Young Hearts Crying

by Richard Yates

  But he survived the lecture classes and the “poetry workshop” classes without incurring cause for shame, and survived the easier hours of conference with individual students as well; then, at home, he would hunch with a pencil over their lame, flimsy poems or their earnest and point-missing “papers” on poetry, and so he was able to believe he was earning his salary.

  “Well, but why do you spend so much time at it?” Sarah asked him once. “I thought the whole point of a job like this was that it would give you some freedom for your own work.”

  “Well, it will,” he told her. “Once I get the hang of this I’ll be doing it with my left hand. You’ll see.”

  *

  Only one drugstore in the college town carried the Sunday New York Times, and Michael bought it every week in order to frown for an hour over the Book Review section, learning of how younger poets he despised were building excellent reputations while older ones, a few of whom he liked, were rapidly losing ground.

  Sometimes, after that small torture, he would pick through the theater pages too; that was how he found out that Blues in the Night had become the first smash hit of the Broadway season.

  … Rarely if ever before on the American stage has a doomed interracial love affair been treated with the dignity, the delicacy, and the overwhelming gut-level power of this landmark work by Roy Kidd, under the brilliant direction of Ralph Morin.

  It isn’t an easy play to watch – or rather it might not have been, if it weren’t for the extraordinary performances of Emily Walker as an aristocratic white Southern girl, barely out of her teens, and of Kingsley Jackson as her stubbornly defiant black lover. Both of these remarkable young people went out onto the Shubert stage as newcomers last Tuesday night, and both came back as stars. In at least one reviewer’s opinion, this show deserves to run forever.

  Michael skipped the paragraph or two about the playwright because he didn’t want to know how young the son of a bitch was, and didn’t want to see him called a “dramatist”; then, further down in the column, he read this:

  … Still, perhaps the highest accolades for this electrifying evening belong to Ralph Morin. As director of Philadelphia’s Group Theater for some years, he earned a reputation for skill and sensitivity in any number of productions. But Philadelphia isn’t New York, and even a play as strong as Blues in the Night might have languished in obscurity if Mr. Morin hadn’t done everything right: assembled a near-perfect cast, drilled them with consummate artistry until every sound and silence was just to his liking, and then brought the show to town.

  Interviewed in his Manhattan hotel suite yesterday, wearing a robe and pajamas though the hour was well past noon, Mr. Morin said he was “still in shock” over the play’s extravagant success.

  “I don’t quite believe any of this,” he said with a disarmingly boyish smile, “but I hope it keeps on happening.”

  At forty-two, with the kind of theatrical good looks that let you know he was once an aspiring actor himself, Mr. Morin can accurately be called a director who has paid his dues.

  His wife Diana came up from their Philadelphia home for opening night but had to return the following day to look after their three small sons. “So the next thing now,” he said, “as soon as I can get my act together, is to find some decent place here for all of us to live.”

  And it would seem that neither Diana nor the boys need have a moment’s concern about that: Ralph Morin is very, very good at getting his act together.

  “What’re you reading?” Sarah inquired.

  “Ah, some bullshit, is all. Some Sunday puff-piece about a guy I met once; he’s married to a girl I used to know. He’s directing a hit play on Broadway now.”

  “You mean what’s-his-name? Blues in the Night and all that? Where’d you know him from?”

  “Well, it’s a long story, dear. You’d only get bored if I tried to tell it.”

  But he told it anyway, going easy on the part about his long infatuation with Diana, telling of Paul in a way that required no mention of the traded punches; then he tried to round it off with a disparaging account of Bill Brock’s visit to Philadelphia, but he could tell her attention was wavering because Bill Brock was someone she’d neither read about nor ever met.

  “Oh,” she said when he was finished. “Yes, well, I can see how it all would sort of – connect for you now. It does sound like kind of a trashy play, though, doesn’t it? Oh, very ambitious and ‘relevant’ and everything, but trashy anyway. If it were a movie they’d call it an exploitation flick.”

  “Right,” he said, and he was glad she’d said it first.

  One afternoon he drove home from school and found two bright new bicycles standing near the garage – a surprise from Sarah – and he went quickly into the house to thank her.

  “Well, I thought it might be good to get a little exercise,” she said.

  “It’ll be great,” he told her. “I think it’s a great idea.”

  And he meant it. They could ride away down the road over this endless prairie every afternoon; he could work the poisons of the job out of his system by pedaling hard with the wind in his face, gulping fresh air. And by the time they got back to the house, to take hot showers and change into clean, soft clothes, his tingling blood and quiet nerves would feel so good that he might not need more than a drink or two before dinner.

  But there wasn’t any pleasure in their first day on the bicycles. She flew away from him like a bird – he couldn’t imagine where all the power came from in that delicate body and those slender legs – while he struggled to keep his wheels straight on the asphalt. He might still be able to deliver a knockout punch in Tom Nelson’s living room, but his legs had gone rotten; that was the first of his bad discoveries this afternoon, and the second was that his lungs were rotten, too.

  He knew the only way to overtake her was to stand up on the pedals, hunch over the handlebars, and pump his heart out; so he did that, with burning knees and a loose-lipped gasping for breath, and although he was nearly blind with sweat he could tell when he’d drawn up alongside her bike and finally passed it.

  “How’re you doing?” she called.

  Then he was obliged to let her get ahead of him again, because any athletic coach in the world would have told him he needed a rest. He let the bike come to a stop, crouched to one side of it, and forcibly emptied one and then the other of his nostrils onto the road; if he hadn’t done that he would have had to retch and puke in order to breathe.

  When he was breathing again he looked into the shimmering distance and saw that Sarah was much too far away to permit his ever catching up; then he watched her make a wide turn to the other side of the road and begin the long ride home. When she approached and came sailing past him she smiled and waved, seeming to say it would be all right with her if he wanted to start his own journey home from here, so he turned the bike around and trailed her at an ever-lengthening distance. The main trouble now was that he kept veering out to the very edge of the asphalt, where it flaked off into irregular crusts and chunks that shuddered his tires and his spine; whenever that happened, with tall yellow weeds beginning to whip at his spokes, he would have to wrestle the handlebars to bring himself up onto the solid part of the road again before he could make any headway.

  He saw Sarah rise and stand on her pedals to pump swiftly up the little hill of their concrete driveway, then coast into the shadows of their garage, and he vowed to save enough strength so that he too could accomplish that final bit of the ride with authority and ease; but from the moment he hit the base of the driveway he knew it was out of the question. He had to get off the damned bike and walk it up to the garage, hanging his head, holding his jaws shut tight to stop himself from greeting his wife with something like Well, I guess you think you’re pretty fucking young, don’t’cha?

  Later, after soaking in the shower and putting on a clean shirt and pants, he sat hunched over his whiskey in the living room and told her it wasn’t going to work. “I can’t do this
, baby,” he explained. “I just can’t do this shit, that’s all. Just can’t.”

  “Well, look, it was only the first time,” she began, and it chilled him to find that both her tone and her words were like Mary Fontana’s, or perhaps like those of any other nice girl trying to comfort an impotent man. “I know it’ll come back to you soon,” she was saying. “It’s only a knack, after all. The main thing is not to fight it, or strain for it; just try to relax. Oh, and next time I won’t be such a show-off; I won’t go tearing off way ahead of you like that. I’ll wait and ride along with you until you’re more comfortable, okay?”

  Okay. And just as an impotent man might well be touched by such kindness in a nice, nice girl – knowing all the while that she didn’t know the half of it, fearing that the wretched business could never be set right – he agreed that they would go on “trying” with the bicycles every day.

  There were faculty parties several times a month in Billings, and the Davenports went to most of them until Michael began to complain that they were all alike.

  The walls in most faculty homes displayed giant black-and-white photographs of old movie stars – W. C. Fields, Shirley Temple, Clark Gable – because this kind of decoration was said to be “camp”; in some houses too an entire wall would be given over to the spectacle of an American flag hung upside down, as proof of bitter and wholehearted opposition to the war in Vietnam. Once, finding his way to the bathroom in such a house, Michael came upon a mock recruiting poster:

  Join the Army

  Visit Exotic Places

  And Kill People

  “And I mean what kind of horseshit is that?” he asked Sarah as they drove home that night. “Since when has it made any sense to blame the war on the soldiers?”

  “Well, it’s not a very good poster,” she said, “but I don’t think that’s what it was meant to suggest. I think the idea is more that everything about the war is wrong.”

  “Then why isn’t that what it said? Christ’s sake, all the kids in the Army today are there because they were drafted, or because they couldn’t find work anywhere else. Soldiers are the victims of wars; everybody knows that.” Then, after a few miles of silence, he said “I don’t think I’d mind these parties so much if the people weren’t all so busy being ‘political.’ You get the feeling that if it weren’t for the Anti-War Movement they wouldn’t have anything in their lives at all. Or maybe all I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t mind them so much if I could ever count on getting a halfway decent drink. Jesus; wine. Wine on top of wine. And all of it warm as piss.”

  So they found ways to avoid most of the parties, until one day when the English department chairman stopped Michael in the corridor, gave him a friendly tug of the sleeve, and made a half-joking suggestion that it might soon be time for the Davenports to have a party of their own.

  “Oh,” Sarah said that night. “I didn’t realize these things were sort of – obligatory.”

  “Well, I don’t think they are, necessarily,” he told her. “But we have been acting a little aloof, dear, and that’s probably not a very good idea in a town as small as this.”

  She seemed to be thinking it over. “Okay,” she said at last. “But if we’re going to do it, let’s do it right. We’ll have real whiskey, with a whole lot of ice, and we’ll put real bread and meat on the table instead of all this crackers-and-dip nonsense.”

  On the afternoon before the party there was a phone call from a young man with a shy, hesitant voice. “Mike? I don’t know if you’ll remember me – Terry Ryan.” And the voice did sound familiar, but the name might not have helped if he hadn’t followed it quickly with “I used to be a waiter at the Blue Mill restaurant, in New York.”

  “Hell, of course I remember you, Terry,” Michael said. “I’ll be damned; how are you? Where you calling from?”

  “Well, the thing is I’m in Billings for a couple of days, and I—”

  “Billings, Kansas?”

  And Terry Ryan gave a brief, self-effacing laugh that brought him instantly alive in Michael’s memory. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? It’s sort of my Alma Mater, after all – or at least it would have been, if I’d ever been able to pass the foreign-language requirement. All that was before I went to New York, you see.”

  “So what’re you up to now, Terry? What’re you doing?”

  “Well, that’s the funny part. I got drafted; then I guess the Army managed to get me trained, more or less, and now I’ve gotta be in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Oh, Jesus; are they sending you to Vietnam?”

  “That’s what I hear, yeah.”

  “What branch are you in?”

  “Oh, the infantry, is all. Nothing fancy.”

  “Well, Jesus, Terry, that’s – that’s really bad news. That’s lousy.”

  “But I took this little detour, you see, to see some friends of mine here in Billings; then when I heard you were teaching here I thought I’d give you a call. Thought you might come out for a beer or something.”

  “Good,” Michael said, “but I’ve got a better idea. We’re having a party at my house tonight, and we’d be delighted if you can come on over. Bring a girl.”

  “Well, I can’t promise the girl,” he said, “but the rest of it sounds fine. What time?”

  And even before they’d finished talking, Michael had begun to feel privileged and kind.

  Terry Ryan had been younger, smaller, and skinnier than any of the other Blue Mill waiters, and he’d clearly been the brightest of them, too. His quick, nervous face always let you know when he had something funny to say; then he’d say it, usually while putting dinner plates on your table, and he’d get away fast every time, heading back for the kitchen or the bar, before there could be any hint of an intrusion on your privacy. And on some nights, after his working shift was over, he and Michael would drink together at the bar until closing time. Terry’s ambition was to be a comic actor – he alluded modestly to having been told he had the talent for it – but his greatest fear was of ending up as what he called a theater bum.

  “You’re a little young to be worried about ending up as anything, aren’t you, Terry?”

  “Well, I see what you mean. Still, everybody’s gonna end up some way, sometime, right?”

  Right.

  “Sarah?” Michael said, ambling over to where she stood at work with the vacuum cleaner. “Listen. We’ll be having a special guest tonight.”

  The department chairman and his wife, John and Grace Howard, were among the first to arrive. They were both in their fifties, and often said to be a lovely couple. He was tall and straight, with a closely trimmed mustache; she had retained the dimpled, “cute” good looks of a much younger woman, though her hair was white, and she usually wore full skirts cut short enough to emphasize her attractive legs. At another recent party they had waltzed together on a cleared floor for twenty minutes, Grace lying back in John’s arms to gaze up at him in girlish rapture, and most of the people watching them agreed it was the prettiest thing they’d ever seen.

  “You’re to be congratulated, Michael,” John Howard said. “It’s about time somebody served an honest drink in this town.”

  And that opinion was echoed by a number of other guests – people who always showed up at these parties whether they liked one another or not because there was hardly anything else to do in Billings, Kansas. Most of them were teachers but there were graduate students, too, with their wives or girls – some smiling as uncertainly as children at a gathering of grownups, others leaning against the walls and observing everything with thinly veiled expressions of disdain.

  When Terry Ryan came in he looked even smaller than Michael had remembered – he must have been barely tall enough to qualify for the Army – and he’d chosen not to wear his uniform: he wore jeans and a gray pullover sweater that was too big for him.

  “Come on, Terry,” Michael said, “we’ll get you a drink and then we’ll find you a place to sit down. All the introductio
ns can wait. Far as I’m concerned you’re the guest of honor tonight. Hey, listen, though: you remember Sarah?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I guess I didn’t start taking her to the Mill until after you’d quit working there. Anyway we’re married now, and she wants to meet you. See the one over there by the window? With the dark hair?”

  “Nice,” Terry said. “Very nice. You’ve got good taste, Mike.”

  “Well, what the hell: why marry some plain girl when you can get a pretty girl instead?” From the tone of his own voice Michael could tell he had begun to drink too much, too fast, but he was sober enough to know he could still repair the damage by staying away from whiskey for the next hour.

  “Wait right here,” he told Terry, who was perched on a tall wooden stool brought from the kitchen and nursing a bourbon and water. “I’ll go get her.”

  “Baby?” he said to his wife. “Would you like to come and meet the soldier?”

  “I’d love to.”

  And from the moment he left them together he knew they would get along. He went to the kitchen and drank water. Then he busied himself at the sink, washing out glasses to kill as much as possible of the time before he could go to the liquor table again. When two or three students drifted into the kitchen he conversed with them in a quiet, humorous, good-host kind of way that seemed to prove he was getting better, though his watch said there was still almost half an hour to wait. He strolled back into the living room to give other people the benefit of his presence, and he almost collided with John Howard, who looked tired and ill.

  “Sorry,” Howard said. “Damn good party, but I’m afraid I’m not used to the hard stuff – or maybe I’m too old for it. I think we’d better be on our way.”

  But Grace wasn’t ready to leave. “Go, then, John,” she said from the sofa where she sat among her friends. “Take the car and go, if you want to. I can always get a ride.” And it occurred to Michael that this was undoubtedly true: all her life, Grace Howard must have been the kind of girl who could always get a ride.