Young Hearts Crying (42 page)

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Yeah, I think I’m getting the picture.”

“And they were here less than twenty-four hours before Laura announced they were going to California. I couldn’t reason with her, couldn’t talk to her at all, and the next thing I knew she was gone. They were all gone.”

“Well, Jesus,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Neither do I. I don’t understand any of it. I only called because I thought – you know – I thought you ought to know.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m glad you did call, Lucy.”

Sarah told him there probably wasn’t anything to worry about. “Laura’s nineteen,” she said. “That’s practically grown up. She can go off on an adventure like this without risking any damage to herself. The drug-taking does sound a little scary, but I think her mother may be exaggerating that part of it, don’t you? Besides, every kid in America is fooling around with some kind of drugs, and most of them aren’t any worse than alcohol or nicotine. The main thing to remember, Michael, is that if she does get into any kind of trouble she’ll call you. She knows where you are.”

“Well, she does, that’s true,” he said. “But here’s the thing, you see: This is the first time since she was born that I haven’t known where
she
is.”

One advantage in being twenty years older than your wife was that you could afford to take a fond, tolerant attitude when she developed interests that had nothing to do with your own.

Michael might have been startled and even frightened, years ago, when Lucy brought home
How to Love,
by Derek Fahr; but the coffee table of this Kansas house soon came to hold book after book by a dismaying variety of more recent authors – Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Eldridge Cleaver – and they seldom caused him a moment’s discomfort.

He wasn’t even ruffled when Sarah joined a dead-serious organization called Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, though he had to acknowledge that once or twice, watching the car take her away to those meetings, he was reminded of Lucy disappearing into the privacy of her appointments with Dr. Fine.

Well, what the hell; girls would always be a mystery. The important thing was that this particular girl still chose to spend most of her time at home – and, in the hours when she wasn’t absorbing propaganda, she could be a lively and engaging talker.

By now she had told him a great many interlocking episodes out of her brief, full life – college; high school and grammar school; parents and family and home – until he’d begun to feel
he knew her almost as well as he would ever know himself. And he was always charmed by the honesty and humor and the pithy selection of detail in those reminiscent stories; they might ramble and digress, but they never strained to portray her in a flattering way, or in a pitiable way, either, and they never even came close to boring her listener.

What a girl she was! There were evenings, watching her talk in the lamplight on their secondhand sofa, when Michael could only marvel at his luck in finding her and at the glowing safety of his having her here. He knew she wouldn’t tell so many intimate, self-revealing things unless she loved him completely – unless she was counting on him to keep these small and terrible secrets to himself until death.

One night in bed, speaking in a very soft voice, she suggested they have a baby.

“Right away, you mean?” he asked, knowing at once that the question betrayed his fear, and he winced in the darkness. He was too old for this; oh, Jesus, too old.

“Well, I meant within a year or two,” she said. “How does year after next strike you?”

And the more he thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. Didn’t every healthy girl want a baby? Why would any healthy girl get married, after all, if not in the hope of having one? And this was the other point: it might be a good thing to raise a new child of his own – to have a chance to atone for all the aching mistakes he’d made over the years with Laura.

“Well, okay,” he said after a while. “But I’ll sure as hell be an old father. Know what I just figured out? By the time this kid is twenty-one, I’ll be seventy.”

“Oh?” she said, as if that hadn’t occurred to her. “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to be young enough for both of us, won’t I?”

*

When the operator asked if he would accept a collect call from Laura in San Francisco he said “Sure I will,” but when Laura’s voice came on the line – “Daddy?” – it was so faint he thought they must have a bad connection.

“Hello? Laura?” he said, raising his own voice as if that would help.

“Daddy?” And this time he could hear her plainly.

“Are you okay, baby?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m still in – you know – still here in San Francisco and everything, but I’m not feeling very well, is all. Things keep closing in. I mean I was fine in the Outer Limits, but then ever since we – ever since I got back I’ve been all – I don’t know.”

“Is that some club out there? The Outer Limits?”

“No, it’s more a state of mind.”

“Oh.”

“And I’ve only got about a dollar and thirty cents, you see, so there really isn’t much I can do to fix myself up – depending on what I mean by fix myself up, of course. Depending on what you think I mean by fix myself up.”

“Well, listen, dear. I think I’d better come out there right away, don’t you?”

“Well, I guess that’s what I was sort of hoping you’d – yes.”

“Okay. If I leave right now I can be there in three and a half or maybe four hours. But first you’ll have to give me the street address where you are.” And he wagged his hand urgently at Sarah for a pencil.

“Two ninety-seven,” Laura was reciting “— no, wait; two ninety-three South Something-or-other Street—”

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, baby: South what? Try to remember.” And when she was able to spell out the street name
at last, with what he could only hope were the right numerals, he said “Okay. Now the phone number.”

“Oh, there aren’t any phones in the building, Dad. I’m calling from a pay phone on the street, somewhere else.”

“Oh, Jesus. Well, listen: I want you to go straight back to your place and wait for me there, however long it takes. Promise me. No more going out tonight for any reason, okay?”

“Okay.”

Sarah drove him to the airport, taking a few close chances in the passing of other cars. There was a San Francisco flight ready for boarding when he rushed up to the ticket counter, and he made it, hurrying breathless through what may have been the same gate where they’d said goodbye to Terry Ryan. And just as it had undoubtedly been for Terry Ryan, the flight to San Francisco was the easy part.

“You sure you got this right?” the cab driver kept asking, even after stopping to confer and frown with two other cab drivers over the obscurity of Laura’s address. Then, once he found he was taking his fare in the right direction, he said “Well, I don’t know; you go into. some of these old run-down neighborhoods, it’s like going into another world. I wouldn’t give you shit for this area along in here. This area isn’t even fit for the blacks – and mind you, I’ve got nothing against the blacks.”

Everybody in America had begun to say “black” instead of “Negro”; it might be only a question of time before everybody began saying “woman” instead of “girl.”

There were no tenants’ names on any of the doorbells, and Michael decided after pressing three or four of them that all the bells were probably out of order – several of them had fallen loose from the wall and were dangling by their own dead wires. Then he discovered that both locks on the big front door had
been smashed: he could get inside just by turning the knob and lunging heavily with one shoulder.

“Is anybody here?” he demanded, walking into the ground-floor hallway, and four or five heads appeared out of partly opened doors – all of them young, more of them boys than girls, and all the boys wearing their hair in styles so wild that nobody would have believed the sight of them a few years ago.

“All right, listen, you guys,” Michael said, not caring whether it sounded like an impersonation of James Cagney or not. “I’m Laura Davenport’s father and I want to know where she is.”

The young faces either withdrew or stared at him blankly – was it the blankness of fear or only of drugs? – but then a resonant male voice spoke up from the shadows at the far end of the hall: “Top floor, all the way to the right.”

There could have been four, five, or six floors in that building; Michael didn’t count them. He would achieve one flight of littered, piss- and garbage-smelling stairs, stand gasping until his strength came back, then go to work on the next flight. The only way he knew he’d made the top at last was that there were suddenly no more stairs.

All the way to the end of the right-hand corridor was a dirty white door. He paused for breath again, if not for prayer, and then he knocked on it.

“Dad?” Laura called. “You can come on in; it’s open.”

There she was, lying on a single bed in a room so small that there wasn’t even space for a chair, and the first thing that struck him was that she was beautiful. She had lost too much weight – her long legs were too thin in greasy jeans and her upper body looked as frail as a bird’s under a greasy workman’s shirt – but her pale and famished face, with its great blue eyes and delicate, thin-lipped mouth, made her look like the heartbreaking debutante her mother might always have wanted her to be.

“Wow,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed near her knees. “Wow, baby, am I ever glad to see you.”

“Well, me too,” she said. “Could I have one of your cigarettes, Dad?”

“Sure, here. But listen: I get the impression you haven’t been eating a hell of a lot. Right?”

“Well, I guess it’s been a little over two weeks now since I—”

“Okay. So the first thing we’ll do is feed you a good dinner somewhere; then we’ll find a hotel for the night, and tomorrow I’ll take you back to Kansas. How does that sound?”

“Oh, it sounds – okay, I guess, except that I don’t know your wife or anything.”

“Sure you do.”

“Well, but I mean I don’t know her as your wife, is all.”

“Oh, Laura, that’s dumb. You’ll get along fine. Now. Is there anything here you want to keep? And do you have a bag to pack it in?”

In policing the narrow floor he found two black, elastic-strap bow ties of the kind worn by restaurant waiters, the kind Terry Ryan used to wear on duty at the Blue Mill, and when he pulled her smudged nylon “backpack” away from the wall a third one fell out from behind it. Had three young waiters been up here and had her and left their accidental souvenirs? No; more likely it had been one waiter, three times – or five or ten times, or more.

(“Hey Eddie, where you been?”

“Been making it with the tall skinny one I told you about: top floor, all the way to the right. She comes on like Gangbusters, man.”

“Well, okay, but shit, Eddie, I wouldn’t mess around in that house if I was you; all those kids are crazy.”

“Yeah? You mean crazy like me, or crazy like you? Listen: I get my pussy where I find it, man.”)

“Are you ready, dear?” Michael asked.

“I guess so.”

But they couldn’t get a cab on this street; they had to walk many blocks before they found one that would stop for them.

“Is there someplace where we can get dinner at this time of night?” Michael asked the driver.

“Well, at
this
time of night,” the man told him, “the only place I can take you is Chinatown.”

And it would always strike him as a ludicrous touch that Chinese food was the best he could provide for his starving child. Egg Foo Young, Pork Fried Rice, Shrimp with Lobster Sauce – stuff that most Americans eat only once in a while, for a change, when they’re not very hungry anyway – this was what Laura took for nourishment in steadily rhythmic forkfuls, and she didn’t speak or even look up until the last empty dish had been cleared away.

“Can I have another cigarette, Dad?”

“Sure. You feeling any better?”

“I guess so.”

Another cabdriver recommended a hotel, and there, as they stood waiting in line at the front desk, Michael was afraid the room clerk might easily misinterpret everything: a nervous-looking professor type with a sweet, doped-up hippie girl.

“I need accommodations for my daughter and myself,” he began carefully, looking the man straight in the eyes, and he realized in the same breath that this was exactly the kind of thing a quivering old lecher might be expected to say. “For one night only,” he added, making it worse. “I think the best arrangement would be two connecting rooms.”

“Nope,” the clerk said with finality, and Michael steeled
himself to be asked – or told – to leave the place at once. But it turned out, as his lungs began to work again, that there was nothing to fear. “Nope; can’t give you any connecting rooms tonight,” the clerk said. “Best I can do for you tonight is a double room with twin beds. Would that be suitable, sir?”

And it may have been the “sir,” as much as the rest of it, that lightened Michael’s step as they walked across the carpeted lobby and into an elevator. More than two thirds of his life was gone, but he hadn’t yet learned to take it for granted when another man called him “sir.”

Laura slept so soundly that she didn’t move or turn all night, but her father lay awake in the other twin bed. Toward morning, as he’d sometimes done on other sleepless nights, he began to whisper his way through the long final poem from his first book, the one called “Coming Clean” that Diana Maitland and Sarah Garvey had liked. His whispering was so faint that nobody could have heard it more than a few inches away from his pillow, but it was an accurate and precise recitation – getting the most out of each syllable and silence, rising and falling in just the right places, never making a mistake because he would always know that poem by heart.

Damn. Oh, Jesus God, it was the best thing he had ever written. And it wasn’t lost yet, though the book was long out of print and increasingly hard to find in public libraries. Oh, it wasn’t lost yet; somebody could still pick it up and get it published again in a classy-looking anthology that might become a standard text in all the universities.