Young Hearts Crying (23 page)

This was bad. Lucy had assumed her manuscripts would be read, like real stories, and that copies of them would then come back to her with written comments by the readers. Having them only listened to would be inadequate and hazardous – a whole sentence might fall out of the listener’s mind before the next sentence began – and besides, it would be too much like working on the stage.

“Several of you sent in stories ahead of time,” Carl Traynor was saying, “so I’ve been able to choose one for this morning’s class. Mrs. Garfield?” and he peered uncertainly down the table. “Would you prefer to read this piece for us yourself, or—”

“No, I’d rather have you read it,” said one of the matronly women. “I like your voice.”

And it wasn’t easy for Carl Traynor to hide his pleasure; this might have been the first nice thing anybody had said to him in months. “Okay, then,” he said. “This is a fifteen-page manuscript,
and the title is ‘Renewal.’ ” Then in a voice that seemed overly measured and sonorous, as if to prove itself worthy of Mrs. Garfield’s liking, he began to read.

After what seemed about two pages the author introduced a boarding house in the poorer section of town, meticulously describing both the house and its neighborhood; then she brought the reader inside to discover a twenty-three-year-old man named Arnold in the slow and difficult process of waking up. Arnold was said to have had a bad night of drinking and of “loss.” But the reader, or listener, had to follow him through every step of his morning ritual – rumbling to make coffee on an old hot-plate, sipping it, taking a shower in a rusty tub and putting on the kind of clothes suggesting the lower middle class – before learning what it was that he’d lost. His young wife had left him a month ago, because of his “wild ways,” and gone back to stay with her parents in another town. Now Arnold climbed into his “battered” pickup truck and drove to that town, where he found that both parents were conveniently away from home for the day.

“ ‘Think we could have a talk, Cindy?’ ” he asked the girl, and they had one. It didn’t last long, but it was a “good” talk, because each of them said what the other most wanted to hear, and Mrs. Garfield’s story came to an end with their heartfelt embrace.

“So that’s it,” Carl Traynor said, looking tired. “Any comments?”

“I think it’s a beautiful story,” one of the women said. “The theme of renewal is announced in the title, it’s developed in the nature descriptions – the renewal of the earth with the coming of spring – and it finds its resolution in the renewal of the young people’s marriage. I was deeply moved.”

“Oh, I agree,” another woman said. “And I want to congratulate the author. I have only one question: if she can write as well as this, why does she consider herself a student?”

Then it was the turn of the truck-driverly man, whose name was Mr. Kelly. “I had a lot of trouble with the opening,” he said. “I think it’s much too slow. We gotta get the weather and the town and the dog and the train whistle and God only knows what else before we even get the boarding house, and then even after the boarding house we gotta wait too long before we get the kid. I don’t know why we couldn’t’ve gotten the kid right away and all the other stuff later.

“But my main problem,” he went on, “is with the dialogue at the end. I don’t think hardly anybody ever says exactly what they mean the way these kids do, with one person feeding the next line to the other. In the movies you might get away with lines like that because there’d be all this sweet music coming up on the soundtrack to let people know it’s the end of the show. But this isn’t the movies. All we’ve got here is ink and paper, so the writer’s gonna have to work an awful lot harder to get the dialogue right.

“And even then – even then I’m not sure if talk alone is gonna do the job. I’m not sure if anybody’s life ever got turned around by talk alone. Seems to me we need some kind of a thing in there too. I don’t suppose a crocus’d work because it’d be a little heavily on the symbolic side, and I guess we don’t want the girl
telling the boy she’s pregnant because that’d take the whole story away in another direction; but something. An incident; an event; something unexpected that rings true. Well, hell, I guess I’m shooting my mouth off.”

“No you’re not,” said the white-haired man. “You’re making sense.” And he turned to the teacher. “I’m with Mr. Kelly all the way down the line on this one. He’s said everything I wanted to say.”

When most of the other students had been heard from – there were several who abstained from comment – it was time for Mr. Traynor’s summing up. He talked for what seemed twenty minutes in an alternately smooth and hesitant voice, repeatedly glancing at his wristwatch, and all he did was try to appease every difference of opinion in the room. At first it seemed clear that he sided with Mr. Kelly – he reviewed each of Mr. Kelly’s points and suggested that Mrs. Garfield might do well to take note of them – but then he began making concessions to the women who’d been deeply moved. He, too, he said, found it strange that Mrs. Garfield considered herself a student, but he was glad she did because otherwise they might not have the pleasure and the benefit of her presence here.

“Well, okay,” he said when he was finished – or rather when his watch told him he had fulfilled his day’s obligation to the New School – “I guess that’s all for this week.”

It wasn’t much. It seemed scarcely worth the effort of having come all the way in from Tonapac. But Lucy was willing to believe it might get better; and besides, she had nothing else to do.

The second or third week’s story was by one of the young girls – a slim, pretty girl who frowned and blushed and stared at her clasped hands on the table throughout Mr. Traynor’s reading.

And it did. In the student cafeteria she met a wonderful-looking boy she’d never seen before: he had recently transferred here as a senior from another college. They “had coffee” and spent the afternoon walking and talking, getting along wonderfully well. The boy owned a blue MG that he drove with “admirable” skill, and he took her to a wonderful restaurant in a neighboring town. In the candlelight, over dishes with names that were given in correctly accented French (though Mr. Traynor had trouble pronouncing them anyway), Jennifer found herself thinking “This could be a real relationship.” Back at school they strolled together into the deep shadows behind her residence hall, and there on the grass, for a long time, they made out.

Lucy could remember “making out” as a wartime expression for getting laid; she didn’t know until now, in the context of this story, that for a later generation of girls it had come to mean necking or petting – maybe unfastening your “bra” for a boy and maybe letting his hand stray into your pants, but nothing more.

Jennifer invited the boy up to her room “to have some tea,” and that was where everything went terribly wrong. He was crude. He wanted to go to bed with her right away, without even being nice to her first, and when she declined he “became another person, more maniac than man.” He shouted at her. He called her names too horrible to be recorded, even in memory, and as his violence mounted she cowered in fear, but luckily there was a heavy pair of scissors on her dresser: she snatched it up and
held it tight in both hands, aiming the point of it at his face. When he’d left the room at last, slamming the door, she found that all she could do was curl up under the covers and weep. She understood now that this boy was a mentally ill person, seriously disturbed, badly in need of professional help – and that might also explain the strangeness of his having changed colleges in senior year. Sometime toward morning she remembered her father’s wise and gentle voice: “We must always be considerate of those less fortunate than ourselves.” And her last thought, just before sleep, was that a real relationship would have to wait.

Several women around the table offered guarded praise for the economy and swiftness of the writing, and one said she’d enjoyed the restaurant scene, though she added quickly that she couldn’t say why.

Then Mr. Kelly was called on, but he only folded his big arms across his company shirt and said he’d rather not say anything today.

It was left to Mr. Kaplan, the dentist – or accountant-looking man, to do the main part of the job. “It struck me as a very immature piece of work,” he said. “There’s more unintentional silliness revealed all through it – and I mean on the author’s part, not the character’s – than I would have thought possible in anything written by an adult. When something as serious as that is wrong in a story, it seems to me that no amount of technical competence is going to help.”

“I’ll go along with all that,” the old man said, “and I’ll tell you something else: I wouldn’t mind hearing the
boy’s
version of the story. I’d like to know how he felt when she pulled the scissors on him.”

“Well, but she was terrified,” one of the women said. “He was wholly out of control. For all she knew she could have been raped.”

“Ah, raped my ass,” the old man said. “I’m sorry, lady, but this is a story about prick-teasing and that’s
all
it is. Oh, and another thing: I never saw a ginger-aley day and neither did you.”

Lucy was almost afraid to look at the girl who’d written the thing, but she risked a glance. No longer blushing, the girl’s face was set in a calm shape of disdain now; she had even managed a wan little smile suggesting tolerance and pity for all the fools in this room and in the world.

The girl was okay; she would survive the morning; and Mr. Traynor seemed to know it. He didn’t even chide the old man for unnecessary roughness, though that would have been in keeping with his opening-day stricture against “discourtesy” in criticism; instead, he made a chuckling observation that some kinds of material would always be more controversial than other kinds. Then he told the girl her story probably did need work. “If you can find ways to soften the tone of self-righteousness here,” he said, “or of apparent self-righteousness, you may have a more satisfying – a more satisfying statement.”

The first and lesser of Lucy’s two stories, “Miss Goddard and the World of Art,” was presented the following week. She sat stiff with fear as Traynor read it aloud, though she had to admit he read it well enough; the trouble was that many small mistakes in it, all unrecognized before, were now made clear in the sound of his voice. When it was over she felt weak; she wanted to hide; she could only hope Mr. Kelly wouldn’t choose to remain silent again today.

And he didn’t: he was the first to speak. “Well, this time we’ve got some dignity here for a change,” he said, and it struck her at once that “dignity” was an uncommonly lovely word. “This lady understands sentences – that’s rare enough – and she
knows how to make them work together, which is even more unusual. You get a lot of strength in writing like this, and a lot of grace, and a lot of – well, I already said dignity, but that’s in there too.

“As for the substance of the story, though, I’m not so sure. I mean what do we have? We have this little rich girl who doesn’t like boarding school because the other girls make fun of her all the time, and she doesn’t like going home on vacations either because she’s an only child and her parents are all wrapped up in each other. Then she’s befriended by this unconventional young art-teacher girl who tells her she’s got a natural talent for drawing, and for a minute or two there I thought we might have some kind of lesbian story on our hands, but that was a wrong guess. The teacher helps the girl find self-esteem through art, so in the end the girl comes to realize she can face her life after all.

“And that may be part of the trouble right there: basically it’s what used to be called a come-to-realize story, and that was a commercial formula that went out of business when the big slick fiction magazines folded up after television came in.

“No, but never mind that,” he amended quickly. “That’s secondary, and it may be a cheap line of criticism anyway. I think all I’m trying to say” – and he frowned hard in the effort of choosing the words – “all I’m trying to say is that I’m afraid I got a kind of who-cares feeling out of this. Very strong writing, fine writing; still, the material kept making me think Yeah, yeah, I get it, but who cares?”

And others, up and down the table, seemed to agree with both parts of Mr. Kelly’s opinion. That made it an easy day for Carl Traynor: there was nothing to challenge the timidity of his leadership. There were no conflicts for him to mollify or retreat from, and his summing-up required nothing as brave as an original idea.

But Lucy kept coming back to the New School every week because there was a chance that her second and more ambitious story might be read aloud. She needed to know what George Kelly and Jerome Kaplan and one or two others would have to say about it. And she was obliged to wait through a good many other people’s stories, with their bland or tumultuous critical discussions, but eventually it happened.

“We have another piece by Mrs. Davenport this morning,” Traynor announced. “It’s twenty-one pages, and the title is ‘Summer Stock.’ ”

This time she could hear no mistakes in the pages being read. She was confident that her sentences would again be acclaimed, and that the new material would leave nobody able to ask who cared. Toward the end she even found herself moved by it – there was a faint swelling in her throat – as if it had been written by someone else.

“Well, okay,” George Kelly said when it was over. “Once again I can’t fault the language – this lady controls her language like a pro – and this time the story’s a lot more interesting, too. We have this young divorced woman falling in love with this summer-theater director, and all that part is plausible and well-developed. The sexual episodes are as tastefully done as anything I’ve read along that line, and they’re very strong and convincing too. So the man talks her into taking the most difficult part in an important play, and she knows she’s not ready for it but does it anyway and exhausts herself; then, even before she’s recovered from that, she finds out she’s lost the man to a younger girl – and that’s plausible too because it’s been in the cards from the beginning – so everything’s over. I think it’s very good stuff.