Young Hearts Crying (17 page)

The expanse of snow and ice between Ann Blake’s kitchen door and Lucy’s house couldn’t have been more than fifty yards, but it seemed to go on forever; then even after making the distance she stood for a long time, with the wind cutting her
face, in order to stare with revulsion at the ice-encrusted spiral staircase. It was no damned conversation piece and never would be, unless you wanted to have the dumbest and most pointless conversation in the world.

When she’d flung her coat over a living room chair she went swiftly into the kitchen because it was time for the sandwich and the milk. She got out the peanut-butter jar and fumbled around for the jelly jar, but that was as far as she could go because she had to lean heavily on the counter with both hands, hanging her head.

It was all right, though; Laura was old enough to make her own sandwich. Everything would be all right now if she could only get up to the bedroom. She did it slowly, using the wall of the staircase for guidance; then she turned back the covers and got into bed with her clothes on. For just a moment she wanted Michael there to take her in his arms (“Oh, Christ, you’re a lovely girl”) but that passed quickly in the peace that came from knowing she was alone.

In another breath or two she would be too sound asleep to hear Laura coming home and calling “Mom? Mom?” – and there might be an edge of fright in the child’s voice when she called again and got no answer – but that was all right, too. If Laura wanted to know where her mother was, she could come upstairs and find out.

“This fear of ‘bondage,’ ” Dr. Fine said, “is by no means unusual. A patient will often come to feel dependent on a therapist, and the sense of dependency may then seem constricting. But it’s an illusion, Mrs. Davenport. You’re not ‘bound’ to me, or to the work we’ve done here, in any way at all.”

“Well, you’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you?” Lucy said. “You guys run a pretty slick racket, don’t you?”

And he looked as if he thought she was kidding. “Oh?” he said.

“Well, certainly. Your whole profession is a slippery, irresponsible business. You suck people in when they don’t know where else to turn; then you seduce them into telling you all their secrets until they’re utterly naked – yes, and so utterly absorbed in their own nakedness that nothing else in the world seems real. And if anybody ever does say ‘Wait – stop – let me
out
of this,’ then you shrug it all off and say it’s an illusion.”

She was almost ready to get up and walk out of the office again. There might not be a very pure sense of defiance and pride in it this time – she might even feel a little foolish, having done the same thing twice before – but there would almost certainly be a slow gathering of strength, all the way home, in her knowledge that this time was the last.

It was embarrassment, more than anything else, that kept her in her chair. She didn’t like the shrill and reckless way her voice had risen just now, and those high, broken notes of near-crying still hung in the silent consulting room. If she couldn’t leave with some measure of dignity, it might be better to stay.

“Suppose we go back a little, Mrs. Davenport,” Dr. Fine said, looking at her steadily over his softly clasped hands. It had often struck her that there was something wormlike about this small, bald, pale and quiet man, and now that impression made her outburst seem all the more unworthy. How could anybody be in bondage to a worm?

“Sometimes it can be helpful just to summarize and clarify,” he said. “The central problem we’ve discussed here, since the end of your marriage, is how best to take full advantage of your wealth and of the personal freedom it provides.”

“Yes.”

“There have been two persistent uncertainties – where to go
and what to do – and while we’ve discussed both questions at length we’ve recognized from the start that the two are interdependent: finding a satisfactory answer to one would resolve the other.”

“Right.”

And so much for summary; so much for clarification. Now it was time for Dr. Fine to get down to business. Lately, he said, Lucy seemed no longer to be “dealing” with the central problem. She was apparently allowing her attention to drift, letting herself be distracted by various inadequacies or elements of dissatisfaction in her present circumstances. And while these matters might indeed be distasteful, they were only transitory; only temporary. Wouldn’t it be more profitable to look ahead?

“Well, of course,” she told him. “And I do, or at least I try to. I know this is just a transitional period; I know it’s only a time for taking stock; for sorting out my ideas; for trying to make plans …” and she remembered that these were the same three tidy activities she had reported to her mother, last fall.

“Good,” Dr. Fine said. “Now perhaps we’re moving in the right direction again.”

But he had begun to look tired and even a little bored, as though he might be allowing his own attention to drift, and Lucy couldn’t blame him for that. Even a small-town psychiatrist would have more interesting things on his mind than assessing the emotional balance of a rich, rich girl who didn’t know where to go and didn’t know what to do.

Nothing worth remembering took place in what little was left of the winter, or in March or April or early May. Then, one bright and fragrant day, she answered a knock on the kitchen door and found a strikingly handsome young man standing there with both thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans.

“Mrs. Davenport?” he inquired. “Be okay if I use your phone for a minute?”

He said his name was Jack Halloran, and that he was the director of a new theater group that would soon begin rehearsals at the Playhouse. Then he called the telephone company, in a tone of crisp, businesslike impatience, and arranged for phones to be installed “at once” in the theater, the dormitory, and the annex.

“Can I – get you a cup of coffee?” she asked when he was finished. “Or a beer or something?”

“Well, if you’ve got enough beer,” he said, “I’d love one. Thanks.” And when he was settled across from her in the living room he said “It’s hard to believe, but whoever’s been running this theater’s been trying to do it without phones. Can you imagine that? Doesn’t that sound like amateur night in Dixie?”

She had never heard that expression before, and wondered if he’d made it up. “Well,” she said, “I think things
have
been a little on the sleazy side here for quite a few summers now. But the place did have a very good reputation once, years ago.”

“Be pretty nice then, wouldn’t it, if somebody could bring it back?” He took a deep swig of beer, making his prominent Adam’s apple rise and fall. “And it might even happen this summer,” he said when he’d wiped his mouth. “Can’t promise anything, but I’ve spent more than a year getting this company together, and we’re not just fooling around. We’ve got some fine young talent and we’ll be putting on some good shows.”

“Good,” Lucy said. “That certainly sounds – certainly sounds good.”

Jack Halloran had pale-blue eyes and black hair, and the kind of tough, sensitive face she had admired in the movies ever since she was a child. She already knew she wanted him; the only question now was how best and most gracefully it could be
brought about. And the first thing to do was keep him talking.

He told her he was from Chicago, and that he’d been raised there by “well-meaning strangers” – first in a Catholic orphanage and later in a succession of foster homes – until he was old enough to join the Marine Corps. And it was on a three-day pass in San Francisco, shortly before his discharge from the service, that he’d walked into a theater for the first time in his life and seen a touring Shakespeare company’s production of
Hamlet.

“I don’t think I understood more than about half of it,” he said, “but I knew I’d never be the same again. I started reading all the playwrights I could get my hands on, Shakespeare and all the others, and seeing plays – any kind of plays – and one way or another I’ve managed to keep hanging around the theater ever since. Hell, it may turn out that I’ll never make it, either as an actor
or
a director, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever quit. This is the only world I understand.”

Over his second or third beer he let something slip that he probably wasn’t used to confiding on such short acquaintance: he had made up his name. “My real name’s Lithuanian,” he explained, “and it’s got more syllables in it than most people can work their mouths around. So I settled on ‘Jack Halloran’ when I was sixteen because it seemed to me the Irish kids were getting all the breaks; that’s the way I signed up in the Marines. Then later it came to feel more natural, once I started working in show business, because a lot of show people have stage names.”

“Sure,” Lucy said, but it was a disappointing piece of information. She had never known anyone who lived under an assumed name; she wouldn’t even have thought people did that kind of thing unless they were criminals, or unless – well, unless perhaps they were actors.

“Well, I think we’ll have a good summer,” he said, getting up in readiness to leave. “I like it here. Tell you a funny thing,
though: I never would’ve expected to find an actor of Ben
Duane’s
stature in a place like this. I asked him if he might consider working with us, but he’s a stubborn old bastard: if he can’t work on Broadway, all he wants to do is grow flowers.”

“Yes. Well, he’s quite a – quite a character.”

“It was Mr. Duane who gave me your name,” Jack Halloran said. “He told me you’re divorced, too – I hope it’s okay to mention that.”

“Certainly.”

“Well, good. And look: as long as we’re going to be neighbors, Lucy, maybe I can see you again, okay?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’d like that, Jack.”

After closing the kitchen door behind him she began to dance around on tiptoe. She executed six or eight neat, whirling steps all the way back into the living room, where she made a little curtsy.

 … And from the moment I met him, Doctor, I began to feel this strange, warm, wonderful sense of–

But she didn’t even finish that sentence in her mind, because it was something Dr. Fine might never have to hear. All she could do, as her heart slowed down, was stand looking out an open window into the colors of spring.

For a day or two, waiting for him to come back, she entertained a sobering, cautionary thought: Could you really make love with a man when you didn’t even know his name? But in almost no time at all, after he did come back, she learned the answer to that question.

Yes. You could. You could rapturously kiss and clasp and writhe and heave with a man all day in what had once been your husband’s bed; you could crave a man so badly it was almost like dying; you could open your legs wide for him if that was the way he liked it, or bring them close around him if he seemed to like that better; you could even cry “Oh, Jack! Oh, Jack!” while knowing all the time that “Jack” was part of an alias conceived because the Irish kids were getting all the breaks.

She meant to ask him about the name right away – she knew the longer she waited the more awkward it might be – but she could never quite find the words because there was too much of Jack Halloran in her life now, filling all her senses and her very bloodstream, filling her dreams.

And there never seemed to be enough time. Every afternoon, at first, they had to be up and dressed and downstairs, seated at a conversational distance, when Laura got home from school. And the ending of the school year imposed a subtler, more hazardous
kind of secrecy: Laura might be far away for hours with the Smith girls, up in the woods or out across acres of grass, but there was no telling when she might come slamming back into the house. Then the actors and the stage technicians began to arrive on the estate, five or six or more of them each day, and this required Jack to be gone a lot of the time on business.

On the last day before rehearsals began he stole most of the afternoon to be alone with her, and their knowing it was stolen time made it all the more exquisite. When they’d fallen apart at last they lay weak with laughter at some small funny thing he had said; they were still laughing in helpless, subsiding spasms as they went lazily about the business of putting on their clothes and making their way downstairs. In the kitchen, fully recovered, he stood holding her close in a long romantic embrace.

Then very shyly, with her face against his shirt, she said “Jack? Do you think you might tell me your real name now?”

He drew away and gave her a short, speculative look. “Nah, let’s hold off a while on that, honey, okay? I’m sorry I even told you about it.”

“Well, but I thought it was charming that you did,” she said, afraid he could tell she was lying. “It was one of the first things I liked about you.”

“Yeah, well, okay, but that was before we got to know each other.”

“Well, exactly. And the point is I can’t go on saying
‘Jack
Halloran’ indefinitely, don’t you see? It’s like taking something counterfeit and pretending not to care. Oh, listen: I can work my mouth around any number of syllables, and I’d love to. Do you think I’m a snob or something?”

He seemed to be turning that question over in his mind. Then he said “No; it’s more that I’m the snob. You’ll find your average Lithuanian slum child can be snobby as hell around
high-class New England girls – didn’t anybody ever warn you about that? My kind of people always feel superior to your kind, you see, because we’ve got the brains and the guts and all you’ve got is the money. Oh, maybe we can take you one at a time, once in a while, but even then there’s bound to be an element of condescension in the deal. So I really think we’re both better off this way, Lucy, don’t you? As long as I’m Jack Halloran we can have a lot more laughs, and that’s a promise.”

Then suddenly he was gone, out in the sunshine where he’d come from, heading for the hill to the dormitory. And at least half the dormitory, by now, would be filled with girls.

But he was back that very evening, soon after dark, barely visible through the screen door except for the burning end of his cigarette. When she let him into the kitchen he seemed to feel that no apologies were necessary, unless she chose to find an implicit apology in the way he winked and murmured “Lucy” just before he kissed her. Then he said “Listen, baby. I’ll be working every day now, and of course I can’t spend any time here at night without upsetting Laura, so how’s this: I’ve got a nice room up in the dorm – it’s all my own and it’s big enough for two. Think you could manage to come up there once in a while?”