The Lonely (10 page)

“Oh, Jerry, I can’t bear to think of it. Tell me it isn’t true,” said Helen Wright, and suddenly put her face into her hands and began to sob hysterically.

Jerry got up. He loved his mother. He wanted to go to her, but did not know how. Harman Wright signalled to Jerry and said: “Maybe you want to wash up a little, son. Afterwards we might have a talk together.”

After Jerry had gone out, Harman Wright went over to his wife and put his hand on her shoulder with considerable tenderness. He said: “Pull yourself together, Helen. Nothing really final has happened. I understand how you feel.”

She grew quieter under his touch and cried: “Harman, it’s too dreadful! We can’t let him. He doesn’t realize. He’s too young to know his own mind. He’s just a child. You know he’s loved Catharine all his life . . .”

Harman Wright was genuinely upset by his wife’s distress. His family was more to him than merely a habit. He loved them greatly and wished them above all to be happy. To make them so, he provided all that was physically in his power of luxury and good living, and to this added the formula by which he had lived so long—the best of all possible worlds, in which good triumphed and the wicked were punished—when they were caught at it.

His was a stratum of society that at least liked to live like gentlemen. His way of life was impregnable to change, disaster, or disintegration. He believed in it, in its mission and its tutelary gods—money, business, advertising, and position—all minor but not insignificant deities, assistants and acolytes to the main god, who was a dignified Episcopalian. He believed in it wholly, since it had been very good to him, and associated only with those who believed likewise.

Nevertheless, he had been a captain of artillery in France in 1917-18, and had his memories.

He said: “The boy’s been to war, Helen. A lot of things can happen. Let me handle him. Go and lie down until dinner and don’t worry. You’ll make yourself ill. I’ll have a talk with him. Jerry’s O.K. He’ll do what’s right in the end.”

Jerry looked up as his father came into the library, his shaving completed, and dressed. He wanted and needed to talk to him, for he respected and trusted him. He asked: “How’s Mother?”

Harman Wright replied: “She’s lying down. She doesn’t want any dinner. I’m afraid she’s pretty unhappy over this.”

“I’m sorry, Dad . . . I wanted to have a chance to talk to you alone first before I said anything, but it . . . sort of all came out.”

Harman went to the side table and made two highballs. “Women always have to be eased up to a new idea gradually,” he said. “Cigar?”

Jerry again felt warmed towards his father for the simple and genuine way he created the atmosphere that his son was a boy no longer, his tacit acknowledgement that the things that had happened to him since he had been away had changed their relationship. He felt strongly that his father was a good man.

They lit their cigars and puffed on them for a moment. Then Harman asked: “When did you say you were going back?”

“I’m due at the airport at two in the morning. I’d better leave here a little before one to be on the safe side . . .”

“Hmmmm! You’re going to have to work fast, son. Do you want to tell me more about it?”

It was still difficult to tell about Patches and himself and how he felt. Jerry could be more articulate with his father, but there were many omissions, things he could not say, things of which he was regretful; others he instinctively felt might be disloyalties to Patches or intrusions upon her privacy.

Words and emotions that came to him to express his love for Patches sounded silly and strained, and he discarded them as quickly as they rose up in his mind. His father was listening quietly, smoking without comment, while Jerry talked, and his very silence placed an added burden upon the telling. He heard himself saying: “I met her a couple of months ago . . .” and his own mind made the comparison. “You met her a couple of months ago. And you’ve known and loved Catharine for as long as you can remember . . .”

Here, in his own home, in the familiar surrounding of his father’s study, he seemed for the first time removed from the immediacy of the things that had been happening to him. But he was still filled with echoes of the days spent with Patches, pictures of her that drifted across his mind, longings, little visions of scenes and moments, and, above all, the ache in his heart, but they had to be reduced to words and the sound of his own voice and the dreadful inadequacy of speech to convey emotion.

He heard himself saying: “We went off for a holiday together for ten days, up in Scotland. After she went away I realized what had happened, that I was in love with her. I guess I can’t help it, Dad. I’ll always be in love with her . . .”

Harman Wright poured out another drink. He had been listening with his mind as well as with his ears, and he thought that he had a clue. He came directly to the point.

“Do you mind if I ask you something, Jerry?”

“Go ahead, Dad.”

“Do you want to marry her because you think you ought to, on account of going away with her?”

“Oh, my God, Dad, no! . . .” The thought had never entered Jerry’s mind, but it was startling to hear his father say it, and for the moment it seemed to open a kind of gulf between them, as though he had heard a voice out of another generation, an older man trying to warn a boy not to be foolish and do something quixotic for which he would later be sorry. He thought suddenly how curious that there should be no compulsion upon him to marry Patches because of what had been between them, and so much compulsion in his conscience to marry Catharine, who for all was yet a stranger to him. He said: “I don’t even know if she’ll marry me, but I’ve got to ask her, to make her understand . . . How can I tell her if I’m still engaged? I can’t make my run until I’m free. Haven’t I done enough to her already? . . .”

Harman said quietly: “I was only asking, son. I just wanted to be sure your thinking was clear. It’s your own life, and you are going to have to make your own decisions . . .”

He paused, and in the pause Jerry seemed to feel that the momentary gulf was closing once more. He was too deeply concerned with his problems to realize that he was under attack by a man who was divided between love for his son and love for his wife and family and a way of living, that he was in a fight . . .

His father continued, dragging at his cigar between sentences: “As long as you realize whatever decisions you make will affect not only yourself . . .”

“Gee, Dad, I know . . .”

“They will affect your mother—very deeply, and Catharine and her family. It may change the whole course of that girl’s life and do her irreparable damage. They will also affect Patches. From what you say, she would surely make you a good wife, but she’ll be a stranger in a strange land. What’s the use of kidding ourselves, Jerry? You know that whoever she is, we’ll make your wife welcome as our daughter, but it won’t ever be the same, will it? Can it? Your mother will get over the shock eventually, but she’s only human after all, and her life has been pretty much wrapped up in you two kids.”

Jerry didn’t reply. He was feeling cornered, but he did not attribute it so much to what his father was saying, because they were merely echoes of his own thoughts and struggles. He had never really brought them to the surface, but they had been there. He hadn’t looked very far beyond his love for Patches and his desperate need of her, because he hadn’t wanted to do so. The song of their being together was still too loud in his heart for him to hear the discords.

But he heard them plainly enough now, because his father was speaking, not with emotion, but reasonably. And yet he had also said: “It’s your own life . . .”

It was not pity for himself he was experiencing, but a kind of despairing rebellion against the forces that had been set in motion against him, forces for which he himself had been partly responsible, and others that had inexorably swept him out of his youth, his life, his home, and his future.

He thought of a phrase spoken by Major Harrison at the bar of the officers’ club at Gedsborough Airbase in what now seemed like the long ago—“Hell, the whole world’s upside down, isn’t it?” Jerry hadn’t asked to be turned upside down, to be spilled out upon a foreign shore, to fly through the icy stratosphere to drop death and destruction on to the earth below. What could a guy do if he was left suspended head down amidst people who still walked right side up?

Patches was not a dream. She had happened to him. Henceforth, though they should never see each other again, his life would never be complete without her, he would never be at peace, never again be himself.

Harman Wright interrupted his thoughts: “Jerry . . .”

“Yes, Dad . . .”

“Do you mind if I tell you a little story? It’s about the last war, when I was in France . . .”

Jerry looked up, wondering what was coming.

Harman Wright looked about him with a half-humorous air, eyeing the closed door to the study before speaking, and even dropping his voice slightly. “God forbid that your mother ever should hear of this! It was in Paris after the armistice. I was engaged to your mother at the time, though of course she was back in St. Louis . . .”

Jerry listened with the sudden, queer consciousness that he was feeling embarrassed. His father continued: “There was a little French girl. Her name was Adrienne. She was pretty as a picture. You know those French girls. I met her in a restaurant on the Bois de Boulogne, and we sort of took to one another. She was really beautiful. I guess you might say she was a stunner.

“Well, to make a long story short, we went away together. We went down to a place called Mentone on the Riviera, and stayed there a week, holed up in a hotel. It was really a wonderful experience for a kid like me who’d never been around much. Did you say something?”

Jerry shook his head. His mind was playing him a curious trick and making him see a picture of the hotel, his father in his World War I uniform, and Adrienne, who looked like the girl on a postcard one of the fellows had brought back with him from France. He realized that he was feeling a little sick at the pit of his stomach . . .

His father continued: “I was pretty stuck on Adrienne, in fact I guess I was in love with her. We even talked about getting married. When I left for the States I half promised to come back for her, and I guess I meant it at the time.”

Harman shook the ashes from the stub of his cigar and leaned forward a little in his chair. “Well, Jerry, here we all are. I’ve never regretted it—never for a moment. I did a lot of thinking after I came home and saw your mother again. That little French girl wasn’t easy to forget. She had a lot of ways about her. I married your mother and settled down. I wouldn’t have had it any other way!”

Reston knocked on the door and said: “Dinner is served, sir. And ah, Mrs. Wright said she was not feeling well enough to come down . . .”

Jerry did not feel like eating either. He wished he could find a hole and crawl away into it. Harman said: “Very well, Reston, we will be there in just a moment,” and when the butler had closed the door, he concluded: “I’ve loved your mother dearly, and I always will. We’ve had a wonderful life together, and I wouldn’t exchange it for any other. We belong together. This is our kind of world, and we understand one another, and our ways and the things we have in common mean a great deal to us. That’s all, Jerry . . .”

They went down and ate dinner by candlelight in the walnut-panelled dining-room, and it was the way it had always been—the creamy linen, the soft sheen of old silver, the gloss of the old wood reflecting the tapers, the sigh of the swinging door, and the quiet footfalls of Reston.

Jerry toyed with his food and tried to answer politely his father’s enquiries about the war, the life he led, his missions, his decorations, his ship, and his crew. At any other time he would have spilled over, for part of his long-cherished homecoming dream was the telling of tales and the bragging about his gang and his airplane. But he was deeply hurt and bitterly disillusioned with his father because of what he had told him, the story of the little French girl.

He had trusted his father, had exposed his innermost feelings to him because he had believed somehow that the older man had understood him and what he felt about Patches. And all that had happened was that his father had managed to dirty it up. To confide in him an escapade of his own youth that was supposed to parallel what had happened between Patches and himself. A pick-up in a restaurant and a week in a hotel. “In Paris after the armistice . . . You know those French girls . . .” My God, it was like one of those stories you heard in a smoking-car, or when the gang was gathering around after a mission was scrubbed or after chow and cutting loose on Topic A!

He felt more lonely now and cut off than he ever had before, and the ashes of disappointment in his father were bitter in his mouth. He knew now that he could never make him understand that Patches was more than a girl he had grown to love; she was a brother in arms who wore the uniform of her country and had buried her dead, and that too made all the difference in the world. She belonged; she was as much a fighter, valiant and unconquerable, as any of them.

He had heard of the gulf between those at home and the men who had been overseas and in combat. Now he was facing his father and realized that not even the generation who had fought the last war knew about this one, what it was like and what it did to people, how you got to feel when you lived in a country that had been fighting with its back to the wall for four years, where streets and homes were in the front lines and never a day went by but somebody died from bombs, or shells, or fire, or bullets from the air.

Maybe they were Enghsh and had queer ways that weren’t like your ways, but they were soldiers, every one of them; they wouldn’t quit; they had guts, and you loved them like brothers and sisters.

“You know those French girls . . . I guess you might say she was a stunner . . . It was really a wonderful experience for a kid like me who’d never been around much . . .” His father’s words still echoed. And brave, tender, gallant Patches, with her soft smile and warm understanding . . . What was the use of talking? . . .