Young Hearts Crying (46 page)

At sixteen or so, if he was turning into a humorless, intellectual kind of kid, he might want you to sit down with him for serious talks about honor and integrity and moral courage until your head swam with those abstractions; or, worse, he might become a surly, slouching, spitting youth who would rarely speak at all except in monosyllables, and who would care about nothing in the world but cars.

Either way, by the time he was of college age he would almost certainly come to stand in the doorway of a room where you were trying to get some work done, and he’d say “Dad? Do you know how much alcohol you’ve taken into your bloodstream today? Do you know how many packs of cigarettes you’ve smoked? Well, listen: I think you’re trying to kill yourself. And I want to tell you something: if you’re going to kill yourself I
wish you’d hurry up and get it over with. Because frankly, you see, it’s not you I’m concerned about. It’s Mom.”

Oh, shit; and there were still other possibilities too dreadful to contemplate. What if, in response to things that struck him as funny, your son took to saying “I love it” or “Oh, how delicious”? What if he wanted to walk around the kitchen with one hand on his hip, telling his mother about the marvelous time he’d had with his friends last night at a really nice new place in town called the Art Deco?

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when Michael Davenport went to bed at last, too drunk even to realize it would be the first time he had slept alone in this house. All he knew for certain, as he pulled the bedclothes sloppily around and over him, was that none of it was fair: he shouldn’t be expected to endure any of this because he was too fucking old. He was forty-nine.

For many months the house seemed almost to tremble with fragility and tenderness and long silences. Though still frail and tired at first, Sarah was an ideal young mother. She took a girlish pride in breastfeeding; she carried her son very slowly up and down the hall to the tune of a charming little music box that one of the faculty families had sent as a gift; she would always place a forefinger at her lips and say “Sh-sh” to her husband after laying the baby down in the crib and softly closing the door behind her.

And Michael found he could go along with the reverence – he liked it, if only because it showed Sarah in a fine and admirable new light that any man would be a fool not to cherish – but his only previous knowledge of this kind of thing was well over twenty years in the past. He could have sworn that the infant Laura had never smelled this bad or soiled this many diapers, that she hadn’t cried this long and loud, or puked this
often, or inflicted such a general, around-the-clock strain on his nerves.

All right, you little bastard, he would say just under his breath during the times when it was his turn to walk the baby in the sweet tinkling melody of the music box, while Sarah slept. All right, you stubborn little son of a bitch, but you’d better be worth it. You’d damn sure better turn out to be worth all this shit, or I’ll never forgive you. Is that clear?

Surprisingly, and perhaps because he had to steal the time for it, Michael wrote well during his son’s first year. New poems began to come easily, and so did ideas for how best to salvage and restore a number of old, failed ones. By the time Jimmy Davenport was able to stand and take hesitant sidling steps, using the edges of the coffee table for support, there was enough finished manuscript on his father’s desk to comprise a new book.

And Michael was prepared to admit there might not be much brilliance in this fourth collection, but he felt there was nothing in it to be ashamed of, either: the things he’d learned about professionalism over the years could be sensed on every page.

“Well, I think it’s – quite good, Michael,” Sarah said one evening when she’d had time to read the whole manuscript at last. “All the poems are interesting, and they’ve been nicely worked out. They’re very – sound. I couldn’t find any weak places.”

She was seated under a good lamp on the living-room sofa, looking as young and pretty as he’d ever seen her look before, frowning slightly now and fingering back through the pages as if in search of weak places that might have escaped her notice on the first reading.

“You have any particular favorites?”

“I don’t think so, no; I think I liked them all about equally well.”

And he had to acknowledge, as he went to the kitchen to refill their whiskey glasses, that he’d hoped for higher praise. This was the book he’d been writing as long as he’d known her; it would have her name on its dedication page. It might have seemed only fair of her to come through with some show of excitement, even if she’d had to fake it; still, he knew it would be a mistake to let her know he was disappointed.

“Well, look, dear,” he said, bringing two fresh drinks back into the room. “I’ve come to think of this as kind of a transitional book – kind of a plateau performance, if you see what I mean. I think I still know how to do the big stuff, how to take the big risks and bring them off, but those things will have to wait now until the next book. The fifth book. And I’m already working on one idea for that one that feels about as ambitious and encouraging as anything I’ve done since – you know, since ‘Coming Clean.’ All I’m going to need is time.”

“Well, that sounds – that sounds good,” Sarah said.

“Meanwhile I think this collection is worth publishing, and I’m very, very pleased if you think so, too.”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, I do.”

“Tell you one thing I’ve decided, though,” he told her, slowly pacing the carpet. “I’ve decided not to send it off right away. I think I’d rather hold it back for a while, because the new work I’ll be doing might help me find ways to make it better. I mean, it seems like a finished book now, but a few of the poems might still break open and need to be fixed.”

And he hoped she would object to that plan – he wanted her to say No, Michael, it
is
a finished book; I’d send it off just as it stands, if I were you – but she didn’t.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose you have to trust your own judgment about something like that.” Then, setting the manuscript
aside on the sofa, she said she didn’t really want the drink he’d brought because she was terribly sleepy.

When the warm weather came around again they took to having picnic lunches in their backyard, on a blanket spread over the grass. That was nice. Michael liked to recline on one elbow with a cold beer in his other hand while his lovely wife arranged the sandwiches and the deviled eggs on paper plates; he liked to watch his son toddle through sunlight and shade as earnestly as if he were discovering the world.

Well, you’re getting the general idea, little buddy, he wanted to say. Part of it’s bright and part of it’s dark, and those big things over there are trees, and there’s nothing here that can ever hurt you. All you have to remember is not to go out beyond the edges of it, because everything is slippery rocks and mud and brambles out there, and you might see a snake and it might scare the shit out of you.

“Do you suppose kids of this age are scared of snakes?” he asked Sarah.

“No, I wouldn’t think so; I don’t think they’re scared of anything until older people tell them what to be scared of.” Then after a moment she said “Why snakes?”

“Oh, because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t scared of snakes, I guess. Also because snakes have something to do with a kind of big, complicated idea I’ve been trying to work out.”

And he thoughtfully plucked and inspected a blade of grass. Talking over his ideas with Sarah had been profitable in the past – the clarity of her questions and comments could sometimes cut through muddled parts of his thinking – but he wasn’t sure if this particular idea would lend itself to discussion. It might be too big and too complicated; besides, he knew he might be sorry if he
gave it away: it was the material for his most ambitious and encouraging poem since “Coming Clean.”

Still, Sarah was here and ready to listen; the sky was a deeply satisfying shade of blue and the beer was excellent, and so he didn’t hesitate very long.

“The thing is, I want to write about Bellevue,” he said, “and I want to have it connect with a lot of other events in my life both before and after the time I spent there. Some of the connections will be easy to make; others are going to be subtler and more difficult, but I think I’ll be able to work them all into the pattern.”

Then he began to tell her about daily life in a psychiatric ward – crowds of barefoot, half-clad men made to walk to the wall and turn, walk to the opposite wall and turn again – but he kept it brief because he knew he’d described it to her before.

“And whenever you make a disturbance, you see, the orderlies grab you and give you a forced injection of some knockout sedative and throw you into a padded cell and lock it, and they leave you alone in there for hours.”

He had told her this part too, but it seemed important now to go over it and make it as vivid as possible.

“You have to imagine one of those cells, if you can. There’s no air in there; you’re entirely enclosed in canvas mats, and they’re very bouncy, and you don’t even have much sense of gravity: you can’t tell up from down.

“So I’d come very slowly back to consciousness with my face pressed into a floor mat – oh, and they’re dirty as shit, those mats, because they haven’t been changed for years – and that’s when I’d think snakes were crawling all over me. Or other times I’d think a string of anti-aircraft shells had just exploded up close and I’d been killed but didn’t know yet.”

Sarah was chewing the last of a sandwich, looking attentive but turned partly away to watch the baby.

“And then after I got
out
of Bellevue,” he said, “I was afraid all the time. Afraid to walk around street corners. There weren’t any more snakes, but the fear of anti-aircraft fire was persistent as hell. I used to think if I went more than a few blocks up Seventh Avenue I’d walk into the flak, right into the exploding shells, and that would be the end. Either I’d be dead, or cops would come and take me back to Bellevue – and I couldn’t have said which would be worse.

“Well, of course all this is only part of it; there’s a great deal more. But the central idea, you see, is the inseparability of fear and madness. Being afraid drives you crazy; going crazy makes you afraid. Oh, and there has to be a third element in there, if I want to get the most out of the other two.”

He paused to let Sarah ask what the third element was; then, when she didn’t ask, he told her anyway.

“The third element is impotence. Not being able to get laid. And I’ve had a little – personal experience along that line, too.”

“You have?” she said. “When?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Years ago.”

“Well, that’s supposed to be fairly common among men, isn’t it?”

“I guess it may be about as common as fear,” he said, “or as common as madness. I’ll be dealing with three fairly common conditions, you see, showing how all three work together, suggesting that maybe they all amount to the same thing.”

He knew then that he wanted very much to tell her about Mary Fontana; that was probably why he’d brought up the third element in the first place. It had always been easy and pleasurable to tell Sarah about other girls – he had made a tidy little comedy for her out of the Jane Pringle story, and he’d done well with lesser stories too – but Mary Fontana had remained his secret, all this time. And there wasn’t any reason why that miserable week
on Leroy Street couldn’t be openly discussed here, now, in the Kansas sunshine: Sarah might even provide the necessary words to make it settle down and recede in his memory at last.

But Sarah was busy at the moment. She had gathered the paper plates and put them into a paper bag; she had gotten up and shaken all the crumbs from the blanket; now she was neatly folding the blanket in half and into quarters, for carrying.

“Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t listening very carefully to any of that, Michael,” she said, “because it all sounded morbid to me. You’ve been talking about ‘madness’ and ‘going crazy’ as long as I’ve known you, and of course it was understandable at first because we both wanted so much to tell each other everything about ourselves; but that was years ago, and you’ve never stopped. You didn’t even let up on it when Laura was with us, and that was certainly a time when it might’ve been a mercy if you had. So you see I’ve come to think this whole line of talk is just a self-indulgence of yours. In a curious way it’s both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, and I don’t see how you can ever make it attractive, even in a poem.”

Then she started back for the house, and there was nothing for him to do but hold his warm, empty beer can and watch her go. On her way across the grass she stopped, reached down, picked up her son and settled him on her hip, and the two of them looked completely self-sufficient.

According to several national magazines, the idea of being a single mother had become a new American romance. Single mothers were brave and proud and resourceful; they had “needs” and “goals” that might set them apart in a strictly conventional society, but today, with changing times, they could find refreshingly open communities. Marin County, California, for example, had now become well known as a lively and inviting sanctuary for recently divorced young women, many of
them mothers – and for swinging, stomping, surprisingly nice young men.

While he sat alone on one of the orange chairs in the waiting area outside Dr. McHale’s consulting room, Michael found that the palms of his hands were damp. He blotted and dried them on his pants, but the moisture came quickly back.

“Mr. Davenport?”

And as he got up to go in, Michael was able to confirm that his first impression hadn’t been wrong: McHale was still courteous and dignified, still very settled and very much the family man.

“Well, this isn’t about my daughter, Doctor,” he said when they were seated behind the closed door. “My daughter’s fine now, or at least I think she is. Hope she is. This is something else. It’s about myself.”

“Oh?”

“And before we begin I want to tell you that I’ve never believed in your profession. I think Sigmund Freud was a fool and a bore, and I think what you people call ‘therapy’ is usually a pernicious racket. I’m only here because I have to talk to somebody, and because it has to be somebody who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut.”