Young Mr. Keefe

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “In what? Oh—that party, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cousins of cousins of my mother’s,” she said. “They heard I was in New York and called me. My first New York cocktail party.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Well—”

  They stood on the sidewalk. “Where would you like to go?” he asked her.

  “You decide,” she said. “I’m just a tourist and this is my last night here.”

  “Then where do you go?”

  “Back home. Back to California.”

  They started walking slowly west, towards Fifth Avenue. “And then what?” Jimmy asked. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I may go back to school in the fall. I don’t know. I was at Cal—but I dropped out. Or I may get a job. I just don’t know. What street is this?”

  “Fifth Avenue,” he said.

  “Oh, yes—Central Park. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Do you like New York?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s—well, it’s almost a little overpowering. Like that cocktail party. Is that typical? Are all New York cocktail parties like that?”

  “I’m afraid a lot of them are.”

  “Oh, but I do love New York.”

  “You mean—?” he began, looking at her.

  “Yes!” she smiled. Then, in chorus, they said, “It’s a nice place to visit, but I’d hate to live here.” And they both laughed.

  They were walking south now, on the park side of Fifth, towards the Plaza, and suddenly Jimmy said, “You know—I’ve got a real tourist’s idea. Let’s get a hansom cab down here and drive through the park. Or have you done that already?”

  “Never!” she laughed. “But I’d love to.”

  A few minutes later they were in the cab, trotting slowly through dark tunnels under trees. “Isn’t it strange,” Helen said, “to be moving so slowly! In a city that I’d always thoughts of in terms of people running about, hurrying everywhere! It’s so slow!” Her face, in the shadows, was warm and animated, her lips parted. Impulsively, he kissed her. “We can get out and take a taxi,” he said. “We don’t need to go slowly.”

  “No, no,” she whispered, holding his hand.

  “You know,” he said, “it’s funny, but you’re terribly different. I mean, back at that cocktail party—you didn’t belong there at all! I took one look at you and saw you didn’t belong there. I don’t mean that unkindly either. But did you take a look at any of the other girls there—the New York girls? Those Finch types—pale, kind of haggard-looking, and”—he mimicked them, talking with the broadest possible a—“‘My deah, so terribly, terribly weary and bored with it all—you can’t imagine how bored. And how initiated!’”

  She laughed softly.

  “But you’re different,” he said. “You don’t belong with them. You belong out on a hill somewhere, or on the deck of a yawl, or—” He broke off. “Do you really have to go back to-morrow?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I wish so, too,” she said.

  Later, when the driver returned them to the Plaza, Jimmy said, “Where would you like to go now? You name it. Statue of Liberty … Staten Island Ferry … Grant’s Tomb …?”

  Helen laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve seen all those things already.” And she added, “It’s nearly midnight.”

  “Look,” he said suddenly, “I have an apartment on Sixty-eighth Street—it’s not mine, but the people are away and have let me use it. Would you like to go back there?”

  “Well—” she said.

  “I mean,” he said hastily, “I could fix us some coffee—something to eat. And it’s near the river—there’s a good view.”

  “All right,” she said.

  They had gone, and he had mixed her a drink, and had put a record on the phonograph—Marlene Dietrich singing her sad songs. In the kitchen, he fixed a plate of crackers and cheese and returned with this to the living-room. They ate in silence. “I can’t get over it,” Jimmy said once again. “How different you are from the other girls I’ve known. Not just healthier—but—I can’t put my finger on it.”

  She said nothing. “Do you like”—he said, his chest feeling tight—“do you like Marlene Dietrich?”

  “Yes.”

  And suddenly they had been in each other’s arms. She had kissed him fiercely, almost angrily. Then she had pulled her face away and put her head back, letting her short brown hair fall loose. “Oh, hallelujah!” she had cried. “Oh, hallelujah! Hallelujah!” They reached, together, for the light; the phonograph played on.

  Later, in the dark, she had whispered, “Jimmy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Darling—am I—am I your first girl?”

  He hesitated, wondering whether to give her the answer he had read somewhere young men his age were supposed to give, or whether, with Helen, to tell the truth. And then, because he suspected that she knew the truth anyway, he told the truth. “Yes.”

  It had happened so fast—the sudden burning, almost unquenchable love. For Jimmy, it was an emotion unlike anything else he had ever experienced. And somehow her departure—she had flown back to California the next day as she had said she must—only served to heighten it. Nearly every night after that he telephoned her. Once, a few weeks later, his father had driven down from Connecticut to have lunch with him. Jimmy had got nowhere with the job hunting; he hadn’t tried. In his talks with Helen it had been decided somehow that he would go to California, marry her, and find a job there. He tried to explain this to his father as they sat over drinks at the, Yale Club. “But you don’t seem to know too much about her, Jim,” James Keefe, Sen., had said. “You don’t know her people, for one thing. You’ve only just met the girl. Oh, I know—at twenty-three you’re ready to win the world. But be a little commonsensical, Jimmy. Don’t feel you’ve got to marry the first pretty face you see!” His father had grinned at him.

  After that, his father wrote him a long letter in laborious longhand—an indication of how important his father considered the letter to be—about maturity and responsibilities, urging Jimmy finally to come to work for the Keefe Company, where, as always, a slot waited for him.

  Nevertheless, one rainy day in December he went to the savings bank and withdrew money that had been placed there for him by his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on every birthday and Christmas of his life; money that represented income from a trust set up by his father, and money that his mother had sent him from time to time to “tide him over” in New York—the total came to a little over nine thousand dollars—and deposited this in his checking account.

  That night, without telling anyone, he took a plane to San Francisco. Helen met him at the airport, and in a rented car, they had driven to Reno. There they had been married in a wayside wedding chapel that offered the services of a justice of the peace, an organist, and, on the premises, a motel. The next day there had been a series of telephone calls—anxious, tearful, and admonishing—to and from the two families, back and forth across the continent. Both families urged their children to come home immediately. But Jimmy and Helen went on to Yosemite, and did not return to Helen’s home in Rio Linda until a week later.

  In the meantime, it had been agreed between the Keefes and the Warrens, negotiating over Long Distance, to treat the elopement as though it had never occurred. A formal wedding, with invitations and announcements in the New York and San Francisco newspapers, was scheduled for early in January. The Keefes prepared to fly to San Francisco, with as many relatives as they could muster on such short notice, and to ensconce themselves in a series of suites at the St. Francis Hotel. It was Jimmy’s first brush with the power and influence of his family. In his attempt to have his marriage with Helen kept secret, spontaneous, and private, he found himself defeated. When they returned from their single secret week in Yosemite, he discovered that his marriage was going to involve many mo
re people than himself and Helen. He spent the weeks between the two weddings receiving and dispatching lengthy legal documents—wills, trusts, community property agreements. Jimmy’s father expressed annoyance with Walker Warren, Helen’s father. “This gentleman,” he wrote, “fails to comprehend the tax advantage to be gained for you if the actual, proper wedding were allowed to fall within the current calendar year, instead of in January. Now, for your greatest tax saving, you must use the Nevada wedding date on your return when you file in April.”

  And Helen? He tried to remember Helen’s face, her reactions, through all of this. But of course, he thought, even by then, it had begun.

  Jimmy climbed on close behind Claire. The straps of his knapsack burned into his shoulders. “Oh!” Claire gasped. “Let’s stop!” They stopped and he looked down. For a moment, he imagined that he could see the world below turning. A blue sliver of Lake Tahoe had appeared between the mountains—the same sliver they had seen from the summit in the car. Beyond the lake lay the wastes of northern Nevada. He wondered wildly if that odd little wayside chapel was somewhere in that expanse. Directly below, the white roof of Squaw Valley Lodge looked like a pale linen handkerchief that had been tossed down. Next to it, the swimming-pool was a vivid blue rectangle that caught the sun. “Looking down makes me dizzy,” he said.

  Dizzily, though, he continued to look down. With the nerve, with the right persuasion, he thought, he would go down himself. He would tumble his troubled frame down, and the rocks would spring up to catch him, to cradle him …

  As though she sensed his thoughts, Claire said amicably, “Death wish?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Will you jump with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then.”

  “All right.”

  She laughed at him, and reached for his hand. In the effort, suddenly she slipped and fell face forward across the rocks. She screamed and clutched at a stone. It came loose and she slipped farther. He went to his hands and knees, tried to reach her, and lost his own footing. Then they were both motionless. A clatter of stones loosened, fell, and echoed below them. “Don’t move,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t move!”

  “I can’t!” she sobbed.

  “If I move, I’ll slip on top of you, and we’ll both go down. Don’t move until I think of something.”

  “Oh, God!” said Claire.

  He tried to steady himself, and when he thought he had, he tried to reach down to her again. Blazer was far ahead, out of sight.

  With his fingers, he groped for her hand. “Don’t touch me!” she screamed sharply. “Don’t touch me!”

  “Let me try to get your pack off.”

  “Don’t touch me!” And suddenly she said, “I’ll get out of this myself, without your help. You only want to make me grateful!”

  Stung, he drew back his hand. “All right,” he said. Slowly, he inched himself forward, placed his knee against a rock, and stood up. He stood, looking down at her, watching her as she crawled painfully up. Tears streamed down her face. She had cut her chin, and the tears mingled with blood. He watched as she slid upward across the shale until her toe found a firm place. Then she stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” Jimmy said quietly.

  Her face was still white. She laughed shakily. “Blazer would never forgive me,” she said, “if I couldn’t make it up this little mountain by myself.” She reached in her pocket and removed a handkerchief. She dabbed at her chin. “Just a scratch,” she said.

  They went on in silence, and after a while, the worst of it was over, and they reached a high level stretch where Blazer was sitting cross-legged, waiting for them. The westward side of the mountain sloped off gently. They started down, and suddenly there was a low clump of trees, and, in a hollow, a spring that bubbled out of nowhere into a pool. They walked to the edge of the pool, turning the rocks over carefully with their toes.

  “This is a large arrowhead,” Blazer said, kicking over a stone.

  “A particularly large arrowhead,” Jimmy said.

  “Probably a deadly weapon.”

  “A blunt instrument, anyway,” Claire said.

  “And look at this curious fossilized dingbat,” Blazer said. “Centuries ago, it lived and walked among us.”

  “Well, not us,” Claire said.

  “And here is a relic of the Pleistocene Age …”

  Tadpoles darted from the edges of the pool where they stepped.

  “How do they get here?” Claire asked. “Such nice big fat ones, too!”

  “They’re disgusting,” Blazer said.

  “Yes,” Claire said, “but don’t forget they turn into butterflies.”

  “No, they turn into swans,” said Blazer.

  “No,” Jimmy said, “they turn into frogs that turn into princes. I read it somewhere.”

  There was another short rise to climb before the whole panorama of the western slope came into view. The lake, and Nevada, had passed behind the ridge. They were looking across a greener, softer expanse into California. There was a small lake below them, rimmed with small firs. “Look,” Blazer said, “that’s where we’ll camp!”

  “We can swim with no clothes on,” Claire said. “We can skinny-dip!”

  “Let’s go.” Blazer looked at her. “How’d you cut your chin?” he asked.

  “A branch snapped in my face,” Claire said casually.

  Going down from there was mostly running and leaping from stone to stone, and half falling, slipping, and sliding. At times, they lost sight of the lake, and then again they would see it, correct their course, and head for it again. Although it was past noon, the sun was still on the morning side of the mountain, and they were in the mountain’s dark brown shadow. Soon they were among sequoias and pines and thick patches of sweet fern, stepping and climbing over fallen trees that resembled giant graves. They came unexpectedly to a clearing in the trees where the grass was thick and tall and green and spattered with buttercups. Claire flopped on her stomach in the grass. “I’ve wanted to do this all day,” she said.

  “All of a sudden, it’s hot,” Jimmy said. He unbuttoned his shirt and let his shirt-tails hang loose.

  “But, oh, God, what a lovely day!” Claire said. “Does anybody feel like gambolling? Let’s gambol on the greensward.”

  For a while, they gambolled. They played hide-and-seek for a minute or two, but there were no good places to hide. They played run, sheep, run. They chased each other until Claire said, “Oh, dear, I’m getting a headache. Let’s stop now.” They took off their shoes and sat in the grass and dug their bare toes into the moist earth. They sang songs and tried to remember good rhymes. “On the top of the mountain,” Claire said, “I remembered Edna St. Vincent Millay—‘The world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide.’ Isn’t that the loveliest thought? She was nineteen when she wrote that.” Claire produced some sandwiches from her knapsack. Later, Claire said, “Let’s climb trees,” and they did. When Claire reached the outermost branch of her tree, she hung on, swaying fantastically, and called, “I’m never coming down! No, no, never-nonnie-nay!”

  Then, since it was getting late, they picked up their packs again, and went on through the last remaining stretch of woods. Presently they reached the lake.

  “This makes it worth all the trouble,” Claire said. “It’s not real—it’s a Maxfield Parrish painting.”

  And it was. Even though it had formed itself in a hollow of the mountains, there was a long strip of sand along its shore, and another section where the shore was cragged with rocks and boulders that stretched like huge stepping-stones into the water.

  They took off their packs and sat down, looking at it. Fish plopped quietly out of the water for flies, and, except for this noise, it was remarkably silent. The slanting sunlight came through the trees and struck every ripple. The branches of the spruces and hemlocks swayed, and a few birds called. Nothing else. Blazer started working on the camp-fire.

  “Collect sma
ll sticks,” he said.

  They did this, and when they returned with them and heaped them on the fire, it burned well, throwing a deep, pungent, piny smoke into the air. Jimmy took the axe and began cutting pine boughs for their beds. “Don’t take too many branches off a single tree,” Claire said. “We mustn’t spoil the beauty of it here.”

  “How shall we arrange the beds?” Blazer asked. “It would be easier to make one big bed than three little ones.”

  They considered this for a moment. “Well,” Claire said, “I think it would be better to make a big one for you and me, and a smaller one for Jimmy.”

  “All right.”

  Claire started unpacking the knapsacks. “What’s this?” she said, holding up the large Thermos bottle. “This isn’t ours.”

  “I told you last night,” Jimmy said. “That’s my contribution to the larder.”

  Claire opened it and sniffed the contents. “You were serious!” she said. “You did bring martinis! I thought you were only joking. How degenerate! Imagine bringing martinis on a camping trip!”

  “Why, I think they might go well,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, I’ll have one,” Claire said, lifting the bottle to her lips. “Just to show you I’m a good sport.” She passed the Thermos to Blazer. “Cocktail hour, darling,” she said.

  “I’ve never felt less like a martini,” Blazer said. “But what the hell.”

  Later, Claire said, “It’s only six o’clock, but it’s beginning to get dark.” She lay on her back on the bed of pine needles with her drink, in a paper cup, resting on her stomach. “I guess if you live between two mountains, you only have about a seven-hour day. We’d better do something about eating.”

  She stood up and began opening cans. Blazer and Jimmy stretched the sleeping-bags across the pine beds. “Now, one thing about selling,” Blazer was saying, “is that you’ve got to be so God-damned nice to so many God-damned bastards, all day long. You know, whether you like them or not. That was what used to gripe me when I first took this job. You know why I really took it? Because of the travel. There’s a hell of a lot of travelling connected with it. Not just up and down the state of California—but, hell, I may go to Honolulu in a month or two. And I may go to Manila. Well, everything has its compensations, I guess. I used to think I’d like to be a lawyer. But a lawyer stays pretty much in the same place.”