Irwin Shaw - The Young Lions

The girl stopped at the corner. "Now," she said coldly, "we take the street car."

"Oh, God!" Noah said. Then he began to laugh. His laughter sounded mad and empty across the trolley tracks, among the shabby store fronts and dingy, brown stone walls.

"If you're going to be so unpleasant," the girl said, "you can leave me here."

"I have come this far," Noah said, with literary gravity. "I will go the whole way."

He stopped laughing and stood beside her, silent under the lamp-post, with the raw wind lashing them in rough, wet gusts, the wind that had come across the Atlantic beaches and the polluted harbours, across the million acres of semi-detached houses, across the brick and wood wastes of Flatbush and Bensonhurst, across the sleeping millions of their fellow men, who in their uneasy voyage through life had found no gentler place to lay their heads.

A quarter of an hour later the trolley car rumbled towards them, a clanking eye of light in the distance. There were only three other passengers, dozing unhappily on the wood seats, and Noah sat formally beside the girl, feeling, in the lighted car creaking along the dark streets, like a man on a raft, wrecked with strangers, relics of a poor ship that had foundered on a cold run among northern islands. The girl sat primly, staring straight ahead, her hands crossed in her lap, and Noah felt as though he did not know her at all, as though if he ventured to speak to her she would cry out for a policeman and demand to be protected against him.

"All right," she said, and stood up. Once more he followed her to the door. The car stopped and the door wheezed open. They stepped down to the wet pavement. Noah and the girl walked away from the trolley tracks. Here and there along the mean streets there was a tree, fretted with green in surprising evidence that spring had come to this place this year.

The girl turned into a small concrete yard, under a high stone stoop. There was a barred iron door. She opened the lock with her key and the door swung open.

"There," she said, coldly. "We're home," and turned to face him.

Noah took off his hat. The girl's face bloomed palely out of the darkness. She had taken off her hat, too, and her hair made a wavering line around the ivory gleam of her cheeks and brow. Noah felt like weeping, as though he had lost everything that he had ever held dear, as he stood close to her in the poor shadow of the house in which she lived.

"I… I want to say…" he said, whispering, "that I do not object… I mean I am pleased… pleased, I mean, to have brought you home."

"Thank you," she said. She was whispering, too, but her voice was non-committal.

"Complex," he said. He waved his hands vaguely. "If you only knew how complex. I mean, I'm very pleased, really…"

She was so close, so poor, so young, so frail, deserted, courageous, lonely… He put out his hands in a groping, blind gesture and took her head delicately in his hands and kissed her.

Her lips were soft and firm and a little damp from the mist.

Then she slapped him. The noise echoed meanly under the stone steps. His cheek felt a little numb. How strong she is, he thought dazedly, for such a frail-looking girl.

"What made you think," she said coldly, "that you could kiss me?"

"I… I don't know," he said, putting his hand to his cheek to assuage the smarting, then pulling it away, ashamed of showing that much weakness at a moment like this. "I… I just did."

"You do that with your other girls," Hope said crisply. "Not with me."

"I don't do it with other girls," Noah said unhappily.

"Oh," Hope said. "Only with me. I'm sorry I looked so easy."

"Oh, no," said Noah, mourning within him. "That isn't what I mean." Oh, God, he thought, if only there were some way to explain to her how I feel. Now she thinks I am a lecherous fool on the loose from the corner drug-store, quick to grab any girl who'll let me. He swallowed dryly, the words clotted in his throat.

"Oh," he said, weakly. "I'm so sorry."

"I suppose you think," the girl began cuttingly, "you're so wonderfully attractive, so bright, so superior, that any girl would just fall all over herself to let you paw her…"

"Oh, God." He backed away painfully, and nearly stumbled against the two steps that led down from the cement yard.

"I never in all my days," said the girl, "have come across such an arrogant, opinionated, self-satisfied young man."

"Stop…" Noah groaned. "I can't stand it."

"I'll say good night now," the girl said bitingly. "Mr. Ackerman."

"Oh, no," he whispered. "Not now. You can't."

She moved the iron gate with a tentative, forbidding gesture, and the hinges creaked in his ears.

"Please," he begged, "listen to me…"

"Good night." With a single, swift movement, she was behind the gate. It slammed shut and locked. She did not look back, but opened the wooden door to the house and went through it. Noah stared stupidly at the two dark doors, the iron and the wood, then slowly turned, and brokenly started down the street.

He had gone thirty yards, holding his hat absently in his hand, not noticing that the rain had begun again and a fine drizzle was soaking his hair, when he stopped. He looked around him uneasily, then turned and went back towards the girl's house. There was a light on there now, behind the barred window on the street level, and even through the drawn blinds he could see a shadow moving about within.

He walked up to the window, took a deep breath and tapped at it. After a moment, the blind was drawn aside and he could see Hope's face peering out. He put his face as close to the window as he could and made vague, senseless gestures to indicate that he wanted to talk to her. She shook her head irritably and waved to him to go away, but he said, quite loudly, with his lips close to the window, "Open the door. I've got to talk to you. I'm lost. Lost. LOST!"

He saw her peering at him doubtfully through the rain-streaked glass. Then she grinned and disappeared. A moment later he heard the inside door being opened, and then she was at the gate. Involuntarily, he sighed.

"Ah," he said, "I'm so glad to see you."

"Don't you know your way?" she asked.

"I am lost," he said. "No one will ever find me again." She chuckled.

"You're a terrible fool," she said, "aren't you?"

"Yes," he said humbly. "Terrible."

"Well," she said, very serious now, on the other side of the locked gate, "you walk two blocks to your left and you wait for the trolley, the one that comes from your left, and you take that to Eastern Parkway and then…"

Her voice swept on, making a small music out of the directions for escaping to the larger world, and Noah noticed as she stood there that she had taken off her shoes and was much smaller than he had realized, much more delicate, and more dear.

"Are you listening to me?" she asked.

"I want to tell you something," he said loudly. "I am not arrogant, I am not opinionated…"

"Sssh," she said, "my aunt's asleep."

"I am shy," he whispered, "and I don't have a single opinion in the whole world, and I don't know why I kissed you. I… I just couldn't help it."

"Not so loud," she said. "My aunt."

"I was trying to impress you," he whispered. "I don't know any Continental women. I wanted to pretend to you that I was very smart and very sophisticated. I was afraid that if I was just myself you wouldn't look at me. It's been a very confusing night," he whispered brokenly. "I don't remember ever going through anything so confusing. You were perfectly right to slap me. Perfectly. A lesson," he said, leaning against the gate, his face cold against the iron, close to her face. "A very good lesson. I… I can't say what I feel about you at the moment. Some other time, maybe, but…" He stopped. "Are you Roger's girl?" he asked.