Free The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw Page B

medicine, something sweet and heavy… He fumbled for the light. He felt the nerves in his hand twitching and he stumbled against a chair before he found the lamp.
    His father lay rigid and frail on the bed, his mouth open as if to speak in the bare light. Noah swayed a little as he looked down at him. Foolish, tricky old man, with the fancy beard and the bleached hair and the leather-bound Bible.
    Make haste, make haste, O God, to deliver me… What religion does the deceased profess? Noah felt a little dizzy. His mind didn't seem to be able to fix on any one thing, and one thought slid in on top of another, independent and absurd. Full lips. Twenty-five dollars for the sailors and nothing for him. He had never had particular luck with women, certainly nothing like that. Trouble probably made a man attractive, and the woman had sensed it. Of course she had been terribly drunk… Ronald Beaverbrook. The way the flowers had waved on her skirt as she rolled towards the ladies' room. If he had stayed he'd probably be snug in bed with her now, under the warm covers, the soft, fat, white flesh, onion, gin, raspberry. He had a piercing, sharp moment of regret that he was standing here in the naked room with the dead old man… If the positions had been reversed, he thought, if it was he lying there and the old man up and around, and the old man had got the offer, he was damned sure Jacob would be in that bed, now, with the blonde and the Four Roses. What a thing to think of. Noah shook his head. His father, from whose seed he sprang. God, was he going to get to talk like him as he grew older?
    Noah made himself look for a whole minute at his father's dead face. He tried to cry. Somehow, deserted this way, at the end of a year, on this winter night, a man, any man, had the right to expect a tear from his only son.
    Noah had never really thought very much about his father, once he was old enough to think about him at all. He had been bitter about him, but that was all. Looking at the pale, lined head, looming from the pillow like a stone statue, noble and proud as Jacob had always known he would look in death, Noah made a conscious effort to think of his father. How far Jacob had come searching for this narrow room on the shore of the Pacific. Out of the grimy streets of Odessa, across Russia and the Baltic Sea, across the ocean, into the rush and clangour of New York. Noah closed his eyes and thought of Jacob, quick and lithe, as a young man, with that handsome brow and that fierce nose, taking to English with a quick, natural, overblown, rhetorical instinct, striding down the crowded streets, his eyes lively and searching, with a ready bold smile for girls and partners and customers and travel… Jacob, unafraid, and dishonest, wandering through the South, through Atlanta and Tuscaloosa, quick-fingered, never really interested in money, but cheating for it, and finally letting it slip away, up the continent to Minnesota and Montana, laughing, smoking black cigars, known in saloons and gambling halls, making dirty jokes and quoting Isaiah in the same breath, marrying Noah's mother in Chicago, grave-eyed and responsible for a day, tender and delicate and perhaps even resolved to settle down and be an honourable citizen, with middle age looming over him, and his hair touched with grey. And Jacob singing to Noah in his rich, affected baritone, in the plush-furnished parlour after dinner, singing, "I was walking through the park one day, In the merry, merry month of May…"
    Noah shook his head. Somewhere in the back of his mind, echoing and far away, the voice, singing, young and strong, resounded, "In the merry, merry month of May," and refused to be stilled.
    And the inevitable collapse as the years claimed Jacob. The shabby businesses, getting shabbier, the charm fading, the enemies more numerous, the world tighter-lipped and more firmly organized against him, the failure in Chicago, the failure in Seattle, the failure in Baltimore,