The Merry Month of May by James Jones Read Free Book Online

potted plants, but Hill was too short to see in. It was crowded with smiling diners.
    “Just keep your eyes and ears open. That’s all. Like I do. And you’ll learn,” Hill said. “It upsets Mom a lot, I don’t know why exactly. But she hides it. Dad doesn’t know. But I can tell.”
    “I think you’re just making up a story,” I said. “If your Dad had girlfriends, I would know. He would tell me.” I stopped at the door to take a last look at the evening, and the evening’s sky. Why couldn’t we all be as serene as that was?
    Hill didn’t answer. And we went on in. The portly old maître d’, who has owned and run that place since before the Third Republic I guess, knew Hill and knew me, and made a big fuss over us as residents of the Island, who are always treated special in his restaurant. He made a big thing of Hill the jeune monsieur out for an evening with a friend, without his parents. Hill ordered and ate a dozen escargots, sopping up the butter sauce from the little cups in the tin plate with his bread, then tried to bring the subject up again. But I avoided it, and tried to give the impression that I considered the matter closed, as we ate our coq-au-vin. I don’t know what else I could have done. But I was to suddenly remember that evening four years later that day up on the Marne—particularly, strangely enough, I remembered the way the sky was. However, he slept very well that night at my place, and nine months later in late June, nine months almost to the day, my Godchild McKenna Hartley Gallagher was born, a small level-eyed girlchild whose New England background could never be mistaken.
    I value it highly in some way that Louisa never thanked me. Not only did she never thank me. She never even mentioned it again. In fact, it was as if it had not ever happened.
    I think that after this near break-up, which I averted, the Harry Gallaghers became that perfect happy-American-family I once imagined them being. I know Harry stopped going out with his young actresses. Certainly there was no more gossip. And Louisa seemed completely happy.
    I know Harry stopped going out with the actresses because he told me. There was no reason he should tell me, but he did. I believed him simply because there was no reason for him to tell me.
    This was a long time after the birth of McKenna. Six years after. And Harry had no idea of the part I’d played in that.
    It was, also, quite a while and almost two years before Samantha Everton and the May Revolution, the Events of May as the French still like to call it, came down upon our heads. No, there was no reason Harry should tell me except that it happened.
    I know it was after McKenna’s sixth birthday because I gave a special Halloween party for her at my apartment that year, which was her first year in serious school. I invited all her little school playmates. Hill was thus at least 17, and already a student at the Sorbonne. God, you never saw a happier, more delighted kid than McKenna was at that party.
    My confessional session with Harry that same winter came about because Harry was trying to decide whether to take a job or not, and he wanted my advice. Why he should ask my advice about a film job has never been explained. But that was the reason, the excuse, that I was asked for dinner that night. The job he had to decide about was whether or not he should contract to write an Italian Western in Spain.
    He had invited the two producers, one French and the other an American, to dinner at his place that night. That was the real reason I was there. I was to be his ploy, his foil, in his Hollywood one-upmanship battle with the two producers. Around film people, I was always sort of Harry’s literary weapon, his artistic broadsword. The Two Islands Review was known by this time, and I as its editor was known with it. Harry liked to defer to me as his expert on artistic and esthetic points. He also liked to bring up as a throwaway that he had put money in the Two