Young Hearts Crying (45 page)

Only now, with a puckering of the palate and throat, did Michael fully comprehend what was the matter with this visit: There hadn’t yet been any offer of a drink, or even of a beer. What’s the deal? he wanted to say. You off the sauce, Paul? But he kept his aching mouth shut. He knew what being off the sauce meant, and he guessed he’d better not inquire into Paul’s case. That kind of thing was a man’s own business.

Then Peggy came back into the room wheeling a little cart that carried a coffee service and a plate of big raisin cookies on its top tray, with four cups and saucers and spoons tinkling on the tray beneath.

“Those look wonderful,” Sarah said of the cookies. “Did you make them yourself?”

And Peggy modestly divulged that she did all her own baking, even her own bread.

“Really?” Sarah said. “Well, that’s very – enterprising.”

Michael declined a cookie – it looked like a meal in itself – and waited until most of his unwanted coffee was down before he opened a new topic with his host:

“I see where your brother-in-law’s made quite a name for himself.”

“Oh, that, yes,” Paul said. “Well, it’s remarkable how a play can sometimes catch fire commercially that way. It’s made enormous changes in their lives – mostly changes for the better, of course, because they’ve got more money coming in than they’ll ever need, but possibly a few for the worse, as well.”

And to expand on what he meant by changes for the worse, he told of a few days that he and Peggy had spent with the Morins in New York last year. Diana had looked “lost” in the luxurious high-rise apartment that was now her home – he couldn’t remember ever having seen her look that way before, even as a child – and the boys had seemed bewildered, too. Ralph Morin had been almost constantly on the phone, talking business, or else on the run: there were urgent meetings every day about the show, or about other, future shows.

“It was all a little – uncomfortable,” Paul concluded. “Still, I imagine it’ll settle out in time.”

Michael replaced his empty cup in its faintly chattering saucer.

“You ever hear from Tom Nelson, Paul?”

“Oh, we’ve exchanged a few letters. He writes terrifically funny letters, as I’m sure you know.”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact, I’ve never had a letter from Tom. He used to send me little cartoons once in a while, with captions, but no letters.” And even that was an exaggeration: there had been only one cartoon, a caricature of Michael frowning sternly in an academic cap and gown, with the caption: ARCHITECT OF YOUNG MINDS.

“I’ll always regret not getting to know Tom years back,” Paul said, “when you first suggested it. I was foolish about that.”

“No, I could understand how you felt,” Michael assured him. “Anybody who makes it big in a commercial way at twenty-six
or – seven is bound to be a little intimidating to strangers. If I hadn’t met him by accident I probably never would’ve – you know – never would’ve sought him out, or anything. Might have been better off all around, too.”

“Well, but the word ‘commercial’ isn’t really appropriate for Tom,” Paul objected. “It may apply to a flukey kind of luck like Morin’s, but that’s an entirely different thing. Tom’s a professional. He found his line early and he’s stayed with it. You have to admire that.”

“Well, I guess you have to respect it; I’m not sure it’s something you necessarily have to admire.” And Michael didn’t like the way this talk was going. Not very many years ago he had tried to defend Tom Nelson against Paul Maitland, only to find his lines of defense falling apart under Paul’s attack; now the roles were exactly reversed, and he had an uneasy sense that he was about to collapse again. It didn’t seem fair – there ought to be more consistency in the world than this – and the worst part was that nothing could be said to be at stake anymore for either adversary: they had both been reduced to eking out a living in farm-state colleges, probably for life, while Tom Nelson went serenely about the business of success.

“His standards are as high as those of any painter I know,” Paul was saying, warming to the argument, “and he’s never sold a picture he doesn’t believe in. I don’t see how anyone can ask more of an artist than that.”

“Well, okay, you may be right about the professional part of it,” Michael conceded, with the deliberation of a strategist abandoning one position in order to strengthen another. “But the man himself is something else. Nelson can be a prick when he puts his mind to it. Or if not a prick, at least a real pain in the ass.”

And almost before he knew what his talking mouth was up to, he had launched into the story of the trip to Montreal. It took
longer to tell than he’d thought it would – that was bad enough – and there seemed to be no way of telling it that didn’t portray himself as something of a fool.

Sarah’s calm, brown-eyed gaze was leveled at him above her neatly held coffee cup while he talked. She had wept in silence after his drunken bungling at Terry Ryan’s expense; she had been openly disappointed in him time and again since then (“Well, now you’ve lost me completely”); by now there had come to be a certain resignation in her way of waiting for him to discredit himself.

“…  No, but the point is Nelson
knew
I could’ve had that girl that night,” he heard himself saying, trying to explain and redeem the story after it had been told. “He was half sick with envy – you could see it all over his face – but he knew too that all he had to do was hang around and be a nuisance, which wouldn’t cost him anything because none of his other friends were there to see it happening, and then he could make sure I’d be out of luck. So that’s the way the little son of a bitch decided to play it, and you could see the decision in his face too: Sly. Smart-assed. Pleased with himself. Oh, and as for his remark on the way home, about the girl thinking we were fags, the funny part there is that Nelson’s spent his whole
life
afraid of being mistaken for a fag. He’s obsessed with it. I remember days on end when he couldn’t talk about anything else, and I always figured it might help explain his wanting to dress up like a soldier all the time.”

But neither the story nor its explanation had gone over very well with this particular audience: all three of their faces looked unconvinced and unsatisfied.

“I don’t get it, though, Michael,” Sarah said. “If you really wanted the girl, why didn’t you stay in Montreal a few more days?”

“Good question,” he told her. “I’ve been asking myself the
same question ever since. I guess the only answer is that I was so snowed by Tom Nelson then I’d go along with whatever the hell he felt like doing.”

“That’s a curious expression, ‘snowed,’ ” Paul said thoughtfully. “I certainly came to admire Tom, once I knew him, but I don’t think I’ve ever been ‘snowed’ by him.”

“Yeah, well, there’s the difference between you and me,” Michael said. “That’s probably why you get letters from him, and all I get is fucking cartoons.”

Mercifully, then, they managed to change the subject; their talk turned to summer vacations.

The Maitlands hadn’t been able to afford an extended trip this year, Paul said, but next summer they planned to spend the whole of their time on Cape Cod.

“That sounds lovely,” Sarah said.

“Well, but I think I like the Cape even better in the off-season,” Peggy pointed out. “We used to know some wonderful people there during the winters. Carnival people. They were gypsies.”

And Michael knew she would now tell the same little anecdote about the sword-swallower that she’d told in Putnam County at least ten years ago, when it had driven the young, stagestruck Ralph Morin into peals of artificial laughter as he pronounced it the very heart and spirit of the entertainer. Sure enough, when she came to the punch line she delivered it word for word:

“…  So I said ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ And he said ‘Think I’d tell
you?’ ”

Sarah rewarded her with an agreeable laugh and Michael was able to chuckle too; Paul Maitland only fondled his mustache as if to mask his having heard the thing far too many times in the past.

Half an hour later, out in the driveway, the Maitlands stood smiling and waving goodbye as attractively as if they were posing for a snapshot – a comfortable Illinois art teacher and his wife, good people who couldn’t afford very many extended trips but at least would never be “snowed” by anyone, sensible people a long way from Delancey Street and willing to settle, with African art and home-baked bread, for a great deal less than the stuff of their dreams.

“Well, Paul’s very nice, of course,” Sarah said when they’d settled down for the long drive back to Kansas, “but I didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary about him. I can’t imagine how you could’ve romanticized him all these years.”

“Whaddya mean? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”

“Oh, sure you have. Come on, Michael. Just before you knocked him out that night you were telling him you’d always thought he was ‘enchanted.’ ”

“Jesus,” he said. “I thought you were in the kitchen all that time.”

“Well, I’d been in the kitchen, but I’d come out. Then after you hit him I went back in, because I knew you’d be coming around to look for me there.”

“I’ll be damned. And how come you never mentioned it until now?”

“Oh, because I knew you’d explain it to me, I suppose,” she said, “and because I didn’t want to hear the explanation.”

A son, James Garvey Davenport, was born to them in June of 1972. He was healthy and well-formed, and Sarah made what one doctor called a reasonably quick recovery, but the birth itself was extremely difficult.

According to the way Michael heard it, the baby began to emerge from her upside down, and some fool of an obstetrician
kept trying to turn it over with forceps. Then a number of other men were summoned to the delivery room to frown and mutter over the case; in the end they had to wheel Sarah unconscious into an elevator and down to another floor, where an emergency cesarean section was finally performed – almost, it seemed, in the nick of time.

“Kansas!” Michael said at her bedside, while she lay weakly sipping from a paper cup of ginger ale through a paper straw. “This kind of blundering incompetence couldn’t happen anywhere else but fucking Kansas.”

“Oh, that’s silly,” she told him. “Anyway, I think he’s awfully nice.”

And he thought she meant one of the doctors, some fatherly Kansas asshole who might have murmured a few pleasant words to her as she came out of the anesthetic. “Who?” he demanded. “Who’s awfully nice?”

“The baby,” she said. “Don’t you think he’s an awfully nice-looking boy?”

All he had seen, through the plate glass, was a wrinkled, wobbling head that didn’t look much bigger than a walnut, with its mouth stretched open in a cry that couldn’t be distinguished from the cries of all the other newly born on every side.

“Well, he did look a little blue at first,” an elderly nurse confided to him outside the nursery window, wearing her sterile mask beneath her chin to show she was off duty. “He
was
blue when we got him, but then we put him in the incubator and he pinked right up.”

That night, trying to chew and swallow an overcooked hamburger in a restaurant that wasn’t even licensed to serve beer, he allowed his mind to speculate on children of the kind who had been born “blue babies.” Did their eyes look funny? Did
they learn only to smile and drool and stammer incoherently, rather than to speak? Did they walk with a softly lurching gait in well-supervised groups, carefully instructed to hold hands with one another when they came to street crossings? Was basket weaving about the most you could expect of them in the way of educational attainment?

Well, but then surely the lady wouldn’t have been so cheerful in reporting that this particular blue baby had “pinked right up” – she probably wouldn’t have told him about the blue part of it at all if she hadn’t meant the pinking-up to be reassuring news.

Even so, as he paid his check and got out of that lousy restaurant and made his way home, he was willing to acknowledge that he wished it had been a girl. Oh, having a son was said to be a splendid thing – there were even men who openly expressed disappointment at the birth of daughters, and who saved all their primal exultation for sons – but Michael didn’t feel up to any of that Old Testament bullshit tonight.

Girls were – well, nicer than boys; everybody knew that. All you had to do with a girl was throw her in the air and hug her and kiss her and tell her how pretty she was. Even after she grew too big to ride on your shoulders you could take her to the zoo and buy her a box of Crackerjack and a balloon (you always had to tie the string of it around her wrist so it couldn’t float away), or you could take her to a matinee of
The Music Man
and see her sad little face transformed into pure rapture at all the unexpected wonders on the stage. Then came the achingly tender years: once when Laura was thirteen, and possibly at her mother’s suggestion, she had called him up from Tonapac to say “Daddy? Guess what! I’m menstruating!”

And sure, of course there could be trouble later: A girl might develop a piercing, near-deadly talent for shock-your-father tactics; she might languish around the house for months, having
to be bullied into making her bed, never quite able – for God only knew what reasons – to get past page 98 of whatever the hell she was pretending to read. Still, even in the worst of times like that, there would always be signs that she was going to be all right. A girl could come out of almost any kind of slump because girls were amazingly resilient. They were graceful; they were swift and smart.

But oh, Jesus, a boy could be a real pain in the ass. If you feigned sparring with a boy in his little drop-seat pajamas at bedtime he might expect to be known as “Slugger,” and might pucker up and cry if you ever forgot to call him by that name. At nine or ten he would pester you to take him out in the backyard and teach him how to throw, whether you were altogether sure you knew how to throw or not; then there would be vigorous outdoor father-and-son activities, organized by the fire department or the VFW, where you might find you didn’t know what to say to any of the other fathers or their shitty little sons.