by Irwin Shaw
So, ten days after Hazen’s body, partially covered with drifting snow, had been found on a sandy road leading to the ocean, I put Leslie on the plane to Paris. We didn’t speak of how long she might stay or when she would return.
Before leaving, she burned all her old paintings.
Babcock, that saintly man, tactfully suggested that since I was a bachelor, at least for the time being, it might be better for me not to have the responsibility of running a house with nine boys by myself. When the term was over, I moved. As there was no longer any need for me to be on the campus, I rented a small furnished apartment in town over the shop that sells tobacco and newspapers. The smell drifting up the stairs is comforting. The Renoir drawing looks incongruously voluptuous hanging over the cracked old leather couch on which I take my naps. I commute to the school by bicycle, which has improved my health. I cook my own meals and eat them in peace. I sometimes dine with the Schillers, where Mr. Schiller allows his wife to do the cooking. Mrs. Schiller serves, as her speciality, potato pancakes.
I spent the summer in France with Leslie. A small portion of the ten thousand dollars took care of the airfare. The summer was not a great success. Leslie had developed quite a large circle of friends, mostly artists, and with her ear for music had become quite fluent in French, the language in which almost all the conversations were carried on, usually about her work and the work of others. My schoolboy French was of little value to me and while everyone, and of course especially Leslie, tried to include me in the give and take of opinions, it was impossible for me not to feel like a rather backward intruder.
Although after her initial surprising success Leslie has not had any of her paintings exhibited or sold, she goes to the studio of the artist she is studying with three mornings a week. He is a small, lively, round old man named Leblanc who swears Leslie will be famous one day. Her paintings have a curious overcast of melancholy, as though there were touches of twilight purple hidden in her palette, even in her noonday pictures. She works with single-minded devotion to her art, and when she is not at her easel, she is tirelessly making the rounds of the galleries and museums. After a few days in the city, I was surfeited and spent most of my time sitting at café tables reading.
We lived in a rather bare one-room studio on the Left Bank, where the atmosphere was pervaded by the smell of paint and turpentine, an odor that gives continual pleasure to Leslie but which finally brought on an allergy in me which made me sniffle and blow my nose constantly. Leslie, who at other times was quick to notice my slightest indisposition, never even remarked that I was red-eyed almost all the time and ran through a box of Kleenex every two days.
Her period of sorrow was definitely over and her energy and enthusiasm, like that of an eager and avid young student, made me feel much older than my fifty years.
The people at the American School in Paris did indeed offer me a job there, but I decided that I did not want to live in a city in which I could not speak the language and where I would be considered an awkward appendage to my wife by her friends. I remembered the words of an author of a story about another American in Paris, “This continent is not for me.” I declined, with regrets. The president of the school could hardly hide his relief. I could understand why. The staff of the school were wanderers and all between twenty-two and thirty and my gray hair must have been a sign of decrepitude and disconcerting permanence to a president who could not have been more than thirty-five.
Leslie took my decision calmly. Art, I have discovered, leads inevitably to the same self-absorption as disease. When one is sick one thinks only of one’s illness and the cares or aspirations of others are of no importance.
We spent two weeks down south with Linda in her delightful house in Mougins. I sat in the garden and tried to read in the hot sunlight and swatted mosquitoes, as Hazen had predicted. Leslie suggested that I sell the Renoir and with the proceeds buy a small house next to Linda’s property. “You don’t have to work anymore,” she said, “and this is a wonderful place to sit and do nothing.”
She was right about that, but I didn’t want to sit and do nothing. Idleness, I found, bored me. I am a teacher. That defines who I am. I am a teacher or nothing. Given just one bright and questing child in a class of thirty who argues with me or whose horizons I feel I am widening and I know that I am doing what I was put on earth to do. Romero, exasperating as he was, was just such a boy. When I told Leslie about my sense of belonging in the front of a classroom, she said that was exactly how she felt in front of a blank piece of canvas. I hope for her sake, if not for mine, that her canvases turn out better for her than Romero did for me.
Nothing I could say or do could make Caroline return to Arizona. Instead, she transferred to Hunter College in New York, intent on majoring in child psychology. She refused to use any of the money that came from selling two acres of the land that Hazen had left her in his will, a deal that had been handled, and handled very well, by one of Hazen’s partners. She took a part-time job as a waitress to support herself through college and never yet, to my knowledge, has visited the house on the beach that is now hers. Instead, with the help of one of her teachers, she threw open the house last summer as a vacation home for what the newspapers call disadvantaged ghetto children, of all races, up to the age of fifteen, complete with volunteer counselors from various social worker agencies. “Jesus Romero taught me something about children,” she told me when I remonstrated with her. “That is, get to them before they become a Romero.” Whether the experiment will succeed or not remains to be seen. In another age and if she had been born a Catholic I believe she would have become a nun. Self-sacrifice in the service of a high-minded ideal may be noble, but a father cannot help but feel that it is a petrification of his child’s humanity. Naturally, there has been grumbling among the neighbors in East Hampton and there is a rumor on foot that a petition is being circulated for the Town Council’s attention to have the house condemned as a public nuisance.
Caroline hired Conroy to oversee the physical management of the house. She has not forgotten the day he swam out to save me from the Atlantic Ocean. From what she tells me he is efficient and dedicated. There has not as yet been any accusation of homosexual attempts on the young boys collected in the house. The poor Ketleys resigned their jobs in the middle of the summer. They said they had not been hired to work in a madhouse.
I must confess that I haven’t had the heart to go down to see for myself what was happening in the place where I had a glimpse of an easeful and generous life such as I had never had before and in which I nearly died.
Hollingsbee called me triumphantly on the day set for Romero’s trial and told me that the boy had gotten off with a year’s probation. But he is in jail as I write this. In a raid on what was suspected to be a hideout of the F.A.L.N., the terrorist organization working for the independence of Puerto Rico, Romero was picked up, along with a store of homemade bombs, machine pistols and revolutionary literature. I remembered his last words to me in the snow outside Hazen’s front door—“The next time you see my name it will be in the newspapers.” It might be termed a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With Hazen dead, the power of his protection was gone in Georgia and while Eleanor and Gianelli were not bombed in their home, the newspaper plant was burned to the ground and a night watchman perished in the fire. In our day it has become habitual for victims to be picked at random.
The building was adequately insured and with the money Gianelli received from it he bought into a newspaper in a small town on the west coast of Florida where the lure of year-round sunshine has brought a great increase in population and local prosperity. Eleanor writes that they are finally learning how to run a newspaper and they are doing well. She is also pregnant, and I face the prospect of becoming a grandfather. By the time he or she is grown I suppose my grandson or granddaughter will be walking through abandoned and burnt-out cities where automobiles will be strewn around everywhere, without fuel and immobilized on their last voyages.
That is, if he or she is lucky and the men over whom we have no control have not yet decided on starting a nuclear war.
Like most people of my generation I feel powerless and regard the future with cynical resignation.
Rollins, I am happy to say, was taken off probation and played last season on the teams and has been given an athletic scholarship to Penn State. He never did make it below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Jimmy has married Mrs. Solomon, nee Nellie Ferguson. In Las Vegas. It seems to have become a dreadful habit in our family. I was not invited to the wedding. The company he runs with Joan Dyer has come out with what is called a Golden Record or Golden Disc, which means that it has sold over a million copies. Have not yet heard it.
I look forward to my classes these days. There is an extraordinary boy called Willoughby who is in two of my courses. He is sixteen years old, a Virginian, with courtly Virginia manners, and seems to have critically read everything from Thucydides to Toynbee, with Caesar, Josephus, Carlyle, Prescott, Hegel, Marx, and Freeman along the way, and of course Gibbon. He is as keen and intelligent as Romero, but with a sense of order and proportion that may come from his Virginian inheritance or some lucky twist of genes that permits him to grasp abstract ideas and the sweep of history without effort. I remember what Crowell, Leslie’s gag-writer piano pupil, said about Mozart. I am astonished and delighted with the boy’s papers and his arguments in class and the maturity and judgment he shows in the walks we take together in the autumn afternoons. When I read what he has written or listen to him recite, I feel once again the ardor I had when I faced my first classes with the almost religious belief that history, with its investigation of science, philosophy, the rise and fall of empires, the arts and the passions of the past, is indeed the queen of disciplines and the great teacher of mankind.
He says he intends to go into politics and I envision him as a senator by the time he is thirty-five. If there are ten such boys scattered through the country perhaps our troubled and magnificent country, built on courage, faith, savagery, looting, greed, compromise and hope, will at the last gasp be saved from catastrophe.
I had a letter from Leslie today. In it, as in every letter, she thanks me for my forbearance in permitting what she calls her middle-aged apprenticeship. She promises to come back for the summer and suggests that I travel with her through the West, which she wants to try to paint. Her letters are full of love and I have no doubt, although she is far away, that she loves me. As for me, I loved her when she was a young girl in the first row of my classroom, when we stood before the altar, when she first played the piano in our home in New York, when she was big with child, when she bound Hazen’s wounds and slapped Hazen’s wife in the dining room in Tours, when I put her on the plane to France. Whether it was fate or accident that put her in my classroom and threw her into my arms for life, I do not know or care. I know I love her and always will and the reasons are unimportant. We have done what we were fated to do or had to do. She says she will return. We shall see.
He stopped and reread the page he had just written. He shook his head, dissatisfied. He kept thinking of Romero. Romero haunted this place and Strand knew he was not through with him, “They graze in peace on grass,” he remembered. “You hunt on cement.” And, “You won’t be here much longer, either.”
Remembering, Strand shook his head again. The gall of the boy. Or was it the wisdom?
He stared at the opened copy book on the desk in front of him, reflecting the light of the lamp off the page. Then he started writing again.
Do I want to end my life here? Do I want to finish as an animal who grazes in peace on, grass? Where is the place where I am needed, where I fit the task and the task fits me? Does a boy like Willoughby need me? The answer must be no. He will blossom as he must and a man like me can only be flattering himself to feel that the final result would be his accomplishment. I am merely on the sidelines cheering on a boy who needs no cheers.
Cement.
There are as many Romeros on cement as there are Willoughbys on grass, maybe more. I have failed with one, but perhaps it has taught me how not to fail with others. The men and women here are one kind of teacher. I am another. I did not enter the profession merely to be comfortable and events have led me to forget that. For a time. For a time. That time is now over. I will not be shamed by my youngest child. “When you are ready to come back,” the principal of my school said when he visited me after I got out of the hospital in the Hamptons, “when you are ready, just give me a call on the telephone. Your place will be open.” I am ready now and I will call in the morning.
Call in the morning. I know the matter is not as simple as that, and he knew it too. It is the sort of thing a visitor to a hospital says to a friend agonizing on what may be his deathbed to pretend that all will be well, that recovery is certain and that he will not die and that his colleagues will be waiting for him to regain his place in the world. Well, I did not die. I will call in the morning, but I will not embarrass that good man by believing him. My place will not be open for me. There will be applications to fill out, suspicious boards to question me, public doctors to be satisfied that I am capable of working, pensions to be altered, positions to be considered, openings closed, transfers to be juggled, long, weary months of waiting, the possibility of eventual denial strong.
Still, I will call in the morning. The effort is necessary for my soul.
It is late now. I have to sleep. I must be fresh for Willoughby in the morning.
He put down his pen, closed the exercise book and rose from his chair and switched off the lamp in the cold, nighttime room.
A Biography of Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the New Yorker to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.
Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.
“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the Dick Tracy radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play, Bury the Dead. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as The Big Game (1936) and The Talk of the Town (1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the New Yorker, he also penned The Gentle People (1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.
World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.
The Young Lions (1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, The Young Lions stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and frien
ds with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel Two Weeks in Another Town (1960).
Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) and Beggerman, Thief (1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries. Nightwork (1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain.
Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.
Shaw’s US Army record.
Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.
A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.
A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.
Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.
Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.
Shaw at home with Marian at Chalet Mia, Klosters, in 1958.
Shaw (center) skiing in Klosters in 1960 with (left to right) Noel Howard (an actor), an unidentified Hollywood producer, Marian Shaw, Jacques Charmoz (a French World War II pilot, cartoonist, and painter), and Jacqueline Tesseron.