by Irwin Shaw
“Mr. Grimes,” he said finally, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
The news old Dr. Ryan had for me on that sunny morning in his big, old-fashioned office changed my whole life.
“Technically,” he said, “the name of the disease is retinoschisis. It is a splitting of the ten layers of the retina into two portions, giving rise to the development of a retinal cyst. It is a well-known condition. Most often it does not progress, but as far as it goes it’s irreversible. Sometimes we can arrest it by operating by laser beam. One of its manifestations is a blocking out of peripheral vision. In your case downward peripheral vision. For a pilot who has to be alert to a whole array of dials in front of him, below him, around him on all sides, as well as the horizon toward which he is speeding, it is essentially disabling. … Still, for all general purposes, such as reading, sports, et cetera, you can consider yourself normal.”
“Normal,” I said. “Boy, oh, boy, normal. You know the only thing that’s normal for me, Doc. Flying. That’s all I ever wanted to do, all I ever prepared myself to do. …”
“I’m sending the report over today, Mr. Grimes,” Ryan said. “With the greatest regret. Of course, you can go to another doctor. Other doctors. I don’t believe they can do anything to help you, but that’s only my opinion. As far as I’m concerned, you’re grounded. As of this minute. For good. I’m sorry.”
I fought to hold back the surge of hatred I felt for the neat old man, seated among his shining instruments, signing papers of condemnation with his scrawly doctor’s handwriting. I knew I was being unreasonable, but it was not a moment for reason. I lurched out of the office, not shaking Ryan’s hand, saying, “Goddamnit, goddamnit,” aloud over and over to myself, paying no attention to the people in the waiting room and on the street who stared curiously at me as I headed for the nearest bar. I knew I couldn’t face going back to the airfield and saying what I would have to say without fortification. Considerable fortification.
The bar was decorated like an English pub, dark wood and pewter tankards on the walls. I ordered a whiskey. There was a thin old man in a khaki mackinaw and a hunter’s red cap leaning against the bar with a glass of beer in front of him. “They’re polluting the whole lake,” the old man was saying in a dry Vermont accent. “The paper mill. In five years it’ll be as dead as Lake Erie. And they keep putting salt on the roads so those idiots from New York can go eighty miles an hour up to Stowe and Mad River and Sugarbush, and, when the snow melts off, the salt goes into all the ponds and rivers. By the time I die there won’t be a fish left anywhere in the whole state. And nobody does a goddamn thing about it. I tell you, I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.”
I ordered another whiskey. The first one hadn’t seemed to do anything for me. Nor did the second. I paid and went out to my car. The thought that Lake Champlain, in which I had swum every summer and on which I had spent so many great days sailing and fishing, was going to die, somehow seemed sadder than anything that had happened to me for a long time.
When I got to the office I could tell by the look on Cunningham’s rough old face that Dr. Ryan had already called him. Cunningham was the president and sole owner of the little airline and was a World War Two-vintage fighter pilot and I guess he knew how I felt that afternoon.
“I’m ch … checking out, Freddy,” I said. “You know wh … why.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He fiddled uncomfortably with a pencil on his desk. “You know, we can always find something for you here. In the office, maybe … maintenance …” His voice trailed off. He stared at the pencil in his big hand.
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice of you, but forget it.” If there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn’t hang around like a crippled bird, watching all my friends take off into the sky. And I didn’t want to get used to the look of pity I saw on Freddy Cunningham’s honest face, or on any other face.
“Well, anyway, Doug, think it over,” Cunningham said.
“No n … need,” I said.
“What do you plan to do?”
“First,” I said, “leave town.”
“For where?”
“Anywhere,” I said.
“Then what?”
“Then try to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.” I stuttered twice on the word life.
He nodded, avoiding looking at me, deeply interested in the pencil. “How’re you fixed for dough?”
“Sufficient,” I said. “For the time being.”
“Well,” he said. “If you ever … I mean you know where to come, don’t you?”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I looked at my watch. “I have a date.”
“Shit,” he said loudly. Then stood up and shook my hand.
I didn’t say good-bye to anyone else.
I parked the car and got out and waited. There was a peculiar muted hum coming from the big red-brick building with the Latin inscription on the facade and the flag flying above it. The hum of learning, I thought, a small decent music that made me remember my childhood.
Pat would be in her classroom, lecturing the boys and girls on the origins of the Civil War or the succession of the kings of England. She took her history seriously. “It is the most relevant of subjects,” she had told me once, using the word that cropped up in every conversation about education in those days. “Every move we make today is the result of what men and women have been doing with each other and to each other since before recorded time.” As I remembered this, I grinned sourly. Had I been born to stutter or lived to be a discarded airman because Meade had repulsed Lee at Gettysburg, or because Cromwell had had Charles beheaded? It would be an interesting point to discuss when we had an idle moment to spare.
Inside the building a bell clanged. The hum of education swelled to a roar of freedom, and a few minutes later the students began to pour out of the doors in a confused sea of brightly colored parkas and brilliant wool hats.
As usual, Pat was late. She was the most conscientious of teachers, and there were always two or three students who clustered around her desk after class, asking her questions that she patiently answered. When I finally saw her, the lawn was deserted, the hundreds of children vanished as if melted away by the pale Vermont sun.
She didn’t see me at first. She was nearsighted, but out of vanity didn’t wear her glasses except when she was working or reading or going to the movies. It had been a little joke of mine that she wouldn’t find a grand piano in a ballroom.
I stood, leaning against a tree, without moving or saying anything, watching her walk down the cleared walk toward me, carrying a leather envelope that I knew contained test papers, cradled against her bosom, schoolgirl fashion. She was wearing a skirt and red wool stockings and brown suede after-ski boots and a short, blue cloth overcoat. Her way of walking was concentrated, straight, uncoquettish, always brisk. Her small head with its dark hair pulled back was almost half obscured by the big, upraised collar of her coat.
When she saw me, she smiled, a nondesultory smile. It was going to be even more difficult than I had feared. We didn’t kiss. You never knew who was looking out of a window. “Right on time,” she said. “My stuff’s in the car.” She waved toward the parking lot. She had a battered old Chevy. A good part of her salary went for Biafra refugees, starving Indian children, political prisoners in various parts of the world. I don’t think she owned more than three dresses. “I hear the skiing’s great,” she said, as she started toward the parking lot. “This ought to be a weekend to remember.”
I put my hand out and held her arm. “W … wait a min … minute, Pat,” I said, trying not to notice the slight strained look that invariably crossed her face when I stuttered. “I have some … something to tell you. I … I’m not going up there th … this weekend.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice small. “I thought you were free this weekend.”
“I am f … free,” I said. “But I’m not going skiing. I’m leaving town.”
“For the weekend?”
“For good,” I said.
She squinted at me, as though I had suddenly gone out of focus. “Has it got something to do with me?”
“N … nothing.”
“Oh,” she said harshly, “nothing. Can you tell me where you’re going?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know wh … where I’m g … going.”
“Do you want to tell me why you’re going?”
“You’ll hear s … soon enough.”
“If you’re in trouble,” she said, her voice soft now, “and I could help …”
“I’m in t … trouble,” I said. “And you can’t help.”
“Will you write me?”
“I’ll try.”
She kissed me then, not worrying who might be at a window. But there were no tears. And she didn’t tell me that she loved me. It might have been different if she had, but she didn’t. “I have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend anyway,” she said, as she stepped back a pace. “The snow’ll last.” She smiled a little crookedly at me. “Good luck,” she said. “Wherever.”
I watched her walk toward the old Chevy in the parking lot, small and neat and familiar. Then I got into the Volkswagen and drove off.
I was out of my small furnished apartment by six o’clock that evening. I had left my skis and boots and the rest of my skiing equipment except a padded parka, which I liked, in a duffel bag to be delivered to Pat’s brother, who was just about my size, and had told my landlady that she could have all my books and whatever else I left behind me. Traveling light, I headed south, leaving the town where, I realized now, I had been happy for more than five years.
I had no destination. I had told Freddy Cunningham that I was going to try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and one place was as good as another for that.
3
FIGURE OUT MY LIFE. I HAD plenty of time to do it. As I drove south, down the entire East Coast of America, I was alone, unfettered, free of claims, with no distractions, plunged in that solitude that is supposed to be the essential condition of philosophic speculation. There was Pat Minot’s cause and effect to be considered; also not to be overlooked was the maxim I had been taught in English lit courses that your character was your fate, that your rewards and failures were the result of your faults and virtues. In Lord Jim, a book I must have read at least five times since I was a boy, the hero is killed eventually because of a flaw in himself that permitted him to leave a shipload of poor beggars to die. He pays for his cowardice in the end by being killed himself. I had always thought it just, fair, inevitable. At the wheel of the little Volkswagen, speeding down the great highways past Washington and Richmond and Savannah, I remembered Lord Jim. But it no longer convinced me. I certainly was not flawless, but, at least in my opinion, I had been a decent son, an honorable friend, conscientious in my profession, law-abiding, careful to avoid cruelty or spite, inciting no man to be my enemy, indifferent to power, abhorring violence. I had never seduced a woman nor cheated a shopkeeper, had not struck a fellow human being since a fight in the schoolyard at the age of ten. I had definitely never left anyone to die. Yet …Yet there had been that morning in Dr. Ryan’s office.
If character was fate, was it the character of thirty million Europeans to die in World War II, was it the character of the inhabitants of Calcutta to drop in the streets of starvation, was it the character of thousands of citizens of Pompeii to be mummified in a flood of lava?
The ruling law was simple—accident. The throw of dice, the turning of a card. From now on I would gamble and trust to luck. Maybe, I thought, it was in my character to be a gambler and fate had neatly arranged it so that I could play out my destined role. Maybe my short career as a man who traveled the Northern skies was an aberration, a detour and only now, back to earth, was I on the right path.
When I got to Florida, I spent my days at the tracks. In the beginning, all went well; I won often enough to live comfortably and not have to worry about taking a job. There was no job that anyone could offer me that I could imagine accepting. I kept by myself, making no friends, approaching no women. I found, mildly surprised, that all desire had left me. Whether this was temporary or would turn out to be permanent did not bother me. I wanted no attachments.
I turned, with bitter pleasure, into myself, content with the long sunny afternoons at the track and the solitary meals and the evenings spent studying the performances of thoroughbreds and the habits of trainers and jockeys. I also had time now for reading, and indiscriminately devoured libraries of paperbacks. As Dr. Ryan had assured me, the condition of my eyes did not interfere with my ability to read. Still, I found nothing in any of the books I read that either helped or harmed me.
I lived in small hotels, moving on from one to another when other guests, to whom I had become a familiar presence, attempted to approach me.
I was ahead of the game by several thousand dollars when the season ended and I drifted up to New York. I no longer went to the track. The actual running of a race now bored me. I continued betting, but with bookies. For a while I went often to the theater, to the movies, losing myself for a few hours at a time in their fantasies. New York is a good city for a man who prefers to be alone. It is the easiest city in the world to enjoy solitude.
My luck began to change in New York and with the onset of winter I knew that I would have to look for some kind of job if I wanted to continue eating. Then the night man at the St. Augustine was held up for the second time.
I put the last of the January 15 bills in the file. It was now three hours into January 16. Happy Anniversary. I got up and stretched. I was hungry and I got out my sandwich and the bottle of beer.
I was unwrapping my sandwich when I heard the sound of the door from the fire emergency stairs opening into the lobby and quick woman’s footsteps. I reached for the switch and the lobby was brightly lit. A young woman was hurrying, almost running, toward the desk. She was unnaturally tall, with those thick soles and exaggerated high heels which made women look like so many displaced Watusis. She had on a white fake fur coat and a blonde wig that wouldn’t fool anybody. I recognized her. She was a whore who had come in just after midnight with the man in 610. I glanced at my watch. It was just after three o’clock. It had been a long session in 610 and the woman looked it. She ran to the front door, pushed futilely at the broken buzzer, then clattered over to the desk.
She knocked sharply on the glass over the desk. “Open the door, mister,” she said loudly. “I want to get out of here.”
I took the key from the drawer under the desk in which the pistol was kept and went through the little room next to the office where there was a huge old safe against the wall, lined with safety-deposit boxes. The safety-deposit boxes were relics of a richer day. None was in use now. I unlocked the door and stepped out into the lobby. The woman followed me across the lobby toward the front door. She was gasping for breath. Her profession didn’t keep her in shape for running down six flights of steps in the middle of the night. She was somewhere around thirty years old, and by the look of her they hadn’t been easy years. The women who came in and out of the hotel at night made a strong argument for celibacy.
“Why didn’t you take the elevator down?” I asked.
“I was waiting for the elevator,” the woman said. “But then this crazy, naked old man popped out of the door, making all kinds of funny noises, grunting, like an animal, and waving something at me. …”
“Waving wh … wh … what?”
“Something. It looked like a club. A baseball bat. It’s dark in that hall. You bastards certainly don’t waste much money on lights in this hotel.” Her voice was whiskey-hoarse, set in city cement, praising nothing. “I didn’t wait around to see. I just took off. You want to find out, you go up to the sixth floor and see for yourself. Open the goddamn door, will you? I have to go home.”
I unlocked the big, plate-glass front door, reinforced by a heavy, cast-iron
grill. For a shabby old hotel like the St. Augustine, the management was nervously security conscious. The woman pushed the door open impatiently and ran out into the dark street. I took a deep breath of the cold night air as the clatter of heels diminished in the direction of Lexington Avenue. I stood at the door another moment, looking down the street, on the chance that a prowl car might be cruising past. I would have felt better about going up to see what was happening on the sixth floor if I had a cop with me. I was not paid for solitary heroics. But the street was empty. I heard a siren in the distance, probably on Park Avenue, but that was no help. I closed the door and locked it and walked slowly back across the lobby toward the office, thinking, Am I going to spend the rest of my life ushering whores to and from anonymous beds?
Praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
In the office I took the passkey out of the drawer, looked for a moment at the pistol. I shook my head and shut the drawer.
Having the pistol there wasn’t my idea. It hadn’t helped the other night man when the two junkies came in and walked off with all the cash in the place, leaving the night man lying in his blood on the floor with a bump the size of a cantaloupe on his head.
I put my jacket on, somehow feeling that being properly dressed would give me more authority in whatever situation I would find on the sixth floor, and went out into the lobby again, locking the office door behind me. I pushed the elevator button and heard the whine of the cables as the elevator started down the shaft.
When the door creaked open, I hesitated before going in. Maybe, I thought, I just ought to go back into the office, get my overcoat and my sandwich and my beer, and walk away from here. Who needs this lousy job? But just as the door began to slide shut, I went in.
When I reached the sixth floor, I pushed the button that kept the elevator door open, and stepped out into the corridor. Light was streaming from the doorway of the room diagonally across from the elevator, number 602. On the worn carpet of the corridor, half in and half out of the light, was a naked man, lying on his face, his head and torso in shadow, old man’s wrinkled buttocks and skinny legs sharply, obscenely illuminated. The left arm was stretched out, the fingers of the hand curled, as though the man had been trying to grab at something as he fell. His right arm was under him. He lay absolutely still, Even as I bent to turn the man over, I was sure that nothing I could do and nobody I could call would do any good.