Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

The nurse looked over at Damon for a sign and Damon nodded. I’ll get it down, he thought, if it kills me.

  “We’re buying a new house out in Amagansett,” Mrs. Dolger said. “Our old house is right on the street and it’s terribly noisy, and there’s no place I can really call my own where I can work. And I know I’ll write better with a view of the ocean. When I get it fixed up, you must come out and visit us, a nice long visit. With your wife, of course.”

  “Isn’t Amagansett a long way out? For your husband, I mean. With his office in New York.”

  “He’s retiring at the end of the month. He won’t have to commute anymore. He says there’s no sense in having a rich wife if you don’t know how to use her money.” She giggled girlishly. “Who would ever have thought I’d be supporting a man in this lifetime?”

  The nurse came back with a plate and a knife and fork and Mrs. Dolger cut a vee out of the pie. “I hope it came out all right,” she said worriedly. “You never can tell with pies. They have a mind of their own.”

  The nurse cranked up the back of the bed, and Damon sat up and accepted the plate from Mrs. Dolger. “It looks delicious,” he said, postponing the moment when he would have to put the first morsel in his mouth.

  “Anybody can make a pie look good,” Mrs. Dolger said. “But with pies it’s beauty is as beauty tastes.” She giggled again, appreciating her own cleverness in changing the hackneyed phrase.

  Damon took a deep breath and cut the smallest piece possible from the end of the vee. He put it into his mouth gingerly, as though it were steaming hot. He began to chew methodically. He swallowed. It stayed down. And it was delicious. Until now the only taste that he could endure had been that of pineapple juice. He cut himself a much larger piece of the pie and ate it with relish. The look on Mrs. Dolger’s face as she watched him reminded him of the childlike and blissful expressions on the faces of some of his clients when he had caught them reading a rave review of a book of theirs that had just come out.

  He finished the slab of pie.

  “Bravo,” said the nurse, who had been trying to stuff all kinds of food down his throat for weeks, without success.

  In a sudden rush of affection for Genevieve Dolger he said, “Now I’ll have another piece.” He knew it was the wildest bravado and that he was running the risk of throwing everything up after Mrs. Dolger left the room, but he felt that he had to prove his gratitude to this dear and devoted woman and that mere words would not suffice.

  Mrs. Dolger beamed and blushed at the same time at this tribute to her and cut a larger slab of pie and put it on his plate. He ate it with relish and did not throw up.

  “Tomorrow, Miss Medford,” he said to the nurse, “when you weigh me in the morning, I’ll bet you I’ll be at least two pounds heavier.”

  Miss Medford looked skeptical. When she had weighed him that morning, it was still a skeletal one hundred and thirty-eight pounds.

  Mrs. Dolger left in a flurry of little uncertain movements that did not go with her new hair-do or the smart green tweed suit and alligator bag. “If there’s anything I can do,” she said at the door, “anything, my darling Roger, just ask me.”

  He could tell that she was not just indicating that she would bake him another pie if he requested it and hoped Miss Medford, who was as sharp-eyed as a forward artillery observer, didn’t interpret Mrs. Dolger’s remark as anything more than a generous offer of her services as a baker.

  He was also relieved that Sheila had had to go to Burlington that day, as her mother had recovered sufficiently from her stroke to be taken home and had asked Sheila to help her. Sheila felt that her mother’s return to health was a sign that the storm of ill fortune that she, her mother and Damon had suffered in the last months was finally abating. If Sheila thought this, Damon was happy for her. As for him, the fact that an old lady who had always disapproved of him was able to speak and get out of bed in distant Vermont was hardly an event that presaged any quick deliverance for himself.

  Being able to eat two pieces of apple pie, one after the other, was far more encouraging to him, even though when Miss Medford weighed him the next morning, he still weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  “DOCTOR,” SHEILA WAS sitting in Zinfandel’s office. Across the desk from her Zinfandel was fiddling nervously with a pencil. “Doctor,” she said, “there’s no way we can get him to eat while he’s in this hospital. He ate two pieces of apple pie that a friend brought him a week ago and that’s it, except for that miserable powder we mix with water or milk that you ordered.”

  “It is life-sustaining,” Zinfandel said. “It has all the vitamins, proteins, minerals …”

  “It isn’t sustaining his life,” Sheila said. “He doesn’t want to sustain his life. We’re lucky if we can coax him into taking half a glass of the stuff a day. He wants to go home. That will sustain his life.”

  “I can’t take the responsibility …”

  “I’ll take the responsibility,” Sheila said. Her anger, which she kept in check, but which was evident nonetheless, was working for her. “If necessary,” she said, using the threat that had worked in getting Damon out of the Intensive Care Unit, “I shall go to his lawyer tomorrow and get a writ ordering you to release him in my care.”

  “You’re running the risk of killing your husband,” Zinfandel said, but Sheila knew he was beaten.

  “I accept that risk,” she said.

  “We will have to make a whole series of tests.”

  “I’ll give you three days to make them in,” Sheila said, discarding all niceties of civilized speech. All pretense was now gone; they were antagonists and what was victory for one of them was abject defeat for the other.

  Damon endured the X-rays, the CAT scan and the taking of blood without complaint or any signs of interest. Sheila had not told him of her conversation with Dr. Zinfandel, and he was resigned to the fact that he would never get out of the hospital alive. He still could make no sense of the New York Times and the only nourishment that did not make him gag was still iced pineapple juice. His mind wandered and when Sheila said that she had heard from Manfred Weinstein from California, he wept and said, incoherently, “He made one wrong move in his life,” as though the long throw from shortstop had been his, Damon’s, fault. He remembered that a woman in a green suit had come into his room and given him a piece of apple pie, but he couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Miss Medford forced him to get out of bed from time to time to walk with a cane in the corridor, but once he had looked out of the window at the end of the corridor, the walks no longer interested him, and Miss Medford’s assurance that he was walking more and more strongly each day seemed the most trivial of information.

  He brightened a little when, after two days of X-rays, tests and examinations, Sheila told him that the doctors had given him a provisional clean bill of health.

  Out of superstition, Sheila didn’t tell him why he had to undergo the series of examinations. To avoid disappointing him, she wanted to wait until the very last moment possible before his liberation to break the news. So it was Miss Medford who was the bearer of the glad tidings. “You’re in the paper this morning, Mr. Damon,” Miss Medford said, when she came in to relieve the night nurse. She waved a copy of the Daily News. “In a column. It’s all about a lady who’s written a book and your agency has made a deal for her for billions of dollars or something like that.”

  “Don’t believe anything you read before eight o’clock in the morning,” Damon said. He was still wondering about Dr. Zinfandel’s frigid behavior at six A.M., when he had made his daily visit.

  “It says you’re getting out of the hospital today after your terrible ordeal, the shootout on Fifth Avenue, they call it. They think you were wounded. They don’t mention Dr. Rogarth.” Miss Medford laughed sourly. She was not an admirer of the doctor. In the few instances that he had come in to see Damon while she was on duty, she had behaved as though she had only that momen
t been taken out of the deep-freeze compartment of a refrigerator. “Do you want to read it?”

  “No, thank you,” Damon said. “I’m not partial to fairy tales. How does nonsense like that get into the papers?”

  “In every hospital I’ve ever worked in,” Miss Medford said, “there’s always somebody, a nurse, a doctor, an orderly, a clerk, who knows somebody on the papers—a cousin, a boy friend, somebody who gets them tickets for an opening night in exchange for information … Don’t think this place is an exception.”

  “Has anybody told you that I’m leaving today?”

  “No,” Miss Medford admitted. “Not a word.”

  “Let me go back to sleep,” Damon said. “I was having a nice dream about going to a football game with my father.”

  It was only when Sheila arrived in the room with some fresh shirts and underwear and got him out of bed and began to dress him that he realized what was happening to him and broke down and wept.

  “Oliver’s waiting downstairs,” Sheila said, “with a car he’s rented. We’re going out to the house at Old Lyme. We can’t have you climbing three flights of stairs up to our apartment and neither Oliver nor I can carry you.”

  The nurse insisted on putting him in a wheelchair and pushing him to the emergency entrance of the hospital, although Damon protested, because he wanted to walk out of the place on his own two feet and was sure he was strong enough to do so.

  It was a mild, sunny spring day and Damon took a deep breath of air as he was wheeled through the door, then slowly and with effort, stood up. He saw Oliver standing next to the rented car, smiling. Damon waved jauntily with the cane that the hospital had given him. Everything was in sharp focus—Oliver, the buds on the trees bordering the courtyard, the shape of his own hand holding the cane.

  He felt neither ill nor well, merely vibrantly observant, the bright colors of the outside world making his eyes squint. He heard Miss Medford’s low voice behind him giving last-minute instructions to Sheila about the care of the bedsore that was still a gaping hole on his buttock. He took a step by himself, toward where Oliver was standing. Then he saw a man in a blue windjacket step out from behind a car parked next to Oliver’s. Damon knew who it was, although why he knew was beyond him. The man took two steps toward him. Damon could see his face. It was flabby and round and the color of wet dough, with eyes that looked as though they had been bored into the man’s head by a pneumatic drill. The man took something out of his pocket. It was a pistol and he was pointing it at Damon.

  At last, Damon thought, crazily relieved, I am going to find out.

  A shot rang out. Damon stopped. Somebody screamed. Then the man crumpled to the pavement two feet from where Oliver was standing with the door to the car open.

  Schulter appeared from somewhere with a gun in his hand and two other large men, also holding guns.

  Damon walked calmly toward where Schulter and the other two men were converging on the body lying on the pavement. Schulter kneeled down, put his ear to the man’s chest, then stood up. “He’s dead,” Schulter said. “For once the goddamn newspapers printed something useful. I had a hunch he’d show.” He beamed with pleasure, like a hunter who had just brought down a giant stag whose impressive horns would make a marvelous trophy to put over a fireplace. “Do you know him?”

  Damon looked down at the dead man, the jacket gleaming with blood. The face was peaceful. Damon had never seen it before. He shook his head. “It might be anybody,” he said wonderingly to Sheila, who had her arms around him. “He never delivered his message.”

  He sat in the garden in Old Lyme, looking out at the Sound. It was twilight and lights were beginning to glimmer along the shore and the water had turned to dark steel. Inside the house he could hear Sheila humming to herself as she prepared dinner. He looked forward to it hungrily. Aside from breakfast, lunch and dinner Sheila made eggnogs for him at eleven in the morning and at five in the afternoon and before they went to sleep at night in the rustling old house that creaked like a boat in the wind off the water. He had gained ten pounds in two weeks and he walked around the garden without a cane.

  Schulter had been to visit there. “It’s the damnedest thing,” Schulter had said. “There wasn’t a scrap of identification on him. Not a license or a credit card or anything. Nobody claimed the body. The gun was an old German P38 that some GI probably brought back from the war. It could have passed through twenty hands by now. That’s all we know. Nothing else.” Schulter shook his head wonderingly. “He just came from nowhere. Off the pavement. Out of the sewer. Nowhere,” he said.

  “Nowhere,” Damon said to himself in the twilight. He remembered that he had wanted to be allowed to die in the hospital and had not been fearful when he saw the man with the gun when he had moved out from behind the parked car.

  Sheila came out from the kitchen in an apron, carrying two glasses of whiskey and soda, one for him and one for her. He took his glass as Sheila sat down on the chair beside his and they both looked out at the darkening Sound. He reached out for her hand. “Healer,” he said. “Giver of life.”

  “Don’t get sentimental in your old age,” Sheila said. “I’m just the lady who brings you your whiskey before dinner.”

  “What a nice place to be,” Damon said, as they drank together.

  A Biography of Irwin Shaw

  Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the New Yorker to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.

  Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.

  “Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the Dick Tracy radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play, Bury the Dead. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as The Big Game (1936) and The Talk of the Town (1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the New Yorker, he also penned The Gentle People (1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.

  World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.

  The Young Lions (1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, The Young Lions stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

  In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel Two Weeks in Another Tow
n (1960).

  Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) and Beggerman, Thief (1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries. Nightwork (1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain.

  Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.

  Shaw’s US Army record.

  Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.

  A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.

  A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.

  Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.

  Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.

  Shaw at home with Marian at Chalet Mia, Klosters, in 1958.

  Shaw (center) skiing in Klosters in 1960 with (left to right) Noel Howard (an actor), an unidentified Hollywood producer, Marian Shaw, Jacques Charmoz (a French World War II pilot, cartoonist, and painter), and Jacqueline Tesseron.

  Shaw in Klosters in 1960 with (from left to right) Kathy Parrish, her husband Robert Parrish (an Academy Award–winning film editor and director), and Peter Viertel (a screenwriter, novelist, and Shaw’s coauthor for the play The Survivors). Shaw’s friendship with Viertel started before the war, when they both lived in Malibu.