by Irwin Shaw
“I don’t like to burden you, but the problem has become too much for me. In the last few months, in Chicago, Steve has fallen under the spell of a terrible girl by the name of McCarthy, and now he says he is going to marry her. The girl is twenty years old, a nobody, from an absolutely nondescript family, without a penny to their name. As you can tell from the name, she is Irish, and I suppose was born a Catholic, although like Steve, and all his other friends, she just laughs ironically when the subject of religion comes up. Steve, as you know, is completely dependent upon the goodness of William for whatever money he gets, outside the bare minimum you send for his tuition and board and lodging at the University. I just can’t see William handing over enough money to a boy, who is, after all not his son, and who has openly showed his scorn of him since he was five years old, to set up housekeeping with a silly little coed he picked up at a dance somewhere, and I must say, I don’t blame him.”
Once more Jack found himself puzzling over the rich confusion of his first wife’s syntax, although the general idea was all too clear.
“What’s worse,” the letter went on, “the girl is one of those rabid little intellectuals of the kind we both knew in the thirties, full of half-baked provocative ideas and rebellious opposition to authority. She has infected Steve and has led him into some very dangerous activities. He is the president of some sort of group which is constantly agitating against H-bomb experiments and signing all sorts of petitions all the time and generally making himself very unpopular with the authorities. Until this came up, Steve was doing marvelously, as you know, at the University, and was practically assured a research fellowship after he had taken his Ph.D. Now, I understand, they are beginning to have doubts about him and he has been warned once or twice by older men in the department, although you can guess how he responded to that, especially with that girl egging him on. What’s more, as a straight A student, he’s been deferred from the draft until now, as a matter of course, but he’s threatening to list himself as a Conscientious Objector. You can just about imagine what that will do to him. He’s at a crucial point in his life now and if he persists in marrying this girl and in his idiotic political activities, it will mean absolute ruin for him.
“I don’t know what you can do, but if you have any love left for your son or any desire to see him happy, you will at least try to do something. Even a letter might help, coming from you.
“I’m sorry that the first communication from me in so many years is such a disturbing one, but I don’t know where else to turn.
As ever,
Julia.”
Jack held the letter in his hand, watching the pages vibrate gently with the throbbing of the plane. As ever, he thought. What does she mean by that? As ever false, as ever foolish, as ever incompetent, as ever pretentious? If the “as ever” was an accurate description of herself, it was no wonder Steve didn’t listen to her.
Jack asked the stewardess for some stationery and, when it came, set about composing a letter to his son. “Dear Steve,” he wrote, then hesitated, as a vision of his son’s cold, narrow, intelligent young face interposed between him and the paper on his knees. Steve had visited him and Hélène the summer before, handsome, aloof, taciturn, observant. He had spoken surprisingly good French for a boy who had never been in France before, he had been polite with them all, had drunk, Jack noticed gratefully, very little, had explained in simple terms what his thesis was going to be about, had made Jack vaguely uncomfortable, and then had disappeared toward Italy with two friends from Chicago. It had been an edgy time, although there had been no incidents, and Jack had been relieved when Steve had suddenly announced his departure. Jack had not been able to love the boy, as, rather foolishly, he had hoped he might, and Steve himself had been merely proper, not loving. He had gone off toward Italy leaving Jack with an uneasy sense of guilt, of opportunities lost, of dissatisfaction with his son and himself and with the course his life had taken.
Now, here he was, high over the bony white spine of Europe, committed to writing a letter that must be loving and tactful, and helpful and instructive, to that taciturn cold young man who was, as his mother pointed out, ruining his life in Chicago.
“Dear Steve,” he wrote, “I’ve just received a disturbing letter from your mother. She’s worried about you, and from what I can tell from here, justifiably so. There isn’t much sense in my going through all the reasons why a young man of 22, without any money, and with all his way to make in the world, should not marry. I, myself, married early, and you should know better than anyone how disastrously it turned out. There is a Greek saying, ‘Only a foolish man marries young and only a foolish woman marries old,’ and from my experience, I would say that the first half, at least, of the adage is all too correct. I would wait if I were you, at least until you’re through with your studies and established somewhere. Marriage has crippled more young men than alcohol. If you’re ambitious, as I think you are, you will finally be grateful to me if you heed this advice.”
Jack looked up from the letter. He was suddenly conscious that the little old lady across the aisle was staring intently at him. He turned his head and smiled at her. Embarrassed, she looked quickly out the window on her side.
“Your mother also writes,” Jack continued, “that you are endangering your future by certain political activities in the University. Perhaps you are justified in your opinions and probably you feel very strongly that you have to express them, but you must realize that for a young man today who intends to pursue a career as a nuclear physicist, either as an experimenter or teacher, or both, open opposition to the government’s policies can only be dangerous. The government of the United States today is under a continuing strain and the men who run the government (which, as you know as well as anyone, is now involved in a great deal of the research and financing of the work in your chosen field) are fretful and suspicious. The government also has a long memory and is not hesitant about using its powers to put pressure on organizations, or people, who might be inclined to hire a man who attacked its position at such a vulnerable and controversial point. Here again, as in the idea of marriage, it might be wise to wait quietly for a while, until you are less dangerously exposed, before taking any irrevocable steps. Just from the viewpoint of practical accomplishment, you might consider whether your protest now, the protest of an untried young man, would serve any real purpose, or merely expose you to the punishments which the system is perfectly prepared and willing to hand out. It is not necessary, Steve, as young people are likely to believe, to say everything that comes to your mind, openly and with complete disregard for the consequences. Strategy and tact need not be taken for submission. It is only recently that reticence has come to be thought of as a flaw of character…”
He reread what he had written. Lord Chesterfield to his son, he thought with disgust. I have been writing too many speeches for generals. If I really loved him, this letter would be entirely different.
“Let me try to express what I feel more completely,” he wrote. “It is not that I do not understand why you are aghast at the prospect of more nuclear explosions, another war. I, too, am aghast, and would like to see the experiments halted, the war avoided. I realize that it is because men on both sides are bankrupt of fruitful ideas that the experiments continue, the threat of war is not laid. But even bankrupts have the right to try to survive, under whatever terms are open to them. What we Americans are doing is perhaps dictated by a bankrupt’s policy of survival, but who has offered us a better policy? I am involved with our present policy, and while I am not satisfied with it, I am not satisfied with any alternative that has been put forward until now. Your half-brother Charlie has expressed my feeling about what I am doing better than I have done to date. When asked by a classmate what his father did in life (a French way of saying what a man’s work is), he answered, ‘My father works at keeping the world from having another war.’”
Jack smiled to himself, thinking of the little boy at the airport, frail a
gainst the steamed glass, saying, “I like Air France better. Blue is a faster color.” Then he looked down once more at the letter, frowning, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to tear it up, try to get Steven to fly over to Rome so that they could have it out at length, man-to-man. It would cost at least a thousand dollars, and if the events of the last summer were any way of judging, not much good would come of it. So he continued to write.
“I am dissatisfied with this letter,” he wrote, “but my motives for writing it are pure. I want to save you from dangers that I see perhaps more clearly than you and that you do not necessarily have to run. Please do not be rash.” He hesitated. Then he wrote, swiftly, “Your loving father,” and folded the pages and put them into an envelope and addressed the envelope. One lie more, he thought, to fly the ocean at four hundred miles an hour.
He put the letter in his pocket, to be mailed later, and sat back with the feeling of an unpleasant duty respectably but not brilliantly performed. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, tried to forget all the irritations and nerve-grinding of the last few months, which had culminated in Hélène’s attack on him, in Joe Morrison’s chilly attitude toward him when he had insisted upon holding Morrison to his promise to give him time off for Rome. The hell with it, he thought, all his problems mingling in distasteful confusion in his head. I don’t care if he sends me to Washington or Outer Mongolia or the South Pole, I don’t mind if my son marries a bearded lady from the circus and defects to Russia with the latest secrets of chemical warfare, I don’t care if I don’t make love to my wife from now till the end of the century. I don’t care, I don’t care…
Then he slept, the fitful, twitching sleep of overburdened, swiftly traveling modern man, the restless, unrefreshing, upright sleep of air liners.
The little old lady peered over her bourbon at the sleeping man. Ever since he had boarded the plane at Orly, she had stolen glances at him when she thought he was not looking in her direction. “Ssst,” she said to the hostess, who was walking down the aisle with a pillow.
“Who is the gentleman, my dear?” the little old lady whispered, holding onto the hostess’s arm. “I’ve seen him somewhere before.”
“His name is Andrus, Mrs. Willoughby,” said the hostess. “He’s getting off at Rome.”
The little old lady regarded the sleeping face. “No.” She shook her head. “I know I’ve seen him before, but I can’t place him. You’re sure his name is Andrus?”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Willoughby.” The hostess smiled politely.
“He has brutal hands,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “But he has a copious face. It’ll come back to me. From the depths of the past.”
“I’m sure it will,” said the hostess, thinking, Thank God I get off at Istanbul.
“I’m sure you’re too young to remember,” Mrs. Willoughby said obscurely, dismissing her.
The hostess passed forward with her pillow and Mrs. Willoughby took a small sip at her bourbon, staring accusingly at the brutal hands and the almost remembered copious face across the aisle.
Jack slept uneasily, moving fitfully against the cushion, a large man with a long, heavy head, the jaw on the side toward Mrs. Willoughby thickened and irregular and marked by a scar that curved down from his wiry, gray-flecked dark hair. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, Mrs. Willoughby decided, making the usual mistake of the old, judging people to be younger than they actually were. She approved of his size. She liked Americans to be big when they traveled in other countries. She approved of his clothes, too, a neutral gray suit, cut in the loose and comfortable manner which makes Europeans say that Americans don’t know how to dress, and a soft dark tie. But his identity eluded her. The name she was searching for was on the tip of her tongue, tantalizingly, and she knew it wasn’t Andrus. The gap in her memory made her feel insecure and old.
When Jack awoke, he pulled back the curtains and saw that they were losing altitude on the approach to Rome. Turning away from the window, he was conscious that the old lady across the aisle from him was staring at him intently, frowning. As he straightened in his seat and buckled the safety belt, he had the feeling that he must have spoken in his sleep and uttered a word of which the old lady hadn’t approved.
In the dusk, the runways were gleaming from a shower that had come in from the Alban Hills, and scraps of cloud, lit by the last dull red of the setting sun, raced across the streaked sky. Looking out of the window as the plane tilted and the flaps came down, Jack remembered the soft thick pewter color of the winter sky over Paris and was pleased with the contrast. Arriving almost anyplace in Italy, he thought, by any means of transportation, was calculated to lift the spirit and renew one’s appreciation of such simple things as color, rain, and the shapes the wind created in the sky.
2
MRS. WILLOUGHBY MADE A last, furrowed examination of him as she turned off toward the restaurant, where the passengers in transit were to wait while the plane was refueled. Jack tipped his hat politely at her, and as he moved toward the passport-control desk he heard her say, with severe satisfaction, “James Royal.” She said it to a Syrian gentleman who was walking beside her. The Syrian gentleman, who understood Arabic and French, spoke the only two words he knew in English. “Very good,” he said, sweating with the effort of international amity.
“I thought he was dead,” Mrs. Willoughby said, walking energetically toward the restaurant. “I’m sure somebody told me he was dead.”
Jack was almost through customs, across the counter from the official in a baggy striped suit who was marking his bags with a piece of chalk, when he saw Delaney. Delaney was standing beyond the glass doors that separated the customs enclosure from the waiting room. He was wearing a little tweed cap, like an Irish race-track tout, and a bright tweed coat, and his face shone, sunburned, near-sighted, welcoming on the other side of the glass. To Jack’s eyes, he didn’t look like a man who was in trouble. By the strength of his relief at seeing Delaney standing there looking so much as he had remembered him, Jack realized how fearful he had been of the first sight of his friend, fearful of the marks that the years might have made on him.
When Jack came through the door, Delaney shook his hand roughly, beaming, saying in his thick, hoarse voice, “I told them the hell with it, they could all go home, I wasn’t going to let you arrive with only a driver to meet you.” He grabbed the small brief case that Jack was carrying. “Here, let me,” he said. “Unless it’s all Top Secret and you’ll be broken to a pulp if you let it out of your hands.”
Jack smiled, walking beside the robust, fierce-looking little man toward the parking lot. “Actually, it’s the line of battle for Northern Europe,” he said. “But I have six other copies at home, if I lose this one.”
While the porter and the driver were putting Jack’s bags in the trunk of the car, Delaney stepped back and frowned thoughtfully at Jack. “You don’t look like a boy any more, Jack,” he said.
“I didn’t look like a boy the last time you saw me,” Jack said, remembering the day he had gone to Delaney’s house to say goodbye.
“Yes you did,” Delaney said, shaking his head. “It was against nature, but you did. A damaged boy. But a boy. I didn’t think I’d ever live to see the gray hairs and the lines. Christ,” he said, “I won’t ask you for any comments on how I look. I weep when I happen to see myself when I’m shaving. Ecco!” he said to the porter, stuffing hundred-lire coins into his hand. “Let’s go.”
They sped toward Rome in the rattly green Fiat. The driver was an olive-skinned young man with beautifully combed, gleaming hair and sad, black-fringed dark eyes. He swung the car in and out among the trucks and the motorcycles and Vespas like a racing driver, blinking his headlights impatiently when he was blocked momentarily on the narrow, bumpy road past the racecourse and the walls of the movie studio that Mussolini had built, in his big years, to challenge Hollywood.
“You can have the car and the driver,” Delaney said. “Whenever you want. For the whole two weeks. I insisted.”
“Thanks,” Jack said. “But if it’s any trouble, I can walk. I like walking around Rome.”
“Nonsense.” Delaney waved his hand in an imperial gesture. He had small, soft, surprising hands, like a child pianist’s, incongruous on his rough, short-coupled, broad body. “You have to make these people feel you’re important. Otherwise they have no use for you and they piss on your work. Be snotty enough and they’ll wreathe themselves in smiles when they give you the five thousand bucks.”
“Seriously,” Jack said, “I want to thank you for…”
“Forget it, forget it.” Delaney waved his hand again. “You’re doing me a favor.”
“That’s a lot of money for me, you know,” Jack said.
“I believe in throwing a little backsheesh in the way of our loyal public servants.” Delaney’s ice-blue, clear little monkey eyes glittered with amusement. “Keep them contented with their sorry lot. Tell me, what’s the inside dope? Are we going to have a war in the next ten minutes?”
“I don’t think so,” Jack said.
“Good. I’ll be able to finish the picture.”
“How’s it going?” Jack asked.
“The usual,” Delaney said. “Some mornings I want to kiss everyone on the set. Some mornings I want to put a bullet through my brain. I’ve gone through it fifty times. The only difference is that this time we have the addition of a little Italian chaos, to make it more amusing. I have the script here.” He patted a bulky pile of paper on the seat beside him, stapled together in flimsy pink cardboard. “You can look it over tomorrow morning.”