Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  They were walking past a church, its medieval bronze doors shut against the night, the church dark and closed, not prepared to answer questions or gather in supplicants or absolve sin until daylight. Holt looked thoughtfully at the huge implacable doors and the sculptured saint, in an attitude of benediction in his niche to one side of the portal. “They’re powerful,” he whispered, “powerful.” He shook his head, shaking Romanism out from under the sombrero once and for all. “I’m not much of a Baptist,” he said. “I sometimes don’t go near a church for years, unless it’s to a funeral or a wedding. But I’m not a Catholic. I can’t say to anyone I am or I will be. A man can’t do that, can he, Jack? No matter what the bribe.”

  It’s a funny question to ask in Rome, Jack thought, contemplating all the gods that had been overturned here, repudiated, installed, altered, swallowed, and for what bribes. “No, I guess not,” he said, because he knew that that was what Holt wanted to hear. “Still,” he said, “it seems to me that every once in a while I hear of people with different religions adopting children…”

  “It happens,” Holt said. “Occasionally. But not to me.”

  “Why not?” Jack asked.

  “Delaney didn’t tell you about me?” Holt asked, suspiciously.

  “No.”

  “I guess it’s not so damn interesting.” Holt laughed harshly. “Only to me. It’s damn interesting to me.” He buttoned up his coat, as though he were cold. “I’m a felon, Jack,” he said flatly. “I served time. I served six years in Joliet, Illinois, for armed robbery.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Jack said involuntarily.

  “That’s it. Oh, Christ,” Holt said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jack.

  “You got nothing to be sorry about. I held up a hardware store when I was twenty years old and I got a hundred and eighty bucks out of the till and I walked into an off-duty cop who was coming into the store to buy a hammer and a pound of nails and instead he got me. And it wasn’t the first time I pulled something like that,” Holt said harshly. “I had two misdemeanors on my sheet before that, and they didn’t know the half of it. Well,” he said briskly, “now I’m trying to adopt a little boy in Leghorn. Everybody back home told me it would be easy.” He chuckled ruefully. “You’d think it would, wouldn’t you? Overpopulation, homes broken up by the war, they’re always yelling they have five million people too many, that they have to emigrate.” He shook his head at his former naïveté. “Why, sir, you would be horrified—and I use the word advisedly—horrified—if I told you what degradation you have to go through just to give a poor little starving wop bastard a home with a swimming pool and seven servants and a Harvard education.” He stopped and looked around him, squinting, lost in the sleeping city. “I guess I’d better be getting back,” he said. “Bertha’ll begin to worry.”

  “If there’s anything I can do,” Jack said.

  “I don’t like to take up your time,” Holt said. “I know you’re down here to do an important job, and you’re a busy man—but if you just happen to drop into the Embassy and there’s a friend of yours who happens to be in good with the Italians…” He looked at his watch. “It’s late, now. Maybe some day this week, we’ll have dinner, you and me and Bertha, and I’ll tell you what I’ve done already, what people I’ve seen…”

  “Of course,” Jack said.

  “You’re a good boy, Jack,” Holt said. “I’m glad I had this talk. I tell you frankly, in the beginning, for the first hour or so, I was afraid I wasn’t going to like you. But I like you fine, now,” he said heartily. “Fine.”

  He turned and went down the street toward the night club, the felon-millionaire with his six years in Joliet, Illinois, with his carefully nurtured tolerance of Italians, orphans, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, junkmen, with his sombrero, his oil wells, his deductible living in a Roman palazzo. Upright and helpless, he walked past the shut, implacable church, back to the wife who would be called a drinking man, if she were a man, and who could be wrenched away from the bottle (one thought) only by infant fingers.

  Jack watched the tall, square-shouldered figure under the wide hat, the plainsman now committed to tax avoidance and artificial insemination, as he diminished under the foreign lampposts, beside the river he was sure he could swim, despite the testimony of literature, even clad in armor.

  Back in Paris, Jack thought wryly, all I worry about are small things, like whether or not the Russians are going to drop the bomb before the end of the year.

  Watching Holt until he was a small, anonymous blur in the perspective of stone and concrete of lampposts and dead trees, Jack understood why Delaney had been so insistent upon his meeting the oilman and his wife. Delaney wanted something from Holt—the three-picture deal might restore his prestige and his finances for the next ten years—and in return, he was ready to offer any favors within his powers. If Jack, through Delaney’s arrangement, could help steer the Holts through the tangle of Italo-American bureaucracy and get them their Leghorn orphan, Holt’s gratitude could be counted upon. Jack chuckled, thinking, it’s Despière and the article all over again. Delaney never stops. He maneuvers day and night. Maybe I ought to ask for a raise in pay. Andrus, the all-purpose actor, call in case of emergency, civil, artistic, alcoholic.

  Then the chuckle died on his lips. Delaney had always maneuvered, it was true, but on a grand scale and for large stakes. When Jack had known him as a young man, he would never have condescended to this petty trading of favors. Today, with all his bluster, Delaney was fighting for his life, and he knew it, and was clawing around him wildly for anything that would save him. Well, if this is what he needs, or thinks he needs, Jack thought, I shall do my best to deliver. And if he needs more later on, I shall do my best to deliver then.

  Even as he understood all this, Jack understood, too, that it was not only for Delaney that he was in this city, at Delaney’s bidding. He was there for himself, too. Delaney was a part of the image of the best time of Jack’s own life, the bright years before the war, when he had loved Delaney as a son might love a father, a brother a brother, a soldier the soldier who fought at his side, their fates dependent on each other’s courage and skill and fortitude. In rescuing Delaney, he was rescuing the purest image of his youth. If Delaney were to be shabby and defeated, Jack, too, would be shabby and defeated. I’m going to save him, Jack thought grimly, if it kills him. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to save him.

  It’s going to be a crowded two weeks, he thought, as he started back toward his hotel, passing shuttered windows, locked churches, fountains playing in dark deserted squares, past broken temples and crumbling bits of walls that had guarded the citizens of the city two thousand years before.

  Enjoy yourself, chéri, he remembered his wife’s voice at the airport.

  When he reached his hotel, he hesitated outside. Two policemen walked soberly up the street, past the entrance, and Jack looked at them speculatively, thinking, How do you say in Italian, “My dear friends, a little earlier this evening, a young man threatened to kill me. Would you be so kind as to come up with me and look under my bed?”

  The policemen passed on. For a moment, Jack played with the idea of going to another hotel for the night, where he could get a few hours sleep untroubled by the possibility that Bresach might find him. Then, in the morning, he could decide what should be done about him.

  The idea was tempting. But he shook his head irritably, annoyed at the arguments of cowardice. He went into the hotel and got his key. There were no messages.

  When he reached his apartment he went in without hesitation. The lights were on, as he had left them. There was no one in the living room. He went through the rest of the suite. No one. He went back into the living room, bolted the door, turned out the light, and started undressing as he crossed the threshold of the bedroom. The bed was cold when he got into it, and he shivered a little. If Delaney hadn’t called at just that moment, he wondered, where would I be now?

  He
lay there, feeling the warmth come back under the covers, on the ripped sheet. “Hymen O Hymenaeus,” he said softly in the darkness. He shut his eyes and waited for sleep.

  10

  IT WAS A BAD MORNING. He awoke late, feeling headachy and hungover from the liquor of the night before and he had to bathe and dress in a hurry so as not to be late for the dubbing session at the studio. There was no message at the desk from Veronica and when he left the hotel to get into the car that Guido had waiting for him out front, Jack thought he caught a glimpse of Bresach, standing leaning against a store front on the other side of the street, staring at the hotel entrance. At any rate, it was a man in a duffel coat, briefly seen through the traffic, ominous, attendant.

  Delaney was waiting for him with his secretary in the projection room, impatient, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. “Christ, Jack,” Delaney said as he came into the room, “we haven’t got ten years to do this job.”

  Jack looked at his watch. “I’m only five minutes late, Maurice,” he said mildly.

  “Five minutes,” Delaney said. “Five minutes. Let’s get to work.” He signaled and the room faded into darkness and there was Stiles, mumbling once more on the screen.

  “I’ve come back,” Stiles said. “It was too strong for me. I have been unhappy since the day I left you.”

  Jack sighed.

  “Save your criticisms,” Delaney said. “You just think about how to say the lines without making him sound like a godamn fool.”

  The tone of his voice was abrupt and harsh, and Jack was grateful that his instinct had warned him the day before against being too candid in his conversation about the picture with Delaney. I will have to play this by ear, Jack thought, and seize the proper moment for honesty, when it comes. If it ever comes.

  They worked on the same short scene for an hour, rehearsing, without registering anything. Even to Jack’s own ears, the sound of his voice going through the lines was flat and false. Delaney sat there, not helping, not suggesting any changes, merely grunting and signaling the projectionist to run the scene over again, and saying to Jack, “Now let’s try it once more.”

  By the end of the hour nothing he was saying seemed to make any sense to Jack or to have any connection with the language that any living human being might possibly employ in any situation whatever. Abruptly, Delaney said, “All right, now we’ll try to put it on the track. And now, Jack, for the love of God, try to think of what you’re doing. It’s a big confession, it’s a confession of love, this feller has been dreaming about this girl for ten years, and now he sees her by accident for the first time. He can’t sound as though he’s saying, ‘I’ll have noodles for dinner.’”

  “Wait a minute, Maurice,” Jack said. “Maybe this isn’t going to work. Maybe it’s been too long and I’ve lost the gift. If I ever had it.”

  “You had it, you had it,” Delaney said impatiently.

  “Anyway,” Jack said, “if you want to get somebody else, I’ll bow out right now. Before we waste any more of your time and my time. I’ll get on the afternoon plane to Paris and maybe everybody’ll be a lot happier.”

  “Don’t be in such a godamn hurry to give up,” Delaney said. “After one hour. What the hell’s wrong with you? Where do you think I’d be today if I quit like that?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that you’re not stuck with me, if you don’t want to be,” Jack said.

  “Now, Jack…” Maurice smiled at him winningly, warmly. “You’re not going to turn sensitive on me, are you? Christ, you’re the only actor I ever made a friend of, just because you behaved like a man, not like a miserable…” He stopped and grinned at the secretary, sitting in the row behind them. “Excuse me, Hilda,” he said, “I was just going to say a dirty word. Derogatory to your sex. Extremely derrrogatorry.” He rolled the r’s of the last word in a sudden, exaggerated, comic brogue. “It’s a word, that has been used to describe sensitive and artistic actors for many centuries.” He patted Jack’s shoulder, companionably. “It’s not as bad as all that, Jack. It’ll come. It’ll come.”

  “I hope so,” Jack said. “But even if it finally comes, will it make that much difference? After all it’s only one small part of the whole picture…” He stopped. This was still not the time to tell Delaney that he had been studying the script and the film that had already been shot and that there were many other things that offended him, that should be changed or cut altogether, and which were, in Jack’s opinion, more important than the mere substitution of his voice for that of Stiles, no matter how well the substitution worked out.

  “It’s not only one small part of the picture,” Delaney said. “I told you before—it’s the keystone of the whole thing. And even if it was only a small part, it still might be the thing that made the difference between a work of art and a piece of crap. You know as well as I do, Jack, NOTHING IS UNIMPORTANT.” He spoke with fanatical emphasis, rooted in his belief. “One frame, the reading of one line, one movement at a crucial time, in a two-hour picture, can blow you to bits. Or it can rake in the whole pot. That’s the nature of a movie, Jack. Why do you think I work as hard as I do on every little detail…?”

  “I know that theoretically it’s true,” Jack said, thinking, No wonder he still seems so young. Fanatics do not age. “But this time…”

  “This time and every time, lad,” Delaney said, with finality. “Now let’s start all over again.”

  They worked for half an hour more, Jack conscientiously trying to put some life into the lines, but without success. In the middle of a speech, Delaney held up his hand and the lights went up. “That’ll do for the day,” he said.

  “It’s no good,” Jack said.

  “Not much.” Delaney smiled good-naturedly. Then he peered closely at Jack. “You got something on your mind?”

  Jack hesitated. “No,” he said, “I’ve got nothing on my mind.”

  “Lucky man,” Delaney said. “Lunch?”

  Again Jack hesitated. “Let me call my hotel first. I had a tentative appointment.”

  Jack telephoned the hotel. There was a message for him. Signorina Rienzi was lunching at Ernesto’s, Piazza dei Santissimi Apostoli. She would be there at one, and she would be pleased if Signor Andrus could join her.

  “Thank you,” Jack said over the phone and hung up. “I’m busy for lunch,” he told Delaney.

  Delaney regarded him shrewdly for a moment and Jack wondered what his face had revealed, what pleasure, what anticipation, what fears, as he had talked on the phone.

  Delaney grunted, gathered his papers, and they went out into a light drizzle, where the two cars were waiting, parked alongside the projection-room building. “Jack,” Delaney said, “did Holt talk to you last night?”

  “A little,” Jack said.

  “Can you help him?”

  “I’ll call a couple of people,” Jack said.

  Delaney nodded, pleased. “He’s okay, Holt,” Delaney said. “It’d be nice if we could help the poor bastard.”

  Jack didn’t mention the three-picture deal. “I’ll do my best,” he said. He put the collar of his topcoat up. The drizzle was cold.

  “Thanks,” Delaney said. “He likes you a lot, he told me. He told me you had a warm heart when he came back to the table last night.”

  “That’s me,” Jack said. “Warm-hearted.”

  “They’re giving a cocktail party at their place tonight,” said Delaney. “They asked me especially to get you to come.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Not like last night, Jack,” Delaney said warningly. “Show up this time.”

  “Not like last night,” said Jack, thinking, I hope not like last night.

  “Guido knows the address.” Delaney got into the car and he and Hilda drove off.

  In the car going toward the Piazza dei Santissimi Apostoli, Jack found out that Guido could speak French and they each had a cigarette to celebrate the discovery that now they could communicate with each other. Their first exc
hanges were general and noncommittal. Guido said that he’d learned French when he’d been stationed, in the Italian Army, near Toulon, during the war, and Jack used the gift of the common language to explain that the traffic in Paris was worse than in Rome, and the weather in general grayer. Still, a new and gratifying flavor of humanity now permeated the green Fiat, and Jack was happy to notice that when Guido had an opportunity to talk he drove more slowly and risked death less frequently. Finally, Jack thought, it may turn out that the French language has saved my life.

  She was sitting in the back room, against a white wall, facing the door. She was wearing the same clothes that she had worn the day before and she was staring boldly at a party of three men who were seated across the room from her. As Jack approached her, just before she turned her head to greet him, he thought, Wherever she is, whatever else she is doing, she is in constant communication with the male sex. She smiled at him, and he was disturbed by the overt animal brilliance of her smile. Conscious that the three men were watching him, he experienced some of the same embarrassment he had felt as a young man when he had gone out with girls who were too blond, or too flamboyantly shaped or dressed. At such times, he would think, There’s only one reason I’m out with this girl, and everybody here knows it.

  He slid into the chair next to hers and touched her hand and said, “I’m crazy about a girl who didn’t leave her address or telephone number. Have you any idea where I can find her?”

  It was only when they had finished their meal and were sitting over their coffee, now the only guests left in the restaurant, that Jack said, “You moved yesterday. Where to?”