Young Hearts Crying (36 page)

He had discovered he could get laid again, too, and he was so grateful to the girl who proved it that he might have wept and thanked her with all his heart the minute it was over, though he managed to check that impulse.

She was one of the secretaries at
Chain Store Age,
and she told
him she had never cheated on her boyfriend before. She would have felt funny about coming down to Leroy Street this afternoon, she said, if she hadn’t recently found out that her boyfriend had cheated on her. Still, she felt she was mature enough to understand and accept her boyfriend’s infidelity: he was just starting out in a new dental practice in Jackson Heights and had been under a great deal of emotional stress.

“Yeah,” Michael said, feeling like a million dollars. “Well, I guess a thing like emotional stress can really – really get you into trouble, Brenda.”

In the summer of 1964, after his third book came out, he was invited to lecture and to read some of his work at a two-week writers’ conference in New Hampshire. The thing took place on a picturesque little campus high in the mountains and miles from any town: enough rambling old residence buildings to house three hundred paying participants, an ample kitchen and dining room, and a light-filled lecture hall where the talk never stopped and writing was the only topic ever discussed.

The director of the program was Charles Tobin, a man of fifty or more whose novels Michael had always liked and who turned out to be an engagingly jovial host. “Come on over and join us at the Cottage as soon as you’re settled, Mike,” he said. “See over there across the road?”

One small frame house with a porch around it, set well apart at the far end of the campus, was used as the faculty gathering place – a kind of club where only privileged outsiders were made welcome. A flood of drink was poured and served there in the hour or two before lunch every day, and an ocean of it in the hours before dinner; then there would often be song and drunkenness far into the night. Charles Tobin’s hearty endorsement of all this seemed based on his view that writers worked
harder than most other people – harder perhaps than most other people could imagine – and so deserved a break for a couple of weeks every summer. Besides, writers understood self-discipline; he knew they could all be trusted.

But by the end of the first week Michael Davenport had begun to sense that he might be going under – or rather that he might be going up and over and out. And it wasn’t just the drink, though that certainly didn’t help; it was the lecture hall.

He had read his poems aloud to small groups in the past, but never before had anybody asked him to stand at a lectern and speak from the heart to a hushed, attentive audience of three hundred people. They wanted to know about the stern and delicate craft he had practiced for twenty years, and he told them. His lectures were either extemporaneous or drawn from a few scribbled notes, but each of them seemed to achieve its own firm design and structure. He was a hit.

“That was a damn good job, Mike,” Charles Tobin said time and again as they left the lecture hall together, but Michael didn’t need to be told because the long, intoxicating applause would still be going on in the hall behind them.

People clustered around him with copies of his books to be autographed; they sought him out for breathless private talks about problems in their own work; and there was a girl for him, too.

She was a slender, dead-serious girl named Irene, one of the young apprentice writers who waited on tables in the dining room in exchange for “scholarships” to the conference; she would knock shyly on his door every night, then whirl inside and fall into his arms as if this were the very kind of romance she had wanted all her life. She praised him in as many ways as he could remember having heard from any girl, even in the early times with Jane Pringle; then, very late one night in his bed, she
said “You
know
so much” – and that took him all the way back to Cambridge in 1947.

“No, listen, don’t say that, Irene,” he told her, “because in the first place it’s not true. These lectures of mine are coming out of the air, coming out of the sky; I don’t know where the hell they’re coming from, but they’re making me sound an awful lot smarter than I am, do you understand me? And in the second place, that’s the same thing my wife said to me once before we were married and it took her a whole lot of years to find out how wrong she was, so let’s not have any more shit along that line, okay?”

“I think you’re very tired, Michael,” Irene said.

“Oh, baby, you said a mouthful. I’m tired as hell, and that’s only the beginning of it. Listen. Listen, Irene. Don’t get scared, but I think I may be going crazy.”

“You may be what?”

“Going crazy. Listen, though: it’s no big deal, if you’ll let me explain a couple of things. I went crazy once before and came out the other side of it, so I know it’s not the end of the world. And I think I’ve caught it earlier this time. I may even have caught it in
time,
if you see what I mean. I’m still mostly in control. If I’m terrifically careful with myself, with the booze and the lectures and all the rest of it, maybe I can still get through this thing. There’re only three or four more days left here anyway, aren’t there?”

“There are six days left,” she said.

“Well, okay, six. But the thing is, Irene, I’m really going to need your help.”

There was a significant pause before she said “In what way?” And both the pause and the timorous, guarded tone of the question let him know at once that he’d taken too much for granted with this girl. Except that they’d writhed and humped
together here for a week they were almost strangers. She might have romanticized him sane, but that was no reason to suppose she would ever know what to do with him crazy. If “help” was needed, she would first have to be very sure she understood what kind of help he had in mind.

“Oh, hell, I don’t know, baby,” he said. “I shouldn’t have put it like that. All I mean is I’d like you to stick around. I’d like you to sort of be my girl, or pretend to be my girl, until this whole thing is over. Then later we’ll have a better time; I promise.”

But that wasn’t right, either. When the thing was over she’d be going back to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, too far from New York for frequent visits even if frequent visits were what she might wish to have. And he should never have said “pretend to be my girl” because no girl in the world would want to consider a plan like that.

“Why don’t you just try and get some sleep now,” she told him.

“Okay,” he said. “Only first come a little closer so I can – there. There. Oh, Christ, you’re a pretty girl. Oh, don’t go away. Don’t go away, Irene.…”

He was walking unsteadily toward the lecture hall the next morning when Charles Tobin fell into step with him and took him by the arm and said “This won’t be necessary, Mike.”

“How do you mean?”

“I just mean you don’t have to face that crowd again today; somebody else can fill in for you.” Tobin stopped walking, obliging Michael to stop too, and they stood looking at each other in the dazzling sunshine. “As a matter of fact,” Tobin said, “I’ve already arranged for somebody else to fill in.”

“Oh. So I’ve been fired.”

“Oh, come on, Mike; nobody gets ‘fired’ from a place like this. I’m concerned about you, that’s all, and I—”

“Where do you get ‘concerned’? You think I’m going crazy?”

“I think you’ve pushed yourself too hard up here, and I think you’re exhausted. I probably should’ve spotted it sooner, but then after what happened in the Cottage last night I—”

“What happened in the Cottage last night?”

Tobin appeared to be scrutinizing Michael’s face. “You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, listen, let’s go back to your room to talk, okay? There’re a few too many – onlookers out here.”

And that was true, though Michael hadn’t noticed it: any number of people, from college kids to ladies with powder-blue hair, had stopped in their tracks on the bright grass, or on the road, in order to witness this confrontation.

Michael had begun to tremble badly when they got to his room; it was a relief to sit on the bed. Then Charles Tobin sat facing him, hunched in the only chair, and told him what had happened last night.

“…  And you kept pouring drinks for yourself out of Fletcher Clark’s bottle. I don’t think you knew what you were doing, but the trouble was you went on doing it even after he’d asked you to stop. Then when he did get mad you called him a cocksucker and took a swing at him, and it took about four of us to pull you apart, and the big table got broken. You don’t remember any of that?”

“No, I – oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.”

“Well, it’s over now, Mike; there’s no point in torturing yourself. Afterwards Bill Brodigan and I brought you back here, and you were very calm by then. You said you didn’t want us coming into the room because it would upset Irene, and that seemed reasonable, so we stayed at the end of the hall and watched you go inside, and that was it.”

“Where is she now? Where’s Irene?”

“Well, it’s almost lunchtime, so I expect she’s busy in the dining room. Don’t worry about Irene. Irene’ll be fine. I think the best thing would be to get undressed and under the covers, don’t you? I’ll stop back to see you in a while.”

And Michael would never know how little or long a while it was before Charles Tobin came into the room again, followed this time by a smaller, younger man in a cheap summer suit.

“Mike, this is Dr. Brenner,” he said. “Dr. Brenner’s going to give you an injection and then you’ll have a good rest.”

There was a needle in one buttock, keener and swifter and less humiliating than any of the Bellevue needles; then he was fully if sloppily dressed again and walking down the hall between Tobin and the doctor, shrugging off their hands to prove he could walk alone, and they went out across a brilliant stretch of grass to where a cream-colored four-door sedan stood waiting in the road. A sturdy young man all in white got out of the back seat and held the door open, and they helped Michael into the car as carefully as if he were very old and frail. Nothing could have gone more smoothly. But he was rapidly losing consciousness as the car moved away through the vivid green and shade of the campus, and he either saw or dreamed a great gathering of oddly assorted people in summer clothes along the roadside, all their faces startled and embarrassed as they watched their favorite lecturer being taken into custody.

He spent a week in the psychiatric ward of a general hospital in Concord, New Hampshire; but the place was so clean and bright and quiet, and the personnel so unfailingly courteous, that it didn’t seem like a psychiatric ward at all.

He even had a room of his own – it took him a few days to realize that its door was always kept slightly ajar onto a
murmurous corridor that was locked from the outside; but still, a room of his own – so there was never any need to meet and mingle with the other disturbed patients; and surprisingly succulent meals were brought to his bedside, always right on time.

“These medications you’re getting now should do the job for you, Mr. Davenport,” said a spruce young psychiatrist, “if you go on taking them at home. But I wouldn’t underestimate what happened to you up here at the whaddyacallit. The writers’ conference. You appear to have had a second psychotic episode, and it may suggest a continuing pattern of further episodes in the future, so if I were you I’d watch my step. I’d certainly go easy on the alcohol, for one thing, and I’d try to avoid any emotionally stressful situations in the course of my – you know – of my life. Your life.”

And when he was alone again he lay slowly trying to sort things out in his mind. Could he still divide the years into pre- and post-Bellevue periods, or not? Would this new thing require the establishment of a new historical era in its own right? Or would it, like the Korean War, serve mainly to show that history couldn’t be expected to make much sense?

Irene came to see him one afternoon. She sat on the bedside chair with her nice legs crossed at the knee and talked about her plans for the coming year at Johns Hopkins. She said more than once that it would be “fun” to “get together” with him in New York, and he said “Well, sure, Irene, we’ll be in touch,” but they said those things in the automatically graceful manner of promises never meant to be kept.

At the end of the visiting hour she rose and bent to kiss his mouth, and he could sense that she’d come here today not only to say goodbye but to have a brief sample, for curiosity’s sake, of how it would feel to pretend to be his girl.

One of the orderlies brought him a pad of paper and a pen,
and he spent hours drafting a letter to Charles Tobin. It wouldn’t have to be a very long letter; the important thing was to find and sustain the right tone. It would have to convey humility and apology and gratitude without ever sinking into remorse, and it would be best if he could conclude it on the note of wry, self-effacing bravery that was characteristic of Tobin’s own style.

He was still working on the letter the day they released him from the hospital, and he continued to sound out certain phrases of it, just under his breath, on the plane back to New York.

Everything in the Leroy Street place looked drab to the point of wretchedness when he first walked into it, carrying a suitcase full of dirty laundry, and it was smaller than he’d remembered. He got the Tobin letter finished and into the mail; then it was time to get back to work.

Work might not be all there was in the world, but it had come to be the only thing Michael Davenport could trust. If he eased up on it now, if he ever let his mind slide away from it, there might be a third episode – and the third one, here in New York, might easily take him back to Bellevue again.

One of the ways he could tell he was getting older, during the next few years, was that Laura looked different every time he met the train from Tonapac.

Until she was thirteen or so he had always been able to spot her at once in the crowd coming out through the gate at Track Ten because she was the girl he had known all her life: skinny and quick, with her best clothes worn a little awry and her white socks beginning to sink out of control into the heels of her shoes. Her face would always be bright with expectation as she ran the last of the distance into his arms – “Daddy!” – and he’d hold her close and tell her how good it was to see her again.