Young Hearts Crying (41 page)

“Well, that’s the funny part. I got drafted; then I guess the Army managed to get me trained, more or less, and now I’ve gotta be in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh, Jesus; are they sending you to Vietnam?”

“That’s what I hear, yeah.”

“What branch are you in?”

“Oh, the infantry, is all. Nothing fancy.”

“Well, Jesus, Terry, that’s – that’s really bad news. That’s lousy.”

“But I took this little detour, you see, to see some friends of mine here in Billings; then when I heard you were teaching here I thought I’d give you a call. Thought you might come out for a beer or something.”

“Good,” Michael said, “but I’ve got a better idea. We’re having a party at my house tonight, and we’d be delighted if you can come on over. Bring a girl.”

“Well, I can’t promise the girl,” he said, “but the rest of it sounds fine. What time?”

And even before they’d finished talking, Michael had begun to feel privileged and kind.

Terry Ryan had been younger, smaller, and skinnier than any of the other Blue Mill waiters, and he’d clearly been the brightest of them, too. His quick, nervous face always let you know when he had something funny to say; then he’d say it, usually while putting dinner plates on your table, and he’d get away fast every time, heading back for the kitchen or the bar, before there could be any hint of an intrusion on your privacy. And on some nights, after his working shift was over, he and Michael would drink together at the bar until closing time. Terry’s ambition was to be a comic actor – he alluded modestly to having been told he had the talent for it – but his greatest fear was of ending up as what he called a theater bum.

“You’re a little young to be worried about ending up as anything, aren’t you, Terry?”

“Well, I see what you mean. Still, everybody’s gonna end up some way, sometime, right?”

Right.

“Sarah?” Michael said, ambling over to where she stood at work with the vacuum cleaner. “Listen. We’ll be having a special guest tonight.”

The department chairman and his wife, John and Grace Howard, were among the first to arrive. They were both in their fifties, and often said to be a lovely couple. He was tall and straight, with a closely trimmed mustache; she had retained the dimpled, “cute” good looks of a much younger woman, though her hair was white, and she usually wore full skirts cut short enough to emphasize her attractive legs. At another recent party they had waltzed together on a cleared floor for twenty minutes, Grace lying back in John’s arms to gaze up at him in girlish rapture, and most of the people watching them agreed it was the prettiest thing they’d ever seen.

“You’re to be congratulated, Michael,” John Howard said. “It’s about time somebody served an honest drink in this town.”

And that opinion was echoed by a number of other guests – people who always showed up at these parties whether they liked one another or not because there was hardly anything else to do in Billings, Kansas. Most of them were teachers but there were graduate students, too, with their wives or girls – some smiling as uncertainly as children at a gathering of grownups, others leaning against the walls and observing everything with thinly veiled expressions of disdain.

When Terry Ryan came in he looked even smaller than Michael had remembered – he must have been barely tall enough to qualify for the Army – and he’d chosen not to wear his uniform: he wore jeans and a gray pullover sweater that was too big for him.

“Come on, Terry,” Michael said, “we’ll get you a drink and
then we’ll find you a place to sit down. All the introductions can wait. Far as I’m concerned you’re the guest of honor tonight. Hey, listen, though: you remember Sarah?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, I guess I didn’t start taking her to the Mill until after you’d quit working there. Anyway we’re married now, and she wants to meet you. See the one over there by the window? With the dark hair?”

“Nice,” Terry said. “Very nice. You’ve got good taste, Mike.”

“Well, what the hell: why marry some plain girl when you can get a pretty girl instead?” From the tone of his own voice Michael could tell he had begun to drink too much, too fast, but he was sober enough to know he could still repair the damage by staying away from whiskey for the next hour.

“Wait right here,” he told Terry, who was perched on a tall wooden stool brought from the kitchen and nursing a bourbon and water. “I’ll go get her.”

“Baby?” he said to his wife. “Would you like to come and meet the soldier?”

“I’d love to.”

And from the moment he left them together he knew they would get along. He went to the kitchen and drank water. Then he busied himself at the sink, washing out glasses to kill as much as possible of the time before he could go to the liquor table again. When two or three students drifted into the kitchen he conversed with them in a quiet, humorous, good-host kind of way that seemed to prove he was getting better, though his watch said there was still almost half an hour to wait. He strolled back into the living room to give other people the benefit of his presence, and he almost collided with John Howard, who looked tired and ill.

“Sorry,” Howard said. “Damn good party, but I’m afraid I’m not used to the hard stuff – or maybe I’m too old for it. I think we’d better be on our way.”

But Grace wasn’t ready to leave. “Go, then, John,” she said from the sofa where she sat among her friends. “Take the car and
go,
if you want to. I can always get a ride.” And it occurred to Michael that this was undoubtedly true: all her life, Grace Howard must have been the kind of girl who could always get a ride.

When the whole of his hour was mercifully over, he felt righteous as he fixed himself a good one at the liquor table. And that oddly bracing sense of righteousness persisted after he’d turned back to mingle with his guests; it seemed to enhance the joviality of his drawing the more sullen students away from the walls, winning their smiles and even their pleasing laughter. It
was
a damn good party, and it was getting better all the time. Looking around the room he could see men he thought of every day as fools, or bores, or worse, but now he felt a comradely affection for all of them, and for their nicely dressed women. This was the old fucked-up English department; he was an old fucked-up English department man – and if they had suddenly begun to raise their voices in the opening verse of “Auld Lang Syne” it would have brought tears to his eyes as he sang along.

Soon he had lost count of how many times he’d replenished his glass at the liquor table, but that no longer mattered because the evening was well past the strain of its early stages. And his greatest pleasure was in watching Sarah move gracefully from group to group, the perfect young hostess. Nobody could have guessed at how reluctantly she had organized this thing.

Then he turned and saw Terry Ryan on the tall wooden stool with no one to talk to. It was possible that Sarah had taken him
around to meet other guests and that he’d come back after running out of polite things to say; but it was possible, too, that he’d sat here all this time, allowing his last night of freedom in the United States to evaporate before his eyes.

“Can I get you something, Terry?”

“No thanks, Mike; I’m fine.”

“You met any of these people?”

“Oh, sure; met quite a few.”

“Well,” Michael said, “I think we can do better than that.” And he stepped around to stand beside him, firmly clasping one thin shoulder beneath the fabric of his sweater.

“This young man,” he announced in a voice loud enough to leave no doubt of his intention to address the party as a whole – and most other talkers in the room fell silent – “this young man may look like a student, and that’s what he was at one time, but not anymore. He’s an infantry soldier on his way to Vietnam, where I imagine his personal problems will soon be a great deal worse than any of our own. So suppose we all forget about college for a minute, please, and let’s have a hand for Terry Ryan.”

There was some clapping, though nowhere near as much as he’d expected, and even before it was over Terry said “Kind of wish you hadn’t done that, Mike.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know; just because.”

Then from across the room Michael saw Sarah looking at him in disappointment or disapproval. He felt as if he’d just traded punches with someone in the Nelsons’ house, or just been told he had called Fletcher Clark a cocksucker at the writers’ conference.

“Well, Jesus, Terry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he said. “I thought they ought to know who you are, that’s all.”

“Oh, I know; it’s okay; forget it.”

But it was a thing that wouldn’t be forgotten.

Grace Howard was on her feet and making her way through the smoke, bearing down on Terry Ryan with one stiff index finger aimed at his chest.

“May I ask you something?” she inquired. “Why do you want to kill people?”

And he smiled bashfully. “Oh, come on, lady,” he said. “I never killed anybody in my life.”

“Well, but you’ll have your chance now, won’t you? With your automatic rifle and your hand grenades?”

“Hold it, Grace,” Michael said, “you’re way out of line here: This boy was drafted.”

“And maybe they’ll give you a little radio, too,” she went on, “so you can call in the artillery and the bombs and the napalm on women and children. Well, listen—”

“Oh,
stop
this,” Sarah called, hurrying to Terry’s side as if to protect him.

“—Listen,” Grace Howard said. “You’re not fooling anybody for a minute. I know why you want to kill people. You want to kill people because you’re so
small.”

Some of Grace’s friends managed to take charge of her then: they turned her around and walked her back across the room and out the front door, which closed with a little slam.

“Terry, I’m sorry as hell about that,” Michael told him. “I knew she was drunk, but I didn’t know she was crazy.”

“Look, the hell with it, okay?” he said. “Fuck it. The more we talk about it, the worse it’s going to get.”

“Exactly,” Sarah said quietly.

Later, when everyone else had gone at last, Sarah made up the bed in the spare room so that Terry could spend the night here. But there wasn’t much left of the night: they had to get up early
to drive Terry to his friends’ place. There he changed into his Army uniform, which Sarah said was “very becoming,” and picked up his duffel bag, and they drove him twenty miles to the airport. There was some mild and pleasant talk in the car – all three of them had reached the stage of easy good humor that sometimes follows a night of too little sleep – but none of them mentioned Grace Howard.

When it was time to say goodbye at the gate to Terry’s flight, Michael shook hands with him in a little excess of old soldier’s heartiness: “Well, stay loose, Terry. And keep a tight asshole.”

Then Sarah opened her arms for him. She was taller than he was, but that didn’t make it an awkward embrace. She held him, however briefly, in the way a man ought to be held before going to a war that nobody would ever understand.

They rode in silence for much of the drive home, until Michael said “Well, hell, the whole damn thing was my fault; I know that. I never should’ve made that dumb little speech.” Then he said “But the point is, baby, when I was in the Army you wanted people to pay attention the night before you went overseas. It was nice to have civilians make a fuss over you – and they did, if you were lucky.”

“Well, I know,” Sarah said, “but that was another time. That was before I was born. Before Terry was born, too.”

And when he glanced away from the road again he found she was quietly crying.

She went to sleep as soon as they were back in the house; that gave him a chance to drink two cold beers in the kitchen and try to get his brains together.

Then the telephone rang. “Michael? John Howard here. Listen: who was that kid you had in your house last night?”

“Friend of mine from New York, is all; he was just passing through. Why?”

“Well, I understand he was very rude and offensive to Grace after I left.”

“Oh?” And Michael instantly knew there would be no point in trying to clear up this messy business. Terry Ryan was a thousand miles away in the sky now, rid of Billings, Kansas, forever; nobody’s brave words could defend him any longer. “Well, I’m sorry there was any unpleasantness, John,” he said with what he hoped was an edge of scorn, and he hung up the receiver before Howard could say anything more.

If Howard called back at once to persist in his false grievance there would be nothing to do but tell him the truth about what Grace had done. And the phone didn’t ring a second time.

He wished Sarah were awake, so she could assure him he’d done the right thing. Still, it was probably better to have her asleep; that way there might be no need to talk it over, ever again.

One evening at the end of the school year, in June, Lucy Davenport called Michael to tell him their daughter was gone.

“Whaddya mean ‘gone’?”

“Well, she’s supposedly heading for California,” Lucy said, “but I don’t think there’s any clear destination. She wants to be a vagabond, you see. She wants to bum around with all the other dirty, smelly little vagabonds on the road – any road, anywhere. She wants to be wholly irresponsible and wholly self-indulgent, and she wants to wreck her mind with all the hallucinatory drugs she can get her hands on.”

Laura’s freshman year at Warrington College had apparently taught her nothing but bad habits, her mother reported – “I
think there must be a very extensive traffic in narcotics on that damned little campus.” When she’d come home from there yesterday she seemed “all funny,” and she’d brought along three friends, presumably as weekend guests: another Warrington girl, also acting “funny,” and two boys that Lucy found difficult to describe.

“I mean they’re
townies,
Michael. They’re proletarian kids; children of textile-mill workers kind of thing. All they can do is grunt and mumble and try to imitate Marlon Brando – except that I don’t suppose Marlon Brando’s ever grown his hair down to his belly-button and his buttocks. Am I making any of this clear?”