A Young Man's Heart (2 page)

Did the young Woolrich overhear his parents quarrelling bitterly about Genaro’s womanizing as young Blair does in Chapter One? Did he see his mother board the night train for the north as Blair does at the end of the chapter? Probably not, since Woolrich was only four or five when Claire and Genaro broke up. In a scene full of religious imagery showing Woolrich’s identification with Blair and his mother, she tells the boy that her husband “won’t let me take you with me” and his father promises (or threatens) to “make a man” of him. That the latter detail accurately reflects how the boy was brought up is suggested by an anecdote shared with me by Lou Ellen Davis (1937- ), who knew Woolrich in his last years. “He told me that near where they lived . . .there was a bigger kid, and that he paid this bigger kid to let Cornell beat him up where Cornell’s father could see it . . .Here was this skinny, frail, very gifted, very artistic kid, and here was this macho guy, and the kid so wanted macho approval.”

In Chapter Two the year is 1916 and Blair and his father are living in a house in Calle Bruselas. Giraldy has become a social lion, throwing endless parties at which he entertains his guests by playing the “black and neurotic” piano, “his ring dashing about over the keys like a mad jewel.” Was the real Genaro musical? Carlos Burlingham said no. Discovering that Blair has filched a cigarette, Giraldy makes the boy smoke in front of his guests, who laugh uproariously until Blair is sick. Regardless of whether anything like this incident really happened, it shows that Woolrich in his mid-twenties had for his father nothing but contempt.

Chapter Two also introduces us to the novel’s most important female character, the teen-age temptress Mariquita. Her first conversation with Blair is on the subject of devils. “There are no devils,” the boy tells her. This throwaway line suggests what Carlos Burlingham confirmed for me, that Genaro was not at all a religious man. In BLUES OF A LIFETIME Woolrich claims that until 1933 he had never set foot inside a church—“Neither for a wedding nor a funeral, a baptism nor a confirmation nor a mass”—and that he didn’t know a single formal prayer. Where then did he pick up the Christian imagery that we find in A YOUNG MAN’S HEART and also in his later
noir
classics like “Three O’Clock” (1938)?
Quién sabe
? We’ll also never know whether Mariquita had a real-world counterpart, but some of the incidental details of Blair’s life at this time, like seeing Pearl White cliffhanger serials on Sunday afternoons at the Parisiana Ciné, seem to ring true. Later in the chapter religion rears its ugly head again: Giraldy’s current mistress has a terrifying experience that causes her to refuse his sexual advances, give away everything she owns and go off to join the black-veiled nuns who look “like apparitions of death.”

In Chapter Three Blair is sixteen and the woman now living with his father suggests that Giraldy should remedy the boy’s spotty education by sending him to school in Europe or the United States. Blair is terrified by the prospect of being torn away. He senses that his father wants to get rid of him so that he’ll have a freer hand with women—and that he wants the boy to have to sail to Europe through the World War I blockade as a test of manhood. “At eighteen,” Giraldy boasts, “I had already been through the Boxer War in China and was fighting headhunters in the Philippines.” This statement is clearly fiction: the real Genaro was somewhere between 25 and 30 at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. But Giraldy’s contempt for his unmacho son does seem to reflect Woolrich’s personal experience, and so does young Blair’s contempt for his father. “A man to whom the height of youthful endeavor had been firing at brown and yellow peasants . . . A man who would send his son halfway around the world, to live among strangers in a land of rumbling terrors, to make room for a soiled mannequin.” That night he dreams that his father is aiming a rifle at him. Not knowing what day has been set for his departure, dreading each daily fall of darkness and only breathing again when that evening’s train has gone: these incidents prefigure the Death Wait sequences that abound in Woolrich’s later novels and stories.

Chapter Four begins precisely as Chapter One did, with Blair opening his eyes. Seven years have passed but Woolrich dismisses them in a few phrases. Blair had been educated in New York rather than Europe (for reasons never made clear), had not wanted for money (thanks apparently to affluent maternal relatives), had never received from his father as much as a letter. His mother seems to be dead. Blair has married Eleanor, a Manhattan socialite, and their honeymoon has taken them to the city of his boyhood. In a horse-drawn carriage they ride to the house in Calle Bruselas where Blair and his father had lived. As they pass a sidewalk cafe the musicians are playing “Poor Butterfly,” a song which relates back to Puccini’s opera and was to become a leitmotif in Woolrich’s suspense classic “Dime a Dance” (1938). The house’s present occupants know nothing of Giraldy except that he’d left years ago. As Genaro never returned to Woolrich’s life, Giraldy never reappears in A YOUNG MAN’S HEART.

The rest of Chapter Four and much of Chapter Five describe Eleanor’s involvement with Rafael Serrano, a diplomat attached to the Argentine legation. Their intense flirtation, which makes Blair violently ill, is punctuated by something with which Woolrich’s childhood in Mexico had made him intimately familiar: a revolution. Serrano offers the Giraldys the safety of his legation in case of violence. The city is plagued by food hoarding and skyrocketing inflation, the rebels dynamite the railroad tracks, Blair and Eleanor return to their hotel in an atmosphere of impending doom.

Chapter Six introduces the mighty rebel general who has turned the hotel into his headquarters. The evocation of Palacios and his entourage of gunmen, spies, cooks, whores and toadies makes us wonder whether Woolrich could have sat through hagiographic movies like VIVA VILLA! and VIVA ZAPATA! without vomiting. The stage is set for the climax, which I won’t spoil by discussing here except to say that as so often in his
noir
fiction it hangs on a huge coincidence and that, as one might expect with Woolrich, it’s tragic.

And perhaps also operatic. In another time, in the age of Verdi, Bizet, Puccini, A YOUNG MAN’S HEART might have been hailed as the perfect libretto for an opera. But it found few readers in 1930 and none at all between then and now. Its autobiographical roots remain tantalizing, and its intense emotional excesses demonstrate that Woolrich’s obsession with the maniacal power of love is by no means confined to his
noir
fiction. Like so many of the novels and stories he wrote later, this one could with perfect propriety have been entitled what I called my own account of his life and world: FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE.

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In the early 1930s, when the Depression had wiped out any possibility of Woolrich’s realizing his early literary ambitions, George Tarler’s children sold the house on West 113
^th
Street and Cornell and Claire took an apartment together in the Hotel Marseilles, a comfortable Victorian pile at Broadway and 113
^th
Street: the prison cell where he was to serve a 25-year sentence. During the first 15 years of that sentence he wrote the 11 novels and the 200-odd stories of pure suspense that earned him his reputation as the Hitchcock of the written word: “Johnny on the Spot” (1936), “Dusk to Dawn” (1937), “Three O’Clock” (1938), “Guillotine” (1939), THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1940), THE BLACK CURTAIN (1941), PHANTOM LADY (1942), THE BLACK ANGEL (1943), DEADLINE AT DAWN (1944), NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1945), RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (1948) and countless others.

On January 12, 1948, Genaro died. A recurring motif in his son’s
noir
fiction is that at death one is forgiven much. When Woolrich in New York heard the news, no doubt from some relative in Mexico, he reverently set down in the 1937 desk diary he used as a sort of portable file cabinet “my father’s resting place—Pantéon Espanol, Cuartito IV (Spanish Cemetery, Section IV), Mexico City, Mexico,” and noted that the grave was “marked with a tile plaque, on which his name is written.” To whatever extent his son’s career was a plea for Genaro’s attention and respect and love, and an attempt to build a bridge on which his long parted parents might reunite, its
raison d’être
was gone now. The fire of creative passion which had sustained Woolrich for almost fifteen years was stamped out. With his mother almost 75 and in worsening health and with the virtual guarantee of steady money from paperback reprints and movies and radio and soon television, why keep writing?

Still, he continued to write. He had to. “New York Blues,” apparently the last story he ever completed and one of the most darkly powerful of his entire career, was included in the collection NIGHT AND FEAR (2004). TONIGHT, SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK (2005) brought together an assortment of first-rate fiction and autobiographical reminiscence from his last twenty years.

In A YOUNG MAN’S HEART we see Woolrich long before then, still young, still hoping to be accepted as a mainstream author, never dreaming of what chance or fate held for him. More than thirty years later he looked back less than fondly on his first literary incarnation. “I was lucky,” he said in BLUES OF A LIFETIME. “I got a second chance. I finally learned to do my job competently only in the mid-Thirties, after I’d already been hitting print steadily for eight years. It would have been a lot better if everything I’d done until then had been written in invisible ink and the reagent had been thrown away.” His early novels he dismissed as exercises in which he would “work [words] into a rich weave, make them glitter, make them dance . . .and in the end have them covering nothing but a great big hole.” Certainly A YOUNG MAN’S HEART emphasizes vivid word-pictures over edge-of- the-seat suspense, although that Woolrich hallmark is far from absent here. But it’s essential reading for anyone who’s been haunted by his suspense novels and stories and is determined to know more about the haunted man who gave them to us.

A

YOUNG MAN’S

HEART

CHAPTER ONE

His Mother

1

Blair
heard the snap of the electric light, and the lining of his flickering eyelids turned vermilion. He opened one eye entirely. They were in the immediate next room, that was their bedroom: the immediate next room. He couldn’t see them at first hand, but Sasha’s bust was visible in a long narrow mirror that leaned over at an angle from the wall. Sasha’s face was as powdered as a Columbine and the lips were heavy with discontent, they were drooping like a red three-leaf clover. She had already taken down her hair, which was the first thing she did whenever she returned home—to the hotel that is—late of an evening. She was subject
to
headaches, an evanescent ailment that Blair seriously believed to be caused by small imps or scorpions lodged within the skull.

Behind her pensive motionless face in the glass, Blair saw his father’s shoulders and neck and the lower edge of his face brush quickly by in the background, giving a blurred impression. Sasha was looking steadily downward. “It isn’t the first time,” he heard her say. Her lips appeared to have hardly moved at all.

“Nor will it be the last.” It was his father’s voice this time, arrogant, noncommittal.

Sasha was looking up all at once, and there was unimaginable width to her eyes, filled as the vacant hollows suddenly were with color and liquidity. “It
will
be the last,” she asserted, and each word was neat and beautifully pronounced, Blair thought. Suddenly her position on the quicksilver changed, she began to move higher on the mirror. Her face and shoulders passed from view. She was crossing the room, she was retreating from the wall, and yet she seemed to be clambering up the face of it. Her tightly draped skirt, slit to reveal a wealth of lace, and the vamps of her shoes were the last of her to disappear over the beveled upper edge of the glass. And then came wisps of sobbing, pitched in the key of a newborn kitten left out in the rain to die.

The light burned steadily all that night, the crisp modern light that Blair knew so well, in a frosted cotton-blossom globe with a sharp point at its navel; a light meant for nail scissors perhaps, or the powdering of faces, but not for eyes red with weeping, since eyes red with weeping were anything but modern, they were old as the hills. Blair couldn’t sleep because of this light that burned so steadily, and when he ventured in there at eight that morning, which was Sunday morning, it was still shining, dimmed by the light of the sun to a mere white glow within the glass itself. The whole apparatus was as hot as lead. Blair turned it out.

He watched her, lying prone as she was across the undisturbed bed, her face downward between two pillows that she had made use of to muffle her groans. A clove-pink scarf was whipped around her arms and shoulders, and it was like nothing so much as the sash of a naughty little girl who has been punished and sent to bed. All night the light of expiation had burned, yet no one had come near there, no one had tried for admittance.

2

The last day on earth had come. Between them they had pressed money upon him, quantities of money, ungrudgingly, eagerly. They vied with one another. “Get yourself this, get yourself that. Go ahead.” He was mystified, embarrassed. All these were indications of insanity.

When he returned, gorged, Sasha called him to her. It was seven in the evening and she had her hat on; it fitted the head very closely and had grosgrain cockades over the ears. She looked like a French medallion, he thought. At the same time he discovered something that made him uneasy. The taffeta pin-bolsters, shaped like éclairs, were gone from the top of her dressing table. So was every other imaginable thing. The room was bare of ornament, the closets empty. In a moment his face was as pale as a sheet of paper. He looked at her with abnormal intensity.

The irises of her eyes, swimming with tears, were refracted crookedly by the coating of liquid that her heavy lashes would not suffer to escape.

“You will have your dinner later with your father,” she told him. “I am going to the train now.”

He buried his face against her artificially flattened bosom.

“And me—what about me?”

“Yes, what about you, poor thing! He won’t let me take you with me.”

“He’s got to,” Blair sobbed.

“I would take you to the Hippodrome and to vaudevilles. I would buy a wrist-watch for you. Oh, how
can
I give you up?”

Her voice, her form, her very nearness to him, all dissolved in a salt agony.

His father, it seemed, had something to say to him. Blair steadied himself to listen, the corners of his mouth dragged down by weights of lead, his head suffused with unshed tears that, turned back upon themselves, bit like acid.

“—I’ll make a man of you, what’s more.”

Blair regarded his father with mute acquiescence.

Then at last he was alone, crucified no longer to the fetish of appearances.

3

Getting up, he allowed a jet of gaseous cold water to dash headlong into the crockery washbowl until it was brimming. Then he plunged his head in over the ears. The water streamed from his hair, carrying it down over his forehead in stringy disorder. He combed it as it was, corrugating the mirror with beads of water that flew off as they met with the close teeth of the comb. He was very particular about parting it, this hair that belonged to Sasha and was being irremediably severed from her.

He went through his father’s room and the sepulcher that had been hers until an hour ago, and descended to the lobby. There was a thunderous shifting of trunks going on on the part of unwashed porters in black blouses. A carriage was drawn up at the entrance to the hotel. Sasha was seated in it, biting the bulb of handkerchief at her lips. Blair took the small flat seat that faced backward and had to be lowered on braces. His father appeared and entered the carriage, seating himself at Sasha’s side.

“Have the trunks been seen to?” she asked quietly.

“I attended to them,” he said.

“Thank you,” she replied with grave courtesy.

The driver’s whip snapped and they rolled noiselessly away on wheels dipped in red gum. They traversed the quiet evening streets of the residential section, lined with long unbroken garden-walls bristling at the top with chopped glass purposely mixed in with the cement, like raisins in a pudding. A glimpse of the lighted sidewalks about the cafe district, and then the station, its thickly lettered kiosks advertising native cigarettes and bottled grenadines.

He and she and Blair stood on a vast concrete dais beside the coaches to say farewell to one another. The engine, lacquered and black as licorice, cast a satanic brick-red funnel of light ahead of it into eternity. Overhead gleamed the forget-me-not blue of the depot arc-lights hanging high as Babel from the beams, in long rows that began as big as full moons and ended the size of luminous peas.

“Sasha,” said the man at her side, “I can’t see you leave me like this. I love you more (go away, Blair) than anything I know of. Beautiful Sasha.”

Sasha smiled a weary smile of hers. “That should have been said long ago. Now the time is past. It is because I am going that you think you want me to stay. If I were to stay you would hate it.”

She put her foot upon the bottom step of the Pullman car and twined her wrist about the vertical brass handrail. The blinds were down behind the low elongated windows, windows interspersed with mosaics of mirror and mother- of-pearl. Blair spelled out the gold lettering that ran the length of the car: “Hesperides.” It bore quotation marks, as though even the railroad people refused to take it seriously.

Above her in the doorway appeared the grinning Juju mask of the carman, black flesh of Senegal torn over the aching world to Barbados. There was a crescent moon in the canal of open sky immediately above the tracks. Sasha’s wish, the golden wish, the never yet fulfilled, the

lode-star high above their heads: happiness, happiness. . .