Young Hearts Crying (16 page)

“I don’t think I’ve seen you more than once or twice since you and Mike broke up,” Nancy Smith said. “What’s that been now – six months?”

“Five, I think.”

Nancy looked as though she knew her next question might be indelicate but felt like asking it anyway. “You miss him?”

“Oh, no more than I’d expected to. It seemed like the right
decision at the time, and since then I haven’t had any – you know – any regrets.”

“So is he still living alone in the city?”

“Well, I don’t suppose he spends too much time alone; I imagine there’ve been a few girls in and out of that apartment. But he’s very good with Laura when she goes in for weekends. He’s taken her to a couple of Broadway shows – she really liked
The Music Man –
and they do a lot of other things; she always seems to have fun with him.”

“Well, that’s nice.”

There was a silence then, and Lucy began to sense that the talk would now develop in either of two ways: Nancy might allude to the peace and happiness of her own marriage; or she might, hesitantly and with averted eyes, express a wish that she too could work up the courage to seek a divorce.

But Nancy’s thoughts were far away from matters like that. “Tomorrow’s my brother’s birthday,” she said. “My brother Eugene. He always got a kick out of having been born on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and he sort of took it to heart. By the time he was eleven or twelve I think he knew more about Lincoln’s career than any of the history teachers did, and he could recite the Gettysburg Address from memory. They asked him to do that in front of the whole school once, at assembly, and I remember being scared the kids would make fun of him, but my God, you could’ve heard a pin drop in that auditorium.

“And talk about proud! Wow, I was proud of him. I was a year older, you see; I spent practically my whole life hoping nobody’d pick on him or push him around, even though it always turned out I had nothing to worry about. Nobody ever did give Eugene any trouble; people couldn’t help knowing he was an exceptional boy. And I mean there
are
kids like that, you
know? Kids so bright and so – out of the ordinary – that everybody understands they need to be left alone?

“Well, he was drafted right after high school, in ’forty-four, and once during basic training he told me he couldn’t seem to qualify with the rifle. That’s what they called it, ‘qualifying.’ You had to be a qualified rifleman, you see, and Eugene couldn’t get a high enough score on the target range. He said he’d keep wincing and blinking when he pulled the trigger; that was the problem. He came home for a three-day pass just before he went overseas, and I remember how funny his uniform looked: the sleeves were way too short and the neck of it stuck way out in back, as if it belonged to somebody else. I said ‘Well, so did you qualify?’ And he said ‘No, but it didn’t matter; in the end they faked up the scores and qualified everybody.’

“I guess the Bulge was almost over by the time Eugene’s bunch of replacements got to Belgium, so they were kept in reserve for a few days until the rifle companies came back off the line and picked them up, and then they all had to go down into eastern France because of something called the Colmar Pocket. I’ve never met anyone who ever heard of the Colmar Pocket, but it was there. A whole lot of Germans were defending this city of Colmar, you see, and somebody had to go in and clean them out.

“So Eugene’s company started walking across this big plowed field, and I’ve always been able to picture that part of it – all these kids plodding along with their rifles in their hands, trying to look as if they weren’t scared and doing their best to keep ten yards apart from each other because that was the rule, you had to keep ten yards apart – and Eugene stepped on a land mine and there was hardly anything left of him. In another week he would’ve been nineteen. The boy who wrote to my parents about it said we could be grateful that he hadn’t suffered any pain, but I
must’ve read that letter twenty times and I still didn’t get it. ‘Grateful’ didn’t seem like the right word.

“Oh, listen, don’t get me wrong, Lucy, I don’t really think about this much anymore; I mean I don’t let it prey on my mind or anything; it’s just that Abraham Lincoln’s birthday always – Abraham Lincoln’s birthday always kills me. Every year.”

Nancy’s head was bowed low over the table and she appeared to be crying, but when she looked up again her eyes were narrow and dry. “And I’ll tell you something else, Lucy,” she said. “A lot of people feel sorry for Harold and me because our boy is handicapped, you know? Well, but do you know the first thing I thought when we found out about his handicap? I thought Oh, thank God. Thank God. Now they can never take him into the Army.”

Ann Blake sat hunched on one of the tall stools in her kitchen, hugging herself and seeming to shiver slightly as she stared into a cup of coffee. She got up promptly to open the door, but she could barely achieve a little smile when Lucy came in to deliver her check for the month’s rent.

“Well,” she said. “And how are you faring, Lucy?”

“How am I what?”

“Holding up. Managing to survive.”

“Oh, we’re doing pretty well, thanks,” Lucy said.

“Ah, yes, ‘we.’ You’ll always be able to say ‘we,’ won’t you, because you have your daughter. Some of us are less fortunate. Well, I don’t mean to sound – here; come and sit down, if you have a minute.”

And it didn’t take long, then, for Ann to confide that Greg Atwood had left her. He had signed up for a six-week tour with a dance troupe, and when the tour was over he’d telephoned her to say he wouldn’t be coming home. He’d decided to join a new
troupe being formed from the nucleus of the old one, with plans for a much more extended tour that might keep him on the road for what he called an indefinite period of time. “He’s flown away, you see,” Ann explained.

“Flown away?”

“Well, of course. With all the other fairies. Listen. Promise me something, Lucy. Never fall in love with a man who’s essentially – essentially homosexual.”

“Well,” Lucy said, “that’s not very likely.”

Ann gave her a slow, frowning, appraising look. “No, I don’t suppose it is. You’re still young, and you’re pretty – I love the way you’ve been fixing your hair lately – and there’ll be any number of men in your life. It’ll be years before your luck starts to change, if it ever does.” Then she got off her stool and stepped back two or three paces, straightening her clothes. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.

Lucy couldn’t guess. Forty-five? Forty-eight? But Ann didn’t wait long for an answer.

“I’m fifty-six,” she said, and came back to sit at the counter again. “It’s been more than thirty years since my husband and I built this place. Oh, and you can’t imagine what high hopes we had. I wish you could have known my husband, Lucy. He was a foolish man in many ways –
is
a foolish man – but he loved the theater. We wanted a summer-stock company that might be the envy of the whole Northeast, and we almost had it. A few of our people really did go straight from here to Broadway, though I don’t think I’ll tell you their names because you’d only say you never heard of them. Oh, but I can tell you this place was alive with wonderful young people in those years – wonderful boys and girls destined for things they never quite achieved. Well. I won’t keep you. And I’m sorry I spilled my troubles all over you, Lucy. It’s just that you’re the first person I’ve seen since Gregsince
that ugly little phone call, and I—” Her lips began to tremble out of control.

“No, really, Ann, that’s okay,” Lucy said quickly. “You’re not keeping me from anything. Let me stay with you for a while, if you’d like, until you feel better.”

Lucy had never been invited beyond the kitchen of this house, and she felt oddly privileged as Ann made her welcome in the living room. It was surprisingly small – the whole house was on a smaller scale than it appeared to be from the outside – and the staircase probably led up to a single luxurious bedroom for two. It was the kind of house that certain songwriters of the nineteen twenties must have had in mind with the phrase “a love nest.”

“Well, you see the fireplace is bigger than necessary,” Ann was saying. “That was my husband’s idea. I think he liked to picture the two of us cuddled up here on the sofa, watching the flames and getting all toasty-warm before bedtime. He was a terrible sentimentalist. I’ve never seen the house he built for the little airline girl, of course, but I’d be willing to bet it has a fireplace at least as big as this.” She fell silent for a while; then she said “Greg always liked it, too. He’d sit here staring into the fire for hours, mesmerized by it, and sometimes I’d go upstairs alone and lie there thinking Well, but what about me? What about me?” And she looked desolate again. “So the hell with it. I suppose I’ll live here for years without ever building a fire.”

“Why don’t we build one now?”

“Oh, no, dear. That’s very sweet, but I’m sure you must have better things to—”

Out in the late February wind again Lucy knocked the snow off three or four logs that lay in a pile beside the kitchen door and gathered up enough kindling to get them started, and when
she carried her load back into the living room she found that Ann had broken out a bottle of scotch.

“It’s much too early in the day,” Ann said, “but I don’t think anybody’s going to care. Do you?”

Soon, when the first steady flames were beginning to climb around the hissing logs, there was a sense of well-earned peace in the room: Ann Blake had curled herself girlishly into the sofa and her guest was settled in an easy chair. Lucy had never liked scotch, but she was discovering now that once you got past the taste it wasn’t really much worse than bourbon. It did the job. It took the harshness out of the day.

“You’re sort of – rich, aren’t you, Lucy?”

“Well, I’m – yes; but how did you know?”

“Oh, it’s just a thing I can smell on people. Michael never gave off that particular smell, but you do; you always have. Well, ‘smell’ is probably the wrong word; I hope I’m not offending you.”

“No.”

“And besides, I’ve caught a glimpse or two of your parents. They’ve got money written all over them. Old money.”

“Yes, I suppose they do. There’s always been quite a lot of-quite a lot of money in my family.”

“Then I don’t understand why you go on living here. Why don’t you take your daughter away someplace where you can be with your own kind?”

“Well,” Lucy said, “I suppose it’s because I don’t really know what kind my own kind is.”

And that didn’t sound like much of an answer at first, but the more she thought it over the better it became. It was certainly closer to the truth than saying “I have friends here”; it was closer even than saying “It wouldn’t be fair to Laura to make some big impulsive move.” Oh, she was getting closer to the truth all the
time – or maybe she needn’t even try to get closer; maybe all she had to do now was give in to what she’d known in her heart all along. The truth – and what if it did take Ann Blake’s whiskey in her veins to make it come clear? – was that she didn’t want to leave Dr. Fine.

Twice now she had severed relations with the man, driving home from his office on each of those afternoons with her head held high in defiance and pride – and both times, after a few weeks, she had gone humbly back. Did other people feel this bondage to their psychiatrists? Did other people find themselves savoring the events of each day in order to have something to say, something to tell about at their next damned psychiatric session?

Well, on Wednesday I got drunk with my landlady, she began to rehearse in her mind, knowing it would come out almost exactly this way in Dr. Fine’s consulting room. She’s fifty-six and she’s just been abandoned by a much younger man, and I guess she’s about the most pitiable person I know. I think I hoped that being there and drinking with her might help take me out of myself a little, do you see? Sort of in the same way that Nancy Smith’s telling about her brother helped take me out of myself that other time? Because I mean nobody can live, Doctor, nobody can breathe and be nourished on self, self, self.…

“Well, I can’t imagine having a great deal of money,” Ann Blake was saying as the flames crackled. “I’ve never even given it much thought, because all I ever wanted was a great deal of talent – and I’d gladly have settled for even a modest amount of that. Still, I suppose the two things are sort of alike. Having either one sets you apart. Being born with either one can bring you more than most people allow themselves to dream of, but they both require an unfailing sense of responsibility. If you ignore them, or neglect them, all the good of them slides away
into idleness and waste. And the terrible thing, Lucy, is how easily idleness and waste can become a way of life.”

 … Then all at once she startled me, Doctor. She said ‘The terrible thing, Lucy, is how easily idleness and waste can become a way of life’ – and it was like a prophecy. Because that’s what my life here is becoming, don’t you see? This neurotic preoccupation with myself that you constantly encourage – oh, yes, you do encourage it, Doctor; don’t deny that – and this helpless sense of inertia. It’s all idleness. It’s all waste.…

“Lucy?” Ann said. “Would you awfully much mind closing the curtains, dear, so I won’t have to know what time it is? Oh, thank you.” And when the room was dimmed she said “That’s better. I want to have it be night. I want to have it be night and I don’t want the morning ever to come.”

The whiskey bottle was still almost a quarter fall – Lucy could tell by holding it up to the firelight – and she poured herself another deep, authoritative drink to make sure she would remember all the things she planned to say to Dr. Fine.

“I think I’ll just sort of stretch out here for a while, Lucy, if you don’t mind,” Ann said. “I haven’t been – haven’t been sleeping at all well.”

“Sure,” Lucy told her. “That’s okay, Ann.” And the silence in the room seemed wholly appropriate to her own need for solitude and contemplation.

On her way to the door she collided softly with a wall and had to stand leaning against it for a few seconds to regain her balance; she was lucky, though, in finding that her winter coat was still where she’d left it.