Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

Jack had a sudden new vision of Holt, the tough, capable, hard-working prospector, driller, gambler, boss, coming home from his office in Oklahoma City where gigantic struggles took place and empires shook and changed hands each working day, to find his wispy, dipsomaniac wife fumbling at one of the two grand pianos, with a bottle of whisky on the floor beside her and the ne’er-do-well brother with yet another hard-luck story, yet another request for another ten thousand (absolutely the last, I swear it…). And the gentle, loving kiss, the absolving, sacrificial checkbook, all hardness and resolution left at the door, and the signature on the check a continuing, unfading declaration of love for the sad, destroyed, lost woman he had married.

  Jack forgot all the inanities he had had to listen to up to then and smiled at Holt, seeing the wrinkled rancher’s face, the balding skull, the puzzled, friendly eyes, with new compassion.

  A curious, reflective expression passed fleetingly across Holt’s face, as though he had caught the change in Jack, and he unexpectedly patted the back of Jack’s hand in a little quick sympathetic movement. His hand was calloused and confident. I mustn’t underrate him, Jack thought, there’s a deft, sensitive man behind the ranch-foreman face, behind the banalities. He didn’t reach the Persian Gulf by being an idiot.

  “I want to say here and now,” Holt said solemnly, “how grateful we all are that you consented to come down and help us out like this, Mr. Andrus, in our disgraceful predicament with Mr. Stiles.”

  “It was a pleasant surprise for me,” Jack said honestly.

  “Mr. Delaney has told me all about you,” Holt went on, “and I’m mighty glad to get this opportunity to tell you what I think personally. You’re in the government, I know, in Paris.”

  “Well—NATO,” Jack said.

  “The same thing,” said Holt, dismissing airily all niggling little distinctions of function and organization among people who were paid out of the public treasury. He laughed, with his flash of false teeth. “I hope you won’t feel that your duty compels you to report back everything I said here tonight on the subject of taxes, etcetera.”

  “Your views on taxes, Mr. Holt,” Jack said gravely, “will go with me to the grave.”

  Holt laughed spontaneously. “I wish more fellers like you in the government had your sense of humor, Jack.” He squinted uncertainly at Jack. “It’s all right, isn’t it, if I call you Jack? You know, out in Oklahoma, in the oil business…”

  “Of course,” Jack said.

  “And everybody calls me Sam,” Holt said, almost shyly, as if asking for a favor.

  “Sure, Sam.”

  “Ecco,” Tasseti said, scowling at the dance floor. “La pluss grande puttain de Roma. La Principessa.” He bunched his mouth, as if he were going to spit.

  Jack looked at the dance floor. A twenty-year-old girl with a blond pony-tail floating over her bare shoulders and pure white dress was dancing with a short fat man of about thirty.

  “What did he say?” Holt asked. “What did the Eyetalian say?”

  “He said, There’s the biggest whore in Rome,” Jack translated. “The Princess.”

  “Is that so?” Holt said flatly. Politely, he waited a moment before turning around, then took a quick glance at the girl. “She looks very nice,” he said. “A nice young girl.”

  “Elle fasse tutti,” Tasseti said. “Elle couche avec son fratello.”

  “What did he say now?” Holt asked.

  Jack hesitated. Well, Sam, he thought, you’re in Rome now, learn what the natives are saying. “He said she does everything,” Jack said, without inflection. “She sleeps with her brother.”

  Holt sat absolutely still. A slow flush came up from his collar and blazed on his cheeks and forehead. “I don’t think people ought to gossip like that about other people,” he said, swallowing hard. “I’m sure it’s merely an unbased rumor.” He looked worriedly down the table at his wife. “I’m glad Mother didn’t hear that,” he said. “It would’ve ruined her evening. Excuse me, Jack.” He stood up and went around the table and pulled up a chair from the next table and sat down protectively next to Mrs. Holt, smiling at her and taking her hand in his. A moment later, when the Princess and her escort had left the dance floor, Holt took his wife out onto the floor and they danced. They danced very well, Jack noted with surprise, Holt erect and light on his feet and going through the intricate rhythms of a rumba with practiced efficiency. He must have spent hours taking lessons, Jack thought. Anything to keep her away from the bottle.

  “Ecco,” Tasseti said heavily, indicating a white-haired man with a cardinal’s face who was dancing with a girl in a red dress, “le pluss grand voleur de Roma.”

  There was a burst of laughter from Delaney and Barzelli at the other end of the table, where Tucino had just finished telling a story. Tucino sat back, grinning, and Delaney called down the table, “Come up here, Jack, and listen to this.”

  Jack stood up, happy to get away from Tasseti and his dark Sicilian judgments on the clientele of the night club. Delaney made room for Jack at the corner of the table and said, “Marco was telling us about his father. Tell Andrus about your father, Marco.”

  “Allora,” Tucino said, smiling happily, as wide-awake and full of energy as a schoolboy, using his hands, speaking in his fluent vaudeville-Italian English, “allora, my father, his name is Sebastiano. He is seventy-three, seventy-six year old, he has the hair white like snow, he walk straight like a rifle, all his life he chase after the girl, he is crazy after the girl, he come from the South, you unnerstand, he drive my mother crazy for fifty year, on his last birthday, she tell him, ‘This year, Sebastiano, I think I give you up for good, I no longer stand the girls, a man your age.’ She made him swear before the priest, no more girls, on his birthday, before we give him the presents, I gave him a Fiat and a Leica camera for his birthday, he go out to St. Peter’s and take picture of the dome. But of course, he never give up the girl. He comes into the studio visit me in my office every afternoon, take a cup of coffee with his son, show me the pictures of St. Peter. It’s a habit, a tradition, five o’clock, after the siesta. Every day the workmen in the studio watch for him to walk through the gate. He come through the gate, each day, he knows they watch him, he puts up a finger, like this, overhead.” Tucino raised his arm above his head with the index finger of his right hand pointing toward the ceiling. “You know what it mean? No? But the workmen know and they laugh each day. Each day I hear the laugh downstairs from my office at the gate and I know in two minute my father come through the door of my office. You know what it mean—it mean that day my father had one girl one time. The workmen love him, they laugh with him, they say, ‘Old Sebastiano, he is a green old man, he will live till age hundred.’ Then, one day—” Tucino hunched down dramatically in his chair, shoulders drooping, eyes lackluster, senility incarnate, death at the door. “One day, the papa arrive my office, but no warning, no laugh at the gate before. He look gray, like he come from the funeral of his best friend and friend sure to go to Hell. I say nothing. We have coffee like usual. He don’t show me any picture. He go out walking slow. Then, one, two month go by, and my father come each afternoon, walking slow, no laughing at gate, the workmen look at him sad now, they say, ‘Poor old Sebastiano, he no live age hundred, lucky see the springtime.’ I see my mama, she look ten, twenty year younger. She put on weight, she laugh like a young girl, she buy three new hats with flowers, she take up bridge. I am sorry for the papa, he is not straight like a rifle no more, he hardly use the Fiat, he make me think, Ah, it is sad to see the father come to winter. I try to tell him go to doctor, but he tell me, ‘Shut your dirty mouth. I don’t need children tell me how to live my life.’ It is first time in thirty year my father say mean word to me. I shut up. I am sad and I shut up. Then today, this afternoon, at five o’clock, I hear biggest shout of laughing at gate, applause, like returning war hero. I look out the window. My father coming through gate, straight like a rifle, white hair standing up like it just come back starched from the l
aundry, smile on his face from one ear to other ear, his hand up. He is making the V sign.” Tucino smiled gently and lovingly. “Two fingers up today.”

  Delaney chuckled and Jack chuckled, too. After all, he thought, it isn’t my father. But Barzelli, even though she had just heard the story five minutes before, leaned back in her chair and rolled out a long peal of coarse peasant laughter, resounding, vulgar, robust, surprising and almost masculine issuing from that slender throat and that perfect, womanly mouth. Arrogant, Italian, beautiful, sure of herself, she was in the male Mediterranean world, sharing its triumphs. The old lady with her three new hats and her afternoon bridge and her extorted pledges had no connection to her.

  Jack looked at his watch and stood up. “I’d better be going,” he said. “If we’re going to start work at seven thirty this morning.”

  Delaney waved carelessly. “No rush, Jack,” he said. “The hell with the morning. We’ll start at ten.”

  “Just the same,” Jack said. He noticed the little, cold contraction of Tucino’s eyes at Delaney’s debonair postponement. The producer’s eyes, immediately veiled, announced that it was his time, his money Delaney was wasting, and that if things went badly between them in the future, Tucino would bring it up and use it as a lever in the argument.

  Jack shook hands with Barzelli, who looked at him without interest. He was not a producer, he was not a director, he could not give her extra close-ups or a richer contract, and she had seen from his first greeting in his hotel room that he was never going to make any advances to her. She would remember his name with difficulty.

  He went to the other end of the table to say good night to Tasseti. Tasseti was swiveled around in his chair, staring disdainfully past the dancers at a group of men and women on the other side of the room. As he shook hands with Jack, he said, harshly, indicating the host at the distant table, “Ecco, le pluss grand pederaste de Roma.”

  Jack grinned, thinking, Three for three, all sins in Roman order, whoredom, theft, and perversion in precise arrangement. Tasseti’s had himself a perfect day, how happy he must be.

  Jack skirted the dance floor, waving good night to the Holts, who were now dancing cheek to cheek to the music of “On the Street Where You Live.” They stopped dancing and came over to Jack. “I wonder, Jack,” Holt said, “if you could spare a minute. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Of course,” Jack said.

  “Good night, Jack,” Mrs. Holt said, her voice wispy and soaked in alcohol. She smiled mistily at him. “Sam has been telling me how much he likes you, how sympathetic you are.”

  “Well, thank you, Mrs. Holt,” Jack said.

  “Bertha,” said Mrs. Holt, pleadingly. “Please do have the kindness to call me Bertha.” She made the faintest ghost of a coquettish grimace. “Mrs. Holt makes me feel so old.”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “Uh…Bertha.”

  “Arrivederci, Jack,” she said and floated on Holt’s arm back to the table, where her husband deposited her in a chair, like a newly excavated treasure frail with the erosion of the years. Then Holt came back to Jack, lightly, not breathing hard, even after all that dancing.

  “I’ll accompany you to the door,” Holt said formally, “if I may.”

  As they went out of the room, Jack glanced back, just in time to see Barzelli slide her hand once more under the table.

  Jack and Mr. Holt went downstairs, past the closed restaurant on the second floor, past the painting of a nude on the landing, to the street-level floor, where there was a little bar with a Negro pianist playing softly for an American couple who were having a whispered argument in a corner. “I’ll tell you what,” Holt said, as Jack got his coat from the hat-check girl, “I could use a little air. Would you like to walk a block or two?”

  “I’d love to,” Jack said. Now that he was actually on his way to his hotel, Jack realized he was in no hurry to face the empty (or perhaps not empty) rooms and the problem of sleep.

  They went out into the night, Holt taking his coat and sombrero and placing the sombrero squarely and soberly on his balding head. Outside, taxi drivers and chauffeurs were talking desultorily, huddled into their overcoats, and a shapeless woman with a basket of violets waited for lovers in the darkness, A fiacre, the horse dozing under a blanket in the light of the fiacre’s kerosene lamp, stood against the opposite wall.

  Jack and Holt turned the corner and walked along the river, the proprietors of sleeping Rome.

  “Bertha hates to go home until the band stops playing,” Holt said. He chuckled tolerantly. “You’d be surprised how many times a year I see the dawn come up.” He peered down at the Tiber. “Not much of a stream, is it? ‘The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,’” he quoted, surprisingly. “Well, you know, I think I could swim it myself, even with armor. I guess Shakespeare never got a look at it.” He smiled shyly at this audacious literary reflection. “Funny people, the Italians,” he said. “They live in this city just like people anyplace else. As though nothing ever happened here.”

  Jack walked in silence, looking across the river at the dark bulk of the Palazzo di Giustizia, thinking about his hotel bedroom, waiting for Holt to say what he had followed him to say.

  Holt cleared his throat uncomfortably. “We were talking back there”—he gestured toward the building behind them which housed the night club—“about your being in the government.”

  Jack didn’t bother to correct him.

  “What I mean is, chances are, you know quite a few people in the Embassy here.”

  “A few,” Jack said.

  “I’ve been in and out of there a dozen times the last month or so,” Holt said. “They’re very nice to me. Don’t get me wrong, they couldn’t be more polite and obliging, but—” He shrugged. “It never hurts to know someone who’s really in the business, does it?”

  “No,” Jack said, noncommittally, wondering what trouble Holt could be in with the State Department that he could conceivably help him with.

  “You see, what we’ve been trying to do is adopt a baby, Mother and me.” Holt sounded diffident, almost a little guilty, as though he had just confessed that he and his wife were planning a crime. “And you’d be surprised how many difficulties there are in the way.”

  “Adopt a baby?” Jack said. “Here?”

  “As I said before, in the night club,” Holt said stiffly, embarrassed, “I think I can honestly say I’ve got over any prejudices about race that I might ever have had. Being born and bred in Oklahoma…” He stopped. “I mean”—now his voice was defiant—“what’s wrong with Italian babies?”

  “Nothing,” Jack said hurriedly. “But wouldn’t it be easier to adopt a baby back home?”

  Holt coughed self-consciously and put both hands to the rim of his sombrero and settled it a quarter of an inch more squarely on the center of his head.

  “We have…uh…a few problems, a few little problems, back home,” he said. “Jack, I feel I can talk to you. I got that feeling back there at the table. You’re a man with understanding. Mr. Delaney tells me you’re the father of two children yourself…”

  “Three,” Jack said automatically.

  “Three,” Holt said. “I beg your pardon. You know how it is. Women need children. There’s something empty about a woman’s life if she doesn’t…Ah, hell, I don’t have to tell you. She’s liable to look for other things to fill the space…” His voice trailed off, and Jack once more had the vision of the bottle beside the piano. “And, for some reason, we haven’t been blessed,” Holt said. “The doctors say we are perfectly healthy, normal people, but we haven’t been blessed. It’s not as unusual as you think. You look around and you see the world crawling with kids, poor, starving, neglected”—his voice was hard and bitter as he contemplated the callous, undeserving fecundity of the poor—“and you never have any idea of how many homes’re empty and’re doomed to stay empty. And with all the scientists, all the vaccines, all the penicillin, all the hydrogen bombs and rockets to the moon, not
hing to be done about it. Ah, the things we tried…” Holt looked out across the sliding dark river, with its country smell, its odor of winter loam and wet, frozen grass between its concrete banks. “What the hell, you’re a grown man,” he said harshly, “you’ve created sons, it’s not as though I’m going to shock you. Gas in the tubes, the fertility rhythm, the taking the temperature at six o’clock in the morning and then trying to…” He stopped. He seemed to be choking up. Then he continued in his calm, flat, conversational Oklahoma drawl. “We even went so far as to try artificial in—insemination, in a doctor’s office. Nothing. Poor Bertha,” he said, with twenty years’ love and pity, carried from one continent to another, in his voice. “You’ve only seen her for an hour or two so I don’t suppose you’ve noticed—but—” He hesitated, then plunged on. “She—well, if it was a man, you’d say she was a drinking man. A hard drinking man.”

  “No,” Jack said, “I didn’t notice.”

  “Well, she’s a lady, of course,” Holt said, “she could drink from morning to night and she’d never say a word that wasn’t right and proper, a cruel word, or an off-color word, or a word that couldn’t be spoken in the best home in the land, but—there’s no getting around it, Jack—it’s getting worse, year by year. If she had a family—one child—”

  “I still don’t see,” Jack said, puzzled, “why it should be so hard to find a baby to adopt back home.”

  Holt took in a deep, loud breath. He walked ten paces in silence. “Bertha’s a Catholic,” he said at last, “as I think I told you back there.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I was born and raised a Baptist and if I’m anything now, I’m still a Baptist,” Holt said. “And in America—well, the people who run orphanages put a lot of store in things like that. What I mean is, the system is Catholics give to Catholic families, Protestants give to Protestant families, even Jews—” He stopped, afraid that he had said something that he didn’t mean. “Of course, I have nothing against the Jews. I don’t have anything against any of them,” he said wearily. “In principle, I’m sure they’re right. In the majority of cases. Maybe if I turned Catholic…Bertha’s never asked me, of course,” he said quickly. “Don’t think she’d ever ask anything like that, and we haven’t even ever discussed it, not as much as a hint. But, privately, I must confess, there’ve been times when I’ve been tempted to go to Bertha and say to her, ‘Mother, take me for instruction to the nearest priest.’”