(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said. He joined the fun. ‘What is my lady’s preference?’

  ‘The Volvo.’

  It was a Swedish runt of a sedan in the middle of the first row, concealed by the darkness and the other vehicles, but nonetheless exposed to the wind. He preceded her, tugged open the front door, and assisted her inside. His teeth chattering, he hugged his parcel, circled the car, and got in behind the wheel. Only one window was open, on the driver’s side, and he rolled it up.

  ‘Sealed tight,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it has a heater.’

  It had none that he could discover. He unwrapped the bottle of Scotch, ripped the seal off with his thumbnail, and removed the cork.

  ‘After you,’ he said. She took the bottle. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and he could see her plainly. She had been huddled against the cold, but now she straightened, and lifted the bottle to her lips, her head thrown back. Her coral sweater fell away from her breasts, and he could not help but see what had arrested his attention in the early afternoon—her prominent nipples, stiffened to points by the icy air, protruding through the white blouse.

  She had finished her drink, and she saw where his eyes were.

  ‘I do not wear brassières,’ she said. ‘Is that wrong?’

  He was taken aback by her unembarrassed frankness. ‘Wrong? It’s beautiful.’ For want of something else to say, he took refuge in intellectualism. ‘In the Restoration, the great ladies understood this. Sometimes, in the bodices of their gowns, there were holes, for the—the breasts to show through. And in France, under Napoleon, the bosom was exposed for admiration, whenever possible. Marie Antoinette had a drinking cup made from a plaster cast of one of her breasts. It’s on display in Sèvres.’

  She listened, perplexed, then handed him the bottle. ‘It is not for such display, or to provoke men, that I do not wear the brassière,’ she said seriously. ‘It is for reasons of health only.’ She patted her hip. ‘I do not wear the girdle either, because of health.’

  ‘What’s health got to do with it?’

  ‘I belong to a nudist society, like my friends. Health comes from the sun outdoors and not binding the body with artificial garments.’

  ‘You mean you actually go around with nothing on?’

  ‘Twice a month, for a full Sunday each time, in the summer. The colony is on a tiny island in Lake Mälaren.’

  ‘Well, I must say, it agrees with you.’ He hesitated. ‘Aren’t you embarrassed?’

  ‘For what? I have a body. Others have bodies. We are interested in our health. Nudism is very popular in Sweden. It is one reason we are strong when we are old.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say I disapprove.’

  ‘You do not?’

  ‘Not at all. I think it’s fine.’

  ‘I had heard all Americans were prudes. Even the men.’

  ‘Some. Not all.’

  ‘Your country is obsessed with sex, like the English country, because you are ashamed of it and afraid of it. An American professor of psychology once visited the German and Swedish nudist camps and said if even one little part of the body is covered for concealment—not protection—it makes bad sex thoughts in everyone’s head.’

  ‘You’re a smart young lady.’

  ‘I only repeat what I hear at lectures of our society.’ Suddenly, disconcertingly, she cupped her breasts from underneath and peered down at them behind the blouse. ‘The nipples are gone. It means I am warm, and the drink is good.’ She released her breasts and tapped the bottle. ‘You are not drinking, Mr. Craig.’

  ‘I—I guess I forgot.’

  He could not remember the last time that a conversation had kept him from drinking. He lifted the bottle to his mouth, and poured, and welcomed the burning fluid into his throat and lungs.

  ‘Whew,’ he said. ‘That was good.’

  The heat of it coursed through his veins, and he laid his head back on the seat, then turned sideways to observe that she was staring at him.

  ‘May I ask you a private question, Mr. Craig?’

  ‘Right now, anything.’

  ‘Your wife is dead three years, yes?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What does a man like you do for love?’ she asked.

  He pulled himself to an upright posture. He was startled, and going to tease her, but he saw that her face was solemn in the darkness.

  What could he tell this serious child in honesty? That he had slept with no woman in desire and love for three years? That once a month, the week that he was sober, he would drive to a boarding-house thirty miles outside of town, where Mrs. Risten had three girl boarders, and in a businesslike way, and by the clock, release his tensions with one of these girls? That he could hardly remember the faces of any of the girls because he paid twenty dollars a visit to use them as receptacles and nothing more? That he had caressed no woman in passion since Harriet?

  ‘A man like me does without love,’ he said simply.

  ‘How is that possible for a human being?’

  His hand weighed the bottle. ‘Drink makes anything possible.’

  ‘But you sleep with some girls?’

  ‘Yes, but not with love. You cannot pay for love.’

  ‘That is dreadful.’ Her face was soft. ‘I am sorry for you.’

  ‘That makes two of us,’ he said lightly. ‘Besides, what do you know about all this, Lilly? Didn’t you tell me you were twenty-three? You’re still teething.’

  ‘I am old enough to have eight children.’

  ‘And to know better.’

  She laughed from deep inside. ‘Yes, I know better. You drink now, and then I will have one more.’

  He drank, and drank, and then again. He handed her the bottle, and slid lower in the seat. Slowly, he was being enveloped by the soft blanket of intoxication.

  ‘This sister-in-law,’ she was saying, ‘is she pretty?’

  ‘Not like you. But all right.’

  ‘Like your dead wife?’

  ‘Not exactly. She has her points, pro and con.’

  ‘You have slept with her?’

  The question hung above his fogged brain and then penetrated it. ‘What kind of thing is that to ask?’

  ‘It is a normal question.’

  ‘No, Lilly,’ he said in a humouring way, ‘I haven’t slept with Leah.’

  ‘What kind of life do you live? Are you rich?’

  ‘I’m poor, but I live beyond my means.’

  ‘What is your occupation? Are you a barrister?’

  ‘I’m a writer, Lilly. I write—used to.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Her face danced. ‘I guessed it, but I was not certain.’

  ‘How did you guess it?’ he asked tiredly.

  ‘Many, many reasons. You are young but look old. You are strange. The pipe. Mainly, the way you drink. Mr. Strindberg also drank.’

  ‘You sound like someone who’s known writers.’

  ‘Some.’

  He watched the slight shimmy of the car-roof, and listened to the prow of the boat slapping the water. They were silent for a while.

  ‘Lilly.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What do you do? Live with your parents?’

  ‘My father is dead. He had a lace shop in Vadstena. My mother is remarried and she lives in Lund. I did not like her husband who has busy hands—so four years ago I moved to Stockholm. I have a nice one-room apartment with a kitchen and a tiny bathroom. I pay a hundred and fifty kronor a month.’

  ‘How much is that in America?’

  ‘Thirty dollars.’

  ‘Where do you get your money?’

  ‘I sell dresses in Nordiska Kompaniet.’

  He could not remember. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘One of the biggest department stores.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Yes. Why not?’

  ‘Why don’t you get married?’

  ‘I will when it makes me happier.’

  ‘No other reason?’
/>
  ‘Is there one other reason to marry?’

  He turned his face towards her. ‘Lilly, if you are Sweden, I am going to like Sweden.’

  ‘You will like Sweden.’

  ‘I liked it last time, but I was young—it was my honeymoon. This time, I haven’t cared.’

  ‘You will like it.’ They were silent a moment, and then she touched his arm. ‘Mr. Craig, we must leave the car. We are almost there.’

  He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and strained them through the wind-shield. Looming before them were the lights of Malmö.

  ‘All right,’ he said. He started to open the door, when something came to his mind. ‘Lilly—one more favour.’

  ‘Your sister-in-law again?’

  ‘That’s right. I’d never get this bottle past her guard without a scene. Can you take it?’

  She took it from him.

  ‘I’ll show you my carriage when we go past. I have room seventeen. Will you remember?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Soon as we leave Malmö, once we’re under way, bring it to me. Can you do that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do I sound terribly drunk?’

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘Good. Thank you for the company.’

  They left the Volvo, and bucked the knifing wind, which fell away when they reached the haven between the train and the cabins. Passengers were filling their path, and they were slow in reaching Craig’s carriage.

  He pointed up. ‘It’s this one. Seventeen.’

  She bobbed her head. ‘Tack för i kväll,’ she said. ‘Det var mycket trevligt.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Thank you. I enjoyed myself.’

  Craig smiled. ‘How do you say, “I hope to see you again soon”?’

  ‘Jag hoppas vi ses igen snart.’

  ‘Well, jag hoppas—’

  But she had already disappeared into the crowd.

  Craig greeted the conductor, went unsteadily up the steps, and entered the wagon-lit. Leah was awaiting him in his compartment, agitated, as he had expected.

  ‘For God’s sake, where have you been?’ she cried. ‘I thought you’d fallen overboard. I looked everywhere, high and low—’

  ‘I was hungry,’ he said placidly. ‘I was eating in the second-class café.’

  ‘I looked there. You weren’t there.’

  ‘Sure I was. I was disguised as a Dane. I’m fine, Leah. Never better. All ready for Mr. Nobel.’

  She eyed him suspiciously, without the nerve to move closer and smell his breath. ‘You haven’t had a drink?’

  ‘On my honour.’

  ‘I’m only thinking of Harriet. I keep thinking of her. I want to treat you as she would.’ Her voice pleaded for understanding. ‘I’m thinking of you, too, Andrew. I want you to be respected, and proud of yourself.’

  ‘You’re very kind, Lee.’ A hollow wooden thud reverberated through the boat, and they struggled for balance.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Leah, frightened.

  ‘Malmö. We’ll be on shore in a few minutes, hitched up and on our way. I’m going to undress and get some sleep.’

  She stood at the door. ‘Don’t think I want to nag you, Andrew. When you’ve needed drink, I’ve been the first to help you, God forgive me. You know that.’

  He nodded dutifully.

  ‘But I feel you don’t need it now, and if you do, you should conquer your weakness. There’s too much at stake.’ She allowed this to sink in, and then went on. ‘I know what you are and can be, more than anyone on earth, and that is all that’s in my heart.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Lee.’ He wondered what would happen if Lilly should suddenly materialize with the bottle. He prayed that she would not be too soon.

  ‘When you stand on that stage in Stockholm, all straight and dignified,’ Leah continued, ‘when you accept the award, it’ll make up for everything that happened before.’

  She buried the shaft deep, and he avoided her prosecutor’s eyes. It’ll make up for murder, she was telling him without telling him. I, Leah Decker, am my sister’s husband’s keeper, his probation officer until he has served penance and is again responsible, and I shall release him when his time is served, if ever that be, she was saying.

  ‘It’ll be a new day for us,’ she concluded.

  ‘Good night, Lee.’

  ‘Good night, Andrew.’

  Grimly, he shut the door, removed his jacket and tie, and waited for the train to resume its passage and for Lilly Hedqvist to appear. He listened to the train being coupled to a locomotive, and soon they were under way. When the knock came at the door, it was not Lilly but the conductor. He was beaming.

  ‘I told the customs inspectors who you were,’ he said. ‘They were impressed. They did not want to disturb you.’

  ‘Thanks, my friend.’

  ‘I have read all the works of Jack London and Upton Sinclair, but I am sorry to say I have not read your books. Are they translated into Swedish?’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘When I tell my wife, she will buy them.’

  ‘I wish I had some copies along, but I didn’t have room.’

  ‘No—no—my wife will buy them.’ He was reluctant to leave, but he saw Craig’s impatience. ‘If you need me in the night, you press the bell. I am at the end of the aisle, at my table. Do you wish to leave a morning call?’

  ‘Just wake me an hour before we get in.’

  ‘I won’t forget, Mr. Craig.’

  After the conductor had gone, Craig remained at the open door. He bent and peered through the window. In the distance, behind the moat of darkness, a Swedish town, brightened by outdoor fluorescent lights, briefly filled the window and as rapidly disappeared from sight. Shortly, a second Swedish town, also illuminated by fluorescent lights, showed itself, and then withdrew. After the third town came and went, Craig closed his door.

  Kneeling, he unsnapped his overnight case removed his pyjamas and the toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, and neatly placed them at the foot of his berth. He took off his shoes, sat on the bed, swaying with the train, and at last he lay down on his back. He was not sleepy, but neither was he wide awake. He was disoriented, not part of this time and place, but contentedly detached. He had consumed more of the bottle than he had realized. He wondered when Lilly would bring what was left of it, and how he would treat her. Was it proper or improper to invite her in to drink with him? . . . mycket trevligt—yes, he had enjoyed her, and it would be relaxing to drink with her as they had in the car at the prow of the ferry-boat. Still, he did not feel like talking. He wanted her female presence, and most of all he wanted to unbutton her white blouse.

  The eroticism of his thoughts surprised him. He felt immature and ashamed and disloyal to Harriet. He tried to explain to her, and went back to find her, as so often he did, and at once he felt more comfortable in the past, which was all solved with its beginnings, middles, ends, than he ever could in the present, which offered him only beginnings and enigmas. It was good to go home again, where everything had happened and was done, and no burdens of proof existed, no demands, no mysteries, because it was done. . . .

  It was the winter after the end of World War II, and New York was bedded down in snow. Two days before, he had been honourably discharged from the Signal Corps at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and now he was in an old hotel on Forty-fourth Street, off Sixth Avenue, waiting for the holiday season to end—it was the week between Christmas and New Year—so that he could see the magazine editors and then leave the city that always made him feel unsure and dissatisfied.

  On this day, luxuriating in his civilian status, drawing on his newly acquired pipe, he stared into the street below the hotel—even the snow was dirty here—and he could not understand the lyricists and singers of this city. What was there to recommend it? There was no sky, no earth with flowers and all things green, no private air to inhale, no aesthetic beauty, no neighbourliness, no place to daydream or meditate leisure
ly. But its professional spokesmen, with inverted snobbery, treated these lacks as its very virtues. It was a place alive and crackling, a place stimulating, civilization’s centre. The centre of what? He wondered. The plays were mediocre gabble, projected by over-publicized personalities rather than first-rate talents, in shameful, musty old barns. Concerts were no better, their small voices and small orchestral sounds slanted at pseudo specialists and reading aesthetes who would turn off the same sounds if heard in a private room. Businesses were the worst, because here competitors were piled on top of each other like gigantic club sandwiches, yet they were expected to disarm and treat each other civilly at lunch and dinner, which was anti-nature, and there could be no other reason for the statistics on martinis dry, ulcers bleeding, and analysts prospering.

  Craig wanted no permanent part of this unnatural club. Before the war, while on the rewrite desk of a St. Louis newspaper, he had tried some short fiction on the side. When he learned the formula, and compromised his fancies sufficiently, the short fiction began to sell. He had determined to free-lance full time, but Pearl Harbor diverted him to a different employment. During his three years of service, especially the months in England and France, he had devoted his leaves to a minimum amount of whoring and a maximum amount of writing. The short stories that he wrote were better, and sold for higher prices, and now that he was free at last, he knew what he would do.

  He had arranged to spend the week after New Year’s Day going about Manhattan, with his agent, meeting the current crop of editors and telling them some of his ideas. With commitments under his arm, he would return to Cedar Rapids, where he had an ailing father, a robust aunt and uncle, and friends, and he would dig in and write. With the money, he would continue westwards. He would live cheaply, but royally, in Taos or Monterey, and he would write the novels that had burned inside him during the war years.

  There was one other possibility. He might visit Peru for a year. He had read that it was inexpensive. The purpose of going to Peru would be research. Among several ideas, he had entertained one about Francisco Pizarro. It would be an historical novel about Pizarro and the strange group of 183 men he had recruited in Panama. It would record the changes in the leader and his men, their conflicts and corruption as well as their strengths, from the day of their landing at Tumbez until they sailed for home. It would lay bare in human terms the whole incredible story of how a small, mortal, fanatical gang, armed with only three muskets and twenty crossbows, conquered Atahualpa and ten million Incas and won a vast empire. The idea had been further nourished by the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler and his original small band, but the Nazis were of too recent date to be examined, and a parallel tale about Pizarro might put the whole modern-day tragedy in perspective.