by Irwin Shaw
“You here again?” the soldier said, annoyed. He stopped for a moment. Then he started moving again, pushing Tom with his chest.
“You better stop pushing,” Tom said. He grabbed the soldier’s sleeve. “You’re not going anywhere.”
The soldier stopped in surprise. He looked down at Tom, who was at least three inches shorter than he, blond and cherubic looking in his old blue sweater and basketball sneakers. “You sure are perky for a kid your size,” the soldier said. “Now get out of my way.” He pushed Tom to one side with his forearm.
“Who do you think you’re pushing, Sidney?” Tom said and jabbed sharply at the soldier’s chest with the heel of his hand. By now people were stopping around them and looking on curiously. The soldier’s face reddened in slow anger. “Keep your hands to yourself, kid, or you’ll get hurt.”
“What’s the matter with you, boy?” the girl said. She had redone her mouth before coming out of the theater but there were still lipstick smears on her chin and she was uncomfortable at all the attention they were getting. “If this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny.”
“It’s not a joke, Angela,” Tom said.
“Stop that Angela crap,” the soldier said.
“I want an apology,” Tom said.
“That’s the least,” Claude said.
“Apology? Apology for what?” The soldier appealed to the small crowd that by now had collected around them. “These kids must be nuts.”
“Either you apologize for the language your lady friend used to us in there,” Tom said, “or you take the consequences.”
“Come on, Angela,” the soldier said, “let’s go get that beer.” He started to take a step, but Tom grabbed his sleeve and pulled. There was a tearing noise and a seam broke open at the shoulder.
The soldier twisted around to view the damage. “Hey, you little sonofabitch, you tore my coat.”
“I told you you weren’t going nowhere,” Tom said. He backed away a little, his arms crooked, his fingers outspread.
“Nobody gets away with tearing my coat,” the soldier said. “I don’t care who he is.” He swung with his open hand. Tom moved in and let the blow fall on his left shoulder. “Ow!” he screamed, putting his right hand to his shoulder and bending over as though he were in terrible pain.
“Did you see that?” Claude demanded of the spectators. “Did you see that man hit my friend?”
“Listen, soldier,” a gray-haired man in a raincoat said, “you can’t beat up on a little kid like that.”
“I just gave him a little slap,” the soldier turned to the man apologetically. “He’s been dogging me all …”
Suddenly Tom straightened up and hitting upward, with his closed fist, struck the soldier, not too hard, so as not to discourage him, along the side of the jaw.
There was no holding the soldier back now. “Okay, kid, you asked for it.” He began to move in on Tom.
Tom retreated and the crowd pushed back behind him.
“Give them room,” Claude called professionally. “Give the men room.”
“Sidney,” the girl called shrilly, “you’ll kill him.”
“Nah,” the soldier said, “I’ll just slap him around a little. Teach him a lesson.”
Tom snaked in and hit the soldier with a short left hook to the head and went in deep to the belly with his right. The soldier let the air out of his lungs with a large, dry sound, as Tom danced back.
“It’s disgusting,” a woman said. “A big oaf like that. Somebody ought to stop it.”
“It’s all right,” her husband said. “He said he’d only slap him a couple of times.”
The soldier swung a slow, heavy right hand at Tom. Tom ducked under it and dug both his fists into the soldier’s soft middle. The soldier bent almost double in pain and Tom hooked both hands to the face. The soldier began to spurt blood and he waved his hands feebly in front of him and tried to clinch. Contemptuously, Tom let the soldier grapple him, but kept his right hand free and clubbed at the soldier’s kidneys. The soldier slowly went down to one knee. He looked up blearily at Tom through the blood that was flowing from his cut forehead. Angela was crying. The crowd was silent. Tom stepped back. He wasn’t even breathing hard. There was a little glow under the light, blond fuzz on his cheeks.
“My God,” said the lady who had said that somebody ought to stop it, “he looks just like a baby.”
“You getting up?” Tom asked the soldier. The soldier just looked at him and swung his head wearily to get the blood out of his eyes. Angela knelt beside him and started using her handkerchief on the cuts. The whole thing hadn’t taken more than thirty seconds.
“That’s all for tonight, folks,” Claude said. He was wiping sweat off his face.
Tom strode out of the little circle of watching men and women. They were very quiet, as though they had seen something unnatural and dangerous that night, something they would like to be able to forget.
Claude caught up to Tom as they turned the corner. “Boy, oh boy,” Claude said, “you worked fast tonight. The combinations, boy, oh boy, the combinations.”
Tom was chuckling. “Sidney, you’ll kill him,” he said, trying to imitate the girl’s voice. He felt wonderful. He half-closed his eyes and remembered the shock of his fists against skin and bone and against the brass buttons of the uniform. “It was okay,” he said. “Only it didn’t last long enough. I should have carried him a while. He was just a pile of shit. Next time let’s pick somebody can fight.”
“Boy,” Claude said, “I really enjoyed that. I sure would like to see that fella’s face tomorrow. When you going to do it again?”
Tom shrugged. “When I’m in the mood. Good night.” He didn’t want Claude hanging around him anymore. He wanted to be alone and remember every move of the fight. Claude was used to these sudden rejections and treated them respectfully. Talent had its prerogatives. “Good night,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
Tom waved and turned off down the avenue for the long walk toward his house. They had to be careful to go to other parts of town when Tom wanted to fight. He was too well known in his own neighborhood. Everybody avoided him when they sensed one of his moods coming on.
He walked swiftly toward home down the dark street toward the smell of the river, dancing a little around a lamppost here and there. He’d shown them, he’d shown them. And he was going to show them a lot more. Them.
As he turned the last corner, he saw his sister Gretchen approaching the house from the other end of the street. She was hurrying and she had her head down and she didn’t see him. He slipped into a doorway across the street and waited. He didn’t want to have to talk to his sister. She hadn’t said anything that he wanted to hear since he was eight years old. He watched her almost run up to the door next to the bakery window and get her key out of her bag. Maybe once he would follow her and really find out what she did with her nights.
Gretchen opened the door and went in. Tom waited until he was sure that she was safely upstairs and in her room, then crossed the street and stood in front of the weathered gray frame building. Home. He had been born in that house. He had come unexpectedly, early, and there had been no time to get his mother to the hospital. How many times he had heard that story. Big deal, being born at home. The Queen did not leave the Palace. The Prince first saw the light of day in the royal bedchamber. The house looked desolate, ready to be torn down. Tom spat again. He stared at the building, all exhilaration gone. There was the usual light from the basement window, where his father was working. The boy’s face hardened. A whole life in a cellar. What do they know? he thought. Nothing.
He let himself in quietly with the key and climbed to the room he shared with Rudolph on the third floor. He was careful on the creaky stairs. Moving soundlessly was a point of honor with him. His exits and entrances were his own business. Especially on a night like this. There was some blood on the sleeve of his sweater and he didn’t want anybody coming in and howling about it.
&nbs
p; He could hear Rudolph breathing steadily, asleep, as he closed the door quietly behind him. Nice, proper Rudolph, the perfect gentleman, smelling of toothpaste, right at the head of his class, everybody’s pet, never coming home with blood on him, getting a good night’s sleep, so he wouldn’t miss a good morning, Ma’am, or a trigonometry problem the next day. Tom undressed in the dark, throwing his clothes carelessly over a chair. He didn’t want to answer any questions from Rudolph, either. Rudolph was no ally. He was on the other side. Let him be on the other side. Who cared?
But when he got into the double bed, Rudolph awoke. “Where you been?” Rudolph asked sleepily.
“Just to the show.”
“How was it?”
“Lousy.”
The two brothers lay still in the darkness. Rudolph moved a bit toward the other side of the bed. He thought it was degrading to have to sleep in the same bed with his brother. It was cold in the room, with the window open and the wind coming off the river. Rudolph always opened the window wide at night. If there was a rule, you could bet Rudolph would obey it. He slept in pajamas. Tom just stripped to his shorts for sleeping. They had arguments about that twice a week.
Rudolph sniffed. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, “you smell like a wild animal. What’ve you been doing?”
“Nothing,” Tom said. “I can’t help the way I smell.” If he wasn’t my brother, he thought, I’d beat the shit out of him.
He wished he’d had the money to go to Alice’s behind the railroad station. He’d lost his virginity there for five dollars and he’d gone back several times after that. That was in the summer. He had had a job on a dredge in the river and he told his father he made ten dollars a week less than he actually did. That big dark woman, that Florence girl, up from Virginia, who had let him come twice for the same five dollars because he was only fourteen and he was cherry, that would have really finished the night off. He hadn’t told Rudolph about Alice’s either. Rudolph was still a virgin, that was for sure. He was above sex or he was waiting for a movie star or he was a fairy or something. One day, he, Tom, was going to tell Rudolph everything and then watch the expression on his face. Wild animal. Well, if that’s what they thought of him, that’s what he was going to be—a wild animal.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember what the soldier looked like, down on one knee on the pavement with the blood leaking all over his face. The image was clear, but there was no pleasure in it any more.
He started to tremble. The room was cold, but that wasn’t why he was trembling.
V
Gretchen sat in front of the little mirror which was propped up on the dressing table against the wall of her room. It was an old kitchen table she had bought at a junk sale for two dollars and painted pink. There were some cosmetic jars on it and a silver-backed brush she had gotten as a present on her eighteenth birthday and three small bottles of perfume and a manicure set all neatly laid out on a clean towel. She had on an old bathrobe. The worn flannel was warm against her skin and gave her some of the same feeling of coziness she used to have when she came in out of the cold and put it on before bedtime as a young girl. She needed what comfort she could find tonight.
She scrubbed the cold cream off her face with a piece of Kleenex. Her skin was very white, a heritage from her mother, like her blue, shading-to-violet eyes. Her straight, black hair was like her father’s. Gretchen was beautiful, her mother said, just as she had been when she was Gretchen’s age. Her mother was constantly imploring her not to allow herself to decay, as she had done. Decay was the word her mother used. With marriage, her mother intimated, decay set in immediately. Corruption lay in the touch of a man. Her mother did not lecture her about men; she was sure of what she called Gretchen’s virtue (that was another word she used freely), but she used her influence to get Gretchen to wear loose clothes that did not show off her figure. “There’s no sense in seeking out trouble,” her mother said. “It comes finding you out soon enough. You have an old-fashioned figure, but your troubles will be strictly up-to-date.”
Her mother had once confided to Gretchen that she had wanted to be a nun. There was a bluntness of sensibility there that disturbed Gretchen when she thought about it. Nuns had no daughters. She existed, aged nineteen, seated in front of a mirror on a March night in the middle of the century because her mother had failed to live up to her destiny.
After what had happened to her tonight, Gretchen thought bitterly, she herself would be tempted to enter a nunnery. If only she believed in God.
She had gone to the hospital as usual after work. The hospital was a military one on the outskirts of town, full of soldiers convalescing from wounds received in Europe. Gretchen was a volunteer worker five nights a week, distributing books and magazines and doughnuts, reading letters to soldiers with eye wounds and writing letters for soldiers with hand and arm injuries. She wasn’t paid anything, but she felt it was the least she could do. Actually, she enjoyed the work. The soldiers were grateful and docile, made almost childlike by their wounds, and there was none of the tense sexual parading and reconnoitering that she had to endure in the office all day. Of course, many of the nurses and some of the other volunteers slipped off with the doctors and the more active officer-wounded, but Gretchen had quickly shown that she wasn’t having any of that. So many girls were available and willing, that very few of the men persisted. To make it all easier, she had arranged to be assigned to the crowded enlisted men’s wards, where it was almost impossible for a soldier to be alone with her for more than a few seconds at a time. She was friendly and easy with men conversationally, but she couldn’t bear the thought of any man touching her. She had been kissed by boys from time to time, of course, at parties and in cars after dances, but their clumsy gropings had seemed meaningless to her, unsanitary and vaguely comic.
She never was interested in any of the boys who surrounded her in school and she scorned the girls who had crushes on football heroes or boys with cars. It all seemed so pointless. The only man she had ever speculated about in that way was Mr. Pollack, the English teacher, who was an old man, maybe fifty, with tousled gray hair, and who spoke in a low, gentlemanly voice and read Shakespeare aloud in class. “‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day …’” She could imagine herself in his arms, and his poetic and mournful caresses, but he was married and had daughters her age and never remembered anyone’s name. As for her dreams … She forgot her dreams.
Something enormous was going to happen to her, she was sure, but it wasn’t going to be this year or in this town.
As she went on her rounds in the loose, gray smock provided by the hospital, Gretchen felt motherly and useful, making up in a small way for what these courteous, uncomplaining young men had suffered for their country.
The lights were low in the wards and all the men were supposed to be in bed. Gretchen had made her usual special visit to the bedside of a soldier named Talbot Hughes, who had been wounded in the throat and couldn’t speak. He was the youngest soldier in the ward and the most pitiful and Gretchen liked to believe that the touch of her hand and her good-night smile made the long hours before dawn more bearable for the boy. She was tidying the common room, where the men read and wrote letters, played cards and checkers and listened to the phonograph. She stacked the magazines neatly on the center table, cleared off a chessboard and put the pieces in their box, dropped two empty Coca-Cola bottles into a waste-basket.
She liked the little housewifely end of the night, conscious of the hundreds of young men sleeping around this central, warm core of the hospital block, young men saved from death, acquitted of war, young men healing and forgetting fear and agony, young men one day nearer to peace and home.
She had lived in small, cramped quarters all her life and the spaciousness of the common room, with its pleasant light-green walls and deep upholstered chairs, made her feel almost like a hostess in her own elegant home, after a successful party. She was humming as she fi
nished her work and was just about to turn out the light and start for the locker room to change her clothes when a tall young Negro in pajamas and the Medical Corps maroon bathrobe limped in.
“Evening, Miss Jordache,” the Negro said. His name was Arnold. He had been in the hospital a long time and she knew him fairly well. There were only two Negroes in the block and this was the first time Gretchen had seen one without the other. She always made a particular point of being agreeable to them. Arnold had had his leg smashed when a shell hit the truck he was driving in France. He came from St. Louis, he had told her, and had eleven brothers and sisters, and had finished high school.
He spent many hours reading and wore glasses while doing so. Although he seemed to read at random, comic books, magazines, the plays of Shakespeare, anything that happened to be lying around, Gretchen had decided that he was ripe for literature. He did look bookish, like a brilliant, lonely student from an African country, with his Army-issue glasses. From time to time Gretchen brought him books, either her own or her brother Rudolph’s, or sometimes from the public library in town. Arnold read them promptly and returned them conscientiously, in good condition, without ever offering any comment on them. Gretchen felt that he was silent out of embarrassment, not wanting to pretend to be an intellectual in front of the other men. She read a great deal herself, but omnivorously, her taste guided in the last two years by Mr. Pollack’s catholic enthusiasms. So she had through the months offered Arnold such disparate works as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Rupert Brooke, and This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
She smiled as the boy came into the room. “Good evening, Arnold,” she said. “Looking for something?”
“Naw. Just wanderin’. Couldn’t get to sleep, somehow. Then I saw the light in here and I say to myself, ‘I’ll go in and visit with that pretty li’l Miss Jordache, pass the time of day.’” He smiled at her, his teeth white and perfect. Unlike the other men, who called her Gretchen, he always used her last name. His speech was somehow countrified, as though his family had carried the burden of their Alabama farm with them when they had migrated north. He was quite black, gaunt in the loose bathrobe. It had taken two or three operations to save his leg, Gretchen knew, and she was sure she could see the lines of suffering around his mouth.