The Young Lions (4 page)

"No," she said, letting it come out, without thinking about it. "I want to stay here. I want to marry you and stay here."

Joseph shook his head, the soft, closely cropped hair, greying a little, glistening where some drops of melting snow had fallen on it. "I must visit America," he said softly. "I must visit the country that produces girls like you."

"I said I want to marry you." Margaret held his arms tight and hard.

"Some other time, Sweet," Joseph said tenderly. "We'll discuss it some other time."

But they never did.

They went back to Langermans', and had a huge breakfast, sitting quietly before a sparkling, sunny window, with the Alps a majestic background for the bacon and eggs and potatoes and pancakes and Viennese coffee, with globs of whipped cream. Frederick waited on them, discreetly and politely. He held Margaret's chair when she sat down and was quick to refill Joseph's cup when it was empty.

After breakfast Margaret packed, and told Mrs Langerman that she and her friend had to leave. Mrs Langerman clucked and said, "What a shame!" and presented the bill.

There was an item on the bill of nine schillings.

"I don't understand this," Margaret said. She was standing at the shiny oak desk in the lobby as she pointed out the neatly inked entry on the bill. Mrs Langerman, bobbing, starched and brilliantly scrubbed, behind the desk, ducked her head and peered near-sightedly at the piece of paper.

"Oh." She looked up and stared without expression at Margaret. "Oh, that's for the torn sheet, Liebchen."

Margaret paid. Frederick was helping with her bags. She tipped him. He bowed as he helped her into the cab and said, "I hope you have enjoyed your visit."

Margaret and Joseph left their bags at the station and walked around, looking at the shops until it was time to get their train.

As the train pulled out she thought she saw Diestl, graceful and dark, at the end of the platform, watching. She waved, but the figure didn't wave back. Somehow though, she felt it would be like him to come down to the station and, without even greeting her, watch her go off with Joseph.

The inn Diestl had recommended was small and pretty, and the people charming. It snowed two of the three nights and there was fresh cover on the trails in the morning. Joseph had never been gayer or more delightful. Margaret slept secure and warm, with his arms around her all night, in the huge feather bed that seemed to have been made for mountain honeymoons. They didn't talk about anything serious, and they didn't mention marriage again. The sun shone in the clear sky over the peaks, all day long, every day, and the air was winey and intoxicating in the lungs. Joseph sang Schubert lieder for the other guests in front of the fire at night, his voice sweet and searching. There was a smell of cinnamon always in the house. Both of them were burned a deep brown, and more freckles than ever before came out on her nose. Margaret found herself crying when she went down to the station on the fourth day because they had to get back to Vienna. The holiday was over.

IN New York City, too, the shining new year of 1938 was being welcomed. The taxicabs were bumper to bumper in the wet streets, their horns swelling and roaring, as though they were all some newly invented species of tin-and-glass animal, penned in the dark stone and concrete. In the middle of the city, trapped in the glare of the advertising signs, like prisoners caught by the warden's floodlights in the moment of attempted flight, a million people, clamped together, rolled slowly and aimlessly, in pale tides, uptown and downtown. The electric sign that jittered nervously around the Times building announced to the merrymakers below that a storm had destroyed seven lives in the Mid-West, that Madrid had been shelled twelve times at the turn of the year, which, conveniently for the readers of the Times, came several hours earlier to Madrid than it did to the city of New York.

The celebrants themselves, pushing lava-like and inexorable through the paper slush underfoot, threw confetti at each other, laden with the million germs of the city's streets, blew horns to tell the world that they were happy and unafraid, shouted hoarse greetings with thin good-nature that would not last till morning. They had come from the fogs of England for this, the green mists of Ireland, the sandhills of Syria and Iraq, from the pogrom-haunted ghettoes of Poland and Russia, from the vineyards of Italy and the cod-banks off Norway, and from every other island, city and continent on the face of the earth. Later, they had come from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and East St. Louis and Texarkana, and from towns called Bimiji and Jaffrey and Spirit, and they all looked as though they had never had enough sun or enough sleep; they all looked as though their clothes had originally been bought for other people; they all looked as though they had been thrown into this cold, asphalt cage for someone else's holiday, not their own; they all looked as though deep in their bones they understood that winter would last for ever, and that, despite the horns and the laughter and the shuffling, religious promenade, they knew that 1938 would be worse than the year before it.

Michael Whitacre pushed his way through the crowds. He felt himself smiling mechanically and hypocritically at people as they jostled him. He was late, and he couldn't get a taxi, and he hadn't been able to avoid staying and having some drinks in one of the dressing-rooms. The hurried gulping had left his head buzzing and his stomach burning.

The theatre had been wild. There had been a noisy, uninterested audience and an understudy had filled in the grandmother's part because Patricia Ferry had shown up too drunk to go on, and Michael had had a trying night keeping everything going. He was the stage manager for Late Spring and it had a cast of thirty-seven, with three children who always got. colds, and five sets that had to be changed in twenty seconds. At the end of a night like this all he wanted to do was to go home and sleep. But there was this damned party over on 67th Street, and Laura was there. Anyway, nobody ever just went to sleep on New Year's Eve.

I must get a home in the country, he thought as he walked briskly, his shoes making a soft tapping on the cement, a little inexpensive place not far from the city, six, seven thousand, maybe, you could swing a loan, where I can get away for a few days at a time, where it's quiet and you can see all the stars at night and where you can go to sleep at eight o'clock when you feel like it. I must do it, he thought, I mustn't just think about it.

He got a glimpse of himself in a dimly lit shop window. He looked shadowy and unreal in the reflection, but, as usual, he was annoyed with what he saw. Self-consciously he straightened his shoulders. I must remember not to slouch, he thought, and I must lose fifteen pounds. I look like a fat grocer.

He refused a taxi that stopped next to him, as he crossed at a corner. Exercise, he thought, and no drinking for at least a month. That's what does it. The drinking. Beer, martinis, have another. And the way your head felt in the morning. You weren't good for anything until noon and by that time you were out to lunch and there you were with a glass in your hand again. This was the beginning of a new year, a wonderful time to go on the wagon. It would be a good test of character. Tonight, at the party. Unobtrusively. Just not drinking. And in the house in the country no liquor closet at all. He felt much better now, resolved and powerful, although his dress trousers still felt uncomfortably tight as he strode past the rich windows towards 67th Street.

When he came into the crowded room, it was just past twelve. People were singing and embracing and that girl who passed out at all the parties was doing it again in the corner. Whitacre saw his wife in the crowd kissing a little man who looked like Hollywood. Somebody put a drink in his hand and a tall girl spilled some potato salad on his shoulder and said, "Excellent salad." She brushed vaguely at his lapel with a long, exquisite hand with crimson nails an inch and a half in length. Katherine came over with enough bosom showing to power a frigate in a mild breeze and said, "Mike, darling." She kissed him behind the ear, and said, "What are you doing tonight?" Michael said, "My wife arrived yesterday from the Coast." And Katherine said, "Ooops. Sorry. Happy New Year."

Michael lifted his glass and drank half of its contents. It seemed to be Scotch into which someone had poured lemon soda. Tomorrow, he thought, will be time enough for the wagon. After all, he had had three already, so this night was lost anyhow. Michael waited until he saw his wife finish kissing the bald little man, who wore a swooping Russian cavalryman's moustache.

Michael made his way across the room and came up behind his wife. She was holding the little man's hand, and saying, "Don't tell anyone, Harry, but the script stinks."

"You know me, Laura," the bald man said. "Do I ever tell anyone?"

"Happy New Year, darling." Michael kissed Laura's cheek.

Laura turned round, still holding the bald man's hand. She smiled. Even with the din of celebration all around her, and the drunks and commotion, there was tenderness and melting, that lovely welcome that always surprised and shook Michael, no matter how many times he saw it. She put up her free arm and drew Michael closer to her to kiss him. There was a single, hesitating moment when his cheek was next to hers, before she kissed him, when he could sense her sniffing inquisitively. He felt himself grow stolid and sullen, even as they kissed. She always does it, he thought. New Year, old year, makes no difference.

"I doused myself, before leaving the theatre," he said, pulling away and standing straight, "with two bottles of Chanel Number 5."

He saw Laura's eyelids quiver a little, hurt. "Don't be mean to me," she said, "in 1938. Why're you so late?"

"I stopped and had a couple."

"With whom?" The suspicious, pinched look that always came over Laura's face when she questioned him corrupted its usual delicate, candid expression.

"Some of the boys," he said.

"That's all?" Her voice was light and playful, in the accepted tone in which you quizzed your husband in public in her circle.

"No," said Michael. "I forgot to tell you. There were six Polynesian dancing girls with walnuts in their navels, but we left them at the Stork."

"Isn't he funny?" Laura said to the bald man. "Isn't he terribly funny?"

"This is getting domestic," the bald man said. "This is when I leave. When it gets domestic." He waved his fingers at the Whitacres. "Love you, Laura, darling," he said, and burrowed into the crowd.

"I have a great idea," Laura said. "Let's not be mean to wives tonight."

Michael drained his drink, and put the glass down. "Who's the moustache?" he asked.

"Oh, Harry?"

"The one you were kissing."

"Harry. I've known him for years. He's always at parties." Laura touched her hair tenderly. "Here. On the Coast. I don't know what he does. Maybe he's an agent. He came over and said he thought I was enchanting in my last picture."

"Did he really say enchanting?"

"Uhuh."

"Is that how they talk in Hollywood these days?"

"I guess so." She was smiling at him, but her eyes flicked back and forth, looking over the room, as they always did everywhere but in their own home. "How did you think I was in my last picture?"

"Enchanting," Michael said. "Let's get a drink."

Laura stood up and took his arm and rubbed her cheek softly against his shoulder and said, "Glad I'm here?" and Michael grinned and said, "Enchanted." They both chuckled as they went towards the bar, side by side, through the mass of people in the centre of the room.

The bar was in the next room, under an abstract painting of what was probably a woman with three magenta breasts, seated on a parallelogram.

Wallace Arney was there, greying and puffy, holding a teacup in his hand. He was flanked by a squat, powerful man in a blue-serge suit who looked as though he had been out in the weather for ten winters in a row. There were two girls, with flat, pretty faces and models' bony, ungirdled hips, who were drinking whisky straight.

"Did he make a pass at you?" Michael heard one of the girls saying as he came up.

"No," the other girl said, shaking her sleek, blonde hair.

"Why not?" the first girl asked.

"At the moment," the blonde girl said, "he's a Yogi."

Both girls stared reflectively at their glasses, then drained them and walked off together, stately and graceful as two panthers in the jungle.

"Did you hear that?" Michael asked Laura.

"Yes." Laura was laughing.

Michael asked the man behind the bar for two Scotches and smiled at Arney, who was the author of Late Spring. Arney merely continued to stare directly ahead of him, saying nothing, from time to time lifting the teacup to his lips, in an elegant, shaky gesture.

"Out," said the man in the blue-serge suit. "Out on his feet. The referee ought to stop the bout to spare him further punishment."

Arney looked around him, grinning and furtive, and pushed his teacup and saucer towards the man behind the bar. "Please," he said, "more tea."

The bartender filled his cup with rye and Arney peered around him once more before accepting it. "Hello, Whitacre," he said. "Mrs Whitacre. You won't tell Felice, will you?"

"No, Wallace," Michael said. "I won't tell."

"Thank God," Arney said. "She won't let me have even a beer." His voice, hoarse and whisky-riddled, wavered in self-pity. "Not even a beer. Can you imagine that? That's why I carry a teacup. From a distance of three feet, who can tell the difference? After all," he said defiantly, sipping from the cup, "I'm a grown man. She wants me to write another play." Now he was aggrieved. "Just because she's the wife of my producer she feels she has a right to throw a glass right out of my hand. Humiliating. A man my age should not be humiliated like that." He turned vaguely to the man in the blue-serge suit. "Mr Parrish here drinks like a fish and nobody humiliates him. Everybody says, isn't it touching how Felice devotes herself to that drunken Wallace Arney? It doesn't touch me. Mr Parrish and I know why she does it. Don't we, Mr Parrish?"