The Young Lions Part 5

"The cheapest price I can quote you, my dear friend ..." The voice on the other end suddenly became large and coherent. "... is seventy six dollars and fifty cents."

"That will be an additional five cents for five minutes," the operator's voice broke in.

"All right." Noah put another nickel into the box and the operator said, "Thank you." Noah said, "All right. Seventy-six dollars and fifty cents." Somehow he would get it together. "The day after tomorrow. In the afternoon." That would give him time to go downtown on January second and sell the camera and the other things. "The address is Sea View Hotel. Do you know where that is?"

"Yes," the drunken voice said, "yes, indeedy. The Sea View Hotel. I will send a man around tomorrow and you can sign the contract ..."

"Okay," Noah said, sweating, preparing to hang up.

"One more thing, my dear man," the voice went on. "One more thing. The last rites."

"What about the last rites?"

"What religion does the deceased profess?"

Jacob had professed no religion, but Noah didn't think he had to tell the man that. "He was a Jew."

"Oh." There was silence for a moment on the wire and then Noah heard the woman's voice say, gayly and drunkenly, "Come on, George, les have another little drink."

"I regret," the man said, "that we are not equipped to perform funeral services on Hebrews."

"What's the difference?" Noah shouted. "He wasn't religious. He doesn't need any ceremonies."

"Impossible," the voice said thickly, but with dignity. "We do not cater to Hebrews. I'm sure you can find many others ... many others who are equipped to cremate Hebrews."

"But Dr. Fishbourne recommended you," Noah shouted, insanely. He felt as though he couldn't go through all this again with another undertaker, and he felt trapped and baffled. "You're in the undertaking business, aren't you?"

"My condolences to you, my dear man," the voice said, "in your hour of grief, but we cannot see our way clear ..."

Noah heard a scuffle at the other end of the wire and the woman's voice say, "Let me talk to him, Georgie." Then the woman got on the phone. "Listen," she said loudly, her voice bra.s.sy and whiskey-rich, "why don't you quit? We're busy here. You heard what Georgie said. He don't burn Kikes. Happy New Year." And she hung up.

Noah's hands were trembling and he felt the sweat coming out on his skin. He put the receiver back on the hook with difficulty. He opened the door of the booth and walked slowly toward the door, past the jukebox, which was playing a jazz version of Loch Lomond, past the group of blonde and drunk and sailors at the bar. The blonde smiled at him and said, "What's the matter, Big Boy, wasn't she home?"

Noah hardly heard her. He walked slowly, feeling weak and tired, toward the unoccupied end of the bar near the door and sat on a stool.

"Whiskey," he said. When it came, he drank it straight and ordered another. The two drinks had an immediate, surging effect on him, blurring the outlines of the room, blurring the music and the other people in the bar into softer and more agreeable forms, and when the blonde, in her tight flowered yellow dress with red shoes and a little hat with a purple veil, came down the bar toward him, swaying her full hips exaggeratedly, he grinned at her.

"There," the blonde said, touching his arm softly, "there, that's better."

"Happy New Year," Noah said.

"Honey ..." The blonde sat down on the stool next him, jiggling her tightly-girdled b.u.t.tocks on the red leatherette seat, rubbing her knee against his. "Honey, I'm in trouble, and I looked around the bar and I decided you were the one man in the room I could depend on. Orange Blossom," she said to the bartender who had padded up to where she was sitting. "In time of trouble," she went on, holding Noah's arm at the elbow, looking earnestly at him through her veil, her small, blue, mascara'd eyes inviting and serious, "in time of trouble I like Italian men. They have more character. They're excitable, but they're sympathetic. And, to tell you the truth, Honey, I like an excitable man. Show me a man who doesn't get excited and I'll show you a man who couldn't make a woman happy for ten minutes a year. There are two things I look for in a man. A sympathetic character and full lips."

"What?" Noah asked, dazed.

"Full lips," the blonde said earnestly. "My name is Georgia, Honey, what's yours?"

"Ronald Beaverbrook," Noah said. "And I have to tell you ... I'm not an Italian."

"Oh." The woman looked disappointed and she drank half her Orange Blossom in one smooth gulp. "I could have sworn. What are you, Ronald?"

"An Indian," Noah said. "A Sioux Indian."

"Even so," the woman said, "I bet you can make a woman very happy."

"Have a drink," Noah said.

"Honey," the woman called to the bartender. "Two Orange Blossoms. Double, Honey." She turned back to Noah. "I like Indians, too," she said. "The one thing I don't like is ordinary Americans. They don't know how to use a woman properly On and off and bang, they're out of bed and they're putting on their pants and on their way home to their wives. Honey," she said, finis.h.i.+ng her first drink, "Honey, why don't you go over to those two boys in blue and tell them you're taking me home? Take a beer bottle with you, in case they give you an argument."

"Did you come with them?" Noah asked. He was feeling very light-headed now, remote and amused, and he caressed the woman's hand lightly and smiled into her eyes as he talked. Her hands were calloused and worn and she was ashamed of them.

"It comes from working in the laundry," she said sadly. "Don't ever work in a laundry, Honey."

"Okay," said Noah.

"I came with that one." With a gesture of her head, the veil fluttering in the green and purple light of the jukebox, she indicated the drunk with his head on the bar. "Knocked out of the box in the first inning. I'll tell you something." She leaned close to Noah and whispered to him, and he got a strong impression of gin and onions and violet perfume, "The sailors are plotting against him. In the uniform of their country. They are going to roll him and they're planning to follow me and purse-s.n.a.t.c.h my purse in a dark alley. Take a beer bottle, Ronald, and go talk to them."

The bartender put down their drinks and the woman took out a ten-dollar bill and gave it to him. "This is on me," she said. "This is a poor lonely boy on New Year's Eve."

"You don't have to pay for me," Noah said.

"To us, Honey." She raised the gla.s.s three inches from his face, and looked over it, through her veil, melting and coquettish. "What's money for, Honey, if it isn't for the use of your friends?"

They drank and the woman put her hand on his leg and caressed his knee. "You're terribly stingy, Honey," she said. "We'll have to do something about that. Let's get out of here. I don't like this place any more. Let's go up to my little apartment. I got a bottle of Four Roses, just for you and me, and we can have our own private little celebration. Kiss me once, Honey." She leaned over again and closed her eyes determinedly. Noah kissed her. Her lips were soft and there was a taste of raspberry from her lipstick, along with the onion and gin. "I can't wait, Honey." She got down off the stool, quite steadily, and took his arm, and they walked, carrying their drinks to the rear of the bar.

The two sailors watched them coming. They were very young and there was a puzzled, disappointed look on their faces.

"Be careful of my friend," the woman warned them. "He's a Sioux Indian." She kissed Noah's neck behind the ear. "I'll be right out, Honey," she said. "I'm going to freshen up, so you'll love me." She giggled and squeezed his hand moistly, still holding her gla.s.s, walked, with her exaggerated, mincing gait, the flowers dancing over her girdled rear, into the ladies' room.

"What's she been giving you?" the younger of the two sailors asked. He didn't have his hat on and he had his hair cut so short that it looked like the first outcropping of fuzz on a baby's skull.

"She says," Noah said, feeling powerful and alert, "she says you want to rob her."

The sailor with the hat on snorted. "We rob her? That's hot. It's just the other way around, Brother."

"Twenty-five bucks," the young sailor said. "Twenty-five apiece, she asked. She said she never did it before and she's married and she ought to get paid for the risks she's taking."

"Who does she think she is?" the one with the hat on demanded. "How much did she ask you?"

"Nothing," Noah said, and he felt an absurd sense of pride. "And she wants to throw in a bottle of Four Roses."

"How do you like that?" The older sailor turned bitterly to his partner.

"You going with her?" the younger one asked, avidly.

Noah shook his head. "No."

"Why not?" the young one asked.

Noah shrugged. "I don't know."

"Boy," the young one said, "you must be well serviced."

"Ah," said the sailor with the hat on, "let's get out of here. Santa Monica!" He stared accusingly at the other sailor. "We might just as well have stayed on the Base."

"Where's the Base?" Noah asked.

"San Diego. But he ..." The older sailor gestured bitterly and derisively at the fuzz-topped one...."he had us all fixed up in Santa Monica. Two widows with a private house. That's the last time I'll leave any arrangements to you."

"It's not my fault," the young one said doggedly. "How was I supposed to know they were kidding me? How was I supposed to know the address was a phony?"

"We walked around in this d.a.m.n fog for three hours," the older sailor said, "looking for that fake address. New Year's Eve! I've had better New Years when I was seven years old on a farm in Oklahoma. Come on ... I'm getting out of here."

"What about him?" Noah touched the drunk sleeping peacefully on the mahogany.

"That's the lady's problem."

The young sailor put on his little white hat with an air of severe purpose and the two boys went out. "Twenty-five bucks!" Noah heard the older one say as he slammed the door.

Noah waited a moment, then patted the sleeping drunk in a comradely fas.h.i.+on, and followed the sailors. He stood outside the door, breathing the soft wet air, feeling it chill his flushed face. Under a wavering, uncertain lamppost down the street he saw the two blue figures, forlornly disappearing into the fog. He turned and went in the other direction, the whiskey he had drunk hammering musically and pleasantly at his temples.

Noah opened the door with careful deliberation, silently, and stepped into the dark room. The smell was there. He had forgotten the smell. Alcohol, medicine, something sweet and heavy ... He fumbled for the light. He felt the nerves in his hand twitching and he stumbled against a chair before he found the lamp.

His father lay rigid and frail on the bed, his mouth open as if to speak in the bare light. Noah swayed a little as he looked down at him. Foolish, tricky old man, with the fancy beard and the bleached hair and the leatherbound Bible.

Make haste, make haste. O G.o.d. to deliver me ... What religion does the deceased profess? Noah felt a little dizzy. His mind didn't seem to be able to fix on any one thing, and one thought slid in on top of another, independent and absurd. Full lips. Twenty-five dollars for the sailors and nothing for him. He had never had particular luck with women, certainly nothing like that. Trouble probably made a man attractive, and the woman had sensed it. Of course she had been terribly drunk ... Ronald Beaverbrook. The way the flowers had waved on her skirt as she rolled toward the ladies' room. If he had stayed he'd probably be snug in bed with her now, under the warm covers. the soft, fat, white flesh, onion, gin, raspberry. He had a piercing, sharp moment of regret that he was standing here in the naked room with the dead old man ... If the positions had been reversed, he thought, if it was he lying there and the old man up and around, and the old man had got the offer, he was d.a.m.ned sure Jacob would be in that bed now, with the blonde and the Four Roses. What a thing to think of. Noah shook his head. His father, from whose seed he sprang. G.o.d, was he going to get to talk like him as he grew older?

Noah made himself look for a whole minute at his father's dead face. He tried to cry. Somehow, deserted this way, at the end of a year, on this winter night, a man, any man, had the right to expect a tear from his only son.

Noah had never really thought very much about his father, once he had got old enough to think about him at all. He had been bitter about him, but that was all. Looking at the pale, lined head, looming from the pillow like a stone statue, n.o.ble and proud as Jacob had always known he would look in death, Noah made a conscious effort to think of his father. How far Jacob had come searching for this narrow room on the sh.o.r.e of the Pacific. Out of the grimy streets of Odessa, across Russia and the Baltic Sea, across the ocean, into the sweat and clangor of New York. Noah closed his eyes and thought of Jacob, quick and lithe, as a young man, with that handsome brow and that fierce nose, taking to English with a quick, natural, overblown rhetorical instinct, striding down the crowded streets, his eyes lively and searching, with a ready bold smile for girls and partners and customers and travel ... Jacob, unafraid, and dishonest, wandering through the South, through Atlanta and Tuscaloosa, quick-fingered, never really interested in money, but cheating for it, and finally letting it slip away, up the continent to Minnesota and Montana, laughing, smoking black cigars, known in saloons and gambling halls, making dirty jokes and quoting Isaiah in the same breath, marrying Noah's mother in Chicago, grave-eyed and responsible for a day, tender and delicate and perhaps even resolved to settle down and be an honorable citizen, with middle age looming over him, and his hair touched at the ends with gray. And Jacob singing to Noah in his rich, affected baritone, in the plush-furnished parlor after dinner, singing, "I was walking through the park one day, In the merry, merry month of May ..."

Noah shook his head. Somewhere in the back of his mind, echoing and faraway, the voice, singing, young and strong, resounded, "In the merry, merry month of May," and refused to be stilled.

And the inevitable collapse as the years claimed Jacob. The shabby businesses, getting shabbier, the charm fading, the enemies more numerous, the world tighter-lipped and more firmly organized against him, the failure in Chicago, the failure in Seattle, the failure in Baltimore, the final, down-at-the-heels, scrubby failure in Santa Monica ..."I have led a miserable life and I have cheated everyone and I drove my wife to death and I have only one son and I have no hope for him, and I am bankrupt ..." And the deceived brother, crumbling in the furnace, haunting him across the years and the ocean, with the last, agonized breath....

Noah stared, dry-eyed at his father. Jacob's mouth was open, intolerably alive. Noah jumped up, and crossed the room, wavering, and tried to push his father's mouth shut. The beard was stiff and harsh against Noah's hand, and the teeth made a loud, incongruous clicking sound as the mouth closed. But the lips fell open, ready for speech, when Noah took his hand away. Again and again, more and more vigorously, Noah pushed the mouth shut. The hinges of the jaw made a sharp little sound and the jaw felt loose and unmoored, but each time Noah took his hand away the mouth opened, the teeth gleaming in the yellow light. Noah braced himself against the bed with his knees to give himself more leverage. But his father, who had been contrary and stubborn and intractable with his parents, his teachers, his brother, his wife, his luck, his partners, his women, his son, all his life, could not be changed now.

Noah stepped back. The mouth hung open, pitiful and pale under the swirling white moustaches, under the n.o.ble arch of the deceptive dead head on the gray pillow.

Finally, and for the first time, Noah wept.

CHAPTER FOUR.

CHRISTIAN FELT like an imposter, sitting in the little open scout car, with his helmet on his head. He held his light automatic machine pistol loosely over his knees as they sped cheerfully along the tree-bordered French road. He was eating cherries they had picked from an orchard back near Meaux. Paris lay just ahead over the ripples of frail green hills. To the French, who must be peering at him from behind the shutters of their stone houses along the road, he looked, he knew, like a conqueror and stern soldier and destroyer. He hadn't heard a shot fired yet, and here the war was already over.

He turned to talk to Brandt, sitting in the back seat. Brandt was a photographer in one of the propaganda companies and he had hitched on to Christian's reconnaissance squadron as far back as Metz. He was a frail, scholarly-looking man who had been a mediocre painter before the war. Christian had grown friendly with him when Brandt had come to Austria for the spring skiing. Brandt's face was burned a bright red and his eyes were sandy from the wind, and his helmet made him look like a small boy playing soldier in the family backyard. Christian grinned at him, jammed in there with an enormous Corporal from Silesia, who spread himself happily over Brandt's legs and photographic equipment in the cramped little seat.

"What're you laughing about, Sergeant?" Brandt asked.

"The color of your nose," Christian said.

Brandt touched the burned, flaked skin gingerly. "Down to the seventh layer," he said. "It is an indoor-model nose. Come on, Sergeant, hurry up and take me to Paris, I need a drink."

"Patience," Christian said. "Just a little patience. Don't you know there's a war on?"

The Silesian Corporal laughed uproariously. He was a high-spirited young man, simple and stupid, and aside from being anxious to please his superiors, he was having a wonderful time on his journey across France. The night before, very solemnly, he had told Christian, as they lay side by side on their blankets along the road, that he hoped the war didn't end too soon. He wanted to kill at least one Frenchman. His father had lost a leg at Verdun in 1916, and the Corporal, whose name was Kraus, remembered saying, at the age of seven, standing rigidly in front of his one-legged father after church on Christmas Eve, "I will die happy after I have killed a Frenchman." That had been fifteen years ago. But he still peered hopefully at each new town for signs of Frenchmen who might oblige him. He had been thoroughly disgusted back at Chanly, when a French Lieutenant had appeared in front of a cafe, carrying a white flag, and had surrendered sixteen likely candidates to them without firing a shot.

Christian glanced back, past Brandt's comic burning face, at the other two cars speeding smoothly along on the even, straight road at intervals of seventy-five meters behind them. Christian's Lieutenant had gone down another parallel road with the rest of the section, leaving these three cars under Christian's command. They were to keep moving toward Paris, which they had been a.s.sured would not be defended. Christian grinned as he felt himself swelling a little with pride at this first independent command, three cars and eleven men, with armament of ten rifles and tommyguns and one heavy machine gun.

He turned in his seat and watched the road ahead of him. What a pretty country, he thought. How industriously it has been taken care of, the neat fields bordered by poplars, the regular lines of the plowing now showing the budding green of June.

How surprising and perfect it all had been, he thought drowsily. After the long winter of waiting, the sudden superb bursting out across Europe, the marvelous irresistible tide of energy, organized and detailed down to the last salt tablet and tube of Salvarsan (each man had been issued three with his emergency field rations in Aachen, before they started out, and Christian had grinned at the Medical Department's estimate of the quality of French resistance). And how exactly everything had worked. The dumps and maps and water just where they had been told they would be, the strength of the enemy and the extent of his resistance exactly as predicted, the roads in precisely the condition they had been told they would be. Only Germans, he thought, remembering the complex flood of men and machines pouring across France, only Germans could have managed it.

There was the sound of an airplane over the hum of the scout car's engine. Christian looked up behind him and smiled. A Stuka, fifty feet in the air, was flying slowly along the road behind him. How graceful and sure it looked, with the two wheels like hawk's talons stretching eagerly forward under the belly. For a moment, looking up at the wings against the sky, Christian regretted that he hadn't gone into the Air Force. There was no doubt about it, they were the darlings of the Army and the people back home. And their living conditions were absurdly comfortable, like first-cla.s.s accommodations at a fancy resort hotel. And the men themselves were wonderful types, the best in the country, young, careless, confident. Christian had seen them in the bars, and listened to them talk, in tight, exclusive groups, with-their own peculiar, elliptical language, spending a lot of money, talking about what it was like over Madrid, and the day they hit Warsaw, and the girls in Barcelona, and what they thought of the new Messerschmitt, all of them seeming to be oblivious of the facts of death or defeat, as though those things could not exist in their close, aristocratic, dangerous, gay world.

The Stuka was above Christian now, and Christian could see the pilot's face, grinning over the c.o.c.kpit, as he banked across the scout car. Christian grinned back, and waved, and the pilot waggled his wings before he flew on, unprotected and youthful and arrogant, down the tree-lined road stretching out ahead of them toward Paris.

Through Christian's head, as he sat easily in the front seat of the scout car, with the sound of the engine busy and rea.s.suring in his ears, and the green-smelling wind in his hair, ran a theme of music he had heard at a concert when he was on leave in Berlin. It was from a clarinet quintet by Mozart, sorrowful and persuasive, like a young girl mourning decorously for a lost lover by a slowly moving river on a summer afternoon. As Christian listened to the interior music, his eyes half closed, the gold flecks in their depths only occasionally glinting for a moment, he remembered the clarinetist. He had been a small, sad-looking little man with a bald head and drooping sandy moustaches, like a henpecked husband in a cartoon.

Really, Christian thought playfully, at a time like this, I should be humming Wagner. It is probably a kind of treachery to the Greater Third Reich not to be singing Siegfried today. He didn't like Wagner very much, but he promised himself he would think of some Wagner after he got through with the clarinet quintet. Anyway, it would help keep him awake. His head fell onto his chest and he slept, breathing softly and smiling a little. The driver looked over at him, and grinned and jerked his thumb at Christian in friendly mockery for the benefit of the photographer and the Silesian corporal in the back. The Silesian corporal roared with laughter, as though Christian had done something irresistibly clever and amusing for his benefit.

The three cars sped along the road through the calm, s.h.i.+ning countryside, deserted, except for occasional cattle and chickens and ducks, as though all the inhabitants had taken a holiday and gone to a Fair in the next town.

The first shot seemed to be part of the music.

The next five shots wakened him, though, and the sound of the brakes, and the tumbling sensation of the car skidding sideways to a halt in the ditch next to the road. Still almost asleep, Christian jumped out and lay behind the car. The others lay panting in the dust beside him. He waited for something to happen, somebody to tell him what to do. Then he realized that the others were looking anxiously at him. In command, he thought, the non-commissioned officer will take immediate stock of the situation and make his dispositions with simple, clear orders. He will betray no uncertainty and will at all times behave with confidence and aggressiveness.

"Anybody hurt?" he whispered.

"No," said Kraus. He had his finger on the trigger of his rifle and was peering excitedly around the front tire of the car.

"Christ," Brandt was saying nervously. "Jesus Christ." He was fumbling erratically with the safety on his pistol, as though he had never handled the weapon before.

"Leave it alone," Christian said sharply, "leave the safety on. You'll kill somebody this way."

"Let's get out of here," Brandt said. His helmet had tumbled off and his hair was dusty. "We'll all get killed."

"Shut up," Christian said.

There was a rattle of shots. Slugs tore through the scout car and a tire exploded.

"Christ," Brandt mumbled, "Christ."