The Lonely

by Paul Gallico

  Jerry didn’t reply. He was feeling cornered, but he did not attribute it so much to what his father was saying, because they were merely echoes of his own thoughts and struggles. He had never really brought them to the surface, but they had been there. He hadn’t looked very far beyond his love for Patches and his desperate need of her, because he hadn’t wanted to do so. The song of their being together was still too loud in his heart for him to hear the discords.

  But he heard them plainly enough now, because his father was speaking, not with emotion, but reasonably. And yet he had also said: “It’s your own life . . .”

  It was not pity for himself he was experiencing, but a kind of despairing rebellion against the forces that had been set in motion against him, forces for which he himself had been partly responsible, and others that had inexorably swept him out of his youth, his life, his home, and his future.

  He thought of a phrase spoken by Major Harrison at the bar of the officers’ club at Gedsborough Airbase in what now seemed like the long ago—“Hell, the whole world’s upside down, isn’t it?” Jerry hadn’t asked to be turned upside down, to be spilled out upon a foreign shore, to fly through the icy stratosphere to drop death and destruction on to the earth below. What could a guy do if he was left suspended head down amidst people who still walked right side up?

  Patches was not a dream. She had happened to him. Henceforth, though they should never see each other again, his life would never be complete without her, he would never be at peace, never again be himself.

  Harman Wright interrupted his thoughts: “Jerry . . .”

  “Yes, Dad . . .”

  “Do you mind if I tell you a little story? It’s about the last war, when I was in France . . .”

  Jerry looked up, wondering what was coming.

  Harman Wright looked about him with a half-humorous air, eyeing the closed door to the study before speaking, and even dropping his voice slightly. “God forbid that your mother ever should hear of this! It was in Paris after the armistice. I was engaged to your mother at the time, though of course she was back in St. Louis . . .”

  Jerry listened with the sudden, queer consciousness that he was feeling embarrassed. His father continued: “There was a little French girl. Her name was Adrienne. She was pretty as a picture. You know those French girls. I met her in a restaurant on the Bois de Boulogne, and we sort of took to one another. She was really beautiful. I guess you might say she was a stunner.

  “Well, to make a long story short, we went away together. We went down to a place called Mentone on the Riviera, and stayed there a week, holed up in a hotel. It was really a wonderful experience for a kid like me who’d never been around much. Did you say something?”

  Jerry shook his head. His mind was playing him a curious trick and making him see a picture of the hotel, his father in his World War I uniform, and Adrienne, who looked like the girl on a postcard one of the fellows had brought back with him from France. He realized that he was feeling a little sick at the pit of his stomach . . .

  His father continued: “I was pretty stuck on Adrienne, in fact I guess I was in love with her. We even talked about getting married. When I left for the States I half promised to come back for her, and I guess I meant it at the time.”

  Harman shook the ashes from the stub of his cigar and leaned forward a little in his chair. “Well, Jerry, here we all are. I’ve never regretted it—never for a moment. I did a lot of thinking after I came home and saw your mother again. That little French girl wasn’t easy to forget. She had a lot of ways about her. I married your mother and settled down. I wouldn’t have had it any other way!”

  Reston knocked on the door and said: “Dinner is served, sir. And ah, Mrs. Wright said she was not feeling well enough to come down . . .”

  Jerry did not feel like eating either. He wished he could find a hole and crawl away into it. Harman said: “Very well, Reston, we will be there in just a moment,” and when the butler had closed the door, he concluded: “I’ve loved your mother dearly, and I always will. We’ve had a wonderful life together, and I wouldn’t exchange it for any other. We belong together. This is our kind of world, and we understand one another, and our ways and the things we have in common mean a great deal to us. That’s all, Jerry . . .”

  They went down and ate dinner by candlelight in the walnut-panelled dining-room, and it was the way it had always been—the creamy linen, the soft sheen of old silver, the gloss of the old wood reflecting the tapers, the sigh of the swinging door, and the quiet footfalls of Reston.

  Jerry toyed with his food and tried to answer politely his father’s enquiries about the war, the life he led, his missions, his decorations, his ship, and his crew. At any other time he would have spilled over, for part of his long-cherished homecoming dream was the telling of tales and the bragging about his gang and his airplane. But he was deeply hurt and bitterly disillusioned with his father because of what he had told him, the story of the little French girl.

  He had trusted his father, had exposed his innermost feelings to him because he had believed somehow that the older man had understood him and what he felt about Patches. And all that had happened was that his father had managed to dirty it up. To confide in him an escapade of his own youth that was supposed to parallel what had happened between Patches and himself. A pick-up in a restaurant and a week in a hotel. “In Paris after the armistice . . . You know those French girls . . .” My God, it was like one of those stories you heard in a smoking-car, or when the gang was gathering around after a mission was scrubbed or after chow and cutting loose on Topic A!

  He felt more lonely now and cut off than he ever had before, and the ashes of disappointment in his father were bitter in his mouth. He knew now that he could never make him understand that Patches was more than a girl he had grown to love; she was a brother in arms who wore the uniform of her country and had buried her dead, and that too made all the difference in the world. She belonged; she was as much a fighter, valiant and unconquerable, as any of them.

  He had heard of the gulf between those at home and the men who had been overseas and in combat. Now he was facing his father and realized that not even the generation who had fought the last war knew about this one, what it was like and what it did to people, how you got to feel when you lived in a country that had been fighting with its back to the wall for four years, where streets and homes were in the front lines and never a day went by but somebody died from bombs, or shells, or fire, or bullets from the air.

  Maybe they were Enghsh and had queer ways that weren’t like your ways, but they were soldiers, every one of them; they wouldn’t quit; they had guts, and you loved them like brothers and sisters.

  “You know those French girls . . . I guess you might say she was a stunner . . . It was really a wonderful experience for a kid like me who’d never been around much . . .” His father’s words still echoed. And brave, tender, gallant Patches, with her soft smile and warm understanding . . . What was the use of talking? . . .

  The two men had been sitting over their coffee, cigars, and brandy. Jerry looked at his watch. It was eight o’clock. Harman noticed Jerry’s gesture and said: “Well, son, have you decided what you want to do?”

  Jerry said: “I’d better call Catharine before I go over there. It’s going to be tough . . .”

  He got up heavily for one so young and moved slowly towards the telephone extension beneath the sideboard. It was the way you felt when you had a rotten mission ahead of you, where the whole atmosphere of the briefing had been heavy with coming disaster and loss, where you shut off your mind from all thinking and worked with your muscles, moving your arms and legs and hands forward into whatever was to come, to get it over with.

  Harman Wright felt a pang of pity for his son because he knew he was suffering, Jerry was young and game, and a fighter for what he wanted. His father seemed to recognize the kind of people they were in Jerry’s slow, inexorable movement forward into something he must have dread
ed with all his soul. The boy was honest. He didn’t ask for pity, and he didn’t shirk. But Harman had not yet given up the fight. He believed more than ever that he was right and Jerry was wrong.

  He asked quietly, without moving: “What are you going to tell Catharine when you see her?”

  Jerry turned and looked up at him heavily. He replied: “About what happened—I’ve got to . . . about Patches and me . . .”

  “Are you going to tell her that you lived together . . .”

  Jerry suddenly cried: “Oh, Christ, Dad, stop hitting below the belt!” Then he said: “I’m sorry. I guess not. One doesn’t speak about such things. I’ve got to ask her to let me out. I thought if I told her what Patches means to . . .”

  He stopped suddenly, because his mind, grown vivid under the impact of the things that had been happening to him, leaped ahead as it were to show him to himself sitting in the chintz-decorated sun-porch off the living-room of the Quentin house with Catharine at his side.

  And he saw her there as he had last remembered her—so healthily beautiful, loving, young, vigorous, clear-eyed, innocent, sexless, and inexperienced as . . . as he had once been and now was no longer. His imagination took him the next step onward and, with shocking clarity, showed him the expression of disbelief, anguish, injury, and deep hurt come into her eyes when he told her about Patches and himself.

  What was he going to tell her? How was he going to make her understand? Back in Glasgow yesterday, in his agony and fear of losing Patches forever, in the confusion of his mind that came from the realization of what she meant to him, he had seen himself in a way making up to Patches for the things he had not said to her by saying them to Catharine.

  His thought had been that Catharine would understand then, that she would not want him when she heard from him the story of his love for Patches. And on the long, drumming flight across the ocean he had even made up the words.

  “It’s like nothing that ever happened before to me. I’ve got to tell you, Catharine, so you’ll understand. She’s part of me. She’s under my skin and in my heart. She’s my pain and my delight and my breath. She’s in my mind and in my blood wherever I go, whatever I do. I never understood what love was before I knew Patches. There’s nothing of me left, nothing that doesn’t belong to her and always will . . .”

  Standing at the sideboard, the telephone within his reach, the dark instrument that had so nearly contained the voice of Catharine, Jerry suddenly found himself so filled with shame, horror, and revulsion that he could hardly bear to contemplate it. He thought his knees would give way, and he slumped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. Dreadful lightnings of truth were searing the dark abyss that had opened up before him.

  For now that he was home—here in his father’s house, where he had been raised, where he had spent his childhood and his boyhood, where he had been taught the creed and tenets of a gentleman—now that for the first time he had begun to think, he knew that the idea that had driven him to take the crazy ride with Eagles was utterly fantastic and completely impossible.

  It was the purest madness to have thought that he could walk coolly into Catharine’s house, jilt her, win his release, and fly back to his Patches. Life wasn’t like that.

  Had he really contemplated facing this girl he had known and worshipped for all of his adolescent life, to whom he was engaged by public announcement, who by now had his most recent letter, in which he had written to hint of the close approach of the day when they might be married, to ask her sympathy and understanding because he had fallen in love with someone else? Had he actually thought he could make a love declaration to Catharine about another girl?

  The shock of the total collapse of this ridiculous, wholly illusory boy’s world shook him physically and made him feel sick.

  Harman Wright got up and came over to his son and put his hand on his shoulder, for he thought the battle won, that his arguments had prevailed, as he had known they would. But he was too wise to press his advantage before he was certain. He was deeply moved by Jerry’s trouble, for it brought back things he was quite certain had been long forgotten, and they seemed to vibrate again with Jerry’s hurt.

  He said: “Take it easy, son. It’s never really as bad as it seems . . .”

  Then he said quietly: “Look here, Jerry. You haven’t thought it out to the end yet. You can’t accomplish anything in a rush this way. Go upstairs and take a rest. Don’t try to see Catharine tonight. Nobody knows you’ve been here. Nobody need know. Go back to England and finish your tour of duty. Don’t do anything foolish. I know you won’t. Then come home to us and see how you feel. How about it? I’ll drive you to the airport tonight, and nobody will be any the wiser.” Then he added: “I know it would make your mother very happy.”

  The old rebellion surged in Jerry again. Make his mother happy. Make Catharine happy . . . Make everybody happy but Patches and himself . . . And yet the strands of his old life, the Jerry he had been, were beginning to enmesh him, binding him, pulling at him, attaching their tenuous threads to his mind.

  Of one thing he was certain. He could not go through with going over to Catharine then and there and breaking the engagement. It was too black a thing to do to add to the burdens of his mind and the weight upon his spirit. But he did want desperately to be alone, to try to think, to regain his sense of values.

  He said: “Okay, Dad. I . . . I can’t see Cat now. I’ll go upstairs for a while.” He added: “Do you think I ought to go see Mother?”

  “If you think you’re ready to tell her that you’re going to go back and wait until—”

  Jerry said: “I’ll see her later . . .” He got up and went out of the room, and Harman heard his slow, heavy footsteps going up the stairs, followed by the scrabbling of Skipper going up with him, stairs his father remembered Jerry never used to go up less than two at a time, and his heart was heavy for him. He was a man who above all wanted to do what was right for those he loved, and there was no doubt in his mind as to what was right.

  Things like that happened to kids, and they had to go through them and get over them in their own way—there was nothing you could really do to help, and they hurt like hell while they were going on. But he knew that in the years to come, when Jerry and Catharine would be married and have a home and children of their own, his son would be happy and grateful, and if he remembered the girl in England at all, it would be with the dim recollection of something wonderful that had happened to him when he was young, and not to be regretted.

  Harman Wright went to the side table and poured himself a drink, and was startled to find with what clarity of detail he was suddenly thinking of Adrienne and the gay, high-ceilinged, rococo room in the hotel at Mentone, the bald-headed waiter who looked like a gnome, the moon on the sea, the old-fashioned brocaded bell-pull, Adrienne’s laugh.

  She was so ridiculously gay and sunny, her eyes crinkled at the corners, the ends of her mouth turned up even when her face was in repose. She . . . Harman set his glass down untouched, arose, and went upstairs swiftly to his wife’s room to see how she was and bring her encouragement.

  Familiar things surrounded Jerry again. His room was exactly as he had left it, the purple-and-white Williams blanket neatly folded over the foot of the bed, the West Point and Westbury High School pennants on the wall next to the framed picture of the championship Westbury football team, taken in his senior year, and on his bureau stood the large framed portrait photograph of Catharine, picking him up with her eyes as it always did when he came into the room, eyes that even in the picture showed the sweetness and clarity of spirit behind them. The photograph shook him, because he had forgotten it was there.

  He went to his wardrobe and opened the door and stood there for a moment in a kind of bewilderment looking at his youth. His civilian clothes hung there neatly pressed and brushed as though waiting for him to step into them, and on the shelf above he saw his ice skates and three fielders’ mitts, including the first one he had ever had, and w
hich he had outgrown. Standing in a corner were his golf clubs, three tennis rackets in presses, a baseball bat, a fly rod in a case, and his old single-shot .22 rifle. On the floor were some discolored tennis balls and a deflated football.

  He glanced at his books lining the shelves along the wall, from Henty and Alger and the Frank Merriwell series to Scott and Dumas and Conan Doyle, and the set of G. K. Chesterton that Catharine had given him one Christmas. Without knowing he was doing it, he took out a book, held it in his hand for a moment, and then put it back again.

  His desk invited him, and he sat down at it and idly pulled open a drawer. It seemed only yesterday that he had been sitting there. He fingered some of the contents. There was his high-school diploma, a half-empty box of cartridges, three golf balls, and the silver medal he had won at the last scholastic track meet. He found an old tasselled dance programme from a club dance when he was fourteen, and, opening it, read the name of “Catharine,” inscribed in his round and then unformed hand seven times. There were letters and an old copy book, a dozen marbles and a set of drawings for putting together a model airplane, a broken fountain pen and a little packet of tissue paper that he knew contained a lock of Catharine’s hair.

  Jerry was conscious of the feeling that Catharine’s steady, friendly gaze was on him from the photograph, and he closed the drawer with a bang, got up, and laid the picture face down upon the bureau. But almost immediately he went back and stood it up again. He said: “I’ve got to stop acting like a kid! . . .”

  He took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one, and thought again of his father and the story he had told him, and it saddened him beyond measure. His young mind fought with a certain kind of stubborn valiance against the destruction of a long-cherished illusion, and he went over his father’s phrases, the things he had said, one by one.

  And as he did so, aided by his desire to excuse him, certain sentences and ideas lingered, and he found his anger fading. He remembered his father had said: “I loved your mother dearly, and I always will. We’ve had a wonderful life together, and I wouldn’t exchange it for any other.”