The Lonely

by Paul Gallico

  IN THIS NEW NOVEL the author of The Snow Goose tells a story of tenderness and yearning, the tale of two young lovers who thought they could fix boundaries for love.

  Jerry Wright had planned on love—for the future. He was engaged—to Catherine, back home. But in the meantime he was lonely: a boy forced into manhood and grown alien to the people and customs of his youth. That explained the place of Patches in his life and the choice that changed him into a man.

  In The Lonely, Paul Gallico tells how Jerry and Patches tried to arrange just how much they would mean to each other, and for just how long. Here is a story to make you feel young and happy and delighted with life again. Only Paul Gallico could see so far into hearts that are simple, ardent, and young.

  Also by PAUL GALLICO

  THE SNOW GOOSE

  CONFESSIONS OF A STORY WRITER

  GOLF IS A FRIENDLY GAME

  THE SECRET FRONT

  THE ADVENTURES OF HIRAM HOLLIDAY

  FAREWELL TO SPORT

  These are BORZOI BOOKS

  Published in New York by

  ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright 1945, 1949 by Paul Gallico. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  An earlier version of THE LONELY appeared in Cosmopolitan

  THE LONELY ARE the too-young conquerors of space and time, the boys-become-men who have lived between the worlds in the silver ships that sail to war and back through the frosty firmament. They are the children of the sky, the wanderers who cannot find their homes. The lonely are those who have come too close to Heaven and Hell, before their time . . .

  T H E

  L O N E L Y

  I

  AT FIVE MINUTES to six, Lieutenant Jerry Wright fidgeted at the bar of the officers’ club of Gedsborough Airbase, near Kenwoulton, Huntingdon, some ninety miles north of London. He wished the leisurely finger of the clock would reach six, when the meagre supply of Scotch would become available. He felt he needed a drink badly, for the Flight Surgeon had just grounded him and told him to go north to Scotland, for a two weeks’ rest furlough.

  The long, barnlike room, furnished with chairs and tables, with the bar running the length of one side, was already beginning to fill with pilots, navigators, and bombardiers, and was alive with chatter and laughter, the whir and chunk-chunk of busy slot machines and occasional outcries of: “Son-of-a . . . She almost hit . . .”

  From the neighboring game room came the click of ping-pong balls and the shouts from the craps table, making Jerry feel even more lonely. He looked up and read again the sign beneath the bar decoration, the silver-painted hundred-pound fragmentation bomb, suspended from the ceiling—“When You See Two of These, Check Your Gas Consumption; Four—You’re Flying Blind. When You See a Salvo, That’s All, Brother, Prepare to Ditch!” He lit a cigarette and thought: “Nerves, my eye. I’ll go nuts away from here.”

  Major Lester Harrison, Jerry’s idol and commander of his wing, was feeding shillings into a slot machine near the door, his cap suspended miraculously, apparently by one blond tuft of hair at the back of his head, an expression of deep concentration on his face. He was a big man, too handsome, square-jawed, with pale, deep-set flyer’s eyes and a close-clipped light moustache. Jerry had not dared to raise one like it, but he tried to copy the major in everything else.

  At twenty-three, Jerry Wright was an enchanting adolescent whose most serious contact with life up to that point had occurred in an airplane flying over enemy-held territory.

  In this he was the product of his class and his family. His father, Harman Wright, for all his mature years and greying hair, still maintained a juvenile pink-and-whiteness, an athlete’s figure, and a sportsman’s mind, a legacy of looking at life as a kind of noble game played according to strict rules of conduct and behavior, handed him by his father and passed along dutifully, with embellishments, to his own son.

  The war had caught young Jerry midway in the final period of his formative years at Williams, when his racy athlete’s body was in the process of becoming equipped with the mentality to match, and put him on a bigger “team” than he had ever encountered before.

  Physically he was equipped for it—a trim, wiry, black-haired boy as finely bred as a racing colt, sensitive, a born competitor with hair-trigger reactions. With his grey-blue lady-killer eyes deep-set beneath dark, heavy brows, and compact athlete’s body confined to the rakish cut of his battle jacket, he looked a man and was still a child and was keenly aware of it. He wished he were older and often tried hard to act older than he was.

  He was playing war the way he played football at Westbury High and a year or two at Williams. His Liberator crew was the varsity of varsities, and every day was the “big game,” except that he was not prepared by anything in his previous life or upbringing for the encounters with the bitter and awful realities behind the sport.

  The Flight Surgeon thought he detected signs of battle fatigue when he had grounded him, but it was only one of Jerry’s encounters with reality, of which he was not even wholly aware, the things that happened to him inside when he saw one of the “team” come home from the “game,” his middle a mass of red and jellied rags.

  As always in the throes of this clash, Jerry felt the need to drink to escape from the repercussions. He was aided too by a natural tendency of upbringing to avoid the contemplation of the immediate realities by the substitution of another. Thus he now waited to drink off his disappointment at being grounded and furloughed to Scotland, which would surely put another month on to his tour of duty before prospective leave. He had but twenty missions left before, if he survived them, he would be sent home. Home—Westbury—his father and mother—his girl.

  Only a few days ago he had written her a letter full of careful and elaborate hints that their marriage might soon be taking place. His grounding would throw this schedule out of gear. It had been eighteen months since he had seen Catharine Quentin.

  For Jerry, his “girl” belonged in brackets just as did the “team” and the “game.” As always when he thought of her, he fell into the mood that the kids back home in Westbury would have described as “mooning,” the adolescent American woman-or girl-worship that has no basis of reality.

  Catharine Quentin was Jerry’s first love. They had grown up together. Their parents were old friends and alike in station, outlook, and mores. They had been intended for each other from the beginning.

  She was a handsome, healthy, loyal girl who had been permitted to grow into but little conception of femininity or herself as a woman. Her upbringing made of her sex a handicap that since it could not be overcome, one learned to live with, athletically as well as otherwise.

  To Jerry she combined such perfection of physical beauty, flawlessness of character, uprightness, and unapproachable purity that it was difficult for him to regard her as human even after they had both emerged from the leggy, voice-changing embarrassment of puberty into the adolescent love that finally ended in engagement before he had left for England. Indeed, he hardly did.

  She was one of those perfect specimens of American beauty which is frequently the result of wealth and careful social selection, a finely proportioned slender girl, violet-eyed, with rich russet hair framing the kind of features that must be reckoned as beauty.

  She had the modern athlete’s body and carried her own sweet fragrance of health and cleanly vitality. Too, she was possessed of a clarity of spirit and a purity that concealed her ignorance of herself and the world. She had been bred to type and to escape all of harm or hurt or realities of life that might be
avoided, as had been Jerry.

  All this made Jerry think of his forthcoming marriage to her with a humbleness verging upon abasement. In his boy’s mind she was locked away in a compartment marked: “Goddess—Sacred . . .”

  Life in the Air Force had abolished Jerry’s virginity and had even assisted in reducing some of the prudery instilled in him by his family, upbringing, class, and general education. Even so, Jerry did not realize that he never thought of Catharine as a woman with whom he would some day join his body in union to produce his children, much less blend in passion and in ecstasy.

  For here was the supreme achievement of the system that made him—not even when he went down to London with the gang to seek sexual release from tension did she cross his mind. So far was his Catharine removed from this concept that he was not even burdened with a sense of guilt or cheating. Since no love or woman-worship was involved, there was no disloyalty. Loyalty loomed large in Jerry’s catalogue of virtues.

  The clock now stood at two minutes to six, and the eager and thirsty lined the bar and were making leading remarks at the frosty backs of the bartenders. They were all boys doing men’s work, and of them all, Jerry felt his youth the most.

  He knew that he was man enough to fly his course under attack or bring home a limping ship, to carry his commission and play his part. But inside he seemed to feel no different from the way he felt at home when he was a high-school football hero, or a freshman star, and then briefly a sophomore at Williams before he had enlisted.

  He yearned desperately to grow up, not only to be a man, but to feel like one instead of a kid, something between the dashing, virile, swashbuckling Lester Harrison, over there at the slot machine, and tough Sam Bognano, captain of the Liberator “My Black Hen,” of which Jerry was co-pilot.

  Sam came in through the door, looking around for friends. A stocky boy with a flat nose and slightly protruding eyes, he spotted Jerry and called: “Hi! How’d you make out with the Flight Surgeon? Nothing trivial, I hope.”

  Jerry said: “Keep away from me. I’m a sick man. I’ve got something awful. Two weeks’ rest furlough. I’m supposed to go to Scotland and graze . . .”

  Bognano quickly rubbed the back of his hand against Jerry’s neck. “Oh, you lucky stiff. Lemme touch you. Maybe it’s catching . . .”

  “Lucky, my foot! I’ll go screwy. Christ, two weeks nutting around by myself! . . .”

  “Yeah”—Bognano said sympathetically—“that’s terrible. Fresh air, plenty of sleep, nothing to worry about. You’d better have some medicine right away.” He turned and waved at Major Harrison and said: “Hi, Lester, come on over and have a drink.”

  The major, without looking up, pulled the plunger of the machine and said in his dry, mocking voice: “I’ve got an investment here. Something’s goin’ to bust soon . . .”

  Precisely at six o’clock, when the two bartenders faced around and said: “What’ll it be, gentlemen?” the major’s slot machine whirred and went: “Chunk, chunk, chunk, CRASH!” and began to cascade shillings.

  Somebody yelled: “Hey, that lucky bastard’s hit it again! Jackpot!”

  Major Harrison came over and dumped his swag on to the bar between Sam and Jerry without emotion, saying: “I knew she was hot, I’m buying. Straight Scotch.”

  Jerry’s moment of envy was not for the pile of silver heaped on the bar, but rather an extension of his admiration for the swashbuckling type of man who could coax jackpots out of one-armed bandits and never turn a hair. The most that Jerry had ever been able to ring up was three bells for the twenty-shilling pay-off. He felt that somehow it had something to do with the kind of a man the major was inside that compelled the machine to disgorge by sheer force of personality. Towards women, gambling, and flying, Harrison displayed an insouciant toughness and careless mastery that Jerry would have given an arm to acquire.

  Sam said: “Be very careful of my friend here. He’s in a highly delicate condition. Flight Surgeon has just plastered him with a two weeks’ rest furlough.”

  The major turned and stared pleasantly. “The hell you say! God bless operational fatigue! What would we do without it? Going up to Scotland?”

  He tossed off a straight Scotch with a jerk of his head, and then set the glass down on the bar with a click and a characteristic sigh.

  Jerry said: “I guess so,” drank off his own Scotch, copying the major’s click and sigh. He fell silent because he was embarrassed. It wasn’t awe, or even remotely bootlicking to the major’s rank that caused this feeling, but rather the certainty that the major must know just how much of a green kid he still was.

  Major Harrison said: “That’s wonderful country up there. You’re lucky.”

  Jerry downed another Scotch straight and tapped the glass on the bar. He said: “It’s going to be damn lonely. What the hell does a guy do off in Scotland by himself? If there was only somebody else from the outfit . . .”

  The major moved some of his pile of shillings towards the bartender and said: “Keep it flowing,” and then remarked casually to Jerry: “Why don’t you take a girl up with you? Nothing to keep you from being lonely like shacking up with some nice kid. I don’t mean picking up with some two-quid bimbo, but get yourself some clean, decent girl. Hell, you must know a dozen of ’em!”

  The idea startled Jerry. Not that it had come from Lester Harrison, but because Jerry had so immediately thought of Patches, and it was as though in thinking of her so swiftly he had done her a wrong. And as a kind of anonymous public apology to her, he said: “It’s a stymie. The kind of girl you’d want to have along on a trip like that wouldn’t go.”

  Patches . . . Patches, that queer little mouse with the grey eyes that were so softly luminous; Patches, with her plain face and straight brown hair, who could sit quietly and contentedly through long silences and leave a fellow to his own thoughts and yet feeling warmed by her presence. Not the kind of kid you’d ever go for really, or get stuck on, but who’d be wizard to be with on a holiday. She’d keep out of your hair . . .

  The major broke in on his thoughts with a cheerful laugh. “The hell she wouldn’t! She’ll go.” He downed his Scotch and grinned at Jerry like an older brother. “This isn’t the U.S.A. Girls aren’t as puritanical as they are back home—thank God!—or where would we be? Hell, the whole world’s upside down, isn’t it? They don’t think anything of it.”

  Jerry suddenly felt stirred and excited and at the same time ill at ease. He wondered whether Sam Bognano was listening, and was relieved to find he had got into an argument with a lead bombardier over taking them for a second run down Flak Alley over Duisburg.

  A holiday in Scotland . . . hills and lakes and funny inns. And not to be lonely. Somebody at your side to share it . . . Patches. Patches had a leave coming up from the WAAF. She had mentioned it the last Saturday night they had been together at the dance at the club. Then, confused and disturbed, he knew that it could never be. Patches was catalogued in his mind as a “decent,” or “good,” girl. His whole background forbade him even to suggest such a thing. How would you say it—how could one? He wouldn’t even know how to begin.

  The major answered his unspoken questions as though he had divined them, though in reality he was only expanding upon his favorite subject.

  “You just ask ’em,” he said. “Put it up to ’em cold turkey. They’re used to it. If they have some other guy, or don’t feel like going, they’ll tell you so, and no hard feelings. That’s what I like about ’em.”

  Jerry found himself looking at the table over by the wall underneath the big, framed, blow-up of the burning oil refineries at Munster. He and Patches had been sitting there last Saturday night drinking gin and grapefruit squash after the Scotch gave out, and smiling at each other. They never talked much. They just liked to dance together and sit. The thick, blue-grey uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force made her look even plainer than she was, and yet her inner gentleness and softness managed to come through. She was a wizard dancer and n
ever got on a fellow’s nerves. He had sat there with her sipping his nasty-tasting concoction and thinking of Catharine and the dances at the country club back home in the fall, when the autumn smoke smell drifted in from the outside.

  It was all right to leave Patches that way with his thoughts, because she seemed to have her own kind of inner life that went on behind her grey eyes and at the corners of her mouth, queer lights and glows that would come and go, and shadows that would pause and drift by like soft clouds across a summer sky. And when he would come to address her, she would return at once, and the curious gravity of her expression would change to light and friendliness. He wondered what would become of that expression, what her face would be like if he put it up to her cold turkey . . .

  “But I’ll tell you one thing,” the major was saying earnestly. “If they go, you want to have an understanding right from the start that there’s nothing permanent about it. Get it? Pals while you’re together, but when it’s over, you give ’em a kiss and a pat on the fanny and that’s that. Hell, you don’t want to get involved with them! But you won’t have to worry if you have an understanding before you start out. Most of ’em are hundred per cent. No tears and no trouble. Boom, it’s over! . . .”

  The major raked up the remainder of his shillings and pocketed them. He said: “Okay, kid,” and clapped Jerry on the shoulder. “Have yourself a time. And remember—right from the start—cold turkey.” He turned abruptly and walked away.

  Sam Bognano picked up the last words and said: “Where’s there any cold turkey? It’s Spam again tonight. What was he talking about?”

  Jerry frowned a little and said: “Nothing. Let’s eat.”

  That night, lying on his cot in the quarters he and Sam Bognano occupied, Jerry thought of his coming holiday, of home, of Catharine, and of Patches, of his mother and father and the village of Westbury, of what life would be like when the war was over, of what Major Harrison had said, and then of Patches again.