.

He turned and went into the garden. The guests had moved discreetly to the other end of the garden, away from the house. They were standing in a stiff, uncomfortable group, their bright clothes shining against the deep green background. Michael walked over to them, brushing the back of his hand against the cut over his eye.

"No badminton today," he said. "I think you'd better leave. The garden party has not been the success of the Pennsylvania summer season."

"We were just going," Johnson said, stiffly.

Michael didn't shake hands with any of them. He stood there, staring past the blurred succession of heads. Miss Freemantle looked at him once, then kept her eyes on the ground as she went past. Michael did not say anything to her. He heard the gate close behind them.

He stood there, on the fresh grass, feeling the sun make the cut over his eye sticky. Overhead the crows were making a metallic racket in the branches. He hated the crows. He walked over to the wall, bent down and carefully selected some smooth, heavy stones. Then he stood up and squinted at the tree, spotting the crows among the foliage. He drew back and threw a stone at three of the birds sitting in a black, loud row. His arm felt limber and powerful, and the stone sang through the branches. He threw another stone, and another, hard and swift, and the birds scrambled off the branches and flapped away, cawing in alarm. Michael threw a stone in a savage arc at the flying birds. They disappeared into the woods. For a while there was silence in the garden, drowsy and sunny in the late summer afternoon.

NOAH was nervous. This was the first party he had ever given, and he tried to remember what parties looked like in the movies and parties he had read about in books and magazines. Twice he went into the kitchenette to inspect the three dozen ice cubes he and Roger had bought at the drug-store. He looked at his watch again and again, hoping that Roger would get back from Brooklyn with his girl before the guests started to come, because Noah was sure that he would do some awful, gauche thing, just at the moment it was necessary to be relaxed and dignified.

He and Roger Cannon shared a room near Riverside Drive, not far from Columbia University in New York City. It was a large room, and it had a fireplace, although you couldn't light a fire there, and from the bathroom window, by leaning out only a little, you could see the Hudson River.

After his father's death, Noah had drifted back across the country. He had always wanted to see New York. There was nothing to moor him in any other place on the face of the earth, and he had been able to find a job in the city two days after he landed there. Then he had met Roger in the Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

It was hard to believe now that there had been a time when he didn't know Roger, a time when he had wandered the city streets for days without saying a word to anyone, a time when no man was his friend, no woman had looked at him, no street was home, no hour more attractive than any other hour.

He had been standing dreamily in front of the library shelves, staring at the dull-coloured rows of books. He had reached up for a volume, he remembered it even now, a book by Yeats, and he had jostled the man next to him, and said "Excuse me." They had started to talk and had gone out into the rainy streets together, and had continued talking. Roger had invited him into a bar on Sixth Avenue and they had had two beers and had agreed before they parted to have dinner together the next night.

Noah had never had any real friends. His shifting, erratic boyhood, spent a few months at a time among abrupt and uninterested strangers, had made it impossible to form any but the most superficial connections. And his stony shyness, reinforced by the conviction that he was a drab, unappealing child, had put him beyond all overtures. Roger was four or five years older than Noah, tall and thin, with a lean, dark, close-cropped head, and he moved with a certain casual air that Noah had always envied in the young men who had gone to the better colleges. Roger hadn't gone to college, but he was one of those people who seem to be born with confidence in themselves, secure and unshakeable. He regarded the world with a kind of sour, dry amusement that Noah was now trying desperately to emulate.

Noah could not understand why, but Roger had seemed to like him. Perhaps, Noah thought, the truth was that Roger had pitied him, alone in the city, in his shabby suit, gawky, uncertain, fiercely shy. At any rate, after they had seen each other two or three times, for drinks in the horrible bars that Roger seemed to like, or for dinner in cheap Italian restaurants, Roger in his quiet, rather offhand way, had said, "Do you like the place you're living in?"

"Not much," Noah had said, honestly. It was a dreary cell in a lodging-house on 28th Street, with damp walls and bugs and the toilet pipes roaring above his head.

"I've got a big room," Roger had said. "Two couches. If you don't mind my playing the piano every once in a while in the middle of the night."

Gratefully, still astonished that there was anyone in this crowded, busy city who could find profit, of any kind whatsoever, in his friendship, Noah had moved into the large, rundown room near the river. Roger was almost like the phantom friend lonely children invent for themselves in the long, unpeopled stretches of the night. He was easy, gentle, accomplished. He made no demands on anyone and he seemed to take pleasure, in his rambling, unostentatious way, in putting the younger man through a rough kind of education. He talked in a random, probing way about books, music, painting, politics, women. He had been to France and Italy, and the great names of ancient cities and charmful towns sounded intimate and accessible in his slow, rather harsh New England accent. He had dry sardonic theories about the British Empire and the workings of democracy in the United States, and about modern poetry, and the ballet and the movies and the war. He didn't seem to have any ambition of his own. He worked, sporadically and not very hard, for an advertising firm. He didn't pay much attention to money, and he wandered from girl to girl with slightly bored, good-humoured lust. All in all, with his careless, somehow elegant clothes, and his crooked, reserved smile, he was that rare product of modern America, his own man.