by Irwin Shaw
Boylan glanced at the mirror. “Ah,” he said, “the orchestra is tuning up.” He took the bottle of champagne from the bucket and came over and sat down on the bed beside Gretchen. He set the bottle on the floor next to him.
Through the mirror, they could see a tall young woman with long blonde hair. Her face was pretty enough, with the pouting, greedy, starlet expression of a spoiled child. But when she threw off the pink, frilly negligee she was wearing, she revealed a magnificent body with long, superb legs. She never even glanced toward the mirror, although the routine must have been familiar to her, and she knew she was being watched. She threw back the covers on the bed and let herself fall back on it, all her movements harmonious and unaffected. She lay there, waiting, content to let hours go past, days, lazily allowing herself to be admired. Everything passed in utter silence. No sound came through the mirror.
“Some more champagne, pet?” Boylan asked. He lifted the bottle.
“No, thank you.” Gretchen found it difficult to speak.
The door opened and a young Negro came into the other room.
Oh, the bastard, Gretchen thought, oh the sick, revengeful bastard. But she didn’t move.
The young Negro said something to the girl on the bed. She waved a little in greeting and smiled a baby-beauty-contest-winner’s smile. Everything happened on the other side of the mirror in pantomime and gave an air of remoteness, of unreality, to the two figures in the other room. It was falsely reassuring, as though nothing serious could happen there.
The Negro was dressed in a navy-blue suit and white shirt and a dotted red bow-tie. He had on sharply pointed light-brown shoes. He had a nice, young, smiling “Yes, suh” kind of face.
“Nellie has a lot of connections in night clubs up in Harlem,” Boylan said as the Negro began to undress, hanging his jacket neatly on the back of a chair. “He’s probably a trumpet player or something in one of the bands, not unwilling to make an extra buck of an evening, entertaining the white folk. A buck for a buck.” He chuckled briefly at his own mot. “You sure you don’t want some more to drink?”
Gretchen didn’t answer. The Negro started to unbutton his pants. She closed her eyes.
When she opened her eyes the man was naked. His body was the color of bronze, with gleaming skin, wide, sloping muscular shoulders, a tapering waist, like an athlete at the height of training. The comparison with the man beside her made her rage.
The Negro moved across the room. The girl opened her arms to receive him. Lightly as a cat, he dropped down onto the long white body. They kissed, and her hands clutched at his back. Then he rolled over and she began to kiss him, first on the throat, then his nipples, slowly and expertly, while her hand caressed his mounting penis. The blonde hair tangled over the coffee-colored gleaming skin, went down lower as the girl licked the tight skin over the flat muscles of the man’s belly and he tautened convulsively.
Gretchen watched, fascinated. She found it beautiful and fitting, a promise to herself that she could not formulate in words. But she could not watch it with Boylan at her side. It was too unjust, filthily unjust, that these two magnificent bodies could be bought by the hour, like animals in a stable, for the pleasure or perversity or vengeance of a man like Boylan.
She stood up, her back to the mirror. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” she said.
“It’s just beginning, pet,” Boylan said mildly. “Look what she’s doing now. After all, this is really for your instruction. You’ll be very popular with the …”
“I’ll see you in the car,” she said, and ran out of the room and down the stairs.
The woman in the white dress was standing near the hall doorway. She said nothing, although she smiled sardonically as she opened the door for Gretchen.
Gretchen went and sat in the car. Boylan came out fifteen minutes later, walking unhurriedly. He got into the car and started the motor. “It’s a pity you didn’t stay,” he said. “They earned their hundred dollars.”
They drove all the way back without a word. It was nearly light when he stopped the car in front of the bakery. “Well,” he said after the hours of silence, “did you learn anything tonight?”
“Yes,” she said. “I must find a younger man. Good night.”
She heard the car turn around as she unlocked the door. As she climbed the stairs, she saw the light streaming from the open door of her parents’ bedroom, across from hers. Her mother was sitting upright on a wooden chair, staring out at the hallway. Gretchen stopped and looked at her mother. Her mother’s eyes were those of a madwoman. It could not be helped. Mother and daughter stared at each other.
“Go to bed,” the mother said. “I’ll call the Works at nine o’clock to say you’re sick, you won’t be in today.”
She went into her room and closed the door. She didn’t lock it because there were no locks on any of the doors in the house. She took down her copy of Shakespeare. The eight one-hundred-dollar bills were no longer between Acts II and III of As You Like It. Still neatly folded in the envelope, they were in the middle of Act V of Macbeth.
Chapter 5
There were no lights on in the Boylan house. Everybody was downtown celebrating. Thomas and Claude could see the rockets and roman candles that arched into the night sky over the river and could hear the booming of the little cannon that was used at the high-school football games when the home team scored a touchdown. It was a clear, warm night and from the vantage point on the hill, Port Philip shimmered brightly, with every light in town turned on.
The Germans had surrendered that morning.
Thomas and Claude had wandered around town with the crowds, watching girls kissing soldiers and sailors in the streets and people bringing out bottles of whiskey. Throughout the day Thomas grew more and more disgusted. Men who had dodged the draft for four years, clerks in uniform who had never been more than a hundred miles away from home, merchants who had made fortunes off the black market, all kissing and yelling and getting drunk as though they, personally, had killed Hitler.
“Slobs,” he had said to Claude, as he watched the celebrants. “I’d like to show ’em.”
“Yeah,” Claude said. “We ought to have a little celebration of our own. Our own private fireworks.” He had been thoughtful after that, not saying anything, as he watched his elders cavorting. He took off his glasses and chewed on an earpiece, a habit of his when he was preparing a coup. Thomas recognized the signs, but braced himself against anything rash. This was no time for picking on soldiers and any kind of fight, even with a civilian, would be a wrong move today.
Finally, Claude had come up with his VE Day plan and Thomas conceded that it was worthy of the occasion.
So there they were on the Boylan hill, with Thomas carrying the can of gasoline and Claude the bag of nails and the hammer and the bundle of rags, making their way cautiously through the underbrush toward a dilapidated greenhouse standing on a bare knoll about five hundred yards from the main house. They had not come the usual way, but had approached the estate on a small dirt road that was on the inland side, away from Port Philip, and led to the rear of the house. They had broken in through a gardener’s gate and left the bike hidden near an abandoned gravel pit outside the estate walls.
They reached the greenhouse on the knoll. Its glass panes were dusty and broken and a musty odor of rotten vegetation came from it. There were some long, dry planks along one side of the sagging structure, and a rusty shovel that they had noticed on other occasions when they had prowled the grounds. When Thomas began to dig, Claude selected two big planks and began to hammer them into a cross. They had perfected their plans during the day and there was no need for words.
When the cross was finished, Claude soaked the boards with gasoline. Then they both lifted it and jammed it into the hole that Thomas had dug. He put dirt around the base of the cross, and stamped it down hard with his feet and the back of the shovel, to keep everything firm. Claude soaked the rags he had been carrying with the rest of the gasol
ine. Everything was ready. The boom of the cannon floated up the hill from the high-school lawn and rockets glared briefly far off in the night sky.
Thomas was calm and deliberate in his movements. As far as he was concerned it wasn’t anything very important that they were doing. Once more, in his own way, he was thumbing his nose at all those grown-up phoneys down there. With the extra pleasure of doing it on that naked prick Boylan’s property. Give them all something to think about, between kisses and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But Claude was all worked up. He was gasping, as though he couldn’t get any air in his lungs, and he was bubbling, almost drooling at the mouth, and he had to keep wiping his glasses off with his handkerchief because they kept clouding up. It was an act of huge significance for Claude, with an uncle who was a priest, and a father who made him go to Mass every Sunday and who lectured him daily on Mortal Sin, keeping away from loose Protestant women, and remaining pure in the eyes of Jesus.
“Okay,” Thomas said softly, stepping back.
Claude’s hands trembled as he struck a match and bent over and touched it to the gasoline-soaked rags at the base of the cross. Then he screamed and began to run, as the rags flared up. His arm was on fire and he ran blindly across the clearing, screaming. Thomas ran after him, yelling to him to stop, but Claude just kept running, crazily. Thomas caught up with him and tackled him, then rolled on Claude’s arm, using his chest, which was protected by his sweater, to smother the flames.
It was over in a moment. Claude lay on his back, moaning, holding his burnt arm, and whimpering, unable to say anything.
Thomas stood up and looked down at his friend. Every drop of sweat on Claude’s face could be clearly made out, in the light of the flaming cross. They had to get out of there fast. People were bound to arrive at any minute. “Get up,” Thomas said. But Claude didn’t move. He rolled a little from side to side, with his eyes staring, but that was all.
“Get up, you stupid son of a bitch.” Thomas shook Claude’s shoulder. Claude looked up at him, his face rigid with fear, dumb. Thomas bent over and picked Claude up and threw him over his shoulder and began to run down off the crown of the hill in the direction of the gardener’s gate, crashing through underbrush, trying not to listen to Claude saying, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, sweet Mother Mary.”
There was a smell Thomas recognized, as he stumbled down the hill under the weight of his friend. It was the smell of broiling meat.
The cannon was still booming down in the town.
II
Axel Jordache rowed slowly out toward the center of the river, feeling the pull of the current. He wasn’t rowing for exercise tonight. He was out on the river to get away from the human race. He had decided to take the night off, the first weekday night he had not worked since 1924. Let his customers eat factory bread tomorrow. After all, the German army only lost once every twenty-seven years.
It was cool on the river, but he was warm enough, in his heavy blue turtle-neck sweater, from his deckhand days on the Lakes. And he had a bottle with him to take the nip out of the air and to drink to the health of the idiots who had once more led Germany to ruin. Jordache was a patriot of no country, but he reserved his hatred for the land in which he was born. It had given him a life-long limp, had cut short his education, had exiled him, and had armed him with an utter contempt for all policies and all politicians, all generals, priests, ministers, presidents, kings, dictators, all conquests and all defeats, all candidates and all parties. He was pleased that Germany had lost the war, but he was not happy that America had won it. He hoped he’d be around twenty-seven years from now, when Germany would lose another war.
He thought of his father, a little, God-fearing, tyrannical man, a clerk in a factory office, who had gone marching off, singing, with a posy of flowers in his rifle barrel, a happy, militant sheep, to be killed at Tannenburg, proud to leave two sons who soon would be fighting for the Vaterland, too, and a wife who had remained a widow less than a year. Then at least she had had the wisdom to marry a lawyer who spent the war managing tenements behind the Alexander Platz in Berlin.
“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles,” Jordache sang mockingly, resting on his oars, letting the waters of the Hudson carry him south, as he lifted the bottle of bourbon to his lips. He toasted the youthful loathing with which he had regarded Germany when he had been demobilized, a cripple among cripples, and which had driven him across the ocean. America was a joke, too, but at least he was alive tonight as were his sons, and the house in which he lived was still standing.
The noise of the little cannon carried across the water and the reflections from the rockets twinkled in the river. Fools, Jordache thought, what’re they celebrating about? They never had it so good in their whole lives. They’d all be selling apples on street corners in five years, they’d be tearing each other to pieces on the lines outside factories waiting for jobs. If they had the brains they were born with they’d all be in the churches tonight praying that the Japanese would hold out for ten years.
Then he saw the fire flare up suddenly on the hill outside the town, a small, clear spurt of flame which quickly defined itself as a cross, burning on the rim of the horizon. He laughed. Business as usual and screw victory. Down with the Catholics, the Niggers, and the Jews, and don’t forget it. Dance tonight and burn tomorrow. America is America. We’re here and we’re telling you what the score really is.
Jordache took another drink, enjoying the spectacle of the flaming cross dominating the town, savoring in advance the mealy-mouthed lamentations that would appear tomorrow in the town’s two newspapers on the subject of the affront to the memory of the brave men of all races and creeds who had died defending the ideals on which America was founded. And the sermons on Sunday! It would almost be worthwhile to go to a church or two to listen to what the holy bastards would say.
If I ever find out who put up that cross, Jordache thought, I’m going to shake their hands.
As he watched, he saw the fire spread. There must have been a building right near the cross, down wind from it. It must have been good and dry, because in no time at all the whole sky was lit up.
In a little while, he heard the bells of the fire engines racing through the streets of the town and up the hill.
Not a bad night, Jordache thought, all things considered.
He took a last drink and then started to row leisurely toward the river bank.
III
Rudolph stood on the steps of the high school and waited for the boys at the cannon to shoot it off. There were hundreds of boys and girls milling around on the lawn, shouting, singing, kissing. Except for the kissing, it was very much like the Saturday nights after the team had won a big football game.
The cannon went off. A huge cheer went up.
Then Rudolph put his trumpet to his lips and began to play, “America.” First the crowd fell silent and the slow music rang out all alone, note by solemn note over their heads. Then they began to sing and in a moment all the voices joined in: “America, America, God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea …”
There was a big cheer after the song was over and he began to play the “Stars and Stripes Forever.” He couldn’t stand still while playing the “Stars and Stripes Forever,” so he began to march around the lawn. People fell in behind him and soon he was leading a parade of boys and girls, first around the lawn and then into the street, marching to the rhythm of his horn. The boys serving the cannon trundled it along at the head of the procession just behind him and at every intersection they stopped and fired it and the boys and girls cheered and grownups along the route applauded and waved flags at them.
Striding at the head of his army, Rudolph played “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along,” and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” and the high-school hymn, and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” as the parade wound its jubilant way through the streets of the town. He led them down toward Vanderhoff Street and stopped in front of the ba
kery and played, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” for his mother’s sake. His mother opened the window upstairs and waved to him and he could see her dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. He ordered the boys at the cannon to give a salute to his mother and they fired the piece and the hundreds of boys and girls roared and his mother wept openly. He wished his mother had combed her hair before opening the window and it was too bad she never took the cigarette out of her mouth. There was no light from the cellar tonight, so he knew his father wasn’t there. He wouldn’t have known what to play for him. It would have been hard to choose the proper selection for a veteran of the German army on this particular night.
He would have liked to go out to the hospital and serenade his sister and her soldiers, but the hospital was too far away. With a last flourish for his mother, he led the parade toward the center of town, playing “Boola-Boola.” Perhaps he would go to Yale when he finished school next year. Nothing was impossible tonight.
He didn’t really decide to do it, but he found himself on the street on which Miss Lenaut lived. He had stood outside the house often enough, hidden in the shadow of a tree across the street, looking up at the lighted window on the second floor which he knew was hers. The light was on now.
He stopped boldly in the middle of the street in front of the house, looking up at the window. The narrow street with its modest two-family dwellings and tiny lawns was packed with his followers. He felt sorry for Miss Lenaut, alone, so far from home, thinking of her friends and relatives joyously flooding the streets of Paris at this moment. He wanted to make amends to the poor woman, show that he forgave her, demonstrate that there were depths to him she had never guessed, that he was more than a dirty little boy with a foul-mouthed German father, who specialized in pornographic drawings. He put the trumpet to his lips and began to play the “Marseillaise.” The complicated, triumphant music, with its memories of flags and battles, of desperation and heroism, rang in the shabby little street, and the boys and girls chanted along with it, without words, because they didn’t know the words. By God, Rudolph thought, no high-school teacher in Port Philip ever had anything like this happen to her before. He played it through straight once, but Miss Lenaut didn’t appear at the window. A girl with a blonde pigtail down her back came out of the house next door and stood near Rudolph, watching him play. Rudolph started all over again, but this time as a tricky solo, playing with the rhythm, improvising, now soft and slow, now brassy and loud. Finally, the window opened. Miss Lenaut stood there, in a dressing gown. She looked down. He couldn’t see the expression on her face. He took a step so that the light of a street-lamp illuminated him clearly and pointed his trumpet directly up at Miss Lenaut and played loud and clear. She had to recognize him. For another moment she listened, without moving. Then she slammed the window down and pulled the blind.