The Young Lions

CHAPTER NINE

THE clashing sound of a lawn-mower awoke Michael. He lay for a moment in the strange bed, remembering where he was, remembering what had happened yesterday, smelling the clipped fragrance of the California grass. "Probably," the movie writer on the edge of the swimming-pool at Palm Springs had said yesterday afternoon, "probably ten guys are home writing it now. The butler comes into the garden with the tea and he says, 'Lemon or cream?' and the little nine-year-old girl comes in, carrying her doll, and says, 'Daddy, please fix the radio. I can't get the funnies. The man keeps talking about Pearl Harbour. Daddy, is Pearl Harbour near where Grandma lives?' And she bends the doll over and it says, 'Mamma'."

It was silly, Michael thought, but more true than not. Large events seemed to announce themselves in cliches. The arrival of universal disaster in the ordinary traffic of life always seemed to come in a rather banal, overworked way. And on Sunday, too, as people were resting after the large Sabbath dinner, after coming out of the churches where they had mumbled dutifully to God for peace. The enemy seemed to take a sardonic delight in picking Sunday for his most savage forays, as though he wanted to show what an ironic joke could be played over and over again on the Christian world. After the Saturday night drunkenness and fornication and the holy morning prayer and bicarbonate of soda.

Michael himself had been playing tennis in the blazing desert sun with two soldiers who were stationed at March Field. When the woman had come out of the clubhouse, saying, "You'd better come in and listen to the radio. There's an awful lot of static, but I think I heard that the Japanese have attacked us," the two soldiers had looked at each other and had put their rackets away and had gone in and packed their bags and had started right back for March Field. The ball before the battle of Waterloo. The gallant young officers waltzing, kissing the bare-shouldered ladies goodbye, then off to the guns on the foaming horses, with a rattle of hoofs and scabbards and a swirling of capes in the Flanders night more than a century ago. An old chestnut, then, probably, but Byron had done it big just the same. How would Byron have handled the morning in Honolulu and this next morning in Beverly Hills?

Michael had meant to stay in Palm Springs another three days, but after the tennis game he had paid his bill and rushed back to town. No capes, no horses, just a hired Ford with a convertible top that went down when you pushed a button. And no battle waiting, just the rented-by-the-week ground-floor apartment overlooking the swimming-pool.

The noise of the mower came in at the french window that opened on to the small lawn. Michael turned and looked at the machine and the gardener. The gardener was a small fifty-year-old Japanese, bent and thin with his years of tending other people's grass and flower-beds. He plodded after the machine mechanically, his thin, wiry arms straining against the handle.

Michael couldn't help grinning. A hell of a thing to wake up to, the day after the Japanese Navy dropped the bombs on the American fleet – a fifty-year-old Jap advancing on you with a lawn-mower. Michael looked more closely and stopped smiling. The gardener had a set, gloomy expression on his face, as though he were bearing a chronic illness. Michael remembered him from the week before, when he had gone about his chores with a cheery, agreeable smile, and had even hummed from time to time, tunelessly, as he had pruned the oleander bush outside the window.

Michael got out of bed and went to the window, buttoning his pyjama top. It was a clear, golden morning, with the tiny crispness that is Southern California's luxurious substitute for winter. The green of the lawn looked very green and the small red and yellow dahlias along the border shone like gleaming bright buttons against it. The gardener kept everything in sharp definite lines out of some precise sense of Oriental design.

"Good morning," Michael said. He didn't know the man's name. He didn't know any Japanese names. Yes – one. Sessue Hayakawa, the old movie star. What was good old Sessue Hayakawa doing this morning?

The gardener stopped the lawn-mower and came slowly up from his sombre dream to stare at Michael.

"Yes, Sir," he said. His voice was flat and high, and there was no welcome in it. His little dark eyes, set among the brown wrinkles, looked, Michael thought, lost and pleading. Michael wanted to say something comforting and civilized to this ageing, labouring, exile who had overnight found himself in a land of enemies, charged with the guilt of a vile attack three thousand miles away.

"It's too bad," Michael said, "isn't it?"

The gardener looked blankly at him, as though he had not understood at all.

"I mean," said Michael, "about the war."

The man shrugged. "Not too bad," he said. "Everybody say, 'naughty Japan, goddamn Japan'. But not too bad. Before, England wants, she take. America wants, she take. Now Japan wants." He stared coldly at Michael, direct and challenging.

"She take."

He turned, and turned the mower with him, and started across the lawn slowly, with the cut grass flying in a fragrant green spray around his ankles. Michael watched him for a moment, the bent humble back, the surprisingly powerful legs, bare up to the knee in torn shorts, the creased, sun-worn neck rising out of the colourless sweaty shirt.

Michael reflected. Perhaps a good citizen, in time of war, should report utterances like this to the proper authorities. Perhaps this aged Japanese gardener in his ragged clothes was really a full commander in the Japanese Navy, cleverly awaiting the arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro Harbour before showing his hand. Michael grinned. The movies, he thought; there was no escape for the modern mind from their onslaught.

He closed the french windows and went in and shaved. While he was shaving he tried to plan what he would do from now on. He had come to California with Thomas Cahoon, who was trying to cast a play. They were conferring about revisions with the author, too, Milton Sleeper, who could only work at night on the play, because he worked during the day for Warner Brothers as a scenario writer. "Art," Cahoon had said, acidly, "is in great shape in the twentieth century. Goethe worked all day on a play, and Chekhov and Ibsen, but Milton Sleeper can only give it his evenings."

Somehow, Michael thought, as he scraped at his face, when your country goes to war, you should be galvanized into some vast and furious action. You should pick up a gun, board a naval vessel, climb into a bomber for a five-thousand-mile flight, parachute into the enemy's capital…

But Cahoon needed him to put the play on. And, there was no escaping this fact, Michael needed the money. If he went into the Army now, his mother and father would probably starve, and there was Laura's alimony… Cahoon was giving him a percentage of the play this time, too. It was a small percentage, but if it was a hit it would mean that money would be coming in for a year or two. Perhaps the war would be short and the money would last it out. And if it was a tremendous smash, say, like Abie's Irish Rose or Tobacco Road, the war could stretch on indefinitely. It was a dreadful thing to think of, though – a war that ran as long as Tobacco Road.

Too bad he didn't have the money now, though. It would have been so satisfactory to go to the nearest Army post after hearing the news on the radio and enlist. It would have been a solid, unequivocal gesture which you could look back at with pride all your life. But there were only six hundred dollars in the bank, and the income-tax people were bothering him about his return in 1939, and Laura had been unpredictably greedy about the divorce settlement. He had to give her eighty dollars a week for her whole life, unless she got married, and she had taken all the cash he had in his account in New York. He wondered what happened to alimony when you joined the Army.

As Michael dressed he tried to think about other things. There was something inglorious about sitting, a little hung-over from last night's nervous drinking, in this over-fancy, pink-chiffon, rented bedroom, uneasily going over your finances on this morning of decision, like a book-keeper who has lifted fifty dollars from the till and is worrying about how to get it back before the auditors arrive. The men at the guns in Honolulu were probably in even worse financial straits, but he was sure they weren't worrying about it this morning. Still, it was impracticable to go down and enlist immediately. It was ridiculous, but patriotism, like almost every other generous activity, was easier for the rich, too.

Outside, across the street, on a vacant lot that rose quite steeply above the rest of the ground around it, there were two Army trucks and an anti-aircraft gun and soldiers in helmets were digging in. The gun, poking its long, covered muzzle up at the sky, and the busy soldiers scraping out an emplacement as though they were already under fire, struck Michael as incongruous and comic. This, too, must be a local phenomenon. It was impossible to believe that any place elsewhere in the country the Army was going to these melodramatic lengths. And, somehow, soldiers and guns had always seemed to Michael, as they did to most Americans, like instruments for a kind of boring, grown-up game, not like anything real. And this particular gun was stuck between a woman's Monday wash-line, brassieres and silk stockings and pantie girdles, and on the back door of a Spanish bungalow, with the morning's milk still on the steps.

Michael walked towards Wilshire Boulevard, towards the drugstore where he usually had his breakfast. There was a bank building on the corner, with a line of people outside the door, waiting for the bank to open. A young policeman was keeping them in order, saying over and over again, "Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Keep your places. Don't worry. You'll all get your money."

Michael went up to the policeman, curiously. "What's going on here?" he asked.

The policeman looked sourly at him. "The end of the line, Mister," he said, pointing.

"I don't want to get inside," said Michael. "I haven't any money in this bank. Or," and he grinned, "in any other bank."

The policeman smiled back at him, as though this expression of poverty had made sudden friends of them. "They're gettin' it out," he gestured with his head to the line of people, "before the bombs fall on the vaults."

Michael stared at the people in the line. They stared back with hostility, as though they suspected anyone who talked to the policeman of being in conspiracy to defraud them of their money. They were well dressed, and there were many women among them.

"Back east," the policeman said in a loud, contemptuous stage whisper. "They're all heading back east as soon as they get it out. I understand," he said very loudly, so that everyone in the line could hear him, "that ten Japanese divisions have landed at Santa Barbara. The Bank of America is going to be used as headquarters for the Japanese General Staff, starting tomorrow."

"I'm going to report you," a severe middle-aged woman in a pink dress and a wide blue straw hat said to the policeman. "See if I don't."

"The name, Lady, is McCarty," said the policeman.

Michael smiled as he moved on towards his breakfast, but he walked reflectively past the plate-glass windows of the shops, some of which already had strips of plaster across them as a protection from blast. The rich, he thought, are more sensitive to disaster than others. They have more to lose and they are quicker to run. It would never occur to a poor man to leave the West Coast because there was a war on somewhere in the Pacific. Not out of patriotism, perhaps, or fortitude, but merely because he couldn't afford it.

He went into the drug-store and ordered orange juice, toast and coffee.

He met Cahoon at one o'clock at the famous restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was a large, dark room, done in the curving, startling style affected by movie-set designers. It looks, Michael thought, standing at the bar, surveying the crowded civilian room, in which one uniform, on a tall infantry sergeant, stood out strangely, it looks like a bathroom decorated by a Woolworth salesgirl for a Balkan queen. The image pleased him and he gazed with more favour on the tanned fat men in the tweed jackets and the smooth, powdered, beautiful women with startling hats who sat about the room, their eyes pecking at each new arrival.

There were rumours and anecdotes about the war already. A famous director walked through the room with a set face, whispering here and there that of course he didn't want it spread around, but we hadn't a ship in the Pacific, and a fleet had been spotted 300 miles off the Oregon coast. And a writer had heard a producer in the MGM barber-shop sputter, through the lather on his face, "I'm so mad at those little yellow bastards, I feel like throwing up my job here and going – going…" The producer had hesitated, groping for the most violent symbol of his feeling of outrage and duty. Finally he had found it," – going right to Washington." The writer was having a great success with the story. He was going to table after table with it, cleverly leaving on the burst of laughter it provoked, to move on to new listeners.

Cahoon was quiet and abstracted and Michael could tell that he was in pain from his ulcer, although he insisted upon drinking an old-fashioned at the bar before going to their table. Michael had never seen Cahoon have a drink before.

They sat down at one of the booths to wait for Milton Sleeper, the author of the play Cahoon was working on, and for Kirby Hoyt, a movie actor whom Cahoon hoped to induce to play in it.

Cahoon stared gloomily at two comedians who were making their way along the bar, laughing loudly and shaking hands with all the drinkers. "This town," he said. "I'd give the Japanese High Command five hundred dollars and two seats to the opening nights of all my plays if they'd bomb it tomorrow. Mike," he said, without looking at Michael, "I'm going to say something very selfish."

"Go ahead," Michael said.

"Don't go in till we get this play on. I'm too tired to get a show on by myself. And you've been in on it since the beginning. Sleeper's a horrible jerk, but he's got a good play there, and it ought to be done…"

"Don't worry," Michael said softly, half afraid already that he was leaping at this honourable excuse in friendship's name to remain aloof from the war for another season. "I'll hang around."

"They'll get along without you," Cahoon said, "for a couple of months. We'll win the war anyway."

He stopped talking. Sleeper was threading his way through the crowd towards their booth. Sleeper dressed like a forceful young writer, dark blue work shirt and a tie that was off to one side. He was a handsome, heavy-set, arrogant man, who had written two inflammatory plays about the working class several years before. He sat down without shaking hands.

"Double Scotch," Sleeper said to the waiter. "Well," he said loudly, "Uncle Sam has finally backed his tail into the service of humanity."

"Did you rewrite Scene Two yet?" Cahoon asked.

"For Christ's sake, Cahoon!" Sleeper said. "Do you think a man can work at a time like this?"

"Just thought I'd ask," said Cahoon.

"Blood," said Sleeper, sounding, Michael thought, like a character in one of his plays. "Blood on the palm trees, blood on the radio, blood on the decks, and he asks about the second scene! Wake up, Cahoon. A cosmic moment. Thunder in the bowels of the earth. The human race is twisting, tortured and bleeding in its uneasy sleep."

"Save it," said Cahoon, "for the trial scene."

"Cut it." Sleeper glowered heavily under his heavy, handsome eyebrows. "Cut those brittle, Broadway jokes. That time's past, Cahoon, passed for ever. The first bomb yesterday dropped right in the middle of the last wisecrack. Where's the Ham?" He looked around him restlessly, tapping the table in front of him.

"Hoyt said he'd be a little late," Michael said. "He'll be here."

"I've got to get back to the studio," said Sleeper. "Freddie asked me to come in this afternoon. The studio's thinking of making a picture about Honolulu to awaken the American people."

"What're you going to do?" Cahoon asked. "Are you going to have time to finish the play?"

"Of course I am," said Sleeper. "I told you I would, didn't I?"

"Yes," said Cahoon. "That was before the war started. I thought you might go in…"

Sleeper snorted. "To do what? Guard a viaduct in Kansas City?" He took a long sip of the Scotch the waiter placed before him. "The artist doesn't belong in uniform. The function of the artist is to keep alive the flame of culture, to explain what the war is about, to lift the spirits of the men who are grappling with death. Anything else," he said, "is sentimentality. In Russia they don't take the artist. Write, they say, play, paint, compose. A country in its right mind doesn't put its national treasurers in the front line. What would you think if the French had put the Mona Lisa and Cezanne's self-portrait in the Maginot Line? You'd think they were crazy, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," Michael said, because Sleeper was glaring at him.

"Well," Sleeper shouted, "why the hell should they put a new Cezanne, a living Da Vinci there? Christ, even the Germans keep their artists at home! God, I get so weary of this argument!" He finished his Scotch and looked furiously around him. "I can't stand a tardy Ham," Sleeper said. "I'm going to order my lunch."

Hoyt came in while Sleeper was ordering and made his way quickly to their table, shaking hands with only five people in his passage.

"Sorry, old man," Hoyt said as he slipped on to the green leather bench behind the table. "Sorry I'm late."

"Why the hell," Sleeper asked pugnaciously, "can't you get any place on time? Wouldn't your public like it?"

"Confusing day at the studio, old man," Hoyt said. "Couldn't break away." He had a clipped British accent which had never varied in the seven years he had been in the United States. He had taken out American citizenship papers when the war began in 1939, but otherwise he seemed exactly the same handsome, talented young toff, via Pall Mall out of the Bristol slums, who had got off the boat in 1934. He looked distracted and nervous and ordered a very light lunch. He did not order a drink because he had a tiring afternoon ahead of him. He was playing an RAF Squadron Leader and there was a complicated scene in a burning plane over the Channel, with process shots and difficult close-ups.

Lunch was a tense affair. Hoyt had promised to re-read the play over the week-end and give Cahoon his final decision about whether he would appear in it. He was a good actor and just right for the part, and if he didn't play it, it would be a difficult job to find another man. Sleeper kept drinking double Scotches gloomily and Cahoon poked drably at his food.

Michael saw Laura at a table across the room with two other women, and nodded coolly at her. It was the first time he'd seen her since the divorce. That eighty bucks a week, he thought, won't go far if she pays for her own lunch in this place. He was angry with her for being improvident and then was annoyed at himself for worrying about it. She looked very pretty and it was hard to remember that he was angry with her and also hard to remember that he had ever loved her. Another face, he thought, that will pull vaguely and sadly at the heart when glimpsed by accident at one end of the country or another.

"I've re-read the play, Cahoon," Hoyt said, a little hurriedly, "and I must say I think it's just beautiful."

"Good." Cahoon started to smile broadly.

"… But," Hoyt broke in a little breathlessly, "I'm afraid I can't do it."

Cahoon stopped smiling and Sleeper said, "Oh, Christ."

"What's the matter?" Cahoon asked.

"At the moment…" Hoyt smiled apologetically. "With the war and all. Change of plans, old man. Truth is, if I went into a play, I'm afraid the bloody draft board'd clap its paws on me. Out here…" He took a mouthful of salad. "Out here it's a somewhat different case. Studio says they'll get me deferred. The word is from Washington that movies'll be considered in the national interest. Necessary personnel, y' know… Don't know about the stage. Wouldn't like to take a chance. You understand my position…"

"Sure," said Cahoon flatly. "Sure."

"Christ," said Sleeper. He stood up. "Got to go back to Burbank," he said. "In the national interest." He walked out heavily and a bit unsteadily.

Hoyt looked after him nervously. "Never liked that chap," he said. "Not a gentleman." He chewed tensely on his salad.

Rollie Vaughn appeared at the table, red-faced and beaming, with a glass of brandy in his hand. He was English, too, older than Hoyt, and was playing a Wing Commander in Hoyt's picture. But he was not on call for the afternoon and could safely drink.

"Greatest day in England's history," he said happily, beaming at Hoyt. "The days of defeat are over. Days of victory ahead. To Franklin Delano Roosevelt." He lifted his glass and the others politely lifted theirs, and Michael was afraid that Rollie was going to heave the glass into the fireplace, now that he was in the RAF at Paramount. "To America!" Rollie said, lifting his glass again. What he's really drinking to, Michael thought unpleasantly, is the Japanese Navy, for getting us in. Still, you couldn't blame an Englishman…

"We will fight them on the beaches," said Rollie loudly, "we will fight them on the hills." He sat down. "We will fight them in the streets… No more Cretes, no more Norways… No more getting pushed out of any place."

"I wouldn't talk like that, old man," Hoyt said. "I had a private conversation not long ago. Chap in the Admiralty. You'd be surprised at the name if I could tell it to you. He explained to me about Crete."

"What did he say about Crete?" Rollie stared at Hoyt, a slight belligerence showing in his eyes.

"All according to the overall plan, old man," said Hoyt. "Inflict losses and pull out. Cleverest thing in the world. Let them have Crete. Who needs Crete?"

Rollie stood up majestically. "I'm not going to sit here," he said harshly, a wild light in his eye, "and hear the British Armed Forces insulted by a runaway Englishman."

"Now, now," Cahoon said, soothingly. "Sit down."

"What did I say, old boy?" Hoyt asked nervously.

"British blood spilled to the last ounce." Rollie banged the table. "Desperate, bloody stand to save the land of an ally. Englishmen dying by the thousand… and he says it was planned that way! 'Let them have Crete!' I've been watching you for some time, Hoyt, and I've tried to be fair in my mind, but I'm afraid I've finally got to believe what people're saying about you."

"Now, old man," Hoyt was very red in the face and his voice was high and rattled, "I think you're the victim of a terrible misunderstanding."

"If you were in England," Rollie said bitingly, "you'd sing a different tune. They'd have you up before the law before you'd have a chance to get out more than ten words. Spreading despondency and alarm. Criminal offence, you know, in time of war."

"Really," Hoyt said weakly, "Rollie, old man…"

"I'd like to know who's paying you for this." Rollie stuck his chin out challengingly close to Hoyt's face. "I really would like to know. Don't think this is going to die in this restaurant. Every Englishman in this town is going to hear about it, never fear! Let them have Crete, eh?" He slammed his glass down on the table and stalked back to the bar.

Hoyt wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief and looked painfully around him to see how many people had heard the tirade. "Lord," he said, "you don't know how difficult it is to be an Englishman these days. Insane, neurotic cliques, you don't dare open your mouth…" He got up. "I hope you'll excuse me," he said, "but I really must get back to the studio."

"Of course," Cahoon said.

"Terribly sorry about the play," said Hoyt. "But you see how it is."

"Yes," said Cahoon.

"Cheerio," said Hoyt.

"Cheerio," said Cahoon, with a straight face.

He and Michael watched the elegant, seven-thousand-five-hundred-dollar-a-week back retreating past the bar, retreating past the defender of Crete, retreating to the Paramount Studios, to the prop plane afire that afternoon against the processed clouds ten miles off the Hollywood-Dover coast.

Cahoon sighed. "If I didn't have ulcers when I came in here," he said. "I'd have them now." He called for the check.

Then Michael saw Laura walking towards their table. Michael looked down at his plate with great interest, but Laura stopped in front of him.

"Invite me to sit down," she said.

Michael looked coldly up at her, but Cahoon smiled and said, "Hello, Laura, won't you join us?" and she sat down facing Michael.

"I'm going anyway," Cahoon said before Michael could protest. He stood up, after signing the check. "See you tonight, Mike," he said, and wandered slowly off towards the door. Michael watched him go.

"You might be more pleasant," Laura said. "Even if we're divorced we can be friendly."

Michael stared at the sergeant who was drinking beer at the bar. The sergeant had watched Laura walk across the room and was looking at her now, frankly and hungrily.

"I don't approve of friendly divorces," Michael said. "If you have to get a divorce it should be a mean, unfriendly divorce."

Laura's eyelids quivered. Oh, God, Michael thought, she still cries.

"I just came over to warn you," Laura said, her voice trembling.

"Warn me about what?" Michael asked, puzzled.

"Not to do anything rash. About the war, I mean."

"I won't do anything rash."

"I think," said Laura softly, "you might offer me a drink."

"Waiter," said Michael, "two Scotch and soda."

"I heard you were in town," Laura said.

"Did you?" Michael stared at the sergeant, who had not taken his eyes off Laura since she sat down.

"I was hoping you'd call me," she said.

Women, Michael thought, their emotions were like trapeze artists falling into nets. Miss the rung, fall through the air, then bounce up as high and spry as ever.

"I was busy," Michael said. "How are things with you?"

"Not bad," Laura said. "They're testing me for a part at Fox."

"Good luck."

"Thanks," Laura said.

The sergeant swung round fully at the bar so that he wouldn't have to crane his neck to see Laura. She did look very pretty, with a severe black dress and a tiny hat on the back of her head, and Michael didn't blame the sergeant for looking. The uniform accentuated the expression of loss and loneliness and dumb desire on his face. Here he is, Michael thought, adrift in the war, maybe on the verge of being sent to die on some jungle island that nobody ever heard of, or to rot there month after month and year after year in the dry, womanless clutch of the Army, and he probably doesn't know a girl between here and Dubuque, and he sees a civilian, not much older than he, sitting in this fancy place with a beautiful girl… Probably behind that lost, staring expression there are visions of me unconcernedly drinking with one pretty girl after another in the rich bars of his native land, in bed with them, between the crisp civilized sheets, while he sweats and weeps and dies so far away…

Michael had an insane notion that he wanted to go up to the sergeant and say to him, "Look here, I know what you're thinking. You're absolutely wrong. I'm not going to be with that girl tonight or any other night. If it was up to me, I'd send her out with you tonight, I swear I would." But he couldn't do that. He could just sit there and feel guilty, as though he had been given a prize that someone else had earned. Sitting beside his lovely ex-wife, he knew that this was still another thing to sour his days; that every time he entered a restaurant with a girl and there was a soldier unescorted, he would feel guilty; and that every time he touched a woman with tenderness and longing, he would feel that she had been bought with someone else's blood.

"Michael," Laura said softly, looking with a little smile over her drink, "what are you doing tonight? Late?"

Michael took his eyes away from the sergeant. "Working," he said. "Are you through with your drink? I have to go."