The Young Lions (6 page)

"Now," she said, "isn't that better?"

The rest of the evening was confused in Michael's mind. Later on he didn't remember whether he had made a date with Louise for Tuesday afternoon or not, or whether Laura had told him that the fortune-teller had predicted they were going to be divorced or not. But he remembered seeing Arney appear at the other end of the room, smiling a little, whisky dribbling down from his mouth on his chin. Arney, with his head slightly to one side, as though his neck was stiff, came walking, quite steadily, through the room, ignoring the other guests who were standing there, and came up next to Michael. He stood there, wavering for a moment, in front of the tall french window, then threw open the window and started to step out. His coat caught on a lamp. He stopped to disentangle it, and started out again. Michael watched him and knew that he should rush over and grab him. He felt himself starting to move sluggishly, his arms and legs dream-like and light, although he knew that if he didn't move faster the playwright would be through the window and falling eleven storeys before he could reach him.

Michael heard the quick scuff of shoes behind him. A man leaped past him and took the playwright in his arms. The two figures teetered dangerously on the edge, with the reflection of the night lights of New York a heavy red neon glow on the clouds outside. The window was slammed shut by someone else and they were safe. Then Michael saw that it was Parrish, who had been half-way across the room at the bar, who had come past him to save the playwright.

Laura was in Michael's arms, hiding her eyes, weeping. He was annoyed at her for being so useless and so demanding at a moment like that, and he was glad he could be annoyed at her because it kept him from thinking about how he had failed, although he knew he wouldn't be able to avoid thinking about it later. He wanted to go home, but Laura said she was hungry, and somehow they were in a crowd of people and somebody had a car and everybody sat on everybody else's lap and he was relieved when they drew up to the big, garish restaurant on Madison Avenue and he could get out of the crowded car.

They sat down in a shrill, orange room with paintings of Indians for some reason all over the walls, and inexperienced waiters, hastily pressed into emergency service, stumbling erratically among the loud, still-celebrating diners. Michael felt drunk, his eyelids drooping with wooden insistence over his eyes. He didn't talk because he felt himself stuttering when he tried. He stared around him, his mouth curled in what he thought was lordly scorn for the world around him. Louise was at the table, he suddenly noticed, with her husband. And Wade, he noticed, sitting next to Louise, holding her hand. Michael's head began to clear and ache at the same time. He ordered a hamburger and a bottle of beer.

This is disgraceful, he thought heavily, disgraceful. Ex-girls, ex-beaux, ex-nothing. Was it Tuesday afternoon he was to meet Louise, or Wednesday? And what afternoon was Wade to meet Laura? A nest of snakes hibernating for the winter, Arney had said. He was a silly, broken man, Arney, but he wasn't wrong there. There was no honour to this life, no form… Martinis, beer, brandy, Scotch, have another, and everything disappeared in a blur of alcohol – decency, fidelity, courage, decision. Parrish had to be the one to jump across the room. Automatically. Danger, therefore jump. Michael had been right there, next to the window, and he had hardly moved, a small indecisive shuffling – no more. There he'd stood, too fat, too much liquor, too many attachments, a wife who was practically a stranger, darting in from Hollywood for a week at a time, full of that talk, doing God knows what with how many other men on those balmy, orange-scented, California evenings, while he frittered away the years of his youth, drifting with the easy tide of the theatre, making a little money, being content, never making the bold move… He was thirty years old and this was 1938. Unless he wanted to be driven to the same window as Arney, he had better take hold.

He got up and mumbled, "Excuse me," and started through the crowded restaurant towards the men's room. Take hold, he said to himself, take hold. Divorce Laura, live a rigorous, ascetic life, live as he had when he was twenty, just ten years ago, when things were clear and honourable, and when you faced a new year, you weren't sick with yourself for the one just passed.

He went down the steps to the men's room. It would start right here. He'd soak his head with ice-cold water for ten minutes. The pale sweat would be washed off, the flush would die from his cheeks, his hair would be cool and in order on his head, he would look out across the new year with clearer eyes… He opened the door to the men's room, and went to the washbowls and looked at himself with loathing in the mirror, at the slack face, the conniving eyes, the weak, indecisive mouth. He remembered how he had looked at twenty. Tough, thin, alive, uncompromising… That face was still there, he felt, buried beneath the unpleasant face reflected in the mirror. He would quarry his old face out from the unsightly outcroppings of the years between.

He ducked his head and splashed the icy water on his eyelids and cheeks. He dried himself, his skin tingling pleasantly. Refreshed, he walked soberly up the steps to rejoin the others at the big table in the centre of the noisy room.

ON the western edge of America, in the sea-coast town of Santa Monica, among the flat, sprawling streets and the shredding palms, the old year was coming to an end in soft, grey fog, rolling in off the oily water, rolling in over the scalloped surf breaking on the wet beaches, rolling in over the hot-dog stands, closed for the winter, and the homes of the movie stars, and the muffled coast road that led to Mexico and Oregon.

The electric sign of the Sea View Hotel, from which at no time, even on the clearest days, could any body of water be observed, added its baleful, minor tone to the thin, sifting fog outside Noah's window. The light filtered into the darkened room and touched the damp plaster walls and the lithograph of Yosemite Falls above the bed. Splinters of red fell on Noah's father's sleeping face on the pillow, on the large, fierce nose, the curving, distended nostrils, the ridged, deep eye-sockets, on the high, imposing brow, the bushy white hair, courtly moustache and Vandyke beard, like a Kentucky colonel's in the movies, ludicrous and out of place here, on a dying Jew in the narrow, hired room.

Noah would have liked to read as he sat there, but he didn't want to wake his father by putting on the light. He tried to sleep, sitting in the single, hard-upholstered chair, but his father's heavy breathing, roaring and uneven, kept him awake. The doctor had told Noah that Jacob was dying, as had the woman his father had sent away on Christmas Eve, that widow, what was her name?… Morton – but Noah didn't believe them. His father had had Mrs Morton send him a telegram in Chicago, telling him to come at once. Noah had sold his overcoat and his typewriter and the old wardrobe trunk, to pay the bus fare. He had rushed out, sitting up all the way, and had arrived in Santa Monica light-headed and exhausted, just in time to be present for the big scene.

Jacob had brushed his hair and combed his beard, and had sat up in bed like Job arguing with God. He had kissed Mrs Morton, who was over fifty years old, and sent her from him, saying in his rolling, actorish voice, "I wish to die in the arms of my son. I wish to die among the Jews. Now we say goodbye."

That was the first time Noah had heard that Mrs Morton wasn't Jewish. She wept, and the whole scene was like something from the second act of a Yiddish play on Second Avenue in New York. But Jacob had been adamant. Mrs Morton had gone. Her married daughter had insisted on taking the weeping widow away to the family home in San Francisco. Noah was left alone with his father in the small room with the single bed on the side street a half-mile from the winter ocean.

The doctor came for a few moments every morning. Apart from him, Noah didn't see anyone. He didn't know anyone else in the town. His father insisted that he stay at his side day and night, and Noah slept on the floor near the window, on a lumpy mattress that the hotel manager had grudgingly given him.

Noah listened to the heavy, tragic breathing, filling the medicine-smelling air. For a moment he was sure his father was awake and purposely breathing that way, laboured and harsh, not because he had to, but because he felt that if a man lay dying, his every breath should announce that fact. Noah stared closely at his father's handsome, patriarchal head on the dark pillow next to the dimly glinting array of medicine bottles. Once more Noah couldn't help feeling annoyed at the soaring, bushy, untrimmed eyebrows, the wavy, theatrical, coarse mane of hair, which Noah was sure his father secretly bleached white, the spectacular white beard on the lean, ascetic jaws. Why, Noah thought, irritably, why does he insist on looking like a Hebrew King on an embassy to California? It would be different if he had lived that way… But with all the women he'd gone through in his long, riotous life, all the bankruptcies, all the money borrowed and never returned, all the creditors that stretched from Odessa to Honolulu, it was a sour joke on the world for his father to look like Moses coming down from Sinai with the stone tablets in his hands.

"Make haste," Jacob said, opening his eyes, "make haste, O God, to deliver me. Make haste to help me, O Lord."

That was another habit that had always infuriated Noah. Jacob knew the Bible by heart, both in Hebrew and English, although he was absolutely irreligious, and salted his speech with long, impressive quotations at all times.

"Deliver me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man." Jacob rolled his head, facing the wall, and closed his eyes once more. Noah got up from his chair and went over to the bed and pulled the blankets up closer around his father's throat. But there was no sign from Jacob that he noticed any of this. Noah stared down at him for a moment, listening to the heavy breathing. Then he turned and went to the window. He opened the window and sniffed at the dank, rolling mist, freighted with the heavy smell of the sea. A car sped dangerously down the street between the straggling palms, and there was the sound of a horn blown in celebration, lost in the mist.

What a place, Noah thought irrelevantly, what a place to celebrate New Year's Eve! He shivered a little in the influx of cold air, but he kept the window open. He had been working in a mail-order house in Chicago as a filing clerk, and, being honest with himself, the excuse to come to California, even if it was to watch his father die, had been a welcome one. The sunny coast, the warm beaches, he had thought, the orchards tossing their leaves in the sun, the pretty girls… He grinned sourly as he looked around him. It had rained for a week and his father was prolonging his death-scene interminably. Noah was down to his last seven dollars and he had found out that creditors had a lien on his father's photographic studio. Even under the best of circumstances, even if everything were sold at high prices, they could only hope to recover thirty cents on the dollar. Noah had gone down to the shabby little studio near the sea and had peered in through the locked, plate-glass door. His father had specialized in very artistic, very terrible retouched portraits of young women. A hundred heavy-lidded local beauties draped in black velvet, with startling high-lights and slumberous eyes, had peered back at him through the dusty, neglected glass. It was the sort of business his father had had again and again, from one end of the country to another, the sort of business that had driven Noah's mother to an early death, the sort of business that appears and disappears in down-at-heel buildings for a season, makes a ragged little flourish for a few months then vanishes, leaving behind it only some inconclusive, tattered books, a smattering of debts, a stock of ageing photographs and advertising signs that are finally burned in a back alley when the next tenant arrives.

In his day Jacob had also sold cemetery lots, contraceptive devices, real estate, sacramental wine, advertising space, second-hand furniture, bridal clothing, and had even once, improbably, set himself up in a ship chandler's store in Baltimore, Maryland. And at no one of these professions had he ever made a living. And in all of them, with his deft, rolling tongue, his archaic rhetoric, loaded with Biblical quotations, with his intense, handsome face and vital, broad-handed movements, he had always found women who made up for him the difference in what he secured by his own efforts from the economic battlefield around him and what it took to keep him alive. Noah was his only child, and Noah's life had been wandering and disordered. Often he had been deserted, often left for long periods with vague, distant relatives, or, lonely and persecuted, in shabby military schools.

"They are burning my brother Israel in the furnace of the heathen."

Noah sighed and closed the window. Jacob was lying rigid now, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide open. Noah put on the single light, which he had shaded with pink paper that was a little singed now in spots and added its small smell to the general sick-room atmosphere when the light was on.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Father?" Noah asked.

"I can see the flames," Jacob said. "I can smell the burning flesh. I can see my brother's bones crumbling in the fire. I deserted him and he is dying tonight among the foreigners."

Noah couldn't help being annoyed with his father. Jacob hadn't seen his brother for thirty-five years, had, in fact, left him in Russia to support their mother and father when Jacob had made his way to America. ›From everything that Noah had heard, Jacob had despised his brother, and they had parted enemies. But two years before, somehow, a letter from his brother had reached him from Hamburg, where Jacob's brother had gone in 1919. The letter had been desperate and pleading. Noah had to admit that Jacob had done everything he could – had written countless letters to the Immigration Bureau, had gone to Washington and haunted the corridors of the State Department buildings, an improbable, bearded, anachronistic, holy vision, half rabbi, half river-gambler, among the soft-spoken, impervious young men from Princeton and Harvard who shuffled the papers vaguely and disdainfully on their polished desks. But nothing had come of it, and after the single, wild cry for help, there had been the dreadful silence of official Germany, and Jacob had returned to his sun and his photographic studio and his plump, widowed Mrs Morton in Santa Monica and had said no more about it. But tonight, with the red-tinted fog sighing at the window, and the new year standing at the gate, and death, according to the doctor, a matter of hours, the deserted brother, caught in the welter of Europe, cried piercingly through the clouding brain.