The Young Lions (24 page)

A door opened and a fat sergeant with a beery face came out and shouted irritably, "All right, all right, you guys. Stop spittin' on the floor, this is government property. And stop shovin'. Nobody's goin' to be left behind. The Army's got plenty of room for everybody. Come in, one by one, through this door, when I give you the word. And leave your bottles outside. This is a United States Army installation."

It took all day. He was shipped to Governor's Island in an Army ferry that had a General's name on it. He stood on the crowded deck, his nose running with the cold, watching the harbour traffic on the slate waters. He wondered what obscure act of heroism or flattery the General had done in his day to deserve this minute honour. The Island was busy and thronged with soldiers who were grimly carrying guns, as though they expected to have to repel a landing party of Japanese marines at any moment.

Noah had told Hope he would try to call her at her office some time during the day, but he didn't want to lose his place in the slow line that went past the bored, short-tempered doctors.

"Christ," the man next to Noah said, looking down the long line of naked, scrawny, flabby aspirants to glory, "is this what's going to defend the country? Christ, we've lost the war."

Noah grinned a little self-consciously, and threw his shoulders back, measuring himself secretly in his nakedness against the others. There were three or four young men who looked as though they had played football, and one enormous man with a clipper in full sail tattooed on his chest, but Noah was pleased to see that he compared favourably with most of the rest. He had become acutely conscious of his body in the last few months. The Army, he thought as he waited to get his chest X-rayed, will probably build me up considerably. Hope will be pleased. Then he grinned. It was an elaborate, roundabout way to put yourself in condition, to have your country go to war against the Empire of Japan.

The doctors paid little attention to him. His vision was normal, he did not have piles, flat feet, hernia, or gonorrhoea. He did not have syphilis or epilepsy, and in a minute-and-a-half interview a psychiatrist decided he was sane enough for the purposes of modern warfare. His joints articulated well enough to please the Surgeon General and his teeth met in an efficient enough manner to ensure his being able to chew Army food, and there were no scars or lesions evident anywhere on his skin.

He dressed, glad to get bis clothes on once again, thinking, tomorrow it will be a uniform, and went up, in the slow-moving line, to the sallow, harassed-looking medical officer who sat at a yellow desk, stamping 1A, Limited Service, or Rejected, on the medical records.

I wonder, Noah was thinking, as the doctor bent over his record, I wonder if I'll be sent to some camp near New York so I can see Hope on passes…

The doctor picked up one of the stamps and tapped it several times on a pad. Then he hit Noah's record and pushed it towards him. Noah looked down at it. REJECTED was smeared across it in blurred purple letters. Noah shook his head and blinked. It still said REJECTED.

"What…?" he began.

The doctor looked up at him, not unkindly. "Your lungs, son," he said. "The X-rays show scar tissue on both of them. When did you have T. B.?"

"I never had T. B."

The doctor shrugged. "Sorry, son," he said. "Next."

Noah walked slowly out of the building. It was evening now, and the wind was cruel and full of December as it swept off the harbour across the old fort and the barracks and parade ground that stood guard over the sea approaches to the city. The city itself was a clot of a million lights across the dark stretch of water. New levies of draftees and volunteers came pouring off the ferries, shuffling off to the waiting doctors and the final purple stamps.

Noah shivered and put his collar up, clutching the sheet of paper with his record on it pulling at his hand in the wind. He felt numb and purposeless, like a schoolboy deserted among the dormitories on Christmas Eve, with all his friends off to celebrations in their homes. He pulled his hand inside his coat and inside his shirt. He touched the skin of his chest and felt the firm skeleton of his ribs. It felt solid and reliable, even with tips of cold wind whipping at it through his opened clothing. Tentatively he coughed. He felt strong and whole.

He moved slowly to the ferry and stepped aboard, past the MP with the winter hat with the earmuffs and the rifle. The ferry was almost empty. Everybody, he thought dully, as the ferry with the dead General's name painted on it slid across the narrow black stretch of water towards the looming city, everybody is going the other way.

Hope wasn't home when he got there. The uncle who read the Bible was in the kitchen, reading, and he peered ill-naturedly at Noah, whom he did not like, and said, "You here? I thought you'd be a colonel by now."

"Is it all right," Noah asked wearily, "if I stay and wait for her?"

"Suit yourself," the uncle said, scratching himself under the arm, above the Book, open at the gospel according to Luke on the table before him. "I don't guarantee when she'll be home. She's a girl who's developed some mighty fast habits, as I write her parents in Vermont, and the hours of the night don't seem to make much impression on her." He grinned nastily at Noah.

"And now her fellah's goin' in the Army – or leastwise, she thinks he is – she's probably out scoutin' out some new ground, wouldn't you say?"

There was some coffee heating on the stove and a half-filled cup before him, and the smell was tantalizing to Noah, who had had nothing to eat since midday. But the uncle made no offer and Noah wouldn't ask for it.

Noah went into the living-room and sat down in the velour easy-chair with the cheap lace antimacassar on it. It had been a long day and his face smarted from the cold and wind, and he slept, sitting up, not hearing the uncle shuffling loudly about the kitchen, banging cups and occasionally reading aloud in his nasal, scratching voice.

The noise of the outside gate being opened, one of the deep familiar noises of his world, woke him from his sleep. He blinked his eyes and stood up just as Hope came into the room. She was walking slowly and heavily. She stopped short when she saw him standing there in the middle of the living-room. Then she ran to him and he held her close to him.

"You're here," she said.

Her uncle loudly slammed the door between the kitchen and the living-room. Neither of them paid any attention to the noise. Noah rubbed his cheek in her hair.

"I was in your room," Hope said. "All this time. Looking at all your things. You didn't call. All day. What's happened?"

"They won't take me," Noah said. "I have scars on my lungs. Tuberculosis."

"Oh, my God," Hope said.

THE clashing sound of a lawn-mower awoke Michael. He lay for a moment in the strange bed, remembering where he was, remembering what had happened yesterday, smelling the clipped fragrance of the California grass. "Probably," the movie writer on the edge of the swimming-pool at Palm Springs had said yesterday afternoon, "probably ten guys are home writing it now. The butler comes into the garden with the tea and he says, 'Lemon or cream?' and the little nine-year-old girl comes in, carrying her doll, and says, 'Daddy, please fix the radio. I can't get the funnies. The man keeps talking about Pearl Harbour. Daddy, is Pearl Harbour near where Grandma lives?' And she bends the doll over and it says, 'Mamma'."

It was silly, Michael thought, but more true than not. Large events seemed to announce themselves in cliches. The arrival of universal disaster in the ordinary traffic of life always seemed to come in a rather banal, overworked way. And on Sunday, too, as people were resting after the large Sabbath dinner, after coming out of the churches where they had mumbled dutifully to God for peace. The enemy seemed to take a sardonic delight in picking Sunday for his most savage forays, as though he wanted to show what an ironic joke could be played over and over again on the Christian world. After the Saturday night drunkenness and fornication and the holy morning prayer and bicarbonate of soda.

Michael himself had been playing tennis in the blazing desert sun with two soldiers who were stationed at March Field. When the woman had come out of the clubhouse, saying, "You'd better come in and listen to the radio. There's an awful lot of static, but I think I heard that the Japanese have attacked us," the two soldiers had looked at each other and had put their rackets away and had gone in and packed their bags and had started right back for March Field. The ball before the battle of Waterloo. The gallant young officers waltzing, kissing the bare-shouldered ladies goodbye, then off to the guns on the foaming horses, with a rattle of hoofs and scabbards and a swirling of capes in the Flanders night more than a century ago. An old chestnut, then, probably, but Byron had done it big just the same. How would Byron have handled the morning in Honolulu and this next morning in Beverly Hills?

Michael had meant to stay in Palm Springs another three days, but after the tennis game he had paid his bill and rushed back to town. No capes, no horses, just a hired Ford with a convertible top that went down when you pushed a button. And no battle waiting, just the rented-by-the-week ground-floor apartment overlooking the swimming-pool.

The noise of the mower came in at the french window that opened on to the small lawn. Michael turned and looked at the machine and the gardener. The gardener was a small fifty-year-old Japanese, bent and thin with his years of tending other people's grass and flower-beds. He plodded after the machine mechanically, his thin, wiry arms straining against the handle.

Michael couldn't help grinning. A hell of a thing to wake up to, the day after the Japanese Navy dropped the bombs on the American fleet – a fifty-year-old Jap advancing on you with a lawn-mower. Michael looked more closely and stopped smiling. The gardener had a set, gloomy expression on his face, as though he were bearing a chronic illness. Michael remembered him from the week before, when he had gone about his chores with a cheery, agreeable smile, and had even hummed from time to time, tunelessly, as he had pruned the oleander bush outside the window.

Michael got out of bed and went to the window, buttoning his pyjama top. It was a clear, golden morning, with the tiny crispness that is Southern California's luxurious substitute for winter. The green of the lawn looked very green and the small red and yellow dahlias along the border shone like gleaming bright buttons against it. The gardener kept everything in sharp definite lines out of some precise sense of Oriental design.

"Good morning," Michael said. He didn't know the man's name. He didn't know any Japanese names. Yes – one. Sessue Hayakawa, the old movie star. What was good old Sessue Hayakawa doing this morning?

The gardener stopped the lawn-mower and came slowly up from his sombre dream to stare at Michael.

"Yes, Sir," he said. His voice was flat and high, and there was no welcome in it. His little dark eyes, set among the brown wrinkles, looked, Michael thought, lost and pleading. Michael wanted to say something comforting and civilized to this ageing, labouring, exile who had overnight found himself in a land of enemies, charged with the guilt of a vile attack three thousand miles away.

"It's too bad," Michael said, "isn't it?"

The gardener looked blankly at him, as though he had not understood at all.

"I mean," said Michael, "about the war."

The man shrugged. "Not too bad," he said. "Everybody say, 'naughty Japan, goddamn Japan'. But not too bad. Before, England wants, she take. America wants, she take. Now Japan wants." He stared coldly at Michael, direct and challenging.

"She take."

He turned, and turned the mower with him, and started across the lawn slowly, with the cut grass flying in a fragrant green spray around his ankles. Michael watched him for a moment, the bent humble back, the surprisingly powerful legs, bare up to the knee in torn shorts, the creased, sun-worn neck rising out of the colourless sweaty shirt.

Michael reflected. Perhaps a good citizen, in time of war, should report utterances like this to the proper authorities. Perhaps this aged Japanese gardener in his ragged clothes was really a full commander in the Japanese Navy, cleverly awaiting the arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro Harbour before showing his hand. Michael grinned. The movies, he thought; there was no escape for the modern mind from their onslaught.

He closed the french windows and went in and shaved. While he was shaving he tried to plan what he would do from now on. He had come to California with Thomas Cahoon, who was trying to cast a play. They were conferring about revisions with the author, too, Milton Sleeper, who could only work at night on the play, because he worked during the day for Warner Brothers as a scenario writer. "Art," Cahoon had said, acidly, "is in great shape in the twentieth century. Goethe worked all day on a play, and Chekhov and Ibsen, but Milton Sleeper can only give it his evenings."

Somehow, Michael thought, as he scraped at his face, when your country goes to war, you should be galvanized into some vast and furious action. You should pick up a gun, board a naval vessel, climb into a bomber for a five-thousand-mile flight, parachute into the enemy's capital…

But Cahoon needed him to put the play on. And, there was no escaping this fact, Michael needed the money. If he went into the Army now, his mother and father would probably starve, and there was Laura's alimony… Cahoon was giving him a percentage of the play this time, too. It was a small percentage, but if it was a hit it would mean that money would be coming in for a year or two. Perhaps the war would be short and the money would last it out. And if it was a tremendous smash, say, like Abie's Irish Rose or Tobacco Road, the war could stretch on indefinitely. It was a dreadful thing to think of, though – a war that ran as long as Tobacco Road.