Young Hearts Crying (37 page)

But along about the time her troublesome socks were
replaced by nylon hose, other changes began. She grew slower and heavier and less openly glad to see him; her smiles became an effort at civility, and sometimes she seemed to be thinking Isn’t this dumb? Why am I supposed to visit my father when all we ever do is get on each other’s nerves?

When she gained forty pounds in what seemed no time at all, at fifteen, Michael almost wished he wasn’t expected to meet these trains anymore. Where was the pleasure in having a big high-shouldered lump of a girl come plodding at you with a sullen and evasive look?

“Hi, baby,” he would say.

“Hi.”

“That’s a nice dress.”

“Oh. Thanks. Mom bought it at Caldor’s.”

“Want to have lunch before we go downtown, or afterwards? We’ll do whichever you like.”

“I don’t care.”

But she lost nearly all that weight by the time she turned seventeen; that seemed to make her happier, and seemed to make her brighter, too. He couldn’t get used to the sight of her carrying a lighted cigarette when she walked out of the train gate, but it was good to have her talking again – and it was nice that not all of the things she said were commonplace.

One night when he was alone there was a phone call from Lucy – the first in years – and after a few shy preliminary courtesies she got down to business: she was worried about Laura.

“…  Well, I know adolescence is a difficult time,” she said, “and I can certainly see that hers might be more difficult than most. Oh, and I’ve read as much as anybody else about how crazy everything’s supposed to be for kids these days, with all this ‘hippie’ stuff breaking out, so that’s not the point, either. It isn’t
Laura’s interests or activities I mind, you see, it’s something worse: it’s her lying. She’s turned into a liar.

“Let me give you just one example. I had some people here for the weekend and their car was in my garage, and Laura sneaked it out and drove it away one night. I don’t know where she went or what she did before she put it back in the garage, but that’s secondary. The main thing is she lied about it. We found a fairly heavy scrape in one fender, you see, and when I asked Laura if she knew anything about it she made me ashamed for even asking. She said, ‘Oh, Mom. You really think I’d take somebody else’s car?’ But then when we opened the driver’s door we found Laura’s change purse there on the front seat.

“So do you see what I’m getting at, Michael? I don’t
like
the clouded, stupid look that comes into her face when she gets caught at something like that. It’s the look of a submissive criminal, and it’s frightening.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, well, I see what you mean.”

“Oh, and then there’s so much else I don’t understand about her anymore.” Here Lucy paused for breath, or perhaps in surprise at herself for talking so easily to a man from whom she’d been estranged for years. “You may not be aware of this, Michael, unless she’s let it slip, but the times you see her in New York are by no means the only times she’s there: She gets into the city quite a lot, and there isn’t any way I can control it. She did let it slip to
me
once, during one of the brainless talks we have about ‘values,’ that she knows a beautiful boy named Larry on Bleecker Street – oh, and needless to say, her ways of explaining what makes him so beautiful were enough to curl your hair; he has ‘a beautiful soul,’ and so on. So I said ‘Well, dear, why don’t you ask Larry out here some weekend? You think he might enjoy a few days in the country?’ And that surprised her, of course, but the funny part was she agreed to it. I could almost see
her making up her mind: having Larry of Bleecker Street to show off, right here, in person, might turn out to be the social triumph of the year among the kids at Tonapac High.

“Then one day I looked out the window and there he was, standing around with her in the front yard: this kid with a ponytail down his back, wearing a dirty leather vest with no shirt under it. And I mean except that there weren’t any lights in his eyes he didn’t look sinister or anything; he just looked like a boy who needed a bath. So I went out in the yard and said ‘Hello; you must be Larry.’ And he took off running – up the road and out across the fields, heading for this rotten old abandoned barn about two hundred yards away.

“I said ‘What’s the matter with him?’

“And Laura said ‘He’s shy.’

“I said ‘How long has he been here?’

“And she said ‘Oh, about three days now. He’s staying in the barn. There’s a lot of old straw in there and we fixed up a nice little place.’

“I said ‘How does he eat?’

“And she said ‘Oh, I’ve been bringing him stuff; that’s okay.’

“Well, I guess I’m making all this sound sort of funny,” Lucy said, “and I guess it was; but I’m getting away from the point. I think the question of her interests and activities will tend to resolve itself – and she might as well get all this bohemian nonsense out of her system now as later – but the lying is something else.”

And Michael said he agreed with that.

“She’s too old to be ‘punished,’ ” Lucy went on, “and how would you punish a child anyway when the offense is lying? One lie simply hooks into another until a whole fabric of lies comes into being, and then the child is living in a world devoid of substance.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I think you’re right to be concerned. I am, too.”

“So here’s the thing. This is why I called. The only therapist I know around here is Dr. Fine, and I’ve come to have decidedly mixed feelings about him; I suppose what I mean is I wouldn’t want to trust him with something like this. So I wondered if you might be – acquainted with someone you could recommend in New York. That’s really why I called, you see.”

“No, I’m not,” he told her. “And I don’t believe in that stuff anyway, Lucy; never have. I think the whole ‘therapy’ industry is a racket.” And he might have gone on at some length in that vein, saying things like “Sigmund fucking Freud,” but decided he’d better stop. It had been only reasonable for her to assume he’d be “acquainted” with some shrink, after two breakdowns; besides, if they had an argument now it would spoil this spontaneous and pleasant phone call. “So I guess I can’t help out there,” he said. “But look: she’ll be in college soon and she won’t be bored half to death all the time the way she is now. There’ll be things to challenge her mind and they’ll keep her busy. I think we’ll find that makes a difference.”

“Well, but college is still a year away,” Lucy said. “I was hoping we might get – you know – get something started now. Well, okay, then,” she said in a way that meant she was concluding the talk. She would probably arrange for Laura to visit Dr. Fine, despite her mixed feelings. “Oh, and speaking of college, Michael,” she said in an afterthought, “I’ve talked with the girl who’s the new whaddyacallit here, the new guidance counselor at the high school, and she says Laura can have her pick of quite a few good colleges. And she said she’ll be calling you in on this, too; that’s the policy.”

“The ‘policy’?”

“Well, you know: where there are divorced parents, the
father is always consulted too. She’s nice – extremely young for a job like that, I’d think, but very capable.”

The guidance counselor did call him a few days later, wanting to know what afternoon he could come in for a two o’clock appointment. Her name was Sarah Garvey.

“Well, tomorrow’s not so good,” he said. “How about the day after that, Miss Garvey?”

“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”

He’d had to make it the day after tomorrow because it would take that long to get his only suit cleaned and pressed. Ever since the divorce he had cut back heavily in the assignments he took from
Chain Store Age
each month, to provide himself with as much time for his own work as possible. Lately, though, finding he was down to one suit and that all his other, mismatched clothes were ready to fall apart, he’d begun to wish he had a university job, like most other poets. He was tired as hell of living in the Village, too: it might be all right to be a ragged kid in the Village but not a ragged middle-aged man, and Michael was forty-three years old.

Still, when he was freshly shaved and everything he wore was freshly cleaned, he always knew he looked all right. It even struck him sometimes, when he caught his reflection in passing plate-glass windows, that he looked better now than he had ten or twenty years ago.

He felt okay riding out on the Tonapac train, and the good mood persisted even as he made his way through boisterous high-school corridors, though he’d always hated the thought of his daughter enrolled in a dumb, blue-collar school like this. Then he was at the door of Sarah Garvey’s office, and he knocked on it.

*

Mothers of Tonapac High School students might sit talking with Sarah Garvey in a businesslike way, asking courteous questions and getting courteous replies, careful not to overstay their appointed time – but the fathers must all have been stricken in this tiny room, helplessly imagining how Sarah Garvey would look naked and how she would feel in their hands, and how she would smell and taste, and how her voice would sound in the delirium of getting laid.

The walls of her office were made of perforated white peg-boards with nothing pegged to them, and the plainness of that background made it easy to believe you were looking at the loveliest girl in the world. She was slim and supple, with dark shoulder-length hair and limpid brown eyes and a wide, full-lipped mouth. When she was seated behind her desk you couldn’t tell what she was like from the rib cage down, but she didn’t keep you waiting very long. Twice during the interview she got up and walked to a tall filing cabinet, and then you saw the whole of her: perfect legs and ankles beneath a straight skirt; a trim little ass with just enough curves to make you ache for it. Your first impulse might be to lock the door and have her here, on the floor, but it wouldn’t take much self-control to follow a more sensible plan: get her out of here, take her somewhere else, and have her there. Soon.

Could Sarah Garvey guess what was going on in your mind? If so, she gave no sign of it. All this time she’d been talking of Vassar and Wellesley and Barnard colleges, and she may have mentioned Mt. Holyoke, too; now she’d begun to talk at length, and with some enthusiasm, about Warrington College in Vermont.

“The arty little place, you mean?” he said. “Well, but aren’t all the girls there expected to be precocious at some – you know – at some art form or other?”

“I suppose it may have acquired a reputation like that,” she said, “but it’s a very open, stimulating environment and I think Laura would do well there. She’s an extremely bright and sensitive person, as you know.”

“Well, sure she is, but she can’t
do
anything. Can’t paint or write or act; can’t play a musical instrument or sing or dance. She hasn’t been raised that way. There were never any leotards in our house, if you see what I mean.”

And that earned him a small, qualified smile from Sarah Garvey’s beautiful eyes and lips.

“What I’m getting at, Miss Garvey,” he said, “is that I think she might be intimidated by all those talented girls. And being intimidated is the last thing I want for her, in college or anywhere else.”

“Well, that’s very understandable,” she said. “Still, you might want to look into Warrington anyway; I have the catalogue here. And the other factor, you see, is that her mother seems to feel it would be the best place for her.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that means her mother and I’ll have to talk it over.”

Their business seemed to be concluded – Sarah Garvey was stacking papers and folders and putting them away in a desk drawer – and Michael wondered if he would be expected to leave before he’d even had a chance to get her out of here. But then she glanced up at him in a way that seemed too shy for such a pretty girl.

“It’s been really nice meeting you, Mr. Davenport,” she said. “I’ve admired your books.”

“Oh? Well, but how did you ever happen to—”

“Laura lent them to me. She’s very proud of you.”

“She is?”

Too many surprises had hit him at once, and when he sorted
them out he found that Laura’s being proud of him was the best. He could never have guessed a thing like that.

Steel lockers were being slammed all up and down the corridors now – school was out, and that made it easy for him to ask her out for a drink. She looked briefly shy again, but said she’d love to.

As she led him out into the faculty parking lot he guessed it wouldn’t matter even if Laura did happen to be in the crowd of kids who watched them go: she might think they were only adjourning to some more comfortable place for a further discussion of her college plans.

“How does someone get to be a guidance counselor?” he asked Sarah Garvey when they were on the road.

“Oh, it doesn’t amount to much,” she said. “You take a few sociology courses in college; then there’s some graduate work, and then you look for a job in a place like this.”

“You look too young to’ve been to graduate school.”

“Well, I’m almost twenty-three; that’s a little younger than average, but not much.”

So there were twenty years between them – and Michael felt so good that twenty years seemed a tidy and even an attractive span of time.

She was driving through a part of the Tonapac countryside that he didn’t recognize, which was just as well – he wouldn’t have wanted to pass the old “Donarann” mailbox, or anything like that. Glancing down, he found she had taken off her shoes to work the floor pedals with her slender stockinged feet, and he thought that was one of the prettiest things he had ever seen.

The bar and restaurant she took him to was a place he didn’t recognize, either – a lot of new business must have come into town since his time – and when he said it was nice she gave him a quick look to see if he was kidding. “Well, it’s not much,” she
said as they settled beside each other in a half-circular leatherette booth, “but I come here a lot because it’s convenient; my house is sort of right around the corner.”

“Do you live alone?” he inquired. “Or …”

And in the moment it took her to reply he was afraid she’d say “No, I live with a man” – that had lately become stylish among even the youngest and prettiest of girls, and they always seemed to say it as though they were boasting.