Young Hearts Crying Read Free Page A

struck you as a falling-back kind of man?”
    And he was instantly glad he’d come up with that line. There had been times, in all this talk, when he’d caught himself almost at the point of blurting out that to accept her money would jeopardize his “very manhood,” or even that it would “emasculate” him, but now all the queasy implications of such a weak and desperately final defense could be forgotten.
    He was up and pacing again, fists in his pockets, and he went to stand for a while at the front windows, looking out over Copley Square at the sunny parade of weekday-morning pedestrians along Boylston Street and at the endlessly deep blue sky beyond the buildings. It was good flying weather.
    “I just wish you’d take a little time to think it over, is all,” Lucy was saying from somewhere in the room behind him. “Couldn’t you at least keep an open mind?”
    “No,” he said at last, turning to face her. “No, I’m sorry, baby, but we’re going to do this my way.”

Chapter Two
    The place they found in New York was almost exactly what Michael had specified: a plain, decent apartment in the West Village. They had three rooms on the ground floor, on Perry Street near the corner of Hudson, and he could shut himself into the smallest room and hunch over the manuscript of a book of poems he wanted to finish and sell before his twenty-sixth birthday.
    Finding the right kind of work for his left hand, though, was a little more difficult. In the course of several interviews he began to suspect that a job in an advertising agency might drive him out of his mind; instead he settled for employment in the “permissions” department of a medium-sized publishing house. His duties there amounted to little more than idleness: he spent much of every office day at work on his poems, and nobody seemed to care or even to notice.
    “Well, that certainly sounds like an ideal situation,” Lucy said – and it might have been, except that the paychecks he brought home were barely enough to cover the groceries and the rent. Still, there was a reasonable hope that he’d be promoted – other people in that sluggish department were sometimes “taken upstairs” to receive real salaries – and so he decided to stick it out for a year. That was the year his twenty-sixth birthday camearound and found his book still far from finished, because he had thrown out many of its earlier, weaker poems; it was also the year they discovered that Lucy was pregnant.
    By the time their daughter Laura was born, in the spring of 1950, he had quit fooling around in the publishing house and found a better-paying job. He was a staff writer now for a slick, fast-growing trade magazine called
Chain Store Age,
hammering out copy all day about “bold, revolutionary new concepts” in the business of retail merchandising. It wasn’t exactly the kind of work he could do with his left hand – these guys wanted a hell of a lot for their money – and there were times at his clattering typewriter when he would wonder what a man married to a millionairess could possibly be doing in a place like this.
    He was always tired when he got home, badly in need of a couple of drinks, and there wasn’t even any hope of seclusion with his manuscript after dinner, because the room he’d once used for writing was now the nursery.
    He knew, though, even if he did keep having to remind himself of it, that only a God damn fool would complain about the way things were going. Lucy had become the picture of a serene young mother – he loved the look that came over her face when she breast-fed the baby – and the baby herself, with her petal-soft skin and her round, deep blue eyes, was a constant source of wonder. Oh, Laura, he wanted to say when he slowly walked her to sleep, oh, little girl, just trust me. Trust me, and you’ll never be afraid.
    It didn’t take him very long to get the hang of the work at
Chain Store Age.
When he was singled out for praise on