Young Hearts Crying (8 page)

Near the southern edge of the county lies a lake called Tonapac, once a popular summer resort for middle-class vacationers from the city; the lake itself has long been out of fashion, but the small commercial settlement spawned at one end of it remains intact.

And it was into this drab village that the Davenports found their way one September afternoon: Michael at the wheel of the car and watching for the necessary left turn, Lucy frowning over a road map that lay unfolded on her thighs.

“Here we go,” he told her. “This is the one.”

They passed through a flat section of tidy, close-set little homes, several of whose front lawns displayed plaster Virgin Marys and lofty poles with American flags that hung limp in the
windless day, and Lucy said “Well, it’s beginning to look a little tacky, isn’t it.” But then they came to a long, curving stretch of road where there were nothing but low, old stone walls and dense masses of trees on either side, and at last they found what they were looking for: a brown shingled mailbox with the name “Donarann.”

They were here to follow up a real-estate ad that had promised a “charming 4½-room guest house for rent on private estate; beautiful grounds; ideal for children.”

“Driveway isn’t exactly in top condition,” Michael said as their tires rumbled uphill in the ruts and the billowing dust of it, but they were both intrigued by what a long and unenlightening driveway it was.

“Oh, good, you’re the Davenports,” the landlady said, emerging from her own house with a thick bunch of keys in her hand. “Did you have any trouble finding us? I’m Ann Blake.” She was short and quick, with an aging, small-chinned face made almost comical by long false eyelashes; she reminded Michael of the old-time cartoon character Betty Boop.

“I think the best thing would be to show you the little guest house first,” she explained, “in case you might find it unsuitable in some way – I love it, but I know it’s not to everyone’s taste – and then if you do think you’d like it well enough, I’ll take you around to see the grounds. Because really, it’s the grounds that are the main attraction here.”

She was right about the guest house: it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. It was stubby and ill-proportioned, made of stucco in a pale shade of pinkish-gray, with the wooden trim and shutters at its windows painted lavender. Upstairs, at one end of it, French doors led out onto an abbreviated balcony that was overgrown with leafy vines, and from the balcony a frivolous, vine-entangled spiral staircase descended to a flagstone terrace at what
proved to be the front door. If you stepped back on the grass to take it all in with a single searching glance, the house had a lopsided, crudely fanciful look, like something drawn by a child with an uncertain sense of the way a house ought to be.

“I designed it myself,” Ann Blake told them as she sorted out her keys. “Actually, I designed all the buildings on this property many years ago, when my husband and I first bought the land.”

But they were surprised to find that the brown-and-gray interior of the house was much more promising: it had, as Lucy pointed out, a lot of nooks and crannies. There was a nice fireplace, there were fake but attractive beams across the living-room ceiling, there were built-in cabinets and bookshelves; and the larger of the two upstairs bedrooms – the one that opened onto the balcony and the spiral staircase, the one both Davenports assumed would be their own – was bright and spacious enough for Lucy to describe it as “sort of elegant in a way, don’t you think?”

Oh, it might be a funny little house, but who cared? It was basically okay; it wouldn’t cost them much; it would be good enough, at least, to live in for the next year or two.

“So,” Ann Blake said. “Are you ready for the grand tour?”

And they followed her out across the grass past a giant weeping-willow tree – “Isn’t that a spectacular tree?” she asked them – and on to a place where broad stone steps began to take them up a hill.

“I wish you could’ve seen these terraces a month or two ago,” she said as they climbed. “Each terrace was ablaze with the most brilliant, heavenly colors: asters, peonies, marigolds, and I don’t know what else; and then here on the other side, all over this latticework, there were masses and masses of rambling roses. Of course we’ve been extremely fortunate in our gardener.” And she looked briefly at both their faces to make sure they’d be
impressed by the name she was about to pronounce. “Our gardener is Mr. Ben Duane.”

Beyond the top of the steps and well back from the highest of the flower-garden terraces, Michael discovered a wooden shed that was more than tall enough to stand in and probably measured five by eight feet square. It struck him at once as a good place for working, and he lifted the rusty hasp of its door to peer inside. There were two windows; there was room enough for a table and chair and a kerosene stove, and he could sense the sweet labor of writing here in total solitude all day, through all seasons, bringing a pencil across the page time and again until the words and lines began to come out right as if of their own accord.

“Oh, that’s just the little pump shed,” Ann Blake said. “You won’t have any need to bother with it; there’s a very reliable man in the village who keeps the pump in good repair. If you’ll step over this way, though, I’ll show you the dormitory.”

Years ago, she told them, and she was getting a little winded from walking and talking at the same time; years ago, she and her husband had founded the Tonapac Playhouse. “Did you happen to notice the sign for it as you were driving up? Just across the road from here?” In its time it had been one of the most celebrated summer-stock theaters in the state, though of course no reputation was easy to sustain nowadays. For the past five or six summers she had rented out the Playhouse to one sort of scruffy little free-lance production company after another, and it
was
a relief to be rid of the responsibility; still, she did miss the way things used to be.

“Now you’ll see the dormitory,” she said as a very long wood-and-stucco building emerged through the trees. “We built it to house and feed the theater people every summer, you see. We hired a wonderful chef from New York, and a good
housemaid, or housekeeper as she preferred to be called, and we – Ben!”

A tall old man with a wheelbarrow full of bricks came slowly around the side of the building. He stopped, set the heels of the wheelbarrow down, and shaded his eyes from the sun with one forearm. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of brief khaki shorts, sturdy work shoes with no socks, and a blue bandana tied low and tight around his brow. When he saw he would be introduced to strangers his eyes and mouth took on a look of pleased expectancy.

“This is Ben Duane,” Ann Blake announced, and after a moment’s futile fumbling for the Davenports’ name she said “These nice people came to look at the guesthouse, Ben, so I’ve been showing them around.”

“Oh, the little guest house, yes,” he said. “Very nice. Still, I think you’ll find the real advantage here is the place itself – the acreage, the grass and the trees, the privacy.”

“That’s just what I’ve tried to tell them,” she said, and looked at the Davenports for confirmation. “Isn’t it?”

“We’re well away from the world here, you see,” Ben Duane went on, absently scratching one armpit. “The world can go about its brutal business every day and we’re shielded from it. We’re safe.”

“What’re the bricks for, Ben?” she asked him.

“Oh, one or two of the terraces could use a little shoring up,” he said. “Thought I’d better get it done before the frost sets in. Well. So nice to’ve met you both. Hope it works out.”

And as Ann Blake led them away she seemed scarcely able to wait until the old man was out of earshot before talking about him: “You
are
aware of Ben’s work, of course, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes, certainly,” Lucy said, allowing Michael to nod and keep his mouth shut. He had never heard the name.

“Well, it’d be really surprising if you weren’t,” she told them. “He’s one of the real – he’s an ornament of the American stage. His readings from Walt Whitman alone were enough to make him famous – he toured every major city in the United States with that production – and then of course he created the role of Abraham Lincoln in
Mr. Lincoln’s Difficulties
on Broadway. And he’s marvelously versatile: he even took an important singing part with the original Broadway cast of
Stake Your Claim! –
oh, what a lighthearted, fun show that was. Now he’s been blacklisted, as I expect you know – one more vile, unspeakable act of Senator McCarthy, you see – and we’re deeply honored that he’s chosen to spend his time of exile here. He’s one of the finest – one of the finest human beings I know.”

They were walking on a gravel road or driveway now, but Mrs. Blake was out of breath again and had to stop for a few seconds, with a hand under one breast, before she could resume her monologue.

“So. Now if you’ll look down through the trees, down into that clearing, you’ll see our picnic area. See the lovely big outdoor fireplace? And the long tables? My husband built all those tables himself. We’d have wonderful parties there sometimes, with Japanese lanterns strung up all around. My husband used to say the only thing we lacked was a swimming pool, but I never minded that because I’m not a swimmer anyway.

“And now coming up here, straight ahead, is the annex of the dorm. There were times when we’d have so many theater people, you see, that we needed an extra building. Most of it’s been closed off and boarded-up for years, but one section of it makes a really nice apartment, so we’ve been renting the apartment to a pleasant young family named Smith. They have four small children, and they love it here. They’re the salt of the earth.”

A girl of about seven sat carefully changing her doll’s clothes on the fringe of grass that bordered the gravel road. Beside her was a baby’s playpen in which a boy of four or five stood sucking his thumb, holding onto the railing with his free hand.

“Hello, Elaine,” Mrs. Blake called brightly to the girl. “Or wait – are you Elaine or Anita?”

“No, I’m Anita.”

“Well, you’re all growing up so fast it’s really hard for a person to keep track. And you,” she said to the boy. “What’s a big guy like you doing in a thing like that?”

“He has to stay in there,” Anita explained. “He’s got cerebral palsy.”

“Oh.”

And as they walked on, Ann Blake seemed to feel that some explanation was required. “Well, when I described the Smiths as ‘salt of the earth,’ ” she said, “I suppose I really meant to imply that they’re very, very simple people. Harold Smith is a clerk of some sort in the city – he wears half a dozen ballpoint pens clipped into his shirt pocket, and that kind of thing. He works for the New York Central, and you see one of the ways that dreadful old railroad manages to keep its employees is by offering them free commutation fares from any point along the tracks. So Harold took advantage of that and moved his family out here from Queens. His wife’s rather a sweet, pretty girl, but I scarcely know her because whenever I’ve seen her she’s at the ironing board – ironing and watching television at the same time, morning, noon, and night.

“No, but here’s a curious thing: Harold once told me very shyly that he’d done some acting in high school and wondered if he could try out for a part. So to make a long story short he played the policeman in
The Gramercy Ghost,
and he was wonderfully good. You’d never guess it, but he has a natural gift
for comedy. I said ‘Harold, have you ever considered doing this professionally?’ He said ‘Whaddya – crazy? With a wife and four kids?’ So that was that. Still, I’m afraid I really didn’t – didn’t know about the cerebral palsy. Or the playpen.”

Then she fell silent at last and walked well ahead of the Davenports, giving them time to stroll and think it all over. The gravel road had brought them back around to where they could see the guest house again, far away on its shallow rise of grass in the fading afternoon, a house that might have been drawn by a child, and Michael squeezed his wife’s hand.

“Want to take it?” he asked. “Or think about it some more?”

“Oh, no, let’s take it,” she said. “We aren’t going to find anything better, at a rent like this.”

And when they’d told her of their decision, Ann Blake said “Wonderful. I love to see that: I love to see people who know themselves well enough to make up their minds. Will you come into my house for just a minute or two, then, so we can get the paperwork taken care of?” And she led them in through the door of her cluttered kitchen, turning back to say “I’ll have to ask you to excuse all the debris.”

“I am not debris,” said a young man who sat on a tall stool at the kitchen counter, hunched over a plate of poached eggs on toast.

“Oh, yes, you are,” she told him, sidling past him and pausing to tousle his hair, “because you’re always, always in the way when I have business to attend to.” Then she turned back again to her smiling visitors and said “This is my friend the handsome young dancer, Greg Atwood. These are the Davenports, Greg. They’re going to be our neighbors in the guest house –
if
I can find the papers, that is.”

“Oh, nice,” he said, wiping his mouth, and he got languorously down off the stool. He was barefoot, wearing skin-tight
“wheat” jeans and a dark-blue shirt that he’d left unbuttoned to the waist in the style newly popularized by Harry Belafonte.

“Do you – dance professionally?” Lucy asked him.

“Well, I’ve done some of that, in a small way,” he said, “and I’ve taught, too, but now I work mostly for my own pleasure, trying new things.”

“It’s like practicing a musical instrument,” Ann Blake explained as she closed a drawer, opened another, and went on rummaging. “Some artists practice for years between performances. And personally, I don’t care what he does as long as he stays right here where I can keep an eye on him. Ah,
here
we are.” And she laid two copies of the lease on the counter in readiness for signing.

On their way out to the Davenports’ car she walked with one hand conspicuously locked and swinging in Greg Atwood’s, until he detached his hand and put his arm around her.