The Young Lions

"What's she been giving you?" the younger of the two sailors asked. He didn't have his hat on and he had his hair cut so short that it looked like the first outcropping of fuzz on a baby's skull.

"She says," Noah said, feeling powerful and alert, "she says you want to rob her."

The sailor with the hat on snorted. "We rob her! That's hot. It's just the other way around, Brother."

"Twenty-five bucks," the young sailor said. "Twenty-five apiece, she asked. She said she never did it before and she's married and she ought to get paid for the risks she's taking."

"Who does she think she is?" the one with the hat on demanded. "How much did she ask you?"

"Nothing," Noah said, and he felt an absurd sense of pride.

"And she wants to throw in a bottle of Four Roses."

"How do you like that?" The older sailor turned bitterly to his partner.

"You going with her?" the younger one asked, avidly. Noah shook his head. "No."

"Why not?" the young one asked.

Noah shrugged. "I don't know."

"Boy," the young one said, "you must be well serviced."

"Ah," said the sailor with the hat on, "let's get out of here. Santa Monica!" He stared accusingly at the other sailor. "We might just as well have stayed on the Base."

"What about him?" Noah touched the drunk sleeping peacefully on the mahogany.

"That's the lady's problem."

The young sailor put on his little white hat with an air of severe purpose and the two boys went out. "Twenty-five bucks!" Noah heard the older one say as he slammed the door.

Noah waited a moment, then patted the sleeping drunk in a comradely fashion, and followed the sailors. He stood outside the door, breathing the soft, wet air, feeling it chill his flushed face. Under a wavering, uncertain lamp-post down the street he saw the two blue figures forlornly disappearing into the fog. He turned and went in the other direction, the whisky he had drunk hammering musically and pleasantly at his temples.

Noah opened the door with careful deliberation, silently, and stepped into the dark room. The smell was there. He had forgotten the smell. Alcohol, medicine, something sweet and heavy… He fumbled for the light. He felt the nerves in his hand twitching and he stumbled against a chair before he found the lamp.

His father lay rigid and frail on the bed, his mouth open as if to speak in the bare light. Noah swayed a little as he looked down at him. Foolish, tricky old man, with the fancy beard and the bleached hair and the leather-bound Bible.

Make haste, make haste, O God, to deliver me… What religion does the deceased profess? Noah felt a little dizzy. His mind didn't seem to be able to fix on any one thing, and one thought slid in on top of another, independent and absurd. Full lips. Twenty-five dollars for the sailors and nothing for him. He had never had particular luck with women, certainly nothing like that. Trouble probably made a man attractive, and the woman had sensed it. Of course she had been terribly drunk… Ronald Beaverbrook. The way the flowers had waved on her skirt as she rolled towards the ladies' room. If he had stayed he'd probably be snug in bed with her now, under the warm covers, the soft, fat, white flesh, onion, gin, raspberry. He had a piercing, sharp moment of regret that he was standing here in the naked room with the dead old man… If the positions had been reversed, he thought, if it was he lying there and the old man up and around, and the old man had got the offer, he was damned sure Jacob would be in that bed, now, with the blonde and the Four Roses. What a thing to think of. Noah shook his head. His father, from whose seed he sprang. God, was he going to get to talk like him as he grew older?

Noah made himself look for a whole minute at his father's dead face. He tried to cry. Somehow, deserted this way, at the end of a year, on this winter night, a man, any man, had the right to expect a tear from his only son.

Noah had never really thought very much about his father, once he was old enough to think about him at all. He had been bitter about him, but that was all. Looking at the pale, lined head, looming from the pillow like a stone statue, noble and proud as Jacob had always known he would look in death, Noah made a conscious effort to think of his father. How far Jacob had come searching for this narrow room on the shore of the Pacific. Out of the grimy streets of Odessa, across Russia and the Baltic Sea, across the ocean, into the rush and clangour of New York. Noah closed his eyes and thought of Jacob, quick and lithe, as a young man, with that handsome brow and that fierce nose, taking to English with a quick, natural, overblown, rhetorical instinct, striding down the crowded streets, his eyes lively and searching, with a ready bold smile for girls and partners and customers and travel… Jacob, unafraid, and dishonest, wandering through the South, through Atlanta and Tuscaloosa, quick-fingered, never really interested in money, but cheating for it, and finally letting it slip away, up the continent to Mi

Noah shook his head. Somewhere in the back of his mind, echoing and far away, the voice, singing, young and strong, resounded, "In the merry, merry month of May," and refused to be stilled.

And the inevitable collapse as the years claimed Jacob. The shabby businesses, getting shabbier, the charm fading, the enemies more numerous, the world tighter-lipped and more firmly organized against him, the failure in Chicago, the failure in Seattle, the failure in Baltimore, the final, down-at-heel, scrubby failure in Santa Monica… "I have led a miserable life and I have cheated everyone and I drove my wife to death and I have only one son and I have no hope for him and I am bankrupt…" And the deceived brother, crumbling in the furnace, haunting him across the years and the ocean, with the last, agonized breath…

Noah stared, dry-eyed, at his father. Jacob's mouth was open, intolerably alive. Noah jumped up, and crossed the room, wavering, and tried to push his father's mouth shut. The beard was stiff and harsh against Noah's hand, and the teeth made a loud, incongruous clicking sound as the mouth closed. But the lips fell open, ready for speech, when Noah took his hand away. Again and again, more and more vigorously, Noah pushed the mouth shut. The hinges of the jaw made a sharp little sound and the jaw felt loose and unmoored, but each time Noah took his hand away the mouth opened, the teeth gleaming in the yellow light. Noah braced himself against the bed with his knees to give himself more leverage. But his father, who had been contrary and stubborn and intractable with his parents, his teachers, his brother, his wife, his luck, his partners, his women, his son, all his life, could not be changed now.

Noah stepped back. The mouth hung open, pitiful and pale under the swirling white moustaches, under the noble arch of the deceptive dead head on the grey pillow.

Finally, and for the first time, Noah wept.