Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  Fitzgerald had done him a service, even though neither he nor Damon had known it at the time. Before the farewell party for Fitzgerald and Antoinetta Bradley, to which Damon had been invited and had not gone, he had received a letter from Fitzgerald, in which his erstwhile friend had written, “Forgive me. I love you like a brother and I am not one to use the word brother loosely. But brothers are fated to screw each other. Consider Cain. Be happy. And the next time we meet I hope we can embrace.”

  Well, this afternoon had been the next time they had met, and if Damon had been a man used to such gestures between men, he would have embraced his old deceitful friend. When Maurice came to dinner the following night, he would remind him of his letter and he would embrace him.

  By this time the whiskey had taken effect and the world was misting over, and for no reason that he could explain to himself he tried to repeat the first verse of “Sailing to Byzantium,” but stumbled over the words and didn’t remember the middle lines and giggled foolishly as he said, with great dignity, to the barman, “The check, please.”

  Under the influence, as Fitzgerald had put it, he left the message-taking machine on the bar. He was not thinking of Zalovsky or Lieutenant Schulter at the moment.

  He never got the chance to embrace Fitzgerald. When he opened the New York Times the next morning, there was Fitzgerald’s photograph on the front page and beside it the story. “Maurice Fitzgerald, the noted actor, whose career spanned more than forty years on the American and later the English stage, suffered a heart attack and collapsed in the restaurant in which he was lunching with the theatrical producer, Mr. Nathan Brown. He was taken to the Lenox Hill Hospital in an ambulance but was pronounced dead on arrival.”

  Damon put the paper down on the table beside his coffee cup and stared vacantly out the window at the house across the street. Then he bowed his head and put his hand over his eyes.

  Sheila, who was sitting across from Damon at the breakfast table, saw by the expression on his face that something was seriously amiss. “What’s the matter, Roger?” she asked anxiously. “Are you all right? You’ve suddenly gone dead pale.”

  “Maurice died just after I saw him yesterday afternoon.”

  “Oh, the poor man,” Sheila said. She reached over and took the newspaper from his side of the table. She glanced at the small headline at the bottom of page one, then read the short article. “He was only sixty-five,” she said.

  “My age,” Damon said. “Time to go.”

  “Don’t say that,” Sheila said sharply.

  Damon felt that he was going to break into uncontrollable sobs. To stem them, he made a hideous joke. “Well,” he said, “he’s missed a good meal tonight.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  WHEN HE GOT TO THE OFFICE, the first thing he did was apologize to Oliver for his outburst the day before.

  “Oh, everybody has the right to show a bit of annoyance once in a while,” Oliver said, embarrassed by the apology. “Sheila seemed so worried, and to tell you the truth, so was I.” He smiled childishly at Damon. “A little temper clears the air.”

  “Well,” Damon said. “Sheila knows everything by now—or at least everything I know, so there’s no need for her to get daily bulletins from the office anymore.” He said it without anger but Oliver understood it.

  “Whatever you say, boss,” he said. “Omerta, as they say in Sicily. The code of silence. But if you ever need my help …”

  “Thanks,” Damon said, “I’ll be all right.”

  Damon looked up the number of Nathan Brown, the producer, and called him. He had to wait a long time. “I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Damon,” the operator said, when he had given his name. She sounded flustered and was close to tears. “This morning here … Everybody in the whole world is calling. You can imagine what it’s like in the office. I’ll give you Mr. Brown.”

  There were some clicks on the wire, then Brown was on. “The last words he spoke were of you,” Brown said. “He told me, “I met a wonderful old friend just before I came to lunch. It’s a lucky omen. Roger Damon, do you know … ?” And before I could answer, he began to sway in his chair in the most frightening way, and before I could reach over to help him, he toppled to the floor. The restaurant suddenly became still as the grave and I guess a waiter called for an ambulance, because I heard the siren in what seemed just a few seconds later, although at that moment, it’s curious. I had no sense of time. The ambulance men did what they could, but it was no use and they carried him off. It’s a terrible loss to all of us … Such a fine and talented man …”

  “Who’s making the funeral arrangements?” On the walk uptown from the office Damon had been able to gain control of his nerves and he spoke unemotionally.

  “When I got back to the office after the hospital, when it was all over,” Brown said, “I took a chance and called his number in London. A woman answered. I didn’t know who it was, if it was his wife or whatever and I asked and she said she was a friend, a very close friend and that she knew Maurice had wanted to be buried in England. I wrote down her name. I’ll give it to you and the telephone number. You might want to call her.”

  “I do,” Damon said. “Who’s making the arrangements?”

  “I am,” Brown said. “Or at least trying to. It’s so complicated.” He sounded weary and uncertain of himself. He had expected the beginning of rehearsals and he had come in as the curtain descended on the last act of closing night. “Would you like to view the body? It’s at the …”

  “No,” said Damon, “I would not like to see the body, thank you.” The knowledge that Maurice was dead was as much as he could bear; he did not want to be confronted with the cold mortal fact. His friend was now just a memory in a long box; he would not mind traveling alone to the lady who answered the phone Of his place in London when he was out of town and who now would take full possession of the man, who while he had been living with her had been possessed by the memory of a woman drowned in the Irish Sea a long time ago. It would be cruel to encumber her with an old American friend who might break down and inadvertently blurt out stories of the dead man’s past that she did not want to hear.

  “Do you know what his religion was?” Mr. Brown was asking.

  “Catholic,” Damon said. “Not much of one. I doubt that he believed in the Virgin Birth.”

  “These days.” Brown sighed, sad at the decline of faith since Moses and Jesus Christ. “Still, I asked the priest at the hospital to administer Extreme Unction. Just in case, you know.”

  “It didn’t do any harm.” Damon didn’t remember Fitzgerald ever having gone to Mass.

  “I thought that it might be fitting if we arranged a kind of memorial service for him in a week or two. In a small theatre. Non-sectarian. He was very popular among his fellow actors, even though most of his career was in England. He did some recordings of Shakespeare for the BBC. Play one of those, have people give small eulogies. As his oldest friend, would you …?”

  “Sorry, no,” Damon said. He remembered Fitzgerald’s speeches the evening when they had tossed for the apartment, but doubted that even the non-sectarian audience assembled in Fitzgerald’s memory would be pleased to hear them.

  “Did he have a favorite hymn? Or poem?”

  “When I knew him, it was ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ His taste may have changed since that time.”

  “Would you consider reading it, Mr. Damon?”

  “No, get an actor. If I read it, he’d turn in his grave.”

  Mr. Brown gave a short, sad laugh. “We’re not used to such modesty in the theatre,” he said. “By the way, do you happen to have a brilliant young playwright among your clients who is just waiting to break upon the scene and needs a producer?”

  Business as usual, even as dead friends are being loaded on planes to fly across an ocean. The show must go on. Scratch entry, prepare for the next race. “Alas, no,” Damon said.

  Mr. Brown sighed. “I’ll have to cancel the prod
uction of the play we were just starting to rehearse. There’s nobody I can think of who could replace him.”

  Good for his tombstone, Damon thought. Here lies Maurice Fitzgerald, Irreplaceable. “Have you got the number of the lady in London handy?”

  “Right here.” Brown gave it to Damon and Damon wrote it on a scratch pad. “There’s a six-hour time difference, you know. I woke her. She sounded amazingly calm when I called her. English phlegm. My wife would be tearing her garments and rending her flesh in similar circumstance. Different customs, racial characteristics. Equal grief, though, I imagine.”

  Damon had only known the man casually and had seen good plays and bad plays he had put on, but now he knew he liked him. He had been faced with unpleasant responsibilities and he had met them. “Let me know,” Damon said, “when the memorial is to take place. I’d like to be there.”

  “Of course,” Brown said. “Well, thank you. It’s a sad day for all of us.”

  Damon felt a wave of fatigue overcome him and he was narcotically drowsy. He looked longingly at the cracked leather couch along one wall of the office, which had been there since the first days of Mr. Gray’s tenure and was used only when there were two or more people in the office for conferences. What hopes had been voiced there, what failures confirmed.

  “Oliver,” he said, “would you please tell Miss Walton not to buzz us? I have to lie down and try to drop off for a few minutes.”

  “Of course,” Oliver said. He looked concerned. Neither of them had ever slept on the couch. “You okay, Roger?”

  “Just a little sleepy. I had a bad night.” Oliver gave the message to Miss Walton and Damon stretched out on the couch. He dozed off immediately, but the sleep was not restful. He had a jumbled and terrifyingly erotic dream. In it he was in a large bed he had never lain on before, with Antoinetta Bradley, young and voluptuous, and Julia Larch, muttering obscenities, both of them making love to him with wicked abandon. Maurice Fitzgerald, clothed and looking as he had looked in the electronic supply shop the day before, stood, glass in hand, leering down at the spectacle before him, and somehow, Damon’s father, smiling and waving invitingly, was on his balustrade, bathed in his golden light.

  When he opened his eyes, Damon was more tired than when he had lain down, shaken by the vision of lust, betrayal and accusation, of the concupiscent interweaving of the dead and the living his subconscious had conjured up in a few seconds of slumber.

  Oliver was looking over worriedly at him from his desk. “That wasn’t much of a sleep,” he said. “You were making the most awful noises.”

  “I was dreaming.” Damon sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I’ll read Freud again tonight.”

  “It sounded as though you were crying …”

  “I wasn’t crying,” Damon said. “Quite the opposite.” He went over to his desk. His legs felt leaden. He pushed the button on his phone as he picked it up and told Miss Walton he was taking calls again.

  “A Mr. Schulter phoned a little while ago,” Miss Walton said. “I told him you were occupied. He left a number.” She gave him the number and he wrote it down. At least, he thought, Schulter wasn’t in the dream. He had been spared that. He didn’t ask Miss Walton to call the number, but dialed it himself. He didn’t want Miss Walton speculating on why he had business to discuss with a detective on the New York City police force. When a man’s voice said, “Homicide” over the phone, he knew he had been right to put the call through himself.

  “Lieutenant Schulter,” he said to the man. “Mr. Damon returning the lieutenant’s call.”

  “Hello, Mr. Damon,” Schulter said. His voice on the phone sounded to Damon’s ear very much like Zalovsky’s. “I have some news for you. We ran your Mr. McVane through the computer and found a McVane who lives near you on West Broadway. It’s probably the same one. He was arrested on the complaint of a kindergarten teacher at a public school in lower Manhattan who didn’t like the way he was always hanging around the kids. When he was searched, a large hunting knife was found strapped to the calf of his leg.”

  “Did he go to jail?”

  “Six months suspended sentence for carrying a concealed weapon,” Schulter said. “We’ll check him out. If we find the knife on him, he’ll serve the time.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant,” Damon said.

  “Now,” said Schulter, “have you got any news for me? Any more calls?”

  “No. I’m still waiting.”

  “Have you made out those lists I asked you to make yet?”

  “I’m working on it,” Damon said.

  “If I was you,” said Schulter, “I wouldn’t take too long about it.”

  “I’ll have them for you in a day or two.”

  Schulter grunted, as though he didn’t believe Damon would have them in a day or two. “I talked to my friend in Gary. He’ll do some … uh … checking. What was the word you used?”

  “Discreet.”

  “That’s it. I just told him to ask around quiet like, not to make a federal case out of it. He says he’s seen the man, Larch, his being a football coach and all. He says he’s well-liked, he’s had three winning seasons in a row.”

  “That makes me feel a lot better,” Damon said, then knew it was a mistake, because Schulter grunted again, more loudly than before. He was not a man, Damon realized, to be amused by irony when it came to the exercise of his profession.

  “By the way,” Schulter said, “did you get that electronic stuff I told you to buy?”

  For the first time, Damon remembered that he had left the package on the bar the afternoon before. “Yes,” he said, “I bought an answering machine.” He didn’t think it advisable to tell the detective that a few hours after he had bought it he had forgotten it in a crowded saloon.

  “What the hell good is that?” Schulter said disgustedly. “You think Mr. Zalovsky is going to leave a message that he intends to blackmail you or shoot you through the head?”

  “The clerk said the only machines he had to tape conversations off a phone give off a beeping tone to warn anybody calling that they’re being taped. What’s the good of that?”

  “One thing I’m glad of, Mr. Damon,” Schulter said, “is that you’re not serving under me in homicide. All right, attach the goddamn machine and we’ll see what happens. When you got those lists, call me.”

  There was an extra-loud click on the phone, as though Schulter had slammed down the phone. Damon looked thoughtfully at the couch, then stood up. “I’ve got to go out for a few minutes,” he said to Oliver. “I forgot something in a bar yesterday and I just remembered it.”

  Once in the open air he was glad the errand was taking him out of the office, away from the morbid temptation of the couch and from the curious, wondering glances Oliver kept sneaking at him when he thought Damon wasn’t noticing.

  It was only eleven o’clock, but the bar already had a morning population of the devoted drinkers of the neighborhood. The barman was the same one who had served him the day before. When Damon asked him if anybody had turned in a package he had forgotten and left on the bar the day before, the barman looked blank. “Hey, Eddie,” he called to the barman who was taking care of the clients at the front end of the saloon, “we find a package yesterday? This gentleman says he left it here—What time about, Mister?”

  “Four, five, something like that,” Damon said.

  “Four, five o’clock, he thinks, Eddie.”

  The second barman shook his head. “Not that I heard,” he said.

  “Not that he heard,” the barman said, as though he thought Damon was deaf. “Sorry. You drinking today?”

  “It sounds like a reasonable idea,” Damon said.

  “What’s your pleasure, Sir?” Now that he saw that Damon had turned into a customer, he became professionally courteous.

  His pleasure, Damon thought, would be to leave this bar, leave this city, go to a distant foreign land where the people who died were all unknown to him, and lie on a beach and listen to the waves whisper
in from thousands of miles of untraveled ocean. “A Scotch and soda,” he said.

  The dead arranged themselves beside him at the quiet morning bar. What is your pleasure, ladies and gentlemen? A slug of Jack Daniel’s with a touch of water from the fountain at Lourdes? Antoinetta, a beaker of sea water, flavored with rue? Maurice, old Shakespeare spouter, some cakes and ale? Mr. Gray, another Cognac spiked with nepenthe to forget your merchant son? Mrs. Larch, although alive and kicking in Gary, Indiana, trespassing in dreams among the tombs, how about a goblet of nectar for a carnal morning on East Thirty-ninth Street or a glass of champagne on Sixth Avenue to celebrate a birthday?

  Damon shook his head, annoyed at the fantasy. Back to the land of the living; McVane with his knife; Sheila pouring coffee at the breakfast table; Elaine, her face lifted, her hair dyed magenta, with her new boy friend; Mrs. Dolger, the royalties coming in, standing over her oven baking pies; Lieutenant Schulter among the murdered Jews, demanding lists of men or women in this real and corporeal world who might conceivably walk into the bar, gun in hand, at any moment, intent on murder.

  Mr. Damon, another Scotch?

  A reasonable idea, Mr. Damon, at this time and place and under these circumstances. Another Scotch, please.

  Just five short days before, he had been a reasonably happy man, in robust health, content in his marriage, comfortable in his home, respected in his profession, fearlessly walking the streets of New York in all weathers and at all times of the day and night, never having spoken to a policeman for anything more than to ask directions, the memory of his dead mellowed by time and the realization that the generations followed each other in inevitable and eternal rhythms. Then a man whom as far as he knew he had never met put a dime in a slot and dialed a number and graves opened. Now he accosted phantoms in broad daylight, learned that a woman he had loved had lain at the bottom of the sea for ten years, her fate unknown to him. He had met a friend who once called him brother, had been reminded of one of the most painful moments of his life, had shaken the friend’s hand in grateful reconciliation, had invited him to a dinner which was never served because the friend had fallen dead between one course and another in a fashionable restaurant minutes after the handshake.