Young Hearts Crying (12 page)

“Yes,” his hostess said, looking as if she wished she had someone else to talk to. “Well, it’s a pleasant spot for reading.”

If you didn’t know Ralph Morin had been trained as an actor, Michael decided, you could guess it from his movements and gestures: the way he held his head to its best advantage in the available light, the falsely casual draping of his arm along the sofa, even the poised clasp of his other hand around his drink and the careful placement of his shapely, well-buffed shoes on the floor. He did everything as if he were having his picture taken.

Walter Folsom had taken up painting in his retirement, as had his wife, and they were both plainly delighted with young Peggy’s choice of a husband. For the rest of the afternoon, whenever Paul wasn’t listening, they seemed eager to let the Davenports know how highly they thought of his work, and once Mr. Folsom spoke the same line as the subcontractor on Delancey Street, long ago: “This boy’s the real thing.” Paul Maitland seemed unable to go anywhere without attracting admirers.

But Michael spent most of that time contriving ways to find Diana alone, in some corner or part of the room away from the mainstream of talkers. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to her; he just wanted to have her at close range, all to himself, so that he could make interesting replies to whatever she might feel like saying to him.

And it happened only once, when they were all leaving the Folsoms’ house to go over to the Maitlands’ for supper: Diana fell into step with him and said “That was an awfully nice book of poems, Michael.”

“Yeah? You mean you read it? And liked it?”

“Well, of course I read it and liked it. Why else would I’ve told you?” Then, after a perilous moment, she said “I especially liked the last one, the long one, ‘Coming Clean.’ That’s a lovely thing.”

“Well,” he said, “thank you” – but he was too shy to speak her name.

Paul and Peggy lived in a small, rude clapboard cottage that had been here for years before Walter Folsom bought the property, and there were signs of honest young poverty all around the front room. A mud-caked pair of Paul’s work shoes stood near the front door, beside his carpenter’s toolbox; there were several cardboard cartons of unpacked books, and not far away was an ironing board where it was easy to picture Peggy pressing her husband’s denim clothes. As the party sat huddled over bowls of the beef stew she had served, they might as well have been inside the burlap hangings of the old Delancey Street place.

“Oh, this is wonderful, Peg,” Diana said of the stew.

And Mrs. Folsom, whose handsome face seemed incapable of hiding her feelings, looked pleased that her daughter’s cooking had been praised. Then she said “Paul? A little later, can we have a look at what you’ve been doing in the other room?”

“Oh, I’d rather not show anything now, Helen, if you don’t mind,” Paul told her. “I’ve just been roughing-out a few things; it’s all very tentative work. I don’t think I’ll have anything to show until after we’re back from the Cape. But thanks anyway.”

Michael would always remember that “tentative” was the word a Harvard
Crimson
reviewer had used to dismiss Lucy’s performance in his first play; now he wondered if he would have been able to tell the difference between Paul’s “tentative” paintings and his finished ones, and he was glad to be spared the task of trying.

A little later he heard Lucy saying “Well, but
why,
Paul?” and saw Paul Maitland shake his chewing head at her in kindly but firm refusal, as if to explain that any question of “why” was irrelevant. And he knew at once that she hadn’t asked to see the paintings; this was something else.

“Okay, but I don’t get it,” she persisted. “The Nelsons are wonderful people and they’re good friends of ours; I know you’d like them. Just because you and Tom may not see eye to eye professionally, does that really suggest you couldn’t enjoy them in a
social
way?”

Then Ralph Morin leaned over to squeeze Lucy’s forearm and said “I wouldn’t press him on it, dear; there are times when an artist has to use his own judgment.”

And Michael wanted to strangle him for calling Lucy “dear,” as well as for his fatuous little remark.

“…  Oh, but the Cape’s lovely in the off season,” Peggy Maitland was saying. “The landscape’s all bleak and windswept, and there are these wonderfully subtle colors. And there’s this carnival that spends the winters near where we stayed last year. They’re delightful people. They’re gypsies, and they’re very friendly but very proud.…”

Michael had never heard her talk at such length: all she usually did was answer questions in monosyllables or cast silent, adoring glances at her husband. Now she was coming to the point of her anecdote:

“…  So I asked one of the men what his act was – his act in the carnival? – and he said ‘I’m a sword swallower.’ I said ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ And he said ‘Think I’d tell
you?’ ”

“Oh, that’s marvelous,” Ralph Morin exclaimed, laughing. “That’s the very heart and spirit of the entertainer.”

On their way back to Tonapac that night, Lucy said “What did you think of what’s-his-name? Morin?”

“Didn’t much go for him,” Michael said. “Pretentious, self-conscious, boring – I think he’s probably a fool.”

“Well, you’d say that anyway.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? Because you’ve always had such a terrible
crush on Diana. It was all over your face today. Nothing’s changed.”

And because he didn’t feel up to denying it – didn’t especially want to deny it anyway – they rode in silence the rest of the way home.

Except for Harold Smith and several other clerks whose fares were paid by the railroad that employed them, there were very few daily train commuters from Tonapac to New York: the ride took an hour and fifty minutes. When Michael was obliged to take his twice-monthly trips to the city he would always exchange brief neighborly greetings with Harold on the station platform; then, aboard the train, he would read the paper alone while Harold joined the other railroad men across the aisle, in two facing seats, for a card game that lasted all the way to town. But one morning, looking pleasantly shy, Harold came over and sat beside Michael instead.

“My wife and I were saying just last night,” he began, “that we’re really glad to have you folks living in the guest house. I mean Ann Blake’s very nice, but we were afraid she might rent it out to a couple of queers or something. Makes it a lot nicer to have a regular family in there, is all I meant. And our Anita really thinks the world of your little girl.”

Michael told him quickly that Laura was very fond of Anita, too – and he added that this was especially nice because Laura was an only child.

“Well, good,” Harold Smith said. “So they’ll always have each other for playmates, right? And our other girls are only nine and ten, so they can really all be playmates together. Our boy is six. He’s – handicapped.” Then after a while he said “So what do you do with your free time, Mike? You like to bowl? You play cards?”

“Well, mostly what I do is work, Harold. I’m trying to finish a play, you see, and I’ve got some poems going, too.”

“Yeah, well, I know about that; Ann told us that. And you’ve fixed up the old pump shed to work in, right? No, but I mean how about when you feel like taking a break?”

“Well, my wife and I do a lot of reading,” Michael said, “or sometimes we visit friends of ours over in Harmon Falls, or up in Kingsley” – and only too late, after hearing himself say “friends of ours” and “up in Kingsley,” did he realize how rude he had been.

Harold Smith bent well forward in the train seat to scratch one ankle above the top of its very short sock, his suit coat gaping open to prove that he really did wear five or six ballpoint pens clipped into his shirt pocket, and Michael was afraid that when he settled back he might open his newspaper and spend the rest of the long ride in injured silence.

Something would have to be said. Well, I’m afraid I don’t care much for bowling, Harold, he might begin, and I never really learned to play poker; but I like to watch the fights – do you? Oh, the girls probably wouldn’t go for it, but maybe you and I could get together in whatever bar you like, some night when there’s a good fight card coming up, and we could –

Wrong; wrong. Harold Smith might say Nah, I don’t follow the fights, or Nah, I don’t go to bars; or worse, he might say Yeah? I wouldn’t of figured you for a fight fan – and that would only lead to one more treacherous stroll down the dust of Memory Lane, to Blanchard Field or even to the unmentionable Golden Gloves.

At last, and in what seemed the nick of time, Michael let his voice start to work without any thought or plan of what he was saying.

“Harold?” he inquired. “Why don’t you and Nancy come
over to the house for supper some night soon? Or if you can’t make it for supper, come a little later and we’ll just have a drink and get acquainted. Because I mean as long as we’re neighbors, the least we can do is be friends, right?”

“Well, that’d be very nice, Mike. Thanks.” And for just a second Harold Smith’s plain, pleased-looking face, blushing very slightly, seemed to hint at what Ann Blake had called his natural gift for comedy.

As easy as that! When both of their newspapers had rattled open, suggesting an agreeable separateness for the rest of the ride, Michael couldn’t get over his discovery that sometimes – and maybe only once in a while – social life wasn’t infernally difficult after all.

On the appointed evening the Smiths used a strong flashlight to find their way across the grass to the guest house.

Harold had changed into his country clothes, a heavy red-and-black-checked hunting shirt with the collar up and the tails out; Nancy looked very trim in a blue sweater and well-faded blue jeans. And the Davenports had made the mistake of dressing up for them – Michael in a suit and tie, Lucy in what might easily have been called a cocktail dress. But Michael was fairly sure that if there could now be talk enough, and drink enough, the question of clothes would no longer matter.

Well, sure, working for the railroad was a pain in the ass, Harold Smith confided, settling back in an easy chair with a gin and tonic in his hand. He hadn’t much liked it when he was hired there as an office boy, years ago, and he couldn’t honestly claim he liked it much better now. “My father said ‘Better get a job, kid,’ so I got a job, and there you have the story of my career.” And he took a drink to allow time for a ripple of laughter around the room.

“Still,” he went on, “there were certain unexpected
advantages right from the start. My first summer on the job I went stumbling into the personnel department one morning and I spotted old skinny here.” He winked at his wife. “She was sitting at her typewriter like all the other girls, but she wasn’t typing: she had both arms up over her head and she was yawning – she looked like this was the last place in the whole world she wanted to be – and I remember thinking
There’s a
girl I might be able to talk to. But I was very shy then, you see. Oh, a smart-ass and a wise guy, and I’d been in the Navy and all that, but still very shy with girls.”

“So you had an office romance,” Lucy Davenport said. “Oh, this is a charming story.” And Michael was instantly afraid that “charming” might have a patronizing sound.

“Well, it sure as hell didn’t happen right away,” Harold said. “I took to walking into personnel three and four times a day, whether I had any business there or not – sometimes all I’d do would be bring in a handful of paper clips – and it must’ve been three weeks before I worked up the nerve to say anything to her.”

“It was more like six,” Nancy Smith said, winning another small laugh. “And all that time I kept wondering Why does this attractive boy keep coming in here, and why doesn’t he ever speak to me?”

“Now, hold it right there, funny-face,” Harold commanded, aiming a stiff index finger at her. “Who’s telling this charming story – you or me?”

And when he was confident of having the floor again, he resumed his own version. “Now, back in those years, you see, they only gave us half an hour for lunch. You were supposed to run around the corner to the Automat, plug in your nickels, eat your sandwich and your lousy little piece a pie, and then come running back to the office like a rat. In other words, I knew there
wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of percentage in asking her out to lunch, you follow me? So I got a better idea. I said ‘Look, it’s a beautiful day. Feel like going for a walk?’ And we walked up Park Avenue all the way from Forty-sixth to Fifty-ninth, taking our time, talking and talking. Couple of times she said ‘Harold, we’ll be fired,’ and I’d say ‘Wanna bet?’ And she’d just laugh. Because, you see, in the kind of kids’ jobs we had then we both knew it’d cost the company more to fire us than to keep us on – and besides, all we’d done was disappear for the afternoon: maybe nobody even noticed it. So anyway, we finally did have lunch about four o’clock that day in the Central Park cafeteria, the one by the zoo, but I don’t think either of us ate much: we were too busy holding hands and smooching and saying all kinds of dopey things to each other – stuff we’d both learned from the movies, I guess.”

“Oh, I think that’s beautiful,” Lucy said.

“Well, okay, but we ran into quite a lot of trouble later on,” Harold said. “My family’s Catholic, you see, and Nancy’s is Lutheran, and those two don’t mix at all. And then her parents thought she ought to marry some better-established guy – that was another shitty little problem. Took us more than a year to talk everybody into it, but they finally came around.”

For a tense moment Michael was afraid the Smiths might now ask to hear the story of the Davenports’ courtship, which would involve an awkward slurring-over or throwing-away of words like “college,” let alone of names like “Harvard” and “Radcliffe,” but Harold seemed to feel that any such inquiry could wait. He was well into his second drink, he had grown accustomed to dominating the talk, and now he brought it back to what he had apparently wanted to tell about from the start, which was his ambition.

Even in a rinky-dink old company like the Central, he said,
you had to give credit where credit was due. This deal of the free commutation fares, for instance: wasn’t that a pretty fair example of enlightened management at work? How else could he and Nancy ever have been able to raise their kids in a place like this, while they were all still young enough to get the good out of it? And hell, he had to admit he liked the guys he worked with in Data Processing. They’d been together a long time; they understood each other. And there was a men’s handball club that met on Friday afternoons; he’d found he really enjoyed that. Kept him in shape, too.