The Lonely (2 page)

She was one of those perfect specimens of American beauty which is frequently the result of wealth and careful social selection, a finely proportioned slender girl, violet-eyed, with rich russet hair framing the kind of features that must be reckoned as beauty.

She had the modern athlete’s body and carried her own sweet fragrance of health and cleanly vitality. Too, she was possessed of a clarity of spirit and a purity that concealed her ignorance of herself and the world. She had been bred to type and to escape all of harm or hurt or realities of life that might be avoided, as had been Jerry.

All this made Jerry think of his forthcoming marriage to her with a humbleness verging upon abasement. In his boy’s mind she was locked away in a compartment marked: “Goddess—Sacred . . .”

Life in the Air Force had abolished Jerry’s virginity and had even assisted in reducing some of the prudery instilled in him by his family, upbringing, class, and general education. Even so, Jerry did not realize that he never thought of Catharine as a woman with whom he would some day join his body in union to produce his children, much less blend in passion and in ecstasy.

For here was the supreme achievement of the system that made him—not even when he went down to London with the gang to seek sexual release from tension did she cross his mind. So far was his Catharine removed from this concept that he was not even burdened with a sense of guilt or cheating. Since no love or woman-worship was involved, there was no disloyalty. Loyalty loomed large in Jerry’s catalogue of virtues.

The clock now stood at two minutes to six, and the eager and thirsty lined the bar and were making leading remarks at the frosty backs of the bartenders. They were all boys doing men’s work, and of them all, Jerry felt his youth the most.

He knew that he was man enough to fly his course under attack or bring home a limping ship, to carry his commission and play his part. But inside he seemed to feel no different from the way he felt at home when he was a high-school football hero, or a freshman star, and then briefly a sophomore at Williams before he had enlisted.

He yearned desperately to grow up, not only to be a man, but to feel like one instead of a kid, something between the dashing, virile, swashbuckling Lester Harrison, over there at the slot machine, and tough Sam Bognano, captain of the Liberator “My Black Hen,” of which Jerry was co-pilot.

Sam came in through the door, looking around for friends. A stocky boy with a flat nose and slightly protruding eyes, he spotted Jerry and called: “Hi! How’d you make out with the Flight Surgeon? Nothing trivial, I hope.”

Jerry said: “Keep away from me. I’m a sick man. I’ve got something awful. Two weeks’ rest furlough. I’m supposed to go to Scotland and graze . . .”

Bognano quickly rubbed the back of his hand against Jerry’s neck. “Oh, you lucky stiff. Lemme touch you. Maybe it’s catching . . .”

“Lucky, my foot! I’ll go screwy. Christ, two weeks nutting around by myself! . . .”

“Yeah”—Bognano said sympathetically—“that’s terrible. Fresh air, plenty of sleep, nothing to worry about. You’d better have some medicine right away.” He turned and waved at Major Harrison and said: “Hi, Lester, come on over and have a drink.”

The major, without looking up, pulled the plunger of the machine and said in his dry, mocking voice: “I’ve got an investment here. Something’s goin’ to bust soon . . .”

Precisely at six o’clock, when the two bartenders faced around and said: “What’ll it be, gentlemen?” the major’s slot machine whirred and went: “Chunk, chunk, chunk, CRASH!” and began to cascade shillings.

Somebody yelled: “Hey, that lucky bastard’s hit it again! Jackpot!”

Major Harrison came over and dumped his swag on to the bar between Sam and Jerry without emotion, saying: “I knew she was hot, I’m buying. Straight Scotch.”

Jerry’s moment of envy was not for the pile of silver heaped on the bar, but rather an extension of his admiration for the swashbuckling type of man who could coax jackpots out of one-armed bandits and never turn a hair. The most that Jerry had ever been able to ring up was three bells for the twenty-shilling pay-off. He felt that somehow it had something to do with the kind of a man the major was inside that compelled the machine to disgorge by sheer force of personality. Towards women, gambling, and flying, Harrison displayed an insouciant toughness and careless mastery that Jerry would have given an arm to acquire.

Sam said: “Be very careful of my friend here. He’s in a highly delicate condition. Flight Surgeon has just plastered him with a two weeks’ rest furlough.”

The major turned and stared pleasantly. “The hell you say! God bless operational fatigue! What would we do without it? Going up to Scotland?”

He tossed off a straight Scotch with a jerk of his head, and then set the glass down on the bar with a click and a characteristic sigh.

Jerry said: “I guess so,” drank off his own Scotch, copying the major’s click and sigh. He fell silent because he was embarrassed. It wasn’t awe, or even remotely bootlicking to the major’s rank that caused this feeling, but rather the certainty that the major must know just how much of a green kid he still was.

Major Harrison said: “That’s wonderful country up there. You’re lucky.”

Jerry downed another Scotch straight and tapped the glass on the bar. He said: “It’s going to be damn lonely. What the hell does a guy do off in Scotland by himself? If there was only somebody else from the outfit . . .”

The major moved some of his pile of shillings towards the bartender and said: “Keep it flowing,” and then remarked casually to Jerry: “Why don’t you take a girl up with you? Nothing to keep you from being lonely like shacking up with some nice kid. I don’t mean picking up with some two-quid bimbo, but get yourself some clean, decent girl. Hell, you must know a dozen of ’em!”

The idea startled Jerry. Not that it had come from Lester Harrison, but because Jerry had so immediately thought of Patches, and it was as though in thinking of her so swiftly he had done her a wrong. And as a kind of anonymous public apology to her, he said: “It’s a stymie. The kind of girl you’d want to have along on a trip like that wouldn’t go.”

Patches . . . Patches, that queer little mouse with the grey eyes that were so softly luminous; Patches, with her plain face and straight brown hair, who could sit quietly and contentedly through long silences and leave a fellow to his own thoughts and yet feeling warmed by her presence. Not the kind of kid you’d ever go for really, or get stuck on, but who’d be wizard to be with on a holiday. She’d keep out of your hair . . .

The major broke in on his thoughts with a cheerful laugh. “The hell she wouldn’t! She’ll go.” He downed his Scotch and grinned at Jerry like an older brother. “This isn’t the U.S.A. Girls aren’t as puritanical as they are back home—thank God!—or where would we be? Hell, the whole world’s upside down, isn’t it? They don’t think anything of it.”

Jerry suddenly felt stirred and excited and at the same time ill at ease. He wondered whether Sam Bognano was listening, and was relieved to find he had got into an argument with a lead bombardier over taking them for a second run down Flak Alley over Duisburg.

A holiday in Scotland . . . hills and lakes and funny inns. And not to be lonely. Somebody at your side to share it . . . Patches. Patches had a leave coming up from the WAAF. She had mentioned it the last Saturday night they had been together at the dance at the club. Then, confused and disturbed, he knew that it could never be. Patches was catalogued in his mind as a “decent,” or “good,” girl. His whole background forbade him even to suggest such a thing. How would you say it—how could one? He wouldn’t even know how to begin.

The major answered his unspoken questions as though he had divined them, though in reality he was only expanding upon his favorite subject.

“You just ask ’em,” he said. “Put it up to ’em cold turkey. They’re used to it. If they have some other guy, or don’t feel like going, they’ll tell you so, and no hard feelings. That’s what I like about ’em.”

Jerry found himself looking at the table over by the wall underneath the big, framed, blow-up of the burning oil refineries at Munster. He and Patches had been sitting there last Saturday night drinking gin and grapefruit squash after the Scotch gave out, and smiling at each other. They never talked much. They just liked to dance together and sit. The thick, blue-grey uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force made her look even plainer than she was, and yet her inner gentleness and softness managed to come through. She was a wizard dancer and never got on a fellow’s nerves. He had sat there with her sipping his nasty-tasting concoction and thinking of Catharine and the dances at the country club back home in the fall, when the autumn smoke smell drifted in from the outside.

It was all right to leave Patches that way with his thoughts, because she seemed to have her own kind of inner life that went on behind her grey eyes and at the corners of her mouth, queer lights and glows that would come and go, and shadows that would pause and drift by like soft clouds across a summer sky. And when he would come to address her, she would return at once, and the curious gravity of her expression would change to light and friendliness. He wondered what would become of that expression, what her face would be like if he put it up to her cold turkey . . .

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” the major was saying earnestly. “If they go, you want to have an understanding right from the start that there’s nothing permanent about it. Get it? Pals while you’re together, but when it’s over, you give ’em a kiss and a pat on the fanny and that’s that. Hell, you don’t want to get involved with them! But you won’t have to worry if you have an understanding before you start out. Most of ’em are hundred per cent. No tears and no trouble. Boom, it’s over! . . .”

The major raked up the remainder of his shillings and pocketed them. He said: “Okay, kid,” and clapped Jerry on the shoulder. “Have yourself a time. And remember—right from the start—cold turkey.” He turned abruptly and walked away.

Sam Bognano picked up the last words and said: “Where’s there any cold turkey? It’s Spam again tonight. What was he talking about?”

Jerry frowned a little and said: “Nothing. Let’s eat.”

That night, lying on his cot in the quarters he and Sam Bognano occupied, Jerry thought of his coming holiday, of home, of Catharine, and of Patches, of his mother and father and the village of Westbury, of what life would be like when the war was over, of what Major Harrison had said, and then of Patches again.

He was in the habit of talking his heart out to Sam Bognano, and night after night the two had exchanged their thoughts and problems and simple philosophies, their fears and doubts, their feelings for their girls and their plans for the future. But somehow Jerry found that he could not speak of the thought that always came uppermost in his mind—to take Patches away with him for his rest leave.

It was the idea that was exciting rather than Patches. She came to mind because she would fit so well. And with a girl as plain and quiet as Patches it wouldn’t even be cheating on Catharine. It would be an episode of the war to be forgotten with all the rest of the sights and sounds and fears and sorrows to be left behind when the war was over.

It wasn’t as though he wanted to go away with someone who was glamorous or beautiful or even important—in a way, to rival Catharine. In the moral code he had acquired by osmosis, as it were, back home, this would have been a gross disloyalty. To feel about anyone else as he felt about Catharine Quentin was an utter impossibility. They were promised, and his profound and enormous gratitude to her for loving him acted as a constant check upon his relations with other girls he met.

Their two families, his and hers, lived within a half a block of each other on quiet and exclusive Severn Avenue in Westlake Park, near Westbury, Long Island. They were only children—he and Catharine—and their mothers, Helen Wright and Millicent Quentin, had been girls together in St Louis. When the Quentins had moved east shortly after Catharine was born, it had been Helen who had persuaded them to settle close by.

They were good, honest people, but, above all, they were nice people of the upper middle class, who, if they lived by formula, at least selected one that had the merit of wide acceptance. Jerry had not an iota of snob in him, but still he was aware of a wonderful rightness about his family and the Quentins that was lacking in others. There was a kind of harmony about their houses. It was a part of the formula.

Jerry’s father, Harman Wright, was president of the Westbury Farmers Bank and chairman of the Real Estate Board, and at fifty-five looked young enough to be taken for Jerry’s older brother. He played fast tennis, low-handicap golf, rode horseback, loved his wife, his son, and his business, and at all times and under all circumstances behaved like a gentleman.

Since Jerry could remember, theirs had been a suburban home of easy-going luxury. Since money was the commodity in which Harman Wright dealt, as well as possessing it from both sides of the family, they were hampered neither by any lack of it nor any necessity for displaying it. Its presence was something taken for granted with no particular merit attached to it. It was a family that had managed to keep its youth and good manners. Helen Wright could always be counted upon to handle the superficial impeccably.

She was a handsome matron who had kept her looks and figure for her husband and son as a part of the formula. She regulated their lives pleasantly. Her social position in the community occupied a good deal of her time, but not to the exclusion of her family. Thus the wheels, and all the wheels within the wheels, of her life appeared to run faultlessly. In her bloodstream were the germs of a minor dynast and geneticist. She believed that if the right people would just always marry the right people, the world must in the end benefit thereby.

The Quentins were much like them. Fred Quentin, Catharine’s father, was a member of a law firm handling a good deal of the business of the Long Island Railroad. He was prosperous, and he and Harman Wright had become devoted friends, golf-, bridge-, and hunting-partners. They belonged to the same town and country clubs, shared a shooting-lodge in the Carolinas, thought and voted the same way politically. They worked hard and played hard, but always, as far as could be observed, clean and according to the rules and traditions, which had a meaning for them. They were both chaps who went all out for what they were after, whether it was a client, a deal, a golf match, or a bird. They knew both how to win, and how, if need be, to lose. It was in this atmosphere that Jerry was brought up and by observation and example acquired his patterns of behavior.