by Irwin Shaw
“Thanks, no,” Gretchen said. “I think I’ll stay on here a few minutes and have a drink with Bunny. Maybe two drinks.” This was no afternoon to leave Dwyer alone.
“As you say,” Rudolph said. He put the bankbooks and the statements he had been holding in his hand on the table. “If you see Jean, tell her I won’t be back for dinner.”
“I’ll do that,” Gretchen said.
It was no afternoon, she thought, to be forced to speak to Jean Jordache, either.
“I think it might be nicer on deck,” Gretchen said to Dwyer after Rudolph had gone. The saloon, which had until now seemed like a welcoming, cosy room, had been darkened for her into a sinister countinghouse, where lives were entered in ledgers, became symbols, credits and debits, not flesh and blood.
She had gone through it before. When her husband had been killed in the automobile accident there hadn’t been a will, either. Perhaps Colin Burke, who had never hit a man in his life, who had lived surrounded by books, play scripts, screenplays, who had dealt gently and diplomatically with the writers and actors whom he had directed, and often enough hated, had more in common than was apparent on the surface with her barely literate, ruffian brother.
Without a will, there had been confusion about the disposal of Colin’s property. There was an ex-wife who lived on alimony, a mortgaged house, royalties. The lawyers had moved in, the estate tied up for more than a year. Rudy had handled everything then, as he was doing now, as he always did.
“I’ll bring the drinks,” Dwyer was saying. “It’s nice of you to visit with me. The hardest part is being alone. After everything we been through, Tom and me. And now Kate’s gone. Most women would have made trouble aboard. Between two men been friends and partners for so long. Not Kate.” Dwyer’s mouth was quivering, almost imperceptibly. “She’s all right, old Kate, isn’t she?”
“A lot better than all right,” Gretchen said. “Make it a stiff one, Bunny.”
“Whiskey, isn’t it?”
“Plenty of ice, please.” She went forward where the saloon cabin and wheelhouse would hide them from passersby on the quay. She had had enough of friends of Tom and Dwyer and Kate from the other boats in the harbor coming on board with doleful faces to mumble their condolences. Their grief was plain. She was not as sure of her own.
In the bow, with the neat coiled spirals of lines and the polished brass and the bleached, immaculate teak deck, she looked out at the now familiar scene of the crowded harbor which had enchanted her when she saw it the first day: the bobbing masts, the men working slowly and carefully at the million small tasks that seemed to make up the daily routine of those who took their living from the sea. Even now, after all that had happened, she could not help but be affected by its quiet beauty.
Dwyer came up behind her, barefooted, the ice tinkling in the glasses in his hands. He gave her her glass. She raised it to him, smiling ruefully. She hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day and the first mouthful tingled on her tongue. “I don’t usually drink hard stuff,” Dwyer said, “but maybe I ought to learn.” He drank in small sips, thoughtfully savoring the taste and effect. “I tell you,” he said, “your brother Rudy is one hell of a man. A take-hold guy.”
“Yes,” Gretchen said. That was one way of describing him.
“We’d’ve been in a stink of a mess without him.…”
Or no mess at all, Gretchen thought, if he’d kept his wife at home and stayed on the other continent.
“We’d’ve been stolen blind without him,” Dwyer said.
“By whom?”
“Lawyers,” Dwyer said vaguely. “Ships’ brokers, the law. Everybody.”
Here was a man, Gretchen thought, who had been caught at sea in hurricanes, had done his job at the extremity of physical endurance, when a failure would have sent him and those who depended upon him to the bottom, who had survived the company of violent and brutal men, but who felt reduced to helplessness by a slip of paper, a mention of land-based authority. Another race, thought Gretchen, who all her adult life had been surrounded by men who moved among paper, in and out of offices, as surefooted and confident as an Indian in the forest. Her dead brother had belonged to another race, perhaps from birth.
“The one I’m worried about,” Dwyer said, “is Wesley.”
Worried, not for himself, she thought, who saw no need for contracts, who just split up what was left over at the end of the year, who had no legal right, even, at this moment, to be standing on the scrubbed deck of the pretty boat on which he had earned his living for years. “Wesley will be all right,” she said. “Rudy’ll take care of him.”
“He won’t want that,” Dwyer said, drinking. “Wesley. He wanted to be like his father. Sometimes it was funny, watching him, trying to move like his father, talk like his father, live up to his father.” He took a gulp of his drink, made a little grimace, looked thoughtfully at the glass in his hand as if trying to decide whether it contained a friend or an enemy. He sighed, uncertain, then went on. “They used to stand up in the pilothouse all hours of the night; at sea or in port, you could hear them talking below, Wesley asking a question, Tom taking his time answering, long answers. I asked Tom once what the hell they had to talk about so much. Tom laughed. ‘The kid asks me questions about my life and I tell him. I guess he wants to catch up on the years he missed. I guess he wants to know what his old man is all about. I was the same about my father, only he didn’t give me any answers, he gave me a kick in the ass.’ From what Tom let drop,” Dwyer said, careful, understated, “I guess there wasn’t no love lost between them, was there?”
“No,” Gretchen said, “he wasn’t a lovable man, our father. There wasn’t much love in him. If there was, he reserved it for Rudolph.”
Dwyer sighed. “Families,” he said.
“Families,” Gretchen repeated.
“I asked Tom what sort of questions Wesley asked him about him,” Dwyer went on. “‘The usual,’ Tom told me. ‘What I was like when I was a kid in school, what my brother and sister’—that’s you and Rudy—‘were like. How come I became a fighter, then a merchant seaman. When I had my first girl. What the other women I’d had were like, his goddamn mother.…’ I asked Tom if he told the kid the truth. ‘Nothing but,’ Tom said. ‘I’m a modern father. Tell the kids where babies come from, everything.’ He had his own kind of sense of humor, Tom.”
“Those must have been some conversations,” Gretchen said.
“‘Spare the truth and spoil the child,’ Tom said to me once. Every once in a while he sounded as though he’d picked up a little education here and there. Though he wasn’t big on education. Tom had a deep suspicion of education. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this to you,” Dwyer said earnestly, swishing the last of the ice around in his glass, “but he used your brother Rudy as an example. He’d say, ‘Look at Rudy, he had all the education a man’s brain could stand and look where he wound up, dry as an old raisin, a laughingstock after what his drunk wife did in his hometown, out on his ass, sitting there wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life.’”
“I believe I could use another drink, Bunny,” Gretchen said.
“Me, too,” Dwyer said. “I’m beginning to like the taste.” He took her glass and went aft and into the saloon.
Gretchen reflected on what Dwyer had said. It told more about Dwyer than it told about either Tom or Wesley. Tom had been the center of Dwyer’s life, she realized; he probably could reproduce word for word everything that Tom had said to him from beginning to end. If Dwyer were a woman, you’d say he’d been in love with Tom. Even as a man … That girlish mouth, that little peculiarity in the way he used his hands.… Poor Dwyer, she thought, maybe he’s finally going to be the one who’s going to suffer most. She had no real fix on Wesley. He had seemed like a mannerly, healthy boy when they had first come aboard. After his father’s death, he had fallen silent, his face giving nothing away, avoiding them all. Rudy would take care of him, she had told Dwyer. She wondered if
Rudy or anybody else would be capable of it.
Dwyer came back with the whiskey. The first drink was beginning to take effect. She felt dreamy, remote, all problems misty, removed. It was a better way to feel than the way she had been feeling recently. Maybe Jean, with her hidden bottles, knew something useful to know. Gratefully, she took a sip from the new glass.
Dwyer looked different, somehow troubled as he stood there, leaning against the rail, in his clean white jersey and chino pants, the comical protruding teeth that had burdened him with his nickname, chewing on his lip. It was as though he had decided something, something difficult, while he was alone in the saloon pouring the drinks. “Maybe I oughtn’t to say this, Mrs. Burke …”
“Gretchen.”
“Thank you, ma’am. But I feel like I can talk to you. Rudy’s a fine man, I admire him, you couldn’t ask for a better man to have on your side in the kind of situation we’re in now—but he’s not the sort of man a guy like myself can talk to, I mean really talk to—you understand what I mean?”
“Yes,” she said, “I understand.”
“He’s a fine man, like I said,” Dwyer went on, uncomfortable, his mouth fidgeting, “but he’s not like Tom.”
“No, he’s not,” Gretchen said.
“Wesley’s talked to me. He don’t want to have nothing to do with Rudy. Or with his wife. That’s just natural human nature, wouldn’t you say, considering what’s happened?”
“I’d say,” Gretchen said. “Considering what’s happened.”
“If Rudy moves in on the kid—with the best intentions in the world, which I’m sure Rudy has—there’s going to be trouble. Awful trouble. There’s no telling what the kid will do.”
“I agree with you,” Gretchen said. She hadn’t thought about it before but the moment the words had passed Dwyer’s lips she had seen the truth of it. “But what’s to be done? Kate’s not his mother and she has her own problems. You?”
Dwyer laughed sadly. “Me? I don’t know where I’ll be twenty-four hours from now. The only thing I know is ships. Next week I may be sailing to Singapore. A month later to Valparaiso. Anyway, I ain’t made to be anybody’s father.”
“So?”
“I been watching you real careful,” Dwyer said. “Even though you didn’t take no more notice of me than a piece of furniture …”
“Oh, come on now, Bunny,” Gretchen said, guilty because almost the same thought had passed through her mind just a few minutes ago.
“I’m not sore about it and I’m not making any judgments, ma’am …”
“Gretchen,” she said automatically.
“Gretchen,” he repeated dutifully. “But since it happened—and now, staying here with me and letting me gab on—I see a real human being. I’m not saying Rudy ain’t a human being,” Dwyer added hastily, “only he’s not Wesley’s kind of human being. And his wife—” Dwyer stopped.
“Let’s not talk about his wife.”
“If you went up to Wesley and said, fair and square, right out in the open, ‘You come along with me …’ he’d recognize it. He’d see you’re the kind of woman he could take as a mother.”
A new idea in the process of natural conception, Gretchen thought, sons choosing mothers. Would evolution never cease? “I’m not what you might call a model mother,” she said dryly. The thought of being responsible in any way for the lanky, sullen-faced, silent boy with Tom’s wild genes in him frightened her. “No, Bunny, I’m afraid it wouldn’t work out.”
“I thought I’d give it a try,” Dwyer said listlessly. “I just don’t want to see Wesley left on his own. He’s not old enough to be left on his own, no matter what he thinks. There’s an awful lot of commotion ahead for Wesley Jordache.”
She couldn’t help smiling a little at the word “commotion.”
“Pinky Kimball, that’s the engineer on the Vega,” Bunny went on, “he’s the one who saw Mrs. Jordache in the nightclub with the Yugoslav, he tells me Wesley’s been pestering him. He wants Pinky to help find the guy, point him out to him.… I may be wrong, but what I believe, what Pinky thinks, too, is that Wesley wants to get revenge for his father.”
“Oh, God,” Gretchen said.
“You look around you here”—Dwyer made a gesture to take in the quiet harbor, the green hills, the useless fort and the picturesque, obsolete military walls—“and you think, what a nice, peaceful place this is. But the truth is, from Nice to Marseilles you got just about as many thugs as anyplace in the world. What with whores and drugs and smuggling and gambling there’s an awful lot of gun and knife toting in this neighborhood and plenty of guys who’d kill their mother for ten thousand francs, or for nothing, if it came to that. And from what Pinky Kimball’s told me, the fella Tom had the fight with is right in with them. If Wesley goes looking for the fella and finds him there’s no telling what’ll happen to him. At that military school Wesley was at, they had to tear him off other kids in fights, it wasn’t just sparring in a gym, he would’ve killed them if there’d been nobody else around. If he wants Pinky Kimball to point out somebody it’s because there’s a good chance he wants to kill him.”
“Oh, Christ,” Gretchen said. “What’re you trying to say, Bunny?”
“I’m trying to say that no matter what happens you got to get the kid out of here, out of the country. And Rudolph Jordache ain’t the man to do it. Now,” he said, “I’m drunk. I wouldn’t’ve talked like this if I wasn’t drunk. But I mean it. Drunk or sober. I mean every word of it.”
“Bunny,” Gretchen said, “thank you for telling me all this.” But she was sorry she had decided to stay on with him when the others had gone. The problem was not hers, she thought resentfully, and the solution was beyond her grasp. “I’ll talk to my brother,” she said; “see what we can figure out. Do you think it would be a good idea if I waited until Wesley came back and we all three had dinner together?”
“You want me to be honest?”
“Of course.”
“I believe Wesley likes you. In fact I know he does, he’s told me as much,” Dwyer said. “But tonight I don’t think he wants to see any Jordache for dinner. I’ll take him out myself. We got some things to talk about together, private, him and me.”
“Thanks for the drinks,” Gretchen said.
“On the house.”
“Drop me a postcard. From Singapore or Valparaiso or wherever.”
“Sure.” Dwyer laughed, a dry little laugh.
She nursed her drink. She had the feeling that if she left Dwyer alone, he would break down, sit on the deck and weep. She didn’t want Wesley to find him like that when he got back. “I’ll just finish my drink and …”
“You want another one? I’ll go get you one.”
“This’ll do, thanks.”
“I’ve become a whiskey drinker,” Dwyer said. “What do you know about that?” He shook his head. “Do you believe in dreams?” he asked abruptly.
“Sometimes.” She wondered if Dwyer had ever heard of Freud.
“I had a dream last night,” Dwyer said. “I dreamed Tom was laying on a floor—I don’t know where it was—he was just laying on the floor looking dead. I picked him up and I knew I had to carry him someplace. I wasn’t big enough in the dream to carry him in my arms so I laid him across my back. He’s a lot taller than me, so his legs were dragging on the floor, and I put his arms around my neck so I could get a strong hold on him and I began to walk, I don’t know where, someplace I just knew I had to take him. You know how it is in a dream, I was sweating, he was heavy, he was a deadweight around my neck, on my back. Then, all of a sudden, I felt he was getting a hard-on against my ass. I kept on walking. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what to say to a dead man with a hard-on. The hard-on kept getting bigger and bigger. And I felt warm all over. And even in my dream I was ashamed. You know why I was ashamed? Because I wanted it.” He shook his head. He had been talking dreamily, compulsively. He shook his head angrily. “I had to tell someone,” he
said harshly. “Excuse me.”
“That’s all right, Bunny,” Gretchen said softly. “We’re not responsible for our dreams.”
“You can say that, Mrs. Burke,” he said.
This time she did not correct him and tell him to call her Gretchen. She could not bear to look at Dwyer, because she was afraid she could not control what her face would tell him. The best she might manage would be pity and she feared what her pity might do to the man.
She reached out and touched his hand. He gripped it hard, in his tough seaman’s fingers, then in a swift, instinctive movement, brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. He let her hand go and turned away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said brokenly. “It was just … I don’t know … I …”
“You don’t have to say anything, Bunny,” she said gently. Silence now would heal wounds, staunch blood. She felt confused, helpless. What if she said, Take me down to your cabin, make love to me? Womanly thought, the central act. Would her body be a consolation or a rebuke? What would it mean to her? An act of charity, a confirmation of continuing life or a last, unworthy cry of despair? She looked at the neat, muscular back of the small man who had kissed her hand and turned away from her. She almost took a step toward him, then pulled back, a psychic retreat rather than a physical one.
The hand with which she still held the whiskey glass was cold from the melting ice. She put the glass down. “I’ve got to be getting on,” she said. “There are so many things to decide. Tell Wesley to call me if he needs anything.”
“I’ll tell him,” Dwyer said. He wasn’t looking at her, was staring, his mouth quivering, toward the entrance to the port. “Do you want me to go to the café and call a taxi?”
“No, thank you. I think I’ll walk; I could stand a little walk.”
She left him there in the bow of the Clothilde, barefooted and neat in his white jersey, with the two empty glasses.
She walked slowly away from the ships, into the town, up the narrow street, the night looming threateningly ahead of her. She looked into the window of an antique shop. There was a brass ship’s lamp there that attracted her. She would have liked to buy it, take it home with her; it would brighten the corner of a room. Then she remembered she had no real home, had come from an apartment rented for six months in New York; there was no room of hers for a lamp to brighten.