Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  “I hope so.” She sounded doubtful. “Look,” she said, “I can’t stay away from the school for more than a couple of days. Stay where you are or wander around anywhere you please. Just don’t go back to New York until I can get there, too. I’ve been thinking—the Easter holidays start next week and we can go out to Old Lyme and camp out and relax together and not see a soul for ten days or so. We can both use the vacation and if there’s anything drastic with mother, Burlington’s not all that far away. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea to you?”

  “Well …” He started to say something about work, but Sheila interrupted him.

  “Think about it,” Sheila said. “You don’t have to decide now. Call me tomorrow morning and we’ll talk about it some more. I promised the doctor I’d be at the hospital before ten. Please, please take care of yourself, my darling. And leave your dead in peace.”

  First he drove toward the house where he was born and where he had lived until he had gone off to college. As he turned into the familiar street, he slowed down as he passed the old Weinstein house. Like the other houses set behind their neat lawns, all of them clapboard or shingle, it was modest and old-fashioned, with a comfortable front porch and Victorian scrollwork for decoration. But it had special associations for Damon. Manfred Weinstein, who was the same age as himself, had been his closest friend from the age often until they had separated to go to different colleges. Manfred had been one of the best athletes in town, had been the star shortstop for the high school baseball team. He had been chubby and deceptively soft-looking, with tow hair and a snub nose and a pink, childish complexion that even the afternoons in the sun never turned tan. His voice had been deep and incongruously loud for his age and during the games you could hear him over all the noise of the crowd as he encouraged the pitcher. He was a fair enough student, with a taste for reading, mostly Dumas and Jack London, but fanatically devoted to improving himself as a baseball player. Like a good friend, Damon, who was not much of an athlete himself, spent long afternoons hitting grounders to him, which Weinstein gobbled up gracefully until they were the only figures moving on the deserted playground as dusk settled over the town. Among his friends it was confidently predicted that Weinstein would end up in the big leagues. Now Damon realized that he had never seen Weinstein’s name in any newspaper’s box score of a National or American League game and wondered what had gone wrong.

  Weinstein had gone to Arnold College in New Haven, which prepared students for careers as teachers of physical training. Damon, already planning to assault Broadway as an actor, had gone to Carnegie Tech, which had a highly regarded dramatic school. In the summers, Manfred had played in the twilight league on Cape Cod, which drew its players from the New England colleges, while Damon had gotten jobs in various theatres on the straw-hat summer circuits.

  When the war broke out, Manfred had joined the Marines and Damon had chosen the Merchant Marine because his family was already in financial straits and the money he could earn as a merchant seaman was necessary to keep his father and mother afloat. When he came back to Ford’s Junction for his father’s funeral, Damon heard that Manfred had been badly wounded on Okinawa and was still being treated in a naval hospital.

  Looking at the Weinstein house as he slowly drove past, Damon felt a pang of regret that the close boyhood friendship had, because of the accidents of time and geography, been allowed to slip away. He didn’t know what Manfred had done with his life or even whether he was alive or dead and he wondered if they would recognize each other if they crossed each other in the street.

  The swift young shortstop was not the only inhabitant of the house he had been interested in. Manfred’s sister Elsie, who was one year older than her brother, had been the first girl Damon had gone to bed with, when she was eighteen and Damon was seventeen. She had been a sweet faced, blond, blue-eyed girl, a little chubby like her brother, but attractively so. She was a shy, romantic girl, even though her slightly curved, slender longish nose gave her an exotic, almost stern beauty, and she seemed older than she was. She was one of the best students in the school, a devourer of books, and helped her brother and Damon prepare for their exams in history, which was her strongest subject. She had confided to Damon that she wanted to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and travel through Europe to see the places she had read about—Agincourt, the Field of Gold, Napoleon’s battlefields, the church in San Juan de Luz where Henri IV had married the princess of Spain and where Velazquez had died. Damon had had a crush on her since he was ten years old and was dazzled by his luck when she had kissed him for the first time and later on had allowed him to make love to her.

  As was Damon, she had been a virgin and their affair had been clumsy and brief. It had been brief because after the second time they made love, hastily, because they were in his room and he didn’t know when his parents would return, Damon, inexperienced and shy as he was, with only the haziest notions of what precautions Elsie was taking, had asked what she would do if she found she was pregnant.

  “I’ll kill myself,” she had said calmly.

  Thinking back on that afternoon, Damon reflected about the drastic change in customs and standards of adolescent behavior that had swept America since his own high school days. He had no children of his own if you excepted Julia Larch’s son, but among his friends with teenage children he had heard of how boys not yet old enough to vote had brought girls into the house for casual weekends with their parents present and of mothers who had put their daughters on the pill on their fifteenth birthday. He didn’t know whether the change had been for the better or worse, whether love showed a profit or a loss in the long run because of it, but he doubted if any eighteen-year-old girl of today would announce her decision to kill herself because of a pregnancy.

  At any rate, terrified by what she had said, he had never touched Elsie again, and after she had graduated from high school in the class ahead of his own and had left town for a summer job in Boston and then college, they had not seen each other again. Manfred had never indicated that he had known of the affair between his best friend and his sister and Damon wondered now, as he drove past the house which he had known as well as his own, whether Manfred had kept quiet out of ignorance or tact.

  Used as he was to the constant altering of the landscapes and quality of the neighborhoods of New York City, since the war, Damon marveled at how this one street had remained the same, peaceful, with the air of having one hundred years before been exactly as it looked today and would probably look for a hundred years to come. The only difference was that the trees had grown enormously along the curbs since he had been there last, but as he approached his house, it was just about as he remembered it, except that the last time he had seen it, on the occasion of his father’s funeral, it had been painted white and now it was dark brown with red shutters. His father had left it to him in his will, but the mortgages on it were so high that Damon, who at that time was still trying to gain a modest foothold in the theatre in New York, knew that even with the income he might have gotten if he managed to rent it out, he couldn’t keep up the yearly payments. He had sold it and with the money from the sale, had been lucky to pay off his father’s last debts.

  The years before his father had died had not been prosperous ones for the sick old man and his attempts to keep his toy-manufacturing business alive in nearby New Haven, to which he had commuted daily for so many years, had drained whatever resources he had in reserve. When he died, he was penniless.

  Damon stopped the car and got out and looked at the house. The lawn was well-kept and there was a baby carriage and a bicycle on the front porch.

  Every two years he had helped his father whitewash the entire house and the shed in the back garden which his father used to fashion the toys he was designing, small models of horse-drawn carts, all the harness meticulously cut to scale in leather, with tiny brass buckles, spring-driven metal models of old-fashioned locomotives, with coal tenders and coaches, small hobby horses on rockers, tin soldier
s in Revolutionary and Civil War uniforms, complete with rifles and horse-drawn artillery.

  His father had been deft with his hands and modest in his ambitions and if at the end, he had told Damon on his deathbed that he had wasted his life in footling tinkering, Damon remembered the hours he had spent, whistling contentedly in the shed, carving wood and delicately painting miniature uniforms.

  The inside of the house had always been as geometrically neat as its exterior and the grounds about it. His mother had been a scrupulous housekeeper and even though she had spent three afternoons a week in the small office next to the workroom in New Haven going over the business’s books, checking invoices and sending out letters, the house was always sweet-smelling and immaculate. Remembering the crisp New England order in which he had been reared, Damon smiled, despite himself, at the thought of the horror which his mother would have felt if she saw the dusty clutter of books and records into which her son had subsided in his later years.

  He suppressed the desire to get out of the car and knock on the front door, introduce himself and see who lived there now and perhaps get a glimpse of the interior. Nostalgia could too easily dissolve into masochism and he was not a masochist. Just as he was about to start the car, the front door opened and a dark-haired boy came out. He was wearing corduroy pants and a sweatshirt and was carrying a baseball glove. Damon stared hard at him. It could have been the same boy he had seen darting among the taxis on Sixth Avenue, or the twin of the boy in the photographic album who had been himself. The boy wheeled the bicycle off the porch, swung himself onto it, glanced curiously at Damon, sitting in the parked car, and pedaled off.

  Damon shook his head, impatient with himself and the tricks time and memory were playing on him. He started the motor and turned the car back in the direction from which he had come.

  Thomas Wolfe had been inaccurate when he wrote that you can’t go home again, Damon thought. Wolfe had gone home again, but after his death. You could go home again, but it was wiser not to.

  As he drove slowly up the street, he saw a man of about his age spading a flower border in front of the Weinstein house. The man had thinning gray hair and the babyish chubbiness had become hard fat around the middle, but Damon recognized him, even at a distance of twenty yards. It was Manfred Weinstein.

  Damon hesitated before putting on the brakes. After all the years what could they say to each other? Had the grown men betrayed the unspoken promises that had bound two boys together? Would they both be embarrassed, ashamed, disappointed with each other? They had parted casually the day after the graduation ceremonies at the high school. “I’ll be seeing you around. Keep in touch. Good luck.” “Yep.” What had seemed on the surface to be a temporary summer parting had widened, deepened, had become a gulf, a geological fault, an abyss. There were some abysses that were perhaps better left unspanned.

  Damon had his foot tentatively on the brake pedal. He took it off, started to accelerate. But it was too late.

  “Holy man!” It was Manfred Weinstein striding toward him, still holding the spade. “Roger Damon!”

  Damon got out of the car and for a moment they stood motionless, staring at each other, grinning foolishly. Then they shook hands. Weinstein dropped the spade and they embraced, something they had never done as boys and young men.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Weinstein asked.

  “I came to visit you,” Damon said.

  “Still the same fucking old liar,” Weinstein said. His voice was still deep and loud and Damon hoped that there were no easily shocked neighbors who could hear how Weinstein greeted his boyhood companion. “I got some coffee on the stove. Come on in. We have a lot of time to catch up on, you and me.”

  They sat at the scrubbed wood table in the kitchen of the Weinstein house, where Weinstein’s mother, a tall, plump woman, whom Damon remembered as always wearing a starched blue apron trimmed with white lace, had fed them milk and cookies when they came in after playing ball in the afternoon. Now they drank coffee out of mugs from a pot that Manfred Weinstein kept warm on the back of the stove. He lived alone. While Weinstein was in the hospital after the war, his father had sold the clothing store in which Manfred had worked after his graduation from college.

  Damon interrupted the flow of reminiscence. “What were you doing selling neckties and tuxedos?” he asked. “I thought you were going to be a ball player.”

  “So did I,” Weinstein said ruefully. “I was being scouted by the old Brooklyn Dodgers and the Red Sox. Then I did something foolish.”

  “That wasn’t like you.”

  “That’s what you think. I could build a skyscraper out of my mistakes. Like everybody else, I guess.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was playing in my last season at Arnold. We were leading seven to three and the game was on ice and everybody was coasting except your gung-ho friend Manfred. There was a ball hit way off to my right but too far for the third baseman, and I dove for it and managed to grab it, but I was way off balance and it was a long hard throw to first. I should have just held the ball and let the guy have his puny infield hit, it didn’t mean anything. Instead, like an idiot, I made the throw across my body and just as I let it go I felt and heard something snap in my shoulder. There went the career. In one second.” He sighed. “Who needs a shortstop with a dead arm? Instead of playing in the World Series I wound up, as you said, selling neckties and tuxedos to snot-nosed Yalies. As my father put it, a man has to eat. He has full of wise sayings like that.” Weinstein grinned. “Anyway, I’m glad he’s alive, down in Miami, nearly ninety years old, a gay widower among the geriatric ladies, with my mother safely gone, still sending me homely nuggets of philosophy from the Sun Belt. I married after the war, a pretty good marriage as marriages go. My wife was a good housekeeper and she didn’t nag, or I don’t remember now if she did and she gave me two nice children, a boy and a girl, they’re grown people now, working in California. Let’s change the subject,” he said brusquely. “I haven’t even thought about that one second in New Haven for years. I know about you. I read that piece in the newspapers about you. You’re riding high now, aren’t you?”

  “Medium high,” Damon said. “A good wife. The second. One mistake and I was careful after that. No children.” Then, remembering Julia Larch, “That I know of.”

  “I should have come down and visited you after that piece,” Weinstein said.

  “I wish you had. For old times’ sake.”

  “Old times. Over in a second.” Weinstein closed his eyes momentarily, then waved his hand as if to sweep away imaginary cobwebs. “I heard that when you came to town for your father’s funeral,” he said, “you asked about me and I thought about writing you, but I was too busy trying to keep alive to do much of anything else.”

  “How long were you in the hospital?”

  “Two years.”

  “Good God.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Weinstein said. “Nobody was shooting at me and I educated myself. I had nothing else to do and I read everything I could get my hands on.”

  Damon thought he looked old, the hard lines of his face sagging. The jaunty shortstop was long gone. “The Marines …” Weinstein sounded rueful. “I joined the first week after Pearl Harbor. I was selling suits in my father’s shop in New Haven and I didn’t think it was the place to be when Americans were going to be fighting the Nazis.” He smiled bitterly. “I never saw a German. All I saw was a lot of little yellow faces. The Jewish thing …” He made a grimace. “Showing the goyim that Jews have balls, even if it means getting them shot off. Maybe the Israelis have taken some of the heat off.” He shrugged. “You never know whether you’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing. I made gunnery sergeant. There’s a bronze star around the house somewhere. I think I got it for being alive.” He laughed softly. “When I finally got out of the hospital, being a clerk in somebody else’s men’s shop didn’t have much attraction for me. A friend of mine from my outfit was a cop on
the New Haven police force and he talked me into joining. It wasn’t a bad life. It had a special meaning for me. I don’t want to sound like George Washington or a retired admiral with blood in his eye, but you fight for your country in different ways. I may be sentimental, but when you put your life on the line, you accept certain responsibilities. If this country’s going to fail, it’ll be through lawlessness. Mugging in broad daylight, race riots, assassinations, politicians stealing left and right, whole neighborhoods going up in flames for the insurance, kids playing cowboys and Indians with Saturday night specials, buying dope by the pound, then screaming about the draft, the National Rifle Association making sure that every nervous idiot has an arsenal stashed away at home, people driving cars as though they’re Apache Indians on the warpath.” He was growling now, the sound booming through the old house. “I was on the traffic detail for a while and when I stopped people when they were going ninety miles an hour through town and reminded them that Connecticut had a fifty-five mile an hour speed limit, they looked at me as if I’d just told them their mother was a whore and they did everything but lynch the governor because they thought the speed limit was his idea and that he’d insulted the honor of the state because suddenly it had the lowest accident rate in America.” He laughed at himself. “I sound like a preacher at a cotton-pickers’ revival meeting. But if you don’t believe in law, you don’t believe in anything. I saw plenty of crooked cops, but that doesn’t change the idea. Besides, the job appealed to me. Maybe I’d just gotten sort of used to being around guns and tough men …” He spoke almost apologetically. “Anyway, I retired five years ago, not a bad pension, detective lieutenant, it’s all over now, good, bad or indifferent. I work in the garden, play some golf, umpire Little League games, go over to the high school field to try to show their shortstops how to go into the hole for deep ground balls, once in a while I visit the kids in California. I rattle around in this old house, it’s miles too big for me, but this is a nice town and it’s the only home I’ve ever known and I hate the idea of giving it up …” He laughed softly again. “Well, there it is, Roger, the two-minute life of Manfred Weinstein. Not much there for a book, is there?”