Young Mr. Keefe (6 page)

“He wants to be first. Everything's a race with Blazer.”

Rocks slipped under their feet and clattered downward. They both thought
avalanche
simultaneously. There was not much breath now for conversation. They proceeded slowly, step by step. The falling rocks suggested a game; Jimmy began pretending that Helen was there. Fancifully, he began plotting an elaborate revenge. “See the view from here,” he said, motioning her closer to the precipice. His legs felt tight and the back of his neck ached. Ahead of him, he could hear Claire's painful breathing. He wondered: Why in God's name are we doing this?

He tried to move faster. There was a declivity, a cavern. Here, he thought, would be a good place to do it. Then he thought of the long loneliness afterward. In his mind, she died; once again, he buried her, brought flowers to her grave.

They climbed in silence, and suddenly Blazer, far ahead of them, stopped and opened his lungs in a magnificent yodel.

Claire called, “Can we stop a minute?” But he had not heard her, and had turned away, so Jimmy and Claire climbed on.

“Hate him, hate him, hate him!” Claire whispered. “Why does he have to drive us so?”

Jimmy tried again to figure out what had gone wrong between him and Helen. Was it only the sex thing? Or was there something else, something that was his own fault? He had agreed to stay in California, which had pleased Helen. He had taken the job with the public relations firm; they had found the apartment. Once more, the gloom settled, dispersed for a moment the way a clock striking would make it do, then settled for good. For one thing was sure: the trouble, the beginning, was before the apartment. By the time they moved into the apartment, hurting each other had already become a force, a sickness. They hurt each other with looks, with silences, with words. Everything that happened in California—the quarrels, Helen's father's death—had been preceded by other things, farther back. On their trip to the Caribbean, or even before.

Remembering the apartment on Capitol Avenue as it had been with Helen there, Jimmy found himself wondering: Does the living-room have one window, or two windows side by side? Are the walls pale green or pale grey? Recapturing the apartment in his mind was like trying to move back into a dream after waking. It was different from his home in Somerville, which could be remembered, lovingly, inch by inch. The apartment was colourless, shapeless. Only small, unimportant details stuck out. Like the gilt birds on the window-sill, poised for flight—a wedding present, gone with Helen. And the low glass bowl by the sofa in which she sometimes floated red camellia blossoms. Another wedding present, also gone. He remembered the Venetian blinds behind the curtains, slanted to keep out the heat of the afternoon, and, sometimes, the curtains pulled tightly across the blinds to achieve a cool, restful twilight in midday. He remembered watching a piece of purple fluff from her skirt floating and settling on the glass top of the coffee table. He remembered ash-trays, clean and cool, sweating slightly from the heat outside. He remembered Helen at night, coming to bed, waiting anxiously a few feet away, waiting for him to say something or do something, or repeat a question.

“Do you love me?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said softly.

Then, quite suddenly, her shoulders shook with sobs and she threw herself across the covers and cried silently into the pillow.

He had met Helen at a party in New York. He had graduated from college the week before, and had been staying in Manhattan while he looked—in rather desultory fashion, perhaps—for a job. It was a hot June night, and the party, at an apartment in the East Sixties, was a cocktail party that had gone on too long by the time Jimmy arrived. His friend Charlie Somerby had taken him by the arm and said, “Hey, I want you to meet a new girl—she's from the Golden West.” They threaded their way through the noise and people to the other side of the smoky living-room. “This is Helen Warren,” Charlie had said. Helen was small and dark. Her slim arms were deeply tanned and her figure was compact and boyish. There was something in her appearance—whether it was her small, finely boned features, her colour, or her extremely white, extremely even teeth—that immediately made her stand out, emphatically, against the others in the room. Jimmy had been attracted by the breathless way she talked—she began talking almost at once—and the quick, nervous way she smoked. She had a bright, sudden laugh, tossing her short brown hair back, and she laughed at nearly everything he said. People crushed around them. There was a shriek as a pack of matches went off in a girl's hand, and, in the ensuing scramble to put out the flames where the girl had dropped the matchbook, someone spilled a drink on Helen's dress. He mopped at it with his handkerchief. “Let's get out of here,” he said. No one noticed when they left the party. They went down into the street. “How did you get mixed up in that?” he asked her.

“In what? Oh—that party, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Cousins of cousins of my mother's,” she said. “They heard I was in New York and called me. My first New York cocktail party.”

“What did you think of it?”

“Well—”

They stood on the sidewalk. “Where would you like to go?” he asked her.

“You decide,” she said. “I'm just a tourist and this is my last night here.”

“Then where do you go?”

“Back home. Back to California.”

They started walking slowly west, towards Fifth Avenue. “And then what?” Jimmy asked. “What will you do?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I may go back to school in the fall. I don't know. I was at Cal—but I dropped out. Or I may get a job. I just don't know. What street is this?”

“Fifth Avenue,” he said.

“Oh, yes—Central Park. Isn't it beautiful?”

“Do you like New York?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “It's—well, it's almost a little overpowering. Like that cocktail party. Is that typical? Are all New York cocktail parties like that?”

“I'm afraid a lot of them are.”

“Oh, but I do love New York.”

“You mean—?” he began, looking at her.

“Yes!” she smiled. Then, in chorus, they said, “It's a nice place to visit, but I'd hate to live here.” And they both laughed.

They were walking south now, on the park side of Fifth, towards the Plaza, and suddenly Jimmy said, “You know—I've got a real tourist's idea. Let's get a hansom cab down here and drive through the park. Or have you done that already?”

“Never!” she laughed. “But I'd love to.”

A few minutes later they were in the cab, trotting slowly through dark tunnels under trees. “Isn't it strange,” Helen said, “to be moving so
slowly
! In a city that I'd always thoughts of in terms of people running about, hurrying everywhere! It's so slow!” Her face, in the shadows, was warm and animated, her lips parted. Impulsively, he kissed her. “We can get out and take a taxi,” he said. “We don't need to go slowly.”

“No, no,” she whispered, holding his hand.

“You know,” he said, “it's funny, but you're terribly different. I mean, back at that cocktail party—you didn't belong there at all! I took one look at you and saw you didn't belong there. I don't mean that unkindly either. But did you take a look at any of the other girls there—the New York girls? Those Finch types—pale, kind of haggard-looking, and”—he mimicked them, talking with the broadest possible
a
—“‘My deah, so terribly, terribly weary and bored with it all—you can't imagine how bored. And how
initiated
!'”

She laughed softly.

“But you're different,” he said. “You don't belong with them. You belong out on a hill somewhere, or on the deck of a yawl, or—” He broke off. “Do you really have to go back to-morrow?”

“Yes, I'm afraid I do.”

“I wish you wouldn't.”

“I wish so, too,” she said.

Later, when the driver returned them to the Plaza, Jimmy said, “Where would you like to go now? You name it. Statue of Liberty … Staten Island Ferry … Grant's Tomb …?”

Helen laughed. “I'm afraid I've seen all those things already.” And she added, “It's nearly midnight.”

“Look,” he said suddenly, “I have an apartment on Sixty-eighth Street—it's not mine, but the people are away and have let me use it. Would you like to go back there?”

“Well—” she said.

“I mean,” he said hastily, “I could fix us some coffee—something to eat. And it's near the river—there's a good view.”

“All right,” she said.

They had gone, and he had mixed her a drink, and had put a record on the phonograph—Marlene Dietrich singing her sad songs. In the kitchen, he fixed a plate of crackers and cheese and returned with this to the living-room. They ate in silence. “I can't get over it,” Jimmy said once again. “How different you are from the other girls I've known. Not just
healthier
—but—I can't put my finger on it.”

She said nothing. “Do you like”—he said, his chest feeling tight—“do you like Marlene Dietrich?”

“Yes.”

And suddenly they had been in each other's arms. She had kissed him fiercely, almost angrily. Then she had pulled her face away and put her head back, letting her short brown hair fall loose. “Oh, hallelujah!” she had cried. “Oh, hallelujah! Hallelujah!” They reached, together, for the light; the phonograph played on.

Later, in the dark, she had whispered, “
Jimmy?
”

“Yes?”

“Darling—am I—am I your first girl?”

He hesitated, wondering whether to give her the answer he had read somewhere young men his age were supposed to give, or whether, with Helen, to tell the truth. And then, because he suspected that she knew the truth anyway, he told the truth. “Yes.”

It had happened so fast—the sudden burning, almost unquenchable love. For Jimmy, it was an emotion unlike anything else he had ever experienced. And somehow her departure—she had flown back to California the next day as she had said she must—only served to heighten it. Nearly every night after that he telephoned her. Once, a few weeks later, his father had driven down from Connecticut to have lunch with him. Jimmy had got nowhere with the job hunting; he hadn't tried. In his talks with Helen it had been decided somehow that he would go to California, marry her, and find a job there. He tried to explain this to his father as they sat over drinks at the, Yale Club. “But you don't seem to know too much about her, Jim,” James Keefe, Sen., had said. “You don't know her people, for one thing. You've only just met the girl. Oh, I know—at twenty-three you're ready to win the world. But be a little commonsensical, Jimmy. Don't feel you've got to marry the first pretty face you see!” His father had grinned at him.

After that, his father wrote him a long letter in laborious longhand—an indication of how important his father considered the letter to be—about maturity and responsibilities, urging Jimmy finally to come to work for the Keefe Company, where, as always, a slot waited for him.

Nevertheless, one rainy day in December he went to the savings bank and withdrew money that had been placed there for him by his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on every birthday and Christmas of his life; money that represented income from a trust set up by his father, and money that his mother had sent him from time to time to “tide him over” in New York—the total came to a little over nine thousand dollars—and deposited this in his checking account.

That night, without telling anyone, he took a plane to San Francisco. Helen met him at the airport, and in a rented car, they had driven to Reno. There they had been married in a wayside wedding chapel that offered the services of a justice of the peace, an organist, and, on the premises, a motel. The next day there had been a series of telephone calls—anxious, tearful, and admonishing—to and from the two families, back and forth across the continent. Both families urged their children to come home immediately. But Jimmy and Helen went on to Yosemite, and did not return to Helen's home in Rio Linda until a week later.

In the meantime, it had been agreed between the Keefes and the Warrens, negotiating over Long Distance, to treat the elopement as though it had never occurred. A formal wedding, with invitations and announcements in the New York and San Francisco newspapers, was scheduled for early in January. The Keefes prepared to fly to San Francisco, with as many relatives as they could muster on such short notice, and to ensconce themselves in a series of suites at the St. Francis Hotel. It was Jimmy's first brush with the power and influence of his family. In his attempt to have his marriage with Helen kept secret, spontaneous, and private, he found himself defeated. When they returned from their single secret week in Yosemite, he discovered that his marriage was going to involve many more people than himself and Helen. He spent the weeks between the two weddings receiving and dispatching lengthy legal documents—wills, trusts, community property agreements. Jimmy's father expressed annoyance with Walker Warren, Helen's father. “This gentleman,” he wrote, “fails to comprehend the tax advantage to be gained for you if the actual, proper wedding were allowed to fall within the current calendar year, instead of in January. Now, for your greatest tax saving, you must use the Nevada wedding date on your return when you file in April.”

And Helen? He tried to remember Helen's face, her reactions, through all of this. But of course, he thought, even by then, it had begun.

Jimmy climbed on close behind Claire. The straps of his knapsack burned into his shoulders. “Oh!” Claire gasped. “Let's stop!” They stopped and he looked down. For a moment, he imagined that he could see the world below turning. A blue sliver of Lake Tahoe had appeared between the mountains—the same sliver they had seen from the summit in the car. Beyond the lake lay the wastes of northern Nevada. He wondered wildly if that odd little wayside chapel was somewhere in that expanse. Directly below, the white roof of Squaw Valley Lodge looked like a pale linen handkerchief that had been tossed down. Next to it, the swimming-pool was a vivid blue rectangle that caught the sun. “Looking down makes me dizzy,” he said.