by Irwin Shaw
“You know I can’t stand organ music!” she said. Her voice was trembling and bitter.
He turned to face her. She stood there in her gay cotton print, pale orange and white, with her midriff showing brown and smooth in the space between the skirt and the halter. She looked very pretty, slender and soft in her fashionable summer dress, like an advertisement for misses’ frocks in Vogue magazine. The bitter, hard-set face, streaked with tears, was incongruous and shocking.
“That’s all,” Michael said. “We’re finished. You know that.”
“Good! Delightful! I couldn’t be more pleased.”
“While we’re at it,” Michael said, “let me tell you that I’m pretty sure about you and Moran, too. I was watching you.”
“Good,” said Laura. “I’m glad you know. Let me put your mind at rest. You’re absolutely right. Anything else?”
“No,” said Michael. “I’ll get the five-o’clock train.”
“And don’t be so goddamn holy!” Laura said. “I know a couple of things about you, too! All those letters telling me how lonely you were in New York without me! You weren’t so damned lonely. I was getting pretty tired of coming back and having all those women look at me, pityingly. And when did you arrange to meet Miss Freemantle? Lunch Tuesday? Shall I go out and tell her your plans are changed? You can meet her tomorrow …” Her face was sharp and rushed and the thin childish face was contorted with misery and anger.
“That’s enough,” Michael said, feeling guilty and hopeless. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Any more questions?” Laura shouted. “No other men you want to ask me about? No other suspects? Shall I write out a list for you?”
Suddenly she broke. She fell onto the couch. A little too gracefully, Michael noted coldly, like an ingenue. She dug her head into the pillow and wept. She looked spent and racked, sobbing on the couch, with her pretty hair spread in a soft fan around her head, like a frail child in a party dress. Michael had a powerful impulse to go over and take her in his arms and say, “Baby, Baby” softly, and comfort her.
He turned and went out to the garden. The guests had moved discreetly to the other end of the garden, away from the house. They were standing in a stiff, uncomfortable group, their bright clothes shining against the deep green background. Michael walked over to them, brushing the back of his hand against the cut over his eye.
“No badminton today,” he said. “I think you’d better leave. The garden party has not been the success of the Pennsylvania summer season.”
“We were just going,” Johnson said, stiffly.
Michael didn’t shake hands with any of them. He stood there, staring past the blurred succession of heads. Miss Freemantle looked at him once, then kept her eyes on the ground as she went past. Michael did not say anything to her. He heard the gate close behind them.
He stood there, on the fresh grass, feeling the sun make the cut over his eye sticky. Overhead the crows were making a metallic racket in the branches. He hated the crows. He walked over to the wall, bent down and carefully selected some smooth, heavy stones. Then he stood up and squinted at the tree, spotting the crows among the foliage. He drew back and threw a stone at three of the birds sitting in a black, loud row. His arm felt limber and powerful, and the stone sang through the branches. He threw another stone, and another, hard and swift, and the birds scrambled off the branches and flapped away, cawing in alarm. Michael threw a stone in a savage arc at the flying birds. They disappeared into the woods. For awhile there was silence in the garden, drowsy and sunny in the late summer afternoon.
CHAPTER SIX
NOAH WAS NERVOUS. This was the first party he had ever given, and he tried to remember what parties looked like in the movies and parties he had read about in books and magazines. Twice he went into the kitchenette to inspect the three dozen ice cubes he and Roger had bought at the drugstore. He looked at his watch again and again, hoping that Roger would get back from Brooklyn with his girl before the guests started to come, because Noah was sure that he would do some awful, gauche thing, just at the moment it was necessary to be relaxed and dignified.
He and Roger Cannon shared a room near Riverside Drive, not far from Columbia University in New York City. It was a large room, and it had a fireplace, although you couldn’t light a fire there, and from the bathroom window, by leaning out only a little, you could see the Hudson River.
After his father’s death, Noah had drifted back across the country. He had always wanted to see New York. There was nothing to moor him in any other place on the face of the earth, and he had been able to find a job in the city two days after he landed there. Then he had met Roger in the Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
It was hard to believe now that there had been a time when he didn’t know Roger, a time when he had wandered the city streets for days without saying a word to anyone, a time when no man was his friend, no woman had looked at him, no street was home, no hour more attractive than any other hour.
He had been standing dreamily in front of the library shelves, staring at the dull-colored rows of books. He had reached up for a volume, he remembered it even now, a book by Yeats, and he had jostled the man next to him, and said “Excuse me.” They had started to talk and had gone out into the rainy street together, and had continued talking. Roger had invited him into a bar on Sixth Avenue and they had had two beers and had agreed before they parted to have dinner together the next night.
Noah had never had any real friends. His shifting, erratic boyhood, spent a few months at a time among abrupt and disinterested strangers, had made it impossible to form any but the most superficial connections. And his stony shyness, reinforced by the conviction that he was a drab, unappealing child, had put him beyond all overtures. Roger was four or five years older than Noah, tall and thin, with a lean, dark, close-cropped head, and he moved with a certain casual air that Noah had always envied in the young men who had gone to the better colleges. Roger hadn’t gone to college, but he was one of those people who seem to be born with confidence in themselves, secure and unshakable. He regarded the world with a kind of sour, dry amusement that Noah was trying now desperately to emulate.
Noah could not understand why, but Roger had seemed to like him. Perhaps, Noah thought, the truth was that Roger had pitied him, alone in the city, in his shabby suit, gawky, uncertain, fiercely shy. At any rate, after they had seen each other two or three times, for drinks in the horrible bars that Roger seemed to like, or for dinner in cheap Italian restaurants, Roger, in his quiet, rather offhand way, had said, “Do you like the place you’re living in?”
“Not much,” Noah had said, honestly. It was a dreary cell in a rooming house on 28th Street, with damp walls and bugs and the toilet pipes roaring above his head.
“I’ve got a big room,” Roger had said. “Two couches. If you don’t mind my playing the piano every once in a while in the middle of the night.”
Gratefully, still astonished that there was anyone in this crowded, busy city who could find profit, of any kind whatsoever, in his friendship, Noah had moved into the large, rundown room near the river. Roger was almost like the phantom friend lonely children invent for themselves in the long, unpeopled stretches of the night. He was easy, gentle, accomplished. He made no demands on anyone and he seemed to take pleasure, in his rambling, unostentatious way, in putting the younger man through a rough kind of education. He talked in a random, probing way, about books, music, painting, politics, women. He had been to France and Italy, and the great names of ancient cities and charming towns sounded intimate and accessible in his slow, rather harsh New England accent. He had dry, sardonic theories about the British Empire and the workings of democracy in the United States, and about modern poetry, and the ballet and the movies and the war. He didn’t seem to have any ambition of his own. He worked, sporadically and not very hard, for a company that took polls for commercial products. He didn’t pay much attention to money, and he wandered from girl to girl with slight
ly bored, good-humored lust. All in all, with his careless, somehow elegant clothes, and his crooked, reserved smile, he was that rare product of modern America, his own man.
He and Noah took rambling walks together along the river, and on the University campus. Roger had found Noah a good job through some friends as a playground director at a settlement house down on the East Side. Noah was making thirty-six dollars a week, more money than he ever had made before, and as they trudged along the quiet pavements late at night, side by side, with the cliffs of Jersey rearing up across the river, and the lights of the boats winking below them, Noah listened, thirsty and delighted, like an eavesdropper on an unsuspected, glowing world, as Roger said, “Then there was this defrocked priest near Antibes who drank a quart of Scotch every afternoon, sitting in the café on the hill, translating Baudelaire …” or “The trouble with American women is they all want to be captain of the team or they won’t play. It comes from putting an inflated value on chastity. If an American woman pretends to be faithful to you, she thinks she has earned the right to chain you to the kitchen stove. It’s better in Europe. Everyone knows everyone else is unchaste, and there is a more normal system of values. Infidelity is a kind of gold standard between the sexes. There is a fixed rate of exchange and you know what things cost you when you go shopping. Personally, I like a submissive woman. All the girls I know say I have a feudal attitude toward women, and maybe they’re right. But I’d rather they submitted to me than have me submit to them. One or the other is bound to happen, and I’m in no rush, I’ll find a proper type eventually …”
Walking beside him, it seemed to Noah that life could not improve on his condition now … being young, at home on the streets of New York, with a pleasant job and thirty-six dollars a week, and a book-crowded room nearly overlooking the river, and a friend like Roger, urbane, thoughtful, full of strange information. The only thing lacking was a girl, and Roger had decided to fix even that. That was why they had planned the party.
Roger had had a good time all one evening casting about among his old address books for likely candidates for Noah. And now, tonight, they were coming, six of them, besides the girl that Roger was bringing himself. There were going to be some other men, of course, but Roger had slyly selected funny-looking ones or slow-witted ones among his friends, so that the competition would not be too severe. As Noah looked around the warm, lamp-lit room, with cut flowers in vases and a print by Braque on the wall, and the bottles and the glasses shining like a vision from a better world on the desk, he knew, with delicious, fearful certainty, that tonight he would finally find himself a girl.
Noah smiled as he heard the key in the door because now he would not have to face the ordeal of greeting the first guests by himself. The door opened and Roger came in. Roger had his girl with him, and Noah took her coat and hung it up without accident, not tripping over anything or wrenching the girl’s arm. He smiled to himself inside the closet as he heard the girl saying to Roger, “What a nice room. It looks as though there hasn’t been a woman in here since 1750.”
Noah came back into the room. Roger was in the kitchenette getting some ice and the girl was standing in front of the picture on the wall, with her back to Noah. Roger was singing softly over the ice behind the screen, his nasal voice bumbling along on a song he sang over and over again, whose words went, “You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy. But, honey, are you makin’ any money, That’s all I want to know.”
The girl had on a plum-colored dress with a full skirt that caught the lamplight. She was standing, very serious and at home, with her back to the room, in front of the fireplace. She had pretty, rather heavy legs, and a narrow, graceful waist. Her hair was pulled to the back in a severe, feminine knot, like a pretty schoolteacher in the movies. The sight of her, the sound of ice, his friend’s silly, good-humored song from behind the screen, made the room, the evening, the world, seem wonderfully domestic and dear and melancholy to Noah. Then the girl turned around. Noah had been too busy and excited really to look at her when she first came in and he didn’t even remember what her name was. Seeing her now was like looking through a glass that is suddenly brought to focus.
She had a dark, pointed face and grave eyes. Somehow, as he looked at her, Noah felt that he had been hit, physically, by something solid and numbing. He had never felt anything like this before. He felt guilty and feverish and absurd.
Her name, Noah discovered later, was Hope Plowman, and she had come down from a small town in Vermont two years before. She lived in Brooklyn now with an aunt She had a direct, serious way of talking, and she didn’t wear any perfume and she worked as a secretary to a man who made printing machinery in a small factory near Canal Street. Noah felt a little irritated and foolish through the night, as he found out all these things, because it was somehow simple-minded and unworldly to be so riotously overcome by a rather ordinary smalltown Yankee girl who worked prosaically as a stenographer in a dull office, and who lived in Brooklyn. Like other shy, bookish young men, with their hearts formed in the library, and romance blooming only out of the volumes of poetry stuck in their overcoat pockets, it was impossible to conceive of Isolde taking the Brighton Express, Beatrice at the Automat. No, he thought, as he greeted the new guests and helped with the drinks, no, I am not going to let this happen. Most of all, she was Roger’s girl, and even if any girl would desert that handsome, superior man, for an awkward craggy boy like himself, it was inconceivable that he, Noah, could repay the generous acts of friendships even by the hidden duplicity of unspoken desire.
But the other guests, men and women alike, were merely blurs, and he moved dreamlike and tortured among them, staring hungrily at the girl, the memory of her every calm, controlled movement burned on his brain, the crisp music of her every inflection singing with a terrible mixture of shame and jubilance in his ears. He felt like a soldier caught in his first battle, like an heir who has just been left a million dollars, like a believer who has just been excommunicated, like a tenor who has just sung Tristan for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera House. He felt like a man who has just been found in a hotel bedroom with the wife of his best friend, like a General leading his troops into a captured city, like Nobel prize winners, like condemned criminals being led to the gallows, like heavyweight champions who have just knocked out all contenders, like a swimmer drowning in the middle of the night, thirty miles from shore in a cold ocean, like a scientist who has just discovered the serum which will make the race immortal …
“Miss Plowman,” he said, “would you like a drink?”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t drink.”
And he went off into a corner to ponder this and discover whether this was good or bad, hopeful or not.
“Miss Plowman,” he said, later, “have you known Roger long?”
“Oh, yes. Nearly a year.”
Nearly a year! No hope, no hope.
“He’s told me a lot about you.” The direct, dark gaze, the soft, definite voice.
“What did he say?” How lame, how hungry, how hopeless.
“He likes you very much …”
Treachery, treachery … Friend who snatched the lost waif among the library shelves, who fed and sheltered and loved … Friend now, all thoughtless and laughing, at the center of the bright group, fingering the piano lightly, singing in the pleasant, intelligent voice, “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho …”
“He said,” once more the troubling, dangerous voice …“He said, when you finally woke up you would be a wonderful man …”
Ah, worse and worse, the thief armed with his friend’s guarantee, the adulterer given the key to the wife’s apartment by the trusting husband.
Noah stared blankly and wearily at the girl. Unreasonably, he hated her. At eight that evening he had been a happy man, secure and hopeful, with friend and home and job, with the past clean behind him, the future shining ahead. At nine he was a bleeding fugitive in an endless
swamp, with the dogs baying at him, and a roster of crimes dark against his name on the books of the country. And she was the cause of it, sitting there, demure, falsely candid, pretending she had done nothing, knew nothing, sensed nothing. A little, unpretentious, rock-farm hill girl, who probably sat on her boss’s knee in the office of the printing-machinery factory near Canal Street, to take dictation.
“… and the walls came tumbling down …” Roger’s voice and the strong chords of the old piano against the wall filled the room.
Noah stared wildly away from the girl. There were six other girls in the room, young, with fair complexions and glowing hair, with soft bodies and sweet, attentive voices … They had been brought here for him to choose from and they had smiled at him, full of kindness and invitation. And now, for all of him, they might as well have been six tailor’s dummies in a closed store, six numbers on a page, six doorknobs. It could only happen to him, he thought. It was the pattern of his life, grotesque, savagely humorous, essentially tragic.
No, he thought, I will put this away from me. If it shatters me, if I collapse from it, if I never touch a woman as long as I live. But he could not bear to be in the same room with her. He went over to the closet in which his clothes hung side by side with Roger’s, and got his hat. He would go out and walk around until the party had broken up, the merrymakers dispersed, the piano silent, the girl safe with her aunt beyond the bridge in Brooklyn. His hat was next to Roger’s on the shelf and he looked with guilt and tenderness at the rakishly creased old brown felt. Luckily, most of the guests were grouped around the piano and he got to the door unobserved; he would make up some excuse for Roger later. But the girl saw him. She was sitting talking to one of the other girls, facing the door, and an expression of quiet inquiry came into her face as she looked at Noah, standing at the door, taking one last, despairing look at her. She stood up and walked over to him. The rustle of her dress was like artillery in his ears.