Young Hearts Crying (2 page)

“Well, it’s about like what I imagined,” she said when he’d shown her into his place, while he made a quick furtive search of the room to be sure there were no dirty socks or underwear in sight. “Sort of stark and simple and a good place to work. Oh, and it’s so – masculine.”

The pattern of near-perfection held. When she turned away
from him to look out a window – “And I’ll bet it’s lovely and bright here in the mornings, isn’t it? With these tall windows? And these trees?” – it seemed entirely natural to move up close behind her, put his arms around her, and take both of her breasts in his hands while he sank his mouth into the side of her neck.

In less than a minute they were naked and reveling under the Army blankets of his double bed, and Michael Davenport found he hadn’t yet known such a fine and responsive girl, hadn’t even guessed at what a boundless, extraordinary new world a girl could be.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said when they were finally at peace, and he wanted to tell her something poetic but didn’t know how. “Oh, Jesus, you’re nice, Lucy.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so,” she said in a low, subtle voice, “because I think you’re wonderful.”

And it was springtime in Cambridge. Nothing else was of any consequence at all. Even the play had ceased to matter very much: when a Harvard
Crimson
reviewer called it “sketchy” and described Lucy’s performance as “tentative” they were both able to take it in stride. There would be other plays soon enough; and besides, everybody knew what envious little snots the
Crimson
reviewers were.

“Can’t remember if I’ve asked you this before,” he said once when they were strolling in the Boston Common, “but what does your father do?”

“Oh, he sort of – manages things. Different kinds of business things. I’ve never quite known what he does, exactly.”

And that was the first clue he had, apart from her elegantly simple clothes and manners, that Lucy’s family might be very rich.

There were further clues a month or two later, when she took him home to meet her parents at their summer place on Martha’s
Vineyard. He had never seen anything like it. First you drove to an obscure coastal village called Woods Hole, where you went aboard a surprisingly luxurious ferryboat that floated you out over miles of sea; then, once ashore again on the distant island of “the Vineyard,” you followed a road between tall uncropped hedges until you came to an almost-hidden driveway that led around among lawns and trees and took you down near the edge of the gentle water, and there was the Blaines’ house – long and amply proportioned, made almost as much of glass as of wood, with its wooden sections finished in dark brown shingles that looked silver in the dappled sunlight.

“I was beginning to think we’d never get to meet you, Michael,” Lucy’s father said after shaking hands with him. “We’ve heard almost nothing but your name since – well, I suppose it’s only been since April or so, but it seems much longer.”

Mr. Blaine and his wife were tall and lean and graceful, with faces as intelligent as their daughter’s. They both had the kind of taut, tan skin that comes with easy mastery of swimming and tennis, and their husky voices suggested a full appreciation of daily alcohol. Neither of them looked more than forty-five years old. Seated and smiling together on a long chintz-covered sofa, in their impeccable summer clothes, they might have been a photograph illustrating a magazine article with a title like “Is There an American Aristocracy?”

“Lucy?” Mrs. Blaine was saying. “Do you think you’ll be able to stay through Sunday? Or would that mean keeping you away from any number of romantic imperatives back in Cambridge?”

A soft-treading Negro maid came in with a liquor tray, and the early tension of their gathering began to fade. Sitting back to savor the first sip or two of an ice-cold, bone-dry martini, Michael stole an unbelieving glance at the girl of his dreams and
then let his gaze follow the lofty ceiling line of one bright wall until it met at right angles with another, far away, that opened onto other and still other rooms in the shadows of the afternoon. This was a place suggesting the timeless repose that only several generations’ worth of success could provide. This was class.

“Well, but what do you mean, ‘class’?” Lucy asked him, with an exasperated little puckering of her forehead, as they walked alone along the narrow beach the next day. “When you use a word like that it makes you sound sort of proletarian and dumb, or something, and you must know I know better than that.”

“Well, compared to you I
am
proletarian.”

“Oh, that’s silly,” she said. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Okay, but listen: Do you think we might get out of here tonight? Instead of staying through Sunday?”

“Well, I suppose so, sure. But why?”

“Because.” And he stopped to let her turn toward him so that his fingers could touch one of her nipples, very tenderly, through the fabric of her shirt. “Because there are any number of romantic imperatives back in Cambridge.”

His own most important romantic imperative, all through the fall and winter of that year, was to find attractive ways of fending off her shy but persistent wish to be married.

“Well, of
course
I want to,” he would say. “You know that. I want to as much as you do, or even more. I just don’t think it’d be too smart a thing to do before I’ve even gotten started in any kind of work. Isn’t that reasonable?”

And she would seem to agree, but he learned soon enough that words like “reasonable” didn’t carry much weight with Lucy Blaine.

A wedding date was set for the week after his graduation. His family came up from Morristown to smile in courteous
bewilderment through the ceremony, and Michael found himself a married man without being fully aware of how it had all come about. When their taxicab brought them from the church to the reception, in an old stone building at the base of Beacon Hill, he and Lucy emerged under the looming figure of a mounted policeman who raised one hand to the visor of his cap in a formal salute as his beautifully groomed horse stood straight and still as a statue at the curbside.

“Jesus,” Michael said as they started up an elegant flight of stairs. “How much do you suppose it costs to hire a mounted cop for a wedding reception?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “Not much, I shouldn’t think. Fifty?”

“Gotta be a lot more than fifty, honey,” he told her, “if only because you’d have to buy oats for the horse.” And she laughed and hugged his arm to show she knew he was only fooling.

A small orchestra played a medley of Cole Porter tunes in one of the three or four big, open rooms of the reception, and crouching bartenders raced under the pressure of their orders. Michael spotted his parents once in the sea of guests and was glad to find they had a sufficient number of strangers to talk to, and that their Morristown clothes looked all right, but then he lost sight of them again. A very old, wheezing man, wearing the silk rosette of some rare honor in the lapel of his custom-made suit, was trying to explain that he’d known Lucy since she was a baby – “in her
pram!
In her little woolly mittens and her
booties!” –
and another man, much younger, with a knuckle-crushing handshake, wanted to know how Michael felt about sinking-fund debentures. There were three girls who had known Lucy “at Farmington” and who rushed with squeals of happiness to embrace her, though she could scarcely wait until they were gone to tell Michael that she hated them all, and there were
women of her mother’s age who dabbed at invisible tears in saying they had never seen such a lovely bride. It was while pretending to listen to the drink-fuddled talk of a man who played squash with Lucy’s father that Michael thought again of the mounted policeman at the curb. Surely it wouldn’t be possible to “hire” a cop and his horse; they could have been stationed here only through the courtesy of the police department, or of the mayor, and that suggested an element of “influence” in Lucy’s family as well as of money.

“Well, I think it all went pretty well, don’t you?” Lucy said much later that night, when they were alone in a lavish suite at the Copley Plaza. “The ceremony was nice, and I guess the party did get a little messy toward the end, but then that always happens.”

“No, I thought it was fine,” he assured her. “Still, I’m glad it’s over.”

“Oh, Jesus, yes,” she said. “So am I.”

Not until about halfway through their week’s stay in that splendid hotel, a week of paid-for luxury dispensed with casual rudeness under the stares of strangers – only then did Lucy make a shy announcement that would greatly complicate everything between them.

It happened after breakfast one morning, when the room-service waiter had trundled away their plates of melon rind and egg yolk and the heavy flakes of broken French croissants. Lucy was at the dressing table, using its mirror both to brush her hair and to watch her new husband pace the carpet behind her.

“Michael?” she said. “Do you think you could sit down for a minute, please? Because you’re sort of making me nervous? And also,” she added, putting her hairbrush down as carefully as if it might break, “also because there’s something important I have to tell you.”

As they took conversational positions, partly facing each other in two overstuffed Copley Plaza chairs, he thought at first she might be pregnant – that wouldn’t be great news, though it wouldn’t be bad news, either – or maybe that she’d been told she couldn’t have children at all; then his racing mind touched on the frightful possibility that she might have a fatal illness.

“I’ve wanted you to know about this from the beginning,” she said, “but I was afraid it might – change things, sort of.”

It seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her, this leggy, pretty girl to whom the word “wife” might never be comfortably applied, and he sat with a chill of dread from his scrotum to his throat as he watched her lips and waited for the worst.

“So now I’ll have to stop being afraid, that’s all. I’ll just tell you, and I can only hope it won’t make you feel – well, anyway. The thing is, I have something between three and four million dollars. Of my own.”

“Oh,” he said.

Remembering it later, even after many years, it would always seem to Michael that they filled their remaining days and nights in that hotel with nothing but talk. Their voices only rarely took on the tension of an argument and never once broke into quarreling, but it was a steady, dead-earnest discussion that kept circling back over the same issues time and again, and there were decidedly two points of view.

Lucy’s position was that the money had never meant anything to her; why, then, should it mean anything to him beyond an extraordinary opportunity for time and freedom in his work? They could live anywhere in the world. They could travel, if they felt like it, until they found the right setting for a full and productive life. Wasn’t that the kind of thing most writers dreamed of?

And Michael would admit he was tempted – oh, Jesus, talk about tempted – but this was his position: He was a middle-class boy and he had always assumed he would make something of himself on his own. Could he really be expected to abandon that lifelong habit of thought overnight? Living off her fortune might only bleed away his ambition, and might even rob him of the very energy he needed to work at all; that would be an unthinkable price to pay.

He hoped she wouldn’t misunderstand him: it was certainly fine to know she
had
all that money, if only because it meant their children would always have the security of trust funds and stuff like that. In the meantime, though, wouldn’t it be better if she kept it all strictly between herself and her bankers, or her brokers, or whoever the hell it was that looked after it?

She assured him repeatedly that his attitude was “admirable,” but he always turned away that compliment by saying it was nothing of the kind; it was only stubborn. All he wanted was to carry out the plans he had made for them long before the wedding.

They would go to New York, where he’d take the kind of job that other fledgling writers took, in some advertising agency or publishing house – hell, anybody could do that kind of work with his left hand – and they’d live on his salary like an ordinary young couple, preferably in some plain, decent apartment in the West Village. The only real difference, now that he knew of her millions of dollars, was that they would both have a secret to keep from the other ordinary young people they’d meet along the way.

“Isn’t this really the most sensible thing,” he asked her, “at least for the time being? Do you see what I’m getting at, Lucy?”

“Well,” she said, “when you say ‘for the time being’ I guess I
– sure I do. Because we’ll always have the money to fall back on.”

“Okay,” he conceded, “but who said anything about falling back? Have I ever struck you as a falling-back kind of man?”

And he was instantly glad he’d come up with that line. There had been times, in all this talk, when he’d caught himself almost at the point of blurting out that to accept her money would jeopardize his “very manhood,” or even that it would “emasculate” him, but now all the queasy implications of such a weak and desperately final defense could be forgotten.

He was up and pacing again, fists in his pockets, and he went to stand for a while at the front windows, looking out over Copley Square at the sunny parade of weekday-morning pedestrians along Boylston Street and at the endlessly deep blue sky beyond the buildings. It was good flying weather.

“I just wish you’d take a little time to think it over, is all,” Lucy was saying from somewhere in the room behind him. “Couldn’t you at least keep an open mind?”

“No,” he said at last, turning to face her. “No, I’m sorry, baby, but we’re going to do this my way.”

The place they found in New York was almost exactly what Michael had specified: a plain, decent apartment in the West Village. They had three rooms on the ground floor, on Perry Street near the corner of Hudson, and he could shut himself into the smallest room and hunch over the manuscript of a book of poems he wanted to finish and sell before his twenty-sixth birthday.