Strange Are the Ways of Love

6

His name was Michael Hawkins. He was the oldest of five children of an English father and an Irish mother in Marionsburg, a town of 2,500 people in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

In Marionsburg his father ran a drugstore and his mother worked behind the counter. Jed Hawkins was a good businessman — not too clever, hardly imaginative, but willing to put in the long hours necessary to earn enough money to support a wife and five children. His mother was a good woman, but he never knew her at all. It took all her time to work in the store and to bring up the children. He was the oldest; he learned to get along by himself. Afternoons he ran errands for his father at the drugstore and swept the floor and dusted the bottles on the shelves. The rest of the time he was alone.

He was a good student and a natural athlete, but he spent little time with school books and less with the boys in his classes. They always seemed so young to him, and they walked around with their eyes closed, hardly realizing that there was a world outside of Marionsburg.

Instead he preferred the company of the lonely old men who sat on the wooden benches in the square and talked with him by the hour. He got along well with them — they had things to tell him that he was hungry to hear, and they in turn were glad to find such a willing listener. Nobody else seemed to listen to them any more.

When he began reading he by-passed the juvenile fiction that others his age were reading. He discovered Steinbeck at fourteen, Wolfe and Dos Passos a year later. The books only drew him farther away from his friends and farther in spirit from Marionsburg. He walked by himself, walked far into the woods at the edge of town singing lonely songs to himself and growing hungry for the world. He listened to the trains rushing by, heard their whistles and watched the smoke trail off in the distance as they left him behind, and he wondered how long it would be before he was riding one of them.

He learned songs constantly. When he heard a song once, it was his and he never forgot it. His family was too tired to sing and his friends were wrapped up in the monotony of popular music, but the old men in the square taught him the old songs, songs of the road and the songs the wobblies used to sing. The Negroes on the south side of town taught him blues, and he would sit on a stump in the woods by the hour, singing blues in his husky, throaty voice, making up new verses and twisting the old ones around.

He was sixteen when he made love to the Negro woman who had taught him John Hardy. He was unsure of himself at first, but she held him gently in her warm arms and helped him, moving expertly beneath him. Afterwards, when she had kissed him and told him to go, he had walked for hours in the woods. It was autumn, and the leaves crunched beneath his feet as he walked, but he was not conscious of the leaves, or of the chill in the air.

He knew that he could not remain in Marionsburg any longer. He had crossed some sort of bridge; remaining at home would be a waste of time, a waste of himself. He wanted to tell his parents, but he knew that he could not make them understand why he had to go.

“I’m leaving town,” he told his father after supper. “Going tonight.”

“Why?”

“Knocked up a girl,” he said. And his father nodded his head slowly; this was the kind of reason he could understand.

“Where are you headed?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “South, I figure.”

His father told his mother. Then Mike kissed them both good-by and took the twenty dollars that his father slipped him. He walked to the railroad siding and waited in the brush, and when the freight pulled out of town he was on it, snug in an empty boxcar. He lay down in one corner of the car and slept all the way to Pennsylvania.

He never went back to Marionsburg.

He was young and the world was huge. There were places to see and he saw them — Virginia and Delaware and the Kentucky hills. There were songs to learn, and he learned them wherever he went.

And there were women, too. There were the wives and daughters of men who never travelled, and their lips were soft against his and their bodies warm and alive. There was a spinster librarian in Broken Ridge, a waitress in Oak Valley.

He worked when he could, begged or stole when there was no work. Less than a year after he left home someone showed him how to play the guitar. He learned quickly, almost instinctively, and now that he could sing for his supper he didn’t steal as frequently.

From time to time he mailed postcards to his parents. There was never room on the cards for him to say those things that he had trouble expressing and there was never any mail for him. He never stayed in one place long enough to have an address of his own until he reached New York.

There the wanderlust left him. By that time every small town was the same to him, but New York excited him and gave him something altogether new to absorb. He took a room on Henry Street on the lower East Side and wrote a note to his parents with his address. His sister Claire wrote a short note back, telling him that his mother and father were dead, killed four months before in an auto accident.

He never wrote again.

He was walking aimlessly now, half heading for the apartment on Cornelia Street and half killing time. New York had been good to him, he reflected. New York had given him a home and helped him to learn things he needed to know. He met other folksingers — banjo pickers and guitarists and others who strummed mandolins and dulcimers. He met blues singers and ballad singers and greensleevers and bluegrassers. He listened to them and he sang with them.

Michael Hawkins, he thought. Boy Folksinger.

It wasn’t enough. The parties weren’t enough, nor were the folksingers or the back rooms of the coffee houses. Greenwich Village was certainly not enough.

And the women were not enough either.

Women like Sandy. Saundra Kane, nee Sandra Cohen. The liberated ones. The exchange students from Kew Gardens, the little girls from the provinces who came to the Village in droves.

How did the song go again?

Sandy, who played at being a Bohemian on an allowance from her father, an allowance that paid for food and rent for both of them. Sandy, who was on stage twenty-four hours a day, even in bed. Who thought there was poetry in filth. Who kept him.

Michael Hawkins, he thought. Boy Gigolo.

As long as he stayed with her he would stay right where he was.

Which was nowhere.

He would go on singing in coffee houses and at parties and once a week in Washington Square. He might even cut a record some day. But he would never really make it, never get to the top, never even start for the top. He wouldn’t care enough to try hard enough.

He had the talent. He knew himself, and he knew that he was good enough to make it. While his voice wasn’t perfect, his style was distinctive, and it suited his voice and the way he played the guitar. He played with simple chords and a compelling beat, and he sang with the beat, strong and cleanly.

But lots of people had talent. Some of them made it and others didn’t. Some of them lost and others won. The whole world was divided into winners and losers, and it was hard to tell what was the dividing line.

Maybe someone like Jan could make the difference...

Turning the corner of Cornelia Street he laughed to himself. In the first place he wouldn’t get Jan; in the second place if he did she would turn into another Saundra, a phony from Indiana instead of a phony from the Bronx. And that was something he needed like he needed cholera.

Twenty-four Cornelia Street, third floor. My pad, he had told Jan, but it wasn’t his pad. He didn’t have a pad. It was Saundra’s.

It even looked like Saundra. There was the same contrived sloppiness about the place, the bed that looked as though it had been left unmade for effect, the prints purposely hung at a tilt on the walls. The floor was dirty, and he grinned as he remembered watching her going through a small hell one afternoon. She had wanted to sweep the floor, wanted it to be clean. But she thought it looked better dirty.

Two years, he thought. Two years at the most and she’ll do a Marjorie Morningstar and marry some doctor and move to Connecticut. She’ll laugh when she thinks of this hole and the guy she used to live with.

She came out of the bathroom, her hair messy and her eyes made up too heavily, smiling.

“Party tonight,” she said.

He nodded.

She walked across the room, leaning back on the messy bed uncomfortably, then stretching out on the bed with a pillow under her head and her shoes off.

“Where were you?”

He shrugged. “Out for a walk. I called Henry.”

“What did he say?”

“He’ll call me. He may be able to set up an audition for next week.”

“That’s good.”

She sounded as concerned as if he had said that the sun was shining. It could be big, an audition with Comet.

He hadn’t told Jan about it and hardly wanted to think about it himself, but he could tell Saundra easily enough. It didn’t count with her. She wouldn’t remember. She wouldn’t mention it again, and if he got the audition and left the pad that day she would ask him where he was going. And when he told her, she would say, “That’s good,” in the same tone of voice.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she said suddenly, holding out her arms for him.

This isn’t home, he thought.

But he went to her.