The Merry Month of May (2 page)

I had no answer. But Hill did not press it. In fact, we did not talk about it again. Not then or later. Or about his parents. Or about his parents’ treatment of McKenna. Naturally, I did not tell his parents of our discussion. I felt it would be a violation Hill would detest me for, one which would make him stop confiding in me. But he didn’t confide in me anyway. I assume he got his piece of ass, the next year, or the year after. Several of them, a whole string of them. But if he did, he didn’t tell me about it.

But he was always a close-mouthed, quite self-contained boy, Hill, even back then; and I never knew much about what went on, was going on, in that ballooning, swiftly growing mind of his. Not, at least, until the
Mouvement du
22
mars
at Nanterre and the
Révolution de mai
unlocked his voice, and he began to confide in me things he had never spoken about before.

I’m sure Harry had no idea of the way he was thinking, either. Any more than I myself had. Not, anyway, until that night of April 27th of this year, when Harry called me.

He called me around two-thirty. He knew well I worked late editing and reading and never got to bed before three-thirty or four.

“The kid’s not home.” Kid? I thought in panic. McKenna? My Godchild? Eight years old? Not home?

“No, no!” Harry said impatiently into my silence. “Hill! Hill hasn’t come home.”

“Is that bad?” I asked cautiously.

“Well, he’s never done it before. Not without letting me know. I’m worried. We’re sitting here waiting up for him. Come on over. I’ll break out a bottle.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come. Do you think there’s anything wrong?”

“How the hell do I know? Come on over.”

It was certainly pleasant strolling down the quai in the soft spring night. Everything seemed so calm. Certainly I had no inkling that young Hill was wrapped up in the student troubles. Hill had been studying both Sociology and Cinema at the Sorbonne for three years, without saying much of anything about it to anyone.

The Gallaghers’ apartment was lovely. That was the only word for it. Back in fifty-five, before I knew them, when Harry had come into his inheritance, the Gallaghers had taken a long-term lease on an entire floor high up across that terminal building at the end of the Island, the one owned by the Princess Bibesco. Four tall double-doored windows looked out across the downriver tip of the Île St.-Louis toward the Pont d’Arcole and the river, for all the world like some luxury-liner captain’s bridge looking out across the prow of his ship. Harry had done it all in superior Louis Treize. I’m a Second Empire man myself. But I had to admit the dark, heavy, massive Louis Treize with its somber deep reds and greens looked very fine in the long sunlit expanse of Harry’s living room when I saw it that first time. And it looked just as nice now, with the lamps lit in their velvet and parchment shades. And over all of this Louisa presided like the casual but considerate hostess that she was.

Dear Louisa. Well, we sat around waiting and talking—about writing, about films, as we always did; and we went through one bottle and then through another. Even Louisa was a little high. “He knows he’s always supposed to be home by one-thirty or two,” Harry said. “He always has before.” It was nearly six o’clock when Hill finally came in.

“Where the hell have you been?” Harry demanded.

“Just to a meeting.” The boy made as if to go on to his room.

“No, sir! Come back here, sir!” Harry called after him. Hill did, and stood by the archway with his shoulders slumped.

“I want to know more than that,” Harry said. “I want to know where you’ve been. You know you’re supposed to be home by one-thirty. Or at least call me,” he added—somewhat inconclusively, I thought.

“I’ve been to a meeting!” Hill cried. He looked up then, and his eyes actually blazed. “A meeting! A students’ meeting!” We followed the papers, but we wouldn’t get tonight’s news until tomorrow morning. “The police arrested Dany Cohn-Bendit today,” Hill said. “They let him go tonight. Because they’re afraid of repercussions. But if they think that’ll stop us, they’re dead wrong. We’re organizing. We’re organizing, and we’re going to make them stop and think. Maybe we’ll do more than that,” he added darkly, and glared at all of us as if we were personally responsible for the arrest of the student leader Cohn-Bendit. I found this suddenly funny, but decided not to say so. I, for one, rather liked young
Dany le Rouge,
and wished him well on his crusade.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Harry said, and then he grinned with that hatchet-face of his. “So you’re in on all of that. How long?”

“Oh, we’ve been talking,” Hill said sullenly. “You don’t think it’s only Nanterre, do you? The Sorbonne’s involved, too. Every university in France’s involved. We’ve had a bellyful of it. And we’re not going to take it lying down.”

My ear loved his use and command of his father’s type of American English. But Hill’s French was equally as good, was perfect. I had a tendency to forget that sometimes. But in fact he was at least as much French as he was American. He had lived in Paris almost all of his life.

“Well, I’m proud of you,” Harry said, still grinning his hatchet grin.

“You’re
proud of
me!”
the boy cried. “What do I care whether
you’re
proud of
me!
You, with your money, rich, and writing those crappy films you write! Look at you, all of you: sitting there boozing it up! Boozers! Lushheads! Getting fat in the belly and fat in the mind! With your old Louis Treize and your ritzy apartment!
You’re
proud of
me!
After what your generation did to the world?”

“Wait a minute!” Harry said. “Wait just a minute, kid! My generation inher—”

“You
wait a minute!” Hill said. The tirade seemed out of all proportion to the offense, if there was one; out of proportion even to his own perhaps over-excited emotions left over from the student meeting; but he went on.

Harry had stopped grinning.

“Hypocrites! Absolute hypocrites, all of you! Well, we’re going to pull you down. Pull the whole damn society down. Down around your ears. We haven’t got anything to put in its place yet, but something good—something better than what exists—has got to happen.” He caught a breath. “Oh, what’s the use of trying to explain anything to
you?
Old phonies like you?” He turned and fled.

Harry had gotten half up out of his chair, and looked as if he were undecided whether to chase his son and hit him, or let it go. Slowly, he dropped back into the chair.

“Well, I’ll be God damned,” he said. Then after a moment, “How do you like them apples?”

“Harry,” Louisa said softly from the lovely Louis Treize couch they had hunted over a year for. “Take it easy, Harry. Take it easy.” She got up to pour us all another drink.

Darling, solid, level-headed Louisa. I still think it was a good thing that she spoke, Harry’s face was a sight to behold. There was a kind of numb snarl on it, and underneath that a bitter hurt the like of which I have rarely seen. And though he had sunk back, he was gripping his highball glass with whitened knuckles as if he might hurl it into the fireplace. And if he had, I don’t know what might have followed. I think he would have gone for Hill. But Louisa kept his thought distracted. She refilled my glass, his, and her own, talking inanities about younger generations. She sat back down, finally, and nobody spoke for an uncomfortably long time.

It may seem that Harry’s reaction was out of proportion to his son’s offense. The key lay in the fact that Harry was a man who all his life had been proud of himself as a fighting Liberal. Now here was this man being upbraided by his own teen-age son for being old, a phony, an arch-Conservative, a member of the “Establishment”. It was apparently the first time it had happened.

In the uncomfortable silence, in which I could hear far too loudly the swallowing mechanism of my own damned throat, I finally got up and took my leave, saying I ought to be getting home, since Hill was obviously all right.

“All right?” Harry said in a dazed way. “All right?”

I suppose it wasn’t the best thing I could have said.

Anyway, I left, I had no concept, no premonition, no idea, nor even any concern, that this might be anything more than a normal father-son squabble, that an element might exist in it which would demolish, would flatten the whole Gallagher family as Hiroshima was flattened.

2

. . . . . M
Y DOORBELL IS RINGING.
I know who it will be. It will be Weintraub. Weintraub, coming by with gossip tidbits about the taking of the Sorbonne today, or perhaps some news about whether the students will be out protesting tonight. Weintraub. David Weintraub, who brought The Catalyst into all our lives. I suppose I must go and let him in. But the thought of seeing him now, depresses me.

But first I am putting these papers away, and locking the desk. Weintraub avidly and openly examines everything that is lying around loose in any apartment that he visits. . . . . .

Weintraub. Weintraub the clown. Weintraub the clown has gone. And he did not see any of these papers of mine. And yet somehow I have a hunch that he suspects that they exist—even though I only began actually working on them today! He has that kind of a ferret’s mind, a kind of immensely aware animal cunning that is not inhibited by any short-circuit of shamelessness on his part, or by any deep-riding sense of the right of privacy of others. Totally open about himself and his private (or what ought to be private) experiences, to the point of embarrassing his listeners, he accords others the same right by prying shamelessly and incessantly into their private experiences as far as they will let him. He made at least two allusive remarks about the fact that I might be working on something, writing something, about the Gallaghers and the events of the past six weeks—remarks which I parried deftly without giving him any information one way or the other.

It is next to impossible to give any kind of accurate description of Weintraub to someone. “Hello, Jack Hartley!” came that deep, booming, falsely hearty voice from the stairwell, as I pressed the button that opened the outside street door a flight below. “I have great news for you tonight! Weintraub has finally been beaten up by the flics! After all these weeks and days of being in the forefront rank of the
Révolution,
Weintraub has finally made it! I got the bruises to prove it! I’ll show you!”

“Come on up, Dave,” I said, deliberately making my voice super-quiet, to contrast with his effusiveness. He always has affected me that way.

One word here about my apartment. It is in one of those old buildings built around 1720 by some long-vanished entrepreneur who was a big wheel in the King’s Finance Ministry or someplace like that, and whose now-forgotten name adorns the wall outside on the quai on a seldom-polished brass plate. These houses were all built as town houses for some rich family or other. Now of course they are all broken up into apartments. And at some time in the last century somebody, for reasons unknown to me, decided to split the high-ceilinged rooms of the ground-floor apartments into two by putting a new floor squarely across the center of them, thus creating two apartments. I have the upper of these. It is, necessarily, low-ceilinged; but I like that. I like being able to reach up my hand and lean on it against the natural-wood beams. Of course Harry, who is tall, and vulnerably bald, always had to duck a little when he came into it, but hardly anyone else did. And it was perfect for me. I had a, spacious living room, a small dining place beyond a high arch which did not cut down on the passage of sun and air, two tiny bedroom-cubicles, bath, an adequate—if small—kitchen where I often cooked, good-drawing fireplaces in every room, and a Portuguese maid who lived on the Island and came in every day. What more could a single man ask? I seldom entertained at home, but I could when I wanted to. And beyond my three French-doored windows on the quai, which could be flung open to the sun in summer, was one of the best views in Paris: the back of Notre-Dame with its soaring buttresses almost close enough to touch; the high wedding cake of the Panthéon on its hilltop floating above the old Left Bank houses; and always the river, and the barges, a never-ceasing source of interest to the eyeball. I had had my writing desk placed right in front of one of these windows. And down below were the old trees, and the ancient cobbled ramp, framed in ancient white stone, where the poor people from the tenements in the center of the Island used on Sundays to run their cars and motorbikes down to the water to wash them. It was a great place to live back in fifty-eight, when I first got it.

Of course, all that has changed now. The Island has become terribly chic, a dozen new restaurants have opened up, and the honest poor people’s tenements have been bought up by entrepreneurs and cleaned up and turned into studio apartments, where young white-collar executive couples, working so hard to build the new Technological Consumers’ Society of France, now live with their narrow black briefcases like a New Yorker’s.

It was into this place that I ushered Weintraub, and offered to make him a drink. Not that he had not been there before and didn’t know his way to the bar perfectly. He made straight for my writing table before its end one of my three windows, and began rummaging through old material for my Review that I had lying there.

“Yeah, God, Hartley,” he said in passing across the room, puffing out his chest and again deepening his already deep, resonant voice; to show sincerity, I suppose. “I could do with a good stiff Scotch.
Les flics
really racked me up tonight.” He put down my papers with a gesture that said they were not of interest to him and that he had already seen them before. “Yes, sir, they really racked old Weintraub up. You want to see my scars?” He began unbuttoning his short Eisenhower-type jacket.

I handed him his drink, and then made a stiff one for myself. “Scars?” I said.

“Well, bruises,” the deep, immensely self-important voice said. “But deep bruises. Those rubber
matraques
with that iron rod in them really sting. And they bite deep. They hurt deep.” He already had his jacket off, and was starting on his turtleneck.