The Young Lions

"Oh, darling," she said, "oh, darling…"

He stroked her bare shoulder as though he were trying to memorize it. "For the next two weeks," he said, his voice almost not trembling, "we will go on a holiday. That's how we'll settle my affairs." He gri

Hope stood up. She blinked twice. "All right," she said. "It's stopped. I won't cry again. It'll take me fifteen minutes to get ready. Can you wait?"

"Yes," he said. "But hurry. I'm starved."

She took the towel from her head and finished drying her hair. Noah sat on the edge of the bath and watched her. From time to time Hope got glimpses of his drawn, thin face in the mirror. She knew that she was going to remember the way his face looked then, lost and loving as he sat perched on the porcelain rim, in the cluttered, garishly lit room – remember for a long, long time.

They had their two weeks on Cape Cod. They stayed at an aggressively clean tourist house with an American flag on a pole on the lawn in front of it. They ate clam chowder and broiled lobster for di

Their noses peeled and their hair got sticky with salt, and their skins, when they went to bed at night, smelled ocean-fragrant and su

Then the two weeks were up and they went back to the city. The people there seemed pallid and wilted, defeated by the summer, and they felt healthy and powerful in comparison.

The final morning, Hope made coffee for them at six o'clock. They sat opposite each other, sipping the hot, bitter liquid out of the huge cups that were their first joint domestic investment. Hope walked with Noah down the quiet, shining streets, still cool with the memory of night, to the drab unpainted shop that had been taken over by the draft board.

They kissed, thoughtfully, already remote from each other, and Noah went in to join the quiet group of boys and men who were gathered around the desk of the middle-aged man who was serving his country in its hour of need by waking early twice a month to give the last civilian instructions and the tickets for the free subway ride to the groups of men departing from the draft board for the war.

Noah went out in the shuffling, self-conscious line, with fifty others, and walked with them the three blocks to the subway station. The people in the street, going about their morning business, on their way to their shops and offices, on their way to the day's marketing and the day's cooking and moneymaking, looked at them with curiosity and a little awe, as the natives of a town might look at a group of pilgrims from another country who happened to pass through their streets, on their journey to an obscure and fascinating religious festival. Noah saw Hope across the street from the entrance to the subway station. She was standing in front of a florist's shop. The florist was an old man slowly putting out pots of geraniums and large blue vases of gladioli in the window behind her. She had on a blue dress dotted with white flowers. The morning wind brushed it softly against her body in front of the blossoms shining through the glass behind her. Because of the sun reflecting from the glass, Noah could not tell what her face was like. He started to cross the street to her, but the leader that the man at the draft board had assigned to the group called anxiously, "Please, boys, stick together, please," and Noah thought, what could I tell her, what could she tell me? He waved to her. She waved back, a single, lifting gesture of the bare brown arm. Noah could see she wasn't crying.

What do you know, he said to himself, she isn't crying. And he went down into the subway, between a boy named Tempesta and a thirty-five-year-old Spaniard whose name was Nuncio Aguilar.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE red-headed woman he hadn't kissed four years ago leaned over, smiling, in Michael's last dream and kissed him. He awoke, warmly remembering the dream and the red-headed woman.

The morning sun angled past the sides of the closed Venetian blinds, framing the windows in a golden dust. Michael stretched.

Outside the room he heard the murmur of the seven million people walking through the streets and corridors of the city. Michael got up. He padded over on the carpeted floor to the window and pulled up the blinds.

The sun filled the back gardens with an early summer wealth, soft and buttery on the faded brick of the old buildings, on the dusty ivy, on the bleached, striped awnings of the small terraces filled with rattan furniture and potted plants. A little round woman, in a wide orange hat and old wide slacks that clung cheerfully to her round behind, was standing over a potted geranium on the terrace directly opposite Michael. She reached thoughtfully down and snipped off a blossom. Her hat shook sorrowfully as she looked at the mortal flower in her hand. Then she turned, middle-aged and healthy, in her city garden and walked through curtained french windows into her house, her cheerful behind shaking.

Michael gri

He washed, dousing himself with cold water, then walked barefoot, in his pyjamas, across the carpeted floor through the living-room, to the front door. He opened it and picked up the Times.

In the polite print of the Times, which always reminded Michael of the speeches of elderly and successful corporation lawyers, the Russians were dying but holding on the front page, there were new fires along the French coast from English bombs, Egypt was reeling, somebody had discovered a new way to make rubber in seven minutes, three ships had sunk quietly into the Atlantic Ocean, the Mayor had come out against meat, married men could be expected to be called up into the Army, the Japanese were in a slight lull.

Michael closed the door. He sank on to the couch and turned away from the blood on the Volga, the drowned men of the Atlantic, the sand-blinded troops of Egypt, from the rumours of rubber and the flames in France and the restrictions on roast beef, to the sporting page. The Dodgers, steadfast – though weary and full of error – had passed through another day of war and thousandedged death, and despite some nervousness down the middle of the diamond and an attack of wildness in the eighth, had won in Pittsburgh.

The phone rang and he went into the bedroom and picked it up.

"There's a glass of orange juice in the icebox." Peggy's voice came over the wire. "I thought you'd like to know."