The Young Lions (32 page)

On foot, feeling a little bereft, he walked slowly across town. The day stretched ahead of him with sudden emptiness. He went into a drug-store and called Peggy.

"After all," he said, when he heard her voice, "there's no law that says I can't see you twice in the same day."

Peggy chuckled. "I get hungry about one o'clock," she said.

"I'll buy you lunch, if that's what you want"

"That's what I want." Then, more slowly, "I'm glad you called. I have something very serious to say to you."

"All right," Michael said. "I feel pretty serious today. One o'clock."

He hung up, smiling. He walked out into the sunlight and headed downtown, towards his lawyer's office, thinking about Peggy. He knew what the serious talk she wanted to have at lunch would be about. They had known each other for about two years, rich, warm years, a little desperate because day by day the war came closer and closer. Marriage in this bloody year was a cloudy and heartbreaking business. Marry and die, graves and widows; the husband-soldier carrying his wife's photograph in his pack like an extra hundred pounds of lead; the single man mourning furiously in the screaming jungle night for the forsworn moment, the honourable ceremony; the blinded veteran listening for his wife's chained footstep…

He felt silly sitting in the panelled room across the desk from his lawyer, reading through his will. Outside the window, high up in the tall building, the city shone in the everyday sunlight, the brick towers rearing into the soft blue haze, the streams of smoke from the boats on the river, the same city, looking exactly as it had always looked, and here he was, with his glasses on, reading, "… one-third of the aforementioned estate to my former wife, Miss Laura Roberts. In the event of her marriage, this bequest is voided and the amount reserved in her interest will be joined to the residual amount left in the name of the executor and divided in this manner…"

He felt so healthy and whole and the language was so portentous and ugly. He looked across at Piper, his lawyer. Piper was growing bald and had a pudgy, pale complexion. Piper was signing a batch of papers, his pudgy mouth pursed, happily making money, happily confident that with his three children and his recurrent arthritis he was never going to war. Michael regretted that he had not written out the will himself, in his own hand, in his own language. It was somehow shameful to be represented to the future in the dry and money-sly words of a bald lawyer who would never hear a gun fired anywhere. A will should be a short, eloquent, personal document that reflected the life of the man who signed it and whose last possessions and last wishes were being memorialized in it. "To my mother for the love I bear her, and for the agony she has endured and will later endure in my name and the name of my brothers…

"To my ex-wife, whom I humbly forgive and who will, I hope, forgive me in the same spirit of remembrance of our good days together…

"To my father, who has lived a hard and tragic life, and who has behaved so bravely in his daily war, and whom, I hope, I shall see once more before he dies…"

But Piper had covered eleven typewritten pages, full of whereases, and in the events of, and now if Michael died, he would be known to the future as a long list of many-syllabled, modifying clauses, and cautious businessman's devices.

Perhaps later, Michael thought, if I really think I am going to be killed, I shall write another one, better than this. He signed the four copies.

Piper pressed the buzzer on his desk and two secretaries came in. One was a notary and carried her seal with her. She stamped the papers methodically, and they both signed as witnesses. Again Michael had the reeling it was all wrong, that this should be done by good friends who had known him a long time and who would feel bereaved if he died.

Michael looked at the date on the calendar. The thirteenth. He was not a superstitious man, but perhaps this was carrying it too far.

The secretaries went out, and Piper stood up. They shook hands, and Piper said, "I will keep an eye on things and I will mail you a monthly report on what you have earned and what I have spent."

Sleeper's play, in which Cahoon had given him a five per cent interest, was doing very well, and it would undoubtedly sell to the movies, and there would be money coming in from it for two years. "I will be the richest private," Michael said, "in the American Army."

"I still think," Piper said, "that you ought to let me invest it for you."

"No, thank you," said Michael. He had gone over that again and again with Piper, and Piper still couldn't understand. Piper had some very good steel stocks himself and wanted Michael to buy some, too. But Michael had a stubborn, although vague and slightly shamefaced, opposition to making money out of money, of profiting by the labour of other men. He had tried once to explain it to Piper, but the lawyer was too sensible for talk like that, and now Michael merely smiled and shook his head. Piper put out his hand. "Good luck," he said. "I'm sure the war will be over very soon."

"Of course," said Michael. "Thanks."

He left quickly, glad to get out of the lawyer's office. He always felt trapped and restless when talking to lawyers or doing any business with them, and the feeling was even worse today.

He rang for the lift. It was full of secretaries on the way to lunch, and there was a smell of powder, and the eager, released bubble of voices. As the lift swooped down the forty storeys, he wondered, again, how these young, bright, lively people could endure being locked in among the typewriters, the books, the Pipers, the notaries' seals and the legal language all their lives. As he walked north along Fifth Avenue, towards the restaurant where he was to meet Peggy, he felt relieved. Now he was through with all his official business. For this afternoon, and all the night, until six-thirty the next morning when he had to report to his draft board, life was free of all claims on him. The civil authorities had relinquished him and the military authorities had not yet taken him up. It was one o'clock now. Seventeen and a half hours, unanchored, between one life and the next.

He felt lightfooted and free and he looked fondly about him at the sunny wide street and the hurrying people, like a plantation owner with a good breakfast under his belt strolling over the wide lawns of his estate and looking out over the stretching rich acres of his property. Fifth Avenue was his lawn, the city his estate, the shop windows were his granaries, the Park his greenhouse, the theatres his workshop, all well looked after, busy, in their proper order…

He turned down the two steps to the entrance of the little French restaurant. Through the window he could see Peggy already sitting at the bar.

The restaurant was crowded and they sat at the bar next to a slightly drunken sailor with bright red hair. Always, when he met Peggy like this, Michael spent the first two or three minutes silently looking at her, enjoying the quiet eagerness of her face, with its broad brow and arched eyes, admiring the simple, straight way she did her hair and the pleasant way she wore her clothes. All the best things about the city seemed somehow to have an echo and reflection in the tall, straight, dependable girl… And now, when Michael thought about the city, it was inextricably mixed in his mind with the streets he had walked with her, the houses they had entered, the plays they had seen together, the galleries they had gone to, the bars they had sat at late in the winter afternoons. Looking at her, her cheeks flushed with her walk, her eyes bright with pleasure at seeing him, her long competent hands searching out to touch his sleeve, it was impossible to believe that that eagerness or pleasure would ever wane, that there ever would be a time he would return here and not find her, unchanged, unchanging…

He looked at her and all the sad, grotesque thoughts that had dogged him uptown from his lawyer's office left him. He smiled gravely at her and touched her hand and slid on to the stool beside her.

"What are you doing this afternoon?" he said.

"Waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"Waiting to be asked."

"All right," Michael said. "You're asked. An old-fashioned," he said to the bartender. He turned back to Peggy. "Man I know," he said, "hasn't a thing to do until six-thirty tomorrow morning."

"What will I tell the people at my office?"

"Tell them," he said gravely, "you are involved in a troop movement."

"I don't know," Peggy said. "My boss is against the war."

"Tell him the troops are against the war, too."

"Maybe I won't tell him anything," said Peggy.

"I will call him," Michael said, "and tell him that when you were last seen you were floating towards Washington Square in a bourbon old-fashioned."

"He doesn't drink."

"Your boss," said Michael, "is a dangerous alien."

They clicked glasses gently. Then Michael noticed that the red-headed sailor was leaning against him, peering at Peggy.

"Exactly," said the sailor.

"If you please," Michael said, feeling free to speak harshly to men in uniform now, "this lady and I are having a private party."

"Exactly," said the sailor. He patted Michael's shoulder and Michael remembered the hungry sergeant staring at Laura at lunch-time in Hollywood the day after the beginning of the war.

"Exactly," the sailor repeated. "I admire you. You have the right idea. Don't kiss the girls in the town square and go off to fight the war. Stay home and lay them. Exactly."

"Now, see here," said Michael.

"Excuse me," said the sailor. He put some money down on the bar and put on his cap, very straight and white on top of his red hair. "It just slipped out. Exactly. I am on my way to Erie, Pennsylvania." He walked out of the bar, very erect.

Michael watched him walk out. He couldn't help smiling, and when he turned back to Peggy he was still smiling. "The Armed Services," he began, "makes confidants of every…" Then he saw she was crying. She sat straight on the high stool in her pretty brown dress and the tears were welling slowly and gravely down her cheeks. She didn't put up her hands to touch them or wipe them off.

"Peggy," Michael said quietly, gratefully noticing that the bartender was ostentatiously working with his head ducked at the other end of the bar. Probably, Michael thought, as he put out his hand to touch Peggy, bartenders get used to seeing a great many tears these days and develop a technique.

"I'm sorry," Peggy said. "I started to laugh but this is the way it came out."

Then the head-waiter came over in a little Italian flurry, and said, "Your table now, Mr Whitacre."

Michael carried the drinks and followed Peggy and the waiter to a table against the wall. By the time they sat down Peggy had stopped crying, but all the eagerness was gone out of her face. Michael had never seen her face looking like that.

They ate the first part of their meal in silence. Michael waited for Peggy to recover. This was not like her at all. He had never seen her cry before. He had always thought of her as a girl who faced whatever happened to her with quiet stoicism. She had never complained about anything or fallen into the irrational emotional fevers he had more or less come to expect from the female sex, and he had developed no technique for soothing her or rescuing her from depression. He looked at her from time to time as they ate, but her face was bent over her food.

"I'm sorry," she said, finally, as they were drinking their coffee, and her voice was surprisingly harsh. "I'm sorry for the way I behaved. I know I should be gay and offhand and kiss the brave young soldier off. 'Go get your head shot off, darling, I'll be waiting with a martini in my hand.'"

"Peggy," Michael said, "shut up."

"Wear my glove on your arm," Peggy said, "as you do KP."

"What's the matter, Peggy?" Michael asked foolishly, because he knew what the matter was.

"It's just that I'm so fond of wars," said Peggy flatly. "Crazy about wars." She laughed. "It would be awful if people were having a war and someone I knew wasn't being shot in it."

Michael sighed. He felt weary now, and helpless, but he couldn't help realizing that he wouldn't have liked it if Peggy was one of those patriotic women who jumped happily into the idea of the war, as into the arrangement for a wedding.

"What do you want, Peggy?" he said, thinking of the Army waiting implacably for him at six-thirty the next morning, thinking of the other armies on both sides of the world waiting to kill him. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing," said Peggy. "You've given me two precious years of your time. What more could a girl want? Now go off and let them blow you up. I'll hang a gold star outside the ladies' room of the Stork Club."

The waiter was standing over them. "Anything else?" he asked, smiling with an Italian fondness for prosperous lovers who ate expensive lunches.

"Brandy for me," said Michael. "Peggy?"

"Nothing thanks," Peggy said. "I'm perfectly happy."

The waiter backed off. If he hadn't caught the boat at Naples, in 1920, Michael thought, he'd probably be in Libya today, rather than on 56th Street.

"Do you want to know what I want to do this afternoon?" Peggy asked harshly.

"Yes."

"I want to go some place and get married." She stared across the small, wine-stained table at him, angry and challenging. The girl at the next table, a full blonde in a red dress, was saying to the beaming white-haired man she was lunching with, "You must introduce me to your wife some day, Mr Cawpowder. I'm sure she's absolutely charming."

"Did you hear me?" Peggy demanded.

"I heard you."

The waiter came over to the table and put the small glass down. "Only three more bottles left," he said. "It is impossible to get any brandy these days."

Michael glanced up at the waiter. Unreasonably, he disliked the dark, friendly, stupid face. "I'll bet," he said, "they have no trouble getting it in Rome."