The Young Lions Part 13

Silence.

"Take her home?"

"Yes."

Silence in the dark room.

"We went out to get some sandwiches," Roger said. "You must have missed us."

"Yes."

Silence again.

"Roger ..."

"Yes?"

"I feel I have to explain. I didn't mean to ... Honest. I started out by myself and then ... I don't quite remember ... Roger, are you awake?"

"Yes."

"Roger, she told me something ..."

"What?"

"She told me she wasn't your girl."

"Did she?"

"She said she wasn't anybody's girl. But if she is your girl. Or if you want her to be your girl ... I ... I'll never see her again. I swear, Roger. Are you awake?"

"Yes. She's not my girl. I won't deny, from time to time the thought's crossed my mind, but who the h.e.l.l could make that trip to Brooklyn three times a week?"

Noah wiped the sweat off his forehead in the dark. "Roger," he said.

"Yes."

"I love you."

"Go the h.e.l.l to sleep." Then the chuckle across the shared dark room. Then silence again.

In the next two months Noah and Hope wrote each other forty-two letters. They worked near each other and met every day for lunch and almost every night for dinner, and they slipped away from their jobs on sunny afternoons to walk along the docks and watch the ships pa.s.sing in and out of the harbor. Noah made the long, shuttling trip back and forth to Brooklyn thirty-seven times in the two months, but their real life was carried through the United States mails.

Sitting next to her, in no matter how dark and private a place, he could only manage to say, "You're so pretty," or "I love the way you smile," or "Will you go to the movies with me on Sunday night?" But with the heady freedom of blank paper, and through the impersonal agency of the letter-carrier, he could write, "Your beauty is with me day and night. When I look out in the morning at the sky, it is clearer because I know it is covering you, too; when I look up the river at the bridge, I believe it is a stronger bridge because you have once walked across it with me; when I look at my own face in the mirror, it seems to me it is a better face, because you have kissed it the night before."

And Hope, who had a dry, New England severity in her makeup that prevented her from offering any but the most guarded and reticent expressions of love in person, would write ..."You have just left the house and I think of you walking down the empty street and waiting in the spring darkness for the trolley car, and riding in the train to your home. I will stay up with you tonight while you make your journey through the city. Darling, as you travel, I sit here in the sleeping house, with one lamp on, and think of all the things I believe about you. I believe that you are good and strong and just, and I believe that I love you. I believe that your eyes are beautiful and your mouth sad and your hands supple and lovely ..."

And then, when they would meet, they would stare at each other, the glory of the written word trembling between them, and say, "I got two tickets for a show. If you're not doing anything tonight, want to go?"

Then, late at night, light-headed with the dazzle of the theatre, and love for each other, and lack of sleep, standing, embraced in the cold vestibule of Hope's house, not being able to go in, because her uncle had a dreadful habit of sitting up in the living room till all hours of the morning reading the Bible, they would hold each other desperately, kissing until their lips were numb, the life of their letters and their real life together fusing for the moment in a sorrowing burst of pa.s.sion.

They did not go to bed with each other. First of all, there seemed to be no place in the whole brawling city, with all its ten million rooms, that they could call their own and go to in dignity and honor. Then, Hope had a stubborn religious streak, and every time they veered dangerously close to consummation, she pulled back, alarmed. "Some time, some time," she would whisper. "Not now ..."

"You will just explode," Roger told him, grinning, "and blow away. It's unnatural. What's the matter with the girl? Doesn't she know she's the postwar generation?"

"Cut it out, Roger," Noah said sheepishly. He was sitting at the desk in their room, writing Hope a letter, and Roger was lying flat on his back on the floor, because the spring of the sofa had been broken five months ago and the sofa was very uncomfortable for a tall man.

"Brooklyn," Roger said. "That dark, mysterious land." Since he was on the floor anyway, he started doing some exercises for the abdomen, bringing his feet above his head and then letting them down slowly three times. "Enough," he said, "I feel healthier already. s.e.x," he said, "is like swimming. You either go in all the way or you stay out. If you just hang around the edge, letting the spray hit you, you get cold and nervous. One more month with that girl and you'll have to go to a psychoa.n.a.lyst. Write her that and tell her I said so."

"Sure thing," said Noah. "I'm putting it down right now."

"If you're not careful," Roger said, "you're going to find yourself a married man."

Noah stopped typing. He had bought a typewriter on time payments when he found himself writing so many letters.

"No danger," he said. "I'm not going to get married." But the truth was he had thought about it again and again, and had even, in his letters, written tentatively about it to Hope.

"Maybe it wouldn't be so bad at that," Roger said. "She's a fine girl and it'd keep you out of the draft."

They had avoided thinking about the draft. Luckily, Noah's number was among the highest. The Army hung somewhere in the future, like a dark, distant cloud in the sky.

"No," said Roger, judiciously, from the floor, "I have only two things against the girl. One, she keeps you from getting any sleep. Two, you know what. Otherwise, she's done you a world of good."

Noah glanced at his friend gratefully.

"Still," Roger said, "she ought to go to bed with you."

"Shut up."

"Tell you what. I'll go away this week-end and you can have the place." Roger sat up. "Nothing could be fairer than that."

"Thanks," Noah said. "If the occasion arises, I'll take your offer."

"Maybe," Roger said, "I'd better talk to her. In the role of best friend, concerned for his comrade's safety. 'My dear young lady, you may not realize it, but our Noah is on the verge of leaping out the window.' Give me a dime, I'll call her this minute."

"I'll manage it myself," Noah said, without conviction.

"How about this Sunday?" Roger asked. "Lovely month of June, etcetera, the full moon of summer, etcetera ..."

"This Sunday is out," said Noah. "We're going to a wedding."

"Whose?" Roger asked. "Yours?"

Noah laughed falsely. "Some friend of hers in Brooklyn."

"You ought to get a wholesale rate," Roger said, "from the Transit System." He lay back. "I have spoken. I now hold my peace."

He remained quiet for a moment while Noah typed.

"One month," he said. "Then the psychoa.n.a.lyst's couch. Mark my words."

Noah laughed and stood up. "I give up," he said. "Let's go down and I'll buy you a beer."

Roger sprang to his feet "My good friend," he said, "the virgin Noah."

They laughed and went out of the house, into the soft, calm summer evening, toward the frightful saloon on Columbus Avenue that they frequented.

The wedding on Sunday was held in a large house in Flat-bush, a house with a garden and a small lawn, leading down to a tree shaded street. The bride was pretty and the minister was quick and there was champagne.

It was warm and sunny and everyone seemed to be smiling with the tender, unashamed sensuality of wedding guests. In corners of the large house, after the ceremony, the younger guests were pairing off in secret conversations. Hope had a new yellow dress. She had been out in the sun during the week and her skin was tanned. Noah kept watching her proudly and a little anxiously as she moved about, her hair dark and tumbled in a new coiffure, above the soft golden flash of her dress. Noah stood off to one side, sipping the champagne, a little shy, talking quietly again and again to the friendly guests, watching Hope, something inside his head saying, her hair, her lips, her legs, in a kind of loving shorthand.

He kissed the bride and there was a jumbled confusion of white satin and lace and lipstick-taste and perfume and orange blossom. He looked past the bright, moist eyes and the parted lips of the bride to Hope, standing watching him across the room, and the shorthand within him noted her throat, her waist. Hope came over and he said, "There's something I've wanted to do," and he put out his hands to her waist, slender in the tight bodice of her new dress. He felt the narrow, girlish flesh and the intricate small motion of the hipbones. Hope seemed to understand. She leaned over gently and kissed him. He didn't mind, although several people were watching, because at a wedding everybody seemed licensed to kiss everyone else. Besides he had never before drunk champagne on a warm summer's afternoon.

They watched the bride and the groom go off in a car with streamers flying from it, the rice scattered around, the mother weeping softly at the doorstep, the groom grinning, red and self-conscious at the rear window. Noah looked at Hope and she looked at him and he knew they were thinking about the same thing.

"Why," he whispered, "don't we ..."

"Sssh." She put her hand over his lips. "You've drunk too much champagne."

They made their good-byes and started off under the tall trees, between the lawns on which water sprinklers were whirling, the flashing fountains of water, brilliant and rainbow-like in the sun, making the green smell of the lawns rise into the waning afternoon. They walked slowly, hand in hand.

"Where are they going?" Noah asked.

"California," Hope said. "For a month. Monterey. He has a cousin there with a house."

They walked side by side among the fountains of Flatbush, thinking of the beaches of Monterey on the Pacific Ocean, thinking of the pale Mexican house's in the southern light, thinking of the two young people getting into their compartment on the train at Grand Central and locking the door behind them.

"Oh, G.o.d," Noah said. Then he grinned sourly. "I pity them," he said.

"What?"

"On a night like this. The first time. One of the hottest nights of the year."

Hope pulled her hand away. "You're impossible," she said sharply. "What a mean, vulgar thing to say ..."

"Hope ..." he protested. "It was just a little joke."

"I hate that att.i.tude," Hope said loudly. "Everything's funny!" With surprise, he saw that she was crying.

"Please, darling." He put his arms around her, although two small boys and a large collie dog were watching him interestedly from one of the lawns.

She shrugged away. "Keep your hands off me," she said. She started swiftly away.

"Please." He followed her anxiously. "Please, let me talk to you."

"Write me a letter," she said, through her tears. "You seem to save all your romance for the typewriter."

He caught up with her and walked in troubled silence at her side. He was baffled and lost, adrift on the irrational, endless female sea, and he did not try to save himself, but merely let himself drift with the wind and tide, hoping they would not wreck him.

But Hope would not relent, and all the long way home on the trolley car she sat stubborn and silent, her mouth set in bitter rejection. Oh, G.o.d, Noah thought, peering at her timidly as the car rattled on. Oh, G.o.d, she is going to quit me.

But she let him follow her into the house when she opened the two doors with her key.

The house was empty. Hope's aunt and uncle had taken their two small children on a three-day holiday to the country, and an almost exotic air of peace hung over the dark rooms.

"You hungry?" Hope asked dourly. She was standing in the middle of the living room and Noah had thought he would kiss her until he saw the expression on her face.

"I think I'd better go home," he said.

"You might as well eat," she. said. "I left some stuff in the icebox for supper."

He followed her meekly into the kitchen and helped as un.o.btrusively as possible. She got out some cold chicken and made a salad and poured a pitcherful of milk. She put everything on a tray and said, curtly, "Outside," like a Sergeant commanding a platoon.

He took the tray out to the back garden, a twilit oblong now, that was bounded on two sides by a high board fence, and on the far end by the blank brick wall of a garage that had Virginia creeper growing all over it. There was a graceful acacia tree growing out of the garden, Hope's uncle had a small rock garden at one end and beds of common flowers, and there was a wood table with shielded candles and a long, sofa-like swing with a canopy. In the hazy blue light of evening, Brooklyn vanished like mist and rumor, and they were in a walled garden in England or France or the mountains of India.

Hope lit the candles and they sat gravely across from each other, eating hungrily. They hardly spoke while they ate, just polite requests for the salt and the milk pitcher. They folded their napkins and stood up on opposite sides of the table.

"We don't need the candles," Hope said. "Will you please blow out the one on your side?"

"Certainly," Noah said. He leaned over the small gla.s.s chimney that guarded the candle and Hope bent over the one on her side of the table. Their heads touched as they blew, together, and in the sudden darkness, Hope said, "Forgive me. I am the meanest female in the whole world."

Then it was all right. They sat side by side, in the swing, looking up at the darkening sky with the summer stars beginning to bloom above them one by one through, the single tree. Far off the trolley, far off the trucks, far off the aunt, the uncle and the two children of the house, far off the newsboys crying beyond the garage, far off the world as they sat there in the walled garden in the evening.

Hope said, "No, we shouldn't" and "I'm afraid, afraid ..." and "Darling, darling" and Noah was shy and triumphant and dazzled and humble and after it was over they lay there crushed and subdued by the wilderness of feeling through which they had blundered, and Noah was afraid that now that it was done she would hate him for it, and every moment of her silence seemed more and more foreboding and then she said, "See ..." and she chuckled. "It wasn't too hot. Not too hot at all."

Much later, when it was time for him to go home, they went inside. They blinked in the light, and didn't quite look at each other. Noah bent over to turn the radio on because it gave him something to do.

They were playing Tchaikovsky on the radio, the piano concerto, and the music sounded rich and mournful, as though it had been especially composed and played for them, two people barely out of childhood, who had just loved each other for the first time. Hope came over and kissed the back of his neck as he stood above the radio. He turned to kiss her, when the music stopped, and a matter-of-fact voice said, "Special Bulletin from the a.s.sociated Press. The German advance is continuing along the Russian border at all points. Many new armored divisions have struck on a line extending from Finland to the Black Sea."

"What?" Hope said.

"The Germans," Noah said, thinking how often you say that word, how well known they've made themselves. "They've gone into Russia. That must have been what the newsboys were yelling ..."

"Turn it off." Hope reached over and turned the radio off herself. "Tonight."

He held her, feeling her heart beating with sudden fierceness against him. All this afternoon, he thought, while we were at the wedding and walking down that street, and all this evening, in the garden, it was happening, the guns going, the men dying. From Finland to the Black Sea. His mind made no comment on it. It merely recorded the thought, like a poster on the side of the road which you read automatically as you speed by in a car.

They sat down on the worn couch in the quiet room. Outside it was very dark and the newsboys crying on the distant streets were remote and inconsequential. "What's the day?" Hope asked.

"Sunday." He smiled. "The day of rest."

"I don't mean that," she said. "I know that. The date."

"June," he said, "the twenty-second of June."

"June twenty-second," the girl whispered. "I'm going to remember that date. The first time you made love to me."

Roger was still up when Noah got home. Standing outside the doorway, in the dark house, trying to compose his face so that it would show nothing of what had gone on that night, Noah heard the piano being softly played within. It was a sad jazz tune, hesitant and blue, and Roger was improvising on it so that it was difficult to recognize the melody. Noah listened for two or three minutes in the little hallway before he opened the door and went in. Roger waved to him with one hand, without looking around, and continued playing. There was only one lamp lit, in the corner, and the room looked large and mysterious as Noah sank slowly into the battered leather chair near the window. Outside, the city was sleeping along the dark streets. The curtains moved at the open window in the soft wind. Noah closed his eyes, listening to the running, somber chords. He had a strange impression that he could feel every bone and muscle and pore of his body, alive and weary, in trembling balance under his clothes, reacting to the music.