The Lonely (11 page)

The two men had been sitting over their coffee, cigars, and brandy. Jerry looked at his watch. It was eight o’clock. Harman noticed Jerry’s gesture and said: “Well, son, have you decided what you want to do?”

Jerry said: “I’d better call Catharine before I go over there. It’s going to be tough . . .”

He got up heavily for one so young and moved slowly towards the telephone extension beneath the sideboard. It was the way you felt when you had a rotten mission ahead of you, where the whole atmosphere of the briefing had been heavy with coming disaster and loss, where you shut off your mind from all thinking and worked with your muscles, moving your arms and legs and hands forward into whatever was to come, to get it over with.

Harman Wright felt a pang of pity for his son because he knew he was suffering, Jerry was young and game, and a fighter for what he wanted. His father seemed to recognize the kind of people they were in Jerry’s slow, inexorable movement forward into something he must have dreaded with all his soul. The boy was honest. He didn’t ask for pity, and he didn’t shirk. But Harman had not yet given up the fight. He believed more than ever that he was right and Jerry was wrong.

He asked quietly, without moving: “What are you going to tell Catharine when you see her?”

Jerry turned and looked up at him heavily. He replied: “About what happened—I’ve got to . . . about Patches and me . . .”

“Are you going to tell her that you lived together . . .”

Jerry suddenly cried: “Oh, Christ, Dad, stop hitting below the belt!” Then he said: “I’m sorry. I guess not. One doesn’t speak about such things. I’ve got to ask her to let me out. I thought if I told her what Patches means to . . .”

He stopped suddenly, because his mind, grown vivid under the impact of the things that had been happening to him, leaped ahead as it were to show him to himself sitting in the chintz-decorated sun-porch off the living-room of the Quentin house with Catharine at his side.

And he saw her there as he had last remembered her—so healthily beautiful, loving, young, vigorous, clear-eyed, innocent, sexless, and inexperienced as . . . as he had once been and now was no longer. His imagination took him the next step onward and, with shocking clarity, showed him the expression of disbelief, anguish, injury, and deep hurt come into her eyes when he told her about Patches and himself.

What was he going to tell her? How was he going to make her understand? Back in Glasgow yesterday, in his agony and fear of losing Patches forever, in the confusion of his mind that came from the realization of what she meant to him, he had seen himself in a way making up to Patches for the things he had not said to her by saying them to Catharine.

His thought had been that Catharine would understand then, that she would not want him when she heard from him the story of his love for Patches. And on the long, drumming flight across the ocean he had even made up the words.

“It’s like nothing that ever happened before to me. I’ve got to tell you, Catharine, so you’ll understand. She’s part of me. She’s under my skin and in my heart. She’s my pain and my delight and my breath. She’s in my mind and in my blood wherever I go, whatever I do. I never understood what love was before I knew Patches. There’s nothing of me left, nothing that doesn’t belong to her and always will . . .”

Standing at the sideboard, the telephone within his reach, the dark instrument that had so nearly contained the voice of Catharine, Jerry suddenly found himself so filled with shame, horror, and revulsion that he could hardly bear to contemplate it. He thought his knees would give way, and he slumped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. Dreadful lightnings of truth were searing the dark abyss that had opened up before him.

For now that he was home—here in his father’s house, where he had been raised, where he had spent his childhood and his boyhood, where he had been taught the creed and tenets of a gentleman—now that for the first time he had begun to think, he knew that the idea that had driven him to take the crazy ride with Eagles was utterly fantastic and completely impossible.

It was the purest madness to have thought that he could walk coolly into Catharine’s house, jilt her, win his release, and fly back to his Patches. Life wasn’t like that.

Had he really contemplated facing this girl he had known and worshipped for all of his adolescent life, to whom he was engaged by public announcement, who by now had his most recent letter, in which he had written to hint of the close approach of the day when they might be married, to ask her sympathy and understanding because he had fallen in love with someone else? Had he actually thought he could make a love declaration to Catharine about another girl?

The shock of the total collapse of this ridiculous, wholly illusory boy’s world shook him physically and made him feel sick.

Harman Wright got up and came over to his son and put his hand on his shoulder, for he thought the battle won, that his arguments had prevailed, as he had known they would. But he was too wise to press his advantage before he was certain. He was deeply moved by Jerry’s trouble, for it brought back things he was quite certain had been long forgotten, and they seemed to vibrate again with Jerry’s hurt.

He said: “Take it easy, son. It’s never really as bad as it seems . . .”

Then he said quietly: “Look here, Jerry. You haven’t thought it out to the end yet. You can’t accomplish anything in a rush this way. Go upstairs and take a rest. Don’t try to see Catharine tonight. Nobody knows you’ve been here. Nobody need know. Go back to England and finish your tour of duty. Don’t do anything foolish. I know you won’t. Then come home to us and see how you feel. How about it? I’ll drive you to the airport tonight, and nobody will be any the wiser.” Then he added: “I know it would make your mother very happy.”

The old rebellion surged in Jerry again. Make his mother happy. Make Catharine happy . . . Make everybody happy but Patches and himself . . . And yet the strands of his old life, the Jerry he had been, were beginning to enmesh him, binding him, pulling at him, attaching their tenuous threads to his mind.

Of one thing he was certain. He could not go through with going over to Catharine then and there and breaking the engagement. It was too black a thing to do to add to the burdens of his mind and the weight upon his spirit. But he did want desperately to be alone, to try to think, to regain his sense of values.

He said: “Okay, Dad. I . . . I can’t see Cat now. I’ll go upstairs for a while.” He added: “Do you think I ought to go see Mother?”

“If you think you’re ready to tell her that you’re going to go back and wait until—”

Jerry said: “I’ll see her later . . .” He got up and went out of the room, and Harman heard his slow, heavy footsteps going up the stairs, followed by the scrabbling of Skipper going up with him, stairs his father remembered Jerry never used to go up less than two at a time, and his heart was heavy for him. He was a man who above all wanted to do what was right for those he loved, and there was no doubt in his mind as to what was right.

Things like that happened to kids, and they had to go through them and get over them in their own way—there was nothing you could really do to help, and they hurt like hell while they were going on. But he knew that in the years to come, when Jerry and Catharine would be married and have a home and children of their own, his son would be happy and grateful, and if he remembered the girl in England at all, it would be with the dim recollection of something wonderful that had happened to him when he was young, and not to be regretted.

Harman Wright went to the side table and poured himself a drink, and was startled to find with what clarity of detail he was suddenly thinking of Adrienne and the gay, high-ceilinged, rococo room in the hotel at Mentone, the bald-headed waiter who looked like a gnome, the moon on the sea, the old-fashioned brocaded bell-pull, Adrienne’s laugh.

She was so ridiculously gay and sunny, her eyes crinkled at the corners, the ends of her mouth turned up even when her face was in repose. She . . . Harman set his glass down untouched, arose, and went upstairs swiftly to his wife’s room to see how she was and bring her encouragement.

Familiar things surrounded Jerry again. His room was exactly as he had left it, the purple-and-white Williams blanket neatly folded over the foot of the bed, the West Point and Westbury High School pennants on the wall next to the framed picture of the championship Westbury football team, taken in his senior year, and on his bureau stood the large framed portrait photograph of Catharine, picking him up with her eyes as it always did when he came into the room, eyes that even in the picture showed the sweetness and clarity of spirit behind them. The photograph shook him, because he had forgotten it was there.

He went to his wardrobe and opened the door and stood there for a moment in a kind of bewilderment looking at his youth. His civilian clothes hung there neatly pressed and brushed as though waiting for him to step into them, and on the shelf above he saw his ice skates and three fielders’ mitts, including the first one he had ever had, and which he had outgrown. Standing in a corner were his golf clubs, three tennis rackets in presses, a baseball bat, a fly rod in a case, and his old single-shot .22 rifle. On the floor were some discolored tennis balls and a deflated football.

He glanced at his books lining the shelves along the wall, from Henty and Alger and the Frank Merriwell series to Scott and Dumas and Conan Doyle, and the set of G. K. Chesterton that Catharine had given him one Christmas. Without knowing he was doing it, he took out a book, held it in his hand for a moment, and then put it back again.

His desk invited him, and he sat down at it and idly pulled open a drawer. It seemed only yesterday that he had been sitting there. He fingered some of the contents. There was his high-school diploma, a half-empty box of cartridges, three golf balls, and the silver medal he had won at the last scholastic track meet. He found an old tasselled dance programme from a club dance when he was fourteen, and, opening it, read the name of “Catharine,” inscribed in his round and then unformed hand seven times. There were letters and an old copy book, a dozen marbles and a set of drawings for putting together a model airplane, a broken fountain pen and a little packet of tissue paper that he knew contained a lock of Catharine’s hair.

Jerry was conscious of the feeling that Catharine’s steady, friendly gaze was on him from the photograph, and he closed the drawer with a bang, got up, and laid the picture face down upon the bureau. But almost immediately he went back and stood it up again. He said: “I’ve got to stop acting like a kid! . . .”

He took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one, and thought again of his father and the story he had told him, and it saddened him beyond measure. His young mind fought with a certain kind of stubborn valiance against the destruction of a long-cherished illusion, and he went over his father’s phrases, the things he had said, one by one.

And as he did so, aided by his desire to excuse him, certain sentences and ideas lingered, and he found his anger fading. He remembered his father had said: “I loved your mother dearly, and I always will. We’ve had a wonderful life together, and I wouldn’t exchange it for any other.”

Jerry thought now that perhaps he better understood his father and what he had been trying to tell him, for the evidence was all about him and had been for all of his life.

It was to be found in the house with its quiet good taste and harmony, the possessions that surrounded them, their friends, the atmosphere that had been made for him into which to be born and educated into manhood, in the kind of person he himself was, the way he thought and acted.

It was, he appreciated, a question of standards. True, they had all been there, ready-made and provided for him until he had made them his habits, but this did not alter their power to hold him, or blind him to the fact that never in his life had he thought of appealing from them. They suited him. He had felt secure and extraordinarily happy in his family life, and believed beyond any doubt, up to that point, that these standards had been a part of his father’s success as a husband, parent, provider, and human being. He came back again to that feeling of rightness he had about his family.

His father had only been trying to say to him: “This is your world, Jerry. You were born and bred into it; it fits you. You’ll be happy in it and no other, no matter what you may think or feel now. We’ve made everything so right for you in every way . . .”

In a way he felt refreshed and relieved, because he could not bear to be angry with his father. As a boy he had made him a hero for what he was and the things he could do as an athlete. Growing up, he admired and loved him for his kindness and his qualities. He even aimed to follow his footsteps in business and banking. If Jerry had thought much as a boy about what his life would be like when he was grown to manhood, it was always a kind of perpetuation of his own home and the example set therein, an extension of his parents’ life and way of living. When the war came it had merely been a postponement.

Now Jerry recalled why he had wanted to be alone, why he had really come to his room. It had been in order to be with Patches again, to be alone with her and near her. And it was with a shock and a feeling of sheer panic that he was aware suddenly that he could not find her.

It was not that she was gone but that momentarily a door seemed to have closed and through it the music of Patches sounded more faintly. It was like looking for someone in a mist, hearing a voice but not being able to see. And Jerry thought of the night in Scotland when they were lost in the storm at the foot of Ben Venue in the Trossachs and she had been silent for so long that he had become alarmed and had groped for her in the dark.

But he was remembering now, and he felt again the helpless clinging of her chilled and rain-soaked form, the trusting, beseeching insinuation of her body to his, and the message it told with its surrender that she was sick and in trouble and speechless with cold, and could not tell him otherwise that she needed him.