Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  Michael laughed softly.

  “What’re you laughing at?” Peggy asked harshly.

  “Say it again. Say ‘What’ll I wear?’ again for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes me laugh and remember you and makes me sorry and tender for you and all women living to hear you say, ‘What’ll I wear?’”

  “My,” said Peggy, very pleased, “you got out of the right side of the bed this morning, didn’t you?”

  “I certainly did.”

  “What’ll I wear? The blue print or the beige suit with the cream blouse or the …”

  “The blue print.”

  “It’ so old.”

  “The blue print.”

  “All right. Hair up or down?”

  “Down.”

  “But …”

  “Down!”

  “God,” Peggy said, “I’ll look like something you dragged out of the Harlem River. Aren’t you afraid some of your friends’ll see us?”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Michael said.

  “And don’t drink too much …”

  “Now, Peggy …”

  “You’ll be going around saying good-bye to all your good friends …”

  “Peggy, on my life …”

  “They’ll pour you into the Army from a bucket. Be careful.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Glad I called?” Peggy sounded again like a flirtatious girl languishing behind a fan at the high-school prom.

  “I’m glad you called,” Michael said.

  “That’s all I wanted to know. Drink your orange juice.” And she hung up.

  Michael put the receiver down slowly, smiling, remembering Peggy. He sat for a moment, thinking of her.

  Then he got up and went out through the living room to the kitchen. He put some water on to boil and measured out three heaping spoonsful of coffee, his nose grateful for the ever-beautiful smell of the coffee imprisoned in the can. He drank his orange juice in long cold gulps, between getting out bacon and the eggs and cutting the bread for toast. He hummed wordlessly as he prepared his breakfast. He liked making his own breakfasts, private in his single house, with his pajamas flapping about him and the floor cool under his bare feet. He put five strips of bacon in a large pan and set a small flame going under it.

  The telephone rang in the bedroom.

  “Oh, Hell,” Michael said. He moved the bacon pan off the flame and walked through the living room, noticing almost unconsciously, as he did again and again, what a pleasant room it was, with its high ceilings and broad windows facing each other, and the books piled into the bookcases all over the room, with the faded spectrum of the publishers’ linen covers making a subtle and lovely pattern, wavering along the walls.

  Michael picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”

  “Hollywood, California, calling Mr. Whitacre.”

  “This is Mr. Whitacre.”

  Then Laura’s voice, across the continent, still deep and artful. “Michael? Michael, darling …”

  Michael sighed a little. “Hello, Laura.”

  “It’s seven o’clock in the morning in California,” Laura said, a little accusingly. “I got up at seven in the morning to speak to you.”

  “Thanks,” Michael said.

  “I heard about it,” Laura said vehemently. “I think it’s awful. Making you a private.”

  Michael grinned. “It’s not so awful. There’re a lot of people in the same boat.”

  “Almost everybody out here,” Laura said, “is at least a Major.”

  “I know,” Michael said. “Maybe that’s a good reason for being a private.”

  “Stop being so damned special!” Laura snapped. “You’ll never be able to make it. I know what your stomach’s like.”

  “My stomach,” Michael said gravely, “will just have to join the Army with the rest of me.”

  “You’ll be sorry the day after tomorrow.”

  “Probably.” Michael nodded.

  “You’ll be in the guardhouse in two days,” Laura said loudly. “A Sergeant’ll say something you don’t like and you’ll hit him. I know you.”

  “Listen,” Michael said patiently. “Nobody hits Sergeants. Not me or anybody else.”

  “You haven’t taken an order from anybody in your whole life, Michael. I know you. That was one of the reasons it was impossible to live with you. After all, I lived with you for three years and I know you better than any …”

  “Yes, Laura, darling,” Michael said patiently.

  “We may be divorced and all that,” Laura went on rapidly, “but there’s no one in the whole world I’m fonder of. You know that.”

  “I know that,” Michael said, believing her.

  “And I don’t want to see you killed.” She began to cry.

  “I won’t be killed,” Michael said gently.

  “And I hate to think of you being ordered around. It’s wrong …”

  Michael shook his head, wondering once again at the gap between the real world and a woman’s version of the world. “Don’t you worry about me, Laura, darling,” he said. “And it was very sweet of you to call me.”

  “I’ve decided something,” Laura said firmly. “I’m not going to take any more of your money.”

  Michael sighed. “Have you got a job?”

  “No. But I’m seeing MacDonald at MGM this afternoon, and …”

  “O.K. When you work, you don’t take any money. That’s fine.” Michael rushed past the point, not letting Laura speak. “I read in the paper you’re going to get married. That true?”

  “No. Maybe after the war. He’s going into the Navy. He’s going to work in Washington.”

  “Good luck.” Michael murmured.

  “There was an assistant director from Republic they took right into the Air Corps. First Lieutenant. He won’t leave Santa Anita for the duration. Public relations. And you’re going to be a private …”

  “Please, Laura darling,” Michael said. “This call will cost you five hundred dollars.”

  “You’re a queer, stupid man and you always were.”

  “Yes. darling.”

  “Will you write me where they station you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll come and visit you.”

  “That will be wonderful.” Michael had a vision of his beautiful ex-wife in her mink coat and her almost famous face and figure, waiting outside Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the soldiers whistling at her as they went past, while he rushed from a formation to meet her.

  “I feel all mixed up about you.” Laura was crying softly and honestly. “I always did and I always will.”

  “I know what you mean.” Michael remembered the way Laura looked fixing her hair in front of a mirror and how she looked dancing and the holidays they’d had. For a moment he was moved by the distant tears, and regretted the lost years behind him, the years without war, the years without separations …

  “What the hell,” he said softly. “They’ll probably put me in an office some place.”

  “You won’t let them,” she sobbed. “I know you. You won’t let them.”

  “You don’t let the Army do anything. It does what it wants and you do what it wants. The Army isn’t Warner Brothers, darling.”

  “Promise me … promise me …” The voice rose and fell and then there was a click and the connection was cut off. Michael looked at the phone and put it down.

  Finally he got up and went into the kitchen and finished making his breakfast. He carried the bacon and eggs and toast and coffee, black and thick, into the living room and put it down on the wide table set in front of the great sunny window.

  He turned the radio on. Brahms was being played, a piano concerto. The music poured out of the machine, round, disputatious and melancholy.

  He ate slowly, smearing marmalade thickly on the toast, enjoying the buttery taste of the eggs and the strong taste of the coffee, proud of his cooking, listening with pleasure to the mournful sweet thun
der of the radio.

  He opened the Times to the theatrical pages. It was full of rumors of endless plays and endless actors. Each morning he read the theatrical page of the Times with growing depression. Each morning the recital of baffled hope and money lost and sorrowful critical reproach of his profession made him feel a little silly and restless.

  He pushed the paper aside and lit the day’s first cigarette and took the last sip of coffee. He turned the radio off. It was playing Respighi by now, anyway, and Respighi quit the morning air with a dying fall and left the sunlit house in fragrant silence as Michael sat at the breakfast table, smoking, staring dreamily out at the gardens and the diagonal glimpse of street and working people below.

  After awhile, he got up and shaved and showered.

  Then he put on a pair of old flannels and a soft old blue shirt, gently and beautifully faded from many launderings. Most of his clothes were already packed away, but there were still two jackets hanging in the closet. He stood there thoughtfully, trying to make up his mind for a moment, then picked the gray jacket, and put it on. It was a worn old jacket, soft and light on his shoulders.

  Downstairs his car was waiting at the curb, its paint and chromium glistening from the garage’s industry. He started the motor and pushed the button for the top. The top came down slowly and majestically. Michael felt the usual touch of amusement at the grave collapsing movement.

  He drove up Fifth Avenue slowly. Every time he rode up through the city on a working day, he felt once again some of the same slightly malicious pleasure he had experienced the first day he had driven in his first, brand-new car, top down, up the Avenue, at noon, looking at the working men and women thronging to their lunches, and feeling wealthy and noble and free.

  Michael drove up the broad street, between the rich windows, frivolous and wealthy and elegantly suggestive in the sun.

  Michael left his car at the door of Cahoon’s apartment house, giving the keys to the doorman. Cahoon was going to use the car and take care of it until Michael returned. It would have been more sensible to sell the car, but Michael had a superstitious feeling that the bright little machine was a token of his gayest civilian days, long rides in the country in the springtime, and careless holidays, and that he must somehow preserve it as a charm against his return.

  On foot, feeling a little bereft, he walked slowly across town. The day stretched ahead of him with sudden emptiness. He went into a drugstore 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,” 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, toward 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 honorable ceremony, the blinded veteran listening for his wife’s chained footstep …

  “Hey, Michael!” A hand slapped him on the shoulder. He turned. It was Johnson, in a rough felt hat with a colored band, and a full knitted tie and a beautiful cream-colored shirt under the soft blue jacket. “I’ve been wanting to see you forever … Aren’t you ever home?”

  “Not recently. I took a vacation.” From time to time, Michael liked to see Johnson and have dinner with him and listen to him argue in his deep, actorish voice. But ever since the bitterness of the arguments about the Nazi-Soviet pact, Michael had found it almost impossible to talk civilly for a whole evening with Johnson or any of his friends.

  “… and I sent you this petition,” Johnson was saying, gripping Michael’s arm as they walked downtown swiftly, because Johnson never did anything slowly. “And it’s so important and your name should be on it.”

  “What’s the petition?”

  “To the President. For the second front. Everybody’s signing it.” Real anger showed in Johnson’s face. “It’s a crime, the way we’re letting the Russians bear the whole brunt …”

  Michael didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t you believe in the second front?” Johnson asked.

  “Sure,” Michael nodded. “If they can swing it.”

  “They can swing it all right.”

  “Maybe. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll lose too many men. Maybe,” Michael said, suddenly realizing that tomorrow he would be in khaki and eligible for the landing on the beach of Europe, “maybe it’ll cost a million, a million and a half lives …”

  “So it’ll cost a million, a million and a half lives,” Johnson said loudly, walking even more quickly down the street. “It’s worth it … A major diversion. Even two million lives …”

  Michael looked at his friend strangely, his friend with the deep, indoor voice, and his 4F neatly on his draft registration card, calling so debonairly for the blood of other men on this handsome city boulevard, feeling religious and just because far away on another continent the Russians were fighting like lions. What would a Russian soldier, crouched behind a broken wall in Stalingrad, facing the oncoming tank, grenade in hand, think of this soft-voiced patriot in his fuzzy hat who called him brother, on the unruined street in the unruined city in America?

  “Sorry,” Michael said. “I’d like to do all I can to help the Russians, but I think I’d better leave it up to the professionals.”

  Johnson finally stopped walking. He dropped his hand from Michael’s arm and stood there, his face tightened with anger and disdain. “I’m going to tell you something frankly, Michael,” he said. “I’m ashamed of you.”

  Michael nodded soberly, embarrassed because he couldn’t say what was in his heart without hurting Johnson forever.

  “For a long time,” Johnson said, “I’ve seen this coming. I’ve seen you growing soft …”

  “Sorry,” Michael said. “I’ve been sworn in as a soldier of the Republic, and soldiers of the Republic do not send petitions to their Commander in Chief, instructing him on questions of high strategy.”

  “That’s an evasion.”

  “Maybe it is. So long …” Michael turned and walked away.

  After ten steps Johnson called, coolly, “Good luck, Michael.”

  Michael waved without looking back.

  He thought of Johnson and his other friends with displeasure. Either they were insensitively militant like Johnson, in their untouchable civilian occupations, or, under a thin veneer of patriotism, they were cynical and resigned. And this was no time for resignation, Michael felt. This was no time for saying no or perhaps. This was a time for a great yea-saying. That was a good thing about getting into the Army. He would get away from the over-sensitive resigners, the poetic despairers, the polite suicides. He had come of age at a time of critics, in a country of critics. Everyone criticized books and poetry and plays and government and the policies of England, France, and Russia. America for the last twenty years had been a perpetual drama-critics circle, saying over and over again, “Yes, I know 3000 died at Barcelona, but how clumsy the second act …” Age of critics, country of critics. He had begun to feel it was a sour age and a barren country because of it. This was a time for roaring rhetoric, savage vengeance, melodramatic shouting of boasts and assurance down the corridors of night. This was a time for roistering and wild-eyed soldiers, crazy with faith, oblivious of death. Michael could see no faith-madness around him. Civilia
ns saw too much of the cheapness of war for faith … the chicanery and treachery of the lovers of six percent, of the farm bloc and business bloc and labor bloc. He had gone into the good restaurants and seen the great boom of heavy eaters, the electric excitement and pleasure of the men and women who were making good money and spending it before the Government claimed it. Stay out of the Army and you had to turn critic. He wanted to be a critic only of the enemy.

  He felt silly sitting in the paneled 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 like the inside of a classroom in torts and grievances. 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 any place. 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 …”