The Young Lions

"I know what you mean." Michael remembered the way Laura looked fixing her hair in front of a mirror and how she looked when dancing and during the holidays they'd had. For a moment he was moved by the distant tears, and regretted the lost years behind him, the years without war, the years without separations…

"What the hell," he said softly. "They'll probably put me in an office somewhere."

"You won't let them," she sobbed. "I know you. You won't let them."

"You don't let the Army do anything. It does what it wants and you do what it wants. The Army isn't Warner Brothers, darling."

"Promise me… promise me…" The voice rose and fell and then there was a click and the co

Finally he got up and went into the kitchen and finished cooking his breakfast. He carried the bacon and eggs and toast and coffee, black and thick, into the living-room and put it down on the wide table set in front of the great su

He turned the radio on. Brahms was being played, a piano concerto. The music poured out of the machine, round, disputatious and melancholy. He ate slowly, smearing marmalade thickly on the toast, enjoying the buttery taste of the eggs and the strong taste of the coffee, proud of his cooking, listening with pleasure to the mournful, sweet thunder of the radio.

He opened the Times at the theatrical page. It was full of rumours of endless plays and endless actors. Each morning he read the theatrical page of the Times with growing depression. Each morning the recital of baffled hope and money lost and sorrowful critical reproach of his profession made him feel a little silly and restless.

He pushed the paper aside and lit the day's first cigarette and took the last sip of coffee. He turned the radio off. It was playing Respighi by now, anyway, and Respighi left the morning air with a dying fall and left the sunlit house in fragrant silence as Michael sat at the breakfast table, smoking, staring dreamily out at the gardens and the diagonal glimpse of street and working people below. After a while, he got up and shaved and bathed.

Then he put on a pair of old fla

Downstairs his car was waiting at the kerb, its paint and chromium glistening from the garage's industry. He started the motor and pushed the button for the top. The top came down slowly and majestically. Michael felt the usual touch of amusement at the grave collapsing movement.

He drove up Fifth Avenue slowly. Every time he rode up through the city on a working day, he felt once again some of the same slightly malicious pleasure he had experienced the first day he had driven in his first, brand-new car, top down, up the Avenue, at midday, looking at the working men and women thronging to their lunches, and feeling wealthy and noble and free.

Michael drove up the broad street, between the rich windows, frivolous and wealthy and elegantly suggestive in the sun.

Michael left his car at the door of Cahoon's apartment house, giving the keys to the doorman. Cahoon was going to use the car and take care of it until Michael returned. It would have been more sensible to sell the car, but Michael had a superstitious feeling that the bright little machine was a token of his gayest civilian days, long rides in the country in the springtime and careless holidays, and that he must somehow preserve it as a charm against his return.

On foot, feeling a little bereft, he walked slowly across town. The day stretched ahead of him with sudden emptiness. He went into a drug-store and called Peggy.

"After all," he said, when he heard her voice, "there's no law that says I can't see you twice in the same day."

Peggy chuckled. "I get hungry about one o'clock," she said.

"I'll buy you lunch, if that's what you want"

"That's what I want." Then, more slowly, "I'm glad you called. I have something very serious to say to you."

"All right," Michael said. "I feel pretty serious today. One o'clock."

He hung up, smiling. He walked out into the sunlight and headed downtown, towards his lawyer's office, thinking about Peggy. He knew what the serious talk she wanted to have at lunch would be about. They had known each other for about two years, rich, warm years, a little desperate because day by day the war came closer and closer. Marriage in this bloody year was a cloudy and heartbreaking business. Marry and die, graves and widows; the husband-soldier carrying his wife's photograph in his pack like an extra hundred pounds of lead; the single man mourning furiously in the screaming jungle night for the forsworn moment, the honourable ceremony; the blinded veteran listening for his wife's chained footstep…

He felt silly sitting in the panelled room across the desk from his lawyer, reading through his will. Outside the window, high up in the tall building, the city shone in the everyday sunlight, the brick towers rearing into the soft blue haze, the streams of smoke from the boats on the river, the same city, looking exactly as it had always looked, and here he was, with his glasses on, reading, "… one-third of the aforementioned estate to my former wife, Miss Laura Roberts. In the event of her marriage, this bequest is voided and the amount reserved in her interest will be joined to the residual amount left in the name of the executor and divided in this ma

He felt so healthy and whole and the language was so portentous and ugly. He looked across at Piper, his lawyer. Piper was growing bald and had a pudgy, pale complexion. Piper was signing a batch of papers, his pudgy mouth pursed, happily making money, happily confident that with his three children and his recurrent arthritis he was never going to war. Michael regretted that he had not written out the will himself, in his own hand, in his own language. It was somehow shameful to be represented to the future in the dry and money-sly words of a bald lawyer who would never hear a gun fired anywhere. A will should be a short, eloquent, personal document that reflected the life of the man who signed it and whose last possessions and last wishes were being memorialized in it. "To my mother for the love I bear her, and for the agony she has endured and will later endure in my name and the name of my brothers…

"To my ex-wife, whom I humbly forgive and who will, I hope, forgive me in the same spirit of remembrance of our good days together…

"To my father, who has lived a hard and tragic life, and who has behaved so bravely in his daily war, and whom, I hope, I shall see once more before he dies…"

But Piper had covered eleven typewritten pages, full of whereases, and in the events of, and now if Michael died, he would be known to the future as a long list of many-syllabled, modifying clauses, and cautious businessman's devices.

Perhaps later, Michael thought, if I really think I am going to be killed, I shall write another one, better than this. He signed the four copies.

Piper pressed the buzzer on his desk and two secretaries came in. One was a notary and carried her seal with her. She stamped the papers methodically, and they both signed as witnesses. Again Michael had the reeling it was all wrong, that this should be done by good friends who had known him a long time and who would feel bereaved if he died.

Michael looked at the date on the calendar. The thirteenth. He was not a superstitious man, but perhaps this was carrying it too far.

The secretaries went out, and Piper stood up. They shook hands, and Piper said, "I will keep an eye on things and I will mail you a monthly report on what you have earned and what I have spent."