Young Hearts Crying (13 page)

But the best thing, he said, sitting back with a fresh drink, the most promising thing, was that the Central had now made an executive training program available to its higher-level data processing people. He himself might not be eligible for another two years, but it certainly gave him something to look forward to. Part of the course work was done “within the corporate structure,” he explained, but the biggest share of it was undertaken by “business-administration professors at several of the leading universities in the metropolitan area.…”

All three of Harold’s listeners, whose eyes had been quick and bright when he’d told of taking Nancy out for a walk, had subsided now into attitudes of stoic patience. Nancy looked as though she wasn’t listening because she’d heard it all before; Lucy managed to award the speaker a dumb-faced little nod at each pause in his voice, to show she was following the points he made; Michael stared down into his glass as if alcohol, taken in reasonable quantities, might turn out to be an effective precaution against dying of boredom.

But at last Harold came forward in his chair in a way that suggested he was almost finished. “So you see,” he said, “in the transportation industry of the future it won’t matter whether a man’s come up through the rails
or
the airlines. He’ll be a
member of responsible, decision-making management in the – you know – in the transportation industry itself.”

“Well, that’s certainly very – interesting,” Lucy said.

“You’re right,” he told her. “It’s interesting. And I’m very interested in your field, too, Mike.”

“My field?”

“Chain Store Age.
Because I mean Jesus, talk about
changes.
Only a few years ago you had your little neighborhood grocery and your little drugstore and your little guy around the corner selling fish. And now there’s a revolution in the entire concept of retail merchandising, am I right? So you take a magazine like yours, right up at the forefront of all those changes; I’d think you must find yourself in a world of opportunity every time you walk into the office.”

“Well, no, Harold,” Michael said. “I don’t think of it as anything but a way of paying the bills, you see, so I can get my own stuff done.”

“Well, sure, I understand that, but you still
work
for the magazine, right? What was the last thing you wrote for them? I’d really like to know.”

Michael set his bite and felt a prickling in his scalp. All this would be over soon. “Well, let’s see,” he said. “I wrote a series of articles about some guy in Delaware named Klapp. He’s an architect who’s built a shopping-mall kind of thing in some town down there and he thinks it’s really swell and he wants to do the same thing in other towns, but he says he keeps being stymied by ‘politics.’ ”

“Did you meet the guy?”

“Talked to him on the phone a couple of times. He sounds like an asshole. The only reason my editor wanted these pieces at all is because the magazine’s planning a special issue on Urban Renewal, or some horseshit like that.”

“Well, okay,” Harold Smith said. “Now. Supposing your articles really do make this guy look good. Then supposing
Life
magazine picks up the story for a big picture spread, and the guy makes a fortune building his stuff in a whole lot of other towns. And supposing he’s so grateful to you he says ‘Mike, I’d like you to come and be my public-relations man.’ Well, sure, he’d still be an asshole; agreed. But look” – and Harold’s face crinkled, winking, in the way it must have done when he first worked up the nerve to speak to Nancy in the personnel department – “Wouldn’t it be a little nicer to write your poems and your plays on fifty thousand a year?

When the Smiths had followed the efficient beam of their flashlight home at last, Lucy said “Well, now that we’ve made the gesture I don’t imagine we’ll have to do it again, at least for a while.” Then she said “It’s funny, you know? You can see how he
would
be good in a stage comedy: he can make you laugh. But my God, when he doesn’t feel like making you laugh he can really put you to sleep.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what years of grubbing along in white-collar work can do. It’s not too bad until they start believing in Management, but then they’re lost. The magazine is crawling with people like that too. Sort of frightening.”

She had collected the empty glasses and was carrying them to the kitchen. “Why ‘frightening’?” she asked.

And he was just tired enough, with just enough drink in him, to express and even exaggerate his fears. “Well, because what if this play doesn’t turn out to
be
my big-assed breakthrough? Or the next play either?”

She was standing at the sink, washing out the glasses and the plate that had held crackers and cheese. “In the first place,” she said, “that’s unlikely, as you know. In the second place you’ll
have two or even three good collections of poems soon, and you’ll be sought-after by universities.”

“Yeah, well, swell. Only, you know something? The college English departments of America are loaded with guys an awful lot like Harold Smith. They may not believe in Management, but the things they do believe in are enough to make your eyeballs dry out and wrinkle up like prunes. If I ever turn into a college English teacher I can guarantee you’ll be bored shitless with me inside of two years.”

She made no reply to that, and the silence in the kitchen began to feel almost like shame. He knew what she had left unsaid: In the third place, there would always be her money. And he was appalled now that the fretful aftermath of this one dull evening could have brought him so close to making her say it again.

He moved up beside her and ran one hand down the straight, firm length of her spine. “Well, okay, dear,” he said. “Let’s just go on upstairs now.”

He didn’t finish his play by the end of the year. All through the late winter months he worked day and night in the pump shed, where the kerosene stove left a fine coating of soot on his hands and face and clothes. By March or April, when he could stop using the stove and open the windows, he thought he had made enough good changes in the second and third acts to bring them alive, but the first act still lay inert on its pages. It was all labored exposition, the kind of writing he could have sworn he’d outgrown years ago, and it stubbornly resisted improvement. If the mark of a professional was to make difficult things look easy, this playwright seemed to be straining in the opposite direction: every new device he tried in that wretched first act had the effect of making easy things look difficult.

Then it was the middle of July, and his only encouragement came from knowing he could literally lose himself in concentration for many hours at a time. He didn’t feel the heat or the strict confinement; he wasn’t aware of the pencil in his hand or the dribbling sweat that constantly had to be wiped from his eyes; sometimes he would emerge from the shed at dusk when he’d expected it to be noon.

He was so hard at work one sweltering afternoon that he scarcely noticed a heavy thump shuddering the door of the shed from the outside, as if a man had fallen against the base of it. And half an hour must have passed before he began to realize that the shed itself was filling with a foul, intolerable smell. What the hell was this? He had to struggle to push the door open because of what proved to be a damp hundred-pound burlap sack, and when the sack fell over and came open it spilled many soft, trowel-shaped objects that couldn’t be identified at first because each of them was swarming with blue-bottle flies. Then he saw they were the rotting heads of fish.

“Oh!” Ben Duane called from fifty yards away, and he came hurrying toward the shed in his scanty khaki shorts. He was a little bow-legged but very agile for an old man, and he smiled engagingly. “Didn’t know anyone was in there,” he said, “or I would’ve put that somewhere else.”

“Yeah, well, I work here, you see, Mr. Duane,” Michael said. “I’ve been working here for several years now. Every day.”

“Is that a fact? Funny I hadn’t noticed. Here, I’ll get all this out of your way.” Squatting low, he used both hands to gather up the spilled fish heads, flies and all, and put them back in the sack. “These are mackerel heads,” he explained. “Don’t smell very nice at this stage, but they make good fertilizer.” Then he stood erect again, still smiling, heaved and slung the sack over one naked shoulder, and said “Well. Sorry about the
inconvenience, my friend.” And he walked off toward the flower beds.

There was no hope of getting any more work done that day. The mackerel heads were gone but their smell hung as heavy as if it had seeped into the very walls of the shed, and whenever Michael let his eyelids close he saw crawling clots of blue-bottle flies.

“And you know something?” he demanded of Lucy later. “I’ll bet the old son of a bitch did it to me on purpose.”

“Oh?” she said. “Well, but why would he do that?”

“Ah, I don’t know; fuck it. I don’t know anything anymore.”

Michael’s parents drove up from Morristown about once a year, and they were model visitors: they never stayed too long or too short a time for comfort; they didn’t seem to find anything strange about the Tonapac place as compared with the house in Larchmont, and they didn’t ask embarrassing questions. It was always clear that their main purpose in making the trip was to see their grandchild, and Laura seemed to love them both wholeheartedly.

But Lucy’s parents were far less reliable. Two or three years could pass without a word from them, except for scribbled-up Christmas cards and perhaps some small remembrance at the time of Laura’s birthday; then, and never with adequate notice, they would suddenly appear in the flesh – two handsome, talkative rich people whose every glance and gesture seemed a calculated unkindness.

“So
this
is where you’ve been hiding,” Charlotte Blaine called as she stepped from a very long, clean automobile. Then, pausing on the lawn to look the place over, she said “Well, it’s – different, isn’t it.” And just before they went into the house she said “I love your little spiral staircase, dear, but I don’t quite see what it’s
for.”

“It’s a conversation piece,” Lucy told her.

Michael thought his father-in-law looked a lot older than the last time he’d seen him. Stewart (“Whizzer”) Blaine might still play a fast game of squash in town and a fast game of tennis in the country; he might still dive from the high board and accomplish any number of vigorous laps in the pool; but his face had taken on the bewildered look of a man who can’t imagine where the years have gone.

He was reported to have told Lucy, once, that he thought Michael’s refusal of her fortune was “commendable”; now, though, as he sat blinking over the rim of his bourbon and water, he was almost visibly changing his mind.

“Well, Michael,” he said after a long silence. “How’re things down at the retail whaddyacallit – the trade journal?”

And it was Lucy who answered him, with a casual little smile that warmed Michael’s heart.

“Oh, we’ve almost forgotten all about that,” she said. And she explained about Michael’s free-lance arrangement, making it sound as though he scarcely needed to bother with
Chain Store Age
from one month to the next. Then she wound it up, after a significant pause, by saying “And he has another book of poems almost finished.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Mr. Blaine said. “And how about the plays?”

This time Michael spoke for himself. “Well, I haven’t had very much luck with those yet,” he said, and the truth was that he’d had no luck at all. Several of his early plays might still be on the desks or in the files of a few off-Broadway producers, but the big one, the three-act tragedy that had cost him so much, had earned only a cursory letter of acceptance from his agent and was now “making the rounds” – an endless avenue of little hope. At times during the summer he had even thought of offering the script to the Tonapac Playhouse, but he’d always held back. The
director of that year’s itinerant company was a nervous, hurrying, indecisive man who didn’t inspire much confidence; the actors were either undisciplined kids, dying for their Equity credentials, or incompetent veterans forever too old for their roles. Besides, it would have been almost too much to bear if they had considered the play and turned it down. “The theater’s a very – a very difficult business,” he concluded.

“Oh, I know it is,” Mr. Blaine said. “I mean, I can imagine it must be.”

Laura came home from school then, and Michael knew this meant the visit would soon be over. Stewart and Charlotte Blaine had never had more than a little of themselves or each other to spare for being parents, so it was only reasonable not to expect them to show much interest in the child of another generation. After their first false cries of delight they seemed unable even to pay attention to the shy, big-eyed, grass-stained little girl who came up to stand too close to their knees, whose presence obliged them to hold their whiskey glasses aloft and well out of harm’s way as they craned their faces comically from one side of her to the other in an effort to keep the grown-ups’ talk alive.

As soon as the Blaines had gone, Michael clasped his wife in a hug and thanked her for the way she had answered her father’s question. “You really came through for me,” he said. “That was great. It’s always so great when you – when you come through for me that way.”

“Well,” she said, “I did it as much for myself as for you.” And she seemed to stiffen in his arms, or maybe it was his arms that stiffened; it might have been that he stepped on her shoe, or that they broke apart too quickly; in any case, it felt like the clumsiest embrace of their lives together.

*

One autumn day there was a knock on the pump shed door and Michael found Tom Nelson smiling there in his old GI tanker’s jacket.

“Want to go out for pheasant?” Nelson inquired.

“I don’t have a shotgun,” Michael told him. “Or a hunting license, either.”

“Hell, they’re not hard to come by. You can get a fairly decent gun for twenty-five bucks or so, and the license is easy. I’ve been going out alone the past couple mornings, and I thought I’d like some company. Thought an old aerial gunner’d make a pretty good wing shot.”