by Irwin Shaw
“Miss Boullard …” Michael turned to the two Frenchwomen. “As women, what’s your position?”
“Oh, Michael!” Laura sounded very irritated.
“Our position …” The younger one spoke, softly, her voice controlled and polite. “I’m afraid we do not have the luxury of choosing our position.”
“Michael,” Laura said, “for God’s sake, go get that stuff.”
“Sure.” Michael shook his head.
“Roy,” Laura said to Johnson, “you shut up, too.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Johnson, smiling. “Should I tell you the latest gossip?”
“Can’t wait,” said Laura, in a good approximation of a completely light, untroubled, garden party voice. Michael and Miss Freemantle started out toward the back of the house.
“Josephine’s got a new one,” Johnson said. “That tall blond boy with the expression. The movie actor, Moran.” Michael stopped when he heard the name and Miss Freemantle nearly bumped into him. “Picked him up at an art gallery, according to her. Weren’t you in a picture with him last year, Laura?”
“Yes,” Laura said. Michael looked at her appraisingly, trying to see if the expression on her face changed as she talked about Moran. Laura’s expression hadn’t changed. “He’s quite a promising actor,” she said. “A little light, but quite intelligent.”
You never knew with women, Michael thought, they would lie their way into heaven without the flicker of an eyelash.
“He’s coming over here,” Johnson said. “Moran. He’s up here for the first production of the summer theatre and I invited him over. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” said Laura, “of course not.” But Michael was watching closely and he could see, for a fleeting instant, a swift tremor cross her face. Then she turned her head and Michael couldn’t tell any more.
Marriage, he thought.
“Mr. John Moran,” the younger Miss Boullard said. Her voice was lively and pleased. “Oh, I’m so excited! I think he’s so wonderful. So masculine,” she said, “such an important thing for an actor.”
“I heard,” Michael said sourly, “he’s a fairy.”
Good God, he thought, women. One moment on the verge of tears because her country was crumbling to the most shameful defeat in its history, the next moment dithering about a pretty, empty-headed movie actor. So masculine!
“He can’t be a fairy,” Johnson said. “Every time I see him he’s with a different girl.”
“Maybe he swings from both sides of the plate,” Michael said. “Ask my wife.” He peered at Laura, feeling ridiculous, but not being able to stop searching her face. “She worked with him.”
“I don’t know,” Laura said, her voice clipped and social. “He’s a Harvard graduate.”
“I’ll ask him,” Michael said, “when he comes. Come on, Miss Freemantle, before my wife nags me again. We have work to do.”
They walked side by side toward the back of the house. The girl was wearing a fresh perfume, and she walked in an easy, unaffected way that made Michael feel suddenly how young she was.
“When were you in Europe?” he asked. He didn’t really care, but he wanted to hear her talk.
“A year ago,” she said, “a little more than a year ago.”
“How was it?”
“Beautiful,” she said. “And terrible. We’ll never be able to help them. No matter what we do.”
“You agree with Johnson,” Michael said. “Is that it?”
“No,” she said. “Johnson just repeats what people tell him to say. He hasn’t got a thought in his head.”
Michael couldn’t help smiling to himself, maliciously.
“He’s very nice,” her voice was rushed a little now and apologetic. Michael thought: Europe has done her a lot of good, she talks so much more softly and agreeably than most American women. “He’s very decent and generous and deep down he means so well … But everything’s so simple for him. If you’ve seen Europe at all, it doesn’t seem that simple. It’s like a person suffering from two diseases. The treatment for one is poison for the other.” She spoke modestly and a little hesitantly. “Johnson thinks all you have to do is prescribe fresh air and public nurseries and strong labor unions and the patient will automatically recover,” Miss Freemantle went on. “He says I’m confused.”
“Everybody who doesn’t agree with the Communists,” Michael said, “is confused. That’s their great strength. They’re so sure of themselves. They always know what they want to do. They may be all wrong, but they act.”
“I’m not so fond of action,” Miss Freemantle said. “I saw a little of it in Austria.”
“You’re living in the wrong year, lady,” Michael said, “you and me, both.” They were at the back of the house now and Miss Freemantle picked up the net and the racquets while Michael hoisted the two poles to his shoulders. They started back to the garden. They walked slowly. Michael felt a tingle of intimacy alone there on the shady side of the house, screened by the rustling tall maples from the rest of the world.
“I have an idea,” he said, “for a new political party, to cure all the ills of the world.”
“I can’t wait to hear,” Miss Freemantle said gravely.
“The Party of the Absolute Truth,” said Michael. “Every time a question comes up … any question … Munich, what to do with left-handed children, the freedom of Madagascar, the price of theatre tickets in New York … the leaders of the party say exactly what they think on that subject. Instead of the way it is now, when everybody knows that nobody ever says what he means on any subject.”
“How big is the membership?”
“One,” Michael said. “Me.”
“Make it two.”
“Joining up?”
“If I may.” Margaret grinned at him.
“Delighted,” Michael said. “Do you think the party’d work?”
“Not for a minute,” she said.
“That’s what I think, too,” Michael said. “Maybe I’ll wait a couple of years.”
They were almost to the corner of the house now, and Michael suddenly hated the thought of going out among all those people, turning the girl over to the distant world of guests and hosts and polite conversation.
“Margaret,” he said.
“Yes?” She stopped and looked at him.
She knows what I’m going to say, Michael thought. Good.
“Margaret,” he said, “may I see you in New York?”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment. She has freckles on her nose, Michael thought.
“Yes,” she said.
“I won’t say anything else,” Michael said softly, “now.”
“The telephone book,” the girl said. “My name’s in the telephone book.”
She turned and walked around the corner of the house, in that precise, straight, graceful walk, carrying the net and the’ racquets, her legs brown and slender under the swaying full skirt. Michael stood there for a moment, trying to make sure his face had fallen back into repose. Then he walked out into the garden after her.
The other guests had come, Tony and Moran and a girl who wore red slacks and a straw hat with a brim nearly two feet wide.
Moran was tall and willowy and had on a dark-blue shirt, open at the collar. He was a glowing brown from the sun and his hair fell boyishly over his eye when he smiled and shook hands with Michael. Why the hell can’t I look like that? Michael thought dully as he felt the firm, manly grip. Actors, he thought.
“Yes,” he heard himself saying, “we’ve met before. I remember. New Year’s Eve. The night Arney did his window act.”
Tony looked strange. When Michael introduced him to Miss Freemantle he barely smiled, and he sat all hunched up, as though he were in pain, his face pale and troubled, his lank, dark hair tumbled uneasily on his high forehead. Tony taught French literature at Rutgers. He was an Italian, although his face was paler and more austere than one expects of Italian faces. Michael had gone to school
with him and had grown increasingly fond of him through the years. He spoke in a shy, delicate voice, hushed and bookish, as though he were always whispering in a library. He was a good friend of the Boullard sisters, and had tea with them two or three times a week, formal and bi-lingual, but today they didn’t even look at each other.
Michael started to put up one of the poles. He pushed it into the lawn as the girl in the red slacks was saying in her high, fashionable voice, “That hotel is just ghastly. One bathroom to the floor and beds you could use for ship-planking and a lot of idiotic cretonne with hordes, really hordes of bugs. And the prices!”
Michael looked at Margaret and shook his head in a loose, mocking movement, and Margaret smiled briefly at him, then dropped her eyes. Michael glanced at Laura. Laura was staring stonily at him. How the hell does she manage it? Michael thought. Never misses anything. If that talent were only put to some useful purpose.
“You’re not doing it right,” Laura said, “the tree’ll interfere.”
“Please,” said Michael, “I’m doing this.”
“All wrong,” said Laura stubbornly.
Michael ignored her and continued working on the pole.
Suddenly the two Misses Boullard stood up, pulling at their gloves, with crisp, identical movements.
“We have had a lovely time,” the younger one said. “Thank you very much. We regret, but we have to leave now.”
Michael stopped work in surprise. “But you just came,” he said.
“It is unfortunate,” the younger Miss Boullard said crisply, “but my sister is suffering from a disastrous headache.”
The two sisters went from person to person, shaking hands. They didn’t shake hands with Tony. They didn’t even look at him, but passed him as though he were not there. Tony looked at them with a strange, quivering expression, incongruous and somehow naked.
“Never mind,” he said, picking up the old-fashioned straw hat he had carried into the garden with him. “Never mind. You don’t have to go, I’ll leave.”
There was a moment of nervous silence and nobody looked at Tony or the two sisters.
“We have enjoyed meeting you so much,” the younger Miss Boullard said coolly to Moran. “We have admired your pictures again and again.”
“Thank you,” Moran said, boyish and charming. “It’s kind of you …”
Actors, Michael thought.
“Stop it!” Tony shouted. His face was white. “For the love of God, Helene, don’t behave this way!”
“There is no need,” the younger Miss Boullard said, “to see us to the gate. We know the way.”
“An explanation is necessary,” Tony said, his voice trembling. “We can’t treat our friends this way.” He turned to Michael, standing embarrassedly next to the flimsy pole for the badminton net. “It’s inconceivable,” Tony said. “Two women I’ve known for ten years. Two supposedly sensible, intelligent women …” The two sisters finally turned and faced Tony, their eyes and mouths frozen in contempt and hatred. “It’s the war, this damned war,” Tony said. “Helene. Rochelle. Please. Be reasonable. Don’t do this to me. I am not entering Paris. I am not killing Frenchmen. I am an American and I love France and I hate Mussolini and I’m your friend …”
“We do not wish to talk to you,” the younger Miss Boullard said, “or to any Italians.” She took her sister’s hand. The two of them bowed slightly to the rest of them, and walked, rustling and elegant in their gloves and garden hats and stiff black dresses, toward the gate at the end of the garden.
The crows were making a lot of noise in the big tree fifty yards away and their cawing struck the ear, harsh and clamorous.
“Come on, Tony,” Michael said, “I’m going to give you a drink.”
Without a word, with his mouth set in a sunken line, Tony followed Michael into the house. He. was still clutching the straw hat with the gaily striped band:
Michael got out two glasses and poured two big shots of whiskey. Silently he gave Tony one of the glasses. Outside, the conversation was starting again, and, over the noise of the crows, Michael heard Moran saying, earnestly. “Aren’t they wonderful types? Right out of a 1925 French movie.”
Tony sipped slowly at his drink, holding on to the stiff, oldfashioned straw hat, his eyes faraway and sorrowful. Michael wanted to go over to him and embrace him, the way he had seen Tony’s brothers embrace each other in times of trouble, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He turned the radio on and took a long sip of his whiskey as the machine warmed up, with a high, irritating crackle.
“You, too, can have lovely white hands,” a soft, persuasive voice was saying. Then there was a click on the radio and a sudden dead silence and a new voice spoke, slightly hoarse, trembling a little. “We have just received a special bulletin,” the voice said. “It has been announced that the Germans have entered Paris. There has been no resistance and the city has not been harmed. Keep tuned to this station for further news.”
An organ, swelling and almost tuneless, took over, playing the sort of music that is described as “light-classical.”
Tony sat down and placed his glass on a table. Michael stared at the radio. He had never been to Paris. He had never seemed to find the time or the money to go abroad, but as he squinted at the little veneer box shaking now with the music of the organ and the echo of the hoarse, troubled voice, he pictured what it must be like in the French city this afternoon. The broad sunny streets, so familiar to the whole world, the cafés, empty now, he supposed, the flashy, rhetorical monuments of old victories shining in the summer light, the Germans marching rigidly in formation, with the noise of their boots clanging against the closed shutters. The picture was probably wrong, he thought. It was silly, but you never thought of German soldiers in twos or threes, or in anything but stiff, marching phalanxes, like rectangular animals. Maybe they were stealing along the streets timidly, their guns ready, peering at the shut windows, dropping to the sidewalks at every noise.
Christ, he thought bitterly, why didn’t I go over there when I had the chance … the summer of ’36, or last spring? You kept postponing things and this is what happened. He thought of the books he had read about Paris. The bubbling 1920s, at the hilarious and desperate end of another war. The gay, doomed, witty expatriates at the famous bars, the pretty girls, the clever, cynical young men with a Pernod in one hand and an American Express check in the other. Now, it was all gone, under the tank-treads, and he had never seen it and probably would never see it.
He looked at Tony. Tony was sitting with his head up, crying. Tony had lived in Paris for two years and again and again he had outlined to Michael what they would do together on vacations there, the little restaurants, the beach on the Marne, the place where they had a superior light wine in carafes on scrubbed wooden tables …
Michael felt the wetness in his own eyes and fought it savagely. Sentimental, he thought, cheap, easy, and sentimental. I was never there. It’s just another city.
“Michael …” It was Laura’s voice. “Michael!” Her voice was insistent and irritating. “Michaell”
Michael finished his drink. He looked at Tony, nearly said something to him, then thought better of it, and left him sitting there. Michael walked slowly out into the garden. Johnson and Moran and Moran’s girl and Miss Freemantle were sitting around stiffly, and you could tell the conversation was all uphill. Michael wished they would go home.
“Michael, darling,” Laura came over to him and held his arms lightly, “are we going to play badminton this summer or wait till 1950?” Then, under her breath, privately and harshly for him, “Come on. Act civilized. You have guests. Don’t leave the whole thing up to me.”
Before Michael could say anything she had turned and was smiling at Johnson.
Michael walked slowly over to the second pole that was lying on the ground. “I don’t know if any of you are interested,” he said, “but Paris has fallen.”
“No!” Moran said. “Incredible!”
Miss Freemantle didn’t say anything. Michael saw her clasp her hands and look down on them.
“Inevitable,” Johnson said gravely. “Anybody could see it coming.”
Michael picked up the second pole and started pushing the sharp end into the ground.
“You’re putting it in the wrong place!” Laura’s voice was high and irritated. “How many times must I tell you it won’t do any good there.” She rushed over to where Michael was standing with the pole and grabbed it from his hands. She had a racquet in her hand and it slapped sharply against his arm. He looked at her stupidly, his hands still out, curved as they were when he was holding the pole. She’s crying, he thought, surprised, what the hell is she crying about?
“Here! It belongs here!” She was shouting now, and banging the sharp end of the pole hysterically into the ground.
Michael strode over to where she was standing and grabbed the pole. He didn’t know why he was doing it. He just knew he couldn’t bear the sight of his wife crazily yelling and slamming the pole into the grass.
“I’m doing this,” he said idiotically. “You keep quiet!”
Laura looked at him, her pretty, soft face churned with hatred. She picked up her arm and threw the badminton racquet at Michael’s head. Michael stared heavily at it as it sailed through the air at him. It seemed to take a long time, arching and flashing against the background of trees and hedge at the end of the garden. He heard a dull, whipping crack, and he saw it drop to his feet before he realized it had hit him over his right eye. The eye began to ache and he could feel blood coming out on his forehead, sticking in his eyebrow. After a moment, some of it dripped down over the eye, warm and opaque. Laura was still standing in the same place, weeping, staring at him, her face still violent and full of hate.
Michael carefully laid the pole down on the grass and turned and walked away. Tony passed him, coming out of the house, but they didn’t say anything to each other.
Michael walked into the living room. The radio was still sending forth the doughy music of the organ. Michael stood against the mantelpiece, staring at his face in the little convex mirror in a gold, heavily worked frame. It distorted his face, making his nose look very long and his forehead and chin receding and pointed. The red splash over his eye seemed small and far away in the mirror. He heard the door open and Laura’s footsteps behind him as she came into the room. She went over to the radio and turned it off.