A Young Man's Heart Read Free Page A

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,