by Irwin Shaw
Young Dyer, working on his father’s behalf, made the whole thing seem very attractive, almost like a holiday. Dyer was a sophomore, with a little more money than most of his classmates, and was a campus politician with a smooth, confident way of talking and a quietly careless way of dressing that he hoped would make strangers believe he was an undergraduate at Princeton.
Benjamin was also involved in his first love affair that winter, with a girl who sat next to him in his English class. Her name was Patricia Forrester, and Benjamin blessed the orderly brain of the English teacher which had decreed that all students were to be seated alphabetically in front of him. Patricia was small and dark, with a pale, fine-boned, flowering face that for several years Benjamin believed to be unsurpassed in the long treasury of feminine beauty. From the first time he met her on a warm September afternoon, Benjamin had ignored all other girls and was coldly impervious to their attentions. For weeks after Pat told him that she loved him he wandered around the school grounds and through his classes in a foolish daze, forgetting where he had left his books, losing keys, turning up for the wrong courses at odd hours, staring unseeingly at his assigned reading, with Pat’s face swimming, gently smiling and rich with love, between his eyes and the printed page.
They were both virgins when they met, and they kissed in doorways and in the autumn woods around the campus and in the back seats of the ramshackle cars that one or two of Benjamin’s friends nagged away from their parents on Saturday nights. Even after they both realized they wanted to make love, it took weeks of planning to find a place they could use for the consummation. Benjamin lived in a dormitory; Pat lived with her mother and father and two younger sisters in an apartment a mile away from the school; the houses they went to for Saturday-night parties were always full of people, and parents in those days made a practice of returning home before midnight. The idea of going to a hotel and registering as man and wife, even if they could have afforded it, was distasteful to both of them. Their first love, they decided, could not be built on a snickering lie. Anyway, they were both sure there wasn’t a hotel clerk in America who would believe that they were man and wife, no matter how many suitcases they carried into the lobby.
Benjamin was despairingly certain that if it depended upon his ingenuity he and Pat would never do more than kiss and pet in the back seats of cars until he was old enough and rich enough to marry. Eight years, he figured, bitterly. It was only when Pat took matters into her own hands and got herself and Benjamin invited to a party at the home of a girl friend of hers in New York on Thanksgiving Eve, lulling her parents’ suspicions with the excuse that she wanted to stay over in the city to see the Macy parade, that Benjamin and she finally found themselves in a room together, with the door locked behind them. The New York friend’s parents had gone to Atlantic City for the holiday, the friend was older than Pat and delighted to be in on the intrigue, the party was small and ended early, and the first embarrassed virginal fumbling changed quickly into joy.
Locked in the strange room that was theirs for eight hours of an autumn night, with the noises of the city drowsy and far away outside the closed and curtained windows, with the silken touch of Pat’s body against his own, listening to her trustful breathing as she slept in his arms, Benjamin was sure that he could never love anyone else again in his whole life and that somehow, sometime, they would marry and spend their lives together.
They did not get up for the parade. Neither of them, as they returned that evening by train to New Jersey, trying consciously to give an appearance of unchanged innocence, regretted having missed it.
After that, having fallen onto one solution, they discovered others—a professor and his wife who wanted to get away from school for the weekend and were happy to leave their house and their small children in Benjamin’s care while they were gone; a clerk at the drugstore in which Benjamin worked who liked Benjamin and was willing to lend him the key to his room occasionally; other parties, now imaginary, in New York, which freed Pat from her parents’ supervision on Saturday night, when she would meet Benjamin at the Pennsylvania Hotel, where he now brazenly registered them as man and wife, using, as a joke, the name and address of the teacher of freshman English in whose class they sat demurely three hours a week, smiling secretly at each other as the teacher, an earnest, humorless young man, read students’ themes aloud for criticism.
Pat’s parents were mild and pleasant people who indulged their daughter and liked Benjamin, and if once in a while Benjamin had a twinge of conscience at the deception he was practicing on those hospitable and warmhearted people, he assuaged it by the knowledge that his love for their daughter was eternal and that in the end marriage would put everything aright.
Poor, overworked, shabbily dressed, uncertain of his future, at a desperate time in his country’s history, Benjamin was as happy as older generations told him a tall, strong, good-looking young American should be. Only once that term were there any sharp words between Pat and himself. It was after one of the afternoons in the room of the drugstore clerk. By now, all traces of shyness, all fear of each other and fear of the obliterating intensity of their feeling had disappeared; they trusted each other absolutely, and it was inconceivable to either of them that they might ever possibly lie to each other or that he could ever conceal anything from her or she from him. They walked hand in hand along the bare, quiet, evening streets to the apartment building where Pat lived, and with no one there to watch or interfere, they kissed good night, the odor of love on their lips, the memory of the afternoon a cocoon enfolding and protecting them against the winter, real and symbolic, around them. Benjamin had read the phrase “weeping for joy” many times, always disbelieving it, but at that moment he could have wept for joy.
He kissed Pat lingeringly, then held her in his arms for a last few seconds, his cheek against hers. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I wish I could tell you how grateful I am—”
Pat pulled away with an angry little wrenching movement. “Don’t ever say anything like that to me again,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked, puzzled. “What’s the matter?”
“You make it sound as though I’ve done you a favor,” Pat said, her voice sharp. “Love is not a favor. At least mine isn’t. Remember that.” And she turned and swept into the building.
He looked after her, stunned. Surprise Number Two, he thought. Surprise Number One had been the revelation that she loved him. He walked thoughtfully back toward school, thinking about what she had said as she pulled away from him. Love is not a favor. Of course not, he thought. What a tremendous girl. He arrived at the school smiling.
When, just before the Christmas holiday, he accepted Dyer’s offer for the New Year’s Eve job in Pennsylvania, he knew he was going to have a difficult explanation to make to Pat. They had both been invited to a party for the holiday at the apartment of Pat’s girl friend in New York, with the usual arrangement for staying over. It was going to be a large party, the girls in evening dresses and the boys in dinner jackets, and Pat had already bought her dress and had arranged to borrow a dinner jacket for Benjamin from her older married brother, who was approximately Benjamin’s size. Pat was sentimental about holidays and anniversaries, and Benjamin knew how eagerly she was looking forward to New Year’s Eve, with its display of an elegance that until now had been so conspicuously absent from their relationship. Added to that, this one holiday was special and dear to both of them, with its celebration of the end of a year that had been the most momentous of their lives and its ceremonial promise of loving days to come.
As they started toward her home after the last class before the Christmas vacation, he knew he was going to have to tell her now and that the next half-hour was going to be painful. It was snowing a little, giving the ordinary little town a festive air, and other students hurried past them exhilarated with their freedom, voices excited, laughter easy. Pat’s face was flushed with cold and pleasure, and she held Benjamin’s arm tightly and made them both run
and slide on the snow like children.
“I have an idea,” Pat said. “Let’s take the bus and go over to my brother’s house and get the tuxedo. I want to see how you’re going to look and…”
“Pat,” Benjamin said soberly, stopping and holding her back. “I’m not going to need that tuxedo.”
“What do you mean?” She looked puzzled. “It’s all arranged.”
“I know,” Benjamin said. “But I can’t take you to that New Year’s party.”
“But we accepted,” Pat said. “What’s happened?”
Benjamin explained about the job at the country club and the fifteen dollars, plus tips.
Pat’s face closed in, and Benjamin could see the effort she was making to hide how deeply she was hurt. “Fifteen dollars, plus tips,” she said finally. “Is it that important?”
Benjamin laughed ruefully. There were holes in the soles of his shoes and he felt the snow coming up through them; his hair was grotesquely long, because he couldn’t afford a haircut; his mother walked more than a mile to do her shopping because she had exhausted all the family’s credit in every butcher and grocery shop in her neighborhood; his father had a temporary job, which would end on Christmas Eve, selling toys in a Newark department store. Pat knew all this. “Pat,” he said, “I don’t have to tell you the whole gloomy story all over again, do I?”
“No,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. “Money!” she said fiercely. “I hate money!” She said it so loudly that two or three of the students who were passing by looked at her curiously.
“You go to the party,” Benjamin said. “You won’t have any trouble finding somebody to take you.” This was certainly true. There were dozens of boys and young men who still persisted in calling her to ask for dates, despite the fact that she had refused them all from the day she met Benjamin. “You’ll have fun.”
“I won’t have fun,” she said. “I’ll hate anybody I go with, just because he isn’t you. How can I have fun when all I want is to start the new year with you and you’re hundreds of miles away waiting on table for a lot of rich miserable pigs?”
“Still,” Benjamin said, “I think you ought to go.”
“I’m not going,” she said. Her face was white and bitter. “I’m going to go to bed at nine o’clock and stuff cotton in my ears so I won’t hear the damn bells at midnight.”
“Pat…”
“I don’t want to talk about it any more,” she said. She began to walk on again.
“Darling,” Benjamin said, “we’ll have our party on the night of the first. We’ll just pretend that our 1932 begins one day later than everybody else’s.”
“All right,” she said. She tried to smile. “One day later.”
The group of fourteen boys, an indiscriminate sampling of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, made the bitterly cold trip through New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the morning of December 31st. When they arrived at the club, a pretentious red-brick pile, gabled and generously adorned with fake Tudor beams to deceive the members into believing they were British aristocrats, they were put to work, even before they could unpack their few belongings and see where they were to sleep. All through the leaden, icy afternoon and the numbing blackness of the early evening, they were rushing in and out of the building, assailed alternately by the north wind and waves of tropical heat from the steaming kitchen, as they carted in cases of bootleg whiskey, cases of soda water and ginger ale, cartons of food, rented chairs and rented crockery for the evening’s festivities.
The first guests were due to arrive at nine o’clock and the boys were kept so busy hauling supplies that they barely had time to dress for the evening. Their rooms were a row of single cells, designed for the summer staff, on the third floor, under the roof. They ate their dinner hurriedly in the kitchen. It was a large kitchen, none too clean, and it was heaped with pots of caviar, loaves of pâté de foie gras, cold lobster and a large dead flock of roast turkeys for the feast that evening. None of this was served to the waiters. They each were given two thin frankfurters, a helping of sauerkraut, chunks of stale bread, and mugs of thin coffee. An old, shapeless Irishwoman, who spoke with a broad brogue, ran the kitchen, and she rushed over and grabbed a plate of butter from Benjamin’s hand when he went to a sideboard to bring it back to the table at which the waiters were wolfing down their meal.
“That’s not for the likes of you, my lad,” the old woman said, putting the butter plate decisively back on the sideboard. “Do you know what butter costs a pound these days?”
Young Dyer, who had not been seen all day, since he had gone directly to his father’s home in town, came into the kitchen to hurry them up so that they would be at their places in the cloakrooms and in the various bars before the first guest arrived. Dyer was completely transformed. He was to help his father as assistant maître d’hôtel and he was immaculately dressed in a dinner jacket, with a stiff wing collar and jeweled studs. The affable campus politician was nowhere to be seen as he looked impatiently at his watch and said, “Come on, boys, you came here to work.”
“Dyer,” Benjamin said, “tell that old bag I want some butter.”
“She’s running the kitchen,” Dyer said. “There’re fixed rules. Sorry. Put a move on.”
“Dyer,” Benjamin said, “You’re a shit.”
“This is no time for jokes, Federov,” Dyer said.
The kitchen door opened and Dyer’s father entered, He was a sallow fat man with the disappointed, suspicious eyes of a failed gambler. He, too, was handsomely turned out in a satin-lapelled dinner jacket. “The first car is coming up the driveway,” he said. “Everybody at his place. Now.”
Benjamin struggled into his white waiter’s coat and went out to his station at the downstairs bar, still chewing on his last mouthful of the tepid, stringy frankfurter.
By nine-thirty the bar was crowded. For some reason, it was decorated in nautical style: fake portholes, red and green brass running lights, model sailing vessels fully rigged in glass cases, a large ship’s wheel in mahogany fitted with electric bulbs as a chandelier, all this at least two hundred miles from the sea. The nautical bar was patronized by the younger set—married couples in their mid-twenties, boys from Princeton and Yale and Harvard, all crew-cut and, to Benjamin’s eyes, self-consciously lordly, who snapped their fingers at him when they wanted to order a drink. There were a great many pretty girls and young women who spoke with a flattened-A finishing-school drawl and who wore low-cut dresses that Benjamin was sure had cost at least five times as much as the dress Pat had bought for this same evening. Men and women alike, they talked of places like Newport and Hyannis and Palm Beach and what a wild weekend it had been at New Haven and how perfectly awful it was that Dahddy was set on getting a divorce again and did you hear about Ginny and that impossible South American and how grim they were going to feel tomorrow because they just absolutely had to catch the train at eleven o’clock for South Carolina and that would mean getting up in what was practically the middle of the night.
To Benjamin they all seemed to have known each other since birth and to be unshakably at home no matter where they were. It’s a room full of Cohns, Benjamin thought, only not Jewish.
The prettiest girl there was a dark beauty in a black dress that displayed a good deal of bosom, and whose shoulder strap dropped disturbingly off her plump, tanned shoulder. She was surrounded by tall young men at the bar, and there was gust after gust of laughter from the group as they drank their bootleg whiskey-sours, and bourbon and ginger ales. The girl spoke quickly in a soft, provocative whisper, confident of her wit, using her eyes to point up her stories, enjoying the glances of the men around her at her exposed perfect breasts and her bare shoulders. She was standing near the service end of the bar, and while Benjamin was waiting next to her with his tray for a round of drinks for a party at one of the tables, he couldn’t help but stare, fascinated and sick with admiration, at her naked shoulder.
“…so I said to him,” the girl
was saying, “if that’s the way Harvard men behave, I’m going to try Tuskegee Institute next time.” The men around her laughed very loudly, and she whipped her eyes from one to the other, making sure all tributes were being paid in full. She caught Benjamin staring at her shoulder. He raised his eyes hurriedly, and for a moment she looked at him directly and consideringly. Her glance was cold and level. He was just about as tall as any of the men in her group; he knew he was at least as good-looking, and his experience in football and boxing made him fairly sure that he could have beaten almost any of the men clustered around the bar without too much trouble. But he was wearing a waiter’s white coat and he was carrying a tray and the girl’s eyes became narrow and hostile. Still looking directly at him, knowing that everybody was watching her, she deliberately and contemptuously put the shoulder strap back into place. Then she turned her back on him.
He felt a hot blush of shame well up from his collar and flood his face. He would have liked to kill the girl on the spot. Instead, he counted the glasses the bartender put on his tray and made his way through the crowd toward the table he was serving.
The laughter from the bar made him tremble. He nearly spilled a drink, and a man at the table looked up at him and said sharply, “Watch what the hell you’re doing, stupid.”
As he went about his duties he knew he hated everybody there that night. Although he didn’t want to be like them, he wanted, hopelessly, to seem like them, to feel that much at ease, that confident of blind, undeserved homage from the rest of the world.
From time to time he saw Dyer and his father as they patrolled the rooms. Now not only the Dyer of the campus, friendly and pleasant, had disappeared, but also the imperious and brusque Dyer of the kitchen. Now the Dyers, father and son, were permanently smiling, permanently bowing, obsequious, slavelike. They both gave the impression that nothing would give them deeper satisfaction than to be able to get down on their knees and kiss every polished patent-leather pump, the toe of every high-heeled satin slipper in the club that night.