by Irwin Shaw
“Good,” Boylan said, lighting his cigarette with a gold lighter he took from his pocket and put down on the bar beside the monogrammed case. “I don’t like girls to smoke. It takes away the fragrance of youth.”
Fancy talk, she thought. But it didn’t offend her now. He was putting himself out to please her. She was suddenly conscious of the odor of the perfume that she had dabbed on herself in the washroom at the office. She worried that it might seem cheap to him. “I must say,” she said, “I was surprised you knew my name.”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t think I’ve seen you more than once or twice at the Works. And you never come through the office.”
“I’ve seen you,” he said. “I wondered what a girl who looked like you was doing in a dreary place like Boylan’s Brick and Tile Works.”
“It isn’t as awful as all that,” she said defensively.
“No? I’m glad to hear that. I was under the impression that all my employees found it intolerable. I make it a point not to visit it more than fifteen minutes a month. I find it depresses me.”
The headwaiter appeared. “Ready now, sir.”
“Leave your drink, pet,” Boylan said, helping her off her stool. “Bernard’ll bring it in.”
They followed the headwaiter into the dining room. Eight or ten of the tables were occupied. A full colonel and a party of young officers. Other tweedy couples. There were flowers on the polished fake-colonial tables and rows of shining glasses. There is nobody here who makes less than ten thousand dollars a year, she thought.
The conversation in the room dropped as they followed the headwaiter to a small table at the window, overlooking the river far below. She felt the young officers regarding her. She touched her hair. She knew what was going on in their minds. She was sorry Mr. Boylan wasn’t younger.
The headwaiter held the chair for her and she sat down and put the large, creamy napkin demurely over her lap. Bernard came in with their unfinished Daiquiris on a tray and put them down on the table.
“Thank you, sir,” he said as he backed off.
The headwaiter appeared with a bottle of red wine from France and the table waiter came up with their first course. There was no manpower shortage at The Old Farmer’s Inn.
The headwaiter ceremoniously poured a little of the wine into a huge, deep glass. Boylan sniffed it, tasted it, looked up, squinting, at the ceiling, as he kept it for a moment in his mouth before swallowing. He nodded at the headwaiter. “Very good, Lawrence,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” the headwaiter said. With all those thank you’s, Gretchen thought, the bill was going to be horrendous.
The headwaiter poured the wine into her glass, then into Boylan’s. Boylan raised his glass to her and they both sipped the wine. It had a strange dusty taste and was warm. Eventually, she was sure, she was going to learn to like that taste.
“I hope you like hearts of palm,” Boylan said. “I developed the taste in Jamaica. That was before the war, of course.”
“It’s delicious.” It tasted like a flat nothing to her, but she liked the idea that a whole noble palm tree had been cut down just to serve her one small, delicate dish.
“When the war is over,” he said, picking at his plate, “I’m going to go down there and settle. Jamaica. Just lie on the white sand in the sun from year’s end to year’s end. When the boys come marching home this country’s going to be impossible. A world fit for heroes to live in,” he said mockingly, “is hardly fit for Theodore Boylan to live in. You must come and visit me.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll rhumba on down on my salary from the Boylan Brick and Tile Works.”
He laughed. “It is the proud boast of my family,” he said, “that we have underpaid our help since 1887.”
“Family?” she said. As far as she knew, he was the only Boylan extant. It was common knowledge that he lived alone in the mansion behind the stone walls of the great estate outside town. With servants, of course.
“Imperial,” he said. “We are spread in our glory from coast to coast, from pine-clad Maine to orange-scented California. Aside from the Boylan Cement plant and the Boylan Brick and Tile Works in Port Philip, there are Boylan shipyards, Boylan oil companies, Boylan heavy-duty machinery plants throughout the length and breadth of this great land, each with a Boylan brother or uncle or cousin at its head, supplying the sinews of war at cost-plus to our beloved country. There is even a Major General Boylan who strikes shrewd blows in his nation’s cause in the Service of Supply in Washington. Family? Let there be the sniff of a dollar in the air and there you will find a Boylan, first on the line.”
She was not used to people running down their own families; her loyalties were simple. Her face must have showed her disappointment.
“You’re shocked,” Boylan said. Again that crooked look of amusement.
“Not really,” she said. She thought of her own family. “Only people inside a family know how much love they deserve.”
“Oh, I’m not all bad,” Boylan said. “There’s one virtue which my family has in abundance and I admire it without reservation.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re rich. They’re verrry, verrry rich.” He laughed.
“Still,” she said, hoping that he wasn’t as bad as he sounded, that it was just a show-off lunchtime act that he was performing to impress an empty-headed girl, “still, you work. The Boylans’ve done a lot for this town …”
“They certainly have,” he said. “They have bled it white. Naturally, they feel a sentimental interest in it. Port Philip is the most insignificant of the imperial possessions, not worth the time of a true, one hundred percent, up-and-at-em male Boylan, but they do not abandon it. The last and the least of the line, your humble servant, is delegated to the lowly home province to lend the magic of the name and the authority of the living family presence at least once or twice a month to the relic. I perform my ritual duties with all due respect and look forward to Jamaica when the guns have fallen silent.”
He not only hates the family, she thought, he hates himself.
His quick, pale eyes noted the minute change in her expression. “You don’t like me,” he said.
“That isn’t true,” she said. “It’s just that you’re different from anyone I know.”
“Different better or different worse?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He nodded gravely. “I abide the question,” he said. “Drink up. Here comes another bottle of wine.”
Somehow, they had gone through the whole bottle of wine and they hadn’t reached the main course yet. The headwaiter gave them fresh glasses and there was the ceremony of tasting once more. The wine had flushed her face and throat. The conversation in the rest of the restaurant seemed to have receded and came to her ears now in a regular, reassuring rhythm, like the sound of distant surf. She suddenly felt at home in the polished old room and she laughed aloud.
“Why are you laughing?” Boylan asked suspiciously.
“Because I’m here,” she said, “and I could be so many other places instead.”
“You must drink more often,” he said. “Wine becomes you.” He reached over and patted her hand. His hand was dry and firm on her skin. “You’re beautiful, pet, beautiful, beautiful.”
“I think so, too,” she said.
It was his turn to laugh.
“Today,” she said.
By the time the waiter brought their coffee she was drunk. She had never been drunk before in her life so she didn’t know that she was drunk. All she knew was that all colors were clearer, that the river below her was cobalt, that the sun lowering in the sky over the faraway western bluffs was of a heartbreaking gold. All the tastes in her mouth were like summertime and the man opposite her was not a stranger and her employer, but her best and most intimate friend, his fine, tanned face kindly and marvelously attentive, the occasional touch of his hand on hers of a welcome calm dryness, his laugh an accolade to her
wit. She could tell him anything, her secrets were his.
She told him anecdotes about the hospital—about the soldier who had been hit over the eye by a bottle of wine that an enthusiastic French woman had thrown to welcome him to Paris and who had been awarded the Purple Heart because he suffered from double vision incurred in the line of duty. And the nurse and the young officer who made love every night in a parked ambulance and who, one night, when the ambulance had been called out, had been driven all the way to Poughkeepsie stark naked.
As she spoke, it became clear to her that she was a unique and interesting person who led an incident-crammed, full life. She described the problems she had when she had played Rosalind in As You Like It in the school play in her senior year. Mr. Pollack, the director, who had seen a dozen Rosalinds, on Broadway and elsewhere, had said that it would be a crime if she wasted her talent. She had also played Portia the year before and wondered briefly if she wouldn’t make a brilliant lawyer. She thought women ought to go in for things like that these days, not settle for marriage and babies.
She was going to tell Teddy (he was Teddy by dessert) something that she hadn’t confided to a soul, that when the war was over she was going to go down to New York to be an actress. She recited a speech from As You Like It, her tongue lively and tripping from the Daiquiris, the wine, the two glasses of Benedictine.
“Come, woo me, woo me,” she said, “for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?”
Teddy kissed her hand as she finished and she accepted the tribute graciously, delighted with the flirtatious aptness of the quotation.
Warmed by the man’s unflagging attention, she felt electric, sparkling, and irresistible. She opened the top two buttons of her dress. Let her glories be displayed. Besides, it was warm in the restaurant. She could speak of unmentionable things, she could use words that until now she had only seen scrawled on walls by naughty boys. She had achieved candor, that aristocratic privilege.
“I never pay any attention to them.” She was responding to a question from Boylan about the men in the office. “Squirming around like puppies. Small-town Don Juans. Taking you to the movies and an ice-cream soda and then necking in the back seat of a car, grabbing at you as though you’re the brass ring on a merry-go-round. Making a noise like a dying elk and trying to put their tongues in your mouth. Not for me. I’ve got other things on my mind. They try it once and after that they know better. I’m in no hurry!” She stood up suddenly. “Thank you for a delicious lunch,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She had never before said to any of her dates that she had to go to the bathroom. Her bladder had nearly burst from time to time in movie houses and at parties.
Teddy stood up. “The first door in the hall to the left,” he said. He was a knowing man, Teddy, informed on all subjects.
She sauntered through the room, surprised that it was empty. She walked slowly, knowing that Teddy was following her every step with his pale, intelligent eyes. Her back was straight. She knew that. Her neck was long and white under the black hair. She knew that. Her waist was slender, her hips curved, her legs long and rounded and firm. She knew all that and walked slowly to let Teddy know it once and for all.
In the ladies’ room, she looked at herself in the mirror and wiped off the last of the lipstick from her mouth. I have a wide, striking mouth, she told her reflection. What a fool I was to paint it just like any old mouth.
She went out into the hall from the ladies’ room. Teddy was waiting for her at the entrance to the bar. He had paid the bill and he was drawing on his left glove. He stared at her somberly as she approached him.
“I am going to buy you a red dress,” he said. “A blazing red dress to set off that miraculous complexion and that wild, black hair. When you walk into a room, the men will drop to their knees.”
She laughed, red her color. That was the way a man should talk.
She took his arm and they went out to the car.
He put the top up because it was getting cold and they drove slowly south, his bare right hand, thoughtfully ungloved, on hers on the seat between them. It was cosy in the car, with all the windows up. There was the flowery fragrance of the alcohol they had drunk, mixed with the smell of leather.
“Now,” he said, “tell me. What were you really doing at the bus stop at King’s Landing?”
She chuckled.
“That was a dirty chuckle,” he said.
“I was there for a dirty reason,” she said.
He drove without speaking for awhile. The road was deserted, and they drove through stripes of long shadows and pale sunshine down the tree-lined highway.
“I’m waiting,” Teddy said.
Why not? she thought. All things could be said on this blessed afternoon. Nothing was unspeakable between them. They were above the trivia of prudery. She began to speak, first hesitantly, then more easily, as she got into it, of what had happened at the hospital.
She described what the two Negroes were like, lonely and crippled, the only two colored men in the ward, and how Arnold had always been so reserved and gentlemanly and had never called her by her first name, like the other soldiers, and how he read the books she loaned him and seemed so intelligent and sad, with his wound and the girl in Cornwall who had never written to him again. Then she told about the night he found her alone when all the other men were asleep and the conversation they had and how it led up to the proposition, the two men, the eight hundred dollars. “If they’d been white, I’d have reported them to the Colonel,” she said, “but this way …”
Teddy nodded understandingly at the wheel, but said nothing, just drove a little faster down the highway.
“I haven’t been back to the hospital since,” she said. “I just couldn’t. I begged my father to let me go to New York. I couldn’t bear staying in the same town with that man, with his knowing what he said to me. But my father … There’s no arguing with my father. And naturally, I couldn’t tell him why. He’d have gone out to the hospital and killed those two men with his bare hands. And then, this morning—it was such a lovely day—I didn’t go to the bus, I drifted into it. I knew I didn’t want to go to that house, but I guess I wanted to know if they really were there, if there were men who actually acted like that. Even so, even after I got out of the bus, I just waited on the road. I had a Coke, I took a sunbath … I … Maybe I would have gone a bit down the road. Maybe all the way. Just to see. I knew I was safe. I could run away from them easily, even if they saw me. They can hardly move, with their legs …”
The car was slowing down. She had been looking down at her shoes, under the dashboard of the car, as she spoke. Now she glanced up and saw where they were. The gas station. The general store. Nobody in sight.
The car came to a halt at the entrance to the gravel road that led down to the river.
“It was a game,” she said, “a silly, cruel, girl’s game.”
“You’re a liar,” Boylan said.
“What?” She was stunned. It was terribly hot and airless in the car.
“You heard me, pet,” Boylan said. “You’re a liar. It wasn’t any game. You were going to go down there and get laid.”
“Teddy,” she said, gasping, “please … please open the window. I can’t breathe.”
Boylan leaned across her and opened the door on her side. “Go ahead,” he said. “Walk on down, pet. They’re still there. Enjoy yourself. I’m sure it’ll be an experience you’ll cherish all your life.”
“Please, Teddy …” She was beginning to feel very dizzy and his voice faded in her ears and then came up again, harshly.
“Don’t worry about transportation home,” Boylan said. “I’ll wait here for you. I have nothing better to do. It’s Saturday afternoon and all my friends are out of town. Go ahead. You can tell me about it when you come back. I’ll be most interested.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. Her head was expa
nding and contracting and she felt as though she were choking. She stumbled out of the car and threw up by the side of the road in great racking heaves.
Boylan sat immobile at the wheel, staring straight ahead of him. When she was finished and the throat-tearing convulsions had ceased, he said, curtly, “All right, come back in here.”
Depleted and fragile, she crept back into the car, cold sweat on her forehead, holding her hand up to her mouth against the smell.
“Here, pet,” Boylan said kindly. He gave her the large colored silk handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Use this.”
She dabbed at her mouth, wiped the sweat from her face. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“What do you really want to do, pet?” he asked.
“I want to go home,” she whimpered.
“You can’t go home in that condition,” he said.
He started the car.
“Where’re you taking me?”
“My house,” he said.
She was too exhausted to argue and she lay with her head against the back of the seat, her eyes closed, as they drove swiftly south along the highway.
He made love to her early that evening, after she had rinsed her mouth a long time with a cinnamon-flavored mouthwash in his bathroom and had slept soddenly on his bed for two hours. Afterward, silently, he drove her home.
Monday morning, when she came into the office at nine o’clock, there was a long, white, plain envelope on her desk, with her name printed on it and “Personal” scribbled in one corner. She opened the envelope. There were eight one-hundred-dollar bills there.
He must have gotten up at dawn to drive all the way into town and get into the locked factory before anyone appeared for work.
Chapter 3
The classroom was silent, except for the busy scratching of pens on paper. Miss Lenaut was seated at her desk reading, occasionally raising her head to scan the room. She had set a half-hour composition for her pupils to write, subject, “Franco-American Friendship.” As Rudolph bent to his task at his desk toward the rear of the room, he had to admit to himself that Miss Lenaut might be beautiful, and undoubtedly French, but that her imagination left something to be desired.