The Young Lions (30 page)

"Everybody," said the chairman with dignity, "has to expect to make some sacrifices at a time like this."

"I'm not going to argue with you," said Michael. "I told you I'm going to enlist in two months."

"Why?" said a man down at the other end. He peered glitteringly through pince-nez glasses at Michael, as though ready to ferret out this last subterfuge.

Michael looked around him at the seven glowering faces. He grinned. "I don't know why," he said. "Do you?"

"That will be all, Mr Whitacre," the chairman said.

Michael got up and walked out of the room. He felt the eyes of all seven men on him, angry, resentful. They feel cheated, he realized suddenly, they would have much preferred to trap me into it. They were all prepared.

The people waiting in the outside room looked up at him, surprised, because he had come out so quickly. He grinned at them. He wanted to make a joke, but it would be too cruel to the taut, harried boys waiting so painfully.

"Good night, darling," he said to the ugly girl behind the desk. He couldn't resist that. She looked at him with the unbreakable superiority of the person who will not be called upon to die over the man who may.

Michael was still smiling as he started down the steps, but he felt depressed. The first day, he thought, I should have gone in the first day. I shouldn't've exposed myself to a scene like that. He felt soiled and suspect as he walked slowly through the mild late-winter night, among the strolling couples oblivious to the tattered, shabby war being fought between one soul and another, in their name, in the dirty loft over the Greek restaurant half a block away.

Two mornings later, when he went down for his mail, there was a card from his draft board. "As per your request," it read, "you will be reclassified as 1A on May 15." He laughed as he read it. They have salvaged victory out of the ruins of their campaign, he thought. But he felt relieved as he went upstairs again in the lift. There were no more decisions to be made.

NOAH opened his eyes in the soft dawn light and looked at his wife. She sleeps, he thought, as though she were keeping a secret. Hope, he thought, Hope, Hope. She must have been one of those grave little girls, walking through that white clapboard town, always looking as though she was hurrying to some private destination. She probably had little caches of things stuffed away in the odd corners of her room, too. Feathers, dried flowers, old fashion-plates from Harper's Bazaar, drawings of women with bustles, that sort of thing. You didn't know anything about little girls. Would be different if you had sisters. Your wife came to you out of a locked vault of experience. Might just as well have come from the mountains of Tibet or a French nunnery. While he was smoking cigarettes under the roof at Colonel Druids Military Academy for Boys, We Take the Boy and Return the Man, what was she doing, walking gravely past the churchyard with all the Plowmans tucked in under the old turf? If there was a plan in anything, she was preparing for him then, preparing for this moment of sleeping beside him in the dawn light. And he had been preparing for her. If there was a plan. Impossible to believe. If Roger hadn't somehow met her (how did he meet her?). If Roger hadn't half-ironically decided to have a party to find him a girl. If Roger had brought one of the dozen other girls he knew, they wouldn't be lying here together this morning. Accident, the only law of life. Roger. "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know." Caught in the Philippines, Bataan, if he had lived that long. And here they were in Roger's room, in Roger's bed, because it was more comfortable. Noah's old bed slanted to the right. It all started when he reached up for the copy of Yeats's The Heme's Egg and Other Plays on the Public Library shelf. If he had reached for another book, he wouldn't've bumped into Roger and he wouldn't have lived here and he wouldn't've met Hope and she probably would be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I love her, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the pit of madness. No plan to anything. No plan to loving or dying or fighting or anything. The equation: Man plus his intentions equals Accident. Impossible to believe. The plan must be there, but cleverly camouflaged, the way a good playwright disguises his plot. At the moment you die perhaps everything is clear to you, you say, oh, now I see, that's why that character was introduced in the first act.

What time was it? Six-fifteen. Another five minutes in bed. This was going to be a kind of holiday today. No nervous thunder of the riveters, no wind on the scaffolds, none of the hiss and flare of the welders in the shipyard in Passaic. He had to go to his draft board today, and once more to Governor's Island to be examined.

Six-twenty. Time to get up. The doctors were waiting on the green island, the ferry with the General's name, the X-ray technicians, the rubber stamp with Rejected on it. What did they do in older wars? Before X-ray. How many men fought at Shiloh with scars on their lungs, all unknowing? How many men came to Borodino with stomach ulcers? How many at Thermopylae who would be turned back by their draft boards today for curvature of the spine? How many 4Fs perished outside Troy? Time to get up.

Hope stirred beside him. She turned to him and put her arm across his chest. She came slowly out from the backstage of sleep and ran her hand lightly, in half-slumbering possession, down his ribs and his stomach.

"Bed," she murmured, still in the grip of the last dream, and he grinned at her and gathered her close to him.

"What time is it?" she whispered, her lips close to his ear. "Is it morning? Do you have to go?"

"It's morning," he said. "And I have to go. But," and he smiled as he said it, and pressed the familiar, slender body, "but I think the government can wait another fifteen minutes."

Hope was washing her hair when she heard the key in the lock. She had come home from work and seen that Noah hadn't returned yet from Governor's Island, and she had pottered around the house, without switching on a lamp, in the summer twilight, waiting for him to get back.

With her head bent over the basin, and the soapy water dripping on to her closed eyelids, she heard Noah come into the big room.

"Noah," she called, "I'm in here," and she wrapped a towel around her head and turned to him, naked except for that. His face was sober and controlled. He held her loosely, gently touching the base of her neck, still wet from the rinsing.

"It happened," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"The X-ray?"

"Didn't show anything, I guess." His voice was remote and calm.

"Did you tell them?" she asked. "About the last time?"

"No."

She wanted to ask why not, but she stopped herself, because in a confused, intuitive way, she knew.

"You didn't tell them that you had a defence job, either, did you?"

"No."

"I'll tell them," she said loudly. "I'll go down myself. A man with scars on his lungs can't be…"

"Sssh," he said. "Sssh."

"It's silly," she said, trying to talk reasonably, like a debater.

"What good will a sick man do in the Army? You'll only crack up. It'll just be another burden for them. They can't make you a soldier…"

"They can try." Noah smiled slowly. "They sure can try. The least I can do is give them a chance. Anyway," and he kissed her behind the ear, "anyway, they've already done it. I was sworn in at eight o'clock tonight."

She pulled back. "What're you doing here then?"

"Two weeks," he said. "They give you two weeks to settle your affairs."

"Will it do any good," Hope asked, "for me to argue with you?"

"No," he said very softly.

"Damn them!" Hope said. "Why don't they get things straight the first time? Why," she cried, addressing the draft boards and the Army doctors and the regiments in the field and the politicians in all the capitals of the world, addressing the war and the time and all the agony ahead of her, "why can't they behave like sensible human beings?"

"Sssh," Noah said. "We only have two weeks. Let's not waste them. Have you eaten yet?"

"No," she said. "I'm washing my hair."

He sat down on the edge of the tub, smiling wearily at her.

"Finish your hair," he said, "and we'll go out to dinner. There's a place I heard about on Second Avenue where they have the best steaks in the world. Three dollars apiece, but they're…"

She threw herself down at his knees and held him tightly.

"Oh, darling," she said, "oh, darling…"

He stroked her bare shoulder as though he were trying to memorize it. "For the next two weeks," he said, his voice almost not trembling, "we will go on a holiday. That's how we'll settle my affairs." He grinned at her. "We'll go up to Cape Cod and swim and we'll hire bicycles and we'll eat only three-dollar steaks at every meal. Please, please, darling, stop crying."

Hope stood up. She blinked twice. "All right," she said. "It's stopped. I won't cry again. It'll take me fifteen minutes to get ready. Can you wait?"

"Yes," he said. "But hurry. I'm starved."

She took the towel from her head and finished drying her hair. Noah sat on the edge of the bath and watched her. From time to time Hope got glimpses of his drawn, thin face in the mirror. She knew that she was going to remember the way his face looked then, lost and loving as he sat perched on the porcelain rim, in the cluttered, garishly lit room – remember for a long, long time.

They had their two weeks on Cape Cod. They stayed at an aggressively clean tourist house with an American flag on a pole on the lawn in front of it. They ate clam chowder and broiled lobster for dinner. They lay on the pale sand and swam in the dancing, cold water and went to the movies religiously at night, without commenting on the newsreels to each other, without saying anything about the charging, tremulous voices describing death and defeat and victory on the flickering screen. They hired bicycles and rode slowly along the seaside roads and laughed when a truckload of soldiers passed and whistled at Hope's pretty legs, and called to Noah, "Pretty soft, Bud. What's your draft number, Bud? We'll see you soon!"

Their noses peeled and their hair got sticky with salt, and their skins, when they went to bed at night, smelled ocean-fragrant and sunny in the immaculate sheets at the shingled cottage in which they lived. They hardly spoke to anyone else, and the two weeks seemed to stretch through the summer, through the year, through every summer they had ever known, and all time seemed to go in a gentle spiral on sandy roads, between scrub firs, in a gleam of summer light on brisk waves and under the stars of cool summer evenings stirred by a holiday wind that came off the Vineyard and off Nantucket and off a sunny ocean disturbed only by gulls and the sails of small boats and the plash of flying fish playing in the water.

Then the two weeks were up and they went back to the city. The people there seemed pallid and wilted, defeated by the summer, and they felt healthy and powerful in comparison.

The final morning, Hope made coffee for them at six o'clock. They sat opposite each other, sipping the hot, bitter liquid out of the huge cups that were their first joint domestic investment. Hope walked with Noah down the quiet, shining streets, still cool with the memory of night, to the drab unpainted shop that had been taken over by the draft board.

They kissed, thoughtfully, already remote from each other, and Noah went in to join the quiet group of boys and men who were gathered around the desk of the middle-aged man who was serving his country in its hour of need by waking early twice a month to give the last civilian instructions and the tickets for the free subway ride to the groups of men departing from the draft board for the war.

Noah went out in the shuffling, self-conscious line, with fifty others, and walked with them the three blocks to the subway station. The people in the street, going about their morning business, on their way to their shops and offices, on their way to the day's marketing and the day's cooking and moneymaking, looked at them with curiosity and a little awe, as the natives of a town might look at a group of pilgrims from another country who happened to pass through their streets, on their journey to an obscure and fascinating religious festival. Noah saw Hope across the street from the entrance to the subway station. She was standing in front of a florist's shop. The florist was an old man slowly putting out pots of geraniums and large blue vases of gladioli in the window behind her. She had on a blue dress dotted with white flowers. The morning wind brushed it softly against her body in front of the blossoms shining through the glass behind her. Because of the sun reflecting from the glass, Noah could not tell what her face was like. He started to cross the street to her, but the leader that the man at the draft board had assigned to the group called anxiously, "Please, boys, stick together, please," and Noah thought, what could I tell her, what could she tell me? He waved to her. She waved back, a single, lifting gesture of the bare brown arm. Noah could see she wasn't crying.

What do you know, he said to himself, she isn't crying. And he went down into the subway, between a boy named Tempesta and a thirty-five-year-old Spaniard whose name was Nuncio Aguilar.

THE red-headed woman he hadn't kissed four years ago leaned over, smiling, in Michael's last dream and kissed him. He awoke, warmly remembering the dream and the red-headed woman.

The morning sun angled past the sides of the closed Venetian blinds, framing the windows in a golden dust. Michael stretched.

Outside the room he heard the murmur of the seven million people walking through the streets and corridors of the city. Michael got up. He padded over on the carpeted floor to the window and pulled up the blinds.