Young Hearts Crying (7 page)

“You can have real battles with ‘em, too,” Tom Nelson was saying.

“Real battles?”

“Oh, well, you can’t do the
small-arms
fire, of course, but you can do the artillery.” And from another drawer came two plastic toy pistols of the kind made to shoot four-inch sticks tipped with rubber suction cups. “Friend of mine back in Yonkers and I used to have battles that’d last all afternoon,” Nelson said. “First we’d get the right terrain – no grass; just dirt with a few little ridges and hills; or if it was supposed to be the First World War we’d dig ourselves a series of trenches on both sides. Then we’d divide up the troops and we’d spend a long time deploying them, trying to figure the best – you know – the best tactical advantages. Oh, and we had a strict rule about the artillery: you couldn’t just blast away at random, or it would’ve been a shambles. You had to get back six feet behind the rear of
your own infantry, and you had to keep the heel of your hand on the ground at all times” – and he demonstrated this by dropping to his haunches and setting the butt of one toy pistol firmly onto the carpet.

Across the small room, where the girls were sitting, Pat Nelson rolled her eyes in fond exasperation and said “Oh, God, they’ve started in on the soldiers. Well, never mind; pay no attention.”

“You could control your elevation and your range,” Nelson said, “and you could even change positions – we used to allow each other three changes of position during a battle – but you always had to fire from a fixed point on the ground, like real field artillery.”

Michael was entranced by all this, and by the unashamedly boyish, dead-serious way Nelson was telling it.

“Then afterwards,” Nelson went on, “I mean if it was a good battle, we’d lay down cigarette smoke very low over the whole scene and take photographs. It didn’t always work, but some of those photographs really did look like the real thing. You’d think they were pictures of Verdun, or something.”

“I’ll be damned,” Michael said. “And can you do this indoors, too?”

“Oh, we’d do that sometimes on rainy days, but it’s nowhere near as good; you can’t have hills or trenches or anything.”

“Well, look, Nelson,” Michael said in mock belligerence, and took another drink. “I fully intend to engage you in military combat at our earliest convenience – my backyard, your backyard, or wherever else we can find the best terrain” – he felt he was getting drunk but couldn’t tell if it was on whiskey or friendship, and it pleased him to see that Tom Nelson was smiling agreeably – “but I’ll be at a severe disadvantage unless I can get some experience on maneuvers first: I won’t even know
how to use my field artillery piece. So whaddya say we set up a few companies right here. Now. In this room.”

“Naw, the carpet’s no good, Mike,” Nelson said. “You need a wood floor to get ’em to stand right.”

“Well, hell, can’t we roll the carpet back? Just until I get a little artillery practice?”

He was dimly aware of Nelson saying “Naw, look, it’s—” but he had already lunged off to where the carpet bordered the kitchen doorway. He backed beyond it, crouched, and got a grip on the edge of it with both hands – noticing for the first time that it was green, cheap, and badly worn – and he’d just heaved it up from the floor when he heard Nelson call “Naw, I mean wait – it’s tacked down.”

Too late. A hundred carpet tacks flew and danced in shuddering clouds of house dust along three borders of the torn-up rug – all the way across the room to where it remained feebly secure, within a few inches of the coffee table and the girls – and Pat Nelson was instantly on her feet. “What’re you
doing?”
she cried, and Michael would never forget her face at that moment. She wasn’t angry, at least not yet: she was only shocked beyond belief.

“Well, I—” Michael said, still wretchedly holding his end of the rug at his chin, “I didn’t realize it was fastened, is the thing. I’m terribly sorry if I—”

And Tom Nelson quickly tried to help him out: “We were gonna set up some of the soldiers, dear,” he explained. “It’s okay; we’ll put it all back.”

Pat set both small fists on her hips and she was angry as hell now, red in the face, but she addressed her husband instead of their guest, as if that were more in keeping with the rules of sociability. “It took me
four days
to drive all those tacks into the floor. Four days.”

“Ma’am,” Michael began, because he had found in the past that calling a girl “ma’am” could sometimes help to ease him out of difficult situations, “I think if you’ll let me borrow a small hammer and some new carpet tacks, I can have this whole disaster repaired in practically no time.”

“Oh, that’s
dumb,
” she said, and this time she wasn’t speaking to Tom. “If it took me four days, it’d probably take you five. What you
can
do, though – both of you – is get down and start picking up the damn tacks. Every one of them. I won’t have the boys coming out here in the morning and cutting their feet.”

Only then did Michael risk a look at his own wife – he couldn’t have borne it until now – and her face was partly turned away, but he was fairly sure he had never seen her so embarrassed.

For what seemed more than an hour, on their hands and knees, the two men slowly patrolled all sectors of the floor and the wrinkled rug in search of rusty or bent or broken tacks. They were able to exchange small, shy jokes as they worked, and once or twice the girls joined hesitantly in the laughter, until Michael began to entertain a wistful hope that the evening might still be saved. And with the pouring of what Pat Nelson called “one last drink,” after the job was done, it seemed that her graciousness was mostly restored – though he knew that if it were wholly restored she wouldn’t have said “one last drink.” Mercifully, then, all their talk was of other things until the time came for the Davenports to say goodnight.

“Ma’am?” Michael inquired at the door. “If you can ever forgive me for the rug, do you think we can still be friends?”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Pat said, and she touched his arm with what felt like kindness. “I’m sorry I got mad.”

But walking home alone with Lucy was another matter.

“Well,
of course
she ‘forgave’ you,” Lucy said. “What are you,
some little boy who feels all goody-good again because his mother’s ‘forgiven’ him? Oh, couldn’t you see how poor they are from the moment we walked into that place? Or at least how poor they’ve always been until the past year or so? And now that he’s begun to earn real money they’re putting every dollar of it into the country place they’ve bought. They’ll be making a whole new life for themselves on the strength of his work, and you can be sure it’ll be a splendid life, too, because they’re just about the most admirable people I’ve ever met. In the meantime they’re stuck here for a little while longer, so they made the awful mistake of having us over tonight. And when I saw you rip up that carpet – I really mean this, Michael – when I saw you rip up that carpet it was like watching a total stranger do some insane, destructive thing. All I could think was: I don’t know this man. I’ve never seen this person before.”

She stopped talking then, as though talking could never lead to anything but exhaustion, and Michael had nothing to say. He felt more weak than resentful and he knew that no reply would be adequate, so he clenched his jaws to keep from making any reply at all. Once in a while, along the intervals of sidewalk between trees, he looked up at the winking stars in the black sky as if to ask if ever – oh, ever – there might come a time when he would learn to do something right.

Things got better before the end of that spring.

Michael did manage to get the job off his back – or almost. He persuaded
Chain Store Age
to let him become one of its several “contributing writers,” rather than an employee. He would work on a freelance basis now, visiting the office only twice a month to deliver his copy and to pick up new assignments; he would lose the security of a salary and all the “fringe benefits,” but he was confident he could earn at least as
much money this way. And the best part, he explained to his wife, was that he could set his own schedule: he could pack all the
Chain Store
stuff into the first half of each month, or maybe even less than that, and have the rest of the time to himself.

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

“Sure as hell is.”

But far more encouraging, for both of them, was that he finished his book of poems – and that it was accepted almost at once by a young man named Arnold Kaplan, who’d been an acquaintance of his at Harvard and was now an editor at one of the more modest New York publishing houses.

“Well, sure it’s a small house, Mike,” Arnold Kaplan explained, “but it beats the shit out of some university
press
imprint.” And Michael was ready enough to agree with that, though he had to acknowledge that some of the younger poets he most admired – people with steadily growing reputations – were published by university presses.

He was given an advance of five hundred dollars – a fraction, probably, of what Tom Nelson earned for a single twenty-minute watercolor – and because the amount was so meager the Davenports decided to spend it all in one place: they bought what turned out to be a surprisingly good used car.

Then came the galley proofs. Michael winced or cursed or cried out in pain as he pounced on each typographical error, but this was mostly to conceal from Lucy, if not from himself, the vast pride he felt on seeing his words in print.

Another heartening aspect of that spring was that Tom and Pat Nelson continued to give every sign of friendliness. They came to the Davenports’ for dinner twice and entertained them once again at their own little place, where the incident of the rug was never mentioned. Tom read the corrected galleys of Michael’s book and pronounced it “nice,” which was a little
disappointing – it would take Michael a few more years to learn that “nice” was about as far as Nelson ever went in praising anything – but then he made it better by asking if he could copy out two or three of the poems, because he said he’d like to illustrate them. When the Nelsons left town for their new home – and by then the very name of Putnam County seemed almost to have taken on the sound of happiness itself – there were easy promises that they would all be seeing one another soon.

A photographer from
Chain Store Age
offered to take Michael’s jacket photograph free of charge, in order to have a credit line on the book, but Michael didn’t like any of the man’s contact prints; he wanted to throw them all away and hire “a real photographer” instead.

“Oh, that’s silly,” Lucy said. “I think one or two of these are very striking – this one especially. Besides, what’re you trying to do? Get a screen test at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer?”

But their only serious discord came over the “biographical statement” that would be printed beneath the picture. Michael secluded himself to try and get it right, knowing he was taking too long over it but knowing too how closely he had always read such statements by other new poets, knowing how subtly and infernally important these things could be. And this was the finished copy he brought out for Lucy’s approval:

“I don’t get the part about the Golden Gloves,” she said.

“Oh, honey, there’s nothing to ‘get.’ You know I did that. I did it in Boston, the year before I met you; I’ve told you about it a hundred times. And I did lose early. Shit, I never even got beyond the third—”

“I don’t like it.”

“Look,” he said. “It’s
good
if you can work a light, self-deprecating touch into something like this. Otherwise it’s—”

“But this isn’t light and it isn’t self-deprecating,” she told him. “It’s painfully self-conscious, that’s all it is. It’s as though you’re afraid ‘Harvard’ may sound sort of prissy, so you want to counteract it right away with this two-fisted nonsense about prizefighting. Listen: You know these writers who’ve spent their whole lives in college? With their advanced degrees and their teaching appointments and their steady rise to full professorship? Well, a lot of them are scared to put
that
stuff on their book jackets, so they get themselves photographed in work shirts and they fall back on all the dumb little summer jobs they had when they were kids: ‘William So-and-so has been a cowhand, a truck driver, a wheat harvester, and a merchant seaman.’ Don’t you see how ludicrous that is?”

Michael walked away from her across the living room, keeping his back straight, and didn’t speak until he had turned and settled himself in an armchair that left at least fifteen feet of floor between them.

“It’s grown increasingly clear lately,” he said then, not quite looking at her, “that you’ve come to think of me as a fool.”

There was a silence, and when he looked up into her eyes he found them bright with tears. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Michael, is that really the way I’ve been? Oh, how hateful. Oh, Michael, I never, never meant – oh, Michael.”

And from the slow, almost theatrical way she came across that fifteen-foot space, he knew even before he got up to take her in
his arms that there would be no more fault-finding, no more condescension, and no more trouble in his house.

Larchmont would never be Cambridge, but the smell of this girl’s hair and the taste of her mouth, the sounds of her voice and her impassioned breathing, hadn’t changed at all from times under the Army blankets on Ware Street, years ago.

In the end, though, he decided she was probably right about the jacket copy. The world, or rather whatever infinitesimal fraction of the American reading public might bother to pick up and glance over his book, would never know that Michael Davenport had once lost early in the Golden Gloves.

In Putnam County, in the fall, you can see pheasant break from cover and take off over long tan and yellow fields, and sometimes there are hesitant deer to be found among the slender trunks and shadows of oak and white birch. Serious hunters don’t much care for the region, though, because it isn’t “open” enough: there are many well-traveled asphalt roads, some with an occasional clustering of houses and stores and public schools, and there is the high, relentlessly solid intrusion of the New York State Thruway.