A Young Man's Heart

by Cornell Woolrich

  Still, he continued to write. He had to. “New York Blues,” apparently the last story he ever completed and one of the most darkly powerful of his entire career, was included in the collection NIGHT AND FEAR (2004). TONIGHT, SOME­WHERE IN NEW YORK (2005) brought together an assortment of first-rate fiction and autobiographical reminiscence from his last twenty years.

  In A YOUNG MAN’S HEART we see Woolrich long before then, still young, still hoping to be accepted as a mainstream author, never dreaming of what chance or fate held for him. More than thirty years later he looked back less than fondly on his first literary incarnation. “I was lucky,” he said in BLUES OF A LIFETIME. “I got a second chance. I finally learned to do my job competently only in the mid-Thirties, after I’d already been hitting print steadily for eight years. It would have been a lot better if everything I’d done until then had been written in invisible ink and the reagent had been thrown away.” His early novels he dismissed as exercises in which he would “work [words] into a rich weave, make them glitter, make them dance . . .and in the end have them covering nothing but a great big hole.” Certainly A YOUNG MAN’S HEART emphasizes vivid word-pictures over edge-of- the-seat suspense, although that Woolrich hallmark is far from absent here. But it’s essential reading for anyone who’s been haunted by his suspense novels and stories and is determined to know more about the haunted man who gave them to us.

  A

  YOUNG MAN’S

  HEART

  CHAPTER ONE

  His Mother

  1

  Blair heard the snap of the electric light, and the lining of his flickering eyelids turned vermilion. He opened one eye entirely. They were in the immediate next room, that was their bedroom: the immediate next room. He couldn’t see them at first hand, but Sasha’s bust was visible in a long narrow mirror that leaned over at an angle from the wall. Sasha’s face was as powdered as a Columbine and the lips were heavy with discontent, they were drooping like a red three-leaf clover. She had already taken down her hair, which was the first thing she did whenever she returned home—to the hotel that is—late of an evening. She was subject to headaches, an evanescent ailment that Blair seriously believed to be caused by small imps or scorpions lodged within the skull.

  Behind her pensive motionless face in the glass, Blair saw his father’s shoulders and neck and the lower edge of his face brush quickly by in the background, giving a blurred impression. Sasha was looking steadily downward. “It isn’t the first time,” he heard her say. Her lips appeared to have hardly moved at all.

  “Nor will it be the last.” It was his father’s voice this time, arrogant, noncommittal.

  Sasha was looking up all at once, and there was unimaginable width to her eyes, filled as the vacant hollows suddenly were with color and liquidity. “It will be the last,” she asserted, and each word was neat and beautifully pronounced, Blair thought. Suddenly her position on the quicksilver changed, she began to move higher on the mirror. Her face and shoulders passed from view. She was crossing the room, she was retreating from the wall, and yet she seemed to be clambering up the face of it. Her tightly draped skirt, slit to reveal a wealth of lace, and the vamps of her shoes were the last of her to disappear over the beveled upper edge of the glass. And then came wisps of sobbing, pitched in the key of a newborn kitten left out in the rain to die.

  The light burned steadily all that night, the crisp modern light that Blair knew so well, in a frosted cotton-blossom globe with a sharp point at its navel; a light meant for nail scissors perhaps, or the powdering of faces, but not for eyes red with weeping, since eyes red with weeping were anything but modern, they were old as the hills. Blair couldn’t sleep because of this light that burned so steadily, and when he ventured in there at eight that morning, which was Sunday morning, it was still shining, dimmed by the light of the sun to a mere white glow within the glass itself. The whole apparatus was as hot as lead. Blair turned it out.

  He watched her, lying prone as she was across the undisturbed bed, her face downward between two pillows that she had made use of to muffle her groans. A clove-pink scarf was whipped around her arms and shoulders, and it was like nothing so much as the sash of a naughty little girl who has been punished and sent to bed. All night the light of expiation had burned, yet no one had come near there, no one had tried for admittance.

  2

  The last day on earth had come. Between them they had pressed money upon him, quantities of money, ungrudgingly, eagerly. They vied with one another. “Get yourself this, get yourself that. Go ahead.” He was mystified, embarrassed. All these were indications of insanity.

  When he returned, gorged, Sasha called him to her. It was seven in the evening and she had her hat on; it fitted the head very closely and had grosgrain cockades over the ears. She looked like a French medallion, he thought. At the same time he discovered something that made him uneasy. The taffeta pin-bolsters, shaped like éclairs, were gone from the top of her dressing table. So was every other imaginable thing. The room was bare of ornament, the closets empty. In a moment his face was as pale as a sheet of paper. He looked at her with abnormal intensity.

  The irises of her eyes, swimming with tears, were refracted crookedly by the coating of liquid that her heavy lashes would not suffer to escape.

  “You will have your dinner later with your father,” she told him. “I am going to the train now.”

  He buried his face against her artificially flattened bosom.

  “And me—what about me?”

  “Yes, what about you, poor thing! He won’t let me take you with me.”

  “He’s got to,” Blair sobbed.

  “I would take you to the Hippodrome and to vaudevilles. I would buy a wrist-watch for you. Oh, how can I give you up?”

  Her voice, her form, her very nearness to him, all dissolved in a salt agony.

  His father, it seemed, had something to say to him. Blair steadied himself to listen, the corners of his mouth dragged down by weights of lead, his head suffused with unshed tears that, turned back upon themselves, bit like acid.

  “—I’ll make a man of you, what’s more.”

  Blair regarded his father with mute acquiescence.

  Then at last he was alone, crucified no longer to the fetish of appearances.

  3

  Getting up, he allowed a jet of gaseous cold water to dash headlong into the crockery washbowl until it was brimming. Then he plunged his head in over the ears. The water streamed from his hair, carrying it down over his forehead in stringy disorder. He combed it as it was, corrugating the mirror with beads of water that flew off as they met with the close teeth of the comb. He was very particular about parting it, this hair that belonged to Sasha and was being irremediably severed from her.

  He went through his father’s room and the sepulcher that had been hers until an hour ago, and descended to the lobby. There was a thunderous shifting of trunks going on on the part of unwashed porters in black blouses. A carriage was drawn up at the entrance to the hotel. Sasha was seated in it, biting the bulb of handkerchief at her lips. Blair took the small flat seat that faced backward and had to be lowered on braces. His father appeared and entered the carriage, seating himself at Sasha’s side.

  “Have the trunks been seen to?” she asked quietly.

  “I attended to them,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she replied with grave courtesy.

  The driver’s whip snapped and they rolled noiselessly away on wheels dipped in red gum. They traversed the quiet evening streets of the residential section, lined with long unbroken garden-walls bristling at the top with chopped glass purposely mixed in with the cement, like raisins in a pudding. A glimpse of the lighted sidewalks about the cafe district, and then the station, its thickly lettered kiosks advertising native cigarettes and bottled grenadines.

  He and she and Blair stood on a vast concrete dais beside the coaches to say farewell to one another. The engine, lacquered and black as licorice, cast a satanic b
rick-red funnel of light ahead of it into eternity. Overhead gleamed the forget-me-not blue of the depot arc-lights hanging high as Babel from the beams, in long rows that began as big as full moons and ended the size of luminous peas.

  “Sasha,” said the man at her side, “I can’t see you leave me like this. I love you more (go away, Blair) than anything I know of. Beautiful Sasha.”

  Sasha smiled a weary smile of hers. “That should have been said long ago. Now the time is past. It is because I am going that you think you want me to stay. If I were to stay you would hate it.”

  She put her foot upon the bottom step of the Pullman car and twined her wrist about the vertical brass handrail. The blinds were down behind the low elongated windows, windows interspersed with mosaics of mirror and mother- of-pearl. Blair spelled out the gold lettering that ran the length of the car: “Hesperides.” It bore quotation marks, as though even the railroad people refused to take it seriously.

  Above her in the doorway appeared the grinning Juju mask of the carman, black flesh of Senegal torn over the aching world to Barbados. There was a crescent moon in the canal of open sky immediately above the tracks. Sasha’s wish, the golden wish, the never yet fulfilled, the

  lode-star high above their heads: happiness, happiness. . .

  CHAPTER TWO

  Her Successor

  1

  They had guests almost every evening after that, friends of Giraldy’s who brought friends of theirs, who in turn soon brought friends of their own. There was a piano, black and neurotic. Giraldy could play and frequently did, light things of the music halls, his ring dashing about over the keys like a mad jewel.

  He made a captivating host, having a certain male charm about him, very difficult to describe, that made him efface himself as much as possible, without actual diffidence, so that the burden of entertainment fell largely upon others with the result that they courted him rather than his having to court them. He served Benedictines to the women and Scotch and soda to the men. Blair wondered at the distinction.

  A rapturous young woman, whose name was Fairchild, was an incessant guest of theirs. She frequently took dinner with them before the others arrived. At such times she had her highball, cool as any man could be, yet later on in the course of the evening Blair would see her sipping cordial sweet as glycerin with the ladies, too delicate to swallow it outright. She chanted when Giraldy played and once she gave an exhibition of a nautch dance with an Eastern scarf. One evening she appeared at dinner in a dressing-gown with flowing angel sleeves, saying she had stolen a bit of a nap, that she would dress for company the minute dinner was through. Blair had not even known she was in the house.

  “I don’t know what Blair will think of me,” she said coyly.

  Giraldy smiled at him engagingly and thrust two fingers under his dinner plate. Blair never moved. When dinner was finished and he was alone in the room he lifted the plate. A leaf of paper money that had been folded to the size of a postage stamp reared and slowly righted itself. At the party that evening Fairchild was more chastely decorous than ever, she fairly outdid herself. When the gathering broke up, Blair, who was narrowly watching each guest leave, did not see her go. He had lost sight of her some little while before. The following morning he was excessively antagonized to have her walk into breakfast while they were there, in a shadow hat of pink chiffon as though she had stepped out of some garden fête.

  “Good morning,” she said with a sugared smile, and added, “Good morning, Blair.”

  “How do do,” said Blair.

  “Won’t you have some breakfast?” offered Giraldy pleasantly, lifting himself an inch or two above the seat of his chair and then relapsing again.

  Blair considered all this merely pretense; he felt that he understood and they might at least respect his intelligence: they had gotten married.

  She seated herself; the old woman came in from the kitchen and whisked away a serviette: the conventional layout of knives, forks, coffee and fruit spoons stood revealed. The table had been arranged beforehand for a third person. None of this was lost upon Blair, who after all had been brought up in an exceedingly artificial atmosphere where every detail counted for something.

  “How did you get in?” he asked ingenuously, “I didn’t hear the bell ring.”

  “It stood open and I walked in,” she grinned. “Wrong of me, wasn’t it?” There was a brittle quality about this last.

  2

  Giraldy and the second Mrs. Giraldy were entertaining their friends. The overhead lights had been done away with after the up-to-date manner. Instead there were a number of glazed pottery lamps with parchment shades on which were depicted silhouettes of satyrs and nymphs in an endless procession going on and on. These lamps shed light upward and downward in a funnel-like arrangement, but kept the greater part of the room in a grottolike twilight, very hard on the eyes until you got used to it. Estelle’s women friends—Estelle was the new Mrs. Giraldy— Estelle’s women friends had an idea she persisted in this arrangement of her rooms possibly because her complexion was past its prime. Of course they didn’t say so in her presence but only when she was out of the room. Her men friends wondered whether it was on account of pregnancy. Naturally they said this only behind the backs of their hands. Blair, who had to live with her and had overheard their ideas on the subject, made investigations. He found her complexion quite tolerable, even in the early-morning light. He would have checked up on the other insinuation too, only was not sure of its meaning. He used to watch her feet to see if she was lame. As a matter of fact these novel lighting-effects were simply an effort on her part toward modishness. The simplicity of the reason laid it open to misconstruction.

  There were eight people in the room altogether. They were singing when Blair went in, and he paused in the doorway.

  “She has rings on her fingers, bells on her toes,

  Elephants to ride upon where-ever she goes.”

  He knew whom they meant. He had seen pictures of her on the inside lids of cigar-boxes, allegories all in gold and primary colors. She was a barbaric princess, coffee-colored and naked. She had plumes on her head and there was usually a tiger crouched beside her and a little negro emptying a cornucopia either of fruits or flowers or else of gold coins at her feet, while she gazed serenely out to sea from a grove of ferns and palms.

  Underneath the picture it usually said something melodious like Flor de Jamaica or Manila Exquisitos.

  He stepped into the living room.

  Estelle came toward him at once, and as though to screen the fact that she had been obliged to send out for anything that was not in the house, carried him back outside the room with her once more by the impetus of her approach. This was a detail of the elaborate technique known as company manners, still in vogue, though less adhered to than formerly. By throwing secrecy over the most harmless household incidents and arrangements it drew a line between host and guests that was unwittingly an actual reversal of the true meaning of hospitality.

  “I couldn’t get the ones you told me to get,” said Blair, sinking his voice to a whisper just outside the door.

  “That’s too bad,” she said, taking the package from him and turning it around with her thumb to look at it. “These Spanish cigarettes are strong little beggars.”

  She looked at them a second time. “They’ve already been opened,” she said. “How’s that?”

  No explanation occurred to him but the simplest one. “I took one.”

  “Did you smoke it?” she said humorously.

  She went inside and he heard her telling every one, “Blair has smoked a cigarette,” and laughing a little over it.

  How treacherous, he thought, to betray him like that.

  “Where is he?” Giraldy said. “Blair, come in here.”

  Blair obeyed reluctantly, vainglorious yet apprehensive. Everyone was watching him.

  “Try another,” Giraldy ordered.

  Blair hesitated.

  “Here,” Giraldy sai
d arbitrarily.

  Mistrustful that a trick was being played on him, Blair slowly took one from the package extended toward him in his father’s hand. He put it to his lips. It fell out, and he caught it in mid-air and put it back again. Giraldy checked an impatient laugh.

  He struck a match, protected it with the hollows of his hands (though the air in the room was still) and crouched forward above his own knees, offering it. Blair directed the cigarette at it with his mouth, thrust it a little too far to one side, then almost immediately covered up his mistake and attained the proper focus for combustion. He drew in breath till his heart felt empty.

  “Now go ahead,” Giraldy smirked.

  No one in the room was making a sound, all were patronizingly watching. They had discovered a new diversion: liqueurs, piano music, now a young boy smoking a cigarette.

  Blair held his mouth open like an O and a casual silver thread began to curl over the edge of his upper lip. Some of it reentered his nostrils. Some got into his eye and scalded.

  “That’s not the way,” said Giraldy.

  “He look like a feesh,” observed a woman. She opened her own mouth in ludicrous imitation.

  Blair felt he ought not to fail them. He thrust his stomach forward and blew through his rounded mouth like a valve. The toiling silver thread was jerked to a horizontal position and expanded into a cone. A few particles of moisture went with it but the rest was undoubtedly smoke.