Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  “All at once the oaken door swings, a familiar figure pauses for an instant upon the threshold, espies us and advances. We are struck rigid and dumb—no, it cannot be, but yes, it is Hoffman himself, and in his hand, pulled from the recesses of his breast’s undergarment, he displays a tattered corner of our rebellious banner! We press about him, raise him on our shoulders, call for wine and acclaim him till the very structure trembles (I cannot refrain from tears). He has been released, he tells us; this time with a final warning from the formidable Chief of Police in person (not General Tolboys, whose instatement appears, after all, to be nothing but a rumour): ‘A warning to which, you may be sure, I shall give not a fig of my attention,’ he says scornfully. All night we carouse and sing; dawn behind the Vistula finds us pale, exhausted, but delirious in our joy, wending each his way to his lodgings—a glorious way, paved with hope and miracles; for are we not on the verge of twenty years, and is this not to be reckoned the first of many days of liberal triumph?”

  “Well?” said Divver.

  “It sounds exciting—colourful.”

  “Don’t you get any other impressions?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, if you don’t, you don’t,” said Divver.

  “What should I get?”

  “Never mind. I guess I forgot that you’re only eighteen. I suppose I would have found it exciting at that age. That’s what I thought Europe really was. That’s how I thought of progressive politics—nitwits throwing banners into golden police-stations.” He examined Morgan with chilly interest, and said: “If you don’t mind my asking, what do you intend to do with yourself after college? You know, you’re the next generation.”

  Divver put the question earnestly and Morgan was sufficiently flattered to reply in his breeziest manner: “I guess if I find nothing better to do, I’ll have to work on momma’s old mag.”

  This statement appeared to astonish Divver; but he made no reply and went off into his own room.

  The first rockets of Independence Day flew up from the square, glowing against the window, climbing in a curve over the cathedral dome. Their course was followed by a few cries out of the dusk below, and Morgan’s heart beat faster; he longed for the exciting darkness of night to come, for the lights in the crowded lobby, the hundreds of shining evening dresses; he was sure, as he cocked his ears, that he could hear the band strike up its first fresh tune in the ballroom, and even catch the squeak of gilt chair-legs on the parquet. He thought of the bold young man’s remark: “It’s in the bag, children”—and the tantalizing faces of the three girls smiled down on him in a vision of hope.

  He took out his new razor, new shaving-brush, new shaving-cream, and carefully nursed the down off his face with trembling fingers. He put on his black silk socks and splendid white shirt, his black tie and gleaming shoes, his new tuxedo. He hovered solemnly over his reflection in the mirror, raising his eyebrows, fixing his lips in various sophisticated shapes, looking toward Divver’s room to see if he was being observed as he patted and pulled at his tie and cuffs. From a velvet box, where he had kept it deliberately for this moment, he took out a flat gold watch, his mother’s farewell present, and strapped it to his wrist. With the same earnestness he brought out a silver cigarette-case, his grandfather’s present, and filled it with Sublime Sultana, a rare brand of Turkish ovals.

  When he now studied himself again in the mirror he was well pleased—so much so that he allowed his reflection a faintly sarcastic smile. Moving with slow and casual dignity, he put his head in at Divver’s door and said: “I think I’ll be going down, Max.” All the words came out sonorously and well except the last one, which for some reason jumped into a high squeak.

  “Come in,” said Divver.

  He looked Morgan up and down with surprise. Then he said: “I must say—if you don’t mind my admitting it—that I never expected you to turn out to be the kind of person you are. It seems to me that you know very well how to look after yourself.”

  “Thank you, thank you; do you know, no one ever said that to me before?” Morgan found himself speaking tremulously, and flushing with emotion: he wanted to shake Divver’s hand, to emphasize how true and deep his thanks were.

  “You also seem to me to be a good deal older, in some ways, than I expected,” continued Divver. “Perhaps that’s why I feel I owe you an explanation.”

  “Do you?” asked Morgan—and was filled with sudden horror.

  “Are you in a great hurry?” Divver asked.

  Morgan shook his head; his heart sank.

  Divver slowly let himself down into his easy chair, clasped his fingers and silently studied his knuckles. Morgan remained standing, nervously scratching his left ankle with his right shoe.

  “I suppose you think I am not in love with my wife,” said Divver.

  Morgan raised his black trousers at the knees and sat down politely on the edge of Divver’s bed. “I never even thought about it, Max,” he said gently. He thought: It’s eight o’clock now. Let’s say it takes him an hour at most. I must be in bed by twelve. I’ll have three hours. Oh, how slow other people’s sadness is! Oh, the details, the thousand aspects, the interjections (“First, I think I should explain …”), the unanswerable dilemmas, the turnings and twistings that end up everywhere and nowhere….

  “Well,” said Divver, looking firmly at his knuckles, “it so happens that I am in love with her, and I think it’s only fair to tell you that I’ve made up my mind not to stay in Europe as long as we planned. I’m going back to her, and I don’t give a damn what anyone says—what your mother says, what any so-called friends say— I’m going back and not a man alive can stop me. What’s more, I don’t care if it does mean the end of my career—that wasn’t worth anything anyway.”

  “How soon do you plan to go, Max?” Morgan had spontaneously put the question that most concerned himself before he could be halted by any after-feelings of sympathy for Divver; and Divver, seeing promptly into his anxious, selfish heart, laughed coldly and replied: “Don’t worry. You’ll have time to enjoy your liberty. Not that it’ll make you feel any better in the long run—take my tip on that, by the way.” He looked at Morgan, and went on: “As for me, it’s probably too late already. I think she’s planning to divorce me. I don’t even know where she’s going to spend the summer. She never said a word before I left, as though I no longer had the right to know. Perhaps, when I get back, I’ll find nothing to get back to—no family life, no child, no wife, nothing.”

  “I’m sorry; I really am. Is it really as bad as that?”

  “If anything, it’s worse,” said Divver very confidently. “And if that was all, it would be bad enough; what makes it worse is that I feel I’m making her do it, that I want her to do it.”

  Now the paradoxes are going to begin, Morgan thought, and paradoxes last longer than anything. At this moment, he’s talking about love, but in an hour or two it’ll be the Bering Straits; and then back to love via ninety-nine contradictory impulses.

  “I love her,” said Divver. “Oh yes, and I love my son. But if I’m with either of them longer than five minutes, they bore the pants off me. And they know it. That’s why they team up together.”

  “Do they team up?”

  “Sure. I’m much kinder with Artie than Lily is: she’s bad-tempered and hysterical with him; but he doesn’t give a damn for me just the same. They’re like husband and wife. Lily’s got no more interest in men; she’s only forty, but she can do without a man. She’ll work herself down to Artie’s age-level.”

  “But then why do you talk of going back?”

  “I’m responsible.”

  “You!”

  “Yes. Don’t you see; or are you too young? I’ve not loved her enough. I’ve been a coward. I’ve lived a fake life ever since I came to New York. When things became too complicated, I came here: it made me feel better; nothing matters outside your own country. Abroad, there’s no competition; no one can hurt you, because they don’t know w
ho you are. I wonder if you know what that means—to be an honoured stranger? If a man did and said what he wanted at home, no one would come near him. He knows the value he has to put on everything in his own country; abroad he makes his own values, and if people object, so what? He knows they’ll never really know who he is, never really find him out. Abroad, the visitor is the one who feels at home. No person away from home need be afraid of anything; no one knows what a worm he is.

  “Europe’s always made me feel bigger. It’s always made me feel that I’m the most serious man in the world. Everything stinks so much, every one’s so bogged down, no one has any money, they all look shabby and helpless; or else glittering, in a perverse way. You can always tell them what to do: I get a big kick out of describing the cheap things I see. I always know what the set-up’s going to be; I always know, for one thing, that they’ll be ungrateful for anything I do to help them; so I get a kick out of helping them and then another kick out of their resenting it; European ingratitude is something I live off; it makes me feel noble.

  “Actually, I hate the whole damn place. I don’t see why anyone should live here at all. I hate it because it’s always there, in the centre of what’s going on, always making me come to it to get a lift. What I really want is to see the whole place blown to hell, and then I can go back where I came from and feel comfortable for once, because home will be the only thing that’s left. But I’ve never had the guts to say so: I’ve always said just the opposite. Actually, I hate like hell to see European books and ideas influence Americans, but I always say I approve of it, and that people who don’t approve are reactionaries. My whole life was spoiled when I first came to New York and found they sneered at me because I didn’t know about Europe. After that I pretended to be serious about Europe, troubled about it; but I never let on how much I hated it for spoiling my life, and how goddamned glad I was when things went wrong here. I even pretended to like modern art—that’s the same thing as Europe—actually, I don’t like any art; I only like sentimental things I knew when I was a boy. I only like tunes, but I used to pretend to like symphonies when Lily used to take me: I used to remember what number they were and who wrote them, so that it would look O.K. Lily used to be able to remember bits of the music, too; but I don’t think she ever liked it either. Of course, that was way back: she doesn’t even play the phonograph now: all her strength and imagination go into making Artie a burden.”

  Feelings of dreadful embarrassment went through Morgan—the embarrassment of a boy revolted by the spectacle of adult abasement, the cruel contempt of youth for a deliberate exposure of mature helplessness. But Divver went on, scarcely pausing:

  “I should have stayed with my first wife. I thought she was below my dignity, because she never worried. I wanted to worry, and feel I was serious: I was ambitious, I mean. I’ve never had had a moment’s peace with Lily, and I’ve never told her the truth. When we were married, I pretended that I wanted her to get ahead; I used to encourage her to play the piano; but even I knew she’d never play it worth a goddam, and that she just did it because it made her feel like a real person, a man. In our first year together, we used to say that she was the sensitive artist and I was the go-ahead, practical type. It makes me vomit to think of it. When I think of the hours I’ve spent listening to Lily hammering the piano!—my part was to sit there frowning, and afterwards to make the comments of an ignorant but honest average man—the old American ideal of honest stupidity. I even used to make photographs of Lily banging away, after she’d fixed her nails. When Artie was born, she stopped playing: I’m sure she was relieved to stop, actually; but she used to say that something had gone from her that would never return, and look at me as though she was a cash register I’d robbed. She probably guessed how relieved I was, but I never told her what I really felt—that the whole damn playing business bored the hell out of me, and so did all ideas about feminine creativeness and women’s rights. I wanted her to be independent and educated—enough so that I wouldn’t be bored by her talk; but I knew all along that she’d never amount to anything herself, and that that suited me fine. For years I’ve been encouraging independence for women, but actually I wish to God they’d stay where they belong; they never get anywhere otherwise. Everything’s getting into a fine mess, with the women becoming more and more like men handicapped with wombs, and the men more and more like Victorian girls. But I never said that to anyone, because it’s Fascism.

  “It’s been more or less the same about the working-class. I don’t give a damn for them; I feel like a fool with them, and I’ve never really believed the pamphlets and manifestos they’re always handing out: I just lived off them because it was the correct thing to do—the way I lived off Europe and Lily’s independence; I felt bigger myself, better liked. It’s been the same with psychology: I learned about it because it was the thing to do—and now look where I am; I can’t say a word or move a muscle without suspecting myself. Sometimes I even think that I should never have been educated, and that nor should most people I know. But how can I admit that? I don’t believe in any of the things I’ve pretended to believe in for twenty-five years.

  “But starting from tomorrow, things are going to be different. I’m going to start saying what I think. I’m going to start saying it to Lily, too, when I get back.”

  A shiver passed down Morgan’s spine: though innocent, he was an imaginative boy.

  “I believe I may find, as often happens, that nothing is needed to set my life straight except the honest saying of a few simple truths. Perhaps Lily has just been waiting to hear me say them for years. Perhaps even other people would feel relieved if I really said what I think for a change. I don’t know as yet exactly what the things are that I want to say to Lily, but I’ll know when I see her. Of course, it may turn out that they’ll have just the opposite effect; that’s a chance I must take. If I’m doomed to be a bachelor again—well, there’s nothing can stop it happening. At least she’ll know I still love her, whatever I may say. I’ll be an honest man at last. I’ll boil things down to a few plain words—cowardice, vanity, love, infantilism. Perhaps I’ll be an outcast: I deserve to be.”

  He surveyed Morgan’s splendour from head to toe with frank contempt, and said:

  “This is your first time here; you don’t understand one damn thing. You’re too young to have to be honest. In a year or two you won’t be. Then you’ll be scared, the way I was when I first came to New York, and you’ll grab the notions of the people you envy and are afraid of, and suck up to them, so they’ll like you and not laugh at you. That’ll make you feel steady and decent—and honest, too, of course; new ideas and young men are always considered honest. You’ll feel warm: the people you know will all smile at you, because they’ll trust you and know you’ll never say anything really painful. As you get older, you won’t get any new ideas or develop your mind; you won’t dare to. But you’ll know all the safe rules by heart, and you’ll have much more confidence in yourself: you’ll suddenly find you’re one of the old-timers, and you’ll be able to sneer or be generous, just as you please, without ever getting into danger. You’ll know you can laugh yourself sick at a Protestant, go pretty far in reviling a Catholic, and never say a bad word about a Jew, unless you are a Jew—then, you must. You’ll find out all about minorities, and little men, and outcasts, and underprivileged, and you’ll always stand behind them even when you think they stink—and they stink as much as anyone else. Of course, there are a few minorities who can be ridiculed—but only because their behaviour has shown them unfit to be little men—that is to say, pals of your pals. There are also a few men who must be treated with respect even though they say cheap things—they are the best artists, and you mutter about them instead, and show that they would be even greater if they only knew what you know. I mean, you learn to know the outs as well as the ins: the rules seem hard to learn at first, but they soon become easy: they turn into instincts and take the place of the instincts you were born with—those you never
feel again. After all, you always read the same magazine and meet the same people at the same parties—and then there’s your wife; even if she doesn’t learn the rules the way you do, you can be sure she’ll know where you stand with the safe people, and kick you back into line if you stray. You’ll think you love her more than ever for that, but really you’ll hate her. When things get too bad, you can always come to Europe for a rest-cure. It’s worked with me for twenty years. I thought it was going to work this time.