Short Stories: Five Decades (2 page)

How long ago? It was autumn then, and the ground was getting hard because the nights were cold and leaves from the maples around the stadium blew across the practice fields in gusts of wind, and the girls were beginning to put polo coats over their sweaters when they came to watch practice in the afternoons.… Fifteen years. Darling walked slowly over the same ground in the spring twilight, in his neat shoes, a man of thirty-five dressed in a double-breasted suit, ten pounds heavier in the fifteen years, but not fat, with the years between 1925 and 1940 showing in his face.

The coach was smiling quietly to himself and the assistant coaches were looking at each other with pleasure the way they always did when one of the second stringers suddenly did something fine, bringing credit to them, making their $2,000 a year a tiny bit more secure.

Darling trotted back, smiling, breathing deeply but easily, feeling wonderful, not tired, though this was the tail end of practice and he’d run eighty yards. The sweat poured off his face and soaked his jersey and he liked the feeling, the warm moistness lubricating his skin like oil. Off in a corner of the field some players were punting and the smack of leather against the ball came pleasantly through the afternoon air. The freshmen were running signals on the next field and the quarterback’s sharp voice, the pound of the eleven pairs of cleats, the “Dig, now
dig!
” of the coaches, the laughter of the players all somehow made him feel happy as he trotted back to midfield, listening to the applause and shouts of the students along the sidelines, knowing that after that run the coach would have to start him Saturday against Illinois.

Fifteen years, Darling thought, remembering the shower after the workout, the hot water steaming off his skin and the deep soapsuds and all the young voices singing with the water streaming down and towels going and managers running in and out and the sharp sweet smell of oil of wintergreen and everybody clapping him on the back as he dressed and Packard, the captain, who took being captain very seriously, coming over to him and shaking his hand and saying, “Darling, you’re going to go places in the next two years.”

The assistant manager fussed over him, wiping a cut on his leg with alcohol and iodine, the little sting making him realize suddenly how fresh and whole and solid his body felt. The manager slapped a piece of adhesive tape over the cut, and Darling noticed the sharp clean white of the tape against the ruddiness of the skin, fresh from the shower.

He dressed slowly, the softness of his shirt and the soft warmth of his wool socks and his flannel trousers a reward against his skin after the harsh pressure of the shoulder harness and thigh and hip pads. He drank three glasses of cold water, the liquid reaching down coldly inside of him, soothing the harsh dry places in his throat and belly left by the sweat and running and shouting of practice.

Fifteen years.

The sun had gone down and the sky was green behind the stadium and he laughed quietly to himself as he looked at the stadium, rearing above the trees, and knew that on Saturday when the 70,000 voices roared as the team came running out onto the field, part of that enormous salute would be for him. He walked slowly, listening to the gravel crunch satisfactorily under his shoes in the still twilight, feeling his clothes swing lightly against his skin, breathing the thin evening air, feeling the wind move softly in his damp hair, wonderfully cool behind his ears and at the nape of his neck.

Louise was waiting for him at the road, in her car. The top was down and he noticed all over again, as he always did when he saw her, how pretty she was, the rough blonde hair and the large, inquiring eyes and the bright mouth, smiling now.

She threw the door open. “Were you good today?” she asked.

“Pretty good,” he said. He climbed in, sank luxuriously into the soft leather, stretched his legs far out. He smiled, thinking of the eighty yards. “Pretty damn good.”

She looked at him seriously for a moment, then scrambled around, like a little girl, kneeling on the seat next to him, grabbed him, her hands along his ears, and kissed him as he sprawled, head back, on the seat cushion. She let go of him, but kept her head close to his, over his. Darling reached up slowly and rubbed the back of his hand against her cheek, lit softly by a street lamp a hundred feet away. They looked at each other, smiling.

Louise drove down to the lake and they sat there silently, watching the moon rise behind the hills on the other side. Finally he reached over, pulled her gently to him, kissed her. Her lips grew soft, her body sank into his, tears formed slowly in her eyes. He knew, for the first time, that he could do whatever he wanted with her.

“Tonight,” he said. “I’ll call for you at seven-thirty. Can you get out?”

She looked at him. She was smiling, but the tears were still full in her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll get out. How about you? Won’t the coach raise hell?”

Darling grinned. “I got the coach in the palm of my hand,” he said. “Can you wait till seven-thirty?”

She grinned back at him. “No,” she said.

They kissed and she started the car and they went back to town for dinner. He sang on the way home.

Christian Darling, thirty-five years old, sat on the frail spring grass, greener now than it ever would be again on the practice field, looked thoughtfully up at the stadium, a deserted ruin in the twilight. He had started on the first team that Saturday and every Saturday after that for the next two years, but it had never been as satisfactory as it should have been. He never had broken away, the longest run he’d ever made was thirty-five yards, and that in a game that was already won, and then that kid had come up from the third team, Diederich, a blank-faced German kid from Wisconsin, who ran like a bull, ripping lines to pieces Saturday after Saturday, plowing through, never getting hurt, never changing his expression, scoring more points, gaining more ground than all the rest of the team put together, making everybody’s All-American, carrying the ball three times out of four, keeping everybody else out of the headlines. Darling was a good blocker and he spent his Saturday afternoons working on the big Swedes and Polacks who played tackle and end for Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, hurling into huge pile-ups, bobbing his head wildly to elude the great raw hands swinging like meat-cleavers at him as he went charging in to open up holes for Diederich coming through like a locomotive behind him. Still, it wasn’t so bad. Everybody liked him and he did his job and he was pointed out on the campus and boys always felt important when they introduced their girls to him at their proms, and Louise loved him and watched him faithfully in the games, even in the mud, when your own mother wouldn’t know you, and drove him around in her car keeping the top down because she was proud of him and wanted to show everybody that she was Christian Darling’s girl. She bought him crazy presents because her father was rich, watches, pipes, humidors, an icebox for beer for his room, curtains, wallets, a fifty-dollar dictionary.

“You’ll spend every cent your old man owns,” Darling protested once when she showed up at his rooms with seven different packages in her arms and tossed them onto the couch.

“Kiss me,” Louise said, “and shut up.”

“Do you want to break your poor old man?”

“I don’t mind. I want to buy you presents.”

“Why?”

“It makes me feel good. Kiss me. I don’t know why. Did you know that you’re an important figure?”

“Yes,” Darling said gravely.

“When I was waiting for you at the library yesterday two girls saw you coming and one of them said to the other, ‘That’s Christian Darling. He’s an important figure.’”

“You’re a liar.”

“I’m in love with an important figure.”

“Still, why the hell did you have to give me a forty-pound dictionary?”

“I wanted to make sure,” Louise said, “that you had a token of my esteem. I want to smother you in tokens of my esteem.”

Fifteen years ago.

They’d married when they got out of college. There’d been other women for him, but all casual and secret, more for curiosity’s sake, and vanity, women who’d thrown themselves at him and flattered him, a pretty mother at a summer camp for boys, an old girl from his home town who’d suddenly blossomed into a coquette, a friend of Louise’s who had dogged him grimly for six months and had taken advantage of the two weeks that Louise went home when her mother died. Perhaps Louise had known, but she’d kept quiet, loving him completely, filling his rooms with presents, religiously watching him battling with the big Swedes and Polacks on the line of scrimmage on Saturday afternoons, making plans for marrying him and living with him in New York and going with him there to the night clubs, the theaters, the good restaurants, being proud of him in advance, tall, white-teethed, smiling, large, yet moving lightly, with an athlete’s grace, dressed in evening clothes, approvingly eyed by magnificently dressed and famous women in theater lobbies, with Louise adoringly at his side.

Her father, who manufactured inks, set up a New York office for Darling to manage and presented him with three hundred accounts, and they lived on Beekman Place with a view of the river with fifteen thousand dollars a year between them, because everybody was buying everything in those days, including ink. They saw all the shows and went to all the speakeasies and spent their fifteen thousand dollars a year and in the afternoons Louise went to the art galleries and the matinees of the more serious plays that Darling didn’t like to sit through and Darling slept with a girl who danced in the chorus of
Rosalie
and with the wife of a man who owned three copper mines. Darling played squash three times a week and remained as solid as a stone barn and Louise never took her eyes off him when they were in the same room together, watching him with a secret, miser’s smile, with a trick of coming over to him in the middle of a crowded room and saying gravely, in a low voice, “You’re the handsomest man I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Want a drink?”

Nineteen twenty-nine came to Darling and to his wife and father-in-law, the maker of inks, just as it came to everyone else. The father-in-law waited until 1933 and then blew his brains out and when Darling went to Chicago to see what the books of the firm looked like he found out all that was left were debts and three or four gallons of unbought ink.

“Please, Christian,” Louise said, sitting in their neat Beekman Place apartment, with a view of the river and prints of paintings by Dufy and Braque and Picasso on the wall, “please, why do you want to start drinking at two o’clock in the afternoon?”

“I have nothing else to do,” Darling said, putting down his glass, emptied of its fourth drink. “Please pass the whisky.”

Louise filled his glass. “Come take a walk with me,” she said. “We’ll walk along the river.”

“I don’t want to walk along the river,” Darling said, squinting intensely at the prints of paintings by Dufy, Braque and Picasso.

“We’ll walk along Fifth Avenue.”

“I don’t want to walk along Fifth Avenue.”

“Maybe,” Louise said gently, “you’d like to come with me to some art galleries. There’s an exhibition by a man named Klee.…”

“I don’t want to go to any art galleries. I want to sit here and drink Scotch whisky,” Darling said. “Who the hell hung those goddam pictures up on the wall?”

“I did,” Louise said.

“I hate them.”

“I’ll take them down,” Louise said.

“Leave them there. It gives me something to do in the afternoon. I can hate them.” Darling took a long swallow. “Is that the way people paint these days?”

“Yes, Christian. Please don’t drink any more.”

“Do you like painting like that?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Darling looked carefully at the prints once more. “Little Louise Tucker. The middle-western beauty. I like pictures with horses in them. Why should you like pictures like that?”

“I just happen to have gone to a lot of galleries in the last few years …”

“Is that what you do in the afternoon?”

“That’s what I do in the afternoon,” Louise said.

“I drink in the afternoon.”

Louise kissed him lightly on the top of his head as he sat there squinting at the pictures on the wall, the glass of whisky held firmly in his hand. She put on her coat and went out without saying another word. When she came back in the early evening, she had a job on a woman’s fashion magazine.

They moved downtown and Louise went out to work every morning and Darling sat home and drank and Louise paid the bills as they came up. She made believe she was going to quit work as soon as Darling found a job, even though she was taking over more responsibility day by day at the magazine, interviewing authors, picking painters for the illustrations and covers, getting actresses to pose for pictures, going out for drinks with the right people, making a thousand new friends whom she loyally introduced to Darling.

“I don’t like your hat,” Darling said, once, when she came in in the evening and kissed him, her breath rich with Martinis.

“What’s the matter with my hat, Baby?” she asked, running her fingers through his hair. “Everybody says it’s very smart.”

“It’s too damned smart,” he said. “It’s not for you. It’s for a rich, sophisticated woman of thirty-five with admirers.”

Louise laughed. “I’m practicing to be a rich, sophisticated woman of thirty-five with admirers,” she said. He stared soberly at her. “Now, don’t look so grim, Baby. It’s still the same simple little wife under the hat.” She took the hat off, threw it into a corner, sat on his lap. “See? Homebody Number One.”

“Your breath could run a train,” Darling said, not wanting to be mean, but talking out of boredom, and sudden shock at seeing his wife curiously a stranger in a new hat, with a new expression in her eyes under the little brim, secret, confident, knowing.

Louise tucked her head under his chin so he couldn’t smell her breath. “I had to take an author out for cocktails,” she said. “He’s a boy from the Ozark Mountains and he drinks like a fish. He’s a Communist.”

“What the hell is a Communist from the Ozarks doing writing for a woman’s fashion magazine?”