Young Hearts Crying (26 page)

Carl Traynor’s first novel didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but Lucy paid close attention to its several excellent reviews, and she bought it at once. The first thing she did was remove its ugly dust jacket – a cheap illustration on the front and a photograph on the back that might have been the picture of an unhappy college boy – then she settled down to read.

She was pleased with the “dignity” of the sentences and the clarity of the scenes, and along in the third or fourth chapter she could dimly begin to see what he’d meant about
Madame Bovary.
Parts of it were very funny, for a man who could never get a laugh at the New School, but there was a pervasive tone of sadness all through the story and a well-earned sense of impending tragedy toward the end.

It kept her sitting up in bed all night and it made her cry a little, turning away from the page to hide her loose mouth in her free hand; then, after trying and failing to sleep for most of the morning, she found his name in the Manhattan phone book and called him up.

“Lucy Davenport,” he said. “Well. Good to hear from you.”

And in a shy voice, fumbling for the words, she tried to tell him how she felt about his book.

“Well, thanks, Lucy, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m very glad you liked it.”

“Oh, ‘liked’ isn’t the right word, Carl; I loved it. I can’t remember when a novel has moved me so deeply. And I’d love to discuss it with you, but a phone call isn’t really – do you think we could meet somewhere in town for a drink? Soon?”

“Well, actually, I’ve got company here now,” he said, “and I’ll probably be – you know – tied up for some time; so maybe
I’d better take a rain check on the drink, okay?”

And for hours after they’d hung up she was still bothered by the clumsiness of his message. Wasn’t “I’ve got company here now” a funny way of telling her he had a girl? And she hadn’t heard anybody say “take a rain check” for years, so that was funny, too – especially from a man with a writer’s abhorrence of clichés.

But she couldn’t deny that her own part of the talk had been all wrong – too open, too direct, too aggressive. If she’d had any sleep last night she would almost certainly have found a subtler approach.

And the worst thing, however she might dwell on the bungled little phone call, the worst thing now was that she was terribly, terribly disappointed. All night, and especially toward morning, she had repeatedly let her mind float away from Carl Traynor’s powerful story into romantic little reveries of the man himself. Her having misjudged and belittled him all those weeks seemed only to lend piquancy to their long afternoon together in that Sixth Avenue bar. She deeply regretted having said no to him that day – if she’d said yes, she might now be alone with him in rejoicing over this very book – and she knew she would never forget how good he had felt to her clasping hands in that lingering embrace on the street.

At the dead-silent hour of five this morning, when she’d put the book aside before starting to read the last chapter because she knew the last chapter was going to break her heart, she could remember whispering audibly against her pillow: “Oh, Carl. Oh, Carl …”

And now, though it wasn’t yet noon – wasn’t even time to allow herself a drink – there was nothing left to dream of. Everything was gone. Everything was desolation and wreckage, because Carl Traynor had said he’d better take a rain check.

She had found in the past that a voluptuously long, hot shower could be made to seem almost as health-giving as a night’s sleep; she had learned too that taking exquisite pains over the selection and putting-on of clothes could sometimes be as good a way as any of helping the hours to pass.

And luck was with her on this particular day: by the time she was ready to settle herself at the telephone table, with her first drink gleaming as deep and substantial as the love of a generous friend, it was after four. The New York Stock Exchange had been closed for more than an hour, and this might easily be the kind of afternoon when even a conscientious broker would have nothing much to do but fool around the office until the clock said it was time to quit.

“Chip?” she said into the phone. “Are you terribly busy, or can you talk for a minute? … Oh, good. I just wondered if you’re – you know – if you’re free tonight, because I’d really love to see you.… Oh, that’s wonderful.… No,
you
say when;
you
say where. I want to place myself entirely at your disposal.”

“Mom? Mom?” Laura called urgently from the living room one evening, when Lucy was finishing up in the kitchen. “Mom, come and look, quick. There’s this neat new series on TV, and guess who’s
in
it.”

For a moment Lucy thought it might be Jack Halloran, but it wasn’t. It was Ben Duane.

“It’s all about this farm family, I think in Nebraska,” Laura explained when Lucy came to sit beside her at the mottled, droning screen, “and I think it’s really gonna be neat. It’s supposed to be back in Depression times, you see, and they’re very poor and all they’ve got is this little plot of—”

“Sh-sh,” Lucy told her, because the girl’s words were
tumbling out too fast to follow. “Let’s just watch. I think I’ll be able to pick it up.”

Most of these television “series” entertainments were dreadful, but once in a while they stumbled onto a lucky formula, and this one did look fairly promising. The father was proud and taciturn, still a young man but prematurely aged by hardship, and the handsome mother was serene and patient to the point of nobility. There was a puzzled-looking boy just emerging from adolescence, and a girl a year or two younger – still a little coltish, perhaps, but large-eyed and brimming with incipient beauty.

Ben Duane played the spry old grandfather, and from the moment he came jauntily downstairs for breakfast you could tell he was going to be lovable all the way through. The scriptwriters hadn’t given him many lines in this opening or “pilot” episode – he would look up briefly now and then to deliver pungent wisdom over his bowl of oatmeal – but he got most of the laughs, or rather most of the spasms of “canned” laughter on the soundtrack.

“I bet the girl turns out to be the star, don’t you?” Laura said when the show was over.

“Well, or it could be the boy,” Lucy said, “or either of the parents. And with so many more episodes to work with, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they make Ben the featured player sometimes. He was a very distinguished actor, you know, for many years.”

“Yeah, I know. Anita and I used to think he was kind of a creepy old guy, though.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I don’t know. He never seemed to have enough clothes on.”

Then Laura got up, switched off the set, and wandered out of the room. She seemed to wander everywhere she went
nowadays, rather than to walk. In a few more weeks she would be thirteen.

Peggy Maitland had studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League of New York for six months or so, before dropping out to devote her life to Paul, and she often said she had “loved” it there. The League had no entrance requirements and no formal program of study: beginners and advanced students were “all mixed up together,” and the teachers gave individual attention to each student according to his needs.

So Lucy decided to give it a try. She didn’t feel she needed drawing lessons – her drawing had been extravagantly praised by that much-admired teacher in boarding school, more than half a lifetime ago – but the challenge of oil painting on canvas would be something entirely new. And what did she have to lose?

The first thing she learned about oil painting, on her first day in one of the big, clean, light-flooded studios of the League, was that it smelled wonderful. It smelled like the very stuff of art itself. Then, slowly and with many mistakes, she began to learn more. Everything was light and line and form and color: you had a limited space, and your obligation was to fill it in a satisfying way.

“Now you’re getting something,” her instructor said quietly when he came to stand at her shoulder one afternoon – and God only knew how many weeks it had been since her enrollment. “I think you’re getting something, Mrs. Davenport. If you stay with this one, you’re going to have a picture.”

He was a short, tan, bald man named Santos, a Spaniard who spoke English with almost no trace of an accent, and Lucy had known from the beginning that he was a real teacher. There was neither fear nor carelessness in his method; he never flattered the dullards or the fools; he expected everyone’s standards to be as
high as his own – and his highest praise, so rarely given as to make it exquisitely valuable, was to say “You’re going to have a picture.”

“And I
love
it,” she exclaimed in Chip Hartley’s house one Saturday night, whirling to face his chair in a way that made her skirt swing and float attractively around her legs. “I
love
the feeling that I’m doing something well – something I can do without any sense of strain or fear of failure; something I may even have been born to do.”

“Well, that’s great,” he told her. “Finding a thing like that does make all the difference, doesn’t it.” But he could look up at her only briefly because he was dismantling an expensive new German camera on the lap of his Bermuda shorts. Something had gone wrong with the thing this afternoon, spoiling the long day of picture-taking he had planned, and now his need to finger and scrutinize loose parts of it obliged him to sit with his thighs pressed together and his shoes pigeon-toed on the rug.

“I remember your saying about Tom Nelson’s work once,” she said, “that he gave you a sense of honest goods. Well, I’m beginning to think I might be able to do that, too – oh, not in his way, of course, but in a way of my own. Does that sound terribly immodest?”

“Sounds fine to me,” he said, holding up a small piece of the camera for inspection in the lamplight. “Speaking of honest goods, though, I’m afraid the Germans may have put something over on us this time.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to take it back to the store?” she inquired. “Instead of trying to fix it yourself?”

“As a matter of fact, dear,” he said, “I came to that same conclusion half an hour ago. All I’m trying to do now is get it put together well enough to
take
it back to the store.”

This wasn’t the first time Chip Hartley had struck her as less
than an ideal companion, and it wouldn’t be the last. He would probably sit here fretting over his broken toy until bedtime; then soon it would be Sunday, always the most tedious of their days together, and once the new week began the only spice of uncertainty in her life would be wondering which of them would call the other first.

Well, being Chip Hartley’s girl might not amount to much – it might even turn out to be little more than a way of waiting for something better to come along – but it would always permit some small things to be accomplished. Later tonight, for example, she could probably find a way to tell him that she’d never liked Bermuda shorts.

Whether she made her daily trips to New York by car or by train, it was necessary first to drive through the village of Tonapac and out along the winding asphalt road that took her past the weathered old sign for the New Tonapac Playhouse on one side and the base of Ann Blake’s steep driveway, with its “Donarann” mailbox, on the other – and one of the reasons Lucy had come to believe the League was better than the New School was that she could now acknowledge those poignant landmarks without a second glance. Sometimes, in fact, she would get all the way through to the parkway entrance, or to the train station, without having noticed them at all.

But one morning she came upon Ann Blake standing alone at the roadside, all dressed up in a nice fall suit, with bright earrings, so she brought the car to a stop and leaned smiling from the driver’s window.

“Can I give you a lift somewhere, Ann?”

“Oh, no, thanks, Lucy, I’m just waiting for the town taxi. They always hate to come up the driveway here, and I’ve never known why. I mean I suppose it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.”

“Taking a trip?”

“Well, I’m going to New York for an – indefinite period of time,” Ann said, though the small suitcase at her feet was the kind meant for carrying a single change of clothes. “Actually, I’m very—” And she lowered her false eyelashes in embarrassment. “Well, I might as well tell you this, Lucy; why not? I’ll be checking into Sloan-Kettering.”

And Lucy may have known at once what “Bellevue” meant, but it took her two or three seconds to realize that Sloan-Kettering was a hospital for cancer patients. She got out of the car – this wasn’t the kind of talk you could have through a car window – and went quickly to Ann Blake’s side without any idea of what she was going to say.

“Well, Ann, I’m terribly sorry,” she began. “This is a rotten break. This really is a lousy, rotten break.”

“Thanks, dear; I knew you’d be kind. And I suppose the world hasn’t dealt me a very good hand this time, but then I never wanted to be an old woman anyway, so who cares? As my husband always used to say, who cares?”

“A lot of people care, Ann.”

“Well, that’s a nice thought, but try counting them up on your fingers. Name me four. Name me three.”

“Listen, come along with me,” Lucy said. “Let me take you up to the station, and we’ll have a cup of—”

“No.” And Ann looked as though she couldn’t be budged. “I’m not leaving here any sooner than I have to. Walking down this driveway was the last concession I’m going to make, and I regretted every step of that. All I want to do now is stand here and wait until they come and – until they come and get me. Do you understand?” Her eyes were suddenly filled with tears. “This is my
place,
you see.”

When the cab drew up and stopped for her, she got into it so
slowly and carefully that Lucy could tell she was in pain. She might well have lived in pain for weeks or even months, alone in her love-nest house, before allowing herself to call a doctor. And she sat facing straight ahead as if determined not to look back, as the cab pulled away, but Lucy stood waving anyway until it was out of sight.

From old habit it occurred to her then that there could easily be a story in Ann Blake. It could be a long story, essentially very sad but with funny moments all through it, and this taxicab scene could serve as its perfect conclusion. There needn’t even be anything to make up.