The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online

now."
    "See," Parrish said loudly, "if there's a forty-year-old Irishman with false teeth in your trouble."
    "I'll ask," Laura said, laughing, and went off arm in arm with the fortune-teller. Michael watched her as she walked through the room, in her straight-backed, delicately sensual way, and caught two other men watching her, too. One was Donald Wade, a tall, pleasant-looking man, and the other was a man called Talbot, and they were both what Laura described as "ex-beaux" of hers. They seemed constantly to be invited to the same parties as the Whitacres. The term ex-beau was one which Michael sometimes puzzled over uneasily. What it really meant, he was sure, was that Laura had had affairs with them, and wanted Michael to believe that she no longer had anything to do with them. He was suddenly annoyed at the whole situation, although at the moment, turning it over in his mind, there didn't seem to be very much to do about it.
    "When are you going back?" Michael asked.
    Parrish looked around him, his blunt, open face taking on a ludicrous expression of guile. "Hard to say, Pal," he whispered. "Not wise to say. The State Department, you know… Has its Fascist spies everywhere. As it is, I've forfeited my American citizenship, technically, by enlisting under the colours of a foreign power. Keep it to yourself, Pal, but I'd say a month, month and a half…"
    "Are you going back alone?"
    "Don't think so, Pal. Taking a nice little group of lads back with me." Parrish smiled benevolently. "The International Brigade is a wide-open, growing concern." Parrish glanced at Michael reflectively and Michael felt that the Irishman was measuring him, questioning in his own mind what Michael was doing there, in his fancy suit in this fancy apartment, why Michael wasn't at a machine-gun this night instead of a bar.
    "You looking at me?" Michael asked.
    "No, Pal." Parrish wiped his cheek.
    "Do you take my money?" Michael asked harshly.
    "I'll take money," Parrish grinned, "from the holy hand of Pope Pius himself."
    Michael got out his wallet. He had just been paid, and he still had some money left over from his bonus. He put it all in Parish's hand. It amounted to seventy-five dollars.
    "See you later," Michael said. "I'm going to circulate."
    "Sure, Pal." Parrish nodded coolly at him. "Thanks for the dough."
    "Stuff it, Pal," Michael said.
    "Sure, Pal." Parrish turned back to his drink, his wide, square shoulders a blue-serge bulwark in the froth of bare shoulders and satin lapels around him.
    Michael walked slowly across the room towards a group in the corner. Long before he got there, he could see Louise looking at him, smiling tentatively at him. Louise was what Laura probably would call an "old girl" of his, except that, really, they had never stopped. Louise was married by now, too, but somehow, from time to time, for shorter or longer periods, she and Michael continued as lovers. There was a moral judgment to be made there some day, Michael felt. But Louise was one of the prettiest girls in New York, small, dark and clever-looking, and she was warm and undemanding. In a way she was dearer to him than his wife. Sometimes, lying next to each other on winter afternoons in a borrowed apartment, Louise would sigh, staring up at the ceiling, and say, "Isn't this wonderful? I suppose some day we ought to give it up." But neither she nor Michael took it seriously.
    She was standing now next to Donald Wade. For a second, Michael got an unpleasant vision of the complexity of life, but it vanished as he kissed her and said, "Happy New Year."
    He shook hands gravely with Wade, wondering, as always, why men thought they had to be so cordial to their wives' ex-lovers.
    "Hello," Louise said. "Haven't seen you in a long time. You look very nice in your pretty suit. Where's Mrs Whitacre?"
    "Having her fortune told," Michael said. "The past isn't bad enough. She's got to have the future to worry about, too. Where's your husband?"
    "I don't know." Louise