The Young Lions

"Margaret," he said.

"Yes?" She stopped and looked at him.

She knows what I'm going to say, Michael thought. Good.

"Margaret," he said, "may I see you in New York?"

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. She has freckles on her nose, Michael thought.

"Yes," she said.

"I won't say anything else," Michael said softly, "now."

"The telephone book," the girl said. "My name's in the telephone book."

She turned and walked round the corner of the house, in that precise, straight, graceful walk, carrying the net and the rackets, her legs brown and slender under the swaying full skirt. Michael stood there for a moment, trying to make sure his face had fallen back into repose. Then he walked out into the garden after her.

The other guests had come, Tony and Moran and a girl who wore red slacks and a straw hat with a brim nearly two feet wide.

Moran was tall and willowy and had on a dark blue shirt, open at the collar. He was a glowing brown from the sun and his hair fell boyishly over his eye when he smiled and shook hands with Michael. Why the hell can't I look like that? Michael thought dully as he felt the firm, manly grip. Actors, he thought.

"Yes," he heard himself saying, "we've met before. I remember. New Year's Eve. The night Arney did his window act."

Tony looked strange. When Michael introduced him to Miss Freemantle he barely smiled, and he sat all hunched up, as though he were in pain, his face pale and troubled, his lank, dark hair tumbled uneasily on his high forehead. Tony taught French literature at Rutgers. He was an Italian, although his face was paler and more austere than one expects of Italian faces. Michael had gone to school with him and had grown increasingly fond of him through the years. He spoke in a shy, delicate voice, hushed and bookish, as though he were always whispering in a library. He was a good friend of the Boullard sisters, and had tea with them two or three times a week, formal and bilingual, but today they didn't even look at each other.

Michael started to put up one of the poles. He pushed it into the lawn as the girl in the red slacks was saying in her high, fashionable voice, "That hotel is just ghastly. One bathroom to the floor and beds you could use for ship-planking and a lot of idiotic creto

Michael looked at Margaret and shook his head in a loose, mocking movement, and Margaret smiled briefly at him, then dropped her eyes. Michael glanced at Laura. Laura was staring stonily at him. How the hell does she manage it? Michael thought. Never misses anything. If that talent were only put to some useful purpose.

"You're not doing it right," Laura said; "the tree'll interfere."

"Please," said Michael, "I'm doing this."

"All wrong," said Laura stubbornly.

Michael ignored her and continued working on the pole.

Suddenly the two Misses Boullard stood up, pulling at their gloves, with crisp, identical movements.

"We have had a lovely time," the younger one said. "Thank you very much. We regret, but we have to leave now."

Michael stopped work in surprise. "But you just came," he said.

"It is unfortunate," the younger Miss Boullard said crisply, "but my sister is suffering from a disastrous headache."

The two sisters went from person to person, shaking hands. They didn't shake hands with Tony. They didn't even look at him, but passed him as though he were not there. Tony looked at them with a strange, quivering expression, incongruous and somehow naked.

"Never mind," he said, picking up the old-fashioned straw hat he had carried into the garden with him. "Never mind. You don't have to go. I'll leave."

There was a moment of nervous silence and nobody looked at Tony or the two sisters.

"We have enjoyed meeting you so much," the younger Miss Boullard said coolly to Moran. "We have admired your pictures again and again."

"Thank you," Moran said, boyish and charming. "It's kind of you…"

Actors, Michael thought.

"Stop it!" Tony shouted. His face was white. "For the love of God, Helene, don't behave this way!"

"There is no need," the younger Miss Boullard said, "to see us to the gate. We know the way."

"An explanation is necessary," Tony said, his voice trembling.

"We can't treat our friends this way." He turned to Michael, standing embarrassedly next to the flimsy pole for the badminton net. "It's inconceivable," Tony said. "Two women I've known for ten years. Two supposedly sensible, intelligent women…" The two sisters finally turned and faced Tony, their eyes and mouths frozen in contempt and hatred. "It's the war, this damned war," Tony said. "Helene. Rochelle. Please. Be reasonable. Don't do this to me. I am not entering Paris. I am not killing Frenchmen. I am an American and I love France and I hate Mussolini and I'm your friend…"

"We do not wish to talk to you," the younger Miss Boullard said, "or to any Italians." She took her sister's hand. The two of them bowed slightly to the rest of them, and walked, rustling and elegant in their gloves and garden hats and stiff black dresses, towards the gate at the end of the garden.

The crows were making a lot of noise in the big tree fifty yards away and their cawing struck the ear, harsh and clamorous.

"Come on, Tony," Michael said, "I'm going to give you a drink."

Without a word, with his mouth set in a sunken line, Tony followed Michael into the house. He was still clutching the straw hat with the gaily striped band.

Michael got out two glasses and poured two big shots of whisky. Silently he gave Tony one of the glasses. Outside, the conversation was starting again, and, over the noise of the crows, Michael heard Moran saying, earnestly, "Aren't they wonderful types? Right out of a 1925 French movie." Tony sipped slowly at his drink, holding on to his stiff, oldfashioned straw hat, his eyes far away and sorrowful. Michael wanted to go over to him and embrace him, the way he had seen Tony's brothers embrace each other in times of trouble, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He turned the radio on and took a long sip of his whisky as the machine warmed up, with a high, irritating crackle.

"You, too, can have lovely white hands," a soft, persuasive voice was saying. Then there was a click on the radio and a sudden dead silence and a new voice spoke, slightly hoarse, trembling a little. "We have just received a special bulletin," the voice said. "It has been a

An organ, swelling and almost tuneless, took over, playing the sort of music that is described as "light-classical".

Tony sat down and placed his glass on a table. Michael stared at the radio. He had never been to Paris. He had never seemed to find the time or the money to go abroad, but as he squinted at the little veneered box shaking now with the music of the organ and the echo of the hoarse troubled voice, he pictured what it must be like in the French city this afternoon. The broad su

He looked at Tony. Tony was sitting with his head up, crying. Tony had lived in Paris for two years and again and again he had outlined to Michael what they would do together on vacations there, the little restaurants, the beach on the Marne, the place where they had a superior light wine in carafes on scrubbed wooden tables…