Young Hearts Crying (47 page)

“Well, then.” The doctor’s face conveyed a calm and expert willingness to listen. “What’s the problem?”

And Michael felt as if he were stepping off into a void. “The problem,” he said, “is that I think my wife is going to leave me, and I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”

Getting out of Kansas and going home – that had become the dominant idea in Michael’s mind, and in his talk, by the time he was fifty-two. And his visions of “home” had nothing to do with New York; he was always clear and emphatic about that. He wanted to go back to Boston and Cambridge, where everything had come alive for him after the war, and he felt he couldn’t wait much longer for the break that would make it possible.

Sarah often said she thought Boston would be “interesting,” and he took heart from that, though she sometimes said it in what sounded like an absentminded way.

“And I mean it doesn’t necessarily have to be Harvard,” he explained to her, several times. “I’ve got applications in at other places all over those towns; something certainly ought to come through.

“Oh, and it’s not as if I were asking for more than I deserve, do you see? I’ve earned this move. I’ve done well here, I’m ready for a better job, and I’m old enough to know where I belong.”

Paul Maitland might allow his life and talent to seep away in Middle Western mediocrity, but that, like the willful blandness implicit in his staying off the sauce, was something only Paul Maitland could account for. Other lives and talents would always need a bracing environment – and one of the ways Michael
could tell he needed a bracing environment was that for a very long time now, ever since Sarah had dampened his interest in the Bellevue poem, he hadn’t written anything.

Still, in his heart, he knew the real reason for all this urgency: whether it made sense or not, he felt that if he could get Sarah to Boston he might have a better chance of keeping her.

Every day he held his breath when he approached the big tin mailbox at the base of the driveway; then one morning he found a letter there that seemed to make all the difference.

It was from the chairman of the English department at Boston University, and it was a clear and definite offer of employment. The final sentence of it, though, was what sent Michael loping up to the house and into the kitchen, where Sarah stood washing the breakfast dishes – this was the sentence that weakened his knees and strengthened his back as he thrust the trembling letter a little too close to her startled face:

“Well,” she said. “That’s really very – really very nice, isn’t it?”

It was nice, all right. He had to read it three more times, walking around the living room, before he could believe it.

Then Sarah came to stand in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel.

“So I guess it’s all settled then, about Boston,” she said. “Right?”

Right; all settled.

But this was the girl whose very skin had once been made “all gooseflesh, all over,” and who’d been made to cry, too, by the
concluding lines of that poem; now she looked as calm and plain as any other housewife considering the practical aspects of moving to a new place, and he didn’t know what to make of the transformation.

“Well, good,” Dr. McHale said. “Sometimes a change of scene can be very helpful. You may find it gives you a new perspective on your – domestic situation.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “A new perspective; that’s what I’m hoping for. Maybe a sense of new beginnings, too.”

“Exactly.”

But Michael had long grown impatient with these weekly sessions. They were always embarrassing and always fruitless. You always knew the doctor didn’t really give a shit about you; how, then, could you be expected to give a shit about him?

What did this particular Kansas family man do when he went home at night? Did he sink into the sofa facing the television set – flanked, perhaps, by whichever one or two of his adolescent children had nothing better to do than come and sit with him? Would his wife provide popcorn? Would he eat it greedily by the heaping handful? And when he became wholly absorbed in the show he was watching, would his mouth slacken and hang slightly open in the mottled blue light of the picture tube? And would there be a rivulet of melted butter down his chin?

“Well, in any case, Doctor, I’m grateful for your time and your help. I don’t think I’ll be needing any more of these appointments now, before I leave.”

“Good, then,” Dr. McHale said. “And good luck.”

At the airport, on the day of his flight, Sarah was in a hazy, dreamy mood. He had seen her like this before, on mornings after she’d had a few drinks; it was an agreeable kind of hangover
that would always vanish with an afternoon’s sleep, but it didn’t seem quite appropriate for a time of saying goodbye.

She strolled far away from him across the enormous floor, with their son treading beside her and clutching her forefinger. She looked as interested in everything as if she’d never seen an airport before, and when she came back to where he stood with his ticket she said “It’s funny, you know? Distance doesn’t matter anymore. It’s almost as if geography didn’t exist. All you do is doze and float in a pressurized cabin for a while – and it doesn’t even matter how long, because time isn’t important, either – and before you know it you’re in Los Angeles, or London, or Tokyo. Then if you don’t happen to like wherever it is you find yourself, you can doze and float again until you find yourself somewhere else.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, look, I think they’re boarding over there. So take care, dear, okay? I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I think you’re going to find this is kind of a transitional book, Arnold,” Michael told his publisher at lunch in a New York restaurant. “Kind of a plateau performance, if you see what I mean.”

And Arnold Kaplan nodded over the brimming of his second martini in a way that suggested patience and understanding. His company had published all of Michael’s earlier books and lost money on them every time. But then, it wasn’t exactly the profit motive that impelled you to publish a poet; if anything, it was your knowledge that some other commercial house might be ready to pick him up and absorb his losses if you let him go. Well, it was a funny line of business; everybody knew that.

Michael was explaining now that he thought he could still do the big stuff, still take the big risks and bring them off, but
Arnold Kaplan had begun to let the words flow past his hearing.

Years ago, when they were college classmates, Arnold Kaplan had been “literary” too. Arnold Kaplan had worked as hard as anyone else at finding a way to put his voice on the page and giving it something to say. Even today, on the floor of his basement in Stamford, Connecticut, there were three cardboard boxes full of old manuscripts: a collection of poems, a novel, and seven short stories.

And it wasn’t bad stuff. It was perfectly decent stuff. It was stuff that almost anybody might want to read and enjoy. How had it come about, then, that no words by Arnold Kaplan had ever been set into type for printing? What was the deal?

He was called a senior vice-president at the office now; he made more money than he could ever have imagined as a boy; but the price of it was that he had to spend too many hours like this – getting half smashed on his expense account and pretending to listen to a boring, rapidly aging striver like Davenport.

“…  Oh, I wouldn’t want to give you the idea this is substandard work, Arnold,” Michael was saying. “I like all of it. If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t be submitting it. I think it’s very – sound. My wife likes it, too, and she’s a tough critic.”

“Good. And how
is
Lucy?”

“No,” Michael said, frowning. “Lucy and I’ve been divorced for years. I thought you knew that, Arnold.”

“Well, maybe it was a thing I knew and just forgot; that can happen sometimes. So you have another wife now.”

“Yeah. Yeah; she’s – very nice.”

Neither of them ate much – you weren’t expected to eat much at lunches like this – and by the time their messy plates were cleared away they had both fallen silent except for dutiful exchanges of small talk.

“So how you getting up to Boston, Mike? The plane or the train?”

“Well, I think I’ll rent a car and drive up,” Michael said, “because I want to make a stop along the way, to see some old friends.”

The car he rented was big and yellow and took to the road so easily it seemed almost to be in control of itself, and in that unearthly way he found he was very soon in Putnam County.

“No, there’s nobody home but the two of us,” Pat Nelson had told him on the phone, “and we’d love to see you.”

“Pretty nice boat, Dad,” Tom Nelson said in the driveway, when Michael had brought the yellow car to a stop and climbed out of it. “Classy set of wheels.” And only after having that small joke did he come forward to shake hands.

He looked older, squinting and a little wizened, but this was a look he seemed to have been cultivating for years. Once long ago, before he was thirty, some admirer had taken a photograph of him outdoors, under a stormy sky, that had strangely caught that middle-aged quality in his youthful face, and Tom had kept an enlargement of the picture on his studio wall. “What’s this?” Michael had asked him. “What’s the deal on displaying pictures of yourself?” And Tom could only say he liked it; he liked having it there.

As they went into the house together Michael saw that Tom had acquired still another costume: an authentic old Army Air Force “flight jacket” that could only have been made and issued in the early nineteen-forties. He must have touched on every branch of the service by now.

When Pat came smiling across the big living room with both arms held out – “Oh, Michael” – he thought she looked remarkably good, better even than she’d looked as a girl. Given
enough luck, enough money, and a good bone structure in the first place, some women seemed never to age.

With the pouring of first drinks they settled into a pleasant grouping of sofa and chairs, and the talk began to flow. All four of the Nelsons’ sons were “fine,” though all grown and gone from home now. The oldest boy was a source of particular pride to his father because he’d become a professional jazz drummer – “Never had any trouble getting
his
union card” – and two of the others were also doing exemplary things; but when Michael asked about Ted, the boy who was Laura’s age, both parents lowered their eyes and seemed to be searching for words.

“Well,” Pat said, “Ted’s had a few problems trying to – you know – trying to find himself. But he’s much more stable now.”

“Yeah, well, Laura went through a difficult time, too,” Michael told them. “She didn’t like Warrington, and then she kind of drifted for a while; but it didn’t take her long to get straightened out, and she’s done very well in Billings.”

Tom looked up with a kindly, puzzled expression. “Very well in what? In ‘Billings’?” He said that as though he thought “Billings,” like Accounts Payable or Data Processing or Personnel, might be a department of some clean and well-managed business office where the safe harbor of commercial employment had been found at last for a drifting girl.

“Billings State University, in Kansas,” Michael told him. “It’s an institution of higher learning, okay? You might say it’s sort of like Harvard or Yale only with prairies, and with a funny smell that comes off the stockyards every day. It’s where I make my fucking living.”

“Oh, I see. And Laura went to school out there, right?”

“Right,” Michael said, and now he was ashamed. The last thing he wanted to do, in this house, was to play the failed and exiled former neighbor.

“We never get to see Lucy anymore,” Pat said. “Never even hear from her. Do you know how she is? And do you know what it is she’s doing there in Cambridge?”

“Well, I don’t suppose she’s necessarily ‘doing’ anything,” he said. “She’s never had to earn money, you know. Never will.”

“Oh, well, of course I knew that,” Pat said impatiently, as if it had been boorish of him to point it out. “But she certainly did keep busy around here. For years. I’ve never seen such drive and energy –
or
such stamina. Anyway, if you see her when you’re up there, or talk to her, will you be sure to give her our love?”

And Michael promised he would. Then Pat went off to the kitchen “to see about supper,” so he followed Tom into the studio for a conversational stroll.

“Well, Lucy tried just about everything,” Tom said, and he hunched up the shoulders of his flight jacket to put his hands in his pants pockets as he walked, the way a real flyer might do in discussing a mission that hadn’t gone very well. “Everything in the
art
line, I mean, except music and dancing, and I guess you have to start those when you’re a whole lot younger. Tried acting; tried writing; tried painting. Really threw herself into each thing, too; worked hard as hell – only, the painting part of it turned out to be a little embarrassing for me.”

“Embarrassing how?”

“Well, because she asked me to criticize her pictures and there wasn’t anything I could say. I sort of improvised a little praise, but she didn’t fall for that. I could tell how disappointed she was and it made me feel lousy, but there wasn’t any way I could help.

“So then I started thinking back: Well, if she’s not a painter, maybe she wasn’t a writer, either, or an actress, either – and look, I know this may sound harsh, Mike, but there’s an awful lot of women running around
trying
things. Oh, you’ll find men doing it, too, but the men seem to have a few more options in their
lives, or else they’re not all that dead-serious to begin with. It’s the women who can break your heart. And I mean they’re mostly good, bright, admirable girls – you can’t dismiss them as ‘silly’ or anything – and they keep on trying and trying until their brains get scrambled, or until they’re so tired they’re ready to drop. Sometimes you want to put your arms around a woman like that and say ‘Hey, listen, dear; take it easy, okay? What’s the big deal? Nobody ever said you had to do this.’ Ah, well, hell; that’s not exactly what I meant to say, but it’s close.”