When the whole of his hour was mercifully over, he felt righteous as he fixed himself a good one at the liquor table. And that oddly bracing sense of righteousness persisted after he’d turned back to mingle with his guests; it seemed to enhance the joviality of his drawing the more sullen students away from the walls, winning their smiles and even their pleasing laughter. It was a damn good party, and it was getting better all the time. Looking around the room he could see men he thought of every day as fools, or bores, or worse, but now he felt a comradely affection for all of them, and for their nicely dressed women. This was the old fucked-up English department; he was an old fucked-up English department man – and if they had suddenly begun to raise their voices in the opening verse of “Auld Lang Syne” it would have brought tears to his eyes as he sang along.
Soon he had lost count of how many times he’d replenished his glass at the liquor table, but that no longer mattered because the evening was well past the strain of its early stages. And his greatest pleasure was in watching Sarah move gracefully from group to group, the perfect young hostess. Nobody could have guessed at how reluctantly she had organized this thing.
Then he turned and saw Terry Ryan on the tall wooden stool with no one to talk to. It was possible that Sarah had taken him around to meet other guests and that he’d come back after running out of polite things to say; but it was possible, too, that he’d sat here all this time, allowing his last night of freedom in the United States to evaporate before his eyes.
“Can I get you something, Terry?”
“No thanks, Mike; I’m fine.”
“You met any of these people?”
“Oh, sure; met quite a few.”
“Well,” Michael said, “I think we can do better than that.” And he stepped around to stand beside him, firmly clasping one thin shoulder beneath the fabric of his sweater.
“This young man,” he announced in a voice loud enough to leave no doubt of his intention to address the party as a whole – and most other talkers in the room fell silent – “this young man may look like a student, and that’s what he was at one time, but not anymore. He’s an infantry soldier on his way to Vietnam, where I imagine his personal problems will soon be a great deal worse than any of our own. So suppose we all forget about college for a minute, please, and let’s have a hand for Terry Ryan.”
There was some clapping, though nowhere near as much as he’d expected, and even before it was over Terry said “Kind of wish you hadn’t done that, Mike.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know; just because.”
Then from across the room Michael saw Sarah looking at him in disappointment or disapproval. He felt as if he’d just traded punches with someone in the Nelsons’ house, or just been told he had called Fletcher Clark a cocksucker at the writers’ conference.
“Well, Jesus, Terry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he said. “I thought they ought to know who you are, that’s all.”
“Oh, I know; it’s okay; forget it.”
But it was a thing that wouldn’t be forgotten.
Grace Howard was on her feet and making her way through the smoke, bearing down on Terry Ryan with one stiff index finger aimed at his chest.
“May I ask you something?” she inquired. “Why do you want to kill people?”
And he smiled bashfully. “Oh, come on, lady,” he said. “I never killed anybody in my life.”
“Well, but you’ll have your chance now, won’t you? With your automatic rifle and your hand grenades?”
“Hold it, Grace,” Michael said, “you’re way out of line here: This boy was drafted.”
“And maybe they’ll give you a little radio, too,” she went on, “so you can call in the artillery and the bombs and the napalm on women and children. Well, listen—”
“Oh, stop this,” Sarah called, hurrying to Terry’s side as if to protect him.
“—Listen,” Grace Howard said. “You’re not fooling anybody for a minute. I know why you want to kill people. You want to kill people because you’re so small.”
Some of Grace’s friends managed to take charge of her then: they turned her around and walked her back across the room and out the front door, which closed with a little slam.
“Terry, I’m sorry as hell about that,” Michael told him. “I knew she was drunk, but I didn’t know she was crazy.”
“Look, the hell with it, okay?” he said. “Fuck it. The more we talk about it, the worse it’s going to get.”
“Exactly,” Sarah said quietly.
Later, when everyone else had gone at last, Sarah made up the bed in the spare room so that Terry could spend the night here. But there wasn’t much left of the night: they had to get up early to drive Terry to his friends’ place. There he changed into his Army uniform, which Sarah said was “very becoming,” and picked up his duffel bag, and they drove him twenty miles to the airport. There was some mild and pleasant talk in the car – all three of them had reached the stage of easy good humor that sometimes follows a night of too little sleep – but none of them mentioned Grace Howard.
When it was time to say goodbye at the gate to Terry’s flight, Michael shook hands with him in a little excess of old soldier’s heartiness: “Well, stay loose, Terry. And keep a tight asshole.”
Then Sarah opened her arms for him. She was taller than he was, but that didn’t make it an awkward embrace. She held him, however briefly, in the way a man ought to be held before going to a war that nobody would ever understand.
They rode in silence for much of the drive home, until Michael said “Well, hell, the whole damn thing was my fault; I know that. I never should’ve made that dumb little speech.” Then he said “But the point is, baby, when I was in the Army you wanted people to pay attention the night before you went overseas. It was nice to have civilians make a fuss over you – and they did, if you were lucky.”
“Well, I know,” Sarah said, “but that was another time. That was before I was born. Before Terry was born, too.”
And when he glanced away from the road again he found she was quietly crying.
She went to sleep as soon as they were back in the house; that gave him a chance to drink two cold beers in the kitchen and try to get his brains together.
Then the telephone rang. “Michael? John Howard here. Listen: who was that kid you had in your house last night?”
“Friend of mine from New York, is all; he was just passing through. Why?”
“Well, I understand he was very rude and offensive to Grace after I left.”
“Oh?” And Michael instantly knew there would be no point in trying to clear up this messy business. Terry Ryan was a thousand miles away in the sky now, rid of Billings, Kansas, forever; nobody’s brave words could defend him any longer. “Well, I’m sorry there was any unpleasantness, John,” he said with what he hoped was an edge of scorn, and he hung up the receiver before Howard could say anything more.
If Howard called back at once to persist in his false grievance there would be nothing to do but tell him the truth about what Grace had done. And the phone didn’t ring a second time.
He wished Sarah were awake, so she could assure him he’d done the right thing. Still, it was probably better to have her asleep; that way there might be no need to talk it over, ever again.
One evening at the end of the school year, in June, Lucy Davenport called Michael to tell him their daughter was gone.
“Whaddya mean ‘gone’?”
“Well, she’s supposedly heading for California,” Lucy said, “but I don’t think there’s any clear destination. She wants to be a vagabond, you see. She wants to bum around with all the other dirty, smelly little vagabonds on the road – any road, anywhere. She wants to be wholly irresponsible and wholly self-indulgent, and she wants to wreck her mind with all the hallucinatory drugs she can get her hands on.”
Laura’s freshman year at Warrington College had apparently taught her nothing but bad habits, her mother reported ??
? “I think there must be a very extensive traffic in narcotics on that damned little campus.” When she’d come home from there yesterday she seemed “all funny,” and she’d brought along three friends, presumably as weekend guests: another Warrington girl, also acting “funny,” and two boys that Lucy found difficult to describe.
“I mean they’re townies, Michael. They’re proletarian kids; children of textile-mill workers kind of thing. All they can do is grunt and mumble and try to imitate Marlon Brando – except that I don’t suppose Marlon Brando’s ever grown his hair down to his belly-button and his buttocks. Am I making any of this clear?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Yeah, I think I’m getting the picture.”
“And they were here less than twenty-four hours before Laura announced they were going to California. I couldn’t reason with her, couldn’t talk to her at all, and the next thing I knew she was gone. They were all gone.”
“Well, Jesus,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Neither do I. I don’t understand any of it. I only called because I thought – you know – I thought you ought to know.”
“Yeah. Well, I’m glad you did call, Lucy.”
Sarah told him there probably wasn’t anything to worry about. “Laura’s nineteen,” she said. “That’s practically grown up. She can go off on an adventure like this without risking any damage to herself. The drug-taking does sound a little scary, but I think her mother may be exaggerating that part of it, don’t you? Besides, every kid in America is fooling around with some kind of drugs, and most of them aren’t any worse than alcohol or nicotine. The main thing to remember, Michael, is that if she does get into any kind of trouble she’ll call you. She knows where you are.”
“Well, she does, that’s true,” he said. “But here’s the thing, you see: This is the first time since she was born that I haven’t known where she is.”
Chapter Five
One advantage in being twenty years older than your wife was that you could afford to take a fond, tolerant attitude when she developed interests that had nothing to do with your own.
Michael might have been startled and even frightened, years ago, when Lucy brought home How to Love, by Derek Fahr; but the coffee table of this Kansas house soon came to hold book after book by a dismaying variety of more recent authors – Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Eldridge Cleaver – and they seldom caused him a moment’s discomfort.
He wasn’t even ruffled when Sarah joined a dead-serious organization called Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, though he had to acknowledge that once or twice, watching the car take her away to those meetings, he was reminded of Lucy disappearing into the privacy of her appointments with Dr. Fine.
Well, what the hell; girls would always be a mystery. The important thing was that this particular girl still chose to spend most of her time at home – and, in the hours when she wasn’t absorbing propaganda, she could be a lively and engaging talker.
By now she had told him a great many interlocking episodes out of her brief, full life – college; high school and grammar school; parents and family and home – until he’d begun to feel he knew her almost as well as he would ever know himself. And he was always charmed by the honesty and humor and the pithy selection of detail in those reminiscent stories; they might ramble and digress, but they never strained to portray her in a flattering way, or in a pitiable way, either, and they never even came close to boring her listener.
What a girl she was! There were evenings, watching her talk in the lamplight on their secondhand sofa, when Michael could only marvel at his luck in finding her and at the glowing safety of his having her here. He knew she wouldn’t tell so many intimate, self-revealing things unless she loved him completely – unless she was counting on him to keep these small and terrible secrets to himself until death.
One night in bed, speaking in a very soft voice, she suggested they have a baby.
“Right away, you mean?” he asked, knowing at once that the question betrayed his fear, and he winced in the darkness. He was too old for this; oh, Jesus, too old.
“Well, I meant within a year or two,” she said. “How does year after next strike you?”
And the more he thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. Didn’t every healthy girl want a baby? Why would any healthy girl get married, after all, if not in the hope of having one? And this was the other point: it might be a good thing to raise a new child of his own – to have a chance to atone for all the aching mistakes he’d made over the years with Laura.
“Well, okay,” he said after a while. “But I’ll sure as hell be an old father. Know what I just figured out? By the time this kid is twenty-one, I’ll be seventy.”
“Oh?” she said, as if that hadn’t occurred to her. “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to be young enough for both of us, won’t I?”
*
When the operator asked if he would accept a collect call from Laura in San Francisco he said “Sure I will,” but when Laura’s voice came on the line – “Daddy?” – it was so faint he thought they must have a bad connection.
“Hello? Laura?” he said, raising his own voice as if that would help.
“Daddy?” And this time he could hear her plainly.
“Are you okay, baby?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m still in – you know – still here in San Francisco and everything, but I’m not feeling very well, is all. Things keep closing in. I mean I was fine in the Outer Limits, but then ever since we – ever since I got back I’ve been all – I don’t know.”
“Is that some club out there? The Outer Limits?”
“No, it’s more a state of mind.”
“Oh.”
“And I’ve only got about a dollar and thirty cents, you see, so there really isn’t much I can do to fix myself up – depending on what I mean by fix myself up, of course. Depending on what you think I mean by fix myself up.”
“Well, listen, dear. I think I’d better come out there right away, don’t you?”
“Well, I guess that’s what I was sort of hoping you’d – yes.”
“Okay. If I leave right now I can be there in three and a half or maybe four hours. But first you’ll have to give me the street address where you are.” And he wagged his hand urgently at Sarah for a pencil.
“Two ninety-seven,” Laura was reciting “— no, wait; two ninety-three South Something-or-other Street—”
“Come on,” he said. “Come on, baby: South what? Try to remember.” And when she was able to spell out the street name at last, with what he could only hope were the right numerals, he said “Okay. Now the phone number.”
“Oh, there aren’t any phones in the building, Dad. I’m calling from a pay phone on the street, somewhere else.”
“Oh, Jesus. Well, listen: I want you to go straight back to your place and wait for me there, however long it takes. Promise me. No more going out tonight for any reason, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sarah drove him to the airport, taking a few close chances in the passing of other cars. There was a San Francisco flight ready for boarding when he rushed up to the ticket counter, and he made it, hurrying breathless through what may have been the same gate where they’d said goodbye to Terry Ryan. And just as it had undoubtedly been for Terry Ryan, the flight to San Francisco was the easy part.
“You sure you got this right?” the cab driver kept asking, even after stopping to confer and frown with two other cab drivers over the obscurity of Laura’s address. Then, once he found he was taking his fare in the right direction, he said “Well, I don’t know; you go into. some of these old run-down neighborhoods, it’s like going into another world. I wouldn’t give you shit for this area along in here. This area isn’t even fit for the blacks – and mind you, I’ve got nothing against the blacks.”
Everybody in America had begun to say “black” instead of “Negro”; it might be only a question of time before everybody began saying “w
oman” instead of “girl.”
There were no tenants’ names on any of the doorbells, and Michael decided after pressing three or four of them that all the bells were probably out of order – several of them had fallen loose from the wall and were dangling by their own dead wires. Then he discovered that both locks on the big front door had been smashed: he could get inside just by turning the knob and lunging heavily with one shoulder.
“Is anybody here?” he demanded, walking into the ground-floor hallway, and four or five heads appeared out of partly opened doors – all of them young, more of them boys than girls, and all the boys wearing their hair in styles so wild that nobody would have believed the sight of them a few years ago.
“All right, listen, you guys,” Michael said, not caring whether it sounded like an impersonation of James Cagney or not. “I’m Laura Davenport’s father and I want to know where she is.”
The young faces either withdrew or stared at him blankly – was it the blankness of fear or only of drugs? – but then a resonant male voice spoke up from the shadows at the far end of the hall: “Top floor, all the way to the right.”
There could have been four, five, or six floors in that building; Michael didn’t count them. He would achieve one flight of littered, piss- and garbage-smelling stairs, stand gasping until his strength came back, then go to work on the next flight. The only way he knew he’d made the top at last was that there were suddenly no more stairs.
All the way to the end of the right-hand corridor was a dirty white door. He paused for breath again, if not for prayer, and then he knocked on it.
“Dad?” Laura called. “You can come on in; it’s open.”
There she was, lying on a single bed in a room so small that there wasn’t even space for a chair, and the first thing that struck him was that she was beautiful. She had lost too much weight – her long legs were too thin in greasy jeans and her upper body looked as frail as a bird’s under a greasy workman’s shirt – but her pale and famished face, with its great blue eyes and delicate, thin-lipped mouth, made her look like the heartbreaking debutante her mother might always have wanted her to be.